Sacred Text -- Sacred Space : Architectural, Spiritual and Literary Convergences in England and Wales [1 ed.] 9789004216457, 9789004202993

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Sacred Text—Sacred Space

Studies in Religion and the Arts Editorial Board

James Najarian Boston College

Eric Ziolkowski Lafayette College

VOLUME 4

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/sart

Sacred Text—Sacred Space Architectural, Spiritual and Literary Convergences in England and Wales

Edited by

Joseph Sterrett and Peter Thomas

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Sacred text, sacred space : architectural, spiritual, and literary convergences in England and Wales / edited by Joseph Sterrett and Peter Thomas. p. cm. — (Studies in religion, ISSN 1877-3192 ; v. 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-20299-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Christianity and the arts—England— History. 2. Christianity and the arts—Wales—History. I. Sterrett, Joseph. II. Thomas, Peter Wynn. BR744.S23 2011 261.5’70942—dc23 2011034521

ISSN 1877–3192 ISBN 978 90 04 20299 3 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................. List of Illustrations ............................................................................. Foreword .............................................................................................. Richard Chartres, Bishop of London

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Introduction ......................................................................................... Joseph Sterrett

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PART ONE

THE MEDIEVAL SACRED Images of Words: Iconographies of Text and the Construction of Sacred Space in Medieval Church Wall Painting ................ Madeleine Gray

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Anglo-Saxon Monasteries as Sacred Places: Topography, Exegesis and Vocation ................................................................... Thomas Pickles

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The Book of the Foundation of St Bartholomew’s Church: Consecration, Restoration, and Translation .............................. Laura Varnam

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An Arena for the Holy: The Imitatio Francisci of Margery Kempe ......................................................................... Roy Eriksen

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PART TWO

RE-WRITING SACRED SPACE IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD To Great Saint Jacques Bound: All’s Well That Ends Well in Shakespeare’s Spain ................................................................... Richard Wilson

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contents

Sacred Space in Laudian England .................................................... 123 Graham Parry Early Modern Sacred Space: Writing The Temple ........................ 141 Helen Wilcox The “Desert Sanctified”: Henry Vaughan’s Church in the Wilderness ........................................................................... 163 Peter Thomas PART THREE

SACRED TEXT AND SACRED SPACE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The Abbey-Meditation Tradition: Wordsworth’s Sources in the Eighteenth Century ............................................................ 195 Dennis Taylor The Nineteenth-Century ‘Church Catholic’: Liturgy, Theology and Architecture ............................................................................. 227 Allan Doig Sacred Space as Sacred Text: Church and Chapel Architecture in Victorian Britain ........................................................................ 247 William Whyte Collector Connoisseurs or Spiritual Aesthetes? The Role of Anglican Clergy in the Growth of Interest in Collecting and Displaying Early Italian Art (1830s–1880s) .... 269 Susanna Avery-Quash Epilogue: Is the Modern World Disenchanted? ............................ 297 Patrick Sherry Index ..................................................................................................... 321 Plates ..................................................................................................... 329

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book grew out of a relatively small but vital research grant awarded by the Cardiff University Graduate Schools. What began as a series of about five research seminars to explore the links between sacred texts and sacred spaces quickly grew into a conference at the reconstructed St. Teilo’s medieval church at St. Ffagan’s Museum of National History in Cardiff. We soon realised we had the beginnings of a volume and drew further interest from those who had been unable to attend the series or conference. We are therefore humbled by the support and outstanding scholarship that has resulted from such small beginnings. First thanks go, without question, to those who were instrumental at the very beginning with their encouragement, funds and experience. The Cardiff University Graduate Schools (sadly no longer in existence) is first among these for their initial award. Thanks also to Judi Loach for her undying interest throughout the whole project. Llion Roberts and Sioned Davies in the School of Welsh and Claire Connolly in the School of English were each instrumental in helping to get the project off the ground. Indeed, while the separate programme ‘Preachers and Pulpits’ in the Cardiff University School of Welsh could not be represented in this volume for contractual reasons, it offered an important model and relevant parallel to the work presented here. Thanks also to Helen Phillips whose advice and guidance were so important particularly with the medieval section. So too are we indebted to Graham Parry whose early recommendations on the book’s three-part structure have been so useful. Thanks indeed to my colleagues Elizabeth Ford and Johann Gregory for their vital and dogged organisational skills helping to make the series such a success. A very big thank you is due to Helen Wilcox, our first speaker and contributor to the final volume, who continued to support the project throughout in her usual ebullient and intellectually stimulating manner. And, as ever, thank you to Richard Wilson whose tireless energy and imagination are a support and inspiration. Thanks finally to all of those who contributed to this volume, doing so with such incisive and interesting scholarship.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1.1 St Christopher at Woodeaton (Oxf ). Copyright: Anne Marshall, www.paintedchurch.org .................................... Fig. 1.2 Text on the painting of the Three Living and the Three Dead at Wensley (Yorks). Copyright: Anne Marshall, www.paintedchurch.org ................................................................ Fig. 1.3 Broughton priest: Donor figure with speech scroll at Broughton (Oxf ). Copyright: Anne Marshall, www.paintedchurch.org ................................................................ Fig. 1.4 Image of Pity: The letters jsu m (possibly jesu miserere, or part of the well-known prayer jesu mercy, lady help) on the Image of Pity from Llandeilo Talybont. Copyright: by permission of the National Museum of Wales .................... Fig. 1.5 Fragment of text reading HOMO DA, possibly jesu christe deus et homo da nobis . . ., from Llandeilo Talybont. Copyright: by permission of the National Museum of Wales ........................................................................................... Fig. 1.6 Bound Christ: The inscription Ecce Homo on the Bound Christ from Llandeilo Talybont. Copyright: by permission of the National Museum of Wales ......................... Fig. 1.7 Christ in Majesty-feet: Fragment of the Sancta Trinitas inscription from Llandeilo Talybont. Copyright: by permission of the National Museum of Wales .................... Fig. 7.1 Francis Quarles, Argalus and Parthenia (1629), frontispiece. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, U.K. .................................................................... Fig. 7.2 George Herbert, The Temple (1633), title-page. Reproduced by permission of Cardiff University Library, Wales, U.K. ...................................................................................... Fig. 7.3 George Herbert, ‘Superliminare’, from The Temple. Reproduced from the 1679 ed. of The Temple by permission of Cardiff University Library, Wales, U.K. ................................ Fig. 7.4 George Herbert, ‘The Altar’, from The Temple (1633). Reproduced by permission of Cardiff University Library, Wales, U.K. .......................................................................................

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list of illustrations

Fig. 7.5 George Herbert, ‘The Altar’, from The Temple (1679). Reproduced by permission of Cardiff University Library, Wales, U.K. Similar to the Superluminare, the layout of ‘The Altar’ in the 1679 edition of The Temple reveals how readers and publishers read the poem in terms of an architectural structure ........................................................................................... 342 Fig. 8.1 Silex Scintillans title page. Reproduced from the author’s copy of the Silex facsimile, ed. William Clare, 1885 ................................................................................................... 343 Fig. 10.1 Thomas Rickman, Holy Trinity, Bristol, 1829. Photograph by William Avery ..................................................... Fig. 10.2 Magdalen College Chapel, Oxford, restored by L. N. Cottingham, 1829–34, Copyright Sacred Destinations Images. Reproduced with permission ................................................ Fig. 10.3 A. W. N. Pugin, ‘They are weighed in the balance and found wanting’, from Contrasts, 1836. Reproduced by permission of The President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford ............................................................................... Fig. 10.4 A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Catholic town in 1440/THE SAME TOWN IN 1840’, from Contrasts, 1836. Reproduced by permission of The President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford ............................................................................... Fig. 10.5 A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Contrasted Residences for the Poor’, from Contrasts, 1836. Reproduced by permission of The President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford ......... Fig. 10.6 A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Contrasted Altar Screens’, from Contrasts, 1836. Reproduced by permission of The President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford .................................. Fig. 10.7 Charles Barry and A. W. N. Pugin, Houses of Parliament. Photo in public domain ........................................... Fig. 10.8 A. W. N. Pugin, St Giles, Cheadle, baptismal font. Photograph by Matthew Doyle. Reproduced by permission ..... Fig. 10.9 A. W. N. Pugin, St Giles, Cheadle, view of the nave. Photograph by Matthew Doyle. Reproduced by permission ..... Fig. 10.10 A. W. N. Pugin, St Giles, Cheadle, Chancel looking through to the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament. Photograph by Matthew Doyle. Reproduced by permission ........................

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list of illustrations Fig. 10.11 A. W. N. Pugin, St. Giles, Cheadle, rood screen. Photograph by Matthew Doyle. Reproduced by permission ..... Fig. 10.12 Birmingham Oratory. Photograph by Matthew Doyle. Reproduced by permission ............................. Fig. 10.13 Birmingham Oratory, Pole Requiem. Photograph by Matthew Doyle. Reproduced by permission ........................ Fig. 10.14 St. Giles, Oxford in 1834. Reproduced by permission ....................................................................................... Fig. 10.15 St Nicholas Church, Littlemore, 1902. Reproduced with permission .............................................................................. Fig. 10.16 Interior of St. Nicholas Church, Littlemore, 1839. Reproduced with permission ....................................................... Fig. 10.17 John Purchas, ‘The Holy Communion’ from Directorium Anglicanum, 1858 .................................................... Fig. 10.18 John Purchas, ‘Chancel’ from Directorium Anglicanum, 1858 ........................................................................... Fig. 10.19 John Purchas, ‘General View of the Chancel Arrangements’ from Directorium Anglicanum, 1858 ............... Fig. 10.20 John Purchas, ‘An Altar, vested’ from Directorium Anglicanum, 1858 ........................................................................... Fig. 10.21 Ripon College Cuddesdon. Reproduced with permission of the Principal of the College ................................ Fig. 11.1 A window in the south side of Harris Manchester College Chapel (1897). Faith personified as Enoch holding the hand of God and Prophesy pictured as Elijah ................... Fig. 11.2 Arlosh Windows, Harris Manchester College Chapel (1896): Creation of land sea and plants. All windows are reproduced with permission of Harris Manchester College, Oxford and with the kind assistance of Sue Killoran, college librarian .............................................................................. Fig. 11.3 Arlosh Windows, Harris Manchester College Chapel (1896): Creation of Adam and Eve ............................................. Fig. 11.4 Arlosh Windows, Harris Manchester College Chapel (1896): Division of night and day ............................................... Fig. 11.5 The West Window of Harris Manchester College Chapel, Oxford (1895): The four evangelists and Paul ............

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366 367 368 369

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list of illustrations

Fig. 12.1 Thomas S. Boys, Celebration of Holy Communion in Margaret Chapel on the Feast of the Epiphany, 1850. Watercolour (London, All Saints, Margaret Street). By kind permission of the Vicar and Churchwardens of All Saints, Margaret Street ............................................................................... 370 Fig. 12.2 Interior of St. Helen’s Church, Brant Broughton, Lincolnshire, showing the reredos (usually a panel depicting the Ascension by the 15th-century German Master of Liesborn), donated and installed by the Revd. Frederick Heathcote Sutton. Reproduced by kind permission of the Rector and Churchwardens of St. Helen’s Church, Brant Broughton ........................................................................................ 371

FOREWORD Richard Chartres, Bishop of London The notion of the sacred as opposed to the profane was deeply controversial when I embarked upon a species of “Which” tour of churches as an adolescent spiritual seeker. The abolition of the sanctuary screen was seen as breaking down “the middle wall of partition”.1 At the same time the “multi-purpose worship space” was in vogue. It was clearly inefficient to set aside a dedicated space to represent a next worldly dimension. We were told to admire churches that doubled as basket-ball courts. Altars were dislodged from their place in the east and were re-placed in the midst of the Christian community. Rather than going on pilgrimage into the new dimension of the kingdom, the focus shifted to the realisation of authentic community in response to the demise of the hierarchies which had lingered on in Churchill’s Britain. There were gains but also an occlusion of the infinite possibilities of heaven and a profound disorientation. The sanctuary had been evacuated and the blood supply to the symbolic life had been reduced. In consequence as the poet Robert Lowell puts it— In this small town where everything is known, I see his vanishing emblems, His white spire and flagpole sticking out above the fog, Like old white china doorknobs, sad slight useless things to calm the mad.

The scientific understanding of space as infinite expanse with no centre has little connection with living in a meaningful world. Human beings have never actually lived in the space conceived by mathematicians as isotropic, having the same properties in all directions. The space experienced by human beings is oriented. Space is not homogeneous for the person who is spiritually aware. Such a person experiences manifestations like Moses in Exodus III. God called to him out of the bush and said, “Draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes from off thy feet for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”

1

Ephesians 2:14.

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Sacred space is a revelation of what is real in the midst of the formless expanse. It reveals the fixed point, the pole, the central axis for orientation. In doing so it permits a cosmos, an ordered world to be constituted. In profane space there is no fixed point and no true orientation. There is no possibility of a cosmos only the fragments of one, like the debris of a stellar explosion. A universe comes to birth from its centre. Jesus Christ was crucified at Golgotha, the place of the skull. Whose skull? The skull was that of the first human being Adam made from the dust of the earth. The lifting up of Christ on a tree in this central place in the history of human life provides the vertical axis to which the new humanity is drawn. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life”.2 In Christian churches the cross is the new axis and it stands upon a table, the mensa mystica around which a new community is assembled and nourished. The Christian sanctuary then has a central vertical axis, an orientation towards the east, the next worldly dimension of the divine kingdom and a horizontal invitation, a space within which the new humanity is assembled and nourished. There is periodic resistance to the idea that sacred text and an oriented, symbolically freighted, sacred space naturally cohere. The minimalist aesthetic of Christian auditoria dominated by the pulpit in which pews are ranged like so many desks testifies to an understanding in which hearing words is the supreme mode of communication with the Divine Word. The revelation of what is seen is by contrast, suspect. Christian orthodoxy has, however, largely resisted this conclusion and been profoundly influenced by visions like that of St John of Damascus. In his treatise “On the Incarnation and the Holy Icons” he argues that, In former times God, who is without form or body could never be depicted. But now that God has appeared in the flesh and dwelt among us, I make an image of God in so far as he has become visible. I do not venerate matter but I venerate the creator of matter who became matter for my sake, who willed to make his dwelling in matter; who worked out my salvation through matter.

2

John 3:14–15.

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In consequence, Christians invest matter with dignity and express their faith by the way they order sacred space. I had the huge privilege of sharing in the restoration of a church which had been reduced to rubble by a terrorist bomb. St Ethelburga’s in Bishopsgate was the largest structure in this busy street in the City of London when it was built in the fourteenth century. It is now by far the smallest in a great concrete canyon but being small also has a peculiar eloquence in our hubristic times. And the Lord spake unto Moses saying “And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them”.3 St Ethelburga’s is discreet and retiring but there is a squint in the façade so that people passers-by can glimpse another possibility within; in a building which is strongly oriented as it always has been. It is a place for people to assemble, a place with a low threshold and a welcome for seekers of all traditions but there is also a sanctuary with the vertical axis and the table to gather the community and steps up to a next worldly dimension. My intuition is that we are overdue for a re-balancing of the temporal and the spiritual in our life together. The relation between our exploration as human beings of the outer spaces and our inner spaces is as intimate as breathing in and out. Our achievements in outer space, first exploring our globe and now even reaching to the stars have been extraordinary. For two centuries past, hope has been resident in political processes. In the faith that a heaven on earth could be created by education and social engineering we have seen huge advances. Some of the world’s growing population experience a standard of security, health and prosperity never before attained in human history. Only a fool would decry these achievements. At the same time sacred spaces only rarely seem to give access to energy or greater reality. They are apologised for and allowed to survive because they make a measurable contribution to tourist revenues. David Jones in the greatest 20th century long poem in English, “Anathemata” is aware of the evacuation of the sacred spaces. He sees them “Ossific, trussed with ferric rods, the failing numina of column and entablature, the genii of spire and triforium, like great rivals met when all is done, nod recognition across the cramped repeats of their dead selves.”

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Exodus 25:8.

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Then he talks of the priests, “these rear guard details in their quaint attire, heedless of incongruity, unconscious that the flanks are turned and all connecting files withdrawn or liquidated—that dead symbols litter to the base of the cult stone, that the stem by the palled stone is thirsty, that the stream is very low.” But there is an underground river which flows and can be discovered. Now that hope is migratory once more and people wonder whether there really is salvation in technology; now that the distress of the earth is more obvious and the consequences become clearer of seeing ourselves not as participants in a sacred creation but as master exploiters of mere matter; now it may be that the doors of perception can be opened once again and we can bathe in the dearest freshness deep down things and receive the energy which flows from the beyond all. I hope so. I believe so. Let the last word be with Eliot the poet and churchwarden. The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without; For this is the law of life; and you must remember that while there is time of prosperity The people will neglect the Temple, and in time of adversity they will decry it . . . I have loved the beauty of thy house, the peace of thy sanctuary, Where there is no temple there shall be no homes, Though you have shelters and institutions, . . . . When the Stranger says: What is the meaning of this city? What will you answer?4

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T. S. Eliot, Chorus from “The Rock”.

INTRODUCTION Joseph Sterrett It is through reading that references take on reality; through reading, in a way, we come to inhabit a place. The volume of a book can provide the espace vital!1 Emmanuel Lévinas

Visitors to St Teilo’s Church in the National History Museum of Wales find themselves walking into a strangely complex space. A medieval church, its walls were cleansed of their religious paintings from the ‘Roman’ past during the Reformation. A new emphasis on the word— read from the Bible and spoken from the pulpit—had required a clean rendering in whitewash to erase the old words and colourful depictions of saints that had previously surrounded the congregation in prayer. As the population shifted over the years, the church building became increasingly isolated in its original location. The words from the pulpit eventually fell silent and the church fell into disrepair. The roof leaked and as the rain trickled down the walls it took the labours performed by those early reformers with it, bringing the medieval wall paintings once again into view. Today, through modern labours of a different sort, the paintings have been preserved in a climate controlled gallery of the museum. The church itself has been painstakingly moved, stone by stone, to its new location within the grounds of the museum’s reconstructed Welsh village. The walls are once again being painted with exact replicas of the original wall paintings as they would have looked in 1536. The wooden screen is being re-carved, and the space is open for people to enter and experience, at least in some sense, the holiness of the space as it once was. But now the church has an additional emphasis, a secular concern to represent an important cultural moment. The sacred is now mediated by curatorial objectives. It is a display offered for historical understanding, and as part of a larger project to give the wider public

1 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Revelation in the Jewish tradition’ in The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 192.

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an aesthetic and cultural appreciation of Welsh life at that time. In a strange way, however, it is those very secular ends—what some might see as being at odds with the pious perspectives of the believer—which have given new life to this sacred space. Current curatorial emphases have sought to elevate the value of a historical object within its original context, and while the original doctrinal and devotional demands of St. Teilo’s may now be secondary to more pluralist requirements, the sense of the sacred lingers powerfully in the space as it is today. Further, this lingering sacrality is derived and is in many ways indistinguishable from the texts that have defined the sacred in this space. Once, one would have carried a prayer book into the church; now, one carries a pamphlet that explains the building’s history and significance. Indeed, the remarkable history that this space now represents, at every moment, has been defined by different, often competing, texts. And the space now, as it has always been, is itself a text read by those who enter it according to the language they bring with them.2 This volume is the result of a research series at Cardiff University which included a conference that used St. Teilo’s space and history as a stimulus for discussion. The aim of these essays is to consider the link between sacred texts and sacred spaces. While the original series looked more widely, this volume will focus discussion specific to the religious culture of England and Wales. It is divided into three sections that focus on the medieval and early modern periods, and the medieval revivalism of the nineteenth century in and around the Oxford Movement; indeed, we are reminded, in the Preface and Epilogue, that our perceptions of these negotiations in earlier times are themselves framed by our experience of sacred texts and spaces today. The study of sacred space in Europe has been gathering momentum over the last few years referring back, naturally, to the important work by Durkheim and Eliade in the previous century and challenging many of those early paradigms. Quite a few studies have focused on sacred space in the ancient world, the Middle East, America and elsewhere, and it seems only recently to have been noticed that a similar examination should be made of sacred space in medieval and early-modern Europe.3 Similarly, the study of sacred texts has a long tradition both 2

Gerralt D. Nash ed., Saving St. Teilo’s. Bringing a Medieval Church to Life, (Cardiff: National Museum of Wales, 2009). 3 See especially Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, eds., Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially the Introduction;

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within respective circles of belief—hermeneutical studies of sacred texts such as the Bible, the Talmud, and Qur’an—as well as within literary studies, social anthropology and religious studies.4 What is surprising is that more attention has not been given to examining the two together. This volume seeks to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to examine both sacred texts and spaces within the same frame. How exactly do written and oral texts such as scriptures and sermons, or more popular forms of spirituality such as hymns and sacred poetry relate to the spaces in which they are expressed? How do text and space interrelate to produce an idea of the sacred? Here the methods of cultural and architectural historians are held alongside textual and literary scholars whose work has increasingly begun to overlap. These essays aim to provide a mix between those that focus on texts and spaces that make up an ‘authorised’ sacred (Parry, Wilcox, Doig),

Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton, eds., Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). The book that comes closest to the current study’s concerns, albeit implicitly, is a collection of reflective and scholarly essays: Philip North and John North, eds., Sacred Space: House of God, Gate of Heaven (London: Continuum, 2007), see especially Michael Tavinor’s and Michelle Brown’s essays, ‘Sacred Space and the Built Environment’, 21–41 and ‘The Book as Sacred Space’, 43–63, respectively. For examples of studies of the ancient and other worlds see Benjamin Z. Kedar and R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, eds., Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land (London: Macmillan, 1998); David L. Carmichael, Jane Hubert, Brian Reeves and Audhild Schanche, eds., Sacred Sites, Sacred Places (London: Routledge, 1994). See also C. Colpe, ‘The Sacred and the Profane’, in Lindsay Jones, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. (16 vols, New York, 2005), XII, 7964–78; Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. by Rosemary Sheed (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979); Eliade popularlized much of this material in The Sacred and The Profane (London: Harcourt, 1987 [1957]); Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. by Joseph Swain (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976); Jacqueline Redding and WSF Pickering, trans. and eds., Durkheim: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975); for an important interpretative study, Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work (London: Penguin, 1973). 4 For examples of studies examining sacred texts or the sacred within texts see John F. A. Sawyer, Sacred Languages and Sacred Texts (London: Routledge, 1999); Ninian Smart & Richard D. Hecht, eds. Sacred Texts of the World: A Universal Anthology (New York: Crossroad, 1989). An important examination of Sacred text and literature from a distinctly Catholic perspective is Nicholas Boyle, Sacred and Secular Scriptures (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2004). An important theoretical Jewish perspective is Emmanuel Lévinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. by Gary Mole (London: The Athlone Press, 1994). For recent examples specific to the late-medieval and early-modern periods see: Susanne Rupp and Tobias Döring, Performance of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005); Alasdair MacDonald, Richard Todd, Helen Wilcox eds., Sacred and Profane: Secular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British Literature (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996).

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those that represent an examination of oppositional responses (Wilson, Thomas, Whyte), and a few that explore more localized interactions of text and space which might not be so easily categorized (Gray, Varnam, Eriksen). Some explore the ways in which physical spaces such as churches, shrines, or even open fields are designed, marked, or recognized as sacred in relation to specific sacred texts, be they Latin wall inscriptions, liturgy, scripture, or sermons. Others consider conceptual constructions of sacred space within literary texts themselves. How do Shakespeare, Herbert, and Vaughan, for example, reflect upon perceptions of sacred space; do these representations suggest irony, idealism or hostility to the limitations imposed upon the sacred in their contemporary world? At one level, this book makes the simple point that sacred texts and sacred spaces can hardly exist without each other. Simple it may be, but it is a point overlooked by earlier studies, particularly Durkheim and later Eliade who often seemed to privilege material from pre-literate societies. While Durkheim at the turn of the twentieth century and Eliade half a century later approached the study of religion and the concept of the sacred in very different ways, both pursued a unifying theory of religious experience. Space was broadly divided into the dichotomy of sacred spaces that represented the known, valued, and honoured on one hand, and profane spaces which were unknown, chaotic, and denigrated on the other. Such a definition of the sacred seems to follow on from the spatial definition referring to what is ‘inside’ the temple, traditionally the counterpart of the ‘profane’ designating what is ‘outside’.5 As Helen Wilcox reminds us, another spiritual tradition has defined the sacred as the whole world ‘and all that therein is’ (Psalm 24:1, Book of Common Prayer). In this volume, as in other recent studies, the emphasis has shifted to a more fluid sense of competing perspectives. Sacred spaces it seems are far more like texts than many have been willing to acknowledge. Though made of stone, earth, wood or some other material that would seem to possess a hard, permanent quality, they possess a Derridian plurality of potential ‘readings’. As Timothy Insoll reminds us, ‘the

5 Döring’s ‘Introduction’ in Rupp and Döring, 8. Andrew Spicer makes the same point in “The Delineation of Sacred Space”, Spicer and Hamilton, 2. See also C. Colpe, ‘The Sacred and the Profane’, in Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion, 513–14.

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same landscape can mean different things to different people, and can be one and the same, and thus lack any arbitrary division’.6 Bringing together textual, historical, and architectural discourses is a way of tracing how different people in different times thought (and continue to think) about the sacred, as well as reflecting upon how the ‘word’ itself came to occupy such a central position in religious thinking. While many of the intersections explored here are inevitably particular in terms of time and place, when taken together they begin to tell a history of the negotiation and renegotiation of the sacred through the often traumatic processes of Reformation and secularization that occurred in England and Wales. Indeed, the trajectory of these essays suggests a remarkable durability in the sacred despite its subjection to powerful forces that have often sought to change or even erase it altogether. The sacred in these spaces seems to be written and re-written; the spaces themselves become a palimpsest, recording successive cultural emphases. Just like the religious paintings on St. Teilo’s Church walls, these sacred texts and spaces seem to have a residual power to recall our attention long after we thought they were covered from our view. Sacred texts and spaces interact in a number of key ways in this study. The first is that text itself, regardless of what we might now know its meaning to be, represents a kind of authority and conveys that authority to the sacred space. Madeline Gray focuses our attention upon the text physically inscribed on the walls of medieval churches. Text—broadly defined to include depictions of Christ and the saints as well as their (often incomplete or misspelled) Latin inscriptions—did more than simply educate the faithful, she argues. It gave a sense of authority and sanctity to the place of worship, both inside and out, and expanded the congregation to include the mystical Body. Frequently it became a kind of performance in stone, permanent prayers of the faithful in memory of the dead. Though the misspellings or phonetic spellings in medieval local churches indicate what we might today understand as illiteracy, they also suggest a close connection with the local labourers who contributed to the decoration of their church and,

6 Timothy Insoll, Archaeology, Ritual, Religion (London: Routledge, 2004). Spicer and Sarah Hamilton, Defining the Holy; MacDonald, Todd, and Wilcox, Sacred and Profane; Rupp and Döring, Performance of the Sacred.

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more importantly, suggest a different kind of reading altogether. Similar to the faux text on pilgrimage medals—text representing text, often merely a set of scratched lines with no clearly discernable meaning—it was symbolic of words. ‘Words’ created the sacred space whether one could read them or not. They created ‘ “textual communities” whose members recognize[d] script as text and associate[d] a specific meaning with it’ (p. 31 below). Another way sacred texts and spaces interact is that a pre-existing text can often define the way a space is perceived as sacred. The space is chosen (or recognised) to be sacred because it offers an analogy to the textual narratives that defined the way people at the time thought life in the spirit was structured. This is a point Thomas Pickles pursues when he examines the foundation myths of monastic sites in the Anglo-Saxon period where biblical texts began an ongoing process of ‘emplacement’ that in many ways textualised a local topography. One of Eliade’s insights in The Sacred and The Profane was that the selection of a sacred site could not be seen to be effected by human agency. It needed, rather, to be designated by some other process where agency could be divested and identified as divine. The example Eliade used was a group of hunters who spear their prey, follow it until it eventually dies, whereupon they build their altar and the site of sacrifice becomes sacred—chosen, it would seem, by the gods. Pickles does not mention Eliade, but we might attribute a similar transferral of agency to the texts he notes were used to establish sacred sites. The site was not simply sacred unto itself. It was recognised to afford an interaction between an interpretative tradition of sacred text and the physical surroundings of a particular locality such as the rock or the fortress poised as defence against the chaos of the ocean, representative of God’s protection.7 Laura Varnam carries this discussion further by showing an ongoing process of textualisation at later points in the history of a sacred site where texts look back toward the foundation moment to reinforce a sense of reverence and divine favour. Varnam’s attention is upon the foundation legend of St. Bartholomew the Great where she finds that awe is conferred through a miraculous history of the site and surrounding landscape some fifty years after building had begun. This Latin text continues to be used for similar purposes, translated into

7

For example, Psalm 46:1.

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Middle English some two hundred years later, retrospectively conveying and strengthening holiness to the needs of a particular moment in the site’s history (usually to raise money for church repairs or expansion). Indeed, the foundation myth she examines served repeatedly to raise the congregation’s commitment by encouraging them to give their money and talent to improve the fabric of the church. And so it does unto this day. We move, in Roy Eriksen’s essay, to conceptual sacred space as it is recreated and passed on from one text to another. Sacred spaces, like texts, circulate as their ‘meaning and impact’ are transferred through successive late medieval and early modern narratives that take up the same schemes, scenarios and rhetorical techniques from the sacred events that precede them. The particular importance of sacred spaces is conveyed through sacred narrative and reconstituted through adaptation in the ‘new’ narrative life of a believer. Eriksen examines The Book of Margery Kempe and the way in which she utilises the stories of Jesus and St. Francis. ‘This place is Holy’, Jesus says to her in a vision which seems to mingle, from her account, an image of Mary with the immediate domestic scene before her, a suffering, poor yet hospitable mother and child. So too Kempe’s trial before clerical authorities in York merges and recreates both the appearance of Christ before Pilate and the moment when St. Francis (1181/82–1226) was accused by his father before the Bishop of Assisi. And again, Kempe’s account of her conversion to a chaste life in 1413 transposes St. Francis’s conversion to a life of poverty-seeking service to her own conversion before a roadside crucifix on the road from York to Bridlington. Here, we are told, Christ speaks to Margery and assists her. In so doing, the account of this event appropriates and reformulates the pattern made famous by an early 13th-century cross, the crucifix that spoke to St. Francis in the Church of San Damiano, Assisi, that caused him to convert to a life of Christ. The sacred space before the cross of San Damiano thus passes to a wayside rest spot in northern England, passing by way of a series of translated accounts that work, no doubt, in conjunction with Margery’s own visit to St. Francis’s shrine at Porziuncula before going to Rome on her way to Jerusalem. Richard Wilson moves us into the heart of contested sacred space in the Reformation religious and political landscape of the early seventeenth century. Here a late-medieval Europe unified by pilgrimage trails, especially the shrine to St. James at Compostella, is picked up and re-imagined in the dramatic world of Shakespeare’s All’s Well

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That Ends Well. Helen’s pronounced intention to go in pilgimage to Compostella is, Wilson notes, the only moment Shakespeare’s dramaturgy turns to Spain. It is, furthermore, a plan diverted and thus indicative of the politic silence that left Spain a mythical obscurity in the plays. On a macro level, this Shakespearean perspective of the continent corresponded to the broader map of European religious and political allegiance. On a more particular level, the play exhibits a fascination with holy wells that remained sites of spiritual interest around England and Wales despite Reformers’ condemnation. The practices attendant upon these wells including pilgrimage, prayer, belief in talismans and holy water provide a subtle and insistent frame of reference and shows the play’s imaginative interrogation of sacred space, the elements of which were the subject of serious dispute. Holy wells with their curiously curative qualities provide sufficient ambiguity to allow a space of transition from Catholic ‘miracles’ (some would say ‘magic’) and a more Protestant-friendly natural, medicinal, and—eventually—scientific explanation. There is a magnanimity in Shakespeare’s sacred spaces that, while in no way easy as the eventual settlement with Bertram attests, turns away from the fundamentalist ‘philosophical persons’ (2.3.1–2) who proclaim that ‘miracles are past’ (2.3.1) and seeks an accommodation where all can be ‘generally thankful’ (2.3.36).8 Graham Parry’s essay turns more directly to the turbulent crises that resulted from Reformation conflicts over the meanings of sacred symbolism. The destruction of sacred spaces in the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, continued with vigour under Edward VI, were in many ways a re-writing of what the reformers wanted the sacred to be. In many cases, as we saw in the opening example of St. Teilo’s in Wales, those who carried out the required changes literally ‘wrote over’ the sacred texts of the old religion. The space where the sacred was performed had been secondary for a long time, Parry notes, to the active exercise of fervent piety. But, anxiety over this rewriting took a number of forms. Some, like Stow, indulged a nostalgia for the ruins left as scarred reminders of earlier sacred practices. Eventually,

8

Line references are from the Norton Edition, Stephen Greenblatt, Katharine Eisaman Maus, et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997). See also Chapter 5 in Joseph Sterrett, Unheard Prayers and Religious Toleration in Shakespeare’s Drama, forthcoming.

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in the 1610s and 1620s, Lancelot Andrewes would re-emphasize the intrinsic holiness of the church and all things associated with it, seek their beautification and to recreate the hierarchy of sacred spaces for the post-Reformation Church of England. Altars and chancels were to be restored, raised up to distinguish the lesser sanctity of the nave and outlying land of the churchyard. Ceremonies of consecration were written and performed for sacred utensils of the altar and for churchyards. His influence would spread as the Laudian or High Church movement became dominant ideology of the time, causing churches to reconfigure their interiors in line with Andrewes’ notions of sacred space. ‘Sacriledge’, as Andrewe’s ardent supporter Sir Henry Spelman would argue, was to be opposed and the desecration restored. Especial in his condemnation were those who had dismantled, sold and appropriated the buildings sacred to the ‘old religion’ for secular (often domestic) use and personal gain. Through a close analysis of Spelman’s writings, Parry not only highlights the contentious divisions over how this sanctity was to be defined but shows how fears about the triumph of sacrilege were all too prophetic once the men of plain religion came to take control of the church in the 1640s. Helen Wilcox’s essay is an appropriate balance to Parry’s in that she identifies an attempt to create a more reconciliatory sacred in the poetry of George Herbert. Wilcox moves our attention again to conceptual space and suggests that, in an era of symbolic reading, books were designed to be entered and read architecturally. Her examination of frontispieces of works such as John Donne’s Devotions (1624) or Quarles’ Argalus and Parthenia (1629) demonstrates the close relationship between textual space and a place set apart to be used for contemplation or worship. Taking George Herbert’s The Temple (1633) as her central example, she goes on to show how a collection of poems can function as sacred space not only in metaphorical terms but also structurally, doctrinally, politically, formally and musically. Wilcox analyses lyrics from The Temple such as ‘The Windows’, ‘The Altar’, ‘Sion’, ‘Jesu’ and ‘Deniall’ and in so doing highlights the elasticity of textual sacred spaces. Where Wilson identifies sacred spaces in All’s Well ranging from an overarching view of the European religious landscape down to the particular locality of a holy well, Wilcox similarly identifies sacred space within Herbert’s text as a ‘temple’ that is a multivalent space ‘as large as church history and as small as the individual human heart’. The important aspect of Herbert’s text is that

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it is designed to create a fellowship or common ground between poet and reader. When the poet and reader ‘sing’ together in The Temple, the idea of text and space merge: as Herbert writes in ‘Sion’, ‘all thy frame and fabric is within’. Peter Thomas returns us to the very real effects of religious division when the wars over sacred space versus plain religion during the Interregnum led some, like Henry Vaughan, to cultivate a perspective of persecuted sacramentalism. Thomas examines the work of Vaughan when he and others of the Llansantffraed congregation were literally locked out of their place of worship. Though he may have revered Herbert and his ‘Temple’, Vaughan found he needed to re-imagine a virtual Church in the ‘wilderness’, essentially a pilgrim church that had no need of buildings since they are following an inward journey towards their spiritual goal. His response to these circumstances blended with the influence of his brother, the alchemist Thomas Vaughan, and ultimately with the ideas of Jakob Böhme where the natural world teemed with life, the Anima Mundi which moves and breathes through it. Nature itself is the book, and the book is Nature (being made out of elements that were once alive, now dead but transformed). Sacred space, for Vaughan, came to be all around him, paradoxically finding that being church-outed provided a kind of liberation based upon a conception of the Primitive Church that had no need of churches or cathedrals. His poetry sanctified the ‘desert’ left from the Civil War and Interregnum. Dennis Taylor picks up the matter of ruins that Parry discussed and carries it into the nineteenth century. He finds two related but divergent literary responses to the ruins left from dissolved abbeys and monasteries. One, predictably denigrates the relics of the old religion, either denouncing their popishness or transforming them into gothic fantasy. Another continued to find fascination in these silent spaces, finding them still charged with historic and spiritual energy, and went on to inform and prepare the way for Wordsworth’s well known response to Tintern Abbey. It is an important bridge, for these literary responses (indeed ruminations) over the ruins of England’s pre-Reformation past find unusual fruit in the resurgence of medieval romanticism that gave new life to old architectural styles for sacred buildings in the nineteenth century. Alan Doig examines the leaders of this movement, the architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, the Tractarians, especially John Henry Newman, the Oxford Architectural and Historical Society, and the Ecclesiologists or Cambridge

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Camden Society, particularly John Mason Neale. Doig examines the liturgies that influenced their thinking on what sacred space should be particularly the liturgies of Mediaeval England, the Sarum rite, the liturgies of the Early Church, the authoritative liturgy of Rome, and the writings of Durandus on the symbolism of church vestments and architecture. The influence of the last group especially began to elevate an idealised perception of the Medieval English parish church which not only spread throughout the practice of church building throughout England, but even went further afield to New Zealand, Australia, India and Canada. William Whyte takes a closer look at the tensions inherent within this trend in church architecture (and the accommodations made with it) by turning to the example of Manchester College Chapel in Oxford. A nonconformist institution, desiring a nonconformist architecture for their place of worship, nonetheless opted for a series of stained glass depictions of the Creation story, though the choice was not made without considerable consternation. It is an illustration of a wider discussion that reveals the challenges presented to architects, artists and their clients by new trends in biblical interpretation. Whyte argues that the challenges presented by historicist interpretations of the Bible were linked with the gothic revival in church architecture as a means of making both belief and sacred spaces intellectually defensible. Susanna Avery-Quash explores a similar by-way of this trend found in the early appreciation and collecting of Italian Renaissance art by a small group of ministers on the edges of the Oxford Movement. Her chapter touches on many of the same controversies discussed by Whyte about the appropriateness of art from the ‘old’ religion in a Protestant church context. The examples Avery-Quash uses, however, carry these trends forward through the creation of a market for these paintings and the subsequent shift in appraisal from spiritual aid (often in a private domestic setting) into the more secular and public appreciation of artistic technique. Her essay concludes, as we began in this introduction, by showing how these paintings, or sacred texts, are now being returned to their original provenance (as near as possible) guided by contemporary curatorial emphases. Patrick Sherry’s Epilogue, like Bishop Chartres’s Preface, brings us back into the present day, offering a critique of views on the sacred advanced by secular modernity, Max Weber’s assertion that the world has become disenchanted has become a commonplace in 20th Century views on the sacred. Sherry considers the implications of Weber’s

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assertion when it intersects the post-modern value of plurality and diversity that has sought a renewed respect for the sacred, what some have called the ‘re-enchantment’ of the world. Sherry offers a third view, which considering the earlier essays this volume would seem to support, that the world was never disenchanted in the first place and maintained a multivalent but powerful ability to invoke wonder and the sacred at every point.

PART ONE

THE MEDIEVAL SACRED

IMAGES OF WORDS: ICONOGRAPHIES OF TEXT AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF SACRED SPACE IN MEDIEVAL CHURCH WALL PAINTING Madeleine Gray We are accustomed to viewing the decoration of the medieval church as libri laicorum, in Peter Comestor’s phrase: “The paintings of the churches are in place of books to the uneducated”. It is surprising, therefore, to discover just how much text there was in the decoration of medieval churches. This was, as far as we know, text deliberately presented to those who could not read it (as we understand the word), and in order to understand how it worked to construct sacred space we may have to revise our understanding of the nature of literacy and the act of reading. In the modern context, reading means the decoding of text, literacy is the ability to read and decode unfamiliar text, and we tend to equate literacy with intelligence. In this paper I propose to reconsider these assumptions in order to consider the purpose and function of text for those who could not “read” as we understand the word. I will focus mainly on text on walls: wall paintings and the texts in them construct sacred space in a very explicit and specific way in that they are part of the building and have to be produced on site rather than in a workshop. As a comparatively cheap form of decoration, wall paintings are also perhaps more likely to reflect the initiative of the ordinary parishioners. The most literal use of wall decoration to construct sacred space is the consecration crosses which were painted on both the inside and the outside of a church to mark the points at which the bishop, consecrating a new or rebuilt church, anointed the building with holy oil. These crosses then formed staging posts in the annual ritual commemorating the anniversary of the consecration. The church at Wanstead (Norfolk) and several Norwich churches had consecration crosses framed by inscriptions. All are now destroyed or illegible but the Norwich texts were recorded in the 1860s. The inscription at St John de Sepulchre once read Adorabo ad templum sanctum tuum domine (“I will worship in thy holy temple, O Lord”), based on a line from Psalm 137/138. St Saviour’s had two crosses, one with the words

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Et aula vocabitur dei (“And it shall be called the hall of God”), the other with Et porta celi (“And the gate of Heaven”), both from Jacob’s vision in Genesis 28. At St Peter per Mountergate were another two crosses, one with Beati qui habitant in domo tua d[omi]ne (“Blessed are they that dwell in thy house, O Lord”, based on Psalm 83/84), the other with Domu[m] tua[m] d[omi]ne decet sanctitudo (“Holiness becomes thy house, O Lord”, from Psalm 92/93).1 All these appear in the liturgy for the dedication of a church; they may even have been sung at the points at which they were recorded on the walls.2 Here text articulates and remembers the making of sacred space. Perhaps the simplest and most obvious use of text was to caption the paintings. This is more commonly found in stained glass and on rood screens (the famous screens of Devon and East Anglia with their serried ranks of saints, sometimes captioned, sometimes not), but is also found in wall paintings. The thirteenth-century figure of St Thomas of Canterbury at Hadleigh (Essex) is clearly identifiable by its cross-staff and pallium but is captioned above, in Lombardic capitals, beatus tomas.3 In the chapel of the relics in Norwich Cathedral, the saints painted on the vault were all named in Lombardic capitals, though most were illegible even when George Fox surveyed them a century ago.4 Charles Keyser recorded inscriptions under the paintings of “ecclesiastical personages” at Toddington (Beds), but these

1 Roger Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 151–52; J. L’Estrange, report in Norfolk Archaeology, 7 (1872): 352. The clustering of these annotated crosses in and near Norwich may indicate a local fashion or may be an accident of survival, but it seems even more likely that they are an accident of recording and that similar crosses may have been lost elsewhere. 2 Jonathan Tyers Barrett, Memorials of the Parochial Church, the Collegiate Chantry, and the Chapel of St. Mary: Commonly Called Mortimer’s Chapel, in the Parish of Attleborough, in the County of Norfolk, Together with Some Account of the Services Used at the Consecration of Churches from the Anglo-Saxon to the Present Time (London: J. W. Parker, 1848), 212–15; L. H. Stookey, “The Gothic Cathedral as the New Jerusalem”, Gesta 8:1 (1969): 35–41; La Trobe University Medieval Music Database at http://0–www.lib.latrobe.edu.au.alpha2.latrobe.edu.au/MMDB/index.htm (accessed 2.09.08). 3 E. W. Tristram and G. M. Benton, “Wall paintings in Essex churches VI: Wall paintings on the churches of Little Easton, Hadleigh and Wendens Ambo”, Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society 22 (1) (1936): 1–27. 4 George Fox, “Medieval Painting”, in William Page, ed., The Victoria History of the County of Norfolk vol. 2 (London: Constable, 1906), 534; E. M. Goulburn, “The Confessio or Relic Chapel”, Norfolk Archaeology 9 (1884), 275–81.

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now seem to have vanished.5 In the recently-discovered wall paintings at Llancarfan in the Vale of Glamorgan, the Seven Deadly Sins are captioned with their Latin names. At Catfield (Norfolk), a complex series of paintings once depicted the Wheel of Fortune, inscribed fortunae rota with crowned figures riding on it. One falling king was captioned regnavi, “I have ruled”, and the king beneath the wheel was captioned non regno, “I do not rule”. Accompanying the Wheel of Fortune were the Seven Deadly Sins, all captioned in Latin, the Seven Virtues, the Seven Sacraments, scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary and martyrdom stories, apparently without captions.6 At Potter Heigham, Moulton and Wickhampton (all Norfolk), the Seven Corporal Acts of Mercy were similarly captioned.7 We find these captions immensely useful: to modern eyes, one medieval saint is pretty much like another, and in a faded wall painting the caption may be the only way of telling them apart. We would, for example, find it virtually impossible to identify the episcopal saint on the walls of St Mary’s. Blackbourton (Oxon) without the inscription scs ricar which places him as St Richard of Chichester.8 But it is hard to see how a caption in Latin would have helped a medieval viewer who was not even literate in the vernacular, let alone in Latin. Captions identifying scenes in narrative sequences seem even less useful. The Passion cycle at Little Easton (Essex) had a band of white script on a black background which E. W. Tristram assumed was an accompanying sequence of captions or a narrative, though it could also have been a devotional meditation on the story. Unfortunately, even in 1936 it was mostly too faded and damaged to be legible.9 However, the scenes in the painting were easily identifiable and would have been totally familiar to medieval viewers. Here the text surely functions not to identify the paintings but to add weight to their message. The cycle of the Miracles of the Virgin Mary in the parochial part of 5 Charles E. Keyser, A list of buildings in Great Britain and Ireland having mural and other painted decorations . . . (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1883), 253. 6 Fox in The Victoria History of the County of Norfolk, 536–7, referring to BL Add. MSS. 23027 pp 149– 68; Dawson Turner, “Mural painting in Catfield church”, Norfolk Archaeology 1 (1847): 133–39. 7 Edward T. Long, “Recently Discovered Wall Paintings in England—II”, Burlington Magazine 76, No. 446 (May, 1940): 156–162, p. 156; Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings, 119. 8 E. T. Long, “Medieval Wall Paintings in Oxfordshire churches”, Oxonienses 37 (1972): 86–108. 9 Tristram and Benton, “Little Easton, Hadleigh and Wendens Ambo”.

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the Eton College chapel has narrative inscriptions in Latin from the Legenda Aurea and the Speculum Historiale of Vincent of Beauvais.10 These scenes, unfamiliar as they are to us, might have been recognized by at least some of the congregation, but for those who did not know the stories the captions would not have helped. The texts could have provided the basis for a number of sermons: or, as Rosewell suggests, they could have served as aides-memoire to the priests or scholars welcoming pilgrims to the college’s miracle-working statue of the Virgin Mary.11 For most who saw them, though, their main function was to point to the importance of the paintings. The caption could explain the significance of the painting. In a fourteenth-century painting at Woodeaton (Oxon), St Christopher holds a scroll reading ki cest image verra le jur de male mort ne murra (“Whoever sees this image, will not die an evil death that day”: an evil death being one without the sacraments of the church) [1.1].12 The Anglo-Norman French of the inscription was still the language of the elite in the fourteenth century but would have been no more comprehensible to the average parishioner than the Latin of the liturgy. A Latin version of the same verse—Christophori sancti speciem quicumque tuetur . . .—was identified under the painting at Witton (Norfolk).13 Like the captions under saints and narrative scenes, these inscriptions would not have been legible for most viewers. We need the text to identify the image; they would have needed the image to understand the text. The verses serve not to inform but to confirm and add weight to the promise of the painting. These inscriptions construct a sacred space which is reflective and meditative, with images designed for devout contemplation. The captions mirror the fictive architectural canopies over so many of the paintings, including some of the narrative scenes. However, much of the text in the wall paintings seems geared to constructing a dynamic and active space with speech scrolls reminiscent of late medieval

10 Miriam Gill, “The Wall Paintings in Eton College Chapel: the making of a late medieval Marian cycle”, Making Medieval Art, ed. Phillip Lindley (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2003), 173–201; Andrew Martindale, “The Wall Paintings in the Chapel of Eton College”, England and the Low Countries in the Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul (Stroud: Sutton, 1995), 133–52. 11 Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings, 202. 12 Ellen Ettlinger, “Folklore in Oxfordshire churches”, Folklore 7(3) (Autumn 1962): 165. 13 Fox in VCH Norfolk, 537, referring to Norfolk Archaeology 6 (1864): 42 et seqq.

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drama. In a fifteenth-century painting at Horley (Oxon), both Christopher and the Christ-child have scrolls in English. Christopher’s reads “What art you and art so yonge, bar I never so hevy a thynge” and the Christ-child replies “Yey, I be hevy no wonder ys, for I am yey kynge of blys”.14 As Ettlinger points out, this does not correspond with the wording in the Golden Legend, but it is possible that it might come from a local version of a mystery play. Speech scrolls are also found in representations of the story of the Three Living and the Three Dead, a macabre legend found in wall paintings from the early fourteenth century onward. Three kings (usually) go hunting (frequently on an unsuitable day—Sunday, Good Friday) and are met by three rotting corpses who warn the huntsmen to mend their ways. In one of the earliest, at Wensley in Yorkshire, the words of the dialogue appear in Lombardic capitals at right angles to the figures: we are noue the sal y?he be [?b]ewar wyt

– a garbled fragment of the verse As you are so once were we; As we are now so shall you be; For God’s love beware with me” [1.2].15

In a now-lost depiction of the same scene at Belton (Suffolk) the dialogue was more lively: the oldest of the three kings faced the corpses and asked “O benedicite, what want ye?” The youngest shielded his face from the sight and cried “O marvelous syte ys that I se” and the third king was galloping away, simply saying “I wyl fle”.16 This is drama, though the texts are probably too simple to represent a performance text as they stand.17 Brief texts also survived long enough to be read in depictions of the same scene at Ampney Crucis (Glos)

14

Ettlinger, “Folklore in Oxfordshire churches”, 165. Rosewell 82–3; illustrated at http://www.paintedchurch.org/wens3l3d.htm (accessed 3.08.08). 16 E. Carleton-Williams, “Mural Paintings of the Three Living and the Three Dead in England”, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 3rd series vol. 7 (1942): 31–40, pp. 36–37. 17 See Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: British Museum Press, 1996), 134–36, for more detailed versions of the dialogue. 15

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and Bovey Tracy (Devon).18 The faded and fragmentary wall paintings at Toddington (Beds) include a crowned figure which the Revd F. C. Clare, vicar of Farmstead, who restored the paintings in 1930, identified as one of the three hunting kings. A text was painted over one of the trees in the hunting scene but he was unable to identify it.19 Text in the painting at Widford (Oxf) was also indecipherable but E. T. Long suggested it might have been in Norman French.20 However, most of the speech scrolls and other inscriptions in scenes of the Three Living and the Three Dead are in English—which may add weight to the suggestion that they reflect dramatic performance. Another lost painting depicting one young man and a skeleton, in the Hungerford chapel in Salisbury Cathedral, had a lengthy poem annexed to it.21 This painting was traditionally identified as part of a Dance of Death but Sophie Oosterwijk has suggested that it was part of a painting of the Three Living and the Three Dead.22 The parish church of St Swithin at Swanbourne (Bucks) has an even more dramatic scheme on the north wall, an allegory of the fate of the human soul. In the uppermost tier the penitent soul is received into Heaven: one of the speech scrolls reads Quia libere solvisti tuum debitum Do ergo tibi liberum exitum (Because you have freely paid your debt, I give you leave to go)

On the bottom tier, souls are led to Hell by demons, again with speech scrolls in Latin. Thus far, we are looking at an allegorical narrative which could have its inspiration in a miracle play. But in the middle tier the speech breaks out of the narrative framework to appeal directly to the viewer. Three souls in the flames of Purgatory plead for help, in words from Job 19 which were also used in the Office of the Dead:

18

Carleton-Williams, “The Three Living and the Three Dead”, 38–39. Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Records Service: Z 913/6/9, P 8/2/5, P 8/28/10/1. I am grateful to Nigel Lutt of the Archive Service for locating and summarizing these documents for me. 20 Carleton-Williams, “The Three Living and the Three Dead”, 33. 21 Francis Douce, The Dance of Death Exhibited . . . (London: William Pickering, 1833), 52–3. 22 Sophie Oosterwijk, “Lessons in ‘hopping’: the Dance of Death and the Chester mystery cycle”, Comparative Drama 36:3–4 (2002–03): 249–87. 19

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Miseremini mei saltem vos amici mei (Have pity on me, at least you my friends)

Beneath is an inscription in English, seven lines long but virtually indecipherable. All that could be read in the nineteenth century was the words . . . Man lyvyth to dye . . . . . . in wynde a dream at his fete . . .23

The extracts from the Office of the Dead would have been recognized by the more devout of the congregation but the other texts would have to have been read to them. It is possible, though, that (like the texts accompanying the Miracles of the Virgin at Eton) these texts provided the priest with material for sermons and became familiar through repetition. Like the Eton texts, those at Swanbourne are not there to be read but to add emphasis to a story which will largely be understood visually. In the very complex Last Judgement at Trotton (W. Sussex), Christ’s words from Matthew 25, Venite benedicti, appear in the speech scroll of an angel welcoming a saved soul into Heaven. They are particularly appropriate in the context of the rest of the painting, which depicts the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, which had their origin in the same passage from Matthew 25.24 At Woodeaton the text from the Doom painting has moved to the rood beam, suggesting that it was emphatically meant to be seen. Christ’s words, Venite, benedicti Patris mei Ite, maledicti, in ignem aeternum

are terrifying to modern eyes, but their placing on the rood beam clearly linked judgement with sacrifice and redemption. The call “Come, you blessed of my father” summoned the parishioners through the screen on Easter Sunday, the one day of the year when they traditionally

23 The Rev. J. Slatter, “Description of the paintings discovered on the north wall of Swanbourne Church, Buckinghamshire”, Records of Buckinghamshire 3 (1879): 136– 40; illustrated in Rosewell, 72–73 and at http://www.paintedchurch.org/swanbou.htm (accessed 4.08.08), though all these mistranscribe the scroll in question. 24 M. D. Anderson, The Imagery of British Churches (London: Murray, 1955), 108 and pl 46.

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received the Eucharist themselves. The same text appears in the magnificent recently-discovered Doom at Holy Trinity, Coventry,25 and in a lost painting at Snetterton (Norfolk).26 On a painting of the Last Judgement on boards above the screen at Penn (Bucks), scrolls above the heads of the apostles on either side of Christ read Surgite mortui, venite ad judicium (Arise, ye dead, and come to judgement), the words of the archangel according to St Jerome (or at least, attributed to St Jerome by Bede).27 Obscure though they were in origin, these words were well known by the later middle ages: they appear, for example, in the N-town play of the Last Judgement. They may also be the words coming from the angel’s trumpet in the Coventry Doom but there they are just below the margin of legibility, and the scroll between John the Baptist and the Wicked Alewives is similarly illegible. It is difficult to interpret the words which Keyser recorded under the Doom at Bloxham (Oxon), . . . carne comburemer (possibly comburemur, “we shall be burned”, for the cry of the souls banished to Hell?).28 In a remarkably graphic depiction of the Incredulity of St Thomas in the north transept of St Albans’ Abbey (near the traditional site of the martyrdom of St Alban and on the pilgrim circuit of the church), Thomas has his hand in Christ’s side: blood spurts from the wound and trickles down Christ’s robe. Thomas has a speech scroll saying Dominus meus deus meus, “My Lord and my God”, and Christ’s scroll reads Beati qui non viderunt et crediderunt, “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed”.29 The most common use of speech scrolls is in depictions of the Annunciation. The Angel Gabriel frequently has a scroll with the opening words of the angelic salutation, Ave Maria gratia plena, “Hail, Mary, full of grace”; less frequently, Mary has a scroll with her response, Ecce

25 I am grateful to Lynn Jones of Holy Trinity, Coventry for this information: see the photographs in Rosewell, Medieval Wall Painting, 74, and at http://www.holytrini tycoventry.org.uk/main.htm (accessed 9.08.08). 26 Francis Blomefield, An Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk . . . vol. 1 (London: William Miller, 1805), 419. 27 L. A. Willoughby, “Two Unpublished Middle High German Poems. ‘Die vunfzehen zeichen’ and ‘Wie Got das jungst Gericht besitzen sol’.” The Modern Language Review, 5: 3 (Jul., 1910): 297–336. 28 List of buildings . . . 30. Keyser seems to have been the only person to have recorded this inscription; none of his references mentions it. 29 Photograph in Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings, 56.

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ancilla Domini, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord”.30 Like the scroll of the souls in Purgatory at Swanbourne, the text in the Annunciation speech scrolls may be a reflection of contemporary drama, but it was also something to be enacted as liturgy. The Ave Maria was one of the basic texts which all parish priests were supposed to teach their congregations,31 and by the fifteenth century it was a key element in lay devotion. Another of the key texts features in the Doom painting at Trotton (W. Sussex), which includes Moses holding up the tablets with the Ten Commandments (in Latin). The link between affective devotion to the Passion and the formal expression of belief was made most powerfully explicit in the paintings on the walls of the chancel at Smarden (Kent), where roundels with the Instruments of the Passion were encircled by clauses from the Apostles’ Creed, the third core element in the lay curriculum.32 The Creed also featured on the screens and stained glass of many churches as scrolls accompanying the Apostles themselves. These texts were therefore familiar to their viewers, who may have been able to recognize them even if they could not “read” in the sense of decoding unknown text. In sacred space they encountered the familiar holy. Some texts were less familiar but must still have been recognizable from regular repetition. On the roof of the chapel of All Saints in St John the Baptist, Maddermarket, Norwich (since destroyed by a gas explosion) angels held scrolls with verses from the Te Deum,

30 For example, the very faded paintings above the chancel arch at Attleborough (Norfolk) and the much better preserved sequence at Great Hockham (also Norfolk): photograph of the latter in Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings, 123. This is a complex composition with God the Father seated on a rainbow, the dove of the Holy Spirit hovering over his breast, embracing the now-vanished carving of the crucified Christ on the rood. There are donor figures to either side and, below them, Mary and the angel. Mary’s lengthy scroll is now virtually illegible apart from the first word ecce but clearly once read ecce ancilla domini: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. There are more speech scrolls around the donor figures and a captioning scroll under the painting but these are frustratingly unidentifiable. The scroll above the donor figure to the right could feasibly be orate pro anima/animabus. . . . For more photographs see http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/hockham/hockham.htm (accessed 8.08.08). 31 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 53–55 for the core elements of lay instruction embodied in the Lambeth Council’s De informacione simplicium of 1281 (better known by its opening words Ignorantia sacerdotum). 32 The Revd Francis Haslewood, “Smarden Church”, Archaeologia Cantiana 14 (1882): 18–22.

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the great hymn of praise of the whole church to God.33 At Long Melford (Suffolk) the late fifteenth-century tomb of John Clopton and his wife has a painting of the Resurrected Christ on its canopy. The tomb sits between the Clopton chantry and the high altar. Flat-topped, with the deceased painted on the slab rather than carved in effigy, it was probably used as a base for the Easter sepulchre.34 The text on the speech scroll, Omnis qui vivit et credit in me non morietur in aeternam (“Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die”: John 11.26), is generally assumed to be linked with the Easter sepulchre (it comes from the story of the raising of Lazarus, one of the prefigurers of the Resurrection), but it is (also) appropriate for a tomb as it is one of the antiphons in the Office of the Dead.35 These texts articulate the sacred space of the church as a performative structure, a permanent prayer in stone. Prayers could appear on speech scrolls. Under the Annunciation on the south window splay at Martin near Fordingbridge (Hants) is a small kneeling figure holding a scroll inscribed o beata mar[ie] m[iserere mei].36 In his chantry chapel at Winterborne (Glos.), Sir Thomas de Bradeston is painted brandishing a prayer scroll (unfortunately illegible).37On the north wall of the chancel at Broughton (Oxf ) is an unusual cycle of the death and assumption of the Virgin Mary. In the first scene, the annunciation of her death by the archangel Gabriel, both she and the angel have speech scrolls but they are now unreadable. Beneath the sequence, though, is the donor figure of a priest (Rosewell suggests this is the late fourteenth century rector John Wykeham) with a scroll reading “Leuedy for thi Joyzes fyve, led me the wey of clene

33 [John Murray], Handbook for Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire (London: John Murray, 1870), 211; Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson, The Buildings of England: Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-east (London: Penguin, 1997), 240. 34 For a recent discussion of the distinction between the Easter sepulchre, the “tomb of Christ” and the sacrament shrine, see Phillip Lindley, Tomb Destruction and Scholarship: medieval monuments in early modern England (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2007), 184–88. 35 Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings, 174–75, with a very clear photograph, though the transcription and translation of the text need correcting. 36 E. W. Tristram, English Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955), 222. 37 Miriam Gill, “Sacred and Secular: the chantry paintings of Sir Thomas de Bradeston at Winterbourne” in E. Bailey, ed., Small is Cosmic. Millennial Issues in Parochial Perspective (Winterbourne, 1998), 30–5. I am grateful to Miriam Gill for a discussion of this painting.

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lyve” [1.3].38 This is interesting for two reasons. The five joys are possibly not the traditional ones—Annunciation, Nativity, Resurrection, Ascension, and Assumption—but the scenes depicted here, the annunciation of her death, her deathbed and burial, her assumption into heaven and her coronation. And the speech scroll is in English (and rather garbled English at that), in spite of the fact that it is spoken by a priest. Variants on the verse in the speech scroll appear in several collections of later Middle English lyrics.39 Most of the prayers in speech scrolls, though, are in Latin. While the medieval congregation could not “understand” Latin as we mean the word, they did clearly “know” quite a lot of Latin, learned by rote as a result of years of listening to the liturgy. The prayers they learned in Latin were not incomprehensible: they had meaning which was enhanced by the use of sacred language. (In the same way, many people in Wales cannot “speak” or “understand” Welsh, but they can sing the National Anthem and probably some of the rugby song Sospan Fach as well.) As in these modern examples, prayer in Latin is another case of language as well as text adding weight and meaning to the image. Less common than prayers in speech scrolls are prayers in place of captions in or under paintings. There is however a remarkable collection of short prayers in the wall paintings rescued from the church of St Teilo at Llandeilo Talybont in west Glamorgan and now in the National Museum of Wales, where the church has been rebuilt. Around an early sixteenth-century painting of the Image of Pity are two fragments, jsu m (possibly jesu miserere, or part of the wellknown prayer jesu mercy, lady help) and a dent . . . . . jhu mercy, possibly a dentibus mortis . . . [1.4]. At the west end of the north wall of nave are the words . . . homo da . . . ., which has been conjecturally read as jesu christe deus et homo da nobis . . . then possibly pacem (there is insufficient room for panem nostrum quotidianum) [1.5]. There are other texts as well—ecce homo on the Bound Christ, te laudamus on a scroll held by an angel, and possibly agnus dei on the reredos of the nave altar—but what is striking and unusual is 38 Rosewell, Medieval Wall Painting, 176–77; Tristram, English Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century, 145. Photographs at http://www.paintedchurch.org/brouoxvi.htm (accessed 8.08.08). 39 BL Royal 8.F.6, fol. 21a; Lincoln Cathedral 91 (Thornton), fol. 177b: cf Karen Saupe, ed., “The Joys of Mary” (originally published in Middle English Marian Lyrics, Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998, accessed online at http:// www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/joys71.htm, 6.08.08).

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these fragments of a sequence of prayers, possibly a litany, guiding the viewer round the church, mapping the sacred space and linking responses to the visual images [1.6 and 1.7].40 Some Latin inscriptions could have had little meaning for the average parishioner. Only a fragment of the rhyming hexameters under the early twelfth-century sequence depicting the life of Christ at Hardham (West Sussex) survives, over the scenes of the Annunciation and Visitation. It reads virgo salutatur, sterilis fecunda probatur (“The virgin is greeted, the infertile woman is shown to be fruitful”).41 This was presumably part of a sequence of rhyming hexameters but cannot be identified elsewhere. Hardham was one of the “Lewes group” of churches associated with the Cluniac priory of St Pancras at Lewes. Other churches in the same group (Witley, Westmeston, Coombes and Stoke D’Abernon) are known to have inscriptions in the same style, but where they have survived they are now illegible.42 Rosewell suggests that these paintings were art from above, a deliberate strategy to demonstrate power, learning and the authority of the Priory and its local patrons the de Warenne family.43 As with the more familiar texts, the writing is there not for what it says but for what its presence indicates—in this case, imposed art constructing hegemonic sacred space. On the other hand, elite art did not have to involve text. The very complex sequences of the Infancy and Passion of Christ in the chancel at Brook (Kent) are of high artistic quality and were executed in the most sumptuous materials, rich vermilion and gold leaf, but they include no text at all. Text was just one of many strategies to impress.

40 The closest parallel to the Llandeilo Talybont inscriptions is not in a church but in another kind of sacred space, that of the medieval hospital. The walls of the infirmary at the Worcester Commandery are decorated with a compendium of medieval devotion including the Trinity, the Image of Pity, the Five Wounds, the Weighing of Souls, and SS Thomas of Canterbury, Anne, Erasmus, Etheldreda, Helen and (possibly) Gudwal. Most have either captions or prayer scrolls. (I am grateful to Christine Buckley of the New Oxford Shakespeare for drawing my attention to these and providing me with detailed photographs.) 41 E. W. Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting: The Twelfth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944), 129 and plates 29 and 30; Clive Bell, Frances ByngStamper and Caroline Lucas, eds., Twelfth century paintings at Hardham and Clayton (Lewes: Miller’s Press, 1947), plate 36. 42 Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting: The Twelfth Century, 27–36. 43 Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings, 99.

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We also need to remember how widespread a limited level of Latinity (if not Latin literacy) was by the end of the fifteenth century. The regulations for the daily worship of the almshouse at Ewelme assumed that at least some of the almsmen would be able to manage a range of Latin prayers. They were expected to say the Matins of Our Lady and even to read at the Master’s direction. It was accepted that not all would be able to recite the set prayers but active engagement with the prayer life of the community was expected from all. Those who could not recite Matins were to say the basic elements of lay instruction, the Paternoster, Ave and Creed, in set cycles of repetition.44 Paul Barnwell has suggested that the early pewing of churches was not to facilitate listening to sermons but to provide space for women with some level of literacy to gather for the collective performance of piety.45 By the fifteenth century, secular donors were keen to be portrayed in the act of worship and accompanied by their devotional books.46 Text could commemorate individuals and ask for prayers for their souls, particularly in the case of those who contributed to the building and decoration of the church. At Halesworth (Suff ), over the door to the vestry, is the painted inscription Orate pro aīabus Thome Clement et Margarete cōsortis sue qui istud vestiarum fecer’—“Pray for the souls of Thomas Clement and Margaret his wife who made this vestry”.47 On the west wall of the north aisle of St Gregory’s, Norwich, under the painting of St George and the Dragon, was a fragmentary inscription reading “Pray for the soul of . . .” (the name is unfortunately missing but was presumably that of the donor).48 And the roof of the

44 John A. A. Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme: life, devotion and architecture in a fifteenth-century almshouse (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 146, 148, 234. 45 “Affective Piety in the Parish Church: The Living and the Dead” (paper presented at the Leeds International Medieval Congress, July 7–10, 2008). The extent (and limits) of lay literacy and lay awareness of the Bible (in Latin and in the vernacular) are discussed in A. Blamires, “The Limits of Bible Study for Medieval Women”, Women, the Book and the Godly, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Woodbridge and Rochester: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 1–12; M. C. Erler, Women, Reading and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 46: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002). 46 David Griffith, “A Portrait of the Reader: Secular Donors and their Books in the Art of the English Parish Church” in Stephen Kelly and John J. Thompson, eds., Imagining the Book (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 209–35. 47 Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Suffolk (London: Penguin, 1961), 226: photograph at http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/images/halesworth2826.jpg (accessed 6.08.08). 48 Fox in VCH Norfolk 538–9.

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now-demolished church of All Saints, Garboldisham (Norfolk), which was diapered with the names Jesus and Mary, also bore an inscription “Betwex syn yis and ye Rode Loff ye yongling hav payd for yis cost”— in other words, the young people’s guild raised the money for the roof near the rood loft.49 These texts usually commemorate the patrons of the building, but in one very rare example at Ampney Crucis (Glos.) a now-lost wall painting of St Christopher was actually captioned “Thomas ye payntre of Malmesburie”.50 Carefully-chosen and distinctive text could also mark out private sacred space within the parish church, on tombs and in guild and chantry chapels. On the inner face of the rood and parclose screens in the Chudleigh chantry chapel in the church of St John the Baptist, Ashton (Devon), scrolls reproduce antiphons and readings from the liturgy for Advent, the Annunciation, the Nativity of John the Baptist and the new feasts of the Visitation and Transfiguration.51 At Berkeley (Glos), John Trevisa (1342–1402), vicar of Berkeley, canon of Westbury-on-Trym and chaplain to Lord Berkeley, transcribed his own translations from the Book of Revelation on to the chapel ceiling. The translation was in Anglo-Norman French but in the context of the political turmoil over Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible it may still have been seen as challenging—too challenging to be allowed outside a private chapel.52 The walls of the Clopton chapel in Holy Trinity parish church, Long Melford (Suff ), were covered with a complex sequence of inscriptions, only a little of which now survives. Above the altar and on the north wall, on fictive scrolls, were stanzas by John Lydgate, some from a poem expressing Christ’s appeal to humanity from the Cross: Behold o man lefte up thyn eyen & see what mortall peyne I suffred for your trespace . . .

49 Edward T. Long, “Painted Roofs in East Anglian Churches”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 55 no 317 (Aug. 1929): 74–81. 50 David Viner, “The martyrdom of St Erasmus and other lost wall paintings from Holy Rood Church, Ampney Crucis”, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 118 (200): 201–6. 51 Marion Glasscoe, “Late Medieval Paintings in Ashton Church, Devon”, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 140 (1987): 182–90. 52 James Herbert Cooke, “On the ancient inscriptions in the chapel at Berkeley Castle . . .”, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 1 (1876):138–46; David Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire, 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 1992), 88 and n 20; cf Miriam Gill and Richard K. Morris, “A Wall-painting of the Apocalypse in Coventry rediscovered”, Burlington Magazine 143 (1181) (August 2001): 467–73.

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and some from a more direct appeal to penitence: Now in the name of oure lord iħs of right hole herte & in our best entent . . .

while on the bressumer beam at the west end are verses from a poem by the same author, “The Lamentation of Mary Magdalene”. The rafters were painted with scrolls with the words jhu mercy and gramercy, and on either side of the central beam were phrases from the Litany. The overall theme seems to have been a call to penitence.53 These complex and idiosyncratic schemes are clearly the choice of an individual or small group. (Experience with the choice of texts for the scrolls in the reconstructed church of St Teilo at St Fagan’s suggests that texts are, if anything, even more difficult to agree on than visuals.) A member of the Clopton family may also have been responsible for the complex textual decoration of the guild chapel of the Holy Cross at Stratford-upon-Avon. Sir Hugh Clopton, mayor of London and builder of William Shakespeare’s future home at New Place, Stratford, arranged for the rebuilding of the chapel nave. Its decoration included the Legend of the Holy Cross, with detailed narrative captions in Latin and English; a Dance of Death with accompanying verses in English, probably the verses which John Lydgate (again) translated for the Dance of Death at St Paul’s Cathedral; and possibly the life and death of Adam, again with narrative captions. On the west wall a version of the poem “Erthe out of erthe” (based on the Ash Wednesday liturgy) surrounded a fourwinged angel (probably St Michael, the weigher of souls). Underneath was a shrouded corpse surrounded by worms, skulls and bones. Two men pointed to a scroll with another popular poem Whoo soo hym be thought Inwardly and ofte How harde hyt ys to flett From bede to peyt From peyt to peyne That neu[er] schall seys serten. He wolde not do no syn all yis world to wyn.

The chapel would have been the preserve of members of the guild, the urban elite: it is interesting that here, as in the Clopton chapel in 53 J. B. Trapp, “Verses by Lydgate at Long Melford”, The Review of English Studies n.s. 6 (21) (Jan. 1955): 1–11. Illustrated at http://www.holycross.edu/departments/ visarts/projects/anglia/x16.htm (accessed 10.08.08).

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Long Melford, English texts were chosen. In this case, the underlying message may be that this was sacred space for those who could actually read the inscriptions. As well as being diapered with the IHS monogram, the chapel of St John the Baptist in the parish church of Ewelme (Oxf ) was decorated with texts from the Vulgate celebrating the Holy Name and carefully chosen to reflect the central Christian mysteries of Incarnation, Redemptive Sacrifice, Resurrection and Judgement.54 This was a complex scheme dependent on a high level of Biblical knowledge to understand all its allusions. At Ewelme, though, the chapel was used by the almsmen. The implication of the regulations for their daily worship was that some of them might be able to read,55 but a fair number would only be capable of the structured repetition of Paternoster, Ave and Creed.56 And in most cases the decoration of chantry chapels was clearly visible to the whole congregation through and over the parclose screens. We should also bear in mind that some of the most complex textual schemes are in the main body of the church—the allegory of penitent and impenitent souls at Swanbourne (Bucks.), the Doom at Trotton (W. Sussex). Even the sequence of the Miracles of the Virgin Mary at Eton was in the parochial part of the church. In order to understand how these texts “worked” for viewers who could not read (in the modern sense of the word), it may be helpful to look at another example of text for the illiterate, the wording on medieval pilgrim badges. While some badges were of high artistic quality, and could even be made in precious metals, most were emphatically the art of the poor. Beggars in medieval paintings are often depicted with pilgrimage badges in their hats.57 These badges, produced in their thousands of low-grade pewter, were sold at all the major shrines and many minor ones. They functioned as souvenirs; they declared to all that the owner had been on pilgrimage (and thus possibly served as a claim to charity); blessed by their proximity to shrines and relics, they became relics themselves.58

54

Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme, 159–169. Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme, 148, 234. 56 Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme, 145–49. 57 The classic and often-quoted example is an anonymous painting of St Joachim giving alms to a group of beggars, in the Historisches Museum in Frankfurt-on-Main: see, for example, the reproduction in Brian Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges (London: Stationery Office, 1998), frontispiece and p. 2. 58 Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges, 16–18. 55

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Text can be found on even the cheapest and crudest of these badges. Some simply name the saint depicted on the badge, others have short prayers or other texts (one of the most popular being the opening words of the Ave Maria on badges from Marian shrines). These texts are often difficult to understand: the letters may be well-formed but not make identifiable words, or the letters themselves may be unrecognizable.59 Some authorities have suggested that these may be magical incantations. In a very illuminating study in Viator, however, Tom Bredehoft argues that they are pictures of words, iconographies of text.60 They thus clarify the very arbitrary relationship between marks on page, words and meanings. We may say “That’s not the proper Ave Maria—you’ve got that bit wrong . . .”. But if the purchaser of the badge asked what the words were, the maker would have said “That’s the Ave Maria . . .”. For both vendor and purchaser, then, the marks on the badge are the words Ave Maria Gratia Plena, and those words signify the whole complex of meaning of late medieval Marian devotion. The contemplation of the written word was considered to be of value even for the illiterate. At the end of the Welsh Life of St Margaret of Antioch she promises certain salvation to those who copy, read or look at the Life, as well as to those who dedicate churches to her.61 On pilgrim badges, then, these images of text were used to construct the small, quite intensely personal sacred space of the pilgrim or the individual worshipper. How does this apply to the more public sacred space of a church? Bredehoft refers to Brian Stock’s concept of “textual communities” whose members recognize script as text and associate a specific meaning with it. That understanding may have been communicated orally: it does not even demand that any member of the community is “literate” in our modern sense, as long as they possess the skill of associating text with meaning. This is public text as

59

See, for example, the badges at http://asstudents.unco.edu/faculty/tbredehoft/ UNCclasses/ENG238/238bust.htm (accessed 17.08.08): badges with inscriptions capt thome [for Caput Thome, “the head of Thomas”, i.e. Thomas of Canterbury], i . a . n . n . i . s [possibly for Johannes, John the Baptist or John the Evangelist], + v o m a n v m s a, + n i v o [d] [n] a i and + v [.] [m] [.] r [ c . ] v o (where letters in brackets indicate best attempts, periods in brackets indicate a totally illegible letter). 60 Thomas Bredehoft, “Literacy without Letters: Pilgrim Badges and Late-Medieval Literate Ideology.” Viator 37 (2006): 433–45. 61 Melville Richards, “Buchedd Fargred”, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 11 (1939): 324–34; Jane Cartwright, Y Forwyn Fair, Santesau a Lleianod: Agweddau ar Wyryfdod a Diweirdeb yng Nghymru’r Oesoedd Canol (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), 125.

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iconography: to quote Bredehoft, “In brief, a text need not always be ‘read’ in order to convey meaning to a viewer, although the association of meaning with text is foundational to any understanding of literacy”. In their introduction to Imagining the Book, Stephen Kelly and John Thompson refer to the “thoroughly social relationship between text, reading and writing” in the later medieval period and describe the book as a “nexus of cultural practice”.62 The same phrase is clearly applicable by extension to text on walls, constructing social as well as sacred space. They go on to argue that the book encodes “the cultural currency of texts specific to the communities within which they were made”.63 Again, the same is true by extension of texts on walls: they articulate the community’s sense of identity, but more than that, they are the product of an intensely social process of negotiation and contestation. They encode not just local society but local politics. Individual letters could stand for whole words, for prayers and even for individuals, on pilgrim badges and in wall painting.64 The feast and cult of the Holy Name of Jesus was one of the most popular devotions in late medieval England, though it was not formally added to the liturgy until the 1480s.65 The chapel of St John the Baptist, built by the de la Pole family at Ewelme (Oxf ) as a chapel for their almshouse, was diapered with the sacred monogram ihs, a reverential abbreviation of the name Jesus.66 The monogram stood not just for Christ’s name but for his being. The lost roof of the chapel of All Saints in St John Maddermarket, Norwich, was diapered with the sacred monogram in crowns of thorns. In the same church, in St Mary’s chapel in the south aisle, angels bore scrolls with the Ave Maria and the name Maria crowned.67 62

Kelly and Thompson, Imagining the Book, 4. Kelly and Thompson, Imagining the Book, 9. 64 See, for example, the crowned “M” badges in Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, 155–57, and at http://asstudents.unco.edu/faculty/tbredehoft/UNCclasses/ENG238/238Marian .htm (accessed 17.08.08). 65 Elizabeth New, “The Cult of the Holy Name of Jesus in late medieval England, with special reference to the fraternity in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, c 1450–1558” (unpublished University of London Ph D thesis, 1999); Hugo Blake, Geoff Egan, John Hurst and Elizabeth New, “From Popular Devotion to Resistance and Revival in England: The Cult of the Holy Name of Jesus and the Reformation”, in David Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist, eds., The Archaeology of Reformation 1480–1580 (London: Maney, 2003), 175–203. 66 Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme, 160–65. 67 [John Murray], Handbook for Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire (London: John Murray, 1870), 211. 63

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The crowned letter M was almost as common as a diapering device as the Sacred Monogram. Such devices are perhaps so familiar that the eye slides over them without questioning their meaning. However, two other examples of the initial standing for the whole individual are more idiosyncratic. At Salthouse (Norfolk), panels from the former aisle screen have been built into the pews. They are now most famous for the sixteenth-century sailing ships which have been scratched on them: but under the scratches they are diapered with flowers and mitred initial “N”s, presumably for St Nicholas, bishop of Myra and patron saint of the church.68 And at the church of St Edmund King and Martyr in Acle (Norfolk) the rood screen was diapered with the letters M and E, the E pierced with crossed arrows (Edmund was martyred by being shot with arrows).69 The diapering at Arminghall (Norfolk), presumably destroyed in Seddon’s restoration, is more puzzling: the church is dedicated to St Mary but according to Keyser the walls were diapered with the letter A, with a consecration cross below and “a text”, which was unfortunately never recorded.70 But there is another explanation we have to bear in mind for at least some of these images of text. While some were clearly intended to be clearly seen (the inscription on the outside of Long Melford church, for example, and the text on the rood beam at Woodeaton, which may have been moved from the Doom painting where it would have been obscured by the rood), much of medieval art was not designed to be seen by human eyes. In Llandaff Cathedral, for example, on the breast of Sir Christopher Mathew’s tomb effigy is a pendant carving of St Christopher. Of course, this was the deceased man’s name saint: but, as the Woodeaton wall painting reminds us, Christopher was also the saint who would ensure you a “good” death, with the sacraments of the church. His presence on a tomb is therefore a perpetual invocation in stone. But the tomb is placed above eye level in an alcove between the north choir aisle and the Lady Chapel and the Christopher is not

68 Keyser, Painted Decorations, 223; photograph at http://www.norfolkchurches. co.uk/salthouse/images/DSCF5512.JPG (accessed 3.08.08). 69 Keyser, Painted Decorations, 300, referring to John L’Estrange, The Eastern Counties collectanea: Notes and queries on subjects relating to the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Cambridge (Norwich: Tallack, 1872–73), 61. The screen has since been restored: photographs at http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/acle/acle.htm (accessed 5.08.08). 70 Keyser, Painted Decorations, 8; Norfolk Archaeology 8 (1877), 334, report by Mr Fitch.

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visible to human eyes. The text in much stained glass would not have been visible to the laity even if they could read it. Perhaps the most extreme example is the text which was (and still is) cast on church bells, unseen unless they are taken down for repair. There was always a third party in the process of reading and viewing text: the writer/painter, the reader/viewer, and God who sees and understands all things. In understanding sacred space we have to remember that to the medieval mind sacred space was the space where God was particularly present. So as the Christopher is a perpetual prayer in stone, the texts on the walls of our churches are a perpetual prayer. With them, the sacred space of the church itself is made active, uttering petition and praise when the congregation is silent or absent.

ANGLO-SAXON MONASTERIES AS SACRED PLACES: TOPOGRAPHY, EXEGESIS AND VOCATION1 Thomas Pickles For over twenty years it has been clear that the locations of AngloSaxon monasteries were chosen with care and consistency. Foundation narratives from the early-eighth century to the early-eleventh century reveal that founders sought permission and property from kings and aristocrats, asked for advice from other leading churchmen and embarked on expeditions to select suitable sites.2 The regular use of Latin locus, ‘place’, to denote any monastery reveals that, like their continental counterparts, Anglo-Saxon authors considered monasteries a distinctive kind of place.3 Bede’s Epistola ad Ecgberhtum of 734 complained about the creation of false monasteries, which did not live up to the standards of religious life that he endorsed, but he assumed that even a false monastery was a new and different kind of place.4 Drawing on the tradition of spatial science in geography and

1 Research for this paper was undertaken during a doctorate funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Constructive criticism was offered by my doctoral examiners, Jane Hawkes and John Maddicott, for which I am very grateful. Lucy Donkin, Jane Garnett and Helen Gittos generously provided discussion, suggested references and gave access to unpublished work. John Blair, Katy Cubitt, Matthew Kempshall, George Molyneaux and Roger Pickles kindly read and improved earlier versions. All errors of fact or interpretation nevertheless remain my own. 2 Bede, H[istoria] E[cclesiastica], iii.23, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and Roger A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), for Bede’s early-eighth century foundation narrative for the monastery at Lastingham (North Yorkshire). Æthelwulf, De abbatibus, c. 11, lines 118–19 and c. 12, lines 125–39, ed. and trans. Alistair Campbell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), for Æthelwulf ’s early-ninth century foundation narrative for an unnamed cell of Lindisfarne (Northumberland). Byrhtferth, Vita Oswaldi, iii.12, 16–17, 19, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), for Byrhtferth’s late tenth-century or early eleventh-century foundation narrative for the monastery at Ramsey (Huntingdonshire). 3 M-Anselme Dimier, ‘Le mot locus employé dans le sense de monastère’, Revue Mabillon 62 (1972): 133–54. 4 Bede, Epistola ad Ecgberhtum, cc. 11–13, ed. Charles Plummer, Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946) I, 414–17. John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 100–8, for commentary.

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landscape archaeology,5 historians and archaeologists have identified the common characteristics of monastic topography.6 Anglo-Saxon monasteries are overwhelmingly associated with coastal and riverine locations. On the coastlines they generally sit alongside the estuaries where important rivers meet the sea. Inland they regularly sit at the junction of two rivers or of a river and major overland route-way. Often they occupy the gravel terraces above, or on the alluvial deposits of, major rivers. At both coastal and inland locations there is an observable preference for elevation, either part way up the side of a river valley or on a raised peninsula or headland. Inherited features, natural or man-made, were employed to provide a sense of enclosure. Island sites were popular, both natural islands off the sea coast, and notional islands bounded by the branches of two rivers, sitting on raised ground above marshy floodplains or occupying woodland clearings. Iron Age and Roman structures were reoccupied, no doubt partly for their island-like qualities. Topographical names applied to monastic communities reveal that topography remained a defining factor in their identity as distinct places.7

5 Two lines of influence can be traced. The first is William G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955). The second is Walter Christaller, Central Places in Southern Germany, trans. Carlisle W. Baskin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), applied to English archaeology in Eric G. Grant, ed., Central Places, Archaeology and History (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, 1986). 6 R. Hill, ‘Christianity and Geography in Early Northumbria’, Studies in Church History 3 (1966): 126–39, was a pioneering study, but not immediately followed up. Topographical surveys really took off in the 1980s: Warwick Rodwell, ‘Churches in the Landscape: Aspects of Topography and Planning’, in Studies in Late Anglo-Saxon Settlement, ed. Margaret L. Faull (Oxford: Oxford University Department for External Studies, 1984), 3–18; John Blair, ‘Minster Churches in the Landscape’, in Anglo-Saxon Settlements, ed. Della Hooke (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 35–58; Richard Morris, Churches in the Landscape (London: Dent, 1989), ch. 2; John Blair, ‘Anglo-Saxon Minsters: a topographical review’, in Pastoral Care before the Parish, ed. John Blair and Richard Sharpe (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), 226–266; David Stocker, ‘The Early Church in Lincolnshire: A Study of the Sites and their Significance’, in Pre-Viking Lindsey, ed. Alan Vince (Lincoln: City of Lincoln Archaeological Unit, 1993), 101–22; Patrick Haes, ‘The Church in the Wessex Heartlands’, in The Medieval Landscape of Wessex, ed. Mick Aston and Carenza Lewis (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1994), 47–82; John Blair, ‘The Minsters of the Thames’, in The Cloister and the World, ed. John Blair and Brian Golding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 5–28; Teresa Hall, Minster Churches in the Dorset Landscape (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2000); Tim Pestell, Landscapes of Monastic Foundation: The Establishment of Religious Houses in East Anglia c. 650–1200 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), 21–64; and Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, ch. 4. 7 Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, 171–2.

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Practical considerations like accessibility and prominence in the local landscape will have been governing factors in the choice of such locations and the continued identification of them with reference to topographical features. Yet monasteries were sacred places—places pertaining to God in which there were restrictions and prohibitions on human behaviour—and communities needed to understand this topography as suitable to their way of life.8 Comparatively little attention has been focused on how knowledge of sacred texts prompted founders and their communities to experience such locations as sacred places. What has been written concentrates exclusively on foundation narratives to explore the connection between sacred text and sacred place. Roman pastoral poets established the tradition of the locus amoenus—a paradise composed of a rocky mountain or gorge, springs, trees or woods and birds.9 Impressed by third- and fourthcentury desert ascetics, Athanasius and Jerome constructed biographies that described ascetic activity in terms of the physical rejection of civilisation in cities, the psychological rejection of civilised society and the transformation of the desert into a locus amoenus foreshadowing the heavenly city.10 Their accounts depicted ascetics occupying the ruins of older civilisations, set amidst a mountain, river and palm trees, before purging them of beasts, demons or brigands to create a place described by the phrases desertum civitas or desertum floribus vernans.11 Athanasius and Jerome became enduring literary models: the genre of biography and the metaphor of desert asceticism became a standard way to promote the sanctity of churchmen and monasteries, embodied in foundation narratives describing the selection of suitable sites and their ritual transformation for occupation by eremites

8 Jane Hubert, ‘Sacred beliefs and beliefs of sacredness’, in Sacred Sites, Sacred Places, ed. David L. Carmichael et al. (London: Routledge, 1994), 9–19, at 11, for this definition of sacred places. 9 Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 183–202. 10 Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert a City (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966); Philip Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Antoine Guillamont, ‘La Conception du Désert Chez le Moines d’Egypt’, in his Aux Origines du Monachisme Chrétien: Pour une Phénoménologie du Monachisme (Begrolle en Mauges: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1979), 69–87. 11 Athanasius, Vita Antonii, cc. 11 and 24 (ed. PL 73, cols. 133 and 148); Jerome, Vita Pauli, c. 5 (ed. PL 23, cols. 20–21); Jerome, Vita Hilarionis, cc. 4, 31, 43 (ed. PL 23, cols. 30–31, 45, 51). Gerhardus J. M. Bartelink, ‘Les Oxymores Desertum Civitas et Desertum Floribus Vernans’, Studia Monastica 15 (1973): 7–15.

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or coenobites. Historians of monasticism across the Latin west have employed foundation narratives to explore the way monastic sites were conceived as islands in the wilderness, transformed from locus horribilis to locus amoenus.12 This approach has also been taken to the topography of Anglo-Saxon monasteries.13 Thanks to this work we are now beginning to understand not just where monasteries were located, but also how they were emplaced— understood as sacred places. Foundation rituals embodied the transformation of chosen locations into sacred places. Regular retelling and re-enactment of these rituals, revealed in the very preservation of the foundation narratives, served to reinforce this transformation. Nevertheless there are limitations to this exclusive focus on foundation narratives, which highlight the need for a new approach. Foundation narratives were rhetorical strategies designed to serve particular historical circumstances.14 They therefore provide a restricted perspective on how monasteries were conceived as sacred places—partial in time and space, focusing on particular aspects of monastic topography and their significance to the exclusion of the rest, reflecting a minority of monasteries and presenting placing as an event rather than an ongoing process. Here it is essential to take account of philosophical and sociological insights into place. The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Heidegger envisages being-in-the-world as a constant process 12 Gregorio Penco, ‘Il senso della natura nell’agiografia monastica occidentale’, Studia Monastica 11 (1969): 327–34; Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Wilderness in the Medieval West’, in his The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 47–59; Gregorio Penco, ‘Un elemento della mentalita’ monastica medievale: la concezione dello spazio’, Benedictina 35 (1988): 53–71; Thomas O’Loughlin, ‘Living in the Ocean’, in Studies in the Cult of St Columba, ed. C. Bourke (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), 11–23, and ‘Distant Islands: The Topography of Holiness in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition: England, Ireland and Wales, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 1–20; John Howe, ‘Creating Symbolic Landscapes: Medieval Development of Sacred Space’, in Inventing Medieval Landscapes, ed. John Howe and Michael Wolfe (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 2002), 208–223. 13 Helen Gittos, ‘Sacred Space in Anglo-Saxon England: Liturgy, Architecture and Place’ (Oxford, D. Phil., 2001), ch. 1; Richard Morris, ‘“Calami et iunci”: Lastingham in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries’, Bulletin of International Medieval Research 11 (2005): 3–21; Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley, ‘Living on the Ecg: The Mutable Boundaries of Land and Water in Anglo-Saxon Contexts’, in A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes, ed. Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (University Park, Pa.: Pensylvania State University Press, 2006), 85–110, esp. 91–105. 14 Antonio Sennis, ‘Narrating Places: Memory and Space in Medieval Monasteries’, in People and Space in the Middle Ages, 300–1500, ed. Wendy Davies, Guy Halsall and Andrew Reynolds (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 275–94.

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of emplacement, whereby the body registers and orientates itself in a pre-socialised world.15 The structuration model of Bourdieu proposes that institutions like the family and school mediate pre-existing social conventions, shaping early experiences of being-in-the-world and creating a structured but flexible habitus, a set of transposable dispositions employed in future emplacement.16 To obtain a wider perspective on how monasteries were conceived as sacred places it is thus necessary to reconstruct the monastic habitus formed by monastic education and observe its influence on emplacement as an ongoing process. Monastic education involved memorising the Latin psalter and equipped the student to study scripture and the patristic authorities.17 The daily round of the monastic offices exposed members of the community to the lectio divina alongside the commentaries of patristic homiliae and short readings from historiae or vitae.18 Even in the false monasteries, Bede assumed that the offices were observed, though not with sufficient concentration.19 Recent studies have emphasised that historiae and vitae were products of this education and written for this environment, connecting scriptural landscapes, patristic commentary and local monastic topography.20 What follows will therefore take 15 Edward S. Casey, ‘How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time’, in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe, N. M.: School of American Research Press, 1996), 13–52, and The Fate of Place: a philosophical history (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997), esp. 202–84; T. Cresswell, Place: a short introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 16 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). 17 Michael Lapidge, ‘Anglo-Latin Literature’, in his Anglo-Latin Literature, c. 600– 899 (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), 1–35, esp. 1–7. 18 Mary Clayton, ‘Homiliaries and Preaching in Anglo-Saxon England’, Peritia 4 (1985): 207–42; Cyril L. Smetana, ‘Paul the Deacon’s Patristic Anthology’, in The Old English Homily and its Backgrounds, ed. Paul E. Szarmach and Bernard F. Huppé (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978), 75–98. 19 Bede, Epistola ad Ecgberhtum, cc. 11–13, ed. Plummer, Venerabilis Baedae, I, 414–17. 20 For the relationship between texts and monastic memory see: Catherine Cubitt, ‘Monastic Memory and Identity in Early Anglo-Saxon England’, in Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain, ed. William O. Frazer and Andrew Tyrrell (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2000), 253–76 and ‘Memory and narrative in the cult of early Anglo-Saxon saints’, in The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 29–66. For explorations of the connections between topography, exegesis and historiae / vitae see: Michael Lapidge, ‘Bede the Poet’, in his Anglo-Latin Literature, 313–38; Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘Reading the Scriptures in the Life of Columba’, in Studies in the Cult of Saint Columba, 81–106; J. C. Eby, ‘Bringing the Vita to Life: Bede’s symbolic structure of the life of St. Cuthbert’, American Benedictine Review 48:3 (1997): 316–38.

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all the major topographical features found at Anglo-Saxon monastic sites and consider their biblical and exegetical associations in order to reconstruct the habitus through which monks and clergy experienced the landscapes around their communities. Terms for landscape features were entered into the search engine of the CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts to ensure that the full range of scriptural associations was observed. Individual patristic texts were then selected for inclusion here on the grounds that they provided examples of the full range of associations, were available and employed by authors in Anglo-Saxon England and were predominantly based in commentary on the Psalms and Gospels or in collections of homilies—fundamental texts in monastic education and the offices.21 Awareness of these ideas was sought in the works of Aldhelm and Bede, to exemplify their transmission to Anglo-Saxon England. An advantage of this methodology is that the Psalms and Gospels, available to every community, were the origin for all these ideas and the appearance of these ideas in a range of patristic texts shows how straightforwardly they were derived from these texts and how commonplace they became. Members of individual communities reading the Psalms and Gospels are therefore likely to have developed and shared such ideas even if they did not have access to the patristic works themselves. Beginning with this habitus, it is then possible to explore aspects of the ongoing significance of place at individual communities through observing the topographical place-names applied to them and passages from historiae and vitae relating to them. This approach helps not only to develop new dimensions within foundation narratives, but it also takes us beyond such narratives, bringing us closer to the way in which monastic communities, through reading sacred texts, understood and redefined monastic topography on a daily basis. I

Coastal Locations

Biblical traditions presented two competing images of the sea: it was a tribute to God’s power over the cosmos, since he gathered the waters and established their boundaries, yet it was a symbol of the continued

21 Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. Appendix E, pp. 174–274 and the Catalogue pp. 275–380, was used to establish the availability of texts in Anglo-Saxon England.

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threat that the forces of chaos posed to God and His creation.22 Patristic commentary elaborated on these associations. The sea and the waves represented the trials and tribulations of the present life: churches were islands established in the midst of the sea of the world, buffeted by waves of persecution, beaten on all sides by the billows of the sea and the storms of temptation, but never submerged because they had Christ as their foundation.23 Since the sea and the waves only raged as far as the shore, where God marked their bounds, the coastline was a symbol of the end of human life, the last judgement and the uninterrupted continuance of eternal life.24 The Church in general, and monasteries in particular, could be considered the closest approximation to the heavenly city on earth, foreshadowing the eternal life to come. Aldhelm therefore equated the sea with secular life and the harbour with the monastic life.25 Bede developed this idea in his commentary on the building of the Tabernacle: the western side of the Tabernacle looked out to the sea because the Holy Church is settled on the firm shores of the eternal God and his heavenly society, looking out at the present sins and future punishments of the damned.26 Coastal locations in the British Isles were particularly suitable for rejection and endurance in the tradition of early monasticism. Biblical passages established that the Ocean was an uninhabitable region surrounding the land, home to the Leviathon and the abode of Satan and his demons.27 Orosius suggested that Jerusalem was at the centre of the world, encircled by the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe, which were in turn surrounded by the Ocean; his suggestions were embodied in T-O maps and adopted by Insular authors including Bede.28 Like the deserts of Egypt and Palestine, the coastlines of the British Isles were 22 Leyland Ryken, James Wilhoit and Tremper Longman, ed., Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (Downers Grove, Ill. and Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 765, ‘Sea’. 23 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo XCVI, ed. CCSL 78:2, 157–8, lines 32–41, and 440–1, lines 21–24. 24 Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum XCIV, c. 9, ed. CCSL 39, 1338, lines 4–7, and In Psalmum LXIV, c. 9, ed. CCSL 39, 832–3, lines 16–51; Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia, Homilia XXIV, c. 2, ed. CCSL 141, 197–8, lines 17–37, and Homilia XI, ed. CCSL 141, 76–7, lines 56–89, and Homilia XXIV, c. 3, ed. CCSL 141, 198–9, lines 38–61. 25 Aldhelm, Prosa de Virginitate, c. 10, ed. CCSL 124A, 115–17, lines 15–24. 26 Bede, De Tabernaculo, II, ed. CCSL 119A, 65–6, lines 939–67. 27 Genesis i.2, Job 41:23, Luke 8:31, Revelation 11:7, 17:8 and 20:1–3. 28 R. Baumgarten, ‘Geographical Orientation of Ireland in Isidore and Orosius’, Peritia 3 (1984): 189–203; Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed their World (London: British Library, 1997), 2–9, 38–46, 50–51;

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liminal places bordering the Ocean, a theatre of operation for monks against demons.29 Nevertheless, coastal locations embodied more than just rejection and endurance: they were also locations for the process of transformation through pastoral activity. Psalm 135 (136): 6 states that God established and confirmed the earth upon the waters, which could be understood as a foreshadowing of baptism and a reminder that faith combined with good works was necessary for salvation.30 The sea could be envisaged as the Gospel on which Christ walked, on which Peter discovered a defence, in which the apostles fished and in which the mysteries of Christ are revealed.31 God’s apostles, saints and preachers worked in the midst of the sea— the temptations of the world—to bathe its peoples in the waters of baptism and work miracles; after this apostolic fishing, the Church will draw out her nets on the day of judgement.32 All God’s servants were advised to work as if on dry land, standing above the swirling waters of the sea, living among the faithful and rousing them to imitation.33 Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica took the biblical and patristic notion of the British Isles as islands apart in the Ocean and used it to present their incorporation into the universal Church as a fulfilment of the promise that the apostolic mission would reach the ends of the earth and as a mission achieved through island monasteries whose brethren alternated between contemplation and action.34 Dramatic coastal locations would prompt general reflection on these associations. The topography surrounding individual monasteries might encourage emphasis on particular strands, fostering independent identities. Overlooking estuaries would have stimulated reflections on the equation between the monastic life and harbours.

and Thomas O’Loughlin, ‘The earliest known maps in Ireland’, History Ireland 1 (1993): 7–10. 29 O’Loughlin, ‘Living in the Ocean’, 11–23. 30 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo CXXXV, ed. CCSL 78:2, 293, lines 28–34. 31 Ambrose, Exameron, V.vii.17, ed. CSEL 32.1, 152, lines 9–25. 32 Augustine, Confessiones, xiii.20.26, ed. CSEL 33, 365, lines 10–12; Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia, Homilia XXIV, c. 4, ed. CCSL 141, 199, lines 62–75, and Moralia in Iob, ix.10.11, ed. CCSL 143, 463–4, lines 1–37, and xviii.31.50, ed. CCSL 143A, 918, lines 17–19 and xxviii.18.38, ed. CCSL 143B, 1424–5, lines 1–32. 33 Augustine, Confessiones, xiii.21.30, ed. CSEL 33, 368, lines 5–12. 34 Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘Islands and Idols at the Ends of the Earth: Exegesis and Conversion in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’, in The Venerable Bede: Tradition and posterity, ed. Stéphane Lebecq, Michel Perrin and Olivier Szerwiniack (Villeneuve d’Ascq: CEGES Université Charles-de-Gaulle, 2005), 119–45.

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Indeed monasteries were sometimes named from their river mouth topography, as at Donaemuthe, Tynemouth (Northumberland) and Wearmouth (Durham).35 Involvement in fishing from these positions would have brought to mind the duty of God’s servants to work in the sea, in the midst of this world, with God’s protection, undertaking the apostolic mission as fishers of men. At Whitby (North Yorkshire), the monastery’s original name of Streanaeshalch, ‘nook of wealth / treasure’, seems to have been a topographical name referring to the role of the harbour as a productive fishing point.36 Stephen of Ripon’s Vita Wilfridi related stories about Wilfrid being delivered from the combined peril of the sea and pagan attackers, saved by God from the troubles of the saeculum.37 Stephen and Bede both recorded traditions that, thanks to an unusually large catch of fish, Wilfrid was able to convert the South Saxons and the Frisians.38 Wulfstan of Winchester’s Vita Æthelwoldi included Æthelwold’s dream about a ship full of fish, especially eels, which he was told to transform into men and bring into the quiet harbour of salvation.39 These stories would have had particular resonance for Wilfrid’s coastal monastery at Selsey (Sussex) and Æthelwold’s riverine monastery at Ely (Cambridgeshire) in terms of their location and their responsibility to be fishers of men. Tidal islands at Lindisfarne (Northumberland), Hartlepool (Durham) and Spurn Point (East Yorkshire)40 would have evoked the monastic alternation between inward contemplation in retreat and outward action in mission promoted by Gregory the Great and Bede; crossing the causeways onto the mainland would recall the journey of Moses and the Israelites across the Red Sea and its associations with baptism. In the Lindisfarne community, where the bishop and his clergy lived 35 Pope Paul I, Letter to Eadberht and Ecgberht, 757–8, trans. Dorothy Whitelock, English Historical Documents I c. 500–1042 (2nd Edn, London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 764–5, no. 184; Bede, HE, v.6, v.21. 36 Bede, HE, iii.24, iv.23; Carole Hough, ‘Strensall, Streanaeshalch and Stronsay’, Journal of the English Place-Name Society 35 (2002–3): 17–24. 37 Stephen of Ripon, Vita Wilfridi, c. 13, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave, The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927). 38 Stephen, Vita Wilfridi, c. 26; Bede, HE, iv.13. 39 Wulfstan of Winchester, Vita Æthelwoldi, c. 39, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom, Wulfstan of Winchester, Life of St Æthelwold (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 58–61. 40 Robin Daniels, Anglo-Saxon Hartlepool and the Foundations of English Christianity (Hartlepool: Tees Archaeology, 2007), 3–8, for the topography of Hartlepool; George de Boer, ‘Spurn Head: its history and evolution’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (1964): 71–89, for the topography of Spurn Point.

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alongside the abbot and monks, these connections between contemplation and action, particularly baptism, will have had special significance, as Bede’s accounts suggest.41 II Riverine Locations Rivers, flowing with inevitable and invisible force from source to sea, provided a perfect parallel for the passage from birth through life to death.42 Journeying from birth to death was also journeying through the world, so that rivers could signify the sins, trouble and evils of the present life, the transitory temptations that each Christian was trying to overcome.43 By living amongst men on earth, Christ had drunk from the torrent by the wayside, but the waters of sin had not touched him.44 To achieve salvation, Christians must overcome the rivers of this world, struggling against sovereignties, powers, rulers and evil people.45 From Christ himself flowed the fountain of wisdom of the Holy Spirit, from which every Christian could drink, and the virtues to which they should live up.46 Rivers were also the means by which the Holy Spirit was disseminated, through the scriptures and the ministers

41 Bede, Prosa Vita Cuthberti, cc. 16–17, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), and HE, iii.3; O’Reilly, ‘Islands and Idols’, 142. 42 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo CXXXVI, ed. CCSL 78:2, 295–6, lines 1–25; Augustine, Sermones, CXIX.3, ed. PL 38, col. 674; Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum LXV, cc. 11–12, ed. CCSL 39, 847–848; Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia, Homilia XXV, c. 7, ed. CCSL 141, 212–213, lines 216–220, and Homiliae in Hiezechihelem Prophetam I, II.6, ed. CCSL 142, 19–21, lines 94–131; Bede, In Tobiam, ed. CCSL 119B, 8, lines 9–28. 43 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo CVIIII, ed. CCSL 78:2, 227–230, lines 166–251, and Tractatus de Psalmo CXLIII, ed. CCSL 78:2, 316, lines 96–101; Augustine, In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus CXXIV, X.6, ed. CCSL 36, 103–104, lines 11–13; Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum LXXIII, c. 18, ed. CCSL 39, 1016–1017, lines 23–27, and In Psalmum LVII, c. 16, ed. CCSL 39, 721–722, lines 1–10; Bede, In Abacuc, c. 19, ed. CCSL 119B, 393, lines 335–347. 44 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo CVIIII, ed. CCSL 78:2, 227–30, lines 166–251; Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum CIX, c. 20, ed. CCSL 40, 1620; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, xiv.55.68, ed. CCSL 143A, 740, lines 9–14. 45 Ambrose, Explanatio Psalmorum XII, Psalm 1:38, ed. CSEL 64, 33, line 15 to 34, line 2; Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum XXIII, c. 2, ed. CCSL 38, 135, lines 6–10; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, xi.50.68, ed. CCSL 143A, 625, lines 45–7. 46 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo LXXVII, ed. CCSL 78:2, 73, lines 268–272; Ambrose, De Paradiso, iii.13–18, ed. CSEL 32.1, 272, line 8 to 277, line 14, and Explanatio Psalmorum XII, Psalm 35:21, ed. CSEL 64, 64, line 18 to 65, line 2, and Psalm 45:12,

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of the Church. John saw a river with a tree on both banks, understood to represent the grace of the Holy Spirit, found in the river of sacred scripture, which has two banks united by Christ in the Old Testament and the New Testament.47 Those who delivered this scripture were rivers too—God’s prophets and apostles, and all saints and holy men who have drunk from the fountainhead of Christ.48 Fundamentally, the Church was founded in the midst of the rivers of adversity but represented the rivers of God’s grace that catch in their ear the word of God, speak it and pour it forth into the heart of each Christian.49 Hence rivers had a particular association with preachers, who by their discourse and invective open up the hearts of men and break down the worldly spirit to do penance.50 Just as Elijah had parted the river Jordan to allow the passage of the Israelites to safety, so Christ had been baptised in the same river to allow humankind to overcome death, establishing the Church in its baptismal mission.51 At several AngloSaxon monasteries with riverine locations, monuments with multivalent imagery drawing on the connections between Elijah, Joshua, the parting of rivers and the appointment of apostles as ministers of baptism were constructed in the late eighth and early ninth century.52 When Bede described monasteries, he often emphasised their riverine location as the defining feature in their location, as at Bradwell

ed. CSEL 64, 337, line 23 to 338, line 4; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, ii.49.76, ed. CCSL 143, 105, lines 15–19, and Moralia in Iob, xv.16.20, CCSL 143A, 760–1. 47 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo I, ed. CCSL 78:2, 7–9, lines 132–182. 48 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo XCII, ed. CCSL 78:2, 431–2, lines 67–79, and Tractatus de Psalmo XXXXI, ed. CCSL 78:2, 544, lines 84–88, and Tractatus de Psalmo XCVII, ed. CCSL 78:2, 166, lines 118–135. 49 Ambrose, Explanatio Psalmorum XII, Psalm 48:4, ed. CSEL 64, 363, line 13 to 364, line 4. 50 Augustine, De civitate Dei, xviii.32, ed. CCSL 48, 624, lines 51–53 and 55–8; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, xi.x.14, ed. CCSL 143A, 593–4, lines 1–22, and xiii.10.13, ed. CCSL 143A, 676, lines 36–57, and xviii.37.58, ed. CCSL 143A, 924–5, lines 1–12; Bede, In Abacuc, c. 24, ed. CCSL 119B, 395–6, lines 407–410. 51 Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii Secundum Lucam, i.37, ed. CCSL 14, 24–25, lines 564–570; Bede, Homeliarum Evangelii, Homilia, ii.15, ed. CCSL 122, 288, lines 284– 302. 52 James T. Lang, ‘The apostles in Anglo-Saxon sculpture in the Age of Alcuin’, Early Medieval Europe 8.2 (1999): 271–82 and ‘Monuments from Yorkshire in the Age of Alcuin’, in Early Deira: Archaeological Studies of the East Riding in the Fourth to Ninth Centuries A.D., ed. Helen Geake and Jonathan Kenny (Oxford & Oakville: Oxbow Books, 2000), 109–119; Thomas Pickles, ‘Angel Veneration on Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture from Dewsbury (WY), Otley (WY) and Halton (La): Contemplative Preachers and Pastoral Care’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 162 (2009): 1–28.

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(Essex), Chertsey (Surrey), Dacre (Cumberland), Jarrow (Durham), Melrose (Roxb), Tilbury (Essex) and Wearmouth (Durham).53 Stories circulated about the interaction of members of individual monasteries with rivers that embodied the scriptural and patristic context. The monastery of St Alban’s (Hertfordshire) preserved a tradition that Alban had dried up the river Ver in order to provoke his own martyrdom.54 In recounting this story, they were creating connections between Joshua, Christ, and their patron Alban as individuals who had overcome the rivers of this world in order to establish the institutional Church, connections that were specifically associated with the Church and its baptismal mission. A brother from Tynemouth (Northumberland) passed on another story to Bede that encompassed most of the associations of rivers identified in scripture and scriptural commentary—the river as passage through life to death, the river as signifier for the troubles of the present life that carry away the soul, the role of the monastery in setting itself up against the rivers of this world, and the responsibility of the brethren to be rivers of God’s grace that pour forth His word into the heart of each Christian. Bede tells us that monks from Tynemouth were carrying wood downriver on a raft and were almost swept out to sea. Despite the jibes of peasants who jeered at them for pursuing a new way of life, the prayers of Cuthbert prompted God to save them from drowning. Such was the impact of these events that a simple peasant was in habit of telling the story before a large audience.55 III

Elevated Locations

Within the Bible no clear distinction is made between mountains and hills: apparently it was relative elevation rather than absolute height that was important.56 Exegetical interpretations frequently suggest that different degrees of elevation can embody the same ideals, although

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HE, iii.22, iv.6, iv.27, iv.32, v.21. Gildas, De excidio Britanniae, c. 11, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom, Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and other works (London and Chichester: Phillimore, 1978), 19–20; Bede, HE, i.7. 55 Bede, Prosa Vita Cuthberti, c. 3. 56 Ryken, Wilhoit and Longman, Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, 572. 54

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sometimes denoting different levels of achievement.57 Because the Jews had been exiled on the mountains, because the prophets and Christ had retreated to the mountains, and because it was prophesied that the house of the Lord would be established on the mountain, mountains were regularly employed as symbols of the Church in exile on earth, the elect in heaven and the city of God to come.58 Mountains also symbolised Christ on whom the city of God was founded.59 As far as Bede was concerned, the Temple was built on the mountain precisely because it was then built on Christ, the foundation of the Church.60 At the same time, mountains could represent those of eminent virtue beneath Christ: the prophets, apostles, evangelists and saints.61 Indeed, mountains were thought to represent anyone whom the light of justice especially illumines.62 Mountains, however, were far from simply a positive symbol. Just as they could signify those who had reached the heights of virtue, so they could signify those swelled up with evil or with pride.63 Essentially this was the difference between the mountains 57 Augustine, In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus CXXIV, I.2, ed. CCSL 36, 1–2, and Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum LXXI, c. 5, ed. CCSL 39, 974, lines 1–10; Bede, In Abacuc, c. 16, ed. CCSL 119B, 390–1, lines 255–276. 58 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo X, ed. CCSL 78:2, 356–7, lines 51–66, and Tractatus de Psalmo XIIII, ed. CCSL 78:2, 30–2, lines 15–57, and Tractatus de Psalmo LXXV, ed. CCSL 78:2, 51, lines 43–52, and Tractatus de Psalmo LXXXIII, ed. CCSL 78:2, 98, lines 84–98; Augustine, De civitate Dei, x.32, ed. CCSL 47, 311, lines 83–91; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, vii.35.53, ed. CCSL 143, 372–3, lines 32–46, and xxx.19.64, ed. CCSL 143 B, 1534–5, and Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam II, I.7, ed. CCSL 142, 213–14, lines 228–263. 59 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo LXVII, ed. CCSL 78:2, 43, lines 93–103; Ambrose, Explanatio Psalmorum XII, Psalm 47:19, ed. CSEL 64, 358, lines 7–19, and Psalm 35:18, ed. CSEL 64, 62, line 5 to 63, line 4; Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii Secundum Lucam, vii.99, ed. CCSL 14, 247–8, lines 1031–1040; Augustine, In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus CXXIV, IV.4 and IX.15, ed. CCSL 36, 32–33 and 98. 60 Bede, De Templo, I, ed. CCSL 119A, 158, lines 460–469. 61 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo LXXV, ed. CCSL 78:2, 51, lines 43–52, and Tractatus de Psalmo LXXXVI, ed. CCSL 78:2, 109–110, lines 5–29; Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum LXVII, cc.22–3, ed. CCSL 39, 885–886, and In Psalmum LXXI, c. 18, ed. CCSL 39, 983, lines 4–8, and In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus CXXIV, I.6, ed. CCSL 36, 3–4; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, xxxiii.1.2, ed. CCSL 143B, 1670, lines 1–46. 62 Augustine, In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus, II.3, ed. CCSL 36, 13, lines 12–14. 63 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo XCVI, ed. CCSL 78:2, 161, lines 119–124, and Tractatus de Psalmo XCVI, ed. CCSL 78:2, 443, lines 90–94; Ambrose, Explanatio Psalmorum XII, Psalm 45:11, ed. CSEL 64, 337, lines 15–22; Augustine, De civitate Dei, xviii.32, ed. CCSL 48, 624, lines 35–38, and Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum XCVI, c. 9, ed. CCSL 39, 1360–1361, and Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum CXXIV, cc. 4–6, ed. CCSL 40, 1837, lines 6–7, and 1839, lines 17–23; Gregory the

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of this world, whose head was the devil, and the mountains of God, whose head was Christ.64 This was not a straightforward dichotomy between the saved and the damned: the Church was to be gathered from the proud and flawed people of this world, and the mountain was a symbol of the transformation at the heart of the creation of the city of God.65 Bede argued that the construction of the Temple on the mountain paralleled the process of transformation by which each human being moved from the mountain of pride to the mountain of the house of the Lord.66 Mountains also provided analogies for the path each person should take in attempting to move from the mountain of pride to the mountain of the house of the Lord. As images of Christ, Peter and Paul, the Law of God and the heritage of faith, they could embody various aspects of the virtuous life.67 Ascending a mountain could stand for prayer and for studying the teachings of the prophets and apostles through the scriptures.68 Both in terms of undertaking prayer or scriptural study, and of physically gaining an elevated position, ascending a mountain also afforded a better chance for successful contemplative encounters with God.69 Yet it was not enough to ascend the mountain to contemplate God. Mountains were repeatedly interpreted as

Great, Moralia in Iob, iii.19.34, ed. CCSL 143, 137, lines 19–22, and iv.pref.4, ed. CCSL 143, 161, lines 116–122, and Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam I, ii.9, ed. CCSL 142, 22–3, lines 176–203. 64 Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum XLV, c. 7, ed. CCSL 38, 522, lines 20–31. 65 Ambrose, Explanatio Psalmorum XII, Psalm 47:5, ed. CSEL 64, 349, line 14 to 350, line 10; Augustine, De civitate Dei, xviii.32, ed. CCSL 48, 624, lines 35–38; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, xi.6.6, ed. CCSL 143, 459–60, lines 1–23. 66 Bede, De Templo, I, ed. CCSL 119A, 152, lines 218–227. 67 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo CXXXII, ed. CCSL 78:2, 282, lines 182–186; Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii Secundum Lucam, viii.39, ed. CCSL 14, 311, lines 420–428; Bede, De Tabernaculo, I, ed. CCSL 119A, 9–10, lines 186–191. 68 Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii Secundum Lucam, v.41, ed. CCSL 14, 149–50, lines 440–455; Jerome, Tractatus in Marci Evangelium: In Marc. VIIII.1–7, ed. CCSL 78:2, 480, lines 111–123 and 482, lines 187–194; Augustine, In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus CXXIV, I.6, ed. CCSL 36, 3–4; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, xxx.19.64, ed. CCSL 143B, 1534–5, lines 1–21. 69 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, v.36.66, ed. CCSL 143, 264–5, lines 17–30; Bede, De Tabernaculo, I, ed. CCSL 119A, 5–6, lines 10–45, and II, ed. CCSL 119A, 69–70, lines 1090–1117, and Homeliarum Evangelii, Homilia i.24, ed. CCSL 122, 172, lines 62–97.

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great preachers and after ascending the mountain it was necessary to descend to teach the crowds.70 Elevated locations were clearly an important part of the identity of some Anglo-Saxon monasteries, which took their names from their elevated topography, such as Breedon-on-the-Hill (Leicestershire) and Watton (East Yorkshire), both containing the Old English element dūn.71 Two foundation narratives invoked at the outset of this paper—Bede’s description of Lastingham and Æthelwulf ’s account of the unnamed monastery in De abbatibus—dwell on this aspect of monastic topography. With this scriptural and patristic background in mind, Bede’s description deserves special attention. At Lastingham, Cedd chose himself a site for the monastery amid some steep and remote hills which seemed better fitted for the haunts of robbers and the dens of wild beasts than for human habitation; so that, as Isaiah says, “In the lairs where dragons once lived, reeds and rushes will arise” [Isaiah 35.7], that is the fruit of good works shall spring up where once bests dwelt or where men lived after the manner of beasts.72

The place-names *Læstingaēg and *Læstingahamm applied to the community probably reflect the fact that Lastingham was an island of good land surrounded by moors.73 Following scriptural and patristic images of mountains and hills as desert like locations and reflecting AngloSaxon traditions about the threatening aspects of moorland, Bede presented Lastingham as an island in the wilderness.74 Nevertheless there is more to this passage. Isaiah 35:7 is an unusual scriptural quotation, rarely commented on in surviving exegesis.75 Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob is an exception to this rule. Since Gregory and his work 70 Jerome, Tractatus in Marci Evangelium: In Marc. VIIII:1–7, ed. CCSL 78:2, 482, lines 194–206; Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii Secundum Lucam, v.46, ed. CCSL 14, 151, lines 492–498, and vii.8, ed. CCSL 14, 217, lines 93–99; Augustine, In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus CXXIV, I.2, ed. CCSL 36, 1–2, lines 6–10, and Enarrationes in Psalmos In Psalmum LXXI, c. 5, ed. CCSL 39, 974, lines 1–10, and Sermones, LXXVIII.6, ed. PL 38, cols. 492–493. 71 Bede, HE, v.3, v.23; Margaret Gelling and Ann Cole, The Landscape of PlaceNames (Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 2000), 164–73. 72 Bede, HE, iii.23. 73 Victor Watts, ‘The Place-Name Hexham: a Mainly Philological Approach’, Nomina 17 (1994): 119–36. 74 Thomas Charles-Edwards, ‘The Foundation of Lastingham’, Ryedale Historian 7 (1974): 13–21; Morris, ‘Lastingham in the seventh and eighth centuries’. 75 This comment is based on a comprehensive search of the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina editions of patristic texts, using the indices of biblical citations.

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were well known to Bede and actively promoted by him, it is extremely likely that Gregory’s ideas underlie Bede’s choice of reference point.76 Gregory says, This verdure is promised to the desert by the voice of the prophet, when it is said: “In the lairs where dragons once lived, reeds and rushes will arise.” What indeed is designated by the reed unless scribes, what by the rush, which always grows near to moisture of water, unless small and tender hearers of the sacred word? Therefore in the lairs of dragons reeds and rushes will arise, because in those peoples, which the malice of the old enemy possessed, both the knowledge of teachers and the obedience of hearers is brought together.77

Like patristic commentators, Bede seems therefore to have envisaged the steep and remote hills chosen for Lastingham not just as an island in the wilderness, but as a place suited to learning, writing, teaching and preaching. Hence the monastery in its location and activity was transforming its members and those around from the mountain of pride to the mountain of the house of the Lord. IV

Woodland Locations

Biblical passages depicted woodland as a desert landscape, defined in opposition to towns and fields, an uncultivated and uncivilised landscape inhabited by beasts.78 The plains of the forest were a symbol of the nations yet untilled, covered with the thorns of idolatry, the abode of the devils and angels of disobedience—a love of the world that must be rooted out.79 Trees provided images for the process by which this might be achieved, representing the vices and virtues80 or symbolising

76 Pickles, ‘Angel Veneration on Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture’, 15–16, for studies of the relationship between Gregory and Bede. 77 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, XXIX.26.52, ed. CCSL 143B, 1470, lines 57–65. The translation is my own. 78 Ryken, Wilhoit and Longman, Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, 890–2, ‘Tree, Trees’. 79 Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum CIII, Sermo III, c. 22, ed. CCSL 40, 1519, lines 56–60, and In Psalmum CXXXI, c. 11, ed. CCSL 40, 1917, lines 15–27, and In Epistolam Ioannis ad Parthos tractatus x, II.9, ed. PL 35, cols. 1993–1994. 80 Ambrose, Epositio Evangelii Secundum Lucam, ii.24, ed. CCSL 14, 41, lines 340–345 and De Paradiso, 1.2–4, ed. CSEL 32.1, 266, line 8 to 267, line 8; Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia, Homilia XX, c. 13, ed. CCSL 141, 164–165, lines 275–289, and Homilia XX, c. 13, ed. CCSL 141, 166–167, lines 302–353; Bede, Homeliarum Evangelii, Homilia ii.25, ed. CCSL 122, 369–70, lines 59–75.

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the scriptures on which those gifted with understanding will meditate.81 Trees were also reminders of the importance of Christian mission. They represented the charity that should be performed by each Christian, bearing the fruit of good works and rescuing a neighbour by affording protection.82 The disciples could be understood to have ‘filled the whole wood of the world’ [Ps. 30] and ‘wanted to build a house in the wood’ [Ps. 95.5] when they freed the earth from captivity by declaring the greatness of the Lord’s house through preaching.83 Felling trees was a metaphor for correcting a neighbour,84 cutting branches and cedar trees for preaching.85 Ultimately, through this work, the trees that had been cut down through preaching would be renewed and rise again in the resurrection as timbers in the house of the Lord.86 Several monasteries in Bede’s time were identified by their woodland locations—Thrythwulf ruled a community in silva Elmete, perhaps Dewsbury (West Yorkshire); John retired to his community in silva Derorum, now Beverley (East Yorkshire); the Irish monk Dicuil ‘had a very small monastery in a place called Bosham (Sussex) surrounded by woods and sea’.87 Clearance of vegetation, presumably including woodland, was in some cases an important part of the process in placing a monastery. Eanmund, Æthelwulf tells us, was to found his monastery on a hill covered with thorn bushes, to be cut away with scythes and removed with all their seed from the expanse of the smooth top.88 Building the Tabernacle from acacia or thorn bushes involved the stripping of thorns, which Bede understood as the

81 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo I, ed. CCSL 78:2, 7–9, lines 119–180; Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum XXVIII, c. 9, ed. CCSL 38, 171, lines 3–5; Augustine, Confessiones, xi.2.3, CSEL 33, 282, lines 7–12. 82 Augustine, Confessiones, xiii.17.21, ed. CSEL 33, 360, lines 11–24. 83 Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum XXX, Enarr. II, Sermo III, c. 9, ed. CCSL 38, 219, lines 21–28, and In Psalmum XCV, c. 5, ed. CCSL 39, 1346–1347, lines 12–39, and In Psalmum CIII, Sermo III, c. 2, ed. CCSL 40, 1499–1500. 84 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob x.7.12, ed. CCSL 143, 544–5, lines 20–35, and Regula Pastoralis, ii.10, ed. Sources Chrétiennes 381, 250–3, lines 183–210. 85 Bede, De Templo, I, ed. CCSL 119A, 149–50, lines 102–127, and 150–152, lines 135–208. 86 Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii Secundum Lucam, ii.24, ed. CCSL 14, 41, lines 340– 345; Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum XCV, c. 13, ed. CCSL, vol. 39, 1351; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, xii.4.5, ed. CCSL 143A, 630–1, lines 1–38, and xiv.55.70, ed. CCSL 143A, 741–3, and Regula Pastoralis, iii.34, ed. Sources Chrétiennes 382, 506–9, lines 51–73. 87 Bede, HE, ii.14, iv.6, iv.13, v.2. 88 Æthelwulf, De abbatibus, vi, lines 125–39.

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expurgation by holy preachers of sins and vices, the cares and delights of the world, to acquire a free mind to care for their neighbour and run far and wide in preaching the word.89 Protection was associated with the woodland topography of the monastery at Crayke, where it was claimed Cuthbert had been granted land in the seventh century along with a circuit of miles around the site that was apparently preserved in the later medieval woodland boundaries.90 For Byrhtferth of Ramsey, the woodland location of Ramsey was a reminder to persist daily in good works, grant to others the talents entrusted to you, and teach by word and example.91 V

Roman Signal Stations

Biblical descriptions of Jerusalem connected urban spaces with the transformation of earthly societies into the heavenly city.92 Athanasius and Jerome reinforced this association in their narratives depicting desert ascetics reoccupying the ruins of fallen civilisations—Antony in a deserted fort, Paul in a former Egyptian mint factory and Hilarion in an abandoned temple.93 No doubt such precedents were vitally important in prompting monastic founders to occupy Roman towns, forts and signal stations, transforming them from potentially haunted places to heavenly cities; they will then have provided one way in

89

Bede, De Tabernaculo, ii.5, ed. CCSL 119A, 60, lines 718–31. For the historical references to Crayke, see: Alcuin, The Bishops, Kings and Saints of the Church of York, ed. and trans. Peter Godman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 108–9; Historia de Sancto Cuthberto cc. 5, 10, 20, ed. and trans. Ted Johnson South (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002); and Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio atque Procursu istius hoc est Dunelmensis Ecclesie, ed. and trans. David Rollason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 46–7. For the circuit of miles, see the discussions in: Peter Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London: Royal Historical Society, 1968), no. 66; Pierre Chaplais, ‘Who Introduced Charters into England? The case for Augustine’, Journal of the Society of Archivists III (10) (1969): 537–8; and Patrick Wormald, Bede and the Conversion of England: The Charter Evidence: Jarrow Lecture 1984 (Jarrow, 1984), 17, 31, n. 47. For the topography of Crayke and its boundaries, see: K. A. Adams, ‘Monastery and Village at Crayke, North Yorkshire’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal LXII (1990): 29–50; and J. Kaner, ‘Crayke and its Boundaries’, in Yorkshire Boundaries, ed. Hilda E. J. Le Patourel, Moira H. Long and May F. Pickles (Leeds: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1993), 103–11. 91 Byrhtferth, Vita Oswaldi, c. 19, ed. and trans. Lapidge, 94–5. 92 Isaiah 16:1–2, Psalm 122:1–7 and Revelation 21:12–24. 93 Athanasius, Vita Antonii, c. 11, ed. PL 73, col. 133; Jerome, Vita Pauli, c. 5, PL 23, cols. 20–21; Jerome, Vita Hilarionis, cc. 4, 31, 43, ed. PL 23, cols. 30–31, 45, 51. 90

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which members of monastic communities interpreted such monasteries as sacred places, embodied in the Old English poem The Ruin with its meditation on Roman ruins as a reminder of the transience of all earthly civilisations and concerns.94 Nevertheless it is essential to acknowledge the multifarious associations between Roman ruins and the extension of the Roman Church to the British Isles, embodied in Anglo-Saxon buildings and monuments, that underpinned this decision and through which such locations would have been interpreted.95 Juxtaposition of monasteries with Roman signal stations certainly echoed earlier ascetic reoccupation and transformation of ruins, but this monastic topography could also reflect and prompt other associations. Scriptural passages made watchtowers, watchmen and lamps central symbols of the role of the Church and her servants in preaching correction by word and example.96 For Jerome, Sion represented the Church and Holy Scripture, through whose efforts the soul ascends to ever more sublime contemplation.97 Ambrose envisaged the towers of Sion as a reminder to the Church of the importance of preachers as watchtowers of discipline and virtue.98 Augustine believed that abbots and bishops in particular were posted like prophets as watchmen over the house of Israel.99 Thanks to these interpretations, the passages from Ezekiel became the central texts for discussions of the role of abbots and bishops in admonishing and teaching both within and beyond their communities.100 All this came together in Gregory the Great’s, Regula Pastoralis, where Christian rulers (rectores) were advised not to hide their light (lucerna) under a bushel, but place it on a candelabrum, a reminder to teach by word and example.101 From

94 Tyler Bell, The Religious Reuse of Roman Structures in Early Medieval England (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005), 20–4; Nicholas Howe, ‘The Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England’, in Inventing Medieval Landscapes, 92–8; Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, 246–51. 95 Jane Hawkes, ‘Iuxta Morem Romanorum: Stone and Sculpture in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Anglo-Saxon Styles, ed. Catherine E. Karkov and George H. Brown (New York and Bristol: State University of New York, 2003), 69–99. 96 Psalm 47, Psalm 75 (76), Ezekiel 3.17 and 33.1–33 for watchtowers. Proverbs 6.23 and Matthew 5.15 for lamps. 97 Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo LXXV, ed. CCSL 78, 50–1, lines 31–36. 98 Ambrose, Explanatio Psalmorum XII, Psalm 47:22, ed. CCSL 64, 360, lines 2–9. 99 Augustine, Sermones, 339, ed. PL 38, cols. 1480–82. 100 Conrad Leyser, Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 26–32, 71–2. 101 Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis, I.5 and iii.24, ed. Sources Chrétiennes 382, 144–6, 420.

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this scripture and commentary Anglo-Saxon authors created further multivalent connections between watchtowers and monasticism. Aldhelm compared virginity to a lofty lighthouse placed on the uprearing promontory of a cliff and shining resplendently.102 Bede used an exegetical interpretation of the watchtower and lamp as a motif in his narratives of the monastery at Whitby (North Yorkshire) and the work of its first abbess Hild.103 Hild’s future was foretold, he claimed, in a vision experienced by her pregnant mother; she dreamt that she found a precious necklace lodged in the folds of her garment, which spread a blaze of light that filled Britain with its gracious splendour.104 Hild’s monastery, he says, was founded at a place called Streanaeshalch, which can be interpreted (quod interpretatur) as sinus fari; in this interpretation he translated Old English (ge)strēones halh, ‘nook of treasure / wealth’ into Latin sinus ‘bay / bosom / fold in a garment / hiding place’ and fari, ‘watchtower/ lamp’.105 This exegetical thread tied together his account of the vision before Hild’s birth with the foundation of a monastery on a promontory near a Roman signal station, her training of five bishops and her role in hosting the council where it was decided to adopt Roman dates for Easter. VI

Conclusion

Because Jews had been promised an earthly Holy Land, but Christ had promised Christians a heavenly Jerusalem, the creation of Christian sacred places seems to have been a delayed phenomenon. Robert Markus has suggested that it was only the transition under Constantine from persecuted to officially endorsed religion that prompted the veneration of martyrs as a bridge between persecuted past and triumphant 102

Aldhelm, Prosa de Virginitate, c. 9, ed. CCSL 124A, 109–11, lines 46–53. Peter Hunter-Blair, ‘Whitby as a Centre of Learning in the Seventh Century’, in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Peter Clemoes, Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 10–11, first observed this link. 104 Bede HE, iv.23. 105 Joseph Bosworth and Thomas Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 446, ge-strēon; P. Stiles, ‘Old English halh, “slightly raised ground isolated by marsh” ’, in Names, Places and People, ed. Alexander R. Rumble and Anthony D. Mills (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1997), 330–44; C. T. Lewis and C. Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), 1709–1017, sinus; Tyler Bell, ‘A Roman Signal Station at Whitby’, Archaeological Journal 135 (1998): 307–8, for fari. 103

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present, in turn investing a new significance in sacred places.106 By the time monasticism expanded across western Europe, cults of martyrs and confessors were well established and the existence of sacred places was widely accepted.107 Within the context of the contrast between the Jewish and Christian covenants, cults of martyrs and confessors were acceptable because recall of their vitae was not expected to achieve the construction of Jerusalem on earth but rather, through emulation, to help the individual achieve salvation in the heavenly Jerusalem. Just as emplacement is inevitably a continual process, so to venerate cult places was to participate in a continuing spiritual journey. Expansion of monasticism to western Europe produced new sacred places, distinct from cult sites, even if they were sometimes also the location of cult sites. Fusing the classical tradition of locus amoenus with biblical landscapes of exile facilitated the image of the monastery as a sacred place for transformation from earthly to heavenly city, embodied in foundation narratives. Nevertheless this was not a single moment of transformation, as concentration on these passages might suggest. Instead, monasteries created a habitus, a set of transposable dispositions, through the reading of sacred texts, which equipped monastic communities to understand monastic topography in terms of sacred place as spiritual journey, connecting topography with their vocation. Where monasteries venerated members as martyrs or confessors and constructed vitae to preserve their memories, these two strands often came together, locating the saint’s spiritual journey in the local landscape.

106 Robert Markus, ‘How on Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 257–71. 107 Alan Thacker, ‘Loca Sanctorum: The Significance of Place in the Study of the Saints’, in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed. Alan Thacker and Richard Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–43.

THE BOOK OF THE FOUNDATION OF ST BARTHOLOMEW’S CHURCH: CONSECRATION, RESTORATION, AND TRANSLATION Laura Varnam So al these thyngis that bene seide or shall be seide / they beholde the ende / and consummacioun of this document / For trewly God is yn this place.1

This statement appears midway through the Middle English translation of the twelfth-century Latin foundation legend known as The Book of the Foundation of St Bartholomew’s Church. As a foundation legend the text’s primary aim is to narrate the construction of the church of St Bartholomew the Great in London, and to consecrate it as a sacred space by promoting its claims to sanctity. The textual and physical space of the church are conflated in the quotation above because the referent of ‘trewly God is yn this place’ is at once the church itself, the immediate subject of the foundation legend, and the translated document, in need of particular authorisation because of its status as a vernacular text. The Middle English translation was commissioned during the ‘Great Restoration’ of St Bartholomew’s at the turn of the fifteenth-century and its promotion of the sanctity of the church played a major role in the church’s strategy to re-establish itself as the dominant church in medieval London. The Middle English translation of The Book of the Foundation follows a transcription of the original Latin foundation legend in British Library MS Cotton Vespasian B IX, dated c.1400.2 St Bartholomew the Great was founded in Smithfield, just outside the walls of the city of London, in 1123 by Rahere and the Latin foundation legend

1 The Book of the Foundation of St Bartholomew’s Church, ed. Norman Moore, EETS, o. s. 163 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), 32. All quotations refer to this edition. For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with Middle English, I provide my own paraphrase. ‘So all these things that have been said or shall be said, they behold the end and consummation of this document. For truly, God is in this place’. 2 See Moore p. xi and Laura Varnam, ‘The Howse of God on Erthe: Constructions of Sacred Space in Late Middle English Religious Literature’, unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford University (2007), 36–40.

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was composed some fifty years after the building process had begun. St Bartholomew’s was the church of the Augustinian priory and it was closely, although not always harmoniously, associated with St Bartholomew’s Hospital, through their shared founder. The original Latin text was translated into Middle English when the physical church was itself being translated into a new form. During the ‘Great Restoration’ of St Bartholomew’s the physical space of the priory church was undergoing a major transformation: the east end of the church was entirely remodelled, the parish chapel was extended, and the monument to the founder Rahere was commissioned.3 Much of this restoration was sponsored by Roger Walden, Bishop of London and favourite of Richard II, and I have argued elsewhere that Walden also instigated the translation of the foundation legend as a parallel activity to his involvement in the physical restoration.4 The Middle English translation, which is the focus of this chapter, resonates back in time to its original twefth-century composition and the sacred space Rahere constructed. But, it is Janus-like in its ability to be of relevance to a late medieval-London architecture and socio-political context which the original Latin author could never have envisaged. This chapter will begin by examining the relationship between The Book of the Foundation and the space that it depicts, the Romanesque church of St Bartholomew the Great, in both its twelfth- and fifteenthcentury incarnations. It will focus in particular on the text’s construction of the church and its builders in order to explore the notion of the sacred which is produced through the interaction of the physical structure with its textual re-imagining. My analysis will also be especially alert to the scriptural and symbolic language with which the sacred is constructed in the text, much of which draws upon the medieval church consecration ceremony. The second section of this chapter will discuss the text’s consecration of the church through the narration of its miracles. It will argue that the location of many of those miracles outside the material building produces a sacred space which is mobile, contagious, and while dependent upon is not restrained by the physical boundaries of its architecture. The chapter will conclude

3 See E. A. Webb, The Records of St Bartholomew’s Priory and of the Church and Parish of St Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), vol. II, esp. 11–12. 4 Varnam, 36–40.

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by exploring the socio-political significance of the text’s construction of a sacred map in which St Bartholomew’s is at the centre, competing to be the most sacred space in late medieval Christendom. The ‘Makynge vp of their Churche’: Textual and Physical (Re)Construction The Book of the Foundation opens with the legend of Rahere’s conversion to Christianity after illness and the vision of St Bartholomew in which he is instructed to build the church: yn myn name thou shalte founde A Chirche / and it shall be the house of God / ther shalbe the tabernacle of the lambe / the temple of the Holy Gost / This spirituall howse, almyghty God. shalle ynhabite / and halowe yt / and glorifie yt: And his yene shall be opyn / and his Eerys yntendyng one this howse, nyght and day / that the asker yn hit schall resceyue / the seker shall fynde / and the rynger or knokker shall entre (p. 5).5

St Bartholomew constructs the image of his church out of a group of scriptural quotations which recall the ritual consecration of a medieval church. In the church consecration ceremony, liturgical practice binds together the physical architecture and the new congregation to be housed within it through a combination of spatial procession and scriptural quotation.6 The bishop and priests performing the ceremony circle the church and mark out the space as sacred, embedding imagery such as the House of God, the Gate of Heaven, and the temple of the Holy Ghost into the space through their ritual movements and gestures.7 The most important image which St Bartholomew employs is the concept of the church as the ‘House of God’ which alludes to Genesis 28 when Jacob had a vision of a ladder leading up to heaven with angels ascending and descending:

5

‘In my name you shall found a church and it shall be the house of God. The tabernacle of the lamb, and the temple of the Holy Ghost shall be there. Almighty God shall inhabit, hallow, and glorify this spiritual house. And his eyes shall be open and his ears shall attend to this house night and day, so that the asker in it shall receive, the seeker shall find, and the ringer or knocker shall enter’. 6 Brian Repsher, The Rite of Church Dedication in the Early Medieval Era (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1998). 7 Repsher, 146–9.

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This was the key textual source for the construction of sacred space in the Middle Ages and The Book of the Foundation draws more directly on Jacob’s comments in the prologue to Book II in which the author sets out a manifesto for sacred space and states: ‘Dredefull, therfore, is this place to the vnderstander / ther is no thyng her els / but the howse of God and the gate of heuyn / to the belever’ (p. 32).8 The author rewrites the quotation slightly by adding ‘to the vnderstander’ and ‘the belever’ and this emphasises the importance of both knowledge and faith in the interpretation of sacred space. In St Bartholomew’s instructions to Rahere, the church is God’s house because he shall ‘halowe yt / and glorifie yt’ and this divine consecration takes the form of miracles, both in the material construction of the church at the beginning of the foundation legend and in its subsequent promotion as a sacred space. The fourteenth-century priory seal also promoted the apostle’s church as God’s house as its motto declared ‘credimus ante Deum proveni per Bartholomeum’ (‘We believe we are brought into the presence of God by Bartholomew’).9 St Bartholomew the Great is the Gate of Heaven because it acts as an entrance and an access-point to God’s heavenly house. God will hear those who pray to him within it. The author here conflates 1 Kings 8:24 in which Solomon prays to God that ‘thine eyes may be open towards this house [Solomon’s temple] night and day’ and Christ’s words during the Sermon on the Mount where he exhorts the faithful to ‘ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you’ (Matthew 7:7). The Book locates such seeking after God within the church of St Bartholomew itself, ‘the asker yn hit schall resceyue’ (p. 5), and thus promotes the efficacy of being present in the church and participating in its communal prayers to God. The sacred Biblical text is the foundation upon which Rahere builds his church. The Book portrays the material construction of the building as directly influenced by the quotation from Matthew 7:7 when St Bartholomew concludes his speech to Rahere:

8 ‘Dreadful, therefore, is this place to he who understands, there is nothing here other than the house of God and the Gate of Heaven to the believer’. 9 Webb, vol. I, 50.

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Nethir of the costis of this bildynge dowte the nowght / onely yeue thy diligence / and my parte schalbe to prouyde necessaries / directe / bilde / & ende this werke / and this place / to me accepte / with euydent tokenys and signys protecte and defende continually hyt / vnder the schadowe of my wyngys / and therefore of this werke knowe me the maister / And thy self onely the mynyster. (p. 6)10

Rahere, the earthly founder of the church, is conceived merely as ‘mynyster’ to St Bartholomew, the ‘maister’ or architect who guarantees the building supplies will flow in. St Bartholomew is the masterbuilder who will plan and execute the church (‘direct / bilde / & ende’), the supplier of materials (‘my part schalbe to prouyde necessaries’) and even the guarantor of site security (‘protecte and defende’). The first description of the physical building process occurs after Rahere has secured the support of the Bishop of London, Richard Belmeis, for his project and been granted the king’s permission to build the church.11 And aftyr the Apostles word, all necessaryes flowid vnto the hande / the Chirche he made of cumly stoonewerke tabylwyse. And an hospital howse a litill lenger of / from the chirche by hymself / he began to edifie (p. 10).12

As St Bartholomew promised, the building materials arrive and Rahere builds his church ‘of cumly stoonewerke tabylwyse’. ‘Tabylwyse’ is unattested elsewhere in Middle English but it appears to mean ‘in flat horizontal layers’, so in this quotation the church is depicted gradually rising up from the foundations.13 The word ‘cumly’ in Middle English means ‘of fair appearance’ but in a religious context it also means ‘noble’ or ‘holy’ and is most often used of Christ and the Virgin Mary.14 This meaning resonates in the context of church building because the physical structure was a symbolic embodiment of the congregation 10

‘Do not worry about the costs of this building, only give your diligence, and my part shall be to provide the necessaries, to direct, build and complete this work, and accept this place with clear tokens and signs, to protect it continually under the shadow of my wings, and therefore know me to be the master of this work and yourself only the minister’. 11 The Smithfield site was part of the ‘kyngis market’ and therefore was under royal jurisdiction (9). 12 ‘And according to the Apostles word, all the necessaries flowed into his [Rahere’s] hands and he built the church of noble stonework in horizontal layers. And a hospital house he began to build by himself, a little way away from the church’. 13 MED s.v. ‘tabylwyse’. 14 MED s.v. ‘comli’ 1a) and 2b).

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who, spiritually, made up the body of Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:27). Throughout The Book of the Foundation the depiction of the building process has similar symbolic and sacred significance. The author’s textual reconstruction of Rahere’s foundation is by no means an accurate representation of the realities of twelfth-century church building, nor is it intended to be so. Rather, the miraculous ease with which the church arises is indicative of divine approval of the project. In addition to God, St Bartholomew and Rahere playing an active part in the building process, the people of the parish play a vital role as witnesses to the miraculous feat: Of this almen grettly were astonyd / boeth of the nouelte of the areysid frame / and of the fownder of this newe werke. (p. 13)15

The people’s reaction to Rahere and his church resonates in both the twelfth- and early fifteenth-century contexts of St Bartholomew the Great. Their astonishment at the ‘nouelte of the areysid frame’ has occasioned some discussion as to whether this marvel might have any architectural and historical basis beyond its significance as a rhetorical trope. Jill Franklin has argued that St Bartholomew the Great may indeed have been a novel building in the twelfth-century rather than, as has previously been argued, merely ‘a rather outmoded imitation of Norwich Cathedral’.16 Franklin further suggests that the fact that St Bartholomew’s had an ambulatory placed it in ‘distinctly exalted company’ as ‘the only other buildings in or near the capital at that time which are likely to have had an ambulatory were highly prestigious’.17 Franklin also suggests that St Bartholomew’s was architecturally unusual in being ‘fully aisled in both presbytery and nave’ whereas contemporary Augustinian churches were constructed on an aisleless, cruciform plan: The decision not to deploy the plan type at Smithfield in 1123 but to opt instead for a church with aisles, ambulatory, and distinctive radiating chapels represented a marked departure from contemporary Augustinian practice.18

15 ‘All men were greatly astonished by this, both the novelty of the frame which had been raised up and the founder of this new work.’ 16 Jill A. Franklin, ‘The Eastern Arm of Norwich Cathedral and the Augustinian Priory of St Bartholomew’s, Smithfield, in London’, The Antiquaries Journal, 86 (2006), 110–30, p. 110. 17 Franklin, 116. 18 Franklin, 116.

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Franklin goes on to posit more tentatively that the ‘frame’ of the church might have given rise to particular astonishment because of its unique solution to the architecture of crossing. The reinforced piers in the westernmost part of the presbytery, ‘may have been designed’, Franklin argues, ‘as supports for weighty or lofty structures rising above them’: In other words, they may have been intended as the basis for a quartet of towers, flanking the presbytery and the nave at the four points where these meet the transept arms. This theory generates a configuration at the crossing which might well have impressed twelfth-century bystanders at Smithfield, for it would have been unparalleled in England.19

There is, Franklin admits, no surviving archaeological evidence for such a feature but E. A. Webb, who compiled the records of St Bartholomew’s, argues that a central tower was planned for in the twelfth century.20 Franklin also notes that there is precedent for church towers being timber-framed with a masonry base which might explain the reinforced bays in the presbytery and the lack of further archaeological evidence of the tower itself.21 The people’s astonishment at the novelty of the church resonates strongly with the fifteenth-century context of the Great Restoration at St Bartholomew’s, however, as the major remodelling of the east end and Lady Chapel would have had a significant visual impact as people walked around medieval Smithfield and entered the church from the Cloth Fair on the northern side of the close. Indeed after the extension of the Lady Chapel earlier in the fourteenth century, the length of the church at 349ft was more than enough to rival the cathedrals at Chester (345ft), Bristol (325ft), and Rochester (320ft).22 The construction of Roger Walden’s chapel in the 1390s would also have had a direct impact on the parish of St Bartholomew’s as the space was an extension of the chapel which housed the parish altar in the northern transept of the church.23 Marvel is a characteristic response to the sacred, and the community’s amazement at the building process represents even the material framework of the church as a miracle.

19 20 21 22 23

Franklin, 123. Webb, vol. II, 107. Franklin, 124. Webb, vol. II, 3. Webb, vol. II, 28.

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If we consider The Book’s remark in its immediate context, however, the author goes on to exclaim: ‘Whoe wolde trowe this place with so sodayn A clensynge to be purgid / and ther to be sette vp the tokeyns of crosse!’ (p. 13).24 This refers to the conditions of the Smithfield site which, as the Book describes it, was ‘as a maryce dunge and fenny with water almost euerytyme habowndynge’ (p. 12).25 In addition to the boggy conditions, the site had also been ‘the Iubeit or galowys of thevys’, a place of execution (p. 12), and so Rahere’s cleansing of the site again needs to work on both the literal and symbolic level.26 He needs not only to stabilise the ground if he is to build a great church upon such marshy foundations but he must also purge the space of its associations with the execution of criminals. The people’s astonishment at his achievement may then relate to the hostile conditions in which he began to build. Indeed Rahere’s association with the sanctification of the wilderness was highlighted on the 1405 monument erected during the Great Restoration. His tomb is inscribed with the following verse from Isaiah: ‘He will make her wilderness like Eden and her desert like the garden of the Lord’ (35:1). Recalling Rahere’s ability to cleanse a space associated with criminals may have been particularly resonant in the fifteenth-century for in 1381 the leader of the Peasant’s Revolt, Wat Tyler, had been dragged out of St Bartholomew’s hospital and beheaded. Similarly in 1401 the first Lollard heresy burning took place in front of the church unmistakably placing St Bartholomew’s at the heart of a politically charged area of medieval London.27 Rahere’s strategy for recruiting workers for his project is also foregrounded by The Book. The author states that he ‘owtward pretendid the cheyr of an ydiotte / and begane a litill while / to hyde the secretnesse of his soule / And the moore secretely he wroght / the moore wysely he dyd his werke’ (p. 13).28 Rahere gathers a ‘felischipe of children and seruantis’ and works as one of them until the ‘grete frame’ has been constructed and he then reveals himself and begins

24 ‘Who would believe that this place would be purged with so sudden a cleansing and there would be set up tokens of the cross!’ 25 ‘A swampy, muddy marsh abounding with water’. Webb includes historical references confirming the treacherous nature of the ground at the Smithfield site, vol. I, 45. 26 ‘A gibbet or gallows of thieves’. 27 Webb, vol. I, 183. 28 ‘Outwardly he feigned the appearance of an idiot and began for a little while to hide the secrets of his soul. And the more secretly he worked, the more wisely he did his work’.

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to preach to the people. Rahere’s pretence that he is an ‘ydiotte’ aligns him with the trope of the holy fool and his fellowship of children and servants builds an ideal congregation into the fabric of the building from its foundations. This would encourage the participation of all the people in the parish not only during the twelfth-century construction of the church but also its fifteenth-century restoration. The image of the church which is promoted by The Book of the Foundation is as a sacred space which serves and is served by its parishioners rather than as a purely monastic space which is set aside from the world. When Rahere reveals himself he begins to preach ‘by dyuerse chirches’ and exhorts the people to ‘folowe and fulfyll those thynges that were of charite and almesdede. And yn this wise he cumpasid his sermon / that nowe he sterid his audience to gladness’ (p. 13).29 The use of the word ‘cumpasid’ in this context is significant because in addition meaning to ‘devise’ or ‘plan’ it also has spatial connotations, meaning to ‘surround, enclose, go from place to place’.30 The sermons which Rahere delivers alongside the neighbouring churches enable him to enclose the surrounding space within the sacred compass of his project. The term is used again later in The Book with reference to Alfun, the church builder who completed St Giles at Cripplegate and was employed by Rahere to assist him in building St Bartholomew’s: It was maner and custome to this Alfunine / with mynystris of the Chirche. to cumpasse and go abowte the nye placys of the churche, besily to seke and prouyde necessaries to the need of the poer men / that lay in the hospitall / and to them that were hyryd to the makynge vp of ther chirche. (p. 24)31

The Book then details a series of miracles in which Alfun is miraculously provided with supplies both to sustain the church builders and for the poor and sick at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. A butcher and a brewer both donate goods and miraculously their own supplies are undiminished (pp. 24–6). Church building and good works are again conflated in the text and when Alfun ‘cumpasses’ the ‘nye placys of the

29 ‘To follow and fulfil deeds of charity and alms. And in this manner he devised his sermon so that he stirred his audience to gladness’. 30 MED s.v. ‘compassen’ 1a), 4a) and b). 31 ‘It was the manner and custom for this Alfun, with the ministers of the church, to go around the near places of the church to seek and provide necessaries for the need of the poor men that lay in the hospital and for those who were hired for the building of the church’.

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churche’, his peregrination through urban space encloses these sites of mercantile miracles within the protective enclosure of St Bartholomew’s. Such imagery naturally resonates with a church that is part of an Augustinian priory as tropes of containment always allude to imagery of monastic or anchoritic enclosure in the Middle Ages. The local shops and businesses become part of the priory’s enclosure and serve the monastery like its own kitchens and stores would. The term ‘compass’ also recalls city walls, the material enclosure of an urban space, and while St Bartholomew’s was built outside the walls of London, the sacred enclosure mapped by its church builders in The Book of the Foundation creates an alternative walled space to rival that of the metropolis.32 Words are of fundamental importance to the construction of sacred space. The building process at St Bartholomew’s is advanced and underpinned by the preaching of sermons, texts which edify a community and strengthen its spiritual foundations. And yn his techynge vnrepreuyd was fownde / those thyngis techynge / that the holy gost by the Apostles / and Appostolyke expositoures, haue yeue to the chirche vnmoueably & stedfastly to beholde. (p. 13)33

Within Rahere’s word lies the authority of his building project, and his teachings solidify and strengthen the church. The teachings of the Holy Ghost which Rahere’s good works exemplify are given to the church ‘vnmoueably & stedfastly’ and such language calls to mind the physical foundations of the church. When Alfun gathers his supplies to support ‘them that were hyryd to the makynge vp of ther chirche’ language again comes to the fore, highlighting the interchangeable nature of sacred text and sacred space. In Middle English literature the word ‘makynge’ is commonly employed of writing poetry: poets are ‘makers’ and they ‘make’ their text.34 The ‘makynge vp of ther chirche’ refers then both to the physical construction and the textual

32 The term ‘compasse’ is also used in the last miracle in The Book in which the wife of a man who is particularly devoted to the church saves her house from fire by making a vow to the apostle and then encircling the building with a thread: ‘Loo, howh by the merytis of the blessed Apostle Barthilmewe / the fyer hadde forfeit the myght of his vertu / that the howse shulde nat feill his brennyng, that bar his tokyne’ (63). 33 ‘And in his teaching irreprovable were found those teachings which the Holy Ghost, through the apostles and the apostolic expositors, gave to the church unmoveably and steadfastly to behold’. 34 MED s.v. ‘makinge’ 5.

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reconstruction of St Bartholomew the Great which The Book ‘makes up’. The text consecrates St Bartholomew the Great by building the word of God into the church and by restoring faith in the foundation and its sacred history. ‘The Excitament of Holynes’: Mapping Sacred Space Herdirto we haue writyn examplys of myracles / the whiche were done / In the days of goode remembrawnce of Rayer, Priore & foundatoure of his place / to the laude of God / and the excitament of holynes. (p. 31)35

The Book of the Foundation catalogues the ‘gloriouse and excellent myraclys wroghte with-yn’ St Bartholomew’s church (p. 1) to the praise of God and the encouragement (‘excitament’) of holiness. But while many of the miracles do occur within St Bartholomew’s church, a great many more occur outside its sacred confines. In addition to sanctifying the church building, The Book’s construction of space promotes St. Bartholomew’s as a pilgrimage centre at the heart of the sacred map of medieval Christendom and by focusing on the ability of sanctity to transgress material boundaries encompasses the urban topography of medieval Smithfield within the church’s sacred enclosure. As a church foundation legend, The Book of the Foundation is remarkably non-specific about the architectural features and spatial contours which it describes. Often it refers to the miracles occurring within ‘this church’ (e.g. p. 20) and those who require healing being sent ‘to the church’ (e.g. p. 23). The church has a monumental status, it is the church, and the deictic ‘this’ ensures that the Book’s miracles are firmly located within the precise setting of St Bartholomew’s. References to ‘this’ church also create a proximity between the reader and the church. Within the space of the text the reader is placed in a direct and close relationship with the building which the foundation legend constructs. The spaces within the church that do feature are the holy altar (pp. 36, 52), the altar of the Apostle (pp. 22, 38), and the Lady Chapel (p. 40), and within the priory close, the kitchen (p. 28) and the chapter house (p. 52) also appear. The latter spaces contribute to a sense of a 35 ‘Hitherto we have written examples of miracles which were done in the days of Rahere, Prior and Founder of this place, to the praise of God and the encouragement of holiness’.

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working priory which both spiritually and physically nourishes its people. The rather vague spatial coordinates within the church, however, are in part a result of the length of time which it takes to build a medieval church; by the late twelfth-century when the Book was originally written, for example, the presbytery was complete but the nave was not constructed until the thirteenth-century. Sacred space was always a work-in-progress. The lack of specific detail regarding the locations of particular miracles within the church allows the entire space to be sanctified and for those who heard The Book’s narratives of lay folk being healed within its confines to make their own mental mapping of the particular space in which it occurred. The Augustinian priory had always had parish responsibilities, which they discharged effectively by paying for a priest to perform services in the parish chapel in the church and to bury their dead in the parish graveyard within the priory close. The focus on the laity within The Book of the Foundation is particularly important because it is from lay parishioners and pilgrims to the church that the Augustinian canons would gain both their spiritual reputation and financial support. E. A. Webb comments that as tenants of the priory close the parishioners ‘materially increased the revenue of the house’; their physical presence on church land sustains the foundations very existence.36 Furthermore, while the lack of detail might be frustrating to the architectural historian, it is an advantage in a text which achieves a new life in translation more than two hundred years after its original composition. The reader is free to map the events of the text onto the church as he knows it. The Book’s refusal to precisely locate the events which it narrates within a specific area of the church also contributes to the sense of a sacred space which is fundamentally spacious and which is not confined to a single location within the building or priory complex. The notion of the medieval church as the gate of heaven suggests that the physical boundaries of space can be traversed by sacred practice and this characteristic of sanctity as fluid, mobile, and unconstrained by material borders is promoted throughout The Book of the Foundation. The centre of sanctity is the church building, but that sanctity can move outwards into the surrounding environment to create sacred outposts, spaces which are sanctified by association and in which the miraculous occurs. This can be seen in particular in two miracles in

36

Webb, vol. II, 248.

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which men who have been wrongfully imprisoned are released from their bonds by the sanctity of St Bartholomew’s. The sanctity of the church promotes spatial freedom. In the first, a man is released from his chains and the prison door is miraculously opened after he has heard the sounds of liturgical singing and bells from the church: Vpon a day whane of custome, the chanons of the chirche of seynt Bartholomewes a-fore the mornynge / the matens endid / and began to synge Te deum laudamus. And the peyll of bell was roonge / the foresayed pore mane, the whiche was artid in bondys / herynge the sownde of the bellis / and the melodye of ympnys / —the howse sothly, that he was crucyat yn. was nygh by to the chirche / —And he began with deuoute soule and lamentable voice to crye / and, as he cowde or myght, to calle vpone seynt Bartholomewe (37)37

The man’s prayer to the saint is efficacious as he finds himself miraculously ‘I-losid’ from his chains and the door ‘opyne’. He is free to leave his prison and enter the church where he prostrates himself in front of the altar of St Bartholomew and gives thanks. Yi-Fu Tuan comments that ‘sound itself can evoke spatial impressions’ and here the sounds of the bells and the canon’s singing stand in for the church and its powers, and allow the man to miraculously transgress the boundaries of his prison.38 In this example, ‘knock and it shall be opened to you’ is found to be literally true as once the poor man has knocked at the saint’s door his prison doors are opened. That the liturgical rituals of the church might instigate miracles also serves as a reminder of the importance of church services and the benefits of supporting the Augustinian canons and their ritual practice. A number of preReformation bells survive from St Bartholomew’s and one of them from c.1510 is inscribed sancte Bartholomeo ora pro nobis (‘Saint Bartholomew pray for us’).39 When the bell is rung the text which is inscribed upon it is activated and the sounds of the church’s prayers

37 ‘It was on a day when of custom the canons of the church of St Bartholomew’s had completed matins and began to sing Te deum laudamus. The peel of the bell was rung and the aforementioned poor man, who was confined in bonds, hearing the sound of the bells and the melody of the hymns- the house, truly, which he was tortured in was nearby the church-began with a devout soul and lamentable voice to cry and to call upon Saint Bartholomew’. 38 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 15. 39 Webb, vol. II, 113.

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ring out across the city encircling the urban community. Text, object, and ritual practice coalesce in the working life of the church. St Bartholomew’s thus functions as the sacred nucleus of Smithfield, radiating outwards into the local area to include potentially profane spaces such as the prison. This is also evident in the second miracle concerning the release of prisoners. A man who is ‘y-bownde’ in a cart is suddenly freed when he calls upon St Bartholomew ‘whan the passage was made by the same chirche’ (p. 51). The man enters the church and ‘yn this wyse he skapid / the handis of his ennemyes’ (p. 52), an episode which additionally alludes to the church’s legal position as a space of sanctuary set apart from secular legal space.40 The church’s sanctity emanates into the city streets and as the man passes by and comes within St Bartholomew’s sacred force field he is both freed from the cart and then encompassed into the church’s legal protection. In his book The Sacred and Profane, Mircea Eliade argues that in order to be visible, the sacred must be made manifest and he calls such a manifestation a hierophany. Eliade defines the hierophany as ‘an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching the territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different’.41 A space is consecrated as qualitatively different in The Book of the Foundation by miracles and because, according to Eliade, in order to be made visible the sacred must be continually performed, the more miracles there are the more that space radiates its sanctity. ‘A hierophany does not merely sanctify a given segment of undifferentiated profane space; it goes so far as to ensure that sacredness will continue there. There, in that place, the hierophany repeats itself ’.42 The Book ensures that in ‘this church’ the sanctity of the original foundation continues even to this day. Sacred spaces are intensely potent, magnetic and attractive and as Eliade goes on to suggest, they become markers in an otherwise undifferentiated landscape. ‘In the homogeneous and infinite expanse in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established’, Eliade declares, ‘the hierophany reveals an absolute

40

‘In this way he escaped from the hands of his enemies’. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Orlando: Harcourt, 1957), 26. 42 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (London: Sheed and Ward, 1958), 368. 41

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fixed point, a centre’.43 The sacred, as he states, ‘founds the world’.44 St Bartholomew’s church functions as such a fixed point around which spiritual and urban life orbits in The Book of the Foundation. Sanctity flows outwards into the urban environment but the recipients of the miraculous in urban space always return to the church, the source of that sanctity, to give thanks. The construction of the church as the centre of sanctity encourages pilgrimage and donations to the church. Such spatial practices and financial contributions boost the church’s profile both spiritually and financially and would have been especially welcome in the early fifteenth-century when the Great Restoration of the church was underway. The Book of the Foundation not only promotes the efficacy of St Bartholomew’s in its own right, it also establishes a competitive relationship between the church and its neighbouring sacred spaces in order to maintain its dominance of urban space. The amount of geographical specificity in The Book contrasts with the lack of architectural specificity I mentioned earlier. The text catalogues in detail the locations from which individuals who are healed at the church originate, beginning at the level of neighbouring parishes and churches, such as St John’s or St Martin in the Fields, and radiating outwards to include nearby towns such as Dunwich, Sandwich, and Windsor. Pilgrims even come from as far afield as Greece and Rome, spaces of great cultural and religious significance, enabling the reader to create a mental map with St Bartholomew’s as the sacred centre around which local and international affairs orbit, analogous to the position of Jerusalem on many medieval maps. Such references attribute an inclusivity to the sacred space of St Bartholomew’s, anyone from anywhere can be healed there, but this ‘excess of signification’ could, however, be read as a sign of anxiety.45 The detailed origins of the pilgrims could be a sign of the church’s lack of confidence in its own position and the perceived need to supersede its potential rivals. This would also resonate in the immediate context of the translated text as the church was in need of considerable financial support for the restoration at a time when there were many other sacred spaces competing for the laity’s attention in medieval London.

43

Eliade (1957), 21. Eliade (1957), 30. 45 Helen Barr argues that Richard II’s excessive use of visual display during his reign could be attributed to such an anxiety, see Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 87. 44

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The Book of the Foundation establishes a particularly competitive relationship between St Bartholomew’s and its most immediate neighbours, St Bartholomew’s Hospital and St Paul’s Cathedral. Despite St Bartholomew’s church and hospital being linked through a common founder and location, the relationship between the two even in the twelfth century was ‘often strained’.46 Indeed the situation became increasingly vitriolic until, after numerous attempts, the hospital finally gained complete independence from the church in 1420. The crux of the matter was the balance of power underlying the relationship and it is perhaps unsurprising therefore that not only does The Book of the Foundation exhibit very little interest in the hospital, but it usurps the hospital’s defining role as healer of the sick and promotes it as the primary sacred practice of the church. Only three of the forty-two miracles in The Book occur in the hospital and of the remaining thirtynine, most are concerned with healing. In the late fourteenth-century the hospital was beginning to assemble a collection of prestigious texts, beginning with an important medical treatise called the Breviarium Bartholomei and culminating in the hospital cartulary in 1456.47 Such texts function as a symbol of status and prestige and the church may have decided to produce the new translation of its foundation legend in response to the hospital’s textual ambitions. The competitive relationship which The Book establishes between St Bartholomew’s and St Paul’s cathedral can be seen most clearly in the first healing miracle in the text. A sick man called Wolmer, afflicted with various physical deformities for thirty years, had been taken to St Paul’s where he was waiting ‘askynge almes of them that enterid yn’ (p. 18).48 But when Rahere builds St Bartholomew’s and ‘the fame of the newe werke / as it were a full swete odur dyffusyd by the mowthis of all the peple’ reaches Wolmer, he ‘conceyuyd a swete desire’ to be taken there (p. 18).49 The motif of the sweet smell is common in medieval hagiography and mystical texts and it often signifies the presence of the divine, thus representing the sanctity of Rahere’s enterprise emanating throughout the population. Wolmer is carried

46 Nellie J. M. Kerling, The Cartulary of St Bartholomew’s Hospital (London: Lund Humphries, 1973), 1. 47 Kerling. 48 ‘Asking alms from those who entered in’. 49 ‘The fame of the new work was diffused as a sweet odour from the mouths of the people’.

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to St Bartholomew’s and after his prayers to the apostle ‘with-owte tariynge’ he is healed (p. 18). St Bartholomew’s therefore clearly surpasses St Paul’s in its miraculous abilities. Particularly relevant to the early fifteenth-century context of the translation is the use of the phrase ‘newe werke’ to describe St Bartholomew’s church. This phrase was being used from the 1270s to describe the great rebuilding of St Paul’s and its literary currency is attested by the late fourteenth century alliterative poem St Erkenwald: Þen was hit [St Paul’s] abatyd and beten doun and buggyd efte neweA noble note for þe nones and New Werke hit hatte.50

Although the Latin original also uses the phrase, at the time of the translation of The Book of the Foundation the phrase ‘newe werke’ had gained particular connotations of which the translator, and indeed his readers, are likely not to have been oblivious. The phrase is also used, as discussed above, when the people marvel at the building and the ‘fownder of this newe werke’ (p. 13) and when Wolmer is healed, he is described as a ‘newe man’. The new work of St Bartholomew’s is more than just a new church, it is a sacred endeavour that rivals the great religious centres of London. That St Paul’s should have been chosen as the representative location may have been due to its geographical proximity to St Bartholomew’s, but the cathedral also had a personal relevance for both Rahere and the sponsor of The Book’s fifteenth century translation, Roger Walden. Both Rahere and Roger Walden held prebends at St Paul’s and Rahere was a canon there before his foundation of St Bartholomew’s. St Bartholomew’s certainly gains in stature if it can surpass even the sanctity of the cathedral church of London. Conclusion Christopher Brooke describes The Book of the Foundation as ‘a sort of prospectus’ for the church.51 The text constructs St Bartholomew the Great as a sacred space and promotes its sanctity in order to encourage

50 Clifford Peterson, ed., Saint Erkenwald (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 73, lines 37–8. ‘Then it was demolished and beaten down and built again anew / A noble business for the occasion and it was called the New Work’. 51 Christopher Brooke, London 800–1216: The Shaping of a City (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975), 327–328.

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spiritual and financial support for the continued restoration and extension of its material fabric. The close connection between the sanctity of the church and its physical structure is highlighted in a miracle in chapter 28 of The Book in which a crippled man called Adwyne the carpenter is healed after spending time in both the hospital and the church. After his health returns, Adwyne ‘the crafte of carpentrye / yn the same chirche, and yn the Cite of Londone he excercisid / as it hadde be taught hym / from his childehood’ (p. 29).52 Adwyne repays the church for his miraculous recovery by using his carpentry skills in the church. The material fabric of the church is enhanced as a direct result of the miracle. But the text does not neglect the celestial sacred space to which all believers aspire. In the Prologue to Book II the author describes the church as ‘a bilynge certeynly styddefastly here permanent, vnspottid shall be translatid yn-to the kyngdome euerlastynge’ (p. 32).53 As The Book of the Foundation was translated from Latin into Middle English and its construction of the church was mapped from Rahere’s foundation onto the fifteenth-century restoration, so the steadfastness of the building and its community will be translated into heaven. If you visit St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield today you will still find The Book of the Foundation performing its role as a sacred text which supports, sustains, and promotes the church. Most churches in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have souvenirs in the form of postcards or bookmarks which visitors can purchase as tokens of their visit. Many also have a short guidebook written by a local expert pointing out features of note. At St Bartholomew the Great, the modern English translation of The Book of the Foundation is available for just this purpose. Those with a particular affection for the church can even become a ‘Friend of St Bartholomew the Great’ and there are three levels of ‘friendship’ which support the church in different ways. ‘Friends of the Cloister’ support enhancements to the ‘visitor experience’, including the provision of educational materials; ‘Friends of the Quire’ represent ‘our support of the tradition of formal worship and music and keeping the roof over our heads’; and ‘Friends of the Sanctuary’ support ‘the church’s furnishings, ornaments and treasures, 52

‘He exercised the craft of carpentry in the same church and in the city of London as he had been taught from childhood’. 53 ‘A building which is steadfastly permanent here shall be translated undefiled into the everlasting kingdom’.

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its conservation, and its beauty’.54 According to the St Bartholomew’s website, Friends of the Quire, who support both the physical church and its liturgical rituals, will receive a copy of The Book of the Foundation as a result of their donation. St Bartholomew’s is a church with an extraordinary history and a legacy of ambitious building and restoration. The church is currently planning to build a columbarium, a set of memorial niches for the internment of ashes, so that modern day worshippers can also become a part of the fabric of the building after death, like their medieval forebears. The Book of the Foundation continues to play an important role in promoting St Bartholomew’s as the greatest church and the most sacred of spaces in both medieval and modern London.

54 The website of St Bartholomew the Great, accessed 18 March 2010 .

AN ARENA FOR THE HOLY: THE IMITATIO FRANCISCI OF MARGERY KEMPE Roy Eriksen “This place is holy.” These are the words Christ addresses to Margery Kempe (1373–1438) in response to her reaction to the hospitality shown her by a poor woman who takes pity on “the creature” on her way to Rome. The woman kindly offers her a cup of wine and bids her sit by the fire to warm herself, while she is breastfeeding her “man child”: He sucked one while on the mother’s breast; another while he ran to this creature, the mother sitting full of sorrow and sadness. Then this creature burst all into weeping, as though she had seen our Lady and her son in the time of Passion, and had so many holy thoughts that she might never tell the half, but ever sat and wept plenteously . . .1

Though Kempe “might never tell the half” of what goes on in this brief episode, we perceive that she interprets the common scene of motherly love in a typological key, reading (in the manner of Romans 1:20) the invisible truth behind the visible and prosaic goings-on. The scene itself appeals to the visual imagination and presupposes acquaintance with images of the Virgin and Child known to all in the European Middle Ages. The poor woman emerges a type of Mary and her hospitality, maternal love and sadness remind Kempe not only of Mary’s sorrow for her dead son, but also of the Virgin’s compassion and maternal love for all human beings.2 The “wine offered in a cup of stone” becomes a materialization of the chalice of the Eucharist with the blood of Christ

1 The classical edition of The Book is eds. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, The Book of Margery Kempe. EETS 212 (New York: Oxford UP, 1940, 1961), 94. For convenience I have quoted from the modern English version by Lynn Staley, The Book of Margery Kempe. A New Translation, Contexts, Criticism (New York and London: Norton, 2001), 69. 2 There is in this chapter a clear departure from mundane motherhood to motherhood that is dependent on the caritas of the Virgin passage that is completed in chapter 11. According to John C. Hirsch, Kempe’s lord “is a woman: first St. Anne, then more importantly and more lastingly, Mary. Christ she apprehends as feminized, both in his infancy and in his passion, physically helpless and at his mother’s disposal in

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and to the creature’s eye the milk of life contrasts with the blood that gives eternal life. Though not visible, the beneficial sacrifice on the Cross is present, in the humble house. Thus a scene from every-day life becomes a representation of the mystery of religion to Kempe, and she even boldly introduces “our Lord Jesus Christ” into her account for confirmation: “This place is holy.” This brief episode both reveals to us how specific events in The Book tend to function on several levels, but more generally it also provides important clues to how holy spaces are created and holy places are represented in medieval devotional narrative. For how were early modern texts reporting events of spiritual content, or sacredness, shaped to enable the transfer of the holy? Do they succeed in transferring the meaning and impact of sacred space to the reader? The case of The Book of Margery Kempe presents an interesting example of such texts, as it embodies at the same time the traditions of oral and written literature. Moreover, in terms of genre it is related both to autobiography, biography, and the sub-genre of saints’ lives, in being an oral account about Kemp’s visions and pilgrimages that she first dictated to her son and later had copied by and revised by two monks acting as scribes in her employ.3 This article discusses two episodes in the narrative about her life as a lay parallel to a saint’s life and how these episodes relate to different but not unrelated ways of recreating sacred space in early modern texts. The book does not provide a chronologically accurate account of Kempe’s life and most of the domestic and personal matters of a married woman who gave birth to fourteen children are left out. Interestingly, though, she openly comments on the book’s episodic nature, as if in anticipation of an expected critique of her emplotment of the holy within the context of her life: This book is not written in order, everything after the other as it was done, but as the matter came to the creature in mind when it was written, for it was so long before it was so long that she had forgotten the

either case.” John C. Hirsch, The Boundaries of Faith: the Development and Transmission of Late Medieval Spirituality, (Leiden, New York and London: Brill, 1996), 65. 3 Hirsch discusses the relationship between narrator subject and scribe in The Boundaries of Faith, ch. IV: “Is The Book of Margery Kempe a Feminist Text?” 60–77. See also, Hirsch’s “Author and Scribe in the Book of Margery Kempe,” Medium AEvum 44 (1975), 145–50. Lynn Staley observes that “Kempe persistently describes Margery as part of a community that values the written word, or the written life. Lynn Staley, “Authorship and Authority” in The Book of Margery Kempe: A New Translation, Contexts, Criticism, (New York: Norton, 2001), 237.

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time and the order when things befell. And therefore she had nothing written but that she knew right well for very truth (5)

The passage suggests that Kempe may have had in mind a structure focused on theme, or, as she phrases it, “very truth” of the particular episode recorded rather than their distribution in time. The work’s structure therefore shows a clear preference for episodic intensification rather than chronology, and the episodes selected present privileged events in the life of Kempe as a self-proclaimed servant of God. In this article I wish to focus on two episodes, the first episode being a public in-door scene: Kempe’s interview with the Bishop of York (chapter 52). The second episode is a private out-door scene: her conversion to a chaste life in 1413 (chapter 11). The episodes at first seem to be straightforward accounts immersed in the narrative of The Book, but on closer inspection they illustrate two important traits of what I tentatively would term Kempe’s particular “Franciscan” use of dramatization to establish the holy. St. Francis and the Dramatization of the Holy From its early beginnings Christianity has depended on the systematic symbolic representation in ritual context of crucial events in the life of Christ,4 the Baptism and the Eucharist being the prime examples.5 The theology of typological repetition of particular figures and actions has shaped Christian liturgy and the liturgical calendar used then, as now, was based on a miniature version of the life story of Christ. In this commemorative and regenerative practice the cultivation and representation of place is crucial, Bethlehem and Jerusalem being the prime locations for the faithful to visit. At a later stage other places too bound to the life and death of the Apostles and saints achieved almost equal importance, especially when access to the holy sites in Palestine was rendered difficult or impossible. Similarly, the imitation in art and

4 Brenda Bolton, “Liturgical Drama as ‘Missionary Theatre’” in ed. R. N. Swanson, Continuity and Change in Christian Worship (Oxford: Boydell Press, 1999), 92. See the basic account in Thomas Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year. (New York: Pueblo Publishing Co., 1986). 5 Bryan D. Spinks, Early and Medieval Rituals and Theologies of Baptism from the New Testament to the Council of Trent. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Staale SindingLarsen, Iconography and ritual: a study of analytical perspectives. (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1984).

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architecture of the holy events and their settings in ritual produced striking works of art that were designed to reinforce the message of the Gospel and offer individual emphatic examples to imitate in their own quest of salvation.6 By visiting such sites “[t]he pilgrim thus became a participant and actor, and not a mere spectator”.7 It suffices to recall the fresco cycles in the two basilicas at Assisi or the Santa Casa at Loreto: the Giotto cycle recreating the episodes in the saint’s life as examples to follow, and that the Santa Casa inciting veneration by enclosing on a different location the very space in which the Annunciation took place. The striking revitalization and renewal of such didactic practices in ritual contexts occur partly as a result of the work and example of St. Francis of Assisi himself (1181/82–1226), who at the age of 23 received a religious vision that changed the rest of his life into “a performance of the holy.”8 Francis’s use of dramatization should be considered in the context of the missionary policies of Innocent III, described in his decretal Cum decorem (c. 1210).9 Francis expanded the established medieval practice of dramatic representation involved in the imitatio Christi to comprise and incorporate new arenas for the holy outside conventional liturgical contexts and sanctioned locations, the most famous of this type of enactment being his staging of the Nativity at Greccio in 1223.10 This first known presepe vivo, was a sacra rappresentazione dramatizing the nativity of Christ with a view to emphasizing the actuality of the mystery to the inhabitants of Greccio. Francis had received the idea for the extraordinary innovation after visiting the Holy Land in 1219/20. He said about the unusual project, that also appealed to and was approved by Pope Onorius III, that, I wish to do something that will recall to memory the little child who was born in Bethlehem and set before our bodily eyes in some way the

6 For the processes that gave rise to Christian architectural forms, see Allan Doig, Liturgy and architecture: From the Early Church to the Middle Ages. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 7 Alessandro Nova, “Art in Renaissance Italy: Early Response to the Holy Mountain at Varallo,” in ed. Claire Farago, Reframing the Renaissance. Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450–1650 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 123. 8 Frida Forsgren, “Topomimesis: The ‘Gerusalemme’ at San Vivaldo,” in ed. Per Sivefors, Urban Preoccupations. Mental and Material Landscapes (Pisa–Roma: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2007), 171–201 (p. 188). 9 Bolton, “Liturgical Drama as ‘Missionary Theatre’,” 9, 95–103. 10 The live crib continues to be staged by the local community at Greccio to this day, on the 24th and 26th of December and on the 6th of January, by the local community.

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inconveniences of his infant needs, how he lay in a manger, how, with an ox and an ass standing by, he lay upon the hay where he had been placed.11

He then set about reenacting sacred history in his own native Umbria. Aided by the local townsfolk, “Francis created a Holy Site on the mountain at Greccio, endowing it with the sacred and reconstructing, physicaly and symbolically, a place of pilgrimage and worship.”12 In the Legenda maior Bonaventura explains that “thus of Greccio almost a new Bethleham was created.”13 In fact, many of the episodes in the life of Francis are staged in a drama of the holy that closely follows the events in the life of Christ and as such they had an enormous impact on Francis’s contemporaries and on later generations.14 Margery Kempe, an economically independent women of the mercantile class and the ‘urban bourgeoisie’, was no St. Francis; but she appears to have had very clear ideas about her mission (thinking it important to have her life recorded) and about the necessity of imitating the practices of holy men and women who lived before her and in her own time.15 She acted out her part in a strikingly physical way that her contemporaries (like later critics) had difficulties relating to. She dresed all in white, but behaved awkwardly and provokingly by weeping abundantly and shouting aloud during her visions and pilgrimages to holy sites. Emphasis has, in the past, been largely concentrated on her contact with Julian of Norwich, and her imitation of female saints such as St Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373) and Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–31). The example of St. Francis is, however, an understudied aspect of her religious self–fashioning. We know that Kempe took a particular interest in him, and when she went on her most daring 11 Chiara Frugoni, Francis of Assisi: A Life (New York and London: Continuum, 1998), 113–114. Italian text is printed in Chiara Frugoni, Vita di un uomo: San Francesco d’Assisi (Torino: Einaudi, 2001), 112–114: “Voglio rappresentare quel Bambino nato a Betlemme come se in qualche modo avessi davanti agli occhi i disagi in cui si è trovato per la mancanza delle cose necessarie a un neonato, come fu posto in una greppia e come stette sul fieno fra il bue e l’asino.” 12 Forsgren, “Topomimesis: The ‘Gerusalemme’ at San Vivaldo”, 192. 13 Bonaventura, cited in translation in Alastair Smart, The Assisi problem and the art of Giotto: a study of the legend of St. Francis in the Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 231. 14 Bonaventura for example enumerates the many instances where Francis performs acts that clearly aim to imitate Christ. See Smart, The Assisi problem and the art of Giotto, 28. 15 See David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360–1430. (London: Routledge, 1988), 77–78.

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pilgrimage, the one to Jerusalem, she did not go directly to Rome, but first visited the shrine of the saint at Sta Maria degli Angeli at Porziuncula, before proceeding to Rome. Besides, one of the female saints admired and emulated by Kempe,16 the widowed St. Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–31), was inspired by the ideals of Francis of Assisi to the point of entering the Third Order of Franciscans. Elisabeth had made a solemn vow to live in celibacy and voluntary poverty. She and St. Bridget became exemplars to widowed or married women who made similar vows and chose to live in service of Christ, Margery Kempe being one.17 But to visit saints’ shrines, following in the footsteps of St. Francis to Jerusalem or imitating the actions of the saints in the manner of Kempe is one thing, representing such imitative actions in writing is quite another. Most saints’ lives are episodic and follow similar plot lines, enumerating the good deeds and the miracles performed and concluding with her or his death and sanctification by the Church. The Book does not end with Margery’s death, nor is there an account of any miracles. Instead it concludes with a short third section, by way of a coda, containing Margery’s prayers and thus it ends with a focus on the afterlife or eternity. Even though The Book consists of parts, or chapters, of vastly differing length, it achieves an unexpected unity in its total number of chapters. The concluding section, an unnumbered 100th “chapter”, with Kempe’s prayers, brings the sequence of 89 plus 10 chapters to the “perfect” total of 100, a figure that strongly suggests deliberate design.18 Besides, the prayers are physically detached in the manuscript, being written on a separate sheet, so as to be easily copied and distributed for use elsewhere on a par with miniature altars made for travel. As is the case with religious poems and hymns, the prayers are considerably more rhetorical and formulaic19 than most of the other parts of 16 Margery refers to Elizabeth in The Book. Diane Watt, Medieval women’s writing: works by and for women in England, 1100–1500. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 87. The work by Elizabeth she mentions, however, is that of her grand-daughter by the same name. 17 Rainer Koessling, ed. and trans., Leben und Legende der heiligen Elisabeth nach Dietrich von Apolda, (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1997), 52. 18 100 is a number of perfection, as seen in works as different as Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Decameron, and Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. 19 Robert Karl Stone analyzes the art of Kempe’s prose in Middle English Prose Style: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. (The Hague: Mouton, 1970).

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The Book. In his brief analysis of the style in Kempe’s concluding third section, Robert Stone has shown that the prayers and other parts of the book make profuse use of the same rhetorical: anaphora, anadiplosis, antimetabole, parallelism, and antithesis. Dhira Mahoney finds this high degree of ornateness “surprising” (50), downplaying the fact that the Gospels exhibit many examples that Kempe certainly knew of similar ornateness, notably in the Sermon on the Mount. And though the level of overt verbal ornament and figuration in the main body of the narrative is, as is to be expected, considerably lower than in the prayers, some attention to finish is apparent even in the recording of events. In spite of its unconventional nature as a record written down by intermediaries (i.e. two monks who revised her son’s draft),20 The Book should be studied also for its literary qualities.21 For its “apparent artlessness . . . conceals a knowledge of the conventions of fifteenthcentury piety and of the contemporary literature of devotion, both Latin and vernacular.”22 As I will argue below, therefore, works narrating the life and works of St. Francis, such as the Vita prima Sancti Francisci Assisiensis (1228) and official Legenda maior (post–1266) by St. Bonaventura, may have contributed to shaping Kempe’s mode of transmitting the holy. The Franciscans came early to England and Friar Agnello da Pisa established the first convent in Oxford in 1224. In actual fact, the second earliest extant legend, Legenda versificata sancti Francisci,23 is of English provenance and was written in Latin at the court of Henry II. In addition to such legends, Kempe would of course

20 For the process from oral account to text, see R. C. Ross, “Oral Life, Written Text: The Genesis of The Book of Margery Kempe”, Yearbook of English Studies 22 (1992), 226–37. 21 Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions. (University Park, Penn: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 2. 22 Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and the Translations of the Flesh, (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Janel M. Mueller, “Autobiography of a New ‘Creatur’: Female Spirtuality, Selfhood, and Authorship in The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Donna C. Stanton, ed., The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autography from the 10th to the 20th Century, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 57–89, p. 88. 23 This is the Legenda versificata S. Francisci written by Henricus Abrincensis and dedicated to Pope Gregory IX as early as 1232, only six years after the death of the saint in 1226, a fact that testifies to the early presence of Franciscans in England. See, Henricus Abrincensis, Legenda versificata S. Francisci Assisiensis, Analecta Franciscana, vol. X, (Firenze: Quaracchi, 1936).

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be well acquainted with vernacular oral traditions but first and foremost with Scripture itself. She frequently drew on The Gospels when attacked by misogynistic clerics, as witnessed in her account of such an occasion during a visit to York and the shrine of St. William. Imitatio Christi at York During her visit to York Kempe met lay people and clerics who supported her, but more notably she encountered hostile priests and monks who accused her of heresy and Lollardy. This reached a head when she was brought before a well-known persecutor of Lollards the Archbishop of York for questioning. The episode presents Kempe at a turning-point in her career, and technically is a kind of paradramatic inclusion into the narrative. What we witness is in effect a trial, which in itself is a form of proto-drama, and one in which Kempe is accused of heresy before the Archbishop, who also cross-examines her. She recounts a test by fire, and the degree of objectivity in the reporting is no doubt questionable, particularly as far as her blend of audacious and evasive replies is concerned. Her way of defending herself, in fact, seems to no little extent patterned on the description of Pilate’s questioning of Christ in Luke 23: 1–32, although the outcome of Kempe’s ordeal (she was, if we are to believe her, led away from the hostile clerics at York thanks to the direct intervention of the Archbishop) is more related to what happened when St. Francis was accused before the Bishop of Assisi than to Luke’s Gospel. In the interrogation of Christ by Pontius Pilate in Luke 23 (the most famous example of a trial in Scripture) Christ is questioned three times and each time deemed to be innocent: 23: 4. Then said Pilate to the hie Priests, and to the people, I find no faute in this man. 23: 13–14. Then Pilate called together the hie Priests, and the rulers, and the people, And said vnto them, Ye haue broght this man vnto me, as one that peruerted the people; and beholde, I haue examined him before you, and haue founde no faute in this man, of those things whereof ye accuse him: 23: 22. And he said vnto them the third time, But what euil hathe he done? I finde no cause of death in him: I wil therefore chastise him, and let him lowse.

Urged by the crowd and the high priests, Pilate then gives in and washes his hands of the matter, and Christ is “led . . . away” to be cruci-

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fied (23.26). This looks neat and orderly, but the sequence of questions is actually interrupted by an interpolated sequence of six verses (6–12) in which Christ is sent to Herod’s palace for questioning. There he is mocked by “[t]he hie Priests and Scribes” (7), before he is “arrayed in white” (11)—the symbol of innocence shines out of the scene—and returned to Pilate for questioning. The questioning of “the creature” at York may seem less obviously structured than the events in Luke, and the two narratives at first may appear to have little in common except for the questioning. Here we need, however, to separate the interview by the Archbishop from the introductory expressions of support Kempe receives and the provocations she suffers from various clerics in the first part of chapter 42. The second part, featuring Kempe and the Archbishop, is of a different kind altogether and attention is deliberately drawn to the questioning of Christ in Luke 22.1–32, when Kempe, after “making a prayer in her mind”, is comforted by “Our Lord”, before the Archbishop and his entourage enter to ask her the first of three questions all put to her vehemently and roughly: Why go you in white? Are you a maiden? Why weepst thou so, woman? Why, you, what say men of me?

In her answer to each of these principal questions, we notice how cleverly Kempe in her answers adopts a technique of indirection, so that with the last question the focus is shifted squarely onto the character of the Archbishop. In response to the his question, she bids him ask other men for an answer. This is also the technique of diversion chosen by Christ when asked whether he is the King of the Jews: “Thou saist it.” The colour of Margery’s dress, too, recalls Christ wearing white when he appears before Pilate; and the Archbishop seemingly dislikes the connotations. He threatens her, therefore, with fetters for being “a false heretic”, but when examined in the Article of Faith she is found to be orthodox: “She knows her faith well enough.” What shall I do with her? He thus parallels the response and attitude of Pilate in Luke (“Ye haue broght this man vnto me, as one that peruerted the people; and beholde, I . . . haue founde no faute”). The clerics do however persist and want the Archbishop to send her away, because “the people have great faith in her dalliance, and perhaps she might pervert some of them.” Thus they bring the same accusation against Margery as the high priests bring against Christ in Luke. When, persisting, they

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lay “Saint Paul for his part against her that no woman should preach”, it is no surprise that Margery cites the mulier de turba—passage in Luke 14:34–35 against them: when the woman had heard our Lord preach, she came before him with a loud voice and said, “Blessed be the woman that bore you and the teats that gave you suck,” Then our Lord said again to her, ‘Forsooth, so are they blessed that hear the word of God and keep it.’

Her quotation of the famous Ave Maria-passage is in keeping with her effective use of Luke 23 throughout her defense before the Archbishop of York.24 Again she reveals a skilful dramatization of events in her own life by means of a subtle imitation of events in the Gospels, a type of reenactment that St. Francis used to great effect in his life and in his conflicts with secular and ecclesiastical authorities. More specifically, the fact that the Archbishop “defends” Margery by sending her away accompanied and without rebuke or punishment recalls the Bishop of Assisi protecting St. Francis by dressing him in white and giving him his own pallium (or chlamys).25 She partly patterns her own story of tribulation on the account in Luke, turning the place of trial at York in her narrative into a place that recreates the sacred space of Christ’s Trial before Pilate, a wellknown play in the York Cycle.26 This reminds us of how Kempe’s “ ‘performance’ of herself—that is, her acts of deliberate and public representation . . . seems in particular to have been indebted to religious dramas.”27 The method she uses I would call a dramatic emplotment of the holy, because it consists in the representation of a series of events in imitation of holy writ, constituting a dramatic plot. In the following, we shall see that she develops this method one step further to create a sacred space for a particularly emplotted action. 24 Christ alludes to his earlier saying (Luke xiv.34–35), when he was conducted from the palace and again is met by a crowd with many women “who bewailed and lamented him,” he now bids them not to weep for him but for themselves and their children: For beholde, the daies wil come, when men shal say, Blessed are the barren, & the wombes that neuer bare, and the pappes which neuer gaue sucke (23:29). 25 The bishop embraces the naked Francis and gives him his chlamys: (“et circumponit chlamydem”). Henricus Abrincensis, Legenda versificata S. Francisci Assisiensis, Analecta Franciscana, vol. X, (Firenze: Quaracchi, 1936), Lib. III.182. 26 John C. Hirsch, The Boundaries of Faith: the Development and Transmission of Late Medieval Spirituality (1996). 27 Claire Sponsler, “Drama and Poetry: Margery Kempe”, in ed. John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis, A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe, (London: Brewer, 2004), 129–143 (p. 132).

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Margery Kempe’s Drama of Conversion My second analytical example, Margery’s conversion in chapter 11 of The Book, is also a paradramatic inset. The drama of her conversion differs from Kempe’s imitatio Christi in her “trial” at York,28 because there is no precedent in the gospels of a married woman who negotiates with her husband to be released from her marital bond and debt. It also differs from the York episode in being endowed with a textual form that differs from the rest of the narrative. While the first public episode is chosen as an illustration of the emplotment of a series of events patterned on the life of Christ, the account of her conversion to a life in chastity and in service of Christ is a considerably more personal, but no less sophisticated part of the narrative in that it strives towards spatial form. Like many episodes recorded in The Book it occurs on a Friday, because as Clarissa Atkinson has pointed out, the use of Friday is an essential element in Kempe’s imitatio Christi.29 The episode that occurred on Midsummer Even, June 23, 1413, occupies nearly all of chapter 11, in all 85 lines of the total of 9630 in Meech and Allen, and has been equipped with a marked frame in its references to time. It opens with the phrase “It befell upon a Friday on Midsummer Even” (19) and concludes the episode in similar fashion: “This was on a Friday on Midsummer Even” (21). Within this frame the episode falls into two distinct parts, separated by a sentence placed at the exact centre, in which Margery asks her husband’s permission to go and say her prayers at a nearby cross before he intends to exact his due in the form of sexual intercourse. The first half of the conversion episode which I would term the complicatio phase, relates how Margery and her husband John “upon a Friday on Midsummer Even” are on their way from York to Bridlington

28

Sarah Salih, “Staging Conversion: The Digny Saint Plays and The Book of Margery Kempe”. in Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih, eds. Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, (London and New York: Routledge 2002), 121–134. 29 Clarissa Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 14. See, also Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body. (London: Routledge, 1993): “Kempe’s prolonged identification with Christ also organizes the very timing of the events of her book, most of which, . . ., take place on a Friday, the day in which Christ’s passion is commemorated in ecclesiastcal ceremonial” (p. 83). 30 The final ten lines function as a coda to the self-contained episode and briefly refer to the many travels Kempe undertook to other countries due to the conversion.

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“in right hot weather,” she carrying a bottle of beer in her hand and he a cake in his bosom. Soon the husband waxes amorous and requests to commune “kindly” or “meddle” with Margery, who instead wants to be chaste. He is wary, because Margery has predicted that he may lose his head within three years if he should continue to demand his sexual rights. He therefore phrases his request carefully in a surprisingly accomplished periodic construction (a b b1 a1): Margery, (a) if there came a man with a sword and would smite off my head unless I should commune kindly with you as I have done before, (b) say me truth of your conscience, (b1) for ye say ye will not lie, (a1) whether would ye suffer my head to be smit off or else suffer me to meddle with you again as I did sometime? (19; author’s coding)

If we take a close look at his sentence, we note that it exhibits parallelism, antithesis, and inversions, thus displaying a surprising command and variety of expression that perhaps contrasts somewhat with the prosaic topic of sex between married folks. In the opening hypothetical clause the verb and the noun of the verbal phrase “if . . . would smite off my head” are inverted in the second hypothetical clause: “whether . . . my head to be smit off,” thus reinforcing the chiastic structure of the period as a whole. Also, in the first (a) and fourth part (a1) of the sentence the verbal phrase “commune kindly with” is echoed in “to meddle with” and the adverbial phrase “as I have done before” is echoed in “as I did sometime), and, finally, the phrase “say me truth” (b) antithetically balances “will not lie” (b1). The verbal skill of John in the first instalment of the ensuing dialogue of increasing conflict, is a further indication of the sophistication of the episode as a whole. The background for John’s question is that Christ has asked Margery to keep a strict Friday and to end all sexual relations, that is, to break her prescribed conjugal bond. Consequently, they have not had sex for eight weeks. His reaction to her refusal and protestation that she would rather see him dead than turn to uncleanness, provokes a blunt response, “Ye are no good wife.” (19) She urgently asks him to consent and make a vow of chastity in front of a bishop, but to no avail. She therefore remains bound by her conjugal bond and unable to refuse her husband his right.31 When they resume their journey,

31 See Elizabeth M. Makowski, “The Conjugal Debt and Medieval Canon Law,” Journal of Medieval History 3 (1977): 99–111.

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Margery thus begins to fear for her chastity, particularly when her husband wishes to rest by a cross by the roadside and pulls her down to him. He now changes his tactics, proposing a bargain: “Margery grant me my desire, and I shall grant you your desire” (19). Before he can grant his wife her wish he first wants her to share his bed with him as before, to have her pay her sexual debts before she goes on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and to eat and drink with him on Fridays. In view of the dangers incurred by pilgrims, many of whom died on their long journeys, the concern on his part is hardly surprising. Somewhat unexpectedly she only explicitly refuses the latter part of the request, which to us may seem the least to grant, but her refusal is due to a pledge she had made to Christ. Be this as it may, her answer does not content an impatient husband who obviously wants it all: “Well, he said, then shall I meddle with you again.” (19) At this point, Christ enters the episode. For when Margery leaves her husband to kneel in prayer at a cross in a nearby field she appeals directly to Jesus at the nearby crucifix or roadside cross. The cross therefore is as textually central in the conversion episode as it is in Margery’s life, for in this second half of the episode, the tone changes entirely. So far it has not lacked overtones of domestic comedy, despite the threatened forced carnal action. She prays passionately, entering into a dialogue with Christ: “Now, blessed Jesu, make thy will known to me unworthy that I may follow thereafter and fulfil it with all my might.” (19) And Christ, presumably in the form of the wooden figure on the cross at which she prays, immediately answers her “with great sweetness”, instructing her to resume negotiations with her husband: And he shall have that he desireth. For, my dear worthy daughter, this was the cause that I bade thee fast for thou shouldest the sooner obtain and get thy desire, and now it is granted thee. I will no longer that thou fast, therefore I bid thee in the name of Jesu eat and drink as thy husband doth. (19)

As a result of this act of divine intervention Margery accepts the conditions put forward by her husband, cleverly putting her own acceptance in the form of an offer in which he is seen to make a concession before she makes hers: “Sir, if it like you, ye shall grant me my desire and ye shall have your desire.” Thus her proposal to her husband inverts the sequence of his demands to her before she prays at the cross (“Margery, grant me my desire, and I shall grant you your desire.”) Her husband’s answer is equally formal as is her proposal: “As free may your body be to God as it hath been to me.” Thanks to divine

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intervention they reach an agreement and we are told that the couple kneeled under the cross, saying “three Pater Nosters in the worship of the Trinity,” before they ate and drank together in great gladness of spirit. The episode concludes with a final reference to the day and the date: “This was on a Friday on Midsummer Even,” thus rounding off the episode in the way it opened, giving it a symbolic temporal structure. The disposition of the episode is both linear and spatial. First, it moves chronologically from a situation of conflict and complicatio, to a state of conflict solution (solutio) and concord, around the cross that appears at the centre of the account. Secondly, this process exhibits antithetical balance and a deliberate use of spatial form in its insistence on repeating elements found in inverted order, a compositional feature particularly evident in the recurrence of elements occurring in the first half of the episode in the second half. The verbal repetitions are conspicuously placed at the beginning, middle and end of the episode, and we have noted how the references to the day are placed at its beginning and the end. The food and drink mentioned in the first lines (cake and ale) reappear in “sanctified” form (a Eucharistic moment) when the couple “in Jhesu name” eat and drink in “great gladness of spirit” at the end of the episode. At the very center of the episode Margery kneels at a cross in a field to pray, an action repeated when husband and wife pray in the episode’s final lines. On either side of Margery’s kneeling at the cross at the centre, we find distributed (in inverted order) references to her “great sorrow” and her pledge “to keep . . . Friday without meat and drink” (vs. “great . . . sorrow” and the pledge “to keep Friday without meat and drink”). Friday, being the day of Christ’s passion, is of course crucial here. Just as the cup of wine in chapter 39 is an antitype to the chalice of the Eucharist, so this scene is charged with with a typological and symbolic meaning. The conversion occurring on St. John’s Eve, the day in the year when the sun is at its highest in the sky, connects with Christ, the Sun of God, as the sun of righteousness (sol justitiae). And there may well be a numerological significance too in the numbers employed to figure forth the holy: there have been three years of prognostgication, three conditions are put forward and, finally, Margery and her husband recite the Pater Noster in honour of the Trinity three times. Neither can we miss the fact that Margery Kempe “converts” in her fortieth year (1413), forty being a highly significant number in Scripture and exegesis. The transition to a higher and mystical level that the

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number symbolized would be a commonplace to Margery Kempe and her contemporaries reflecting the 40 years the Jews wandered in the desert before being led into the Promised Land. Equally well-known would be the number of penance, eleven, underwriting, as it were, the story of her conversion placed in The Book’s eleventh chapter. Kempe was free to place the conversion in another place in the book, but chose not to do so. Of course, these numbers do not represent a particularly sophisticated use of scriptural or holy numbers, but they do help to structure the narrative and doubtlessly contribute to reinforcing the narrative’s spiritual dimension for informed readers like the monks at Syon Monastery, where the manuscript was kept. By the same token a general typological dimension can be discerned in the simple events of Margery and her husband’s life: John’s fear of being beheaded in the initial part of the episode makes senses both in relation to his namesake St. John the Baptist who was decapitated, and to Midsummer Even, the evening preceding the saint’s feast. Equally interesting is the concept of debt as found at various points: John wants Margery to settle his debts before she goes on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and she wants him to guarantee that he shall “ask no debt of matrimony after this day while ye live” (19). Inevitably, one relates this prosaic talk to the fact that Christ who brings about the settlement is the redeemer of mankind, who absolves his human debitores. And when Margery converts to a life in chastity in the service of Christ, she abandons mundane motherhood to embrace caritas.32 In this way Margery Kempe adds a scriptural and typological dimension to her representation of the crucial event in her own life. The mixture of domestic actuality and religious symbolism finds no precedent in Scripture or among female saints’ lives about women who negotiate with their husbands to be freed from their marital debt or duties. Although St. Elizabeth and St. Brigid chose a life of chastity and charitable work after their husbands had died, the type of conversion created by Kempe is wholly original. Nonetheless there looms behind the conversion episode another example, the conversion of St. Francis that could serve as her model. I suggested above that the Trial of St Francis before the Bishop of Assisi may have influenced

32 When Kempe has her husband state that “As free may your body be to God as it has been to me”, she probably alludes to herself as the handmaid of the Bridegroom.

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Kempe’s account of her Trial at York. Be this as it may, the most striking parallel from the Legend of St Francis that makes it relevant to speak of Margery’s imitatio Sancti Francisci is the well-known episode in the life and iconography of the saint: The Miracle of the Cross. This is the account of how the young merchant’s son Francis was converted from a life of luxury and profit–seeking to a life as the poverello in the service of the Church. As in the case of Kempe’s conversion episode, the conversion of St. Francis is the result of a direct intervention by Christ through a crucifix that speaks. This is a story that Kempe would have been acquainted with in the teachings of Franciscans, as in St Bonaventura’s Legenda maior: For on a certain day, having gone out to meditate in the fields, he was walking near the church of San Damiano, which on account of its excessive age was threatening to fall into ruins, and prompted by the Spirit he went inside to pray. Lying prostrate before a crucifix, he was filled as he prayed with no small consolation of spirit; and as with tear-filled eyes he gazed upon the Lord’s Cross he heard with his bodily ears a voice proceeding from the very Cross which said to him three times: ‘Francis, go and repair my house, which as you see, is falling into ruin’! All a-tremble, since he was alone in the church, Francis was astonished, at the sound of that wondrous voice; then, experiencing in his heart the power of the divine utterance, he was carried out of his senses in a rapture of the spirit.33

If we compare this account with the conversion of Kempe we cannot but note the striking similarity. For the key elements of the conversion episode in the Legend reappear in Kempe’s text: Margery kneels “down beside a cross in a field,” praying to “Lord God” “with great abundance of tears” (372). Christ responds to her prayers with great sweetness, ordering Margery to reach the agreement with her husband that facilitates her conversion. As in the episode in the life of St. Francis, then, the crucified Christ directly and miraculously intervenes in Margery’s life. In other words, in the conversion episode Kempe 33 Smart, The Assisi problem and the art of Giotto, 265. The Latin text reads: Dum enim die quam, egressus ad meditandum in agro, deambulat iuxta ecclesiam Sancti Damiani, quae minabantur prae nimia vetustate ruinam, et in eam, instigate se spiritu, causa orationis intrasset: prostratam ante imaginem Cruxifixi, non modica fuit in orando spiritus consolatione repletus. Cumque lacrymosis oculis intenderet in dominicam crucem, vocem de ipsa cruce dilapsam ad eum corpoeis audivit auribus, ter dicentem: ‘Francisce, vade et repara domum meam, quae, ut cernis, tota destruitur!’ Tremefactus Franciscus, cum esset in ecclesia solus, stupet ad tam mirandae vocis auditum, cordeque percipeiens divini virtutem eloquii, mentis alienatur excessu.

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deploys the Franciscan technique of actualization and dramatization that sought to establish a sacred space outside conventional contexts in its aim to convert people to God. In the view of Dhira B. Mahoney Kempe’s “preaching is associated with learned men; it implies rhetorical training, . . . [and] patriarchal language.”34 Although it seems clear enough that Kempe had not received training in composition and formal rhetoric, She could hardly avoid imitating the compositional strategies of the Gospels (the Sermon on the Mount, mentioned above, is a striking case in point) and adapting them to her narrative ends and needs. Kempe, whose culture was oral and visual rather that literary, may not have been formally trained in the techniques of writing and reading, but she would have had ample opportunity to absorb and copy the style of scriptural passages read to her and the oratory of preachers trained in the Ars praedicandi.35 While the formally and rhetorically effective style of the prayers at the end of Kempe’s work may contrast with the colloquial language that dominates throughout The Book, the difference is, I would argue, not absolute but a matter of degree. She was, as the episodes analysed above demonstrate, able to draw on the conventions of scripture and devotional writing to open new sacred spaces and build arenas for her Franciscan enactment of the holy.36

34 Dhira B. Mahoney, “Margery Kempe’s Tears and the Power over Language,” in ed. Sandra J. McEntire, Margery Kempe. A Book of Essays. (New York and London: Garland, 1993), 37–50 (p. 47). 35 N. W. Lund, Chiasmus in the New Testament, (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1942); R. C. Ross, “Oral Life, Written Text: The Genesis of The Book of Margery Kempe”, 226–37. 36 Robert Stone, Middle English Prose Style, p. 220.

PART TWO

RE-WRITING SACRED SPACE IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD

TO GREAT SAINT JACQUES BOUND: ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL IN SHAKESPEARE’S SPAIN Richard Wilson ‘I am Saint Jaques’ pilgrim, thither gone’: at the turning-point of All’s Well That Ends Well [3,4,4] the heroine, Helena ‘the daughter of Gerard de Narbonne’ [1,1,33], writes to her mother-in-law, the Countess of Rousillon, to tell her that instead of staying in Perpignan, she is taking the pilgrim road—El Camino—across Navarre and the Pyrenees to Pamplona, and by way of Burgos and Leon, to the greatest of Europe’s Catholic shrines at Compostela. Helena’s announcement astonishes the old lady, who declares that ‘Had I spoken with her, / I could have well diverted her intents’ [3,4,20–1]; and with good cause, since this is the only time in Shakespearean drama that a character declares an intention to go to Spain. It is true that the province of Roussillon was itself in Spanish hands when All’s Well was written around 1603, and would remain so until 1659; and that for a supposedly patriotic Englishman the dramatist had a provocative trick of setting happy endings in Habsburg territories of the Mediterranean, Belgium and the Holy Roman Empire. But for Shakespeare ‘the hot breath of Spain, who sent whole armadas of carracks’ [Errors, 3,2,134] remained always a myth. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona ‘the Imperial’s court’ [2,3,4] is not quite connected with the Spaniards, despite the boys joining a party ‘journeying to salute the Emperor’ led by one Don Alfonso [1,3,39– 41]; in Much Ado About Nothing Don Pedro’s army seems more at home in Sicily than Aragon; in As You Like It the exiles perhaps flee to Warwickshire Arden rather than the Ardennes of the colleges sponsored by Philip II; in Twelfth Night Illyria floats far free from the Adriatic coast coveted by the Habsburgs; in Measure for Measure Vienna is rescued from Hispanic religious mania; in The Winter’s Tale Bohemia is as much a haven for refugees harried north by Inquisition politics as it was under Rudolf II; and in The Tempest Milan is restored to its rightful ruler in defiance of the fact that in reality it was also to stay Spanish for another fifty years. In The Merchant of Venice Belmont ridicules the Prince of Aragon as ‘a blinking idiot’ [2,9,54];

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while in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Navarre laughs at that ‘refined traveller of Spain’ [1,1,161] Armado, whose penance ‘enjoined him in Rome’ is to wear his mistress’s old dishcloth ‘next to his heart’ [5,2,695–8]. And it seems no accident that the Don is so devoted to a girl called Jaquenetta. When Helena claims to set off barefoot to do penance on a pilgrimage ‘To Saint Jaques le Grand’ [All’s Well, 3,5,31], her ‘zealous fervour’ [3,4,11] therefore appears to open an approach which is unique in Shakespeare, to the shrine of the patron saint of Spain and the sacred heartland of the Counter-Reformation: I am Saint Jaques’ pilgrim, thither gone. Ambitious love hath so in me offended That barefoot plod I the cold ground upon With sainted vow my faults to have amended. [3,4,4–7]

On Saint James’s Day, July 25, 1555 Queen Mary and King Philip had been married in Winchester cathedral in a solemn Mass that haunted Shakespeare, a glowing mention of the bride’s ‘cloth o’ gold’ wedding-dress in Much Ado implies [3,4,17], as a frustrated solution to the impasse of England’s wars with Spain. Thus, from Don Pedro to Catherine of Aragon his plays are full of Spanish exiles whose sadness comes, Benedick observes, from disappointed love [5,4,117]. And only Shakespeare could personify even the dreaded Armada itself in the ‘sweet war-man’ Armado who goes ‘woolward for penance’ [Love’s, 5,2,647;696]. But it is this very cordiality which makes Spanish settings such a conspicuous absence from his stage. Which is to say that the Europe Shakespeare presents is split by the same iron curtain as the fractured continent of his day. Spain remains a shadowland, out of bounds to Shakespeare’s characters, because the key fact of CounterReformation Europe was the sectarian wall which cut the pilgrim ways from Britain to Iberia and the shrine of Saint James. As Diarmaid MacCulloch relates in Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, until the 1560s it was ‘pilgrimage routes that still united Europe by sea and land’. Thus, Bristol was a ‘national departure point for the Apostle’s shrine on Spain’s coast, and pilgrims sailing from the port would be able to enjoy the devotion to Saint James in the city-centre church’.1 The voyage from Bristol to Galicia took just five days; but the three-week journey across France, under the auspices of 1 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 18.

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the Confraternity of St James, was preferred by penitents, as Helena suggests, keen to expiate their sins with a more punishing ordeal. So for five centuries it had been the multitudes on the Great Road of St James who fused Europe into a single narrative that ‘transcended while affirming local allegiances’: from Reading, where a hand of the saint donated by Queen Matilda was preserved; or Slovenia, where his pilgrims went tax-free; to Saragossa, where it was said he had been visited by the Virgin.2 Even in the sixteenth century, Fernand Braudel reminds us, the road to Spain from Paris down the Rue St-Jacques was still ‘the most active thoroughfare of France’.3 For ‘while trips to Jerusalem and Rome became the privilege of the rich, penitents continued to wend to Santiago’ in such hordes that, according to John Hale in The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, the period was the ‘high-point of cosmopolitanism’ for everyone but the English.4 So, when Helena vows to take the Road of the Stars she is reminding Londoners of the sacred spaces they had repressed, and at the very instant when the power of pilgrimages and shrines was being reaffirmed in countless Spanish miracle books, saints’ lives, pilgrims’ manuals and tourist guides: Thus Calderon and other numerous dramatists joined the huge throngs in the festivals by writing spectacular pageants. For one of the great themes of Baroque literature was the pilgrimage. Cervantes, Meteo Alemán, and Baltasar Gracian each made pilgrimage the basis of the works they considered their masterpieces, and Lope de Vega poured into one of his most ambitious narratives, El peregrino, accounts of pilgrimages and shrines, and poems honouring wonder-working images of the Virgin.5

When Shakespeare’s Arden relations were arrested in 1583, it was their copy of Luis de Granada’s penitential Prayers and Meditations, with

2 Walter Starkie, The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St James (London: John Murray, 1957), 16, 60 & 68–9. 3 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (2 vols., London: Collins, 1972), vol. 1, 217. 4 Francois Lebrun, ‘The Two Reformations: Communal Devotion and Personal Piety,’ in A History of Private Life: The Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 89; John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (London: Harper Collins, 1993), 164. 5 Alban Forcione, Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four ‘Exemplary Novels’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 321–3.

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its joy in martyrdom, the prosecution produced to see them hanged.6 Clearly, the Stratford writer understood the impact of scenes like the one when Helena enters, after her ‘sainted vow’ to walk to Spain, and is identified by the pilgrim’s costume she wears until the final seconds of the play: ‘God save you, pilgrim! Whither are you bound? / To Saint Jaques le Grand’ [3,5,32–4]. As the Countess recognises, a happy end now depends on the power to work miracles with prayers ‘heaven delights to hear / And loves to grant’ [3,4,27–8]. But even Catholic critics admit this scenario of ‘a pilgrimage to Spain, invocation of Saint James, penitential practice of walking barefoot,’ and prayers for intercession must have struck Protestants as perversely Romish:7 so much so the Arden editor states the idea Shakespeare takes it seriously is ‘too Popish to be probable’.8 Yet it is precisely in terms of such perversity that Helena dedicates herself when she says her love for Bertram is such an ‘idolatrous fancy’ she ‘must sanctify his relics’, since she is ‘Indian-like, / Religious in [her] error’ [1,1,95–6;3,200]. Like the Indian boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream [2,1,124] or the ‘base Indian’ of Othello [5,2,356], this ‘Moorish’ figure puns, Patricia Parker explains, on Catholics as the ‘tribe of (Thomas) More’: the Tudor proto-martyr.9 And it suggests that, when Helena discloses how the medicine she practices as an inheritance has been ‘sanctified / By th’luckiest stars in heaven’ [All’s Well, 1,3,231–2], the ‘receipt’ with which she cures the King of France of a deadly fistula has been consecrated by ‘the great’st grace lending grace’ [2,1,159] during her father’s own pilgrimage to Compostela. The text of All’s Well is full of exchanges about getting ‘well’, but the association of Helena’s luck with Compostela is also reinforced by stellar imagery. Thus the play opens with this ‘poor physician’s daughter’ [2,3,115] wishing for Count Bertram as ‘a bright particular star’ [1,1,81], but seeing herself among the unlucky ones ‘Whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes’ [170]. And when by healing the King she

6 Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1907), 75–6. 7 David Beauregard, ‘“Inspired merit”: Shakespeare’s theology of Grace in All’s Well That Ends Well,’ Renascence, 51 (1999), 231. 8 William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, ed. G. K. Hunter (London: Methuen 1959), 82. 9 Patricia Parker, ‘What’s in a Name and More,’ Sederi XI: Revista de la Sociedad Espanola de Estudios Renascentistas Ingleses (Huelva: Universidad de Huelva, 2002), 101–449, esp. 117.

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rises enough for her ‘star’ to reject her as his wife, she says she will ‘With true observance seek to eke out that / Wherein toward me my homely stars have failed’ [2,5,70]. The clown Lavatch thinks she was born under ‘a blazing star’, however, and associates her with ‘the surplice of humility’ worn’ over the black gown of a big heart’ [1,3,76–84]. And it is the pilgrim garb she does wear that makes us believe she will finally be among those who, the braggart Paroles jests, ‘eat, speak, and move, under the influence of the most received star’ [2,1,52]; as she smiles he was ‘born under a charitable star’ [1,1,177]. So all these wishes made upon the ‘most received’, ‘charitable’, ‘homely’, ‘base’, yet ‘sanctified’, ‘blazing’ and ‘luckiest’ of stars set Helena firmly towards the ‘bright particular star’ of Santiago, within one of those tall stories of miraculous healing told by the wayfarers themselves, as the old courtier Lafeu exclaims: I have seen a medicine That’s able to breathe life into a stone, Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary With sprightly fire and motion; whose simple touch Is powerful to araise King Pepin, nay, To give great Charlemagne a pen in’s hand, And write to her a love-line. [2,1,70–6]

Shakespeare’s pun on the hand of Charle-main, the liberator of Compostela from the Moors, according to the twelfth-century Book of St. James, connects his plot to those tales of chivalry with which the Cluniac monks paved the Pilgrim’s Way. And one cue for the play is, indeed, the yarn about Gerard of Roussillon who built the abbey of Vézelay, at the start of the Road, as penance for refusing a bride chosen by Charlemagne.10 There he enshrined the relics of Mary Magdalene, who supposedly died at Marseilles: from where Helena returns as if from the dead. Other sources include a fable of a doctor’s daughter, Christine of Pisano, who cured King Charles V; and Boccaccio’s novella about Giletta, ‘a physician’s daughter of Narbonne,’ who ‘healed the French king of a fistula’.11 And in the background lies the Grail legend of the Fisher King, hinted in that allusion to Pepin. But where these trails converge is in posing the problem put

10 William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, ed. Russell Fraser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 6. 11 William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure (London: 1566), quoted ibid., 7.

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by the heroine to the dying King: namely, the pay-off for belief in an age ‘When miracles have by the greatest been denied’ [2,1,139]. As Julia Lupton writes in her study of Renaissance hagiography, Afterlives of the Saints, in scenes like this Shakespeare highlights aspects of his Catholic sources most offensive to Protestants, for while his rivals honoured the Anglo-centric geography of the Elizabethan state, ‘the Europe of Shakespeare—his Venice, Verona, Navarre, Paris, Florence, as well as Vienna—is still a continent of pilgrimage routes, mapped by the motifs and scenarios of the late medieval legends of the saints’.12 When Helena confesses ‘on my knee, before high heaven,’ that her love of one she adores ‘next unto high heaven’ is a ‘sieve’ in which ‘I still pour in the waters of my love / And lack not to lose still’ [1,3,175– 88], the expectations she prompts are therefore those of the miracle books. And when she dedicates herself with her ‘sainted vow’ to ‘wish chastely and love dearly’ [196] we are led to expect impossible returns, like the wonders of Our Lady of Rocamadour, who saw to it, we are told, that when the ‘man tormented by a fistula in his leg was taking his bandages off the ulcers that gnawed at his muscles, he discovered nothing but scars and to his delight found he was cured.’13 This is a drama of ‘exceeding posting day and night’ [5,1,1] which according to the Counter-Reformation crown of thorns its heroine says she relishes [4,4,32], might well end in the dispensation of miraculous ‘waters of love’ at the shrine of the saint. Shakespeare had previously mocked such stories in episodes like the ‘miracle’ of Simpcox, the ‘blind man at Saint Alban’s shrine’ [2Henry VI, 2,1,66]; and this is hardly surprising as it was precisely Protestant disgust at any such ‘religious rite smacking of magic’ which now defined English attitudes to the European continent: It was on the Continent that Papists preserved their trust in relics and pilgrimages. [So] it was the ‘superstitious’ character of popular devotion that attracted the attention of English visitors . . . how in South Germany peasants flocked to get water blessed by the image of St. Francis Xavier; how in Rome the Virgin drove away pestilence; in Venice . . . St. Rock. So long as it was possible for a Catholic prelate, like the Bishop of Quimper in 1620, to throw an Agnus dei into a dangerous fire in hope of putting

12

Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 112. 13 Marcus Bull (ed.), The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999), 143.

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it out, the Roman Church could hardly fail to retain the reputation in England of laying claim to supernatural remedies.14

‘How should I your true love know / From another one?’ sings Ophelia, and gives an answer to rebuke Hamlet, who has come not, in the words of the old Catholic ballad, from Walsingham, still less Compostela, but Luther’s Wittenberg: ‘By his cockle hat and staff, / And his sandal shoon’ [Hamlet, 4,5,23–6]. For those who did return from the ‘field of the star’—like the pilgrim buried in Worcester cathedral ‘with his staff and cockleshell by his side, his boots on his feet’; the fifteenth-century Sussex testator who left provision for five neighbours to go ‘to St James in Galicia’; the Suffolk parishioner who in 1501 donated to his church ‘scallops and other signs of St James’; or the London families of the 1560s who ‘cherished shells from Santiago as heirlooms passed from father to son’15—seeing was believing and the act of faith in walking to Spain was rewarded by relics carried home. Dante, who famously compared the candlelit procession on the campus stellae to the Milky Way, wrote that ‘none are called pilgrims save those journeying to St James’.16 So, the shells of Compostela became proof of pilgrims’ faith that miracles were secured when ‘the saints’ aid was attained through exchange of gifts.’17 In All’s Well the ‘triple eye’ Helena says that her father gave her on his deathbed [2,1,103–5] may be such a talisman. For back in England the contract with Spain was renewed each Feast of St James by the picturesque custom of decorating shrines with scallops as cups that gave the date its popular name of Grotto Day. Thus Londoners danced on this day at springs such as Clerkenwell, Holywell, and Ladywell, and threw their pennies into public fountains ornamented with oyster-shells, ‘wishing well’ for luck. Folklorists describe the shell grottoes erected to collect money on July 25 by London children as late as 1900 as a ‘last faint memory of the great medieval pilgrimages to the shrine of St James’.18 But

14 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 84–5. 15 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars:Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 167 & 193; Starkie, op. cit. (note 2), 71. 16 Dante, Vita Nuova, 40, Commentary on Sonnet XXIII, quoted op. cit. (note 2), 60. 17 Beauregard, op. cit. (note 7), 231. 18 Christina Hole, A Dictionary of British Folk Customs (London: Paladin, 1978), 119; and English Custom and Usage (London: Batsford, 1942), 82.

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seashells are ancient prophylactics against the evil eye and the aphrodisiac connotations of the story that Saint James’s commemorate a bridegroom who rode into the sea on his horse to pull the saint’s body ashore, and returned to his bride covered in cockleshells, are perpetuated in the fertility rite of dropping coins in wishing-wells.19 Such was presumably the symbolism when Shakespeare had a ‘fantastically dressed’ Petruchio ride to wed Kate to a cockney rhyme: ‘Nay, by Saint Jamy, / I hold you a penny, / A horse and a man / Is more than one’ [Shrew, 3,2,74–8]. It can be no accident, therefore, that James is the male saint with most well-dedications in Britain. Nor, for a play about ‘holy wishes’ that starts with Helena’s joke ‘I wish well . . . That wishing well had not a body in it’ [1,1,52;166–8], can it be irrelevant to All’s Well That Ends Well that the largest number of all well-dedications is to the mother of Constantine, who united Britain and Rome, the first English pilgrim, Saint Helena herself.20 For once the title of this comedy is taken literally as a play on ‘well’, Helena’s wishing well has a specific cultural politics: The water of St Thomas Becket—into which, it was said, some of Thomas’ blood had been infused—was the most important of the relics for healing miracles at his shrine . . . Equally important were the many holy wells associated with a particular saint—St Friedswide in Oxford, and Our Lady at Walsingham. They represented the Church’s ‘christianisation’ of ‘unacceptable’ sources of supernatural power to its own ends . . . For the medieval Christian, the pilgrimage itself and the rituals upon reaching the shrine—venerating the relics, drinking holy water, or washing parts of the body in it—were central components of a tradition in which miracles, especially of healing, were experienced in relation to holy places, ritual, and sacred object.21

It was the London hospital devoted to the waters of the saint which gave the English court its title, when a royal palace was built over the spring, of the Court of St James, and for centuries English kings sponsored the well cult as their own.22 Even in the 1530s Henry VIII went 19 Mortimer Wheeler, ‘A Symbol in Ancient Times,’ in Ian Cox (ed.), The Scallop: Studies of a shell and its influence on humankind (London: Shell, 1957), 35–48; Horton and Marie-Hélène Davies, Holy Days and Holidays: The Medieval Pilgrimage to Compostela (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1982), 21–20. 20 James Rattue, The Living Stream: Holy Wells in Historical Context (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), 70–1. 21 Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 21. 22 Edwin Mullins, The Pilgrimage to Santiago (London: Secker & Warburg, 1974), 64.

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on pilgrimage to the sacred well at Walsingham, trudging barefoot the last few miles.23 As Keith Thomas details in Religion and the Decline of Magic, after such patronage the wells which lined the pilgrim routes became covers for Catholic resistance in Reformation England because they ‘retained semi-magical associations, even though Protestants preferred to regard them as medicinal springs working by natural means.’24 Thus Mary Queen of Scots turned St Anne’s well at Buxton, officially blocked in 1538, into a Mecca for recusants when she drank the ‘milkwarm’ water there nine times during her captivity; and Bath was redeveloped in the 1590s by the clique of Catholic gentry who ‘met at the Bath’ to plan the Gunpowder Plot.25 In fact, the Elizabethan regime only lifted a 1539 ban on drinking mineral-waters because of the exodus of dissidents to Spa in the Spanish Netherlands under the pretext of taking the cure. A starting-point for the Grand Tour, Spa would remain ‘a centre of Catholic intrigue’ which ‘the English government kept under strict surveillance’ in the reign of James I, its colony of exiles quaffing Spa-water as an act of faith as much as health.26 Given that wells were so much ‘associated with the Catholic past and now masked recusant plots,’27 it is therefore suggestive that in All’s Well the heroine equivocates about the magical or natural origin of the ‘something’ added to the remedy she gives the King, hinting only that ‘Great floods have flown from simple sources’ [2,1,137]. The liturgical chant with which she works the miracle specifies, however, that ‘Ere twice in murk and occidental damp / Moist Hesperus hath quenched her flame . . . Health shall live free’ [162–7], and this pictorial invocation of sunset over western waters may indicate an implied source for the purgative in St Winifred’s—or Holy Well—in Wales. In the 1600s this Flintshire shrine remained the most popular devotional site in Britain, and the regime was unable to stop ‘daily disorders around St. Winifred’s Well’ of the ‘confused multitudes’ going on ‘superstitious pilgrimage there by pretending the waters are beneficial’.28 In 1629 an informer reported that ‘Papists and priests assembled on

23

Francis Jones, The Holy Wells of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1954),

58. 24

Thomas, op. cit. (note 14), 80. Phyllis Hembry, The English Spa, 1560–1815: A Social History (London: Athlone Press, 1990), 22–4 & 33; Shaw, op. cit. (note 21), 25. 26 Ibid., 40–1. 27 Ibid., 4–5. 28 Quoted ibid., 15. 25

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St. Winifred’s Day’ comprised ‘knights, ladies, gentlemen and gentlewomen of diverse countries to the number of 1,500’.29 James II and his Queen Mary of Modena would take the waters there in 1687, in a defiant attempt to secure her pregnancy and their Catholic succession. And we can infer that the dramatist who set the climax of Measure for Measure at such a ‘consecrated fount’ [4,3,89] took an interest in this shrine, because among those who travelled to Holywell and adopted Winifred as a patron—according to the Jesuit ‘Testament’ he is believed to have signed in 1580—was Shakespeare’s father John.30 When Bertram forsakes Helena for Diana he calls her ‘Fontibell’ [4,2,1]: the name of a public fountain—‘all’s well’—in Cheapside featuring a statue of Diana. But as G. K. Hunter asks, ‘Why should Bertram give his beloved the name of a fountain?’31 The answer might be that All’s Well follows the programme of St James’s Day in revolving on a wish. Thus, when Helena cures the King of the disease he says that even her ‘most learned’ father would have wished to terminate in death, and ‘I after him do after him wish too’ [1,3,63–4], their wishing-game does follow the ambiguous scenario of a Stuart pilgrimage, where magic coexisted with tourism, and as Lafeu exalts, the confusion of ‘the learned and authentic Fellows’ allowed the ‘hand of heaven’ its credit [2,3,12–31]. Sceptics such as Camden were bemused when science corroborated the curative power of waters ‘famous in old wives’ fables’.32 But Shakespeare’s comedy takes place precisely in the intermediate space opened by this embarrassment, when ‘scientific discourse was the first to re-signify old religious beliefs’, and those ‘ensconcing’ themselves ‘in seeming knowledge’ learned to be ‘Generally thankful’ for such popish rituals [38].33 So with her ‘waters of love’, Helena treads the same road as pilgrims with their flasks of consecrated water, even as she disavows ‘water in which relics were immersed’.34 Her wish that her wishing-well ‘had not a body in it’ seems aimed, in 29 Jones, op. cit. (note 23), 64. See also T. W. Pritchard, St Winefride, Her Holy Well and the Jesuit Mission, c.650–1930 (Wrexham: Bridge Books, 2009). 30 Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 41–6, esp. 42. 31 Shakespeare, op. cit. (note 8), 101. 32 Rattue, op. cit. (note 20), 114–15. 33 Manuel J. Gomez Lara, ‘Trotting to the Waters: Seventeenth-Century Spas as Cultural Landscapes,’ Sederi XI: Revista de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Renascentistas Ingelses (Huelva: Universidad de Huelva, 2002), 225. 34 Carole Rawcliffe, ‘Pilgrimage and the sick in medieval East Anglia,’ in Colin Morris and Peter Roberts (eds.), Pilgrimage: The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 121, 131 & 136.

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fact, at Catholic ultras who still dispensed water fortified with saints’ blood, and prepares for the surprise when ‘Doctor She’ [2,1,77] does not have her wish come true. For with each of her suitors given a wish by ‘Her that so wishes’ [2,3,83], this the waters of this well-wishing is meant to mix her ‘merit’, Lafeu quips, with the ‘one grape’ whose ‘father drank wine’ as a Catholic before the son had lapsed [95]. Elizabeth I thought wine mixed in holy water a joke, and goaded Leicester to sip his ‘with as much sacred water’ from Buxton ‘as he lusteth to drink’.35 But The Faerie Queene spelled out the Eucharistic implications by relating how the sacred ‘well of life’ had flowed with Reformation ‘virtues and med’cine good’, like Bath or Spa, until the ‘Dragon defiled those sacred waves’ with blood.36 Helena’s wellwishing to marry Bertram, the King therefore explains, will dilute such differences, since ‘our bloods, / Of colour, weight, and heat, poured all together, / Would quite confound distinction’ [2,3,114–16]. In Shakespeare’s Tribe Jeffrey Knapp claims the dramatist (who lodged at this time in Clerkenwell with a family of French Huguenots whose lovelife may have cued his plot) himself wished to unite audiences in the ecumenical or Gallican spirit with which Lavatch would like to knock together the heads of ‘young Chairebonne the puritan and old Poisson the papist’ [1,3,45].37 And with his cynical preaching to Diana that ‘Love is holy’ [4,2,33], it is possible to see Bertram as the portrait of just such a hypocritical young Puritan. But when the King imposes marriage upon this ‘proud, scornful boy’ [2,3,151], the ‘recantation’ [186] is as constrained as any of the actual King of France’s wishful decrees of religious reconciliation such as the recent Edict of Nantes: Good fortune and the favour of the King Smile upon this contract, whose ceremony Shall seem expedient on the now-born brief, And be performed tonight. The solemn feast Shall more attend upon the coming space, Expecting absent friends. As thou lov’st her Thy love’s to me religious; else, does err. [2,3,173–9]

35 Quoted Reginald Lennard, Englishmen at Rest and Play: Some Phases of English Leisure, 1558–1714 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 9. 36 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), I, xi, 29–30, 149. 37 Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 53 & 169. For a moving novelistic take on the plot of All’s Well That Ends Well and the Huguenot Mountjoys see Charles Nicholl, The Lodger (London: Allen Lane, 2007).

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On the ‘not coincidental’ St James’s Day 1603, King James walked to Westminster for an ‘expedient’ coronation service with ‘all show and pomp omitted’, and the new sovereign ‘lost no time retreating to uninfected air’ as ‘that week 1,103 persons died of plague’.38 Thus, instead of London’s Fountain of Diana running wine, the Jacobean age was inaugurated with wells dressed in shells, which that year must have truly been intended to repel bad luck. And it was in this hiatus of ‘coming space’, with the ‘solemn feast’ delayed until 1604, ‘Expecting absent friends,’ that editors infer that the only one of Shakespeare’s comedies to open with a funeral was staged. After the funerals, the season of All’s Well was, in fact, a unique period of well-wishing in England, when the king suspended anti-Catholic fines, peace with Spain was proclaimed, and the court did wait upon absent friends in the form of an embassy from Philip III. Research locates Shakespeare at this time in the orbit of crypto-Catholic nobles, like the Howards, who received pensions from Spain and had most to gain from the act of toleration they hoped to extract from a monarch who had, after all, been baptised in the Catholic faith.39 With Spanish gold behind them, nothing was therefore more apt than that the newly patented King’s Men should stage a comedy set on the Jacobean Road to Spain that hangs on promises, like those of Bertram, to admit ‘The great prerogative and rite of love’ in ‘due time . . . Whose want and whose delay is strew’d with sweets / Which they distil now in the curbed time, / To make the coming hour o’erflow with joy / And pleasure drown the brim’ [2,4,38–44]. Given its constant references to overflowing waters, it cannot be incidental to All’s Well that a likely venue for the premiere was the spa-city of Bath itself, where Shakespeare’s troupe acted on the ‘King’s Holiday’, Coronation Day, and pitched base, according to Leeds Barroll, during the epidemic when the entire court decamped to Winchester.40 Shakespeare may have taken heart for his own waiting-game, indeed,

38 David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 57; A. P. V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant: The Court of King James I (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962), 29–30. 39 John Finnis and Patrick Martin, ‘Another Turn for the Turtle: Shakespeare’s Intercession for Love’s Martyr,’ Times Literary Supplement, 18 April 2003, 12–14; Caroline Bingham, James VI of Scotland (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979), 22. 40 Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 107–9.

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from the presentation of credentials in the spa town on October 8 by the special Spanish envoy, Don Juan de Tassis, after a ‘slow journey’ to Wiltshire spent testing Catholic strength. On October 12 Tassis wrote home that a ‘Gallican’ toleration would depend on peace.41 And scholars are fascinated by this diplomatic summitry, because when the Spaniards did arrive, Shakespeare and eleven fellow-actors were paid to amuse the Constable of Castile at Somerset House for eighteen days in August 1604. Some have even speculated that though ‘we are unable to say what form Shakespeare’s “tip” may have taken,’ he was among those who shared in the bribes distributed by the Spaniards, possibly in the shape of the ‘broad silver-gilt bowl’ he bequeathed in his will to his daughter Judith.42 So Shakespeare’s ‘Gallican’ comedy might register the dramatist’s own investment in the anticipated decrees of coexistence in speeches like the one in which the King declares he plans to waste ‘Not one word more of the consumed time’: Let’s take the instant by the forward top; For we are old, and on our quick’st decrees Th’inaudible and noiseless foot of time Steals ere we can effect them. [5,3,38–42]

‘Let us from point to point this story know / To make the even truth in pleasure flow’: at the close of All’s Well, according to the King, ‘The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet’ [321–30], and the image of healing waters promises benefits from unpalatable lies. Thus, it is in the spirit of Grotto Day that Lafeu throws coins to Paroles after the man of words falls into ‘the unclean fish-pond’ of Fortune, even though the old lord sees through him as ‘a vagabond and no true traveller’ who makes ‘tolerable vent’ of his travels but is not ‘a vessel of too great a burden’ [2,3,196–245;5,2,17]. In fact, the ambush of the ‘Captain’ appears to condescend to the discredited Anti-Spanish warparty, and could allude to the Winchester show-trial of the Puritan hero Raleigh. Biographers link All’s Well to the Herberts of nearby Wilton and a ploy by the Countess of Pembroke to use her handsome son to entice James there and ‘cajole him in Raleigh’s behalf ’ with the

41

Quoted Antonia Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1996), 77–8. 42 Ernest Law, Shakespeare as a Groom of the Chamber (London: George Bell, 1910), 59–60; Schoenbaum, op. cit. (note 30), 196.

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bait of ‘the man Shakespeare’.43 That would explain the shift of sympathy when Paroles grovels to live, as Raleigh did before his similar mock-execution; and also the ironic characterisation of the Countess as a patroness like Mary Herbert, relentlessly driving her household to ‘Write, write . . . Let every word weigh heavy’ [3,4,28–31] to ensure ‘all’s well’: HELEN: My mother greets me kindly, is she well? LAVATCH: She is not well, but yet she has her health. She’s very merry, yet she is not well. But thanks be given she’s very well and wants nothing in the world. But yet she is not well. HELEN: If she be very well, what does she ail That she’s not very well? LAVATCH: Truly she’s very well indeed, but for two things. HELEN: What two things? LAVATCH: One, that she’s not in heaven, whither God send her quickly. The other, that she’s in earth, from whence God send her quickly. [2,4,1–11]

As Paul Yachnin remarks, from the instant Lafeu regrets that the King’s illness is now ‘notorious’ [1,1,32], All’s Well is ‘newsy’ in its awareness of the power of the media to shape opinion, while ‘spinning’ the ‘cascade of letters’ Helena sets off about her travel as superior to tales spread by broadsheets and ‘odious ballads’ [2,1,171].44 So the hand offered the war-monger could be seen as part of the comedy’s own well-wishing, and of its investment in the advocacy Helena begins when she writes to the Countess to ‘Write, write’ in turn, ‘that from the bloody course of war . . . your dear son, may hie’ [3,4,8–9]. If All’s Well does date from the Anglo-Spanish talks, it appears, moreover, to accept the policy of ‘live and let live’ which James would also offer the Puritans, in Paroles’ resolve to let his sword rust on the politique understanding that ‘There’s place and means for every man alive’ [4,3,316]. With the ‘gallant militarist’ [137] disgraced as the precondition for negotiations, the play can then locate itself precisely between 43 The theory was first put forward by George Bernard Shaw. For Shakespeare and the Herberts see Michael Brennan, ‘“We have the man Shakespeare with us”: Wilton House and As You Like It,’ Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine, 80 (1986), 225–7; Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London: Routledge, 1989), 105–7; Anthony Holden, William Shakespeare (London: Little, Brown & Co., 1999), 209–10; and Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 301. 44 Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 201–3.

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‘an overture of peace’ and ‘a peace concluded’ [39–40]. And if this all well-wishing looks excessively ‘newsy’, then that reflects the text’s confidence in what Bertram (who will be trapped by them) unthinkingly states are ‘The best wishes that can be forged’ [1,1,68]. If All’s Well was written to make wishes come true in 1603, the bedtrick Helena rigs to fool Bertram might have been devised to prepare audiences to swallow similar white lies. For in this play we learn to distinguish, as Lafeu says, ‘one that lies three thirds’ and ‘should be once heard and thrice beaten’, like Paroles, from a ‘good traveller’ who is ‘something at the latter end of a dinner’ [2,4,27–30] because her deceits are benign. Thus, by a coincidence worthy of Borges, this play about a miracle cure, which draws on tales of chivalry to show the uses of enchantment, was put on to welcome the first readers of the greatest fiction ever built upon that same ‘ill-compiled’ edifice of ‘Knightly Books’, Don Quixote itself.45 Cervantes’ masterpiece was actually at press when the Treaty of London was signed in August 1604; but the Don had smashed so many sales records by the time negotiators returned to Spain to ratify the Treaty with their English co-signatories in June 1605 that the figure of Quixote starred in the pageant put on at Valladolid to celebrate the peace. This was the occasion (the Cervantes scholar Astrana Marin speculated) when the creators of Hamlet and Don Quixote themselves met face-to-face, Shakespeare having come to Spain in the train of Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham.46 Since this was probably also the time when Cervantes reflected upon the Earl’s 1587 raid on Cadiz with his story, La española inglesa, in which a girl kidnapped by one of the invaders is raised as his daughter in London,47 Hispanists are excited by the idea of ‘a summit meeting of the two giants of literature’ with the same mutual respect. But as Jean Canavaggio writes: ‘Let us stop dreaming. Only one thing is certain. Howard and his compatriots, when they return to the banks of the Thames, are going to spread the word about Don Quixote’.48 It is enough that the first English writer ever to quote Cervantes was

45 Miguel de Cervantes, The History of Don Quixote of the Mancha, trans. Thomas Shelton (London: Edward Blount, 1612; repr. 4 vols., London: David Nutt, 1896), ‘To the Reader,’ vol. 1, 11. 46 Luis Astrana Marin, Vida exemplar y heroica de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, con mil documentos hasta ahora ineditos y numerosas illustraciones y grabados de epoca (7 vols., Madrid: 1948–57), vol. 6, 37. 47 William Byron, Cervantes: A Biography (London: Cassell, 1979), 383–4. 48 Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes, trans. J. R. Jones (New York: Norton, 1990), 222.

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Shakespeare’s collaborator George Wilkins, who at the time of their Pericles in 1607 images ‘tilting at windmills’ in The Miseries of Enforced Marriage. That play uses the All’s Well story of the coerced groom to allegorize the plight of papists bullied to conform, and arose from a Howard clan desperate for Catholic rehabilitation.49 So it is significant that when Shakespeare himself adapted Don Quixote, and at last set a play in Spain, the Cardenio he wrote with John Fletcher was based on Thomas Shelton’s 1612 translation, dedicated to Theophilus, heir to Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk. Equally moot is the fact that in Cardenio a coerced marriage was again played to advertise Howard ambitions, this time during the divorce of Frances Howard from the Puritan Earl of Essex.50 As England and Spain drew closer during the 1600s, what English Catholics discovered in the Cervantine story of arranged marriage, it seems, was a template for mutual toleration and its changing terms. In the surviving transcript of Cardenio the hero leaps out to stop his lover marrying her detested groom Henriquez, who seems to satirize the Puritan Prince Henry. The episode expresses Catholic confidence in 1612–14, when Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, was so powerful he was nicknamed ‘El Cid’. But it also signals Shakespeare’s most pointed revision of Cervantes, whose Cardenio goes crazy after he dares not halt the wedding by preventing Luscinda answering in ‘a languishing voice, “I will”.’51 The rewriting destroys the motive for Cardenio’s madness; yet if it was to please the Howards, it looks like a riposte to Cervantes’ report on England’s secret Catholics, in La española inglesa, as too weak for armed revolt, ‘even if spiritually ready for martyrdom’.52 For though the Spanish novelist may never have read the English dramatist, he was an acute reader of Shakespeare’s world, and his story of Isabela, the girl her namesake Elizabeth I admires for being ‘star-like’ in her Catholicism, reflects badly on her captors, who are torn between the Queen and the Pope. So, if Cardenio answers the ‘Bloody Question’ of loyalty by dreaming of a Catholic England so strong it can dictate its own terms, Cervantes was true to the reality Shakespeare 49 See David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London: Routledge, 1993), 41. 50 See Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in theatre, religion and resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 230–45. 51 Cervantes, op. cit. (note 45), vol. 1, 271–2. 52 Miguel de Cervantes, La Española inglesa, quoted in Ruth Safar, Novel to Romance: A Study of Cervantes’s ‘Novelas ejemplares (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 153.

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figured in All’s Well when he projected his happy ending as one in which the Englishman Ricaredo goes on a pilgrimage and is reunited with Isabela only as she is about to enter a convent in Seville. Cervantes had been impressed during the peace conference that Charles Howard spoke Spanish (a facility he attributed to the Queen), and attended Masses to celebrate the birth of Philip’s heir, and even a new Pope, when observers mocked the cynicism of this ‘Lutheran who swore / To the Treaty on Calvin’s works’.53 But the similarity between his novella and All’s Well—in both of which the heroine comes very close to immuring herself in a Spanish religious house—underlines the nervous brinkmanship of this detente. The precariousness of Cervantes’ fantasy of toleration helps to explain Helena’s dogged pursuit of Bertram and the anxiety aroused in Shakespeare’s drama by fear of ‘deadly divorce’ [5,3,312] if the shotgun marriage is prevented and the pilgrim is allowed to go her own way. For feminists note how Helena conforms to the militant type of ‘holy anorexic’ whose ‘superhuman fasts and vigils’ challenged patriarchy in the post-Reformation Church.54 Holy wells, like Shakespeare’s own local one at Shottery which ‘cured women’s complaints’, were always ‘a women’s preserve’, and the sorority that Helena ends up leading with Diana and her mother does look like some female religious cult.55 Thus in All’s Well, as the Countess warns, happiness hinges on hopes that the heroine ‘will speed her foot’ back from her devotions [3,4,37], before she really does achieve the sanctity she is said to have attained in Spain: Sir, his wife some two months since fled from his house. Her pretence is a pilgrimage to Saint Jaques le Grand; which holy undertaking with most austere sanctimony she accomplish’d; and there residing, the tenderness of her nature became as a prey to her grief; in fine, made a groan of her last breath, and now she sings in heaven. [4,3,45–51]

Helena’s Spanish ‘Life’, verified ‘by her own letters, making her story true even to the point of her death,’ and her saintly ‘death itself,’ which since it ‘could not be her office to say is come’ is ‘faithfully confirmed

53 Sonnet attributed to Luis de Gongora, quoted in Canavaggio, op. cit. (note 48), 221; Thomas Hanrahan, ‘History in Española Inglesa,’ Modern Language Notes, 83 (1968), 267–71. 54 See Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), 122 & 151–79. 55 Rattue, op. cit. (note 20), 95.

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by the rector,’ no less, of Santiago [52–6], is a fiction which echoes the expectations of a generation of English Catholics who saw their daughters vanish into the convents of Toledo and Madrid. Shakespeare’s daughters were both unmarried at this time, when English ‘Poor Clares’ were also recruiting for a new convent at Saint-Omer; and Susanna would shortly be listed as a ‘popishly affected’ recusant.56 So in his next comedy, Measure for Measure, the writer would test the conventual vocation even more intensely, by having Isabella take her vows in Vienna among the ‘votarists of Saint Clare’ [1,4,5]. There even the rake Lucio pays lip-service to one ‘enskied and sainted’ by her ‘renouncement’ [33]. In fact, no other English dramatist accords anything near the respect given by Shakespeare to those who ‘endure the livery of a nun / For aye to be in shady cloister mewed,’ and whose ‘maiden pilgrimage’ he has Theseus salute [Dream, 1,1,70–5]. In Troilus and Cressida, for instance, it is Hector’s awe at the ‘strains / Of divination’ in Cassandra that silences Troilus’s contempt for a ‘foolish, dreaming superstitious girl’ [2,2,112;5,3,82]. And Hamlet’s obscenity to ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ [Hamlet, 3,1,122] is purged in Pericles by Mariana’s purification of the brothel and the prayers of the ‘maiden priests’ of ‘Diana’s altar’ [5,1,226;2,37], led by her mother Thaisa in the specific habit of a ‘nun’ [5,3,15]. In Pericles the ‘votress’ Mariana is given a curriculum vitae that makes her sound an exemplar of the life among those sisters in Flanders or Spain that may have inspired ‘Henley Street piety’,57 as ‘She sings like one immortal’, dances ‘goddess-like’, composes ‘admired’ hymns, and teaches needlework so ardently ‘That pupils lacks she none’ [5,0,3–11]. Feminists who assume that Shakespeare shared Puritan disgust at the decision of those, like Olivia, who wall themselves up in chantries, therefore ignore the irony that he gives the stock Reformation critique

56 See May Winefride Sturman, ‘Gravelines and the English Poor Clares,’ London Recusant, 7 (1977), 1–8. See also A. C. F. Beales, Education Under Penalty: English Catholic Education from the Reformation to the Fall of James II (London: Athlone Press, 1963), 203–4; Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1700 (London: Routledge, 1992), 85; and Marie Rowlands, ‘Recusant Women, 1540–1640’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society, 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 1985), 168–74, esp. p. 169. For Susanna Shakespeare’s listing as a recusant on May 5 1606, see Hugh Hanley, ‘Shakespeare’s Family in Stratford Records,’ Times Literary Supplement, 21 May 1964, 441: the records are in the Act Books of Kent County Records Office, via the Sackville papers. 57 Honan, op. cit. (note 43), 309.

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of virginity to the roué Paroles [1,1,116–50].58 They forget that what makes his image of monastic life so unlike that of his rivals is the ‘return effect’ in his dramas between society and the convent, meaning that if the cloister is tested in them by the world, the world is also tested by the cloister. So it comes as no surprise that in 1619 Pericles was catalogued as the only secular text taught in the seminary at Saint-Omer; nor that in the 1640s the Second Folio was on the Jesuit syllabus at Valladolid.59 The Europe of the Counter-Reformation evidently took this English dramatist seriously. And he returned the compliment, projecting the lost and forbidden continent of seminaries and pilgrimages as a hypothetical possibility in play after play, where the end always seems to draw towards some virtual shrine like the pilgrim’s tomb of cockleshells which Pericles imagines for Thaisa: a monument upon thy bones And aye-remaining lamps. . . Lying with simple shells. [Pericles, 3,1,60–3]

In All’s Well, Helena’s burial in Santiago is reported to her husband as the truth, with ‘the particular confirmations, point from point, to the full arming of the verity’ [4,3,60]. The audience knows, however, that this is yet another pious tale, and that instead of plodding, as pretended, from France to Spain, the heroine has turned up in Florence, where she changes direction again and introduces herself to the Widow as one of the ‘palmers’ (so-called from palms they carried) coming from Jerusalem [3,5,35]. Critics have long frowned at this false-turning, starting with Dr. Johnson, who dryly remarked that the Tuscan city ‘was somewhat out of the road from Rousillon to Compostela’.60 Helena’s trip to Italy looks like an instance of Shakespeare’s ignorance; or of the gap between European fact and English fiction which, Manfred Pfister objects, traps criticism in ‘a law of diminishing returns’, whereby ‘the more information scholars gather’ concerning Europe, ‘the less this knowledge yields new insights into the plays’ themselves.61 Helena has,

58 See, in particular, Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 5–7 and 30–51. 59 Willem Schrickx, ‘Pericles in a Book-List of 1619 from the English Jesuit Mission and Some of the Play’s Special Problems,’ Shakespeare Survey, 29 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 21–32. 60 Quoted in William Shakespeare, op. cit. (note 10), 6. 61 Manfred Pfister, ‘Shakespeare and Italy, or, the law of diminishing returns,’ in Michelle Marrapodi, A. J. Hoenselaars, Marcello Cappuzzo and L. Falzon Santucci

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however, travelled to Florence to shadow Bertram. And her detour also fulfils her mother-in-law’s wish to have ‘diverted her intents’. So, it is very much to the point that in Shakespeare’s next play, Othello, the ‘young and sweating devil’ Iago [3,4,40] carries a name that affiliates him expressly with the road to Compostela, and the most fundamentalist face of St James, as the defender of Christendom and the slayer of the Moors.62 Iago has been interpreted by critics as a caricature of Jesuit sedition; and it was indeed the cult of the warrior saint as Santiago Matamoros which fired his Basque countryman, the maimed veteran and Jesuit founder, Inigo de Loyola.63 Othello could be read as an allegory, therefore, of the incitement by Jesuits of the English ‘tribe of More’; and the perversion of what the Moor calls his ‘pilgrimage’ [1,3,152] into paranoia over a handkerchief as figuring the ‘foolishness’ of the ‘Spanish faction’ of politicised Catholics who put their faith in bloody relics.64 If so, this tragedy shows why the comedy could not end in Compostela, and why its pilgrimage must remain a feint. Having projected a Spanish religious exile as the last resort, All’s Well then turns back from the Pyrenees to disavow the ultramontanes. In a London that would applaud Middleton’s anti-Jesuit and Hispanophobic Game at Chess, what is striking, however, is not that Helena shies away from Spain, but how long she keeps up her ‘pretence’ of being one of the ‘enjoin’d penitents . . . To Great Saint Jaques bound’ [3,5,93], and when she is ‘supposed dead’ [4,4,11] has those who mourn her believe her ‘incensing relics’ are interred at Compostela [5,3,25]. Most startling of all is how she allows her purported return from Iberia, when she rises from her ‘oblivion’ at the end [24], to be interpreted by the King as a popish plot, one of the exorcisms which had made the Jesuits notorious: Is there no exorcist Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes? Is’t real I see? HELENA: No, good my lord; ’Tis but the shadow of a wife you see . . . [5,3,298–301]

(eds.), Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 296. 62 See Barbara Everett, ‘Spanish Othello: the Making of Shakespeare’s Moor,’ Shakespeare Survey, 35 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 103. 63 See Robert Watson, ‘Othello as Protestant Propaganda,’ in Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (eds.), Religion and Culture in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 234–57. 64 See Wilson, op. cit. (note 50), 155–85.

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‘Who cannot be crushed with a plot?’: Paroles’ comment on his forced ‘confession’ as a spy to the interrogator ‘he supposes to be a friar’ [4,3,104;301] is a question that also casts doubt on the Jesuitical trickery with which Helena corners the Count. Thus, in ‘King Lear and the Exorcists’ Stephen Greenblatt concludes that by the time of All’s Well ‘Shakespeare had marked out exorcisms as frauds’, and staged such rituals as ‘popish impostures’ that are now ‘emptied out’.65 Yet this is to side too much with those ‘philosophical persons’ who, in the terms of the play, ‘say miracles are past’ and ‘make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless,’ making ‘trifles of terrors,’ when they ‘should submit . . . to an unknown fear’ [2,3,1–5]. It is to ignore how Shakespeare toasts ‘absent friends’ on this day of rapprochement with Catholic Spain and meets them in their faith just half way. The audience knows Helena’s pilgrimage to Compostela is only a lying traveller’s tale. And they can see that, far from dying a martyr, ‘she feels her young one kick’ [5,3,299] from bedding Bertram. But the end depends on her husband fearing he has killed his wife, and confessing his ‘high-repented blames’ [37]. So like the statue of Hermione reputedly by ‘that rare Italian master’ the Counter-Reformation Giulio Romano [Winter’s Tale, 5,2,87], Helena’s supposed ‘incensing’ tomb in Compostela is an enraging piece of Catholic idolatry around which happiness turns. In Henry VIII Shakespeare would set such fictions in their historical context, when he had Catherine of Aragon dream about the ‘spirits of peace’ who visit her from her ‘friends in Spain’ and her father, King Ferdinand of Spain, who was, we are told, ‘The wisest prince that there had reigned’ [2,4,46–53;4,2,83]. ‘My friends, / They that my trust must grow to, live not here,’ grieves Shakespeare’s devout Spanish Queen: ‘They are (as all my other comforts) far from hence / In mine own country’ [3,1,87–91]. But she dies in the arms of an envoy from her nephew, Charles V. Habsburg Spain, the demonized Spain of superstitious penitents, holy wells and pilgrim shrines, remained under erasure on Shakespeare’s stage. But no English dramatist was ever so open as this one to the return of the repressed from the enemy side. It may not be chance, therefore, that the first recorded purchaser of the 1623

65

Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 114 & 119.

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Folio was Spain’s ambassador, Count Gondomar.66 For the hospitality and magnanimity Shakespeare gave his Navarre define an entire dramaturgy, when the King says the lying crusader stories Armado tells about St James and the Moors are of such ‘enchanting harmony’ that the Don’s tilting-at-windmills can be turned to art: This child of fancy that Armado hight For interim to our studies shall relate In high-borne words the worth of many a knight From tawny Spain lost in the world’s debate. How you delight, my lords, I know not, I; But I protest I love to hear him lie, And I will use him for my minstrelsy. [Love’s, 1,1,160–74]

‘All’s well that ends well; still the fine’s the crown. / Whate’er the course, the end is the renown’ [All’s Well, 4,4,35–6]: Helena’s rhyme, with its allusions to Catholic fines, wells and relics, cheerfully accepts that in an age when ‘They say miracles are past’ [2,3,1] the old beliefs can be put to modern ends. As Harold Gardiner wrote in his classic study of the last days of the medieval stage, Mysteries’ End, ‘dramatic artists, particularly in Spain,’ continued to work in religious forms in the 1600s, and plays like Alls Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure indicate that ‘English dramatists, too, might have given the people a dramatic fare devotional as well as secular, had they felt free to do so.’67 Critics like Louis Montrose have returned to Gardiner’s insight that the place of the Elizabethan stage was often literally that formerly occupied by shrines like Holywell, the location of the original Theatre.68 And in the two plays he wrote during the Anglo-Spanish talks of 1603–4 that spin upon the Jesuitical bed-trick Shakespeare used the setting or scenario of the holy well with a topical sense of the ironic potential of the old shrine as an intermediate space, where ‘the qualities of the water were no longer credited by Episcopal bulls but chemical testing, and the friars were replaced by doctors, quacks and chemists’. Seventeenth-century comedies set in Epsom, Tunbridge or Sadler’s Wells would exploit the paradoxical status of the spa as a

66 See Gary Taylor, ‘Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton,’ English Literary Renaissance, 24 (1994), 315. 67 Harold Gardiner, S.J., Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), 117. 68 Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 23–8, 30–1 & 58–61.

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contact zone for just such an accommodation.69 But by returning to the well-springs of drama as a purging pharmakon, All’s Well That Ends Well already affirms, with its equally shifting title, that the well’s end as a site of pilgrimage is its beginning as a cultural centre, and that the multi-faith society of the play has everything to gain from this transition. ‘Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears, / Hither I come to seek the spring’, declared John Donne in ‘Twickenham Garden’, the most explicit Jacobean reinvention of the sacred space of wishing wells. As Alexandra Walsham has commented, the reason such well-wishing was ‘allowed to linger on the fringes and margins of scattered country parishes’ was that the Protestant state remained eager to appropriate a tradition of pilgrimage and healing once it had been shorn of its ‘overtly “popish” components.’70 So in All’s Well the holy well with which Helena heals the King, and finally has her wish come true, is the sign of a culture which does not merely evacuate the old supernaturalism, but transports it into ‘modern and familiar’ contexts.71 And there are two parallel texts that seem to confirm Shakespeare’s acquiescence in this slippage. Sonnets 153 and 154 conclude his ‘sugared sonnets’ with a bitter-sweet coda which tells how the ‘sick’ poet ‘help of bath desired, / And thither hied, a sad distempered guest’. Despite his ties with Wilton, editors are reluctant to identify the ‘cold valley-fountain’ with Bath. Yet the account of the Protestantization of this ‘holy fire’ by ‘A maid of Dian’s’ into ‘a seething bath, which yet men prove / Against strange maladies a sovereign cure,’ is close enough to All’s Well to suggest it also dates from the 1603 season at the Wiltshire spa. The poet finds ‘no cure’ in the ‘bath and healthful remedy’, however, as his shrine ‘lies / Where Cupid got new fire’: his ‘mistress’ eyes’. The bitter secular reading of this ending is that Shakespeare received no benefit from his ‘treatment for venereal disease’.72 But the sweet meaning is

69

Lara, op. cit. (note 33), 225. Alexandra Walsham, ‘Reforming the Waters: Holy Wells and Healing Springs in Protestant England,’ in Life and Thought in the Northern Church, c. 1100–c. 1700: Essays in honour of Claire Cross, ed. Diana Wood (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999), 236 & 244. 71 For a similar interpretation of the statue-scene in The Winter’s Tale, see Lupton, op. cit. (note 12), 196–218. 72 William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 387. 70

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an insinuated Catholic one: the cold water of the Reformation ‘cools not love’ because the poet’s ‘heart’ remains on fire. ‘Yes, I have gained my experience’: in As You Like It, the traveller who has brought home no more than the biscuit he says is all that is left after a voyage, is not called Jaques for nothing. As editors note, his name plays on ‘jakes’, the word for toilet. And the pun suggests his experience has been that of a tourist in an age when the waters of Saint Jaques have indeed been turned from holy wells to drains. With his Spaniolated melancholy, Jaques has returned from Santiago, Rosalind sighs, with only the experience to make him sad: ‘to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands . . . and to travel for it too!’ [2,7,39; 4,1,10–26]. The very name ‘Jakes’ thus sums up English disenchantment when the pilgrimage network centred on Compostela was disrupted as, in the words of Reformers, ‘a forsaking of the Fountain of living waters, to go to a broken Cistern.’73 For Londoners the breach had been celebrated in 1589 when Drake landed in Spain ‘intent on destroying Santiago, the heart of “pernicious superstition”.’74 On that occasion the saint’s relics were saved from the English by being buried in cement. And Shakespeare ironized such iconoclasm by showing the most famous English traveller to Compostela, John of Gaunt, as a vandal whose idea of chivalry is to be feared as far as ‘the sepulchre, in stubborn Jewry’ [Richard II, 2,1,52–5]. Similarly, by setting Henry IV’s deathbed in the ‘Jerusalem Chamber’ of Westminster rather than the Holy Land he trumped Erasmus’ joke that there was no point travelling if you could be a pilgrim in your living room.75 For such was the Protestant cliché attested by Raleigh in his prison, when he swore he preferred his ‘Bottle of salvation’ and his ‘Scallop shell of quiet’ to any credulous pilgrimage to Spain.76 ‘They say miracles are past’: Tudor minds had been set in a sceptical frame by the ex-monk and physician Andrew Boorde, when he reported back that not only was there ‘not one ear or bone of St James in Compostela’, but that the holy wells there were so polluted nine of

73 Thomas Hall, Flora Floralia; Or, the Downfall of the May Games (London: 1661), quoted op. cit. (note 13), 105–6. 74 Starkie, op. cit. (note 2), 58. 75 Erasmus, The Colloquies, trans. C. Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 312, quoted in Wes Williams, Pilgrimages and Narrative in the French Renaissance: ‘The Undiscovered Country’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 128–9. 76 Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage,’ in The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, ed. Agnes Latham (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 49.

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his compatriots died after drinking from them.77 Shakespeare may have read this ‘modern and familiar’ travelogue while writing All’s Well, if Boorde’s volume stood in the library of his fellow graduate of Montpellier, Doctor John Hall, who settled in Stratford in 1601. Perhaps Hall was one reason why, in this comedy of medicine and magic, the heroine walks towards Huguenot Montpellier rather than to Catholic Compostela, since within two years the Puritan doctor would marry the playwright’s ‘recusant’ daughter, Susanna. Though the Gunpowder Plotters would make one last desperate pilgrimage from Stratford to St Winifred’s holy well, to pray for England to be reunited with Catholic Spain, it might have seemed to the author of All’s Well That Ends Well that since the well now belonged to all, this wishing well was well-ended with his daughter’s swelling.

77 Andrew Boorde, The First Book of the Introduction of Knowledge, ed. James Hogg (Salzburg: Universitat Salzburg, 1979), 9 & 87–8.

SACRED SPACE IN LAUDIAN ENGLAND Graham Parry The concept of sacred space was elaborated and refined to an unusual degree in the decades before the Civil War, in the time of the Laudian ascendancy in the Church. With the rise of the High Church movement, associated in its early stages with bishops Lancelot Andrewes, Richard Neile and William Laud (who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633), a pervasive change occurred in attitudes towards the places of worship throughout the country. In Elizabethan times, the parish church was regarded, broadly speaking, as a utilitarian place. It was where the people came together to worship God, where preaching and prayer took place regularly, where baptisms were performed, and where, several times a year, the sacrament of Holy Communion was administered. It was fitting that the church should be maintained in decent order, that is should be ‘well adorned, comely and clean kept’, as the ‘Homily for repairing and keeping clean, and comely adorning of Churches’ urged on the parishioners. But this same homily, first published in 1563, and reprinted throughout Elizabeth’s reign, gives several glimpses of the actual state of affairs prevailing in many places, where neglect and disarray were more common than decent order. ‘It is a sin and shame to see so many churches so ruinous, and so foully decayed, almost in every corner’. This widespread neglect was what caused this homily to be issued, to counteract the broad indifference to the condition of the fabric and the role of the church as the house of worship. ‘Do ye your parts, good people, to keep your churches comely and clean; suffer them not to be defiled with rain and weather, with dung of doves and owls, stares and choughs, and other filthiness, as it is foul and lamentable to behold in many places of this country. It is the house of prayer, not the house of talking, of walking, of brawling, of minstrelsy, of hawks, of dogs’.1 The picture here painted of neglect and casual behaviour probably presents an exaggerated scene in order to emphasise the need for 1 Certain Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in Churches, Oxford, 1840, 244–45.

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improvement, but there must be some truth in it. Improvement began to take a purposeful hold in the later 1610s, as a more decorous form of worship began to spread through the ecclesiastical system, promoted particularly by the prelates mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The most significant figure for our theme was Lancelot Andrewes, for it was his example that set the tone for a more reverential mode of worship and a more elevated respect for the setting of the services of the Church. Widely admired by contemporaries for his piety as well as his learning, and for his authority in spiritual matters, he would have been a prime candidate for sainthood, had the Church of England ever decided to create its own Protestant saints. His explorations in the records of the early Church and in the writings of the Church Fathers, allied to his own natural temperament, led him to aspire to an exceptional holiness of life, and gave him a heightened reverence for the places dedicated to the service of God. Andrewes’s sensitive attitudes towards the church, the reverence that it merited, and the solemn conduct of services were reinforced by the writings of Richard Hooker, particularly the fifth book of The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity. There Hooker had defended the use of ceremonies in worship and fine furnishings in churches against the hostility of the Puritan movement in late Elizabethan England. Puritan zeal reached such a height that the very need for churches was called into question, as Hooker reminded his readers. They were part of the old superstitious and ritualistic world that should have been swept away by the Reformation. God could be worshipped anywhere by the sincere and contrite soul; the setting was of no consequence, and churches carried with them the lingering odour of popery. Hooker resolutely and eloquently defended the rites of the Church of England, and dilated on the benefits brought by traditional forms of worship, emphasising its continuity from Old Testament times, through the age of the early Church, and into the long centuries of the Catholic Church. ‘The very majesty and holyness of the place where God is worshipped, hath in regard of us great value, force and efficacy, for that it serveth as a sensible help to stir up devotion, and in that respect, no doubt, bettereth even our holiest and best actions in this kind’. He reminded his readers that sacred space was essential to right worship, and that space must be formally created and honoured by decorous furnishings and reverential behaviour. The custom of consecration, now fallen into disuse, should be revived, for ‘we know no reason wherefore Churches should be the worse, if at the first erecting of them, at the making of

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them publick, at the time when they are delivered, as it were, into God’s own possession, and where the use thereunto they shall serve is established, Ceremonies fit to betoken such intents, and to accompany such Actions, be usual, as in the purest times they have been’. Such ceremonies mark the moment when God himself becomes their owner. ‘For which cause, at the Erection and Consecration as well of the Tabernacle, as of the Temple, it pleased the Almighty to give a manifest sign that he took possession of both. Finally, it notifieth in solemn manner the holy and religious use whereof it is intended such houses shall be put’. ‘When therefore we sanctifie or hallow Churches, that which we do is only to testifie . . . that we invest God himself with them, that we sever them from common uses. In which action, other solemnities than such as are decent and fit for that purpose we approve none’.2 Lancelot Andrewes fulfilled Hooker’s intentions. He wished to impress on congregations that the church was a holy place, not just a place of assembly for worship. He revived the custom of consecration for buildings and gifts to the Church, to emphasise that these were now dedicated to the service of God. In Elizabethan times, new bishops were consecrated, but not buildings, as Hooker had observed. There were, in any case, few new buildings to consecrate in those days. But in Jacobean times, there was a steady increase in the construction of chapels and churches, and the rebuilding of decayed churches. These were now consecrated, and the ceremonies used were devised by Andrewes, who had appreciated the need for a special form of service for an occasion not covered by the Book of Common Prayer. The form of consecration that survives in fullest detail is that which he employed in September 1620 for the Jesus Chapel, just outside Southampton, which had been rebuilt at the expense of a local landowner Richard Smith, who then gave it to the Church. At 8.00 in the morning Andrewes, as Bishop of Winchester, arrived, in full regalia, accompanied by his chaplains Matthew Wren (who would end his career as Bishop of Ely), and Christopher Wren (father of the architect). The donor asked the bishop, in God’s stead, to accept the free-will offering of the chapel, and to decree that the chapel ‘be severed from all common and profane uses’. Andrewes replied that ‘we

2 Richard Hooker, The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1666, 143–45 ( Book V, sections 12 & 16).

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promise we will ever hold it as an holy place and we will see it conveniently repaired and decently furnished’. There was then a prayer, and a declaration that invoked the memory of King David who desired to build a house for God, and his son Solomon who built the Temple; on the dedication of which, God was ‘pleased visibly to send fire from heaven to consume the sacrifice, and fill it with the glory of [his] presence before all [his] people’. Then followed an invocation of the Trinity to accept the chapel and sanctify it, after which came prayers by the two chaplains asking for protection from misfortune for the chapel. They then repeated the prayer of King Solomon at the consecration of his temple, taken from 2 Chronicles vi. Some Latin prayers came next, invoking blessings on the chapel’s furnishings: on its altar, font, pulpit, gallery and bell. Extended blessings were requested for the churchyard, to approve the place for Christian burial. The importance of holy burial in sanctified ground was given special emphasis. The Litany was read, followed by a sermon, which led on to the communion service, when Christ’s presence in the new chapel could be celebrated in the Eucharist. The service finished with a prayer for the benefactor, and with the vow to keep this space for ever holy. After dinner had been taken, the party returned to the chapel to hear a sermon preached by Matthew Wren on the text from John 2:16, where Jesus expelled the dove-sellers from the Temple. This reinforced the message that secular and mercantile transactions should have no place in the precincts of a sacred building. The service of Evening Prayer closed the proceedings, which had lasted all day.3 This consecration ceremony, with variations, was used on a number of occasions in the 1620s and 1630s: for Peterhouse Chapel in Cambridge, consecrated in 1632, presumably by Francis White, Bishop of Ely, and for St John’s Leeds in 1634 by Richard Neile, Archbishop of York, with John Cosin as chaplain. William Laud was an enthusiastic consecrator. He first performed the ceremony for his own chapel at Abergelly in 1625 when he was Bishop of St Asaph. As Bishop of London he used Andrewes’ rite for a new chapel at Hammersmith in 3 The ceremonies are printed in The Forme of Consecration of a Church or Chappel, and of the Place of Christian Buryall, exemplified by the Right Reverend Father in God Lancelot Andrewes, 1659. In the Preface, the publisher T. Garthwait states that he hopes hereby to ‘do an acceptable service to the Church of God and in some measure stop the mouths of the prophane Novelists, who never more than now, shoot out their arrows, even bitter words, against such holy places’. So resentment against ceremonies is still strong in 1659, and the old animosities have not faded.

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1631, for the Lord Treasurer’s chapel at Roehampton in 1632 and for the handsome new church at Great Stanmore, Middlesex, also in 1632. In January 1631 Laud had consecrated the rebuilt church of St Katherine Cree in London with a ceremony that he had himself devised, using such exaggerated bodily gestures that he attracted the scorn and derision of Puritan onlookers. He knelt at the west end of the church on arrival, with a arms outstretched, uttering the words ‘this place is holy, and this ground is holy; in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I pronounce it holy’. There were elaborate processions around the church to invest all its parts with holiness, prayers, and an anathema against profane and sacrilegious persons who might wish to desecrate the church. That such people existed was evident from the presence of the Puritan malcontents who witnessed the ceremony with censorious eyes.4 A month after his performance at St Katherine’s, he consecrated St Giles in the Fields, which had also recently been rebuilt after falling into decay. That church had been used for services for the previous three years or so, in its restored state, for Laud’s predecessor George Montaigne did not consider that consecration was necessary; but Laud had it shut up, believing that the building should not be used for worship until it had been made a holy place by consecration. At his trial Laud admitted that he had derived his pattern for consecration from the example of Bishop Andrewes.5 The growing consciousness of the need to emphasise the sacredness of churches, initiated by Lancelot Andrewes, communicated itself to those who were not committed to High Church practices. Even George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury before Laud, and no friend of the High Church party, began to recognise the desirability of heightening the status of churches by reviving the ceremonies of consecration. He undertook one such mission in 1621, which unfortunately led to his downfall. Abbot journeyed to Bramshill Park near Reading in July of that year in order to consecrate the new chapel of Lord Zouche, and whilst staying there he was invited to go hunting. In the course of the chase, he shot at a buck with a cross-bow, missed, and killed a keeper. Thus he found himself facing a charge of homicide, a rare plight for

4 See the account of the consecration ceremony in William Prynne’s book denouncing all aspects of William Laud’s career, Canterburies Doome, 1646, 113–5. See also Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge, Manchester, 2001, 298–341 for an account of the consecration in relation to the parish politics of St Katherine’s. 5 Canterburies Doome, 118.

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an archbishop. His reputation and authority were destroyed by the incident, so that his rule over the Church was weakened, making possible the rise of men whom he would not have chosen to advance. It was an odd consequence of the policy of consecration. In his chapel at Winchester House, his London residence after he became Bishop of Winchester in 1618, Andrewes laid out a new scheme which gave formal expression to his ideal of Anglican worship. The altar was placed against the east end of the chapel, raised up on three steps. On it lay the utensils for the service of communion, which had been consecrated for divine use. The space before the altar had been railed in, making it a delimited space where only the minister should enter; this area, more sacred than the rest, was raised two steps above the level of the chapel floor. The pulpit stood at the foot of the steps to the communion rails. In the midst of the floor was a music table around which singers could stand, the lectern, and a table from which the litany could be read. The north and south walls of the chapel had benches, while against the west wall were stalls for the bishop and his chaplain. Since most bishops and senior clergy when in London visited Winchester House, for it was noted for the beauty of its services, the chapel became a model for other prelates’ chapels, and its plan could be extended on a larger scale to cathedrals and churches where more formal services were desired. As the High Church movement gained ground in the 1620s, as more of its adherents gained bishoprics, and more ministers warmed to the idea of ceremonial services in settings of enhanced beauty, so the emphasis on revering the church as sacred space grew. In parish churches where the incumbent inclined towards ceremonial worship—which for convenience we shall term Laudian, although Laud did not initiate it, and did not become head of the Church until 1633, after which ceremonialism was in the ascendant—it became conventional to recognise that there were several degrees of sanctity within the building. The nave was for all the community, where they listened to the sermon, heard the prayers and participated in the responses. The pulpit was in the nave, as was the font, which should be sited close to the west or south door, to symbolise one’s entrance into the Church. Sacredness increased as one passed into the chancel, where the sacrament was received. The highest degree of sanctity belonged to the altar, and to the space around it, which increasingly came to be railed off from the laity. To acknowledge the greater sanctity of the chancel and the altar space, the roof above these sections of the

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church was frequently painted in rich colours or adorned with fine carving or figures of angels to honour the holiness of the place. Such practice was a return to the pre-Reformation Catholic model, which in many respects remained valid for Laudians, who were inclined to respect many Catholic practices which they felt were compatible with the reformed doctrines and ceremonies of the Church of England. Inevitably, there was much invocation of that archetypal model for places of worship, the Temple at Jerusalem. Hooker in his survey of practices that he deems acceptable to the reformed Church in England refers back constantly to the building, furnishing, decoration and dedication of the Temple, and the ceremonies associated with it, as it was the first site of formal worship of the Lord, approved by evidences of divine favour. The lay-out of the Temple had permanent significance, with its graded sequence of sacred spaces, with the most sacred being the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, with access strictly limited to the High Priest. Christian churches retained the custom of a gradation of sacred space, from the time of Constantine down to the Reformation, and the Church of England, in Hooker’s view, would do well to retain this pattern in its own places of worship. Tradition was an important factor in worship, and helped to maintain continuity with ancient Jewish practice. For Laudians, with Hooker behind them, the practices of the Jews of the Old Testament, the practices and ceremonies of the early Church, and those of the medieval Catholic Church continued to have relevance. The traditions of worship accumulated ever greater authority as they lengthened through the ages. What was needed was an intelligent, moderate choice of those that were most valid for the purposes of the Church of England, those that could claim ancient lineage as well as those that supported the ideal of decent decorous formal worship favoured by the High Church party. The Laudian movement, like Hooker who had contributed much to its ideology, along with Andrewes, aspired to be inclusive of what its leaders considered to be the best practices of earlier times. This policy led, of course, to accusations of reverting to Catholicism. But Laudians could retaliate that there was much that was good and valid in Catholic modes of worship, and that the Church of England had reformed from the Church of Rome, not against it. So, memories of the Temple haunted the High Anglican imagination, and many pre-Reformation practices, such as the ordering of the church into gradations of space of ascending holiness, were reinstated.

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Hooker, remarking that ‘our churches, as being framed according to the pattern of the Jewish Temple’, and having a hierarchy of spaces, saw that these spaces were determined with liminal markers: ‘which thing being common unto us with Jews, we have in this respect our churches divided by certain partitions’.6 The screen between nave and chancel became once again in early Stuart times a significant partition. Churches that were built or were restored in the 1620s and 1630s under the influence of Laudian bishops or ministers tended to have imposing screens. Abbey Dore in Herefordshire, restored by Sir John Scudamore, had a massive screen adorned with the royal arms, the arms of the see of Canterbury impaled with those of Laud, and the Scudamore arms. St John’s in Leeds had a screen of extravagant ornateness, with bold strapwork flourishes, gloriously painted. In County Durham, John Cosin who had considerable influence there in the 1630s as a result of his time as a member of the chapter of Durham Cathedral from 1624–35, was responsible for the introduction of spectacular screens in a quirky gothic-survival style in several churches in the diocese, most notably at Brancepeth and Sedgefield. At Winchester, a stone screen in a pure neo-classical style was erected by Inigo Jones, and paid for by King Charles, to separate the nave from the choir. At the east end of the chancel, the altar was usually raised up on several steps, and railed off to create a sanctuary. The rise to the altar was a way of honouring it, of making it the pre-eminent place in the church. In William Laud’s phrase, the altar was ‘the greatest place of God’s residence upon earth’.7 As such, everything associated with it should enhance its beauty. The vessels used in the communion service should be of silver, the altar-cloth should be of the finest linen, the bible should be well bound, and sometimes an embroidered altarfrontal would add splendour to the scene. Laudian ministers would approach the altar in a spirit of great reverence, bowing to it, and never turning their back upon it. All the arts were brought back to the church to add to the ethos of holiness that had its centre at the altar and suffused the whole building. Stained glass—or rather painted glass—was installed in the windows of many churches and chapels, after eight decades during which ecclesiastical policy and popular sentiment had been hostile to the

6 7

Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V., 145. The Works of William Laud, ed. J. Bliss and W. Scott, Oxford, 1847–60, vol. vi, 57.

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presence of images in any form in churches. Laudians and all those who believed that ‘the beauty of holiness’ should be evident in churches were favourably disposed to the installation of painted glass showing biblical scenes and figures, feeling that they were an acceptable aid to devotion. Many agreed with the young Milton that ‘storied windows richly dight / Casting a dim religious light’ helped to create an atmosphere conducive to worship and contemplation. The refurnishing of churches became common in Jacobean and Caroline times, as many years of neglect were countered by renewal. Much fine woodwork was introduced, often in the chancel, in the form of screens and panelling. Beautifully carved font covers, sometimes of remarkable size, and often of fanciful shape, gave distinction to the other sacramental focus in the church: baptism and communion were the only sacraments retained by the Church of England after the Reformation. Fonts had their own claim to sacredness, and sometimes were raised up on steps for honour; their new covers were also a way of showing reverence to them. Sculpture made a modest come-back in churches at this time too, not in any very extensive way, and usually in the form of images of Moses, David or Solomon, or representations of the evangelists. Even religious painting revived. Depictions of the Last Supper, to be used as an altar reredos, of the baptism of Christ, figures of the apostles, are recorded as novel introductions into English churches in this period. The series of Old and New Testament scenes mounted across the screen at the end of the nave in Exeter Cathedral is the largest display of early seventeenth-century religious painting to survive in the country. By innumerable inroads, the English Protestant opposition to images in churches was being eroded, as the movement towards more formal services, with a ceremonial liturgy, gained ground.8 As an acceptance of the sacredness of churches slowly spread through the land, accompanied by an active desire to realise an air of holiness in the services and in the fabric, so a greater sensitivity to offences against the church developed. Awareness of sacredness and awareness of sacrilege were two sides of the same coin. Lancelot Andrewes was again in the vanguard of this trend. For much of his career he strove for greater holiness in his personal life and in the

8 For an account of the revival of the arts in the service of the Church, see Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: Glory, Laud and Honour, Woodbridge, 2006.

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spheres which his public life influenced. He was concomitantly aware of the evil of sacrilege, which threatened to diminish the lustre of the Church, and appropriate its lands and its means of support. His distress about sacrilege showed itself early. When he proceeded Doctor of Divinity in Cambridge, probably in 1589, the sermon he delivered on that occasion was entitled, in its English translation from the Latin, ‘Sacrilege a Snare’, on the text from Proverbs 20:25: ‘It is a snare to the man who devours that which is holy’.9 He was protesting against the plunder of the Church in Elizabethan times, which continued well into James’s reign. The removal of lands belonging to the Church, usually by the crown, but sometimes by bishops, for sale or gift to the nobility or the gentry, had been going on since the Reformation. The alienation of tithes from the Church to secular owners had become commonplace. Advowsons, the right of presentation to a living, were sold like commodities. The Church was being steadily stripped of its assets, and in Andrewes’ eyes, this amounted to sacrilege, for these lands and tithes had been devoted to the service of God, and were part of the maintenance of the Church. Historically, land had been given to the Church for pious purposes; now it was being taken away.10 All things belonging to the Church, buildings, plate and treasure, vestments, lands, entitlements, were part of an extended patrimony that was held by the Church on behalf of God. All these things, then, shared in the sanctity that was part of the essential character of the Church. Despoliation of Church property was therefore as much an act of sacrilege as the breaking of medieval stained glass by Puritans or violations of the sanctuary by irreverent men. Andrewes built up an extended notion of sacrilege in his sermon. He opened with the theme that ‘the Temple much have its share in prosperity’, recalling the vast amounts of money expended by David on the Temple, and the rich materials used in its construction: ‘cedar and marble, precious stones and metals’. Gifts were liberally brought to the Temple. But now, ‘in our age, a wicked custom hath prevailed, and growes dayly more and more, of laying hands upon Holy Things’. ‘Unless we would have the Universities to be broken up, the Clergy to

9 The sermon in its English translation was published in London in 1646, at a time when the Church was suffering another major assault on its possessions. 10 The plight of the Church in the reigns of Elizabeth and James is amply documented in Christopher Hill’s book The Economic Problems of the Church, Oxford, 1956.

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be trampled upon, and all that is called Holy come to ruin, there must be a necessity upon us to plead for the Church’s patrimony’. ‘This blur upon our Age, that Holy Things are so devoured, much troubles me’.11 It continued to trouble him for the rest of his life, for Bishop John Buckeridge in his funeral sermon declared that Andrewes most deplored ‘three sins, too common, reigning in this age’: simony, usury, and above all, sacrilege. In his Cambridge sermon, Andrewes had gone on to describe the misfortunes suffered by those men who had violated holy places and turned holy objects to profane use. He took a long view of this sin, beginning with Belshazzar who used the sacred vessels of the Temple sacrilegiously, and Crassus who robbed the Temple at Jerusalem and died a horrible death. As the line of malefactors extends through history, his hearers could have little doubt that Andrewes expected that the English despoilers of the Church in his own time would experience a well-deserved fate that would be a punishment for their offences. The wrath of God may be swift, but equally, retribution may delay before it descends, even generations may pass, ‘the destruction is slow, but ever sure’. The theme remained strong in his imagination, for Buckeridge mentioned in his funeral sermon that Andrewes ‘wished some man would take the pains to collect, how many families that were raised by the spoils of the Church were now vanished, and the place thereof knows them no more’.12 Some man did take pains: Sir Henry Spelman, a lawyer, antiquary and High Churchman. He also felt strongly about the moths who were eating into the fabric of the Church, and in 1613 he published a tract entitled De Non Temerandis Ecclesiis, or Churches not to be violated. The tract had two more editions in 1616, and six altogether by the end of the century. He made a forceful case for regarding all churches and property associated with them as sanctified by their dedication to the service of God. A wealth of biblical examples and historical incidents was provided to impress on the reader that if things belonging to God are violated in any way, then retribution follows. The consecration of churches ensures their especial sanctity, and everything belonging to the church or given to the church participates in that sanctity. ‘Great 11

Lancelot Andrewes, ‘Sacrilege a Snare’: a Sermon preached at Cambridge when he proceeded D.D. 1646, 5. 12 John Buckeridge, ‘A Sermon preached at the Funeral of Lancelot. Late Bishop of Winchester’, in Ninety-Six Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, Oxford, 1843, vol. V. 296.

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devotion, many blessings, prayers, works of charity, and some ceremony’ have been employed ‘for sanctifying the same to Divine Uses’. Spelman claims that ‘the Law of Nature primarily taught all nations in the world to give these things unto God; so the very same Law also taught them, that it was sacrilege and Impiety to pull them back again’.13 He is also convinced that tithes are due to the priesthood by divine right for their maintenance, and that secular appropriation of tithes will eventually bring a punishment upon the transgressors. Spelman’s intention was to build a defence against the constant erosion of its possessions and its status as a divinely ordained institution. The Church of England had had little legal protection in its short existence, and Spelman was putting himself forward as a defender of the faith by arguing for the essential holiness of churches and their appurtenances, a case that could only effectively be made by citing divine writ from the Bible. Divine writ combined with the Law of Nature, ius naturalis, that is the evidence of practices and behaviour common to all mankind, could make a powerful argument to Englishmen in the early seventeenth century. He could add citations from the Fathers and ‘the Councils and Ancient Canons of the Church’, in which Spelman was expert; it is not surprising that Spelman came to be regarded as one of the great champions of the rights of the Church and the sanctity of the ecclesiastical domain. Fired by his discovery of what seemed to be one of the unvarying laws governing mankind, that sacrilege would always be punished by God, he set himself to document the history of this law through the ages by compiling what he called ‘The History and Fate of Sacrilege’. It begins, as all good seventeenth-century histories do, in Paradise, where Adam and Eve, by appropriating the fruit of the forbidden tree, perpetrated ‘the highest kind of sacrilege, committing thereby robbery upon the Deity itself’. Spelman traced this sin through the long annals of the Old Testament, so rich in examples, through the history of the heathen nations, whose gods were just as quick to punish sacrilege as was Jehovah, then gave some instances from Byzantine and even Merovingian history, before moving to England and cataloguing the great misdeeds of Saxon and medieval times. His real target, though, is Henry VIII, whose dissolution of the monasteries he regards as the most egregious

13 De Non Temerandis Ecclesiis in The English Works of Sir Henry Spelman, ed. Edmund Gibson, London, 1727, 7.

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act of sacrilege since the destruction of the Temple. Securely on home ground now, he settles down to detail the misfortunes visited upon that king: the failure of his policies, his near-bankruptcy after ‘the ocean of wealth’ that came to him from the monasteries was wasted through his reckless pursuit of war, and the childlessness of his children. He has to exempt, rather awkwardly, ‘the immortally renown’d Princess, Queen Elizabeth’, from the general condemnation. She was ‘the golden period’, but her lack of issue showed she ultimately shared in the divine curse on King Henry. Failure of the family line was always interpreted by Spelman as a judgement of God upon a man guilty of sacrilege. For those malefactors who had descendants, the sins of the fathers would reliably be visited upon the children: that was his conviction, as his history proved. There is an undeniable relish in the way Spelman follows the fortunes—or misfortunes—of those who were involved in the Dissolution of the Monasteries, or who bought or were given lands that had belonged to the Church. Scores of families are examined to see how they fared, all without exception suffering early deaths, grievous injuries, extinction of heirs, bankruptcy or other forms of ignominy, all incurred by laying profane hands on sacred property. He devotes a special section to the gentry of Norfolk, his native country, to show how sacrilege has brought ruin to virtually the whole class of men who benefited from monastic lands or from the alienated property of the Church. He adds evidence to his vast indictment of sacrilegious men from personal knowledge. From his son John, who had been present at the occasion, he can tell how Frederick the Elector Palatine and King James’s son-in-law, had destroyed part of a dissolved abbey in the Low Countries to take stone for a house he proposed to build. Frederick was warned that he might incur divine displeasure for this action, but paid no heed, but soon afterwards he was nearly drowned in a sailing accident, and his eldest son perished, ‘most miserably starv’d with cold and frozen to death’.14 Spelman makes us realise what a live topic sacrilege was when he mentions, near the end of his manuscript, that ‘dining yesterday at Lambeth with my Lord of Canterbury’, the conversation turned to the sacrilegious theft of church bells by reformers in Scotland. ‘Yesterday’ was 13th November 1632, and my Lord

14

Sir Henry Spelman, The History and Fate of Sacrilege, 1698, 236–37.

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of Canterbury was George Abbott. Spelman probably introduced the topic, for it was a bee in his bonnet, but Abbott was concerned with the problem, even though he did little to combat it. Spelman accumulated data for his History until 1634, when he left it incomplete. His youngest son Clement gave it some shape, and inherited his father’s preoccupation with the subject. There was an attempt to print it in 1663, when the Church of England was re-establishing itself after its eclipse, but it was stayed in the press, perhaps because ‘the publication of it should give offence to the nobility and gentry’, as its eventual editor surmised. Then the printed sheets were burnt in the Great Fire. Critics of the project might have been forgiven believing that here was an example of divine judgement on an unjustly severe book. The book finally appeared in 1698, with an anonymous preface. It was a work that could discomfit many readers, for Spelman did not hesitate to name names, and had taken considerable pains to find out who had benefited from the appropriation of church lands and revenues since the Reformation. His roll of guilty families was very long, and included many distinguished names. Given the devastating nature of the crime, as he conceived it, to be tainted with accusations of sacrilege by a respected scholar was a most unwelcome prospect. Exploring the consequences of sacrilege was one way of looking at history. It could explain national calamities as well as personal ones. During the Civil Wars and in the years afterwards, the Church suffered greater injuries and losses than at any time since the Reformation. Large numbers of churches were ransacked and wrecked, and the bishops’ lands were confiscated by Parliament. Huge numbers of individuals were implicated, from the highest in the land to the lowest. Retribution was sure to follow. After the Restoration, Clement Spelman raised his father’s standard again, convinced that only a nationwide restitution of confiscated assets would appease the deity and clear the way for a brighter future for England. He tried to enlist the support of John Cosin, one of the leading Laudians of the 1630s, now Bishop of Durham and highly influential in the affairs of the Church. In a lengthy letter written sometime between 1660–62, he gave a brief over-view of recent history, starting with the dissolution of the monasteries, which act he believed was responsible for all the misfortunes of the crown and state thereafter. The monarchy would always be clouded until it restored to the Church the palaces of Whitehall and St James, both of which had originally been religious houses. The crown could then rent them back again, but the Church would be

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the rightful owners. His ingenious, simplistic view of history can be deduced from the following survey, in which politics is seen as a neat working out of the consequences of sacrilege, and the Dissolution and the Civil Wars are linked: The King (Henry VIII) makes use of a Crumwell to dissolve the Monasterys and God of a Crumwell born in a dissolved Monastery to punish the Kinge, thus our punishments sprang from our sinnes. King Henry 8 had taken all the Challices from the Altars of the dissolved Monasterys, and the Parliament and Cromwell seize all the Kings estates soe that the daye before that His Majestie dyed he was necessitated to send to the Taverne at Charing Cross to borrow a Cup wherein to receive his last Communion at St James, a dissolved hospitall his prison. When the next daye His Majestie goes to Whitehall the place of his murder, first a religious house one of 400 dissolved, and given to Cardinall Wolsey, by him built for the Archbishop of Yorke, but again torne from the Church by King Henry 8 and made his court . . .15

Charles I had always intended to make a restitution to the Church, Spelman claims, but events overtook him, and so he died ultimately as a victim of Henry VIII’s misdemeanours. During the Commonwealth years, following the iconoclastic outbursts of the Civil War and the extensive Parliamentary confiscations of church property, the awareness of living in sacrilegious times was maintained at a high level by Henry Spelman’s protégé William Dugdale. In the three great folios he published in the 1650s, he insistently sounded the theme of sacrilege. The first volume of Monasticon Anglicanum (1655) was the first attempt to rescue the records of the dissolved monasteries. Dugdale became involved wit the project at a late stage when the original compiler, Roger Dodsworth, faltered and died. He immediately introduced his concerns over the national damage brought about by sacrilege by depicting on the engraved frontispiece Henry VIII ordering the destruction of the monasteries, contrasted with a pious king who is shown making a deed of gift ‘Deo et 15 The Cosin Letter Book, 1B, Letter 94, in Durham University Library, Palace Green. This is a draft letter, unsigned and undated, but evidently by Clement Spelman, as he mentions that he caused to be reprinted his father’s tract against sacrilege ‘about fifteen years since’. De Non Temerandis Ecclesiis was reprinted in 1646. He mentions that ‘our tears are not yet dryed for the noble Duke of Gloster & Cambridge, & the royal Princess of Orange, who were not sooner lodged than dead in Whitehall’—more victims of the extended retribution for sacrilege. Both these children of Charles I died in late 1660. The allusion to Oliver Cromwell assumes one knows that he was born in a house that had been built on the site of an Augustinian Friary.

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Ecclesiae’—to God and the Church. The preface also expressed dismay at the great diminution of the Church’s presence in the land, and horror at the destruction wreaked by the king’s impious will. In The Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), Dugdale proved himself a true disciple of Spelman by noting on many occasions how attacks on the church or engrossing church property or turning ecclesiastical land to secular use have brought about the downfall of the perpetrator. Old and recent examples are narrated to warn the reader to respect and honour the Church. At Coventry, we hear of the knight in the reign of King Stephen who turned the monks out of the Priory and fortified it for his own use: he soon met his death by misadventure. At Warwick, the man who acquired vast tracts of monastic land at the Dissolution ends his life in debt and in prison, Dugdale is pleased to report. The examples mount up. Churches are sacred places: dishonour them at your peril! In the 1650s, this must have seemed a vain warning. Dugdale’s last book before the Restoration could stand as a lament for all that had been lost in the violent years of the Civil War and the unsettled time thereafter. The History of St Paul’s was published in 1658, and was an elegy for the Church of England as well as for the metropolitan cathedral. The services of the Church had been suppressed and the framework of the Church had been dismantled in a series of parliamentary ordinances from 1641 to 1646; in that last year the office and title of bishop was abolished. There was no one then to defend the Church. Parish churches and cathedrals had been damaged by military actions or deliberately desecrated by opponents. Almost all notion of sanctity adhering to a church and its possessions had been abandoned. A few communities had protected their church, but all over the land the signs of respect for the church as a sacred place had gone. Altar rails had been pulled down, chancels levelled, chancel decorations and altar furnishings had been destroyed, plate sold, and much figured glass removed. When ‘the monuments of superstition’ had been removed, the church became a utilitarian space for godly worship, in the austere mode of severely reformed Protestantism. In this dismal scene, St Paul’s had suffered as much as anywhere, and perhaps worse. The restorations of the 1630s had been vandalised, the choir floor had been opened up and used as a saw-pit. Horses were stabled in the cathedral, and the nave became a cavalry barracks. As Dugdale prepared his book for publication, he thought it desirable to display the former splendour of this great cathedral, and was willing to spend a considerable sum to make his book one of the most lavishly

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illustrated volumes of the century, in order to evoke for his readers the treasures that had been lost. Page after page carries engravings of noble monuments that had been mutilated or destroyed, or harmonious vistas of the interior, before the devastation began. He had a large number of drawings of the pre-war cathedral to hand, and an exceptionally accurate and sensitive etcher in the person of Wenceslaus Hollar to translate the drawings into a permanent record of the undamaged structure. In his introductory section, he recalled the many centuries from Saxon times during which kings made generous gifts to the cathedral, and innumerable benefactors gave money and land to adorn and enhance all aspects of the place. After this long history of support for the Church, and for its devotional life, how bleak and irreligious appears the present age. where sacrilege, in the Laudian sense, seems to be universally tolerated. Dugdale ends his introduction with a recapitulation of some themes of lament common to Laudian survivors. The ‘dismal ruins’ of St Paul’s put him in mind of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, ‘Stateliness and beauty’ have gone. ‘What may we do’, he asks, ‘ that have lately seen the destruction of this magnificent church, once the glory of our principal city; and of the whole nation, and the monuments of so many famous men in their times thus torn in pieces?’ His only hope is that the desecration of sacred places will bring retribution, and that Spelman’s reading of history will prove correct: Here it might not be improper to take notice of what we find denounced in sacred Scripture against those which are destroyers of God’s house (for so the church is called) and taking away the possessions belonging thereto; as also what temporal judgements have, by the stories of our own and other nations, been observed to fall upon offenders in that kind. But the substance of what is to be said herein, is so excellently spoken by that learned and pious gentleman, Sir Henry Spelman, knt, in his discourse ‘De non temerandis Ecclesiis, . . . that I will forbear’.

EARLY MODERN SACRED SPACE: WRITING THE TEMPLE Helen Wilcox I What is sacred space? The simple answer, given a context in which the idea of the sacred is generally accepted, is—everywhere. The entire creation, being a divine work, is inherently holy and thus everything that exists in the spatial dimension may be claimed as sacred. As the Psalmist declares, ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and all that therein is’ (Psalm 24:1, Book of Common Prayer)—or, in the Authorised Version, ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof ’.1 However, this sweeping and inclusive sense of the divine ‘fulness’ of creation and the holiness inherent in our environment, both natural and constructed, is only the starting-point for a complex series of ideas about the relationship between location and holiness. One of the most important of these is the notion that a place is marked out as spiritually significant on account of its particularity—what the medieval theologian Duns Scotus referred to as the ‘thisness’ or distinct identity of each created thing.2 The definition of this kind of sacred space, in contrast to the inclusive vision of the divinity of ‘the earth . . . and all that therein is’, is predicated on difference and exclusivity, identifying particular locations as holy and thus, logically, holier than those that are not so perceived. These sacred spaces are set apart from ordinary or profane life, and frequently exist in opposition to it; they are perceived as other than the everyday places we inhabit. They offer the potential of safety or immunity from the world and its dangers or temptations; they promise security derived from the experience of closeness to God in 1 The Book of Common Prayer 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book, edited by John E. Booty (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976). The Bible: Authorized King James Version, edited by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); all further biblical references are from this edition and are supplied in the main text. 2 The philosophy of Duns Scotus is familiar to many readers of poetry through its importance to Gerard Manley Hopkins, but the concept of ‘thisness’ or haecceitas is specifically explored in relation to sacred space by Philip Sheldrake in Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory and Identity (London: SCM Press, 2001), 22–29.

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an intensely sacred setting. But how is such an impression of sacredness created? What makes ground holy?3 History suggests that there are three main ways of transforming an ordinary site into a sacred space. The first is by divine decree or intervention: as ‘the God of Abraham’ said to Moses, ‘Take off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’ (Exodus 3:5). The site is proclaimed to be special and thus deserving of appropriate reverence and respect; the act of removing one’s shoes is linked to entering a space that has been cleansed or set apart. Other potentially sacred spaces can be washed and declared holy by priests and ministers intervening on God’s behalf, as in the sprinkling, consecrating and sanctifying of a new church building. The place is holy because, like the Jewish tabernacle, as St Paul explains in Hebrews 9, it is the dwelling-place of God. This is a potentially sacramental sense of sacred space: earthly places, land or buildings, are transformed into sites of divine presence. Second, a place can be made holy by a historical event, such as a miracle or martyrdom (or both). The site of St Winefride’s Well in North Wales has been a centre of pilgrimage ever since the seventh century when the young Winefride was beheaded for keeping her vow of chastity by refusing to marry a local prince. The legend of St Winefride asserts that a fountain of pure water sprang up where her severed head fell to the ground. This vivid history has given the site its sacred allure, and the surrounding town its name—Holywell. As the twelfth-century vita reports, Winefride was restored to life by St Beuno, who told her succinctly, ‘God has appointed this place for you’.4 The location then goes on to become holy not just by virtue of the event that occurred there but by the tradition of pilgrimage which builds up around it, adding to the sacredness of the space with accounts of repeated healings and other blessings experienced there. History and the holiness of place go hand in hand, as the dimensions of time and space meet at the ‘appointed’ spot.5

3 I have been much inspired in these thoughts by Philip Sheldrake’s Spaces for the Sacred, though the categories that follow are my own. 4 Vita prima sancti Wenefredae, in Vitae sanctorum Britanniae et genealogiae, ed. and trans. A. W. Wade-Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1944), 293. For a fuller account of holy wells and their continuing significance in the post-Reformation period, see Richard Wilson’s contribution to this volume. 5 Lying behind this idea is Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘chronotope’ which asserts the inter-relatedness of the temporal and spatial dimensions in experience and

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The third way in which a lowly piece of ground can grow into holiness is by association, particularly when linked with the borders of life and death. The liminal spaces of graveyards and shrines, for example, are often experienced as sacred settings, where earth seems to meet heaven more immediately and directly than in the bustle of material existence. Locations of this kind, such as the pilgrimage island of Ynys Enlle (Bardsey) off the west coast of Wales, where twenty thousand saints are said to be buried, are often described as ‘thin’ places, where the veil between the finite and the infinite is so thin that it is barely perceptible.6 What characterises a sacred space, then, whether created by decree, event or association? Strangely, it is often defined by what is not there: a holy site tends not to be busy or noisy or cluttered or peopled, but empty and silent. In the Bible these places are high up, on the tops of mountains, or far away from the city, in a wilderness or at the very least a garden.7 Like a garden, such places of spiritual intensity are also often characterised by being enclosed or bounded, as in the case of medieval hermitages attached to parish churches, or the inner courtyards and cloisters of convents and monasteries.8 Whether the sacred space is a natural setting or shaped by humans, it is evidently distinguished or framed for its sacred purpose. Its silence and its emptiness are not marks of abandonment but indicators of a readiness to be filled. But can a holy place ever fail to fulfil that promise—can it lose its sacredness? The danger of discovering that emptiness is actually all

in literary narrative; see M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austen: University of Texas Press, 1981). 6 The expression appears to stem from the Celtic Christian tradition, and was originally used by George McLeod about the Scottish holy island of Iona; see Ron Ferguson, George McLeod, Founder of the Iona Community (Glasgow: Wild Goose publications, 2001). ‘Thin’ places have more recently been defined by Mary DeMuth as ‘snatches of holy ground’ (Thin Places: A Memoir (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan 2010), 11). 7 See, for example, the mountain-top on which the Ten Commandments are delivered to Moses; the wilderness as the favoured site of John the Baptist, place of repentance and baptism; the ‘high mountain apart’ where the Transfiguration occurs, and the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prayed the night before he was crucified (Exodus 19, John 1:23, Matthew 17:1, Mark 14:32–42). 8 The place-name of Bangor (North Wales) derives from the Celtic word for an interlocking wooden fence, and referred originally to the boundary enclosing the sacred ground of the monastery of St Deiniol (on the site where Bangor Cathedral now stands) in the sixth century.

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there is, in an old church marked over the years by the rich silences of prayer, is the subject of ‘In Church’ by the late-twentieth century Welsh priest-poet, R. S. Thomas. The poem opens in meditative mode: Often I try To analyse the quality Of its silences. Is this where God hides From my searching? I have stopped to listen, After the few people have gone, To the air recomposing itself For vigil. It has waited like this Since the stones grouped themselves about it.9

These lyric lines teem with an awareness of the sacred nature of this particular space. It is silent and deserted, the ‘few people’, presumably his congregation, having gone away after the service. This absence of persons does not seem to be a new state of affairs; as the term ‘vigil’ suggests, the real watching and praying take place between the services, through the sheer existence of this holy site. The church is not waiting impatiently for action; its holiness resides in the state of anticipation. It is not waiting for voices; its sacredness lies in the still peacefulness of ‘air’ enclosed by its walls that have ‘grouped themselves about it’ like a stone circle in a field. There is a sense of mystery, too: is God hiding in the silences of the church? ‘Searching’, waiting, recomposing—these are the processes of a sacred space. As the poem proceeds, it also entertains the possibility that the sacred space of this church is in transition, in a classic confrontation between darkness and light: These are the hard ribs Of a body that our prayers have failed To animate. Shadows advance From their corners to take possession Of places the light held For an hour. The bats resume Their business. The uneasiness of the pews Ceases. There is no other sound In the darkness but the sound of a man Breathing, testing his faith On emptiness, nailing his questions One by one to an untenanted cross. (180)

9

180.

R. S. Thomas, ‘In Church’, Collected Poems 1945–1990 (London: Phoenix, 1993),

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This is a troubled poem of sacred space, and its difficulty turns on the matter of where ‘faith’ is to be found and reasserted. It seems to suggest that spirituality is expressed in silence, emptiness, darkness and absence—even the ‘untenanted’ cross can be an emblem of the resurrection—but it also raises doubt and challenges faith with the ‘nailing’ of questions to the cross. On the other hand, the poem reminds us that there was also an appropriately sacred use of this space in the preceding ‘hour’ of the service, when light temporarily banished the shadows to the corners, the pews were occupied, even though with ‘uneasiness’, and attempts were made at prayer. Space, and that which fills it—light or shadow, people or emptiness—is no static phenomenon. Indeed, the metaphor of the church building as a body with ‘hard ribs’, combined with the later reference to ‘the sound of a man / breathing’, suggests the idea of a sacred space as a living entity, responsive to but also reliant upon the spiritual energies of those who enter and ‘animate’ it. II R. S. Thomas’s contemplative and searching poem has helped to bring to the surface some of the many issues concerning the complex subject of sacred space. The purpose of the rest of this essay is to consider these matters in relation to the early modern period in general and the devotional poems of George Herbert in particular. It is fitting to have introduced the discussion of sacred space in Herbert’s texts with reference to R. S. Thomas, since he was himself a reader, admirer and editor of Herbert.10 Thomas’s poem ‘In Church’ is also quite possibly a response to—and certainly an analogue of—Herbert’s own collection of lyric poems, entitled as a volume The Temple, but gathered together within the book as ‘The Church’. This key spatial metaphor will be further investigated later in this essay, but it is important at this point to recall the significance of sacred space in the period when Herbert was writing.

10 See, for example, Thomas’s selection of A Choice of George Herbert’s Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), and discussions of Thomas’s debt to Herbert in Tony Brown’s R. S. Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006) and my ‘“That I may sit and write”: Herbert’s Presence in Recent British Poetry’, forthcoming in George Herbert’s Travels, edited by Christopher Hodgkins (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011).

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In the early seventeenth century, Britain was still dealing with the immediate consequences of the Reformation. After the ecclesiastical turmoil of the mid-sixteenth century, the reformed Church of England was established at the start of the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) and maintained under the Stuart kings until the outbreak of Civil War in 1642. However, throughout this period there were strong undercurrents of recusant Catholic resistance, as seen in events such as the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and increasing dissatisfaction within the church among puritan Calvinist reformers.11 Many of these doctrinal and liturgical debates centred on the nature and use of sacred space. To what extent should a holy place be marked by statues, images and embellishments? Is the beautifying of a sacred space an idolatrous distraction or an inspiration to faith? In what ways could a site such as St Winefride’s Well continue to be a source of blessing when the events and traditions which had made it holy were consigned to the (reputedly erroneous) Catholic past, and when those in authority condemned the practice of visiting such places of pilgrimage as heretical? The Calvinist answer to many of these issues of sacred space played down the significance of particular sites in favour of an internalised holiness and a Scripture-based faith, stressing the sacredness of the biblical text rather than the church building or the special enclosed space of a shrine. The radical Protestant sects of the mid-seventeenth century, particularly the Quakers, demonstrated their antipathy towards the tradition of reverence for ‘holy ground’ by refusing to remove their hats for worship and referring to church buildings as ‘steeple-houses’.12 Inside the church, even the furnishings and divine ‘household-stuffe’ formed part of the debate over authority and the nature of salvation.13 Was the altar a site of sacrifice, as in the Catholic interpretation of Holy Communion, or a holy table at which to commemorate the Last Supper, as Calvinists believed? Above all, were the reading desk and the pulpit in

11 See, for example, The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, edited by Kenneth Fincham (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993) and Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 12 This phrase appears throughout Fox’s autobiographical writings; see The Journal of George Fox, edited by Norman Penney, with an introduction by T. Edmund Harvey (New York: Octagon Books, 1973). 13 The phrase ‘household-stuffe’ is from Herbert’s poem, ‘Affliction (I)’, The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 162. All further references to Herbert’s poems are taken from this edition and are supplied in the main text by page number.

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fact more important than the table/altar, because these were the places where the Word of God was proclaimed and preached? Indeed, it is possible to see the key doctrinal controversies of early modern England in terms of the rivalry between sacred text and sacred space, or Calvinist word versus Catholic sacramental presence. The contention of this essay, however, is that the relationship between these two traditions was not necessarily so simple or so polarised in this way, but may be seen as a creative dialogue between text and space, particularly in the work of a devotional poet such as George Herbert. Crucial to this argument is the inter-relation of the verbal and the visual in the early modern period, an era when the things that were read or heard, and those that were seen, were intimately bound up in a shared system of symbolic interpretation. As one of the characters in Philip Pullman’s novel, Northern Lights, comments, Oh, this was in the seventeenth century. Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books . . .14

This comment highlights the way in which space, along with other visual or tangible forms, functioned rhetorically as a text in the early modern period. Church windows, for instance, were not simply markers of the boundary between the enclosed space within and the light outside a building, but were there to be read, filled with colourful images and narratives. As George Herbert asserted in his poem ‘The Windows’, a stained-glass window is capable of telling out the gospel; addressing Christ, he comments that ‘thou dost anneal in glasse thy storie’ (247). The images ‘annealed’ into the colours of the windows are there to provide a narrative to be read by anyone who ‘looks on glasse’.15 This principle of visual interpretation, casually asserted in Pullman’s fiction, applied in the other direction, too, in the early modern period: if windows, buildings and pictures were texts with stories intended to be ‘read’, then books were equally designed to be viewed and experienced like buildings or pictures. To read a book was, symbolically, to enter it, discern its textual architecture and enjoy its created space. The perception that an early modern book was a kind of edifice is confirmed by the magnificent architectural title-pages which became

14 15

Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (London: Scholastic, 1995), 173. Herbert, ‘The Elixer’ (English Poems, 641).

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so popular in printed books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.16 One of the most significant of these was designed for the Workes of Ben Jonson in 1616, a folio volume reflecting the author’s unprecedented ambition to collect together his own texts and present them in printed form to the reading public.17 The elaborate title-page reflects the grandeur of the project: it is a three-tiered classical archway with Corinthian columns, emblematic statues and carved pedestals, and, above the first level, swirling fronds supporting a small upper pseudoarch with niches for yet more figures. These emblematic figures complete an imposing array of urban and rural symbols, both triumphant and peaceably artistic; its images form a compendium of literary forms (including comedy, tragicomedy, tragedy, satire and pastoral), musical traditions (from pan pipes to shawm) and theatrical locations (including amphitheatres and pageant wagons).18 The title-page thus announces, with minimal words but many a visual flourish, the nature of the works within: confident, dramatic, varied and learned. To reach them, the reader must pass through this imposing printed archway and enter an edifice in the classical style. In the subsequent decade, the variety of forms taken by these architectural title-pages betrays the ever more intense relationship between textual and spatial effect. John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) features another splendid design surmounting the title-page: a broken pediment, elaborately designed and decorated, displays in its central open space, not an urn or other classical form as might be expected, but an open book.19 The text has become a part of the visual, imaginatively three-dimensional work—indeed, it is the crowning glory, the ‘costly coping stone’ (1 Kings 7:9) or lintel which completes the arch. The facade of this title-page not only invites the reader to enter and elevates the text to the status of ‘hewed stone’ (1 Kings 7:9) but arouses curiosity—for the pages of the book depicted at the top of the title-page are blank. To discern their contents, readers

16 See Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbrown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550–1660 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). 17 Workes of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1616). 18 See Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson: To the First Folio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 19 John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, edited by Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), 1.

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must turn the pages of the actual book they have in hand, proceeding under the textual archway, and read on. Similarly enticing but significantly more provocative is the frontispiece of Francis Quarles’s 1629 work, Argalus and Parthenia [7.1], which does not offer the reader an image of blank pages but instead presents the ‘argument’ of the ‘history’ as a handwritten text, inscribed in what would otherwise be the window or entrance beneath a classical arch flanked by a fine pair of pillars.20 Great prominence is again given to the textual heart of the design, but with a difference: here the writing is almost entirely covered by a curtain which is drawn back slightly at the edges to reveal a few of the words behind it. In this teasing, almost erotic hint of uncovering, the frontispiece whets the readers’ appetite (as it were) and lures them in to a fuller experience of the text. It is as if the reader is being enticed into entering the book and discovering—in the early modern sense of the word, that is, revealing—the secrets hidden within it. Quarles was renowned as a writer of emblem poetry, and it is thus no coincidence that his frontispiece functions emblematically, with symbolism to be ‘read’. The curtain in front of the words must have reminded readers at the time, as it still does today, of the veil of the temple and the curtain of the tabernacle in the Jewish and Catholic traditions. Viewed in the light of both these parallels, the design suggests that the partially-covered written text glimpsed beyond the curtain fulfils the role of the holy of holies or the divine sacramental presence. The text itself has the capacity to become the very thing which signifies the sacred space, the ‘holy ground’. Just a few years after Quarles’s Argalus and Parthenia, when Herbert’s volume of devotional poetry, The Temple, was posthumously published in 1633, the title-page [7.2] chosen for this pocket-sized duodecimo book was much plainer than those of Jonson, Donne and Quarles, reflecting both the modesty of its format and the humility of the devotional purpose expressed by the poet.21 Instead of an engraved neo-classical frontispiece, whether assertive like Jonson’s or enticing

20 Francis Quarles, Argalus and Parthenia, edited by David Freeman (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986), 44. 21 George Herbert, The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (Cambridge: Thomas Buck and Roger Daniel, 1633). The collection’s principle of humility is also suggested by the poet’s ‘motto’, taken from Genesis 32:10 and Ephesians 3:8: ‘Lesse then the least of Gods mercies’ (English Poems, 43).

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like Quarles’s, Herbert’s title-page is simply framed by a homely printer’s decoration. However, the implication that the text is a spatial entity, a construction to be entered by the reader, is not left behind but intensified: instead of the architectural designs and visual symbolism of the earlier title-pages, the metaphor of Herbert’s title, The Temple, denotes a holy building, a place of worship. There is thus no need for an elaborate title-page to inform anyone who approaches the book that this is itself a special or sacred space; the architectural conception is unequivocally announced in the choice of emblematic title. The epigraph on the title-page, quoting Psalm 29:8 (Book of Common Prayer version), affirms that ‘every man’ speaks of God’s ‘honour’ in ‘his Temple’, suggesting that the poems are lyrics of prayer and praise to be spoken or sung within the sacred enclosure of walls or pages. As the Bible asserts, the temple is ‘the most holy place’ (Ezekiel 41:4) and so too is this book, this textual Temple. The decision to entitle Herbert’s collection of devotional poetry The Temple (which may not have been made by Herbert himself but possibly derived from a late intervention by his friend Nicholas Ferrar) was not a neutral choice in the charged ecclesiastical politics of 1633. As we have already noted, sacred spaces can easily become contested and their significance claimed or reinterpreted for adversarial purposes, and this was particularly true of places and habits of worship in early seventeenth-century England. In this period, the splendour of the Hebrew temple, as fully described in 1 Kings 5–8, had come to be associated with the Laudian faction in the Church of England, who favoured elaborate worship, sacramental liturgy and highly decorated churches that stimulated the senses.22 This is the tradition with which Ferrar was sympathetic, and which he attempted to put into practice in his foundation of the Little Gidding community, later regarded as a place of refuge by an embattled Charles I.23 However, the temple of Herbert’s poems is a less partisan and more complex place; the title functions as a multivalent emblem of sacred space, sacred text and personal spiritual experience, as we shall see as we explore the poems themselves.

22 See Guibbory, Ceremony and Community, 57–62, and Graham Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2006), as well as his contribution to this volume. 23 See The Ferrar Papers, edited by Bernard Blackstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938).

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At first, the temple in Herbert’s usage signifies the church as a place in which the individual soul encounters God—a location to which ‘Love bade me welcome’, as the opening line of the poem ‘Love (III)’ (661) declares. The architectural structuring of the collection of poems is very strong, and was unwavering in Herbert’s conception of the work. From the earliest of the manuscripts onwards, long before the formal title of The Temple had been added, the poems were arranged into subsections entitled, in sequence, ‘The Church-porch’, ‘The Church’ and ‘The Church Militant’.24 The organisation of the volume implies an itinerary, a topographical progression through the sacred space. The reader enters through ‘The Church-porch’, a long poem of moral precepts, evoking the traditionally roomy church porch in which many of the more worldly transactions of the church were carried out. The ethical advice given in the poem forms a particularly appropriate topic for the borderline between the world and the church represented by the porch, as a place of transition from earthly to heavenly considerations and, in readerly terms, from ordinary life to the experience of entering the devotional text. Once the ‘precepts’ expressed in the sixty-six stanzas of ‘The Church-porch’ have ‘sprinkled and taught’ the reader ‘how to behave’ in church (as asserted in the poem which follows it), then the reader is invited to ‘approach, and taste / The churches mysticall repast’ (85). The title of this short poem which concludes the ‘Church-porch’ section, ‘Superliminare’, refers to the block of stone or beam of wood above a doorway, confirming that the reader has passed through the capacious ‘porch’ on this metaphorical journey towards holy ground, and is now facing the door of the church itself. As with the title-page of The Temple, there is no need for a neo-classical arch here to inform Herbert’s readers that they are about to pass through a doorway: it is the text itself, especially the title ‘Superliminare’, which emblematically supplies the visual or spatial dimension. However, Herbert’s early readers, including his publishers, were so conscious of the meaning of the Latin title and its spatial significance that the design of an arched door-frame was added to this page in the 1674 edition of The Temple [7.3].25 Passing through this doorway, crossing the threshold to ‘The Church’ itself, the reader is warned that ‘profanenesse’ should not

24 25

For a brief textual history of The Temple, see English Poems, xxxvii–xl. George Herbert, The Temple, tenth edition (London, 1674).

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enter the holy place ahead: only that which is ‘holy, pure, and cleare’, or—very importantly in Herbert’s spirituality of forgiveness—‘that which groneth to be so’ (85), is permitted to proceed. As the 1674 door-frame indicates, evidence of the reception of The Temple in the seventeenth century confirms the sense that the architecture of the title emblem and the book’s structure was taken almost literally by some readers:26 it was understood that the poems erected and provided a sacred space. One of the very earliest known responses to The Temple, a short poem by John Polwhele dating from the mid-1630s, refers to ‘Mr. Herberts Devine poeme the church’ and addresses the poet as a ‘Sacred Architect’ who has raised up ‘a glorious Temple’ that is ‘ecchoinge’ with God’s praise.27 Polwhele interpreted this ‘Temple’ as a sign of ‘most Catholique Conformitie’ in worship, and describes Herbert’s ‘Church’ as a Laudian stronghold with ‘Statelye’ pillars and an ‘Alter’ standing at the ‘Eastward’ end of the church, suggesting an emphasis on sacramental and traditional liturgy. Herbert’s ecclesiastical politics were in fact much less straightforward than Polwhele’s response, and other early readers saw The Temple as a very different kind of church—for example, as a place where Psalms were sung in true Protestant tradition28—but these varied readings and appropriations have in common an emphasis on the book itself as a sacred space.29 As Thomas Forde advised in a poem of 1660, when giving Herbert’s poems as a gift, ‘Visit this Temple, at your vacant hours, / Twas Herberts Poem once, but now tis Yours’.30 A ‘visit’ to The Temple takes the reader through the ‘porch’ and under the ‘Superliminare’ into ‘The Church’ itself, where the first poem to be encountered is a very material entity: ‘The Altar’, a fixture of the building and itself a miniature sacred site, a place of worship and sacrifice. The poem is shaped in the form of an altar [7.4], indicating immediately that the words of the lyrics are themselves part of the sacred architecture of The Temple.31 The collection as a whole

26 See, for example, the poems of Christopher Harvey in The Synagogue, or, The Shadow of the Temple (London, 1640). 27 Bodleian MS Eng. Poet f16, f11r (my italics). 28 See, for example, Select hymns, taken out of Mr. Herbert’s Temple (London, 1697). 29 For a subtle and distinctive response to Herbert’s ‘sacred text’ and to midseventeenth century displacements of sacred spaces, see the poetry of Henry Vaughan, whose writings are the subject of Peter Thomas’s contribution to this volume. 30 Thomas Forde, Fragmenta Poetica (London, 1660), 18. 31 Herbert, The Temple (1633), 18.

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forms an enclosed space, a site set apart in opposition to the ‘profaneness’ (85) outside it, while the individual poems within it are integral to the activities appropriate to such holy ground, such as the rearing of altars and offering of sacrifices. At first sight, the ‘Altar’ of the poem appears to be solid, carved out of stone, but a reading of the words soon introduces a typical Herbertian complexity: though it looks perfect, the altar is described as ‘broken’, and the substance from which it is made is a human ‘heart’, hard as stone but still by no means a conventional altar (92). The apparently Laudian aesthetic evoking the sacrifice of the Catholic mass is destabilised by the more Protestant emphasis on the sinner’s broken heart and penitential ‘teares’. This opening lyric of the collection suggests just how subtly Herbert delves into the relationship between the stones of the church building or its fittings, and the less tangible aspects of devotional experience—as well as the complex interactions between God and the human heart. The broken altar (or heart) is a paradox, damaged by spiritual struggle and yet at the same time complete; it is fixed yet by no means static. The poem is Herbert’s, prominently so at the very start of ‘The Church’, yet it is said to be framed by God without the touch of a ‘workmans tool’. The purpose of the poem is to utter praise (‘In his Temple doth every man speak of his honour’, as the epigraph on the title-page states) yet the speaker’s wish is to ‘hold my peace’ and let Christ’s ‘blessed sacrifice’ do the talking. It is already possible to see in this poem not only the richness of Herbert’s creativity but also the ways in which the poet uses aspects of the church building and features of its sacred space for rhetorical and devotional purposes. He takes dynamic advantage of the visual, spatial and material impact of the ‘altar’ on the reader, who is both a visitor to this textual holy place and an interpreter of its language. The building and the text, being the environment of worship and the words through which faith is expressed, are brought together in Herbert’s poems, individually and collectively. As the full extent of ‘The Church’ opens up before the reader, more than a hundred and fifty lyrics come into view in this central section of The Temple, recalling the Psalms in their number, in their variety of moods and in the created impression that they are spiritual songs accessible to all readers and listeners. Among the lyrics are several which overtly continue the architectural theme, taking as their focus such features of the building as ‘Churchmonuments’, ‘Church-lock and key’ and ‘The Church-floore’. The way in which place and language combine is particularly clear in ‘The

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Windows’, as we saw earlier when considering how it was possible to read a ‘storie’ (247) in a stained glass window. Herbert’s lyric uses the church building, an enclosure of sacred space, as a metaphor for human experience of faith and inspiration. The poem begins: Lord, how can man preach thy eternall word? He is a brittle crazie glasse: Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window, through thy grace. (246)

A priest in the church, or an ordinary Christian called to preach the gospel, is depicted metaphorically by Herbert as ‘glasse’, which suggests how ‘brittle’ and ‘crazie’ human beings are—vulnerable, weak, full of cracks and flaws. Yet even poor-quality glass can have a place in the ‘temple’, allowing the light of God’s love to shine through it, illuminating (as the subsequent stanzas explain) Christ’s vivid ‘storie’ expressed in human nature through the incarnation. This colouring of the glass with the narrative of redemption transforms the ‘watrish, bleak, & thin’ pale glass of humanity through the ‘grace’ of Christ’s life shining within those who speak of him (247). As Herbert’s use of the word ‘temple’ in ‘The Windows’ demonstrates, the title term of The Temple functions as a metaphor for the Christian church as both physical building and spiritual institution. However, in the seventeenth century the ‘temple’ brought with it a set of ideological associations which Herbert used and challenged, as we have seen, and it is not surprising that the organisation of the poems in his ‘Church’ gradually becomes less bound by actual sacred space and the immediate physical environment of doors, altars and windows. Inspired by biblical precedent—St Paul refers to the individual Christian as ‘the temple of the Holy Ghost’ (1 Corinthians 6:19) in whom ‘the Spirit of God dwelleth’ (1 Corinthians 3:16)—Herbert’s poems also explore a much more internal sense of the ‘temple’, the soul itself. By analogue with the ‘temple’ as a holy building, the soul, too, is a sacred space—the place where God dwells. In his lyric ‘Sion’, Herbert analyses the relationship between the temple architecture of the Old Testament and the inner fabric of spiritual life in the New. In ‘Solomons temple’ everything was physically glorious: ‘purest gold’, ‘all embellished’ with carvings ‘mysticall and rare’, a ‘sea of brasse and world of stone’, ‘pomp and state’ (382). However, with the incarnation of Christ the temple has moved inwards: ‘now thy Architecture

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meets with sinne’, and God is not averse to building holy places within human frailty. Suddenly the temple is no longer made of stone—or, if it is, these are now the kinds of stone that built ‘The Altar’, the symbolically stony hearts of human beings. As ‘Sion’ asserts succinctly of Christ’s new temple, ‘all thy frame and fabrick is within’.32 The problem of locating this holy site, the temple, in the inner space of the individual soul, is that it will no longer be consistently echoing with sounds of communal praise. In the sin-stained inner ‘fabrick’ of this new temple, God ends up ‘struggling with a peevish heart’ or the ‘grones’ of a sorrowful soul. Typically, Herbert asserts in his delightfully paradoxical fashion that this new situation is absolutely right, since even ‘one good grone’ is very ‘deare’ to God.33 Whereas ‘brasse and stones are heavie things, / Tombes for the dead, not temples fit for thee’, these heart-felt ‘grones’ are, by contrast, ‘quick, and full of wings’. This sense of the lightness and liveliness of ‘grones’ is appropriate for a temple—whether church or soul—that is founded on the resurrection of Christ. While the old temple was weighed down with ‘heavie things’, the new inner temple is filled with ‘grones’ whose ‘motions upward be; / And ever as they mount, like larks they sing’ (382). Any doubts about the rightness of the ‘fabrick within’ for the new temple are dispelled by the short poem ‘Jesu’, which uses the Petrarchan metaphor of the beloved’s name carved upon the heart of her lover and combines this trope with the visual traditions of carving and inscription in the temple or church building. The poem begins: ‘JESU is in my heart, his sacred name / Is deeply carved there’ (401). While the ‘carvings’ in Solomon’s temple as described in ‘Sion’ were said to have shown ‘the builders, crav’d the seers care’ (382), the carved letters of ‘Jesu’ do not crave admiration but are hidden and intimate; they do not display the earthly builders’ skill but quietly declare God’s love. As the poem proceeds, the heart on which Jesus’s name is inscribed is said to be a ‘little frame’, a recurring term in Herbert’s ‘Church’ which we have already seen suggesting the art of the divine builder of ‘The Altar’, ‘whose parts are as thy hand did frame’ (92), and the new temple in

32

English Poems, 382 (my italics). ‘All Solomons sea of brasse and world of stone / Is not so deare to thee as one good grone’ (Sion, ll. 17–18, English Poems, p. 382). Compare the parable of the lost sheep, proclaiming more ‘joy . . . in heaven’ at ‘one sinner that repenteth’ than over ‘ninety and nine just persons’ (Luke 15:7). 33

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‘Sion’ of which the ‘frame and fabrick is within’ (382). In each case, ‘frame’ functions visually, both as a verb suggesting creation or shaping (in ‘The Altar’), and as a noun suggesting the divine architecture of the new inner temple (‘Sion’) or the enclosure that is the human heart (‘Jesu’). Despite these different poetic contexts, the ‘frame’ is always a sacred space, defined and contained.34 In all three lyrics, the word ‘frame’ also evokes the poem itself, whether an altar, a temple of praise or a site on which names are inscribed. Sacred text and sacred space are becoming almost identical in Herbert’s ‘Church’. The inner sacred space created by the poem ‘Jesu’ within Herbert’s ‘Church’ is shown to be a living entity, recalling R. S. Thomas’s ‘Church’ with its ribs of stone grouped around the vigilant air. In Herbert’s short verse, the ‘sacred name’ carved on the speaker’s heart is a lively and benevolent force, transforming itself into a statement of consolation to the afflicted. The poem enacts the breaking of the speaker’s heart, which in turn shatters the name written upon it into fragments. The speaker goes in search of the letters of Jesu’s name: And first I found the corner, where was J, After, where E S, and next where U was graved. When I had got these parcels, instantly I sat me down to spell them, and perceived That to my broken heart he was I ease you, And to my whole is JESU. (401)

The sacred space, the ‘frame’ that contains the name of Jesu, is not static but responsive, offering comfort or ‘ease’ when necessary; the name, like all holy sites associated with it, offers from within itself the potential for redemption. III As these poems from The Temple have shown, the spatial metaphor of Herbert’s title is a multivalent emblem working on many levels, often simultaneously, in this devotional text. The sacred space entered by the reader of Herbert’s volume is at once a Hebrew temple recalling ‘Solomons sea of brasse and world of stone’ (‘Sion’, 382) and a

34 See the fine discussion of this Herbertian ‘fit framing’ by Terry G. Sherwood in Herbert’s Prayerful Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 77–99.

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Christian church in which ordinary mortals are afforded a ‘glorious and transcendent place’ (‘The Windows’, 246). Echoing the biblical trope of the individual as a temple of the Holy Spirit, Herbert’s poems take as their basic premise the idea that ‘man’ is a ‘stately habitation’ in which God should ‘dwell’ (‘Man’, 332–3). Thus the human heart itself becomes a temple in which the name and presence of Christ are ‘deeply carved’ (‘Jesu’, 401) and in which God works to counteract the effects of ‘sinne’ and ‘affliction’ (‘Sion’, ‘Jesu’). Having established that Herbert’s poetic temple both evokes and constitutes a sacred space, it remains for us to enquire what goes on within this special place set apart by and for God. I would suggest that there are three main activities as revealed by the poems that we have read, as well as throughout the volume. The first is the process undertaken by the speaker in ‘Jesu’ once he has found the ‘pieces’ of his saviour’s name: spelling the word. As the speaker tells us, in a miniparable of the process of salvation, ‘I sat me down to spell’ the discovered fragments of the holy name, and—very significantly—‘perceived’ the double comfort offered by Christ (401). The truth about God can only be seen and experienced, it seems, by coming to terms with the detailed effects of his word, in the sacred text of the Bible, in dialogue with God and, above all, through Christ, the creating Word of God himself.35 ‘Spelling’ as frequently enacted in The Temple means not only breaking down a word into its constituent parts but also reassembling and making sense of it, as is clear from ‘Jesu’ and several of Herbert’s other lyrics. The speaker of ‘The Flower’, desperately trying to fathom the conflicting seasons of joy and despair and the apparent contradictions of God’s love and power, concludes that ‘Thy word is all, if we could spell’ (568). The unnamed ‘friend’ in ‘Jordan (II)’ advises the bemused poet to ‘Copie out’ the ‘sweetnesse readie penn’d’ in ‘love’ itself (367)—that is, spelling over again the word of God written in the texts of the Bible and the person of Christ. Spelling is thus both reading, silently or out loud (speaking of God’s ‘honour’ in the temple, as the title-page psalm epigraph asserts), and writing. We have seen that the poems themselves are sacred spaces, ‘frames’ for salvation, but the process of creating them is also a vital part of the activity taking place within Herbert’s Temple. When signs of the speaker’s recovery are observed in ‘The Flower’, they are expressed directly in

35

See John 1:1–3.

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terms of the renewal of poetic gifts: ‘I once more smell the dew and rain, / And relish versing’ (568). To live is to write, and to write is to enter and explore sacred space. The three basic activities taking place within the temple, and The Temple, are all interlinked and overlapping. If the first is spelling (reading and writing), then the second is singing, and in many cases singing the biblical and poetic texts that have been read or written there. Herbert was known to his early admirers as ‘the sweet singer of the Temple’36 and the poems in his Temple were likened to the Psalms of David, the songs of the original temple musician. Some sacred places are silent—as a result of awe or contemplation—but the temple and its analogue the church are made to resound with music of praise. ‘The church with psalms must shout, / No doore can keep them out’, proclaims the versicle of ‘Antiphon (I)’ (187). Herbert’s poems are variously referred to as antiphons, hymns, ‘window-songs’, ‘countrey-aires’ and ‘angels musick’,37 and metaphors of music abound in these texts at the meeting point of sacred word and holy place. In ‘Vertue’, the poet refers to his lyrics quite simply as ‘my musick’ (316), while ‘Easter’ expands on complex identifications of the trinity with the three parts of the triad underlying all harmony, and Christ’s crucified body with the tension of strings on the wood of a lute.38 Crucially, the music in Herbert’s constructed temple does not have to be perfect: if the mortal musician struggles to play a part, then the Holy Spirit will make up any ‘defects’ with his ‘sweet art’ (140). That these harmonies are metaphorical as well as actual is made clear by the continuing context of the temple, which is not only a sacred building and a body of poetry but also the human soul, dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit. As the poem ‘Sion’ makes absolutely clear, the inward temple whose ‘frame and fabrick is within’ has its own peculiar music—a ‘good grone’. And, as the last line of the poem defiantly asserts, ‘The note is sad, yet musick for a king’ (382).

36 The phrase was first used in print by Barnabus Oley in his prefatory biography of Herbert, Herbert’s Remains (1652), a11v. 37 Relevant titles include ‘Antiphon’ (there are two lyrics by this name), ‘Even-song’ and ‘A true Hymne’; the phrases above are taken from, respectively, ‘Dulnesse’ (411), ‘Gratefulnesse’ (436) and ‘The Church-porch’ line 388 (60). 38 ‘The crosse taught all wood to resound his name, / Who bore the same. / His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key / Is best to celebrate this most high day.’ (139).

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The third key activity within the sacred space of the temple is praying, a vital spiritual practice which can often encompass the first two. Spelling the word, whether reading and reciting the Bible or writing poems which attempt to ‘Copie [Christ’s] fair, though bloodie hand’ (‘The Thanksgiving’, 112), turn naturally into prayer, while the singing that takes place in the temple always tends to apostrophise God in a manner akin to praying. However, just because the context is a sacred space set aside for the experience of God, this does not necessarily mean that the prayer will be easy or successful. At the centre of the devotional experience in Herbert’s Temple is the poem ‘Deniall’, a lyric which begins from the frustration and despair of one whose prayers seem to have failed. The devout speaker, who has ‘benumme[d] / Both knees and heart’ praying desperately ‘night and day’ in the manner appropriate to a sacred space such as the temple, gains no response as his troubled thoughts ‘like a brittle bow . . . flie asunder’ (288). One is reminded of R. S. Thomas’s ‘In Church’, in which the perplexed speaker asks, ‘Is this where God hides / From my searching?’39 Herbert’s speaker has a desperate sense of being completely cut off from God, summed up in the startling phrase ‘Thy silent eares’ (288) which forms the second line of the poem. This terrifying image of combined deafness and dumbness, implying the total impossibility of dialogue, gives a vivid idea of the extremity of helplessness experienced by the speaker. The exclamation in the fourth stanza echoes Psalm 94 in its despair at the human condition: ‘O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue / To crie to thee, / And then not heare it crying!’ The hopelessness of the speaker’s situation is also expressed in terms of what we have identified as the other two main activities in the sacred space of the temple, spelling the word and making music. The poet/speaker confesses that this apparent ‘deniall’ at the hands of God causes great distress, equating sorrow with failed poetic creativity: ‘Then was my heart broken, as was my verse’. The phrase draws attention to the brokenness of the stanza form, with its non-rhyming final lines of each stanza, and particularly to the first instance of this with the ominous word ‘disorder’ hanging unresolved as the last word of the first stanza. The poem’s reference to the music that might normally be expected in a sacred place, a site of prayer, is equally telling: the fifth stanza opens with the statement, ‘Therefore my soul lay out of sight, / Untun’d,

39

Collected Poems, 180.

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unstrung’. Since harmony is the basis for the partnership of the human and the divine in Herbert’s temple, this failure of the soul’s tuning and playing suggests complete spiritual discord. Herbert is a poet of arresting endings, but the closing stanza of ‘Deniall’ contains one of the most brilliantly satisfying rescues in all of his verse: O cheer and tune my heartlesse breast, Deferre no time; That so thy favours granting my request, They and my minde may chime, And mend my ryme. (289)

The transformation that occurs in these last lines of the poem stems from the fact that instead of talking about the failure of prayer, the speaker actually prays, letting out what might be called a ‘good grone’ (‘Sion’, 382): ‘O cheer and tune my heartlesse breast’ (289, my italics). The result is that we, along with the speaker, come to realise that the ‘deniall’ referred to in the title is not God denying the supplicant access but the speaker denying all hope, not allowing for the possibility that earthly prayers might be answered. When finally forced into a prayerful mode in this last closing stanza, the terms of the prayer are, interestingly, the very skills, music and writing, identified as crucial activities in the temple and clearly failing in the earlier stanzas. To be made cheerful is to be in ‘tune’ again, and to receive an answer to prayer is to bring God and the speaker into tuneful chiming, which is not only a harmonious musical effect but also the ordering of the verse: an answered prayer will ‘mend my ryme’. And since this line is in fact the first of the last lines to rhyme, the verse form itself indicates that harmony has indeed been restored and thus the ‘request’ is granted in the very process of expressing it. A renewed relationship with God is embedded in the language of the three key functions carried out in the temple: spelling the word, singing and playing music in harmony with God, and praying that culminates in the receipt of grace. The rhyming of the word ‘ryme’ with ‘chime’ in the final word of ‘Deniall’ reminds us that this poem is located within the sacred space of the temple, a place described elsewhere in Herbert’s volume as ringing with the ‘harmonious bells’ on the hem of the high priest’s robe (‘Aaron’, 601). In the end it is difficult to separate the soundscape of the temple from its poetic forms and its practices of prayer: as in ‘Deniall’, tuning and rhyming are the harmonies of answered prayer.

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Similarly, it is almost impossible to distinguish the spatial aspects of the sacred site created by the whole volume, with its architectural title and topographical organisation, from the sacred text formed by the poems themselves. The sequence of ‘The Church-porch’, ‘The Church’ and ‘The Church Militant’, the longer poem exploring the troubled narrative of church history with which The Temple concludes, dictates a topography of anticipation, entry into and emergence from a sacred place. But the individual poems, too, are edifices: ‘The Altar’ and ‘JESU’ have their own visual architectures, and so too do the many other poems in ‘The Church’ which use principles of shape, pattern, metre, rhyme and name in the search for a multidimensional language rich enough to embody spiritual experience.40 At the same time, the poems themselves are sites in which the activities associated with those temple practices of writing, reading, singing and praying take place— where, in R. S. Thomas’s words, the very ‘air’ is ‘recomposing itself / For vigil’. The devotional acts made possible by the poems lead us, finally, to one last corner of The Temple’s holy ground. After all these aspects of the temple’s sacred space—the architectural metaphor of the title, the topography of the three parts of the ‘Church’ building, individual poems responding overtly to particular features of the church, lyrics that are themselves expressive monuments in visual and spatial as well as verbal and oral dimensions, and poems which present the speaker’s heart as the temple of the Holy Spirit—the ultimate site of encounter with the divine is the inner space of the reader’s own being. While the church, as we have seen, is expected to ‘shout’ with ‘psalms’, Herbert adds that ‘above all, the heart / Must bear the longest part’ (‘Antiphon (I)’, 187). These are, fundamentally, poems intended to comfort, involve and transform those who see, read, hear or sing them. As the opening stanza of ‘The Church-porch’ claims, ‘A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies, / And turn delight into a sacrifice’ (50). But a poem from The Temple does not just ‘finde’ readers out; it engages them and brings them into a spiritual encounter. Herbert’s lyric, ‘A true Hymne’, boldly states that ‘The finenesse which a hymne

40 See also, for example, ‘Easter wings’ constructed in the shape of angels’ wings (147), ‘Coloss. 3.3’ in which the biblical text referred to in the poem’s title can be read diagonally across the horizontal lines (305), and the ‘pruned’ words at the end of each line of ‘Paradise (464)’ suggesting the careful paring by the heavenly gardener to ensure greater fruitfulness in his faithful.

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or psalme affords, / Is, when the soul unto the lines accords’ (576). The art of devotional poetry lies not in aesthetic qualities alone but in the partnership—the musical tuning (‘accords’)—between earth and heaven, or between words, music and the soul. In this sense, then, the ‘frame and fabrick’ of this temple are indeed ‘within’ (‘Sion’, 382), in the sacred space of the reader as well as the author of the poems. The site defined as Herbert’s ‘temple’ is, thus, a hugely varied and immensely creative space, drawing on biblical as well as architectural and ecclesiastical traditions to invoke a setting as large as church history and as small as the individual human heart. In this poetic setting, the sacred text functions as space and the sacred space is given textual form; the two principles at the heart of this essay collection are here mirrors and metaphors of each other. In the Christian tradition, this reconciling of spatial and textual experience, the material and the verbal, draws its inspiration from Christ himself, whose incarnate body is referred to in the Bible as the new ‘temple’ and whose being is understood as the Word.41 In the context of seventeenthcentury England, this poetic merging of the opposing traditions of the Reformation—The Temple as both sacred space of worship and sacred text of the Word—confirms the radical and reconciliatory achievement of George Herbert.

41 While Christ is a sacred text in himself as the ‘Word’ (in Greek, ‘logos’) in John 1:1–14, he is also a sacred space, a temple: before his crucifixion, Jesus declared of his own body, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up’ (John 2:19).

THE “DESERT SANCTIFIED”: HENRY VAUGHAN’S CHURCH IN THE WILDERNESS Peter Thomas I

Church-Outing

George Herbert’s Temple, like his rebuilding of the ruined parish church at Leighton Bromswold, Huntingdonshire, in the 1620s,1 was designed as a sacred architectural space. We are invited to enter it through ‘The Church Porch’; to pass, duly asperged with holy water, beneath the lintel of the porch door (with its inscription warning off the profane) into the body of the church; and there, in preparation for its “mysticall repast”, to join in the round of liturgical, scriptural, prayerful worship and self-examination. In the structure that contains and shapes all that, sacred building and poetic text, becoming one, fortify and rejoice the spirit: “Blest be the Architect, whose art / Could build so strong in a weak heart.” And it is a Laudian edifice, no mistake (witness the book’s title and the stone altar that faces us in verse as we enter the nave), marked out by its painted glass, its chequered floor, its choral music, and its priestly ethos.2 The 1633 first edition title-page, however, does not embody that design. Instead, like contemporary editions of the Book of Common Prayer, it adopts a plain and simple lay-out of words within a surrounding double-row border of commonplace printers’ ornaments. How different Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans’ 1650 title-page is! [8.1]3 His subtitle in the lower part of the page, “Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations”, reiterating

1 See the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Life’ of George Herbert; and Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation, (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 134. F. E. Hutchinson, ed., The Works of George Herbert, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972 [1941]), xxxv and 4, refers also to Herbert’s expenditure of £200, a not inconsiderable sum then, on repairing the rectory and two churches of the Bemerton living. 2 Parry, op. cit., 64, describing Lincoln College, Oxford. 3 Cf. the Herbert title-page reproduced in Helen Wilcox’s essay above. The Vaughan, clearly devised by the poet, commonly features in editions of his works including, of course, Henry Vaughan. The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum, Penguin Classics, (1995 [1976]), hereafter referenced R in the text and notes.

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Herbert’s, like his insistent echoing and re-echoing of Herbert’s words, phrases and images throughout the text, proclaims a deep indebtedness and common purpose. But it is a graphic image that dominates, as dramatically eye-catching as The Temple’s is unostentatious. And this is no temple or built sanctuary, but a thunderstruck heart, bleeding and weeping beneath heaven’s blows, half in darkness, half in light, suspended in space. Vaughan transforms Herbert’s reiterated imagery of heart and tears into a violent apocalypse. This heart, moreover, is also a head, as Louis Martz4 first noticed: one craggy profile in the dark, another looking towards the light, with a third (making this a kind of Celtic tricephalos) looking out at us full-face between them, the new spiritual being emerging from the titanic, elemental contention the engraving embodies. And lest readers should not spot that, Vaughan’s overleaf Latin verses—‘Authoris (de se) Emblema’, ‘The Author’s Emblem (of Himself)’—point up the double reading: “my rocky heart . . . formerly stone is now made flesh . . . . tears from the flint staining my cheeks. . . . By dying I live again” [my italics]. Packed with public and personal resonance, this title-page is a once-seen-neverforgotten icon of the trauma of loss and defeat and the struggle for survival and renewal that overtook Vaughan mid-century. Wales largely escaped pitched battles and was spared the worst of the Civil War’s material devastation; and Vaughan, who fought in the first Civil War, could still proclaim his borderland Usk Valley as “The land redeemed from all disorders!” as he did in ‘To the River Isca’ written in the lull between that and the second outbreak (R, 72, l. 76). But in July1648 the death at home, apparently from war wounds, of the poet’s beloved younger brother, William, felled him. The following January the King’s beheading redoubled the blow, and in short order the full force of revolutionary zeal fell on South Wales in the shape of the evangelising Propagators appointed under of the Act for the Better Propagation and Preaching of the Gospel, passed on 22 February 1650.5 Archbishop Laud had been executed in 1645; bishops were abolished, and idolatrous practices and items (altar rails, images, crosses and crucifixes, organs, fonts, rood screens and surplices among them)

4 Louis L. Martz, ‘The Man Within’, PMLA 78 (1963), 40–9; reprinted as Cap. 1 of The Paradise Within, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964). 5 For a fuller account of the Act and its eventual demise in 1654, see in Thomas Richards, A History of the Puritan Movement in Wales, National Eisteddfod Association, 1920; and Geraint H. Jenkins, Protestant Dissenters in Wales 1634–1689 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1992), 117–23.

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anathematised in Ordinances of 1643 and 1644.6 But in largely Royalist Wales, the darkest of the dark corners of the land, a nest of recusants and fellow-travelling Laudians, ‘popish’ worship lingered on. The 1645 prohibition of the Book of Common Prayer was too often ignored. Matthew Herbert, for example, Vaughan’s beloved schoolmaster in Llangattock, across the river from Crickhowell and some ten miles down the road from Henry’s home at Newton Farm, had been displaced as rector as early as 1646; but he continued to serve his parishioners, and preached to them until eventually stopped in 1655. A year later he was thrown into gaol in Brecon and only saved from banishment by interceding neighbours, a sympathetic Parliamentarian leader of the old school among them. Herbert, alas, died three months before the Restoration, “leaving wife and children destitute and with many debts to pay.”7 The sufferings of the clergy all around Vaughan were real enough. His even nearer neighbours and friends, Thomas Powell and Thomas Lewes, rectors of Cantref and Llanfigan respectively, and both (like the Vaughan twins) men of Jesus College, Oxford, where Laudianism had flourished, were likewise sequestered well ahead of the Propagation Act but not finally evicted until 1650 for “Adhering to the King, and Reading Common Prayer”. Being unreplaced, they too persevered in their ministry. In February and March 1654, emboldened by the Rump Parliament’s refusal to renew the Propagation Act the year before, they wrote to the powers-that-be in the intimidating shape of Captain Jenkin Jones of Llandetty (also of Jesus College, but a fiery Anabaptist Propagator with a troop of horse at his back) to protest against his ruthless persecution of orthodox clergy: some “sent prisoners to Chepstow Garrison, others pull’d out of the Pulpit and all the rest threatened to have the same measure meted out to them, if they should make the same attempts”.8 Jones had appointed no replacements. He brushed all that aside: there are “more Sermons Preached (now) in one moneth, then were formerly in twelve”. Four days later, on 6 March 1653, the priests defiantly replied:

6 Parry, op. cit., 188 refers to the ‘Ordinance for Removing Superstitious Images, Crucifixes, Altars of Stone . . . out of Churches’ as “the death sentence for all that the Laudian movement had introduced into churches during the previous thirty years.” 7 F. E Hutchinson, Henry Vaughan. A life and Interprtetation, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1947, pp. 110, 201–2. 8 For a sympathetic contemporary account of Jones’s dedication and prowess as a preacher see Edmund Jones, A geographical, historical, and religious account of the parish of Aberystruth, in the county of Monmouth, Trevecka, 1779, 118–21.

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peter thomas If we be silent, and do not Preach, we are reproached, and if we do Preach we are menaced. A hard dilemma, Sir, notwithstanding your paines in preaching (which nevertheless is much abated of what it was, since you have caught the fish that you looked for) there are many dry and thirsty soules in this Country, that are very seldom refreshed with the dew of Heavenly Doctrine.

Thomas Powell was duly jailed for his pains and subsequently “went beyond the Seas.”9 The story was much the same at Llansantffraed, Henry’s parish, where Thomas Vaughan, his twin, had been installed in the early 1640s. He survived an initial sequestration order; but in 1650, the very year Silex I appeared, he was evicted by the Propagators for being (and these were mostly standard charges) a common drunkard, a common swearer, no preacher, a whoremaster, but most damningly “in armes personally against the Parliament”10 But it was December 1657, seven years on, before a replacement was installed. Little wonder that back in March 1652 the ‘The Petition of the Six Counties of South Wales’, with 15,000 signatures, begged Parliament for “a supply of Ministers in lieu of those that have been Ejected” and “the Churches in most places shut up, and the Fabric thereof ready to fall to the ground for want of repair.” “You may ride”, wrote Alexander Griffith, “ten or twenty miles on the Lords day, where there is twenty Churches, and not one door opened”. This was scarcely an exaggeration. In Wales overall some 300 rectors, vicars and curates were expelled from their benefices; 196 of them in South Wales and Breconshire (which lost 25 clergy) where in 71 out of 73 parishes no replacements, not even the often ill-equipped itinerants, (there were only 2 in the whole of the county) were appointed to replace displaced incumbents. Not even Vavasor Powell, sarcastically dubbed the “Metropolitan of the Itinerants”, sometimes riding a hundred miles a week, “often preaching in two or three places a day” and “in every place where he might have admission both day and night”, “seldome two dayes in a week throughout the year out of the Pulpit”, could cover the territory.11 Then there was the cash. What had the Propagators done with the monies raised by their wholesale acquisition of rectories,

9

For the Powell, Lewes, Jones exchanges see Hutchinson, op. cit., 110–20. Ibid., 93. 11 For the figures cited, the hostilities between Griffith and Vavasor Powell and the latter’s indefatigable travels see Jenkins, op. cit., 17 and 78–9. Powell’s title was bestowed on him in the title of Griffith’s pamphlet, Strena Vavasoriensis, 1654. 10

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vicarages, tithes, glebe lands and livings? Not, according to their victims, spent it on propagating the Gospel. And Vaughan’s contemptuous response to being offered some kind of official position under the new regime, “I’ll not stuff my story / With your Commonwealth and glory” (in ‘The Proffer’, R, 250, ll. 35–6), glances askance at the Propagators’ Parliamentary stipends paid out of hi-jacked church tithes. Even some of the Propagators shared the misgivings, one of them, William Erbery, refusing in 1652 to accept his salary any more.12 But it was not the smell of malfeasance so much as desecration and neglect of places of worship, and the abandonment of congregations to a “Famine of the Word of God”, that most distressed orthodox pastors and congregations. “Slain flock, and pillaged fleeces” was Vaughan’s phrase for it, contemplating the sad condition of the ‘The British Church’ (R, 162, l. 17). Assuredly the faithful orthodox were (in Milton’s word from some years before, when the boot was on the other foot) well and truly “church-outed”. Or rather, the church of Lancelot Andrewes, of Archbishop Laud and George Herbert being dismantled, they found themselves unceremoniously cast out into the wilderness. II

Armed with Texts

What now could redeem Vaughan’s land? What price now ‘the beauty of holiness’? The doors of the temple being bolted and barred, where was the sacred to be found? His answer is inscribed in that Silex titlepage and all that follows it. Emulating and challenging comparison with Herbert’s talismanic text Vaughan seeks to demonstrate, in a time of destruction and disjunction, a continuum of poetic and religious commitment, and the ascendent imperative (in a world turned upsidedown) of private devotion and inward spirituality. There is, too, a line of succession and progression under the pressure of cataclysmic events, from George Herbert’s enigmatically prophetic ‘Church Militant’, appended to the main body of The Temple, to Vaughan’s “sense of an impending apocalypse”.13 Indeed, that man “of blessed memory”, “a most glorious true Saint and a Seer” whose “holy life and verse

12

See Jenkins, op. cit., 22, 80–1. Jonathan Post, Henry Vaughan. The Unfolding Vision, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982), 189. 13

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gained many pious converts, (of whom I am the least)”14 was never far from Vaughan’s mind. Even in extremis he is at pains to identify with him, connecting Silex, completed when he was “nigh unto death; and am still at no great distance from it”,15 with the posthumous publication of The Temple. And he hopes, whether he survives his crisis or not, to harvest converts as Herbert still does, though dead (R, 143, ll. 199–200). For a book is “The dead alive and busy” (‘To his Books’, R, 366, l. 5), “another body, in which” the writer “always lives” (R, p. 140, l. 93). One can hardly, however, imagine Vaughan entrusting his manuscript poems to a friend, as Herbert allegedly did on his death-bed, requesting that they be published only if it was felt they might “turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soule”,16 otherwise to be burnt. True, Vaughan did not flinch from suppressing his own “greatest follies” (R, p. 140), and the list of his publications he sent cousin John Aubrey in 167317 does not mention his Poems, 1646. But Silex Scintillans was not for burning. By 1650 there were all too many dejected souls in need of spiritual guidance; and Vaughan, urgently proactive, “begged leave to communicate this my poor talent to the Church under the protection and conduct of her glorious Head” hoping it would prove “as useful now in the public, as it hath been to me in private.”. (R, 142, ll. 177–81) Amidst the desolation of its days Silex, actively seeking converts, is a driven book, in ways and to a degree that Herbert’s volume is not. The title page portrays an agon, charged with urgent intensity by the poet’s first-hand experience of war and of spiritual trial, of breakdown and recovery. He offers healing, and to carry the battle to the enemy. With “Silurist”—the first flourish of his nom-de-guerre (punning on the Latin “silex” for flint)—Henry Vaughan makes his stand.18 As a direct descendent on Silures land, living not far from the site of a fierce and bloody action against the colonising Romans, he proclaims both an inheritance of heroic guerilla resistance, and his descent from the

14 The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957 [1914]), 186; and Vaughan’s ‘Preface’ to Silex Scintillans, 1655 in R, p. 162 respectively. Martin’s edition is hereafter referenced M in the text and notes. 15 R, p. 143. Experience of severe illness is a standard feature of much hagiographical writing. It serves here to authenticate and validate Vaughan’s spiritual testimony and his offering it to others in the shape of Silex, under the protection of the Church. 16 See the ‘Life’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 17 M, p. 688. 18 See Roland Mathias, ‘The Silurist Re-Excamined’, Scintilla 2, 1998, 62–77.

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remnant of the ‘true’ ancient British Church driven into Wales over a thousand years earlier by the Saxon invasion—a history cherished in the narrative of the modern Church from the Elizabethan Settlement on.19 ‘Ad Posteros’, the Latin poem prefacing Olor Iscanus, 1651, further spells out Vaughan’s profound attachment to his Celtic lineage and landscape. Constructing a new identity, part Celtic warrior, part surrogate priest of the resistance network, he thrust himself, hot on the heels of the Propagation Act of February 22, 1650, into the van of the ‘Anglican’ Survivalist Movement in Wales.20 It was a remarkable demarche. A five year sequence of sacred texts ensued: Silex Scintillans (1650), Mount of Olives; or Solitary Devotions (1652), Flores Solitudinis (1654) and the augmented Silex Scintillans (1655), all books with a mission to comfort and strengthen the scattered, isolated faithful and refute the arguments and claims to sanctity of the self-styled ‘Saints’ in the ascendancy. ‘The Constellation’, towards the end of the 1650 Scintilla, epitomises Vaughan’s two-pronged strategy, simultaneously attacking those “commissioned” (a dig at the Propagation Commission in Wales) who “by a black self-will / . . . would heal / The wounds they give by crying, zeal”, and praying in solidarity with the persecuted clergy and their abandoned congregations that God might “So guide us through this darkness that we may / . . . / Become an humble, holy nation” with a Church once more in “her perfect, and pure dress, / Beauty and holiness!” (R, 230–2, ll. 37–40 and 51–8). The prose The Mount of Olives begins, in the same vein, famously satirising the evangelists’ “frequent Extasies, and raptures to the third heaven; I onely wish them real, and that their actions did not tell the world they are rapt into some other place”; and mocking their assumption of “the glorious stile of Saints” (M, 140–1). Against that he sets “Morning and

19 Post, op. cit., 124. Most Welshmen, notably the South Wales gentry, regarded the Propagators, though Welshmen themselves and welcomed by the Welsh Puritan ‘Saints’, as agents of an alien occupation. 20 See R. Wilcher, ‘Henry Vaughan, Jeremy Taylor, Edward Sparke, and the Preservation of the Anglican Communion.’, Scintilla 12, 2008, 141–59; Philip Jenkins, ‘Welsh Anglicans and the Interregnum’. Journal of the Historical Society of the Church in Wales, 32 (1990), 51–9; and Lloyd Bowen ed., Family and Society in Early Stuart Glamorgan: The Household Accounts of Sir Thomas Aubrey of Llantrithyd, c. 1565–1641, Publications of the South Wales Record Society, Cardiff, no. 19, 2006. Two future archbishops, James Ussher and Gilbert Sheldon, took refuge at Llantrithyd in the 1640s (Bowen, 42). Vaughan was actively connected with the Llantrithyd Aubreys by ties of kinship through his cousins Charles Walbeoffe and John Aubrey the antiquarian.

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Evening sacrifices, with holy and apposite Ejaculations for most times and occasions”, plus “very faithful and necesssary Precepts and Meditations before we come to the Lord’s Table.” This is not a devotional treatise or “peece of Ethics”, but a pocket service-book standing in for the forbidden Book of Common Prayer, a vade mecum for souls wandering in the “waste and howling Wilderness.” (M, 138) Playing minister and communicant,21 Vaughan constructs a model of regular and dutiful holy living, a daily round of devotions.22 Here are “Admonitions for Morning-Prayer” at home; through “Admonitions when we prepare for any farre journey” and “When we go from home”; “Admonitions how to carry thy self in the Church” with “A Prayer before thou goest to Church” and “Another when thou art come home, or in the way if thou beest alone”; “Admonitions for Evening-Prayer” with “A Meditation at the setting of the Sun”: to “A Prayer for the Evening” and “A Prayer when thou art going into bed.” The day over, “Ejaculations”— fifteen short exclamatory prayers suitable for learning by heart—mark off the “Morning and Evening Sacrifices” from as many pages again of prayers to be used before, during and after holy communion. For the “Sacrament of the Lords Table”, which “requires the most perfect and purest Accomplishments”, “hath ever been the Custom of Gods Church”, and “was in our Church.” Here therefore are meticulous Admonitions with Meditations and Prayers to be used before we come to the Lords Supper”; “A Prayer for the grace of repentance, together with a Confession of sins”; “A Meditation before the receiving of the holy Communion”; a short “Prayer when thou art upon going to the Lords Table” and another even shorter to be said “Immediately before the receiving”. Then (passing in silence over the consecration and administration of the sacrament) come an “Admonition after receiving the holy Communion” and “A Prayer after you have received”, followed by two bidding prayers to end the (‘virtual’) service. For by 1652, there was no place for Holy Communion (the sacrament at the heart of Laudianism) to be celebrated, save sometimes in private houses, secretly. 23 Vaughan, however, has a way round that too: 21

Post, op. cit., 126. Occupying M, pp. 143–167. Leading Laudians (notably Henry Hammond) saw persistence in such private devotions as Vaughan here provided as essential to the survival of the Church. 23 For Puritanism’s extreme aversion from the Prayer Book and Anglicans persisting “by stealth” with the “descarded [sic] liturgy”, see Thomas Richards, op. cit., 12, 140–1. 22

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These reverend and sacred buildings (however now vilified and shut up) have ever been, and amongst true Christians still are the solemne and publike places of meeting for Divine Worship. . . . Such reverence and religious affection hath in all ages been shew’d towards these places, that the holy men of God detain’d either by Captivity, or other necessary occasions, when they could not remedy the distance, yet . . . they would always worship towards them. (M, p. 147)

However desecrated and abandoned, those consecrated spaces remained hallowed ground and, even at a distance, a source of spiritual energy. Silex I confronts the same dilemma. ‘Church-Service’ (R, 181–2), for example, opens on a joyous up-beat, “Blest be the God of harmony, and love”, as if the sacred space of church and choir still stands open. But the undeniable calamity of formal worship silenced and delapidating buildings have invaded the poet’s psyche; and for all its echoes of Herbert’s ‘Church Monuments’, ‘Sighs and Groanes’, and ‘Church-musick’, the poem inhabits a more threatened, exposed and problematic place, blasted by “winds” and “busy thoughts”; no firmer than a heap of sand, yet “propped” by God’s hand that “doth . . . knit my frame” (Ibid., ll. 9–16). Broken and pulverised,24 the poet nevertheless finds affliction resolving, a la Herbert, into a new harmony of echoing sighs and groans, a sacred music for that choir of souls in which he still stands (the church choir proper, the physical holy space being forbidden ground), and now offers by way of service. Similarly, in ‘The Match’, joining hands with Herbert’s “holy, ever-living lines” and abjuring all distractions “That may unknit / My heart” (R, pp. 191–2, ll. 1 and 29–30), Vaughan “recreates a surrogate for the Anglican rite of Confirmation”25 also removed from public worship as a Popish ceremony. ‘The Feast’, three years on from The Mount of Olives is even bolder. Going further than before, he re-enacts the moment of Holy Communion: Come then true bread, Quickening the dead, .... Spring up, O wine, And springing shine .....

24 Cf. the first line of ‘Distraction’ (R, p. 165), “O knit me, that am crumbled dust!”; and “grind this flint to dust” in ‘The Tempest’, R, p. 221, l. 60. 25 Post, op. cit., 117.

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peter thomas O drink and bread Which strikes death dead, The food of man’s immortal being! Under veils here Thou art my cheer, Present and sure without my seeing. How dost thou fly And search and pry Through all my parts, and like a quick And knowing lamp Hunt out each damp, Whose shadow makes me sad or sick? O what high joys, The turtle’s voice And songs I hear! O quickening showers Of my Lord’s blood You make rocks bud And crown dry hills with wells & flowers! For this true ease This healing peace, For this taste of living glory, My soul and all, Kneel down and fall And sing his sad victorious story. (R, pp. 303–5, ll. 13–60)

“Under veils here” asserts Christ’s presence on earth in the bread and wine; but may hint also, at clandestine ceremonies.26 Perhaps, too, something more complex and layered is implied—that the poem itself is a veiled form of the sacrament, which is in turn (as Vaughan reminds the reader in a text from Revelation XIX appended to the poem) a veiled form of “the marriage supper of the Lamb” awaiting the “Blessed” at the end of time. The solitary worshipper, meanwhile, “faith supplying what is lacking to the senses” (R, 637 n.) can, despite captivity, not merely look on from a distance but participate spiritually in ‘The Feast’, “Present and sure without my seeing.” The mystery no longer performable in the sacred architectural space is celebrated in a text.

26 Cf the references to “secret meals” in ‘The Sap’ and ‘The Request’, R, pp. 237 and 375 respectively.

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Schematically the last three stanzas, meditating Christ’s “crown and Cross” and charged with pain, grief and bloodshed, match the The Mount of Olives’ fervent post-communion “Prayer in time of persecution and Heresie’ and ‘A Prayer in adversity, and troubles occasioned by our enemies’, with their “ Thy Service and thy Sabbaths, thy own sacred Institutions and pledges of thy love are denied unto us; Thy Ministers are trodden down, . . . the robbers are come into thy sanctuary, and persecutors are within thy walls”, and have “not only rob’d me, . . . but they have also washed their hands in the blood of my friends, my dearest and nearest relatives”. They match its supplication too, that God might “heale . . . these present breaches and distractions” and “renew our dayes as of old. . . . Keep me . . . from the guilt of blood and suffer me not to stain my soul with the thoughts of recompence and vengeance” (M, 166–7). Milton’s “Avenge O Lord”, was not for Vaughan, whose final petition here—“O Lord, sanctifie all these afflictions unto thy servant”—would be duly answered in ‘The Feast’; just as his “Turne thou us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned” resolves three years on into “Who turned our sad captivity”, the last line of ‘L’Envoy’ (R, 311–13), the closing poem of Silex Scintillans. In short, Vaughan’s 1650s textual demarche presents a process of spiritual seeking (not a fixed position) in which he becomes increasingly concerned “over the true meaning of sanctification”27 and increasingly distrustful of the desire for vengeance which had burned so angrily in him and scorched too many in the fury of civil war. More and more he reads affliction as providential and creative: Thus doth God key disordered man (Which none else can,) Tuning his breast to rise, or fall; And by a sacred, needful art Like strings, stretch every part Making the whole most musical (‘Affliction I’, R. 219–20, ll. 35–40)

So Vaughan, echoing George Herbert’s “This is but tuning of my breast / To make the music better” (F. E. Hutchinson, ed. The Works of George Herbert, Oxford Clarendon Press, 1972 (1941), p. 55, ll. 23–4.) tunes his verse, as his mentor did, to God’s “sacred . . . art”. He looks to the

27 Post, op. cit., 134; see also Philip West, Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans. Scripture Uses, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 207–222, on ‘The Patience of the Saints’.

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power of poetry, even in the most discordant of times, to resolve into harmony the afflictions of the soul. The gift of song, however—I nothing have to give thee, / But this thy own gift, given to me” (R, 145–6, ll. 17–22, 43–44)—is not granted without an active striving, a disposition to “devotion and sanctity”, and “a true, practic piety” (R, p. 142). In George Herbert’s exemplary life at Bemerton and his A Priest to the Temple, Or, The Country Parson His Character, and Rule of Holy Life, published like Mount of Olives in 1652, there was a pattern to hand. Vaughan was not in holy orders, of course, nor in a place hospitable any longer to parsons and parishes. But his distinctly ascetic way of life was positively monastic—witness his discipline of prayer and devotion at “prescribed times”; his ”hour” of walking and meditation with which (observing an office of the Church) he began each day about dawn. Witness too his habit of prayer and watching at night while others slept.28 His medical practice also, from the 1650s on, most likely followed Herbert’s Parson’s practice of dispensing spiritual with medicinal comfort. As Vaughan, who looked to the suffering and patient Christ the healer and physician, wrote in Hermetical Physick (1655), “Every Physitian . . . must be a sound Christian, and truly religious and holy” (M, 579)—as must a poet, striving to write that “true Hymn”.29 III

Pilgrims, Hermits and Paulinus

George Herbert was not Vaughan’s only model. There were “many blessed Patterns of a holy life in the Brittish Church” (M, 186), and elsewhere back to Biblical times; and these, not “professors” and “propagators”, were the lights to steer by, beacons of true holiness in a dark land. All the displaced are wayfarers now, sharing Christ’s lot whose life, which took him into wilderness and desert places, “was nothing else but a pilgrimage” (Ibid., 161). Journeying, travelling, walking are key metaphors for Vaughan. And it is with a consoling vision of the trans-historical Church travelling towards the Heavenly City that ‘To the . . . Reader’ in Mount of Olives draws to a close: “Think not that thou

28 See ‘Looking Back’ and ‘Midnight’ (R, p. 367, ll. 6–8; and p. 174, ll. 1–4, respectively.) 29 R, p. 142. Jonathan Nauman’s unpublished paper on ‘Sacred Yearning: Hierotheus and Henry Vaughan’, given at the 13th Colloquium of the Usk Valley Association in 2008 explores Vaughan’s linking of Hierotheus with Herbert.

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art alone upon this Hill, there is an innumerable company both before and behind thee. Those with Palms in their hands and these expecting them. . . . Presse thou towards the mark, and let the people and their Seducers rage” (M, 141). There was comfort in that for the many who, without a visible Church to turn to, felt abandoned and alone. For though the way be through “thornes and . . . thistles” (‘Man in Darkness’, M, 169), “the businesse of a Pilgrim is to seek his Countrey”(M, 169). “Meditate in this way”, he advises, “upon the sojournings and travels of the Patriarchs and Prophets, the many weary journeys of Jesus Christ in the flesh, the travels of the Apostles by sea and land, with the pilgrimages and peregrinations of many other precious Saints that wandered in Deserts and Mountains” (Ibid., 147). Those liturgical poems in Silex marking and observing Holy Days legislated into oblivion in December, 1644 (see R, p. 565 n.)—‘Easter Day’, ‘Easter Hymn’, ‘Ascension Day’ and ‘Ascension Hymn’, ‘White Sunday’, ‘Trinity Sunday’, ‘Palm Sunday’—are so many signposts guiding spiritual wayfarers home. It was the solitary “sojournings” and retirements of the patriarchs and prophets, however, and the figure of the hermit in his cell that most stirred Vaughan’s imagination. Like heremitic Orpheus and exiled Ovid in his secular poems, they resonated with Vaughan’s own isolation and (internal) exile.30 So, in the Mount of Olives, it is to the “Christians in Egypt” that he turns in his translation (181–2) of St Jerome’s eye-witness account: I have seen (saith he) and I was not deceived, the treasure of Christ laid up in earthen vessels; for amongst those Christians in Egypt I have seen many Fathers who had here upon earth already begun the heavenly life; and regenerate Prophets who were indued not only with holy habits, but had received therewith the Spirit of promise. . .They lived dispersed up and down the wildernesse, and separated from one another in several Cells or Cots, but knit all together in the perfect bond of Charity. The reason of their distinct and distant habitations, was, because they would not have the silence of their retirements disturbed, nor their minds diverted from the contemplation of heavenly things . . . They take

30 For Orpheus’ and Ovid’s presence in Vaughan see P. W. Thomas, ‘Henry Vaughan, Orpheus, and the Empowerment of Poetry’, in Of Paradise and Light. Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton in Honor of Alan Rudrum, ed. Donald R. Dickson and Holly Faith Nelson, (Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2004), 218–49. See also Robert Wilcher, ‘Exile in Breconshire: the Double Displacement of Henry Vaughan’, due to be published in Scintilla 15, 2011.

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peter thomas no thought for meat and drink and cloathing, nor for any such accommodations; they seek onely the Kingdome of God and the righteousness thereof, they fight with the weapons of prayer, & being guarded with the shield of faith from the devices of their spiritual enemies, so travel on towards their heavenly countrey. (M, 1181–2) .

That settlement of solitaries, separate but united in prayer and meditation, was no bad model for the scattered faithful in their Welsh wilderness. Follow them and men like “Saint Hierome, who preferred the poore Coate of Paul the Hermite to the purple and pride of the world” (Ibid., 141) is the message. Or copy Paul (the first monk according to St. Anthony) who retreated young into a mountain cave in the Theban desert with only a spring and a palm tree to water, feed and clothe him. Or Antonius, who at eighteen gave up worldly possessions, “betook himself to the wildernesse”, built “a poore narrow Cottage”, dug a well, made a garden and lived undisturbed save by wild asses that made “bold with his sallads” (Ibid., 183–5). Such was “that blessed and glorious age the Primitive Christians lived in, when the wildernesse and the solitary places were glad for them, and the desert rejoyced and blossom’d as the rose” (Ibid., 181). As it did too, in Vaughan’s lifetime—not in post-Dissolution-of-the-Monasteries Britain of course, but in the famous Spanish Carmelite settlements widely copied across Northern Europe and in the New World. Planted in remote valleys of the Spanish highlands and devoted to reviving the ascetic practices of primitive holiness in their heremitical ‘deserts’, they seemed “to inhabit this landscape like sweetly smelling white flowers”. Such was the union of spiritual with material the Carmelites’ baroque Edens aspired to,31 where person and place were one and spiritual and natural fecundity radiated from the hermit’s cell—that “calm recess /Of faith, and hope and holiness!” as Vaughan called it in ‘The Bee’.32 Here “something still like Eden looks”, where “flying winds and flowing wells / Are the wise, watchful hermit’s bells”, where “in the desert grows the rose” and

31 See Trevor Johnson, ‘Gardening for God: Carmelite deserts and the sacralisation of natural space in Counter-Reformation Spain’ in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 193–210. St Teresa’s words referring to the friars of Villanueva are quoted on p. 210 of that volume, and come from the Epistolario of the Jesuit Juan Nieremberg some of whose writings Vaughan translated in Flores Solitudinis, for which see below. 32 R, pp. 381–4, ll. 21–2, 29–30, 14 and 102 respectively. ‘The Bee’ was published in Vaughan’s Thalia Rediviva, 1678.

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“hills blossom like the vales”. Whether or not Vaughan knew of the Spanish ‘deserts’, he was manifestly steeped in the hermetic and heremitic thinking behind them. Here in the “happy harmless solitude” (R, p. 382, l. 9) of the hermitage where the hermit prays and praises, true holiness (despite the clamorous Saints and noisy factions of the Commonwealth) could still flow. The poet had, in fact, already portrayed a hermit (in Olor Iscanus (1651), R, 127–30), drawn from the Polish Jesuit poet Casimir Sarbiewski (1595–1640), complete with “rural cot”, “low cell” and “well”— a favourite rhyme—and “Fresh . . . salads”. Looking to “The hills our fathers walked on here”, he pictures the self-sufficient, soliloquizing “Saint”, the “loud strife” of the world behind him, yearning for heaven yet rooted in his valley, communing with nature, his inner self and the Creator. A “slow-pilgrim . . . / . . . his sleeps light, and soon past”,33 walking under the stars that “shine” in the silent sky, or botanising and meditating in the “green fields and bowers” where flowers teach him the way to heaven, even fly-fishing mid-river. He could pass for Henry himself. WithVaughan/Casimir’s hermit we are drawn into the psychological complexity of heremitic (and hermetic) introspection. We step, in short, into the world of Flores Solitudinis: Certaine Rare and Elegant Pieces . . . Collected in His Sicknesse and Retirement (1654), the very title of which proclaims Vaughan’s solidarity with those whose holiness made the desert blossom. His chosen texts, translations of Nierembergius, Eucherius and the Life of Paulinus, are “forward flowers”, offered to his kinsman-by-marriage Sir Charles Egerton34 to lead him “from the noyse and pompe of this world into a silent and solitary Hermitage”; and dedicated to the reader’s “use”, who is reassured that “If the title shall offend thee, because it was found in the woods and the wildernesse, give mee leave to tell thee, that Deserts and Mountaines were the Schooles of the Prophets. . . . I sent it abroad to be a companion of those wise Hermits, who have withdrawne from the present generation, to confirme them in their solitude, and to make that rigid necessity their pleasant Choyse.” (M, 213 and 216 respectively). As the thousands of Cavaliers forced to withdraw from London on March 20, 1650, in

33

“Slow” because (as R, p. 524 observes) in one place while journeying spiritually. See J. Nauman and P. W. Thomas, ‘Sir Charles Egerton of Newborough’, Scintilla 10, 2006, 196–207. Egerton was a former Member of the Long Parliament who had been given a hard time by the Cromwellian regime. 34

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response to the Act Banishing Papists and Delinquents from the city,35 knew only too well, there was necessity aplenty. As for “pleasant”, “we live in an age, which hath made this very Proposition (though suspected of Melancholie,) mighty pleasing, and even meane witts begin to like it; the wiser sort alwaies did” (M, p. 213). Vaughan was thinking of Robert Burton’s recently republished (1651) Anatomy of Melancholy’s praise of monks’ “profitable meditations, contemplations and a kind of solitariness to be embraced which the Fathers so highly commended”.36 Most likely he was aware, too, of antiquarians’ ongoing reassessment of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. That, as Graham Parry puts it, was to Sir Henry Spelman “the cardinal act of sacrilege in English history” and to Sir William Dugdale (the first volume of whose Monasticon Anglicanum, compiled with Roger Dodsworth, appeared in the year of Silex II) “the most signal disaster in the nation’s history”, spiritually, socially and economically.37 The lesson of that history for the revolutionary 1650s and its vehement anti-Catholicism was plain enough. Doubtless Vaughan shared his fellow-survivalist Jeremy Taylor’s view (he had taken refuge at Golden Grove in nearby Carmarthenshire) who wrote to congratulate Dugdale in 1656.38 The godly, to whom monks and hermits were anathema, thought otherwise. And approving allusions in Flores to “wise Hermits, who have withdrawne from the present generation” and “the rough and severe habit of the Franciscans”(M, p. 216), or to candles, beads, rosaries and the Virgin (she also figures prominently in the Dedication to Silex Scintillans), even to Jesuit missionaries’ successes in the dark corners of the land seem calculated to discomfort them. What can they have made of Flores’ Jesuit sources? Here was a book in which the opening essays on ‘Temperance and Patience’ and ‘Life and Death’ were translated from the De Arte Voluntatis (1631) of Juan Nieremberg (1595– 1658), the celebrated Spanish Jesuit scholar, theologian and ascetic, still in post in the Colegio Imperial in Madrid in 1654; an admirer of

35

See P. W. Thomas, Sir John Berkenhead, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 176. Richard Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson, Everyman, 1932, i, pp. 247–8. 37 Graham Parry ‘The Antiquities of Warwickshire’ in William Dugdale, Historian, 1605–1686, ed. Christopher Dyer and Catherine Richardson, (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009), 18 and 20 respectively. 38 Ibid., 24. 36

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those Carmelite settlements;39 and, like Vaughan, immersed in occult and hermetic philosophy and in natural history.40 The short second piece too, Eucherius’ ‘The World Contemned’,41 and the concluding ‘Primitive Holiness, Set forth in the Life of blessed Paulinus . . . Bishop of Nola’ both came, as Vaughan underlines in an editorial note, from Jesuit Antwerp publications of the early 1620s (M, 312). Two years before, in 1652, he had concluded ‘Man in Glory’ (published as part of the Mount of Olives) with the trade-mark Jesuit tag “Soli Deo Gloria”; and now (challenging the Commonwealth’s habitual demonisation of Jesuit missionaries) he declares his debt to the spiritual guidance of these texts which had brought him precious “Remissions” amid the “sad Conflicts” (spiritual and physical) of his own “Sicknesse and Retirement” (M, pp. 210, 216 and 211 respectively). He had felt on the pulse the truth of Nieremberg’s contention (it lies at the heart of Silex Scintillans too) that “The conflicts of a good man with calamities are sacred: he is made a spectacle to the world, to Angels and men, and a hallowed Present to the Almighty” (M, 232). At the deepest level Vaughan identified with that teaching. Not that he was a closet recusant! True, he was descended on his mother’s side from a recusant family (her grandfather Thomas Somerset spent a quarter of a century in the Tower, a prisoner for his faith),42 and could hardly fail to sympathise, in “sad captivity” himself, with recusants enduring the persecution and exclusion that had been their lot in Britain since the Reformation. Nor can he have been unaware of the Jesuits’ activities in Wales—notably in Denbighshire at St Winifred’s Well, the most significant pilgrimage site in the British Isles; or at the much-visited pilgrimage chapel “remodelled as a beacon of militant Tridentine Catholicism” on the Skirrid Mountain near Abergavenny, a mere 20 miles from his home.43 His aim in Flores, however, was not to press the Roman case, but reach out to those 39 See Johnson, op. cit., 208–9, referring to Nieremberg’s Curiosa filosofia y tesoro de maravillas de la naturaleza/Treasury of Natural Wonders, Madrid, 1629. 40 For Nieremberg’s influence on Vaughan see Jonathan Nauman, “Nieremberg’s Patience of the Saints: Experiencing Flores Solitudinis in Silex Scintillans’, Scintilla 13, 2009, 196–207. 41 See Jonathan Nauman ‘Alternative Saints: Eucherius and Silex Scintillans’, Scintilla 14, 2010, 132–7. 42 Hutchinson, 6–7. 43 See Alexandra Walsham, ‘Holywell: contesting sacred space in post-Reformation Wales’, in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, 211–36 (Skirrid ref. p. 221); and Colleen M. Seguin, ‘Cures and Controversy in Early

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Anglicans in Wales and Laudians everywhere who (like fellow-poet Richard Crashaw across the border) were tempted to go over to Rome. He sought to rally them (maybe moderate Puritans too) around an image of “Primitive Holiness” that did not entail eradicating every last vestige of a thousand years of ecclesiastical tradition. In “blessed Paulinus”, bishop, church-builder and forerunner of “blessed Mr Herbert”, Vaughan found his model and mirror. The convergences between poet and Paulinus are legion:44 noble ancestry, conversion to a life of prayer and “pure devotion”; strict observances, and as worshipers and poets celebrating “Sacred Festivals, or holy daies” against the grain of an “age of Schismes and Heresies” (M, p. 377). Both pursued lives of self-abnegation and ascetic retirement in “Mountanous [sic] and solitary parts” (M, 344). Both endured “captivity” and “sharpe and tedious sicknesse”(M, 344 and 356 respectively); and Vaughan, “nigh unto death” compiling Flores and completing Silex, matches Paulinus celebrating Matins at daybreak on his deathbed. Even “Steal{ing] . . . undressed, to meditate” at the graveside of his cousin Walbeoffe, “accompanied by none, / An obscure mourner that would weep alone” he takes his cue from the Saint (at the tomb of Felix the Martyr) who “ would oftentimes steale privately to visit his sepulchre”.45 So well does Vaughan ‘play’ the part—mindful maybe of Nieremberg’s assertion that every man “is the work of his own hands. . . . Thou hast leave to be whatsoever thou wouldst be” (M, 260)—that it is sometimes difficult to be sure which of the two is speaking to us.46 He presents Paulinus as, like himself, refusing to “call those Saints and propagators, who were Devills and destroyers” (M, 346).47 Not that the Silurist saints himself ! He would be, as Nieremberg advises, “a lively Figure and likenesse”, not “an Idol, or Counterfeit” (M, 260). So through the narrative of Saint Paulinus’ life he voices and validates his unwavering devotion to the British

Modern Wales: the Struggle to Control St. Winifred’s Well’, North American Journal of Welsh Studies, vol. 3, 2 (Summer 2003), 1–17. 44 Cf Post, op. cit., 140–2. 45 See ‘To the Pious Memory of C. W. Esquire’, R, pp. 331–3, and M, p. 355. 46 Cf. P. W. Thomas, ‘Henry Vaughan, Orpheus, and the Empowerment of Poetry’, in Of Paradise and Light, ed. Donald Dickson and Holly Faith Nelson, (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 232 re Vaughan’s ventriloquism and speaking “through the mask”. 47 Cf. his ‘Man in Glory’, appended to The Mount of Olives, in 1652, where he speaks through St. Anselm, long-dead Archbishop of Canterbury, “Restored to see these desolations here” and, standing in for Laud, “to vex the age”. (M. p. 193)

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Church as belonging, more manifestly than ever in its desert wilderness, to a continuum of ‘pure’ worship and belief. The very fabric of that Church stood, all around him, under threat; but here, in a “last Paragraph” several pages long, he conjures a prospect of restoration and reconstruction in the chiefest of Paulinus’ crowning “Works of Piety” (M, 374–850), sacred buildings—“the four old Basilicas, or Churches, dedicated to the Martyr Felix” “repaired and beautified”, and a fifth joined on to them, new-built and exceeding “them all, both for beauty and largenesse.” Here are fountains, arbours, courts and alleyways, porches, archways and marble pillars, cells and oratories (“all richly pictured with Histories out of the Pentateuch”); and, facing incomers, a great picture of the cross, “limned in most lively and glorious Colours and hung with Garlands of palms and flowers; above it . . . a cleare and luminous skie, and on the Crosse which was all Purple, sate perching a flock of white Doves”, with verses carved beneath. A sixth church follows, near Nola, where “in the great Isle leading to the Altar, he caused to be put up another peece of Limning, or sacred Paisage, which for beauty and excellencie exceeded all the former” The scene Vaughan conjures could not but recall the glory days of Laudian construction, renovation and refurbishment in the 1630s, undone by ensuing iconoclasm as in his kinsman Sir Thomas Aubrey’s case at Llantrithyd in the Vale of Glamorgan where the 1630’s-built private chapel was vandalised in 1648.48 As for those who would cry “Idolatry” and “Vanity” at such ungodly ostentation as is pictured here, Vaughan quietly insists that “in all these sacred buildings, our most pious and humble Bishop did not so much as dream of Merit.” Indeed, he “thought as blessed Mr. Herbert did” that they were only “good works if sprinkled with the blood of Christ”. Connecting the episcopal Church of Laud and Herbert directly to that of the great Fourth Century patriarch, Vaughan sanctions and sustains the idea of the church building as a sacred space that might one day be recovered. Meanwhile men, drawing on inner resources, must manage without basilicas. IV

Turning Inwards

Flores was not, however, a blueprint for built spaces, but a persuasive to retirement to the hermitage of the inner life. Those great basilicas

48

See the Lloyd Bowen and Philip Jenkins references in n. 20 above.

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are, however sacred, grounded in Paulinus’ years of spiritual labour, patient endurance and self-scrutiny, not least the four years he spent in the “remote parts of Spain” leading a “most solitary and austere life” (M, 346). Indeed, he “did so abound with private devotions, that all the time from his Baptism to his buriall, may be truly called his Prayertime.” For while “wee outwardly build unto him [God] these visible buildings, he would build inwardly in us those which are invisible, that is to say, the house not made with hands.” (M, 377) Such was the lesson learned by Vaughan in the wilderness of the Civil War and Interregnum: not that church buildings are to be despised (let alone destroyed), but that that house within us is the most sacrosanct of spaces. Such is the burden of Vaughan’s great elegy to Charles Walbeoffe. It opens with the poet (called out of his “sad retirements” by the death of his cousin and close friend on September 13th, 1653) a solitary figure standing apart from the “rich & outside mourners” leaving the funeral: I (who the throng affect not, nor their state:) Steal to thy grave undressed, to meditate On our sad loss, accompanied by none, An obscure mourner that would weep alone.

It is precisely this detachment from “their state”—their worldly dress and behaviour, and their body politic too—that validates Vaughan’s claim to be “the just recorder of thy death and worth.” He sees beyond the secular and public show, to assert in the teeth of triumphant “sects”, “blasphemy” and “sacrilege”, a continuity of faith and worship by other, more inward means: And true devotion from an hermit’s cell Will Heaven’s kind King as soon reach and as well As that which from rich shrines and altars flies Led by ascending incense to the skies.

Which again is not (as first glance may suggest) a repudiation of the beauty of holiness but an insistence on the equal worth and necessity in adverse times beset with “sects”, “blasphemy” and “sacrilege”, of private prayer and devotion. On this premise the poet—he sounds like his cousin’s confessor—rests his ensuing eulogy of Walbeoffe’s integrity: And for thy heart Man’s secret region and his noblest part; Since I was privy to’t, and had the key Of that fair room, where thy bright spirit lay:

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I must affirm, it did as much surpass Most I have known, as the clear sky doth glass.

Within it “sacred thoughts (like bees) did still / . . . stir and strive”. For “No outward tumults reached this inward place, / ‘Twas holy ground: where peace, and love and grace / Kept house. . ..” So Vaughan relocates the “holy ground”, identified in The Mount of Olives with the consecrated building, in that most inward place, the heart; and the poem which began “in the dark” does not circle back to retirement and tears; but ends in the light of “troops of stars, and the bright day’s forlorn” (vanguard of resurrection), looking forward to the Second Coming and joyful reunion: “Some bid their dead good night! But I will say / Good morrow to dear Charles! For it is day.” The poem hallows that space within us, that house not made with hands, that “secret region”, where the spiritual energy is generated by which we and our world can, as in that triumphant acclamation, be transformed. For the heart, like the hermit’s cell and the alchemist’s laboratory is a place of metamorphosis, a workshop of secret, prayerful labouring to purify (God willing) the stuff, material and spiritual, of which we are made. In ‘Jacob’s Pillow, and Pillar’ (R, 295–6), too, “the Temple” sinks from view; and the “meek heart, not in a Mount, nor at / Jerusalem”, becomes “the place” to “serve” God in—“A heart . . . that dread place, that awful cell, / That secret Ark, where the mild Dove doth dwell / When the proud waters rage”. For the hermit’s “cell” (the key word where heart and hermitage meet) is a hive of activity where (as with Walbeoffe) “the immortal restless life / In a most dutiful and pious strife” seeks to serve God. It is, in Nieremberg’s words (recycling St. Basil) “the place of those who struggle valiantly”,49 like the heart that confronts us on the title-page of Silex I, inspired by the Jesuit polymath’s image of “Certaine Divine Raies [that] breake out of the Soul in adversity, like sparks of fire out of the afflicted flint”.50 The emblem’s absence from Silex II five years later was unfortunate but not altogether unfitting. For the full process unfolded there takes us through and beyond the dark struggle with afflictions and uncertainties foregrounded in Silex I, which ended on a note of mourning

49

Quoted in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. cit., 209. M, p. 249. These convergences call to mind also the cult of the Flaming Heart featured on so many Jesuit title-pages and much copied, as Graham Parry observes (op. cit., 122), “by the devotees of ceremonious worship in the earlier decades of the century.” 50

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for his lost brother (in ‘I walked the other day’, R, 240–2) and the petition in ‘Begging (I) (R, 242) that God might “Perfect what thou hast begun” and “reduce a stubborn heart”. What greets us in Silex II, however, is a joyous acclamation, a bright burst of energy as ‘AscensionDay’ and ‘Ascension-Hymn’ launch into an upward trajectory towards the light: I soar and rise Up to the skies, Leaving the world their day, And in my flight, For the true light Go seeking all the way51

And though darkness does not cease to be—and even in ‘Cock-Crowing’ we are reminded of “a dark, Egyptian border” where “The shades of death dwell and disorder” (R, 251, ll. 29–30)—the prospect of light persists and the impetus drives forward to climax in the triumphant apocalypse of ‘L’Envoy’: O the new world’s new, quickening Sun! Ever the same , and never done! The seers of whose sacred light Shall all be dressed in shining white, . . . . . Arise, Arise!

Having sketched “a portion of a saint’s life for himself ” in the ‘Life of Paulinus’, Vaughan completes the process of regeneration and sanctification. Finally configuring himself in the image of primitive holiness,52 he achieves in ‘The Palm-Tree’ (the first Christian hermit, Paul of Thebes had one growing outside his cave in the mountains of the desert) “the patience of the Saints” (R, 254. l. 21). And remorse and mourning are finally transformed by ‘Jesus Weeping (II)’ into A grief so bright ‘Twill make the land of darkness light; And while too many sadly roam, Shall send me (swan-like) singing home. (R, p. 270, ll. 50–3)

51 52

The quotations are from R, p. 242, ll. 3 and 14; and p. 243, ll. 9–14 respectively. Jonathan Post, op. cit., 142.

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Singing Home

Olor Iscanus, Swan of Usk, believed that the closing poems of Silex, composed under the bright shadow of death, would be his swan-song. And, indeed, here are some of his greatest compositions, ‘The Book’ and ‘To the Holy Bible’ among them53—the two texts on which his whole life and everything he wrote had turned. Followed only by ‘L’Envoy’, they clinch Vaughan’s construction of his text as holy space.54 ‘To the Holy Bible’ recapitulates the whole process of his life and regeneration, from childhood when he learned from it to read, through the many moments when it conveyed “A sudden and most searching ray / Into my soul”, till the “mild art of love”, overcoming his stubborn resistance, “brought me home” to hallowed ground, a place of fulfilment, a sacred feast of love: Gladness, and peace, and hope, and love, The secret favours of the Dove, Her quickening kindness, smiles and kisses, Exalted pleasures, crowning blisses, Fruition, union, glory, life Thou didst lead me to, and still all strife (R, p. 311, ll. 27–32)

On the verge of death, he writes with a spring in his step (in cadences that recall his acclamation of the Usk Valley “redeemed” at the close of ‘To the River Isca’), not looking back but forward to what lies beyond the limits of language: “Thy next effects no tongue can tell; / Farewell O book of God! Farewell!” Characteristically simple-seeming and double-edged, it is both parting shot at millenarians and poignant salute to the transformative power of the Holy Bible. But ‘The Book’, too, marks out holy ground, the bedrock of Vaughan’s being in God’s other Book, of Nature. He reads it not (as was routine) as a collection of static emblems but as a process— “that’s best / Which is not fixed, but flies, and flows” (‘Affliction I’, R, 219–20, ll. 25–6.). That dynamic (observed first-hand and confimed

53

Cf. ‘The Agreement’ (R., pp. 296–8), another impassioned tribute to the Bible also written, it seems from ll. 61–66, in anticipation of imminent death. 54 Ibid., 155–6. Post observes that ‘To the Holy Bible’ “consecrates the ground around the place of his [Vaughan’s] approaching death”, turning Silex into “something of a sacred feast.”

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by Behmenist hermetic philosophy) pervades his thinking and infuses his imaginings. For him, nature, the earth, the whole universe was a living organism, a mysterious union of “spirit and matter”, “visibles and invisibles”. “For a preserving spirit still doth pass / Untainted through this mass” (‘Soul’, R, 152–3, ll. 31–2); and God breathes unceasingly through all things. This holistic vision, animating Henry’s interpretation of the founding texts and teachings of Christianity, was not mere theory but rooted in the Breconshire hills and river valley that he walked. It was (as it remains) a deeply-layered, magical landscape that Matthew Herbert, his boyhood tutor, taught him to read, where much of the Matter of Britain, memories of Merlin included,55 was inscribed all around him in the cromlechs and hill forts, the Celtic memorial stones, and Roman roads (six highways converged near Brecon)56 the sacred druid groves, the holy wells and hermit cells,57 the waterfalls, mythic Llangorse Lake, and the river rich in Arthurian associations, running down to Camelot at legionary Caerleon. Hallowed by history and myth, embedded in his psyche, Vaughan’s world was full of presences and voices—not least of the Celtic Saints and their ‘llans’ or churches,58 often sites where the martyrs lay buried. No fewer than seven such places—Llangynidr, Llangattock, Llandetty, Llangorse, Llanfihangel Tal-y-Llyn, Llanfrynach and Llanhamlech— cluster along the Usk within walking distance of Henry Vaughan’s Llansantffraed, the church of Saint Bridget. Little wonder Wales came to be known as the Land of the Saints. Yet of all these sainted dead, though they cannot but have helped shape his sense of the holy and lent an edge of indignation to his “Who saint themselves, they are no saints”,59 there is no explicit recollection in Silex Scintillans. He seeks

55

“Daphnis”, R, p. 387, ll. 59–62. See Revd, J. Jones-Davies, The Kingdom of Brycheiniog in the Age of the Saints with special reference to the Llywell Stone, Brecon and Radnor Eexpress, Brecon, 1956, 4–6. In ‘Vanity of Spirit’ (R, pp. 171–2) Vaughan records finding just such “A piece of much antiquity” (probably the nearby Scethrog Early Christian monument now in the Brecon Museum) “With hieroglyphics quite dismembered, / And broken letters scarce remembered”; and his frustration at not being able to interpret it. 57 Phil Cope, Holy Wells:Wales, Seren, Bridgend, 2008, 137–9 describes and illustrates Maen-Du Well, just north of Brecon, where “the wellhouse’s design seems ancient, resembling that of early Irish Christian monastic cells”. 58 See R. W. D. Fenn, Sanctuaries and Saints. An Essay on the Churches and Saints of Brecon and Radnor, [Brecon and Radnor Express, Brecon], 1964, 12. 59 The last line of ‘St. Mary Magdalen’ (R, p. 275, l. 72). Thomas Richards, op. cit., 167, notes that “Vavasor Powell wanted Parliament to declare ‘the places consecrated 56

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instead to Biblicise (as well as classicise) his valley and its mountains, people them in poetry with patriarchs and prophets and saints from the Testaments, Old and New, Mary Magdalene prominent among them. And in ‘Mount of Olives’ Jesus himself walks the Black Mountains, and the “Sweet, sacred hill! On whose fair brow / My Saviour sate” becomes “his chair”, or “cader” in Welsh—a subliminal pun that relocates Jesus on Gader Fawr, a few miles East of the poet’s home (R, 167–8, ll. 1–2, 32). It is probably the hill too that Vaughan imagines himself heading for when the Saviour (maybe one day soon) will ascend the horizon at dawn: So when that day, and hour shall come In which thy self will be the Sun, Thou’lt finde me dressed and on my way, Watching the break of thy great day. (‘The Dawning’, R. p. 211, ll. 45–8)

‘I walked the other day’ (R, 240–2) is similarly circumstantial, set on home ground, and an epitome of the dynamic relationship between poet, natural world and the Bible. At the turning point of the poem, the botanising poet, reburying the plant he had uncovered, seems to catch himself, in flashback, drawing the bedsheet over his dead brother William’s face: sighing, he whispers the words of Revelation “Happy are the dead!” and reflects “how few believe such doctrine springs / From a poor root”. Similarly in his “sacred wash and cleanser here”, ‘The Water-fall’ (probably Rhyd Goch not far from Llansantffraed), first-hand observation and textual cue (this time Eucherius’ emblematic reading of just such a fall)60 converge in what some see as a Wordsworthian moment: Dear stream! Dear bank, where often I Have sat, and pleased my pensive eye, . . . . . What sublime truths, and wholesome themes Lodge in thy mystical, deep streams! (R, 306–7, ll. 13–14, 27–8)

by the Bishops to have no inherent holiness in them’; and the word ‘Saint’ is very often omitted from the designation of parish churches in the Puritan records of the time.” 60 See in Jonathan Nauman, ‘Alternative Saints: Eucherius and Silex Scintillans’, Scintilla 14, 2010, 132–7.

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‘The Morning Watch’, too (though prompted by a line of George Herbert’s ‘The Holy Scriptures. I’) is a celebration—“with what flowers, / And shoots of glory, my souls breaks and buds!”—from the Book of Nature: In what rings, And hymning circulations the quick world Awakes, and sings; The rising winds, And falling springs, Birds, beasts, all things Adore him in their kinds. Thus all is hurled In sacred hymns, and order, the great chime And symphony of nature. Prayer is The world in tune, A spirit-voice, And vocal joys Whose echo is heaven’s bliss. (R, 179, ll. 9–22)

What outcast worshippers, deprived of ‘Heavenly Doctrine’ and the ceremonies and celebrations of their religion, can no longer receive in church from altar and pulpit, lies all about them: each day at dawn “every field / Full hymns doth yield” (‘The Dawning’, R, p. 210, ll. 15–16). So in ‘Psalm 65’ (R, 300–1, ll. 10–11, 23–6, 37–8, 42) the way to “thy blessed house! / . . . thy holy Temple” is manifested, even for “the most remote, who know not thee”, in the awe-inspiring “great works” and cycles of the natural world. “The outgoings of the Even and Dawn, / In Antiphones sing to thy Name” / . . . / . . . while all unseen / The blade grows up alive and green. / . . . / For thou dost even the deserts bless”, like the desert in ‘The Search’ (R, p. 158, ll. 63–4) “sanctified / To be the refuge of thy bride”, the Church. And at the Psalm’s end all things in the wilderness “shout for joy, and jointly sing” God’s praises (R, 301, ll. 67–8). For Vaughan, in the wrack of man-made desolation, it is repeatedly the herbs (like the ‘Seed Growing Secretly’, R, 276–8)) and the creatures, even the stones, that witness to the truth and look to God. “Some kind herbs here, though low & far, / Watch for, and know their loving star” (‘The Favour’, R, 255, ll. 7–8). “Trees, flowers & herbs; birds beasts & stones / That since man fell, expect with groans / To see the lamb, which all atones”, (‘Palm-Sunday’, R, 266, ll. 11–13). Men may falter, but “My fellow-creatures too say, Come! / And stones, though

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speechless, are not dumb” (‘The Day of Judgement’, R, 299, ll. 15–16). Worldly goods, as civil war had demonstrated, might be plundered, but there is no sequestrating the holiness of nature: Poor birds this doctrine sing, And herbs which on dry hills do spring Or in the howling wilderness Do know thy dewy morning-hours, And watch all night for mists or showers Then drink and praise thy bounteousness. (‘Providence’, R, 271, ll. 25–30)

So the bird “in early hymns doth sing”; “hills and valleys into singing break, / And though poor stones have neither speech nor tongue, / . . . / Yet stones are deep in admiration” (‘The Bird’, R, 261, ll. 8, 14–16). Repeatedly Vaughan measures himself, his human changeability, against their steadfastness. Churches might be closed, ceremonies, offices and sacraments proscribed, but the sacred does not cease to be. ‘The Book’, however (R, 309–10), third poem from the end of the 1655 Silex Scintillans, is where we feel the fusion of place and text, the processes of nature with words on the page, at its most potent. Quintessenially hermetic, its originality is, as Alan Rudrum argues (R, p. 641n), that it does not see nature as a book but in a book—in the paper that once was seed, then grass, then “Made linen”; in the wooden cover that, alive, was a tree; and in the leather covering that was once a living animal, “this harmless beast”. All now dead things; but all, “trees, beasts and men” to be made “new again” in the eventual restitution of everything, which Vaughan—like many Behmenist sectaries, ironically enough,—believed in and draws into the immediate present of this poem. This “aged book”—and some three hundred years on that fits Silex as well as any volume—is made not of abstractions but materials that are, as Diane McColley argues,61 “a kind of sacrifice or sacred making, as is his poem.” It is an epitome, in fact, of the divine making / unmaking / remaking. And the poem itself, in which all stages of that process are simultaneously present, as they are in the Divine Mind—“Thou knew’st, and saw’st them all and though / Now scattered thus, dost know them so” and “shalt restore trees, beasts and men, / When thou shalt make all new again”—becomes a sacrament

61 Diane Kelsey M.Colley, ‘Water, Wood, and Stone: the Living Earth in Poems of Vaughan and Milton’ in Of Paradise and Light, ed. cit., 272–4.

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in which the poet’s transforming imagination, seeing before and after their present state, has already restored all those things to everlasting life.62 So ‘L’Envoy’, concluding Silex, ends in an epiphany: So shall we know in war and peace Thy service to be our sole ease, With prostrate souls adoring thee, Who turned our sad captivity.

Where again (in “shall . . . adoring . . . turned”) past, present and future are fused in an act of worship; a moment of trans-historical imagining, a point of renewal in which the future has already happened, transforming the foreseen into fait accompli. So Henry Vaughan, proto-priest and prophet of the British Church, reaching out from heremetic ‘retirement’ at “Newton by Usk near Sketh-rock, 30 September 1654”, offered Silex Scintillans as a “holy writing”, a new sacred text for the Church in the wilderness. Placing it “under the protection and conduct of her glorious Head: who (if he will vouchsafe to own it and go along with it)63 can make it as useful now in the public, as it hath been to me in private”, he hopes that he might win converts to “devotion and sanctity; and so (punningly) “flourish not with leaf only, but with some fruit also”(R, 142).64 He found himself and his true vocation (something beyond the kind of literary fame he initially hankered after) when he embraced the wilderness and dedicated his “poor talent” to sanctifying the desert that Civil War and the Interregnum made. When his confessional 1655 Preface, that remarkable manifesto of a reformed lyric poetry, drew attention to those closing poems written, as he thought, near death it was not just because a dying man’s last utterances are in some way sacrosanct, nor primarily by way of memento mori, though it is that too. Rather,

62

The one material part of a book not mentioned is the ink. Vaughan’s “Afflictions turn our blood to ink, and we / Commence when writing, our eternity” (‘On Sir Thomas Bodley’s Library’, R, p. 336, l. 21) confirms, however, that for him the writer is (almost literally) bound up in the book and the process of making / unmaking / remaking. Hence the penultimate line, “Give him amongst thy works a place”. 63 That is, literally, that the Holy Ghost should accompany it. 64 Given his connections with the Aubreys and the Stradlings, he may well, when he first published Silex, have had in mind (among others) the ‘underground’ group of sons of leading South Wales families gathered around Francis Mansell, formerly Principal of Jesus College, which moved to Oxford around 1650 to set up their own ‘Welsh Hall’ “in a very religious atmosphere of ‘primitive devotion and solemnity’ with frequent communions” (Philip Jenkins, op. cit., 55).

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it was because, unlike George Herbert, he had been granted a remission from death. That was proof positive, felt literally on his pulse, of God’s power of radical renewal even in extremis. He had been spared to send his ‘Sacred Hymns and Pious Ejaculations’ into the world that they might, as “that blessed Man, Mr George Herbert” ’s Temple had done in more peaceful times, “Hallow the place”.65

65 The phrase is from ‘To the River Isca’ (R, p. 70, l. l6), voicing Vaughan’s abiding belief in the purpose and power of poetry.

PART THREE

SACRED TEXT AND SACRED SPACE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE ABBEY-MEDITATION TRADITION: WORDSWORTH’S SOURCES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Dennis Taylor I

“Tintern Abbey”

For some two hundred years, critics have attempted to explain the originality and power of Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.”1 The poem presents a moment of contemplative stillness in a beautiful natural setting. The speaker is fully immersed in the natural scene and there experiences a moment of being centered, with a sense of something ultimate, which makes the scene a “sacred” place. The sacred scene is both natural and more than natural; the sense of being centered is both a natural “mood” and yet seems in contact with something larger than nature and the self—“A motion and a spirit.”2 Nature acts as an amphitheater and in the middle is the poet seeing into “the life of things.”3 In this and similar poems by Wordsworth, the specific nature of the setting is often an encirclement of landscape, with the poet surrounded by an enclosing mountain range or row of hills or line of tree or simply an horizon. The history of criticism has attempted to explain, or explain away, this experience by emphasizing one rung or other of the naturalspiritual ladder. The genius of Wordsworth is that he keeps the ladder intact. He keeps pointing toward the spiritual but keeps anchoring it in the natural. This complex combination is felt in something as small as the exclamation point (“wreaths of smoke/Sent up, in silence, among the trees!”) that accentuates the intensity of the silence without explaining it, and continues in the varying combinations of natural

1 Quotations, except for The Prelude are taken from Wordsworth, Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols. (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1981). 2 The poet becomes a “living soul”, a quotation from Genesis 2.7 (King James), which itself straddles the supernatural, the living soul created by God, and the natural, the living soul that constitutes the natural human being. 3 On mythic traditions of the omphalos and “sacred places,” see Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (London: Sheed and Ward, 1958).

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and spiritual language (“blessed mood,” “sense sublime”), and the hesitations (“perhaps,” “If this/Be but a vain belief,” “If I were not thus taught”) that keep qualifying and making tentative any assertion of a religious absolute. The result is that readers of all stripes, from the most secular to the most religious, can be accommodated in the poem. To speak simply, one might make Wordsworth’s motion and spirit a purely natural thing, of mood and sensibility. Or we might associate it with the God of religion. Or one might finesse these two extremes, material and supernatural, into a third approach that makes the motion and spirit resonant, suggestive, symbolic, but its spiritual dimension not to be pinned down.4 The purpose of these preliminary remarks is to give background to the question: what are the sources of Wordsworth’s meditation in “Tintern Abbey” that can help explain its power and originality. As I took out my copy of Wordsworth for this essay, a postcard of Tintern Abbey slipped out, from a friend whom I would characterize as secular leaning toward Unitarian. He wrote: “To me there is something peaceful, haunting and mysterious about ruined churches. This setting is beautiful.” In the poem, “Tintern Abbey”5 what does the abbey have to do with the beautiful setting, or the spiritual moment of the speaker? Why does Wordsworth prominently position the abbey in the title of the poem (and nowhere else)?6 “Tintern Abbey” needs to be connected with an important moment of discovery recorded in Wordsworth’s Prelude, namely, his visit to the monastery of Chartreuse during the French Revolution. The monastery surprised Wordsworth with an analogy, an objective correlative, 4 Meyer Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism; Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York Norton, 1971) famously emphasizes Wordsworth’s secularizing of the religious. 5 Wordsworth’s abbreviated title for the poem: see Wordsworth, Fenwick Notes, ed. J. Curtis (London: Duckworth, 1993), p. 15; and passim in Wordsworth’s letters. 6 Peter Brier, in “Reflections on Tintern Abbey,” (Wordsworth Circle 5.1 (Winter, 1974), p. 4) argues that Wordsworth overtly snubbed the abbey to underscore his secularization of the meditative tradition. Marjorie Levinson reemphasized the importance of the obscured abbey, in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), to be followed by Dennis Taylor, “Wordsworth’s Abbey Ruins,” The Fountain Light: Studies in Romanticism and Religion, ed. Robert Barth (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 37–53, and two articles in Religion and the Arts: Henry Weinfield, “ ‘These Beauteous Forms’: ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the Post-Enlightenment Religious Crisis,” 6 (2002), 257–90; James Deboo, “Wordsworth and the Stripping of the Altars,” 8 (2004), 323–43.

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for some of his most important experiences in the Lake Country. He described Chartreuse as a place of “soul-affecting solitude” (Wordsworth’s italics), a “sacred mansion,” a community “which so long/Had bodied forth the ghostliness of things/In silence visible and perpetual calm.”7 The experience of Chartreuse gave Wordsworth a new consciousness about his youthful experience of abbeys and holy sites back in the Lake Country.8 This experience of the abbey was accompanied by his description of the threat that the French Revolution posed to it: “ ‘Stay, stay your sacrilegious hands!’—The voice/Was Nature’s.” The site of the vulnerable Abbey and the destruction facing it gave Wordsworth a whole new understanding of his English setting, where the stripping of the altars9 had long been occluded in ivy-covered ruins. Wordsworth saw enacted in France what had long been visible but grown over and made picturesque in England. His recoil against the French iconoclasm, in the midst of his sympathies for the revolutionary ideals, made him recapitulate in his own experience the complex history of England’s relation to its destroyed abbeys. The experience made him able to recover the buried Catholic past, and link it with his personal experience in the Lake Country. When he returned home, Wordsworth newly imaged the connection of nature and monastic

7 The Prelude, Book 6, 1850 edn, ed. J. C. Maxwell (New York: Penguin 1972), ll. 421, 423, 427–8, 430–1. 8 Kenneth R. Johnston notes: “he was seeing a working monastery for the first time, reawakening his interest in England’s ruined abbeys, such as Furness near Hawkshead” (The Hidden Wordsworth Poet Lover Rebel Spy (New York: Norton 1998), 19). Dorothy Wordsworth commented: “I do not think that any one spot which he visited during his youthful travels with Robert Jones made so great an impression on his mind;” cited in Joseph Kishel, “Wordsworth and the Grande Chartreuse,” Wordsworth Circle 12 (1981), 86. 9 Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400– 1580 (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1996) has become the classic account of the persistence of the Catholic cultural underground in England. Later Wordsworth would write “Old abbeys” in Ecclesiastical Sonnets (3.35): Monastic Domes! following my downward way, Untouched by due regret I marked your fall! . . . Once ye were holy, ye are holy still; Your spirit freely let me drink, and live. Geoffrey Hartman compares in passing Wordsworth’s “numinous sense” of the genius loci with “religious manifestation, such as an image of the Virgin showing up in relatively unknown places,” and adds: “The poet would have rejected such happenings as ‘superstitious fancies’ while accepting them as ‘local romance’;” “he felt haunted by spots in the rural world . . . on which, once upon a time, ancient shrines were built;” see A Scholar’s Tale (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 37, 137.

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solitude in Descriptive Sketches (I am quoting the revised version of 1836) which begins Were there, below, a spot of holy ground, Where from distress a refuge might be found, And solitude prepare the soul for heaven; Sure, nature’s God that spot to man had given Where falls the purple morning far and wide In flakes of light upon the mountain-side, Where with loud voice the power of water shakes The leafy wood, or sleeps in quiet lakes.

And he now described Furness in a new way: that large abbey which within the Vale Of Nightshade, to St Mary’s honour built, Stands yet a mouldering pile with fractured arch, Belfry, and images, and living trees, A holy scene!10

The idea of the monk or hermit meditating within the round of an impressive natural landscape influenced the imagery of “Tintern Abbey,” with its mountain-embracing solitude and its analogy of “some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire/The Hermit sits alone.”11 The spirit that Wordsworth sought was a synthesis of the older Catholic and newer naturalized sacred. The poem transmutes the old images of hermit12 and holy mansion and sacred space into naturalized forms which draw energy from their sources.13 Wordsworth’s poem climaxed an English recovery, since the Reformation, of the abbey as a site of profound religious meditation within a natural setting, where nature participates in a symbiotic way with the meditation. One way of describing the secret of Wordsworth’s extraordinary poetic vitality is that it is a synthesis coming 10

The Prelude, Book 2, 1805 edn, ll. 110–14. Damian Walford Davies, “Hermits, Heroes, and History: Lamb’s ‘Many Friends’,” Charles Lamb Bulletin NS 97 (Jan. 1997), 9–29, discusses the real Celtic hermit, King Tewdrig, associated with the Abbey, whom Wordsworth may have read about in David Williams’ History of Monmouthshire. 12 The OED notes that until 1799 the primary meaning of “hermit” was still religious; the first secularized meaning is recorded in 1799. On the traditional relation of solitary hermit and cenobite monk, see the entry, “Hermit,” in The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, ed. W. Shannon et al. (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 195–7. 13 Elizabethan critics like Stephen Greenblatt and Julia Lupton have suggestively discussed how Shakespeare’s plays, for example, draw energy from the older, though supposedly discarded, Catholic forms. 11

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at the end of a long history of negotiation between Catholic, Protestant, and secular elements in the English experience. For Wordsworth, Roman Catholicism14 continued to have negative connotations, especially political but also because of its connection with punitive asceticism and dark superstition; he was nervous about that aspect of Chartreuse life which stressed “conquest over sense, hourly achieved/ Through faith and meditative reason . . . ,” the note that most troubled Arnold in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse.” Given this English suspicion of monasticism, Wordsworth’s continuous negotiation with Catholicism was remarkable, if so far unremarked. At the end of “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth and his sister constitute a new humanized monastic community as “worshipper[s] of Nature . . . Unwearied in that service . . . with far deeper zeal/Of holier love.” The “sacred mansion” of Chartreuse is transmuted into Dorothy’s hermit-like mind: “thy mind/ Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms.” The argument here is that the old Catholic world of the Abbey though effaced from the body of the poem, exerts an insistent pressure and helps account, by its synthesis with the secular, for the poem’s power and originality. II

Seventeenth-Century Forerunners: Burton, Milton, Marvell

What is the source, then, of Wordsworth’s use of the abbey image as a galvanizing setting for his most profound reflections? A full account would begin with the history of monastic spirituality in general, and English mysticism in particular with its distinctive relationship to solitude and nature, a topic too large to be discussed here. This tradition had gone underground with the Reformation, and been replaced by more strenuous modes of Protestant and Counter-Reformation spirituality, which included Protestant Puritan soul-searching,15 and

14 Anglicanism and its Catholic claims are subjects too large to consider here. Let it be said that the recovery of Catholic dimensions in the abbey meditation tradition was supported by high church elements in the eighteenth century, though “AngloCatholicism,” properly speaking, was a creation of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the recovery of the abbey meditation tradition by Wordsworth, a tradition toward which Protestant poets were stumbling (as we shall trace below), was a prime source of the Oxford Movement. 15 See Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

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Ignatian meditation and its “forcible application.”16 The old mysticism could be still be felt in the softer Salesian style of meditation in Herbert and the diffused Neoplatonic mysticism of Traherne and Vaughan (“There is in God—some say—a deep but dazzling darkness” (“The Night”), the “some” perhaps being the English mystical tradition) and the Cambridge Platonists. But the eighteenth century was notable for establishing English “National Identity” as distinctively Protestant, the distinction being its abhorrence of the older Catholicism.17 Consistently, the abbey was often seen as a site of superstition, its ruins testifying to the downfall of an idolatrous system. Alternatively, the ruined abbey was used as an occasion for reflection on human mortality and the transience of all human works.18 But another more positive interpretation began to develop. Regret for the ruin of the abbeys was at first most prominently expressed in the antiquarians Camden and Stow19 in the sixteenth century (supported by Drayton’s Poly-Olbion), through Weever20 and Dugdale and Dodsworth in the seventeenth century.21 Sir Henry Spelman

16

Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1954, rev. 1962), 14. See Kenneth Kirk, The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum, 2nd edn. (London: Longmans, 1932): “whilst the Protestant tendency was to reduce the idea of prayer to that of petition and intercession only, in Catholicism petition and intercession were always held together in a framework of meditation” that still fell short of contemplation (p. 431). 17 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Also see Raymond Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination . . . 1660–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714–80 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 18 On this theme, see Margaret Aston, “English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973), 231–255. This is the note most poignantly struck in Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Walker, 1966, orig. 1953). As opening exemplar, Macaulay quotes John Cunningham’s later version of “Elegy on a Pile of Ruins” (1766) (pp. v–vi). But see Cunningham’s earlier version discussed below. 19 See Patrick Collinson, “John Stow and Nostalgic Antiquarianism,” in Imagining Early Modern London, ed. J. F. Merritt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 20 John Weever. Ancient Funerall Monuments in . . . Greate Britane and the Islands adiacent, with the dissolved Monasteries therein contained (1631), though typically anxious to acknowledge the royal supremacy, praised the “zealous devotion” of the monks and was “the first broad expression of approval of the medieval Church to appear since the Reformation;” see Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarianism of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 194). 21 Sir William Dugdale and Roger Dodsworth, Monasticon Anglicanum, 1655, vol. 1 (further vols. 1662, 1673), describing medieval architecture, defending monastic life,

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added to the antiquarian regret the theme of sacrilege and violation, associated with strippings of the abbeys and the supposedly bad end that came to those who profited.22 This note was sounded in John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill,” (1642), which early associated the ruined abbey theme with traditions of topographical poetry and eventually “the greater romantic lyric,” for which Denham was a major antecedent.23 Antiquarianism led to various meditative themes for poetry: the mortality of all human monuments, the tragic necessity of historical change, the terrible waste in the destruction of ancient heirlooms, the yearning for old neglected places of spiritual power, even a regret at the loss of a Catholic spiritual culture, often in a kind of schizophrenic tension with the celebration of Protestant enlightenment. So Richard Burton, in An Anatomy of Melancholy (1622), while attacking the evils of monkish celibacy and superstition and all religious melancholy whether caused by papist or puritan religion, confessed: I may not deny but that there is some profitable meditation, contemplation, and kind of solitariness to be embraced, which the Fathers so highly commended, Hierom, Chrysostom, Cyprian, Austin . . . an Heaven on earth, if it be used aright . . . as many of those old Monks used it, to divine contemplations . . . Methinks, therefore, our too zealous innovators were not so well advised, in that general subversion of Abbies and Religious Houses, promiscuously to fling down all. They might have taken away those gross abuses crept in amongst them, rectified such inconveniences, and not so far to have raved and raged against those fair buildings, and everlasting monuments of our forefathers’ devotion, consecrated to pious uses.24

No less important as a seventeenth-century precursor was John Milton, intrigued by the old Catholic spirituality. His “Il Penseroso” (c. 1631), with its praise of “divinest Melancholy,/Whose Saintly visage is too

and regretting the stripping of the altars, to be widely read by Anglicans, royalists, and recusant gentry. 22 Sir Henry Spelman, History of Sacrilege (written ca. 1632, pub. in 1698). See Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); chapter 1, “Abbey ruins, sacrilege narratives and the Gothic imagination,” traces these related themes in later literature. 23 M. H. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Hilles and Bloom (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). Denham was probably read by Wordsworth in 1789 (Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 47). 24 Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Dell and Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor, 1948), 215.

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bright,” along with “retired Leisure” and the “Cherub Contemplation,” where the “studious Cloister’s pale,” and their stained glass windows “Casting a dim religious light” evoke the Gothic structures. Milton’s muse could be a pagan priestess and yet the word25 and setting suggest a Catholic religious: “Come pensive Nun, devout and pure,/Sober, steadfast, and demure,/All in a robe of darkest grain . . . Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes . . . And join with thee calm Peace and Quiet.” The Milton of the later anti-papist Tracts would hardly take this sort of risk nor would he propose to end his life, even in this academic fantasy, with “the peaceful hermitage,/The Hairy Gown and Mossy Cell.”26 In “L’Allegro”, the companion piece to “Il Penseroso”, Milton would consign this monastic melancholy, “born,/in Stygian Cave forlorn/’Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy,” to “some uncouth cell”—reflecting the obverse valuation of the Catholic note as a Gothic horror.27 Thus, Milton projected the long tradition to come, of the attraction and repulsion felt for Catholic hermitic contemplation. Perhaps the most fascinating of these balancing acts was Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” (c. 1652) with the poet anxious to condemn the papist history of the nunnery, but also give it some positive qualities (dedicated to “holy things,” “Here Pleasure Piety doth meet”) that have similarities to Marvell who describes himself “Like some great Prelate of the Grove” taking “Sanctuary in the Wood.” So he draws on notions of Catholic contemplation to celebrate both the new Protestant house (absolved of sacrilege)28 and his own garden

25 The primary meaning of “nun” in the OED is a Catholic religious sister; the secondary meaning of pagan priestess is mainly used in English translations of the classics. Milton is quoted from Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957). 26 “It has been often observed that . . . Milton could not yet have developed his later extreme antipathy to the liturgy and its . . . consecrated . . . building” (A. Woodhouse and D. Bush, eds. A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972, vol. 2, 334). On Milton’s repressed Catholic or ritualistic leanings, see Andrew Hadfield, “Milton and Catholicism” in Milton and Toleration, ed. Achinstein and Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 27 Yet “Allegro” details (“Towers and Battlements it sees/Bosom’d high in tufted Trees . . . Hard by, a Cottage chimney smokes,/From betwixt two aged Oaks”) also influenced Wordsworth. 28 See Patsy Griffin, “ ‘ ’Twas no Religious House till now’: Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ ” (SEL 28 (1988), pp. 61–76) which argues that the poem is “an effort to relieve Fairfax’s fears” of “Divine retaliation for such sacrilege;” also that the “cloister parodies retired life, whereas the wood provides a true retirement” (pp. 62, 71).

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ideal: the result is a kind of Protestantizing, and secularizing, of the older Catholic form. Marvell’s poem contributed to a complex English negotiation on the pluses and minuses of the Protestant take-over of holy sites.29 III

The Abbey-Meditation in the Early Eighteenth Century: Shaftesbury to Collins

So the seventeenth century saw various ways of adapting the old monkish spirituality, in the reluctant indulgence of Burton, the classicalizing of Milton, the Protestantizing of Marvell. What is interesting to observe over the course of the eighteenth century is the slow emergence of another use of the abbey, within the Protestant tradition itself: the abbey as a locus of real spiritual power, however concealed under its ruined papist forms, and as a stimulus to meditative recovery and spiritual breakthrough. It is this developing tradition that becomes the basis for the synthesis of “Tintern Abbey.” It is possible, if somewhat surprising, to say that the story of the eighteenth-century recovery of the hermitic spirituality began with Shaftesbury’s The Moralists in 1709, with its famous “Apostrophe to Nature” which draws on the old Catholic terms, while preaching Deistic nature: “Ye fields and woods, my refuge . . . receive me in your quiet sanctuaries, and favour my retreat and thoughtful solitude . . . To thee this solitude, this place, these rural meditations are sacred.”30 Augustan Enlightenment science helped develop a new attitude toward nature and its vastness, complexity, and independence from medieval allegorizing. Such an impressive natural world served for a new kind of moralizing that attended to the actualities of the natural world,31 presided 29 In 1767 a poem by the antiquary, Dr. William Cowper, Il Penseroso: An Evening’s Contemplation in St. John’s Church-Yard, Chester (London: Longman) (ECCO, Eighteenth Century Collections Online), follows the Denham line deploring Henry’s “rapine foul” but then pulls back at one point and nervously praises the “bounteous” noble family that took over the Vale-Royal-Abbey. 30 Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John Robertson, vol. 2 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 97–8. 31 An important essay is still C. A. Moore’s “The Return to Nature in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century,” PMLA 14.3 (1917), 243–91. “The poet of the eighteenth century . . . was committed to a moralized interpretation of all natural phenomena as parts of a stupendous revelation of God, the beauty of which consists in its complex unity and its nice conformity to the laws of science” (p. 284). Shaftesbury for Moore is the key originator and was influenced by the Cambridge Platonists; “his

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over by the deistic “smiling God” of Thomson (The Seasons, “Spring,” l. 862) and others. The effect was a rejuvenation of the power of nature as a locus of spiritual meditation. We shall see how this cooperated with a revived abbey mysticism. The other shoe, derived from the English mystical tradition, would have to drop before the Wordsworthian synthesis could occur. Pope, coming from inside the Catholic tradition unlike Wordsworth, had, in fact, already combined that tradition with the new Augustan universalism, mixing sacred and secular terms, as in “The Universal Prayer” (1717, pub. 1738): To thee, whose Temple is all Space, Whose Altar, Earth, Sea, Skies, One Chorus let all Being raise! All Nature’s incense rise!32

But Enlightenment nature verse proved too high and dry; it needed some of the enriched complex interiority of the abbey tradition. And always the tradition of the pastoral continued, with its influences from biblical and classical sources, evolving under the Augustan influence into a new realism of natural description but still sometimes evoking echoes of the Golden age and mystical invocations of nature.33 Something of that interiority and mysticism emerges, perhaps for the first time in Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea’s 1713 poem, “Nocturnal Reverie”. She intersperses it with the internal refrain “In such a night,” echoing the Catholic Easter liturgy and celebrating the “solemn quiet” of such a time. Winchilsea describes the “silent musings” that “urge the mind to seek/Something too high for syllables to speak” at a time “When through the gloom more venerable shows/Some ancient fabric, awful in repose.” Wordsworth’s at first sight surprising praise

main purpose is to illustrate in detail the matchless beauty and harmony inherent in all creation . . . ‘’tis impossible,’ he said, ‘that such a divine order should be contemplated without ecstasy and rapture’ . . . Such passages are scattered through his works” (p. 258). Moore traces the Shaftesbury influence through the century, especially in Henry Needler, Thomson and Akenside. 32 Pope quotations are taken from Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 33 Frank Kermode discusses pastoral’s connection with the mystical traditions of John of the Cross, in English Pastoral Poetry, ed. Kermode (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1952), p. 35.

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of Winchilsea34 was caused, I think, by her rich combination of quiet, contemplation, and natural world, with just a hint of an accompanying ruin, whether church or castle. As a Jacobite Catholic, forced into country exile on her estate, Winchilsea embodies the old English mysticism in this new naturalized form. There is, of course, no shortage of extensive surveys exploring and charting the complex evolution of poetry through the eighteenth century. Aubin,35 Fairchild,36 Whelan, Reed and Sickels,37 Røstvig, Andrews, Monk, Havens and Mayo38 have stressed, respectively, topography, sentimentalism, enthusiasm, melancholy, the Horatian ethos, the Picturesque, the Sublime, the “Penseroso” tradition, and the contemporary lyrics and ballads. However the abbey meditation was submerged within their larger themes. And so, overlooking the substantive importance of that abbey ruin tradition, they have left Wordsworth’s accomplishment in ‘Tintern Abbey’ a mystery.39 What follows here is therefore by way of a descriptive and critical inventory, a detailed step-by-step account of that tradition as it unfolded and deepened in the course of the eighteenth century. And it begins with Alexander Pope taking the first overt poetic step in his

34 Wordsworth, Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, in Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. W. J. B. Owen (London: Routledge, 1974), 203. 35 Robert Aubin, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York: Modern Language Association, 1936). 36 Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, vol. 2, Religious Sentimentalism in the Age of Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942) reviews the cult of sentimentalism in a manner that discounts the seriousness of the poetry and its connection with Catholicism. 37 M. Kevin Whelan, Enthusiasm in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century (1700– 1774) (Washington DC: Catholic University of America, 1935); Amy Reed, The Background of Gray’s Elegy: A Study in the Taste for Melancholy Poetry 1700–1751 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924). Reed’s study was continued by Eleanor Sickels, The Gloomy Egoist: Moods and Themes of Melancholy from Gray to Keats (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932). 38 Maria Røstvig, in The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphosis of a Classical Ideal (Oxford, 1954); Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Robert Mayo, “The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads (PMLA 69 (1954), pp. 486–522; Samuel Monk, The Sublime: a Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York, Modern Language Association, 1935); Raymond Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1922). 39 Many of these critics, notably Fairchild, Aubin, and Mayo, seem to regard their material, compiled with weary labor, as second-rate, instead of being an important negotiation of Catholic, Protestant, and secular currents by way of the abbey ruin tradition. But their bibliographies are very helpful.

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1717 Eloise and Abelard, which begins with the topic, “In these deep solitudes and awful cells,/Where heavenly-pensive contemplation dwells, and ever-musing melancholy reigns.” The poem seems to move toward a negative valuation of Gothic immurement (“Lost in a convent’s solitary gloom”). But as the poem proceeds, higher values intrude with the tribute to the ideal nun (“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot . . . eternal day”). Eloisa prefers human to divine passion, but along the way acknowledges what had been her mystic pre-Wordsworthian meditation: The darksome pines that o’er yon rock reclined Wave high, and murmur to the hollow wind, The wand’ring streams that shine between the hills, The grots that echo to the tinkling rills, The dying gales that pant upon the trees, The lakes that quiver to the curling breeze; No more these scenes my meditation aid, Or lull to rest the visionary maid. (ll. 155–62)

It is Eloisa’s discarded vision that the eighteenth century will pursue until it climaxed with Wordsworth’s visionary maids and solitaries, secularized versions of Pope’s nun but drawing on the historic spiritual energy. In 1722 Thomas Parnell, the Scriblerian, published posthumously “The Hermit,” who ventures into the world and at the end of the poem returns gratefully to “A Life so sacred, such serene Repose”: he “sought his antient place,/And pass’d a Life of Piety and Peace.” As the century advances, we will see poets get more deeply into the hermitic experience of “Piety and Peace.” In poems to come, the hermit will often be the sacred guide for wandering heroes, as in Richard Savage’s The Wanderer (1729). In 1727 William Pattison, noted for his Popean Abelard to Eloisa, published a prescient “The Morning Contemplation”:40 “View this reverential Shade!/Sacred to Retirement made! . . . Bles’d in this obscure Abode/I think my self almost a God,” the power of the experience leading to a romantic exaltation (though the “reverential shade” is probably just a grove of trees). Whelan calls Pattison “[one] of the first to celebrate the praises of retirement with all the fervor of an enthusiast” (87). What we see in the eighteenth century, as it leads to

40

Pattison, Poetical Works (London, 1727), pp. 101–8.

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“Tintern Abbey,” is a convergence of multiple themes, Solitude, Meditation, Contemplation, Silence, Retirement, and a softer Melancholy,41 which are energized when put in the context of the ancient Catholic landscape. At the same time, the alternative secular tradition continues, indeed more visibly than the abbey tradition, and celebrates Solitude and Retirement in non-religious philosophic or epicurean ways.42 Many of our poems could appear in discussions of either tradition. Thus in 1729 Thomson’s “Hymn on Solitude” is a remarkable example of converging secularity and religion. Solitude has a “holy piercing eye,” dwells in “the woodland dumb retreat” and a “secret cell,” and is embodied in the “lone philosopher” flying “from vale to vale” and in the shepherd and lover: “Descending angels bless thy train . . . Religion’s beams around thee shine.” Religion here is broad Enlightenment Anglicanism which indulges in metaphors from the Catholic tradition. In 1733, Peter Aram, gardener poet, published “Studley-Park” which sees the Fountains Abbey ruins as a “Stupendous Act of former piety,” “Where Prayers were read, and pious Anthems sung,” but the moral is only the “Mutability of Things.”43 In 1743 Robert Morris, architectural writer in the Palladian tradition, published Saint Leonard’s Hill: or, the Hermitage,44 which is a rewriting of English history from the point of view of the ancient hermit, St. Leonard. “A pious Hermit had enclos’d a Cell,/And chusing Solitude, came there to dwell . . . A Grove of Poplar circumscrib’d it round.” This “Sacred Seat,/Where blissful Peace and Contemplation meet” within a circumambient natural setting, becomes the vantage point from which St. Leonard prophecies the important places to come, Windsor Castle, Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, Pope’s Windsor Forest, Hampton Court, etc. The contemplative hermit is at the center of English history. Even Pope had not been this presumptuous. In 1744 in “The Pleasures of Imagination,” which Wordsworth was reading in the mid-1780s,45 Mark Akenside milked the horror of

41 Amy Reed traces the early positive association of melancholy with solitude, retirement and contemplation, i.e. p. 21 and passim. 42 The competing tradition of secular “Solitude” is discussed by Abbott Martin, “The Love of Solitude in Eighteenth Century Poetry”, South Atlantic Quarterly 29 (1930), pp. 48–59. 43 Cited in Kennedy, “The Ruined Abbey,” p. 507. 44 London: Cooper, 1743 (ECCO). 45 Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, p. 1.

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the Gothic supernatural in a manner that Patricia Spacks has traced through the century;46 he describes “the poisonous charms/Of baleful Superstition” that “leave the wretched pilgrim all forlorn/To muse at last, amid the ghostly gloom/Of graves, and heavy vaults, and cloister’d cells;/To walk with spectres through the midnight shade . . .” Yet Spacks notes that these lines, from the revised version of 1757, invests the experience with a compelling significance and fascination with the “fairy way of writing” (76).47 Abbey meditations gradually fight their way out from under the exotic influences of the Gothic. At the same time, the Gothic revival, in the Gothic novel, and in Gothic aestheticism and theories of architecture, provide a nurturing setting for the increasing importance of abbey meditations. In 1745 (pub. 1747) Thomas Warton the Younger’s “The Pleasures of Melancholy”48 included the setting of a ruined abbey where the lost chants are still heard “Till all my soul is bathed in ecstasies.” The poem celebrates the “hermit-haunted rocks” and “Contemplation sage,/Whose mansion is upon the topmost cliff . . . in secret bower,” and celebrates that side of Pope’s Eloisa who “More secret transport found . . . amid the shrines/Of imaged saints.” Warton’s is typical of the transition from morbid to pleasurable melancholy, though tinged with that new sense of the sacred (“Melancholy, queen of thought/Oh come with saintly look . . .). The important eighteenth-century tradition of Sentimentalism might seem to undermine the seriousness of these meditative moments, in their quality here of self-entertainment and fanciful indulgence (“Where thoughtful Melancholy loves to muse”). Fairchild argues that the “poetry of our period is almost completely out of touch with the mystical tradition” and that its “pre-romantic medievalism . . . implies no more than a desire for emotional stimulation by the strange and the remote.”49 Admittedly, one must make critical judgments about the seriousness with which the mystical tradition is expressed in these abbey meditations. The problem of sentimentalism is connected with the problem of eighteenth-century sensationalism, a Gothic sensationalism about supernatural phenomena indulged

46 Spacks, The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in EighteenthCentury Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). 47 Shell, chapter 2, “Anti-popery and the supernatural,” discusses the connection between “Popery and faery” in these centuries. 48 Wordsworth read Warton’s Poems by 1788 (Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 144). 49 Fairchild, vol. 2, 151, 365.

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in an Enlightenment era of suspicion. Such suspicion made the poetic machinery of supernatural seem pretended, fanciful, conventional, to be indulged for shock effects, or as a concession to tradition or popular culture. Thus the use of such machinery in an abbey poem, like the use of it in a Gothic novel or sensationalist ballad, has the liability of a self-consciousness which will pose a great challenge to the romantics in search of an organic consciousness. But what we see in this history of abbey meditation is an attempt to distill a genuine spirituality out of the ruins of an abused and suspected supernaturalism.50 In 1746 Joseph Warton’s “Ode to Fancy”51 helped establish the tradition of Melancholy52 and Gothicism, already implicit in Milton, as the prime fuel for Fancy: “Let us with silent footsteps go/To charnels and the house of woe . . . to some abbey’s mould’ring tow’rs.” The cult of melancholy only gradually yields to a more religious less Gothicized contemplation. Fairchild asks of Warton: “Gothic architecture is indubitably romantic; but is it holy or superstitious?” (vol. 2. 347). In 1746, William Collins, under the Warton influence, published “Ode to Evening” where the address to the spirit of Evening moves from its pagan (“O nymph reserved”) to its religious and Catholic characteristics: “Then lead, calm vot’ress, where some sheeny lake/ Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallowed pile,” the latter a reference probably to a Gothic religious ruin, as suggested by the lines that were replaced: “Then let me rove some wild and healthy Scene,/Or find some Ruin ‘midst its dreary Dells,/Whose Walls more awful nod/By thy religious Gleams.”53 “We are moving away from the self-conscious act of imagination toward religious celebration, from the art of transcendence to the worship of an immanent Presence.”54

50 Patricia Spacks argues that English skepticism kept poems, that indulged supernatural sensations, second-rate or worse (Spacks, 78); compare Aubin, Fairchild, Mayo above in note 39. In fact, a great negotiation is going on between these currents in eighteenth-century culture. 51 Wordsworth probably read Warton’s Odes on Various Subjects during the 1780’s (Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 144). 52 M. Kevin Whelan surveys this tradition and says: “It is upon the Catholic monastic ideal . . . that the solitude and retirement motif in the poetry of enthusiasm seems largely to be based” (p. 83). 53 Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969). 54 Martin Price, To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1964), 376.

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The Continuing Anti-Papist Tradition

The growing prestige of these themes in Akenside, Collins, and especially the three Wartons seemed at this time to provoke a counterresponse reflecting the century’s drive to define “English National Identity” in militant Protestant terms (see above Colley et al .). In 1746 Dr. Samuel Bowden published “To the Rev. Mr Lionel Seaman, M.A., on his Building a new Vicarage House at Froom, on the Ruins of the old one,”55 a destruction recorded as all to the good, with no Marvellian qualification. Clearly Bowden had found a fellow spirit for he continued in “An Epithalamium Inscrib’d to Lionel Seaman”: Let cynic monks, or bearded hermits dwell, In some lone cloyster, or sequestred cell, Mankind for nobler purposes were made, Not born to live in solitude, and shade.

This anti-monastic tradition continued through the rest of the century. In 1750 Thomas Gibbons, the dissenting minister, published “A Poem on the Rebellion in 1745”56 warning that the Jacobite rebellion may have a dangerous result: Again the Abbeys, half-consum’d by Time, Or levell’d in the Dust, shall lift on high Their tow’ry Heads, and in their lazy Wombs The Monks shall kennel . . .

In 1762, Thomas Denton, Anglican minister and author of Religious Retirement for One Day in every Month; Freed from the peculiarities of the Romish Superstition; and Fitted for the Use of Protestants (London, 1758), published “The House of Superstition”57 where monasticism, that “spends in Lethargy devout the ling’ring Years” is dispelled by Truth. In 1764 William Shenstone’s posthumous “The Ruin’d Abbey: Or, the Effects of Superstition,”58 begun in 1743, depicts the happy wanderer enjoying the solitude at the center of the grove marked by the monastic cell (“Yet here may Wisdom, as she walks the maze,/ Some serious truths collect”), but the wisdom gained is the happy

55 Gentleman’s Magazine 16 (Feb. 1746), p. 100 (BPCO, British Periodicals Collection Online). 56 Gibbons, Juvenalia: Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1750) (ECCO). 57 London: Hinxman, 1762 (ECCO). 58 Shenstone, Works (1773) (EPO, English Poetry Online).

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triumph of the Reformation over superstition. The conclusion praises the Gothic ruin as “Now but of use to grace a rural scene . . . to glad the sons/of George’s reign, reserv’d for fairer times!”59 In 1782, Cowper’s “Truth”60 was more uncompromising in its attack on the Catholic hermit: “Wearing out life in his religious whim,/Till his religious whimsy wears out him . . . You think him humble--God accounts him proud.” (ll. 89–92) In 1767 a poem by the antiquary, Dr. William Cowper, Il Penseroso: An Evening’s Contemplation in St. John’s Church-Yard, Chester,61 followed the Denham line deploring Henry’s “rapine foul” but then pulls back at one point and nervously praises the “bounteous” noble family that took over the Vale-Royal-Abbey. In 1790, Robert Merry, member of the Della Cruscan school attacked by Wordsworth in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, published “Inscription, Written at La Grande Chartreuse,”62 which sounds the Protestant note: “Not is it solitude that leads to God. // He form’d this bounteous Earth our social home . . . The sky’s whole concave is Religion’s dome,” rejecting Catholic solitude in favor of Enlightenment sociality and general nature. Wordsworth himself, in his school years c. 1785, had indulged in this tradition, in “Lines Written as a School Exercise at Hawkshead, Anno Aetatis 14.” The goddess of education speaks: When Superstition left the golden light And fled indignant to the shades of night; When pure Religion reared the peaceful breast . . . And beam’d on Britain’s sons a brighter day. . . . No jarring monks, to gloomy cell confined, With mazy rules perplex the weary mind. . . .

But in spite of this influential resurgence of a mainstream Protestant tradition (influencing the pupil Wordsworth), another tradition, to prove more important for Wordsworth, continued to develop, namely the transformation of the abbey from a site of ruined superstition to a

59 Some other examples of these, like Percival Stockdale’s “The Poet” (c. 1773) (“What boots, alas!, a stupid Roman spell . . . the moss-grown cell?”) are given by Fairchild, vol. 2, 213. 60 Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, 3rd edn. (London: Oxford University Press, 1926). 61 London: Longman, 1767 (ECCO, Eighteenth Century Collections Online). 62 Universal Magazine, vol. 86, 330–31.

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site of a newly invigorated Catholic religious contemplation.63 To that thread we now return. V

The Abbey-Meditation in the Late Eighteenth Century: Hamilton to Whitehouse

In 1747 William Hamilton, a Jacobite, published “Contemplation: Or, The Triumph of Love”64 which begins with a telling distillation of hermitic power into the subjective and naturalized: No longer Contemplation dwell, Blest Eremite, in thy lonely Cell; But come to me, slow pacing Maid, And lean thee in the silken Shade.

In 1748 Thomas Warton the Elder published posthumously “Retirement: An Ode” which celebrates “Contemplation, maid divine . . . retired queen,/By saints alone and hermits seen.” The speaker seeks the “joy” of such contemplation in “sunny field or mossy cell,” signaling the rich ambiguity of “cell,” as simply a natural cave or a hermit’s retreat. In the same year, Warton published “Verses on Henry the Eighth’s Seizing the Abbey-Lands, and on Queen Anne’s Augmentation of Livings,”65 which is an extended lament on the theme of “Royal Sacrilege” and how the ghosts still hover over the ruins and terrify the peasants; the poem ends with Anglican illogic in praising Queen Anne for supporting her Protestant clergy (at least she was better than Henry). The capacity of the ruins to evoke Gothic ghosts or saintly ghosts— illustrates the dark and light forms of the notion that somehow the real supernatural was once contained in the ruins. The complexity of Warton’s ghost vision will be later simplified by William Sotheby, friend of Wordsworth and others, in his 1790 “Netley Abbey, Midnight”66

63 This argument is also made by an article, just discovered, Deborah Kennedy’s “The Ruined Abbey in the Eighteenth Century” (Philological Quarterly, Fall, 2001) that focuses on prose, art, and general history as well as poetry. The subject is so rich that Kennedy’s article can be read with profit, with little duplication of what is presented here. Also see Kennedy, “Wordsworth, Turner, and the Power of Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth Circle 33 (2002), 79–84. 64 Edinburgh: Hamilton and Balfour, 1747 (ECCO). 65 Warton, Poems on Several Occasions (1748) (EPO). 66 Sotheby, Poems (1790) (EPO).

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where the poet remembers seeing “gleaming far the visionary crowd/ Down the deep vaulted aisle in long procession float.” In 1752, the Gentleman’s Magazine published two poems together “on the same subject,” as though the originality of the topic and the difference of treatment was remarkable. Both poems, “The Pleasures of Solitude” by I. I., and “Solitude” by “Fantom,”67 argued the positive value of hermitic retreat: “See the bald hermit, studious in the wild,/ Disdain the tinsel vanities of life” (Fantom) etc. In c. 1755, John Langhorne, noted Plutarch translator, published “Studley Park”68 where the narrator comes upon a chapel “by deep’ning Woods embrac’d,” and experiences a strange “awful Pleasure” at the “sacred Solitude, the lone Recess”: “Raptures Divine thro’ all my Bosom glow,/The Bliss alone immortal Beings know.”69 In 1758, “An Evening-Walk in the Abbey-church of Holyroodhouse” (Anon.)70 mourns the abbey subject to “defoliating Time” and neglect which is the modern form of desecration, but finds it a place for “sacred, solemn meditation.” In 1761, John Cunningham, Irish-born and a benevolist in the Shaftesbury tradition, empathizes unself-consciously with the abbey tradition in An Elegy on a Pile of Ruins:71 Many rapt hours might Meditation pass, Slow moving ‘twixt the pillars of the pile! And Piety, with mystic-meaning beads, Bowing to saints on every side inurn’d, Trod oft the solitary path, that leads Where, now, the sacred altar lies o’erturned.

The poem illustrates that refreshing characteristic of this first historiographical century to render without judgment the religious custom of the past as its passing is mourned—with sometimes vivid punning

67

Gentleman’s Magazine 22 (Sept 1752), 428 (BPCO). Langhorne, Poems on Several Occasions (Lincoln, c. 1760) (ECCO). Wordsworth read Langhorne’s Poetical Works by 1787 (Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 83). 69 Langhorne is cited by Whelan to represent her view that “Catholic monasticism was particularly hateful to the eighteenth century mind. It was believed to be the last and worst stage of religious melancholy” (Whelan p. 83). But the story as we shall see, and have seen even with Burton and now with Langhorne, is much more complicated than this. 70 Scots Magazine 20 (Aug., 1758), 420 (BPCO). 71 London: Payne and Cropley (1761) (ECCO). 68

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language, “many a cherub, here, descends in dust/From the rent roof, and portico sublime.” In 1762, Elizabeth Keene published “Fragment,”72 on Solitude: “’Tis dreadful! ‘tis superb! this sacred spot . . . beneath that wall,/Which mould’ring threatens ruin on my head” and where the ghost arises to “wail his woes with mine,” the Gothic, the Melancholy, the Enthusiastic nicely compact. This poem, like a few others, expresses the concern, a bit comical, that an abbey brick will dislodge from the ruin and hit the pilgrim on the head. On occasion, this danger evokes the curse discussed by Spelman. In 1762, Edward Jerningham, fellow traveller with the Della Cruscans, published the first of various poems on cloistered life. His “The Nunnery: An Elegy. In Imitation of the Elegy in a Church-Yard”73 praises “gentle Daughters of Devotion” but with increasing nervousness about their pious immurement, reflecting the Thomas Gray image prophetic of Wordsworth: “Full many a Riv’let steals its gentle Way/ Unheard, untasted, by the thirsty Swain.” But subsequent poems by Jerningham turned with the fury of a rejected lover on the monastic prisonhouse.74 1764 saw the publication of the anonymous “On the Ruins of Godstow Nunnery,”75 a tribute to a beautiful nun, buried in this “prison of the cloister’d fair,” but does not sound the Gothic dungeon note, and respects her high choice “Which well might awe the serious pious mind.” The poem concludes “Weep, stranger, as thou passeth, weep its fall,/And strew a flow’r on Rosamonda’s tomb,” a complicated act of melancholy, with the Protestant critique suppressed. Here the convent nun becomes a romantic heroine by virtue of her vocation. In the same year, an anonymous “Invocation. Written under the Ruins of an Old Abbey” appeared, a prayer to the old “sacred shades” from “this hallow’d ground”: 72

Keene, Miscellaneous Poems (London, 1762) (ECCO). London: Dodsley, 1762. 74 In 1764, Jerningham’s “The Nun: An Elegy” (London: Dodsley, 1764) mourned the waste of maidens fooled by “the Legends of Monastic Bliss.” In 1765, “An Elegy Written Among the Ruins of an Abbey” (London: Dodsley, 1765) Jerningham attacked the monkish world lured by the sound of “Veil’d Superstition” until finally “Truth at length dissolv’d the mental Chain.” In 1771, “The Funeral of Arabert, monk of La Trappe” (London: Robson, 1771) described the agony of the monk’s former lover, Leonora. In 1792, his “Abelard to Eloisa” (London: Robson, 1792) will make up the balance of Pope’s account, with an anguished portrayal of Abelard. By the 1790s, Jermingham, from an old Catholic family, had converted to Anglicanism. 75 London Magazine 33 (May 1764), p. 652 (BPCO). 73

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To guard this place from ev’ry noxious ill, To guide your vot’ries thro’ life’s darksome road, And point the way to Virtue and to God.76

On occasion, anonymous authorship may have been a screen for Catholic writers not wishing to be so identified. In 1765, the anonymous author of The Ruins of Netley Abby77 mourned the abbey, “The hallow’d habitation of thy saints,” destroyed by avarice and “sacrilegious rage,” where nevertheless “the man with contemplation pleas’d” can pilgrim through the “venerable scene” where a meteor’s light might cast “a glare amidst the foliage wild,/ That spread romantic o’er the abby walls,” a green transformation to be followed by Wordsworth. The author ponders the lesson of mortality which leads him to pursue anew “sacred piety, celestial truth” and “adore/With strict obedience thy divine decrees,” presumably Anglican or generally Christian decrees, inspired by the rich but ambiguous example of the ruined abbey. In 1769, George Keate, noted friend of Voltaire and author of Ancient and Modern Rome (1760) that celebrated Roman art while condemning Catholic superstition, published Netley Abbey. An Elegy,78 which summarizes many of our themes: . . . Where frowns the dreadful Sanctuary now? No more Religion’s awful Flame aspires! No more th’Asylum guards the fated Brow! No more shall Charity, with sparkling Eyes And Smiles of Welcome, wide unfold the Door … No other Sounds, amid these Arches heard, The death-like Silence of their Gloom molest, Save, the shrill Plaints of some unsocial Bird, That seeks the House of Solitude to rest . . . Here too . . . Some rude Dismantler of this Abbey sleeps . . . Scenes such as these, with salutary Change, O’er flatt’ring Life their Melancholy cast; Teach the free Thoughts on Wings of Air to range, O’erlook the present, and recall the past!— Here pious Beadsmen, from the world retir’d, In blissful visions wing’d their souls to Heav’n;

76 77 78

Gentleman’s Magazine 34 (Feb. 1764), 92 (BPCO). Anon., The Ruins of Netley Abby (sic) (London, 1765) (ECCO). London: Dodsley, 1769 (ECCO).

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“[T]he embody’d Shades appear”: Silent they pass, then fading like a Dream, To seek their lone unhonor’d Graves return, Yet fleeting they bequeath a Sigh, and seem With me these violated Groves to mourn.—

The poem concludes by encouraging beautiful women, in no danger of being immured, to remember the lesson of mortality taught here so that they might pursue Reason and Sense.79 In 1769, coincident with Keate’s definitive formulation, a work by a major author appeared, Chatterton’s “Elegy”: The darksome ruins of some sacred cell, Where erst the sons of Superstition trod, Tott’ring upon the mossy meadow, tell We better know, but less adore our God.80

Chatterton, Wordsworth’s “marvellous Boy,” is a heavyweight among many of these poets. His Rowley poems (1767–70), too important to be discussed here, were a major rendition of the medieval Catholic world, along with Warton’s History of English Poetry, Bishop Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Percy’s Reliques, Collins’s Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland (these last two read by Wordsworth in the 1780’s).81 In 1771, James Beattie’s The Minstrel82 repeated the melancholy and abbey theme, but moved them closer to a less Gothic “power”: “Solitude, mild, modest power!/Leans on her ivy’d shrine.” “And Contemplation soars on seraph wings.” The minstrel, Edwin, is instructed by a hermit, and “Enraptur’d by the hermit’s strain.” In 1775, “A. B.” published “An Elegiac Poem on the Magnificent Ruins of the Abbey at Aberbrothock”83 that follows the pattern of 79 Keate resolves the ambivalence of his earlier version, “The Ruins of Netley Abbey: A Poem” (London, Dodsley, 1764) (the one cited by Aubin, and often reprinted); for example, “zealous Bigot” here is changed to the later “wond’ring Zealot.” 80 Chatterton, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (London 1778) (ECCO). 81 Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 34, 110. 82 Beattie, Poems on Several Occasions (Edinburgh, 1776) (ECCO). Wordsworth read Beattie’s poems in the mid-1780’s (Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 11). 83 Scots Magazine, vol. 37, pp. 101–2, possibly by Maurice Morgann who used the pseudonym, “A. B.”.

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empathetic response (“The consecrated altar stood sublime,/With imag’d gods, and busts of saints, adorn’d,/Before whose shrine the penants prostrate mourn’d”) and Protestant recoil (“And carv’d seraphs in rich clusters smil’d,/Whose artful shades the ignorant beguil’d”), moves into a Thomas Gray meditative experience (“There Contemplation’s sons delight to stroll . . . We hear at ev’ning’s glimm’ring twilight hour,/The screech-owl plaining from her lonely bow’r . . .”) and ends with rage at the Protestant “bigots” for their “blinded zeal . . . To raze ere time these fairest forms of art.” In 1775 appeared Anon., An Elegy Written at a Carthusian Monastery in the Austrian Netherlands,84 which engagingly expresses Protestant puzzlement: Can Error reign in these calm Seats of Peace? Here, doth not Wisdom make her blest Abode? . . . Here, the rapt Soul have Converse with her God?

But the balance of the poem attacks this “sullen Solitude” in favor of life and action, though in the end conceding wearily: “Haply some antient Virtues linger here.” In 1776 Beattie’s “The Hermit,” the visionary (“Beauty Immortal awakes from the tomb”) is far from an escapist, but is the most deeply humanized of men: “He thought as a Sage, while he felt as a Man,” prophetic of Wordsworth’s religiously tinged humanism. In 1776, Richard Cumberland, remembered as a playwright, paid tribute to the Lake Country in “Ode 1. To the Sun,”85 and included the holy sites and the disciples of St. Bruno: Such solemn soul-inviting shades, Ghostly dells, religious glades . . . Where Penitence may plant its meek abode, And hermit Meditation meet its God.

Here also were the heights enshrined Bruno trod, When on the cliff he hung his tow’ring cell, Amongst the clouds aspired to dwell, And half ascended to his God.

84 85

2nd edn., London: Folingsby, 1777 (ECCO). Cumberland, Odes (London, 1776) (ECCO).

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Such is the re-seen Lake Country that Wordsworth experienced on his return from Chartreuse. In 1777, Thomas Warton the younger published “Ode . . . Written at Vale-Royal Abbey in Cheshire”86 which shows a typical schizophrenia; on the one hand the ruined abbey suggests the overthrow of monkish sloth and superstition by “freed Religion;” on the other hand the poet in spite of himself pays tribute: Thus sings the Muse, all pensive and alone; Nor scorns, within the deep fane’s inmost cell, To pluck the grey moss from the mantled stone, Some holy founder’s mouldering name to spell.

But the point of this spelling is not very clear. Earlier in the poem Warton celebrates the monkish world of hospitality, learning, art, and poetry, and yet complains “Superstition blind . . . to cheat the tranced mind,/Oft bade her visionary gleams arise.” Yet again the loss of these visionary trances is regretted by the modern imagination that is left “all pensive and alone.”87 In 1780, the year when the Gordon Riots reminded England that anti-papism was alive and well, the anonymous “The Ruins of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury”88 acknowledged that “Pride rul’d the church, and luxury the state,” thus leading to the ruin of the abbeys. But the balance of the poem celebrates the spiritual devotion of the monks, and ends: “O’er their remains then, stranger, gently tread/And think that here rests many a holy head.” In 1781, Thomas Penrose, widely anthologized, published posthumously “The Hermit’s Vision,”89 about a model contemplative who surveys all the passions of mankind and prays for philosophic reason. In 1782 John Scott, author of the noted Elegies Descriptive and Moral (1760), published “Ode XVI. Viewing the Ruins of An Abbey”90

86

Warton, Poems, new edn. (London, 1777) (ECCO). Warton came increasingly to recant his lifelong medievalism, as in “Verses on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Painted Window at New College, Oxford” (1782): Reynolds’s classicalist truth “broke the Gothic chain” and Warton’s addiction to “the phantoms of my fairy dream.” But the poem’s last lines still suggest a synthesis, praising Reynolds’s power “To add new lustre to religious light . . . to reconcile/The willing Graces to the Gothic pile.” 88 Gentleman’s Magazine 50 (May, 1780), 241–2 (BPCO). 89 Penrose, Poems (London, 1781), 70–76 (ECCO). 90 Scott, Poetical Works (London, 1782) (ECCO). Wordsworth read Scott’s Moral Eclogues by 1788 (Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 122). 87

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which deplores the waste of life in monasticism but reveals an attempt to disinter good monkish spirituality from its defects: Their motive still our praise must claim, Their constancy our thought reveres: And sure their solitary scheme Must check each passion’s wild extreme, And save them cares, and save them fears.

The poem ends with a now common query, “Would this kind calm atone . . .?”, i.e. for the loss of fame and family. 1784 saw the publication of the anonymous “Verses written amidst the Ruins of Broomholm Priory in Norfolk, by a Lady.”91 Fancy “feels the brooding Genius of the pile,” and would “snatch from ruffian time/The hoary fragment of a monkish rhyme,” but quickly even this barely critical note is dropped as Fancy’s “magic spell” concludes the poem with a full scale evocation: Still the damp shrines a grateful awe inspire, Pale burn the lamps, and rapt th’attentive choir, Still the loud organ’s peal I seem to hear, That wakes the slumb’ring soul, and fills the ravish’d ear.

The pre-romantic imagination in this poem and others becomes identified with the recreation of the old monkish world. In 1786, Mary Hunt published “Written on Visiting the Ruins of Dunkeswell-Abbey in Devonshire,”92 with an interesting thesis that combines the dark and light views of the monk’s spirituality: Blest be the power, by heaven’s own flame inspir’d, That first through shades monastic pour’d the light; Where, with unsocial indolence retir’d, Fell Superstition reign’d in tenfold night . . .

But from this tenfold night, as from something deep buried and preserved, comes for us the freed spirit of “intellectual light,” thus making the monks a conduit for that “sacred source of sweet celestial peace/ From age to age in darksome cells confin’d.”

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Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 55 (June, 1784), 455. In Poems Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall ed. Richard Polwhele (Bath, 1792) (1.134–6) (ECCO); earlier in European Magazine 10 (1786), 384–85. Wordsworth probably read this issue in 1786–7 (Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 54). 92

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In 1787 John Whitehouse’s “Elegy Written near the Ruins of a Nunnery”93 invokes Melancholy and poor Eloisa: “Amid these mossgrown piles/Reflection loves to wake, and shed a tear/O’er human weakness.” The weakness is that of noble minds “By superstition cramped,” but the compassion seems to be for something larger. The nun is also compared to some “fair flow’r that on the wild heath blows,” and the place made a goal of “Calm Contemplation” enwrapping the modern person, “as when the rising moon/O’er the smooth lake reflects her silver beam,” all Wordsworthian notes to come. The convent solitude is transformed into an inner psychic solitude that protects the Protestant in the active world. VI

The Decade of “Tintern Abbey”: “The Hermit’s Address” to Dallas

In 1788, the anonymous “The Hermit’s Address”94 delivers simply the now widely accepted message: Stop, stranger, here awhile! and view The Hermit’s peaceful cell; Like him, Religion’s path pursue; Like him, contented dwell.

In 1789, in Thomas Dawson Lawrence’s “The Hermit of Lansdown,”95 the hermit is another master contemplative, an image of wisdom, addressing “Dear Contemplation . . . Thou guide of all my solitary hours.” In the same year, William Jackson, colleague of Gainsborough, published “Stanzas . . . written amongst the Ruins of St. Austin’s Monastery in Canterbury, Part of whose Site is Converted into a FivesCourt, a Cock-pit, and a Bowling Green.”96 A regret for this modern stripping of the altars is interesting in the way it imagines how “copeclad priests with chant divine/The sacred host upraise” and celebrates this imagining as a “Fairy spell”: “Companion of my pensive way,/The Fairy Fancy roves.” Fancy is compact with these Catholic images and both are threatened by industry.

93

Whitehouse, Poems (London, 1787) (ECCO). Gentleman’s Magazine 58.1 (Jan. 1788), 64. 95 Lawrence, Miscellaneous Works (Dublin, 1789) (ECCO). 96 Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 66 (Oct. 1789), 936 (BPCO). Wordsworth probably read this issue in 1789–90 (Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 62). 94

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In 1790, William Sotheby published “Netley Abbey. Midnight”97 which enforced the association of remembered past, imaginative fancy, and the lost monastic music; the speaker reclines on a mossy stone and is “to a visionary world resigned;” he remembers that he once heard “the chaunted vesper’s peaceful note,” but now says “Farewell, delightful dreams, that charm’d my youth.” In 1792 Richard Polwhele, prolific writer and Anglican curate, emphasized in “Mona: An Ode,”98 an English alternative to the French stripping of the altars then taking place: “the Enthusiast loves to dwell,/ Lost in the romantic dell;/Tracing temples, abbey-walls . . .” In 1793 Joseph Jefferson published The Ruins of a Temple99 (i.e HolyGhost Chapel, Basingstoke) which sounds the old note of the frailty of man’s works, but nicely captures the range of our history: “A learned Camden’s pages still rehearse/How fair and graceful once the beauteous Temple stood.” “Superstition” and all its works fell, but “Pardon the verse that wishes all were blest,/Whom priests and human absolutions have forgiv’n.” In 1793, William Eusebius Andrews, in “Glastonbury Abbey. An Elegy,”100 conducts a long lament (“No Relic now o’erpays the Pilgrim’s toil,/And cheers his footsteps to a distant home!”) and poses the increasingly important query: Say, gentle Muse, where deigneth now to rove Humane Religion?—ah! where to dwell? Thro’ what ambrosial bow’r, or what fragrant grove? In what Fane splendid, or what peacefraught Cell?

We keep waiting for the Protestant shoe to drop but it does not (Andrews was an important Catholic publisher), and the poem ends in simple lament about “these violated Groves.” The query is one for Wordsworth to answer. In 1794, William Mickle, translator of The Luciad, published “Pollio: An Ode,”101 in which the speaker bereft of his friend frequents 97 Poems (Bath), 73–77. The poem was memorized by Coleridge (Collected Letters, ed. E. Griggs, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 853). 98 In Poems, Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall (Bath, 1792) (ECCO). 99 London: T. North, 1793 (ECCO). 100 Andrews, Poetical Works, vol. 1 (Southampton) (ECCO). Aubin notes an earlier publication in 1791 in the West Country Magazine, vol. 5 (1791). 101 Mickle, Poems, and a Tragedy (London: 1794) (ECCO), published posthumously. Wordsworth probably read Mickle’s Sir Martyn in 1795 (Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, p. 98).

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the solemn scene of “the Abbey’s shatter’d Walls,” compares doing so to the ancient practice of “holy Seers” experiencing vision in the wilderness “Where rising Extasies their Bosoms fir’d,” and imagines the glorious Morn as a sign of resurrection. Mickle reminds us that the abbey meditation experience is connected to the tradition of biblical prophecy and its association with desert and solitude, and that there is continuity between Wordsworth’s pastoral and apocalyptic visions, rooted in the old religious texts. In 1795, Robert Lovell, friend of Southey and Coleridge, attacked, in “Elegy. The Decayed Monastery,”102 the selfish piety of the monastery dispelled by Protestant activism: “Does man exist to bless himself alone?” The poem reminds us that the attacks by the McGann school on escapist transcendentalism had good Protestant roots. But the poem contains in passing an interesting point, that a legitimate solitude might still be excavated, in Wordsworthian style, from the decay: This sacred pile, for solitude design’d, To pious age might form a still retreat; But bigot zeal here rankled in the mind, And superstition fix’d her baneful seat.

In 1795, the anonymous Gothic novel, Phantoms of the Cloister; or, the Mysterious Manuscript (London: Lane) includes some verses with an interesting twist on our theme: Around Religion’s shrine are charms displayed, Which oft to Cloister’d votaries are unknown; The virtues meek, in milk-white robes array’d, Shed a mild lustre round the brilliant throne. Hope plumes her wing,—Faith points the distant road, And Charity directs the soul to God. (1.55)

(Elsewhere the novel attacks “monkish superstition” 2.12). In the poem, the Protestant onlooker discovers a spirituality in the ruined cloisters that is unknown to its original occupants. In 1796, in Peter Courtier’s “The Pleasures of Solitude,”103 the sublimity of solitude is most found in a setting of ruined spires where “Superstition might erect a throne,” as though Superstition and the

102 103

Lovell and Robert Southey, Poems (Bath: 1795) (ECCO). Courtier, Poems (London, 1796) (ECCO).

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modern solitary are drawn there for parallel reasons. Though the main lesson is mortality, nevertheless “From Solitude’s retreats mankind have gain’d/Invaluable pearls.” In 1796, Edward Gardner published “Sonnet Written in Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire”104 which evokes “This hallow’d floor by holy footsteps trod” and insists: “The soul’s improvement from these walls may flow,” implying more than the overt lesson of mortality preached here. We are on the verge here, in Gardner’s “enraptured sight,” of a more mystical spirituality gleaned from the ruins. Notably, Gardner’s poem, probably because of its title, is a rare example of the rich abbey-meditation tradition to be included in The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse.105 In 1797, Robert Charles Dallas, noted friend of Byron, published “Kirkstall Abbey,”106 which is innocent of religious history but begins with an interesting preface: “The picturesque scene of a venerable ruin, a winding river, with a distant bridge, woods in full foliage, the verdure of the neighbouring fields, a village terminating the valley, and the whole heightened by the delightful calm of the evening, gave me a sensation of religious complacence and comfort, that may be felt, but cannot be described” (3). Underneath this convention of Sensibility is, nevertheless, a significant query: what is the nature of this indescribable “comfort” and how is the ruin its source? Dallas’s use of the word “picturesque” reminds us of the way in which the picturesque tradition softened and tamed the abbey-ruin scene, making such abbeys an indigenous part of the English landscape and effacing recollection of the sacrilege of their destruction.107 (Thus the abbey ruins could easily be considered “Anglican,” and their Catholic provenance forgotten.)108 104

European Magazine 30 (Aug. 1796), 119 (BPCO). The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 106 Dallas, Miscellaneous Writings (London: 1797), 3–15 (ECCO). 107 “The trouble is that the Picturesque enterprise in its later stages, with its almost exclusive emphasis on visual appreciation, entailed a suppression of the spectator’s moral response to those very subjects which it could least hope to divest of moral significance—the ruin, the hovel and rural poverty” (Malcolm Andrews, Search for the Picturesque, 19). On the relation of the picturesque ruins to English nationalism, see Anne F. Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1990). 108 Wordsworth’s Anglicanism, associated with his English patriotism, represents another side of his sensibility. One might contrast, in Wordsworth’s poetry, the naturalized piety of the Anglican church nestled in the glen, with the harsher dimensions of Catholicism embodied in the ruined abbeys. The national English Cathedral, 105

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At the same time, the “picturesque” was part of an eighteenth-century movement to see the abbey ruins in a detached way, separated from the old religious agendas, and thus made possible a fresh recovery of their historical reality.109 VII

Conclusion

We have arrived at the doorstep of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” published in 1798. The series of abbey meditations leading up to Wordsworth give us a crucial context for this poem. One interesting thing about Wordsworth, and his extraordinary vitality, is that he presumed to experience these themes ab ovo, on his own, in the nakedness of his own experience in the Lake Country. In his early life in the Lake Country, he did not have a name for these experiences, nor did he understand the sources of the extraordinary exaltation that he felt: was the source Nature? The Egotistical Sublime? The artist’s creativity? Something objective, or subjective? Yet, famously, Wordsworth cannot be reduced to any of these things. Another source might be “God,” but the orthodox language of Anglicanism offered him nothing at first. Thus he came at the Chartreuse experience with a startling freshness, the Catholic thing having been held uncontaminated behind the screen constructed by eighteenth-century Protestantism. For Wordsworth, the abbey locus was like a secret cave, a magic cavern, an old faeryland, to be made current now in his everyday experience. The hints given him by the tradition of abbey meditation were very important. But Wordsworth’s transformation of those hints into the language of everyday is remarkable. The abbey meditation tradition does not completely explain the extraordinary quality that the poem achieves (for this we need all the tools of criticism), but suggests some dimensions that need to be taken into account. Wordsworth’s achievement is, among other things, to prune the abbey meditation tradition of its dross, its artificial

once Catholic, is disputed territory that Wordsworth tries to sort out in Ecclesiastical Sonnets. 109 Too extensive to consider here is the important way in which the abbeymeditation theme influenced prose travel writers like William Gilpin, William Beckford, James Clarke, and Richard Warner who were read by Wordsworth.

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conventions, and its dead ends. The overtly Roman Catholic elements, whether as setting or as object of attack, are pruned (except for “Tintern Abbey” in the title, and the “hermit” in the poem.) The abbey itself is occluded in the poem and replaced by a lay meditation, which is nevertheless kept tied by the title to the abbey tradition. There is no sense in Wordsworth that the abbey meditative experience is an exotic experience, or sentimental, or sensationalist, or something extra and outside real life, or dependent on exile or imprisonment. Wordsworth’s experience is preeminently ordinary, something to be found in the everyday, and seen in full daylight. The moldering of the abbey ruins, reunited with Nature, is dimly felt in the wilderness feeling of the opening lines, the foliage out of control, the gardens overrun, the woods “houseless.” Wordsworth’s imagination is not something sportively promoted as Fancy dancing in the ruins; it is hard to distinguish from seeing the present scene and from remembering. The sense of sacrilege in the stripping of the abbeys, and the historical commotion associated with it, are entirely subdued, so much so that we might say that Wordsworth is indulging in the occlusion of the picturesque. But here sacrilege, felt if at all as a buried trauma of an ancient time, is distilled into Wordsworth’s subjective sense of his proneness to disbelieve and disregard, or more harshly into “the sneers of selfish men.” Wordsworth seems to answer the question posed at intervals in the eighteenth century: how can a Protestant nation recover the vision and spirituality associated with the abbey tradition? The thematic rhythm of the poem builds its variations in accord with the abbey meditation tradition. “Again” is repeated and not only signals a return to an old landscape but to an old tradition recaptured at the end of the eighteenth century. Subtly, the lost personal past of the speaker lines up with the lost Catholic past of Tintern Abbey. The experience of the landscape setting leads into an image of the solitary spiritual power of the hermit. The experience is claimed as a continuing resource (“oft, in lonely rooms”) in both Horatian and abbey meditation style, which recovered leads again to that sense of spiritual power, in seeing into “the life of things.” The experience is then turned into a faith that can be perpetually retrieved—and this recovery leads to the mind’s reviving “again.” The acknowledgment then of a changed and matured consciousness leads to insight into human mortality, “The still, sad

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music of humanity,” as in the abbey tradition, and again into a recovery of hermitic power within the natural world of “the meadows and the woods,/And mountains.”110 The solitary vision of the poet is then complimented by the vision of a “holy maid,” as in Hamilton, Warton, and others; and the maid, Dorothy, is associated with “quietness and beauty” and the power of her “solitary walk,” a vision which finally leads into the last recovery of the old power, in the “far deeper zeal/ Of holier love.” Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” constitutes a great poetic moment because it brings together the different aspects of the abbey meditative tradition. It is a climactic negotiation of Catholic, Protestant, and secular currents that had competed and cooperated throughout the eighteenth century.

110

The Abbey tradition clarifies Wordsworth as “A worshipper of Nature,” which is not the “religion of nature” in some pantheistic sense but what Wordsworth later called it, “the Religion of gratitude” (Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. De Selincourt, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 351. Critics often prefer the word, “panentheism”; see, for example, E. D. Hirsch, Wordsworth and Shelling (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 29–30. Any discussion of this topic, too large for this essay, must consider the Abbey tradition, which also suggests a greater continuity between the earlier and later Wordsworth. Various critics have tried to express this non-pantheist non-dissolving relation between self and landscape: thus Albert Wlecke, Wordsworth and the Sublime, Berkeley: University of California, 1973: “The relationship is rather one of dweller to dwelling-place” (p. 3).

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ‘CHURCH CATHOLIC’: LITURGY, THEOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURE Allan Doig Social and religious change in England during the first third of the nineteenth century had produced an alarming situation, from whatever social, political or religious angle it was viewed. In Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle expressed his alarm pretty starkly when he wrote: ‘Who shall compute the waste and loss, the obstruction of every sort, that was produced in the Manchester region by Peterloo [1819] alone! Some thirteen unarmed men and women cut down,—the number of the slain is very countable: but the treasury of rage, burning hidden or visible in all hearts ever since, more or less perverting the effort and aim of all hearts ever since, is of unknown extent.’ To check this, the Church was seen by politicians as an instrument of social control, and indeed it was not unusual at this time for parsons to sit on the bench as JPs. Remember also that on either side of this period, in 1789 and 1848, France had two revolutions.1 Thomas Carlyle had reflected long on (and would later write even longer about) the French revolutionary example and on English Chartism, but despite his alarm, he wrote: ‘Fancy a man, moreover, recommending his fellow men to believe in God, so that Chartism might abate and the Manchester operatives be got to spin peaceably.’2 In England, the poor were being ill-served by the Church, in all its conflicting guises. The possibility of growing political instability was a dangerous reality, and while on the one hand Dissenters were still living under political penalties, on the other the Established Church was in serious decline. Social and religious reforms were desperately needed. The Church had to recapture its sense of the sacred, and, as is so often the case, this meant returning to texts and

1 For an idea of the extent of the local power of the vestry see ‘Introduction’ in The Victorian Church: Architecture and Society, ed. Chris Brooks and Andrew Saint (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 2–3. 2 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1845), the first quotation is from Book I, Chapter 3, 21, the second from Book III, chapter 15, 303–04.

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forms from its periods of greatness—while at the same time engaging with present political and social realities. Religious affiliations in the population, when they were present, increasingly reflected social and economic divisions. At the end of the eighteenth century only about one in ten of the population was a Nonconformist, but by 1815 they had grown to number about a third of the population. One major contributing factor was that many of the livings provided by the Established Church were inadequate, and where they were adequate they were often held in plurality with absentee Rectors keeping the tithes of the parish and putting in poorly-paid curates to carry out the clerical duties. George Eliot captured this beautifully when she wrote about the Rev. Amos Barton’s predicament, trying to keep a family in respectability on an inadequate stipend, in her Scenes of Clerical Life (published in 1858 but set before 1834): You are not imagining, I hope, that Amos Barton was the incumbent of Shepperton. He was no such thing. Those were the days when a man could hold three small livings, starve a curate a-piece on two of them, and live badly himself on a third. It was so with the Vicar of Shepperton; a vicar given to bricks and mortar, and thereby running into debt far away in a northern county—who executed his vicarial functions towards Shepperton by pocketing the sum of thirty-five pounds ten per annum, the net surplus remaining to him of the proceeds of that living, after the disbursement of eighty pounds as the annual stipend of his curate.3

Secondly, industrialisation brought great concentrations of labourers into towns and conurbations that had quickly expanded beyond the capability of the Established Church to serve them. Manchester, to remain with that example, had churches that provided only 11,000 ‘sittings’ for a population of 80,000. The distribution of churches and clergy was hopelessly outmoded, whereas the Methodists and New Dissenters (Particular Baptists and Congregationalists) provided lay ministers from within their own number, and were perfectly content to gather in any sufficiently commodious hall.4 The result was that since 1739, Wesleyan Methodism had drawn the labourers and the poor away from the Established Church, offering

3

George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. Thomas A. Noble (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 9–10. 4 Numbers of sittings are given in Nicolaus Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 32–33.

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active participation for the laity as readers and preachers, and open-air services abolished the social hierarchies architecturally frozen within the system of pew-rents. This freedom from the dominant religious and political structures was immensely attractive. The Government recognised the inadequate provision by the national Church by establishing the Church Building Commission by Act of Parliament in 1818 and providing it with £1,000,000 to redress the situation. This very decently funded the building of ninety-six new churches, for the most part in the burgeoning industrial areas of Lancashire, Yorkshire and London. In 1824 a further £500,000 was voted to provide partial funding for 450 more churches. This second, smaller, grant for a much greater number of new churches clearly indicates that the quality of the buildings was to be severely restricted. Not surprisingly the aim was to get the maximum number of sittings for the minimum cost, with the inevitable result, known as ‘Commissioners’ Gothic’. Thomas Rickman, one of the first serious students of Gothic architecture, produced twenty-one of the churches over the course of both schemes, including Holy Trinity, Bristol, of 1829 [10.1]. Some were well funded and archaeologically well informed, but most were thinly Gothicised preaching boxes. This probably worried him very little since the arrangement will have suited the current service well enough, and as a Quaker he will not have been ideologically committed to a more historically correct arrangement. None of his churches lived up to the high historical and archaeological standards set out for the first time in his article of 1815 ‘An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation’, published again as a book in 1817. This was not just a discriminating exercise, but was a work of very considerable scholarship. These measures by the Commissioners temporarily staunched the flow of the working class from the Anglican Church, but the Establishment remained under attack, and continued pressure resulted in the 1828 repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and their penalties against Dissenters which barred them from entering the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge or hold public office, and in 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed. In 1833 reform continued apace with the Irish Temporalities Act, restructuring the finances of the Irish Church and abolishing ten bishoprics. Clearly reform was needed here, and since the Church was ‘by law established’, it had to be ‘by law reformed’, but to the High Church Catholic wing of the Church

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of England this was State interference in Church affairs, which is to say Erastianism. That was the cry taken up by John Keble in his Assize Sermon at Oxford on 14 July 1833, a ‘Sermon on National Apostacy’. In the same year, 1833, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin was travelling England studying Gothic architecture, a long-established habit with his family. At Wells in 1832, Pugin, his father Auguste, his mother and his friend Osmond had discussed the contrasts between the religion, truth and beauty embodied in mediaeval Gothic architecture, and its degeneration under the morally and religiously decayed contemporary Established Church.5 The poverty of the ‘Commissioners’ Gothic’ only served to reinforce his view. In January of 1834 when travelling through Ely, he wrote to Osmond of a recent trip, having been to ‘that most detestable of all detestable places—Birmingham— Where Greek buildings & Smoking chimneys—radicals and dissenters are blended together’, but ‘at Oxford I was much delighted with the restoration of Magdalen College chapel by Mr Cottingham which I can truly say is one of the most beautiful specimens of modern design that I have ever seen & executed in both wood and stone in the best manner. It is impossible for me to give you an adequate idea of the interest of the city of Oxford—where at every turning you meet a buttress and face an oriel window.’ [10.2]6 Pugin saw the ugliness and decay in contemporary architecture not only as symptomatic of, but directly, even causally, connected with the ugliness and decay of both morality and religion—despite a mild protest to the contrary inserted in the Preface to the second edition.7 Pugin was weighing contemporary architecture in the balance of truth against glorious examples of mediaeval architecture, and contemporary architecture was found wanting, aesthetically, religiously and morally, which would be literally portrayed two or three years later in an engraving published in Contrasts [10.3–10.6] by Pugin, which juxtaposes a modern workhouse and a thirteenth-century almshouse [10.5]. The one degrades its inmates with flails, manacles, bare rooms, poor food

5 Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London: Penguin, 2007), 103–4. 6 Letter from Ely on Thursday, 30 January [1834?] to William Osmond, published in The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin, ed. Margaret Belcher, Vol. I 1830–42 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 23. 7 A. W. N. Pugin, preface to Contrasts: or, a parallel between the noble edifices of the Middle Ages, and corresponding buildings of the present day; shewing the present decay of taste. Accompanied by appropriate text, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1898), iii.

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and, in the pragmatism of the day, their bodies are ultimately removed for dissection; opposing this, Pugin presents a mediaeval almshouse where the poor are cared for by a Prior, they are clothed with dignity, given wholesome food, and given a decent religious burial.8 The same letter from Ely continues: I truly regret to say that in my travels I am every day witnessing fresh instances of the disgraceful conduct of the greater portion of the establised [sic] clergy . . . I can assure you after a most close & impartial investigation I feel perfectly convinced the roman Catholick church is the only true one—and the only one in which the grand & sublime style of church architecture can ever be restored—A very good chapel is now building in the north & when compleat I certainly think I shall recant. I know you will blame me, but I am internally convicted—that it is right but on this subject I beg you will make no mention in your Letter to me till I see you for then I can more fully explain my ideas.9

Pugin wrote remarkably little about his conversion, and this rare example both shows his reticence and makes the connection between his religious and architectural principles very clear. The Catholic Revival and the Gothic Revival were for him one and the same. The tide of political reform, with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act so recently, seemed to be sweeping Establishment out and Catholicism in, but another Catholic revival was also brewing within the Church he was about to leave. In 1834, Pugin installed himself near Salisbury, building St Marie’s Grange from 1835, just outside the city at Alderbury, but with views to the cathedral. The Cathedral has the perfect unity of a continuous build, and the Sarum Rite, developed for use by the Cathedral community as part of the reforms of St Osmund, were for Pugin the perfect distillation of Catholic England—‘sacred’ text and sacred space here had been one. The Use of Sarum became the most widespread liturgy in England until the Reformation. It is an extremely elaborate and colourful rite that involves processions and drama sequentially taking in the whole of the architectural space. This is what he longed to retrieve and restore—to create a sacred space that would make this sacred text for Christian worship become fully alive again. Before that

8 See Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, 25 & 26–7 for a description of the workhouse before 1834. 9 Letter of 30 January [1834?], in Belcher, Vol. I, 24.

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opportunity presented itself, an opportunity to re-form another great English institution presented itself. On 16 October 1834, the old, decayed Houses of Parliament caught fire in the early evening and burned into the night. Pugin, Turner and Constable were all eye-witnesses, and to Pugin, with his close association of social degeneracy and physical decay, the purging fire must have seemed the very embodiment of reform. In 1835 Pugin was engaged in two of his best-known works, one of architecture, the other a book: he produced designs for schemes by both and Gillespie Graham and Charles Barry in the competition to rebuild the Houses of Parliament [10.7]; and in August of that year he produced the paired drawings for his book Contrasts, a scheme hatched on his travels in 1833.10 In early 1836 he finished the drawings, had them etched and wrote the text in May. These two projects were to be his contribution to the reform of architecture, the nation and its religion. He expected the Anglican Church to be disestablished soon in the wake of recent radical reform and he looked forward, as he wrote, ‘to follow the processional cross through the western doors of the cathedral’ of Salisbury when the true Catholic Church would again come into the possession of the great works of architecture built by them and allowed to decay by the Protestants. Contrasts set out to demonstrate ‘how intimately the fall of architectural art of this country, is connected to the rise of the established religion’, and, mutatis mutandis, the restoration of architecture and the city depended on disestablishment and restoration of the old religion and its liturgical practices: On comparing the Architectural Works of the present Century with those of the Middle Ages, the wonderful superiority of the latter must strike every attentive observer. . . . Who can regard those stupendous Ecclesiastical Edifices of the Middle Ages (the more special objects of this work), without feeling this observation in its full force? Here every portion of the sacred fabric bespeaks its origin; the very plan of the edifice is the emblem of human redemption—each portion is destined for the performance of some solemn rite of the Christian Church. Here is the brazen font where the waters of baptism wash away the stain of original sin; there stands the gigantic pulpit, from which the sacred truths and ordinances are from time to time proclaimed to the congregated people; behold yonder, resplendent with precious gems is the high altar, the seat of the most holy mysteries, and the tabernacle of the Highest! It

10

Hill, God’s Architect, 149.

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is, indeed, a sacred place; and well does the fabric speak of its destined purpose: the eye is carried up and lost in the height of the vaulting and the intricacy of the aisles; the rich and varied hues of the stained windows, the modulated light, the gleam of the tapers, the richness of the altars, the venerable images of the departed just, all alike conspire to fill the mind with veneration for the place, and to make it feel the sublimity of Christian worship. . . . Such effects as these can only be produced on the mind by buildings, the composition of which has emanated from men who were thoroughly embued with devotion for, and faith in, the religion for whose worship they were erected.11

This was Pugin’s Catholicism, Romantic, aesthetic, the doctrine expressed in every gesture of an elaborate liturgy that sequentially filled the whole space, and an architecture where ‘every portion of the sacred fabric bespeaks its origin’, and, it is a perfect description of Pugin’s Cheadle Church, a spatial embodiment of sacramental worship [10.8–10.11]. Furthermore, it was not the merely theologically informed, but the theologically committed architect who could achieve such work. It is a grand and compelling vision, but one that his coreligionists managed to resist, while the reviving Catholic wing of the Established Church enthusiastically took it to their hearts. John Henry Newman was present, as Vicar, when John Keble preached his ‘Assize Sermon on the National Apostacy’ in the University Church on 14 July 1833. Despite the dramatic title, the sermon itself offered no practical way forward in terms of the reform of the Established Church. It was only in the later Preface to the published version (edited during the following week by Newman)12 that the matter of the suppression of the Irish Sees by the Irish Temporalities Act was specifically addressed, complaining ‘that the Apostolical Church in this realm is henceforth only to stand, in the eye of the State, as one sect among many’.13 Thus began the Oxford Movement amongst an extended group of ‘University men’—at that time all clerics. Publishing a series of ‘Tracts for the Times’, they became known as the Tractarians. As a result of

11 For more detail concerning the circumstances of the publication of Contrasts, see Hill, God’s Architect, 149–56, ending with the quotation. 12 Sheridan Gilley, Newman and his Age (London, Darton, Longman, Todd, London, 2003 [1990]), 115–16. 13 For the general setting see Frances Knight, The Church in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2008), 14–19.

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those tracts, their influence spread quickly, even amongst the provincial clergy, as captured by George Eliot: The Clerical Meetings and Book Society, which had been founded some eight or ten months, had had a noticeable effect on the Rev. Amos Barton. When he first came to Shepperton, he was simply an evangelical clergyman, whose Christian experiences had commenced under the teaching of the Rev. Mr Johns, of Gun Street Chapel, and had been consolidated at Cambridge under the influence of Mr Simeon. John Newton and Thomas Scott were his doctrinal ideals; he would have taken the Christian Observer and the Record, if he could have afforded it; his anecdotes were chiefly of the pious-jocose kind, current in Dissenting circles; and he thought an Episcopalian Establishment unobjectionable. By this time [1834] the effect of the Tractarian agitation was beginning to be felt in backward provincial regions, and the Tractarian satire on the Low-Church party was beginning to tell even on those who disavowed or resisted Tractarian doctrines. The vibration of an intellectual movement was felt from the golden head to the miry toes of the Establishment; and so it came to pass that, in the district round Milby, the market-town close to Shepperton, the clergy had agreed to have a clerical meeting every month wherein they would exercise their intellects by discussing theological and ecclesiastical questions, and cement their brotherly love by discussing a good dinner.14

On 13 August, scarcely a month after Keble’s sermon, the aim of the group of Tractarians was agreed to be to inspire ‘our brethren to consider the state of the Church, and especially to the practical belief and preaching of the Apostolical Succession’. This was a key statement; Apostolic Succession brought with it a high doctrine of the sacraments and clothed what must have been a rather beleaguered clergy with a sense of great dignity. The concerns of the Oxford Movement were set out in a series of 90 Tracts for the Times on a variety of subjects published between 1833 and 1841, the first three of which Newman himself wrote. Number three was entitled: ‘Thoughts Respectful Addressed to the Clergy on Alterations to the Liturgy’. It admonished them to resist any alterations to the Prayer Book as a ‘temper of innovation’, and asserts that the men of the world who wish to see these innovations do so because ‘they dislike the doctrine of the Liturgy’. Tract 63, written by Richard Hurrell Froude in 1835, ‘On the Antiquity of the Existing Liturgies’, argues that ‘it appears from all we can learn, that throughout

14

Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, 29–30.

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the whole world, there neither exist now, nor ever have existed, more than four independent forms of Liturgy; a circumstance which, of itself, gives some credibility to the supposition otherwise suggested, that these four were of Apostolic origin’. Of course this opens up a huge number of questions, not all strictly liturgical, between Tracts 3 and 63, but what is of greatest importance for the subject in hand is what this approach of scholarly, textual antiquarianism has to say about the (narrowly defined) Tractarian conception of Catholicity, and that it is completely different from Pugin’s idea of what was involved in restoring the Catholic Church in England. Pugin was very much a Romantic Catholic espousing a return to mediaeval English ritual and architecture to restore the nation’s religious and moral health; Newman in particular, would look far beyond these shores. Conversions to Roman Catholicism amongst the Tractarians began in 1843 and Newman himself would be received in 1845. Newman admitted a sneaking admiration for Pugin’s own favourite creation, the Church of St Giles, Cheadle, built for the Earl of Shrewsbury, Pugin’s greatest patron. By a remarkable coincidence Newman attended the consecration of St Giles on 1 September 1846, just before his departure to Rome where he was to train at the Propaganda Fide (or Sacred Congregation), for the Roman Catholic priesthood.15 He described the church literally in glowing terms: The new Cheadle Church . . . is the most splendid building I ever saw. It is coloured inside every inch in the most sumptuous way—showing how Gothic—in those countries where there is no marble, contrived to make up for the mosaics etc. of the South. The windows are all beautifully stained. The Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament is, on entering, a blaze of light—and I could not help saying to myself “Porta Coeli”.16

Newman’s subsequent training and discovery of the Baroque during his Italian sojourn, and perhaps his meeting with the man himself, cooled his initial enthusiasm. He returned to England at the end of December 1847. On 6 June 1848 he wrote to Miss Gisberne: Last week [30 May] I went up to preach at the opening of Mrs Bowden’s new Church at Fulham; it is very pretty, but it has the faults of Pugin. In details Pugin is perfect but his altars are so small that you can’t have a

15

Gilley, Newman, 255. Quoted in J. Mordaunt Crook, The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Post-Modern (London: John Murray, 1989), 58. 16

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These two Catholic converts of very different hue had met in Rome in 1847 and it was definitely not a meeting of minds. On 15 June 1848 Newman definitively summarised his view of Pugin in a letter to his friend Lisle Phillipps, who was a supporter of ‘the noble efforts of that admirable man Pugin’. In that letter, Newman praised Pugin’s accomplishments in Gothic architecture and his God-given genius, but when Pugin dismissed Classical architecture as pagan, including ‘the see of St Peter’, Newman maintained that he was simply a bigot. ‘Mr Pugin is a man of genius; I have the greatest admiration for his talents . . . . But he has the great fault of a man of genius, as well as the merit. He is intolerant, and, if I might use a stronger word, a bigot. . . . The Canons of Gothic architecture are to him points of faith, and everyone is a heretic who would venture to question them.’ The trouble with the Gothic revival, according to Newman, was that ‘In order that any style of Architecture should exactly suit the living ritual of the 19th century it should be the living architecture of the 19th century—it should never have died—else, while the ritual has changed, the architecture has not kept pace with it.’ The core of their dispute was, then, their competing views of the liturgy and the form of architecture required for its performance. Newman wished to treat architectural form freely to take account of current liturgical use and complained that Pugin would not allow such freedom with historically correct forms. Pugin was committed to mediaeval Sarum Use, Newman had been trained in contemporary Roman use. From the letter it appears Newman spoke of the possibility that Pugin might design an oratory, but ‘he implied, in conversation with me at Rome, that he would as soon build a mechanic’s institute as an Oratory’. Newman had joined the Oratarians, founded by St Philip Neri in 1558, and the Birmingham Oratory [10.12–10.13] built in Newman’s memory, was more in tune with the ‘dress’ he had 17

Pugin, Letters, XII, 215.

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in mind for their liturgy, being a distinctly Roman pattern. Newman’s letter to Lisle Phillipps expresses this perfectly: Now, for Oratarians, the birth of the 16th century, to assume the architecture simply and unconditionally of the 13th, would be as absurd as their putting on them the cowl of the Dominicans or adopting the tonsure of the Carthusians. We do not want a cloister or a chapter room but an Oratory. I, for one, believe that Gothic can be adapted, developed into the requisitions of an Oratory. Mr Pugin does not . . . . Our Padre Ceremoniere tells me that the rigid observance of Gothic details is inconsistent with the Rubrics—that he must break the Rubrics if he would not break with Mr. Pugin; which is he to give up, Mr. Pugin or the Rubrics?18

The question was purely rhetorical; in terms of correct form, for Newman the rubrics clearly took priority over the architecture. Newman had converted in 1845, but he was still a Fellow of Oriel College and Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin when, in 1839, the Oxford Architectural and Historical Society was founded. It numbered many Heads of House amongst its luminaries and soon it had Bishop Bagot of Oxford, peers, archdeacons and the Archbishop of Canterbury himself amongst its supporters. Its aim was to study ‘ecclesiology’, at that time understood to be building new, and improving existing, churches according to correct principles of Gothic architecture. Many of the members were, broadly speaking, Tractarians, but the leaders of the Oxford Movement, Richard Hurrell Froude, Pusey, Keble, and Newman, showed little or no interest at all.19 However, it was their High Church view of Anglicanism at that time that informed the ecclesiological brief. A paper read to the Society at the end of October of 1845, the year that Newman converted, was on ‘the development of Roman and Gothick Architecture, and their Moral and Symbolical teaching’. In that, ‘the chief object of the writer [Mr Freeman] were to “challenge the perfection of Gothic art to belong to the Perpendicular”, and to show “the Romanesque style to be as truly and in as strict a sense a Christian Architecture as Gothic

18

Quotations are from the same important letter to Phillipps published in Letters, XII, 220–23. 19 For the general background see ‘The Cambridge Camden Society and the Ecclesiologists’ in Pevsner, Architectural Writers, 123–38.

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itself ”.’20 Pugin was not the only one to connect morality, architecture and theology. The Society published examples of liturgical furnishings, and produced detailed studies of fine local churches, including St Giles, Oxford [10.14], and Newman’s own church at Littlemore [10.15–10.16]. They also advised on the restoration of churches, including Dorchester Abbey. Soon it was not just English parsons who were writing for advice, the Society also advised on the building of Gothic churches in the colonies. For example Snettisham in Norfolk could be copied as a cathedral in New Brunswick in Canada, but it would be necessary to apply the style judiciously in a place like Bombay. They answered its Bishop’s enquiries saying: The church should be wide open so as to admit the sea breeze from south to north-west. Care should be taken to have doors on the sides to admit of soldiers easily getting out of the church. I would suggest whether it would not be preferable to give up the idea of a middle aisle (gangway), and have two side ones: by this arrangement the troops will be more immediately before the clergyman. It will be desireable to have at least one porch, and on the north side, for protection from the sun of ladies and others on getting out of their carriages. Moulding in this country, especially on the outside of a building, soon falls down . . . . It will be necessary to have punkahs in the church.21

Clearly, climate, social structure and military security were considerations that might require adaptation of the style, but the architect’s view of the Gothic was that the origin of the style arose from the efficient function of its elements—pinnacles and buttresses to counter the outward thrust of the roof; mouldings, parapets and gargoyles to direct the flow of water off and away from the fabric; and even the pleasing effect of Picturesque asymmetry functioned to allow flexibility in the functional distribution of rooms, stairs, windows, producing a pleasing, often dramatic, massing. In the more moderate Oxford Society, essays on the use of the Gothic in the colonies emphasised the necessary adaptability of the style, while remaining true to its origins and its liturgical and sacramentalist doctrinal symbolism.

20

Minutes of the meeting of 29 October 1845, published in The Ecclesiologist, VII, January 1846, 24. 21 Quoted in W. A. Pantin’s historical sketch of the Society, ‘The Oxford Architectural and Historical Society, 1839–1939’, read before the Society, 17 May 1939, 5.

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On the other hand, the Cambridge Camden Society was also founded in 1839, the same year as the Oxford Society, by two undergraduates, John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb, and their views were considerably more strident than the Oxford group. Their writings in the journal The Ecclesiologist were highly polemical in their advocacy of the reintroduction of mediaeval Catholic ritual to the Church, as far as could be justified within the theology of the Prayer Book, and the restoration of ancient, and building new, Gothic churches according to the best approved examples. A central aim was to increase the frequency of the Communion service and provide for its more elaborate ritual celebration. This rested on a particular interpretation of the ‘Ornaments Rubric’ inserted under Elizabeth I into the 1559 Prayer Book and retained in 1662, which said: ‘that such Ornaments of the Church, and of the Ministers thereof, at all times of the Ministration, shall be retained, and be in use, as were in this Church of England, by the Authority of Parliament, in the Second Year of the Reign of King Edward the Sixth’. This clearly permitted vestments, allowed the revival of long disused ritual including the sign of the cross in blessing, and could also be used to smuggle in mediaeval liturgies as well. Many of the changes, though moderate and commonplace now, including lighted candles and wearing a surplice to preach, were met with disapproval and even censure. Webb himself as Warden of Sackville College, East Grinstead, had his orders inhibited by the Bishop of Chichester for a full sixteen years.22 Neale and Webb published a translation of William Durandus’ Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, as The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments in 1843, by which time their annual Report records lists nearly 700 members, including distinguished architects, MPs, peers, archdeacons, sixteen bishops (including of Nova Scotia, New Zealand, Tasmania, and New Jersey) and the Archbishops of Armagh and Canterbury. That list of politicians, peers and prelates indicates that the Establishment recognised a strong force for the revival of the Church and probably also for the spread of its influence across the expanding British colonial system.

22 See discussions in Pevsner, ‘The Cambridge Camden Society’, 123–38; Anthony Symondson, ‘Theology and Worship in the late Victorian Church’ in Brooks and Saint, The Victorian Church, 192–222; and ‘The Liturgical Impact of the Oxford Movement’, in Nigel Yates, Buildings, Faith and Worship: the Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches 1600–1900, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 127–49.

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Significantly, the great architectural historian of both the University of Cambridge and Canterbury Cathedral, Robert Willis, resigned from the Cambridge Camden Society in 1841 because, as he wrote in a ‘Remonstrance’ published in the journal of the Society, The Ecclesiologist, ‘it is in the highest degree improper’ to ‘convert the Society into an engine of polemical theology, instead of an instrument for promoting the study and practice of Ecclesiastical Architecture’.23 Like the detached academic Willis, they were interested in archaeology, but theirs was an archaeology with a very particular agenda. The thrust of that agenda is summed up in Neale and Webb’s Preface to their translation of Durandus’ Rationale: ‘we have considered it necessary to prefix an essay on the subject; in which we have endeavoured to prove that Catholick Architecture must necessarily be symbolical; to answer the most common objections to the system; and to elucidate it by references to actual examples, and notices of the figurative arrangements of our own churches’, and furthermore, they conclude, ‘pointing out the sacramental character of Catholic art’.24 The whole space of the church thus becomes not only overlaid with symbolism, but a sacramental vessel of the doctrine of the Church. In response to a huge spate of architectural work inspired by their activities, the Society published the pamphlet ‘Church Enlargement and Church Arrangement’ in 1843. The revival of the Anglican Church led to a huge spate of church building with 3765 new and rebuilt churches being consecrated between 1835, when the permanent Ecclesiastical Commission was set up, and 1875.25 A third of churches had been restored, almost universally according to ecclesiological principles. They were restored to what they should have been to conform with current liturgical practices—as they should be. Doubtless some of this was driven by committed ecclesiologist architects as by devoted tractarian clergy.26 Though Pugin had converted to the Catholic Church, unlike Newman he was no ‘Romaniser’; he looked forward to a revival of the English mediaeval Catholic tradition, and in that he was more perfectly

23

Quoted in Pevsner, ‘The Cambridge Camden Society’, 124. John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb, ‘Preface’, to William Durandus, The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments: A Translation of the First Book of the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (London and Cambridge: Rivington, 1843), vii–viii. 25 For the numbers, see Brooks and Saint, The Victorian Church, 9–10. 26 Examples are given in Knight, The Church in the Nineteenth Century, 18–19. 24

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aligned with the Ecclesiologists of Cambridge and Oxford than with members of his adoptive Church. In 1858, following the precepts of the Ecclesiologists, the Rev. John Purchas of Christ’s College Cambridge published the Directorium Anglicanum; A Manual for the Right Celebration of the Holy Communion, for the Saying of Matins and Evensong, and for the Performance of other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, according to Ancient Uses of the Church of England with Plan of Chancel and Illustrations of ‘SUCH ORNAMENTS OF THE CHURCH, AND OF THE MINISTERS THEREOF, AT ALL TIMES OF THEIR MINISTRATION, (AS) SHALL BE RETAINED, AND BE IN USE AS WERE IN THIS CHURCH OF ENGLAND, BY THE AUTHORITY OF PARLIAMENT, IN THE SECOND YEAR OF THE REIGN OF KING EDWARD THE SIXTH’ [10.17– 10.20]. It was hardly a brief title, but made the purpose extremely clear. The lineage and legality of the rites and ceremonies and of the ornaments of the ministers and the architecture were to be established according to the best authorities, and furthermore were to be reintroduced not for their own sake, but as part of the teaching ministry: We have a ritual, and must use it, whether we like it or not. It behoves us to use it aright, and not curtail and mar its fair proportion. Every part of the Church must have a ritual, and as there is but one Catholic Church, so the ritual of every portion thereof will have a family likeness, and be one in spirit, though diverse in details. Ritual and Ceremonial are the hieroglyphics of the Catholic religion, a language understanded of the faithful, a kind of parable in action, for as of old when He walked on this earth, our Blessed Lord, still present in His Divine and human nature in the Holy Eucharist on the altars of His Church, still spiritually present at the Common Prayers, does not speak to us ‘without a parable’.27

The liturgy, architecture, sacraments and teaching of the Catholic Church are presented as integral parts of the sacramental system, the one to be read and understood in and through the other. At the core of the system is the Eucharist itself and it was to be restored to its proper frequency of celebration as the ‘acted sermon of the Church’ (viii). Beyond that, the ritual is the shadow on earth of the heavenly worship, so the architecture becomes (in a substantial, not simply, or rather weakly, symbolic sense) ‘porta coeli’. What was not at all clear was which system of ‘hieroglyphics’ was to be restored. The Book of

27

John Purchas, preface in Directorium Anglicanum (London, 1858), vii.

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Common Prayer has within it sections ‘Concerning the Service of the Church’ and ‘Of Ceremonies, why Some be Abolished and Some Retained’ which could be used for guidance in historical liturgical revision in the Church of England and: If the comparison of our present Service Book with its predecessors be needful for a perfect understanding of the Rubrics, it follows as a corollary that equally is it necessary to institute a comparison with the rubrical directions of the pre-reformation Service Books, (of which our Prayer Book is a revised collection,) especially in an age in which the careful performance of Divine Worship is a happy characteristic, and yet in which, from the laxity of former times, the old Catholic uses and traditions, which were household words to the revisers of 1549, and were familiar to those of 1661, are in some sort lost sight of. Hence this attempt to read our Rubrics by the light of the pre-reformation Service Books and ancient ecclesiastical customs. . . . The ancient Liturgies, the mediaeval Service Books, the present Uses of the East and West, have all been consulted to throw light upon and to interpret the Rubrics of our own Service Book in the Directorium, on the principle recognised by the last Revisers. . . .28

This last, very slight, reference to ‘present Uses of the East and West’, admitted a Romanising tendency and indeed the Missale Romanum published in Mechelen in 1846 (and the Antwerp 1677 edition), the Pontificale Romanum published in Paris in 1664, and Baldeschi’s Ceremonial according to the Roman Rite in Dale’s translation of 1853, all appear in the bibliography. The apparatus surrounding the Eucharist in the Directorium does significantly allude to the modern Roman Rite, but for the most part authority is sought in ancient English examples. However, Symondson concludes: ‘Its claim to accord with the ancient uses of the Church of England was, however, cosmetic and illusory. It depended far more on the translation by Hilarius Dale of Baldeschi’s Ceremoniario della Basilica Vaticana, published in 1839, and the Pontificale Romanum of 1664. Roman rubrics were adapted to the Anglican rite.’29 There is very probably more contemporary Roman influence than Purchas would have been comfortable admitting, but there is such a weight of ancient English authority heaped up on every page that, if cosmetic, it is very heavily applied.

28 29

Purchas, Directorium Anglicanum, xi–xii. Symondson, ‘Theology and Worship’, 197.

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Whatever the balance of dependence, whether on contemporary Roman practice or ancient English, the practical effect was that mostly English vestments (but also including the biretta and zucchetto), two altar lights (representing the two natures of Christ, human and Divine), crosses, and extensive inventories of functional ornaments, stone altars, lecterns and the liturgical chancel were all justified [10.17 & 10.20]. Amongst those thanked by the editor in the Preface was the Rev. J. M. Neale,30 and in the bibliography were his translation of Durandus (along with a 1510 edition of the Latin original ), The Ecclesiologist, Church Schemes by the Ecclesiological Society, and the Transactions of the Ecclesiological, Late Cambridge Camden, Society. Pugin too is represented with his Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume and The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England. Not surprisingly the design of the liturgical chancel [10.18 & 10.19] was according to the approved fashion of Pugin and the Ecclesiologists and the Directorium gives clear instructions for the positioning and movement of the celebrant and assistants within the architectural space. With its sequence of readings and prayers, the service provided for the consecration of a Church ties all the elements, from the cemetery, through the font, pulpit, chancel, the altar and finally its furnishings together into a coordinated architecturally defined sacramental structure. Theology and preaching were enacted in the liturgy and drawn across the architecture. The Calendar of the Church was laid out with instruction for the proper observance of feasts, festivals and fasts, thus adding coordinated sacramental time to integrated sacramental space, and liturgical teaching. It is small wonder that this book with its unified vision was the standard authority for worship over the next half century. As early as 1841 the reach of the influence of the Cambridge Camden Society promised to become global in extent. In volume 1 number 1 of The Ecclesiologist published in November of that year, there was a notice entitled ‘Parish Churches in New Zealand’, which began with the interesting news that the Lord Bishop of New Zealand wanted the Cambridge Camden Society to provide designs for the new Cathedral and parish churches. The logic of the principles to be followed, typify their approach:

30

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allan doig The ingenuity of the natives in carving is well known; and it is the Bishop’s design to convert this faculty to the glory of God. For this purpose the Camden Society will furnish working models of the actual size, of Norman capitals, sections of mouldings, ornamented pier, door and window arches: and these, it is hoped, it may be easy for the natives to imitate in the stone of their own country, which is said is well adapted for building. One model of a parish church will at present be sufficient; because the churches will be, at first, two hundred miles apart. Norman is the style adopted; because, as the work will be chiefly done by native artists, it seems natural to teach them first that style which first prevailed in our own country; while its rudeness and massiveness, and the grotesque character of its sculpture, will probably render it easier to be understood and appreciated by them. . . . It is indeed a matter of heartfelt delight to the Society, that it is enabled to be of service to so interesting a branch of the ONE Catholick and Apostolic Church as that about to be established in New Zealand. . . .

Clearly, on an ideological and stylistic level, an Anglo-Norman architecture suited itself to the colonial project, but for the Ecclesiologists its suitability was based on the Catholicity of the Church and the suitability of the form for the liturgy. The Society’s Annual Report of 11 May 1842 notes that the Bishop returned to New Zealand with an elevation by Mr Salvin and ‘working drawings are to be forwarded as soon as possible’.31 Whatever view we now take of the Church’s complicity in the Colonial project, it is clear that by the 1840s, the Church was off the back foot and was involved in spirited social engagement, whereas social conditions in England in the early nineteenth century had reached a point of dangerous instability. Social reform had had political, religious and even architectural ramifications. Because the Church of England is ‘by law established’, reforming the Church was necessarily a political act and often with deeply political motives. As has so often been the case, religious reform from within (here in the development from the Oxford Movement through the Ecclesiologists) sought to recover the authenticity, authority, and outward forms of the ancient Church— including its liturgical practices and architectural forms. During this period some of the ‘sacred’ texts appealed to by the different sides of the debate included the liturgies of Mediaeval England, the Sarum rite,

31 ‘Report of the Cambridge Camden Society for MDCCCXLII’, Cambridge 1843, 26–27.

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the liturgies of the Early Church, the authoritative liturgy of Rome, and the writings of Durandus on the symbolism of church vestments and architecture. This was a heady mix of authorities to support widely differing conceptions of what it is for a Church to be ‘Catholic’ and to shape the iconic architectural forms of the sacred space (in a stylistic spectrum from Norman through the variety of Gothic to Roman Baroque) in which to carry out its sacramental rites. The major developments in this long process had centred around the architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, the Tractarians, especially John Henry Newman, the Oxford Architectural and Historical Society, and the Ecclesiologists or Cambridge Camden Society, particularly John Mason Neale. It was through the influence of this last group that an idealised version of the Mediaeval English parish church, a very particular and national conception of sacred space, informed by a very particular interpretation of a selection of sacred texts, was exported across the globe throughout the Empire, to New Zealand, Australia, India, and Canada. There was already in the 1840s very considerable momentum to the ‘Oxford Movement’, broadly defined, and in 1854 the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, founded Cuddesdon Theological College [10.21] just outside Oxford to encourage High Church Catholic vocations and training. If there is one way to transform the teaching, theological approach, missionary thrust, and liturgical practice of the Church, it is through the training of its footsoldiers. The founding vision of the theological college is neatly captured in two images, the lower part of the west window of the parish church and the theological college itself, both designed by GE Street. In the window are angels with trumpets heralding the coming down out of heaven of the New Jerusalem, built in Gothic style and having an uncanny resemblance to the college. That was the agenda of both Church and college—bringing in the Universal Kingdom of God—and if the structures of the advancing Colonial Service could assist with that universality for the Catholic and Apostolic Church, so much the better. But, as many institutions of the Mother Country have discovered to their cost, the Colonial enterprise has proven to have multiple stings in its tail—but that moves us into another century and another subject altogether.

SACRED SPACE AS SACRED TEXT: CHURCH AND CHAPEL ARCHITECTURE IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN William Whyte On 18 October 1891, a brand new college was opened in a brand new building on a brand new road in Oxford. Manchester College was not just a new institution; it represented a whole new chapter in the university’s history.1 For more than a century, Oxford had been closed to Roman Catholics and Non-Conformists: they were simply not allowed to matriculate as undergraduates. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, the statutes were changed and the old barriers were broken down. Slowly but surely, the Anglican monopoly on Oxford was relaxed. In 1886 the Congregationalist Mansfield College was opened.2 Ten years later, the Roman Catholic hierarchy abandoned its prohibition on attendance at Oxford.3 These were both momentous events. The inauguration of Manchester College was, nonetheless, still more significant—for it represented the advent of Unitarianism in the university. Unitarianism was a dangerous and exotic creed for many Anglicans. It seemed to threaten not just the Established Church but also Christianity itself. By challenging Trinitarian theology, Unitarians challenged the nature of orthodox faith. Appropriately, then, the building itself was as striking as its purpose. To house a great Unitarian college, its architect, Thomas Worthington, offered what one disgruntled local clergyman called an ‘an impertinence’, built in an ‘obtrusively Unitarian’ Gothic.4 Like its neighbour, Mansfield, this was indeed a little bit of Northern Non-Conformity brought to the heart of

1 Barbara Smith, ed., Truth, Liberty and Religion: Essays Celebrating Two Hundred Years of Manchester College (Oxford: Manchester College, 1986). 2 Elaine Kaye, Mansfield College, Oxford: Its Origin, History, and Significance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3 Peter Hinchliff, “Religious Issues, 1870–1914”, in The History of the University of Oxford vol. vii: Nineteenth-Century Oxford part ii, M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys, ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 104. 4 Richard Ennis, Manchester College: A Short History (Oxford: Manchester College, 1990), 18.

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the Anglican Establishment.5 It was, thus, both a noteworthy moment and a striking monument for Oxford and for Unitarianism alike.6 The Unitarians were not, however, wholly united. Even as the celebrations died away, there were growing signs of discord. One wing of the new college contained a chapel, and it was resolved that this grand Gothic space should be ornamented with stained-glass windows. After much debate and ‘anxious consideration’, the college turned to the designer William Morris and to his collaborator, the artist Edward Burne-Jones, for ideas.7 Reconciling their vision with the desires of the windows’ donors, the views of the wider Unitarian community, and the needs of the college itself was to prove a lengthy and protracted process.8 In the end, a scheme was drawn up which placed New Testament themes in the great west window over the Communion Table, and an allegory of Truth, Liberty, and Religion in the east window, at the entrance to the chapel. To the south came a cycle of virtues personified as Christian figures.9 To the north came something still more remarkable: three windows on the theme of the Creation [11.1–11.5]. Originally designed for the Anglican church of Middleton Chaney in Northamptonshire, they were reworked and remade for the college: becoming colourful, jewel-like, and iridescent.10 For James Arlosh, the benefactor who paid for the windows in memory of his son, they were a huge success: ‘the glowing, glittering realisation of a vision from the world’s childhood’.11 Yet, despite their acknowledged beauty, it was these three windows that were to prove problematic. Whilst the

5 William Whyte, “ ‘Redbrick’s Unlovely Quadrangles’: Reinterpreting the Architecture of the Civic Universities”, History of Universities 21:1 (2006), 160–1. 6 Manchester College, Oxford: Proceedings and Addresses on the Occasion of the Opening of the College Buildings (London: Longman’s, 1894). 7 The Report of Manchester New College, Oxford 109 (1894), 11–12. 8 Oxford, Harris Manchester College Archive, MS/MNC/MISC/79, Minute Book O (1893–98) and MS/MNC/MISC 40/ii, Committee Minutes 1893–1904, reveal the debates within college. 9 They comprise: Justice, Humility, St Martin as Generosity, St George as Courage, the Good Samaritan as Charity, Dorcas as Mercy, St Valentine as Prayer, St Theresa as Inspiration, Enoch as Faith, and Elijah as Prophecy. See Alan J. Middleton, A PreRaphaelite Jewel: the Chapel of Harris Manchester College, Oxford (Oxford: Harris Manchester College, 2006). 10 A. C. Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and His Circle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974), 147–8. 11 Harris Manchester Archive, MS/MNC/MISC/85, Appendix to Minutes, 139. James Arlosh to Thomas Worthington (18 January 1896).

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Unitarians were pleased to be in Oxford, many were displeased with the chapel they had built there. The problem was twofold. For some critics, the use of stained-glass windows was, in itself, simply wrong. The pseudonymous ‘Jerubbaal’, taking the name given to Gideon after his destruction of Baal’s altar (Judges 7:1), not only wrote to the Unitarian Inquirer, but published his letter as a pamphlet. He condemned coloured glass on principle, writing: ‘I, for one, cannot see why we should have the light of heaven shut out by the devices of the colourist.’ He also disliked the representation of non-Biblical figures: ‘idle women shuffling along with fantastic robes and gaudy wraps of impossible feathers, doing nothing but make eyes at those who court them.’12 For other writers, it was not so much the medium as the message which repelled them. Writing in the Inquirer, James Harwood observed that the choice of the Creation as a theme ‘seems almost studiously incongruous’, given the college’s commitment to science and the fact that ‘probably everyone of its alumni now thinks of the cosmic process as conforming to the type of Evolution rather than that of creation.’ A window should be left blank, he went on, so ‘that the light of Heaven can find its way to the souls of man undimmed by outgrown tradition.’13 The debate went on for months, leaving—in the mind of the Inquirer—a ‘very unpleasant feeling’.14 Some defended the windows;15 some attacked them.16 What they all agreed was that these three windows were highly important; that they were meaningful. The Creation cycle was not removed. It remains in the chapel; indeed, it is the highlight of a visit to the college.17 But the conflict it produced is noteworthy nonetheless—as is its context, the college itself. Taken together, what they reflect is the passionate intensity of debates about building and the particular importance of architecture and design in Victorian Britain. This was an age in which 400,000 people would queue to visit newly-opened civic buildings; in which the police might be required to remain on duty for days, keeping back

12 “Jerubbaal”, Manchester College Chapel Windows (1895). See also Inquirer, March 16, 1895, 170. 13 Inquirer, February 2, 1895, 69. 14 Inquirer, March 23, 1895, 177. 15 Inquirer, February 16, 1895, 102; March 9, 1895, 149. 16 Inquirer, February 23, 1895, 122; March 9, 1895, 149. 17 Geoffrey Tyack, Oxford: an Architectural Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 272.

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tourists who wished to view the highly-ornamented façade of a new factory.18 This was a time in which the highest political circles could be preoccupied with architecture and in which buildings were discussed at every level of society.19 More importantly still, the case of Manchester College reveals the extent to which debates on architecture ceased to be solely about function or form, they were also about morality. In Victorian Britain, ethics and aesthetics were conflated, even confused. Buildings were not just good or bad, they were also true or false. Details—like windows, or doors, or symbols, or floors— were either lies or truths, fake or honest.20 The terms of the debate, then, were set very high—and when it came to religious buildings, this conflation of architecture and morality had significant implications. If it mattered whether school buildings ‘speak the truth, the honourable truth’, and if it was thought possible for even school carpets to be directly inspired by the Athanasian Creed (as one headmaster alarmingly claimed), then how much more important was it that a place of worship and a house of prayer should be appropriately, morally wellbuilt?21 The battle over three windows at Manchester College, Oxford, was just one small skirmish in a very much larger war.22 A key figure in this process was, of course, the Roman Catholic architect Augustus Pugin. In his Contrasts (1836) and True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), he argued that only Gothic served the functional, theological, and moral needs of the nation. As his title suggested, for him, Gothic—that is, ‘Pointed’—architecture, was the only Christian architecture. It was the only ethical and aesthetically acceptable way to build.23 Pugin’s arguments spoke to a

18 William Young, The Municipal Buildings Glasgow (Glasgow and London: David Bryce and Son, 1890), 12. Michael Stratton, The Terracotta Revival (London: Victor Gollancz, 1993), 14. 19 Brownlee, David, “ ‘A Regular Mongrel Affair’: G. G. Scott’s Design for the Government Offices”, Architectural History 28 (1985), 159–78; William Whyte, “Building the Nation in the Town: Architecture and National Identity in Urban Britain”, in William Whyte and Oliver Zimmer, ed., Nationalism and the Reshaping of Urban Communities in Europe, 1848–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 204–33. 20 More generally, see David Watkin, Morality and Architecture Revisited (London: John Murray, 2001). 21 Edward Thring, Addresses (London: T. F. Unwin, 1887), 75; A. K. Boyd, The History of Radley College, 1847–1947 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), 99. 22 J. Mordaunt Crook, The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Post-Modern (London: John Murray, 1987), 115–19, 132, 174. 23 Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2007).

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generation. George Gilbert Scott, who became the pre-eminent architect of mid-Victorian Britain, later recalled that ‘Pugin’s articles excited me almost to fury’; claiming that it was through reading them that he was ‘morally awakened’.24 A similar process was undergone by many Anglican clerics of the day, with the foundation of the Cambridge Camden Society and its journal the Ecclesiologist marking the moment—in 1839—when many members of the Church of England got together to proclaim their commitment to the moral superiority of the Gothic Revival. Arguably, the Ecclesiologist was to be even more important than Pugin: but both were highly significant.25 Architectural critics could sneer at those who were willing—as they put it—to ‘Puginise’; that is, ‘to mix up political and theological speculations with architectural ones.’26 Architectural journals might satirize the whole business in verse: The Catholic Church, she never knew Till Mr Pugin taught her, That Orthodoxy had to do At all with bricks and mortar But now, ‘tis plain to me and all, Since he’s published his lecture, No church is Catholic at all Without Gothic Architecture!27

But, by the 1840s, it is clear; the link between morality and architecture had become absolute.28 Much has been written on the Gothic Revival, on Pugin, on the Ecclesiologist and on its followers, the Ecclesiologists.29 The impact of these developments on the Church of England is now particularly well understood.30 What we know less about is the parameters of this

24 George Gilbert Scott, Personal and Professional Recollections, ed. Gavin Stamp (1879; Stamford, Paul Watkins, 1995), 88. 25 James F. White, The Cambridge Movement: the Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962); Christopher Webster and John Elliott, ed., “A Church as it should be”: the Cambridge Camden Society and its Influence (Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 2000). 26 W. H. Leeds, quoted in Crook, Dilemma of Style, 42. 27 Builder 15 (1857), 440. 28 James A. Schmiechen, “The Victorians, the Historians, and the Idea of Modernism”, American Historical Review 93 (1988), 305, 314–5. 29 See also, Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1999). 30 Nigel Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship: the Liturgical Arrangements of Anglican Churches, 1600–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). We know surprisingly

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debate. As the arguments at Manchester College suggest, battles about buildings were not confined to the Established Church, nor were they just about style.31 Indeed, as Michael Hall has argued, at the heart of any discussion about Victorian church architecture was a fundamental struggle about architectural meaning.32 The framework for this debate was not confined to the narrowly architectural, nor the solely theological. It encompassed the aesthetic and the moral, the scriptural and the functional. In other words, it was about the very nature of architecture itself. A row about windows might also be about evolution or the Bible or Biblical interpretation. A debate about sacred space might also— indeed, almost invariably did also—involve engagement with sacred texts, and especially the Bible. Throughout human history, there have been many ways of trying to conceptualize architecture. Almost invariably, people have sought to understand it by analogy or metaphor: comparing it to music; to philosophy; even to science. Yet as Geoffrey Scott complained nearly a century ago, the Victorians were overwhelmingly inclined to see architecture in linguistic terms.33 For the clergyman G. A. Poole, ‘Ecclesiastical architecture’ was, in fact, just that: ‘a language’.34 For the architect G. F. Bodley, architectural style was ‘after all, only language.’35 For the art critic John Ruskin, the highest aim was an architecture which would leave the viewers ‘reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas’.36 Of course, this notion of architecture as language and

little about the impact of this on the colonial church. This is the subject of Alex Bremner’s important work. See, for example, his “Out of Africa: G. F. Bodley, William White, and the Anglican Mission Church of St. Philip, Grahamstown, 1857–67” Architectural History 51 (2008), 185–210. 31 Bridget Cherry, ed., Dissent and the Gothic Revival (London: Chapels Society, 2007); Nigel Yates, Liturgical Space: Christian Worship and Church Buildings in Western Europe, 1500–2000, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), ch. 6. 32 Michael Hall, “What Do Victorian Churches Mean? Symbolism and Sacramentalism in Anglican Church Architecture, 1850–1870”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59 (2000). 33 Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism (1914; London: Constable, 1924), 54–5. 34 George Ayliffe Poole, The Appropriate Character of Church Architecture (Leeds: T. W. Green, 1842), 18. 35 G. F. Bodley, The Modes in Which Religious Life and Thought May Be Influenced By Art (1881), 5. 36 John Ruskin, Collected Works, E. J. Cook and A. Wedderburn, ed., (London: George Allen, 1903–9), vol. 10, 206.

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buildings as texts was not new. It goes back to the ancient world—and can be found in the writings of Vitruvius.37 The church builders of the Middle Ages appear to have symbolised religious ideas in the plans of their churches.38 Architects in Elizabethan England and Renaissance France used emblems and devices to turn buildings into symbols.39 Writers in the seventeenth century similarly imagined church buildings as ‘a mode of access to the Word.’40 In that sense, the Victorian emphasis on architecture as language and buildings as texts was hardly unprecedented. Nonetheless, the nineteenth century—with its emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics and morality—approached this issue in original ways and with distinctive consequences. In the first place, the Victorians engaged in a fundamental debate about the mechanism of architectural language.41 True enough, throughout the century, there were those—like the architect and theorist James Fergusson—who utterly denied the capacity of buildings to convey any meaning whatsoever.42 But, for most other writers, the question was not whether buildings bore meaning, but how they did so. Did meaning reside (as Ruskin seemed to suggest) in the ornamentation of a building; in its sculpture, which—if ‘legible’—was ‘nearly certain to be worth reading’?43 Or was it found in the ‘symbolic language’ of the plan, elevation, and structure of the church (as Poole proposed)?44 Or (as Bodley concluded) were both aspects equally important—with the ideal church one that was ‘instinct with symbolism, not merely in details, but in the 37 William Whyte, “How Do Buildings Mean? Some Issues of Interpretation in the History of Architecture”, History and Theory 45 (2006). 38 Nigel Hiscock, The Symbol at Your Door: Number and Geometry in Religious Architecture of the Greek and Latin Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 25–33. 39 Mark Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 24–8; Judi Loach, “On Words and Walls”, in An Interregnum of the Sign: the Emblematic Age in France, David Graham, ed., (Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 2001). 40 Paul Dyck, “Locating the Word: the Textual Church and George Herbert’s Temple”, in Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins, ed., Centred on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 224–5. 41 Edward N. Kaufman, “Architectural Representation in Victorian England”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 46 (1997), 30. 42 James Fergusson, An Historical Inquiry into the True Principles of Beauty in Art (London: Longman, Brown, Longman, 1849), 121. 43 Ruskin, Works, vol. 10, 269. 44 George Ayliffe Poole, A History of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England (London: John Murray, 1848), 171.

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whole structure soaring upward to heaven’?45 This discussion was not confined to Britain. As Neil Levine has shown, the question of whether and how architecture bore meaning dominated French architectural debates in this period too.46 Nor was the question ever resolved. Nevertheless, the debate was intense—and important; and the distinction between those who argued that meaning was inherent in architecture, and those who saw it as applied to or simply associated with architecture, was a perennial one. Above all, the issue of architectural meaning was one raised by the generation that inspired the Ecclesiologist. Late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century advocates for Gothic architecture had tended to defend it on the grounds of propriety or practicality.47 Certain building types—churches, colleges, and the like—were believed to be best served with a Gothic façade. Contextual considerations also played their part. Thus, whilst Christopher Wren disliked non-classical architecture, he was nonetheless willing to embrace it from time to time. At Westminster Abbey, he proposed a medieval enlargement; seeking to avoid ‘a disagreeable Mixture’ of Roman and Gothic themes.48 Similarly, in some of his City Churches, he found himself ‘oblig’d to deviate from a better style’ and take up medieval motifs.49 Towards the end of the eighteenth century, picturesque theory and associational psychology also shaped attitudes towards the Gothic: with its function as a ‘national’ style and as an architecture capable of moving the emotions both strongly stressed by its supporters.50 What was new about the Ecclesiologist’s arguments was that they represented a rejection of all these claims in favour of a much more overarching analysis. Gothic architecture, it claimed, was not just contextually appropriate, not just aesthetically more appealing, not just functionally more effective or capable of inspiring nobler thoughts: it was simply more meaningful than any other sort of building. Indeed, the Ecclesiologists 45

Bodley, Modes, 2. Neil Levine, “The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Architecture and Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste-Genevieve”, in The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture, Robin Middleton, ed., (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982). 47 Michael Hall, ed., Gothic Architecture and Its Meanings, 1550–1830 (Reading: Spire, 2002). 48 Wren Society (Oxford: Wren Society, 1928–42), vol. 11, 20. 49 Christopher Wren, Parentalia (London: Printed for T. Osborn &c, 1750), 302. 50 Simon Bradley, “The Gothic Revival and the Church of England, 1790–1840” (PhD diss., London, 1996); Philip A. H. Aspin, “Gothic Cathedrals as National Monuments in England, c. 1790–c. 1820” (MSt diss., Oxford, 2009). 46

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self-consciously went well beyond all their predecessors—and even a little further than Pugin—in arguing ‘that in pointed architecture Christian symbolism has found its most adequate exponent.’51 This remarkable claim clearly chimed with changes in contemporary debates about architectural meaning; although, naturally, not everyone accepted it. Whilst agreeing that architecture was analogous to language, the influential architectural critic and Anglican clergyman, J. L. Petit believed that Gothic architecture was not only ‘in fact a dead language’, it was also one with no rules whatsoever.52 Likewise, although James Barr was willing to grant that Gothic was the most appropriate style for church buildings, he defended this chiefly on the emotional impact of medieval architecture rather than because of its intelligibility.53 But it is clear that the ideas articulated by the Ecclesiologist were widely shared, nonetheless.54 Indeed, even those like G. R. Lewis—who argued against the Ecclesiologists’ exclusive emphasis on a single Gothic style—believed, on the one hand, that ‘art can be made a vehicle of communication as well as letter press’ and, on the other, that the architecture of the Middle Ages was superior precisely because it was an expression of holy writ.55 This was all very close to the Ecclesiologist and its argument that: The more truly symbolical a style is, the more beautiful it must be; and hence we may assume that it was the perpetual yearning after symbolical truth that produced the highest and most beautiful style of architecture.56

In other words: the leading proponents of the Gothic Revival—and some of their opponents—were not just arguing about the beauty of the style, but about its legibility. The debate hinged on the question of which style was seen as spiritually more articulate architecture.

51

Ecclesiologist 4 (1845), 50. J. L. Petit, Remarks on Church Architecture (London: James Burns, 1841), 5. 53 James Barr, Anglican Church Architecture (Oxford: Henry Parker, 1842). 54 The varieties of response to the Ecclesiologist are wonderfully well illustrated in James Cottle, ed., Some Account of the Church of St Mary Magdalene Taunton (London: Vitelly Brothers, 1845). In Cottle’s contribution, the associational qualities of Gothic are stressed (18). In Henry Christmas’ section, the symbolic and representational qualities are emphasized (120). 55 G. R. Lewis, Illustrations of Kilpeck Church, Hereford (London: G. R. Lewis, 1842), 35. 56 Ecclesiologist 5 (1846), 223. 52

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For Gothic Revivalists, indeed, Gothic architecture was nothing more and nothing less than a text. How one read that text, it is true, remained the subject of dispute. For the historian Augustus Freeman, the real search was for ‘protosymbolism’: the almost unconscious expression of essential religious ideas.57 ‘Thus’, he went on, Romanesque Architecture has to convey the great lesson that the Church is everlasting on earth . . . This is expressed by giving the building a character of physical firmness and immobility; huge unbroken walls, massive columns, heavy arches, all combine to produce this effect.58

The Ecclesiologists disagreed. For them, the architectural text was more complex, more subtle, and—as a result—more powerful. The rediscovery and translation of the thirteenth-century Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durandus enabled them to claim an authentic pedigree for this belief: showing not only that ‘Catholick Architecture must necessarily be symbolical’, and that ‘architecture . . . is a branch of poesy’, but also that a truly Christian church could be read as a sort of devotional work. Describing a visit to a cathedral, J. M. Neale and Benjamin Webb wrote: Far away, and long ere we catch our front view of the city itself, the three spires of the Cathedral, rising high above its din and turmoil, preach to us of the most Holy and Undivided Trinity. As we approach, the Transepts, striking out cross-wise, tell us of the Atonement: the Communion of Saints is set forth by the chapels clustering round Choir and Nave: the mystical weathercock bids us watch and pray and endure hardness: the hideous forms that seem hurrying from the eaves speak of those who are cast out of the church: spire, pinnacle and finial, the upward curl of the sculptured foliage, the upward spring of the flying buttresses, the sharp rise of the window-arch, the high-thrown pitch of the roof, all these, over-powering the horizontal tendency of string course and parapet, teach us that vanquishing earthly desires, we also should ascend in heart and mind. Lessons of holy wisdom are written in the delicate tracery of the windows: the unity of many members is shadowed forth by the multiplex arcade: the duty of letting our light shine before men, by the pierced and flowered parapet that crowns the whole.59

57 E. A. Freeman, “Development of Roman and Gothick Architecture and Their Moral and Symbolical Teaching”, Proceedings of the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture [Proc. Oxf.], November, 12 1845, 25. 58 Ecclesiologist 5 (1846), 181. 59 J. M. Neale and Benjamin Webb, The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments: a Translation of the First Book of the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, Written by William Durandus (Leeds: T. W. Green, 1843), vii, xxiv, cxxx.

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These were not, they argued, subjective views. It was the science of Ecclesiology that enabled them to read the cathedral just as one might read a book.60 This was heady stuff: but it was highly attractive to a large constituency of people. Nor was it an attitude confined only to romantic Ritualists and High Anglicans. Freeman’s own friend and collaborator, the low-church Welshman, Basil Jones—the man who coined the term protosymbolism—also agreed with the Ecclesiologist.61 Still more strikingly, in his Palace of Architecture, the architect George Wightwick described a visit to a cathedral in similarly literary terms: ‘a Cathedral is an epic poem’, he wrote. It has its ruling theme, and subservient machinery—its progressive conduct and climax. What an opening passage is its Front! Then onward toward its nave, flows the current of its fable with the collatoral accompaniments of its Aisles, till it expands in the comprehensive triple tide of Transepts and Tower, and concludes in all the condensed magnificence of its Choir!62

Written well before the publication of the Rationale divinorum, and published only shortly after the first volume of the Ecclesiologist had gone to press, there is little wonder that Wightwick’s view is far from Ecclesiological in its details—nor that he fell out with them shortly afterwards. His account is far closer to the protosymbolism of Edward Freeman. But what is remarkable is their shared assumption that the highest form of architecture was ecclesiastical and that the highest praise was reserved for architecture was that it was like a literary text.63 The initial responses to this new way of seeing architecture were not encouraging. For the distinguished classical architect, C. R. Cockerell, the symbolism of medieval churches was simply further proof that, in Gothic Architecture, ‘solidity is sacrificed to superstition.’64 Fearful of Roman Catholic influences, many Anglican clerics were even

60 Chris Brooks, “Historicism and the Nineteenth Century”, in Vanessa Brand, ed., The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxbow, 1998), 13. 61 W. B. T. Jones, “On Uniformity, Considered as a Principle in Gothic Architecture”, in Proc. Oxf. February 26, 1845, 35–6, and May 14, 1845, 44–53. 62 George Wightwick, The Palace of Architecture: a Romance of Art and History (London: James Fraser, 1840), 128. 63 See also Athenaeum 1843, 696–7. 64 Athenaeum 1843, 188.

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more alarmed.65 Frederick Close, a pious protestant parson, made his feelings clear in a vituperative pamphlet, The ‘Restoration of Churches’ is the Restoration of Popery. For him, the notion of sacred symbolism was simply sacrilegious: ‘there is no need of mystic emblems, and mysterious signs, whereby a reconciled God in Christ Jesus may communicate with his people’, he wrote.66 Peter Maurice, chaplain of no fewer than two Oxford colleges, likewise revealed his horror at John Henry Newman’s Ecclesiological ideas; claiming, that at the dedication of his new church in Littlemore, Newman had preached a sermon in which he drew attention of his hearers to the perfect pattern he had followed in the erection of the building—comparing the windows, to the twelve apostles; the seven arches to the pillars of the church; the windows of three divisions to the mystery of the Trinity.

This was, Maurice maintained, nothing more than ‘Popery’. Looking at the window, his ‘offended eye detected one pane of glass, like a drop of blood, polluting the whole, and upon this I found the representation of an ornamental cross.’ Worse still, he expostulated, ‘I felt an indescribable horror stealing over me, as I carried my eye towards the eastern wall of the building, and beheld a plain naked cross’. This, he declared, was still worse: it was idol worship.67 Increasingly, however, even those who opposed the Ecclesiologists came to accept their approach. The Scots Presbyterian, Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson had no place in his heart for medieval styles, but he completely accepted the idea that architecture—and especially church architecture—should be meaningful. Indeed, he argued that neo-classical, rather than Gothic, buildings conveyed a higher spiritual message. Whilst the medieval church sought to impress with useless show, he wrote, ‘The Presbyterian Protestant Church of the present day, instead of thus seeking to impose upon the minds of its people by spectacles, professes rather to inform their minds with truth’.68 Gothic, he concluded, was consequently not only unsightly, but also unsuitable.

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See also British Magazine 16 (1839), 501. F. Close, The “Restoration of Churches” is the Restoration of Popery (London: Hatchard, 1845), 7. 67 Peter Maurice, The Popery of Oxford Confronted, Disavowed, and Repudiated (London: Francis Baisler, 1837), 53. 68 Alexander Thomson, “On the Unsuitableness of Gothic Architecture to Modern Circumstances”, in The Light of Truth and Beauty: the Lectures of Alexander “Greek” Thomson, 1817–75, Gavin Stamp, ed. (Glasgow: Alexander Thomson Society, 1999), 58. 66

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A rather different argument was made by the proudly puritanical J. A. Tabor, an Essex Congregationalist. ‘Christianity’, he claimed, ‘has nothing in common with the development and display of the arts or sciences.’ Christians, as a result, should feel ashamed to participate in the ‘vain-glorious erection, for the worship of God, of highly architectural and gorgeous edifices, with lofty and defiant towers.’ Yet even he did not attempt to deny the idea that buildings could communicate— he simply did not like what it was they were saying. In a Gothic church, he argued, ‘The towering and ambitious spire, in a spiritual sense, points downward.’69 As this suggests, once the notion of architecture as text was put forward, it proved very hard to escape. Even if used only metaphorically, it nonetheless had the power to transform discourse and buildings alike.70 Moreover, as these last examples suggest, what had started as an almost exclusively Anglican debate, and a rather controversial contention, quite quickly became a much more widespread set of assumptions. When the great Baptist preacher, C. H. Spurgeon, came to build his massive, 6,000-seater Metropolitan Tabernacle, he explicitly rejected the Gothic Revival and all its associations, but he could not avoid the idea of buildings as text and architecture as language. The Tabernacle, Spurgeon affirmed, had to be ‘a Grecian place of worship’. This was not because of the beauty or even practicality of Greek art, but because, It seemed to me, that there are two sacred languages in the world: there was the Hebrew of old; there is one other sacred language, the Greek, which is very dear to every Christian heart. Every Baptist place should be Grecian, never Gothic.71

Even as Spurgeon was confidently choosing classicism, however, other Non-Conformists were turning to Gothic—convinced that it was a still more effective architectural language.72 A key figure in this process was the architect James Cubitt.73 He defended Gothic architecture on pragmatic grounds: arguing for its cheapness, its flexibility, its appeal 69 J. A. Tabor, Nonconformist Protest Against the Popery of Modern Dissent, as Displayed in Architectural Imitations of Roman Catholic Churches (Colchester: J. Beckett, 1863), 4–5. 70 See also Christian Remembrancer 5 (1843) 84. 71 J. C. Carlile, C. H. Spurgeon: an Interpretative Biography (London: Religious Tract Society, 1933), 155. 72 Graham Hague, The Unitarian Heritage (Sheffield: Unitarian Heritage, 1986), 55. 73 Clyde Binfield, The Contexting of a Chapel Architect: James Cubitt, 1836–1912 (London: Chapels Society, 2001).

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to educated taste.74 He sought Biblical precedent for the adoption of grander chapels.75 But ultimately he argued that architecture must be meaningful. When building churches, he wrote, It is not enough that they can be used, in spite of their inconvenience, for Protestant worship: they should be its visible counterpoint and reflection. The great charm of good architecture lies in this—that it expresses the aims and feelings of its founders; that centuries after they have passed away, it is still alive with their life, and every stone of it tells in a universal language what they believed, and what they sought.76

Cubitt was a Congregationalist and spoke mainly—though not exclusively—to his co-religionists. Nonetheless, the message soon spread beyond them. In 1850, the Methodist minister F. J. Jobson offered a similar argument for his own denomination: arguing for Gothic on the grounds of its legibility. ‘A building’, he wrote, ‘should, as far as possible, make known by its appearances the purpose for which it was constructed.’ Gothic was ‘the outward and visible representation of Christian worship.’ It should thus become the basis of a new, national, Methodist style: a unified architecture symbolic of a unified church.77 By the middle of the nineteenth century, then, there was a widespread consensus, reaching across all religious denominations. This was reflected in a turn towards Gothic architecture: one that began within Anglicanism but soon spread throughout the Christian denominations—with even the undemonstrative Quakers acquiring a number of Gothic buildings.78 But this move towards medieval revival was a symptom, not a first cause. The underlying motives for this development were the belief that architecture could communicate and the desire to build churches which expressed sacred ideas. This impulse shaped classical as well as Gothic buildings. It was also about more than just the façade. As the influential critic A. J. B. Beresford Hope put it, it was now the case that ‘Every stone, every window, was found

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James Cubitt, “Chapel Architecture in 1864”, Building News 12 (1865), 163–4. [James Cubitt], “Remarks on Ecclesiastical Architecture as Applied to Nonconformist Chapels”, Congregational Year Book 1847, 150–1. 76 James Cubitt, Church Designs for Congregations (London: Smith, Elder, 1870), 8. 77 F. J. Jobson, Chapel and School Architecture as Appropriate to the Buildings of Non-Conformists, Particularly to Those of the Wesleyan Methodists (London: Hamilton Adams, 1850), 14, 43, 12. 78 Christopher Stell, “Nonconformist Architecture and the Cambridge Camden Society”, in Webster and Elliott, ed., “A Church as it should be”, 327. 75

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to tell its own appropriate tale, to bear its own peculiar meaning.’79 As a result, the plans of Victorian churches and chapels were similarly transmuted into texts. At Holy Trinity Convent, Oxford, for example, the architect Charles Buckeridge proposed a triangular building which would embody Trinitarian doctrine. Taking an image from a medieval manuscript as its model, it was to be a spherical triangle with a central circle representing God, surrounded by three other circles representing the three persons of the Trinity.80 Furnishings, too, were believed to possess meaning. ‘There is not a single article of Church furniture’, wrote one enthusiast, ‘which does not teach its special lesson; which is not a sign of some deep, full, abiding truth;—which is not a “messenger”.’81 The church as a whole was thus now intended to convey religious truth. In the words of the controversial Anglican clergyman William Bennett: ‘It must not be looked upon as mere walls and timber, but should be sanctified to us, as preaching some doctrine of our Lord in every part.’82 The church building and all that it contained, had, in effect been reimagined as a book. Such a significant shift in attitudes demands an explanation. There are several factors to be taken into account. To some extent, the idea that buildings possessed meaning—that they could be decoded— represented the triumph of the Antiquarian imagination.83 This was, after all, precisely what antiquaries like John Carter had argued in the eighteenth century, when he had maintained that the mystic sign of the Trinity manifested itself in every part of a church’s architecture.84 This antiquarian assumption was given a new impetus by the rise of Romanticism. It was Coleridge who—in a much-quoted phrase— described a Gothic Cathedral as ‘petrified religion’. Wordsworth’s ‘Ecclesiastical Sonnets’, with their invocation of ‘Ye everlasting piles!/ Types of the spiritual church which God hath raised’, proved to be an

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A. J. B. Beresford Hope, “The Present state of Ecclesiological Art in England”, Proc. Oxf., June 23, 1846, 26. 80 Howard Colvin, Unbuilt Oxford (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 113–6. 81 James Skinner, Why Do We Prize Externals in the Service of God? (London: J. T. Hayes, 1855), 15. 82 William J. E. Bennett, The Principles of the Book of Common Prayer Considered (London: W. J. Clearer, 1845), 272. 83 Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: the Discovery of the Past in the Eighteenth Century (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), ch. 7. 84 J. Mordaunt Crook, John Carter and the Genesis of the Gothic Revival, Society of Antiquaries Occasional Papers 7 (1995), 63.

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equally popular articulation of the same idea.85 The Romantic emphasis on honesty and authenticity in architecture found its apotheosis in John Ruskin: who, of course, was a key figure in shaping Victorian attitudes towards church buildings.86 Ideas from within the architectural world also had an impact, too. Influenced by Ruskin and by writers like the French historian Auguste Choisy, there was a widespread consensus amongst both architects and critics that, as the American architect Louis Sullivan put it in 1906, architecture is ‘a great and superb language wherewith Man has expressed, through the generations, the changing drift of his thoughts.’87 This was never just about theology or theologians.88 Nonetheless, to ignore the theological underpinnings of this change would be foolish. This development in architecture is linked to developments in religious ideas—and, especially, to the typological approach to Biblical studies which experienced a remarkable revival in the early nineteenth century. Victorians were encouraged to read the Bible in search of symbols. ‘EVERY WORD MUST HAVE SOME MEANING’, declared the influential Biblical scholar, Thomas Hartwell Horne. That meaning might be literal or spiritual; and, if spiritual, then it might be allegorical, parabolic, or typical. Searching for the typical—or typological—meaning was fraught with danger, but also with opportunity, for it could unlock otherwise inaccessible spiritual truths.89 Types were symbols which foreshadowed some future person or event. So, for example, as John Henry Newman famously preached, Moses could be seen as the type of Christ.90 This typological symbolism

85 For example, both Coleridge and Wordsworth are quoted in Barr, Anglican Church Architecture, 7–8, 11 and Poole, Appropriate Character, 15, 86. 86 John Unrau, Looking at Architecture with John Ruskin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972). 87 Robert Twombley, ed., Louis Sullivan: the public papers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 175. See also Nikolaus Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), ch. 23; David Watkin, The Rise of Architectural History (London: Architectural Press, 1980), esp. ch. 1 and 4. 88 See also Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne, 1995). 89 Thomas Hartwell Horne, A Compendious Introduction to the Study of the Bible (London: Longman, Born, Green, and Longman’s, 1852), 127–8, 184. 90 J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons (London: Rivingtons, 1868), vol. 7, 118–32.

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was not confined to scriptural exegesis.91 It was also highly influential on Victorian art: shaping the imagination of painters like John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. Viewing Tintoretto’s Annunciation, Hunt observed: When language was not transcendental enough to complete the meaning of a revelation, symbols were relied upon for heavenly teaching, and familiar images, chosen from the known, were made to mirror the unknown spiritual truth.92

It was this insight that led him to embrace typology in his own work: as such symbolically rich paintings as The Light of the World (1854), The Shadow of Death (1871), and—most obviously—The Scapegoat (1856), reveal. In this typological approach, art became a rich tapestry of symbols which could be decoded. Every part of a Pre-Raphaelite painting could be read for its theological message: from the theme as a whole, to the details of the scene, to the frame and the text written upon the frame.93 The impact of typology was not confined to art. It similarly shaped literature, poetry, and criticism.94 And, we can now see, it was formative for architecture, too. It was the Ecclesiologist which—for example— praised the Chapel of the Holy Trinity in Roehampton for the ‘very felicitous manner in which type and antitype are combined’.95 It was William Bennett who concluded that ‘A church is a type, a great spiritual type of our religion in Christ Jesus.’96 To be sure, typology was a complex and disputatious field: Evangelical typology needs be

91 Patrick Fairbairn, The Typology of Scripture, or the Doctrine of Types (Edinburgh: Thomas Clark, 1855), 6, 20. 92 Quoted in George P. Landow, William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 5. 93 Kate Flint, “Reading the Awakening Conscience Rightly”, in Marcia Pointon, ed., Pre-Raphaelites Re-viewed (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989); Paul Mitchell and Lynn Roberts, “Burne-Jones’s Picture Frames”, Burlington Magazine 142 (2000); Karen D. Rowe, “Painted Sermons: Explanatory Rhetoric and William Holman Hunt’s Inscribed Frames” (PhD diss., Bowling Green State University, 2005). 94 Herbert L. Sussman, Fact Into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979); George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). 95 Ecclesiologist 4 (1845), 32. 96 Bennett, Principles of the Book of Common Prayer, 272.

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distinguished from the typology of the Tractarians.97 J. M. Neale and Benjamin Webb made a distinction between what they called ‘typical’ symbolism and the ‘Sacramental’ symbolism that was at the heart of Ecclesiology.98 But the appeal of typological analysis was very wide indeed—and architectural debate clearly reflected this. The Ecclesiologists’ insistence that ‘Sacramentality’ was not associational, nor arbitrary, nor allegorical, and their assertion that there was a clear and fixed meaning to every symbol in church architecture, echoes absolutely the claims made for typology in scripture. Just as there was ‘only ONE true sense attached to any word’,99 so there could be only one true meaning associated with any architectural detail.100 Just as any type must point to a deeper spiritual reality, so any architectural symbol must allude to something beyond itself.101 This was, put plainly, nothing more or less than typological reasoning applied to architecture. In the same way that High Churchmen embraced typology in art, so they also accepted—indeed, promoted—it in church building.102 Moreover, as we have seen, it soon became the case that Low Churchmen, Non-Conformists, Catholics, and Christians of all sorts accepted this approach and agreed—with the Ecclesiologist—that ‘A church is but the material development of an idea’.103 This widespread acceptance of typology in architecture is highly significant. It was a hermeneutic that transformed the nature of architectural debate. It suggests one way in which nineteenth-century churches were experienced by contemporaries. For them, every detail was resonant with sacred meaning: the font was by the door ‘to typify that by baptism is the entrance to the church’;104 the building as a whole was ‘an exposition of the distinctive doctrines of Christianity, clothed with a material form’105 It also helps reveal why the controversy over church

97 Jerome Bump, “The Victorian Radicals: Time, Typology, and Ontology in Hopkins, Pusey and Müller”, in Lucia V. Nixon, ed., Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 31. 98 Neale and Webb, Symbolism of Churches, xxv–xxvi. 99 Horne, Compendious Introduction, 127. 100 Ecclesiologist, 5 (1846), 222. 101 Poole, History of Ecclesiastical Architecture, 178. 102 Alastair Grieve, “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Anglican High Church”, Burlington Magazine 111 (1969). 103 Ecclesiologist, 3 (1843–4), 180. See also Eclectic Review 25 (1849), 35–50. 104 Henry Christmas, “Of the Furniture and Ornaments of Churches”, in Cottle, ed., Some Account of the Church of St Mary Magdalene, 127. 105 Poole, Appropriate Character, 6.

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buildings was so prolonged, intense, and bitter. If architecture was ‘a thing that speaks to the soul; an embodying of religious feeling’, then it was vitally important to choose the right style, the right plan, the right ornament, and the right decorations.106 Above all, the widespread adoption of this typological approach to architecture provides an explanation for the fact that Victorians understood their churches in a very particular way. Typology taught them to see symbols in everything— in art, in literature, in nature, in music. It also taught them to look at buildings as though they were books—and, more particularly, to look at churches as though they were the Bible. Indeed, for some authors, architecture came to possess a superior claim as a vehicle for holy writ—sometimes exceeding the power of the Bible itself. The author of the Ecclesiological pamphlet ‘A Few Words to Church Wardens’ (1841) admitted that ‘I am not fond of quoting Scripture’.107 This did not, however, prevent him from arguing that the church building was a sort of superior sacred text: For as the Altar stands at the east end of the Chancel representing the full Communion of the Christian, and the end of the Christian life in heaven, so the entrance ought to be at or towards the west end of the Nave, and the Font by it, to show that thus the entrance into the earthly building typifies our initiation by Holy Baptism into the spiritual Church.108

Whilst the critics of Ecclesiology evidently believed that this extreme position was widespread, it was, in fact, rather rare to believe that buildings could communicate more effectively than books and rarer still to see them as superior to the Bible itself.109 This author’s attitudes are nevertheless striking and suggestive. They show the lengths to which some Victorians could go once they had come to see architecture as an instrument of Revelation. The great irony of this move was that it came at the same time as the Bible itself began to undergo very serious challenges. The impact of science and—especially—of Biblical criticism meant that by the

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Ecclesiologist, 1 (1841–20), 98. “A Few Words to Church Wardens on Churches and Church Ornaments Suited to Country Parishes”, in “Temples . . . Worthy of His Presence”: the Early Publications of the Cambridge Camden Society, ed., Christopher Webster (Reading: Spire, 2003), 197. 108 “A Few Words to Church Wardens on Churches and Church Ornaments Suited to Town and Manufacturing Parishes”, in “Temples . . . Worthy of His Presence”, 7. 109 Close, “Restoration of Churches”, 7. 107

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middle of the nineteenth century large numbers of English men and women had their doubts about the revealed truth of scripture.110 By the 1870s, modern critical approaches were triumphant—and the typological analysis of the Bible was, in particular, on the wane.111 As the debate over the Creation windows at Manchester College suggests, in some contexts this led to serious doubts about the details of design. As the critics asked: was it really right to depict ‘a scheme of dogmatic theology which science has thoroughly disproved’?112 In other contexts, by contrast, similar themes were used precisely to assert the primacy of the Biblical account of Creation. In the 1870s, the church at Garton-in-the-Wolds, for example, was similarly ornamented with scenes from Genesis apparently in an effort to counteract the effects of Darwinism.113 But, as these two examples suggests, even as the Bible itself was challenged, the Victorian assumption that buildings were texts—and texts to be read typologically—did not go away. Arguably, indeed, the more that the truth of the Bible was challenged, the more necessary it became to communicate to people through church and chapel buildings. For that reason, we should not be so very surprised to find that there was controversy when Manchester College installed its Creation windows. At one level, the complaints of ‘Jerubbaal’ and his allies expressed nothing more than a traditional protestant distrust of religious imagery. At another level, it reflected the very Victorian—and specifically Unitarian—problem of reconciling the Biblical narrative with scientific truth. The terms of the debate thus seem very familiar. Yet it is worth pausing to re-examine this case, nonetheless. What was going on at Manchester College was a battle about architectural meaning: not about whether the chapel and its ornaments possessed meaning, but about what the appropriate meaning was that they should convey. Some writers suggested alternative images. Others supported the theme that had been chosen. But no one argued that this was an unimportant or irrelevant debate. Even the contention that clear glass should be used to symbolise the clarity of God’s Word rested upon the

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Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (London: SCM, 1971), vol. 1, 529–30. Nigel M. deS. Cameron, Biblical Higher Criticism and the Defence of Infallibalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987). 112 Inquirer, February 23, 1895, 122. 113 Jill Allibone, The Wallpaintings at Garton-on-the Wolds (London: Pevsner Memorial Trust, 1991), 7. 111

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assumption that symbolism of that sort was inescapable. The idea of architecture as vehicle of revelation underwrote the whole exchange. What had begun as the—controversial—ideas of a small group of Anglicans and a few Roman Catholics, had transcended denominational divides and would outlast the Victorian era. At Manchester College, and all across the country, the distinction between sacred space and sacred text had been visibly dissolved.

COLLECTOR CONNOISSEURS OR SPIRITUAL AESTHETES? THE ROLE OF ANGLICAN CLERGY IN THE GROWTH OF INTEREST IN COLLECTING AND DISPLAYING EARLY ITALIAN ART (1830s–1880s)1 Susanna Avery-Quash Currently on loan in the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery in London are six small panels attributed to Jacopo di Cione and his workshop showing Saint Anthony Abbot, Beata Paola, Saint Luke, Saint Peter Damian, Saint Bruno Boniface and Saint John the Evangelist. Dating from about 1365–70, they would originally have formed part of two pilasters of an altar-piece, perhaps from the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Florence (a foundation of the Roman Catholic Camaldolese Order of reformed Benedictines).2 By the 19th century they had ended up in Protestant England, adorning the collections of various important collectors of early Italian art, including the well-known connoisseur, William Young Ottley, and a High Church Anglican priest, John Fuller Russell. However, by 1940, the panels are recorded back in a sacred context, this time in the Church of England parish church of Saint Mary Magdalene, Littleton, Middlesex. Finally, 1

Through researching the provenances of certain National Gallery pictures for Dr. Dillian Gordon’s catalogue of 15th-century Italian paintings in 2003, I came across some extremely colourful even eccentric men-of-the-cloth, who had a penchant for early Italian art and who played a significant part in purchasing it during the 1840s. Unfortunately, there was insufficient space in the published Schools Catalogue to tell their story as fully as I would have liked, so I was delighted to have the chance to do so when Dr. Joe Sterrett of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University invited me to contribute a paper to his seminar series, Sacred Text—Sacred Space. This article has developed out of that seminar and I am grateful to Dr. Sterrett for comments at that time. I am indebted in particular to Dr. Petà Dunstan, Librarian of the Divinity School, Cambridge, for sharing her expertise, and to my colleagues, Dr. Susan Foister (who organized the exhibition, Cardinal Newman 1801–90, at the National Portrait Gallery in 1990) and Dr. Dillian Gordon, for reading an earlier draft. 2 The six saints are catalogued at the National Gallery as L1080–1085, on loan from the Littleton Collection. The presence of saints of the Camaldolese Order suggests that their original setting may have been the Camaldolese monastery in Florence. These saints may have come from the same altarpiece as a pinnacle panel depicting Noli me Tangere by the Master of the Lehman Crucifixion (NG 3894), which was presented to the National Gallery by Henry Wagner, in 1924.

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in 2009, they made the journey to Trafalgar Square to be displayed in a secular public art gallery. The provenance of this group of saints demonstrates a rich and varied history of use for altarpieces as potentially sacred or secular objects, with homes equally apposite in the public and private spheres. This essay will look at a larger group of early religious paintings, mainly Italian, which now form part of the National Gallery’s permanent collection, but which during the 19th century belonged to various English clerical collectors, whose churchmanship largely dictated the way these pictures were regarded and displayed at that time. Among the clergy-collectors under review those who saw the last Hanoverian monarch on the throne and who were broad church in outlook and not deeply interested in the heated ecclesiastical debates that rocked the Anglican Church during Victoria’s reign, tended to collect sacred art merely as amateur connoisseurs. By contrast, a group of younger, dedicated High Church Anglicans from the late 1830s, including John Fuller Russell, who were inspired by the Oxford Movement, were keen to acknowledge the inherent spirituality of early art (especially Italian) and to evaluate schools and artists from a Christian standpoint rather than according to the perceived excellence of any formal or technical qualities. It was their belief that these visual treasures, containing within themselves (and pointing towards yet other) spiritual truths, were nothing less than windows into heaven. Further assurance of their theological position came, as we will see, from various art-historical publications, initially generated abroad by foreign writers in the late 18th century but from the early-mid 19th century also propagated by a number of influential British writers of art-history. These High Church Anglican clerical collectors, seeking a practical outcome for their theological and doctrinal position, came to believe that early religious art could be displayed not only in their homes but also in the churches with which they were associated. The clergymen collectors brought into focus here may be a marginal or eccentric part of the greater story of the Anglican church of their day,3 yet their tale 3 Certainly their bias was recognised at the time and voices were raised in protest against the ‘ecclesiological art-party’. Why, one opponent argued, should their personal taste be taken up ‘as a way of thinking almost amounting to an article of ecclesiological faith—the belief in the Prae-Raphaelite school?’, see Anon., ‘The Dutch School and Mr. Fuller Russell’, Ecclesiologist, vol. 17 (Feb. 1856), 112. (In fact the author misunderstood Russell’s terminology of Pre-Raphaelism and took it to mean the 19th-century movement in the English school of William Holman Hunt!)

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is worth retelling, for through their collecting and displaying of early Italian art they did their part to foster a more general interest in such art, which ultimately led to its being bought by the British government and enshrined in the nation’s leading art institution, the National Gallery in London. Before undertaking biographical examinations of these collectors, the first half of the essay will ‘flesh out’ the theoretical context in which these clerical-collectors were operating: the larger debate over the use of painting in sacred spaces as well as the more specific issue of using actual examples of early Italian and Netherlandish art in a church or religious setting. The debate about church decoration as part of the larger interest in the architecture and adornment of churches was of little concern to the leaders of the Oxford Movement, Edward Bouverie Pusey, John Keble and John Henry Newman. Rather, it was some of their followers who became interested in finding a more practical outlet for Tractarian theology, believing that aesthetics was potentially a very strong but hitherto overlooked weapon in the armoury. For instance, John Mason Neale (1818–66), constantly vociferous in promoting the ‘Beauty’ of God (manifested in things visual) in relation to a consideration of ‘His Truth’ (manifested through the word), wrote in 1844: ‘It is clear to me that the Tractarian writers missed one great principle, namely, the influence of aesthetics—and it is unworthy of them to blind themselves to it’.4 While some High-Church adherents (many with Tractarian leanings) made it their business to revive ceremonial in public worship (‘Ritualism’), others concentrated on the physical appearances of the church itself (‘Ecclesiology’). No longer was it deemed sufficient for places of worship to be clean and tidy, but rather that they should be decorated and furnished in a way appropriate to and symbolical of their function. The specific aim of High Church Anglican Ecclesiology was to promote the belief that gothic or ‘pointed architecture’ was the true expression, in architectural terms, of Catholic Christianity. Within the Church of England this style of church architecture and furnishings was promoted most effectively by Neale, who, as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, set up in 1839, with his friends Edward Boyce and Benjamin Webb, the Cambridge Camden Society and its associated journal, the Ecclesiologist. As the prominent

4 Quoted in E. A. Towle, John Mason Neale, D.D.: A Memoir (London; New York, 1906), 51.

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evangelical Francis Close, later Dean of Carlisle, memorably put it, what was being ‘taught analytically at Oxford [was] taught artistically at Cambridge . . . it is inculcated theoretically, in tracts, at one University, and it is sculptured, painted and graven at the other…’5 The mid-19th century in Britain was one of the greatest ages and places for church building. Between the first fruits of ecclesiological principles in practice at Newman’s church at Littlemore outside Oxford (undertaken by his chaplain, Henry Bloxam) and at All Saints Church, Margaret Street (rebuilt by Newman’s supporter, Frederick Oakeley) and its later flowering in Neale’s own convent at East Grinstead, High Church clergymen did much in their parish churches to promote their brand of theology through ritual and ecclesiology. To this end they introduced stained glass, tiles, mosaics and painted wood-work on ceilings, floors and walls. Often a church’s interior polychromy would derive not only from abstract patterning on wall surfaces or columns, but from figurative paintings distempered in the chancel and elsewhere. Given his penchant for polychromy, it is not surprising that the architect George Edmund Street (1824–81) was a vociferous exponent of wall painting in churches, citing in one particular article Giotto’s chapel at Padua and the church of San Francesco at Assisi as good examples of what contemporary artists should aspire to and urging his readers to consider in relation to bright murals ‘how eminently beautiful and permanent their decorative effect’ might be.6 Street published his article in the Ecclesiologist of 1858, a magazine which constantly promoted the use of wall-painting, heralding it as ‘the Scripture of the vulgar’;7 occasionally reporting on ancient murals worldwide;8 and, more nationalistically, suggesting that were the Anglican Church again to make ‘Painting her handmaiden’ perhaps a new national school of English artists might arise to rival ‘those English painters, who in 1350 . . . made St. Stephen’s chapel in Westminster, the glory not only of England but of Christendom itself’.9

5

F. Close, The Restoration of Churches is the Restoration of Popery (London, 1844), 4; quoted in M. Chandler, The Life and Work of John Mason Neale, 1818–1866 (Leominster, 1995), 28. 6 G. E. Street, ‘On the future of Art in England’, Ecclesiologist, vol. 19 (June 1858), 236–7. 7 Anon., ‘On Decorative Colour’, Ecclesiologist, vol. 5 (Sept. 1845), 199–203. 8 E.g., ‘E. L. B.’, ‘Ancient Wall-Painting [at Yaxley, Suffolk]’, Ecclesiologist, vol. 28 (Dec. 1867), 369–71 and Anon., ‘Ancient Paintings in Cologne Cathedral’, ibid., vol. 7 (May 1847), 174–8. 9 Anon, ‘Altar-Screens’, Ecclesiologist, vol. 2 (Nov. 1843), 35.

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Colourful sacred imagery was even introduced in the holiest liturgical space of all—the altar—most frequently in the form of an ornate reredos, which came to replace an earlier, Protestant type of altarscreen which had generally been arranged to accommodate boards with the Ten Commandments. While many reredoses were painted with richly diapered abstract decorations others were ornamented with Christian emblems and figures, as favoured by the Ecclesiologist. Most of the reredoses ‘with images’ were sculpted (well-known examples being produced by the Roman Catholic architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–52) for his patron Lord Shrewsbury at St. Giles, Cheadle and at the chapel of St. John’s Hospital, Alton, as well as by the Anglican builder George Gilbert Scott (1811–87) for various cathedrals in the 1860s and 1870s),10 but occasionally painted reredoses were commissioned. For instance, a huge one whose central panel depicted the Virgin and Child with three angels in adoration was painted during the 1850s by William Dyce as the centre-piece for All Saints Church, Margaret Street.11 Other well-known Victorian artists also painted reredoses, notably the young Edward Burne-Jones for St. Paul’s Church, Brighton; Dante Gabriel Rossetti was commissioned by Llandaff Cathedral in the late 1850s to paint one which included ‘a very striking and original treatment of the Nativity’; and Frederick Leighton frescoed a reredos for Lyndhurst parish church, Hampshire, about 1860, depicting Christ between the wise and foolish virgins.12 Specific mention of independent or free-standing paintings—altarpieces—adorning the altar is rarer in contemporary literature than mention of reredoses. This appears to reflect the fact that their use was, and remained, relatively uncommon. In the article on reredoses 10 E.g. G. G. Scott’s reredoses at Ely (1850–68, including alto-relievo sculpture in the niches), Gloucester Cathedral (1873, with figure sculpture by Redfern) and Salisbury Cathedral (c. 1875); see P. F. Anson, Fashions in Church Furnishings (London, 1965), 144–5, 150–5. See also ibid., 123, where Anson notes a hybrid reredos which combined a carved stone relief after Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper with side panels reaching the ground which were inscribed with the Ten Commandments in Gothic script. A reredos of the Last Supper after Leonardo was executed in 1867 with a central panel in mosaic by Antonio Salviati, a design that was repeated in another Scott building, Chichester Cathedral, in 1876. 11 According to the website of All Saints Church, Margaret Street, the reredos ‘suffering the effects of London air, was reproduced by Comper in 1909 on wooden panels in front of the original’ while the ceiling also painted by Dyce ‘was repainted in 1909 by Comper, and in 1978–80 by Larkworthy’. 12 For the Burne-Jones commission, see Anson, op. cit., 76; for the Rossetti commission, see G. E. Street, ‘On the Future of Art in England’, Ecclesiologist, vol. 19 (June 1858), 239; for the Leighton commission, see Anson, op. cit., 241.

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referred to above the writer ‘strongly . . . recommends’ the ‘re-introduction of triptychs’. The arguments adduced in favour of this move were that precedents existed for their use within the Church in England (‘an ancient example is preserved at S. Cross’s hospital’ and other examples ‘are still to be seen in two churches in Worcestershire’)13 and that their presence lent a ‘fitting dignity to an Altar’. Furthermore, the commissioning of a triptych was relatively cheap (cheaper in any case than a large-scale reredos) and would encourage ‘a demand for ecclesiastical painting’ which would bring obvious financial benefit to the artist and an ‘improved state of feeling’ to the viewer. By the 1840s and 1850s the idea of commissioning or purchasing a reredos or altarpiece from a living artist was not regarded as unusual, which reflected the fact that an ever-growing number of clerics and laity, mainly of High Church persuasion, were becoming ever-more knowledgeable about religious art in the West. Their thoughts were influenced in such directions not only by their theological, liturgical and ecclesiological reading but also by some highly influential arthistorical texts. What is fascinating is that both disciplines—the ancient school of theology and the nascent field of art-history—reached identical conclusions concerning the perceived merits of early Italian art, even though theologians tended to hold up Fra Angelico as the epitome of purity and beauty while some art-historians clung to an older view that Raphael was the greatest painter of all time. The overlaps were not just academic either, for a number of the most important writers in English on early Italian art and its theological significance also collected it. From the 1840s several new trends, some already evident in earlier writings about early Italian art, radically altered the terms of evaluation by which it was assessed, and hence the reasons why it was collected. Previously the assumption, more or less explicitly stated, had been that art should be judged according to the contribution it made to the progressive development of a particular school of painting. This methodological approach had a long history, traceable back to the first 13 N.B. The historical precedent for ‘the use of pictures enclosed in frames and laid arbitrarily on flat surfaces’ as well as for murals or abstract polychromy in churches was noted by the Revd. John Hungerford Pollen in a paper he gave ‘On the Use of Decorative Painting in Churches’ and reported in the Ecclesiologist (vol. 12 (Aug. 1851), 288): ‘Both ways are historical, nor could he trace any connection or development of one into the other. He named churches in Italy of the 4th, 6th, and 13th centuries, and in England of the 13th, 14th, and 15th, in which both these methods were in use’.

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biographer of artists’ lives, Giorgio Vasari, writing in the 16th century. Vasari had made it clear that what counted was development in the formal and technical elements of painting and that such progress had culminated in the achievements of the 16th-century artists, Raphael and Michelangelo, in the period subsequently termed the High Renaissance. But from the 1840s it was widely acknowledged that artists preceding Raphael such as Fra Angelico, Giovanni Bellini and Perugino had produced works of great intrinsic beauty which should not be viewed merely as historical curiosities. This radical change seems to have come about because certain writers started to judge art according to its ‘spiritual’ content. Such writers believed that art could show true inspiration or poetic worth and move the spectator deeply only when it stemmed from deep and genuine religious convictions. As a result—and for the first time—the work of earlier artists came to be seen by some as superior to and more meritorious than that of their successors. The earliest and most radical writings which promoted this idea were published in Germany and France, but the notion soon enjoyed some influence in England, both as a number of these works were translated into English and as a few English writers took up the theme, adapting it for their native readers. In Germany it was the writings of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798)14 and his apostle (Carl Wilhelm) Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) who did most to encourage a re-appraisal of the early masters and to establish the notion of a specifically Christian art. Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders of 1796, a series of stories about art during the Middle Ages, portrayed the period as a golden age when artists had been free to express profound religious feelings in their works and viewers ready to respond to them. Raphael was held up as the supreme example of a spiritually-inspired painter. In the Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst, a series of lectures delivered at Berlin in 1801–4, Schlegel developed Wackenroder’s theme, and suggested that the early painters had produced their works in a consciously Roman Catholic vein. He also complained about the lack of religious feeling and spirituality in his own day.

14 See W. D. Robson-Scott, ‘Wackenroder and the Middle Ages’, Modern Language Review, vol. 50, no. 2 (April 1955), 159, 161, 164, 166.

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Such ideas tended to reach English readers through the writings of a Frenchman, Alexis-François Rio (1798–1874).15 Inspired by the work of Wackenroder, Schlegel and others, Rio wrote De la poésie chrétienne, the first part of which was published in 1836. Desiring to bring about in France a revolution in the interpretation of Christian art, Rio used the same fundamental question that the German writers had devised to gauge the worth of any given work of art, namely whether the work in question breathed the religious spirit. He concluded that only the artists between Giotto and the early Raphael remained true to their artistic calling and it was Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, Gentile da Fabriano, Perugino and the early Raphael who succeeded best in painting in the right spirit—one that was both mystical and lyrical. By contrast, artists such as Masaccio and Uccello, who succumbed to naturalistic and classical influences, were criticized for showing signs of corruption. In England Rio’s ideas had an immediate impact in certain quarters, assisted by his marriage to an English woman and his consequent frequent presence in the country from 1836. His work was favourably discussed by such figures as Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Stanhope, Thomas Carlyle, William Gladstone, William Wordsworth and Samuel Rogers, some of whom were adherents of the Oxford Movement and occasional worshippers at Margaret Street, and Rio himself was in touch with the leaders of the Oxford Movement.16 Such continental writings, together with the nearly contemporary radical and controversial artistic developments of the German Nazarenes and the Italian equivalents (exponents of ‘Purismo’), gave a moral and at times religious edge to a host of literature that was consequently spawned in England. This included polemical articles concerning the National Gallery’s inadequacies by journalists like George Darley and popular surveys of public collections and of Christian iconography by the staunch Protestant, Mrs. Anna Jameson.17 Perhaps more important still were a number of passionate critical and historical publications

15 See Rio’s autobiography, Epilogue à l’art chrétien (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1870); also M. C. Bowe, François Rio: sa place dans le renouveau catholique en Europe (1797– 1874) (Paris, 1938). 16 See letter to Lord Lindsay, dated Florence, 16 Feb. 1843; quoted in H. Brigstocke, ‘Lord Lindsay and the Sketches of the History of Christian Art’, in A. Weston-Lewis (ed.), ‘A Poet in Paradise’: Lord Lindsay and Christian Art (Edinburgh, 2000), 22. 17 See S. Avery-Quash, ‘The Growth of Interest in Early Italian Painting in Britain with particular reference to pictures in the National Gallery’ in D. Gordon, National Gallery Catalogues: The Fifteenth Century Italian Paintings (London, 2003), xxvi.

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about early Italian art, which did much to encourage art collectors to think again about its aesthetic and spiritual value. One writer whose work was heavily influenced by Rio was the Scottish nobleman Alexander William Lindsay, who became the 25th Earl of Crawford and 8th Earl of Balcarres in 1869 (1812–80). From an early age he conceived the idea of plotting the progress of European art through writing a book; for research purposes he travelled through Europe between 1839 and 1841 and built up a notable library and art collection. The endresult was Lindsay’s three-volume Sketches of the History of Christian Art, published in 1847. This work is hugely important for it is the first serious attempt in English to trace the evolution of early Italian art and architecture from the time of Cimabue and Giotto up to the young Raphael. As published, the work comprised an introductory essay on Christian iconography, and ten epistolary essays on particular periods and schools, such as Giotto and his followers, and the early Sienese and Bolognese painters. Although Lindsay, like the majority of his contemporaries, regarded Raphael and Michelangelo as the greatest artists of all time, he was independent enough to champion the work of Giotto and, unusually, Piero della Francesca. The metaphysical theory which Lindsay advanced at the start of his book, the influence of which continues through the work, in part followed Rio’s ideas. He suggested that the development of art could be divided into three ages, and that these ages could be correlated with different geographical areas and different parts of the human body: Egypt with the body, Greece with the Intellect, and Christianity with the Spirit. From this basis he went on to argue that since the spirit is nobler than the body or intellect, Christian art must be greater than Pagan art and he was particularly fulsome in his praise of early Italian art.18 Where Lindsay’s work differed from the foreign works mentioned above was in its desire to prove the moral, spiritual, and intellectual superiority of Christian art, without pinning it down specifically to Roman Catholic art. To complement his writings, Lindsay sought to build up a comprehensive and exemplary historical collection of European art with emphasis on the period between the 13th and 17th centuries. 18

See H. Brigstocke, ‘Lord Lindsay and the Sketches of the History of Christian Art’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, vol. 64 (1981–2), 27–60 and J. Steegman, ‘Lord Lindsay’s History of Christian Art’, Journal of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes, vol. 10 (1947), 123–31.

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Ultimately, Lindsay’s ambitious vision was never fully realised: there remained gaps in his sequence, while some of the paintings (acquired from London auctions or from dealers and agents in Italy) were of unexceptional quality. That said, several of the best paintings he acquired are now prized possessions in the National Gallery, London: a Martyr Bishop or Abbot attributed to Fra Angelico (NG 2908), a fresco fragment of the Virgin and Child enthroned by Domenico Veneziano (NG 1215) and a panel showing Saints Bartholomew and Andrew by Ugolino di Nerio (NG 3473). Another writer whose admiration for early Italian art was encouraged by reading Rio and also Lord Lindsay was John Ruskin (1819–1900), who came from a Scottish Calvinist family and remained uninfluenced by the Tractarian cause. Before encountering these authors he had paid no heed to early Italian art. Indeed, on his first visit to Italy he had ignored or disparaged the work of Fra Angelico and Botticelli in Florence and the work of Perugino, Fra Angelico and Raphael in Rome. Consequently, his first volume of Modern Painters, published in 1842, contained no hint of enthusiasm for early Italian art. His ‘conversion’ to this type of painting came in late 1844, as a result of reading Rio’s and Lindsay’s work. ‘Perceiving thus, in some degree, what a blind bat and puppy I had been all through Italy,’ he later recalled, ‘[I] determined that at least I must see Pisa and Florence again before writing another word of Modern Painters’.19 With his new-found zeal for early Italian art, Ruskin produced no fewer than six publications entirely devoted to art before the time of Raphael, while the subject crops up in many more of his works. His views are expressed particularly clearly in his Lectures on Architecture and Painting, originally delivered in November 1853. Here he states and expands on his ‘indisputable’ belief in the identity between religion and true art and that ‘art is the impurer for not being in the service of Christianity’ (although, in his case, it should be understood that he was looking with a Protestant eye and nor should his ‘unconversion’ of the later 1840s be forgotten). To him, a religious spirit was clearly expressed by the early masters, such as Cimabue, Giotto, Orcagna, and Fra Angelico. Later works of art, starting with Raphael’s work in the Stanze of the Vatican, tended rather to be suffused with—and hence soiled by—sensuality and

19 See J. S. Decarderis, ‘John Ruskin: the Collector’, The Library, 5th series, vol. 21, no. 2 (June 1966), 124–5.

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worldliness. There were, however, exceptions: Tintoretto became— with Fra Angelico—the hero of the second volume of Modern Painters. Ruskin himself assembled a select collection of paintings. Among them was a Virgin and Child attributed to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) and an icon of Saint Jerome which was later presented to the National Gallery, London (NG 3543; transferred to the British Museum, London). From the 1830s then, many writers were passionately and systematically promoting the innate religiosity of early Italian art. In this surge of enthusiasm it was almost inevitable that when specimens of this kind of art started to become available to English buyers (after the suppression of the monasteries in the late 18th century and the spoliation of works of art during the Napoleonic wars in Europe from the early 19th century), there were many buyers keen to acquire specimens. Among such collectors were a number of wealthy High Church supporters, two of whom—the priests John Fuller Russell and Frederick Heathcote Sutton—may be taken as important case-studies. It is revealing to compare their attitude to early Italian art with that of another pair of clerical connoisseurs, of an older generation—John Sanford and Walter Davenport Bromley—whose motivations for purchasing early Italian art were altogether different. Previous research, notably by Nigel Yates, has demonstrated that some collectors among the clergy and laity in the early 19th century placed medieval fittings in their churches and private chapels, in particular reusing 15–16thcentury German, Flemish and Dutch wood-carvings in this way.20 Was this also the case with regard to Old Master paintings in general and early Italian pictures in particular? This question of the redeployment of Old Master paintings in such settings is hard to answer definitively, partly because it appears not to have been a widely debated issue at the time and partly because subsequently very little research has been undertaken. A few examples of later Italian paintings are known to have been used to adorn certain altars.21 From my own foray into the field of the ‘oldest’ Old Masters 20 See W. N. Yates, Buildings, Faith and Worship: The Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches, 1600–1900 (Oxford, 1991; hereafter Yates, Buildings), esp. 112–5. 21 E.g. Yates, Buildings, 118–9, notes that in 1823 at Holy Trinity, Birmingham, a ‘painting by Foggo, representing Christ healing at the pool of Bethseda’ was included behind the altar; see also Anson, op. cit., 224–5, where he notes that at St. Augustine’s Church, Kilburn (started in 1871 by G. E. Street) Lord Northcliffe presented ‘several Italian ‘old masters’ . . . which hang on the walls’, and 137, where Anson notes that

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it would seem that original examples of earlier or ‘medieval’ painting were redeployed in a similar way, although comparatively rarely. The main documentary evidence for this assertion is an article entitled ‘Thoughts on the Revival of Panel Painting in the style of the 14th and 15th centuries, in connection with Ecclesiastical Decoration’, which appeared in the Ecclesiologist in August 1852. Appropriately, its author was the ubiquitous John Fuller Russell. In it he mentions, in passing, that antique pictures have been introduced in a few churches, even if not yet employed on any High Altar. Having lamented the fact that ‘[a]s yet we see not in our churches the stately screen or reredos (once so common in Italy) . . .[nor] the triptych . . . like those altar pictures still remaining in Flanders and Germany’, he admits that ‘[h]ere and there, indeed, a picture (recently imported from abroad, or rescued from some receptacle of lumber where perhaps it had lain concealed for centuries,) may possibly be found in our chancels’.22 He goes on to speak of the need for the Anglican Church to foster ‘the reproduction of any panel paintings in the form of reredos or triptych or of any specimens at all worthy of comparison with ancient examples’ believing that ‘this appears the only way in which sacred pictures intended for churches, oratories, and the like, should be designed and executed’.23 He justifies the value of the Gothic originals for two reasons. Firstly, on ‘aesthetical grounds,’ he speaks of the ‘painful inappropriateness of the later school of religious pictures in Pointed churches’, finding its ‘naturalist’ element ‘out of place’ and also stating that ‘[a] picture to be effective in a church properly enriched with stained glass and polychromy must partake more or less, of the brilliancy around it’,24 this latter point being one that Neale had vigorously promoted in his Church Enlargement and Church Arrangement of 1843. Secondly, Fuller Russell urges the appropriateness of Gothic exemplars on religious grounds—for the sake of ‘sacred Christian symbolism’.25

in 1864 the reredos of Merton College chapel, Oxford, comprised a Crucifixion by Tintoretto. N.B. The tradition of Old Master paintings serving as altar-pieces in Oxbridge college chapels has continued, witness the purchase of Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi by King’s College, Cambridge, in 1961. 22 J. Fuller Russell, ‘Thoughts on the Revival of Panel Painting in the style of the 14th and 15th centuries, in connection with Ecclesiastical Decoration’, Ecclesiologist, vol. 13 (Aug. 1852), 219. 23 Ibid., 220. 24 Ibid., 220. 25 Ibid., 220.

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Why Fuller Russell promoted the use of art that mimicked Gothic originals rather than the ‘genuine articles’ themselves may be explained relatively easily. Practically speaking, antique religious art was harder to come by and more expensive to purchase (painting more so than sculpture) than other types of ecclesiastical artefacts, especially if modern.26 Collectors had to have the ‘wherewithal’ to buy antiques and the ‘know-how’ (or at least good advisors) to do so properly: certainly all the clergymen and laity in this study stemmed from aristocratic or upper-middle-class families with schooling, travelling and associates to their names which helped to mould them in the necessary direction— but they were in the minority. Furthermore, thinking about aesthetics, there were issues around the matching of an altarpiece with its setting to ensure a visually-pleasing union which may have hampered some attempts to introduce ‘antiques’ into churches and favoured instead the commissioning of new works of art, whose size, subject-matter and colouring could be decided on in relation to their intended settings. Finally, and most importantly, from a theological point of view, there was the on-going and highly-charged debate as to whether the reintroduction of altarpieces, be they sculpted or painted, would induce idolatry and ‘Popish’ practices (and with regard to paintings of the Virgin whether such images would encourage the yet more heinous sin, in Protestant eyes, of Mariolatry); probably many clerics or lay patrons preferred to avoid these contentious issues altogether by leaving the altars of their churches bare, or perhaps adorned more simply with a cross. For these and other reasons, there are, to date, few documented cases of genuine medieval altarpieces, especially of Italian origin, finding new life in the Anglican Church during the 19th century. Among the best known instances is that recorded in a watercolour drawing of 1850 of the chapel at Margaret Street, which shows the High Altar adorned with a triptych (now in the Oratory of the Vicarage): its central panel is a 15th-century Netherlandish depiction of the Crucifixion;

26 N.B. What was more common was the use of affordable attractive chromolithographs after the work of 14th- and 15th-century Italian masters, 197 of which were produced by the Arundel Society after 1852, many examples still surviving in parish churches in England and the Commonwealth; see R. Cooper, ‘The Popularization of Renaissance Art in Victorian England’, Art History, vol. 1, no. 3 (Sept. 1978), 284, note 149 and A. Bird, ‘An Earnest Passion for Art: The Arundel Society’, Country Life (3 June 1976), 1513–4.

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the two wings are later additions [12.1].27 It is hoped that what follows will supply further data to the as-yet very select canon. Taking the four case-studies in chronological order, we begin our investigations with the Revd. John Sanford (1777–1855),28 the second son of John and Jane Sanford of Nynehead Court, Nynehead, Somerset, whose zeal in collecting art (of a wide range) was that of an amateur antiquarian. After being educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, he became rector of All Saints, Nynehead, Somerset, from c. 1810– 1834 but it is unlikely that he ever occupied the Vicarage, as he placed a curate there—a certain Thomas Tanner. Meanwhile, in 1813, he was appointed Chaplain to Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge, a post he retained until 1846, but again this was merely a titular appointment because in 1819 he married a glamorous divorcée, Elizabeth Georgina Morgan (1786–1846), and the pair spent much time travelling abroad before settling in the 1830s at the Villa Torrigiani, Florence. Although Sanford had started to collect pictures about 1815 the majority of his purchases were made in Italy in the early 1830s. Perhaps his collecting instincts were encouraged by his wife, whose first husband, the Irish peer, Lord Cloncurry, had amassed an extensive collection of antiquities in Rome. Certainly they were aided by her great wealth—she inherited £180,000 from her father, who had been employed in the East India Company. Sanford’s purchases, bought either directly from Florentine families or via the art market, are recorded in an account book, now preserved in the Barber Institute, Birmingham. Sanford’s tastes were eclectic, and he collected statues, furniture, ‘pietradura’, and was an active patron of the sculptor, Aristodeme Costoli, a pupil of Canova, who carved his portrait-bust.29 As far as pictures were concerned, he amassed works by 17th-century Dutch and Flemish artists and High Renaissance artists as well as by early Italian painters. Among his specimens of early Italian art was 27 The watercolour drawing by Thomas S. Boys is reproduced in P. Galloway and C. Rawll, Good and Faithful Servants: All Saints’ Margaret Street and its Incumbents (Worthing, 1988), 22. Research on this painting has been undertaken by Canon David Hutt; I am grateful to Fr. Alan Moses, Vicar of All Saints Church, Margaret Street, for the information supplied here. 28 See G. Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain, 3 vols. (London, 1854), vol. 2, 337–8; B. Nicholson, ‘The Sanford Collection’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 97, no. 628 (July 1955), 207–214 and S. Avery-Quash, op. cit., xxv. 29 N.B. Sanford’s appearance is also recorded in a portrait by John Hollins of 1850 (Corsham Court), which shows him in non-clerical attire, dignified and apparently aware of his own importance.

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Zanobi Strozzi’s Death and Assumption of the Virgin (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), an untraced triptych by Duccio of the Virgin and Saints and Masaccio’s Portrait of a Man and a Woman (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Washington). In 1837 Sanford decided to move back to England, an event which was reported to the National Gallery, London (in case a picture sale ensued); the pictures were then displayed at the family’s new home, Winkfield Place, Windsor. As predicted, two years later, in March 1839, nearly one hundred and fifty paintings were auctioned at Christie’s, leaving sixty or so—the paintings which Sanford valued most highly. This remnant (to which he added very few) were listed in a catalogue published in 1847. Sanford’s pictures passed on his death to his only child, Anna Horatia Caroline, who married the Hon. Frederick Henry Paul Methuen, subsequently 2nd Lord Methuen, of Corsham Court, Wiltshire. Although sales in 1899 and 1920 depleted Sanford’s collection further, some forty of his pictures and numerous other works of art remain at Corsham, among them an Annunciation by Fra Filippo Lippi. Much of Sanford’s original collection may be reconstructed from the miniature watercolour copies that he had made of the majority of his pictures before he moved to London, which are preserved in four large albums at Corsham. Although the National Gallery bought nothing from the Sanford sales (not being interested in this sort of art at that date), it has subsequently acquired six paintings once belonging to this clerical-collector, including panels of the Resurrection and The Maries at the Sepulchre which Sanford had purchased in 1832 as authentic Mantegnas, but which are now considered to be by a later imitator (NG 1106 and 1381) and Andrea di Aloigi’s panel of the Virgin and Child (NG 1220), probably the only authenticated painting anywhere by this assistant of Perugino’s. Despite Sanford’s apparent worldliness he was not forgetful of the Church. In his late seventies he donated to All Saints Church, Nynehead, two excellent sculptures of the Virgin and Child by Luca and Andrea Della Robbia (in situ) as well as a tabernacle by Mino da Fiesole (sold to the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, in 1970 to pay for the restoration of the church).30 It would be interesting to know how this tabernacle was originally displayed, but it would not have been

30 See C. Avery, ‘Treasures in Relief ’, Antique Collector (July–August 1991), 46–9 (reprinted in C. Avery, Studies in Italian Sculpture (London, 2001), 139–46), which includes an illustration of the interior of the church, with the Della Robbias visible.

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entirely out of place in this English parish church which itself dates back in its earliest parts to the 14th century. It is worth noting that in 1869, sometime after Sanford’s death, All Saints Church was restored and many of the alterations were along ecclesiological lines: the old box pews were replaced and the Sanford memorials removed (to a new Memorial Chapel). Apparently the architect of the project, who also designed a rose-window, was a descendant of John Sanford: the Revd. Edward Ayshford Sanford (1794–1871), F.R.S., J.P., and M.P. A second priest-collector to form one of the most distinguished collections of his day was the Revd. Walter Davenport Bromley (1787– 1863). As in the case of Sanford the revamping of the family chapel was left to a descendant at the end of the 19th century, although one of Davenport Bromley’s early Italian pictures has left its mark on the chapel’s interior. He was the youngest son of Davies Davenport of Capesthorne Hall, Macclesfield, Cheshire. Having graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, he took responsibility for the family livings of Ellaston in Staffordshire, and Fanshawe, near Capesthorne in Cheshire (apparently the ‘Hayslope’of George Eliot’s novel, Adam Bede). He added the name Bromley to his own in 1822 on succeeding to the Bromley properties, which included Wootton Hall, Staffordshire; he also had a home in London at 32, Grosvenor Street. Further financial resources may have come from his marriages, first to Caroline Barbara Gooch, daughter of the Archdeacon of Sudbury, and, after her death, to Lady Louisa Mary Dawson. Davenport Bromley invested his wealth largely in paintings, his first acquisition being Giovanni Bellini’s Agony in the Garden, which he bought in Italy in the 1820s. Most of his paintings, however, were acquired at auctions of previous collectors of early Italian art. For instance, he bought more than forty paintings at the celebrated Cardinal Fesch sale at Rome in 1845, and nine lots from the also historically-significant Northwick Park sale in 1856. He bought mainly Italian paintings, which, according to the German art-historian, Gustav Waagen, were ‘chiefly altar-pieces, illustrating the Italian schools from their first rise in the 13th century to their highest development in the 16th, such as [Waagen had] not met with, especially as regards the earlier schools, in any other gallery in England’.31 This choice of painting reflects the fact that the collector was, in Waagen’s opinion, ‘an ardent

31

Waagen, op. cit., vol. 3, 371.

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admirer of all such pictures, be they of the 13th or 16th century in which an unaffected and genuine feeling is expressed’,32 but there is no evidence of any espousal on the part of this cleric of Tractarianism or of the related movements of Ritualism and Ecclesiology. According to Waagen the pictures were displayed all over the house: in the hall, ‘a small room’, ‘another small room’, the Drawing Room and in the Dining Room. A watercolour by James Johnson depicting Davenport Bromley’s drawing-room at Capesthorne Hall shows several early Italian paintings, including a polyptych of Christ and various saints by Taddeo Gaddi.33 Some of these pictures remain at Capesthorne, including a Virgin and Child with Saints Francis and John by Bicci di Lorenzo, but many were sold posthumously by his son, William.34 At this sale, of 12–13 June 1863, Sir Charles Eastlake (first Director of the National Gallery, London, who did so much to acquire first-rate specimens of early Italian art) managed to secure four paintings for the National Gallery, acquisitions which were considered ‘a most valuable addition to the treasures of the National Collection’.35 These were Bellini’s Agony in the Garden (NG 726), Boltraffio’s Virgin and Child (NG 728), Foppa’s Adoration of the Kings (NG 729), and the central part of Pesellino’s Trinity Altarpiece (NG 727). Subsequently, several other pictures once in Davenport Bromley’s collection have found their way to Trafalgar Square, including Ugolino di Nerio’s panel showing Saint Bartholomew and Saint Andrew (NG 3473). None of the pictures appear to have been displayed in the Chapel of the Holy Trinity, the chapel of Capesthorne Hall. However, when the chapel was restored by Mrs. Augusta Bromley Davenport between 1886 and 1888, Giotto’s painting of the Dormition, still in family collection at that date (now Berlin, although sought after by the National Gallery, London),36 inspired Antonio Salviati’s mosaic reredos of that subject. As a keen ecclesiologist, Augusta introduced other modifications into this originally neo-classical church: the box-pews were replaced and the triple-decker pulpit was cut down and moved, part of the ceiling

32

Ibid., 371. For a reproduction, see S. Avery-Quash, op. cit., xxvii. 34 N.B. Somewhat confusingly, William inverted his surname to Bromley Davenport. 35 Letter from O. Mündler (the National Gallery’s former Travelling Agent) to R. N. Wornum (the Gallery’s Keeper), dated 8 Oct. 1863 (National Gallery Archive, ref: NGA02/3/4/4). 36 See a letter from Lady Eastlake to W. Boxall (Eastlake’s successor as Director at the Gallery), dated 26 Nov. 1872 (National Gallery Archive, ref: NGA1/1/67/4). 33

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received decorated panelling and the chancel windows were filled with stained-glass.37 Of course, by the 1880s such renovation schemes were no longer viewed as ‘Popish’ manifestations, as they often had been a generation earlier. Notwithstanding efforts to restrict ritualism through a Royal Commission in the 1860s and legislation around the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, the mid-to late-19th century witnessed a gradual change of attitude until the ecclesiological ordering of the Anglican Church became the accepted norm, a dominance retained, arguably, as late as the 1970s.38 By comparison the second pair of clergyman-collectors under investigation in this essay—John Fuller Russell and Frederick Heathcote Sutton—had an altogether different relationship to the early Italian pictures they were collecting, enjoying them as much as religious images as historical curiosities or financial investments. Furthermore, in the case of the Sutton, it was he himself—not a descendant—who invested time and money into the restoration and adornment of churches. Perhaps unsurprisingly this pair of clerics also enjoyed a completely different relationship with the Church of England, being dedicated parish priests who were interested in theological and liturgical matters and who were personal friends with the leaders and leading associates of the Oxford Movement. In the case of the Revd. John Fuller Russell (1813–84),39 he was ordained in 1838 and then served his curacy in two South London parishes, St. Peter’s, Walworth (1838–9) and St. Mary’s, Newington Butts (1839–41), before being appointed perpetual curate of St. James’s, Enfield (1841–54); from 1856 until his death he was Rector of Greenhithe, Kent. Throughout his life he was a High Church sympathizer and he even visited Pusey and Newman in Oxford in the autumn of 1837. His association with the Oxford Movement is commemorated in his correspondence with Pusey between 1836 and 1838, an exchange deemed of sufficient note to be quoted at length in the first biography of Pusey. As an undergraduate at Peterhouse, Cambridge, Fuller Russell first wrote to Pusey to clarify his thinking regarding various doctrinal matters, but it was over ritualistic

37 See Images of England: Chapel of the Holy Trinity, English Heritage: National Monuments Record website (ref: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archon). 38 See Yates, Buildings, 143, 150. 39 See Waagen, op. cit., vol. 1, 35, 36; vol. 2, 461, 464 and ibid., Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain (London, 1857), 284–6; Crockford’s Clerical Dictionary, 1860–84; and Notes and Queries, 6th series, vol. 9 (12 Apr. 1884), 300.

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concerns, in particular their differing views on eye-catching interiors and furnishings and vestments, that tension between the correspondents arose.40 Whether Fuller Russell pursued his interests in liturgy is unknown, but his associations with ecclesiology continued, and among the various committees on which he served was the Ecclesiological Society.41 A related pursuit was collecting early religious art, which he hunted down in sale-rooms in London and on the Continent,42 and during his extensive study-trips to Holland, Germany and France.43 Waagen, recording his visit to Eagle House (Fuller Russell’s home near Enfield), described the collector as being ‘one of the most enthusiastic admirers of the grandeur and high significance of the ecclesiastic art from the 13th to the 15th century that I met with in England’.44 Since Fuller Russell was ‘so much impressed with its purity and religious depth of feeling’ he ‘only sparingly’ admitted works of the 16th century into his collection. Waagen’s list includes works of the Sienese and Florentine 40 In 1839 Fuller Russell sent Pusey a copy of his tract Judgment of the Anglican Church . . . on the Sufficiency of Holy Scripture, and the Value of the Catholic Tradition . . . (London, 1838) and received a letter full of robust criticism. Pusey especially attacked ‘some practices of friends of yours, e.g. the hanging a room with black velvet during Lent’ and their choice of clerical dress (Liddon, op. cit., vol. 2, 142–5). While saying nothing negative about the tendency towards adornment per se, it is clear from Pusey’s reply that richly ornate interiors and furnishings and vestments were acceptable only within limits and so long as their origins were a reverence of spirit. Furthermore, Pusey commented that visual adornment of churches was best left to others than the priest and to a future time when more pressing issues had been worked through. 41 Fuller Russell also served on the committees of the Society of Antiquaries and Royal Archaeological Institute. His publications included Few Hints on the Practical Study of Ecclesiastical Antiquities: for the Use of the Cambridge Camden Society (1839); The Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1847); and The Ancient Knight, or Chapters on Chivalry (1849). His contributions to the Ecclesiologist journal continued, e.g. ‘Description of the Glass in Fairford Church, Gloucestershire’ (Oct. 1865), 286 and ‘Ecclesiastical Embroidery’, ibid., vol. 29 (Oct. 1868), 281–2. 42 E.g., Fuller Russell acquired works from the Ottley sale of 1847 and the Bladys sale of 1849 (both in London) and at foreign sales in Berlin, Paris and Lisbon in the early 1850s. 43 Fuller Russell published a lengthy series of notes from these continental art-tours, see ‘Early Christian pictures at Berlin’, Ecclesiologist, vol. 13 (Mar. 1852), 141–50; ‘Reminiscences of a Tour in Holland’, ibid., vol. 16 (Dec. 1855), 358–60; ‘Mr Russell’s Tour in Germany’, ibid., vol. 20 (Feb. 1859), 1–9; (April 1859), 100–108; (Oct. 1859), 345–8; vol. 21 (Feb. 1860), 7–11; and ‘Notes on Some Early Pictures in Paris’, ibid., vol. 28 (June 1867), 165–9, of which a copy is in the National Gallery Archive (ref: NGA1/7/35). 44 Waagen, op. cit., vol. 2, 461–4. Doubtless it was Fuller Russell’s enthusiasm for early Italian art that induced him to lend generously to the 1857 Manchester Art Exhibition, to which other clerics also sent pictures.

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Schools and of the early German School.45 Among the Sienese pictures were fragments from the dismembered Santa Croce altarpiece by Ugolino (now in the National Gallery, London) and panels from a polyptych showing Saint Germinius by Simone Martini (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). Waagen does not go into any detail about the exact arrangement of the pictures at Eagle House, but does note, more generally, that the walls were ‘[s]o richly . . . adorned with Italian specimens of the 14th century, that the spectator feels as if transported into a chapel at Siena or Florence’.46 It would seem as though the earlier chiding from Pusey regarding the need to eschew ornate displays in decoration and dress had fallen on deaf ears! Whether Fuller Russell went one step further and used his proto-chapel surroundings as a space for private devotions is impossible to answer, although probably unlikely. After his death, Fuller Russell’s collection was auctioned at Christie’s, between 18 and 20 April 1885. Among the Italian pictures were several which have subsequently been acquired by the National Gallery: fragments from Ugolino’s dismembered polyptych (NG 1188–9, 3375–7, 4191), a Crucifixion attributed to Jacopo di Cione (NG 1468, previously thought to be by Spinello Aretino), the Madonna of Humility attributed to Lorenzo Veneziano (NG 3897, previously considered a work by Barna da Siena) and the Florentine School, Baptism of Christ (NG 4208, which arrived at the Gallery as a Cavallini). From correspondence in the National Gallery Archive, it appears that in 1878 Fuller Russell attempted to interest the Gallery’s Trustees in his collection but was told that the Gallery had no funds available for the purchase of pictures.47 The last clerical-collector under review is the Revd. Frederick Heathcote Sutton (1833–88), the seventh son of Sir Richard Sutton, second Baronet, and the brother of Sir Richard Sutton, squire of Brant Broughton, the fourth Baronet. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then became vicar of St. Helen’s Church, Brant Broughton, Lincolnshire and a decade later was appointed Prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral. Like Russell, Sutton was an ardent supporter of Pusey and High Church Anglicanism and his friends and family shared similar enthusiasms. One of his close friends, for instance, was 45

N.B. Fuller Russell’s collection also included miniatures, incunabula and French, German, Netherlandish and English manuscripts of the 15th century. 46 Waagen, op. cit., vol. 2, 461. 47 Ref: NG6/5/7, dated 6 March 1878.

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Charles Lindley Wood, Second Viscount Halifax, the lay leader of the Anglo-Catholic party, while his elder brother, later Sir John Sutton, was a founder member of the Cambridge Camden Society, who, during his Deanship of Jesus College, Cambridge, in the 1840s, instigated the magnificent restoration of the college chapel. Sutton maintained a passionate love of Gothic architecture and mediaeval art throughout his life. He became involved in the re-decoration of several ecclesiastical buildings, including Southwell Minster and Lincoln Cathedral; for Lincoln Cathedral he and another brother, Augustus, made stained-glass from 1842. He also gave advice on building works at his old college. Between 1874 and 1876, he undertook the restoration of St. Helen’s, Brant Broughton, a church with parts dating back to 1290 though in the main a late 14th-century building, and received help from George Frederick Bodley (1827–1907) and Thomas Garner (1839–1906). Sutton himself designed many of the stained-glass windows, the stone font and the metal-work chandeliers. Furthermore, he donated the reredos:48 a panel of the Ascension by the 15th-century German Master of Liesborn, one of a good number of early German and Netherlandish pictures which Sutton amassed [12.2]. This painting had in fact belonged for a short period to the National Gallery in London but, together with other paintings from the Krüger collection, which were considered undesirable for display at Trafalgar Square, it had been sold at Christie’s, on 14 February 1857. This is a prime example of a painting that has yo-yoed between various ecclesiastical settings, where it was viewed as an aid to devotion, and various secular settings—a private gallery and a public museum— where its worth was reckoned principally in terms of its interest as an example of early German art. Two other pictures from Sutton’s collection—both early Italian ones—have ended up, conversely, at the National Gallery, London. His most significant early Italian picture, indeed arguably his most important acquisition, was Masaccio’s Virgin and Child (NG 3049). It has been suggested that Sutton was attracted by the music-making

48 N.B. It may have been presented by Sutton in 1887 in association with Queen Victoria’s Jubilee; see C. Grossinger, North-European Panel Paintings: A Catalogue of Netherlandish and German Paintings before 1600 in English Churches and Colleges (Studies in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art History, 6) (London, Harvey Miller, 1992), 63–4. For an image of the reredos in its setting, see the website of St. Helen’s Church, Brant Broughton (Wikipedia).

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angels in the picture because of his interest in organs.49 That Sutton was particularly attached to this picture is suggested by circumstantial evidence, for he bequeathed it to his nephew,50 who eventually presented it to the National Gallery in 1916. The importance of the picture has always been signalled by the Gallery through the prominent position assigned to it (it currently hangs beside Gentile da Fabriano’s Virgin and Child, on loan from the Royal Collection). The second Sutton painting now in the Gallery is a fragment from a predella panel showing Incidents in the Life of Saint Benedict by Lorenzo Monaco (NG 4062). It was also acquired from Sutton’s nephew, although in this instance by purchase in 1925. The rest of Sutton’s pictures were dispersed, several being sold at Sotheby’s on 25 June 1924 and 26 June 1925, the main bulk, however, being auctioned after the death of Sutton’s heir, at Christie’s, on 12 February 1926. The infectious enthusiasm for collecting and displaying early Italian art demonstrated by certain men of the cloth was not, however, their monopoly. There were a number of devout Anglican laymen who formed collections similar to those of their clerical counterparts.51 Among the most significant was Thomas Gambier Parry (1816–88), who, with family money from the East India Company, bought the estate of Highnam, Gloucestershire, in 1838. He spent time between 1847 and 1851 beautifying the Church of the Holy Innocents, Highnam, designed for him by Henry Woodyer (1816–96).52 Gambier Parry

49 See F. Russell, ‘A Means to Devotion: Italian Art and the Clerical Connoisseur’, Country Life, vol. 178, (5 Dec. 1985), 1748–51: Sutton wrote a book about organs and designed a number himself. The organ at St. Helen’s Church, by Wordsworth and Maskell of Leeds, was installed during Sutton’s restoration of the church, in 1876. 50 His nephew, successor and heir was Arthur Frederick Sutton, who undertook a further bout of restoration work at St. Helen’s Church, Brant Broughton, in 1919. 51 N.B. The impression, perhaps encouraged by the tight focus of this essay, that it was only High Church clergy or laity that collected early Italian art fails to take account of the collecting instincts of several other very serious collectors of early Italian art, who chose not to advertise their ecclesiastical affiliations so openly, including the poet Samuel Rogers, Prince Albert and William Fuller Maitland; see S. Avery-Quash, op. cit., xxvi and Waagen, op. cit., vol. 1, 35: ‘Various collections also exist, extending not only to the Italian schools of the 15th century, but even to the Netherlandish and German schools of the same period;—a taste formerly unknown in England. Of such class are the collections of H. R. H. Prince Albert, of Lord Ward, Mr. Labouchere, Mr. Fuller Maitland, Mr. Alexander Barker, and Lord Elcho. Others unite even the Italian forms of art of the 14th century, such, for instance, as the collections of Mr. Davenport Bromley, and of the Rev. Mr. Fuller Russell’; also vol. 1, p. 36; vol. 3, pp. 371–80; and G. Waagen, Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain (London, 1857), 166–8. 52 See J. J. Fenton, History and Guide to the Church of the Holy Innocents (Highnam, 1985).

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undertook much of the internal decoration himself, including the spirit frescoes, a painting technique he pioneered and employed at Ely Cathedral. He also wrote an article on ‘the study and revival of Gothic art in painting’.53 Gambier Parry used his wealth also to purchase pictures including a number of early Italian paintings, which are now in the Courtauld Institute Galleries, London.54 The second such layman is Alexander Beresford Hope (1820–87), the third and youngest son of Thomas Hope (the well-known writer and patron of art), who became a High Tory M.P. Sympathetic to the Oxford Movement, a member of the Cambridge Camden Society and on the Council of the Arundel Society (as was Gambier Parry), he wrote various tracts and books on liturgical and ecclesiological matters and was in contact with Pusey.55 He also assisted financially with the refurbishment of St. Augustine’s College in Canterbury and several churches, notably All Saints Church, Margaret Street—the church built by William Butterfield (1814–1900) between 1849 and 1859, which replaced the original Margaret Chapel. For the church Beresford Hope paid for the reredos and painted ceiling by Dyce and presented the triptych of the Crucifixion (see above) as well as some medieval ivories which Butterfield turned into covers of an altar-book.56 Beresford Hope’s passion for Gothic art and architecture led him also to cram his house with medieval ecclesiastical furnishings and fixtures as well as a modest collection of early paintings, so that, in Waagen’s opinion, his home resembled a chapel.57 Waagen’s remarks that the homes of Fuller Russell and Beresford Hope looked like shrines are valuable because they hint at a fluidity existing between sacred and secular spaces during the first half of the 19th century, perhaps more than has previously been recognised. Indeed, there are instances when the boundary marking the ecclesiastical and secular became so blurred that it eventually broke down, sometimes with

53 ‘T. G. P.’ [Thomas Gambier Parry],‘Whitewash and Yellow Dab—No. V’, Ecclesiologist, vol. 21 (Apr. 1860), 78–82. 54 See The Provisional Catalogue of the Gambier-Parry Collection, introduction by Sir A. Blunt (London, [1967]); special issue of the Burlington Magazine, vol. 109, no. 768 (March 1967), including article by E. Fahy, ‘Some Early Italian Pictures in the Gambier-Parry Collection’, and J. Fleming ‘Art Dealing in the Risorgimento II’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 121, no. 917 (Aug. 1979), 503–5. 55 E.g. A. J. Beresford Hope, English Churches in the XIX. Century (1861); Hints towards Peace in Ceremonial Matters (1874); Worship in the Church of England (1874) and Worship and Order (1863). He discussed with Pusey the establishment in the early 1840s of the Park Village Sisterhood at Birmingham. 56 See Anson, op. cit., 85–6. 57 Waagen, Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain (London, 1857), 189.

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dramatic consequences. A renowned instance is found in the biography of the advanced Tractarian, Frederick William Faber (1814–63), whose conversion to Roman Catholicism occurred during his time as Rector at Elton parish church, Huntingdonshire, in 1845 (he went on to become Priest in charge at the important Jesuit church, the Brompton Oratory, South Kensington). From contemporary accounts it is evident that the changes which occurred in liturgy and furnishings in his church did not remain restricted to that public holy space, but seeped into the Elton Rectory, his private home. Faber introduced into his Anglican church an organ and hymn-singing, and he observed saints’ days, heard confessions, preached wearing a surplice and installed stained glass windows. While this was in keeping with the times, less usual and more extreme changes were brought about within his household: ‘[l]ittle by little the men servants became a sort of Brotherhood . . . There were spiritual exercises and readings from the lives of the saints. There was meditation, reading, visiting the sick. There were midnight prayer meetings when an hour was spent in reading the psalter. On the eves of feasts the devotions were prolonged to three hours. As time went on the discipline was introduced on Fridays and in Lent. Other young men joined in the exercises. They began to think of the Rectory as their ‘monastery’ and themselves as monks’.58 From this passage one can assume that services were conducted in Faber’s home; further research may reveal whether his rectory was adorned with any religious images and if so, whether the images played a part in the private—albeit communal—devotions noted above; one presumes, in this instance, that they probably would have done. In any case the placing of ‘either a religious picture (a triptych if possible), or a cross’ was suggested by the Ecclesiologist in 1849 as the best way of forming ‘a fitting and sufficient centre of worship’ for a domestic oratory.59 It was cases like Faber’s60 which led certain militant Protestants to warn their fellow countrymen against things ‘Popish’, including the inherent dangers of studying early sacred art too closely. A characteristic caution came from the Revd. M. Hobart Seymour, who confessed that whenever he contemplated early Italian pictures he was ‘drawn

58 R. Chapman, Father Faber (London, 1961), 94; quoted in N. Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain, 1830–1910 (Oxford, 2000), 59–60. 59 Anon., ‘On Domestic Oratories’, Ecclesiologist, vol. 10 (June 1849), 367. 60 N.B. Newman and Oakeley likewise set up proto-monastic communities before converting to Roman Catholicism in the 1840s.

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toward that kind of recluse and contemplative religion, which they seem designed to embody’ and found himself becoming ‘all the less fitted for that active and stirring benevolence, which is an essential of a living Christianity’.61 Although High Church Anglicans of the sort featured in this essay would have disagreed with this analysis of cause and effect, they would have concurred with Seymour’s admission of the ‘general and powerful effect’ of works by Giotto, Pinturicchio, Fra Angelico, Francia, Perugino and the early Raphael. What a change of perception this comment indicates! Italian medieval art had come to be recognised across the board—by the religious as well as by laity of various persuasions—as significant not only in terms of its historical and antiquarian interest or its financial worth, but also for its innate spiritual power (perceived of as a force for good or evil depending on the viewer’s doctrinal stance). Debate about the value of sacred art became increasingly main-stream during the 19th century in Britain, encouraged by a dovetailing of interests from theologians, ecclesiologists and writers on art history. One result was that the sacred significance of early religious painting, lost when such art was divorced from its original sacred setting, was now restored to it, and this in turn opened up discussion about its legitimate display, including the potential redeployment of religious art in holy settings. It became not uncommon to commission reredoses and altarpieces often in a medievalizing style, but the display of genuine ‘originals’ went one stage further: such images, on the comparatively few occasions that they were used, were real ‘eye-openers’ and appeared ‘marvellously splendid’.62 To its promoters, the restoration of beautiful and pious medieval art on the altars of private chapels and parish churches, many of which edifices had been founded in the 14th and 15th centuries or were modern recreations based on earlier models, was anything but out of place. The aesthetic and theological values surrounding early religious painting, traditionally seen as competing values, ended up in 19thcentury Britain being drawn together in such a way that the clear divisions between sacred and secular and between public and private

61

M. Hobart Seymour, Pilgrimage to Rome (London, 1848), 139. J. Fuller Russell, ‘Early Christian Pictures at Berlin’, Ecclesiologist, vol. 13 (Mar. 1852), 141, where he describes medieval sacred art, especially the ‘elder Italian religious pictures of the 14 and 15th century’ as ‘[r]adiant with their gilded backgrounds, glowing colours, and burnished nimbi’ and as being ‘in the aggregate marvellously splendid’. 62

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became blurred. Interestingly, this phenomenon has not entirely disappeared from view, a recent manifestation occurring within the context of the secular space of the National Gallery, London. It has always been the practice of curators to seek to establish a full provenance-history of the paintings in their care, and although the permanent hang has tended to focus on a painting’s contribution to the story of art the accompanying label will also often draw attention to a picture’s original setting—in the case of the earliest pictures in the Sainsbury Wing inevitably to a sacred context of some kind.63 However, in some of its temporary exhibitions since the start of the 21st century the National Gallery has decided on the bold and pioneering step of drawing attention principally to the sacred nature of the religious art on display: to the sacred spaces the exhibits would originally have occupied and the sacred functions they were created to fulfil. The most striking instance of this change of conventional curatorial practice was seen in its Millenium exhibition, Seeing Salvation: The Image of Christ (February to May 2000).64 The public response in relation to this initiative was overwhelmingly positive and the exhibition was the best attended to date in the National Gallery’s history. At the time of writing The Sacred made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600–1700 exhibition has just opened (October 2009–January 2010),65 which presents religious art from the Spanish Golden Age, with many of the devotional works of art borrowed from the worshipping spaces of Spanish churches and monasteries. This latest exhibition, which explores how and why Spanish art of the 17th century was created to shock the senses and stir the soul, can usefully be seen as a follow-up to Seeing Salvation—as a second pioneering attempt to recover a sense of the sacred in art, albeit mediated by the secular space of an art gallery. Such exhibitions, it should be added, sit happily within a newly-defined programme of research to which the National Gallery, London, has committed itself 63 The architect of the Sainsbury Wing, Robert Venturi, having spent time in Rome in the late 1950s, clearly took inspiration from churches by Brunelleschi when designing the National Gallery’s extension, especially for its interior. The Sainsbury Wing houses the Gallery collection of early Renaissance art. 64 See G. Finaldi, with contributions from S. Avery-Quash, X. Bray, E. Langmuir, N. McGregor and A. Sturgis, Seeing Salvation: The Image of Christ (London, 2000). 65 X. Bray, A. Rodríguez G. de Ceballos, D. Barbour and J. Ozone, The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600–1700 (London, 2009); see esp. A. R. Rodríguez G. de Ceballos, ‘The Art of Devotion: Seventeenth-century Spanish Painting and Sculpture in its Religious Context’, 45–57. This exhibition was subsequently awarded the Apollo Magazine 2010 award for the best exhibition of the year.

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over the next five years (and possibly beyond). Given that one of the three designated research strands is ‘Art and Religion’,66 it is clear that the novel approach of exploring sacred art and sacred space creatively within the walls of a secular art gallery and within the pages of its scholarly literature is here to stay.

66 The other two designated research strands are: ‘The Meaning of Making’ (i.e. the technical and scientific interests of the National Gallery) and ‘Buying, Collecting, Display’ (including the history of taste and provenance research). At the time of this article going to press (July 2011), a third National Gallery exhibition has just opened— Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces before 1500—which seeks in a fresh and innovative way to explore the function, original location, and development of altarpieces in Italy during the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. It looks at the relationship of altarpieces with both their frames and the monumental architecture of their original settings. The exhibition also examines the reasons why altarpieces came to be dismembered and the methods which art historians now use to reassemble them.

EPILOGUE: IS THE MODERN WORLD DISENCHANTED? Patrick Sherry One person who would have found many of the essays in this book strange is the sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). I am thinking here of his famous thesis that the modern world is disenchanted. By the modern world, he was thinking primarily of his own time; but he sees the process of disenchantment as going back several centuries. He mentions three relevant factors: (i) The Reformation, especially Calvinism; (ii) The rise of modern science; (iii) The Industrial Revolution. It is noticeable that the philosopher Charles Taylor also stretches out the related process of secularization over five centuries, in his recent book A Secular Age.1 What I am going to do now is to look more closely at Weber’s idea of disenchantment, next to consider briefly some recent writers who claim that the world is being re-enchanted today by postmodernism and New Age ideas, but then to undercut the discussion by suggesting a third possibility, that the world may still be enchanted, for those who have eyes to see, and who have kept fresh the responses of wonder, reverence, and delight. Perhaps it never was really disenchanted! Here I shall draw on the work of the poet and artist David Jones, as well as on that of some more recent theologians who are arguing for a close connection between aesthetics and religion, and suggest that their work depends on a wider sense of sacramentality, and one very different from Weber’s understanding of that concept.

1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 77–9, 426, 553, 614–15.

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patrick sherry Max Weber on Disenchantment

It needs to be noted straightaway that the English term ‘disenchantment’ is a poor translation of the German ‘Entzauberung’: the latter (which is not original to Weber, for Wieland had used it earlier and Schiller had used the cognate verb entzaubern) means something like ‘losing its magic’. In English it is primarily people who become disenchanted, somewhat like being disillusioned, whereas Weber is describing the world as having lost some of its allure and coming to seem lifeless in certain ways. As Francois-A. Isambert notes, the poetic force of the term has popularized it, while concealing its original sense and so giving the misleading impression that Weber was nostalgic for the old world.2 But the latter thought that the process was inevitable, and insofar as it is a loss, it is primarily the loss of an illusion. The reasons for its occurrence are varied. They include the Reformation, the understanding of the world given by science and technology, and the organization of modern society brought about through the Industrial Revolution; all at the cost of some impersonality, especially through the relegation of personal relations and the aesthetic to the realm of the private. The process is to be seen as the modern world’s ‘rationalization’, involving a loss of a sense of supernatural beings like spirits operating in the world. It is akin to secularization, a term more popular nowadays, though one that Weber also used. Weber used the term ‘disenchantment’ in his best-known work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05), though discussing it only briefly there. He says that the process can be traced back to the Hebrew prophets; later, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought, it ‘repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin;3 and it came to its logical conclusion in Puritanism, with its rejection of Catholicism’s ‘sacramental magic as a road to salvation’ and its adoption of ‘worldly asceticism’, so typical of the

2 Francois-A. Isambert, ‘Le “Desenchantement”du monde’: non sens ou renouveau du sens’, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 61/1 (1986), 83–103 (p. 83). 3 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 105. Avihu Zakai, following Alexander Koyré and others, traces it back rather to fourteenth-century Nominalism, in his Jonathan Edwards’ Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 88, n. 16.

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Calvinist businessman.4 Thus the process is not as such anti-religious, though it contributes to the breaking down of some forms of traditional religion, a fact emphasized by Charles Taylor. In a later essay of 1915 Weber says that the rationalization which has brought about the disenchantment of the world includes both modern capitalist industry and bureaucratization, which have helped to bring about the separation of public and private life and the consequent impersonality of modern cities; and also the understanding of the world as a ‘causal mechanism’, produced by ‘rational, empirical knowledge’.5 But nature abhors a vacuum; so, says Weber, with the development of intellectualism and the rationalization of life, art takes over the function of this-worldly salvation, and ‘provides a salvation from the routines of everyday life, and especially from the increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism.’6 Hence art claims a redemptive function, and begins to compete with salvation religion. Weber’s thinking was further developed in his last work on the subject, his lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’, given to an audience of students in Munich a few years later, towards the end of his life. This lecture gives Weber’s fullest treatment of the concept of disenchantment. In it he says that the rationalization brought about through science and technology means, . . . the knowledge or belief that, if only one wanted to, one could find out any time; that there are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers at work, but rather that one could in principle master everything through calculation. But that means the disenchantment of the world. One need no longer have recourse to magic in order to control or implore the spirits, as did the savage for whom such powers existed. Technology and calculation achieve that, and this more than anything else means intellectualization as such.7

Such a view affects the way we regard the natural world: most scientists today, says Weber are not concerned with learning through

4

Weber, op. cit., 105, 149. Weber, ‘Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions’, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1948), 323–59, (p. 350). 6 Ibid., 342. 7 Idem, Science as a Vocation, ed. P. Lassman, I. Velody, and P. Martins (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 13–14. (The essay can be found also in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills [eds.], op. cit.). 5

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science about the meaning of the world, or with answering Tolstoy’s question ‘What should we do? How should we live?’ Nowadays nobody can doubt in his heart of hearts that science is irreligious, whether he wishes to admit it or not. Deliverance from the rationalism and intellectualism of science is a precondition of life in communion with the divine.8

Weber’s view of science, it would seem, ignores the idea that God works in the world mainly through ‘secondary causes’, i.e. the ordinary course of nature; and he brushes aside the long tradition of thought, exemplified in Francis Bacon and Newton, and later in Einstein, that the scientist’s task is to follow in the Creator’s footsteps and to trace out the signs of His wisdom in the laws of nature. Hence not long after Weber’s lecture was published, Heinrich Rickert, commenting on it, wrote in 1926: But we can say that science does not need to lead to the demystification of the world, for it is quite capable of making us fully conscious of the ‘magic’ of life, and the clarity it creates can still give happiness and joy to a theoretically minded person. . . .9

Such a way of looking at things is, however, ruled out for Weber, for he has made a sharp distinction between the realm of rational cognition and mastery of nature, on the one hand, and that of mystic experiences, on the other.10 His tendency to compartmentalize the various spheres of life mean also that for him there has to be a radical dichotomy between the first of these realms and many other important aspects of life, e.g. personal relations and the arts. Weber realizes this, for he ends his lecture on a rhetorical note: The fate of our age, with its characteristic rationalization and intellectualization and above all the disenchantment of the world, is that the ultimate, most sublime values have withdrawn from public life, either into the transcendental realm of mystical life or into the brotherhood of immediate personal relationships between individuals.11

He sees this withdrawal as including art too, for he immediately remarks that great art now is intimate, not monumental. Finally, as a 8

Ibid., 17. Ibid., 84. 10 Weber, ‘The Social Psychology of World Religions’, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), op. cit., 282. 11 Idem, Science as a Vocation, 30. 9

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Parthian shot, he dismisses the likelihood of any return to religion, for this would involve a ‘sacrifice of the intellect’. By now, as Taylor notes, Weber is tending to equate disenchantment with the end of religion.12 As I have remarked already, the connotations of the English term ‘disenchantment’ might suggest that Weber was wistful or nostalgic; but in his last and fullest discussion in “Science as a Vocation” (he does not discuss the idea in his posthumous work), he sees the process as inevitable and as the path to knowledge and freedom, for it eliminates incalculable forces, and so makes us masters of our destiny.13 Intellectual and cultural rationalization is irreversible, because magic and religion have been dispossessed by science and technology. Hence Johannes Weiss claims that, for Weber, ‘there is no plausible way back from the moral-philosophical insights and postulates of the Enlightenment’; so the disenchantment of the world is irreversible in the near future, ‘since this alone corresponds to our intellectual aspirations and requirements.’14 This perhaps explains why he did not explore the possibility suggested by Nietzsche and discussed recently by Gordon Graham,15 that the decline of religion gives art the opportunity to become the means whereby humanity can re-enchant the world. Of course, Weber himself did see some of the limitations of this viewpoint, and was aware of the dangers of oversimplification. He confessed too in a letter that he was ‘absolutely unmusical religiously’ (while insisting that he was not irreligious or antireligious).16 Obviously Tolstoy’s great question will not go away, even if it is one which science cannot answer, and people continue to ask about the meaning of existence; indeed, secularization and disenchantment may encourage

12

Taylor, A Secular Age, 553. Lawrence A. Scaff, ‘Weber on the cultural situation of the modern age’, in Stephen Turner (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 99–106, (p. 105). Yves Lambert makes a similar point in ‘Un paradigme inspire de Weber. Pour contribuer a renouveler Le debat sur secularisation’, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 61/1 (1986), 153–65. 14 Johannes Weiss, ‘On the Irreversibility of Western Rationalism and Max Weber’s Alleged Fatalism’, in Sam Whimster and Scott Lash (eds.), Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity (London: Allen and Unwin: 1987), 154–63, (p. 162). 15 Gordon Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 16 Marianne Weber, Max Weber: a Biography, trans. H. Zohn (New York: John Wiley, 1975), 324. See Basit Koshul, The Postmodern Significance of Max Weber’s Legacy (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 60–1, for further comments on this letter, arguing that it did not commit Weber to an ‘Enlightenment mindset’ or to metaphysical naturalism. 13

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the search for religious meaning; and scientists too need inspiration and imagination.17 Like Nietzsche, Weber saw that an increasing technical mastery over life would not necessarily lead to an increase in happiness for the human race, and that disenchantment’s creation of a cold and impersonal human realm, an ‘iron cage’, could bring about a restriction of human values.18 But, as Arthur Mitzman says, ‘Disenchantment, rationalization, and mass society—although he became steadily more apprehensive of their cultural effects—were ‘inexorable destiny’ to Weber.19 We have to ask, however, if historical trends are always inevitable, for at least to some extent we are talking of a world that we have made. In the decades since Weber wrote, critics have enlarged on the reservations that I have just noted, added further objections to Weber’s main theses, and brought out some of his implicit assumptions. Some have seen his work as a late flowering of the Enlightenment, vulnerable to some recent criticisms of what Alasdair MacIntyre and others call ‘the Enlightenment Project’.20 Others have more specific objections. For example, Weber’s view of Catholic sacramentalism, which he assimilates to magic (here using the term ‘magic’ fairly literally, it seems), is something of a caricature. He fails to see that the former depends on a wider sense of the sacramentality of the world (which a religion stressing the importance of our inwardness may undervalue). I shall leave discussion of this topic, however, until later, when I shall discuss magic in more detail and also the wider sense of sacramentality. More generally, Jean Séguy accuses Weber of underestimating the creative power of religion to survive, adapt, and regroup in the modern

17 Jean Séguy, ‘Rationalisation, modernite et avenir de la religion’, in Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 61/1 (1986), 127–38, esp. pp. 129–33. 18 See R. Schroeder, ‘Nietzsche and Weber’, in Whimster and Lash, op. cit. 207–21. 19 Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1985), 267. The phrase ‘iron cage’ was used by Weber himself in The Protestant Ethic . . ., 181. 20 A minority view, however, points to Weber’s own reservations that I have noted and finds two sides to his work. Thus Koshul argues that Weber sees the limitations of the Enlightenment Project, that he does not exclude questions of meaning and value, and that his work contains the resources to bridge the supposed gap between science and religion. In particular, what he says about scientific methodology, including that of the social and cultural sciences, could be used to arrest the process of scientific disenchantment of human culture, by questioning its assumptions of rigid determinism in nature and consequent absence of meaning (Sinn). Thus, he says, ‘Weber’s methodology . . . disenchants the disenchanting rationalism that has consistently used rationality to disenchant everything else’ (Koshul, 141).

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world;21 while Marcel Gauchet, less concerned with institutional religions, argues that ‘the religious’ will survive in a world without religion, so that, for example, ‘art, in the specific sense we moderns understand it, is the continuation of the sacred by other means.’22 More radically, John Milbank accuses him of taking ‘the secular’ as the norm and so having to privatize religion, and of propounding a general thesis about religion which fails to fit e.g. Islamic society or Christian monasteries; he accuses both Weber and Troeltsch of creating ‘a “sociology” which is nothing but a spurious promotion of what they study—namely the secular culture of modernity.’23 Milbank might also have extended his critique to Weber’s view of art: for just as the latter sees mysticism as a way out of the disenchanted world, from the public to the private, so he sees art as a similar way out. There is some truth in Weber’s position here, but, again, it is an oversimplification: there is still a lot of ‘institutional’ and ‘performative’ art even today, and in any case Weber’s conception verges on what John Dewey called the ‘museum conception of art’, i.e. one which compartmentalizes the aesthetic, and treats art as a separate realm, cut off from other areas of activity and experience.24 Such a conception commonly fails to do justice to people’s appreciation of natural beauty—not surprisingly, for here we have a public realm and something appreciated widely, often by people with no interest in the arts as such. It also contrasts with the view that both nature and art have become desacralized in modernity.25 At times, Weber’s world seems to be that of Dickens’ Mr Gradgrind, or that of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century ‘scientism’. Certainly, it leaves little room for wonder (a point that applies, I think, to his understanding of science, as Rickert noted). Some feminists have approached this question by claiming that Weber’s view of the world is masculinist and patriarchal. For him, it seems, the public world is a grey and impersonal one, in which love, like many other

21

Séguy, op. cit., 136. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, trans. O. Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 203. Weber himself, of course, might well agree with this example. 23 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 97–8; cf. pp. 84, 88–9. 24 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Putnam, 1958), ch. I. 25 See Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism failed? ( New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 92–7. 22

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important things, is relegated to the private world of personal relations. Roslyn Bologh makes this accusation; and to the defence that the former is the real world, she replies that economic and social reality is no more real than our social relationships, so that: . . . our desires and feelings, which are inseparable from our social relationships, are no more illusory than our economic and political worlds. Psychic reality, like social reality, is no more nor less real than political and economic reality.26

Re-enchantment Thus most recent writers reject Weber’s attitude to the putative modern disenchantment of the world (though they may agree with some of what he said, e.g. about the effects of industrialization or the impersonality of cities today).27 They regard it as an oversimplification; and many express a desire to ‘re-enchant’ the world. ‘Re-enchantment’ has become a fashionable term, and a wide variety of means to it have been suggested. For example, David Ray Griffin commends process thought as offering re-enchantment, without the baggage of traditional supernatural religion. (He construes disenchantment widely, as including not only a lack of divine meaning and of inherent purpose, but also the absence of moral principles in the constitution of the world, according to modern thought, and instances J. L. Mackie and Gilbert Harman in the latter regard.)28

26 Roslyn W. Bologh, Love or Greatness: Max Weber and Masculine Thinking— A Feminist Inquiry (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 19; cf. pp. 12–13. See Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991), ch. 11, for another appeal to feminism, emphasizing the importance of interconnectedness and interdependence. 27 Richard Rorty is a rare exception. In a discussion of John Rawls’ work he suggests that a light-mindedness about traditional philosophical topics like the nature of the self helps along the disenchantment of the world, and helps to make people more pragmatic, tolerant, liberal, and receptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality. Communal and public disenchantment may be the price we pay for individual and private spiritual liberation. See ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’ in his Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 175–96, at 193–4. 28 David Ray Griffin, Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press), 23, n. 7. Charles Taylor also links disenchantment with modernity’s seeming lack of moral authority or coherence, in his Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 148–9.

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Talk of re-enchantment is particularly prominent, however, among writers who are familiar with or sympathetic to postmodernism or to New Age ideas, whether as theorists or as observers. Zygmunt Bauman, for example, writing from the point of view of a social theorist, says in the introduction to his Intimations of Postmodernity that, all in all, ‘postmodernity can be seen as restoring to the world what modernity, presumptuously, had taken away; as a re-enchantment of the world that modernity had tried hard to dis-enchant’. That disenchantment was supposed to be part of modernity’s war of liberation from mystery and magic; but it de-spiritualized and de-animated the world, reducing it to raw material to be shaped by human designs, by ‘instrumental rationality’ and ‘social engineering’. ‘Left to itself the world had no meaning.’29 Bauman finds it difficult to characterize re-enchantment in a similar way, for postmodernity is a relatively amorphous condition. It is easier to define it negatively: ‘Postmodernity . . . is modernity without illusions’, e.g. the illusion that the ‘messiness’ of the human world is but a temporary and repairable state.30 So re-enchantment too can be seen, negatively, as a liberation from disenchantment. But Bauman also says, more positively, that postmodernity allows for mystery, accepts contingency, and respects ambiguity; and is therefore more realistic.31 Graham Ward agrees with Bauman in hoping that such a reenchantment will offset much of the spiritual poverty of modernity, but is mainly concerned with spelling out its benefits for Christian theology. He welcomes contemporary critical theory for helping to bring to an end the desacralization of the Enlightenment and for revealing the limits of modern secularity; and hopes that in restoring a richer account of human experience it may assist the return of the ‘suppressed voices of theology and the return of God-talk from the other side of Nietzsche.’32 He goes on to argue that only theology can complete the postmodern project, preventing it from surrendering to the flux or to cosmic indifference,33 and he expresses the hope

29 Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), x–xi, xv. 30 Idem, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 32. 31 Ibid., 33–4. 32 Graham Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory (2nd edn., London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), xx; cf. pp. 117, 160. 33 Idem (ed.), The Postmodern God: a theological reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), xli–xlii.

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that postmodern theology will move away from the atheologies of Don Cupitt and Mark C. Taylor towards a reappraisal and re-examination of traditional authors in the light of critical theory, and that it will also, following Donald MacKinnon, recognize its close connection with other disciplines: ‘Overall the theology of tomorrow, the theology working within a re-enchanted world, will be more aware of the place it occupies in discursive borderlands.’34 Thus Ward hopes for a new flourishing of traditional theology, albeit one which recognizes its relations with other fields. But he suggests that this new flourishing, and the accompanying re-enchantment, have been recognized more by filmmakers, novelists, poets, philosophers, political theorists, and cultural analysts than by theologians.35 Thus he draws his net widely, as when he points to the re-appearance of angels in contemporary culture, e.g. in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire. He sees the new bodies, states of desire, and knowledges hinted at here as figuring forth ‘a new enchantment of the real’ which he contrasts with Weber’s disenchantment of the world and consequent withdrawing of mystery.36 Others too look more widely, and bring in some less familiar religious manifestations. Raymond Lee and Susan Ackerman, for instance, follow many writers in wondering whether disenchantment in a secularized environment may not fuel the search for religious meaning and thereby encourage new religious movements; and they suggest that Buddhism’s appeal in the West is unlikely to wane ‘because the doubts and ambivalence of secularized consciousness are gradually transforming the path of disenchantment into that of re-enchantment.’37 They mention too the revival of Christian Fundamentalism as providing, through its symbolic renewal of the holy word, the antithesis to the ‘commodified world.’ Above all, however, they see New Age activities

34

Idem, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, 171. Idem (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), xv. 36 Idem, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000), 214. Compare Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), who finds a deeper meaning in traditional fairy stories. Somehow, however, I do not think that Weber would be impressed by these two examples! 37 Raymond L. M. Lee and Susan Ackerman, The Challenge of Religion and Modernity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 6, 12. 35

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as particularly exemplifying the trend towards re-enchantment at the beginning of the twenty-first century: The New Age . . . brings together the themes of healing, self-determinism and transcendental consciousness in a variety of movements that challenge the ethos of disenchantment and reintroduce the idea of the magical as something that binds empirical and spiritual realities in a continuous relationship.38

New Age activities include, for Lee and Ackerman, the shamanism of Carlos Castaneda, a modern form of magical practice which involves a power of ecstasy and of healing, and new forms of spiritual consciousness such as are commonly included in the category of what are called ‘altered states of consciousness’.39 Here they appeal to what Paul Heelas calls the ‘sacralization of the self’ in New Age movements, and to the way in which these encourage the remaking of the self without institutional constraints (e.g. those of established religions), to be contrasted with the self of bourgeois consciousness which has surrendered to the alienating conditions of modernity.40 Most extremely, there is the possibility of a disintegration of the self in ecstasy, and even the mass suicides of some religious cults—the ‘ultimate sign of re-enchantment’, we are told, somewhat implausibly.41 Christopher Partridge goes still further afield: he gives a fuller account, in which he combines coverage of New Age activities with that of other such contemporary movements, for which he has coined the term ‘occulture’, in the two volumes of his The Re-enchantment of the West. He concluded an earlier article with the statement that although secularization and disenchantment have reshaped Western societies, ‘Re-enchantment is not a modern reconstruction of the enchanted landscape of the past, but a new growth in a secularized, globalized, technologically sophisticated, consumer-oriented landscape.’42 In his recent work he fleshes out this statement, not just with reference to New Age activities, but through an investigation of other newly emerging forms of spirituality and being religious, including cyberspirituality,

38

Ibid., 27–8. Ibid., 97–102. 40 Ibid., 40–7, 114–15. 41 Ibid., 121–2. 42 Christopher Partridge, ‘Alternative Spiritualities, New Religions, and the Reenchantment of the West’, in James R. Lewis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 39–67, p. 60). 39

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contemporary demonology, and the sacralisation of the extraterrestrial. The chapter on the last of these discusses sightings of UFOs, extraterrestrial communication, and stories of abduction by aliens. He quotes Diane Purkiss as saying ‘Aliens are our fairies’, and suggests that to explore such notions ‘is to re-enchant the world’, and thereby to reverse, at least to some degree, ‘disenchantment’, understood as ‘at least in part, the process whereby magic and mystery are driven from the world and nature is managed rather than enchanted. . . .’43 The last quotation introduces a topic which will be very relevant to my later consideration of contemporary theological aesthetics, that of our attitude today to ecology and the environment. Partridge mentions the erosion of the ‘enchanted view of nature’ in the West, which writers like Lynn White trace back to the emergence of Judaeo-Christian monotheism and its rejection of paganism’s sacralisation of nature. Weber recognized that once magic and spirits were eliminated from our view of the natural world, the latter became, according to Partridge, ‘simply the physical arena in which one obeyed God. The natural world was the creation of a good and loving God, but it was not itself sacralised.’44 There was perhaps a partial enchantment in mediaeval times, when the world was interpreted in theological terms, but the Reformation, Renaissance, and industrialization accelerated ‘the forces of disenchantment.’45 Nineteenth-century Romanticism, however, recovered a sacralised understanding of nature, as have some contemporary movements—what Partridge describes as ‘eco-enchantment’ and ‘ecospirituality’.46 In both Romanticism and contemporary ecology ‘increasingly evident are re-sacralized, holistic interpretations of nature as infused with the divine, if not, in some sense, divine in itself.’47 Partridge supplies a vast amount of detail here, and some judicious comments. But I think that we need now to get behind the sequence of thought that I have just summarized and to expose some of its assumptions. The proposal to re-enchant the world suggests at least

43 Idem, The Re-enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture, vol. 2 (London: T. and T. Clark, 2005), 169. 44 Ibid., 45. 45 Ibid., 46. 46 Ibid., 47. 47 Ibid., 50. See also vol. 1 (London: T. and T. Clark, 2004), 72, 89–96.

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two fundamental questions. First, can one set about re-enchanting the world, just like that? And second, is the modern world disenchanted? My first question is suggested by the memory of a prediction made by a popular newspaper at the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, that Britain stood at the beginning of a new, glorious Elizabethan Age. Such a thing was possible; but I wonder whether one can intend or predict it, or consciously bring it about? The authors I have mentioned, however, could reply that reenchantment is happening anyway, especially through the contemporary rejection of scientism. For if postmodernism involves, as Lyotard says, the rejection of ‘grand narratives’,48 then just as the modern world rejected the Christian narrative of Creation, Fall, and Redemption, so the postmodern world has rejected that of scientism, i.e. the view that the empirical sciences are the only route to truth, and the accompanying idea of progress. My second question is more radical, however, and asks whether Weber exaggerated the importance of the trends that he discerned in the modern world. What if the world always was enchanted and still is, if we but look and keep our sense of wonder? Maybe talk of reenchantment begs the question, in that it presupposes that the world is disenchanted. This question, in turn, is suggested by, above all, some recent work in theological aesthetics. Enchantment Shortly after Weber’s death in 1920 Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Sonnets to Orpheus, that, despite the work of machines, But for us existence is still enchanted; still in a hundred places the source. A play of pure powers, touched only by those who kneel and wonder. (Pt. II, no. 10)

More prosaically, a recent book by a sociologist of religion, Andrew Greeley’s The Catholic Imagination, begins with the following provocative statement: ‘Catholics live in an enchanted world. . . .’49 The author explains this in terms of the Catholic sense of sacramentality, 48

Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University, 1984), 37–8. 49 Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1.

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understood widely, i.e. not just in terms of the seven defined sacraments of the Church, or even ‘sacramentals’ like holy water, rosary beads, and icons, but very generally, in terms of seeing created reality as a revelation of the presence of God. Greeley does not mention Weber at this point (he is cited later in the book, on another subject); but he does consider the idea that disenchantment rules the modern world and the possibility that the enchanted Catholic imagination is a manifestation of postmodernity, only to brush aside both ideas as fictions: ‘I find no persuasive evidence that either modern or postmodern humankind exists outside of faculty office-buildings. Everyone tends to be pre-modern.’50 The rest of the book tests the hypothesis that the sensibility displayed by Catholic high art also reveals itself in the attitudes and behaviour of ordinary Catholics in many different spheres. Thus he uses various surveys of public opinion to show that Catholics have a greater interest in the arts than Protestants do, that (would you believe it?) they visit bars more frequently, and that, more surprisingly perhaps, they engage in sexual intercourse more often, with greater enjoyment and more playfulness. Greeley is obviously interpreting the term ‘sacrament’ very generously; but this serves as a corrective to Weber’s account, which assimilates the concept to magic (later on we shall need to distinguish the two more clearly). For Greeley the world is enchanted, not because it is full of spirits or magical powers, but because it is sacramental in a wide sense, which he links to aesthetics. I think that this wider sense of sacramentality is a crucial factor here, and we get a fuller discussion of it in another recent book, David Brown’s God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience, which also advocates that the world is enchanted—and not just for Catholics. It is significant that Brown too writes of ‘enchantment’ rather than ‘re-enchantment’. At the beginning of the book he summarizes briefly what Weber said about disenchantment and the growth of rationality, and sets out his own aim, which is to help recover a sense of how God can be mediated through nature and culture, and thereby to restore a kind of natural religion.51 In some ways Brown is recovering lines of thought found two centuries earlier in the Romantic

50

Ibid., 2. David Brown, God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 16–18, 34–6. 51

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Movement. As both Partridge and Taylor remind us, some of the Romantics had already reacted against a sense of the flatness and emptiness of the world left by the Enlightenment. In particular, Schiller, in his poem ‘The Gods of Greece’, refers to a time when ‘poetry’s magic cloak still with delight enfolded truth’ and ‘Everything to the initiate’s eye showed the trace of a God’, and laments that now we face a ‘Godshorn [entgotterte] nature’, slavishly obeying the law of gravity.52 Like Greeley, Brown relies explicitly on an extended sense of sacramentality, and one closely linked to the aesthetic. Much of his book is a discussion of topics like sacred and secular art (including landscape painting), architecture, places like homes and cities, gardens, and sport. In all these areas Brown thinks that there may be ‘the symbolic mediation of the divine in and through the material’, for ‘God can come sacramentally close to his world and vouchsafe experiences of himself through the material.’53 The fact that God is omnipresent does not mean that His presence is felt everywhere equally. Thus Brown’s aim is to recover ‘enchantment’ by reinvigorating our wider sense of the sacramental, and thereby reclaiming large areas of human experience neglected by religion. Both Catholicism and Protestantism are at fault here, he thinks: the former for narrowing down the concept of sacramentality in its official teaching, and the latter for giving insufficient attention to it, both in its narrower and wider senses. Surprisingly, although Brown appeals to beauty on occasion, e.g. with reference to churches, he says relatively little about this fundamental concept, which seems an obvious one for being a source of the world’s enchantment. Traditionally, many Christian thinkers have seen beauty as a mode of God’s presence in the world, and the idea often asserts itself in art and literature, e.g. in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘God’s Grandeur’, which begins ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God, / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.’ Weber, as we have seen, though relegating art to the realm of the private, acknowledges its power, including the ability to rival religion (he instances too cases of evil beauty, like Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal).54 Those who, like Hopkins, see beauty as a mode of divine presence are giving it a sacramental significance, in the wider sense just

52 53 54

Taylor, A Secular Age, 302, 316; cf. p. 615. Brown, 30, 82. Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, 22.

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noted. I should point out, however, that one could see it as a source of enchantment without explicitly appealing to any religious belief. For behind our responses to beauty there are, I believe, the wider and more fundamental reactions of wonder and perhaps reverence (both noted by Rilke), and also delight. These reactions may accompany religious beliefs or even be their source, but this is not necessarily the case: Richard Dawkins, for instance, sometimes expresses a sense of wonder at the variety and complexity of natural forms, yet is famously hostile to religion. Thus he stops short of a ‘sacramental’ sense. Moreover, people may wonder at something without necessarily asking for an explanation of it, whether a religious or a naturalistic one like evolution. One can wonder simply at the existence of something—the young Wittgenstein wrote ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists (Tractatus 6.44). Or, more commonly, one can wonder at the beauty or intricacy of particular things, as suggested already, whether in nature or in human creations. Wittgenstein, again, writes later: One might say: art shows us the miracles [Wunder] of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature (the blossom, just opening out. What is marvellous about it?) We say: ‘Just look at it opening out!’55

Such a response is not inconsistent with knowing the relevant scientific explanations: Wittgenstein, as it happens, thinks that science tends to send people to sleep here, in the sense of dulling the sense of wonder,56 whereas Rickert, as we have seen, insists that science need not lead to a demystification of the world; and indeed one can think of many scientists who pursue their profession without losing their sense of wonder. And even ordinary people, who know what causes, say, thunder and lightning, can still find them amazing or terrifying. Weber might well agree with what I have just said about wonder, and even perhaps regret his own seeming lack of a sense of wonder. But he would not, I think, accept what Brown and Greeley say about sacramentality, because for him this term suggests magic, and he would certainly insist that science excludes magic and that such an

55 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 56e. See John Churchill, ‘Wonder and the End of Explanation: Wittgenstein and Religious Sensibility’, Philosophical Investigations 17 (1994), 388–416. 56 Wittgenstein, op. cit., 5e. Churchill remarks that there can be a kind of ‘aspect blindness’ (a phrase used by Wittgenstein) here: cf. op. cit., 414.

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exclusion is gain, even if it involves some disenchantment (by definition, in German). By magic he is thinking, it seems, of some kind of extraordinary factor, an unpredictable causal intervention, as when the fairy godmother waves her magic wand and Cinderella suddenly becomes beautiful and finely dressed. This is evident from his remarks in ‘Science as a Vocation’ about there being no mysterious, incalculable forces at work, like spirits needing to be invoked or controlled by magic, and about technology and calculation being the sources of knowledge and control over the world. Thus he seems to have in mind an instrumental view of magic, as contrasted with one that stresses more its expressive and ritual aspects.57 But why link magic with religion? Weber thinks that premodern views of nature envisage extraordinary powers as present in empirical phenomena, through the action of ‘spirits’ and suchlike,58 whereas science deals with unvarying causal laws, leaving no room for notions like miracle, revelation, and sacramental causality as understood by Catholicism; and that religion is obsolete as an explanation of the world (of course he acknowledges that there is ‘religious rationalism’, e.g. Christian theology, but this too looks for an unworldly meaning in events). In his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber sees later Judaism’s repudiation of magical means to salvation as coming to its logical conclusion in Puritanism’s rejection of medieval Catholicism’s ‘sacramental magic’, in which, he says, ‘The priest was a magician who performed the miracle of transubstantiation, and who held the key to eternal life in his hand.’59 The accusation that belief in transubstantiation amounts to magic is a common one, made by some Protestant Reformers in the sixteenth century, and more recently by, most famously, the Modernist Ernest Barnes, Anglican bishop of Birmingham 1924–53. It is said that when Barnes encountered the chaplain of a nearby convent, and, wondering if he should know him, asked who he was, he received the reply ‘The magician at your gate, my Lord.’60

57

See Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World, 118. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans E. Fischoff (London: Methuen, 1965), 2–4. This book is a translation of parts of his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, published posthumously in 1922. 59 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 117. 60 John Barnes, Ahead of His Age: Bishop Barnes of Birmingham (London: Collins, 1979), 190. 58

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It is often difficult to distinguish clearly magic and religion, and indeed there is some likeness between the ritual speech and action of magic and that of sacraments. In his later work Weber does distinguish cult and religion, which include prayer, sacrifice, and worship, from sorcery, which is ‘magical coercion’; and priesthood from practice of magic. The priest functions within an organized cult, in contrast with ‘the individual and occasional efforts of magicians.’ He denies, however, that we can differentiate them absolutely, for religious cults, he says, nearly always include magical components (though he thinks that the latter decline in proportion to the centrality of preaching).61 Keith Thomas, in his Religion and the Decline of Magic, follows Weber’s remark about coercion, and suggests that magic is supposed to work automatically, whereas prayer, for instance, is non-coercive in that it will only be answered if God chooses to concede it.62 The case of sacraments, however, is more complex. In Catholic theology they are, it is true, said to be valid ex opere operato, for the moral worthiness of the priest does not affect their validity. Nevertheless, the extent of their effectiveness may depend on the disposition of the recipient: for example, someone who goes to confession without due repentance cannot presume on forgiveness. And although transubstantiation is ‘supernatural’, it is not regarded as miraculous quite in the way that, say, a sudden healing might be; for here again the fruitfulness of the sacrament may depend on the reverence with which it is received. Weber’s understanding of sacramentality is fairly crude, as is his grasp of divine agency more generally. Since he does not really take into account the ways in which God is believed to work through the ordinary chains of cause and effect in nature, he tends to construe God’s agency in terms of special interventions (whereas Keith Thomas, by contrast, argues, following A. N. Whitehead and others, that it was the religious belief in divine order that contributed to the growth of modern science,63 so that it was the spread of Christianity more than the rise of science that led to the decline in belief in magic).

61

Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 28, 75. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 41. 63 Ibid., 577, 657. 62

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Weber also fails to reckon with the fact that belief in magic, especially witchcraft, continued to some extent after the Reformation, e.g. in Calvinist New England. Keith Thomas shows how witchcraft survived in England, especially around 1558–1670, and suggests that this was because of the elimination of ‘the protective ecclesiastical magic which had kept the threat of sorcery under control.’64 Weber forgets, too, that Calvinism kept two sacraments, albeit giving one of them a lesser role than in Catholic worship and with a different theology. Even though Calvin attacked the Council of Trent’s teaching, because it seemed to him to promise a righteousness apart from faith, and he insisted that sacraments’ effectiveness depends on the Holy Spirit who penetrates hearts and affections, he nevertheless kept the understanding of them as signs and as having certain effects, like sustaining faith (Inst.IV.xiv.1, 9, 14). Thus, with some caveats, he kept the old scholastic definition of sacraments as ‘effective signs’ (it is worth noting here, however, that among the sacraments he rejected is marriage— see Inst.IV.xix.34–7; something that may reveal a lack of a sense of the sacramentality of the body and sexuality, which Brown wishes to recover, somewhat as parts of the modern ecological movement wish to recover a sense of reverence for the earth). Clearly, Weber failed to see how much of traditional Catholic teaching survived in Calvinism. Clearly, too, he is much more interested in the causal aspects of sacraments, which he construes narrowly, than with their sign-bearing qualities. But it is the latter which preoccupy writers like Greeley and Brown as much as the former, and it is these qualities that are relevant to their claim that the world is enchanted. Our discussion of magic and sacraments, though necessary because Weber links them, is in danger of taking us away from the wider sense of sacramentality, which is more our concern now and which is not particularly connected with magic. As we have seen, these recent writers have linked this wider sense to aesthetics; and they have kept in mind the connection (both etymologically and in reality) between ‘sacrment’ and ‘sacred’. Thus Brown, for example, has a long chapter later on the idea of sacred places (pp. 153–244). Another writer, Mircea Eliade, goes further and devotes a lot of attention to the idea of ‘sacred space’, contrasted with ‘profane space’ (in his terms Weber’s modern world would be desacralised and

64

Ibid., 498.

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so profane). Thus for him the Jewish temple was a sacred space, in which there was a special presence of God, as also are Christian basilicas, cathedrals, and so forth. Both the earthly Jerusalem and the Church prefigure the Heavenly Jerusalem to come.65 Pursuing this idea further, one might see some poets as expressing the idea of a sacred place or space: Wordsworth, for instance, in his ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey . . .’ writes of his finding a presence there that ‘impels/all thinking things . . ./, and rolls through all things.’ Of course, ‘enchanted’ means less than ‘sacred’ in Eliade’s sense (though it may perhaps have wider connotations). But sacred places may seem enchanted in some sense; and some parts of the world may seem more enchanted than others. All this suggests that the wider sense of sacramentality might be linked to other aspects of religion. Thus, in terms of Catholicism we should look now perhaps not so much to sacramental theology in the narrower sense as to certain forms of spirituality, e.g. that of St Ignatius Loyola. One of his followers, Fr Walter Burghardt, reminds us of Ignatius’ ideal of finding God in all things, and draws the conclusion that nothing is merely human or secular: ‘We live in a universe of grace’.66 It should not be forgotten here that Hopkins was a Jesuit, and that his keen sense of the presence of God’s glory in the world, expressed in his poem ‘God’s Grandeur’, can be seen as an exemplification of Ignatian spirituality. It is to be noted again that both Greeley and Brown find the closest parallel to reading the world sacramentally in aesthetic appreciation. An even more telling example of this parallelism is to be found in the classic essay ‘Art and Sacrament’ by the poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974). This essay maintains that any understanding of the Church’s sacraments depends on a wider sense of sacramentality, which he thought has been lost to a great extent in the modern world. As he puts it, ‘People speak of sacraments with a capital “S” without seeming to notice that sign and sacrament with a small “s” are everywhere eroded and in some contexts non-existent’, for, because of the growth of technology, we tend to take things at their face-value today.

65 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion, trans. Willard A. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959), ch. 1. Eliade also notes that for pre-modern societies the sacred conveys the notion of a power (p. 12). 66 Walter Burghardt, Long Have I Loved You: A Theologian Reflects on His Church (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2000), 195.

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He remarks, however, that one cannot remain at this level all the time, for man is a sign-maker by nature, and the creative artist’s task is to, as he puts it, ‘make radiant “particular facts”, so that they become intimations of immortality, or . . . of some otherness of some sort.’67 Jones is not concerned here in the first instance with what preoccupies Weber, the causal effectiveness of sacraments, nor particularly with their ritual role. Towards the end of his essay he quotes a French theologian, Maurice de la Taille, as saying that on Maundy Thursday Christ ‘placed himself in the order of signs.’68 Jones’ point is that this condescension presupposes an already existent world of signs—or in his parlance again, sacraments with a big ‘S’ presuppose a world of sacraments with a small ‘s’. Like Brown, Jones is giving us a kind of natural religion, in that he is starting from the world, which is for him already a world of signs, especially art and other forms of making. This sense of the sacramentality of the world and of art, exhibited by Jones, Brown, and Greeley, is of vast importance, raising as it does many vast issues, concerning the nature of God’s presence or agency in the world, and our awareness of them; the nature and variety of signs; and the role of wonder here, not just for theologians or aesthetes, but also for scientists like Einstein, philosophers, and indeed people in general. It often tends to be assumed today that the wider sense of ‘sacrament’ is parasitic on the narrower one, referring to the official sacraments of the Church. Brown, however, in advocating a wider use, reminds us that the term was not narrowed down until the Middle Ages; and Jones argues that the narrower use presupposes the wider one, in so far as the former assumes that we can understand the language of signs. But what is the relation between the two uses now? Now if sacraments are conventionally defined as ‘effective signs’ which convey grace (following Aquinas in e.g. On Truth 27:4), then the wider sense of the term follows the narrower, for it too regards parts or aspects of the world as signs, especially when people like Hopkins see them as signs-by-likeness of God’s beauty. It also regards them, in their way, as effective: a beautiful landscape may arouse wonder, reverence, and delight, or even more specific moral and religious

67 David Jones, ‘Art and Sacrament’, in his Epoch and Artist (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 143–79. I quote from the Preface, 13, 16. 68 Ibid., 179.

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feelings (‘See the lilies of the field. . . .’). Likewise with works of art. There is, however, a third aspect of ecclesial sacraments that it is hard to extend to sacraments widely understood, namely their use of words. Certain formulae are central to the former, e.g. ‘I baptize you. . . ., ‘With this ring I thee wed. . . .’, or ‘I absolve you. . . .’ Many of these uses of words are what J. L. Austin called ‘performative utterances’, i.e. uses of language that do things as well as saying things, like promising or congratulating. Moreover, such formulae are accompanied by other uses of words that comment on or explain the signs and actions of the sacraments. As both Aquinas and Calvin saw, if I were merely to pour water over people, this action would only puzzle them. I think that such uses of words, both formulae and comments or explanations, serve to differentiate the two kinds of ‘sacrament’, whilst not invalidating the wider one.69 People’s perception of the wider sacramentality seems to be akin to what Walter Stace called ‘extrovertive mysticism’, by which he meant the kind of mysticism which consists of a seeming apprehension of God or of Ultimate Reality, not through some inner experience but through distinctive experiences of the natural world, found according to him in e.g. Jakob Boehme,70 and also, I think, in the Cornish poet Jack Clemo, who wrote I was a spirit and sense mystic, and the artist in me demanded realism— landscapes, people, events. I had an inner vision that gave transcendent meaning to the external world, not an inner vision that was independent of the external world.71

In a similar vein, Taylor writes of art . . . there are certain works of art—by Dante, Bach, the makers of Chartres Cathedral: the list is endless—whose power seems inseparable from their epiphanic, transcendent reference. Here the challenge is to the unbeliever, to find a non-theistic register in which to respond to them, without impoverishment.72

69 See further my article ‘The Sacramentality of Things’, New Blackfriars, 89 (2008), 579–90. 70 See W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1960), 60–79. 71 Jack Clemo, The Marriage of a Rebel (London: Gollancz, 1980), 107. 72 Taylor, A Secular Age, 607. I do not think that Gordon Graham would sympathize with this statement or with the wider sense of sacramentality seen in Brown, Greeley, and Jones. He does not discuss natural beauty; and as the full title of his book (The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion) suggests, he treats religion and art as rivals, and he concludes that any attempt by ‘autonomous’ art to re-enchant

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Conclusion By now we have travelled a long way from both Weber and postmodernism. But the linking themes are the responses of wonder, reverence, and delight; and also the idea of a sense of the wider sacramentality of things. Weber, seemingly, lacked those responses and that sense. It is not, however, clear to me that postmodernism and talk of reenchantment are the remedy for these deficiencies, though they may serve to show up the poverty of a lot of ‘modernism’. In the final section of this essay, therefore, I have looked rather to an enriched and wider sense of sacramentality, to be recovered first through aesthetic responses to the world.

the world will fail (p. 186). But the other authors mentioned do not wish to limit the connection between art and religion to ‘religious’ art.

INDEX Abbeys see also Dissolution of the Monasteries Abbey Dore 130 Chartreuse 196–7, 199, 224 Dorchester 238 Furness 198 Glastonbury 221 Kirkstall 223 St Alban’s 22 St Augustine’s Canterbury 220 Tintern see Wordsworth Vale Royal 211, 218 Westminster 254 Whitby 43, 54 Abbott, George (1562–1623) Archbishop of Canterbury 127, 135 Abraham 142 Aldhelm 40–1, 54 Anderson, M.D. 21 Andrea di Aloigi 283 Andrewes, Lancelot (1555–1626), Bishop of Winchester 9, 123–9, 130–3, 167, 208 Anglicanism xi, 128–9, 131, 137, 150, 163, 169–70, 178, 180,199–201, 207, 210, 212, 214, 221, 223–4, 229, 232, 237, 239–43, 247–8, 251–2, 255, 257, 259–62, 264, 267, 269–73, 279–81, 286–8, 290, 292–3, 313 Annunciation, the 23–6, 28, 80, 263, 283 Antiquarianism 169, 178, 200–1, 235, 261, 282, 293; see also Dodsworth, Dugdale, Spelman Apostle’s Creed 23, 27, 30, 247, 250 architects see Bodley, Butterfield, Cockerell, Cubitt, Pugin, Rickman, Scott, Street, Thomson, Wightwick, Woodyer, Worthington, Wren architecture 47–8, 57–76, 79–80, 163, 227–45 passim, 247–67 passim, 280; see also Gothic Revival art 11, 26, 30, 33, 79, 80, 181, 209, 215, 252, 263, 269–95 passim, 299–301, 303, 310–12, 317 art collectors see Bromley, Lindsay, Ottley, Parry, Sanford, Sutton

artists see Andrea, Bellini, Botticelli, Burne-Jones, Cimabue, Cione, Della Robia,Veneziano, Duccio, Dyce, Fabriano, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Francesca, Giotto, Hunt, Leighton, Mantegna, Perugino, Raphael, Rossetti, Strozzi, Tintoretto, Uccello, Ugolino Assisi 7, 80–4, 86, 92, 272 Aston, Margaret 200 Bakhtin, Mikhail 142–3 Bangor 143 Bann, Stephen 262 Baptism 42–4, 45–6, 79, 123, 131, 143, 182, 264–5, 232, 288 Baptists 228, 259 Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlle) 143 Barr, James 255, 262 Barroll, Leeds 108 basilicas 80, 181 Bauman, Zygmunt 305 beauty xvi, 75, 128, 130–1, 139, 167, 169, 181–2, 203–4, 217, 226, 230, 248, 255, 259, 271, 274–5, 303, 311–2, 317–8 Bede, the Venerable (673/4–735) 22, 29, 35, 39, 44–52, 54, 284 Behmenism /hermetic philosophy 186–9 Bellini, Giovanni 275, 284 Bennett, William 261, 263 Bethlehem 79–80 Bible / Authorised Version 1, 3, 11, 28, 130, 134, 141, 143, 150, 157, 159, 162, 185, 187, 222, 252, 262–3, 265–6 Vulgate 27, 46 Bodley, G.F. (1827–67), architect and designer, 252–4, 289 Book of Common Prayer 4, 125, 141, 150, 163, 165, 170, 239, 241–2, 261, 263 Boorde, Andrew (c. 1490–1549), ex-monk and physician 120–1 Botticelli 278 Bourdieu, Pierre 39 Boyce, Edward 271

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Bromley, Rev. Walter Davenport (c. 1787–1863), art collector, 279, 284–5, 290 Brooke, Christopher 73 Brown, David 310–12, 315–8 Burne-Jones, Edward (1833–98), painter 248, 263, 273 Burton, Robert (1577–1640), 178, 199, 201, 203, 213 Butterfield, William (1814–1900), architect and designer 291 Byrhtferth of Ramsey (fl. c. 986–c.1016) monk and scholar, 35, 52 Calvin, John 113, 315, 318 Calvinism 146–7, 278, 297, 299, 315 Camden Society 11, 237, 239–40, 243–6, 251, 260, 263–5, 271, 287, 289, 291; see also Ecclesiologist Cambridge Platonists 200, 203 Canavaggio, Jean 111, 113 Carleton-Williams, E. 19–20 Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881) 227, 263, 276 Carter, John 261 Cathedrals 256–8 Bangor 143 Durham 130 Exeter 131 Lincoln 289 Llandaff 33, 273 Norwich 16 Salisbury 231–2 St Paul’s 29, 32, 72–3, 138–9, 142 Winchester 98, 130 Worcester 103 Catherine of Aragon 98, 117 Cervantes, Miguel de 99, 111–113 Don Quixote 111–2 Charlemagne (742–814) Holy Roman Emperor 101 Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland (1600–49), 130, 137, 150 Charles V (1338–80), King of France 101, 117 Choisy, Auguste 262 Christine of Pisano 101 Church architecture, furnishings and decoration altar xiii, 6, 9, 24–5, 28, 63, 67, 69, 82, 126, 128, 130–1, 137–8, 146–7, 149, 152–4, 156, 163, 165, 181–2, 188, 197, 201, 204, 208, 213, 217, 220–1, 232–3, 235, 241–3, 249, 265, 270, 273–4, 280–1, 293

altar book 291 altar pieces 164, 269, 273–4, 279, 280–1, 284–5, 288, 293, 295 altar rails 164 bells 34, 69, 135 candles 239 chancel 9, 23–4, 26, 128, 130–1, 138, 241, 243, 265, 272, 280, 286, chequered floors 165 communion vessels 130 consecration crosses 15–16 fonts 130–1, 164, 232, 242, 265, 289 lecterns 208, 243 mosaics 272 organs 290, 292 paintings 128, 130–1, 272–4 pulpits 146, 208, 232, 285 reredoses 273–4, 280, 285, 289, 291, 293 sanctuary or rood screens xiii, 1, 16, 21, 22, 23, 28, 30, 33, 130–1, 164, 235–6, 273, 280 sculpture 130, 244, 253, 273 stained glass 11, 16, 23, 34, 130–1, 132, 147, 154, 163, 202, 215n., 233, 235, 245, 248–50, 252, 272, 280, 286, 289, 292 surplices 239, 292 tabernacles 41, 125, 142, 149, 232, 235, 283–4 transept 22, 63, 257 tryptichs 274, 280, 291–2 vestments 239, 243, 245, 287 wall paintings 1, 5, 15–26, 28, 272 windows 9, 131, 147, 154, 157, 202, 235–6, 238, 248–9, 250, 252, 256, 258, 266–7, 270, 286, 289, 292 Church of England 9, 124, 129, 131, 134, 136, 138, 146, 150, 239, 241, 242, 244, 251, 269, 271, 286 Churches building, rebuilding, refurbishing 57–76, 124–5, 130–1, 163, 181, 230, 271–3, 280, 292 consecration and hallowing of 118, 123–8, 132–3, 235–6, 240, 243 desecration and neglect of 123, 132–5, 139, 166–7, 169, 171–2, 181 All Saints Margaret Street, London 273, 281, 291 All Saints, Nynehead, Somerset 282–3 Eton College Chapel 17–18 Jesus Chapel, Southampton 125

index Magdalen College Chapel, Oxford 230 Peterhouse Chapel, Cambridge 126 St Bartholomew’s the Great, Smithfield 57–76 St Bridget’s/Llansantffraed 186 St Ethelburga’s xv St Giles at Cripplegate 65 St Giles, Cheadle 233, 235, 273 St Giles in the Fields 131 St James at Compostella 7, 98–9, 104, 116–21 St Katherine Cree, London 131 St Marie’s Grange 231 St Martin in the Fields 71 St Mary Magdalene, Littleton, Middlesex 269 St Mary’s, Blackbourton, Oxfordshire St Paul’s, Brighton 272 St Stephens’s Chapel, Westminster 272 St Teilo’s Church, Llandeilo Talybont (now—reconstructed and restored—at the National History Museum of Wales, St. Fagan’s, nr. Cardiff ) vii, 1, 2, 5, 8, 25–6 Cimabue 277 Cione, Jacopo di 269, 288 Clerkenwell 103, 107 Cockerell, Charles Robert (1785–1863), architect 257 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834) 221–2, 261–2 Colley, Linda 200, 210 Collinson, Patrick 200 Colonial Gothic 238–9, 243–5 ‘Commissioner’s Gothic’ 229–30, 236–8, 245 conversion 7, 50, 87, 89–93, 180, 231, 235, 278, 292 Cosin, John (1595–1672), Bishop of Durham 126, 130, 136–7 Counter Reformation 98, 102, 115, 117, 176, 199 (Anglican Counter Reformation), 131, 150, 163 Courtauld Institute 200, 277, 291 Crook, J. Mordaunt 235, 250, 251, 261 the cross xiv, 7, 15, 28, 78, 87, 89, 90, 92, 145, 181, 258, 281 Cubitt, James (1876–1912), architect 259–60 Cuddesdon Theological College 245 Darley, George (1795–1846), poet and writer 276

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delight 161, 252, 311–12, 317 Della Robbia, Luca and Andrea 283 Dewey, John 303 disenchantment 297–313 passim; see also enchantment, re-enchantment Dissolution of the monasteries 10, 134–6, 137, 176, 178, 200; later suppression of monasteries in Italy, 279 Dodsworth, Roger (bpt. 1585–1650), antiquarian 137, 178, 200 Donne, John (1571–1633) 9, 119, 148–9 Döring, Tobias 3–5 Drayton, Michael (1563–1631) 200 Duccio 283 Duffy, Eamon 23, 103, 197 Dugdale, Sir William (1605–86), antiquary and herald, 137–9, 178, 200 Duns Scotus (c.1265–1308), friar and theologian 141 Durandus, William (1230–96), canonist and liturgical writer 11, 239–40, 243, 245, 256 Durkheim, Émile 2–4 Dyce, William (1806–64), painter 273, 291 Eastlake, Sir Charles (1793–1865), painter and art administrator 285 Ecclesiologist 238–9, 243–6, 251, 254–7, 263–5, 270–4, 280, 287, 292–3; see also Camden Society Ecclesiologists 10, 240–1, 243–5, 254, 256, 285, 293; see also Russell and Sutton ecology 308 Edward VI (1537–1553), King of England and Ireland 8, 239, 241 Eliade, Mercia 2–4, 6, 70–1, 195, 315–6 Eliot, George (1819–1880) 228, 231, 234, 284 Eliot, T.S. (1888–1965) xvi Elizabeth I, (1553–1602), Queen of England and Ireland 105, 107, 112, 123, 135, 146, 239 enchantment 111, 297–319 passim, esp. 309–19; see also disenchantment and re-enchantment Enlightenment 104, 196, 201, 203–4, 209, 211, 301–2, 305, 311 Eton College 18, 21, 30 Eucharist 22, 77, 79, 90, 107, 126, 171, 241–2

324

index

Faber, Rev. Frederick William (1814– 63), Tractarian 292 Fabriano, Gentile da 276, 290 Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452–1516) 117 Fergusson, James (1808–86) architectural historian 253 Ferrar, Nicholas (1593–1637) 150 Finch, Ann, Countess of Winchelsea, (1574–1639) 204–5 Fox, George (1624–91), Founder of Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) 16–18, 27, 146 Fra Angelico 274–6, 278–9, 293 Fra Filippo Lippi 283 Francesca, Piero della 277 Franklin, Jill 62–3 Freeman, Edward Augustus (1823–92), historian 256–7 Froude, Rev. Richard Hurrell (1803–36), Oxford Movement leader 234, 237 Gaddi, Taddeo 285 Gardiner, Harold 118 Garner, Thomas (1839–1906), architect and lawyer 289 Gauchet, Marcel 303 Giotto di Bondone 80, 81, 92, 272, 276–8, 285, 293 Gladstone, William (1809–98), statesman 276 Golgotha xiv Gondomar, Don Diego Count of (1567–1626), Spanish ambassador to England 118 Gospels 40, 83–7, 93 Gothic revival 11, 202–3, 206, 208–9, 211, 222, 231, 236, 247–8, 250–2, 254–6, 258–61, 271, 289, 291; see also Colonial Gothic and Commissioner’s Gothic Gozzoli, Benozzo 276 Granada, Luis de 99 Greeley, Andrew 309–12, 315–8 Greenblatt, Stephen 8, 117, 198 Gregory the Great 41–53 Guibbory, Achsah 146–50 Gunpowder Plot 105, 109, 146 Hall (née Shakespeare), Susanna 122 Hall, Dr John (1575–1636), Shakespeare’s son-in-law 121–2 Hall, Michael 252, 254 Hartwell, Thomas 262 Harwood, James 249

Haydon, Colin 200 Heidegger, Martin 38 Henry VIII (1491–1547), King of England and Ireland 8, 104, 117, 134, 137 Herbert family (Wilton House) 109–10 Herbert, George (1593–1633) 141–62, 163–4, 167–8, 173–4, 187, 192, 253 Herbert, Mary (1561–1621), Countess of Pembroke 109–10 Hermits and hermitages 37–8, 171, 174ff., 181–4, 198–9 202–3, 206–13, 216–21, 225 hierophany 70 Hill, Rosemary 230, 250 holy wells 8, 83,103–5, 113, 117–21, 142, 179; see also Clerkenwell, Holywell, Ladywell Holywell 103, 106, 118, 142, 179 Hooker, Richard (1554–1604) 124–5, 129–30 Hope, A.J.B. Beresford (1820–87), 260–1, 291 Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–89) 141, 311, 316–7, Horne, Thomas Hartwell (1780–1862), biblical scholar 262, 264 Howard family (Earls of Suffolk) 108, 111–3 Hunt, William Holman (1827–1910), painter 263, 270 Hunter, G.K. 100, 106 Innocent III (1160/61–1216), Pope 80 Insoll, Timothy 4–5 Iona 143 James VI & I (1560–1625), King of England, Scotland and Ireland 105, 108–9, 135 Jameson, Anna Brownell (1794–1860), art historian 276 Jerusalem 7, 16, 41, 52, 54–5, 71, 78–9, 82, 89, 99, 120, 129, 133, 91, 139, 183, 245, 316 Jesus xiv, 7, 28, 32, 54, 78, 89, 125–6, 143, 155, 162, 165, 175, 184, 187, 190, 258, 263, 289 Jews 47, 54, 85, 91, 129–30 Jobson, F.J. (1812–81), Wesleyan minister 260 Johnson, Dr. Samuel (1709–84), 115, 205, 287

index Johnson, James (1753–1811), engraver and publisher 285 Jones, Basil (1822–97) Bishop of St David’s 257 Jones, David (1899–1965), poet and painter xv, 297, 316–7 Jones, Inigo (1573–1652), architect and theatre designer 130 Jonson, Ben (1572–1637) 148–9 Keble, Rev. John (1792–1866), literary scholar and poet 230, 233–4, 237, 271 Kempe, Margery (c. 1373– c.1438) v, 7, 77–93 Keyser, Charles E. 16–7, 22, 33 Knapp, Jeffrey 107 Ladywell 103 Landscape 35–56, 186, 195–226 passim; see also ‘Monastic topography’ Last Judgement, the (or the Doom) 21–3, 30, 33, 41 Laud, William, (1573–1645), Arcbishop of Canterbury 123, 126–7, 130, 164, 167 Laudianism 123–39 passim, 152–3, 65 Leighton, Frederick (1830–96), painter 273 Lévinas, Emmanuel 1, 3 Levine, Neil 254 Lewis, G.R. (1782–1871), painter and engraver 255 Lindisfarne Island 35, 43 Lindsay, Alexander William, (1812– 80), 25th Earl of Crawford and of Balcarres, collector and historian 276–8 Little Gidding 150 liturgical practice wearing of surplices 164, 239, 292 vestments 11, 132, 243, 245, 287 making the sign of the cross 239 liturgy 4, 11, 16, 18, 23, 25, 28–9, 32, 38, 79–80, 124–5, 128, 131, 151–3, 170, 172, 202, 204, 227–45 passim, 287, 292 Lowell, Robert xiii Lupton, Julia 102, 119, 198 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 309 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 98 Magdalen College, Oxford 29, 101, 186–7, 230, 264, 269, 288

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magic 8, 31, 102–3, 105–6, 121, 186, 219, 224, 298–302, 305, 307–8, 310–15 Mahoney, Dhira 83, 93 Manchester College, Oxford 11, 247–50, 252, 266–7 Mantegna 283 Martz, Louis 164, 200 Marvell, Andrew (1621–78) 199, 202–3 Mary, Queen of England and Ireland (1516–58) 98 Mary Magdalene 29, 101, 187, 255, 264, 269 Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–87) 105 Masaccio 276, 283, 289 Maurice, Peter 258 Meditation, abbey tradition of 174, 195–226 passim, esp. 198, 203–9 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 38 Michelangelo 275, 277 Middleton, Thomas (bpt.1580–1627), dramatist 116 Milbank, John 303 Millais, Sir John Everett (1829–96), painter 263 Milnes, Richard Monckton (1809–85) author and politician 276 Milton, John (1608–74) 131, 146, 167, 173, 175, 189, 201–3, 205, 209, 252 miracle 8, 17–8, 20–1, 30, 42, 58, 60, 63, 65–9, 70, 72, 74, 82, 92, 99, 100, 102–4, 105, 111, 117–8, 120, 142, 312–3 modernity 301, 303–5, 307 Monaco, Lorenzo 290 monasteries 10, 35–56 passim, esp. 35–9, 41–3, 49–55; 134–7, 143, 178, 200, 269, 279, 292 (a secular ‘monastery’), 303 monastic spirituality 199, 219 monastic topography 35–56, 81, 195–226 passim, 175–7, 179, 184 Morgan, Elizabeth Georgina 282 Morris, William (1834–96), designer and writer 248 Morris, Richard 28, 36, 38, 49 Moses xiii–xv, 23, 43, 131, 142–3, 262 mysticism 199–200, 204, 303, 318 Nash, Gerralt D. 2 National Gallery, London 269–95 passim Natural world 10, 134, 146, 177, 185–90, 195, 197–9, 203–6, 211, 224–6, 265, 299–300, 302–3, 308, 310–2, 314, 317

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Neale, Rev. John Mason (1818–66), author 11, 239–40, 245, 271–2, 280 Neile, Richard (1562–1640), Archbishop of York 126 Nerio, Ugolino di 278, 285 New Ageism 297, 305–7 Newman, John Henry (1801–90), theologian and cardinal 10, 233–8, 240, 245, 258, 262, 269, 271, 272, 286 Nieremberg, Juan, seventeenth century Jesuit devotional writer and theologian 178–80, 183 Orosius, Paulus 41 Ottley, William Young (1771–1836), art collector and writer 269, 287 Oxford Architectural and Historical Society 10, 237, 238–9, 245, 251, 256 Oxford Movement 2, 10–11, 199, 233–4, 237, 238–9, 244–5, 270–6, 286, 291, 307; see also Froude, Keble, Newman, Pusey Parker, Patricia 100 Parry, Graham vii, 8, 131, 150, 163, 178, 183, 200 Parry, Thomas Gambier (1816–88), art collector 290–1 Partridge, Christopher 307–8, 311 The Passion 17, 23, 26, 77, 87, 90 Paternoster 27, 30, 90 penance 45, 91, 98, 101 performative utterance or prayer 24, 303, 318 Perugino 275–6, 278, 283, 293 Philip II (1527–98), King of Spain 97 Philip III (1578–1621), King of Spain 108 Pilgrims and pilgrimage xiii, 6–8, 22, 30–2, 67, 71, 73, 78, 80–2, 89, 91, 97–121 passim, 142–3, 146, 150, 174–5, 179, 208, 214, 221, 293, ‘Pointed’ architecture 250, 255, 27; see also Gothic Revival Pontius Pilate 84 Poole, Rev. George Ayliffe (1808–83), author 252–3, 262, 264 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744) 204–6 Powell, Vavasor (1617–70), Independent minister and activist 166, 169 prayer ix, 1, 2, 4–5, 8, 24–7, 31–2, 34, 46, 48, 60, 69, 82–3, 85, 87, 89, 92–3, 99–100, 114, 123, 125–8, 134, 141, 144–5, 156, 159–60, 163, 165, 170,

173, 174, 176, 180, 182–3, 188, 200, 204, 207, 214, 234, 239, 241–3, 248, 250, 261, 263, 292, 314 Primitive Church 10 Psalms 15–16, 40, 42, 152–3, 158, 161 Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore (1812–52), architect and designer 230–3, 235–8, 240, 243, 245, 250–1, 255, 273 Purgatory 20, 23 Puritanism 146, 170, 313 Pusey, Rev. Edward Bouverie (1800–82), theologian 237, 271, 264, 286–8, 291 Quarles, Francis (1592–1644), poet 149, 150

9,

Raleigh, Sir Walter (1554–1618) 109, 110, 120 Raphael 275–8, 293 rationalization 302 recusants 105–6, 115, 146, 179; see also ‘Howard family’ re-enchantment 297–319 passim, esp. 304–9; see also disenchantment, enchantment Reformation 1, 5, 7–8, 32, 69, 105, 107, 114, 120, 124, 129, 131–2, 136, 146, 162, 179, 198–9, 200, 211, 229, 231, 297–8, 308, 315 relics 10, 16, 30, 100–4, 106, 116, 118, 120 reverence 6, 124, 130–1, 142, 146, 171, 287, 297, 312, 314–5, 317, 319 Richard II (1367–1400), King of England 58, 71 Rickman, Thomas (1776–1841), architect and Quaker 229 Rilke, Rainer Maria 309, 312 Rio, Alexis-Francois 276 Roman Catholicism 106–8, 112, 129, 179, 197, 199–205, 223, 225, 231, 233, 235–6, 247, 257, 267, 292, 298, 302, 309–15; see also Newman, Pugin Rorty, Richard 304 Rosewell, Roger 16–9, 21–5, 24, 26 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828–82), painter and poet 263, 273 ruins 8, 10, 37, 52–3, 92, 139, 196–7, 200–1, 207, 208–10, 212–16, 218–25 Ruskin, John (1819–1900) 252–3, 262–3, 278–9 Russell, John Fuller (1813–84), ecclesiastical historian 101, 269–70, 279–81, 286–8, 290–1, 293

index sacrament 18, 24, 33, 17, 123, 128, 131, 170, 172, 189, 234–5, 241, 310, 314–8 sacramentality 10, 131, 142, 147, 149–50, 152, 233, 241, 238, 240, 243, 245 264, 297, 298, 302, 309–3, 314–19 sacriledge 9, 131–8, 182, 197, 201–2, 212, 223–4 Saints St Ambrose 42, 44–5, 47–51, 53 St Anthony 176 St Antony 52 St Athanasius 37, 52 St Augustine 41–2, 44–5, 47–53, 218, 279, 291 St Bartholomew v, 57–75, 278, 285 St Beuno 142 St Bonaventura 81, 83, 92 St Bridget of Sweden 81–2 St Bridget (at Llansantffraed) 81–2 St Bruno 217 St Christopher 18, 28, 33–4 St Cuthbert 39, 44, 46, 52 St Deiniol 143 St Eucherius 179, 187 St Elizabeth of Hungary 82, 91 St Felix the Martyr 180–1 St Francis of Assisi 78–93 passim St Friedswide 104 St Hierothius 174 St Hilarion 37, 52 St James 100, 101, 103, 137 St Jerome 41–2, 44–5, 47–9, 51–3, 175, 279 St John of Damascus xiv St John the Baptist 22–3, 28, 30–2, 91, 143 St Mary Magdalene 29, 101, 187, 255, 264, 269 St Paul 48, 142, 154 St Paulinus of Nola 174–82 passim, 184 St Peter 16, 48 St Teresa of Avila 176 St. Teilo 1, 2, 5, 8, 25–6 St Thomas 22 St Thomas Becket 104, 106 St Thomas of Canterbury 16 St Winefride 106, 121, 142, 146 Salviati, Antonio 273, 285 Sanford, Edward Ayshford 284 Sanford, John (1777–1855), art collector 279, 282–4 Santa Casa, Loreto 80 Sarbiewski, Casimir (1595–1640), Polish Jesuit poet 176–9

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Sarum Rite 11, 231, 244 Schlegel, Friedrich von 275–6 science 35, 88,106, 203, 249, 252, 257, 259, 263, 265–6, 297–303, 309, 311–14 Scott, Geoffrey (1884–1929), architect and writer 252 Scott, George Gilbert (1811–78), church architect 251, 273 Scudamore, Sir John (1601–71) 130 secularization 5, 196, 297–298, 301, 307 sermons 3, 18, 21, 27, 65–6, 123, 133, 165, 262–3 Shakespeare, William (c. 1564–1616) 4, 8, 26, 29, 97–121, 198 Shakespeare, John (c.1530–1601) 106 Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950) 110 Shelton, Thomas (fl. 1598–1629), translator 111–2 shrines 4, 30–1, 82–3, 97, 99, 103, 115, 117, 143, 182, 197, 208, 219, 291 Skinner, Rev. James (1818–81), religious writer 261 Solomon’s Temple 126, 129–30, 133–4, 139, 150, 154–6, 183 Spanish Armada, The 97–8 Spelman, Sir Henry (1563–1641), historian and antiquarian 9, 133–9, 178, 200–1, 214 Spenser, Edmund (1552–1599) 107 Spicer, Andrew 2–5, 177, 179 Spurgeon, C.H. (1834–92), Baptist preacher and writer 259 St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London 58, 64–5, 72 Stanhope, Lord Philip Henry (1805–75), historian 276 Stone, Robert 82–3, 93, 101 Stowe, John (1524/5–1605), historian 8, 200 Street, George Edmund (1824–81) architect and architectural theorist xii, 245, 272–3, 279, 290 Strozzi, Zanobi 283 Sullivan, Louis 262 Sutton, Rev. Frederick Heathcote (1833–88), art collector 279, 286, 288–9 289 Sweet, Rosemary 261 Tabor, J.A. 259 Taylor, Charles 10, 297, 299, 301, 304, 306, 311, 318

328

index

Temples and tabernacles 141–62 passim, esp. 142, 149, 154–5; see also Solomon’s Temple Thomas, Keith 103, 105, 314–5 Thomas, R S., (1913–2000) priest and poet 144–5, 156, 159, 161 Thomson, Alexander (‘Greek’) (1817–75), architect 258 Tintoretto 263, 279 Tractarians 10, 233–5, 237, 245, 264 Traherne, Thomas (1637–74), poet and writer 200 transubstantiation 313–4, The Trinity 26, 90–1, 126, 158, 256, 258, 261

Vasari, Giorgio 275 Vaughan, Henry (1621–95), poet and physician 4, 10, 152, 163–91, 200 Vaughan, Thomas (1621–1666), priest and alchemist 10, 166, Veneziano, Domenico 278 Veneziano, Lorenzo 288 Virgin Mary 17–18, 22–4, 30, 61, 77, 178, 273, 280–1, 283 Vitruvius 253

Wales 1, 2, 5, 8, 25, 31, 38, 105, 142–3, 145, 164–6, 168–9, 179–80, 182, 186, 190, 283; see also Henry Vaughan Walsham, Alexandra 119, 179 Walsingham 103–5 Webb, Benjamin 239–40, 256, 264, 271 Webb, E.A. 58, 60, 63, 64, 68–9 Weber, Max 11, 297–304, 306, 308–315, 317, 319 Weever, John 200 wells, see ‘holy wells’ Wesleyan Methodism 228, 260 Wightwick, George (1802–72), architect and architectural writer 257 Wilberforce, Samuel (1805–73), Bishop of Oxford and of Winchester 245 Wilcox, Helen vii, 3–5, 9, 142–62 Wilkins, Rev. George (1785–1865) 112 Wittenberg 103 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 312 wonder 12, 99, 102, 297, 303, 306, 309, 312, 317, 319; see also ‘enchantment’ Woodyer, Henry (1816–96) , architect 290 Wordsworth, William 10, 185, 187, 195–226, 261–2, 275–6, 290, 316 Worthington, Thomas (1826–1909), architect 247–8 Wren, Christopher (1624–73) 254 Wren, Matthew (1585–1667), Bishop of Ely 124–5

Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich 275–6

Yachnin, Paul 110 Yates, Nigel 239, 251–2, 279, 286, 292

Uccello 276 Ugolino, Nerio di 278, 288 Unitarianism 247–8 Unrau, John 262

PLATES

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Fig. 1.1

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St Christopher at Woodeaton (Oxf ). Copyright: Anne Marshall, www.paintedchurch.org.

Fig. 1.2

Text on the painting of the Three Living and the Three Dead at Wensley (Yorks). Copyright: Anne Marshall, www.paintedchurch.org.

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Fig. 1.3

Broughton priest: Donor figure with speech scroll at Broughton (Oxf ). Copyright: Anne Marshall, www.paintedchurch.org.

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Fig. 1.4 Image of Pity: The letters jsu m (possibly jesu miserere, or part of the well-known prayer jesu mercy, lady help) on the Image of Pity from Llandeilo Talybont. Copyright: by permission of the National Museum of Wales.

Fig. 1.5 Fragment of text reading HOMO DA, possibly jesu christe deus et homo da nobis . . ., from Llandeilo Talybont. Copyright: by permission of the National Museum of Wales.

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Fig. 1.6 Bound Christ: The inscription Ecce Homo on the Bound Christ from Llandeilo Talybont. Copyright: by permission of the National Museum of Wales.

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Fig. 1.7 Christ in Majesty-feet: Fragment of the Sancta Trinitas inscription from Llandeilo Talybont. Copyright: by permission of the National Museum of Wales.

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Fig. 7.1 Francis Quarles, Argalus and Parthenia (1629), frontispiece. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, U.K.

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Fig. 7.2 George Herbert, The Temple (1633), title-page. Reproduced by permission of Cardiff University Library, Wales, U.K.

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Fig. 7.3 George Herbert, ‘Superliminare’, from The Temple. Reproduced from the 1679 ed. of The Temple by permission of Cardiff University Library, Wales, U.K.

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Fig. 7.4 George Herbert, ‘The Altar’, from The Temple (1633). Reproduced by permission of Cardiff University Library, Wales, U.K.

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Fig. 7.5 George Herbert, ‘The Altar’, from The Temple (1679). Reproduced by permission of Cardiff University Library, Wales, U.K. Similar to the Superluminare, the layout of ‘The Altar’ in the 1679 edition of The Temple reveals how readers and publishers read the poem in terms of an architectural structure.

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Fig. 8.1 Silex Scintillans title page. Reproduced from the author’s copy of the Silex facsimile, ed. William Clare, 1885.

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Fig. 10.1

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Thomas Rickman, Holy Trinity, Bristol, 1829. Photograph by William Avery.

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Magdalen College Chapel, Oxford, restored by L. N. Cottingham, 1829–34, Copyright Sacred Destinations Images. Reproduced with permission.

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Fig. 10.3 A. W. N. Pugin, ‘They are weighed in the balance and found wanting’, from Contrasts, 1836. Reproduced by permission of The President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford.

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Fig. 10.4 A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Catholic town in 1440/THE SAME TOWN IN 1840’, from Contrasts, 1836. Reproduced by permission of The President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford.

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Fig. 10.5 A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Contrasted Residences for the Poor’, from Contrasts, 1836. Reproduced by permission of The President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford.

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A. W. N. Pugin, ‘Contrasted Altar Screens’, from Contrasts, 1836. Reproduced by permission of The President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford.

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Fig. 10.7

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Charles Barry and A. W. N. Pugin, Houses of Parliament. Photo in public domain.

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Fig. 10.8 A. W. N. Pugin, St Giles, Cheadle, baptismal font. Photograph by Matthew Doyle. Reproduced by permission.

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Fig. 10.9

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A. W. N. Pugin, St Giles, Cheadle, view of the nave. Photograph by Matthew Doyle. Reproduced by permission.

Fig. 10.10 A. W. N. Pugin, St Giles, Cheadle, Chancel looking through to the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament. Photograph by Matthew Doyle. Reproduced by permission.

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Fig. 10.11 A. W. N. Pugin, St. Giles, Cheadle, rood screen. Photograph by Matthew Doyle. Reproduced by permission.

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Fig. 10.12

Birmingham Oratory. Photograph by Matthew Doyle. Reproduced by permission.

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Fig. 10.13 Birmingham Oratory, Pole Requiem. Photograph by Matthew Doyle. Reproduced by permission.

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Fig. 10.14

St Giles, Oxford in 1834. Reproduced by permission.

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Fig. 10.15 St Nicholas Church, Littlemore, 1902. Reproduced with permission.

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Fig. 10.16

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Interior of St. Nicholas Church, Littlemore, 1839. Reproduced with permission.

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Fig. 10.17

John Purchas, ‘The Holy Communion’ from Directorium Anglicanum, 1858.

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John Purchas, ‘Chancel’ from Directorium Anglicanum, 1858.

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Fig. 10.19

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John Purchas, ‘General View of the Chancel Arrangements’ from Directorium Anglicanum, 1858.

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John Purchas, ‘An Altar, vested’ from Directorium Anglicanum, 1858.

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Fig. 10.21 Ripon College Cuddesdon. Reproduced with permission of the Principal of the College.

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Fig. 11.1 A window in the south side of Harris Manchester College Chapel (1897). Faith personified as Enoch holding the hand of God and Prophesy pictured as Elijah.

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Fig. 11.2 Arlosh Windows, Harris Manchester College Chapel (1896): Creation of land sea and plants. All windows are reproduced with permission of Harris Manchester College, Oxford and with the kind assistance of Sue Killoran, college librarian.

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Fig. 11.3

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Arlosh Windows, Harris Manchester College Chapel (1896): Creation of Adam and Eve.

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Fig. 11.4

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Arlosh Windows, Harris Manchester College Chapel (1896): Division of night and day.

Fig. 11.5

The West Window of Harris Manchester College Chapel, Oxford (1895): The four evangelists and Paul.

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Fig. 12.1 Thomas S. Boys, Celebration of Holy Communion in Margaret Chapel on the Feast of the Epiphany, 1850. Watercolour (London, All Saints, Margaret Street). By kind permission of the Vicar and Churchwardens of All Saints, Margaret Street.

Fig. 12.2 Interior of St. Helen’s Church, Brant Broughton, Lincolnshire, showing the reredos (usually a panel depicting the Ascension by the 15th-century German Master of Liesborn), donated and installed by the Revd. Frederick Heathcote Sutton. Reproduced by kind permission of the Rector and Churchwardens of St. Helen’s Church, Brant Broughton.

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