The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Literature 150363826X, 9781503638266

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Politics of Grace
1. Equity and Grace in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
2. Grace, Gender, and Patronage in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer
3. The Beauty of Grace in Abraham Cowley’s Davideis
4. Cooperative Grace and Interpretation in Milton’s Paradise Lost
5. Grace and Prophetic Education in Paradise Regained
Conclusion: The Poem of Grace
Notes
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

TH E PO LITIC S O F G R AC E I N E A R LY M O D E R N L I T E R AT U R E

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The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Literature DENI K ASA

STA N FOR D U N I V E R SI T Y PR E SS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2024 by Deni Kasa. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­f ree, archival-­quality paper ISBN 9781503638266 (cloth) ISBN 9781503638310 (ebook) Library of Congress Control Number 2023022824 CIP data available upon request. Cover design: Gabriele Wilson Cover art: Caravaggio, Conversion on the Way to Damascus (1601). Oil on canvas, 90.5 x 68.8 in. Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments I N T R O D U C T I O N

vii 1

The Politics of Grace

1

Equity and Grace in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

23



2

Grace, Gender, and Patronage in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer

53



3

The Beauty of Grace in Abraham Cowley’s Davideis

82



4

Cooperative Grace and Interpretation in Milton’s Paradise Lost

109



5

Grace and Prophetic Education in Paradise Regained

137

CONCLUSION

176

The Poem of Grace Notes

183

Index

233

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began at the University of Toronto and matured at Tel Aviv University and the University of Oxford. I owe its existence to the guides, friends, and colleagues in each of these institutions who shaped my work and supported me, particularly during the difficult times. I am grateful to Paul Stevens for his compassion, grace, and generosity during the most important years of my intellectual development. I am grateful to Mary Nyquist and David Galbraith, who helped me overcome the timidity of a student and embrace the creative sacrifices involved in writing a book. I am grateful to Noam Reisner, who taught me the true meaning of the golden rule and guided my transition to a new culture, a new professional stage, and a new phase of personal maturity. I am grateful to Sarah Mortimer for the many conversations and ideas that are woven into the fabric of this book, and for her tireless efforts to include me in her community at Oxford even in the darkest days of the pandemic. I am indebted to Tom Dilworth and Stephen Pender, who guided my first steps in literary criticism, and to my first teacher, Daniel Bonk, whose memory lives with me still. This book also owes its existence to the many friends and colleagues who accompanied me over the past decade. I am especially grateful for the unfailing support of Michael Donnelly, who has advised on every part of this book in each of its many incarnations, and who guided me through my most difficult crises of confidence. I am grateful to Noel Malcolm, whose advice, wisdom, and experience were crucial in helping me to finish the book in its vii

viii

Acknowledgments

final stages. I am grateful for the warmth, advice, and goodwill of Lynne Magnusson and Laura Lunger Knoppers, who provided extensive feedback on an early version of the manuscript. I am indebted to John Rogers for his invaluable advice on the final chapters and to Leslie Wexler for her care and patience in editing and providing feedback on the final draft. I am grateful to Jonathan Stavsky and Spencer Morrison for their feedback, and for making Tel Aviv feel like home. I completed much of the final draft during my time at Oxford, and I am indebted to those who sharpened my thinking in that crucial period: Noël Sugimura, William Poole, Lorna Hutchinson, Blair Worden, David Scott, James Hooks, and the larger community of scholars at Oxford’s Centre for Intellectual History, the Faculty of History, and Wolfson College. I am also very grateful for the conversations and warmth I have shared with Alex Beeton, Eli Bernstein, Sophie Aldred, Hannah Dongsung Lee, Dmitri Levitin, and other early career scholars during this period. Part of the fourth chapter of this book appeared in Milton Quarterly as an article, and I am grateful to Edward Jones and the anonymous reviewers at MQ for their feedback on this publication. Other parts of the book have appeared at conferences and seminars in Budapest, Oxford, Strasbourg, Haifa, Toronto, Beersheva, New Orleans, Bruges, and Berlin. I am indebted to the organizers and to my interlocutors at these events, including David Ainsworth, Alison Chapman, Stephen Fallon, Jason Kerr, Nigel Smith, Miklos Peti, and many others for their incisive questions and feedback. I am indebted to Caroline McKusick and the anonymous reviewers at Stanford University Press for their feedback on the final drafts. I am also indebted to the Azrieli Foundation, which funded my research in Tel Aviv with an international postdoctoral fellowship, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding this book for multiple fellowships. I am more grateful than I could express to my parents, Agron and Laura Kasa, who remain the best embodiment of grace in my life. I dedicate this book to them.

INTRODUCTION

The Politics of Grace

In The Ili a d,or the Poem of Force, Simone Weil argues that The Iliad revolves around a single concept: force. Force, she explains, is what turns a human being into a thing. Killing is the most extreme example, but most of the essay concerns the kind of force that dehumanizes without killing. Time and time again in The Iliad, defeated warriors clasp the knees of the victor to beg for life. Priam kisses the hands of the man who killed his son. Weil argues that in such moments, the suppliant’s vulnerability is so extreme that he is deprived of the right to show even the most basic signs of life: If a stranger, completely disabled, disarmed, strengthless, throws himself on the mercy of a warrior, he is not, by this very act, condemned to death; but a moment of impatience on the warrior’s part will suffice to relieve him of his life. In any case, his flesh has lost that very important property which in the laboratory distinguishes living flesh from dead—­the galvanic response. If you give a frog’s leg an electric shock, it twitches. If you confront a human being with the touch or sight of something horrible or terrifying, this bundle of muscles, nerves, and flesh likewise twitches. Alone of all living things, the suppliant we have just described neither quivers nor trembles. He has lost the right to do so.1

The suppliant has lost the right to tremble because he must concentrate his entire self in a single act of submission to force, the principle that transforms human beings into things. Even if the sword does not perform the final cut, this act of submission dehumanizes the suppliant with an exchange: as the 1

2

Introduction

suppliant offers his submission, the conqueror pauses to consider, with absolute authority over life and death, if to accept the offer and show mercy. Weil believes that all of the heroes in The Iliad are subjected to force at some point or other in the poem. Force is the only true victor in the poem, the universal, cosmic principle. This book is devoted to the politics of grace rather than the force Weil explored in her essay. Nevertheless, the Christian idea of grace resembles the situation Weil described in one important way: it involves an extreme disparity between God and the sinner. The key difference is that grace does not imply the same kind of exchange, because sinners receive grace as a free gift. Early Modern Protestants in particular stressed that salvation was not an exchange or an economic bargain. God, they argued, was free to dispense his unmerited grace on some and to punish the rest of humanity on account of the original sin of Adam. He who begs for grace does not earn it by begging; he discovers, rather, that grace has always already been offered to him, and this divine gift was what moved him to penitence in the first place. The redeemed sinner does not feel the anxiety the suppliant feels as he clasps Achilles’s knee because God, in his genuinely absolute power over life and death, has bestowed grace freely and thus humbled human force. The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Poetry tells the story of how four early modern poets—­Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, Abraham Cowley, and John Milton—­built on this Protestant tradition to envision grace as a form of agency fulfilled in submission to God. Because grace is a gift, the most important battles in their poems are no longer fought between warriors on a battlefield. The warriors who continue to rely on what Spenser calls “fleshly force” (V.vii.40.9)—­such as the monster Geryoneo, who evokes Catholic Spain, or the Roman soldiers in Lanyer’s Passion poem—­ are not simply defeated but also ridiculed for their inability to understand the eclipse of force by a new dispensation.2 The important battles, according to these poets, are now interpretive. Given that God bestows grace unilaterally, all that remains for human beings to do is to interpret how grace will be received, to whom it will be given, and what will be its fruits in those who accept it. Their poetry valorizes those who use grace to interpret the will of God creatively so as to find space for individual and collective agency within their submission to the divine gift.

The Politics of Grace

3

From a more critical perspective, however, this idea of grace can validate other modes of domination and inequality. Alongside the Protestant theory of salvation, each of these poets understood grace through the humanist theory of education. Humanism helped inspire the Protestant Reformation, but it also bestowed on Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton a profound respect for the power and prestige of an elite education.3 This assumption informs how they imagine grace. They argue that while grace is indeed a divine gift that cannot be earned through human means alone, to accept grace fully one must demonstrate the learning, civic virtue, and interpretive liberty celebrated in humanist educational writing. While grace was in theory available regardless of social station, the fruits of grace were clearest in the work of humanist Protestants who had the necessary cultural capital and education to read the Word of God critically, to debate its meaning publicly, and to mold the nation with eloquence. While this argument was not always inherently violent, it did at times allow the castigation and repression of those who did not exhibit this ideal. In Book V of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, for example, the flail of the iron man Talus is as ruthless as anything to be found in Homer, yet the aim of his violence is ostensibly to spread the grace of a Protestant ruler over a rebellious people. Such a justification for violence was rendered acceptable, for Spenser, by assumptions that were both religious and cultural: the rebels were brute-­ like because they lacked civility as well as grace, while those directing this policy of oppression did so from an elevated moral and cultural position. The overlap between grace and education explains this political approach to grace. It also helps to explain, more broadly, a fact increasingly noted by literary critics and intellectual historians: some of the loudest proponents of liberty and equality in this period were also apologists for colonialism, empire, and repressive government.4 By taking this approach to grace, some poets were able to speak about the eclipse of force while idealizing the use of force by well-­educated Protestant men. This book explores poems that unmoored grace from theological precision to explore these imaginative possibilities for political life. The political stakes are clearest in Spenser’s writing on Protestant empire, Lanyer’s idea of sacred poetry, Cowley’s view of civil war, and Milton’s ideal of citizenship. Spenser draws on Protestant legal thinking to argue that the Elizabethan

4

Introduction

colonization of Ireland, a project in which he was personally implicated, is the political expression of grace. In doing so, he presents the Irish as both uncivilized and religiously backward, thus making grace essential to his arguments for colonial expansion. Lanyer addresses the gendered inequalities of humanism head-­on by foregrounding the exclusion of women from education notwithstanding their equal claim to religious grace. Cowley draws attention to the divisiveness of contemporary republicanism, and he develops a vision of sacred poetry in which grace reunites a nation on the brink of civil war under a king. Milton takes a different perspective on republicanism, arguing that sovereignty should belong to an elite of humanist-­educated men. These poets pursue very different aims, but they all frame their ideal political communities in the language of grace, which allows them to present political agency as paradoxically fulfilled by a recognition of insufficiency. This paradoxical agency-­in-­submission is part of the tension they explore between agency and repression in a political community. Throughout this book, I use the term “political” heuristically, following the convention of historians of political thought, to describe communities that are larger than a household but more particular than would-­be universal constructs such as the Church.5 Some examples relevant to this book are a nation, a city, a republic, or an empire. Grace provided a way to challenge the boundaries of these communities because the New Testament promises their imminent dissolution. The Apostle Paul stressed that “the fashion of this world passeth away” (1. Cor. 7:31), and that “the time is short” (1 Cor. 7:29) before the arrival of Kingdom of God.6 As a result, Protestant theologians saw worldly authority as important but temporary, and thus distinct from questions pertaining to grace and the eternal Kingdom of God.7 The poets explored in this book, on the other hand, repurposed the language of salvation to reimagine the boundaries and ambitions of their political communities. Lanyer, for example, writes on the grace of visionary women to challenge women’s exclusion from political life, while Spenser imagines a patriarchal vision of empire in which Protestant magistrates conquer the known world. While their approaches seem on the face of it to be wholly incompatible, Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton nevertheless use a shared language to articulate what are ultimately very different political visions. While each poet understands his or her ideal to be unrealistic in practice,

The Politics of Grace

5

they turn to grace in order to imagine new possibilities as well as to reflect on existing inequalities. Alongside the Protestant language of salvation, these poets also draw on the humanist ideal of poetry as a form of creative making. In Philip Sidney’s contrast between poetry and history, the poet is told to “borrow nothing of what is, has been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.”8 In other words, a humanist poet strives to create an ideal pattern for imitation rather than true accuracy or verisimilitude. As Colin Burrow has shown recently, this humanist idea of imitation allowed poets to adapt their material creatively to a rhetorical situation.9 Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton embody this Sidneian vision by imagining communities that aim to educate their readers, not to represent the political world as it really was. And the reality was often disappointing for these poets. Spenser celebrates the virtues of a Protestant magistrate while conveying his frustration with the indecision of real magistrates in Ireland. Lanyer celebrates female noblewomen who were not likely to offer her any patronage, so her praise for them doubles as a complaint. Cowley, an erstwhile royalist writing in the zenith of Cromwellian power, strikes an elegiac note as he imagines the beauty of grace averting the kind of civil war that had so recently led to regicide in the real world. Milton wrote his epics after power changed hands again during the Restoration, and his idealized communities accordingly criticize the nation’s refusal to embody republican virtue. Combining the language of grace with the humanist ideal, these poets seek to transcend their disappointment and imagine political communities as they may be or should be. To emphasize the key role of the imagination in these poems, I express the political ideals they describe as imagined communities of grace. In doing so, I do not imply any necessary connection to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” to describe nationhood.10 Whereas Anderson’s focus is on print as a medium, my focus falls instead on the poet’s imagination, which turns to grace in order to authorize the effort to mold and educate readers in terms of some imagined ideal. An imagined community of grace weaves Protestant ideas of salvation with the humanist ideal of poetry, and it celebrates the poet’s imagination and transformative eloquence as the means of bringing that ideal to the world.

6

Introduction

By bringing education as a crucial third term to the relationship between politics and salvation, this book seeks to build on recent criticism that has emphasized the radical or even violent aspects of grace.11 While radicals in this period often disavowed human learning in favor of divine inspiration, the poets explored in this book embrace learning as the complement to grace.12 Even when these poets seem to disavow education or critique the worldly wisdom of rivals, they then go on to emphasize their own creativity, poetic skill, and civic virtue in explicitly humanist terms. Milton, for example, insists on the need for a learned response to grace throughout his work, and in a key moment in Paradise Regained, he imagines the messiah as a man with patrician tastes who dismisses the common people as “a herd confused, / A miscellaneous rabble, who extol / Things vulgar” (3.49–­ 51).13 If we contextualize Milton only in terms of radical religion, we risk bypassing the deep-­rooted elitism that separates him and other educated poets from what they saw as the vulgar rabble. In addition to these contextual approaches, I am committed throughout this book to close reading and formal analysis as the means of recovering the paradoxes of grace. The key paradox is the belief that human force is ineffective on its own, because genuine human agency is fulfilled in the believer’s submission to God and the gift of grace. Instead of resolving such paradoxes in detailed argument, the poems explored in this book often represent them as unresolved tensions in poetic form, meter, and thematic patterning. While the importance of grace in early modern culture invites these different approaches, it also places constraints on this book that are worth acknowledging at the outset. I do not attempt a comprehensive study of all poets who used grace to reimagine their communities because such a project would require many volumes. The poets chosen for this study are interesting to study together because they share overlapping concerns, but other poets could be studied in a parallel way, and I hope this book will invite future research in that direction. Moreover, although I describe common themes that these poets inherit from a shared idiom and religious tradition, I do not argue for a linear, teleological development between chapters. Rather, each chapter explores different ideas of poetry, faith, and politics that were developed in different contexts. While I discuss Milton’s work over two chapters, this added detail is due to the fact that Milton wrote

The Politics of Grace

7

more (and more explicitly) about grace, but these concluding chapters are not intended to provide a teleological resolution to the themes discussed earlier in the book. The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Poetry thus explores how early modern poetry used grace—­as a theological concept, as a cultural topos, and as an encounter provoked by a poem’s form—­to imagine political communities. It shows that Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton built on a broader Protestant humanist tendency to map the paradoxes of grace onto the promise of a humanist education. This effort challenged the distinction that Protestant doctrine ordinarily maintained between salvation and the kingdoms of this world. Because this distinction was central to Protestant thought, it deserves further elaboration. The Politics of Grace and the Two Kingdoms

The magisterial Protestant theologians had good reason to fear radical arguments about salvation. Grace enabled believers to transcend their worldly communities, fraught as they were with inequality and social hierarchy, so as to become part of a messianic Kingdom of God. If the boundary between worldly kingdoms and the Kingdom of God were to be erased, it would be difficult to stop the many calls for transformative social change that dogged the Reformation from its earliest days and threatened to delegitimize the likes of Luther and Calvin. In order to explore why poets were interested in the politics of grace, it is first necessary to explain why these major theologians avoided conflating grace with political agency. The dangers of free grace theology became clear to Protestants soon after Luther began to preach his ideas. During the German Peasants’ rebellion of 1524–­25, rebel leaders used Luther’s arguments to challenge the authority of the civil (or “temporal”) authorities as well as the Catholic church. Some of them, like Thomas Müntzer, claimed that grace had emancipated the saints from all law, both religious and secular. This position, which came to be known as antinomianism, became one of the most reviled interpretations of grace among the magisterial reformers. All Protestants opposed the kind of Catholic legalism that sought to bind consciences, but the antinomians claimed that they were also freed from worldly authority

8

Introduction

by grace and the Holy Spirit.14 Luther rejected these arguments because, in his view, the majority of professed Christians in any worldly community are hypocrites, and temporal law is thus necessary to restrain them from abusing the godly. He argued that “if anyone attempted to rule the world by the gospel and to abolish all temporal law and sword . . . the wicked under the name of Christian [would] abuse evangelical freedom, carry on their rascality, and insist that they were Christians subject neither to law nor sword, as some are already raving and ranting.”15 This skepticism led Luther to oppose the German peasants, contributing to their defeat.16 The term “antinomian” became a term of abuse for later groups, including radicals during the English Civil Wars who attempted to use grace as the grounds of political liberty.17 On the other hand, the Gospel represents grace as part of the believer’s entry into a new kingdom, the Kingdom of God, so the magisterial reformers needed a sophisticated explanation for how grace could build a new kingdom without overturning the existing political order. The key inspiration was Augustine’s division of the heavenly and earthly cities in City of God: “two cities then were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city by a love of self carried even to the point of contempt for God, the heavenly city by a love of God carried even to the point of contempt for self.”18 The force of the ruling authorities was necessary in the earthly city to restrain the rapacious love of self, thus making possible the conditions for life. In the City of God, on the other hand, force was no longer necessary because divine love had a transformative effect on the universal community of saints, leading them toward the voluntary performance of the good. Luther built on this approach to argue that “God has ordained two governments: the spiritual, by which the Holy Spirit produces Christians and righteous people under Christ; and the temporal, which restrains the un-­Christian and wicked so that—­no thanks to them—­they are obliged to keep still and to maintain an outward peace.”19 It is true, he adds, that those who have received grace no longer need a magistrate: “there is no need for any suit, litigation, court, judge, penalty, law, or sword among Christians, since they do of their own accord much more than all laws and teachings can demand.”20 Nevertheless, true Christians are a small minority in the kingdom of this world, so temporal authority is needed in order to constrain the ungodly.21 Luther was in fact so committed to defending temporal authority that he argued

The Politics of Grace

9

against resistance to princes who persecuted Protestants.22 It became more common for Lutherans to claim a right of resistance after the 1530 Augsburg confession, but even then, resistance had to come from inferior magistrates—­public officers below the ruler—­rather than the godly in general.23 Luther and followers thus saw grace as a source of spiritual regeneration that should not be used to undermine political authority. Like Luther, Calvin reclaimed this Augustinian separation of the two kingdoms as a means of avoiding radical antinomianism. While Calvinists produced influential theories of resistance in the sixteenth century,24 they did not base the right of resistance on grace. Calvin insists that law and discipline is necessary to constrain the ungodly: Let us first consider that there is a twofold government in man: one aspect is spiritual, whereby the conscience is instructed in piety and in reverencing God; the second is political, whereby man is educated for the duties of humanity and citizenship that must be maintained among men. These are usually called the “spiritual” and the “temporal” jurisdiction. . . . There are in man, so to speak, two worlds, over which different kings and different laws have authority.25

Building on this distinction, Calvin takes direct aim at the radicals of his day: “we are not to misapply to the political order the gospel teaching on spiritual freedom, as if Christians were less subject, as concerns outward government, to human laws because their consciences have been set free in God’s sight.”26 In an earthly polis, where the ungodly are often the majority, any confusion between spiritual and political freedom would simply lead to license for the wicked majority, and thus ultimately the persecution of the godly by the ungodly: “For since the insolence of evil men is so great, their wickedness so stubborn, that it can scarcely be restrained by extremely severe laws, what do we expect them to do if they see that their depravity can go scot-­free—­when no power can force them to cease from doing evil?”27 Later Calvinists followed suit on the need to separate grace from resistance theory.28 Beza’s On the Rights of Magistrates Over Their Subjects and the anonymous Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos argued that tyrants could be opposed only by inferior magistrates, and not by private citizens.29 Radical proponents of resistance theory, such as John Knox, Christopher Good-

10

Introduction

man, and John Ponet, did extend the right of resistance to the common people, but even they argued that resistance was legitimate only when the ruler was idolatrous, and not because grace had freed the godly from legal obligation.30 George Buchanan’s argument for tyrannicide in De Jure Regni Apud Scotos similarly avoided authorizing resistance on the basis of grace.31 This tradition of arguing against antinomianism means that the Presbyterians of the English Civil Wars had a powerful arsenal of arguments with which to oppose radicals in their context.32 From Calvin and Luther to the Presbyterians, grace was seen by most Protestants as insufficient on its own to legitimize political liberty, driving such arguments to the antinomian fringes of the Reformation. Historians of political thought have taken these Protestant reformers at their word, concluding that grace is less important for political thought than concepts drawn from political theory, such as the state, sovereignty, or liberty. In his Machiavellian Moment, for instance, John A. Pocock explains Machiavelli’s influence in the period as part of an effort among European thinkers to pull away from transcendent concerns so as to study the prudence needed in a worldly republic.33 Similarly, in his Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Quentin Skinner privileges secular ideas of liberty, tracing their origins to the political culture of medieval Italian city-­states or, in a later version of this argument, to a “neo-­Roman” theory of liberty that revived pre-­Christian modes of thinking.34 As a result, when historians and literary critics do wish to study grace as part of political thought, they often look toward the radical fringes of the Reformation, where there were clearer continuities between, for example, republican theory and radical religion.35 This tendency is especially clear in Milton criticism, where the politics of grace are often understood as part of the larger politics of antinomianism, manifesting the sometimes egalitarian but also the fanatical, violent, or “terrorist” features of those groups.36 These approaches reflect not only a modern critical interest in radicalism, but also the efforts of Protestant reformers themselves to marginalize free grace theology by associating it with the fringes of the Reformation. More recently, however, historians have reimagined political thought in ways that create new opportunities for literary criticism. In a recent study, Sarah Mortimer takes the community as her object of analysis rather than

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11

political thought proper, because she contends that political theory in this period was inseparable from legal, educational, literary, and religious forms of envisioning communities.37 Sovereignty, for instance, has been traditionally described as a quintessentially political concept, but Mortimer shows that some of the major theorists of sovereignty in this period drew on larger ideals of community that were, in turn, influenced by religious and educational writing.38 Alongside these evolutions in intellectual history, literary critics have increasingly insisted on the “porous” boundaries between religion and secular concepts in the poetry and drama of this period.39 From this perspective, the distinction between the political and what lies beyond it is not clear-­cut, but rather the problem that poets struggled to define as they imagined their communities. By extension, a literary representation of grace is interesting for the history of political thought not only when the writer happens to make explicitly political claims, but also when he or she uses grace to reimagine a given community. This book explores how early modern poets moved between the language of salvation and the language of politics to reimagine their communities. Grace enabled this imaginative crossover because it was part of the conceptual boundary between worldly kingdoms and the kingdom of God—­between communities ruled with force and a those that were part of a new and messianic dispensation. Whereas the major reformers sought to contain the divisive potential of grace by defining precisely the boundaries between the two kingdoms, Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton did not exhibit the same theological precision, and they used grace to examine communities in this world. Their goal in doing so was not radical or antinomian, as criticism has sometimes suggested. Rather, they sought to become the poetic mediators between the gift of grace and the rest of the people. This argument, as we shall see, was ultimately rooted in the promise of a humanist education. Protestant Humanism and the Literary Expressions of Grace

Humanism was woven into the fabric of the Protestant Reformation. It influenced the theology of the magisterial reformers, the splinter movements that emerged in response to them, and a range of cultural responses, from

12

Introduction

educational theory and political theory to visual art and poetry.40 Though Protestant theologians were careful to separate the kingdom of God from the kingdoms of this world, their commitment to humanist learning opened the door for other thinkers to make ideas about grace central to the governance of this world. Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton were ultimately able to repurpose the language of salvation for social and political ends because they drew on these underlying tensions between Protestant theology and the humanist ideal of education. Historians of Protestantism distinguish between Calvin’s and Luther’s position on salvation and their comparatively tolerant view of humanism in worldly affairs.41 In contrast with humanist proponents of free will, such as Erasmus, these reformers attributed salvation to the “special” grace of God, which saves the elect without regard for their human merit or free will. The reformers did accept reason and humanist learning, however, in politics, linguistics, ethics, law, and other disciplines that did not pertain to salvation.42 Based on the achievements of the ancients in these spheres, Calvin argues that God bestows intellectual gifts even on those who are not saved.43 Such intellectual gifts are part of what Calvin calls the “general grace of God,”44 a common expression of divine mercy that is not to be confused with the “special” grace that predetermines the godly to salvation. There is in all human beings a “universal apprehension of reason and understanding by nature implanted in men,” but “because it is bestowed indiscriminately upon pious and impious, it is rightly counted among natural gifts” rather than saving grace.45 This distinction reproduces the split between the two kingdoms: There is one kind of understanding of earthly things; another of heavenly. I call “earthly things” those which do not pertain to God or his Kingdom, to true justice, or to the blessedness of the future life; but which have their significance and relationship with regard to the present life and are, in a sense, confined within its bounds. I call “heavenly things” the pure knowledge of God, the nature of true righteousness, and the mysteries of the Heavenly Kingdom.46

The secular ambitions of humanism could thus be justified as part of the wisdom that ensured proper governance and moral behavior in the king-

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dom of this world. The godly had to rely on special grace for knowledge of matters pertaining to salvation, but humanism and the classics were legitimate for ensuring worldly order. Other Protestant theologians, such as Philip Melanchthon, gave an even wider scope to humanism by emphasizing the activity of the will in salvation. Melanchthon was Luther’s closest ally and the most influential Protestant humanist of his generation.47 In the 1555 edition of his Loci Communes, he argues that all human beings may know God through “natural light,” thus softening the cognitive barrier separating the godly from the ungodly in Calvinism. While he was still committed to a view of salvation through grace alone, he saw the cultivation of knowledge and moral virtue as necessary for knowing God.48 Already in the 1530s, this belief arguably led him to shift toward a “synergistic” position according to which the human will cooperates with God in salvation.49 God, he argues, “draws the one who is willing, not the one who resists. . . . God comes first toward us, but nevertheless that we should also will that he come to us.”50 While this statement does not necessarily contradict Luther’s ideas, it emphasizes the believer’s responsibility to accept grace in ways that would go on to be important for later thinkers.51 Melanchthon’s mature position in the 1555 Loci registers the practical problem at the heart of Protestant humanism: if grace was really a free gift enabling salvation, why should human beings strive for moral improvement, classical learning, artistic creativity, and political participation, as the ancients advised, and as the Protestant reformers recommended? As Paul Cefalu has shown, Protestant preaching was riven by this tension between grace as a once-­and-­for-­a ll gift and grace as the foundation for a process of virtue acquisition.52 Moreover, as Nicholas Tyacke has shown, later theologians followed Melanchthon’s approach to this problem, culminating with the rise of seventeenth-­century Arminianism, an offshoot of Calvinism that argued for a synergistic position on grace with more room for human freedom, effort, and agency.53 Melanchthon was also important for the “Philippists,” a diverse network of humanists, theologians, and men of letters who shaped Protestant literary culture, resistance theory, and the work of luminaries such as Philip Sidney.54 A synergistic idea of grace was one way to reintroduce virtue, responsi-

14

Introduction

bility, and the educated imagination into a Protestant idea of salvation. A less heterodox path was the humanist conception of equity. Summarizing the legal definition of equity in Greek philosophy and Roman law, George Buchanan argues that “where the law appears to say one thing and the legislator to have intended another,” equity is what intervenes to uphold the legislator’s intention.55 As equity entered early Christian culture and Renaissance humanism, it became a hermeneutic principle for reading all texts with an emphasis on context and authorial intent.56 Protestant humanists such as Melanchthon associated equity with charity and defined both as the capacity to interpret the Bible in a way that captures the charitable intention of the text.57 For Erasmus, equity and good judgment were necessary in making sense of the contradictions in the New Testament, because they moved creatively beyond the letter into the context and intention of the speaker.58 It was a short step from these arguments to the more provocative view that grace empowers the Christian interpreter to dismiss the plainest meaning of the letter of scripture in favor of the equitable intention. As we shall see, Milton argues that grace enables Christians to make better equitable judgments, thus allowing them to enjoy the freedom of divorce even though the Gospel forbids the practice.59 A different but related version of this argument underpins Spenser’s view of equity as a sign of civility in The Faerie Queene. Humanist equity thus provided Protestants with a way to think about grace as a source of creativity in the process of interpreting any text, from scripture to law and classical moral theory, thus blurring the boundaries between questions pertaining to salvation and relationships in a political community. Beyond equity, humanist poets in this period reimagined grace by seeing it as the source of sacred poetry, namely, creative poetry on a biblical subject. While Protestant theology ordinarily maintained that the human imagination was too depraved to write poetry about the Bible, some Protestants pointed to the Book of Psalms as evidence that the promise of grace had always been mediated through biblical poetry. Some poets went further by arguing that such poetry legitimized new forms of poetic eloquence. Sidney’s A Defence of Poesy captures the tension: Give right honor to the Heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature. Which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry, when

The Politics of Grace

15

with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam,—­since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it.60

Poetry is a creative “divine breath” through which human beings imitate God’s creation of Adam. But this optimistic view of human creativity is qualified by Sidney’s concession to Calvinism: the human will remains “infected” and thus in need of grace. God is the pattern for human creativity, but imitating God requires grace. While Sidney is careful to distinguish biblical poetry from “right poets” who rely on “learned discretion,”61 he also blurs these categories playfully.62 The cumulative effect of the Defence is to situate poetic creativity ambivalently between the human and the divine, opening the door for later poets to claim grace more explicitly as a source for their creativity when writing on a biblical subject. Like equity, these ideas about sacred poetry legitimized the interpretive creativity and agency that ranges beyond the literal text of scripture. The emergence of English metrical psalm translations transformed these theoretical questions further, because they raised a practical question about the degree to which a translator shapes the poetry of the Word of God.63 Whereas prose translations of the Psalms conveyed only the literal meaning of the text, metrical psalms adapted scripture to the formal conventions of sixteenth-­century English poetry. The translator’s virtuosity was especially conspicuous in Philip and Mary Sidney’s joint translation of the Psalms, which were valued as devotional texts as well as metrical experiments.64 Mary Sidney added a gendered aspect to the question: although she was a woman and a fallen human being, the gift of grace empowered her to be a creative translator of the Word.65 Hence the account of a contemporary calligrapher who saw Mary Sidney’s work as “A Worke of Art and Grace (from Head and Heart)”—­which, as Margaret Hannay notes, uses grace to mean both saving grace and aesthetic beauty.66 This tradition of metrical psalm translation was especially influential, as we shall see, for Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton, who used similar arguments to reimagine grace as the gift that authorizes their rewriting of scripture. Although these tensions within Protestant humanism are important throughout this book, they receive varying degrees of emphasis in each

16

Introduction

chapter. Chapter 1 focuses on equity, arguing that Book V of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene brings out the imperialistic possibilities in the Protestant idea of equity as an expression of grace. Although equity was related to charity and interpretive liberty for the godly, Spenser illustrates the punitive side of this argument for the ungodly: the Irish, he suggests, are too barbaric and religiously corrupt to be capable of true equity, so they deserve swift and violent prosecution. Both the enabling and punitive sides of equity are clear in the career of Artegall, the knight of Justice and the principal character of Book V. He is the ideal godly magistrate because he accepts the grace and instruction of Britomart and Mercilla, weaving questions of justice into the Pauline language of spiritual liberty. In terms of the historical allegory of Book V, Artegall is also a colonial officer acting to reform the laws and practices of Ireland, and he uses significant force to spread his equity against an ostensibly recalcitrant people. The chapter as a whole illustrates the link between grace, equity, and the boundaries of exclusion that are erected when an idealized community is imposed on a reluctant people. In contrast with criticism that has seen early British imperialism as a secular ideology, I conclude that, in Spenser’s work, Protestant ideas about grace and equity are complicit in the colonization of the Catholic Irish.67 There are also glimpses in Book V of how this argument might move beyond Ireland. Spenser’s imagined community is ultimately an ideal of a global Protestant empire that spreads, like the fame of its ruler Mercilla, “from th’utmost brinke of the Americke shore, / Unto the margent of the Molucas” (V.x.3.3–­7). Sacred poetry is a particularly important concept in chapter 2 and chapter 3. Chapter 2 argues that Lanyer imagines herself in Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum as part of a community of women who are empowered by grace to write sacred poetry about the Passion. Lanyer’s argument is proto-­feminist insofar as she claims that grace empowers women poets to compensate for their exclusion from ordinary paths to education and patronage. Lanyer was in fact a skilled and learned poet, but she presents her poem as a “worke of Grace” (1), bereft of human learning or scholarly merit, so as to challenge the exclusions of humanism head-­on.68 While Lanyer’s vision of a nonpatriarchal community is not shared by the other poets explored in this book, her use of grace to challenge education and cultural capital speaks to the

The Politics of Grace

17

tension within Protestant humanism between grace and education in a sacred poem. Chapter 3 argues that Cowley imagines grace as a source of poetic creativity and national unification in his unfinished epic, the Davideis. Like Lanyer, Cowley builds on the tradition of metrical psalm translations to fashion himself as a sacred poet who is inspired by grace to write creatively about scripture. In this case, the subject is the life of David. In contrast with influential writers such as Thomas Hobbes and William Davenant, who had argued that epic should avoid themes of religious inspiration, Cowley argues that sacred poetry is essential for containing the kind of religious enthusiasm that led to the Civil Wars. His Davideis presents David as the archetypal sacred poet who mediates grace to the people through poetry, curbing their tyrannical passions and ensuring peace. The implication is that grace empowers poets—­not only David, but also Cowley—­to heal the fractures of civil war by transforming an aggregation of rebels into a community of grace. Chapters 4 and 5 explore how these ideas shape Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Chapter 4 argues that Milton developed a heretical theology of grace that emphasized free will and human liberty in religious and political communities. In contrast with contemporary Calvinism, he argues that grace rehabilitates the human will and makes it capable of pursuing the virtues of humanism and republicanism. In Of Education, he describes the ideal Protestant humanist as someone who pairs grace with virtue and learning: The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.69

Milton repeats this overarching claim—­ that grace flourishes best in highly educated men who demonstrate public virtue in church and state—­ throughout his career, and chapter 4 traces its implications for Milton’s politics and poetry. As empowering as the argument is for humanist-­educated Protestants like Milton, it excludes anyone who did not aspire to the same

18

Introduction

goals or who did not have the necessary learning to embody Milton’s ideal in practice. At his most vituperative, Milton claims that such men are deservedly enslaved.70 Chapter 4 traces both the empowering and exclusionary aspects of this imagined community to the Son of God in Paradise Lost, who acts as a paradigmatic example for the ideal Christian interpreter. The Son responds to the Father’s intention creatively, like a sacred poet and an equitable interpreter, while at the same time submitting himself obediently to the letter of paternal authority.71 Grace enables Adam and Eve to imitate the Son’s interpretive practice later in Paradise Lost, illustrating how liberating Milton’s view of grace is for those who fit the protocols of his imagined community. The punitive side of the argument emerges when Michael discusses justified slavery. Chapter 5 explores Milton’s ideas on prophecy, through which he recuperates humanist eloquence and oratory for his ideal community. Milton sees prophecy as one of the gifts of grace, but unlike many radicals and antinomians in the period, he insists that it must be cultivated by a humanist education and actualized in the pursuit of civic liberty. To become prophets endowed with public authority, therefore, believers cannot rely on grace alone but must also teach in public, engage in scholarly debate, and take part in shaping laws and institutions. I argue that Milton’s paradigmatic model for this idea of prophecy is Jesus in Paradise Regained, who fashions a new community of citizen-­prophets by presenting his own rhetorical skill as an example to be followed. Although Milton’s messiah invites all Protestants to participate in this community, his emphasis on learned debate and civic liberty excludes, in practice, those vast swathes of the nation who do not have the necessary education to meet this rigorous standard. Grace and the Individual Talent

The poems explored in this book incorporate the paradoxes of grace into their literary form. One example is Milton’s “When I consider how my light is spent,” which explores the dynamics of grace without naming the concept.72 The sonnet is often read as Milton’s reflection on his blindness, but physical blindness in this case also conveys the fear of alienation from God

The Politics of Grace

19

and the community of the elect.73 The speaker is initially unable to use his God-­g iven “talent,” alluding to the scriptural parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–­30). As his anxiety reaches its greatest pitch in line 8, “Patience” intervenes: When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide, Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide, Doth God exact day-­labour, light denied, I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best, his state Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er land and ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait.74 Patience is the catalyst for the change in tone from anxious complaint in the beginning to the more confident, declarative lines at the end. But where does patience come from? It could be the speaker’s virtue, thus making the poem an internal dialogue between two parts of the same speaker.75 Read in this way, the shift in tone in line 8 represents a shift in perspective from religious anxiety to the speaker’s internal moral resources. In doing so, he exemplifies how a virtuous man was supposed to behave according to moralists and neostoics in this period. On the other hand, the poem can also be understood as a dialogue between two persons: the original speaker, who is unable to save himself on his own, and Patience, which intervenes as a second person to bestow her consolation as a gift. The suddenness of the shift in tone in line 8, coupled with the sharp caesura that divides the consolation from the complaint, suggest that Patience’s reply is the intervention of a second and more authoritative voice. Moreover, as R. F. Hall notes, the consolation comes earlier than

20

Introduction

expected for this kind of sonnet: it appears in the last line of the octave, half a line earlier than in its expected place at the beginning of the sestet.76 The result is that the voice of Patience appears to intervene suddenly, giving her and the speaker distinct personalities in the poem’s minidrama. Patience can thus be understood as a new speaker, perhaps a messenger from God or one of his unmerited “gifts,” but in any case a voice that the first speaker experiences as both foreign and intimate. Like the talent that originally caused the anxiety, patience resides within the self—­“ lodg’d with me,” like a guest sharing a bed—­but it also speaks on behalf of a remote “maker.” Their dialogue captures the internal divisions that emerge within the self in response to a divine gift. There is more than religious anxiety at play here, however, because the speaker reflects on a specific kind of gift: the talent that enables poetry. To be a poet is to be a maker, so if God is “my maker” in this context, he is also the divine poet whose poem I am. The speaker feels anxiety, therefore, because he wants to be not only God’s poem but also a creative poet who uses his maker’s talent productively, like the good servant in the parable. Such a gift feels like a burden to a blind man who is despairing of his ability to engage productively in day labor. The sonnet we are reading is an example of how to use the talent despite these anxieties, because the key images—­the speaker’s murmur, the intervention of Patience, the community of “thousands”—­ are creative transformations of anxiety into poetry. God bestows the talent that initially spurs creativity, but the speaker is also responsible for refusing to rest with anxious self-­interrogation, and for reimagining the talent not as a burden, but as a gift that enables poetry. The creative dialogue between Patience and the first speaker is part of a human maker’s attempt to discern, respond to, and imitate a divine maker. Serving God can mean, therefore, standing and waiting patiently, but it can also mean listening to the Patience that God sends Christians in the midst of their suffering. In a metapoetic sense, service can mean writing this sonnet about religious anxiety. Human creativity does involve giving a “true account” to the divine maker, but it is not a reductively economic exchange. The creative account begins, rather, by reimagining the self and the community as part of a relationship of gift-­g iving. The poet’s light seems “spent” and his talent “useless” when he hides himself in an internal mono-

The Politics of Grace

21

logue, but Patience transforms that isolation into a dialogue that allows the talent to be reimagined as the gift of poetic creativity.77 The form of the sonnet, with its expected tension between complaint and consolation, captures the speaker’s evolution from monologue to dialogue, from anxiety to patience, from murmur to gifts, from “I” to “thousands.” These subjective transformations mirror the poet’s effort to reimagine the talent not as a burden, but as a special expression of the gift of grace that enables poetry. The poem thus engages grace without naming it. There may be an echo of prevenient grace—­the grace that first regenerates a sinner—­insofar as patience “prevent[s]” the speaker’s murmur. Yet even without this echo, the sonnet evokes grace as a concept, as a relationship of gift-­g iving, and an expression of creativity. As in other Protestant humanist ideas of grace, virtue and individual effort are clearly important for this speaker, as is the education and eloquence that enables poetry. But the poet’s effort does not originate entirely within him. The voice of Patience comes earlier than expected to show that grace is surprising, arriving unsought and undeserved. The speaker transcends his anxious self-­interrogation precisely when he imagines his agency as fulfilled in submission to a higher authority that bestows gifts. As with the other poems explored in this book, this sonnet builds on the language of grace to imagine a new community: “Thousands at his bidding speed / And post o’er land and ocean without rest: / They also serve who only stand and wait” (12–­13). It is tempting to imagine these mysterious thousands as God’s private army of angels, but in truth we know little about them. The speaker tells us only that a multitude is laboring to serve God, and that the variety of their labor seems broad and varied enough for everyone to serve. But is this community truly universal? To say that thousands speed at God’s bidding is, arguably, to imply that many other thousands do not. Many people do murmur impatiently when they are struck blind, after all, and one wonders whether Milton’s speeding thousands have any room for such people—­or for the vulgar majority who can’t represent their blindness in a sonnet form. It is impossible to answer these questions either way, because the community at the end of this sonnet flickers into view only for an instant. There is nevertheless a recognizable effort to map grace onto the education and

22

Introduction

eloquence that enables poetry. This sonnet does not articulate how a community of grace might look, but it briefly expresses a hunger for such a community to emerge. The ensuing chapters will argue that similar ideas are woven throughout many other early modern poems that carry within them both the promise of grace and the reality of force.

ONE

Equity and Grace in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

At the beginningof Canto VII in Book V of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser claims that princes mediate divine justice to the worldly commonwealth. “Jove,” he explains, “doth true justice deale” in “his heavenly Common-­weale / The skill whereof to Princes hearts he doth reveale” (V.vii.1.6–­9).1 Although worldly communities will always fall short of the “heavenly Common-­weale,” Christian rulers restore a limited measure of God’s “true justice” to this world. Given Spenser’s context as a Protestant poet in Catholic-­majority Ireland,2 this statement is not simply a disinterested description but also part of a pointed call for Protestant English magistrates to restore their view of divine justice to Ireland.3 Like Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland, a treatise that lavishes praise on Lord Grey for starving the Irish rebels, Book V of The Faerie Queene idealizes magistrates who introduce Protestant rule by extirpating the allegedly barbarous traditions of the Irish. Spenser promotes this goal by associating grace and divine justice with Protestant English settlers. His ultimate fantasy is a Protestant empire that extends globally, like Mercilla’s fame, “From th’utmost brinke of the Americke shore, / Unto the margent of the Molucas” (V.x.3.6–­7). While such an empire was unachievable in practice for sixteenth-­century England, it nevertheless informs how Spenser imagines the grace permeating English Protestants in Ireland. 23

24

Chapter One

In order to justify this vision of a Protestant empire, Spenser draws on a tradition of thinking about equity as a sign of grace.4 Scholars have long explored how the various meanings of equity in ancient philosophy, early modern law, and absolutist theories of sovereignty shaped Spenser’s work.5 Even more important for Spenser’s colonial politics, however, is the Protestant view of equity as the godly habit of obeying the spirit of the law without compulsion. For preachers such as William Perkins, equity was a sign of grace because it allowed the godly to obey divine justice regardless of their legal obligation.6 Spenser draws on these ideas to imagine grace as a distinctive feature of the Protestant community in his colonial context. His descriptions of the Catholic Irish in poetry and prose suggest that they are intrinsically barbarous and unjust, whereas the Protestant settlers are conversely associated with equity and the grace that enables it. Each community’s religious character determines its capacity for equity and, as a result, the degree of force that is appropriate for ruling it. Spenser justifies the forceful expansion of Protestant empire on these grounds. When Arthur neutralizes a Catholic military threat at the end of Book V, for example, Belgae urges him to continue using force in extirpating the religion as well: “Till ye have rooted all the relickes out / Of that vilde race” (V.xi.18.6–­7). The end of Book V is full of these moments that suggest a Protestant empire is necessary to introduce divine justice by force to Catholic lands because they supposedly are a “vilde race” bereft of the grace and equity to obey voluntarily. The Protestant view of equity thus enables Spenser to imagine grace as a feature of a particular political community, thereby transforming the concept from a matter pertaining to salvation into a key justification for empire. Spenser’s Protestant imperialism provides a counterpoint to the influential argument that the aim of early British imperialism was the secular one of bringing the Irish to civility.7 Critics have already shown that a reformed religious sensibility was inseparable from broader questions of civility and education,8 and Spenser’s work illustrates this process by weaving the language of salvation into legal concepts like equity and assumptions about the civility or barbarism of a people. The boundaries between politics, religion, and law blur as Spenser imagines the ideal Protestant community. That ideal is meant to be an instructive example to English magistrates, but it comes at the expense of the Catholic Irish, who are represented as unteachable and

Equity and Grace in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

25

religiously backward. Spenser’s work thus illustrates the key role of grace in supporting boundaries of inclusion and exclusion throughout this period. Equity as a Sign of Grace

Although Christians saw equity in religious terms, this concept first emerged in ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric as a practical solution to legal exceptions. When the law was too rigid or general to account for the unique circumstances of a case, equity enabled the magistrate to judge the case in terms of the law’s intention. In Spenser’s culture, this concept had also become a term with which to describe the godly community and its leaders. Despite alluding frequently to the classical Greek term for equity, Perkins presents equity as a sign of salvation: “[a man] can neuer be forgiuen, till he forgiue his brother: and so it is plaine, that e∣uen saluation it selfe, in some sort, depends vpon the practise of this dutie, yet not as a cause, but as a signe, or an effect of saluation.”9 This passage momentarily represents salvation as something that “depends vpon the practise of ” equity, before adding the Calvinist qualification that equity is in fact “a signe, or an effect” of grace. Grace comes first in the logical priority, but we usually see the sign of grace—­equity—­before we perceive its cause. The evolution of the concept from classical philosophy to Protestant writing is essential for understanding Spenser’s colonial politics, because these arguments allow him to present equity and divine justice as more fully materialized in Protestant communities than in their rivals. The link between salvation and the ideal political community is rooted, as we shall see, in centuries of Christian appropriations of classical equity to describe the Christian polis. The central assumption in classical Greek and Roman writing on equity was that the usual mechanisms for applying justice were imperfect and thus in need of periodic correction by a good interpreter. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics provides the most influential definition of equity (epiekeia or ἐπιείκεια): When the law speaks universally, then, and a case arises on it which is not covered by the universal statement, then it is right, where the legislator fails us and has erred by over-­simplicity, to correct the omission—­to say what the legislator himself would have said had he been present . . . [T]his

26

Chapter One

is the nature of the equitable, a correction of law where it is defective owing to its universality.10

Aristotelian epiekeia thus appealed to the unwritten intentions of the lawgiver in situations that were unforeseeable by the law. Whereas epiekeia concerned the particulars of the case, Roman equity (aequitas) added a Stoic emphasis on natural law as the basis of justice.11 Cicero cites the well-­k nown Latin axiom, summum ius summa iniuria (“the more Justice, the more injustice),12 to suggest that equity moderates legalism.13 Although Roman equity was distinct from its Greek counterpart, they both represented human justice as flawed, and they empowered the equitable interpreter vis-­à-­v is the written law. Patristic theologians Christianized equity by arguing that the higher law governing equity should be the will of God as revealed in nature, scripture, and conscience.14 As Kathy Eden has demonstrated, this Christian view of equity initially developed in patristic interpretations of scripture that steered a middle way between literalism, which was seen as overly bound to the letter of scripture, and Greek allegory, which disregarded too much of the written text.15 Christian equity balanced interpretive creativity with obedience to the written text in order to reconstruct God’s intention in scripture.16 Renaissance humanists later returned to these patristic sources, and they reimagined equity as a form of interpretive charity that mirrors the Pauline liberation of the spirit from the letter of law, and grace from the rigor of law.17 The result was a form of equity that was shaped not only by classical sources but also by a distinctly Pauline set of oppositions around law and grace as well as an overarching effort to reconstruct scriptural intention contextually. This tradition influenced not only early modern legal thinking but also the humanism of Erasmus and Melanchthon, and through them the broader culture of the Reformation.18 I will return to these arguments to discuss Milton’s thinking, but already in Spenser’s context, equity had become a crucial way for humanists to make grace part of their interpretive process. As scholars have long recognized, the Christianization of equity had political implications for sovereignty. The sovereign of a Christian community was expected to use equity to amend human laws in light of scripture and natural law.19 As Victoria Kahn among others has argued, equity was often

Equity and Grace in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

27

seen as inseparable from sovereign power, and it featured prominently in debates on the limits of the monarch’s authority vis-­à-­v is common law.20 English jurists and political theorists followed Aquinas in seeing equity as the sovereign’s authority to make human laws reflect divine justice. Jurists such as Christopher St. Germain, however, argued that equity was embodied in the common law, while others such as William Lambarde argued that the monarch’s conscience was embodied in courts of equity, such as Chancery.21 In his defense of the sovereign prerogative, Lambarde echoes the ancient language of written law as an imperfect “Rule” in need of equitable correction, but he insists that the supreme magistrate as the “immediate minister of Iustice under God.”22 This argument echoes the position of continental theorists such as Jean Bodin, who similarly made equity a major pillar of his theory of sovereignty.23 These thinkers argued that God reveals justice to the ruler’s conscience so as to correct the rigidity of law. While critics tend to emphasize the meaning of equity in law and sovereignty, the concept was also essential to Protestant preaching on godly life.24 As Mark Fortier has argued, Protestant preachers used equity so frequently in their preaching that it became “the basis for Christian community in all its elements, both public and private.”25 For these religious writers, Christian equity was revealed not only to the sovereign’s private conscience, but to all godly Christians via the moral law in the Old Testament and the “golden rule” of Matt. 22:40.26 For example, Luther argues that the “golden rule” was a better guide to equity than legal training: “when you judge according to love you will easily decide and adjust matters without any lawbooks.”27 Calvin recognizes that magistrates possess authority from God,28 but adds that the guide to equity is scripture: the law of God which we call the moral law is nothing else than a testimony of natural law and of that conscience which God has engraved upon the minds of men. Consequently, the entire scheme of this equity of which we are now speaking has been prescribed in it. Hence, this equity alone must be the goal and rule and limit of all laws. (IV.xx.16)

Whereas jurists like Lambarde and Bodin associate equity with the monarch’s conscience, Calvin describes equity more broadly as the “conscience which God has engraved upon the minds of men.” This discussion of “men”

28

Chapter One

in the plural does not necessarily imply disagreement with absolutist thought, but it does signal a tendency to see equity as a widely available sign of grace in a godly community. As Fortier notes, it is likely that this view of equity was more well known to many people than the technical language of the law courts thanks to the many figurative descriptions of justice in the Psalms and the Gospel.29 In Protestant religious writing, equity was also understood as a habit of fair dealing that went beyond the letter of the law. Grace was thought to inspire equity among the godly, making them obey the intention of a law even in the absence of compulsion from a magistrate. For example, Richard Hooker argues that equity did more than obey a law: “many things by strictness of law may be done, which equity and honest meaning forbiddeth. Not that the law is unjust, but unperfect; nor equity against, but above, the law, binding men’s consciences in things which law cannot reach unto.”30 Equity is “above” the “strictness” of law because it requires every believer to interpret and obey the spirit of the law without abusing the letter. The public sword of the magistrate becomes necessary when believers fail to self-­regulate in this way, but genuine believers need no compulsion.31 Perkins similarly opposes equity to legalism, arguing that Christians “must not stand onely vpon the law” because the Gospel binds them to a higher standard: “As they are men, they have a law of the country, which may allow extremitie; but as they are Christians, they live under a law of God.”32 Public law thus enforces a minimum standard of behavior, but grace makes the godly equitable without a magistrate. The magistrate intervenes only when ungodly men abuse others: then must the godly Magistrate exercise his power, and by the force of his authoritie, cause them to mitigate their extremitie, and to put in practice that equitie which becommeth Christians. And let every Iudge and Magistrate know, that by the law of the everlasting God, hee not onely may, but is bound thus to doe to them who will not doe it of themselves. It may bee therefore good counsel to all men rather to practise this Christian Equitie of themselves, then to be compelled to it by authoritie.33

Perkins argues that a godly nation, a nation that experiences the spiritual effects of grace and the guidance of scripture, should not need the magistrate

Equity and Grace in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

29

to be equitable. Both Hooker and Perkins describe the ideal community of grace as a self-­regulating body. Grace enables this kind of equity in a godly community, but the regrettable persistence of the ungodly in the kingdom of this world means that the magistrate is still necessary. In Protestant preaching, therefore, equity encapsulates both the public authority of the magistrate and the ethical and the behavior characteristic of the ideal godly community. It was so closely intertwined with grace that it allowed particular communities to seem more permeated with the gift of grace than others. This is the implication in Perkins’s passage mentioned above: “saluation it selfe, in some sort, depends vpon the practise of [equity] . . . yet not as a cause, but as a signe, or an effect of saluation.”34 Salvation depends on grace alone, but equity is such a recognizable sign of grace that salvation seems to depend, “in some sort,” on equity. This reversal suggests that equitable, godly communities are more permeated with grace than others. While these arguments meant that godly communities should be treated leniently, the converse was that strict justice and ruthless force were wholly appropriate for the enemies of the church. We have already seen Perkins and Hooker calling for magistrates to punish hypocrites, but Perkins goes even further against religious enemies. Such persons deserve the harshest possible justice, because leniency for them is incompatible with equity: In thy owne right thou maist yield . . . but this caution holdeth, especially when the cause is not ours, but Gods, or his Churches; for when it is such a truth, which directly concerneth the honour of God, or the good of his Church, then must a man take heed he yield not, without warrant from Gods word. For as it is Equity often to yield thy right, so to yield in Gods causes is to betray the truth.35

Although equity means tolerance among godly Christians, strict justice is appropriate for those who challenge the “truth” of God and “the good of his Church.” A magistrate who tolerates the perceived enemies of the Protestant church, whether Catholics or other perceived heretics, would not be showing genuine equity at all, because this concept is fit for those who demonstrate grace. Perkins’s argument thus implies a conflict between two distinct and competing communities, one godly and equitable, and the

30

Chapter One

other ungodly and opposed to “Gods word.” It is a short leap from this argument to a more straightforward call for retribution in a site of inter-­religious conflict such as Spenser’s Ireland. Equity and Civility

Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland argues that English law is more equitable than the indigenous Brehon law of Ireland.36 Although Irenius acknowledges that in Brehon law “there appeareth great shew of equity, in determining the right betweene party and party,” this oral tradition is “in many things repugning quite both to Gods Law, and mans.”37 On the face of it, Irenius’s statement concerns the cultural and legal primitivism of the Irish rather than their religious beliefs.38 Traditionally, such passages have been read as proof that Spenser’s main justification for the colonization of Ireland is “the secular one of drawing the Irish to civility.”39 As Paul Stevens has argued, however, this secularizing reading fails to capture the “enormous confidence [grace] afforded Protestants in their expansive enterprises.  .  .  . Whatever despair Spenser might feel on contemplating the heart of his own darkness, there stands universal truth ready to reassure him about the efficacy of grace.”40 While Stevens rightly emphasizes the psychological effects of grace, this argument can be taken even further. The Protestant idea of equity also offered a legal and political framework through which to transform grace into a marker of the superior civility of the Protestant English in comparison to the Catholic Irish. Grace thus provides Spenser not only confidence but also a way to legitimize the force of Protestant magistrates in a colonial context. While grace is less central to the View than to The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s prose nevertheless engages the Protestant idea of equity by imagining English law and culture as more civilized and compatible with divine justice than Irish customs.41 The View describes traditional Irish laws, such as Brehon law and Tanistry, as grounded in a pervasive Irish superstition that is both responsible for Catholicism and made worse by it. For example, when Eudoxus learns about Tanistry, the process through which the Irish chose their leaders, he asks: “Do they not use any ceremony in this election? for all barbarous nations are commonly great observers of ceremonies and superstitious rights.”42

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Since “superstition” and “ceremony” were key terms in Protestant anti-­ Catholic polemic, this passage merges barbarity and the Catholic religion as two parallel expressions of Irish superstition. Irenius echoes Eudoxus’s language while discussing what he sees as the pagan and barbarous features in Irish culture: “it is the maner of Many nations to be very superstitious, and diligent observers of old customs & antiquities, which they receive by continuall tradition from their Parents.”43 Superstition now joins “custom” and “tradition,” two additional terms common in anti-­Catholic writing.44 When Irenius turns to discuss religion more explicitly at the end of the treatise, he emphasizes the same absence of understanding that is evident everywhere else in Irish culture: “they be all Papists by their profession, but in the same so blindly and brutishly informed, (for the most part) that not one amongst a hundred knoweth any ground of Religion.”45 The implication in these passages is that Irish culture is pervaded by a superstitious adherence to tradition and custom, which are responsible for the barbarity of the Irish and their Catholic faith. The religious understanding of equity aids the View in explaining why the Irish people prefer their own traditions to the ostensibly superior law brought by the English. According to Irenius, the Irish “scarsely to know the name of Law, but in stead thereof have alwayes preserved and kept their owne law, which is the Brehon Law.”46 Brehon law is thus a contradiction in terms, a “law” that does not merit “the name of law” because of its inherent injustice.47 In cases of murder, for example, Brehon law stipulates that “the malefactor shall give unto them, or to the child, or wife of him that is slaine, a recompence, which they call an Eriach.”48 Irenius considers the practice unjust because it hides the murder from authorities and grants the Brehon judge an unfair share of the payment, yet the Irish people stubbornly follow this law when they are able.49 To explain this preference, Irenius insists that Brehon law is an inculcated tradition: “It is a rule of right unwritten, but delivered by tradition from one to another, in which often there appeareth great show of equity, in determining the right between party and party, but in many things repugning quite both to Gods Law, and mans.”50 By emphasizing that Brehon law is an oral tradition rather than a written rule, Irenius treats it as a symptom of the broader tendency among the Catholic Irish to blindly follow customs and traditions as a result of their religious as well

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as cultural backwardness.51 Moreover, an oral law is unfit for the complex interpretive principle of equity, because it makes it difficult to recuperate historical context and the lawgiver’s intention. Spenser concludes that civility is an epistemic quality: he argues that the Irish have been so thoroughly corrupted by their religion and barbarous culture that they are unable to distinguish between the “show of equity” and the genuine equity of “God’s law,” which is enshrined in English law. Spenser’s approach to equity establishes a causal relationship between a nation’s religious character and its capacity for equitable judgment. A similar argument was implicit in the Protestant view of the godly, who were expected to practice scriptural standards of equity even when the law did not require them to do so. Irenius represents the Irish as the converse to this godly example: they are incapable of perceiving equity even when the English introduce equitable laws. If the equity of the godly is a sign of grace, the failure of the Irish to perceive equity points to their exclusion from grace. In both cases, the ability or inability to practice equity signals the moral and religious character of a people and their relationship with grace. The argument suggests that equity is more fully materialized in Protestant cultures than Catholic ones, thereby coopting equity for colonial expansion. These assumptions about the superiority of English justice inform the passages in the View that idealize Lord Arthur Grey de Wilton, the colonial officer under whom Spenser worked as a secretary. Irenius suggests that Ireland during the Fitz-­Garret rebellions was “like a ship in a storme, amidst all the raging surges, unruled, and undirected of any.”52 The only exception was Grey: “hee (like a most wise Pilote,) kept her course carefully, and held her most strongly even against those roaring billowes, that he safely brought her out of all.”53 Grey is the pilot of the metaphorical ship of state because he puts down the rebellion with brutal force. This well-­k nown and controversial passage seems on the face of it to have little to do with grace or equity, but the View’s large claims about English justice inform these nautical metaphors. The representation of the Irish as roaring billows helps to erase their native laws and ideas on equity until they become agents of elemental chaos, further justifying Grey’s punitive use of force. Spenser is not a single-­m inded propagandist, of course, because much of the View challenges the Elizabethan authorities for failing to support

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Grey.54 This critical approach does not necessarily signal any reservations about the broader project of empire, however, as much as a desire to teach the English authorities why they were wrong to slander Grey. The charge raised against Grey at court was that he was not sufficiently merciful: complaint was made against him, that he was a bloodie man, and regarded not the life of her subiects no more than dogges, but had wasted and consumed all; so as now she had nothing almost left, but to raigne in their Ashes, care was soon lent thereunto, & all suddenly turned tospide-­t urvy the Noble Lord eft-­soones was blamed, the wretched people pittied & new counsels plotted, in which it was concluded that a generall pardon should be sent over to all that would accept of it, upon which all former purposes were blancked.55

Critics have long suggested that Grey’s withdrawal from Ireland anticipates Artegall’s premature withdrawal from Irena’s lands in The Faerie Queene.56 I will return to Artegall below, but this passage already anticipates the link between equity and force that Spenser engages again in the poem. As we have seen, preachers like Perkins insisted equity is wholly compatible with harsh prosecution of religious enemies, because “as it is Equity often to yield thy right, so to yield in Gods causes is to betray the truth.”57 Spenser similarly criticizes the “generall pardon” offered to the Catholic Irish on the grounds that it to recognize the unbridgeable differences between them and the Protestant community. Forbearance, he suggests, is appropriate only for English Protestants, but the Irish are so far from understanding equity or possessing grace that they answer pardon with renewed rebellion. Spenser’s criticism of the Elizabethan policy in Ireland is designed to correct the lack of discernment shown by the court in treating Catholic barbarians with the same equitable moderation that is suitable for English Protestants. While the View aims to teach its audience with its idealization of Lord Grey, it is ultimately a prose treatise concerned with the political realities involved in conquering, settling, and repressing rebellion in Ireland. In The Faerie Queene, which aims to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline,” Spenser is less constrained as he imagines the ideal magistrate.58 As we shall see, his ideal community of grace requires magistrates to learn the meaning of equity and grace through a careful process of education.

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Artegall, Grace, and Fleshly Force

In canto VII of Book V of The Faerie Queene, Artegall, the knight of Justice, is rescued from captivity by Britomart, who by this point in the poem represents “that part of Justice, which is Equity” (V.vii.3.3). Critics often see Britomart’s freeing of Artegall as an allegory for the moderation that equity brings to the law.59 In addition to its rich legal resonances, however, this scene also engages the Protestant view of equity as a sign of grace. Before freeing Artegall, Britomart chastises the flesh: “Could so great courage stouped have to ought? / Then farewell fleshly force; I see thy pride is nought” (V.vii.40.1–­9). This condemnation of “fleshly force” evokes the Pauline understanding of grace as a liberation from the flesh, which stands metonymically for the world of sinful pride and human effort. Britomart appeals to this Pauline language in order to illustrate that the ideal magistrate does not rely on force alone; rather, the use of force is legitimate when used to uphold scripturally sanctioned laws for a godly community. The scene thus exemplifies a broader tendency throughout Book V to see equity as a sign of grace that permeates some communities more than others. Artegall’s captivity under Radigund teaches him that the ideal magistrate relies on the grace mediated to him through the providential bloodline of the Tudors, who are Britomart’s heirs in the allegory. Britomart’s condemnation of fleshly force is a key scene that teaches Artegall the religious dimension of equity, thereby setting the stage for the more openly imperialistic fantasies that appear at the end of Book V. Throughout Book V, equity describes the duty of the sovereign and her magistrates to return divine justice to the kingdoms of this world. Book V begins with a vision of the Golden age, when “Justice sate high ador’d with solemne feasts” (V.proem.9.8). God allows rulers to restore some measure of that divine justice to the fallen world: “That powre he also doth to Princes lend, / And makes them like himselfe in glorious sight, / To sit in his owne seate, his cause to end, / And rule his people right, as he doth recommend” (V.proem.10.1–­9). From the beginning of Book V, therefore, Spenser insists that the force of the magistrate is grounded in an effort to restore divine justice to the community. Equity is the instrument by which magistrates achieve this. Astraea, the goddess of justice, teaches Artegall equity:

Equity and Grace in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

There she him taught to weigh both right and wrong In equall ballance with due recompence, And equitie to measure out along, According to the line of conscience, When so it needs with rigour to dispence.

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(V.i.7.1–­5)

This passage engages key features of early modern equity, including its special relationship to conscience, its opposition to “rigour,” and its attempt to restore an “equall ballance” that avoids extremity. By beginning Artegall’s education with a lesson on equity, Spenser illustrates the key role of this concept in merging political authority and claims to mediating divine justice. The rest of Artegall’s career illustrates the need to return repeatedly to scripture as a means of preserving the religious foundation of Protestant equity. His early victories depend on his knowledge of scripture and his ability to cite it judiciously.60 For example, in his encounter with Sanglier, Artegall imitates the judgment of Solomon in 1 Kings 3:16–­28. In his conflict with the so-­called Egalitarian Gyant, he defeats the Gyant with biblical allusions. The Gyant attempts to weigh everything, including the divinely instituted order of the world, in his own “ballance” (V.ii.30.3), but he understands that divine order in a narrowly literalist sense that sees differences in size, shape, and power as unjust. The Gyant’s “ballance” hearkens back to Astraea’s “ballance” of equity, signaling that his inflexible literalism is a parody of the flexibility of genuine equity. Artegall responds by citing the book of Job at least four times, thus illustrating that the ultimate solution to debates on equity is a return to scripture as the source of divine justice.61 He insists that the true “ballance” is not the Gyant’s physical scales, but the “eare”: “The eare must be the ballance, to decree / And judge, whether with truth or falshood they agree” (V.ii.47.8–­9). This metaphor evokes the Protestant idea that the Word of God seizes the believer’s imagination aurally. By thus citing the book of Job to defeat the Gyant, and by urging him to open his “eare” to the scriptural passages which reaffirm the fairness of cosmic order, Artegall suggests that scripture is the final authority in equitable interpretation.62 Only after this appeal to scripture does Artegall’s enforcer, the iron man Talus, apply his ruthless force, illustrating that force is justifiable once an enemy resists attempts at religious persuasion.

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Artegall’s encounter with Radigund is another test of how well he understands scripture, but he fails the test and is taken into captivity so as to learn the importance of grace. Initially, he follows the scriptural pattern by assuming the role of the messianic liberator in Isaiah 41. For example, Talus defeats the first waves of the Amazons with a flail that resembles the “threshing instrument having teeth” of Isaiah 41:15.63 Artegall later urges the escaped knight Turpine to “wend with me, that ye may see and know” (V.iv.34.7–­8), alluding to Isaiah 41:20: “That they may see, and know, and consider, and understand together, that the hand of the LORD hath done this.” Artegall fails to reveal the hand of God against the Amazons, however, because he agrees to fight according to Radigund’s terms of engagement, which are a legalistic trap: “if I vanquishe him, he shall obay / My law, and ever to my lore be bound, / And so will I, if me he vanquish may” (V.iv.49.2–­5). These words allude to Goliath’s challenge to the Israelites in 1 Sam. 17:9: “If he be able to fight with me, and to kill me, then will we be your servants: but if I prevail against him, and kill him, then shall ye be our servants.” Radigund does not resemble Goliath physically, of course, but the allusion suggests that she similarly wants to enslave a godly people through a legalistic contract.64 By agreeing to her battle terms, Artegall abandons his earlier tendency to refer questions of justice to the authority of scripture. Not only does he fail to appeal to God as the arbiter of the duel, as David does 1 Sam. 17:45, but he also shows mercy to Radigund when he has the upper hand, which she repays by taking him captive.65 To drive home the point that the scene concerns equity, Radigund admits that Artegall’s enslavement violates unwritten principles of fair dealing: “What right is it, that he should thraldome find, / For lending life to me a wretch unkind; / That for such good him recompence with ill?” (V.v.32.4–­6). Like the Irish rebels of the View, who responded to pardon with renewed rebellion, Radigund returns Artegall’s mercy with force, illustrating the dangers of showing mercy to one’s religious enemies. Artegall’s servitude under Radigund illustrates not only how scripture underpins human justice but also the fragility of the magistrate that abandons his commitment to divine justice. Artegall is reduced to a captivity from which he cannot even plead for liberation, let alone win liberty by his own effort. He requires Britomart’s unexpected intervention—­an interven-

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tion that, as we shall see, echoes the language of unmerited grace. On the other hand, Radigund is also shown to have a fragile hold on power as a result of her violation of divine justice. Spenser suggests that her laws offend the patriarchal norms of the Bible: “vertuous women wisely understand, / That they were borne to base humilitie, / Unlesse the heavens them lift to lawfull soveraintie” (V.v.26.7–­9). These lines allude to the Elizabethan view that women must not rule over men unless they have special dispensation from God, as Elizabeth I ostensibly did. The rest of Book V suggests that when a ruler violates divine justice in this way, God raises other liberators, such as Britomart, to topple them. Following Artegall’s failure, Britomart takes over as the agent of equity when she goes to the temple of Isis to learn about “That part of Justice, which is Equity” (V.vii.3.3). Critics have long considered the “Isis Church” episode to be central for the discussion of equity in Book V.66 According to an influential reading, Britomart learns equity during a dream in which she is transfigured into Isis as fires overcome the temple. The crocodile at the feet of Isis’s statue comes to life, eats the flames, becomes “swolne with pride of his owne peerelesse powre,” (V.vii.15.7–­8), and threatens to eat Britomart. She tames the crocodile with her rod and, “turning all his pride to humblesse meeke” (V.vii.16.1), becomes pregnant by him and gives birth to a lion. Aided by the priests of Isis, Britomart learns that the crocodile represents Artegall and that her taming of the crocodile represents equity: “To shew that clemence oft in things amis, / Restraines those sterne behests, and cruell doomes of his” (V.vii.22.8–­9). As Andrew Zurcher notes, the vision suggests an equitable “balance, even a conjugal union, between rigour and mercy.”67 The crocodile comes to represent the force and rigor of the law, while Isis represents the mitigation of law by equity. While this reading goes a long way toward explaining equity in the dream, it does not sufficiently emphasize Britomart’s special dispensation from God as the progenitor of the dynasty that will bring Protestantism to England. As we have seen, the Protestant understanding of equity presupposed that Protestant monarchs safeguard the work of grace in the kingdom of this world by using equity to uphold scripturally sanctioned laws. This principle is central to Britomart’s characterization because she is the progenitor of the Tudors, and thus the first monarch in a long line

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that will eventually sponsor the English Reformation. The priest claims that Britomart is important to the gods because of her lineage: “They doe thy linage, and thy Lordly brood; / They doe thy sire, lamenting sore for thee; / They doe thy love, forlorne in womens thraldome see” (V.vii.21.4–­9). The priest situates Britomart conceptually and grammatically between her sire, her love, and her future son, thus reminding her of the dynasty that she will engender through these relationships. Britomart first learns of the providential role of this dynasty from Merlin in Book III, who foretells her lion-­l ike child (III.iii.30) and the peace that her successors, the Tudors, will bring to Britain (III.iii.49). Merlin also explains that her love for Artegall is predestined by “the streight course of hevenly destiny, / Led with eternall providence” (III.iii.24.3–­4). The underlying assumption in Merlin’s prophecy is that Britomart and her successors have a special dispensation from God to unify the British nation and to reform its religion. This providential role is what makes Britomart’s marriage to Artegall a fitting symbol for equity. While women may not rule unless “the heavens them lift to lawfull soveraintie” (V.v.26.9), Merlin’s prophecy shows that Britomart does have a religious mandate to rule Artegall (as the crocodile) in the dream. The marriage of Britomart and Artegall reflects the broader assumption in Elizabethan England that God bestowed grace on England by enabling a Protestant ruler to rise to the throne and reform the nation’s religion. Elizabethan propagandists routinely argued that God chose the Tudors to save England from Catholicism. Writing against John Knox, John Aylmer insists that God chose a female ruler to illustrate England’s dependence on grace: Placeth he a vvoman vveake in nature, feable in bodie, softe in courage, vnskilfull in practise, not terrible to the enemy, no Shilde to the stynde, vvel, Virtus mea (saith he) In infirmate perficitur. My strengthe is moste perfight vvwhen you be moste vveake, if he ioyne his strengthe; she can not be vveake.68

Aylmer thus politicizes Paul’s description of grace as the source of a paradoxical strength-­in-­weakness: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12: 9). According to Aylmer’s adaptation of Paul, God chose a woman “feable in bodie” to teach the English that their deliverance from Catholicism is due to grace rather than human force. In

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Spenser’s poem, the priest’s interpretation of the dream highlights a parallel transformation of female weakness into divinely appointed strength thanks to grace. In the dream, Britomart tames the crocodile not because she is stronger, but because the gods have chosen her and her dynasty, including Elizabeth Tudor, to be the vehicles of grace to the nation.69 The crocodile’s “pride of his owne peerelesse powre” (V.vii.15.7–­8) reflects a negative, prideful understanding of human strength that tempted Artegall; the cure is for an apparently weak woman to transform “all his pride to humblesse meeke” (V.vii.16.1) and illustrate his dependence on grace. The conjugal union between Britomart and Artegall represents not only equity in general but also the Protestant equity that Elizabeth, as the vehicle of grace to the English nation, was supposed to bring to her realms by safeguarding the Reformation with scripturally sanctioned laws. Britomart partially fulfills these expectations for the Protestant monarch by restoring patriarchal laws to Radegone. Spenser hails patriarchy as “true Justice”: “The liberty of women did repeale, / Which they had long usurpt; and them restoring / To mens subjection, did true Justice deale” (V.vii.42.5–­7). Moreover, Britomart retrains the captive knights as new magistrates to protect the patriarchal order: “all those Knights . . . she did from thraldome free / And magistrates of all that city made” (V.vii.43.1–­3).70 For her pains, she is praised in terms that evoke the divine justice of Astraea: “they as a Goddesse her adoring, / Her wisedome did admire, and hearkned to her loring” (V.vii.42.3–­9). Britomart’s “wisedome” and “loring” associate her with Astraea’s “righteous lore” (V.i.4.9), and the Amazons’ “adoring” evokes the voluntary obedience of the people during the Golden Age, when “Justice sate high ador’d with solemne feasts” (V. proem.9.8). Britomart’s “lore” and “true Justice” also echo the “righteous lore / Of highest Jove, who doth true justice deale” (V.vii.1.4–­7). These echoes of divine justice suggest that the restoration of patriarchy is supposed to be the religious as well as juridical expression of equity. Against this backdrop of equitable reform, Britomart suggests that Artegall must undergo a personal reformation by acknowledging his own need for grace as a result of his overreliance on unaided human force. Her address to Artegall directly echoes the Pauline binary between the false strength of the flesh and the paradoxical strength-­in-­weakness of grace.

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Upon first seeing Artegall as a captive in women’s clothes, Britomart argues that he has become an emblem of the weakness of this “fleshly force”: “Ah my deare Lord, what sight is this” (quoth she) “What May-­game hath misfortune made of you? Where is that dreadfull manly looke? where be Those mighty palmes, the which ye wont t’embrew In bloud of Kings, and great hoastes to subdew? Could ought on earth so wondrous change have wrought, As to have robde you of that manly hew? Could so great courage stouped have to ought? Then farewell fleshly force; I see thy pride is nought.” (V.vii.40.1–­9) Britomart thus catalogs the signifiers of chivalrous masculinity only to dismiss them all in the final lines as signs of “pride” and “fleshly force.” This volta inscribes Artegall’s slavery in terms of Pauline binaries between flesh, law, and sin on the one hand and faith, spirit, and grace on the other. By framing the liberation of Artegall in these terms, Britomart looks backward to the taming of the crocodile’s pride and strength. At the same time, this passage associates equity with the theological understanding of grace in Book I. After Redcrosse’s encounter with Despair, the narrator anticipates Britomart by castigating “fleshly might” (1.x.1.1–­2) and adding, in what is arguably the most explicitly Calvinist statement of the poem, that spiritual strength is a gift of grace: “If any strength we have, it is to ill, / But all the good is Gods, both power and eke will” (I.x.1.1–­9). As Redcrosse learns in the House of Holinesse, good works and zeal are important for salvation, but his mistake was to forget that human agency relies on grace.71 Hence Redcrosse wields “more then manly force” (I.i.24.6) when he ascribes all his strength to God (I.i.19.3), but he succumbs to the “huge force” (I.vii.11.2) of Orgoglio, the giant of pride, when he trusts in his own power.72 Part of the reason Britomart castigates pride and “fleshly force” in Book V is to suggest that Artegall, like Redcrosse before him, misunderstood his dependence on God and the gift of grace. He engaged Radigund according to the rules of chivalry, but in doing so elided the religious dimension of their contest, which appears in the allusions to David and Goliath. The solution, for him

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as for Redcrosse, is to humble the pride of the fresh and reimagine grace as the source of agency. Moreover, whereas Redcrosse’s conflicts are primarily spiritual, Britomart illustrates that spiritual victories over pride and the flesh must be paired with equitable reform of impious laws in the kingdom of this world. At Isis Church, she learns that grace will empower her David-­ like successors, including Elizabeth Tudor, to defeat the apparently superior force of the various Goliaths and other monsters representing the military strength and global reach of Catholicism. She in turn demonstrates the ideal magistrate’s attitude toward grace by using her God-­g iven authority to institute scripturally sanctioned laws in Radegone. The similarities between Artegall and Redcrosse suggest that Book I and Book V address related but distinct aspects of divine justice and its moderation by grace. Whereas Redcrosse’s career conveys how grace moderates the spiritual effects of divine justice, Artegall’s liberation captures the political implications of grace in a worldly kingdom.73 In Book I, Despair’s most dangerous argument is his reduction of divine justice to the strict letter of retributive justice: “For life must life, and blood must blood repay” (I.ix.43.6). Redcrosse can give no answer here, and it is up to Una to articulate grace as the fulfilment of the law: “Where justice growes, there grows eke greater grace, / The which doth quench the brond of hellish smart” (I.ix.53.6). Redcrosse is saved from the letter of the law, which stipulates the payment of a life for a life, through the unearned intervention of grace. In Book V, Britomart returns to this Pauline language to explain how equity moderates strict justice in a parallel way. She first saves Artegall from the letter of the law, which bound him to Radigund’s battle terms, then reproaches fleshly force to teach Artegall how to be a more equitable magistrate. Her teaching echoes Fidelia’s method in Book I: “For she was hable, with her wordes to kill, / And rayse againe to life the hart, that she did thrill” (I.x.19.8–­9). Understood in this way, Artegall’s liberation captures the confidence that godly Christians could expect from grace even in the midst of their captivity. Although Britomart turns him temporarily into an emblem of pride and fleshly force, Artegall always means more than his crime despite his temporary lapses.74 The difference between him and the likes of Radigund or Sanglier is that he has access to grace thanks to his role in the prov-

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idential history of England. Grace waits on the wings when the godly enter captivity, granting them not only psychological confidence but also access to a more equitable and generous kind of justice. The magistrate’s force is ruthlessly punitive for some and gently instructive for others, and the crucial difference is each community’s access to grace. From America to the Moluccas

Notwithstanding Britomart’s castigation of fleshly force, the second half of Book V of The Faerie Queene features extravagant displays of force against England’s Catholic opponents. Artegall and Arthur use military force liberally in their quests to liberate Irena’s and Belge’s lands, which allegorize English military expeditions in the Spanish Netherlands and Ireland. As Spenser recommends of English magistrates in the View, Artegall and Arthur forcefully reform the laws and religious habits of Irena’s and Belge’s lands. The fantasy underlying much of these final cantos is an eschatological vision of England as a budding Protestant empire that will defeat Catholicism in its immediate periphery and, eventually, around the world. This imperial fantasy animates Spenser’s representation of Mercilla and her magistrates as agents of justice against rival Catholic regimes and the rebels in Ireland.75 The most important teacher in equity at the end of The Faerie Queene is Mercilla, the idealized ruler who simultaneously represents Elizabeth, mercy, and the equitable Protestant ruler.76 If Britomart represents Elizabeth through her dynastic role in giving rise to the Tudors, Mercilla is an idealized vision of Elizabeth’s public authority as a protector of divine justice at home and abroad. Describing her and her court, Arthur emphasizes her “sovereign Grace, with which her Royal Crown / She doth support, and strongly beateth down / The Malice of her Foes” (5.viii.17.4–­6). The phrase “soveraine grace” is also used to describe divine “Justice” in the temple of Isis, illustrating that the predictions in Britomart’s dream are realized in Mercilla’s rule. Moreover, in keeping with the idealized understanding of the equitable ruler, Mercilla’s cloth of state alludes frequently to scripture:

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All over her a cloth of state was spred, Not of rich tissew, nor of cloth of gold, Nor of ought else, that may be richest red, But like a cloud, as likest may be told, That her brode spreading wings did wyde unfold; Whose skirts were bordred with bright sunny beams, Glistring like gold, amongst the plights enrold, And here and there shooting forth silver streames, Mongst which crept litle Angels through the glittering gleames. (V.ix.29) By differentiating Mercilla’s “cloth of state” from works of human artifice such as the “rich tissew” and the “cloth of gold,” Spenser implies that her authority stems from grace rather than human effort. The scriptural allusions in the passage reinforce the religious basis of her authority. The cloth’s resemblance to a “cloud” alludes to the cloud of God in Ex. 20:16, and her “litle Angels” evoke the seraphims around God’s throne in Isa. 6:1–­2. The prostration of “kings and kesars” (V.ix.29.9) evokes the submission of all creation to Christ in Rev. 7.11 and Rev. 4.10.77 Two stanzas later, Mercilla is shown to have power over the Litae, who represent divine mercy (V.ix.31.9).78 These iconographic details signal that Mercilla is the ideal Protestant monarch who rules through divine election and manifests divine justice. Echoing Elizabethan propagandists like Aylmer, who saw the alleged weakness of Elizabeth I as a sign of her election by grace, Spenser presents Mercilla as weak according to the flesh but powerful on account of her religious mission. To highlight this reliance on divine election, Spenser spends nine stanzas on the scriptural allusions encoded in her clothes and royal regalia, but he does not pause on her face or body. Her authority is so inextricable from her role as a religious reformer that her person risks disappearing into the rich texture of scriptural allusions woven into her cloth of state.79 Mercilla demonstrates her relationship to divine justice by using force only when she perceives sin. Although Mercilla punishes multiple criminals, Spenser goes out of his way to suggest that these punishments are justified and, in some sense, self-­inflicted by the criminal.80 She punishes the slanderous poet Bon Fons by nailing his tongue to a post and rewriting

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Malfont over his name, but the grammar of the passage places the onus on Bon Fons: “For the bold title of a Poet bad / He on himselfe had ta’en” (V.ix .25.8–­9). The verb “had ta’en” gives Bon Fons the agency, as if he punished himself voluntarily. A similar pattern structures Mercilla’s other foes: Thus she did sit in soverayne Majestie, Holding a Scepter in her royall hand, The sacred pledge of peace and clemencie, With which high God had blest her happie land, Maugre so many foes, which did withstand.

(V.ix.30.2–­5).

Mercilla’s only action in this passage is to “sit in soverayne Majestie,” while the “foes” in the final line appear almost to defeat themselves in an afterthought. The most prominent example of criminal self-­indictment is Duessa’s trial, where the defendant’s crimes bear witness against her: “to her more Disgrace, / The plot of all her practise did display, / And all her traynes, and all her treasons forth did lay” (V.ix.47.7–­9). Duessa is dis-­g raced, or alienated from grace, by a guilty conscience that testifies against her. By unveiling Duessa’s sins in this way, Mercilla fulfills the traditional understanding of equity as part of the sovereign’s authority over conscience. Her rule is therefore peaceful and merciful not in the sense that she dispenses with force entirely, but because she punishes exclusively those who are truly guilty, especially if they encroach on her religious mandate. As we shall see, this is the key premise that supports the imperialism of the last few cantos of Book V. More than any other event in the ninth canto, the trial of Duessa reveals that Mercilla’s claim to authority rests on her zealous commitment to the interests of the Protestant church. Like Britomart, Mercilla trains Artegall and Arthur as magistrates by elevating them to the status of assistant judges, and their example for emulation is the prosecutor, Zele, whose name illustrates the religious basis of equity.81 Zele is “a person of deepe reach, / And rare in-­sight, hard matters to revele” (V.ix.39.1–­2), and he demonstrates this insight by calling forth Duessa’s crimes as witnesses (V.ix.47–­49). By revealing Duessa’s conscience to Mercilla, Zele completes Una’s first despoliation of Duessa in Book I. Una asks Arthur only to “spoile her of her scarlot

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robe, and let her fly” (I.viii.45.9), whereas Zele unmasks Duessa’s “wretched semblant,” which “did sure / The peoples great compassion unto her allure” (V.ix.38.8–­9). In Book I, holiness requires only a theoretical exposure of Catholic error, but in Book V, equitable magistrates such as Zele go beyond this to provide a legal and political solution to Catholic threats.82 According to Spenser’s representation, the use of force advocated by Zele is justifiable because God revealed Duessa’s plots: “high heavens grace . . . all this cursed plot, / Ere proofe1 it tooke, discovered was betymes” (V.ix.42.1–­4). Grace is directly involved in the trial to support the use of judicial force against Duessa. Given that Duessa also allegorizes Mary, Queen of Scots, the implication in the historical allegory is that the equitable and merciful response against Catholic threats to the Tudors is not leniency but a rigorous and politically expedient application of law.83 By framing Mercilla’s sovereignty as a bulwark against Catholic foes, the trial lays the foundation for the tenth canto’s vision of England as an emerging Protestant empire. Even though England did not have the military or economic means to successfully pursue empire, Spenser suggests that equity grants English magistrates a right to intervene abroad should such means arise.84 Mercilla trains Arthur and Artegall as judges so that they may spread her justice abroad: “Which that those knights likewise mote understand, / And witnesse forth aright in forrain land” (V.ix.37.4–­5). Given Duessa’s Catholic associations, the “forrain land” Mercilla has in mind is most likely Catholic.85 In the next canto, Spenser imagines that Catholic subjects yearn for Mercilla: What heavenly Muse shall thy great honour rayse Up to the skies, whence first deriv’d it was, And now on earth it selfe enlarged has, From th’utmost brinke of the Americke shore, Unto the margent of the Molucas?

(V.x.3.3–­7)

Mercilla’s fame extends globally from the “Americke shore” to “the Molucas,” which were at the time the westernmost and easternmost limits of the Catholic empires of Spain and Portugal. By suspending his allegory and foregrounding the expansiveness of real-­world Catholic empires, Spenser

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suggests that England has a religious mandate to take over these Catholic colonies even though it presently lacks the means to do so.86 Spenser’s implicit point is that Catholic subjects abroad acknowledge Mercilla-­Elizabeth as the living embodiment of divine justice and are waiting for an Arthur or an Artegall to liberate them in her name. At the same time, they do not understand Mercilla’s rule as well as the English: “Those Nations farre thy justice doe adore: / But thine owne people do thy mercy prayse much more” (V.x.3.8–­9). What Mercilla’s “owne people” in England know, and what the “Nations farre” fail to understand, is that Mercilla’s rule depends on divine grace: “[Mercy] first was bred, and borne of heavenly race; / From thence pour’d down on men, by influence of grace” (V.x.1.8–­9). Mercilla’s domestic subjects “prayse much more” her mercy than her justice because, being Protestants, they are more responsive to a theology based on sola gratia than nations in the Moluccas and the Americas, who have ostensibly been misled by Catholic powers. Spenser’s main purpose is to assert Mercilla-­ Elizabeth’s right to rule, but he does not dwell at length on these distant nations because a military invasion was not within England’s means at the time. He thus gives Protestant English subjects their privileged position as the center of this imperial vision even as he imagines English power growing at first in Ireland and the Netherlands, and eventually farther afield. In Arthur’s quest to liberate Belge’s lands from Geryoneo, Spenser uses arguments about equity and divine justice to defend the real application of military force in the context of the Eighty Years’ War. In 1585, Elizabeth sent an expedition to the Spanish Netherlands under the command of her most important military advisors, including the Earl of Leicester, Philip Sidney, and John Norris.87 In the historical allegory of these concluding cantos, Arthur represents the courtiers who went abroad to support Dutch Protestants, while Geryoneo represents Phillip II, the Spanish ruler of the Netherlands.88 Although equity does not appear by name here, Spenser evokes the concept by suggesting that Geryoneo’s religion offends divine justice. Geryoneo asserts that the letter of the law is on his side: “deliver him his owne, ere yet too late, / To which they had no right, nor any wrongfull state.” (V.xi.3.8–­9). Geryoneo aims to defend this “right” and “state” with brute strength: “he there did stand / That would his doings justifie with his owne hand” (V.xi.4.8–­9). By suggesting that “his owne hand” is sufficient

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to “justifie,” Geryoneo evokes Catholic works-­r ighteousness as well as the assumption that fleshly force can dispense with divine justice. As the narrator explains, Belge’s city has “now by force extort out of her hand, / By her strong Foe” (5.x.25.3–­4). This use of force is illegitimate because Geryoneo has brought the “Yoke of Inquisition” and upheld Catholic idolatry: “now he hath new lawes and orders new. . . . And forced it, the honour that is dew / To God, to doe unto his Idole most untrew” (V.x.27.6–­9). These stanzas return repeatedly to the word “force” to suggest that the soon-­to-­ be-­defeated Geryoneo represents the inadequacy of mere power without a religious mandate, which Britomart castigated earlier as fleshly force. Artegall’s triumph conversely embodies a legitimate use of force in defense of Protestantism. During the battle, Spenser uses each combatant’s fighting style to further distinguish Geryoneo’s fleshly force from Arthur’s use of force. Geryoneo’s monstrous physicality reflects his emphasis on the flesh: “great advauntage eke he has / Through his three double hands thrise multiplyde, / Besides the double strength, which in them was” (V.xi.6.1–­3). By contrast, Arthur’s power resides in his shield, which symbolizes grace in Book I and Book V.89 Arthur’s shield proves impenetrable not because of its size, which is dwarfed by the shields of Geryoneo’s officers, but rather the purity of its metal, which signals its link to grace and holiness. The shield’s religious symbolism is clearest when it saves Arthur’s life by chance: “had he chaunced not his shield to reare, / Ere that huge stroke arrived on him neare, / He had him surely cloven quite in twaine” (V.xi.10.5–­6). Arthur “reare[s]” the shield, but the effort appears involuntary and providentially planned because it is “chaunced.” As in his fight against Orgoglio in Book I, the chance intervention reveals God supports Arthur in his moments of weakness.90 Instead of seeking to justify himself by his own hand, as Geryoneo does, Arthur is justified by the unmerited intervention of grace.91 A similar chance exposure is fatal for Geryoneo (V.xi.13), further illustrating the weakness of fleshly force before God’s representatives. If the Catholic Geryoneo sees justice as an empty term propped up by fleshly force, Arthur’s own use of force is justified by his reliance on grace and divine justice. The religious imperative behind Arthur’s use of force becomes even clearer when he uproots Catholicism from Belge’s lands. If the View defends

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Lord Grey’s use of force against the Irish on account of their irredeemable superstition and cultural habits, Arthur’s conquest of Geryoneo once again illustrates that justice requires cultural and religious reformation. Belge asks Arthur to uproot Geryoneo’s religion: “Till ye have rooted all the relickes out / Of that vilde race” (V.xi.18.6–­7). This is a turning point in the quest because Mercilla sends Arthur to liberate Belge’s land, but not necessarily to reform its religion.92 As a result, the scene turns on whether Protestant magistrates have the authority to pursue Protestant reform even when they do not have an explicit mandate to do so from their monarch. As in the View, Spenser suggests that all magistrates should have this authority. After Arthur promptly and decisively defaces Geryoneo’s church, he is crowned as a liberator for his efforts: So him they led through all their streetes along, Crowned with girlonds of immortall baies, And all the vulgar did about them throng, To see the man, whose everlasting praise They all were bound to all posterities to raise.

(V.xi.34.5–­9)

Although Arthur rejects Belge’s offer of political sovereignty, he appears as a crowned figure at the head of a liberated Protestant nation.93 This symbolic crown suggests that Arthur participates in the overall aim of Mercilla’s sovereignty, which is to spread Protestant equity globally.94 The rhyme between “everlasting praise” and “raise” supports this argument further because Spenser uses the same rhyme in V.x.3.1–­3 to describe Mercilla’s praise at its greatest extent from the Americas to the Moluccas. Arthur thus resembles Mercilla insofar as he uses force to pursue equity. He also educates the “vulgar” throng to accept divine justice: “the vulgar did about him flocke / And cluster thicke unto his leasings vaine” (V.ii.35.1–­2). This popular following evokes the crowds that around the Egalitarian Gyant in the second canto, thus suggesting that Arthur has reformed those who are susceptible to false equity. If Arthur’s quest represents the ideal of equity, the last canto of Book V offers a glimpse of the residual challenges that prevent magistrates from fully embodying this ideal. Artegall’s encounter with Burbon foregrounds

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the threat of hypocrisy in a ruler. Burbon allegorizes Henry IV of France, who converted from Protestantism to Catholicism to gain the French throne.95 The poem alludes to this apostasy when Burbon abandons his shield, which represents the Protestant faith (V.xi.54.3–­5). His apostasy reveals the danger of ambition: O sacred hunger of ambitious mindes, And impotent desire of men to raine, Whom neither dread of God, that devils bindes, Nor lawes of men, that common weales containe, Nor bands of nature, that wilde beastes restraine, Can keepe from outrage, and from doing wrong, Where they may hope a kingdome to obtaine.

(V.xii.1.1–­7)

The “sacred hunger of ambitious mindes” violates divine law (the “dread of God”), natural law (the “bands of nature”), and human law (the “laws of men”). Ambition is thus a parody of equity: whereas equity moves beyond the written law to obey a higher order of divine justice, Burbon dispenses with law to pursue his narrow self-­interest. By engaging Burbon’s apostasy in this way, Spenser acknowledges a major problem: if a nominally Protestant ruler like Henry IV can change his religion as the situation demands, then how can the Protestant church rely on a ruler genuinely embodying divine justice?96 The distinction between fleshly force and the legitimate force of equity, which is so central to the earlier successes of Britomart and Arthur, threatens to collapse here into bare realpolitik.97 Elizabeth and her courtiers do not emerge unscathed from these cantos. Although the majority of Book V suggests that grace has elected the Tudor dynasty to rescue England from Catholicism, the conclusion of Artegall’s quest suggests that the crown has failed to support its best magistrates in Ireland. Critics have long recognized that Artegall’s forced withdrawal from Irena’s lands implies a critique of the crown’s policy toward Grey, which the View attributes to intrigue and slander. During Artegall’s quest, Grantorto allegorizes the rebels of Ireland, most notably Tyrone, whereas Artegall himself stands for Lord Grey and other officers, such as John Norris, who were sent to defeat the rebels.98 Echoing Lord Grey, Artegall sidesteps

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Grantorto’s legalistic wrangling in order to apply swift and decisive force.99 Like other successful agents of equity in Book V, he follows up this victory with cultural and religious reform: “day and night employ’d his busie paine / How to reforme that ragged common-­weale” (V.xii.26.3–­4). He restrains Talus long enough to give the people a chance to convert (V.xii.8), thus embodying Mercilla’s view that it is “better to reforme, then to cut off the ill” (V.x.2.9)—­a strategy that the View recommends in Ireland. Despite following the pattern of an equitable magistrate, however, Artegall is recalled prematurely by the crown: “But ere he could reforme it thoroughly, / He through occasion called was away, / To Faerie Court” (V.xii.27.1–­3). Spenser’s obvious disagreement with the court evokes the View’s critique of the decision to withdraw Grey prematurely from Ireland. Artegall’s pursuit by Slander and Detraction further illustrates the susceptibility of the court to political intrigue. Much of the discussion of equity in Book V centers on the assumption that worldly injustices can be solved through appeals to scripture. However, Detraction sidesteps divine justice to attack Artegall’s personal reputation: Then th’other comming neare, gan him revile, And fouly rayle, with all she could invent; Saying, that he had with unmanly guile, And foule abusion both his honour blent, And that bright sword, the sword of Justice lent Had stayned with reprochfull crueltie, In guiltlesse blood of many an innocent: As for Grandtorto, him with treacherie And traynes having surpriz’d, he fouly did to die.

(V.xii.40.1–­9)

In a single stanza, Detraction rewrites the main plot of Book V to present Artegall as the villain and Grandtorto as the hero. The word “invent” suggests that Detraction’s accusations are untrue, but the narrator cannot provide any independent evidence to defend his version of the story as less invented. It is his word against Detraction’s, and Artegall’s ignominious withdrawal at the behest of the crown hints that Detraction has already found more favor. This ending illustrates that Protestant monarchs and their magis-

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trates are vulnerable to intrigue and slander in addition to ambition, and these vulnerabilities complicate the tendency throughout Book V to resolve competing accounts of justice by appealing to scripture. Artegall’s mixed success in Irena’s lands illustrates the fragility of Spenser’s hopes for a Protestant empire, though it does not necessarily signal a withdrawal from imperialism as such. The argument of Book V rests on the idea that Protestant rulers such as Elizabeth are God’s chosen patrons of the Reformation and are therefore empowered by grace to reform the injustice of worldly kingdoms. While England lacks the military might of a Catholic empire like Spain, Book V suggests that grace can overcome the fleshly force of England’s Catholic foes. While Artegall and Arthur dispatch militarily superior foes with relative ease, the susceptibility of Protestant rulers to ambition, intrigue, and slander turns out to be the biggest obstacle. Spenser’s description of empire in Book V is a vision of what England should aim to achieve, and there is no question that such a result would be welcome to him if it were possible. His teaching is similar to Britomart’s: he turns a critical eye on English Protestant authorities in order to teach them how the ideal community of grace ought to be. If a would-­be reformer did commit to introducing divine justice with the equity Spenser catalogs, the result, he suggests, would be the global expansion of the justice of Mercilla’s court—­a justice that would be all the more desirable to the English in Ireland, surrounded as they were by a culture they deemed barbarous and superstitious. *

*

*

Spenser’s vision of empire rests on an imaginative cleavage between the people of God and the enemies who encroach on them. In his writing, grace is not simply a matter pertaining to salvation but also a feature that is unevenly distributed between different communities. He suggests that Irish culture and religion is so devoid of grace that the Irish will never voluntarily follow an equitable law and must therefore be reformed with the inflexible force of Talus. This boundary was already present in the larger culture’s view of grace, but Spenser’s colonial context exacerbates and sharpens it. As Artegall discovers in his captivity, grace is available to a godly magistrate even after lapses in judgment, and this is doubly true for a colonial officer.

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The providential destiny of a Protestant nation rests on the confidence that God will find a way to emancipate a chosen nation by returning to its leaders after allowing them to become temporarily the prey of their Catholic enemies. Artegall’s education in equity accordingly involves a Pauline regeneration through sola gratia, because only a return to grace can grant him the strength to uproot Grantorto from Irena’s lands. The poems discussed in chapters to come do not share Spenser’s colonial imaginary, but they too imagine grace as a source of interpretive agency that is unevenly distributed. The enemy in their case does not always look like the Irish kerns and Spanish tercios that populate Spenser’s imagined Ireland, but there is always an opponent of some kind who threatens a godly people with dissolution. In moments of doubt, these later poets echo not only Spenser’s imperial vision or his confidence in grace but also his sense of encroachment, his occasional pessimism, and his willingness to justify force when it is used to defend a godly community.

TWO

Grace, Gender, and Patronage in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer

Gr ace is one of the most frequently referenced concepts in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus, Rex Iudaeorum. Sometimes Lanyer deploys the Calvinist language of salvation explicitly, but at other times grace is a gift enabling poetry or a metaphor for aristocratic generosity. This wordplay is likely due to the fact that Lanyer addressed the poem to the most influential Protestant women in Jacobean England, hoping to win their patronage.1 A critical debate has thus emerged around the degree to which Lanyer subverts orthodox theology to fashion herself as a poet before this audience. Does she advance a heterodox idea of grace that empowers women, perhaps anticipating the female prophets of the English Civil Wars?2 Or does she, like many of her male competitors for patronage, adopt an orthodox Calvinist ideal of “ungendered virtue” even as she challenged patriarchy in other ways?3 This debate has made Salve Deus a key text for exploring the relationship between grace, gender, and devotional poetry in this period. I argue that Lanyer understands grace according to two axes: she describes grace first as the gift that empowers women poets vis-­à-­v is male competitors, and second as the gift that allows marginalized women to challenge other women of higher status. In practice, these axes overlap frequently in Lanyer’s poetry, and she uses the tension between them to articulate her most provocative claims. Grace is therefore central to how 53

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Lanyer envisions the intersection of gendered and class-­based inequality as she asserts herself as a poet. Lanyer’s approach is distinct from that of her male competitors because she represents grace as a remedy for women’s inequality rather than for a generalized idea of original sin. Male devotional poets in this period, such as Abraham Fraunce, Giles Fletcher, and Nicholas Breton, routinely emphasized their sinfulness so as to argue that grace enabled them to write on biblical subject matter.4 The more insistently they bemoaned their depravity, the more assertively they laid claim to grace as their inspiration. Lanyer turns this argument on its head by suggesting it is women, not men, who are inspired by grace to write, because grace was necessary for them to overcome their exclusion from the advantages male poets enjoyed, such as access to a humanist education and to networks of patronage. By using grace to draw attention to the social context that enables poetry, Lanyer transforms the language of salvation into a way to imagine the limits of an abstract community of women. On the one hand, Lanyer underscores men’s guilt and responsibility for the most important sins of human history, such as the Crucifixion, while asserting that women have a special relationship to grace.5 This argument allows her to imagine a united community of women made up of herself, her desired patrons, various scriptural figures, and female martyrs, all of whom share a spiritual insight derived from grace.6 While this community poses a coherent alternative to men’s social and political dominance, it ultimately proves to be an unrealizable ideal because of the inequalities that divide Lanyer from the wealthy and powerful women from whom she desired patronage. In these moments of Salve Deus, the two axes of gender and social status converge on grace even when there is apparently no practical solution. In Salve Deus, therefore, grace provides a language with which to articulate not only an imagined community but also the gendered and class-­based limits that prevent Lanyer’s full inclusion in that community. The tensions within grace help explain the often-­noted tendency in Lanyer’s work to alternate from emphasizing the solidarity between women to the class divisions dividing her from wealthy patrons. In terms of the larger argument of this book, Lanyer’s poetry offers a gendered perspective on the Protestant humanist tendency to see grace as the source of poetic eloquence. Like Spenser, Cowley, and Milton, Lanyer

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explores the degree to which grace enables poetry on scripture. Unlike them, however, Lanyer highlights that while grace was ostensibly available to both genders equally, education and patronage were ordinarily available only to men. By emphasizing this discrepancy, Salve Deus opens up an ironic challenge to the poetic self-­fashioning explored elsewhere in this book. On the other hand, despite challenging men’s access to learning, Lanyer does not adopt a radical or heterodox theology that claims inspiration from the Spirit of God. Although critics have long recognized that Lanyer’s life and work were both religiously diverse, the rejection of learning in Salve Deus has encouraged some critics to read her ideas as a foreshadowing of seventeenth-­century antinomianism.7 As we shall see in later chapters, some antinomians did advance the equality of the genders under the Spirit while challenging the value of human learning, but this approach is different from Lanyer’s. Although Lanyer imagines a nonpatriarchal community of women as an alternative to the male-­dominated kingdoms of this world, she does not claim—­as many antinomians did—­that the Spirit inspires her as a passive instrument, or that her ideal community is realizable in practice. Lanyer and the Grieving Poets

Lanyer’s Salve Deus is part of a larger body of devotional poetry in which the poet grieved for Christ during the Crucifixion as the women of Jerusalem do in Luke 23:27. Scholarship has long noted the role of grief in authorizing women’s poetry, but the theological explanation for this poetic tendency is ultimately tied to the Calvinist suspicion of the human imagination.8 To understand why grief was so important for Lanyer and her competitors, it is first necessary to delve into parallel forms of self-­abnegating creativity, including translation. Poetic translations of scripture allowed poets to appease Calvinist concerns by grounding their own creations in the text of scripture. Translations of scripture went on to become essential, as we shall see, for Lanyer’s response to her competitors. Devotional poetry on scriptural subject matter was especially indebted to the metrical Psalm translations of Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke. Calvinist doctrine maintained that the effects of the Fall had corrupted the human imagination, thus making it doctrinally

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suspect to write creative poetry on scripture. Given that the original Psalms were poems and songs, however, translating them in verse was more legitimate. The Sidney-­Pembroke Psalter was a key example of a translation that adapted scriptural Psalms to secular English verse, thus blurring the line between human and divine creativity.9 Already in his A Defense of Poesy, Philip Sidney distinguishes between the “infected will” and the “erected wit,” thus insinuating, albeit guardedly, that the wit might be erected enough to write creative poetry on scripture.10 As Kim Coles has shown, Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke and Philip Sidney’s sister, probably published the Psalter alongside her brother’s Defence to demonstrate the link between his argument and her translations.11 John Donne praised the Psalter as an inspiration for preaching, but its true impact was on English devotional poetry.12 Along with du Bartas, the Psalter is now recognized as a key source for English “sacred poetry,” namely, creative poetry on scriptural subject matter.13 At the same time, the Psalter raised larger questions about the role of grace in poetic representation that became essential to later sacred poetry. A Psalm is the Word of God as dictated to David by the Holy Spirit, but a verse translation of that Psalm requires the human imagination to adapt God’s word creatively to a novel form and context.14 Does the human imagination collaborate with God in translating each Psalm? If it does, how does one resolve the tension between the creativity of the human poet and that of the divine poet? At stake in these questions was the broader principle of imitatio, or imitation, which underpinned the humanist pedagogical enterprise. Humanists imitated the classics by creatively adapting the style and unwritten principles of a text to new occasions, audiences, and forms in their historical present.15 This practice has been compared to an “equitable or spiritual imitation” because, like the equitable judge explored in the previous chapter, the humanist reader diverged from the letter of a given text to preserve its supposed intention and rhetorical context.16 Sidney’s Defense engages this view of imitation: “Poesy therefore is an arte of imitation; for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis [μίμησις], that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring foorth: to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture: with this end, to teach and delight.”17 Poetic imitation is a “counterfeit” insofar as it does not attempt exact verisimilitude, but it nevertheless teaches

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the intention of the original while delighting the imagination. Such an argument could be used to authorize a creative translation of David’s Psalms in original English verse, as demonstrated by the Sidney-­Pembroke Psalter. At the same time, Sidney is cautious in applying these ideas to scripture, because the sacredness of the subject matter naturally made counterfeits of any kind highly suspect and dangerously close to blasphemy. Later devotional poets were inspired by the Psalter to resolve the problem of the human imagination by appealing to grace as their inspiration for scriptural poetry. Sidney himself probably began to move away from orthodox Calvinist ideas on grace, but later poets turned to grace more explicitly as a remedy for the sin that makes the poetic imagination suspect.18 For example, in his preface to Christs victorie, and triumph in Heauen, and earth, ouer, and after death, Giles Fletcher insists that David is the fountain of sacred eloquence,19 and that poets have an obligation to imitate him by writing original poetry about scripture.20 Sensitive to the accusation of illegitimate counterfeiting, Fletcher acknowledges the sinfulness of his imagination and his need to be inspired by grace. Addressing divine mercy, he bemoans his style in language usually reserved for examining one’s conscience: “How may weake mortall euer hope to file / His vnsmooth tongue, and his deprostrate stile? / O raise thou from his corse, thy now entomb’d exile.”21 In the same way that the poet is a “corse” and “exile” in sin, his poetic style is “vnsmooth” and “deprostrate” and thus unfit to represent scripture in a way that disagrees with the text. Each time Fletcher flagellates himself this way, however, grace supplies the eloquence that is otherwise missing: Thy lippes, whear smiling sweetnesse keeps her home, And heau’nly Eloquence pure manna sipps, He that his pen but in that fountaine dipps, How nimbly will the golden phrases flie, And shed forth streames of choicest rhetorie, Welling celestiall torrents out of poesie?22 After the poet dips his pen, divine agency takes over: the “fountaine” becomes “streames of choicest rhetorie” and “celestiall torrents out of poesie” without any intervening verbs to suggest human effort, so that the “golden

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phrases flie” seemingly of their own accord. The rhyme between “dipps,” “sipps,” and Mercy’s “lippes” heightens the speaker’s dependency on grace further by suggesting that the poet’s only action, his dipping of the pen to write, originates in the unmerited grace from the “lippes” of Mercy without human contribution. Fletcher thus circumvents the problem of illegitimate imitation by suggesting that the poem is not really his own work but the work of grace working within him. A similar poetic self-­fashioning informs the work of other poets, including Abraham Fraunce and Nicholas Breton, who wrote creative poetry on scriptural subject matter in this period while assuming a position of grief. Kim Coles has demonstrated that the female mourner was a persona routinely taken up by Fletcher, Fraunce, and especially Breton, who competed with Lanyer for Pembroke’s patronage.23 Lanyer’s distinctive intervention is to emphasize that men’s monopoly on learning blinds them to grace. Women, by contrast, have a clearer perspective on grace because they are not as tied to worldly power. Like her competitors, Lanyer guards against the charge of presumption with the customary language of self-­indictment. However, what sets Lanyer apart from her male competitors is her tendency to blame the inadequacies of her sacred poetry not on sin, but on her lack of learning. This approach strikes at the Achilles’ heel of sacred poetry by revealing that it does not really depend on grace alone, but on the educated imagination. If grace inspires poets to write—­indeed compels them, if we take Fletcher’s metaphor seriously—­then why is learning, which is so necessary for writing the kind of poem that teaches and delights patrons, so unequally distributed in this world? To put it more simply, if sacred poetry is due to grace alone, why was it written only by educated men? These are the questions at the heart of Lanyer’s Salve Deus. The first volume of English poetry published by a woman calls attention to its author’s gender so as to reveal the hypocrisy of men when they attribute their learned poetry to grace rather than to their learning. The significance of the volume is important not only for what it tells us about gender, but also because it shows us what gender reveals about grace and its role in mapping salvation onto the cultural capital of a humanist. Like her competitors, however, Lanyer does not state her most profound insights as arguments, but rather conveys them in her representation of the

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origins and effects of sin and grace. If Fletcher, Fraunce, and Breton describe sin as an indwelling curse that eats at the conscience, Lanyer describes it as a social structure that makes women’s poetry invisible. For example, Lanyer echoes these poets in emphasizing the cowardice and depravity of the men around Jesus, including the apostles: “Though they protest they never will forsake him, / They do like men, when dangers overtake them” (631–­32). Joseph of Arimathea becomes the first man to sympathize with Christ at the end of Lanyer’s poem. Before he does so, however, the only persons who sympathize with Jesus are women: Mary, the wife of Pilate, and the daughters of Jerusalem in Luke 23:27–­28. The daughters of Jerusalem resist the procession of sin during the Passion: First went the Crier with open mouth proclayming The heavy sentence of Iniquitie, The Hangman next, by his base office clayming His right in Hell, where sinners never die, Carrying the nayles, the people still blaspheming Their maker, using all impiety; The Thieves attending him on either side, The Serjeants watching while the women cri’d.

(961–­68)24

The passage begins with “First,” a word that predisposes us to read the ensuing scene as a list. The stanza then appears to fulfil this expectation as it lists a procession of men who are either “proclayming” the “heavy sentence of Iniquitie” or “watching” it as voyeurs. The reader is also watching, and the final line establishes an uncomfortable parallel between the aesthetic experience of reading the poem and the “Serjeants.” Are we not, like them, watching and doing nothing? At the very end of the last line, however, Lanyer adds a phrase that retroactively changes the whole stanza: “while the women cri’d.” “While” is a key word because it suggests that the women have been crying all along, but they have been invisible and inaudible as we move from “First” to last. What appeared to be a universal image of sin turns out to be a multilayered portrait of social stratification. What appeared to be a list of the order of being, from top to bottom, turns out to be a sinful perspective on worldly hierarchy that allows sinners to come first. The women are in the

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background and at the bottom, unseen and unheard by the men and by the reader—­yet stubbornly present. These multiple, female criers offer the only alternative to the Crier in the foreground. Why turn to the women in a half line at the bottom, as if in an afterthought? Part of Lanyer’s point is that these women are an afterthought—­ not only for the men in the Passion, but also for poetry about the Passion. Lanyer sees them, and she eventually invites us to see them too, but first we must learn how easily the fallen imagination makes them invisible. To borrow Stanley Fish’s phrase, Lanyer makes her reader surprised by sin in order to teach the metapoetic insight that poetry can obscure as well as illuminate.25 By calling attention to the gendered hierarchies in a conventional Crucifixion scene, Lanyer refuses to treat the women’s weeping as a metaphor for the gender-­neutral soul of the poet, as many of her immediate competitors did. In the Blessed Weeper, for example, Breton presents his poem as analogues to the tears of Mary Magdalene as she weeps for Christ.26 Echoing Luke 20:15–­16, Breton imagines Christ to be moved by Mary Magdalene’s tears: “He felt my teares, though no man heard my weeping, / And gaue me grace.”27 Breton frames his own poem as a form of weeping in verse, thus soliciting the same grace that Mary Magdalene did.28 While critics have described gender as “fluid” in Breton’s poem, Lanyer reveals that this fluidity obscures what women really did during the Crucifixion.29 The reason they could not stop the soldiers, according to her account in Salve Deus, is that their weeping is not simply a metaphor for poetry, but a response to a real event that they had no power to prevent.30 The “criers” at the bottom of the passage place an ethical demand on the reader to re-­read the stanza from the beginning, this time with the knowledge that the Crier is silencing these women in the same way that male poets do by treating them only as metaphors. A few stanzas later Lanyer makes these ideas clearer by suggesting that the women of Jerusalem preempt the Passion by attempting to save their savior. They fail only because men have excluded them from power: When spitefull men with torments did oppresse Th’afflicted body of this innocent Doue, Poore women seeing how much they did transgresse,

Grace, Gender, and Patronage in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer

By teares, by sighs, by cries, intreate, nay proue, What may be done among the thickest presse, They labour still these tyrants hearts to moue: In pitie and compassion to forbeare

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(993–­99)

Male activity is summed up by one verb, “oppresse,” while the women “intreate, nay proue” and, following the rhyme, “labour . . . to moue” against sin. What stands out in this description is the breadth and scope of weeping as a kind of “labour” that seeks to move, entreat, and petition for the salvation of the savior. Far from treating the women’s weeping as a metaphor for human guilt in general, Lanyer suggests that tears and poetry are forms of rhetoric, the “labour . . . to moue.” The reason Lanyer and the daughters of Jerusalem do not succeed is that women are excluded from the effective use of public rhetoric. As a result, the sin that Lanyer emphasizes throughout the poem dwells not within the human imagination in general, but in the patriarchal social structures that exclude and repress women. The most important social structure that obscures women is men’s monopoly on learning, and it is here that Lanyer most often draws on grace as a challenge to men. The clerics who accuse Jesus are characterized by a form of learning that is bereft of grace: “Yet could their learned Ignorance apprehend / No light of grace, to free themselues from blame” (546–­47). The paradox of “learned Ignorance” invites the reader to consider how learning obscures truth when it is tied to worldly power structures that repress both Christ and women. To drive home the point, she contrasts Jesus’s weakness to male strength: “their strengths, they bend / Against one siely, weake, vnarmed man” (550–­51). Jesus is a man, but the adjectives that distinguish him here—­“siely, weake, vnarmed”—­characterize Lanyer and her poetry: she writes “siely lines” (277), fruits of a “poore barren Braine” (267). As we have seen, other poets, including Fletcher and Breton, were happy to castigate worldly learning and identify themselves with biblical women rather than the men of the Passion, but what distinguishes Lanyer is her refusal to turn scriptural women into metaphors. By drawing attention to her own material situation and that of the biblical women of Jerusalem, Lanyer suggests that men have a monopoly on learning that makes them ignorant of grace.

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When Lanyer adopts the position of Mary Magdalene, she emphasizes more explicitly than Breton and other poets the contrast between the daughters of Jerusalem and the male apostles. In an earlier part of the poem, she argues that Peter fails to “climb” through faith: “But yet poore Peter, he was most too blame, / That thought aboue them all; by Faith to clime” (355–­ 56). The daughters of Jerusalem, on the other hand, climb successfully: Most blessed Daughters of Jerusalem, Who found such favor in your Saviours sight, To turne his face when you did pitie him; Your tearefull eyes beheld his eyes more bright; Your Faith and Loue vnto such grace did clime, To have reflection from this Heav’nly light

(985–­90)

Peter’s mistake is to assume, as men are wont to do in this poem, that knowledge of God involves an ascent from ignorance to knowledge. The women have a more complicated relationship with knowledge that reflects the paradoxes of grace. The line “To turne his face when you did pitie him” raises a question: when did the Savior turn his face—­before they pitied him, after, or at the same time? The word “when” does not establish clear temporal boundaries, so that it is not clear who sees whom for how long. We are left not with an orthodox order of priority—­grace first, human effort second—­but with a mystical encounter unmoored from time and language: “Your tearefull eyes beheld his eyes more bright.” The verb “beheld” is in the past tense, but one could argue that the women and Christ are still beholding each other, because the scene is governed by the temporally ambiguous “when,” which does not indicate if this act of beholding has concluded. These women’s relationship to grace seems to transcend time and place. By the next line, “Your Faith and Loue vnto such grace did clime,” time and agency have been so thoroughly defamiliarized that there is no clear difference between climbing up and climbing down. To climb “vnto such grace” means not only to climb from ignorance to knowledge but also to climb down into vulnerability, to make oneself observable, naked, lowly. Unlike Peter, the women know that to ascend is to descend because, like the Christ whose grace they reflect, they are partly invisible in the kingdom of this world.

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It is now possible to return to the debate around Lanyer’s relationship to orthodox Calvinism. On the one hand, what could be more orthodox than to say that humanist learning can distort revealed truth as well as illuminate it, that the human imagination is not to be trusted, and that those who write poetry about the Passion are likely distorting scripture? English Calvinist men did write this kind of poetry, however, and when they did so, they subjected their ostensibly orthodox appeals to grace to the ironies of representation. Grace is supposed to be an unearned, unmerited gift that flows through the poet as a passive recipient, yet the more insistently poets attributed their poetry to grace, the more visible became their ambition to be praised and recognized for their creativity as poets. Lanyer’s poetry foregrounds this problem by revealing that the worldly privileges that make poetry possible, such as education and patronage, are not available to women on the same grounds as grace. The Grace of Patronage

By presenting religious grace as women’s compensation for their worldly weakness, Lanyer seems to undermine her own bid for patronage. Would patronage not make Lanyer less marginalized than before and thus, ironically, less able to draw on religious grace to write? The possibility is not taken seriously in Salve Deus, however, because Lanyer was likely pessimistic about her ability to receive support from the likes of Cumberland, as we shall see further in “The Description of Cooke-­ham.” Even if she were to be successful, any financial support would not be sufficient to transform the long-­standing inequalities, such as educational disparity, that Lanyer holds responsible for the disempowerment of women. The material conditions in which Lanyer frames Salve Deus explain what would otherwise be a contradiction in her poetry. The tension between seeking patronage and emphasizing marginalization is clearest in the dedicatory poems that introduce Salve Deus. In these poems, Lanyer applies the arguments reserved for the women of Jerusalem to describe herself as a woman poet. She urges a series of aristocratic women to show her patronage because she lacks sufficient poetic skill and learning due to her gendered marginalization. This kind of patronage will resemble

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religious grace, she argues, because it would break the circular, mutually reinforcing economy that ordinarily joined privileged, learned, and male poets to their rich, male patrons.31 Lanyer uses language of religious grace to seek a different kind of gift—­the metaphorical grace of patronage—­from aristocratic women. To further accentuate the solidarity between women in this imagined community, she imagines grace through a series of distinctly feminine metaphors centered on marriage, childbirth, and fertility, which connect this dedicatory material to the core metaphors in the body of Salve Deus. Lanyer’s biography suggests that Salve Deus was written and circulated in the hope of securing financial support.32 Born into a family of Italian Jewish musicians, Lanyer enjoyed some favor at court during her youth as the mistress of Lord Hunsdon.33 During this time she may have had received some education, because she later attempted to alleviate her financial problems by founding a school for girls.34 She may also have come into contact with some of the aristocratic women addressed in Salve Deus, though she likely exaggerated her connections.35 Her fortunes declined after she became pregnant with Hunsdon’s child and was married off to Alfonso Lanyer, another court musician.36 In a bid to restore these connections, she devoted much of the Salve Deus and The Description of Cooke-­ham to celebrating a series of desired patrons, reserving her highest praise for the wealthy Countess of Cumberland, but her efforts were unsuccessful. The thinly veiled criticisms and complaints woven throughout her poetry, particularly the end of her volume, cast doubt on whether she expected to succeed in the first place.37 This underlying pessimism is also visible in the dedicatory sonnets, where she repeatedly seeks patronage as an unmerited grace. The central argument of the dedicatory poems is that Lanyer’s relative lowliness and lack of learning are paradoxically what make her worthy of patronage because sacred poetry is incompatible with worldly merit. In her prefatory address to Cumberland, Lanyer claims that God “giueth grace to the meanest & most unworthy hand that will vndertake to write thereof.”38 By presenting herself as the “meanest & most unworthy” among poets, she claims that she is more worthy of religious grace and, so she hopes, the metaphorical “grace” of financial support. Her references to her gender lend further credence to this argument by foregrounding her competitive dis-

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advantage in relation to male poets. The dedicatory poems thus draw an analogy between divine grace and patronage so as to argue that aristocratic women should elevate fellow women to a poetic vocation.39 Lanyer advances this argument by contrasting women’s humility to the presumption of learned, male poets. In the dedicatory poem to the Countess of Dorset, for example, she contrasts her own humility to those who rely exclusively on poetic merit: Blest by our Sauiors merits, not my skil, Which I acknowledge to be very small; Yet if the least part of his blessed Will I haue perform’d, I count I have done all: (“To the Ladie Anne,” 9–­12) The rhyme between her insufficient “skil” and the divine “will” emphasizes the gulf between human weakness and the will of God. This confession of imaginative insufficiency was equally pronounced, as we have seen, in the work of Breton, Fraunce, and Fletcher, but Lanyer insists that her lack of skill is due to her marginalization as a woman rather than any sense of original sin in all people. This insistent foregrounding of the social context asks the patron to make her grace change the practical balance of power inhibiting a female poet. To further strengthen this gendered appeal, Lanyer represents grace through a series of metaphors centering on fertility and marriage. These metaphors attempt to create a degree of intimacy and shared experience between herself and women of vastly superior social status. She argues that the Passion, for example, is “A Matter farre beyond my barren skill” (313), but divine grace, coupled with the patronage of a fellow woman, can remedy this barrenness and provide her the metaphorical fertility needed to write. She later turns to scriptural accounts of marriage to reinforce this point. In the poem to Dorset, she continues with an allusion to the Parable of the Ten Virgins in Matt. 25:1–­13: One sparke of grace sufficient is to fill Our Lampes with oyle, ready when he doth call

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To enter with the Bridegroome to the feast, Where he that is the greatest may be least. (“To the Ladie Anne,” 9–­16) Part of Lanyer’s point is that her male competitors have dispensed with the “sparke of grace,” like the foolish virgins in the Parable of the Ten Virgins in Matt. 25:1–­13, by expecting a reward for their merit and learning, whereas Lanyer awaits grace with the patient humility of the wise virgins. At the same time, the allusion to the parable also introduces marriage as a feminine metaphor for grace, thus reminding Dorset of the experiences they share as women despite their vast difference in the social hierarchy. Later, she conveys this shared experience by tracing women’s origin to Eden: “All sprang but from one woman and one man, / Then how doth Gentry come to rise and fall?” (35–­36).40 Lanyer does not wish to abolish the gentry, of course, but she does wish to remind her patrons that they are all daughters of “one woman,” Eve, and are like her expected to be mothers and wives. This language of childbirth, marriage, and fertility foreshadows themes that are later taken up in the body of Salve Deus and in “The Description of Cooke-­ham.” In the prefatory poems, the same metaphors amplify the connections between the poet and her desired patrons, as well as their shared differences from Lanyer’s male competitors. The key argument in these poems, therefore, is that female patrons should bestow their grace on a fellow woman notwithstanding her supposed lack of learning and poetic skill relative to male poets. This contrast between grace and education mirrors arguments developed in the body of the Salve Deus, where Lanyer explicitly castigates men for their hypocritical hoarding of learned books: “Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke / From Eues faire hand, as from a learned Booke” (807–­8). While Adam takes knowledge freely from Eve, his descendants exclude women from equal access to education. In the dedicatory poems, Lanyer foreshadows these arguments and applies them to herself in order to argue for a shared experience of womanhood. The most explicit contrast between male learning and women’s creativity appears in the poem to the queen: Not that I Learning to my selfe assume, Or that I would compare with any man:

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But as they are Scholers, and by Art do write, So Nature yeelds my Soule a sad delight. And since all Arts at first from Nature came, That goodly Creature, Mother of Perfection, Whom Joves almighty hand at first did frame, Taking both her and hers in his protection: Why should not She now grace my barren Muse, And in a Woman all defects excuse. (“To the Queenes,” 146–­56) Lanyer’s lack of “Learning” makes her unable to “compare with any man,” particularly male “Scholers” who “by Art do write.” Precisely because she is unlearned and “barren” in this masculine art, however, her poetry is more fit for a distinctly female fertility deriving from the feminized figure of Nature. Critics have noted the separation of artifice and nature in this metaphor, but there is more to this passage than this conventional contrast.41 Nature “grace[s]” Lanyer’s “barren Muse,” so the binary in the passage is not only between nature and art, but also between a grace and art, while grace is coded feminine by its association with fertility and the maternal figure of Nature. As elsewhere in Salve Deus, Lanyer mediates grace through feminine metaphors so as to narrow the gap between women of different social station. The main body of Salve Deus returns to these metaphors to envision an imagined community of women. Poetry as a Faithful Straying

Like the dedicatory poems, the body of Salve Deus suggests that women have a special relationship with grace as a result of their marginalization in this world. Lanyer imagines herself to be part of a community of women who see Christ more clearly than men do, thus authorizing her poetry. Grace, she argues, empowers her as a woman poet to revise the letter of scripture so as to articulate its intended meaning. As we have seen, this was an overriding concern for sacred poets who took poetic license with scripture, but Lanyer distinguishes herself by offering a gendered perspective on the issue. Her solution is implicit in the title, Salve Deus, Rex Iudaeorum, which

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means “Hail God, King of the Jews” and revises the taunt of the soldiers torturing Jesus, “Hail, King of the Jews” (Mark 15:18).42 As Janel Mueller has noted, Lanyer’s insertion of the word “Deus,” meaning “God,” transforms the soldiers’ insult into a sincere celebration of Christ as the true God.43 Lanyer’s point, which is fully developed in the body of the poem, is that women see the divinity of Christ more clearly than men do, and are thus able to revise the letter of scripture to illustrate its true meaning—­in this case, by turning a taunt into sincere praise. The spiritual clear-­sightedness that women receive from grace authorizes them to revise scripture and rewrite the Passion. When she discusses why she strays from the text of scripture, Lanyer emphasizes the paradox of grace as a form of creativity and agency that is paradoxically actualized in an attitude of submissiveness. On the one hand, she prays for grace and attributes all authority to God: “I humbly for his Grace will pray, / That he will give me Power and Strength to Write” (297–­98). Lanyer does not use grace simply to reproduce doctrine or scripture, however, but to stray from the written text so as to capture its intended meaning: Yea in these Lines I may no further stray, Than his most holy Spirit shall giue me Light: That blindest Weakenesse be not over-­bold, The manner of his Passion to vnfold. In other Phrases than may well agree With his pure Doctrine, and most holy Writ, That Heavens cleare eye, and all the World may see, I seeke his Glory, rather than to get The Vulgars breath, the seed of Vanitie

(301–­9)

Lanyer appears at first to be apologizing for writing “in other Phrases” than those of “holy Writ” as understood in church “Doctrine,” but the rest of the stanza clarifies that this is not an apology as much as a declaration of poetic intent. Like other sacred poets in the tradition of the Sidney Psalter, Lanyer claims that an exact reproduction of scripture would fail to capture its inner meaning. Lanyer thus intends to use grace to unfold the Passion’s inner meaning as it was revealed to women. The rest of the poem builds on

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this argument by maintaining that women derive a special kind of clear-­ sightedness from grace that makes them see Christ more clearly than men. At first glance, Lanyer’s argument for creativity seems to anticipate the radicalism of the English Revolution and even, as some critics have argued, the poetry of John Milton. Guibbory argues that “like the women prophets during the English Revolution and like Milton in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Lanyer invokes divine inspiration, hence insisting on divine authority for what she will speak.”44 For John C. Ulreich and Kari Boyd McBride, Lanyer foreshadows Milton’s claim that the Spirit speaks to him independently of scripture: “For the claim to be truly inspired (not merely guided) by the Holy Spirit, as the prophets were who spoke and wrote the original Scriptures, carries with it an affirmation that is finally self-­authorizing.”45 By attributing to Lanyer the radicalism of a later period, however, these critics elide the degree to which Lanyer builds her case on her larger challenge to men’s privileged access to education. As we shall see in chapter 5, Milton often takes his own education and social privilege for granted. The passage from Milton’s The Reason of Church-­Government that Ulreich and McBride cite as proof continues: “if the Athenians, as some say, made their small deeds grat and renowned by their eloquent writers, England hath had her noble atchievments made small by the unskilfull handling of monks and mechanicks.”46 Milton’s patrician distaste for the “unskilfull” hands of “mechanicks” could not be further in spirit and tone from Lanyer’s insistence, both in her dedicatory poems and the body of Salve Deus, that she embodies “blindest Weakness” because she lacks an elite education. The opposition Lanyer draws between “Spirit” and “Doctrine” is not a claim to antinomian inspiration, but a criticism of the learning and social privilege that blinds men, both in their poetry and religious dogma, to the insight of women. Insofar as she appeals to the Holy Spirit as compensation for insufficient learning, it is true that Lanyer comes closer to the radical prophets of the Civil War than Milton does, yet this analogy is incomplete because her criticism centers on the “Vanitie” of scholarship that is not universally available. Lanyer’s goal is not to declare herself the mouthpiece of the Spirit, but to challenge the social barriers and material conditions that prevent women poets from writing creatively about scripture.

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The clearest examples where Lanyer advances this gendered understanding of poetic authority are her descriptions of the daughters of Jerusalem, the wife of Pilate, the Virgin Mary, and the Countess of Cumberland. As she praises this imagined community of “good women,” Lanyer explains that what makes them “good” is not virtue or learning, but their self-­effacement and openness to grace.47 Aligning herself alongside these women, Lanyer argues that she has special insight into Christ and his teaching because she is disempowered in comparison to the men who dominate this world. Cumberland was of course the richest woman in England and thus hardly powerless, and Lanyer does acknowledge, as we shall see at the end of the volume, the class hierarchies that make lasting friendship between them impossible. For much of the body of Salve Deus, however, Lanyer suspends these doubts so as to project on her desired patron the privileged insight that she claims for herself. The exaggerated praise for Cumberland is not only part of Lanyer’s bid for patronage, but also a strategic way to elevate women’s poetry, including her own poetry, above the authority of the clergy. While the persecutors of Christ are spiritually blind, the Countess’s “Eagles eyes behold the glorious Sunne / Of th’all-­creating Providence” (25–­26). Grace grants the Countess spiritual vision: “And thou (deere Ladie) by his speciall grace, / In these his creatures dost behold his face” (31–­32). “Speciall grace” alludes to saving grace that belongs to the Calvinist elect, but the Countess’s grace is also “speciall” because it is rare. Like Moses in Ex. 33:11, she “behold[s] [God’s] face.” Grace enables a face-­to-­face intimacy with God that parallels the social intimacy Lanyer desires with her patrons. Saving grace blends with the social graces of politeness, which allows unequal persons to converse with their superiors as friends. Men are excluded from this imagined community not only because they are predisposed to sin, as their violence in the Passion illustrates, but also because they are less receptive to the Spirit as a result of their attachment to social privileges in this world. Cumberland’s clear insight into Christ reverberates throughout the poem as the ideal against which Lanyer measures her own poetic authority. The daughters of Jerusalem share Cumberland’s face-­to-­face intimacy with God:” “Thrice happy women that obtaind such grace / From him whose worth the world could not containe; / Immediately to turne about his face” (969–­71). Christ bestows grace to the women by engaging them in a face-­

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to-­face conversation, mirroring the intimacy the Countess enjoyed. While Cumberland’s “Eagles eyes behold the glorious Sunne” of Providence, the same metaphor describes how the daughters of Jerusalem behold the “Sunne”—­and Son—­of God: “Your Eagles eies did gaze against this Sunne” (991). Lanyer has the same “powrefull Grace” that enables her to see how “his Glory shines” in verse (290, 292). Thus understood, grace is a social leveler that enables Lanyer, Cumberland, and the women of Jerusalem to see Christ in a similar way despite their vast differences in status. As different as they are otherwise, they share an experience of gendered marginalization that invites the inspiration of grace. By bestowing this praise on Cumberland and the daughters of Jerusalem, Lanyer also departs widely from the text of scripture. The Gospel passage describing Jesus’s words to the women of Jerusalem is in fact a stark warning for all humankind: “But Jesus turned back unto them, and said, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For behold, the days will come, when men shall say, Blessed are the barren” (Luke 23:28). Lanyer transforms this warning into a sign of grace and divine love: Your cries inforced mercie, grace, and love From him, whom greatest Princes could not mooue To speake on[e] word, nor once to lift his eyes Vnto proud Pilate, no nor Herod, king By all the Questions that they could devise, Could make him answer to no manner of thing; Yet these poore women, by their piteous cries Did moove their Lord, their Lover, and their King

(975–­82)

The warning in the scriptural source remains for the men of the Passion, such as “Pilate,” “Herod, king,” and the other men who torture Jesus. But there is no warning for the women, who see Christ truly and receive unqualified “mercie, grace, and love.” Lanyer ranges from the letter of Luke 23:28 to emphasize this gendered distinction, but she presents her interpretation as part of Christ’s intention.

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In her representation of the Virgin Mary, Lanyer continues to revise scripture so as to idealize the poverty of the women around Jesus and their special connection to grace. Her representation of Mary is based on the Magnificat in Luke 1:46–­48: “Then Mary said, My soul magnifieth the Lord, And my spirit rejoiceth in God my Savior. For he hath looked on the poor degree of his servant: for behold, from henceforth shall all ages call me blessed” (Luke 1:46–­48). McBride and Ulreich argue that “by paraphrasing the Magnificat in her own voice, Lanyer becomes herself the messenger of God.”48 Lanyer offers not a paraphrase, however, as much as a reinterpretation of Mary’s spiritual insight and its implications for other women. For example, she highlights Mary’s poverty: “Poverty and Riches met together, / The wealth of Heaven, in our fraile clothing wrought” (114–­15). While scripture states that Mary “magnifieth the Lord,” in Lanyer’s poem it is the Lord that magnifies Mary: For the Almightie magnified thee, And looked downe upon thy meane estate; Thy lowly mind, and unstain’d Chastitie, Did pleade for Loue at great Iehouaes gate

(1033–­36)

Mary’s “meane estate” and “lowly mind” “plead for Loue” from God, moving him to bestow grace and magnify her above her meanness. This plea is answered in the next stanza, where Lanyer adapts Gabriel’s words in Luke 1:28: “He thus beganne, Haile Mary full of grace, / Thou freely art beloued of the Lord” (1041–­42). While the line is scriptural, Mary’s lowliness echoes Lanyer’s self-­fashioning earlier in the poem as an impoverished woman, thus suggesting that the same grace blooms in Lanyer as in Mary, and for the same reasons.49 The most creative revision of scripture in Salve Deus is Lanyer’s expansion of the words of Pilate’s wife into a full-­fledged apology for Eve and for all women after her. In the scriptural source, Pilate’s wife makes no specific comments on gender and focuses instead on her dream about Jesus: “When he was set down on the judgment seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him” (Matt. 27:19). In Lanyer’s version, Pilate’s

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wife launches into a wide-­ranging discussion of gender. She argues that if the Crucifixion goes ahead, it will be such a gross misuse of power that it will invalidate men’s authority over women: Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny? If one weake woman simply did offend, This sinne of yours hath no excuse, nor end.

(829–­32)

As the most direct and extensive challenge to patriarchy in Salve Deus, these lines have generated extensive critical commentary.50 Lanyer’s argument is that patriarchy was once legitimate as punishment for Eve’s role in the Fall, but it became obsolete after men abused that power in the Crucifixion. Men’s power belongs, like the Law of Moses, to a pre-­Messianic time that no longer binds Christians.51 As a result, while grace liberates the godly in general from the burden of sin and from bondage to the letter of the law, it should offer women the additional gift of social and political liberty, making them “equals, free from tyranny” (830). One implication in Lanyer’s apology for Eve is that men’s monopoly over learning enables “sinne.” Pilate’s wife suggests that the Fall was due to two different approaches to knowledge: “If Eve did erre, it was for knowledge sake, / The fruit beeing faire perswaded him to fall: / No subtill Serpents falshood did betray him” (797–­99). In other words, Eve wished for knowledge, so her desire is less culpable in light of the fact that men have jealously guarded knowledge since the Fall. In fact, by sharing her knowledge with Adam, Eve becomes the first teacher in history: “[Adam] tooke / From Eues faire hand, as from a learned Booke” (807–­8). According to this bold rewriting of the Fall, the heaviest sin is not Eve’s desire for knowledge, but men’s refusal to imitate Eve in sharing knowledge equally. Lanyer’s praise for Cumberland extends this contrast between grace and learning to a broader contrast of the clergy. She praises Cumberland as a female priest whose spiritual clear-­sightedness is superior to that of the learned clergy in the same way that Lanyer’s poetry is superior to that of her competitors.52 Cumberland’s “special grace” opens the face of God to other women, including would-­be poets like Lanyer: “Thy faith, thy prayers, and

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his speciall grace / Doth open Heau’n, where thou behold’st his face” (1367–­ 68). Cumberland’s effect on women poets is similar to that of the priestly power represented in St. Peter’s keys: These are those Keyes Saint Peter did possesse, Which with a Spirituall powre are giv’n to thee, To heale the soules of those that doe transgresse, By thy faire virtues; which, if once they see, Unto the like they doe their minds addresse, Such as thou art, such they desire to be: If they be blind, thou giv’st to them their sight; If deafe or lame, they heare, and goe upright.

(1369–­76)

Cumberland’s prayers, praise, and grace are the true keys of Saint Peter that were traditionally—­and, Lanyer suggests, mistakenly—­attributed to the clergy, who were of course exclusively male.53 The rest of the stanza suggests that Cumberland is superior to actual clergymen because her ministry does not consider class or gender. She mediates grace to the “blind” and “lame,” empowering those who seek to imitate her “faire virtues” regardless of their social station. The poet draws her own poetic authority from this aristocratic woman, whose effect on her poetic vocation is virtually messianic. Lanyer learns from Cumberland how to “goe upright,” deriving “Spirituall powre” and all the other fruits of grace, including the authority to write this praise. If men hoard their books and refuse knowledge to women, Cumberland shares her virtues with aspiring female poets like Lanyer, sharing her gifts as generously as Eve without any of the sin traditionally attributed to her. In each of these descriptions of inspired women, Lanyer changes the scriptural text to highlight women’s special relationship to grace. The justification for this poetic license is ultimately Cumberland’s spiritual insight, because the poet models her own authority over texts on that of her desired patron. In the same way that Cumberland sees beyond patriarchal social structures to authorize Lanyer’s poetry rather than that of her competitors, so Lanyer sees beyond the letter of scripture and accreted dogma to derive its spiritual meaning, which tends to celebrate women in general and Cum-

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berland in particular. The more assertively Lanyer praises Cumberland, the more praise is mediated back to her via the community of women centered on this desired patron. Salve Deus never allows its reader to forget, however, that this imagined community is an ideal that the poet, anxious as she is about patronage, inhabits only precariously. At the end of the volume, the limits of this ideal become increasingly clear as the poet turns toward her feelings of isolation. Grace and Aristocratic Condescension in “The Description of Cooke-­ham”

“The Description of Cooke-­ham,” the country-­house poem at the end of Salve Deus, interrogates the limits of the community explored earlier in the volume. Cumberland is no longer a female priest uniting all pious women in Christian history, but rather a limited human being who is forced by circumstances beyond her control to leave the estate at Cookham, forcing Lanyer to question the basis of her poetic vocation. The change in tone is clear from the opening lines: “Farewell (sweet Cooke-­ham) where I first obtain’d / Grace from that Grace where perfit Grace remain’d” (1–­2). In contrast with the main body of Salve Deus, where grace is an ever-­present gift uniting women in a mystical community across vast tracts of time, “Cooke-­ham” begins by shifting to the past tense: grace was “obtain’d” at “Cooke-­ham,” but it also “remain’d” there, locked away from the poet in an accessible past. The grace obtained by Lanyer was Cumberland’s encouragement to write in their previous meeting on the estate. Lanyer references this moment both in her prefatory writing and in “Cooke-­ham”: “Yet you (great Lady) Mistris of that Place, / From whose desires did spring this worke of Grace” (11–­22).54 Once again, Cumberland inspires poetry with the same freedom that God inspires good works, but her subsequent abandonment of the estate is for Lanyer a traumatic withdrawal of grace. “Cooke-­ham” thus uses the vocabulary of salvation to interrogate the breakdown of the community imagined earlier in Salve Deus. Although Lanyer frames Cumberland’s time in Cooke-­ham in religious language, the real reasons for her stay and subsequent departure were more prosaic. As Jessica L. Malay has argued, Cumberland was probably

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in Cooke-­ham, an estate rented by her brother, in 1604 during a period of financial difficulty and estrangement from her husband, George Clifford.55 Cumberland may well have supported Lanyer’s poetic ambitions during her stay, but she and her daughter left after their finances improved. The death of her husband in 1605 then initiated a protracted legal battle to ensure Anne’s inheritance, making a return unlikely.56 Lanyer tactfully avoids mentioning these details at length, preferring instead to idealize Cumberland’s period in Cookham with biblical imagery. Her emphasis on grace and the transformation of the natural world were likely meant as compliments to Cumberland’s Puritan values and alchemical interests.57 The second half of “Cooke-­ham,” however, casts a bitter light on the social gulf separating Lanyer from Cumberland, prompting critics to debate why Lanyer seems to withdraw from the idealized sisterhood of Salve Deus. One explanation is the genre: “Cooke-­ham” is among the earliest country house poems in English, predating Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” by five years, and class is central to this genre. The two poems are as a result frequently compared. Marshall Grossman, for example, argues that the breakdown of female community in “Cooke-­ham” reveals the patriarchal basis of property law, which is usually hidden by country house poems such as “Penshurst.”58 For Ann Baynes Coiro, on the other hand, “Cooke-­ham” resembles “Penshurst” in revealing the poet’s insecurity relative to a wealthier patron, thus separating Lanyer from the likes of Cumberland.59 Before discussing social stratification in “Cooke-­ham,” however, it is first necessary to grasp the degree to which grace bridges class distinctions in the beginning of the poem. This approach allows Lanyer to transform Cumberland’s departure into a reflection on the precariousness of women poets, which fits with the larger themes of Salve Deus. Her approach resembles what Paul Stevens describes as “graceful condescension,” namely, the tendency to describe the self-­lowering of social superiors in the language of salvation.60 A key example is Book 7 of Paradise Lost, when Adam thanks Raphael for visiting his humble home: “This friendly condescension to relate / Things else by me unsearchable” (8.9–­10). As Stevens explains, “what Adam means by ‘condescension’ is the extraordinary grace Raphael shows in appearing to dispense with hierarchy and treating Adam and Eve as though they were his equals . . . ‘condescension’ is a manifestation of the way God’s

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grace can animate and transform social relations.”61 Lanyer’s “Cooke-­ham” anticipates this later use of grace to discuss the apparent equality that emerges when nobles condescend to converse with social inferiors. Cumberland’s willingness to lower herself in this way graces Lanyer, authorizing her vocation as a poet and giving her a glimpse of a second Eden. The key difference, however, is that Lanyer’s poem describes this idyllic situation only to highlight the depth of her subsequent fall into social stratification after Cumberland leaves. Grace thus provides Lanyer not only with the means through which to idealize a community of women, but also with the vocabulary through which to challenge the social hierarchies that make such a community unrealizable in practice. For much of “Cooke-­ham,” Cumberland condescends toward social inferiors in a way that evokes some of the most messianic images in scripture. The landscape of Cookham is graced when Cumberland steps on it: The very Hills right humbly did descend, When you to tread vpon them did intend. And as you set your feete, they still did rise, Glad that they could receiue so rich a prise.

(35–­38)

The rising and falling of the hills is a metaphor for class relationships on the estate. As the hills “descend” to be “tread vpon” by Cumberland, their prostration enables them to “rise” into an unmerited intimacy. The description of the natural world continues to emphasize this paradox: “Each Arbor, Banke, each Seate, each stately Tree, / Thought themselves honor’d i[n] supporting thee” (45–­46). Servants are implicit in the grace shown to the household: “The House receiv’d all ornaments to grace it, / And would indure no foulenesse to deface it” (19–­20). The winds and woods are similarly “grac’d” by the aristocrat’s presence, and the “cristall Streames” are “with siluer spangles graced” (27). By describing Cookham as ennobled in prostration, Lanyer translates the Protestant language of salvation, with its emphasis on the insufficiency of human merit, to the social relations at Cooke-­ham. As in the body of Salve Deus, Cumberland’s willingness to elevate inferiors is due to her ability to see beyond class relationships into the conscience.

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This power is clearest in the description of Cumberland’s favorite oak, which stands tall on the estate in contrast to the “Hills, vales, and woods” that are “as if on bended knee” (68).62 The oak is a metaphor for the godly, because the contrast between it and the rest of nature alludes to Psalm 92, where the cedars of Lebanon (Psalm 92:12–­13) are compared to fast-­g rowing grass (Psalm 92:7).63 Lanyer follows the imagery of Psalm 92 closely: That Oake that did in height his fellowes passe, As much as lofty trees, low growing grasse: Much like a comely Cedar streight and tall, Whose beauteous stature farre exceeded all: How often did you visite this faire tree, Which seeming joyfull in receiuing thee, Would like a Palme tree spread his armes abroad, Desirous that you there should make abode

(55–­62)

The oak’s resemblance to a “cedar” and a “palme” echoes the righteous in the psalm, thus illustrating that Cumberland’s love for the oak reflects her broader condescension to the godly as equals in spirit regardless of their place on the social hierarchy. The imagery presents Cooke-­ham as an idealized space in which one’s position is determined by conscience, not birth or wealth. Given everything Lanyer has already said throughout Salve Deus about her lack of sufficient wealth, learning, or merit, the oak signals what she herself aspires to be: a lowly but spiritually upright poet who hopes to be rewarded, as the oak is, with some recognition by an idealized patron. When Cumberland eventually abandons both the poet and the estate, however, Lanyer describes the breakdown of this community as a painful discovery of the limits of aristocratic grace. The departure reintroduces a fallen world of unequal class relationships. The house mourns Cumberland’s departure: “The house cast off each garment that might grace it, / Putting on Dust and Cobwebs to deface it” (201–­2). The poet is as powerless to stop Cumberland as the daughters of Jerusalem were in the Passion: “But your occasions call’d you so away, / That nothing there had power to make you stay” (147–­48). These lines convey resentment and a new recognition of the limits of grace, which is itself imbued with scriptural lament. The house-

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hold’s tearing of “each garment that might grace it” alludes to Job’s grief: “Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, and said  .  .  . Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:20–­21). If Cumberland’s presence on the estate was nearly Edenic, her departure inspires a Job-­l ike grief at the unpredictability and precariousness of divine gifts. Cumberland’s departure is thus a catalyst for a pessimistic meditation on the limits of the imagined community in Salve Deus. Lanyer feels abandoned by the differences in degree that separate women from each other: And yet it grieues me that I cannot be Neere vnto her, whose virtues did agree With those faire ornaments of outward beauty, Which did enforce from all both love and dutie. Unconstant Fortune, thou art most too blame, Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame: Where our great friends we cannot dayly see, So great a diffrence is there in degree.

(99–­106)

Cumberland’s departure from the estate makes the “diffrence” in “degree” entrenched, separating “great friends” from lowly ones and ending the graceful condescension that formerly softened hierarchies on the estate.64 This change amounts to a second Fall for poets like Lanyer, who derive their entire purpose from their friendship to superiors. To reflect the magnitude of this loss, Lanyer’s grieving “I” becomes a general “we,” signaling that the poet’s condition has degraded into that of the general, sinful mass of humanity. Cumberland’s suspension of social hierarchy, which is idealized in the first half of “Cooke-­ham” and most of Salve Deus, is shown to be temporary and subject to the forces of fortune. Lanyer’s lament increasingly focuses on insuperable hierarchies: Many are placed in those Orbes of state, Partners in honour, so ordain’d by Fate; Neerer in show, yet farther off in loue,

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In which, the lowest alwayes are aboue. But whither am I carried in conceit? My Wit too weake to conster of the great. Why not? although we are but borne of earth, We may behold the Heauens, despising death; And louing heauen that is so farre aboue, May in the end vouchsafe vs entire loue.

(107–­16)

There is a tension in this passage between the superiority of the “great,” who rise above the rest as celestial “Orbes,” and the common humanity that binds great and low alike to a single origin in Genesis: “we are but borne of earth.” “Partners in honour” is a bitter phrase, because here it means that the great orbs are partners to each other, yet the poet remembers a time when she herself seemed to be Cumberland’s partner.65 Lanyer alternates between accepting this condition and asking “why not?”—­that is, why not write poetry without endorsement? But this thought remains undeveloped, and the mood of “Cooke-­ham” quickly shifts back to elegy. There are ultimately no lasting answers in “Cooke-­ham” as much as a desire for a poetic vocation that remains unfulfilled. This emphasis on unfulfilled desire is clear, for example, when Lanyer attempts to steal Cumberland’s kiss from her favorite oak: And with a chaste, yet loving kisse tooke leave, Of which sweet kisse I did it soone bereave: Scorning a sencelesse creature should possesse So rare a favour, so great happinesse. No other kisse it could receive from me, For feare to give backe what it tooke of thee: So I ingratefull Creature did deceive it, Of that which you vouchsaft in love to leave it.

(165–­72)

By “bereau[ing]” the oak of the kiss, Lanyer takes by force the gift that Cumberland gave freely to a competitor.66 Lanyer is “ingratefull” because she is not thankful, but there is also a hint in this word of “ungracious”—­ both lacking in Cumberland’s grace and impolite in her refusal to accept the

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grace shown to a rival. The theft is legitimized by the fact that it is “so rare a fauour,” perhaps hinting at how inaccessible Cumberland’s patronage has been for Lanyer. “Cooke-­ham” is neither a poem of uncomplicated praise for Cumberland nor a straightforward indictment of the aristocracy, but rather an exploration of the extent to which aristocratic condescension can authorize poetry.67 Grace is an apt metaphor for patronage because it captures the generosity of Cumberland’s self-­lowering, but also the precariousness of the poet who relies on such a gift. Much of the rest of Salve Deus centers on moments of fullness and intimacy where grace empowers a community of women, regardless of their social standing, to see the messiah clearly and thus authorize creative poetry on scripture. But the conclusion of the volume reveals why this imagined community is an unfulfilled ideal. Cumberland has the power to rectify the poet’s situation, of course, by recognizing the volume dedicated to her and kissing it instead of the oak. The lavish praise heaped on her throughout the volume certainly suggests a hope for patronage. Should Lanyer fail in this purpose, however, Salve Deus nevertheless articulates frustration with the kingdoms of this world and the hope of a poetic vision that may yet emerge in the fullness of time.68 Lanyer imagines her community of grace as unlikely to emerge in practice, but Salve Deus nevertheless articulates how it may look—­and why it seemed to appear as a second Eden in Cookham.

THREE

The Beauty of Grace in Abraham Cowley’s Davideis

A br a h a m Cow ley is not well known today, but in his lifetime, he was considered the best poet in England.1 After his death in 1667, he was respected enough to be buried in grandiose fashion at Westminster Abbey, next to Spenser and Chaucer. Milton, whose later career eclipsed Cowley’s, is reported to have thought of him as the most important English poet after Shakespeare and Spenser.2 Cowley’s Davideis has the distinction of being the first vernacular English epic on a scriptural subject, predating Paradise Lost by eleven years.3 Like Lanyer, Giles Fletcher, and the other poets described in the previous chapter, Cowley describes Davideis as a “Sacred Poem” on a scriptural subject, namely, “the Troubles of David.”4 The Davideis is also unfinished, however, and it appeared as Cowley’s fortunes took a turn for the worse. Despite being a committed royalist during the English Civil Wars, his preface to his 1656 collection of poetry counseled erstwhile royalists to submit to the Protectorate: “we must lay down our Pens as well as Arms, we must march out of our Cause it self.”5 The royal court in exile was outraged at this perceived betrayal, and as a result Cowley did not receive preferment after the Restoration.6 He ended his life as “Melancholy Cowley,”7 dreaming of exile in America and settling for a less remote retirement in rural England. Very little in Cowley’s biography suggests religious radicalism, so he 82

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seems at first glance to be the last poet who might have anything to say about the politics of grace. Yet his pioneering efforts to adapt scripture into a Virgilian epic inspired him to reimagine grace as a metaphor for the transformative power of poetry in a post–­civil war context. Before I turn to the Davideis, let me begin with a representative example of Cowley’s perspective on grace from “The Garden,” an essay in verse and prose written in retirement. Building on the scriptural metaphor of grace as “grafting,” the horticultural practice of uniting different plants as one, Cowley argues that creative art imitates grace: We no where Art do so triumphant see, As when it Grafs or Buds the Tree: In other things we count it to excel, If it a Docile Schollar can appear To Nature, and but imitate her well; It over-­r ules, and is her Master here. It imitates her Makers Power Divine, And changes her sometimes, and sometimes does refine: It does, like Grace, the Fallen Tree restore To its blest state of Paradise before8 The final couplet alludes to Romans 11, where Paul explains that the people of God will not grow through natural reproduction, but will be elected by grace alone. Sinners are restored to Christ like branches engrafted on a living root: “if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be grafted in: for God is able to graft them in again” (Rom. 11:23).9 Cowley’s “Fallen Tree” alludes to Pauline grace, but his aim is to reimagine salvation as an act of divine creativity that enables poetry. A reader familiar with Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy will note the Sidneian echoes in Cowley’s contrast between a “maker” and “imitator,” who resembles Sidney’s poet in ranging “into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.”10 Cowley argues similarly that artists should not reproduce nature as “Docile Schollar[s],” but should imitate the grace-­g iving creativity of God, “her Makers Power Divine.” As he describes the creativity of grace, he also begins to imitate God in his verse. His mixing of verse and prose in “The Garden” enacts a generic “grafting”

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that imitates God’s engrafting of gentile nations into Christ. Moreover, the line that asserts God’s creativity—­“And changes her sometimes, and sometimes does refine”—­is longer than the others by a metrical foot, illustrating that Cowley changes his meter with the same freedom that God refines human nature. Cowley’s Sidneian claim is that he is no “Docile Schollar” bound to a rigid form, but a Godlike maker who refines his creation as freely as God bestows grace. Grace is the paradigm for the sacred poet’s craft. The arguments and metaphors of “The Garden” capture in miniature the humanist ideal that Cowley develops in Davideis. Cowley aestheticizes grace in Davideis to offer sacred poetry as a solution to the political divisions of the English civil wars.11 His epic hero is David, whose psalms imitate the redemptive work of grace by pacifying the otherwise rebellious passions of his enemies. Like David’s psalms, sacred poetry calms an audience without force: “Thus they our souls, thus they our Bodies win, / Not by their Force, but Party that’s within” (1.469–­76). Throughout Davideis, Cowley draws on the language of grace to explain how poetic beauty quells political disorder and transforms its audience into a new community. In the same way that the grafter changes nature in “The Garden,” the sacred poet calms rebellion by adapting scripture to a new, beautiful form that is suited to the needs of the people. David exemplifies this ideal within Davideis by using poetry to calm Saul, a ruler whose violence makes him a byword for tyranny, as well as the people of Israel, who share the English appetite for civil war. Cowley’s ambition is to imitate David by swaying his own nation away from the destructive tendencies that had led to the regicide, thus enacting a political and aesthetic analogue to the redemption promised by grace. The Davideis attempts to pacify the English nation in the same way that grace transforms the “Fallen Tree.” Cowley developed this approach in response to his friends William Davenant and Thomas Hobbes, who had argued that heroic poetry should discuss only natural phenomena so as to avoid the divisive religious questions that inspired the civil wars in the first place. As Niall Allsopp has shown, these interlocutors encouraged Cowley to see poetry as the means of ensuring obedience to the sovereign.12 Unlike Hobbes and Davenant, however, Cowley believed that scripture was an indispensable subject for epic.13 He argues that a sacred epic must rewrite scripture and adapt it to the needs of

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its audience. When a poem sways an audience away from rebellion, its effect is similar, he suggests, to the elevation of human nature by grace. Although Cowley eventually abandoned his project, the Davideis shows how the language of grace could be used to reunite nations after the divisive experience of civil war. The Poet and the Bagpipe

In 1650, Davenant published his preface to Gondibert as a stand-­a lone essay, perhaps anticipating that the theory of poetry outlined therein was more ambitious than the unfinished poem it was meant to introduce. Attached to the preface were two prefatory poems by Cowley and Edmund Waller, as well as a longer reply by Hobbes. Hobbes respected Davenant enough to give Gondibert “a daily examination as it was writing” even though he was, at the time, writing Leviathan at a breakneck pace.14 At stake in their dialogue was the question that had troubled theorists of poetry from Plato to Sidney: to what extent, and in what circumstances, should poets be allowed to distort the truth? Although Davenant and Hobbes express subtle differences in their approach, they agree on the broad outlines of an argument with far-­reaching implications for politics and aesthetics.15 Heroic poetry, they argue, should dispense with the supernatural and impossible fictions inherited from classical epic and medieval romance, because such fictions potentially arouse enthusiasm and rebellious passions. Hobbes enumerates “impenetrable Armours, Inchanted Castles, invulnerable bodies, Iron men, flying Horses, and a thousand other such things which are easily feign’d.”16 By restricting themselves only to naturally possible events, poets can then concentrate their fictions on poetry’s true purpose: to promote political obedience by disciplining the reader’s passions. For Davenant, heroic poetry should quell “the Distempers of Love, or Ambition: for Love and Ambition are too often the raging Feavers of great minds.”17 Literary critics and historians have long recognized the influence of these ideas on neoclassical poetry18 as well as contemporary theories of psychology, rhetoric, and politics.19 What has not been sufficiently recognized is Cowley’s alternative vision of epic in the celebratory poem he wrote to accompany Davenant’s preface.

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In this poem, Cowley uses biblical narratives of grace and redemption to celebrate Davenant’s Gondibert, thus pushing back against the secularizing bent of Davenant’s and Hobbes’s arguments despite agreeing with their political aims. Although Cowley agrees that poetry should aim to preserve peace and quell rebellion, his poem suggests that the best way to achieve this goal is to adapt scripture into a beautiful form. This short poem thus anticipates the poetics of Davideis, including the idea that grace empowers the poet to calm rebellion. Although he adopts many of Hobbes’s and Davenant’s arguments, Cowley sees the biblical narrative of redemption as the pattern for the creative artist. Davenant and Hobbes agree that the main purpose of poetry is to adorn philosophical truth to make it more attractive to the senses and passions.20 To achieve this aim and avoid the distortions of rhetoric, poets should show discretion and avoid unnatural metaphors that might stir religious conflict.21 The argument rested on the view that religion was the exclusive purview of public authorities. For Hobbes, ancient poets were the “Divines” and “Prophets” of their time, and could legitimately draw inspiration from the muses as a result of this official capacity. Given that Christian poets are private men without an official religious role, however, they had to limit their imagination to the works of nature: “Beyond the actuall works of Nature a Poet may now go; but beyond the conceived possibility of Nature, never.”22 Davenant argues similarly that epic fictions were once permissible when poets had religious authority, but they are no longer legitimate in the Christian present.23 The most dangerous of ancient fables is the epic invocation, because it comes close to Puritan enthusiasm: “Inspiration is a spirituall Fit, deriv’d from the antient Ethnick Poets, who then, as they were Priests, were States-­men too, and probably lov’d Dominion . . . so these who now professe the same fury, may perhaps by such authentick example pretend authority over the people.”24 Those who “now professe the same fury” are the Puritans who had so recently caused the civil war by claiming special inspiration from the Spirit of God. Davenant accordingly omits the customary epic invocation in Gondibert, and Hobbes singles out this decision for special praise. An invocation, Hobbes argues, is “a foolish custome; by which a man, enabled to speak wisely from the principles of nature, and his own meditation, loves rather to be thought to speak by inspiration, like a Bag-­

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pipe.”25 Poetic creativity is rather a material process: “Time and education beget experience; Experience begets Memory; Memory begets Judgement and Fancy; Judgement begets the strength and structure, and Fancy begets the ornaments of a Poem.”26 In this masterful example of anadiplosis (the repetition of the last word in a phrase at the beginning of the next), Hobbes presents creativity as a chain of causality that moves from “Time and education” through “fancy” to “the ornaments of a Poem” without intermediary gaps in which supernatural inspiration, whether from a muse or God, might intervene.27 This rhetorical figure not only adorns Hobbes’s argument but also illustrates his larger point that rhetoric and poetry are legitimate only to the extent that they frame the imagination to the works of nature. Once purged of dangerously religious fictions, however, poetry is essential for governing the passions of the people. Davenant argues that the English are no longer able to govern as large a territory as the Romans because their clergymen, statesmen, and army captains are no longer skilled in the art of poetry. English governors provoked civil war by governing with “threatnings, and seconded by force.”28 In the pre-­Christian era, however, Roman governors dominated a whole continent by charming the people into consenting to be governed: [A] willing and peacefull obedience to Superiours becalm’d the World; then that obedience like the Marriage yoke, is a restraint more needfull and advantageous then liberty; and hath the same reward of pleasant quietnesse, which is antiently had, when Adam, till his disobedience, enjoy’d Paradise. Such are the effects of sacred Poesie which charm’s the People with harmonious precepts.29

By “charm[ing] the People,” poetry enabled an Edenic peace of the kind imagined in humanist defenses of a rhetorical education. Davenant is more willing than the humanists, however, to see persuasion as a complement to force: “Harmonious and delightfull insinuations, and never any constraint; unlesse the ravishment of Reason may be call’d Force. And such Force . . . begets such obedience as is never weary or griev’d.”30 The word “ravishment” means both delight and rape, thus acknowledging that the kind of poetic charm used by governors often complements genuine violence.31 Such force, he argues, is particularly suited to controlling the un-

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educated people, who are strong enough in body to instigate a rebellion but too weak in mind to resist a skilled orator.32 In addition to classical sources, Davenant’s argument draws on Hobbes’s psychological account of rhetoric as a way to awe the senses into consenting to be governed.33 Davenant and Hobbes wish to preserve the power of epic poetry to charm and awe the people, but they also seek to inoculate this genre from religious enthusiasm by limiting it to the works of nature. The naturalism that characterizes Gondibert is part of a deliberate strategy to promote peace and political order while avoiding dangerous conventions such as the epic invocation. As we shall see, Cowley’s “To Sir WILLIAM D’AVENANT,” the poem he wrote in praise of Gondibert, celebrates Davenant’s political aims and his demystification of the supernatural.34 It also reveals, however, another view of epic as a genre fit for sacred topics. Cowley celebrates Davenant as a heroic and Orphic figure who tames violent passions of the people while demystifying the conventions of older epic. He singles out the monsters of Spenserian romance for criticism: Methinks Heroick Poesie, till now Like some fantastic Fairy Land did show, Gods, Devils, Nymphs, Witches and Gyants race, And all but Man in Mans chief work had place. Thou like some worthy Knight, with sacred Arms Dost drive the Monsters thence, and end the Charms: Instead of those dost Men and manners plant, The things wch that rich soil did chiefly want.

(1–­8)

Davenant restores man to its central place as the subject of heroic poetry by driving out the monsters of the “Fairy Land.” The aim of Gondibert is similar to that of The Faerie Queene—­Spenser sought to fashion the perfect gentleman, while Davenant plants “Men and Manners”—­but Spenser’s fairies and monsters are no longer fit for this purpose in a culture scarred by Puritan zealotry, regicide, and civil war. Alluding to the recent regicide, Cowley blames the Puritans for making spirits and other supernatural fictions dangerous:

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By fatal hands whilst present empires fall, Thine from the Grave past Monarchies recal. So much more thanks from humane kind does merit The Poets Fury, then the Zelots Spirit.

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(12–­14)

Whereas Puritan zealots claim inspiration from the “Spirit” to kill monarchs, Davenant’s poetic “Fury” brings the long-­dead kings of Verona back to life. Davenant’s revision of his sources thus amounts to a heroic victory over the zealots that had executed their king. As he praises Davenant, however, Cowley also outlines an alternative model for a sacred epic. The contrast between “Poets Fury” and “Zelots Spirit” already suggests more parallelism between the two than either Davenant or Hobbes is willing to acknowledge. The rest of Cowley’s poem shows that he aims to recuperate fury. For example, he praises Davenant with scriptural metaphors: “Thy Fancy like a Flame its way does make, / And leave bright Tracks for following Pens to take” (35–­36). Cowley alludes here to the pillar of flame that led Israel across the desert—­an image to which he would later return in his invocation in Davideis. This metaphor suggests that Moses is the ultimate model for Davenant’s demystification of supernatural fictions, because Moses led Israel away from the false idols of Egypt. The rest of Cowley’s poem pairs this Mosaic paradigm with an allusion to the heightening of human nature by grace: And from the Grave thou mak’est this Empire rise Not like some dreadful Ghost t’affright our Eyes, But with more Luster and triumphant state, Then when it crown’d at proud Verona sate: So will out God rebuild mans perisht frame, And raise him up much Better, yet the same. So God-­like Poets do past things reherse, Not change, but Heighten Nature by their Verse.

(15–­22)

The first four lines praise Gondibert for resurrecting the Lombard kings of Verona without polluting them with supernatural ghostliness, echoing Hobbes’s view that poets should add “Luster” without straying from the

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possibility of nature. The second half of this passage, however, delves precisely into the kind of religious discussion that Hobbes advised poets not to touch. First, Cowley suggests that Davenant’s imaginative resurrection of the past resembles the resurrection Christians expect from God. Even more importantly, he implies that the creative license Davenant takes with chronicle history parallels the “Heighten[ing]” of “mans perisht frame” by grace. The implication is not only that poets should freely revise their source material, but also that their authority in doing so is due to their similarity with God. The creativity of God in changing human nature legitimizes the license that “God-­like Poets” take with nature and with the sacred material that they revise, change, and adapt to a new poetic form. Cowley’s scriptural imagery implies a challenge to Davenant and Hobbes: how can a Christian poet stay within the “possibility of Nature” when grace so fundamentally transforms human nature? While he agrees with the effort to undercut supernatural fiction and religious zealotry, he does not go as far as to bar poets from discussing religious questions. Instead, he remains wedded to grace as the foundation for poetic creativity. Even as he praises Gondibert, Cowley suggests that poets ought to have more authority over scriptural subject matter, not less. These ideas hint at his ambition to write a sacred epic. Cowley’s preface to Davideis explains how a sacred epic differs from Davenant’s model by empowering poets to discuss scripture. Like Davenant, he starts with the axiom that good poetry should not lie: “There is not so great Lye to be found in any Poet, as the vulgar conceit of men, that Lying is Essential to good Poetry.”35 However, while Davenant and Hobbes concluded from this premise that poets should restrict themselves to nature, Cowley argues instead that scripture is a fit subject for epic because it tells of true miracles. David, he argues, was gifted with “miraculous virtues and excellencies” similar to those of classical heroes, but David’s miracles also have the advantage of being true.36 Moreover, sacred poets need not follow the letter of scripture in describing such events as long as they use their judgment: he who can write a prophane Poem well, may write a Divine one better; but he who can do that but ill, will do this much worse. The same fertility of Invention, the same wisdom of Disposition; the same Judgement in observance of Decencies, the same lustre and vigor of Elocution; the same mod-

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esty and majestie of Number; briefly the same kinde of Habit, is required to do both.37

The key word is “Judgment,” which in this case means the rhetorical judgment that preserves “Decencies,” or decorum, when adapting source material to a new context, language, and poetic tradition.38 Cowley was well-­k nown for his view of active judgment in translation: his translations of Pindar’s odes, for example, were admired long after his death because they diverged from the literal meaning of the Greek original to make them more beautiful in English.39 By applying these arguments to scriptural epic, Cowley argues that poets have not only the license to discuss scriptural miracles but also the right to modify scripture creatively according to their judgment, as they would with any secular text. His analogies between grace and poetic creativity justify the creative license of poets over sacred subject matter. The invocation of Davideis further illustrates how Cowley’s view of sacred epic empowers poets to adapt scripture creatively into a new form. His invocation is a prayer to continue the work of the apostle Paul in Christianizing pagan culture: “But Thou, Eternal Word, hast call’d forth Me / Th’ Apostle, to convert that World to Thee” (1.39–­40).40 As Joseph Wallace notes, in the Latin version of Book 1, Cowley refers to the poet as “Paulus,” and his notes make this connection explicit.41 Paul was the apostle to the gentiles, so he is an appropriate model for a poet who believed the time had come to convert poetry from gentile conventions inherited from the classics: “it is time to Baptize it in Jordan.”42 Paul is also central to Cowley’s self-­fashioning because of his frequent use of temple imagery to describe the purity of grace. His chief model, however, is David: Ev’en Thou my breast with such blest rage inspire, As mov’d the tuneful strings of Davids Lyre, Guid my bold steps with thine old trav’elling Flame, In these untrodden paths to Sacred Fame; Lo, with pure hands thy heav’enly Fires to take, My well-­chang’d Muse I a chast Vestal make! From earths vain joys, and loves soft witchcraft free, I consecrate my Magdalene to Thee!

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Lo, this great work, a Temple to thy praise, On polisht Pillars of strong Verse I raise!

(1.25–­34)

Echoing the praise he once gave Gondibert, Cowley invokes the pillar of flame that delivered Israel from Egypt. The implication is that Cowley will follow Davenant in emptying the epic of its pagan idols, but he will also add a true representation of God in “Pillars of strong Verse.” The subject matter guarantees the truth of the miracles in the poem, but the pillars holding it up will be his creative and judicious deviations from the text. In this way, the invocation balances fidelity to the scriptural text with the poet’s creativity in adapting the inner meaning of that text to a new situation. Despite broadly agreeing with the political aims of Davenant and Hobbes, Cowley remains committed to the right of poets to write creatively about scripture. The argument ultimately rests on a Sidneian view of the poet as a Godlike maker whose freedom to range in the zodiac of his imagination imitates divine creativity. For some critics, this Sidneian model seems less modern than Davenant’s and Hobbes’s arguments. Victoria Kahn, for example, has claimed that Hobbesian poiesis is based on the modern principle that “we can know only what we make ourselves,” as opposed to the Renaissance humanist attempt to imitate God: “in its rejection of transcendental legitimation, this [Hobbesian] notion of poiesis also differs from the more familiar Renaissance notion that human creativity is modeled on the divine creativity of God.”43 Though sympathetic to the political aims of Davenant and Hobbes, Cowley was not willing to abandon this older, humanist idea of the poet as Godlike maker. Even as he praises Davenant, he insists that a Christian poet should not simply demystify the untrue myths of the classics but also replace them with the true miracles of scripture. Grace is the ultimate poetic miracle, and the new transcendental grounds for human creativity: as God “heightens” human nature through grace, poets heighten nature by weaving it together with scriptural miracle. The fruit of these arguments was the first scriptural epic in English literature.

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This World’s Grace in Davideis

Cowley’s Davideis is a “Sacred Poem” that was originally designed as a Virgilian epic about the life of David, tracing his evolution from a poet in the court of Saul to a king in his own right. Although Cowley finished only four books, his original plan was to write until the deaths of Saul and Jonathan in 1 Samuel 31.44 The first four books of the poem establish a relationship between poetry and political order. Saul is a tyrant who is possessed by the demon of Envy to pursue and kill David, causing him to flee to Samuel’s college of prophets and to the kingdom of Moab. As David narrates key events from scriptural history—­such as his victory over Goliath, his idealized love for Jonathan, and the history of civil war in Israel—­he dwells on the power of poetry to tame the disorders of Saul and the people of Israel. In doing so, he illustrates how sacred poetry unites a divided nation. Cowley’s poem was presumably meant to conclude with the final union of poetry and political power in David as poet-­k ing of Israel. As it stands, the unfinished fragment ends with a description of the beauty of Jonathan, Saul’s son and David’s friend, as he narrowly avoids death thanks to his transformative influence on the nation. For Cowley, poetry cultivates peace by inspiring obedience to the divine harmonies that govern the cosmos.45 Critics have traced his “world of order” to a range of influences, from the neo-­stoicism of Justus Lipsius to the musical theories of Athanasius Kircher. Cowley’s ultimate purpose is to show that an awareness of these divine patterns will convince human beings to obey sacred authority and avoid rebellion.46 David begins to illustrate this principle when he tames the animals and the elements with his song: “The fighting Winds would stop there, and admire; / Learning Consent and Concord from his Lyre” (3.335–­36). Beauty teaches “Consent and Concord,” thereby restoring creation to Edenic peace. When David sings in this way to human beings, his song lifts the effects of sin from the fallen imagination. Grace is one of Cowley’s preferred metaphors for this subjective transformation.47 Throughout the poem, Cowley contrasts the aesthetic concord taught by David to the unity achieved through force and fraud.48 He compares cosmic beauty to a musical choir:

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In this Great World so much of it we see; The Lesser, Man, is all o’re Harmonie. Storehouse of all Proportions! Single Quire! Which first Gods Breath did tunefully inspire! From hence blest Musicks heav’enly charms arise, From sympathy which Them and Man allies. Thus they our souls, thus they our Bodies win, Not by their Force, but Party that’s within.

(1.469–­76)

This view of consent avoids the model of rhetorical force and fraud that Davenant outlines in the preface to Gondibert. Instead, Cowley envisions consent as a result of an aesthetic revelation of divine “sympathy,” which supposedly permeates all creatures and makes them voluntarily obey the will of God as soon as they are confronted with beauty. In the endnotes for this passage, Cowley explains sympathy as a term for divine love: “Love is well termed by Cicero Cognatio Natura, The Kindred, or Consanguinuity of Nature.”49 It has been argued that cognatio is Cicero’s translation of the term συμπάθεια [sumpatheia], meaning an influence based on cosmic order.50 Cowley was most likely influenced by the neo-­stoic reception of Ciceronian ideas, and he uses the Anglicized term, “sympathy,” to describe poetry’s capacity to awaken these divine patterns in his audience.51 Cowley uses the language of grace and conversion to describe the subjective effect of divine harmony on a human being. This clearest example is the encounter between Jonathan and David after the victory over Goliath. When Jonathan sees David covered in blood and sweat, he is struck with amazement by David’s beauty: For when the noble youth at Dammin stood Adorn’d with sweat, and painted gay with Blood, Jonathan pierce’d him through with greedy Eye And understood the future Majestie Then destin’ed in the glories of his look; He saw, and strait was with amazement strook, To see the strength, the feature, and the grace Of his young limbs.

(2.28–­35)

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Jonathan experiences love as a subjective transformation caused by David’s “grace,” a word that carries both an aesthetic and a religious meaning in this passage. Jonathan imagines grace as the beauty of David’s “young limbs,” and “future Majestie” as kingship. From Cowley’s perspective and that of his reader, however, David evokes the spiritual grace earned by Christ during the drama of the Passion. Not only will Christ descend from David and thus be his “future Majestie,” but David also resembles Christ in the blood and sweat that evokes the Passion. The metaphorical piercing of David by Jonathan’s gaze also foreshadows the piercing of Jesus’s side. Indeed, David’s beauty makes Jonathan part of the historical chain of causation that will lead to the Passion, because Jonathan goes on to save David from Saul and thus ensure the survival of the bloodline that will give rise to Jesus. This example illustrates Cowley’s point that beauty unites human beings to God even when they cannot understand providence.52 Throughout this scene, Cowley suggests that the entirety of creation, including inanimate objects, is moved by the beauty of grace to behave in ways that seem supernatural. In a long metaphor that elaborates on Jonathan’s love for David, Cowley compares grace to magnetism: How is the Loadstone, Natures subtle pride, By the rude Iron woo’d, and made a Bride? How was the Weapon wounded? what hid Flame The strong and conqu’ering Metal overcame? Love (this Worlds Grace) exalts his Natural state; He feels thee, Love, and feels no more his Weight.

(2.52–­7)

The attraction of the “Iron” by the “Loadstone” resembles Jonathan’s attraction to David.53 In both cases, love is “this Worlds Grace” because it “exalts” the “Natural state” of the lover. Cowley hastens to explain this provocative metaphor in his notes: “As Humane Nature is elevated by Grace, so other Agents are by Love to Operations that are above, and seem contrary to their Nature, as the ascension of heavy bodies, and the like.”54 In other words, love and grace are similar because they inspire the recipient to “ascend” above the limits of their nature: the iron by shedding its physical weight, human beings by shedding original sin.

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While these transformations seem “contrary to their Nature,” Cowley’s point is that love, grace, magnetism, and similar phenomena are not so much unnatural as poorly understood. Nature is permeated with the creativity of God in ways that reason cannot fully understand: “the short beams of Reasons Eye, / See onely, There thou art, nor How, nor Why” (2.50–­51). The goal of poetry is to enforce conformity with these laws even when they are not fully understood: How does the absent Pole the Needle move? How does his Cold and Ice beget hot Love? Which are the Wings of Lightness to ascend? Or why does Weight to th’ Centre downwards bend? Thus Creatures void of Life obey thy Laws, And seldom We, they never know the Cause.

(2.62–­7)

In addition to the magnetic force that pulls compasses toward the “absent Pole,” Cowley alludes to gravity, which pulls “Weight to th’ Centre downwards,” and the “Wings of Lightness” that govern the movement of gases. These examples betray Cowley’s well-­k nown interest in Baconian science, but his main purpose is to emphasize the subjective effect of discovering the limits of natural knowledge.55 Beauty reveals this imperfectly understood order in creation, and the effect on a human being is similar to an encounter with grace. By raising these questions about poetry and its relationship to nature and grace, Cowley speaks to the central tensions in Davenant’s preface to Gondibert. Like Davenant, Cowley claims that poetry charms audiences into obeying laws they do not fully understand. The difference is that Davenant sought to leave such topics to the religious authorities, while Cowley gives poets the responsibility to adapt scriptural principles in a new form. Thus when he asks “what hid Flame / The strong and conqu’ering Metal overcame,” Cowley is not simply asking about the material properties of metal bodies, but also alluding to David’s triumph over Goliath, who was miraculously defeated shortly before this scene while bedecked in “conqu’ering Metal.”56 The divine love that animates magnets and enables grace is also visible in scriptural history. In each case, poetry brings out the beauty of

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divine love in a way that transforms human nature. As Saul recognizes in a fit of rage, Jonathan has reason to fear David because he is the natural heir to the throne: “ne’re did story yet, or fable tell / Of one so wild, who meerly to Rebel / Quitted th’unquestion’d birthright of a Throne” (2.391–­ 93). Although Saul is right that Jonathan undoes the natural tendency to protect one’s birthright, Cowley represents the response as the work of grace, which moves human beings to fulfill a divine providence they cannot wholly understand. Cowley’s metaphors invite abstract speculations about metaphysics, thus moving away from the kind of naturalistic foundation proposed by Davenant and Hobbes. The comparison between divine love and magnetism is precisely why Dryden and Samuel Johnson considered Cowley to be a metaphysical poet.57 For Johnson, Cowley’s metaphors create the impression of “discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike . . . The most heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions.”58 Johnson captures the intellectual abstraction that one feels when reading Cowley as he yokes grace, friendship, divine love, and magnetism in the same metaphor. His purpose in doing so, however, is answerable to the poetic aim of Davideis. If Hobbes and Davenant had sought to limit poetry to the possibility of nature, Cowley yokes vastly heterogenous things together so as to show that natural and religious phenomena are governed by a shared cosmic order. His metaphors also give stylistic expression to his view that divine beauty permeates all things from scriptural narrative to natural phenomena. Moreover, by uniting dissimilar things, Cowley asserts his own freedom as a poet to imitate God in creating this impression through the beauty of poetry. The result is a characteristically baroque style that seems to “ransack” Creation.59 It is also worth noting that by using these metaphysical conceits to discuss poetic creativity, Cowley diminishes the erotic charge that might have existed between Jonathan and David. In contrast with the sensuous eroticism between male lovers in classical epic, Cowley’s description moves so quickly into abstraction—­magnets, cosmic sympathy, and exegesis—­ that Jonathan and David hardly seem like lovers capable of any passion or desire.60 Part of the reason is that Cowley was rather cold and antisep-

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tic when discussing love. His The Mistress, a youthful collection of love poetry, was ridiculed for being overly intellectualized—­a tendency that biographers blamed on Cowley’s supposed lack of interest and experience in erotic love.61 Later in life, Cowley translated the homoerotic poetry of Anacreon into English, but as Paul Hammond has shown, his translations do not specify the sex of the beloved.62 Cowley may well have been simply uninterested in eroticism of any kind, whether between men or between men and women, but the question is likely to remain a matter for biographical speculation.63 Whatever other motives may have been in play, Cowley also had practical reasons to de-­eroticize the love of Jonathan and David in Davideis. Given that David’s beauty is among other things a metaphor for the transformative beauty of sacred poetry, it would be counterproductive to emphasize the erotic possibilities of his relationship to Jonathan, because such eroticism would raise uncomfortable questions about the sacred poet’s relationship to his audience. For a poet who described his muse as a “chast Vestal” (1.30), the ready response was to convert erotic possibilities into metaphysical conceits and abstractions that could be more easily coopted as part of the larger defense of the sacred poet’s authority. In fact, while David’s physical and moral beauty attracts Jonathan in this scene, it is the beauty of David’s poetry that transforms audiences in the Davideis and provides the most important pattern for other sacred poets to imitate. His poetry has an Orphic effect on nature: Scarce past a Child, all wonders would he sing Of Natures Law, and Pow’er of Natures King. His sheep would scorn their food to hear his lay, And savage Beasts stand by as tame as they. The fighting Winds would stop there, and admire; Learning Consent and Concord from his Lyre.

(3.331–­36)

As David sings the “Pow’er of Natures King,” he takes on that divine power to transform nature into a condition of pre-­lapsarian peace.64 The taming of “savage Beasts” and “fighting Winds” alludes to Orpheus’s classical poetry, while David’s childlike eloquence and the attention of his sheep allude to Christian imagery. As David weaves classical and Christian eloquence, he

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redeems nature with the “Consent and Concord” of beauty—­a concord that is further amplified by the regularity of Cowley’s meter. There are no far-­ fetched, extended metaphors here to distract from the synoptic vision of nature at peace. Rather, he dispatches each image in a single couplet, thus imposing the kind of musical order on thought that David imposes on the winds. This transformation of beasts and winds anticipates David’s transformative effect on human beings when political disorder increasingly clouds his career as a sacred poet. The political effect of David’s poetry is clearest when he sings to Saul, the tyrannical king who is also the main antagonist in the epic. At the end of Book 1, David sings a version of Psalm 114 to calm Saul’s violent rage: he “did Sauls wild rage controul. / And tun’d the harsh disorders of his Soul” (1.481–­82). Psalm 114 concerns Moses’s parting of the sea, and David chooses this psalm because he tries to calm Saul in the same way that Moses calms the sea.65 Cowley signals the importance of the psalm by translating it as a Pindaric-­ode-­w ithin-­an-­epic—­a novel experiment in an epic poem, as his notes emphasize.66 This poetic form allows Cowley to be creative in the translation by changing the lengths of each line, thus changing the emphasis. For example, he expands a brief line, “The sea saw it and fled” (Psalms 114:3), into an epic simile that anthropomorphizes the waves as a fleeing army: The great Sea beheld, and fled. As men pursu’d, when that fear past they find, Stop on some higher ground to look behind, So whilst through wondrous ways The sacred Army went, The Waves afar stood up to gaze, And their own Rocks did represent, Solid as Waters are above the Firmament.

(1.486–­493)

By comparing the waves of the sea to “men pursu’d,” Cowley suggests that the natural world sees what the Pharaoh does not: the Israelites are not fugitives, as they appear, but a “sacred Army” from whom the Egyptians should be fleeing in terror. The parting of the seas is scriptural, but the ironic in-

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version of the pursued into pursuers reflects a creative adaptation to the dramatic situation. Saul will soon pursue David with the same proverbial hard-­heartedness as Pharaoh; the terror of the seas is therefore a warning to Saul to cease this pursuit. If water can become solid, as the final line suggests, Saul’s heart can also lose its hardness if he heeds the poem. The final stanza doubles down on the link between grace and natural transformation. Cowley’s translation emphasizes the disruption of the natural world: Why leapt the Hills? why did the Mountains shake? What ail’d them their fixt Natures to forsake? Fly where thou wilt, O Sea! And Jordans Current cease; Jordan there is no need of thee, For at Gods word, when e’re he please, The Rocks shall weep new Waters forth instead of these. (1.509–­15) These lines emphasize the awful power of God to make, unmake, and change the natural world. All things give up “their fixt Natures”: the fluid seas and rivers cease moving and become solid, while the solid hills and mountains leap with life. As nature changes, so too does the speaker, who shifts from the interrogative to the imperative mood: “Fly where thou wilt,” and “there is no need of thee.” The speaker not only describes the transformative power of “Gods word,” but also takes on the authority of God’s word to command his audience to change. The final alexandrine implies that grace is a similar transformation, because if God can make the rocks “weep” new waters in penitence, Saul too can be spared the fate of the hard-­ hearted if he accepts grace.67 While the psalm’s effect on Saul is ultimately temporary, its implications for poetic creativity are profound. “Gods word” is not only the Logos that created the world, but also a gift that inspires a chain of poetic creativity—­f rom the creativity of David as he speaks these words, to Cowley’s creativity as he modifies his source, to Saul as he is invited to convert.68 The broader implication in this psalm is that poetry transforms the

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nature of an audience. This implication is even clearer when David calms Saul’s pursuing soldiers, echoing 1 Samuel 19. While scripture emphasizes that the spirit of God seizes the pursuers, Cowley imagines the soldiers transformed by sacred song: The furrows of their brow, so rough erewhile, Sink down into the dimples of a Smile. Their cooler veins swell with a peaceful tide, And the chaste streams with even current glide . . . The thoughts of war, of blood, and murther cease; In peaceful tunes they adore the God of Peace. (1.895–­8, 901–­2) By comparing blood to streams and tides, this passage alludes to the translation of Psalm 114, which used the same rhyme between “tide” and “glide” (1.506–­7). The implication is that the parting of the sea is a metaphor for the transformation of human nature by sacred poetry. Like the soldiers, Saul is similarly transformed to become a Balaam-­l ike prophet whose blessings come “unbidden”: “His foolish Anger a wise Fury grew, / And Blessings from his mouth unbidden flew” (1.905–­6). Beauty even moves Saul to glimpse the possibility of redemption, leading him to abandon his crown and embrace Jonathan: “Embrac’ed his wondring Son, and on his head / The balm of all past wounds, kind Tears he shed” (1.909–­14). This embrace is among the most poignant parts of the poem, because readers familiar with scripture know that Saul will revert to persecuting David, setting off the chain of events that will lead to his death alongside Jonathan in the Battle of Gilboa. The “balm” of Saul’s tears will be the closest Jonathan will come to feeling the royal oil on his head. Even though Saul resists the invitation to grace, David’s poetry invites Saul to embrace an alternative future, thus demonstrating the power of beauty to act as the vehicle of grace. Grace, Beauty, and Civil War

In the fourth book of Davideis, Cowley explores how these metaphysical ideas of beauty and divine love might sway nations away from civil war. David flees to the court of the king of Moab, where he narrates Israel’s his-

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tory from the time of the judges to the early exploits of Saul as a king. His narrative alludes to the English Civil Wars by highlighting the questions of political liberty, divine right, and tyranny in the context of scriptural history. Whereas the first half of Book Four tells a story of national decline, the second half describes Jonathan’s escape from death and his pacifying effect on the nation. In the concluding scene, Cowley emphasizes Jonathan’s Christlike beauty, thus hearkening back to the metaphysical discussions of divine love and beauty in earlier parts of the poem. In this scene, beauty mediates grace insofar as it elevates the nation above their predisposition to rebellion and civil war. Nevertheless, the specter of civil war is not fully exorcised from the poem by this moment of beauty, because Cowley’s subsequent interruption of his poem points to the divisive effects of civil war in the real world. In David’s long narration of scriptural history, the ultimate cause of civil war and political tyranny is the vulgarity and superstition of the people of Israel, which leads them to obey their governors only when they are clothed in royal splendor. The judges who ruled pre-­monarchical Israel embodied graces and divine gifts that were invisible to the people: But they whose stamp of Power did chiefly ly In Characters too fine for most mens Ey, Graces and Gifts Divine; not painted bright With state to awe dull minds, and force t’affright, Were ill obey’d whil’st Living, and at death, Their Rules and Pattern vanisht with their breath.

(4.68–­83)

The people’s rejection of the judges causes the the disasters that follow.69 The political decline begins in the people’s “Ey,” which is too vulgar to see “Graces and Gifts Divine” in the simplicity of a pre-­monarchical judge. While grace means the virtue of an ideal magistrate in this case, David also hints at the religious sense of grace by castigating the people’s idolatrous tendency toward image worship. The same tendency leads Israel to civil war. Building on the intertribal warfare in Judg. 19–­21, David argues that the people’s rejection of the judges “did (’tis true) a Civil War create / (The frequent curse of our loose-­govern’d State)” (4.96–­97). The final effect of

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these civil wars was the removal of “Religion” (4.101), thus suggesting that religious disorder and political decline have a common source in popular superstitiousness. Throughout this description of national decline, David adopts a form of politicized anti-­Judaism that was common in English republican writing.70 Republicans argued that Israel’s request for a king marked their descent into Asiatic servility, while pre-­monarchical Israel exemplified the republican freedom fit for European Christians.71 On these grounds, liberty could be reimagined as part of the patrimony that Christians inherited from ancient Israel as part of the covenant of grace.72 David draws on this tradition to suggest that the people of Israel sought a king because they adored the “Scepters of the East”: They saw the state and glittering pomp which blest In vulgar sense the Scepters of the East. They saw not Powers true Source, and scorn’d t’obey Persons that look’ed no dreadfuller than They. They mist Courts, Guards, a gay and num’erous train; Our Iudges, like their Laws, were rude and plain.

(4.156–­61)

By highlighting the people’s love of “glittering pomp,” David presents Israel as a people who have lost their liberty alongside their religion. A growing rift separates this alien “they,” with their preference for courts and guards, from the simplicity of “Our Iudges.” The description culminates in an image of the people of Israel as colonial natives: As midst the Main a low small Island lies, Assaulted round with stormy Seas and skies. Whilst the poor heartless Natives ev’ery hour Darkness and Noyse seems ready to devour. Such Israels state appear’ed

(4.426–­30)

The choice of a king precipitates Israel’s decline from chosen people to Oriental idolaters and, eventually, natives of a non-­European island. This demotion prepares the way for the nation’s eventual redemption by the beauty

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of grace, which is mediated to them by good governors who pair inner virtues with a beautiful external appearance. David’s account of national decline alludes to topical political debates that had recently divided England. This allusiveness is clearest in his discussion of Saul’s election as king in 1 Samuel 8. In the scriptural source, the people ask Samuel to select a king to rule over them, and Samuel responds with a laundry list of the king’s prerogatives over the people. Early modern absolutists tended to read the passage as a foundational contract through which the people alienated their rights to Saul, thus establishing the pattern for monarchy. Republicans, on the other hand, responded that Samuel was not describing monarchy, but tyranny.73 Taking this second viewpoint, David claims that Samuel warned the people against tyranny: “Cheat not your selves with words: for though a King / Be the mild Name, a Tyrant is the Thing” (4.228–­29). Cowley’s notes clarify that Samuel is not endorsing absolutism: “It is a vile opinion of those men . . . who hold, that the right of Kings is set down by Samuel in this place.”74 As soon as David concludes, however, Moab offers another vision of sovereignty: “Tis Jest to tell a People that they’re Free, / Who, or How many shall their Masters be / Is the sole doubt” (4.266–­68). For Moab, sovereignty is always indivisible irrespective of the form of the constitution, echoing Hobbes’s arguments in the Leviathan.75 The debate then ends inconclusively as David changes the subject. Why does Cowley allude to a topic as divisive as 1 Samuel 8 only to end with stalemate? The traditional view is that Cowley attempts to signal covert royalist sensibilities while paying lip service to the Cromwellian regime, but an inconclusive debate was unlikely to appease either side.76 A more compelling hypothesis is that Cowley wanted to highlight what republicans and absolutists had in common.77 David and Moab do agree that the numerical majority of the people are too superstitious to be trusted with supreme rule, so their passions and tastes must be carefully governed. The debate shows that beauty is necessary to unite a nation no matter who happens to be sovereign. As Cowley had begun to suggest in his poem to Davenant, in this passage he represents sacred poetry as the way to cure rebelliousness in the people by imitating the heightening of human nature by grace. This antidote to rebellion was useful to the supreme political authority regardless of political partisanship.

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As part of this argument, Cowley foregrounds the beauty of the governors that God chooses to lead the people despite divine anger at the request in 1 Samuel 8. When Samuel approaches the Ark of the Covenant to request a king, he is met with a display of flames and thunder to signal divine displeasure at the request (4.314). Nevertheless, a beautiful vision then spreads calm over the people: “Beauty th’ illustrious Vision did impart / To ev’ery Face, and Joy to ev’ery heart” (4.320). The vision conveys God’s intention to moderate his anger by adapting his laws to the people’s need for visual beauty. Saul’s beauty satisfies this popular need: Above the whole vast throng he’appear’d so tall, As if by Nature made for th’ Head of All. So full of grace and state, that one might know ’Twas some wise Eye the blind Lot guided so.

(4.409–­12)

God guides the lot to an especially beautiful ruler so as to accommodate his truth to popular weakness. In addition to this visual element, Cowley highlights Saul’s rhetorical use of beauty: “on his tongue / An Artless grace above all Eloq’uence hung” (4.364–­5). This passage may glance at the Italian humanist concept of grace as “sprezzatura,” namely, the practiced impression of artlessness, but Saul’s grace is genuinely artless insofar as it reflects his inner moral condition.78 When he is later corrupted by ambition, his appearance and speech both reveal the new ugliness that infects him within: “Power and violent Fortune . . . Did, Deluge-­like, the nat’ural forms deface, / And brought forth unknown Monsters in their place” (3.370, 3.372–­73). Even though Saul eventually abandons his duties, his beauty is initially a sign of grace to the nation because it reveals the will of God in a visually compelling way that the people can readily respect and obey. The political sinfulness of Israel, as revealed in David’s republican account of national decline, is ultimately one more angle through which Cowley defends the beauty of grace as the only way to ensure political peace. After Saul descends into tyranny, God sends Jonathan to take his place in mediating beauty to his people. David describes Jonathan as “the Joy and Grace, / The beautifull’st, and best of Humane Race” (4.473–­74). The description also lingers on Jonathan’s piety: his “chief study is Gods sacred

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Law (4.510). Jonathan’s patience before a sacrifice makes his beauty appear distinctly Christian and messianic. Following 1 Samuel 14:24–­45, David explains that Saul wished to spur his soldiers into pursuit of an enemy, so he vows to kill the first soldier who breaks his fast. Jonathan does not hear the vow and eats, thus forcing Saul to sacrifice his son. The closest historical precedent known to either Saul or Jonathan was Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter in the Book of Judges, which does end in a sacrifice.79 Jonathan has every reason to believe he will truly die, so he experiences the same faith as Christ or Abraham when they are called to a sacrifice. The scene highlights the transformative effect of his patience on the people: The Prince alone stood mild and patient by, So bright his sufferings, so triumphant show’d, Less to the best then worst of fates he ow’ed. A victory now he o’re himself might boast; He Conquer’d now that Conqu’eror of an Host. It charm’d through tears the sad Spectators sight, Did reverence, love, and gratitude excite And pious rage, with which inspir’ed they now Oppose to Sauls a better publick Vow.  They all consent all Israel ought to be  Accurst and kill’d themselves rather then He.  Thus with kind force they the glad King withstood,  And sav’ed their wondrous Saviours sacred blood.

(4.1095–­107)

The soldiers in the army thus become aesthetic observers, or “Spectators,” who are “charm’d,” “excite[d],” and “inspir’ed” by Jonathan’s beauty.80 The final couplet, particularly the phrase “sacred blood,” leaves no doubt that Jonathan’s beauty provides the people with a premonition of the Christian Passion. Despite not understanding fully what they are seeing, the people are moved to transcend their engrained rebelliousness by a glimpse of grace. Not only does Jonathan resemble a “wondrous Saviour,” but the people too are inspired by beauty to save their savior. Jonathan’s beauty transforms the people of the nation, elevating them by grace above their habitual vulgarity, idolatry, and penchant for civil war to become a community of grace. Such

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a community sways the ruler toward the correct political solution without, however, resorting to rebellion. As with the magnets, the seas, and the rivers in earlier expressions of divine beauty, the people respond in this uncharacteristic way because they are transformed by beauty in the same way that human nature is heightened by grace. Jonathan’s effect on the people also unifies them politically as an imagined community. For the first time in the poem, the people of Israel speak as one person: “They all consent all Israel ought to be / Accurst and kill’d themselves rather then He” (4.1104–­5). Jonathan is the focal point that makes this community possible, and his role is reflected in the form of Cowley’s verse. At the beginning, “The Prince alone stood,” but by the end his patience grows into the collective will of “all Israel,” so that the agency of the prince gives shape to that of the nation. Jonathan’s infectious effect on the people also illustrates the key difference between Cowley’s poetics and Davenant’s and Hobbes’s ideas. Far from advising the people to submit passively to their governors, Cowley celebrates the “pious rage” that leads the people to dissuade Saul from human sacrifice, echoing the “blest rage” he discussed in the epic invocation. This poetic rage not only moves the nation but also allows the people to imagine themselves as one community rather than as a collection of warring factions that submit only to the threat of force. While the chaotic and idolatrous forces that pull at the seams of Israel’s national unity are temporarily paused here, they are not definitively laid to rest. The bitter irony in Jonathan’s Christlike appearance is that he must eventually die for Christ to be born, because Jonathan’s death clears the path for David’s establishment of a new royal line. The final lines of the poem allude to this future as well as the renewed bouts of civil war that will engulf Israel.81 Cowley mentions that David interrupts his story to Moab before telling of the story of Amalek in 1 Samuel 15: The boundless quarrel with curst Am’alecs land; Where Heav’en it self did Cruelty command And practis’ed on Sauls Mercy, nor did ere More punish Inno’cent Blood, then Pity there.

(4.1112–­5)

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The “boundless quarrel” alludes to God’s demand that Saul eradicate the people of Amalek: “go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not” (1 Sam. 15:3). Saul does smite the tribe but shows mercy to their leader Agag, and this disobedience leads God to condemn him and his descendants, contributing to Saul’s and Jonathan’s deaths in battle. Cowley asks why God spares the sacred blood of Jonathan in one moment only to “punish Inno’cent Blood” later, pulling the reader away from the apparent closure that Jonathan’s patience seems to provide in the final column. The reader is reminded that the fickleness of Saul and the rebelliousness of the people under him will only pause for a time. The ending of Book Four of Davideis suggests an ideal community of grace that is not fully realized in practice. Beauty should transform the people so that they sway rulers toward virtue without resorting to violence, but as Cowley knew all too well, beauty is insufficient by itself to govern nations in the real world. In a much-­quoted passage in his preface, he explains that he interrupted the poem because “a warlike, various, and tragical age is best to write of, but worst to write in.”82 The ideals discussed in the Davideis proved too difficult to write of in the midst of political disorder, so Cowley invites others to build on his foundation: “I shall be ambitious of no other fruit from this weak and imperfect attempt of mine, but the opening of a way to the courage and industry of some other persons, who may be better able to perform it thoroughly and successfully.” This statement suggests that Cowley recognized that his poem does not provide a political solution to civil war, but he saw it as worth publishing anyway given the genuine contributions it made to sacred epic as a genre, including the authority that poets may claim as the fruit of grace. The next two chapters discuss how this link between poetic creativity and grace inspired a very different kind of sacred epic.

FOUR

Cooperative Grace and Interpretation in Milton’s Paradise Lost

In 1642, shortly a fter the outbreak of the first English Civil War, John Milton published The Reason of Church-­Government, the first treatise published under his own name. While his main concern is episcopal authority, Milton also takes the opportunity to announce his poetic ambition. Like Isaiah, who was purified by a burning coal on his lips, Milton claims to be elected by grace to become a poet: “that eternall Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallow’d fire of his Altar to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases” (CPW 1: 820–­21).1 Taken too far, however, this emphasis on divine gifts threatens to erase human merit, so Milton also attributes his poetry to “labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joyn’d with the strong propensity of nature” (CPW 1: 820). Milton is thus not only a latter-­ day Isaiah but also a humanist whose “labour and intent study” enable him to respond virtuously to divine gifts.2 Viewed in one way, poetry is the fruit of grace; from another perspective, poetry is due to the poet’s merit and learning. While the productive tension between grace and human creativity animates each of the poets explored in this book, Milton is unique insofar as he developed his own theological system that moved away from the Calvinist consensus that informed the work of earlier poets. Drawing on Arminian109

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ism, a branch of Reformed thought that stressed the freedom of the will to “cooperate” with grace, Milton argues that grace enables human beings to freely perform virtuous acts, including writing poetry and engaging in politics.3 Milton repurposes the Arminian phraseology of “cooperative grace” to argue that human beings “cooperate” with God by interpreting scripture creatively and adapting it to new rhetorical situations. While Arminianism typically emphasized the sovereign power of God, Milton stresses the interpretive agency that God bestows on Christians through the gift of grace.4 This argument allows Milton to justify his political ideals and his poetry as two parallel ways to voluntarily cooperate with God. On the one hand, Milton’s views on cooperative grace help to explain the distinctive features of his imagined community. Critics are increasingly recognizing that notwithstanding his “radical” and “republican” ideas, Milton’s political writing empowers a minority of Protestant, humanist-­ educated, ostensibly virtuous men as representatives of the whole nation.5 This tendency is ultimately due to his celebration of active faith: “We are justified, then, by faith, but a living faith, not a dead one, and the only living faith is a faith which acts” (CPW 6: 490). While “living faith” was a common Protestant phraseology to distinguish true believers, for Milton “living faith” manifests in the republican virtue and the humanist modes of interpretation that characterized the so-­called best part of the nation.6 To cooperate with grace fully, citizens must reject kings, bishops, and clergymen along with inherited interpretive customs. They must also interpret laws with equity, subject dogmas to public debate, and persuade others eloquently.7 This argument empowers well-­educated Protestant humanists like Milton, because the activities in which such men excel become essential for cooperating with grace and thus for proving greater merit relative to the rest of the nation. The same argument also excludes anyone who did not share Milton’s political commitments or his humanist education. For example, such arguments ultimately underpin his tacit exclusion of women and the numerical majority of men from what he calls the better part of the nation.8 In Paradise Lost, Milton imagines the Son of God as the founder, paradigm, and model for the imagined community of grace that he theorizes in the prose. The Son embodies Milton’s interpretive ideal when he finds

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room for grace within the wrathful pronouncements of God the Father. As the Son departs creatively from the Father’s words to articulate an original vision of salvation, he cooperates with the Father in interpreting grace, thus providing the model for the interpretive methods Milton attributed to the ideal citizen. The end of Paradise Lost reveals that grace enables Adam and Eve to imitate the Son. After they are judged for their sin, they approach the place of their judgment with “hearts contrite, in sign / Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek” (10.1101–­1104).9 By reinterpreting the Fall as an opportunity for redemption, they imitate the Son’s interpretive agency vis-­à-­v is the Father, thus demonstrating that the Son is a pattern for human communities after the Fall. As in Milton’s prose, however, this imagined community is not as inclusive as it seems. As Michael goes on to explain, the vast majority of human beings will not live up to the rigorous standard of virtue. The end of Paradise Lost represents both Milton’s ideal community of interpreters and the barriers that exclude most human beings from belonging to it. The Politics of Cooperative Grace

In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton justifies English efforts to depose Charles I in terms of God’s donation of sovereignty to Adam and Eve: “No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all the creatures, born to command and not to obey” (CPW 3: 198–­99). Although the Tenure builds its call for consensual government on these grounds, it was vulnerable to the counterargument that the Fall had obscured the native freedom of Adam and Eve.10 To show that this donation of sovereignty was still important, Milton reimagines grace as a gift that renovates this native human capacity to rule. Drawing from the Dutch theologian Arminius, Milton argues in his Christian Doctrine that God restores the human will to a neutral position from which it may freely choose to resist grace or cooperate with it further. What distinguishes Milton from other Arminians is his tendency to emphasize, within the category of good works, the political virtues of active citizenship, republican liberty, and humanist interpretation.11 Already in the 1640s and 1650s,

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Milton describes these virtues as the means by which human beings cooperate with grace. This argument also excludes the majority of the nation, however, who do not live up to Milton’s high standard of civic virtue. Milton’s views on grace underpin both his defense of liberty and his tendency to restrict that liberty to a minority of men. Arminianism attracted Milton because it carved a space for free will and virtue within a non-­Catholic framework.12 Arminianism began in the Netherlands, where Jacobus Arminius and his followers, the Remonstrants, challenged the then-­dominant Calvinists on grace and free will.13 Calvinists in turn accused them of synergism.14 Despite being condemned at the Synod of Dort with support from an English delegation,15 Arminianism went on to influence English religious culture in the 1620s and 1630s as English bishops, under Archbishop Laud, moved the church from a Calvinist to an Arminian foundation.16 Arminianism became almost synonymous with Laudianism in England, but it spread elsewhere by attracting anti-­ Trinitarians and other freethinkers.17 Milton continued to maintain Calvinist phraseology to resist the Laudian influence, but his mature theology rested on an Arminian foundation and reinforced its sweeping emphasis on human freedom.18 The most important Arminian argument for Milton was the view that grace regenerates some measure of Adam’s and Eve’s capacity for free will.19 For Arminius, grace inspires genuine free will in the present: For when a new light and knowledge of God and Christ, and of the Divine Will, have been kindled in his mind; and when new affections, inclinations and motions agreeing with the law of God, have been excited in his heart, and new powers have been [ingeneratae] produced in him; it comes to pass,—­t hat . . . he loves and embraces that which is good, just, and holy;—­ and that , being made [potens] capable in Christ, co-­operating now with God he prosecutes the Good which he knows and loves, and he begins himself to perform it in deed.20

The key term is “co-­operating,” or “cooperans” in Arminius’s Latin.21 Grace regenerates the will to a neutral condition, and the will is free to either cooperate with God in the pursuit of good works or to resist grace. The freedom in question here is not that of an independent agent, but of a willing servant: “the willing are assisted that they may work and may co-­operate with God.”22

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While the influence of Arminianism on Milton’s Christian Doctrine is well-­k nown, criticism tends to emphasize Milton’s borrowings from Arminian theories of predestination rather than cooperative grace.23 In fact, cooperation was equally important for Milton’s understanding of moral agency, because it supported his view of grace as a partial return to the native liberty of Adam and Eve.24 Milton follows Arminius in arguing that Christians who receive grace are capable of free decision-­making: “To order us to do right but decree that we shall do wrong!—­this is not the way God dealt with our forefather, Adam, nor is it the way he deals with those he calls and invites to grace” (CPW 6: 177). Milton thus rejects Luther’s view that God commands human beings to illustrate the bondage of their will.25 Instead, he argues that “those [God] calls and invites to grace” are free to accept or reject the Gospel’s call in the same way that “our forefather, Adam” was free to obey or disobey the prohibition of the Forbidden Fruit. Milton follows Arminius in his emphasis on human liberty: not only are unbelievers free to respond to the Gospel, but if they go on to accept grace, they are brought into a state of renewed righteousness. Like Arminius, Milton envisions the agency human beings derive from grace as fulfilled in cooperation with God. Thanks to the unilateral action of God, the human will is restored to a neutral position where it may freely resist or cooperate further in the pursuit of good works. Milton interprets St. Paul’s injunction to “work out your own salvation” as a return to this prelapsarian agency: “Phillipp. ii. 12, 13: work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who works in you to will and act for his pleasure. What can this mean but that God gives us the power to act freely, which we have not been able to do since the fall unless called and restored?” (CPW 6: 457). Salvation begins with God, who “call[s] and restore[s]” human beings through the Gospel, but human beings are free to cooperate with grace or reject it.26 The political implications of this argument become clearer when Milton describes good works in ways that evoke republican virtue. In Christian Doctrine and in his political prose, Milton argues that to cooperate with grace means to distinguish oneself from the slavish majority of the nation by embodying the virtues and interpretive habits of a humanist-­educated Protestant. Individuals in his imagined community reject customs, traditions, and dogmas to interpret scripture critically with others. While grace

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is offered to all Christians, it will be accepted only by the minority who behave in this virtuous way. The empowerment of the better part requires the denigration of the multitude, whom Milton accuses of preferring law over Christian liberty. While the political uses of grace are clearest in Milton’s political prose, they are also implicit in the Christian Doctrine when Milton describes Christian liberty. For Milton, grace empowers Christians to serve God freely rather than from fear and compulsion: CHRISTIAN LIBERTY means that CHRIST OUR LIBERATOR FREES US FROM THE SLAVERY OF SIN AND THUS FROM THE RULE OF THE LAW AND OF MEN, AS IF WE WERE EMANCIPATED SLAVES. HE DOES THIS SO THAT, BEING MADE SONS INSTEAD OF SERVANTS AND GROWN MEN INSTEAD OF BOYS, WE MAY SERVE GOD IN CHARITY THROUGH THE GUIDANCE OF THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH. (CPW 6: 537)

Although Christian liberty serves God, it is a voluntary form service fit for sons and men rather than the servitude of slaves and boys.27 While Milton’s language is conventional, the passage reflects a tendency throughout his work to contrast the civic virtue of good men with the slavishness of the rest of the nation. As Martin Dzelzainis notes, “liberty for [Milton] is not a freestanding condition but has to be seen in apposition to slavery; slaves because not free, free because not slaves.”28 This binary evokes the definition of the citizen as a subject who is legally protected from arbitrary rule—­an echo strengthened further by the Latin term “manumission.”29 Milton’s definition also evokes the anti-­Judaic strand of early modern republicanism, which he repeats elsewhere: “the peoples of Asia readily endure slavery, while the Jews and Syrians were born for it” (CPW 4: 343).30 Cooperative grace explains this interweaving of Christian liberty and republican freedom. If the best way to cooperate with grace is to demonstrate civic virtue, those who do not manifest the same virtue are deservedly enslaved because they refuse grace. This argument provides the theological justification for dividing the nation into a “better part” and a slavish majority. This understanding of grace informs Milton’s humanist theory of interpretation. As Dayton Haskin has shown, Milton believed that interpreters should work

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out their own salvation by comparing scriptural commonplaces with each other so as to develop an original, creative interpretation of divine intention.31 Milton also describes this search for intention as part of the equitable and charitable interpretation of scripture, with charity as a key part of Christian liberty.32 When equity and charity were used to mean an interpretive habit, they described the interpreter’s power to correct the inflexibility of a text.33 Milton was attracted to this hermeneutic not only because of his theology, but also because of his commitment to a humanist education.34 As we shall see, Milton associates this interpretive liberty with the gift of grace. Given that a humanist education was designed for privileged men, Milton’s incorporation of humanist ideas into his theory of grace ends up excluding the majority of the people. In his divorce tracts, Milton defends men’s right to divorce their wives as part of a larger argument about the interpretive liberty derived from grace. Against the prevailing view that the Gospel prohibits divorce, Milton argues that such inflexibility is uncharitable.35 Interpreters should use charity and equity to recover the aim, or “scope,” of marriage: For all sense and equity reclaims that any Law or Cov’nant, how solemne or strait soever, either between God and man, or man and man, though of Gods joyning, should bind against a prime and principall scope of its own institution, and of both or either party cov’nanting: neither can it be of force to ingage a blameles creature to his own perpetuall sorrow, mistak’n for his expected solace, without suffering charity to step in and doe a confest good work of parting those whom nothing holds together. (CPW 2: 245)

Because some marriages are unhappy, a blanket prohibition of divorce is too inflexible to uphold “the principall scope” of marriage, which in Milton’s view is to give men a fit companion. Drawing on his view of equity and charity as the recovery of authorial intention, Milton concludes that Jesus’s prohibition of divorce in Matthew 19:8 is meant only for his immediate audience: “the occasion, which induced our Saviour to speak of divorce, was either to convince the extravagance of the Pharisees in that point, or to give a sharp and vehement answer to a tempting question” (CPW 2: 596). This tendency to resolve apparent contradictions by appealing to authorial intention and the rhetorical “occasion” are hallmarks of Milton’s interpretive

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liberty. In order to preserve charity and equity, a rhetorically sophisticated interpreter such as Milton must adapt Jesus’s words to the very different occasion of English national reform. Milton justifies this hermeneutic by appealing to grace, which both enables and obliges individuals to interpret in this way. In Tetrachordon, he argues that Christians range beyond the letter of scripture because of the dignity bestowed on them by grace: “for what can be more opposite and disparaging to the cov’nant of love, of freedom, & of our manhood in grace, then to bee made the yoaking pedagogue of new severities, the scribe of syllables and rigid letters” (2: 636). The phrase “our manhood in grace” means not only that those who have grace deserve the interpretive liberty of manhood, but also that only those who demonstrate this liberty have accepted grace correctly. Moreover, a nation can lose grace if it does not interpret in this way: In every common wealth when it decayes, corruption makes two maine steps; first when men cease to doe according to the inward and uncompell’d actions of virtue, caring only to live by the outward constraint of law, and turne the Simplicity of reall good, into the craft of seeming so by law. . . . The next declining is, when law becomes now too straight for the secular manners, and those too loose for the cincture of law. This brings in false and crooked interpretations to eeke out law, and invents the suttle encroachment of obscure traditions hard to be disprov’d. To both these descents the Pharises themselves were fall’n. Our Saviour therefore shews them both where they broke the law in not marking the divine intent thereof, but onely the letter, and where they deprav’d the letter also with sophisticall expositions. (CPW 2: 639)

Jesus punishes the Pharisees with the letter of law because the Pharisees had already refused to interpret with the method that Milton associates with grace. By treating the Pharisees as an illustration of “every common wealth” that declines from virtue, Milton warns the English people that they too can suffer the same fate. Long before outlining his Arminian idea of grace in Christian Doctrine, Milton had begun to imagine grace as something that can be gained or lost depending on one’s willingness to cooperate with it as part of interpretive virtue. And since most of the nation could not pass Milton’s high standards of virtue, “our manhood in grace” is in effect available only to a Protestant humanist minority.

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In Areopagitica, Milton continues to imagine the best part of the nation as a body of academic-­m inded Protestants who interpret scripture in a humanist way. He argues that the full emergence of scriptural Truth will be deferred until after “Masters second coming” (CPW 2: 459). In the interim, the people become “heretick[s] in the truth” if they “believe things only because [their] Pastor says so” (CPW 2: 543).36 Truth thus involves not simply belief in true propositions but also a willingness to engage in ongoing interpretive labor. Learning is implicitly the barrier of exclusion for this imagined community. At his most optimistic, Milton imagines a city of learning: “there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and idea’s wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty the approaching Reformation; others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement” (CPW 2: 554). Milton seems to describe the whole nation here, but the representatives are the “pens and heads,” or intellectual elite, who judge all opinions for themselves. In these moments, Areopagitica does not represent the nation as it is, but rather as it might be if it were made up exclusively of Protestant humanist men like Milton.37 In his republican prose, Milton presents his favorite method of interpretation as a part of republican virtue. In A Defense of the People of England, he attacks Salmasius for interpreting Mark 12:17 (“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”) too literally to mean that the secular authorities should never be challenged on religious grounds. Citing equity, Milton argues that Jesus meant only to chastise his immediate audience of Pharisees: “What if some fellow tried to attack you by stealth or ensnare you in your talk and provoke you to a statement to be used against you later, and, in a country ruled by a king, question you as to the rights of a king? I supposed you would not become angered with such a questioner?” (CPW 4: 376). The ideal interpreter reads the passage as part of the intention of the Gospel, which is to restore liberty: “Our freedom belongs not to Caesar, but is rather a gift from God at birth, and to surrender it to any Caesar, when we do not receive it from him, would be an act of shame most unworthy of man’s origin” (CPW 4: 376). Like Christian liberty, this political liberty is rooted in the imago Dei, but it belongs fully only to men who accept divine gifts and put them to good use by interpreting scripture with equity.38

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Milton’s prose foregrounds not only the political uses of grace but also the exclusions implicit in his imagined community. As soon as grace becomes a gift with which one must freely cooperate, and as soon as the sign of that cooperation becomes civic virtue and humanist interpretation, grace maps onto the social privileges enjoyed by Milton and a small group of like-­ minded humanists. Milton excludes women by treating marriage in terms of men’s interests and by associating “our manhood in grace” with a degree of education that was unavailable to most women. He also excludes most men insofar as his examples of cooperative grace highlight the public virtue and rhetorical sophistication conferred by a humanist education, which only a minority of men enjoyed. As a result, Milton’s commitment to humanism means that only a minority of men can accept and cooperate with grace. Even as he softens the Calvinist contrast between the elect and the reprobate, Milton creates a new contrast between a humanist-­educated minority and the vicious, ignorant, tradition-­loving majority of the nation.39 Milton’s idea of grace helps explain why he is, in practice, an apologist for minority rule by the “better part of the people.” The irony was not lost on Sir Robert Filmer: “J[ohn] M[ilton] will not allow the major part of the representers to be the people, but the ‘sounder and better part only’ of them . . . how shall we know, or who shall judge who they be?”40 Filmer has struck a key problem in Milton’s thought that explains his justifications of minority rule: despite defending popular sovereignty, Milton imagines sovereignty as belonging in practice only to himself and a small minority of like-­m inded men.41 While Milton never fully clarifies who these good men are, his Defense suggests that his own republican writing is the ideal model: I call on almighty God, giver of all gifts, to grant that just as success and righteousness attended those famous men who led us to liberty, who crushed in line of battle the insolence of the king and the passion of the tyrant, and who then by a memorable punishment put an end to them forever, and that just as I alone, when the king rose again as it were from the dead and in his posthumous volume commended himself to the people by new slyness and meretricious arguments, did recently overcome them and do away with him, so may I now with good success and in very truth refute and bring to naught the ill-­tempered lies of this barbarous rhetorician. (CPW 4: 305–­6)

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By comparing his efforts against Eikon Basilike 42 to Cromwell’s military victories, Milton presents himself as a heroic republican subject extending the struggle against monarchy to the realm of interpretation.43 Milton’s learning and eloquence are the fruits of the liberty bestowed on him by God, while his efforts for the republican cause are a way to serve God actively. Milton himself is therefore the paradigm of what he elsewhere calls the “uprighter sort” (CPW 3: 197). The same presuppositions lead Milton to identify the true church with the most tolerant and academic-­m inded Protestants. Even in the Christian Doctrine, he imagines the ideal community of grace as a body of virtuous, humanist-­educated Protestants. While he no longer thinks of himself as a revolutionary, he still imagines himself part of a humanist readership: I implore all friends of truth not to start shouting that the church is being thrown into confusion by free discussion and inquiry. These are allowed in academic circles, and should certainly be denied to no believer. For we are ordered to find out the truth about all things, and the daily increase of the light of truth fills the church much rather with brightness and strength than with confusion. (CPW 6: 121)

Christians are “ordered” by God “to find out truth,” and this divine order legitimizes the judging, debating, and ceaseless interpreting that Milton sees as hallmarks of the true church. But most Christians were unlikely to have the necessary rhetorical training and exposure to “academic circles” to discuss heresies in this way. Implicitly, Milton’s ideal readership continues to be a virtuous minority modelled on Milton’s own interpretive preferences.44 As we shall see, these arguments persist not only in Milton’s prose but also his mature poetry.

The Son’s Mediation in Paradise Lost

Literary critics have often assumed that Milton’s emphasis on human autonomy and liberty does not sit very well with the absolute sovereignty of God in Paradise Lost. More than five decades ago, William Empson concluded that Milton’s God aims to abdicate to a nonauthoritarian form of divinity,45 and more recent criticism continues to offer similar readings.46 Writing in

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a more political register, David Norbrook suggests that while God will not abdicate, he speaks like a republican ruler who wishes to reduce sovereignty to his people.47 The implication is that while Milton was too Protestant to allow it, the republican energies of Paradise Lost push against divine sovereignty.48 Milton’s cooperative idea of grace suggests, however, that the sovereignty of God does not diminish human agency, but rather increases and amplifies it. As we have seen, Milton’s God orders Christians to obey him creatively. To fulfil God’s commands, creatures must become the kind of creative interpreter that Milton imagines himself to be. If God really were to abdicate, there would no longer be a source of legitimacy to authorize this community of interpreters. Milton’s binary between sons and slaves would then be unsustainable, because the superiority of the sons vis-­à-­v is the slaves depends on their willingness to obey God in the way that Milton deems more dignified, humanist, and republican. In Paradise Lost, the ideal interpreter is the Son of God, who acts as the paradigm for the interpretive habits and virtues in Milton’s ideal community. When the Son interprets the Father’s decrees in Book 3, he demonstrates the interpretive creativity that Milton outlines in his prose. Although the Son submits to the literal text of the Father’s speeches, he also interprets the meaning of divine decrees creatively. The Son demonstrates that God is a teacher who cooperates with his creatures, cultivates their virtue, promotes their autonomy—­briefly put, he teaches them to be citizens—­ because God, unlike any human king, loses none of his sovereignty by devolving agency to his creatures.49 Although the Son does not need grace, he provides human beings with an example of how to accept grace in the work of interpretation. His relationship to the Father reverberates throughout the poem as an example for all creatures. As soon as the Son appears on the scene in Book 3, he transforms the Father’s harsh tone into a more cooperative expression of authority. The Father’s first speech in 3.80–­134 flaunts divine sovereignty and omnipotence by predicting and condemning humanity’s Fall. The Son’s appearance, however, tempers the Father’s speech: Thus while God spake, ambrosial fragrance filled All heaven, and in the blessed spirits elect

Cooperative Grace and Interpretation in Milton’s Paradise Lost

Sense of new joy ineffable diffused: Beyond compare the Son of God was seen Most glorious, in him all his Father shone Substantially expressed, and in his face Divine compassion visibly appeared, Love without end, and without measure grace, Which uttering thus he to his Father spake.

121

(3.135–­43)

The compassion, love, and grace on the Son’s face suggest additional levels of meaning beyond the literal sense of the Father’s words. In the same way that the “ambrosial fragrance” communicates “joy ineffable” to the angels through their olfactory sense,50 the Son’s face acts as a visual supplement to the Father’s speech.51 Unlike the angels, however, Milton’s reader experiences Father and Son sequentially: first we hear the Father condemn humanity harshly, and only then do we imagine the Son visibly expressing “without measure grace.” This sequential presentation of a synchronous event provokes the reader to be, as it were, surprised by the Son.52 What initially appeared to be an authoritarian dictation from the sovereign to his subjects turns out to have been a synesthetic, cooperative performance between Father and Son all along. The scene teaches readers to view divine sovereignty with a double focus: while God is a genuinely omnipotent sovereign who rules, judges, and declares his will, his most authoritarian expressions are also qualified and mediated through the Son. Milton’s God is thus both a sovereign and a teacher: in his role as a sovereign, he retains the sole power to judge humanity and establish law, but in his pedagogical role he works with the Son to teach creatures how to interpret creatively. The ultimate purpose of divine teaching is for all creatures to become more like the Son in their creative responses to divine law. This process does not imply that God will abdicate, but rather that God invites the Son to interpret his laws and soften their apparent severity. The Son in turn submits to God’s absolute sovereignty even as he finds room for creative interpretation and grace within it. The Son reflects the cooperative understanding of grace in his responses, which always emphasize grace: “O Father, gracious was that word which closed / Thy sovereign sentence, that man should find grace” (3.144–­ 45). Since the Father also promised many ungracious things, including eter-

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nal torture for all fallen angels and many human beings, the Son does not simply state the obvious when he chooses “grace” as the defining word of the father’s judgment of mankind. Far from a passive exposition of the Father’s meaning, the Son’s interpretation of the speech is a creative and imaginative act in its own right.53 Echoing the virtues of interpretive equity and charity, which aimed to reveal the unstated intention of scripture, the Son strives to creatively reimagine the Father’s judgment. The Son’s creativity is further highlighted by the fact that he is not part of a Trinity in Milton’s theological system, so his understanding of God is that of a creative subordinate rather than a coequal being who shares divine omniscience. The Son is a subject, but also creative in his subjection; in the idiom of Christian Doctrine, his obedience is that of a son and a man, not a boy or slave. The Father in turn encourages the Son’s freethinking: “All hast thou spoken as my thoughts are, all / As my eternal purpose hath decreed” (3.171–­72). In other words, the Son understands intention or “purpose” even though he diverges from the letter. This response illustrates that God wants to be understood in this way: instead of revealing his “eternal purpose” directly, God prefers to rely on the creative response of the Son. The overall implication in the exchange is that the Father retains sovereignty, but he shares interpretive authority with the Son.54 When Milton calls the Son’s offer of self-­sacrifice his “dearest mediation” (3.226), he draws on the traditional role of the Son as a mediator to explain his interpretation of the Father’s decrees. Christ is called a “mediator” in the Pauline epistles and in the Epistle to the Hebrews. While Paul uses this word to describe Christ’s intercession for sin, in Hebrews the word “mediator” refers to his reconciliation of Old and New dispensations: “But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, by as much as He is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises” (Heb. 8:6). The Epistle later adds: “For this reason He is the mediator of a new covenant, so that, since a death has taken place for the redemption of the transgressions that were committed under the first covenant, those who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance” (Heb. 9:15). Echoing Matthew 5:17, the Epistle to the Hebrews defines Christ as a mediator because his “new” covenant is both an interruption and a fulfilment of the “first covenant” of Moses.

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In addition to this scriptural understanding of mediation, however, the Son also mediates the Father by demonstrating the interpretive charity that was essential to Protestant humanism and to Milton’s broader system of thought. This tendency is clearest in the speeches leading up to the Son’s offer of self-­sacrifice, where the Father and the Son reproduce the Pauline conflict between Law and grace through dialogue. The Father’s insistence that someone must “pay / The rigid satisfaction, death for death” (3.211–­ 12) associates him with the Mosaic “law of Sin and death” in Romans 8:2, whereas the Son’s emphasis on grace links him to the life-­g iving Gospel that makes up the other half of the Pauline binary. As in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Son’s “mediation” resolves this crisis between Law and grace: And now without redemption all mankind Must have been lost, adjudged to death and hell By doom severe, had not the Son of God, In whom the fulness dwells of love divine, His dearest mediation thus renewed.

(3.222–­26)

The Son’s speech brings out the possibility of grace within the foreboding words of the Father in the same way that the messiah in Hebrews finds the Gospel within the Law. The Son finds room for grace within the letter of “doom severe.” The Son’s interpretive practice is thus a literary correlative to the “mediation” that reconciles Old and New dispensations in Hebrews. Yet at the same time, the Son’s response is also a charitable and equitable interpretation that goes beyond the literal wording of the law to recover authorial intention. The “mediation” of this scene foregrounds tensions between law and grace, Father and Son, Old and New, while at the same time revealing that the Son bridges these binaries via his creative interpretive practice.55 Since God’s words in this case also carry the legal and political weight of a “sovereign sentence” (3.142), the Son’s mediation softens the expression of divine sovereignty. Although the Son plays a decisive role in sentencing humanity when he interprets the judgment in light of grace, he simultaneously defers to the Father’s legal and political authority and refuses to stray from the text of the Father’s speech. The Son is neither a sovereign in his

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own right nor a completely passive subject to the Father, but rather a unique political agent whose equity and charity empower him to participate as a creative interpreter of divine law. As the Son mediates between Old and New dispensations, he also mediates between sovereignty and subjection.56 Milton’s anti-­ Trinitarianism further underscores the political dimension of the Son’s mediation by emphasizing his subordination to the Father.57 According to Trinitarian orthodoxy, the Son is a mediator for humanity because in Christ he is not only fully human but also has the same divine essence as the Father. After his incarnation as Jesus, the Son acts as a mediator between God and sinners because he sacrifices his life to atone for sin. For orthodox Trinitarians, therefore, the Son, Father, and Holy Spirit are all “co-­equal” and “co-­eternal” and all share in the same, unitary divine will. Orthodoxy thus represents the relationship between Father and Son as metaphysical rather than political. In anti-­Trinitarian thought, by contrast, the Son is a creature and subordinate of the Father, so his mediation implies a subject-­sovereign relationship.58 Milton emphasizes that “[the Son] could not have been a mediator, nor could he have been sent by or obedient to God, unless he was by nature less than God and the Father” (CPW 6: 243). The key word here is “obedient”: since Milton’s anti Trinitarian Son is by “nature” less than the Father, his mediation depends not only on the sacrifice itself but also on the Son’s obedience to God.59 At the same time, the Son’s obedience is free and creative, so it elevates and dignifies the Son as God’s voluntary servant.60 Milton clarifies this point when he explains John 10:30, in which Jesus claims to be “one” with the Father: “they are one in that they speak and act as one . . . he and the Father are one in the same way as we are one with him: that is, not in essence but in love, in communion, in agreement, in charity, in spirit, and finally in glory” (CPW 6: 220). The Son’s obedience allows him to “speak and act as one” with God, thus sharing in divine sovereignty even though he is still a subject. Like Moses and Abraham, the Son is a mediator not because of his nature—­as the Nicene Creed insisted—­but rather because he interprets the Law creatively and favorably for humanity.61 This aspect of the Son’s mediation becomes clear when he echoes the words of Abraham in Gen. 18:25—­“That be far from thee, Father” (3.154)—­to plead on behalf of Adam and Eve as Abraham did for Sodom and Gomorrah.62 The Son’s mediation is an example for other

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creatures because, like Abraham’s mediation, it is based on a charitable interpretive habit rather than a unique role as part of a Trinity.63 Milton’s ideas on mediation challenge received readings of Paradise Lost as a straightforwardly republican poem. Critics who espouse this reading tend to represent the dynamic between Father and Son as part of the Father’s desire to abdicate his rule, which would seem to confirm the principles of Machiavellian republicanism. In his Discourses on Livy, for instance, Niccolò Machiavelli argues that republics acquire liberty through the wise laws of a founding legislator, but republics then require periodic renewal from virtuous citizens.64 Republican readings of Paradise Lost represent the Son as a Machiavellian innovator who reduces divine sovereignty to the foundations first laid by God.65 Whereas the Machiavellian innovator responds to the indifferent force of fortune, however, the Son responds to a sovereign God who phrases his Law in a way that encourages the Son’s discovery of grace within it.66 The key difference from the Machiavellian imaginary is that Milton’s God is a teacher as well as a ruler: he creates the necessary circumstances for the Son’s interpretation in order to teach the Son and, through him, all other creatures. God not only wants to be understood by a humanist interpreter, but he also—­as Milton argues more fully in Christian Doctrine—­commands all creatures to interpret with the same method that the Son does. There is no clear parallel for this educational telos in Machiavellian fortune, which has neither any pedagogical aim nor a sovereign will that can be construed as the intention of an absent lawgiver. Moreover, Milton transforms the concept of political virtue altogether by framing the Son’s example as a pedagogical model for other creatures. The Son possesses political agency in heaven because God is an absolute sovereign, not despite this fact. In Machiavelli’s political system, virtue and liberty are necessary simply to ensure survival in the harsh political realities of sixteenth-­century Italy.67 By contrast, there is no prudential motive for the Son’s virtue because, despite Satan’s best efforts, God’s omniscience makes him impervious to the kind of crisis that would make virtue politically necessary.68 There is no danger, no fortune, no civil war in God’s heavenly academy. It follows that the Son is virtuous not because he needs to avert these evils, but simply because God loves him enough to teach him and empower him to make interpretive decisions. The same paradigm extends beyond the

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Son to other creatures who imitate his example. Understood in this way, the interpretive activity of the Son in Paradise Lost parallels the agency-­in-­ submission that characterizes Milton’s ideal community of grace in both his politics and his prose. The basis of this community is built on the argument that God is an absolute sovereign—­arguably the only rightfully absolute sovereign for Milton—­and he may therefore bestow his grace without diminishing his sovereign power. This vision of the Son as both a subject and an interpreter of the Father’s laws explains why his tone during the mediation is so peculiarly divided between assertiveness and submission. Shortly before offering himself as a sacrifice, the Son puns on the word “grace”: Father, thy word is past, man shall find grace; And shall grace not find means, that finds her way, The speediest of thy winged messengers, To visit all thy creatures, and to all Comes unprevented, unimplored, unsought, Happy for man, so coming . . .

(3.227–­32)

“Grace” is “thy”—­the Father’s—­word because the Father mentioned it first. Grace is also the Son’s word, however, because his earlier speech shaped the meaning of grace in this passage. As a result, the Son praises not only the Father’s grace but also his own interpretations of what grace means. Moreover, the phrase “speediest of thy winged messengers” seems to describe grace as a gift that proceeds preveniently (“unimplored, unsought”) from God. On the other hand, “winged messengers” evokes the angels—­angelos means “messenger” in Greek—­and, since the Son is already the head of the angels by this point in the poem’s chronology, the phrase “speediest of thy winged messengers” is also an epithet for the Son as the leader of an angelic community. The Son praises the Father’s grace in a way that could also suggest self-­aggrandizement for himself and the angels. This delicate balance between assertiveness and submission parallels his role as a bridge between the Father’s sovereignty and the agency of an empowered interpreter. The tension between Father and Son reaches its climax when the Son assumes for himself the authority to bestow paternal grace. After explain-

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ing that man will become “dead in sins and lost” (3.233) and incapable of bringing “atonement for himself or offering meet” (3.234), the Son offers himself as a sacrifice: “Behold me then, me for him, life for life / I offer, on me let thine anger fall; / Account me man” (3.236–­38). This declaration displays the Son’s exemplary obedience and his appeasement of the Father’s righteous anger. Read differently, however, the speech also represents the Son’s assertiveness. In the context of the dialogue, “behold me then” is an unexpected shift in conversation—­a shift as “unsought” and “unimplored” as grace. If we read “behold me then” as a speech-­act, this phrase is itself the first act of grace: by offering himself in this unexpected way, the Son begins to bestow on human beings the very grace for which he has been pleading from the Father. As a result, the Son’s “dearest mediation” is both his most submissive statement and, at the same time, an almost impudently innovative interpretation69 of the Father that effectively coauthors the meaning of grace for all time thereafter.70 The sovereignty underpinning the command belongs to Father alone, but its meaning for human beings is not complete until the Son interprets it gracefully. Throughout Book 3, the Son illustrates the interpretive habits that Milton describes in his prose as the fruit of cooperative grace. Like the charitable and equitable interpreters that Milton idealizes in his prose, the Son steers a middle way between slavish adherence to the literal text of the Father’s pronouncement and, at the other extreme, a complete disregard for the word of God. The Father’s tendency to invite the Son’s response reveals his wish to devolve interpretive authority to the Son and, eventually, to other creatures. When all obedient creatures interpret as the Son does, Milton holds out the possibility that “God shall be all in all” (3.341). The Father’s desire to make all creatures imitate the Son should not be confused with a wish to abdicate, however, because such an abdication would remove the authoritative texts that Miltonic interpreters need in order to exercise their liberty and creativity. He does not wish to abdicate, but to teach; and the Son of God is the ideal pupil who represents how that teaching is supposed to work. Thanks to the Son’s mediation, the God of Paradise Lost appears as a humanist teacher who does not want human beings to be like the “meer artificiall Adam” that Milton mocks in Areopagitica (CPW 2: 527). But God is also destined to remain an authoritarian ruler whose word is always

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the foundation for all interpretation, including the Son’s creative responses. Without such paternal authority, there would be no way to distinguish, as Milton consistently does, between the better part who interpret as the Son does and the vicious majority of human beings who refuse his example. The implications for human history become clear at the end of Paradise Lost. Interpretation in Adam and Eve’s Prayer

According to a well-­k nown anecdote, Thomas Ellwood asked Milton after reading Paradise Lost: “Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?” Milton supposedly “sat some time in a muse” and, months later, presented him with the manuscript of Paradise Regained.71 Critics appreciate this anecdote in part because it reinforces a neat separation between the longer epic’s emphasis on the Fall and the shorter epic’s concern with redemption. One reason Milton might have sat musing, however, is that human regeneration is already prominent in Paradise Lost.72 Even though Adam and Eve do in fact lose Paradise, in Book 10 they manage to find renewed hope through an active and creative interpretation of their judgment, which mirrors the interpretive activity of the Son in Book 3. Like their savior, the human couple interpret their judgment and situation creatively in light of grace. In doing so, they regain some measure of the prelapsarian liberty that Milton’s prose presents as the distinctive feature of the ideal Protestant community. The Son’s judgment of humankind in Book 10 evokes once more his role as a mediator between the Law and the Gospel. The Father sends him with the explicit purpose of mediating his commands: “Easy it might be seen that I intend / Mercy colleague with justice, sending thee / Man’s friend his mediator” (10.58–­60). During the judgment, the Son mediates by introducing them to the mysteries of the Gospel: Between thee and the woman I will put Enmity, and between thine and her seed; \ Her seed shall bruise thy head, thou bruise his heel. So spake this oracle, then verified When Jesus son of Mary second Eve Saw Satan fall like lightning down from Heaven . . .

(10.179–­84)

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The scriptural source of these words, Genesis 3:15, was known to Christian theologians as the protoevangelium, or “first Gospel,” because it was thought to contain the first prefiguration of Christ in Genesis. Milton’s rendition emphasizes its typological meaning with a proleptic account of Mary and Jesus. As a result, in this passage the Son is the mediator of the Old and New Testaments because he speaks about the Gospel using the text of the Old Testament curse. Milton’s reader is expected to know that the crushing of the Serpent’s head prefigures Jesus’s victory over Satan, but this point is not obvious to Adam and Eve, who encounter the protoevangelium for the first time. Milton acknowledges that this messianic prophecy is obscure to the human couple: “God at last / To Satan first in sin his doom applied / Though in mysterious terms, judged as then best” (10.171–­73). What is the purpose of this mystery? The answer lies in Book 3. The Father couches his grace in Book 3 in wrathful language to invite the Son to find grace through his own effort and so participate in the interpretation and elaboration of the father’s sovereign sentence. The initial display of paternal anger and hostility creates the necessary interpretive space for the Son to intervene, like Abraham, and state that the law has a graceful intention: “That be far from thee, Father” (3.154). Similarly, the mysterious terms of the protoevangelium have a pedagogical purpose. The most obvious interpretation of the punishment of Adam and Eve is that they will be forced to live out a life of suffering without consolation, but this interpretation is wrong because it relies on an overly literal reading of the “bruise” that the serpent will receive on his head. As a result, Adam and Eve face the same interpretive situation as the Son in Book 3. Like the Son, they confront a seemingly clear-­cut judgment of death on mankind, but we know that the most obvious reading is wrong, and the right answer is for them to read the text creatively and imaginatively so as to find redemption within the judgment. In order to come to the right interpretation, Adam and Even need to reimagine the letter of paternal law as an opportunity for grace.73 In their ensuing dialogue, Adam and Eve eventually rise to the challenge of interpreting the protoevangelium by reenacting the Son’s interpretive practice in Book 3. Their approaches to interpretation are different, but they each imitate aspects of the Son’s interpretive practice. Eve is the proximate cause of grace because she is the first to repent, admit responsibility,

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and have mercy on Adam.74 Her language explicitly echoes the Son’s offer of self-­sacrifice: And to the place of judgment will return, There with my cries importune heaven, that all The sentence from thy head removed may light On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe, Me me only just object of his ire.

(10.932–­36)

These lines evoke the Son’s words in Book 3: “me for him, life for life / I offer, on me let thine anger fall” (3.236–­37). Eve begins to resemble the Son because she takes the initiative to not only repent but also share her repentance with Adam and God. Adam previously had almost the same thoughts—­“On me, me only, as the source and spring / Of all corruption, all the blame lights due” (10.831–­33)—­but he keeps these words to himself, unable to lose face by openly admitting his responsibility to Eve. If Adam’s fallen masculinity is defined by excessive pride, Eve’s words resemble the self-­lowering of the Son. Her approach reflects her connection to Mary and thus to the incarnation of the Son, which Milton highlights further by describing the incarnated Son as “Jesus son of Mary second Eve” (10.183). Adam completes the imitation of the Son by transforming Eve’s self-­ lowering into an interpretive principle with which to understand the divine intention behind a text. It is Adam who first proposes that the crushing of the Serpent’s head signifies victory over “our grand foe / Satan, who in the serpent hath contrived / Against us this deceit” (10.1033–­35). He achieves this insight by focusing on the Son’s gracious appearance: “Remember with what mild / And gracious temper he both heard and judged / Without wrath or reviling” (10.1047–­49). The discrepancy between the gentle appearance of the Son and the harshness of his judgment signals, as it does in Book 3, additional levels of meaning in the Father’s words. This realization is made possible by Eve’s Christlike self-­lowering, which reveals the Son’s mercy, but Adam also engages in a version of the interpretive process outlined in Milton’s prose. In the same way that the Miltonic interpreter in the divorce tracts compares place with place to arrive at an equitable interpretation of scripture, Adam compares different memories of God’s self-­presentation—­

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some wrathful, some graceful—­ to conclude that the protoevangelium should not be understood according to the letter, but rather according to Adam’s sense of divine intent. By calling the Son gracious, therefore, Adam does not state the obvious as much as make a decision to prioritize the signs of grace over the signs of divine anger as more indicative of divine intention. Adam and Eve both have to make this kind of interpretive decision to overcome their initial despair. If Eve first embodies grace and mediates it to Adam by offering to be punished in his stead, Adam transforms what he learns from Eve into a principle of interpretation with which to read texts. Together, they imitate the Son’s mediation in Book 3 by revealing the promise of grace within an Old Testament curse.75 The interpretive work of Adam and Eve underscores their resemblance to the Son even further by foregrounding their doubts prior to their prayer. While Adam needs to imagine God’s generosity and pity, he also dwells on the evidence of judgment before his eyes: his timely care Hath unbesought provided, and his hands Clothes us unworthy, pitying while he judged; How much more, if we pray him, will his ear Be open, and his heart to pity incline, And teach us further by what means to shun The inclement seasons, rain, ice, hail and snow, Which now the sky with various face begins To shew us in this mountain, while the winds Blow moist and keen, shattering the graceful locks Of these fair spreading trees.

(10.1057–­67)

Although Adam does not yet understand grace well enough to name it, this passage captures the process by which a fallen human mind beings to grapple with the paradoxes of grace. Adam and Eve are now “unworthy,” and in this unworthiness Adam glimpses the fact that salvation will no longer be predicated on works alone. A clearer echo appears when the care of God is described as “unbesought”; this word alludes directly to the Son’s view, in Book 3, that grace “Comes unprevented, unimplored, unsought, / Happy

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for man, so coming” (3. 231–­32). Like the Son’s “unsought” grace, the “unbesought” care noted by Adam is surprising to him because of its discrepancy with the evidence of his eyes. Although Adam begins to say that God will pity them, he cannot help but turn, mid-­statement, to the evidence of cosmic devastation: “inclement seasons, rain, ice, hail and snow” now shatter the “graceful locks” of the trees that he and Eve called home. The passage forces us as readers to enter the paradox of grace through the experience of a mind divided by two contradictory experiences: the catastrophe caused by sin all around him and the memory of a judge who was “pityng while he judged.” Adam is behaving as a Miltonic interpreter because he is comparing place with place, squaring evidence against evidence, and working with Eve as part of a community to develop the phraseology of grace as an “unbesought” gift. This creative effort to come to terms with the Fall eventually leads Adam to name grace and follow Eve’s initiative in seeking mercy at the place of their judgment. Adam’s words before their prayer reflect a tentative hope: Undoubtedly he will relent and turn From his displeasure; in whose look serene, When angry most he seemed and most severe, What else but favour, grace, and mercy shone?

(10.1093–­96)

“Undoubtedly he will relent” seems at first to suggest that Adam and Eve have no doubts in God’s mercy, but the ensuing rhetorical question undercuts this confidence. Since the tone balances assertion and uncertainty, the illocutionary force of “undoubtedly” is to suggest that Adam and Eve do have doubts, but are freely choosing to ignore them and to believe in divine mercy anyway. In other words, they are free to interpret their situation despairingly, as they both do in different ways in part of Book 10, but they nevertheless choose to have faith in God’s grace. Their statement is rhetorically very similar, therefore, to the Son’s appeals to the Father in Book 3: “that be from thee far, / That far be from thee, Father, who art judge / Of all things made, and judgest only right” (3.153–­55). Adam and Eve’s prayer, like the Son’s words in Book 3, are a challenge to the Father—­ they tell the Father that he must accept their prayer to be consistent in his

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“grace” and “mercy”—­but they frame the challenge as a submissive confession of faith.76 Although Adam and Eve resemble the Son’s interpretive practice, the crucial difference is that they are now hindered from sensing God’s presence as easily as before, illustrating the enduring effects of sin. In terms of the Pauline metaphor for interpretation in 1 Corinthians 13:12, the Son already sees God face to face, whereas Adam and Eve see him through a glass darkly. The meandering dialogue of Adam and Eve throughout Book 10 reveals the interpretive difficulties they can expect to have in their relationship with God moving forward. Even when they finally strike upon the beginnings of the correct reading of the protoevangelium, it is still “mysterious” to them until Michael explains its meaning in Books 11 and 12. In the meantime they must pray without hard evidence of divine mercy—­a difficult act of faith that John Tanner aptly compares to Kierkegaardian anxiety.77 Even though they embody aspects of the Son’s interpretive practice during their regeneration, they still cannot hope to rival the affinity and intimacy that exists between the Father and the Son. Despite these difficulties, Milton reveals, retroactively, that grace rehabilitates the free will of Adam and Eve enough to enable the work of interpretation. Though they are not aware of it, they have been cooperating with prevenient grace throughout the scene: Thus they in lowliest plight repentant stood Praying, for from the mercy-­seat above Prevenient grace descending had removed The stony from their hearts . . .

(11.1–­4)

The mention of “prevenient grace” emphasizes God’s care for human beings. Without such grace their hearts would remain stony and they would be unable to pray, but God restores to Adam and Eve their agency. In terms of Milton’s Arminian theology, God’s prevenient grace is resistible and thus compatible with human freedom.78 Their doubts reveal the temptation to resist grace and the effort required in accepting it. The implication is that Adam and Eve freely cooperate with grace when they forgive each other and when they choose to interpret the Son as gracious rather than as wrathful.79

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Their prayer is the first good work that fallen human beings achieve in cooperation with grace.80 By making them capable of this good work, grace also returns to Adam and Eve some of their prelapsarian agency. Given Milton’s Arminian influences, it is entirely appropriate that the first work performed by regenerated human beings is an interpretation of the protoevangelium. This link suggests that the Gospel, even in its earliest typological formulation, regenerates the human will and restores some of the dignity and interpretive freedom that human beings enjoyed before the Fall. Understood in this way, the prayer of Adam and Eve establishes them as an interpretive community that achieves some degree of merit by cooperating with grace.81 Sin is a serious but not insuperable barrier to interpretation, because grace allows even fallen human beings to imitate the Son. By imagining a merciful God when they have every reason to expect a wrathful judge, Adam and Eve discover the Gospel within Genesis, and in so doing they share in the Son’s agency as the mediator who finds grace within the Law in Book 3. This resemblance does not mean that Adam and Eve are themselves mediators of salvation—­the Son’s role is unique in that regard—­ but it does mean that the behavior of the Son is a pattern for imitation.82 *

*

*

In terms of its internal relationship to other parts of Paradise Lost, the prayer of Adam and Eve can be understood as a key text that looks in two directions. Looking back at Book 3, the prayer shows that the Son’s exemplary participation in divine sovereignty was not an isolated event but a paradigm for other creatures to follow and imitate. By assuming his role as head of the angels and of the church, the Son ensures that angels and human beings may participate in divine sovereignty as the Son does even though his intimacy with the Father is much closer than theirs. At the same time, Adam and Eve’s prayer looks forward to the ending of Paradise Lost. It shows that no matter how isolated Adam and Eve might feel when they leave Eden and enter into the long development of human history, they still have the freedom and indeed the duty to regain some measure of their native liberty by cooperating with grace. The prayer also illuminates the relationship between Paradise Lost and Milton’s political prose. By imitating the Son, the first couple becomes the

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first community of grace in human history, and they act as a paradigm for Milton’s other imagined communities in the prose. Their active interpretation of the protoevangelium is the interpretive attitude that Milton urged on the sad friends of truth in Areopagitica, on the interpreters of charity in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, on the mature and strong-­m inded men of Christian Doctrine, and on the best part of the English nation in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and A Defense of the English People. For all their differences, these texts idealize similar imagined communities that acquire agency by cooperating with God in the pursuit of good works, especially the politically significant work of equitable interpretation. In some of Milton’s work this ideal community acquires republican overtones, particularly when he argues that liberty is a human birthright renovated by grace and exemplified in virtuous men. Yet this republican vision is only one of several shapes that the ideal community of grace assumes in Milton’s work. The same community can appear as a Protestant brotherhood of scriptural interpreters, or as a couple coming to terms with the catastrophe of the Fall. In each case, grace inspires neither an antinomianism that bypasses the word entirely nor a rigorous adherence to the letter, but rather cooperation with a sovereign yet merciful God. The standard of merit required to enter into this community is very high, thus virtually guaranteeing that only a minority of human beings will accept grace and cooperate with it. Milton makes the regeneration of Adam and Eve depend on the kind of interpretive work that he once described in Christian Doctrine, implying once again that the persons best suited to his vision of cooperative grace are academically minded Protestant humanists like himself. As we have seen, this ideal excludes those who do not have the necessary training, leisure time, and cultural capital to interpret texts in a rigorous way. Even in Paradise Lost, Milton draws attention to this implication by foregrounding the interpretive difficulty of scripture in Book 11 and 12 when Adam fails to understand Michael’s lesson. The difficulty of scriptural interpretation also helps explain the tendency of nations to fall away from virtue and leave only a minority of good men. Michael explains to Adam that the vast majority of human beings will not accept the grace that God offers them, and the godly will often be reduced to “one just man,” as Michael twice describes Noah (11.818, 890).83 This minority is part of an

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imagined community that reflects the ideals Milton espoused in his prose, while those who refuse this model are subjected to what Milton presents as a deserved punishment.84 As Mary Nyquist demonstrates, Milton alludes to the curse of Ham in order to suggest that some nations deserve to be enslaved: “no wrong, / But justice, and some fatal curse annexed / Deprives them of their outward liberty” (12.98–­100).85 Here Milton parallels Spenser, who, as I argued in chapter 1, sees grace as present in the Protestant community but absent from the victims of colonial violence.86 The theological rationale for these tendencies is of course very different for both poets, because for Milton it hinges on an effective reintroduction of merit into his theology. If grace empowers only those who willingly cooperate with God, then those who do not cooperate in the same way are guilty of resisting grace, and the loss of their liberty is treated by Milton as a justifiable punishment. While Paradise Lost begins to discuss the politics of grace in its depiction of Adam and Eve, this community of two is still removed from public life. The effects of war, tyranny, and social stratification are not yet known to them except as a vision of what is yet to come. The next chapter traces how the example of the Son in Paradise Lost is transmuted into the public ministry of Christ in Paradise Regained in a time when Michael’s predictions had already come to pass. As we shall see, Christ’s public preaching echoes the scholarly activities Milton discusses in his prose.

FIVE

Grace and Prophetic Education in Paradise Regained

At the beginning of Paradise Regained, Jesus enters a divided and socially stratified world. His aim is ostensibly to convince all men to follow him, yet he also dismisses the people as “a herd confused, / A miscellaneous rabble” (3.49–­50).1 Surprised by this disdain for the common people, Satan asks what the Son of God shares with others: “All men are Sons of God, yet thee I thought / In some respect far higher so declared” (4.520–­21). Satan seeks to tempt Jesus, but his statement also illustrates a broader tension throughout the poem between an inclusive vision of grace, which invites “all mankind” to become Sons of God like their messiah, and an elitism that privileges special individuals who are elect in a “far higher” sense. One critically influential way to understand Jesus’s pessimism about the people is to read it in terms of the radical sects in the 1640s and 1650s, including Seekers, Ranters, Quakers, and Fifth Monarchists.2 These sects were not doctrinally uniform, but their opponents described them pejoratively as “antinomians” after anti-­nomos, Greek for “against law,” because they argued that grace frees the elect from sin and moral law, thus enabling them to preach as modern-­day prophets. Some of these antinomians, notably Henry Vane, argued in the 1650s that this minority of self-­declared saints should wield supreme rule in a “godly republic.”3 Milton respected Vane and other antinomians, and there are moments in Paradise Regained 137

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when Jesus seems to evoke their language. One often-­cited example is his view that the “spirit of truth” is “an inward oracle / To all truth requisite for men to know” (4.462–­64).4 Critics who read Milton as an antinomian tend to understand this “spirit of truth” as a source of direct inspiration that empowers Jesus to refuse Satan’s offers of political power, military might, and the learning of Athens. The implication is that the ideal community in Paradise Regained is a body of elect saints who have the same direct inspiration from the Spirit as Jesus. It is in comparison to this godly elite that the nation appears to be a “herd” and a “rabble.”5 By emphasizing direct inspiration, however, this spiritualist reading underestimates the degree to which prophets in Milton’s work are defined by their education. One of the reasons antinomians are considered “radical” today is that their emphasis on the unilateral action of God meant that in theory anyone—­even uneducated laborers and marginalized women—­ could be raised by God as prophets. While many antinomians were learned, their theology made learning less essential to prophecy. Milton, on the other hand, synthesizes humanist education and religious inspiration in his self-­fashioning as a prophet and in Jesus’s model of prophecy in Paradise Regained.6 As we have seen in his autobiographical digression of The Reason of Church- ­Government, Milton claims that the reason he can speak on religious matters is that he is both gifted and well educated. While he is in some sense inspired, like the prophet Isaiah, his prophetic vocation also rests on his “labour and intent study” as well as the praise he received in the “privat Academies of Italy,” not to mention “sundry masters and teachers both at home and at the schools” (CPW 1: 808–­10).7 In his epics as well as his prose, Milton never abandoned this emphasis on labor and study as a key part of prophetic authority.8 If in Paradise Lost Adam and Eve cooperate with grace to interpret God’s words creatively, in Paradise Regained Jesus teaches this method of interpretation as part of his public vocation as a prophet. Christian prophecy is thus the fruit of human labor cooperating with the Spirit, and education is as indispensable for Jesus as it is for Milton. As a direct corollary of this argument, the numerical majority of the nation is excluded from political participation not simply because they lack inspiration from the Spirit, but also because they do not have Milton’s considerable academic pedigree, which enables him to cooperate with the Spirit in teaching the meaning of scripture.

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Milton’s God does not provide direct inspiration, therefore, because doing so would deprive his pupils of the opportunity to demonstrate learning, merit, and interpretive creativity. God’s pedagogical role distinguishes Milton’s vision of prophecy from the secular activity of interpretation, which to modern eyes appears functionally indistinguishable. Victoria Kahn, for example, has argued that Jesus’s remarkable use of irony and creativity in reading the scriptural text foreshadows a modern, secular idea of literature.9 For Kahn, “the implication of Paradise Regained, as of Milton’s oeuvre as a whole, is that there are no privileged sacred texts.”10 While Kahn offers a compelling view of the agency of the Miltonic interpreter, her reading also makes Milton appear more inclusive than he really is. If we are all secular interpreters, we are all in some sense equal. None of us should then be able to argue, as Milton consistently does, that there is only one method—­h is own, humanist method—­to interpret scripture, or that those who fail to meet this rigorous standard are a deservedly enslaved rabble. Milton’s God does not, however, abdicate to a secular activity of interpretation, because God commands pupils to cooperate with grace in the public work of prophecy. The interpretive liberty, creativity, and skill that Jesus demonstrates in Paradise Regained represents how all prophets are meant to obey Milton’s God. While a community of Miltonic prophets seems to leave no dogma unchallenged, their interpretive method is itself a marker of authority to which men must adhere—­dogmatically—­in order to fulfil God’s will and, in so doing, claim authority over the rest of the nation. In addition to erecting implicit boundaries of inclusion and exclusion around education, Milton’s idea of prophecy in Paradise Regained explains why Satan subjects Jesus to several identity tests. Satan attempts to sever the link between education and inspiration by provoking Jesus into a binary choice: his prophecies must be rooted either in miraculous inspiration or in worldly rhetoric, but not both. Either position would undermine Milton’s community of grace—­the first by restricting prophecy to the antinomian saints, the second by reducing prophecy to philosophical speculation, thereby blunting its religious and messianic purpose. The most dangerous part of Satan’s temptation is not the effort to make Jesus sin, but rather the broader attempt to prevent Jesus from being an example for future prophets, among them John Milton, who seek to interweave the promise of grace and the privilege of humanist learning. As we shall see, one proof of Satan’s

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persuasiveness is the fact that criticism continues to replicate these identity tests by framing Jesus either as an antinomian or as a secular rhetorician. I argue that Jesus maintains a productive tension between learning and the indwelling Spirit. As Jesus evades the identity tests, his implication is that grace and learning must cooperate in the work of prophecy; any effort to untangle them would undermine the ideal community to come. I begin by demonstrating how Milton’s idea of prophecy intervenes in a contemporary debate between radical antinomians and more moderate Calvinists in their definition of prophecy. While Milton aligns himself with the antinomians to attack the state church, he does not follow them in their tendency to present themselves as the Spirit’s passive vehicles. I then turn to how Jesus in Paradise Regained fashions himself as the founder of a humanist community. The vision uniting Milton’s idea of prophecy, both in the poetry and the prose, is a view of the church as community of humanist Protestants. Prophecy, Antinomianism, and Education

The meaning of “antinomianism” is necessarily relative, because the word was often used pejoratively. Most Protestants were anti-­nomos, or “against law,” insofar as they saw grace as liberation from works-­r ighteousness. In the Preface to the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, Luther argues that “a law is fulfilled by works, even though there is no heart in the doing of them. But God judges according to what is in the depths of the heart.”11 Luther later qualified these views after they were appropriated by John Agricola and the leaders of the German Peasants’ rebellion, such as Thomas Müntzer.12 Whereas these radicals argued that Christian liberty involved freedom from moral and civil law, Luther insisted that grace frees Christians only from Jewish ceremonial law but not the Decalogue—­a view later echoed by Calvin.13 The antinomians, on the other hand, believed they were following the original spirit of the Reformation by following the law that rules in the depths of the heart.14 They exaggerated to the point of scandal the main reformers’ own binary between law and grace.15 English Calvinists were especially susceptible to this argument, because their emphasis on religious discipline drove some of the laity toward the antinomian message of free

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grace.16 Many antinomians saw themselves as recuperating Luther’s original message of sola gratia, which they interpreted to mean freedom from both law and sin.17 Prophecy was one of the concepts that the antinomians used when defending their position on grace against orthodoxy. From the Anabaptists to the most disruptive sects of the English Civil War period, antinomian “saints” argued that they were inspired by the Spirit to prophesy publicly, thus advancing a claim for freedom of speech in religious matters.18 Calvin condemns such persons directly: “many doo boast of the impulsion of the spirit, and doo glory of the secret calling of God, whereas neuertheles they are unlearned and rude.”19 Explaining this argument further in his reading of 1 Cor. 14, Calvin argues that Paul uses “prophet” to mean not those which had the gyft of prophesying or foreshewing what should come to passe many yeres afterward: but those which were endued with a notable grace, not only in interpreting, but also in prudent applying the Scripture to the present use . . . Prophets are so called, which cunningly and aptly applying predictions, threatnings, promises, and the whole doctrine of the Scriptures, to the present use of the Church, doo reveale the will of God.20

Calvin thus anticipates Milton’s view, which I explore more fully below, that prophecy relies on the “notable grace” of a rhetorical education, which enables the minister to analyze the rhetorical occasion and apply “the Scripture to the present use.” Because the purpose of prophecy is to build up or “edify” the church into a godly community, Calvin restricts it to orthodox clergy.21 English puritans such as William Perkins echoed this perspective: “the Minister may, yea and must priuatly vse at his libertie the artes, philosophie, and varietie of reading, whilest he is in framing his sermon.”22 Although the audience should feel as if the Spirit speaks directly through the minister, this effect is a rhetorical performance: “it is also a point of Art to conceale Art.”23 In contrast with this orthodox Calvinist perspective, antinomians presented genuine prophecy as a direct inspiration from the Spirit which owed nothing to human invention. While it is an oversimplification to describe antinomianism as “Calvinism’s lower-­class alter ego,”24 the antinomians

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did argue that the Spirit could choose anyone, independently of social status, as God’s mouthpiece.25 A key source for this argument was John 3:8: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”26 Many Civil War sectarians cited this line to argue that the Holy Spirit spoke through them regardless of their education or social status,27 culminating in the Quaker claim that the saints are “godded with God” and equal to the Son of God.28 George Fox, for example, argued that “he that hath the same spirit that raised up Iesus Christ, is equal wth God”29—­a sentiment that James Nayler took to the extreme by entering Bristol on a horse in an explicit imitation of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem.30 By insisting on the freedom of the Spirit to blow wherever it wished, antinomians allowed women prophets to claim public authority. Mary Cary, for example, turns to 1 Cor. 14 to argue that the Spirit can inspire anyone to preach: Be wise, and be sure you do not stop the mouths of the Prophets of Iesus Christ, commanding them to Preach no more in his name. Let it be far from you to do so, for if you should do so, yet they cannot but speak the things they have seen and heard; .  .  .  And what this Prophesying is, the Apostle shews in the 1 Cor. 14.3. That is speaking to edification, exhortation, and consolation. And he makes no distinction in the exercise of this gift of the Spirit, between an Officer of the Church and another; for he makes it to appear that any Member of the Church may exercise this gift.31

Cary envisions prophecy as a voice from the Spirit that seizes the individual and speaks through her directly. Her double negatives—­the prophets “cannot but speak”—­convey her helplessness before the Spirit, illustrating that God speaks directly through her. To censor such prophets is therefore to censor God. While Cary acknowledges her education elsewhere,32 she presents the prophets as passive mouthpieces in this case so as to challenge censorship. At the same time, by describing her prophecies as a form of Pauline “speaking to edification,” she challenges the monopoly over public preaching claimed by “Officer[s] of the Church.” Cary’s self-­fashioning as a prophet is part of a broader pattern among antinomians in this period.33 Fox claimed to have the same Spirit as the Apostles: “hee . . . askt me . . . whether I had ye same spirit as ye Apostles

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had & I tolde him yes.”34 He adds that “for the true Ministry is the gift of Iesus Christ, and needs no addtion of human help and learning.”35 And because the gift is indifferent to learning, it belongs to women too: “What, are Women Priests? Yes, Women Priests.”36 Whether as a rhetorical strategy or genuine belief, many radicals claimed that learning was unnecessary for prophecy, thus enabling marginalized “saints” to prophesize. Milton and Prophecy

Milton’s relationship to antinomianism poses an interpretive problem, because while he shares the radicals’ animus against the university-­educated clergy, he also differs from the most extreme sectaries by imagining the Spirit working in tandem with the learned intellect. On the one hand, he argues in Christian Doctrine that the “supreme authority” is not the external church or written scripture, but “the Spirit, which is internal, and the individual possession of each man” (CPW 6: 587). On these grounds, all men are invited to preach: “Each believer is ruled by the Spirit of God. So if anyone imposes any kind of sanction or dogma upon believers against their will . . . he is placing a yoke not only upon man but upon the Holy Spirit itself ” (CPW 6: 590). Milton also attacks the universities for their role in training hireling clergymen (6: 584). These statements against enforced conformity to a state church, coupled with Milton’s close relationships with men like Henry Vane and Thomas Ellwood, are among the reasons why Milton continues to be understood as an antinomian.37 Unlike Fox and Cary, however, Milton also insists that humanist learning is essential to prophecy. In The Reason of Church-­Government, Milton argues that the Psalms prove that Hebrew prophets were skilled poets. Poetic ability is “the inspired guift of God rarely bestow’d” (CPW 1: 816), and it is “of power beside the office of a pulpit, to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of vertu, and publick civility, to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in right tune, to celebrate in glorious and lofty Hymns the throne and equipage of Gods Almightinesse” (CPW 1: 816–­17). Echoing Philip Sidney and the psalm-­l ike poetry I explored in previous chapters, Milton argues that the key link between poetry and prophecy in the Bible means that public teachers should be skilled in rhetoric

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and poetry. Though it might be an “inspired guift,” poetry is cultivated by education and exercised through intellectual effort.38 After the Presbyterians met his divorce tracts with hostility, Milton began to see his work as not only beside the pulpit, but superior to it. In a sonnet written after the hostile reception of Tetrachordon, Milton mocks the Scottish names of his opponents—­“Gordon, / Colkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp”39—­to suggest that their intolerance is due to incivility: Those rugged names to our like mouths grow sleek That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp. Thy age, like ours, O soul of Sir John Cheke, Hated not learning worse than toad or asp; When thou taught’st Cambridge, and King Edward Greek.40 Milton imagines Tetrachordon as part of a humanist tradition of public preaching and teaching that hearkens back to John Cheke’s humanism and to Quintilian. This full-­throated embrace of rhetoric and humanist poetry distinguishes Milton from the radical antinomians. While radicals were adept rhetoricians, they often masked their learning to emphasize the unilateral work of the Spirit. Milton, by contrast, argues that it is not he who should adapt his ideas to a “rugged” or intellectually impoverished standard, but the people who should learn Greek and become like Milton. His radical inclinations are not in conflict with his “patrician social prejudices,” as Christopher Hill once argued; rather, his inclinations were never egalitarian to begin with, because he cannot disavow his own cultural capital.41 He therefore insists on marrying grace to an elite education. Milton’s mature position on prophecy explains why he thinks an elite education is necessary to cooperate with the Spirit. Building on the Arminian ideas discussed in the last chapter and the non-­Trinitarian bent of his theology, Milton describes the Spirit as a creature who is sent by God to dwell within Christians to make them capable of interpretive liberty. The Spirit helps Christians interpret the scriptures, but it does not grant absolute certainties about the questions that divided Protestant sects, nor does it blow on prophets as passive vessels. Indeed, as David Ainsworth has shown, Milton believes that scripture does not reveal the nature of the

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Spirit precisely so as to dissuade human beings from seeing its promptings as infallible.42 I will return to how this evasiveness shapes Jesus’s ministry in Paradise Regained, but first I will explore how Milton’s prose builds on these ideas to make education necessary for prophecy. While Milton adopts some antinomian ideas, such as the view that laymen are as qualified to preach as the clergy, he also insists that prophets should have the education to debate dogma publicly. This insistence on learning excluded all those who did not have access to an elite education, namely, the majority of men and nearly all women. The link between public preaching and learning is clearest in Milton’s definition of prophecy in Christian Doctrine. The treatise argues that grace inspires intellectual diligence: “the offers of God were all directed, not to an indolent credulity, but to constant diligence, and to an unwearied search after truth” (CPW 6: 120). In other words, all opinions, from orthodox dogma to the prophecies of self-­declared saints, should be heard, discussed, and subjected to analysis. Milton also admits that interpretive diligence requires “linguistic ability, knowledge of the original sources, consideration of the overall intent, distinction between literal and figurative language, examination of the causes and circumstances, and of what comes before and after the passage in question, and comparison of one text with another” (CPW 6: 682–­83). Milton never explains how an uneducated layman, supposedly equal to Milton in the priesthood of all believers, will acquire extensive “knowledge of the original sources” while also working for his bread. The real answer is that he will not. The Spirit invites everyone to accept grace and become a prophet, but in all of Milton’s examples, it seems that only male humanists like Milton will have the necessary education, training, and time to respond adequately to the Spirit’s invitation. Women are excluded by omission, and uneducated men by the vast amounts of time and resources needed for them to fit this standard. The capacity for advanced intellectual labor is essential, as Milton’s definition of prophecy makes clear: [t]he term prophet is applied not only to a man able to foretell the future but also to anyone endowed with exceptional piety and wisdom for the purposes of teaching. . . . Thus under the gospel the simple gift of teaching, especially of public teaching, is called prophecy: I Cor. xiv. 1: particularly

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that you may prophesy, and xiv.3: he who prophesies speaks to men for their edification . . . and so on, until the end of the chapter. I Cor. iii. 8, etc.: he who plants and he who waters are one: but each man will receive his reward according to his own labor. For we are God’s assistants. . . . It is not the Universities, then, but God who has given us pastors and teachers: that same God who gave us apostles and prophets. (CPW 6: 572)

The final sentence argues that “pastors and teachers,” like the original “apostles and prophets,” are provided by God rather than the “Universities” that ordain the orthodox clergy, thus giving laymen the right to preach publicly. Once again, Milton repeats the anticlerical argument of the antinomian sects. Unlike them, however, he does not envision prophecy as direct inspiration: God provides pastors and teachers, but he does so indirectly, by enabling educated men like Milton to labor in bringing reform. The scriptural citations reinforce this emphasis on labor. Milton begins by citing 1 Cor. 14:3, “he who prophecies speaks to men for their edification,” which was central to all discussions of prophecy, but he also returns to 1 Cor. 3:8: “each man will receive his reward according to his own labor. For we are God’s assistants.” By juxtaposing these passages, Milton emphasizes that prophets are not only those who are chosen by God, but also those who add their intellectual labor to the gifts of God as “assistants.” The kind of labor required to be an assistant is exemplified by the erudition displayed in Christian Doctrine. This balance between anticlericalism and humanist learning is not unique to Milton, but was also shared by the Socinians, who similarly envisioned their ideal church as a scholarly community. The Socinians sought to protect intellectual freedom from both censorship and enthusiasm. Their solution was to describe prophecy as a cooperation between the Spirit and the human intellect. In their preface to the Racovian Catechism, Andrew Wissowatius and Joachim Stegman ask their censors rhetorically: “Why do you not rather imitate Moses . . . and say with him (Numb.xi. 29) ‘Would God, that all the Lord’s people were prophets?’ ”43 As soon as they make this apparently universalist claim, however, they add that prophecy requires rhetorical skill: “We wish, indeed, that all the people would prophecy:—­but at the same time would not have the person prophesy who knows not how.”44 While everyone should read and study scripture in private, public teaching

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requires a humanist education: “who would deny that he who is expert in speech, who is familiar with the liberal arts, who has a clear and cultivated judgment, who also has a flowing style of teaching . . . is commonly and ordinarily more ‘apt to teach,’ than he who is destitute of all these things?”45 In other words, educated laymen are better prophets than uneducated laymen. While all prophets should be tolerated, they should also be challenged: “the spirit should not be quenched, nor prophesyings be despised, it must not be thought that we are advocating the cause of enthusiasts, and arrogating to ourselves divine miraculous inspirations.”46 Put differently, the preface presents the many heresies for which the Racovian Catechism was infamous, such as their rejection of the Trinity, not as “miraculous inspirations” from the Spirit, but rather as scholarly deductions from the scriptural text. By presenting prophecy as legitimate for discussion even when it is judged to be mistaken, the preface encourages its audience to debate the Racovian Catechism even if they disagree with it. The Socinians imply that a prophet can be inspired by the Spirit and still be wrong or subject to critical debate. How is this possible? The explanation is that the Spirit does not speak through prophets as passive vessels, but by “improv[ing] the powers which [prophets] possess by nature, or have acquired by art and study.”47 Infallible prophecy belonged to the Apostles, but modern prophets “are the first cause of their declarations, the Holy Spirit being only the second and assisting cause.”48 Prophecy cannot be censored because the Spirit is involved. Yet because its involvement is as a “second and assisting cause,” prophecy is still open to debate. The 1665 edition of the Racovian Catechism appeared in Amsterdam, so this understanding of prophecy may have been influenced by other groups in the Netherlands such as Arminians, Collegiants, and Quakers.49 The Collegiant Adam Boreel, for example, was concerned to extend the liberty of prophesying to Quakers and other enthusiasts, but only on the condition that their words were not treated as infallible truth.50 The preface to the Racovian Catechism similarly steers between the Scylla of state censorship and the Charybdis of enthusiasm so as to imagine the church as a community that embraces rational disagreement.51 Milton was not a Socinian, but he was their fellow traveler in the broader anti-­Trinitarian movement, and he used similar arguments to argue that the

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church should foster free debate on the doctrines that separated Protestants from one another. Like the Socinians, he justifies his most controversial heresies in the Christian Doctrine, such as his denial of the Trinity, on the grounds that all interpretations of scripture are subject to public debate (CPW 6: 203). He does not deny the possibility of direct inspiration but argues that most interpretations are not revealed in this way: If indeed those with whom I have to contend were able to produce direct attestation from heaven to the truth of the doctrine which they espouse, it would be nothing less than impiety to venture to raise, I do not say a clamour, but so much as a murmur against it. But inasmuch as they can lay claim to nothing more than human powers, assisted by that spiritual illumination which is common to all, it is not unreasonable that they should on their part allow the privileges of diligent research and free discussion to another inquirer, who is seeking truth through the same means and in the same way. (CPW 6: 204)

Milton subdivides divine inspiration into “direct attestation from heaven,” which was infallible and available to the Apostles, and the less authoritative “spiritual illumination which is common to all,” which works by enlivening “human powers” of interpretation without removing the potential for error completely. Such a division was not inherently provocative, but the argument becomes subversive when the broader aim is to challenge the Trinity. Against the Calvinists, he argues that laymen and clergymen have the same right to preach even against the Trinity; yet against radical antinomians, he insists that “spiritual illumination” is a generally available gift. The result is a view of the church that seeks tolerance for all Protestant prophets, including antinomians, but subjects their views to “diligent research and free discussion.” Milton supports this vision of the church further in his description of how God empowers the human understanding. Because Christ and the Spirit are not for Milton members of a Trinity, his Christian Doctrine deemphasizes sacrificial theology, thus foregrounding the intellectual illumination granted on human beings. The “Spirit,” he argues, can mean “that impulse or voice of God by which the prophets were inspired” in the Old Testament (CPW 6: 282). Elsewhere, it is “that light of truth, whether ordinary or extraordinary, wherewith God enlightens and leads his people”

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(CPW 6: 283). While the Spirit sometimes works through “extraordinary means” such as direct inspiration, its “ordinary” work is to enable the capacity for critical interpretation, discussion, and preaching. At the same time, Milton defines the Spirit imprecisely so as to carefully shift the attention away from the Spirit’s identity to its function. The end result is to encourage scholarly debate while deemphasizing the possibility of infallible truths.52 This approach to the Spirit mirrors the Christian Doctrine’s view of the messiah. Milton argues that human understanding is rehabilitated by Christ, whose “prophetical office consists of two parts; one external, namely, the promulgation of divine truth; the other internal, to wit, the illumination of the understanding” (CPW 6: 432). While this definition of Christ’s prophetical office was commonplace, the “illumination of the understanding” in Milton’s view is powerful enough to give laymen the right to publicly question every dogma, including the Trinity. The implication is that prophecy requires intellectual labor supported by learning, eloquence, and theological training along with grace and the Spirit. Milton’s apparently inclusive theology thus masks a deep-­rooted social elitism, because full participation in his community of grace requires a degree of learning that was available only to a minority of men. Gendered and social inequalities are built into his approach. As we have seen, Lanyer saw men’s monopoly over learning as the root cause for her challenges as a poet, so she idealized the spiritual insight of the women of Jerusalem as a criticism of the status quo. Closer to Milton’s context, female prophets in the antinomian movement contrasted the Spirit to human learning because they too saw education as a root cause for clerical control. Milton shares with these radicals their hostility to the professional clergy, but not their desire to destabilize the gendered and social inequalities that determined access to a humanist education. It follows that only virtuous and humanist-­ educated men like Milton may teach the nation through their “diligent research and free discussion.” This emphasis on education also explains why Milton does not emphasize sin.53 Milton cannot indict himself too much, because he sees prophecy as a freely willed cooperation with God, and he therefore needs to prove himself fit. While his rationale appears in Christian Doctrine, the ideological stakes are clearer in his political prose, which present Milton as an example for the whole nation to follow.

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Milton’s Areopagitica draws clear parallels between prophecy and learning. As I argued in the last chapter, Milton often speaks of the whole nation in terms of its intellectual leaders, whom he imagines “reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason” (CPW 2: 554). This imagined community supports Paul Stevens’s view that for Milton, it “is precisely the industry of free reasoning, the trial of intellectual effort within the bounds of faith, that makes the English who they are.”54 In his description of England as the new temple of Solomon, Milton joins this enlightened minority in the nation to Moses’s wish for a nation of prophets: as if, while the Temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrationall men who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every peece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportionall arises the goodly and the gracefull symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure. Let us therefore be more considerat builders, more wise in spirituall architecture, when great reformation is expected. For now the time seems come, wherein Moses the great Prophet may sit in heav’n rejoycing to see that memorable and glorious wish of his fulfill’d, when not only our sev’nty Elders, but all the Lords people are become Prophets. (CPW 2: 55–­55)

Drawing on the Pauline language of prophecy as a form of edification or “building up” of the church, Milton emphasizes human labor and creativity in building the nation into a Temple. Because Milton concludes with “all the Lords people” laboring in harmony and tolerance, this passage is commonly understood as one of his most egalitarian visions of the nation. But who are the people in the extended metaphor? They are both “considerat builders” and the stones in the “quarry.” It is possible that this confusion is a rhetorical sleight of hand, but it is worth asking if there are two categories of people at work. Some people are active builders and coworkers in reformation, while others are the raw material for builders to work on. The implication could be that the majority of the people—­those who do not have the education or leisure to spend their time debating and revolving new

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notions—­w ill not be as active as others in reformation. They will need to either let men like Milton lead or else become like Milton, thus graduating from stones to builders. To illustrate the centrality of intellectual labor, the passage emphasizes not only the unilateral action of God but also the work of the prophet-­builders cutting, dissecting, and laying the stones of reformation “artfully.” To be “wise in spirituall architecture” means not only to be inspired, therefore, but also to be educated enough to see “brotherly dissimilitudes” as an opportunity for scholarly debate. Milton does imagine prophetic authority eventually expanding from “sev’nty Elders” to the rest of the nation, but the overriding assumption is that this process will take time and will occur under the tutelage of a humanist-­educated elite.55 The people will graduate from stones to builders only when (or if) they learn how to prophesy as Milton does. Although Milton is far less optimistic about the nation in The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, he continues to imagine prophecy as a form of education that transforms the nation. Writing on the eve of the Restoration, he urges the nation to avoid returning to kingship and to bestow sovereignty on a perpetual, unelected senate. This senate has rightly been read as an echo of the godly republicanism of Sir Henry Vane,56 who proposed a Senate of incorruptible Saints in his A Needfull Corrective.57 Vane, however, believes the Spirit works through the Senate as an instrument: “through the mighty and universal pouring out of the Spirit upon all flesh . . . a restored People and holy Nation, in their Assemblies of Judicature, may not so much be the judgement of Man, as of the Lord himself.”58 For Vane, the judgment of man must give way to the judgment of the Spirit. Milton, meanwhile, believes human judgment should be educated and cultivated: They should have heer also schools and academies at thir own choice, wherin thir children may be bred up in thir own sight to all learning and noble education not in grammar only, but in all liberal arts and exercises. This would soon spread much more knowledge and civilitie, yea religion through all parts of the land, by communicating the natural heat of government and culture more distributively to all extreme parts, which now lie numm and neglected, would soon make the whole nation more industrious, more ingenuous at home, more potent, more honorable abroad. (CPW 7: 460)

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Whereas Vane emphasizes the Spirit “pouring out” on “all flesh,” Milton imagines national rebirth as a process driven by “schools and academies” that spread “knowledge and civilitie” to the “numm and neglected” parts of the nation. While Milton clearly thought of Vane as an ally, his aim is to cultivate human judgment with tutors and academies.59 In Of True Religion, which was published not long after Paradise Regained, Milton returns to these arguments to make a plea for tolerance between Protestants. As in Areopagitica, he builds his case on the premise that “no man is infallible here on earth” (CPW 8: 423) and concludes that all Protestant sects should be tolerated as long as they pursue sincere and scholarly interpretations of scripture: “so long as all these profess to set the Word of God only before them as the Rule of faith and obedience; and use all diligence and sincerity of heart, by reading, by learning, by study, by prayer for Illumination of the holy Spirit, to understand the Rule and obey it, they have done what man can do” (CPW 8: 423–­24). Once again, the “Illumination of the holy Spirit” is an aide to “learning” and “study.”60 The disagreements between Protestants are not revealed infallibly by the Spirit: “But some will say . . . God hath promis’d by his Spirit to teach all things. True, all things absolutely necessary to salvation: But the hottest disputes among Protestants calmly and charitably enquir’d into, will be found less then such” (CPW 8: 424). Since debates “among Protestants” are indifferent to salvation, the only necessary articles of faith are those that unite Protestants against Catholics.61 This minimalist view of the Protestant faith means that the main criterion is sincere study: “If he who thinks himself in the truth professes to have learnt it, not by implicit faith, but by attentive study of the Scriptures & full perswasion of heart, with what equity can he refuse to hear or read him, who demonstrates to have gained his knowledge by the same way?” (CPW 8: 424). Even a sincere prophet relies on “attentive study” rather than direct inspiration. In these moments, Milton reveals that his ideal “nation of prophets” is in fact a nation of Miltons: a community defined not only by the Spirit but also by its capacity for scholarship. This implication is even clearer in Eikonoklastes, where he describes the English as prophets when they reject Eikon Basilike: “like to Balac the son of Zippor, against a Nation of Prophets [Charles I] thinks it best to hire other esteemed Prophets, and to under-

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mine and weare out the true Church by a fals Ecclesiastical policy” (CPW 3: 510). The majority of the people did not in fact reject the king’s book. What Milton really means is that the best part of the nation has rejected Eikon Basilike. This minority is the “nation of prophets” that aims to rule and educate the rest.62 Moreover, the allusion to “Balac the son of Zippor” suggests that Milton is the chief among these prophets. In Num. 22–­2 4, the Moabite king Balak hires the mercenary prophet Balaam to curse the Israelites, and God forces Balaam to bless the Israelites instead. If King Charles resembles Balak because he hired false prophets, Milton’s line-­ by-­line refutation of Eikon Basilike draws out truth unwillingly from the king’s book in the same way that God brings out truth unwillingly from the mouth of Balaam. The next allusion to Balaam in Milton’s work appears in Paradise Regained when Satan takes up the role of “Balaam reprobate” (1.490). As we shall see, the poem reimagines Jesus in terms of Milton’s humanist ideal of prophecy. Prophecy and Education in Paradise Regained

The identity of the Son of God has been described as the central interpretive problem in Paradise Regained,63 but in a sense it is not much of a mystery: Jesus is Milton, or rather a perfected version of Milton’s self-­fashioning as a prophet.64 The problem is determining how Jesus’s identity impinges on the pedagogical function of prophecy. If Milton is the exemplary prophet who teaches a nation of prophets, and Jesus teaches Milton how to be that kind of prophet in the first place, then who teaches Jesus? The ultimate answer is “God,” but God does not teach directly in this poem as he did in Paradise Lost, and Milton makes Jesus unaware at first that he is the incarnated Son from the earlier epic.65 Perhaps, God dictates prophecy to Jesus through the Holy Spirit, that “spirit of truth” that dwells “In pious hearts, an inward oracle / To all truth requisite for men to know” (1.463–­64). This assumption governs the antinomian reading of Paradise Regained, according to which Jesus derives infallible certainties from the indwelling Spirit in the same way as Vane and Fox.66 As I have suggested, however, Milton does not believe the Spirit moves prophets so directly, and Jesus in Paradise Regained spends too much time studying, debating, and resolving different opinions

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on scripture to be that kind of antinomian, though Jesus might agree with Vane in rejecting hirelings and forcers of conscience. I argue that the Spirit works in Paradise Regained like a humanist teacher who not only cultivates the moral and intellectual capacities of the pupil but also tests those capacities through trial. It is Satan who claims to be directly inspired when he compares himself to “Balaam Reprobate, a Prophet yet / Inspired” (1.490–­91). This allusion is ironic because Balaam was inspired against his will, whereas the Spirit’s inspiration depends on the prophet’s cooperation. Milton describes this pedagogical inspiration in On Education as an infusion: the ideal teacher “infus[es] into [the students’] young brests such an ingenuous and noble ardor, as would not fail to make many of them renowned and matchlesse men” (CPW 2: 385). Infusion, like inspiration, describes the recipient as a vessel, but Milton is not suggesting that pupils are wholly passive; on the contrary, to be a matchless man means to imitate the teacher when the guidelines for imitation are not self-­evident. Like the Miltonic educator of the 1640s, the Spirit in Paradise Regained leads Jesus into temptation so as to enable his creative interpretation of scripture. The Spirit is always intimately present in the messiah, leading him “step by step” (1.192). Instead of giving Quaker-­l ike revelations, however, it leads him into a “multitude of thoughts”: “What from within I feel myself, and hear / What from without comes often to my ears, / Ill sorting with my present state compared” (1.198–­200). This “ill sorting” is the first trial that enables the temptations to come, anticipating Satan’s subsequent temptations.67 Temptation is a built-­in part of the Spirit’s pedagogy. Jesus is called Son of God “by merit” (1.66) because he interprets, through studious labor,68 what God would say in the uncertain situation of the temptation. At the beginning of his internal monologue in Book 1, Milton’s messiah illustrates his scholarly predilections by recalling that he was “Serious to learn and know” (1.202–­3) and eager to engage in public teaching in the temple of Jerusalem: “I went into the temple, there to hear / The teachers of our law, and to propose / What might improve my knowledge or their own” (1.211–­13). As Stephen Fallon has shown, Milton diverges from the scriptural source to model Jesus after his own studiousness as a child.69 There is more at stake here, however, than autobiography and self-­representation: the similarity between Jesus and Milton reveals that prophets more generally must

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also be scholars. Jesus seeks not simply to know, but to “improve my knowledge” discursively by hearing others, proposing new ideas, and, implicitly, accepting well-­intentioned errors as part of the discussion. This memory of the temple is what guides him before his final submission to the Spirit: And now by some strong motion I am led Into this wilderness, to what intent I learn not yet, perhaps I need not know; For what concerns my knowledge God reveals.

(1.290–­94).

These lines emphasize Jesus’s submission to the “strong motion” of the Spirit, but the foregoing monologue emphasizes the mental preparation and interpretive work that precedes and makes possible obedience to such a motion. He accepts uncertainty—­“I learn not yet, perhaps I need not know”—­not because he abandons reason to obey the divine voice, as a radical antinomian would, but rather because he trusts the Spirit to teach him how to improve knowledge. The phrase “what concerns my knowledge God reveals” does not mean that the revelation is necessarily direct, because God also reveals himself through the learned debates in the temple. Another way to state this argument is to say that knowledge for Jesus is not a possession to use or own, but a relationship with God and with fellow intellectual laborers.70 It is Satan who implies knowledge is a finished, ownable resource when he urges Jesus to “let extend thy mind o’er all the world, / In knowledge” (4.223–­24). Satanic knowledge is a static, hermetic, almost occult tool that can be used to seek Faustian power, but cannot change or improve itself.71 By contrast, Jesus envisions knowledge as an evolving relationship, and he accordingly refers to it more often as a verb, “to know,” rather than as a noun.72 Thus the angels proclaim that “The Father knows the Son” (1.176), Mary tells him to “know, thou art no Son of mortal man” (1.234), Jesus concludes that the messiah is “to our scribes / Known partly” (1.260–­61), and he finally tells Satan “I know thy scope” (1.494). These passages emphasize that knowledge is an activity and process done with others engaged in worshipping God. To know in this way means to be part of a community that knows “partly,” and which must labor to improve its relationship to God as Jesus does in the temple.

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In addition to his experiences at the temple, Jesus remembers Mary’s key role in teaching him to exercise good judgment in interpreting a text. Mary does not engage in public preaching, so she does not have the public authority sought by someone like Mary Cary or even Lanyer, but she comes closer than Milton’s other characters to demonstrating women’s importance in prophecy. As Dayton Haskin has shown, Mary teaches Jesus the most important Miltonic hermeneutic of all: to derive the unwritten meaning of scripture by comparing place with place.73 Noting his comfort with the Law, she reveals that Gabriel “foretold / Thou shouldst be great and sit on David’s throne, / And of thy kingdom there should be no end” (1.234–­ 41). Gabriel’s words are prophetic in the sense that they foretell the future, but the angel leaves out key information about the kingdom of God, and it is Mary who weaves this information into Jesus’s educational program. Mary compares place with place to teach Jesus, and he in turn learns this method as he develops his own prophetic conclusions.74 When Jesus comes to understand his true identity, he uses the method of comparing place with place. His divine “I am” is the fruit of interpretive labor: This having heard, strait I again revolved The law and prophets, searching what was writ Concerning the Messiah, to our scribes Known partly, and soon found of whom they spake I am

(3.259–­63)

Jesus responds to the Annunciation by hearing, revolving, “searching what was writ” before providing a syncretic exegesis. While the result is in a sense “found” in “the law and prophets,” the passage highlights intellectual labor so consistently that Jesus finds the unwritten intention of scripture, its equitable rather than literal meaning.75 This nuanced approach echoes Milton’s ideal of “diligent research and free discussion” (CPW 6: 204) in Christian Doctrine, and his exhortation to the church “not to an indolent credulity, but to constant diligence, and to an unwearied search after truth” (CPW 6: 120). This model of interpretation broadly resembles the antinomians in seeking to transcend literalism and legalism, but Jesus’s approach relies

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on intellectual labor rather than direct inspiration. Indeed, his creativity is clearest in the implied contrast with Moses. Whereas in Ex. 3:14 God tells Moses “I am that I am” without explaining himself, Jesus arrives at his own divine “I am” through a meticulous process of textual criticism enabled by his relationships with Mary and the rabbis of Jerusalem. The implication is that Christian prophecy is no longer a one-­way dictation from God to a human mouthpiece, as some of the radical antinomians argued, but rather a laborious process of textual analysis. Moreover, while it is true that Jesus goes beyond the letter of existing scripture when he concludes that “my way must lie / Through many a hard assay even to the death” (1.264–­65), this conclusion is not revealed to him independently of scripture, as George Fox occasionally claimed for his revelations. Rather, Jesus completes Gabriel’s prophecy by “searching what was writ” in existing Old Testament prophecy, most likely Isaiah 53:6 and the messianic psalms.76 Given that Jesus speaks and interprets as a scholar, it is necessary to balance his humility with his unwavering confidence in his interpretive skill. For example, it has been argued that Jesus’s willingness to be tried in “humble state” evokes Quaker claims to simplicity.77 The context emphasizes not only Jesus’s humility, however, but also his academic capacity to entertain a hypothesis without immediately approving it: What if he hath decreed that I shall first Be tried in humble state, and things adverse, By tribulations, injuries, insults, Contempts, and scorns, and snares, and violence.

(3.188–­91)

The conditional “what if ” suggests possibility, not certainty, so Jesus is not claiming he is humble or that he is certain God has decreed for him to be humble, but rather that such an interpretation of scripture is possible. Jesus thus urges more interpretation, not less; his tone is that of a scholar debating the meaning of scripture, not an enthusiast blown by the spirit to speak. In fact, Jesus’s tone is startling in its emotional detachment and its implicit view of the Passion as a subject for rational, academic debate rather than the transformative event of human history.78 As in his original reading of Gabriel’s prophecy, the physical horror of the crucifixion recedes to the

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background, and the focus of the passage falls instead on his interpretive skill. This approach is very different from Lanyer’s, for example, who imagined the women of Jerusalem compensating for their lowliness in this world through their sympathetic and embodied suffering for Christ. Jesus implies a very different imagined community that mediates its relationship to God not through bodily suffering or direct revelation, but through diligent interpretation and scholarly debate. Education thus defines the boundary of inclusion and exclusion within this imagined community, and Jesus makes that boundary clearer during his interpretive labor during the temptations. Satan’s first temptation appears to be based on hunger as a corporeal demand, but its broader aim is to establish a binary separation between Old Testament law and messianic grace in a way that imitates popular antinomianism. Before asking Jesus to turn stones into bread, Satan presents himself as one among many deprived desert dwellers: “what ill chance hath brought thee to this place,” he asks, before adding that in the desert “single none / Durst ever, who returned, and dropped not here / His carcase, pined with hunger and with drouth?” (1.321, 323–­25). The overriding concern with scarcity, suffering, and death suggests that the desert stands metonymically for the condition of all human beings after the Fall. By ascribing this condition to “ill chance,” Satan elides Mosaic law and the ultimately human responsibility for the Fall. This elision underlies his request for a new “command” in the desert: But if thou be the Son of God, command That out of these hard stones be made thee bread; So shalt thou save thyself and us relieve With food, whereof we wretched seldom taste.

(1.341–­45)

The phrase “we wretched” summarizes Satan’s pessimistic assessment of the human condition, while the desired miracle baits Jesus into alleviating suffering.79 By asking for grace as part of a new “command,” Satan elides existing commandments and their detailed explanation of the conditions for human forgiveness.80 In the book of Numbers, known in Hebrew as ‫ְּב ִמ ְד ַַּבר‬,ְ or “in the desert,” the people of Israel contrast the “evil place” of the desert to the

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plenitude of Egypt: “wherefore have ye made us to come up out of Egypt, to bring us in unto this evil place? it is no place of seed, or of figs, or of vines, or of pomegranates; neither is there any water to drink” (Num. 20:5). As a conceptual space, the desert is not only where the commandments were given but also where the people rejected those commandments because they thought themselves too wretched to endure them. Milton cites Numbers in The Readie and Easie Way to express his extreme disgust with the people when he envisions them “chus[ing] a captain back to Egypt” in imitation of Israel in Numbers 14:4. By asking for a new and more generous “command” for a wretched people, Satan resembles the common people as Milton perceives them in The Readie and Easie Way. Moreover, like the popular antinomians that appalled Luther and Calvin, Satan seeks grace at the expense of Law and the human responsibility revealed through it. In the context of the poem, this vulgar antinomianism not only distorts the necessary conjunction of law and grace but also threatens Jesus’s self-­fashioning as a prophet who expresses novel interpretations within existing scripture. Jesus responds with a vision of prophecy that seeks freedom from the law not by providing new revelations but by interpreting existing commands in a new, rhetorically flexible way. Paraphrasing Deuteronomy 8:3, Jesus answers: “Man lives not by Bread only, but each Word / Proceeding from the mouth of God; who fed / Our fathers here with manna” (1.349–­ 51). Even though Jesus seems to refuse engaging Satan by citing scripture, the citation challenges Satan’s rhetorical framing of the wilderness and the community living therein. The immediacy of “here” reclaims the wilderness as a space enmeshed with Old Testament law, while the collective “our” in “our fathers” reminds Satan that the community of desert dwellers is defined by a shared scriptural history rather than by its wretchedness. Meanwhile, the manna alludes to Deut. 8:3, where Moses does feed the people in the desert by requesting grace from God. Against Satan’s vulgar antinomianism, therefore, Jesus reclaims the Deuteronomic law as an illustration of both human responsibility and grace. At the same time, Jesus also begins to illustrate how his prophetic office will supersede that of Moses’s.81 By refusing to perform a miracle on his own accord, Jesus alludes to Numbers 20, where Moses brings water from the stones on his own initiative and is punished for it with a premature death. Whereas Moses falls to the

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temptation of the crowd by subjecting divine miracles to their whims, Jesus maintains the austere position of a prophet-­pedagogue who will teach the people to become like himself. He thus reveals that new miracles and direct revelations will no longer be necessary because prophecy can achieve its pedagogical work by adapting existing scripture to a tempting situation. Here he reflects Milton’s argument in his prose that a Christian prophet is not a passive mouthpiece of the Spirit because education is more likely than direct inspiration to produce a nation of prophets. In the second temptation, Satan elides the pedagogical function of scripture by reducing prophecy to Machiavellian prediction. Satan describes prediction as an abstraction that governs all kingdoms by determining the horizon of political possibility. Like Machiavellian fortune, Satanic prediction prescribes the limits of the possible, and in so doing it necessarily constrains the capacities of the prophet. Satan echoes Machiavelli’s teaching and aphoristic style in his “politic maxims” (3.400), such as “Zeal and Duty are not slow; / But on occasion’s forelock watchful wait” (3.172–­73). While this view of the Machiavellian occasione is reductive,82 Satan does reveal how Machiavelli’s idea of prophecy differs from Milton’s model.83 In the Prince, Machiavelli argues that Moses succeeded because he was an “armed” prophet, whereas Savonarola failed in Florence because he did not back reformation with force.84 Satan coopts this argument by contrasting Jesus to Judas Maccabeus, who “indeed / Retired unto the desert, but with arms” (3.165–­66). Satan not only echoes Machiavelli but also implies that prophecy should be supported by the power of the civil magistrate—­a position that Milton vehemently rejected as incompatible with religious liberty.85 These presuppositions lead Satan to argue that prophecy is not a pedagogical endeavor, but a verification of what is written: “So shalt thou best fulfil, best verify / The prophets old, who sung thy endless reign” (3.177–­78). While teaching implies a back-­and-­forth discussion, verification assumes that the meaning of the prophecy is complete and transparent. Prophecy thus requires means to obey what is foretold: thy kingdom though foretold By prophet or by angel, unless thou Endeavour, as thy father David did,

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Thou never shalt obtain; prediction still In all things, and all men, supposes means,  Without means used, what it predicts revokes;

(3.350–­56)

The “means” under Satan’s control include historical means to power, including wealth (2.406–­31), Parthian military power (3.267–­309), Roman civic majesty (4.44–­108), and Athenian learning (4.212–­84). The temptation does not rest on the intrinsic appeal of these means as much as on the predictive view of prophecy implicit in them: “Without means used, what it predicts revokes.” The grammatical subject is “it,” meaning “prediction,” illustrating that prediction is for Satan an abstract entity that constrains “endeavour” to the political calculus of worldly power.86 By reducing prophecy to prediction, Satan forecloses the possibility that prophecy might involve moral choice and a pedagogical process of honing interpretive ability. Jesus responds once again by citing scripture, but as in his other responses, his citations demonstrate a sophisticated rhetorical approach that adapts scripture to the occasion. For Jesus, the true purpose of prophecy is to teach the sovereign decrees of God: If of my reign prophetic writ hath told, That it shall never end, so when begin The Father in his purpose hath decreed, He in whose hand all times and seasons roll.

(3.183–­87)

Prediction is possible only in the sense that God’s decrees will always come to pass because he is an omnipotent ruler. Supreme rule belongs not to an abstraction like “prediction” or to Machiavellian fortune, but to a living and sovereign God. By extension, the prophet’s goal is not simply to verify the prophets but to interpret God’s decrees and teach them in a historically evolving situation. Put differently, Jesus understands the occasion to mean not simply a time to act but also a time in which to interpret with equity what God, the divine lawgiver, would say if he were present. Jesus also demonstrates equity as he adapts scripture to his immediate situation. The rolling “times and seasons” allude to Daniel 2:21: “And he changeth the times and the seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings.” Moreover,

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the description of time in God’s hand alludes to Psalms 31:15: “My times are in thy hand: deliver me from the hand of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me.” These allusions relate directly to Jesus’s situation, because the passage from Daniel emphasizes the transient nature of all the earthly kingdoms offered by Satan, while the psalm exposes Satan as the ultimate persecuting enemy underlying each manifestation of political bondage. Jesus thus rejects worldly kingdoms not because he passively submits to divine revelation, but because he equitably and creatively adapts the Father’s scriptural decrees to the immediate situation. By thus illustrating how prophets should adapt scripture to the rhetorical occasion, the messiah of Paradise Regained evokes the messiah of Milton’s divorce tracts: The occasion which induc’t our Saviour to speak of divorce, was either to convince the extravagance of the Pharises in that point, or to give a sharp and vehement answer to a tempting question. And in such cases that we are not to repose all upon the literall terms of so many words . . . Christ meant not to be tak’n word for word, but like a wise Physician, administring one excesse against another to reduce us to a perfect mean: Where the Pharises were strict, there Christ seems remisse; where they were too remisse, he saw it needfull to seem most severe. (CPW 2: 596)

In the divorce tracts, Jesus forbids divorce to the Pharisees but allows it to those who have the sufficient virtue and grace to avoid “extravagance.” While Milton’s messiah evokes the antinomians by transcending the “literall terms,” he relies on equity, not direct revelation. The messiah of Paradise Regained interprets similarly: the Spirit speaks through Jesus in the sense that a humanist teacher speaks through the pupil—­that is, not as a passive vessel, but by providing opportunities for interpretive trial, labor, and equity.87 At stake in this method of learning, interpreting, and teaching is the character of Milton’s nation of prophets, which is implicitly an imagined community of highly educated men. While the liberty of prophesying is inseparable from political liberty, both depend on the education that allowed Milton (and Milton’s Jesus) to prophesy.88

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Athenian Learning and the Pinnacle

I have argued that Jesus’s teaching requires human effort in response to spiritual illumination. But where does divine inspiration end and human effort begin? This question is tied to the role of the Son of God as a bridge between the divine and the human. As Satan notes, however, the term means many things: “The Son of God, which bears no single sense; / The Son of God I also am, or was, / And if I was, I am; relation stands” (4.517–­ 19).89 Satan himself is counted among the “sons of God” in Job 1:6, while the firstborn Son could be understood in multiple ways, as Milton illustrates in his assaults on the Trinity. All of Satan’s temptations, especially those in Book 4, are designed to elucidate what “Son of God” means by making Jesus choose either fallen humanity or divine authority. This binary is clearest on the pinnacle, where Satan asks Jesus to stand either as a man or as a commander of angels, but similar assumptions govern the offer of Athens, which pits human learning against the illumination of the Spirit. I argue that Jesus refuses to answer the exact balance between human effort and divine inspiration because it does not matter for his pedagogical aim, which is to edify the church into a nation of prophets resembling Milton. In his own way, Satan is trying to learn: “that I might learn / In what degree or meaning thou art called / The Son of God” (4.515–­16). But Satan misunderstands the incarnational mystery—­Jesus’s union of divine and human—­as a riddle to be deciphered. He is not alone in this assumption. As we have seen, the radical antinomians claimed they were made perfect by the indwelling Spirit, and their opponents undermined their authority by questioning their inspiration. Literary critics continue to suggest, in a strangely Satanic manner, that the best way to know who or what Jesus is in Paradise Regained is to evaluate the degree to which the Spirit inspires him. My view is that Jesus leaves most of these questions unanswered because they do not matter for the reasons that Satan (and critics) think they do. As we have seen, Jesus illustrates that the most important principle for the Christian prophet is to cooperate with the Spirit by diligently and laboriously adapting scripture to the situation. From this perspective, the effort to decipher the prophet’s inner tension between the divine and the human is itself Satanic, because the source of inspiration should not affect the

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prophet’s authority. As Jesus evades the identity tests in Book 4, he reveals that all would-­be Christian prophets—­both antinomians and academically minded humanists like Milton—­should be tolerated in the same way and for the same reasons: to stimulate interpretation and debate in a likeminded community. For Milton and for Jesus, prophecy is defined not by its source, but by its pedagogical aim. Although my emphasis is on Paradise Regained, it is worth noting that criticism has already wrestled with the difficulty of judging spiritual inspiration in Samson Agonistes.90 This problem is well-­k nown in criticism on Samson because of the “rousing motions” that Samson feels before punishing his enemies.91 Critics have debated whether these motions are genuinely divine or an imagined construct, often on the basis that the origin of the motions determines the ethical meaning of Samson’s actions.92 As Ross Lerner has noted, however, “polemics about Samson Agonistes . . . resemble Reformation attempts to police the border drawn between proper religious heroes and madmen.”93 In other words, the critical effort to discover the provenance of Samson’s inspiration is not neutral, because that is precisely the kind of question that Milton or his allies might have faced from skeptical authorities who questioned claims about the Spirit. From this point of view, Milton denies readers an objective perspective on the motions so as to make the reader grapple with Samson in the same way that Samson grapples with God.94 Given that Lerner and other critics have already covered this ground in Samson, my focus will be on why Paradise Regained frames Jesus’s spiritual illumination in terms of an identity test, and what Milton’s broader ideas about education might tell us about that test.95 Because Jesus is the perfect prophet, he embodies the pedagogical ideal in Milton’s nation of prophets, with its tendency to weave the Spirit and human effort together. Satan accordingly questions the nature of Jesus’s divine power so as to conceptually separate the Spirit from education, while Jesus in turn responds by challenging this binary. In his offer of Athenian learning, Satan attempts to separate Jesus’s love of learning from his scriptural reasoning, thus introducing a binary between worldly and heavenly ways of knowing. The pattern of this temptation may be based on Acts 17, where Paul converts Athens first by debating pharisees (Acts 17:17) and then pagan philosophers (Acts 17:18). Satan similarly begins by insinuating that Jesus in the temple aspired to become a pharisee:

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there was found Among the gravest rabbies disputant On points and questions fitting Moses’ chair, Teaching not taught.

(4.217–­20)

The phrase “Teaching not taught” makes being taught seem like a deficiency, which is the opposite of how Jesus sees his experience in the temple. Satan’s binary between teaching and being taught is implicitly pharisaical. “Moses’ chair” echoes Matt. 23:2, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat,” while the “gravest rabbies disputant” evokes Matt. 23:7, “[the Pharisees love] to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.” Knowledge of the Law can thus be Satanic if it is valued as a title of gravity, and it is in this sense that the Pharisees resemble philosophers: All knowledge is not couched in Moses’ law, The Pentateuch or what the prophets wrote, The gentiles also know, and write, and teach To admiration, led by nature’s light.

(4.225–­28)

Satan’s point is that if knowledge of the Law is a source of power, as the Pharisees believe, then the Greeks pursue the same aim through philosophy and rhetoric. Both efforts are rooted in “nature’s light,” a term that in this context has Pelagian implications because it means nature without a proper view of Mosaic Law, and thus without grace. If Jesus were to accept nature’s light on these terms, he would be an ordinary pharisee or philosopher rather than a Son of God. But if he refuses nature’s light, he would also refuse fallen human beings who rely on education for their best intellectual achievements. The true temptation, therefore, is not learning per se, but the attempt to force Jesus on either side of a binary between human and divine ways of knowing. In this context, the ideal answer would be to circumvent the choice between ordinary and extraordinary light by insisting that while Jesus’s way of knowing is higher than that of pharisees and philosophers, it is also freely available to anyone who accepts grace. As we have seen, this is Milton’s answer when he speaks of a “spiritual illumination which is common to all” (CPW 6: 204), by which he means that Christians are inspired by the Spirit

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to preach in a way that is fallible but still higher than that of pharisees or pagan philosophers due to the assistance of grace. Jesus’s answer is similar, but more cryptic: “he who receives / Light from above, from the fountain of light, / No other doctrine needs” (4.288–­90). Loewenstein compares this response to the inner light claimed by Anna Trapnel and George Fox, because Jesus appears to set “the Spirit’s inner illumination (and the Light within) above the letter of Scripture.”96 Jesus notably mentions “a light above,” however, not a light within, and we need not conclude from his answer that he is suggesting either a radically antinomian idea of the self or a rejection of scripture in favor of revelation. At any rate, Jesus is not dismissing learning, because as Haskin has suggested, “If he receives ‘Light from above’ and needs ‘no other doctrine,’ it is because he has assimilated the Hebrew Scriptures and reads them according to canons of interpretation that are not divinely infused but learned.”97 Jesus moves beyond the letter of scripture not as an enthusiast, but as an equitable reader who combines general illumination with education. Similar assumptions govern Jesus’s rejection of books and Athenian learning. When Satan offers the learning of Socrates and the Greek academies (4.272–­84), Jesus responds: who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior (And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek) Uncertain and unsettled still remains

(4.322–­26)

Once again, Jesus seems to reject Athenian learning in favor of the indwelling spirit. But he does not reject reading in general, because he cites Ecclesiastes 12:12 in his response, proving that he has read incessantly—­so incessantly, in fact, that he has internalized scripture’s equitable meaning and is able to dispense with it on this occasion. Moreover, Jesus mentions judgment as a complement to the spirit. Milton defines judgment in Of Education: By this time, years and good general precepts will have furnisht them more distinctly with that act of reason which in Ethics is call’d Proairesis: that they may with some judgement contemplate upon moral good and evil. Then will be requir’d a special reinforcement of constant and sound en-

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doctrinating to set them right and firm, instructing them more amply in the knowledge of Vertue and the hatred of Vice. (CPW 3: 396–­97)

Proairesis, or judgment, is sharpened by exposure to challenging texts in both Of Education and Paradise Regained. In the poem, Jesus is suggesting that the goal of reading is to sharpen one’s judgment, not to accept classical authorities uncritically as Satan is implying. Moreover, by pairing the spirit with judgment, Jesus resists the implicit identity test in the temptation. What Satan really wants to know is the precise balance between spirit and judgment: where does spiritual illumination end and human learning begin? Here Jesus is silent because he recognizes that the temptation turns on the binary between inspiration and education. All we know is that the illumination of grace goes hand in hand with a judgment sharpened by education, but Jesus remains silent on the precise balance between the two. While Jesus is characteristically evasive about the nature of his inspiration and its boundaries vis-­à-­v is human learning, he is abundantly clear when describing how his method of interpretation works in practice. As he describes the proper approach to the prophets, he shows that rhetoric and poetry are legitimate when they are understood as the fruits of grace. The problem with the Athenians is that they do not know grace: “Ignorant of themselves, of God much more, / And how the world began, and how man fell / Degraded by himself, on grace depending?” (4.310–­12). The word “ignorant” echoes Paul’s declaration to the Athenians in Acts 17:23: “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.” True ignorance is ignorance of grace; once grace is known and accepted, however, rhetoric and poetry are known through it. Adopting the traditional argument espoused by other poets such as Lanyer and Cowley, Jesus argues that the Hebrew psalms—­“our Psalms with artful terms inscribed” (4.335)—­were the first models for poetry: “Greece from us these arts derived” (4.338) Having excused poetic “art,” Jesus rehabilitates rhetoric by claiming that the Hebrew prophets were the best orators: Herein to our prophets far beneath, As men divinely taught, and better teaching The solid rules of civil government In their majestic unaffected stile

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Then all the oratory of Greece and Rome. In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt, What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so, What ruins kingdoms, and lays cities flat; These only with our law best form a king.

(4.356–­64)

A prophet is superior to an orator because he is “divinely taught” and engaged in “teaching” others. Why is their teaching better? One possible, antinomian explanation is that the prophets and the pagan philosophers are formally indistinguishable, so only sincere obedience to the indwelling Spirit can distinguish genuine from false prophecy.98 The tension between “divinely taught” and “better teaching,” however, is pushed into the next line by the enjambment: the distinction between good and bad teaching turns out not to be the direct inspiration of the Spirit, but to “the solid rules of civil government.” As Jesus goes on to explain, these rules are not a literal code of laws but a series of principles derived from an equitable reading of scripture. The final four lines are a list of headings under which to organize scripture into rhetorical topoi, such as “what makes a nation happy, and keeps it so.” This approach to scripture evokes Milton’s method in Christian Doctrine, which aims to “assist the reader’s memory by collecting together, as it were, into a single book texts which are scattered here and there throughout the Bible, and by systematizing them under definite headings” (CPW 6:1 27). Like Milton, Jesus in Paradise Regained distils scripture into a series of “headings” so that future prophets may determine scriptural principles and apply them in equity to the occasion. Jesus is not rejecting antinomianism in all contexts or suggesting that prophets are never directly inspired. His aim, rather, is to show that the precise source of inspiration reveals nothing about prophetic authority, because all would-­be prophets—­both those who claim direct inspiration and those who rely on general illumination—­should be tolerated as long as they read and preach scripture in the equitable manner that Jesus models during the temptations. Put differently, Jesus sidesteps Satan’s identity tests because the criterion by which to judge prophecy is its capacity to build an ideal community, which Milton at his most optimistic imagines “sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas”

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(CPW 2: 554). This approach allows Milton to tolerate the radical antinomians, many of whom he saw as allies and friends, without granting them the theocratic authority to impose dogma. While Jesus is not quite an antinomian, neither is he a secular poet, because to deny religious inspiration would mean to remove the basis of religious liberty. While Jesus is more often read as an antinomian radical, Kahn has argued for the opposite view: because God the Father does not intervene to end “the Son’s activity of interpretation,”99 the Son’s incessant questioning undermines religious enthusiasm.100 For Kahn, the Son anticipates a secular view of poetry that resists “dogmatism, in the form of detachable pronouncements that bear only a ‘single sense.’ ”101 While it is true that Jesus’s approach to scripture is “poetic” and creative, his creativity and Milton’s are still the gift of grace and the Spirit. As we have seen, Calvinists argued that because antinomians did not have direct revelation, public preaching should be restricted to clergymen. Milton argued repeatedly against this view, and in his prose he echoes the Socinians when arguing that Protestants are too inspired to be censored, yet not so inspired as to speak infallibly. The counterpart to this strategy in Paradise Regained is the poem’s evasiveness about where spiritual illumination ends and human judgment begins. The poem anticipates these critical desires by projecting on Satan the wish to understand Jesus’s prophetic authority by deciphering his inner relationship to the Spirit—­a tendency literary critics tend to reproduce. While the clearest test is the pinnacle, Satan’s interpretive assumptions are on display earlier in Book 4: if I read aught in heaven, Or heaven write aught of fate, by what the stars Voluminous, or single characters, In their conjunction met, give me to spell, Sorrows, and labours, opposition, hate, Attends thee, scorns, reproaches, injuries, Violence and stripes, and lastly cruel death, A kingdom they portend thee, but what kingdom, Real or allegoric I discern not,

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Nor when, eternal sure, as without end, Without beginning; for no date prefixed Directs me in the starry rubric set.

(4.382–­93)

Satan adopts an astrological idea of prophecy that ascribes authorial agency to “heaven” and “fate” rather than to the sovereign will of God. It would perhaps be too much to say that Satan is a literary critic, but he does interpret prophecies as if their divine author has died, leaving Satan free to wrestle with aporia. Prophecy has become for him a text to decode rather than an opportunity to exercise equity. His word choice emphasizes his concern with patterns of reading: the stars are “voluminous,” illustrating both their great number and their similarity to a book volume, while the “conjunction” of “single characters” evokes the grammar and syntax that join letters in a sentence. Ironically, Satan is correct about what will befall Jesus, but he does not understand the prophecy because he lacks the right interpretive frame or “rubric”—­a word that denotes, among other things, a set of instructions for a church service. If Satan has all the necessary information, why does he not know anything? The key phrase appears in the middle of the passage: “Real or allegoric I discern not” (4.390). Satan means that he cannot discern if Jesus’s kingdom will be real or allegoric, but the word order also suggests, ironically, that the binary between “real or allegoric” is the reason why Satan cannot discern Jesus. He assumes that Jesus’s kingdom can be “real” only if it fits the pattern of other fallen creatures. This is also what Satan means by “relation stands” (4.519). In order for the relation between Jesus and fallen creatures to be real, tangible, knowable, it must be consistent with what Satan knows about fallen experience. Conversely, if Jesus refuses to think and behave in a way that relates to fallen creatures, then he will indeed be Son of God in some higher sense, but fallen human beings will not be able to imitate him, and Christ’s kingdom will be merely “allegoric.” Satan’s rubric thus presumes a series of binaries—­either real or allegoric, either man or Son, either “Sorrows” or “kingdom”—­and the reason he is obsessed with the source of Jesus’s power and inspiration is that he thinks this information will help him decisively situate Jesus on one side or the other.102 The pinnacle is Satan’s most ambitious identity test and the one that finally illustrates to him and to us in what sense Jesus is a prophet.

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After placing Jesus precariously on the pinnacle, Satan asks him to stand through a divine command or through human skill, and he adds in conclusion that the manner of standing will illustrate the meaning of scriptural prophecy: There stand, if thou wilt stand; to stand upright Will ask thee skill; I to thy Father’s house Have brought thee, and highest placed, highest is best, Now show thy progeny; if not to stand, Cast thyself down; safely if Son of God: For it is written, he will give command Concerning thee to his angels, in their hands They shall uplift thee, lest at any time Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone. (IV.551–­59) Satan offers Jesus a choice between “command” and “skill,” two words that in this context imply two different interpretive attitudes to the occasion. “Skill” describes a practiced, human ability; in early modern English it also described “discretion in relation to special circumstances,”103 echoing the humanist discretion that adapts meaning to the occasion. If Jesus were to stand using this kind of humanist skill, then it would be a measure of ordinary, purely human discretion, thus blunting his messianic purpose. If Jesus were to command the angels, on the other hand, then he would indeed be Son of God in a “far higher” sense, but ordinary people would not be able to imitate him and Satan would keep his kingdom intact. Satan attempts to force this choice between skill and command not only to discover Jesus’s identity but also to circumscribe how others will imitate Jesus. Another clue that Satan’s key concern is with prophetic authority is his verbatim citation, in the final four lines of the passage above, of the prophecy in Psalms 91:11–­12. This citation leaves out the psalm’s conclusion: “the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet” (Ps. 91:13). Christians saw this line as an allusion to the protevangelium of Genesis, which was central, as we explored in the preceding chapter, to how Adam and Eve learn to embody grace. Either through misreading or as part of a deliberate stratagem, Satan severs the psalm’s promise of grace from its description of the messiah’s

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power, thus undermining the possibility that a broader community of grace might share in the messiah’s prophetic authority. The standard critical gesture at this point in the poem is to determine whether Jesus stands through a divine command, through human skill, or through some mixture of the two.104 Jesus responds by citing scripture: “To whom thus Jesus: also it is written, / Tempt not the Lord thy God; he said and stood” (4.560–­61). Critics tend to interpret this cryptic response based on their holistic understanding of Jesus’s interpretive practice in the poem. Building on his broader view of Jesus and Milton as antinomians, Fish argues that this response is a “linguistic miracle” that allows Jesus’s ego to vanish into the Father’s words, so that Jesus becomes God by ceasing to be an independent person.105 By contrast, Kahn argues that Jesus resembles a secular poet who “parries Satan’s scriptural quotation with another scriptural quotation,” thereby “direct[ing] our attention to the creative power of the literary tradition.”106 In fact, Jesus’s answer can support both readings, because it ultimately obscures as much about his identity as it reveals.107 The terse phrase “he said and stood” tells us what happens after this answer, not really how Jesus stands—­a conspicuous omission given that Satan’s aim was precisely to discover how Jesus will stand. How we read Jesus’s answer thus depends on what we presuppose about the question. If the question of the critic is similar to Satan’s question—­what is the balance between divinity and humanity within Jesus?—­then Jesus’s identity is even less clear than before. His words solicit ongoing interpretation. If the critic asks what the effects of Jesus’s teaching are, then the answer is clear: he once again adapts scripture to an unforeseen situation, and “Satan smitten with amazement fell” (4.562). I am suggesting, in other words, that Jesus’s answer is a temptation for the reader, the purpose of which is to teach how prophecy works for the nation of prophets. Milton tempts his reader to join Satan in subjecting Jesus to several identity tests that might be asked of any would-­be prophet in Restoration England. What is the source of your authority? Where are the miracles that might justify your violation of decorum? Is your kingdom real or allegoric? Like the persecuting authorities in Milton’s context, Satan asks these questions not to learn who Jesus is, but to use his answers so as to limit his prophetic power—­or, failing that, to limit how others might imi-

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tate him. Jesus’s answer is deliberately cryptic to teach readers that his inner source of inspiration belongs to the category of adiaphora, or “things indifferent.” It is a question that readers (and Satan) are welcome to debate. No matter what their answers might be, they cannot create an infallible dogma about how Spirit and human skill are balanced in Jesus, because the source of inspiration is not what determines one’s capacity to prophesy. The nation of prophets will imitate Jesus’s method of critical analysis, not his source of inspiration, so the liberty of prophesying will depend on equitable reading and teaching rather than infallible inspiration. In the same way that the Christian Doctrine treats the Trinity as a question for further debate rather than the bastion of the faith, so too Jesus’s identity is a matter for ongoing criticism rather than the interpretive end point Satan assumes it to be. The debate continues today in the secularized form of literary criticism. As we have seen, however, a community built on an ideal of academic interpretation and debate tends to assume an invisible barrier separating learned participants from others who do not have the same access to education. Given how inaccessible a humanist education was for the majority of the people, it is not surprising that Jesus sounds so much like Milton, because only men like him could imitate this standard of prophecy. In Milton’s time and perhaps our own, belonging to a community a scholars requires the necessary education and cultural capital—­the years of training, the scholarly titles, the private tutors and academies—­that allow interpreters to debate ceaselessly about a concept like the Trinity, the meaning of “Son of God,” or the significance of the pinnacle in Paradise Regained. *

*

*

One of the reasons the radical antinomians presented themselves as unlearned vessels of the Spirit, despite often being well-­educated, is that they wished to make their ideas relatable to a mixed audience. Their teaching echoed the simple language of the Gospel and appealed to those who wished for a priesthood of all believers. Milton, by contrast, never disavows his learning because he assumes that prophets should teach and transform the people. I have argued that Paradise Regained must be understood in terms of this invisible boundary of education that separates the ideal prophet Milton aspired to be from the people he attempted (and often despaired) to teach.

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Milton in his prose and Jesus in the poem never say that only educated men can be prophets, but in practice, only men as educated as Milton will be able to interpret and teach as Jesus does. This implicit elitism occasionally bubbles to the surface when Jesus describes the people as “a herd confused, / A miscellaneous rabble, who extol / Things vulgar” (3.48–­50). This is the same note of disgust that Milton exhibits in 1660 when he imagines the common people choosing a captain back to Egypt with a renewed acquiescence to kingship and episcopacy. It is tempting to conclude in these moments that the only way to accept grace and be saved is to extol the same nonvulgar things that Milton does. On the other hand, a key part of what makes Milton’s messiah so interesting in these moments of antipopulist disgust is his frank acknowledgment of the academic labor that enables his privileged position. I have suggested that Milton can be understood as an ally of men like Vane and other “godly republicans,” but the difference between them is that Milton is far more explicit about the role of education in creating a godly elite that represents the rest of the nation. Milton acknowledges that he has labored tirelessly to earn his role as a prophet, and Jesus does not shy away from academic labor in Paradise Regained. His most significant memories involve either teaching others or being taught, and these memories govern his responses in the temptations. It takes decades of incessant reading to know when to dismiss incessant reading. As Jesus evades Satan’s identity tests, he shows that it does not matter how exactly the Spirit inspires another prophet, because the response of the community should be a consistent attitude of diligent labor among like-­m inded scholars. To read Paradise Regained in this way is also to suggest that what unites the different strands of Milton’s thought is not a fixed theological position, but a consistent attempt to envision an imagined community of grace. Sometimes Milton sounds like a Quaker, but at other times he is more of a Socinian; he was personally connected to Vane and Ellwood, but also to a number of Italian humanists; his poetry claims the inspiration of the Spirit, but it also anticipates secular irony. The list of tensions and contradictions could go on and on. What unites these otherwise very different aspects of Milton’s thought is his consistent vision of the ideal nation of prophets as an educated Protestant citizenry that is tolerant to men who interpret scrip-

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ture as Milton does. In Paradise Regained, this community is made possible by the prophetic example of the messiah, the first teacher who weaves the Spirit and human effort in a way that is impossible and ultimately unnecessary to disentangle. Like each of the other poets I have explored in this book, Milton imagines a community that is empowered by grace working in tandem with a humanist education. The unresolved and perhaps irresolvable tension between these aspects of thought exert pressure on every aspect of Milton’s poetry, including what it means for a man to be a Son of God.

CONCLUSION

The Poem of Grace

I conclude by asking how Simone Weil’s reading of the Iliad, with which I began this book, compares to the descriptions of grace provided in earlier chapters. For Weil, force is what turns human beings into things by killing or dehumanizing the defeated warriors of the Iliad: How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it can kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone.

The defeated warrior turns into a stone as he awaits the victor’s decision to kill or enslave. But force also has a deadening effect on the victor. Noting that Achilles refuses to spare a life because he too will die in battle, Weil concludes that the victor loses his own humanity: To respect life in somebody else when you have had to castrate yourself of all yearning for it demands a truly heart-­breaking exertion of the powers of generosity. . . . Lacking this generosity, the conquering soldier is like a scourge of nature. Possessed by war, he, like the slave, becomes a thing, though his manner of doing so is different.

One man becomes a stone as he begs for life, and the other as he takes it. What seems impossible between them is anything like the gift of grace, 176

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which might bestow mercy as a gift without reducing the captive to a life of slavery. Yet Weil’s hint at “god-­like generosity” suggests that the Christian idea of grace may be in the background of her reading, albeit as an idea that is not available to the Homeric heroes. In her private notes, which were gathered and published after her death as Gravity and Grace, Weil is more forthright about a possible relationship between force and grace: “Not to exercise all the power at one’s disposal is to endure the void. This is contrary to all the laws of nature. Grace alone can do it.”1 If force is the principle that dehumanizes human relationships, it can also act as a spiritual purgation that attracts human beings to an alternative, namely “grace alone.” Grace is the principle that gives life back to dead things, enabling them to move beyond the economy of force. The Protestant reformers may well have agreed with Weil’s choice of words. The relationship between God and the supplicating sinner is after all even more unequal than the encounter Weil describes between Homeric warriors. But because grace is for Protestants a preemptive gift, a gift that God offers freely before the sinner even asks for it, the sinner does not experience the extreme anxiety and vulnerability of a captive for whom mercy is conditional, and the threat of force “hangs, poised and ready, over the creature it can kill.” The Protestant insistence on salvation by grace alone was meant to ease the sinner’s anxiety. By removing human beings’ responsibility to earn such a gift, the reformers sought to liberate the repentant sinner from the anxiety of worrying about whether works merit salvation. The metaphors describing this regeneration in the Psalms and the Gospel are accordingly the inverse of the ones used by Weil: where force turns men into stones, grace melts the hardened heart and turns desert stones into gushing fountains. The Protestant poets I have explored in the preceding chapters build on this scriptural language to describe how poetry mediates grace to an imagined community. Gazing at the epic tradition with Christian eyes, these poets celebrate the eclipse of what Spenser calls “fleshly force” by a new regime of grace. If Priam’s lips kiss the hands of Achilles, Milton’s lips are touched by Isaiah’s burning coal. While Achilles’s slaves are permitted to weep only when their master weeps, the tears of Lanyer’s weepers challenge Pilate’s soldiers and their Elizabethan heirs to power. Grace melts even the

178 Conclusion

heart of a tyrant: Cowley shows the awful, transformative power of God by imagining Saul’s heart melting in penitence at the sound of sacred song, long before he falls prey to the force of the Philistines. Grace makes the invisible visible, the captive free, the mute speak, the rivers and mountains shake. These poets idealize not warriors but interpreters: the equitable magistrate, the charitable scriptural reader, the sacred poet, the Christian prophet are all figures of interpretation mediating between the human community and the awe-­inspiring power of God. These interpreters find space for individual and collective liberty within grace bestowed by the divine sovereign. The process of regeneration involves a rebirth from sin toward this new position of empowered creativity. In Milton’s rendition of the first prayer after the Fall, Adam and Eve water the ground with their tears, but grace also empowers them to tell God, in a submissive yet also assertive and creative interpretation of their punishment, that they will in the end be forgiven. Their creativity becomes the pattern for all political communities thereafter in their pursuit of liberty. By the same token, grace finds Artegall in a humiliating captivity where he is unable to even seek a liberator, let alone merit his liberation or earn it in battle. As Britomart frees the captive knight, she both humbles him and empowers him to pursue reformation. In the poems of Lanyer and Cowley, grace compensates for each poet’s limitations, empowering them to transform communities marginalized by gendered oppression or divided by civil war. Thus understood, the poet demonstrates that grace enables human beings to transcend the economy of force. That is one way to read these poems, but it is only half of the reading provided in the preceding chapters. From a different, more critical perspective, grace in these poems is a way to justify other forms of domination. Each poet wants to imagine grace as a source of political agency and communal liberation in this world, but this also means a division between those who have grace and those who do not. The opportunities for violence and repression are clearest, as we have seen, in the work of Spenser and Milton. Artegall might be empowered by grace to overcome his own captivity, but a very different fate awaits the heaps of bodies cast into the sea by Talus, or the Irish Catholics starved into abject submission by Lord Grey. Talus’s iron flail is an instrument of force, and it appears all the more cruel given

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that it is meant to support the agent of divine justice. Talus and Artegall cannot pause and consider the advantages of sparing a life, as Achilles does, because they are not Homeric warriors with unqualified authority over life and death, but rather the self-­proclaimed executors of divine justice. Artegall cannot show mercy to Radigund any more than Saul can show mercy to the children of Amalek; when they do, divine justice falls swiftly on their own heads. Grace thus supplies the elect with a supreme confidence that their colonial projects are not grounded in the same fleshly force as their opponents, but in God’s redemptive plan. In Milton’s work, it is the crowd that is excluded from the benefits of grace. Although everyone is invited to accept grace in Milton’s theology, the culturally backward and politically slavish majority of the nation does not respond to grace adequately, and are thus deservedly enslaved even in the eyes of Milton’s messiah. How can grace be both an alternative to force and the justification of domination? Part of the explanation is that these poets discussed grace not simply as a theological concept, but also as a gift that was interwoven with the humanist ideals of education, eloquence, and civic virtue. Grace was not just a matter pertaining to salvation, but also what shaped a poet’s sense of his or her creativity and the liberty of an imagined community. Protestantism and humanism were intimately related from their beginnings even in the work of the orthodox reformers, but these poets moved well beyond orthodoxy to imagine a new place for merit in the believer’s response to grace. Milton imagines his ideal interpreter responding to grace with the equity, creativity, and charity of the ideal Protestant humanist. Even the Son of God is transformed into a humanist, indeed the first and paradigmatic humanist who legitimizes Milton’s political and poetic ambitions. The exclusionary aspect of this argument, meanwhile, is clear in Lanyer’s work, because she did not have a straightforward path to recognition in the humanist academies where Milton earned his Italian plaudits. Her imagined community of women is quite literally invisible to the “learned ignorance” of her contemporaries, so she draws on grace to be seen. Invisibility is the silent anxiety that dogs each poem: traces of this fear appear in Milton’s poetry, for example, when he meditates on the talent hidden within him, or in Cowley’s preface when he laments the interruption of his abortive epic. Grace helped these Protestant humanist poets translate force from the

180 Conclusion

spear of Achilles to the cultural capital of a humanist. When the appropriate response to grace becomes learned interpretation, grace becomes the gift that legitimizes the virtues by which poets seek recognition. The gift elevates and empowers those who possess these subtler weapons. The multitudes who are excluded from this gift, meanwhile, suffer the same process in reverse. The weak are no longer simply the unarmed in battle, but also the uncivil and unlearned. The Irish in the colonial imagination of Spenser’s View are presented at first as barbarous and uncivil, and only afterward as a military problem to be dispatched. The boys and slaves that make up most of the nation in Milton’s prose undergo a parallel movement as their incivility disqualifies them from full political participation. As these poets outline their vision of what grace achieves in the world, the gifts of God are woven into cultural capital. The union between a theology of grace and the prestigious eloquence of humanism gave rise to the paradoxes at the heart of the imagined communities explored throughout this book. An imagined community presents the unreformed multitude as a negative foil to the better, nobler, more prestigious minority that embodies the poet’s ideal response to grace. This imaginative separation allows poets to present their visions of community as paths beyond collective trauma, marginalization, and civil war. Reflecting on the late civil wars, Hobbes remembers that his friend Sidney Godolphin, who in his view embodied the best of public virtue, was “slain . . . in public quarrel, by an undiscerned and an undiscerning hand.”2 In the poems we have explored, grace blunts the undiscerning hand of force and substitutes it with the more discerning, pedagogical example of the poet’s imagined community. Cowley’s Israel is as divided by civil war as England, but grace moves the common people to spare Jonathan and thus provide an example to a far less merciful English audience. On the other side of the political divide, John Milton imagined grace inspiring the better part of the nation as prophets, scholars, and citizens engaged in national reform, thus embodying the ideals Milton himself sought to embody throughout his life. Decades before Milton, Spenser idealized Protestant magistrates in colonial Ireland, while Lanyer’s imagined community of women stands as a corrective to the aristocrats who had abandoned her. Their poems are riven by the conflict between the political and social reality and the imagined

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ideal. Unable to fully resolve these problems in fully structured argument, these poets capture the tension in literary form. Grace did not disappear entirely from the political vocabulary of later cultures. Today, the word occasionally crops up in public rhetoric when political leaders feel the need to invest their ideas and ambitions with a religious purpose. What secularized cultures do not share, however, is the wide currency of grace as a key concept that binds citizens to each other and to the promises of a sovereign God. Gender, empire, colonization, and civil war remain crucial themes in literature, but they are no longer commonly imagined in terms of the Protestant humanism that was so influential for Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton. Their poetry illustrates how force was translated from the battlefield to churches and academies. In doing so, they help us question how force has evolved since.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1956), 6. 2. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al., rev. 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson/Longman, 2007). 3. For a classic definition of humanism, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Humanism,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 113–­37. On Christian humanism, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), 70–­87. 4. On Spenser and colonialism, see Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford University Press, 1997), and Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). On Milton’s justification of chattel slavery, see Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). On his preference of minority rule, see Martin Dzelzainis, “Harrington and the Oligarchs: Milton, Vane, and Stubbe,” in Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism, ed. Dirk Wiemann and Gaby Mahlberg (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 15–­33; William Walker, Antiformalist, Unrevolutionary, Illiberal Milton: Political Prose, 1644–­1660 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014). 5. The distinction between the household and the political community is ultimately Aristotelian. See, for example, Aristotle, Politics, ed. and trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 2–­5. The distinction between particular communities and the universal church is explained further in Sarah Mortimer, Refor183

184 Notes to the Introduction

mation, Resistance, and Reason of State (1517–­1625) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 17–­41. 6. All citations to the Bible are to the King James Version in www.biblegateway. com. 7. See, for example, Martin Luther, Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 655–­703. 8. Sir Philip Sidney, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Miscellanous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-­Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 81. 9. Colin Burrow, Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). See in particular Burrow, Imitating Authors, 169–­205, for the view that Renaissance humanists privileged “adaptive imitation,” which sought to adapt source material in a new form that was adapted to a given rhetorical aim, context, or occasion. 10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006). Other critics have already shown that Anderson’s ideas are too secular to explain nationalism in the early modern period. See the essays in David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, eds., Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), and Paul Stevens, “The Pre-­Secular Politics of Paradise Lost,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Paradise Lost,” ed. Louis Schwartz (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 94–­108. 11. Ross Lerner, Unknowing Fanaticism: Reformation Literatures of SelfAnnihilation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019); Nichole E. Miller, Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014). The radical reading of Milton can be traced to Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1979). Other important interventions include Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–­1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–­1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 12. David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-­Civil-­War England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 149–­50. See also Lerner, Unknowing Fanaticism, 3–­7. 13. John Milton, Paradise Regained, in The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 417–­517. 14. On the overlap between Protestant and antinomian positions on grace, see

Notes to the Introduction 185

Susan E. Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79–­130. 15. Luther, On Temporal Authority, 665. 16. Martin Luther, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, in Martin Luther, ed. E. G. Rupp and Benjamin Drewery (New York: St. Martin’s, 1970), 121–­25. 17. For a summary of antinomian and “radical” Protestantism on the continent, see Francis Oakley, “Christian Obedience and Authority, 1520–­1550,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–­1700, ed. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 187–­92. On antinomianism in England, see Como, Blown by the Spirit, 33–­38. Antinomianism was so closely related to grace that it has been described as a “free grace” movement. See Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–­ 1641 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 1. 18. Augustine, City of God, Volume IV: Books 12–­15, trans. Philip Levine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 405. 19. Luther, Temporal Authority, 665. 20. Luther, Temporal Authority, 663. 21. Luther, Temporal Authority, 664. 22. Luther, Temporal Authority, 668–­69. 23. On Lutheran resistance theory after the 1530 Augsburg confession, see Robert M. Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–­1580,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–­1700, ed. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), 193–­218, esp. 200–­203. Kingdon notes that the memory of the Peasants’ Rebellion dissuaded the Protestant princes from endorsing a general right to resistance; instead, they “wanted to be very careful to develop a resistance theory that would not justify revolt by anyone in the general population but would permit the revolt they planned to lead” (201). See also Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2:195–­99. 24. Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory,” 203–­18. Compare J. W. Allen, “The Break from Calvin,” in A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1928; repr., 1958), 203–­20. On Calvin’s preference for nonresistance, see Allen, “Break from Calvin,” 52–­60. 25. John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1960), 2:833–­34. 26. Calvin, 2:834. See also his castigation of antinomianism in 2:1488: “certain men, when they hear that the gospel promises a freedom that acknowledges no king and no magistrate among men, but looks to Christ alone, think that they

186 Notes to the Introduction

cannot benefit by their freedom so long as they see any power set up over them. They therefore think that nothing will be safe unless the whole world is reshaped to a new form, where there are neither courts, nor laws, nor magistrates, nor anything which in their opinion restricts their freedom. But whoever knows how to distinguish between body and soul, between this present fleeting life and that future eternal life, will without difficulty know that Christ’s spiritual Kingdom and the civil jurisdiction are things completely distinct.” 27. Calvin, 2:1487–­88. 28. See Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:191–­94. 29. Stephanus Junius Brutus, the Celt, Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: or, Concerning the Legitimate Power of a Prince Over the People, and of the People Over a Prince, ed. and trans. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 45–­46; Theodore Beza, Concerning the Rights of Rulers Over Their Subjects and the Duty of Subjects Towards Their Rulers, ed. A. H. Murray, trans. Henri-­L ouis Gonin (Cape Town: H. A. U. M., 1956). For an overview of how these texts understood the role of the inferior magistrate, see Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory,” 203–­14. On the Calvinist rejection of popular rebellion, see Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:302–­9. 30. See John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of Women (Geneva: Printed by A. Poullain and J. Rebul, 1558); Christopher Goodman, How Superior Powers Oght to Be Obeyd of Their Subiects (Geneva: Printed by John Crispin, 1558); John Ponet, A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (Strasbourg: Printed by the heirs of W. Köpfel, 1556). These opinions, particularly Knox’s treatise, were too radical for Calvin. See Allen, “Break from Calvin,” 106–­ 20; Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:227–­38; Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, 63–­76. 31. See George Buchanan, The Powers of the Crown in Scotland, trans. and ed. Charles Flinn Arrowood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1949), 126–­32; 140–­ 44. De Jure Regni Apud Scotos, 126–­32; 140–­4 4. On the secular aspects of Buchanan’s arguments, see Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory,” 218. 32. On the flowering of antinomian groups during the English Civil Wars, particularly the Ranters and Fifth Monarchists, see David Loewenstein, “Ranter and Fifth Monarchist Prophecies: The Revolutionary Visions of Abiezer Coppe and Anna Trapnel,” in Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 92–­124. See also Bernard Capp, “The Fifth Monarchists and Popular Millenarianism,” in Radical Religion in the English Revolution, ed. J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 65–­90; Como, Blown by the Spirit. On antinomianism in the English Civil Wars, see Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Notes to the Introduction 187

33. J. G. A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 42–­45. 34. Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, and Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); J. G. A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). 35. Winship, Making Heretics; Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). See also Blair Worden, “English Republicanism,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–­1700, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 443–­75, esp. 471–­74; Blair Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 225–­45. 36. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 413–­27; Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton, 266–­67; Feisal G. Mohamed, Milton and the Post-­Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Feisal G. Mohamed, “Milton, Sir Henry Vane, and the Brief but Significant Life of Godly Republicanism,” Huntington Library Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2013): 83–­104; Lerner, Unknowing Fanaticism, 115–­42. 37. Mortimer, Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State, 13–­15. 38. See especially Mortimer, Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State, 42–­62. 39. Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13. See also Arthur Marotti and Ken Jackson, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies,” Criticism 46, no. 1 (2004): 167–­90; Arthur Marotti and Ken Jackson, eds., “The Turn to Religion” and Shakespeare Criticism (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2011). 40. On humanism in the work of the major reformers, see William J. Bouwsma, “Humanism,” in John Calvin: A Sixteenth-­Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 112–­27; Ake Bergvall, “Reason in Luther, Calvin, and Sidney,” Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no. 1 (1992): 115–­27; Nicholas Wolstertorff, “The Christian Humanism of John Calvin,” in Re-­Envisioning Christian Humanism: Education and the Restoration of Humanity, ed. Jens Zimmerman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 77–­94; Renaissance Thought, 85–­87. On grace as a principle connecting visual art, humanism, and religion, see Ita Mac Carthy, The Grace of the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

188 Notes to the Introduction

41. For an overview of this distinction, see Bergvall, “Reason in Luther, Calvin, and Sidney,” 117–­22. 42. See Bouwsma, John Calvin, 112–­27. 43. Calvin, Institutes, 1:274–­75. 44. Calvin, Institutes, 1:276. 45. Calvin, Institutes, 1:273. 46. Calvin, Institutes, 1:272. 47. On Melanchthon’s humanism and its importance for Protestant doctrine, see Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 87; Robert E. Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2016), 35–­62; Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 82–­85; Kees Meerhoff, “Logic and Eloquence: A Ramusian Revolution?” trans. Anna Myatt, Argumentation 5, no. 4 (1991): 357–­74; Kees Meerhoff, “The Significance of Philip Melanchthon’s Rhetoric in the Renaissance,” in Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Peter Mack (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1994), 46–­62; Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–­1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 105–­35. 48. On the significance of Melanchthon’s “natural light” and its implications for Christian humanism, see Clyde E. Manschreck, Preface to Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes 1555, ed. and trans. Clyde L. Manschreck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), vii–­x xiv, esp. xviii–­x ix; Hans Engelland, Introduction to Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes 1555, ed. and trans. Clyde L. Manschreck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), xxv–­x lii, esp. xxxii, xxxvi. 49. This debate ultimately turns on what is meant by “synergism.” Manschreck, Preface to Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine, xiv, and Engelland, Introduction to Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine, xli, argue that while Melanchthon did indeed stress the active participation of the will in salvation as well as the ability of the human will to resist grace, this position did not entail synergism because it did not entail a defense of full works-­r ighteousness or a theological break from Luther (xiv). See also Gregory B. Graybill, Evangelical Free Will: Phillipp Melanchthon’s Doctrinal Journey on the Origins of Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), for a reading of Melanchthon as distinct from Erasmus as well as Luther and Calvin. On the differences between Melanchthon and Erasmus, see Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism, 46–­47; Timothy J. Wenger, Human Freedom, Christian Righteousness: Philip Melanchthon’s Exegetical Dispute with Erasmus of Rotterdam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 50. Philip Melanchthon, Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes 1555, ed. and trans. Clyde L. Manschreck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 60. Note that “willing” in this case does not refer to free will, and thus does not contradict Luther.

Notes to the Introduction 189

51. See Graybill, Evangelical Free Will, 208. Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism, 46–­47, notes that Melanchthon’s position on grace did distinguish him and his followers from Calvin even though there were more continuities with Luther. 52. Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2–­3. See also Richard Strier, “Milton against Humility,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 269, for a parallel reading of Milton’s Arminianism as more commensurate with classical ethics and humanism. 53. See Nicholas Tyacke, “Anglican Attitudes: Some Recent Writings on English Religious History, from the Reformation to the Civil War,” Journal of British Studies 35, no. 2 (1996): 139–­67. Tyacke stresses Melanchthon’s importance for Arminianism in England (196–­97). For more on the relationship between Melanchthon, Hemmingsen, Baro, and Barret, and how this line of influence challenged the Calvinist consensus in England before the rise of Arminianism, see David Hoyle, “Barret, Baro, and the Foundations of the Faith,” in Reformation and Religious Identity in Cambridge, 1590–­1644 (Cambridge: Boydell, 2007), 71–­87. 54. Robert E. Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 35–­62, 101–­22. 55. Buchanan, De Jure Regni Apud Scotos, 73. On legal definitions of equity, see Mark Fortier, The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 3–­4. 56. See Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 1–­31; Fortier, Culture of Equity, 4. 57. On equity and charity, see Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 57–­58. On Melanchthon’s use of equity, see Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 87, and Meerhoff, “Logic and Eloquence,” 366–­68. 58. Desiderius Erasmus, A System or Method of Arriving by a Shortcut at True Theology, in The New Testament Scholarship of Erasmus, ed. and trans. Robert D. Sider (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 486–­7 13. For the view that this text is crucial for humanist equity as a hermeneutic principle, see Kathy Eden, “Equity and the Origins of Renaissance Historicism: The Case for Erasmus,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 5, no. 1 (1993): 137–­45, 141–­4 2. On adaptive imitation and its relationship to rhetoric, see Burrow, Imitating Authors, 169–­2 05. 59. John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2, ed. Douglas Bush et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 245. See also Fortier, Culture of Equity, 143–­4 4; Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

190 Notes to the Introduction

1994), 55; Alison A. Chapman, “Roman Law and Equity in John Milton’s Divorce Tracts,” Critical Analysis of Law 5, no. 2 (2018): 27–­43. 60. Sidney, “A Defence of Poetry,” 79. 61. Sidney, “A Defence of Poetry,” 81. 62. Anne Lake Prescott, “King David as a ‘Right Poet’: Sidney and the Psalmist,” English Literary Renaissance 19, no. 2 (1989): 131–­5 1; Robert Kilgore, “Poets, Critics, and the Redemption of Poesy: Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Metrical Psalms,” in The Sacred and Profane in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Mary A. Papazian (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 111–­12. 63. Margaret P. Hannay, “Re-­revealing the Psalms: Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, and Her Early Modern Readers,” in Psalms in the Early Modern World, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David L. Orvis (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011; repr., New York: Routledge, 2016), 219–­33. 64. On the connection between Sidney’s Defence and metrical psalms, see Kilgore, “Poets, Critics, and the Redemption of Poesy,” 108–­31. On the devotional implications, see Hannay, “Re-­revealing the Psalms,” 219–­22, and Raymond-­Jean Frontain, “Translating Heavenwards: ‘Upon the Translation of the Psalmes’ and John Donne’s Poetics of Praise,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 22, no. 1 (1996): 103–­25. 65. Hannay, “Re-­revealing the Psalms,” 23. See also Frontain, “Translating Heavenwards,” 112–­13. 66. John Davies of Hereford, The Muses Sacrifice; or, Divine Meditations (London: Printed by George Norton, 1612), 41. His words and Hannay’s analysis appear in Hannay, “Re-­Revealing the Psalms,” 227. 67. See, for example, Nicholas Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1973): 588; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 63–­64. For a parallel critique of these arguments, see Paul Stevens, “Spenser and the End of the British Empire,” Spenser Studies 22 (2007): 5–­26, 12. 68. Aemilia Lanyer, “To the Lady Anne, Countess of Dorcet,” in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 42–­47. 69. John Milton, “Of Education,” in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 366–­67. 70. See Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, 139–­45. 71. For a parallel reading of Milton’s interpretive method, see Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 35–­38. 72. For a parallel reading of this poem as a meditation on the burden of interpretation, see Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 106–­9.

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73. The poem is usually dated to the early 1650s, when Milton experienced his blindness. See John Carey’s notes in John Milton, “Sonnet XVI,” in Milton: The Complete Shorter Poems, 2nd ed., ed. John Carey (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 331–­32. 74. John Milton, “Sonnet XVI,” 331–­33. 75. See R. F. Hall, “Milton’s Sonnets and His Contemporaries,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, 2nd ed., ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 110–­12, for a parallel reading of the sonnet as both an internal dialogue in the speaker and a gradual transformation. 76. Hall, “Milton’s Sonnets and His Contemporaries,” 111. 77. See also Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 106. Chapter 1 1. All citations to The Faerie Queene are from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyoshi Suzuki, rev. 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007). Citations will be provided in parentheses indicating book, canto, stanza, and line number. 2. Key studies on Spenser’s Protestantism include Anthea Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); John N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Darryl J. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Richard Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Carol V. Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 3. Spenser’s career in Ireland has received extensive critical commentary since the 1990s. Key studies include Richard McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Ciaran Brady, “Spenser’s Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s,” Past and Present 111, no. 1 (1986): 17–­49; Christopher Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture, and Identity (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), and Patricia Coughlan, ed., Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989). 4. Criticism has long recognized the importance of equity in Spenser’s work. Important studies include Nicholas Canny, “Introduction: Spenser and Reform in Ireland,” in Coughlan, Spenser and Ireland, 9–­2 4; R. S. White, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Andrew Zurcher, Spenser’s Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern En-

192 Notes to Chapter 1

gland (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006); Andrew Majeske, Equity in English Renaissance Literature: Thomas More and Edmund Spenser (New York: Routledge, 2006). My perspective on equity emphasizes the religious aspects of this concept. On Protestant equity, see Guenther H. Haas, The Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997), and Mark Fortier, The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). 5. See Majeske, Equity in English Renaissance Literature, 1–­21, for a summary of the many definitions of equity in this period. 6. William Perkins, “A Treatise of Christian Eqvity and Moderation,” in The Works of That Famovs and Worthy Minister of Christ in the Vniversitie of Cambridge, M. William Perkins, vol. 2 (printed by Iohn Legatt, London, 1631), 440, in Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/ openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id​= xri​:eebo&rft ​_ ​id​​=​x ri​:eebo​:image​:16190​ :230, accessed July 15, 2017. I discuss this text further on. 7. Several critics have argued that Spenser and other early apologists for Ireland’s colonization were by secular rather than religious motives. See Canny, “Ideology,” 588, and David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 63–­64. For the view that Spenser “is not an imperial poet,” see Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 135–­38. See also Tobias Gregory, “Shadowing Intervention: On the Politics of “The Faerie Queene” Book 5 Cantos 10–­12,” ELH 67, no. 2 (2000): 390–­92, and Andrew Hadfield, “The ‘Sacred Hunger of Ambitious Minds’: Spenser’s Savage Religion,” in Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-­R eformation England, 1540–­1688, ed. Donna Hamilton and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 35–­36. Several critics observe that genuine imperialism was beyond England’s means at this point, and that Spenser was not an uncritical propagandist for Elizabeth. My view is closer to that of critics who do find Protestant imperialism in Spenser. For early versions of this reading, see Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (New York: Viking, 1971), and Frances A. Yates, “Queen Elizabeth as Astraea,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 10 (1947): 27–­82. For an important and recent study of religion and imperialism in Spenser’s work, see Paul Stevens, “Spenser and the End of the British Empire,” Spenser Studies 22 (2007): 5–­26. 8. Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). See Pestana, Protestant Empire, 6–­7, on how religion shaped culture and civility. 9. Perkins, “A Treatise of Christian Eqvity and Moderation,” 55–­56. 10. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Lesley Brown and trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 99. 11. See Majeske, Equity in English Renaissance Literature, 1–­4, and Fortier, Cul-

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ture of Equity in Early Modern England, 3–­4, for the distinctions between epiekeia and aequitas. 12. Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin, trans. E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), I.33. 13. See Majeske, Equity in English Renaissance Literature, 19–­21. 14. On the patristic idea of equity and its role in the Renaissance, see Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 44–­70; Haas, Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics, 25–­30. 15. Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 61–­63. This “middle way” is pronounced in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, but its source and inspiration is the Pauline dialectic between law and grace. 16. Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 98–­100. 17. Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 57–­58; Haas, Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics, 30. For more on the view that equity was both a “principle of divine mercy and a hermeneutical imperative,” see Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–­1674 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 53–­54. 18. On Melanchthon, see Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 82–­ 87; on Erasmus and humanists, see Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 73–­78. On the Renaissance’s reception of classical equity, see Ian Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 175–­77. 19. See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), Q. 120, for a Christianized view of equity, and Q. 90 for a threefold definition of the eternal, natural, and divine law that must guide the magistrate. On Aquinas and equity, see Haas, Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics, 30. 20. See Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 199–­203; Deborah Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2001), 72–­101. 21. See Christopher St. German, Doctor and Student; or, Dialogues between a doctor of divinity and a student in the laws of England, containing the grounds of those laws, together with questions and cases concerning the equity thereof, ed. William Muchall (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1874), and William Lambarde, Archeion; or, A discourse vpon the high courts of iustice in England (printed by E. P. for Henry Seile, London, 1635), in Early English Books Online, http​:​/​​/​gateway​.proquest​.com​.my​ac​ cess​.library​.utoronto​.ca​/​openurl​​?​c tx ​_​ver​​=​Z39​.88​-2003&res​_ ​id​​=​x ri​:eebo&rft​_ ​id​​ =​x ri​:eebo​:image​:8667, accessed July 15, 2017. For another example of equity as a concept in common law, see Edward Hake, Epiekeia: A Dialogue on Equity in Three Parts, ed. D. E. C. Yale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953). See Fortier,

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Culture of Equity in Early Modern England, 71–­89, and White, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature, 46–­59, on the conflict between Chancery and the common law. On the influence of these debates on Spenser, see Michael O’Connell, “The Faerie Queene, Book V,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 735–­37; Andrew Zurcher, Spenser’s Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 130–­36. 22. Lambarde, Archeion, 68. 23. See Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England, 77–­78. For the parallels between continental and English absolutism, see Johann P. Sommerville, “English and European Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century: Revisionism and the Case for Absolutism,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 2 (1996): 175. 24. See Fortier, Culture of Equity in Early Modern England, 8. 25. Fortier, Culture of Equity in Early Modern England, 30. See also Haas, Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics, 12–­19. 26. On the golden rule in Protestant equity, see Fortier, Culture of Equity in Early Modern England, 30, 39–­41; Haas, Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics, 50–­51, 68. 27. Martin Luther, “Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 45, ed. Walther I. Brandt and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1962), 128. 28. Calvin claims that God “is present with [magistrates] and also presides over the making of laws and the exercising of equity in courts of justice” (Institutes IV.xx.4). 29. Fortier, Culture of Equity in Early Modern England, 32–­35. 30. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: The Fifth Book, ed. Ronald Bane (Macmillan, 1902), V.ix.3. 31. Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, V.ix.4. 32. Perkins, “A Treatise of Christian Eqvity and Moderation,” 440. On the historical context around Perkins’s treatise see Fortier, Culture of Equity in Early Modern England, 42–­50. 33. Perkins, “A Treatise of Christian Eqvity and Moderation,” 440–­41. 34. Perkins, “A Treatise of Christian Eqvity and Moderation,” 55–­56. 35. Perkins, “A Treatise of Christian Eqvity and Moderation,” 445. 36. The edition used here appeared posthumously as A View of the State of Ireland, Written Dialogue-­Wise Betweene Eudoxus and Irenaeus, by Edmund Spnser Esq. in the Yeare 1596 in the collection: Saint Edmund Campion, 1540–­1581, The Historie of Ireland, Collected by Three Learned Authors Viz. Meredith Hanmer Doctor in Divinitie: Edmund Campion Sometime Fellow of St Iohns Colledge in Oxford: And Edmund Spenser Esq (Dublin: Printed by the Societie of Stationers, printers to the Kings most excellent Majestie and London: by Thomas Harper], 1633), http​:​/​​/​

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myaccess​.library​.utoronto​.ca​/​login​​?​qurl​​=​https​%​3 A​%​2F​%​2Fwww​.proquest​.com​%​ 2​F​doc​v iew​%​2F2240893322​%​3Faccountid​%​3 D14771. 37. Spenser, View, 4. 38. On Spenser’s denigration of Irish culture, see McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, 61–­63. 39. Canny, “Ideology,” 588. See also Brady, “Spenser’s Irish Crisis,” 23–­2 4. 40. Stevens, “Spenser and the End of the British Empire,” 12. 41. See Fortier, Culture of Equity in Early Modern England, 151, for a parallel reading of equity as a key part of Spenser’s representation of Irish law. 42. Spenser, View, 5. 43. Spenser, View, 42. 44. On the politics of custom, see Stephanie Elsky, “ ‘Wonne with Custome’: Conquest and Etymology in the Spenser-­Harvey Letters and A View of the Present State of Ireland,” Spenser Studies 28 (2013): 181–­85. 45. Spenser, View, 59. 46. Spenser, View, 3–­4. 47. See Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses, 166. For a counterargument that sees Spenser as more generous toward Brehon law, see Annabel Patterson, Reading between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 100. 48. Spenser, View, 4. 49. Spenser, View, 4. 50. Spenser, View, 4. 51. For the argument that the View links savage Irishness to the “savage religion” of Catholicism, see Hadfield, “Savage Religion,” 38–­39. 52. Spenser, View, 14. 53. Spenser, View, 14. 54. For the view that Spenser was a consistent critic of the crown in Ireland, see Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–­1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 33. In contrast with my reading, Canny concludes that Spenser did not see a need for religious reform in Ireland. 55. Spenser, View, 73. 56. Hadfield, Irish Experience, 154–­56, and McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, 215–­17. For the view that Artegall represents both Grey and other colonial officers such as John Norris, see Josephine Waters Bennett, The Evolution of the “Faerie Queene” (New York: Burt Franklin, 1960), 194–­95. 57. Perkins, “A Treatise of Christian Eqvity and Moderation,” 445. 58. Edmund Spenser, “A Letter of the Authors expounding his whole intention in the course of this worke,” in Faerie Queene, 714–­15. 59. See Fortier, Culture of Equity in Early Modern England, 116–­22, for a summary of the various definitions of equity that critics use to read Book V. 60. Artegall has been read as “a representative of Old Testament justice” be-

196 Notes to Chapter 1

cause of the many scriptural citations to the Old Testament in his early engagements; see Donald Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in “The Faerie Queene” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 161. 61. See Abraham Stoll’s annotations to this passage in the Hackett edition, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: Book Five, ed. Abraham Stoll (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2006). Stoll points out that V.ii.40.4–­5 alludes to Job 14:2 (28, n. 7), V.ii.41.9 alludes to Job 42:2 (29, n. 2), and V.ii.43.2 alludes to Job 28:25 (29, n. 4). For the view that the Book of Job underlies the entire dialogue, see T. K. Dunseath, Spenser’s Allegory of Justice in Book Five of The Faerie Queene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 97–­104. 62. For a parallel reading, see Michael O’Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 137–­38. For the alternative view that the Gyant wins this debate, see Patterson, Reading between the Lines, 88–­92, 94–­96, and 102–­3. It is also worth noting that there is an ironic parallel between Brehon law and Artegall’s preaching, because both seem to be unwritten. The difference for Spenser is that Brehon law is rooted in human custom, which he sees in that case as illegitimate, whereas Artegall attempts to ground his response in scripture. 63. All biblical citations are to the Geneva version at www​.biblegateway​.com. 64. The link to Goliath is more persuasive considering that many Elizabethan writers, including the Sidneys and their associates, routinely associated Elizabeth with David and Spanish Catholicism with Goliath. See Margaret P. Hannay, Joel P. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan, introduction to The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 98. Radigund is also an allegory for Mary, Queen of Scots, who was sometimes linked to Goliath in Protestant propaganda. See Margaret Christian, Spenserian Allegory and Elizabethan Biblical Exegesis (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 157–­61. 65. Critics have long recognized that her terms violate equity. See White, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature, 66; Zurcher, Spenser’s Legal Language, 138–­39; Nicholas W. Knight, “The Narrative Unity of Book V of The Faerie Queen: ‘That Part of Justice Which Is Equity,’ ” Review of English Studies 21, no. 83 (1970): 280. 66. See Clifford Davidson, “Isis Church,” in The Spenser Encycloepdia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 407–­8; Donald V. Stump, “Isis versus Mercilla: The Allegorical Shrines in Spenser’s Legend of Justice,” Spenser Studies 3 (1982): 87–­98. On the historical allegory, see Rene Graziani, “Elizabeth at Isis Church,” PMLA 79, no. 4 (1964): 376–­89. 67. Zurcher, Spenser’s Legal Language, 66. Similar readings appear in earlier criticism, such as William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser: A Study (New

Notes to Chapter 1 197

York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 268–­69, and Jane Aptekar, Icons of Justice: Iconography and Thematic Imagery in Book V of The Faerie Queene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 96. 68. John Aylmer, An Harborovve for Faithfull and Trevve Subiectes (Printed by John Day, at Strasborough [i.e. London] the 26th of April, 1559), S110398, sig. B2v–­ B3r, in Early English Books Online, http​:​/​​/​gateway​.proquest​.com​.myaccess​.library​ .utoronto​.ca​/​openurl​​?​c tx ​_​ver​​=​Z39​.88 ​-2003&res ​_ ​id​​= ​x ri​:eebo&rft ​_ ​id​​= ​x ri​:eebo​ :image​:466, accessed July 15, 2017. 69. On Britomart’s special election, see James E. Phillips, “Renaissance Concepts of Justice and the Strucure of ‘The Faerie Queene,’ Book V,” Huntington Library Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1970): 103–­2 0; Louis Montrose, “Spenser and the Elizabethan Political Imaginary,” ELH 69, no. 4 (2002): 907–­46, 910–­11. 70. Montrose, “Spenser and the Elizabethan Political Imaginary,” 935, similarly reads Britomart’s freeing of the knights as proof of Spenser’s patriarchal endorsement of a “masculine political nation.” 71. On the parallels between Artegall and Redcrosse, see King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, 229. 72. On the role of grace in this scene, see Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 65–­68. 73. See Stump, “Isis versus Mercilla,” 88, for a parallel reading of the similarities between the two books. 74. See Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 213, for the view that Book V concerns “poetic justice,” namely, the correspondence between a criminal and his crime until “the criminal is made to mean his crime.” Dolven’s reading is a compelling account of how instruction works for others, but Artegall’s liberation suggests that grace ultimately makes the godly mean more than their crime. 75. See Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses, 143–­66, for the effect of anti-­ Catholic polemic on the expansionist vision of Book V. 76. Mercilla has traditionally been seen as representative of both mercy and divine justice. See Richard F. Hardin, “Mercilla,” The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 469. 77. See Aptekar, Icons of Justice, 72–­73. 78. See Aptekar, Icons of Justice, 17–­20, for a parallel reading of the Litae. 79. See Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 136–­37, for a parallel reading. 80. Some critics argue that Bon Fons’s punishment undercuts Mercilla’s justice. See Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 3–­5; John D. Staines, “Elizabeth, Mercilla, and the Rhetoric of Propaganda in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 2 (2001): 283–­312. For a counterargument that sees Mercilla

198 Notes to Chapter 1

as a judge who punishes only the truly guilty, see Cyndia Susan Clegg, “Justice and Press Censorship in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” Studies in Philology 95, no. 3 (1998): 255–­59. 81. Mercilla’s reliance on magistrates is consistent with Protestant equity. See, for example, Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1971), 173–­74; Clegg, “Justice and Press Censorship,” 259–­60; Montrose, “Spenser and the Elizabethan Political Imaginary,” 936–­37. 82. Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics, 137, makes a similar link between Duessa’s punishments in Book I and Book V, but emphasizes Artegall’s role rather than Zele’s. 83. Duessa and Radigund both allegorize Mary, Queen of Scots, thereby providing another point of comparison between Britomart and Mercilla. See Donald V. Stump, “The Two Deaths of Mary Stuart: Historical Allegory in Spenser’s Book of Justice,” Spenser Studies 19 (1988): 81–­105. 84. For a parallel reading of Mercilla’s “interventionist” equity, see Zurcher, Spenser’s Legal Language, 151. 85. See Joel B. Altman, “Justice and Equity,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 1090–­91. 86. See Clegg, “Justice and Press Censorship,” 261, for a parallel reading. 87. For an overview of the historical allegory in the latter cantos of Book V, see Bennett, Evolution of the “Faerie Queene,” 187–­205. 88. See James P. Bednarz, “Geryoneo,” The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 331. 89. For a parallel reading of grace in Arthur’s two fights, see Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 145. 90. See Arthur’s victory by “chaunce” in I.viii.19. 91. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 137, argues that the “chaunce” occurrence allegorizes Protestant doctrine on grace. 92. Belge initially asks Mercilla for “ayde, against that cruell Tyrants theft” (V.x.14.4), without mentioning religion. 93. Arthur’s refusal also contrasts with the historical Leicester, who became Governor-­General of the United Provinces in 1585 against Elizabeth’s wishes. See Craig E. Harline, Pamphlets, Printing, and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic (Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1987), 7. 94. Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics, 81, reads Arthur’s despoliation of the altar as the completion of his battle with Orgoglio in Book I. See also Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses, 161–­62. 95. See Anne Lake Prescott, “Foreign Policy in Fairyland: Henri IV and Spenser’s Burbon,” Spenser Studies 14 (2000): 190–­93. 96. See Kenneth Borris, Spenser’s Poetics of Prophecy in “The Faerie Queene” V

Notes to Chapters 1 and 2 199

(Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1991), 62; Prescott, “Foreign Policy in Fairyland,” 207. 97. See Zurcher, Spenser’s Legal Language, 158, for a parallel reading of “practical policy” as a problem for Spenser. 98. See Bennett, Evolution of the “Faerie Queene,” 194–­95. 99. Some critics have argued that Grantorto represents Irish manipulations of the English legal system, which were designed to exploit English law. See Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics, 78, and McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, 224. Chapter 2 1. Lanyer’s Calvinist dedicatees included Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, and Margaret, Countess of Cumberland. See Erica Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 71–­72 and 87–­88. On Pembroke’s influence, see John Rogers, “The Passion of a Female Literary Tradition: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” Huntington Library Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2000): 435–­46; Kim A. Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,, 2008). 2. On the radical reading of Lanyer, see Achsah Guibbory, “The Gospel According to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998), 191–­211; Kari Boyd McBride, “Sacred Celebration: The Patronage Poems,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998), 60–­82; Kari Boyd McBride and John C. Ulreich, “Answerable Styles: Biblical Poetics and Biblical Politics in the Poetry of Lanyer and Milton,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100, no. 3 (2001): 333–­54. 3. Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, 62. On the range of gendered perspectives that were possible within Calvinism, see Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, 59–­91; Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing, 149–­78; Lucy Busfield, “Gender and the Spectacle of the Cross: Aemilia Lanyer in Context,” Reformation and Renaissance Review 17, no. 2 (2015): 129–­41; Lucy Busfield, “Women, Men, and Christ Crucified: Protestant Passion Piety in Sixteenth-­Century England,” Reformation and Renaissance Review 15, no. 3 (2013): 217–­36; Julianne Sandberg, “Book, Body, and Bread: Reading Aemilia Lanyer’s Eucharist,” Philological Quarterly 96, no. 1 (2017): 1–­25. 4. See Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 227–­2 8, and more recently Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing, 149–­86, especially 156–­62. 5. On Lanyer and sin, see Catherine Keohane, “ ‘That Blindest Weakness Be

200 Notes to Chapter 2

Not Over-­Bold”: Aemilia Lanyer’s Radical Unfolding of the Passion,” ELH 64, no. 2 (1997): 368; Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing, 171–­72; Busfield, “Gender and the Spectacle of the Cross,” 137. For Coles, Lanyer’s claim to grace is a “marketing tactic” (150), while Busfield concludes that Lanyer “asserted no generalized sense of female spiritual privilege” (139). I argue below that Lanyer does assert women’s special relationship to grace, though that relationship is shown to be unstable due to differences in wealth and social standing. 6. On the clear-­sightedness of Lanyer’s community of women as an alternative to the homosocial bonds of humanist discourse, see Lorna Hutson, “Why the Lady’s Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun,” in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Routledge, 1992), 154–­75. 7. Lanyer was descended from a family of Italian converts who may have originally been Jews, and she married a Catholic musician. See Lorna Hutson, “Lanier [née Bassano], Emilia (bap. 1569, d. 1645), poet,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004, accessed February 23, 2021. https​:​/​​/​ezproxy​-prd​ .bodleian​.ox ​. ac ​.uk ​:2648​/​v iew​/​10​. 1093​/​ref​:odnb​/​9 780198614128​.001​.0001​/​odnb​ -9780198614128​-e​-37653. Although I focus on Protestant themes in this chapter, other critics have shown that she draws on an eclectic range of sources, including Catholic writing. See Keohane, “That Blindest Weakness Be Not Over-­Bold,” 359–­ 89; Gary Kuchar, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Virgin’s Swoon: Theology and Iconography in ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’ ” English Literary Renaissance 37, no. 1 (2007): 47–­73; Nancy Bradley Warren, The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–­1700 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 47–­56; Yaakov Mascetti, “ ‘Here I have prepar’d my Paschal Lambe’: Reading and Seeing the Eucharsitic Presence in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 9, no. 1 (2011): 1–­15; Femke Molekamp, “Reading Christ the Book in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611): Iconography and the Cultures of Reading,” Studies in Philology 109, no. 3 (2012): 311–­32. 8. On mourning as a gendered form of poetic expression, see Patricia Phillippy, “Sisters of Magdalen: Women’s Mourning in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” English Literary Renaissance 31, no. 1 (2000): 78:106; Elizabeth M. A. Hodgson, “Prophecy and Gendered Mourning in Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–­1900 43, no. 1 (2003): 101–­16. For the counterargument that Lanyer’s mourning is designed only to distinguish her from male contemporaries, see Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing, 162–­69. 9. Margaret P. Hannay, “Re-­revealing the Psalms: Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, and Her Early Modern Readers,” in Psalms in the Early Modern World, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David L. Orvis (New York: Routledge, 2016; repr., Ashgate, 2011), 220–­33. For the effect of the Psalter on En-

Notes to Chapter 2 201

glish verse from Donne to Phineas Fletcher, Herbert, Vaughan, and Milton, see Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 118–­4 4. 10. See Anne Lake Prescott, “King David as a ‘Right Poet’: Sidney and the Psalmist,” English Literary Renaissance 19, no. 2 (1989): 131–­51, 146–­47; Robert Kilgore, “The Politics of King David in Early Modern English Verse,” Studies in Philology 111, no. 3 (2014): 411–­41, 423. 11. Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing, 76. See also Robert Kilgore, “Poets, Critics, and the Redemption of Poesy: Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Metrical Psalms,” in The Sacred and Profane in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Mary A. Papazian (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 108–­31. On the tension between Calvinist and humanist influences in the treatise, see Robert E. Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 160–­67. 12. See Hannay, “Re-­revealing the Psalms,” 219–­20, and Raymond-­Jean Frontain, “Translating Heavenwards: ‘Upon the Translation of the Psalmes’ and John Donne’s Poetics of Praise,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 22, no. 1 (1996): 103–­ 25. See Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing, 110–­11, for a counterargument stressing its limited effect on preaching. 13. Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing, 100–­101. 14. Hannay,“Re-­revealing the Psalms,” 227–­2 8; Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing, 101. 15. Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 70. See also Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism, 120–­21. 16. Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 70. 17. Philip Sidney, Apologie for Poetry, ed. J. Churton Collins (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 10. The vast literature on this definition of poetry testifies to its incompleteness. For a classic study on Sidney and imitation, see S. K. Heninger Jr., Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989). On the unresolvable tensions in this idea of imitation, see Noam Reisner, “The Paradox of Mimesis in Sidney’s Defence of Poesie and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” Cambridge Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2010): 331–­49; Catherine Bates, On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 103–­14. 18. Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism, 167. 19. Giles Fletcher, 1610, Christs Victorie, and Triumph in Heauen, and Earth, Ouer, and After Death, Cambridge, (printed by C. Legge), sig. A3r sig. A3v. http​:​/​​/​ my​access​.library​.utoronto​.ca​/​login​​?​u rl​​=​https​:​/​​/​search​-proquest​-com​.myaccess​.li​ brary​.utoronto​.ca​/​docview​/​2240871325​​?​accountid​​=​14771.

202 Notes to Chapter 2

20. Fletcher, Christs Victorie, sig. A4r. 21. Fletcher, Christs Victorie, 13. 22. Fletcher, Christs Victorie, 14. 23. Lewalski, Writing Women, 217–­2 6; Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing, 157–­78. 24. Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus, Rex Iudaeorum, in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 51–­129. Line numbers to the main poem, which shares the title of the volume, Salve Deus, Rex Iudaeorum, are provided in parentheses. Minor poems are indicated where relevant. 25. Stanley Eugene Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (London: Macmillan, 1967). 26. Nicholas Breton, A Diuine Poeme Diuided into Two Partes: The Rauisht Soule, and the Blessed Vveeper. Compiled by Nicholas Breton, Gentle-­Man (London, By R. Bradock], for Iohn Browne, and Iohn Deane, 1601), not paginated, https​:​/​​/​ezproxy​ -prd ​. bodleian ​. ox ​. ac ​.uk ​:2090​/ ​b ooks​/​d iuine ​- poeme ​- diuided​- into ​- two ​- partes​ -rauisht​/​docview​/​2248567408​/​se​-2​​?​accountid​​=​13042. 27. Breton, Diuine Poeme Diuided. 28. On Breton and Lanyer, see Lewalski, Writing Women, 227–­2 8; Busfield, “Gender and the Spectacle of the Cross,” 136; Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing, 152–­76. 29. On gender fluidity in Breton’s and Lanyer’s poetry, see Busfield, “Gender and the Spectacle of the Cross,” 139. 30. See Keohane, “That Blindest Weakness Be Not Over-­Bold,” 363–­64, for a parallel argument. 31. For a classic reading of grace as a metaphor for patronage in Salve Deus, see Susanne Woods, “Vocation and Authority: Born to Write,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998), 83–­98. On the exchange of patronage for education implicit in patronage between men, see Hutson, “Why the Lady’s Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun,” 160–­6 9. On patronage and public virtue, see Audrey E. Tinkham, “ ‘Owning’ in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (‘Hail God King of the Jews’),” Studies in Philology 106, no. 1 (2009): 52–­75. 32. Leeds Barroll, “Looking for Patrons,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 29–­48, 37. 33. On Lanyer’s biography, see Hutson, “Lanier,” and Woods, “Introduction,” xv–­x lii, esp. xv–­x xx. 34. Woods, “Introduction,” xvii–­x viii. 35. Barroll, “Looking for Patrons,” 30.

Notes to Chapter 2 203

36. Ann Baynes Coiro, “Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson,” Criticism 35, no. 3 (1993): 357–­76, 362–­63. 37. Woods, “Introduction,” xxvi. 38. Aemilia Lanyer, “To the Lady Margaret Countesse Dowager of Cumberland,” Salve Deus, Rex Iudaeorum in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 35. 39. On weakness as a way to solicit grace, see Guibbory, “Gospel According to Aemilia,” 195–­96; Woods, “Vocation and Authority,” 85. 40. Some critics have linked this passage to the radicalism of mid-­seventeenth-­ century Levellers and other revolutionary moments in English history. See McBride and Ulreich, “Answerable Styles,” 344–­45; McBride, “Sacred Celebration,” 78–­79; Guibbory, “Gospel According to Aemilia,” 201. 41. Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing, 176. 42. All biblical citations are from the Geneva version at www​.biblegateway​. com. 43. Janel Mueller, “The Feminist Poetics of ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998), 116. 44. Guibbory, “Gospel According to Aemilia,” 195. 45. McBride and Ulreich, “Answerable Styles,” 335. 46. All citations to Milton’s prose will be provided in parentheses that indicate volume and page number, and will be abbreviated as CPW. The complete collection is Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–­82). CPW 1:812. 47. For a parallel reading, see Mueller, “Feminist Poetics,” 99–­127, 116–­17. 48. McBride and Ulreich, “Answerable Styles,” 338. 49. For similar readings, see Kuchar, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Virgin’s Swoon,” 49; Guibbory, “Gospel According to Aemilia,” 206–­7. 50. See, for example, Lewalski, Writing Women, 231–­32; Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1992), 115–­16; Guibbory, “Gospel According to Aemilia,” 198–­99; Mueller, “Feminist Poetics,” 119. 51. For the view that Pilate’s wife identifies grace with the liberation of women, see Guibbory, “Gospel According to Aemilia,” 200–­201. 52. On Cumberland’s priesthood and poetry, see Micheline White, “A Woman with Saint Peter’s Keys?: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) and the Priestly Gifts of Women,” Criticism 45, no. 3 (2003): 323–­41; Keohane, “That Blindest Weakness Be Not Over-­Bold,” 381; Guibbory, “Gospel According to Aemilia,” 192, 207.

204 Notes to Chapter 2

53. On the significance of the keys for priestly authority, see White, “A Woman with Saint Peter’s Keys?,” 325–­2 6, 330–­31; Keohane, “That Blindest Weakness Be Not Over-­Bold,” 381. 54. Aemilia Lanyer, “The Description of Cooke-­ham,” in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 130–­38. Parenthetical citations to “Cooke-­ham” refer to line numbers in this edition. 55. On the date and context, see Jessica L. Malay, “Positioning Patronage: Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and the Countess of Cumberland in Time and Place,” The Seventeenth Century 28, no. 3 (2013): 251–­74, 253–­54. 56. Malay, “Positioning Patronage,” 254. See also Richard T. Spence, “Clifford [née Russell], Margaret, Countess of Cumberland (1560–­1616), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, May 28, 2015; accessed July 17, 2022. https​:​/​​/​ezproxy​-prd​ .bodleian​.ox ​.ac​.uk​:2102​/​10​.1093​/​ref​:odnb​/​5655. 57. On the link between Cumberland’s Puritanism and alchemical interests, see Malay, “Positioning Patronage,” 256. 58. On Lanyer, country house poetry, and patriarchy, see Barbara K. Lewalski, “The Lady of the Country-­House Poem,” Studies in the History of Art 25 (1989): 261–­ 75; Marshall Grossman, “The Gendering of Genre: Literary History and the Canon,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Genre, Gender, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington,: University of Kentucky Press, 1998), 128–­42. 59. Coiro, “Writing in Service,” 365–­66. 60. Paul Stevens, “Raphael’s Condescension: Paradise Lost, Jane Austen, and the Secular Displacement of Grace,” in Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 531–­53. 61. Stevens, “Raphael’s Condescension,” 532. 62. For the oak as representative of social hierarchy, see Coiro, “Writing in Service,” 371. On the Edenic and apocalyptic resonances of the oak, see Lewalski, Writing Women, 238; White, “A Woman with Saint Peter’s Keys?,” 328. 63. On the oak and Psalm 92, see Elaine V, Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 203–­4. 64. On class as a second Fall, see Lewalski, Writing Women, 235, 241. 65. On the sexual overtones of this partnership, see Amy Greenstadt, “Aemilia Lanyer’s Pathetic Phallacy,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2008): 67–­97, 69–­70. 66. For parallel reading of this kiss, see Coiro, “Writing in Service,” 374; Lisa Schnell, “ ‘So Great a Diffrence Is There in Degree’: Aernilia Lanyer and the Aims of Feminist Criticism,” Modern Language Quarterly 57, no. 1 (1996): 23–­35, 33–­34. 67. Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 205, reads the kiss as an unproblematic mourning for intimacy, whereas Schnell, “Aims of Feminist Criticism,” 34, reads it as an indictment.

Notes to Chapters 2 and 3 205

68. See Mascetti, “Here I have prepar’d my Paschal Lambe,” 10–­11, for a similar reading. Chapter 3 1. Most of what we know about Cowley’s life derives from Thomas Sprat, “An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Abraham Cowley,” in The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley Consisting of those which were Formerly Printed, and those which He Design’d for the Press, Now Published Out of the Authors Original Copies (London, Printed by J. M. for Henry Herringman . . . , 1668), https​:​/​​/​ezproxy​-prd​.bodleian​.ox​ .ac​.uk​:2082​/ ​books​/​works​-mr​-abraham​-cowley​-consisting​-those​-which​/​docview​/​ 2240918464​/​se ​-2​​?​accountid​​=​13042. See also Arthur H. Nethercot, Abraham Cowley: The Muse’s Hannibal, 2nd ed. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1967); Thomas O. Calhoun, “Abraham Cowley (1618–­2 8 July 1667),” in Seventeenth-­ Century British Nondramatic Poets: Third Series, ed. M. Thomas Hester, 61–­72, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 131 (Detroit, MI: Gale, 1993). Gale Literature: Dictionary of Literary Biography (accessed May 4, 2021), https​:​/​​/ ​l ink​.gale​.com​/​ apps​/​doc​/​SZNKUW784204068​/​DLBC​​?​u​​=​oxford&sid​​=​DLBC&xid​​=​e0567855. 2. Joseph Milton French, ed., The Life Records of John Milton (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949–­58), 5:322–­23, cited in William Poole, The Making of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 117–­27. On Cowley’s influence on Milton, see Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 126; Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 446–­47; Poole, Making of Paradise Lost, 124–­27; Maggie Kilgour, “Cowley’s Epic Experiments,” Royalists and Royalism in 17th-­Century Literature: Exploring Abraham Cowley, ed. Philip Major (New York: Routledge, 2019), 93–­123. 3. The poem’s date of composition is usually understood to be the early 1650s. See Frank Kermode, “The Date of Cowley’s Davideis,” Review of English Studies 25 (1949): 154–­58; James G. Taafe, Abraham Cowley (New York: Twayne, 1972), 79; David Trotter, The Poetry of Abraham Cowley (London: Macmillan, 1979), 83. 4. I cite from Abraham Cowley, Poems Written by A. Cowley (London, Printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1656), https​:​/​​/​ezproxy​-prd​.bodleian​.ox​.ac​.uk​:2090​/ ​books​ /​poems​-written​-cowley​/​docview​/​2 240852954​/​se​-2​​?​accountid​​=​13042. I use the line numbers in The Abraham Cowley Text and Image Archive, ed. Daniel Kinney, John Knapp, and Genevieve McCarthy: http​:​/​​/​cowley​. lib​.virginia​.edu​/​worksol​. html. All citations of Cowley’s notes are taken from Gayle Shadduck, ed., A Critical Edition of Cowley’s Davideis (New York: Garland, 1987). 5. Abraham Cowley, “The Preface to the Poems, 1656,” in Abraham Cowley: The Essays and Other Prose Writings, ed. Alfred B. Gough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915), 1–­17, 9. 6. See Nethercot, Abraham Cowley: The Muse’s Hannibal, 159–­60; Calhoun,

206 Notes to Chapter 3

“Abraham Cowley (1618–­2 8 July 1667),” 69–­71. On Cowley’s reputation at court, see Theodore F. Kaouk, “ ‘Perjur’d Rebel’: Equivocal Allegiance and Abraham Cowley’s ‘Cutter of Coleman Street,’ ” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–­1700 33, no. 2 (2009): 25–­46. 7. See Abraham Cowley, “The Complaint,” in Verses Written on Several Occasions, in The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley Consisting of those which were Formerly Printed, and those which He Design’d for the Press, Now Published Out of the Authors Original Copies (London, Printed by J.M. for Henry Herringman . . . , 1668), 28. https​:​/​​/​e zproxy​-prd ​.bodleian ​.ox ​. ac ​.uk ​:2082​/ ​books​/​works​-mr​-abraham​-cowley​ -consisting​-those​-which​/​docview​/​2240918464​/​se​-2​​?​accountid​​=​13042. 8. Abraham Cowley, “The Garden,” in Abraham Cowley: The Essays and Other Prose Writings, ed. Alfred B. Gough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915), 168–­ 78, 177. 9. All scriptural citations are to the King James Version at www​.biblegateway​. com. 10. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry; or, The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), 99–­101. 11. For more on Cowley’s religious poetics, see Joseph Wallace, “True Poetry and False Religion in Abraham Cowley’s Davideis,” Review of English Studies 66 (2015): 895–­914. 12. Niall Allsopp, Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 112–­38. Allsopp convincingly shows the influence of the Cavendish Circle (also known as the “Newcastle Circle”) on Hobbes, Davenant, and Cowley. See Allsopp, Poetry and Sovereignty, 1–­25; Stephen Clucas, “The Atomism of the Cavendish Circle: A Reappraisal,” The Seventeenth Century 9, no. 2 (1994): 247–­73; Lisa T. Sarasohn, “Thomas Hobbes and the Duke of Newcastle: A Study in the Mutuality of Patronage before the Establishment of the Royal Society,” 90, no. 4 (1999): 715–­37. For more on this context, see Nethercot, Abraham Cowley: The Muse’s Hannibal, 150–­51; Robert B. Hinman, Abraham Cowley’s World of Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 92–­134; Trotter, Poetry of Abraham Cowley, 57; Catherine Gimelli Martin, “Two Baconian Poets, One Baconian Epic: Milton, Cowley, and the Royal Society,” in Milton and the New Scientific Age: Poetry, Science, Fiction, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (New York: Routledge, 2019), 20–­52. These ideas are also part of a longer debate on whether Cowley was royalist, quietist, or impartial. On Cowley as an underground royalist, see T. R. Langley, “Abraham Cowley’s ‘Brutus’: Royalist or Republican?”, Yearbook of English Studies 6 (1976): 41–­52; Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–­1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 251–­68; Anthony Welch, The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2012), 113–­3 4. On Davideis as a quietist poem, see Nigel Smith,

Notes to Chapter 3 207

Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–­1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 216–­18; John Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil War: The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 86–­88, 97–­98; David Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–­1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 341–­46. On Cowley as more interested in authority than partisanship, see Trotter, Poetry of Abraham Cowley, 84–­100; Warren Chernaik, “Laurels for the Conquered: Cowley, Epic, and History,” Royalists and Royalism in 17th-­Century Literature: Exploring Abraham Cowley, ed. Philip Major (New York: Routledge, 2019), 46–­70; Nathaniel Stogdill, “ ‘Out of Books and Out of Themselves’: Invigorating Impartiality in Early Modern England,” in The Emergence of Impartiality, ed. Kathryn Murphy and Anita Traninger (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 189–­210. 13. For a similar contrast between Cowley and Davenant, see Stephen N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–­1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 26–­29. On Cowley’s contrasts with Hobbes, see Richard Hillyer, Hobbes and His Poetic Contemporaries: Cultural Transmission in Early Modern England (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2007), 51–­68. Allsopp, Poetry and Sovereignty, 115–­16, recognizes that inspiration is a major difference, but does not discuss grace. For older but still relevant criticism on Cowley’s reconciliation of rationalism and humanism, see Hinman, Abraham Cowley’s World of Order, and Timothy Dykstal, “The Epic Reticence of Abraham Cowley,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–­1900 31, no. 1 (1991): 95–­115. 14. Sir William D’Avenant, “The Author’s Preface to His Much Honovr’d Friend, M. Hobbes,” in A discourse upon gondibert an heroick poem / written by sr. william D’avenant ; with an answer to it, by mr. Hobbs (Paris: Chez Matthieu Guillemot, 1650), 1–­1 17, 1. Retrieved from https​:​/​​/​ezproxy​-prd​.bodleian​.ox​.ac​.uk​:2082​/​ books​/​d iscourse​-upon​-gondibert​-heroick​-poem​-written​-sr​/​docview​/​2240863454​ /​se​-2​​?​accountid​​=​13042. 15. For a reading that emphasizes their differences, see Hillyer, Hobbes and His Poetic Contemporaries, 19–­50. 16. Thomas Hobbes, “THE ANSVVER OF Mr. HOBBS TO Sr. WILLIAM D’AVENANT’S PREFACE before GONDIBERT,” in A discourse upon gondibert an heroick poem / written by sr. william D’avenant; with an answer to it, by mr. Hobbs (Paris: Chez Matthieu Guillemot, 1650), 119–­45. Retrieved from https​:​/​​/​ezproxy​ -prd ​. bodleian ​.ox ​. ac ​.uk ​:2082​/ ​books​/​d iscourse ​-upon​- gondibert​-heroick​-poem​ -writ​t en​-sr​/​docview​/​2240863454​/​se​-2​​?​accountid​​=​13042. 17. Davenant, “Author’s Preface to His Much Honovr’d Friend, M. Hobbes,” 31. 18. Edmund Gosse, From Shakespeare to Pope: An Inquiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of Classical Poetry in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1885), 154; Alfred Harbage, Sir William Davenant: Poet Venturer, 1606–­ 1668 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935), 197–­98; David F.

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Gladish, Introduction to Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), ix–­x lvi, xi; Phillip Connell, “Hobbes and Davenant: Poetry as Civil Science” in The Poetic Enlightenment, ed. Tom Jones and Rowan Boysom (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 64. For a critique, see William McCarthy, “Davenant’s Prefatory Rhetoric,” Criticism 20, no. 2 (1978): 128–­43. See also Burrow, Epic Romance, 242. 19. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 381–­90. Skinner’s humanist reading has been successfully challenged by Timothy Raylor, Reason, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 271–­74. See also David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Conal Condren, “On the Rhetorical Foundations of Leviathan,” History of Political Thought 11, no. 4 (1990): 703–­20). On Hobbes’s reception history, see Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England, 1640–­1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 18–­135. On the role of education in Hobbes’s circle, see Timothy Raylor and Jacob James, “Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and A Proposition for the Advancement of Moralitie by Sir William Davenant,” The Seventeenth Century 6, no. 2 (1991): 205–­50; Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 82–­83. 20. Beyond these agreements, they also have differences. See Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–­1674 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 142–­43; Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 83. 21. On humanist discretion, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 192–­94, 370–­71. On Hobbes’s attempt to contain the power of metaphor, see Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 134–­70, and Victoria Kahn, “Hobbes and the Science of Metaphor,” in Scientific Statesmanship, Governance, and the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Kyriakos N. Demetriou and Antis Loizides (New York: Routledge, 2015), 85–­100. 22. Hobbes, “THE ANSVVER OF Mr. HOBBS,” 136. 23. Davenant, “Author’s Preface to His Much Honovr’d Friend, M. Hobbes,” 54–­55. 24. Davenant, “Author’s Preface to His Much Honovr’d Friend, M. Hobbes,” 54. 25. Hobbes, “THE ANSVVER OF Mr. HOBBS,” 130. 26. Hobbes, “THE ANSVVER OF Mr. HOBBS,” 130. 27. For a parallel reading, see Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 22–­25; Connell, “Hobbes and Davenant,” 66–­67. 28. Davenant, “Author’s Preface to His Much Honovr’d Friend, M. Hobbes,” 100.

Notes to Chapter 3 209

29. Davenant, “Author’s Preface to His Much Honovr’d Friend, M. Hobbes,” 78. 30. Davenant, “Author’s Preface to His Much Honovr’d Friend, M. Hobbes,” 100–­101. 31. On Davenant’s embrace of force against the common people, see Connell, “Hobbes and Davenant,” 67–­69; Raylor and James, “Opera and Obedience,” 211. 32. Davenant, “Author’s Preface to His Much Honovr’d Friend, M. Hobbes,” 98. See also Raylor and James, “Opera and Obedience,” 210–­15. 33. See Hobbes, “THE ANSVVER OF Mr. HOBBS,” 140–­41. On Davenant’s mixture of Hobbism and humanism, see Raylor and James, “Opera and Obedience,” 222–­27; Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 19–­20. On awe more broadly in Hobbes, see Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 199–­228. 34. Abraham Cowley, “To Sir WILLIAM D’AVENANT, upon his two first Books of GONDIBERT, finished before his Voyage to America,” in A Discourse upon Gondibert an Heroick Poem / Written by Sr. William D’Avenant; with an Answer to it, by Mr. Hobbs (Paris: Chez Matthieu Guillemot . . . , 1650), https​:​/​​/​ezproxy​-prd​ .bodleian​.ox ​.ac​.uk​:2082​/​books​/​d iscourse​-upon​-gondibert​-heroick​-poem​-written​ -sr​/​docview​/​2240863454​/​se​-2​​?​accountid​​=​13042. In-­text citations are to line numbers counting from the first line. 35. Cowley, “Preface,” 15. 36. Cowley, “Preface,” 13. 37. Cowley, “Preface,” 16–­17. 38. On humanist judgment, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 193–­97. 39. On Cowley’s theory of translation, see Nethercot, Abraham Cowley: The Muse’s Hannibal, 137; Philip Major, Introduction to Royalists and Royalism in 17th Century Literature: Exploring Abraham Cowley, ed. Philip Major (New York: Routledge, 2020), 1–­19, 5–­6; Colin Burrow, Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 303. See also Samuel Johnson, “Cowley,” in The lives of the poets of Great Britain and Ireland; and a criticism of their works. By Samuel Johnson, vol. 1 (Dublin: Printed for J. Moore, No. 45, College-­Green, 1793–­1802), 40. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (accessed March 18, 2021). https​:​/​​/​l ink​ .gale ​ . com ​ /​a pps​ /​d oc​ /​C W0116977020​ / ​ E CCO​​ ? ​ u ​​ = ​ o xford&sid​​ = ​ E CCO&xid​​ =​ f75c44b2&pg​​=​42. 40. For a parallel reading of Pauline conversion, see Wallace, “True Poetry and False Religion,” 899–­900. 41. Wallace, “True Poetry and False Religion,” 899. 42. Cowley, “Preface,” 14. 43. Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 3. See also Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 227–­2 8. 44. Cowley, “Preface,” 12–­13.

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45. See Hinman, Abraham Cowley’s World of Order, 227–­66. 46. On musical harmony, see Hinman, Abraham Cowley’s World of Order, 255–­ 59; Welch, Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past, 115–­16. On neostoicism, see Allsopp, Poetry and Sovereignty, 135–­38. Cowley cites Book 10 of Kircher’s De Arte Consoni and Dissoni as a source of his musical ideas; see Shadduck, Critical Edition of Cowley’s Davideis, 177–­78, note 37. 47. For a parallel reading of Cowley’s reclaiming of inspiration, see Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 28–­29. 48. The psalms were the paradigm for therapeutic poetry. In addition to the criticism cited in the last chapter, see Raymond-­Jean Frontain, “Translating Heavenwards: ‘Upon the Translation of the Psalmes’ and John Donne’s Poetics of Praise,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 22, no. 1 (1996): 103–­25. 49. Shadduck, Critical Edition of Cowley’s Davideis, 251–­52, note 3. For a Thomist reading, see Ted-­Larry Pebworth, “Cowley’s Davideis and the Exaltation of Friendship,” in The David Myth in Western Literature, ed. Raymon-­Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1980), 98, 101–­2. 50. Peter Fraňo, “Cicero’s Translations of the Stoic Term συμπάϑεια into Latin,” Greco-­Latina Brunensia 25, no. 2 (2020): 88–­97. 51. On divine love as the key harmonizing principle in Cowley’s world of order, see Hinman, Abraham Cowley’s World of Order, 245–­56. 52. On the classical sources for this exaltation of friendly love, see Pebworth, “Cowley’s Davideis and the Exaltation of Friendship,” 99, 102–­3. 53. See Hinman, Abraham Cowley’s World of Order, 247, on Cowley’s borrowing from William Gilbert, the Elizabethan scientist of magnetism. Gilbert used the language of love to describe magnetism, while Cowley describes both love and magnets in the language of grace. On Gilbert’s metaphors, see Book 2, ch. 25 in William Gilbert, Guilielmi Gilberti Colcestrensis, Medici, Londinensis, De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, Et De Magno Magnete Tellure Physiologia Noua, Plurimis & Argumentis, & Experimentis Demonstrata (London: Excudebat Petrus Short, 1600). http​:​/​​/​myaccess​. library​.utoronto​.ca​/ ​login​​?​qurl​​=​https​%​3 A​%​2 F​%​2 Fwww​. proquest​.com​%​2Fdocview​%​2F2240863175​%​3Faccountid​%​3 D14771. 54. Shadduck, Critical Edition of Cowley’s Davideis, 252, note 4. 55. Key studies tracing Bacon’s influence on Cowley’s poetics include Hinman, Abraham Cowley’s World of Order, 92–­134; Mary Elizabeth Green, “The Poet in Solomon’s House: Abraham Cowley as Baconian Apostle,” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–­1700 10, no. 2 (1986): 68–­75; Achsah Guibbory, “Imitation and Originality: Cowley and Bacon’s Vision of Progress,” SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–­1900 26, no. 1 (1989): 99–­1 20; Margaret J. M. Ezell, The Oxford English Literary History: Volume V: 1645–­1714: The Later Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 168–­84. See Hinman, Abraham Cowley’s

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211

World of Order, 107–­34, and Gimelli Martin, “Two Baconian Poets, One Baconian Epic,” 30–­41, for the view that Cowley responds to Hobbes more than to Bacon. 56. Contrast my reading to that of Dykstal, “The Epic Reticence of Abraham Cowley,” 104–­5, who claims that Cowley takes magnetic attraction “to a ridiculous extreme” by reducing love to a “natural law.” Dykstal misses the importance that Cowley gives to grace. 57. Johnson, “Cowley,” 200. See also Edmund Grosse, From Shakespeare to Pope: An Inquiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of Classical Poetry in England (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1885),117–­5 4. Gosse provides an early assessment of Cowley as closer to baroque poetry than the neoclassicism of Davenant and Waller: “he was with the classicists, yet not of them” (150). 58. Johnson, “Cowley,” 200. 59. For a parallel reading, see Kilgour, “Cowley’s Epic Experiments,” 95. 60. For the view that Cowley abandoned his poem because he was afraid to apply to Jonathan and David the homoeroticism he saw between Nisus and Euryalus in Aeneid, see Stephen Guy-­Bray, “Cowley’s Latin Lovers: Nisus and Euryalus in the Davideis,” Classical and Modern Literature 21, no. 1 (2001): 25–­42, 35. On the antisexual nature of Cowley’s idealized love, see Pebworth, “Cowley’s Davideis and the Exaltation of Friendship,” 100; Sue Starke, “ ‘The Eternal Now’: Virgilian Echoes and Miltonic Premonitions in Cowley’s Davideis,” Christianity and Literature 55, no. 2 (2006): 195–­219, 201. 61. See for instance Johnson, “Cowley,” 3–­4. 62. Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 45. 63. I am grateful to Noel Malcolm for letting me read part of his forthcoming monograph, Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-­Male Sexual Relations, 1400–­1750 (Oxford University Press), which discusses the danger of anachronism in applying a modern concept of homoeroticism to early modern literary works. 64. See Hinman, Abraham Cowley’s World of Order, 256–­57. 65. On David’s calming of Saul as a Renaissance commonplace for the near-­ magical power of poetry, see Robert Kilgore, “The Politics of King David in Early Modern English Verse,” Studies in Philology 111, no. 3 (2014): 411–­41, 41–­45. See also Frontain, “Translating Heavenwards,” 107. 66. See Shadduck, Critical Edition of Cowley’s Davideis, 179, note 41. See also Kilgour, “Cowley’s Epic Experiments,” 101, on the originality of this ode. 67. See Welch, Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past, 113–­14, for a parallel reading of the psalm as generalizing Israel’s deliverance into an account of grace. Welch, however, finds a royalist allegory in the psalm. 68. On the multiplication of authors in psalm translation, see Margaret P. Hannay, “Re-­revealing the Psalms: Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, and

212 Notes to Chapter 3

Her Early Modern Readers,” in Psalms in the Early Modern World, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David L. Orvis (New York: Routledge, 2016), repr.: Ashgate, 2011, 228–­29. 69. For a parallel reading of the judges, see Trotter, Poetry of Abraham Cowley, 87–­88; Chernaik, “Laurels for the Conquered,” 59–­60. 70. On the republicanism of Davideis, see Chernaik, “Laurels for the Conquered,” 58–­63. 71. Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 137. 72. Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, 267. See also Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 23–­56. 73. On the significance of 1 Sam. 8 in absolutist thought, see Johann P. Sommerville, “English and European Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century: Revisionism and the Case for Absolutism,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 2 (1996): 168–­94, 177–­80. On the civil war uses of these ideas, see Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, 132–­39; Johann P. Sommerville, “Hobbes and Absolutism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, ed. Al P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 378–­94, 382–­83; Kevin Killeen, The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 126–­3 4. For Hobbesian readings of Cowley’s position on 1 Sam. 8, see Michael Austin, “Saul and the Social Contract: Constructions of 1 Samuel 8–­1 1 in Cowley’s Davideis and Defoe’s Jure Divino,” Papers on Language and Literature 32, no. 4 (1996): 410–­36; Allsopp, Poetry and Sovereignty, 126–­27. 74. Shadduck, Critical Edition of Cowley’s Davideis, 472, note 16. 75. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Or, the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil by Thomas Hobbes (London: Printed for Andrew Crooke, 1651), 110. 76. Cowley’s divided loyalties are a recurring theme in criticism. See the summary in Major, Introduction, 7–­8. For a covertly royalist Cowley, see Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 255–­68; Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, 97–­98. For a more republican reading, see Nethercot, Abraham Cowley: The Muse’s Hannibal, 150–­63; Trotter, Poetry of Abraham Cowley, 97. Both positions are criticized by Austin, who reads Cowley’s view on 1 Sam. 8 as an “analogy of the Hobbesian social contract” (“Saul and the Social Contract,” 427). 77. See Chernaik, “Laurels for the Conquered,” 58–­61; Allsopp, Poetry and Sovereignty, 128–­36; Stogdill, “Impartiality,” 197–­98; Nathaniel Stogdill, “Abraham Cowley’s ‘Pindaric Way’: Adapting Athleticism in Interregnum England,” English Literary Renaissance 42, no. 3 (2012): 482–­514, 495–­96. For the view that republicans and absolutists shared a view of indivisible sovereignty, see Feisal Mohamed,

Notes to Chapters 3 and 4 213

Sovereignty: Seventeenth-­Century England and the Making of the Modern Political Imaginary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 78. See Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. John Humphreys Whitfield (London: Dent, 1974), 13. For a recent analysis of this idea of grace, see Ita Mac Carthy, The Grace of the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). 79. Deni Kasa, “Abraham among the Tyrants: The Politics of Genesis 22 in George Buchanan’s Iephthes, sive votum and Abraham Cowley’s Davideis,” Modern Philology 117, no. 1 (2019): 48–­69, 66. 80. On spectatorship in this scene, see Kasa, “Abraham among the Tyrants,” 67. 81. For parallel readings of Cowley’s failure to resolve the specter of civil war, see Welch, Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past, 121–­12; Kilgour, “Cowley’s Epic Experiments,” 103. 82. Cowley, “Preface,” 5. Chapter 4 1. All citations to Milton’s prose will be provided in parentheses that indicate volume and page number and will be abbreviated as CPW. The complete collection is Don M. Wolfe et al., eds., Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–­82). The allusion here is to Isaiah 6:6–­7: “Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged” (Isaiah 6:6–­7). Scriptural citations are from the King James Version at www​. biblegateway​.com. 2. Key studies on Milton’s self-­fashioning and its relationship to his work include Stephen Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-­R epresentation and Authority (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); William Poole, Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Nicholas McDowell, Milton: Poet of Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). See Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 97–­99, for a similar reading of The Reason of Church-­Government. Fallon describes the tension in this treatise in terms of Milton’s view of prophecy, a concept to which I return in chapter 5. 3. For a view of Milton’s development from early Puritanism to mature Arminianism, see Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography, rev. ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 154–­97. More recently, critics have rightly shown that Milton was committed to a humanist interpretive method rather than a single theological label. See McDowell, Milton: Poet of Revolution, 12; Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 21–­38. 4. For parallel readings of the early Milton’s key differences with Arminianism

214 Notes to Chapter 4

on the questions of sin and grace, see McDowell, Milton: Poet of Revolution, 241–­ 42, 379–­80, 411; Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 31–­32. 5. On Milton’s religious radicalism, see Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–­1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), and Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–­1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–­1660. McDowell anticipates the view that Milton’s ideas are not egalitarian. See also Nicholas McDowell, “Humanism and Heresy in Milton’s England,” Literature Compass 1 (2004): 1–­1 2. The usefulness of the term “radical” has been contested by, for example, Conal Condren, “Radicals, Conservatives, and Moderates in Early Modern Political Thought: A Case of the Sandwich Islands Syndrome?,” History of Political Thought 10 (1989): 525–­4 2, and Conal Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-­Century England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994). For a recent defense, see Laurent Currelly and Nigel Smith, Introduction to Radical Voices, Radical Ways: Articulating and Disseminating Radicalism in Seventeenth-­and Eighteenth-­Century Britain, ed. Laurent Connelly and Nigel Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 1–­40. For counterarguments that emphasize Milton’s elitism, see Martin Dzelzainis, “Harrington and the Oligarchs: Milton, Vane, and Stubbe,” in Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism, ed. Dirk Wiemann and Gaby Mahlberg (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 15–­33; Paul Hammond, Milton and the People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Paul Stevens, “Milton and National Identity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 342–­63; Feisal G. Mohamed, Sovereignty: Seventeenth-­Century England and the Making of the Modern Political Imaginary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 91–­139. 6. Stevens, “Pre-­Secular,” 96. 7. For the view that Milton’s elite self-­fashioning suggests that he writes only for himself, see Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 188. I build on the alternative view that Milton’s self-­fashioning implies an imagined community. See Paul Stevens, “How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. Paul Stevens and David Loewenstein (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 286–­315; Sharon Achinstein, “De Doctrina Christiana: Milton’s Last Divorce Tract?,” Milton Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2017): 153–­63, 153–­54, 159. 8. Milton first uses this phrase in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in a trans-

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lation of Zwingli: “when by suffrage and consent of the whole people, or the better part of them, a Tyrant is depos’d or put to death, God is the chief leader of that action” (CPW 3:245). The “better part” can mean a majority, but for Milton it usually means a virtuous minority. An early critic of this concept is Sir Robert Filmer, Observations Concerning the Originall of Government, upon Mr Hobs “Leviathan,” Mr Milton against Salmasius, H. Grotius ‘De Jure Belli’ in Filmer: Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 184–­234, 199. 9. All citations to Paradise Lost are to John Milton, Paradise Lost, 2nd ed., ed. Alastair Fowler (Longman) 1998. Here and elsewhere, citations to this edition will be provided in parentheses indicating book and line number. 10. Milton’s opponents saw Israel’s request for a king, for example, as an abandonment of its native freedom. See Johann P. Sommerville, “English and European Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century: Revisionism and the Case for Absolutism,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 2 (1996): 168–­94; Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 132–­37. 11. Whereas I see Milton’s politics as inseparable from his theology, his republicanism has long been seen as influenced by Niccolò Machiavelli. See David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–­1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 433–­91, and the essays in David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner, eds., Milton and Republicanism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Barbara Riebling, “Milton on Machiavelli: Representations of the State in Paradise Lost,” Renaissance Quarterly 49, no. 3 (1996): 573–­9 7. On early modern republicanism, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation, 1500–­1700 (London: Routledge, 1964). Studies on the religious aspect of Milton’s republicanism include Warren Chernaik, “Biblical Republicanism,” Prose Studies 21, no. 1 (2000): 147–­60; Warren Chernaik, Milton’s Burden of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Walter S. H. Lim, John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 15–­22; Dirk Vanderbeke, “ ‘None can love freedom heartily, but good men’: Milton’s Religious Republicanism,” in Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism, ed. Dirk Wiemann and Gaby Mahlberg (135–­47); Feisal Mohamed, “Milton, Sir Henry Vane, and the Brief but Significant Life of Godly Republicanism,” Huntington Library Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2013): 83–­104. See also Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the

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Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3–­39. 12. When I use “Arminian” to describe Milton’s ideas, I mean the views that Milton held in common with Arminius himself and the Dutch Remonstrants, not Laudians. On the different strands of Arminianism, see Mortimer, Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State, 42–­45, and Jason A. Kerr and John K. Hale, “The Origins and Development of Milton’s Theology in De doctrina Christiana, 1.17–­18,” Milton Studies 54 (2013): 181–­206, 189–­91. 13. On the Remonstrants, see Freya Sierhuis, The Literature of the Arminian Controversy: Religion, Politics, and the Stage in the Dutch Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 27–­47. See also Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–­1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 181, for the historical roots of Arminianism. 14. The view that salvation depends on grace cooperating with the human will. Calvinists saw this as crypto-­Catholicism. 15. For a historical overview, see William Van Doodeward, “Remonstrants, Contra-­Remonstrants, and the Synod of Dordt (1618–­1619): The Religious History of the Early Dutch Republic,” Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies 28 (2007): 139–­64. 16. See Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-­Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–­1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), and Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism. See also Daniel Walker Howe, “The Decline of Calvinism: An Approach to Its Study,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 14, no. 3 (1972): 306–­27; Gerald R. Cagg, “Eclipse of Calvinism,” in From Puritanism to Age of Reason: A Study of Changes in Religious Thought within the Church of England, 1660 to 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 13–­36. For a more recent view on the persistence of Calvinism later in the period, see Stephen Hampton, Anti-­A rminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 17. Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, 279, and 290–­91. 18. Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 200–­203. For Fallon, the God of Paradise Lost sounds like a Calvinist when he states: “Some I have chosen of peculiar grace / Elect above the rest” (3.183–­84). Fallon sees the poem as mostly Arminian despite these lines and explains the contradiction as part of Milton’s wish to be elect by merit and grace (202). He also sees Christian Doctrine as “clearly and unequivocally Arminian” (200). My analysis is compatible with Fallon’s but differs in emphasis. While Fallon emphasizes Milton the individual, I explore the imagined community that Milton describes as the better part of the nation.

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19. See the definition of renewed righteousness in James Arminius, The Works of James Arminius, trans. James Nichols and William Nichols, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1986), 2:191. 20. Arminius, 2:194–­95. The full Latin quotation appears in Jacobus Arminius, Opera Theologica (Lvgdvni Batavorvm, Apud Godefridvm Basson, 1629), 265: “Quum enim in mente illius nova lux & agnitio Dei Christique & voluntatis divine accensa sit, in corde novi affectus, inclinations & motus cum lege Dei congruentes excitati & novae vires ipsi ingeneratae sint, fit, ut liberates e regno tenebrarum & jam lux factus in domino verum & salutare bonum intelligat: ut lapidei cordis duritie in carneam mollitiem mutate; id quod bonum, justum & sanctum est, amet & amplectatur, & ut potens in Christo factus, bonum cognitum & amatum Deo jam cooperans prosequatur, & ipse opere praestare incipiat: hoc autem quicquid est, cognitionis, sanctitatis & virium a Spiritu Sanctu ipsi ingeneratur.” 21. See n. 20 above—­especially the phrase “bonum cognitum & amatum Deo jam cooperans prosequatur” (Arminius, Opera, 265, emphasis mine). 22. Arminius, 2: 196. 23. Key studies on Milton’s Arminianism include Dennis Richard Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Maurice Kelley, This Great Argument: A Study of Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana as a Gloss Upon “Paradise Lost” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1941). For an overview of Arminian influences, see Stephen Fallon, “Elect Above the Rest: Theology as Self-­R epresentation in Milton,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 93–­116, and “Milton’s Arminianism and the authorship of De Doctrina Christiana,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41, no. 2 (1999): 103–­27. On Milton’s Arminianism in his poetry, see Debora K. Shuger, “Milton Über Alles: The School Divinity of Paradise Lost, 3.183–­2 02,” Studies in Philology 107, no. 3 (2010): 401–­15. 24. For a parallel reading of prevenient grace, see Benjamin Myers, “Prevenient Grace and Conversion in Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2006): 20–­36, 25–­27. 25. Martin Luther, “On the Bondage of the Will,” in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, ed. and trans. E. Gordon Rupp, A. N. Marlow, and Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 2006), 185. Luther argues that God commands so as to “lead us by means of law to a knowledge of our impotence if we are his friends or truly and deservedly to trample on and mock us if we are his proud enemies.” 26. See also Jason A. Kerr and John K. Hale, “The Origins and Development of Milton’s Theology in De Doctrina Christiana, 1.17–­18,” Milton Studies 54 (2013): 181–­ 206, 204.

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27. On Milton’s tendency throughout his work to associate legalism with corporal punishment of boys, see McDowell, Revolution, 83–­84. 28. Martin Dzelzainis, “Liberty and the Law,” in Milton, Rights, and Liberties, ed. Neil Forsyth and Christophe Tournu (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 57–­68, 60. 29. Dzelzainis, “Liberty and the Law,” 60–­1. 30. See Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, 275, and Achsah Guibbory, “England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–­1660,” in Milton and the Jews, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 13–­34, 27–­2 8. 31. On Milton’s hermeneutics, see Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). On equity and charity in the divorce tracts, see Achinstein, “De Doctrina Christiana: Milton’s Last Divorce Tract?,” 153–­63; Alison A. Chapman, “Roman Law and Equity in John Milton’s Divorce Tracts,” Critical Analysis of Law 5, no. 2 (2018): 27–­43. 32. On charity as a hermeneutic principle connecting the divorce tracts to Christian Doctrine, see Jason A. Kerr, “De Doctrina Christiana and Milton’s Theology of Liberation,” Studies in Philology 111, no. 2 (2014): 346–­74. 33. Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 57–­58. 34. Colin Burrow, Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 281–­334. 35. On charity as the hermeneutic principle of the divorce tracts, see Jason Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 145–­4 8. On charity as shared between Christian Doctrine and the divorce tracts, see Achinstein, “De Doctrina Christiana: Milton’s Last Divorce Tract?,” 158–­59; Kerr, “De Doctrina Christiana and Milton’s Theology of Liberation,” 351–­52; Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 77–­78. 36. For a related reading of Areopagitica, see Phillip J. Donnelly, Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning: Narrative and Protestant Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 37–­47. 37. For a related reading, see Stanley Fish, “Driving From the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Areopagitica,” in Re-­Membering Milton: Essays in the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (London: Methuen, 1987), 234–­54. Fish rightly emphasizes that the strategy of Areopagitica is the “supremely pedagogical” aim of transforming the nation in Milton’s image (243). Whereas Fish sees this strategy as antinomian, however, I am suggesting it has more in common with humanist methods of education and interpretation. I return to Fish in chapter 5. 38. For a parallel critique of Milton’s oligarchy of the virtuous, see Stevens, “National Identity” and Feisal G. Mohamed, “Milton’s Tacitist Sovereignty,” in Mil-

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ton’s Modernities: Poetry, Philosophy, and History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Feisal G. Mohamed and Patrick Fadely (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 241–­57. See also Mohamed, Sovereignty, 91–­139. 39. Compare Fallon’s view that “Milton’s real concern is not with men in general but with men like Milton, and that set is sufficiently small that it seems at times as if Milton is writing for himself ” (Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 188). I agree, but I would add that Milton does consider men in general insofar as he wants men like himself to represent the whole nation. He thus imagines grace as a gift that is widely offered, but accepted and used well only by men like Milton. 40. Filmer, Observations Concerning the Originall of Government, 199. Already in the Tenure, Milton argues that the power to determine who is a tyrant belongs to “to the uprighter sort of [magistrates], and of the people, though in number less by many, in whom faction least hath prevaild” (CPW 3:197, Tenure). On Filmer’s response to Milton’s thinking on the people and its implications for sovereignty, see Stevens, “National Identity,” 357; Mohamed, “Tacitist Sovereignty,” 252–­53; Hammond, Milton and the People, 93–­138. 41. See Mohamed, Sovereignty, 106, 117. 42. This is the king’s “posthumous volume,” which Milton challenged in Eikonoklastes. 43. For a recent examination of Milton’s creative reading of scripture in the republican period of his career, see David Ainsworth, “Spiritual Reading in Milton’s Eikonoklastes,” SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–­1900 45, no. 1 (2005): 157–­89. 44. On the role of charity in Christian Doctrine and Areopagitica, see Kerr, De Doctrina Christiana and Milton’s Theology of Liberation,” 351–­52. For the relationship between humanism and Milton’s republican prose, see Stevens, “National Identity,” 354–­59. 45. William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 91–­146. Empson believes that Milton’s God is “an emergent or evolutionary deity” who “will dissolve into the landscape and become immanent only” (133). I propose that Milton’s God does not abdicate, but he does evolve by allowing the Son to interpret him creatively. 46. See the discussion of animist materialism in John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 5–­13. See also John P. Rumrich, “Milton’s God and the Matter of Chaos,” PMLA 110, no. 5 (1995): 1035–­46. 47. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 475, reads the elevation of the Son in Book 3 of Paradise Lost as “closely parallel to a king’s abdicating and showing solidarity with his people.” Unlike Empson, Norbrook is careful to emphasize that the abdication will not take place because Milton’s religious commitments are based on a kingly God.

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48. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 480, claims that there is a “republican unease about traditional hierarchies” that “deeply informs Milton’s presentation of the heavenly kingdom.” 49. For Milton’s God as a humanist pedagogue, see Stevens, “Milton and National Identity,” 361. See also Thomas Festa, The End of Learning: Milton and Education (New York: Routledge, 2008), 66–­9 0. For an analysis of Milton’s first encounters with humanist education, see Donald Lemen Clark, John Milton at St. Paul’s School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1964), 250–­52. 50. On the relationship between the ambrosia in the scene and the layers of interpretation suggested in it, see Noam Reisner, Milton and the Ineffable (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 219. 51. For a recent analysis of how sight influences the sequential disclosure of meaning in the divine dialogue in Book 3, see David Quint, Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 52. I am suggesting that in this speech Milton reorients the reader’s imagination toward the Son rather than toward the experience of sin, which is explored more fully in Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (London: Macmillan, 1967), 1–­56. 53. For the view that the Son’s “imagination serves as the instrument of grace” in this scene, see Paul Stevens, Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in Paradise Lost (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 146. 54. See Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 146, for a parallel view of Milton’s idea of the Scriptures as a text that becomes complete only after interpretive engagement. I am suggesting that the Father’s words in Book 3 are similarly incomplete until the Son responds to them, and that this response is not an addition to the Father’s speech as much as the speech’s fulfilment. 55. See Thomas N. Corns, Regaining Paradise Lost (Harlow, England: Longman, 1994), 18, for a reading of the Son’s mediation as a synthesis of mercy and justice. 56. For a parallel reading of this scene as a “devolution of sovereignty” from Father to Son, see Stevens, “Pre-­secular,” 102–­3. 57. For an introduction to Milton’s anti-­Trinitarianism, see Maurice Kelley, Introduction to John Milton, Christian Doctrine, CPW 6:74–­86. For some surveys and perspectives on the critical literature on Milton’s anti-­Trinitarianism, see John P. Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: Why It Matters,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75–­92; John Rogers, “Milton and the Heretical Priesthood of Christ,” in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),

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203–­20; Nigel Smith, “ ‘And if God was one of us’: Paul Best, John Biddle, and Anti-­ Trinitarian Heresy in Seventeenth-­Century England,” in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 160–­84. 58. On anti-­Trinitarianism and divine sovereignty, see John Rogers, “The Political Theology of Milton’s Heaven,” in The New Milton Criticism, ed. Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 68–­ 84. See also Deni Kasa, “Education, Political Theology, and Anti-­Trinitarianism in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 64, no. 1 (2022): 20–­48. 59. Anti-­Trinitarianism shifted the emphasis away from the atonement to obedience and interpretation. For more on this shift from atonement to interpretation, see Nigel Smith, “Literature and Church Discipline in Early Modern England,” Studies in Church History 43 (2007): 317–­30, 327–­2 8; Gregory Chaplin, “Beyond Sacrifice: Milton and the Atonement,” PMLA 125, no. 2 (2010): 354–­69, 361. 60. For a link between the Son’s liberty in the Christian Doctrine as the foundation of interpretive liberty in Areopagitica, see Kerr, De Doctrina Christiana and Milton’s Theology of Liberation,” 348–­51. 61. Anti-­Trinitarian thought compared Jesus to Moses and Abraham to prove that Jesus did not have to be coessential with God in order to be a mediator. See Michael Servetus, On the Errors of the Trinity in The Two Treatises of Servetus on the Trinity, trans. Earl Morse Wilbur, D.D. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 1–­188. For Servetus, Christ’s mediation resembles that of “the man Moses [who] was called an earthly mediator between the people and God” (18). 62. For more on the Abrahamic resonance of this scene, see Stevens, “National Identity,” 360, and Stevens, “Pre-­Secular,” 101–­3. 63. For a parallel reading, see Chaplin, “Beyond Sacrifice,” 360. See also Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh, Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), 50–­70. 64. On the founding legislator, see Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), I:1.7–­9. For his discussion of periodic renewal, see 3.1:209–­12. 65. See Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 474–­77; Angus Fletcher, “The Innovation of Milton’s Machiavellian Son,” Studies in Philology 107, no. 1 (2010): 97–­113. 66. For more on Machiavellian fortune and its relationship to the will, see Marcia L. Colish, “The Idea of Liberty in Machiavelli,” Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 3 (1971): 323–­50, 326–­27. 67. On the prudential motives of Machiavellian liberty and virtu, see Quentin Skinner, “Machiavelli on Virtu and the Maintenance of Liberty,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 160–­85.

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68. Milton’s God rejects contingency before creation: “necessity and chance / Approach not me, and what I will is fate” (7.172–­73). Milton’s position on divine necessity is further explained in Stephen Fallon, “ ‘To Act or not’: Milton’s Conception of Divine Freedom,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49, no. 3 (1988): 425–­49. 69. For a parallel reading, see Fletcher, “The Innovation of Milton’s Machiavellian Son,” 104–­5. 70. For a similar reading, see Stevens, Imagination, 158. While Stevens describes the dialogue as a series of “incremental repetitions in the movement of God’s progressive self-­revelation,” I am suggesting that the dialogue is best understood slightly differently, as a cooperation between two distinct and unequal beings in an anti-­Trinitarian hierarchy. Stevens has revised this earlier reading to emphasize the Son’s creativity in “National Identity,” 360. 71. See John Carey, Introduction to John Milton, Paradise Regained, in The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, rev. 2nd ed. (Harlow, UK: Pearson/Longman, 2007), 417. 72. The importance of Adam and Eve’s reconciliation is given due weight in classic studies such as E. M. W. Tillyard, Studies in Milton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951), 13–­14 and 39–­40. 73. For a parallel reading, see Stevens, “National Identity,” 361. 74. On Eve’s key role in initiating regeneration, see Tillyard, Studies in Milton, 39–­4 2. See also Mandy Green, Milton’s Ovidian Eve (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), and Christopher Bond, Spenser, Milton, and the Redemption of the Epic Hero (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 109. 75. For an alternative reading of Adam and Eve’s conversion from a Lutheran perspective that emphasizes the sovereignty of grace, see Georgia B. Christopher, Milton and the Science of the Saints (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). I am suggesting instead that the passage emphasizes Adam and Eve’s voluntary cooperation with God. 76. The similarity between the Son and the human couple is stronger if we read the Son’s offer of self-­sacrifice in Book 3 as including a fear of death, because he, like Adam and Eve, does not necessarily know that he will be reborn. See Quint, Inside Paradise Lost, 104–­5. 77. John S. Tanner, Anxiety in Eden: A Kierkegaardian Reading of Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 128. 78. For similarly Arminian readings of prevenient grace here, see Danielson, Milton’s Good God, 90, and Hugh MacCallum, Milton and the Sons of God: The Divine Image in Milton’s Epic Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 184–­85. 79. The reconciliation between Adam and Eve has itself been read as the fruit of

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prevenient grace. See Joseph H. Summers, The Muse’s Method: An Introduction to “Paradise Lost” (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), 108, and C. A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 210–­11. 80. See Myers, “Prevenient Grace,” 29–­31, for an Arminian reading of the prayer as the result of cooperative grace. 81. On the priority of merit in Milton’s ideas, see Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 200–­202. While Fallon emphasizes the merit that Milton himself hoped to garner, I am suggesting that in this passage the merit belongs to Adam and Eve in lieu of their imitation of the Son, and this sets them up as the paradigms of an imagined community that also includes Milton. 82. The angels have been read as beneficiaries of mediation too. For a view of Abdiel as a “mediating figure” whose activity parallels that of the Son, see Stevie Davies, Images of Kingship in Paradise Lost: Milton’s Politics and Christian Liberty (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 161–­62. 83. For the view that Michael’s lesson in Books 11 and 12 exemplifies Milton’s interpretive middle way toward scripture, see Jason A. Kerr, “Prophesying the Bible: The Improvisation of Scripture in Book 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2013): 13–­33, 28–­29. 84. Stevens, “Pre-­secular,” 94–­100. 85. Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, 139. 86. For more on Milton’s tendency to essentialize original sin in the victims of colonial violence, see Mary Nyquist, “Friday as Fit Help,” in Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 335–­59, 343. Chapter 5 1. All citations to Paradise Regained are from John Milton, Paradise Regained, in The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 417–­517. Here and elsewhere, citations are provided parenthetically indicating book and line number. 2. Key historical studies on radical antinomians and other sectaries in this period include Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946); Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1972); J. F. McGregor, “The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy,” in Radical Religion in the English Revolution, ed. J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 23–­63; Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–­1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-­Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Leopold Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James

224 Notes to Chapter 5

Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003); David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-­ Civil War England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Paul Chang-­Ha Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 69–­123. 3. The concept of “godly republicanism” has received a book-­length treatment in Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). On Vane’s and Milton’s godly republicanism, see Feisal G. Mohamed, “Milton, Sir Henry Vane, and the Brief but Significant Life of Godly Republicanism,” Huntington Library Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2013): 83–­104, and Feisal G. Mohamed, Sovereignty: Seventeenth-­Century England and the Making of the Modern Political Imaginary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 91–­138. 4. Milton has long been associated with Puritanism in studies such as Arthur Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 1641–­1660 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942). Later, he was characterized as both radical and antinomian. See, for instance, Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1977); Joan S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). McDowell, English Radical Imagination, 183–­ 92; Abraham Stoll, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 160–­96. For an alternative view of Milton’s antinomianism that does not stem from Hill, but that does emphasize Milton’s uncompromising insistence on inner light, see Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001). Critics have also argued specifically that Paradise Regained and other late poems encapsulate radical antinomian themes. See Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 413–­27; Stanley Fish, “Inaction and Silence: The Reader in Paradise Regained,” in Calm of Mind: Tercentary Essays on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in Honour of John S. Diekhoff, ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich Jr. (Cleveland: Case Western University Press, 1971), 25–­47; Bennett, Reviving Liberty, 161–­202; Norman T. Burns, “ ‘Then Stood Up Phinehas’: Milton’s Antinomianism, and Samson’s,” Milton Studies 33 (1997): 27–­46; Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 242–­68; Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, 115–­53, especially 137–­38; Jeffrey Shoulson, “Milton and Enthusiasm: Radical Religion and the Poetics of Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 47

Notes to Chapter 5 225

(2008): 219–­57; Mohamed, “Godly Republicanism” and Sovereignty, 117–­33. On uncompromising belief more generally in Milton, see Feisal G. Mohamed, Milton and the Post-­Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 5. See Mohamed, Sovereignty, 133–­38, for the view that Milton, like Vane, espouses the absolute sovereignty of antinomian saints over the numerical majority of the people. See also Paul Stevens, “Milton and National Identity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 342–­63, and Paul Hammond, Milton and the People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 93–­138. 6. Milton’s self-­representation has long been recognized as crucial to Paradise Regained. See, for example, Ashraf Rushdy, The Empty Garden: The Subject of Late Milton (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), and Stephen M. Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-­R epresentation and Authority (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 238–­63. 7. Don M. Wolfe et al., eds., Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–­82). All quotations of Milton’s prose are taken from this edition and cited parenthetically as CPW. 8. For parallel readings, see Nicholas McDowell, Milton: Poet of Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 12; McDowell, Radical Imagination, 183–­92. For a parallel reading of Milton’s self-­fashioning as distinct from that of the Quakers and similar radicals, see Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 32–­39. 9. Victoria Kahn, “Job’s Complaint in Paradise Regained,” ELH 76, no. 3 (2009): 625–­60. 10. Kahn, “Job’s Complaint in Paradise Regained,” 649. 11. William R. Russell and Timothy F. Lull, eds., Martin Luther’s Preface to the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 76–­85, 76. 12. Harry Loewen, Luther and the Radicals: Another Look at Some Aspects of the Struggle between Luther and the Radical Reformers (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1974), 47–­66, 127–­30. 13. John T. McNeill, ed., Ford Lewis Battles, trans., John Calvin’s The Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols. (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1960), 1:361. 14. Como, Blown by the Spirit, 34–­38. 15. On the early Luther’s antinomian tendencies, see Como, Blown by the Spirit, 113. 16. Como, Blown by the Spirit, 122–­23. 17. On Civil War radicalism, see Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 26–­2 8; Smith, Perfection, 107–­84; Como, Blown by the Spirit, 39–­41. On antinomianism as primarily a “free grace” movement, see Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics: Mili-

226 Notes to Chapter 5

tant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–­1641 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). On this controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, see Winship, Making Heretics and Godly Republicanism. 18. Andrew Fix, Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 164, and Francesco Quatrini, “Adam Boreel on Collegiant Freedom of Speech,” Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 4 (2019): 511–­31. 19. John Calvin, A commentarie vpon S. Paules epistles to the Corinthians. Written by M. Iohn Caluin: and translated out of Latine into Englishe by Thomas Timme minister (London: [By Thomas Dawson] for Iohn Harrison, and Georgey Byshop, 1577), STC S11124, Early English Books Online, (S11124, fol. 150r). 20. Calvin, A commentarie, S11124, fol. 150v. 21. Calvin, S11124, fol. 151r. On edification, see John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 27–­35. See also Gregory Kneidel, “Samuel Daniel and Edification,” SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–­1900 44, no. 1 (2004): 59–­76. 22. William Perkins, The Art of Prophesying with The Calling of the Ministry, ed. Sinclair B. Ferguson (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1996), 133. 23. Perkins, Art of Prophesying, 133. 24. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 163. For a critique of Hill’s assumptions about class, see Como, Blown by the Spirit, 28–­31, 49–­50. 25. See McDowell, Radical Imagination, 1–­21; Como, Blown by the Spirit, 52. 26. All scriptural citations are to the King James version at www​.biblegateway​ .com. 27. Nigel Smith, “Elegy for a Grindletonian: Poetry and Heresy in Northern England, 1615–­1640,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 2 (2003): 335–­51. 28. See Como, Blown by the Spirit, 302–­3, and Smith, “Elegy,” 341–­4 4. On the nontrinitarian implications of this approach, see Lim, Mystery Unveiled, 73. 29. George Fox, (1654) Saul’s errand to damascus, with his packet of letters from the high priests against the disciples of the lord, or, A faithful transcript of a petition contrived by some persons in lancashier who call themselves ministers of the gospel breathing out threatnings and slaughters against a peaceable & godly people there, by them nick-­named quakers: Together with the defence of the persons thereby traduced against, the slanderous and false suggestions of that petition, and other untruths charged upon them : Published to no other end but to draw out the bowels of tender compassion from all that love the poor despised servants of jesus christ, who have been the scorn of carnal men in all ages (London: Printed for Giles Calvert), 8. Nuttall, Holy Spirit, 54. discusses this passage as one of the most heterodox and antinomian in Fox’s corpus.

Notes to Chapter 5 227

30. On the significance of the Nayler episode, see Nuttall, Holy Spirit, 54, and Damrosch, Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, 146–­76. 31. Mary Cary, 1647, A Vvord in Season to the Kingdom of England. Or, A Precious Cordiall for a Distempered Kingdom. Wherein are Laid Down Things Profitable, and Usefull for all, and Offensive to None that Love the Truth and Peace. / by the Meanest of the Servants of Jesus Christ, M. Cary. London: Printed by R.W. for Giles Calvert, and are to be sold at the Black-­spred Eagle at the west end of Pauls, Early English Books Online, 4. 32. Mack, Visionary Women, 90. 33. See Mack, Visionary Women, and Nuttall, Holy Spirit, 87–­89. 34. Quoted in Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, 161. 35. Fox, Saul’s Errand to Damascus, 18. 36. Quoted in Nuttall, Holy Spirit, 87. 37. On anticlericalism as a key sign of radical antinomianism in Milton’s prose, see Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 93–­116, and Bennett, Reviving Liberty, 1–­32. 38. For a parallel reading of poetry and prophecy, see Jameela Lares, Milton and the Preaching Arts (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 1–­15. 39. John Milton, “Sonnet XI,” in The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 307–­9, 8–­9. For the historical allusions in this line, see Carey, 308, n. 8 and n. 9. 40. “Sonnet XI.” 41. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 401. See also McDowell, Radical Imagination, 184, and Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 40–­41. 42. David Ainsworth, “Milton’s Holy Spirit in De Doctrina Christiana,” Religion and Literature 45, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 1–­25. 43. “Preface, by Andrew Wissowatius and Johann Stegman the Younger,” in The Racovian catechism, with notes and illustrations, translated from the Latin: to which is prefixed a sketch of the history of Unitarianism in Poland and the adjacent countries (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster Row, 1818), xcv–­c viii, xcvi–­xcvii. 44. “Preface,” cii. 45. “Preface,” ci. 46. “Preface,” xcvii. 47. “Preface,” xcviii. On similar thoughts by Baxter, see Nuttall, Holy Spirit, 28. 48. “Preface,” xcviii. 49. See Fix, Prophecy and Reason, 135–­61; Gary K. Waite, “The Drama of the Two-­Word Debate among Liberal Dutch Mennonites, c. 1620–­1660,” in Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform, ed. Bridget Heal and Anorthe Kremers (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2017), 118–­35; Francesco Qua-

228 Notes to Chapter 5

trini, Adam Boreel (1602–­1665): A Collegiant’s Attempt to Reform Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 129–­93. 50. See Quatrini, “Collegiant Freedom of Speech.” 51. On Socinianism’s interweaving of humanism and scripturalism, see Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Lim, Mystery Unveiled, 16–­68. See especially Mortimer, Reason and Religion, 35–­36, on Socinianism and Italian humanism. 52. Ainsworth, “Milton’s Holy Spirit,” 1–­2, 6–­8. 53. Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 32, notes that Milton writes as if he had never sinned at all. 54. Stevens, “National Identity,” 356. On nationalism in Aroepagitica, see Andrew Escobedo, “The Invisible Nation: Church, State, and Schism in Milton’s England,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 173–­201; Paul Stevens, “How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 273–­302. 55. On the temple as a metaphor for the nation, see David Loewenstein, “Milton’s Nationalism and the English Revolution: Strains and Contradictions,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 25–­50, 30–­33. 56. On the similarities between Vane’s and Milton’s proposals, see Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 196–­200; Nicholas von Maltzahn, “Milton: Nation and Reception,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 401–­42, 418–­ 21; Mohamed, “Godly Republicanism,” 84–­87. 57. Sir Henry Vane, A Needful Corrective Or Ballance in Popular Government Expressed in a Letter to James Harrington, Esquire, upon Occasion of a Late Treatise of His, and Published as Seasonable in the Present Juncture of Affaires, s.l., s.n, 1660, 7. 58. Vane, Needful Corrective, 11. 59. For a parallel reading stressing how Milton emphasizes both civic and religious virtue, see Cedric C. Brown, “Great Senates and Godly Education: Politics and Cultural Renewal in Some Pre-­and Post-­Revolutionary Texts of Milton,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 43–­60. 60. For a parallel reading of Of True Religion as similar to Areopagitica, see Stevens, “How Milton’s Nationalism Works,” 290–­91. See also Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, 127–­2 8. 61. On this anti-­Catholic dimension, see Elizabeth Sauer, “Milton’s Of True Re-

Notes to Chapter 5 229

ligion, Protestant Nationhood, and the Negotiation of Liberty,” Milton Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2006): 1–­19. 62. For a parallel reading of Milton’s elitism in the treatise, see Loewenstein, “Milton’s Nationalism,” 36–­37. 63. A classic statement of this problem appears in Barbara K. Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (London: Methuen, 1966), 133–­63. 64. See Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 239–­50; Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, The Empty Garden: The Subject of Late Milton (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 384–­88. 65. On the implications of the Son’s forgetting what it means to be a son of God more generally, see John Rogers, “Paradise Regained and Paradise Lost,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 589–­612. See also John Rogers, “Introduction: Relation Regained,” Huntington Library Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2013): 1–­9. 66. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 242–­68; Mohamed, “Godly Republicanism,” 88–­95. 67. For parallel readings, see Dayton Haskin, Milton and the Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 123, and Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 25. For an alternative reading, see Mohamed, Sovereignty, 127–­30. 68. The poem’s emphasis on labor is so consistent that it has sometimes been described as a georgic. See Anthony Low, “Milton, Paradise Regained, and Georgic,” PMLS 98, no. 2 (1983): 152–­69; Louis L. Martz, “Paradise Regained: Georgic Form, Georgic Style,” Milton Studies 42 (2003): 7–­25. If it is a georgic, then it is at least in part due to the agricultural metaphor of teaching as a form of cultivation. 69. Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 241–­4 4. 70. For a classic study of Paradise Regained as a poem based on different ways of knowing, see Arnold Stein, Heroic Knowledge: An Interpretation of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1957). 71. See MacCallum, Milton and the Sons of God, 145, for a parallel reading of Athenian knowledge as hermetic or Pythagorean magic. 72. For parallel readings of the differences between Satan’s and Jesus’s way of knowing, see Stein, Heroic Knowledge, 16–­17; Peggy Samuels, “Labor in the Chambers: Paradise Regained and the Discourse of Quiet,” Milton Studies 36 (1998): 153–­ 72, 166–­72. On the fluctuation of knowledge as the basis of tension in the epic, see Lewalski, Brief Epic, 163. 73. Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 132–­38. See also Dayton Haskin, “Milton’s Portrait of Mary as a Bearer of the Word,” in Milton and the Idea of

230 Notes to Chapter 5

Woman, ed. Julia M. Walker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 169–­84. 74. For a parallel reading, see Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 123. 75. See Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 146. 76. See also Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics, 26–­30. 77. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 252, 254–­55. See also Bennett, Reviving Liberty, 177. 78. On Milton’s downplaying of sacrifice as a sign of Socinian influence, see Feisal G. Mohamed, “Milton Against Sacrifice,” Religion and Literature 45, no. 1 (2013): 192–­2 06. See also John Rogers, “Delivering Redemption in Samson Agonistes, ” in Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on Samson Agonistes, ed. Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), 72–­97. 79. On the idea of charity as a bait, see Arnold Stein, “The Kingdoms of This World: Paradise Regained,” ELH 23, no. 2 (1956): 112–­26, 124. 80. For a parallel reading of “command” and “commandment,” see Rogers, “Relation Regained,” 1–­2. 81. On Milton’s ambivalent relationship to Moses as a prophet and poet, see Jason P. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 148–­55. 82. See David Norbrook, “Republican Occasions in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes,” Milton Studies 42 (2003): 122–­48, 133–­39. 83. For a parallel reading, see Mohamed, “Godly Republicanism,” 100. 84. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. and trans. James B. Atkinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976; repr., 2008), 149–­51. For a discussion of Machiavelli’s armed prophecy as a secularizing argument, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 170–­71. 85. See Hill, Upside Down, 399; Norbrook, “Republican Occasions,” 133; Mohamed, “Godly Republicanism,” 103–­4. 86. See Stein, “Kingdoms of This World,” 73, on the relationship between these “means” and knowledge. 87. On the pedagogical similarity between the two representations of Jesus, see MacCallum, “Jesus as Teacher,” 137–­39. 88. See Mary Ann Radzinowicz, “ ‘In those days there was no king in Israel’: Milton’s Politics and Biblical Narrative,” Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 242–­52. 89. My reading is compatible with John Rogers’s view that “relation stands” is a crucial phrase, because all statements of identity in the poem are relational. See Rogers, Introduction, 4–­5, and John Rogers, “Paradise Regained and Paradise Lost,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 589–­612, 596. For a parallel reading, see

Notes to Chapter 5 231

Joseph Mansky, “Does Relation Stand? Textual and Social Relations in Paradise Regain’d,” Milton Studies 56 (2015): 45–­72. 90. For more on the difficulties involved in judging inspiration, see Susan E. Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 91. John Milton, Samson Agonistes in The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 349–­413, 402. 92. For Samson as a hero of faith, see Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Towards Samson Agonistes: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). For a reading that distances Milton from Samson’s act, see Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Interpreting Samson Agonistes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002). For a polemical comparison to modern terrorism, see John Carey, “A work in praise of terrorism? September 11 and ‘Samson Agonistes’,” TLS, the Times Literary Supplement 5188 (2002): 15–­16, and the responses by Mohamed, Post-­Secular Present, 93–­103, and Stanley Fish, Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 79–­97. Samson has also been read as an antinomian. See Mohamed, Post-­Secular, 97–­99, and Burns, “Milton’s Antinomianism.” 93. Ross Lerner, Unknowing Fanaticism: Reformation Literatures of Self-­ Annihilation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 177. 94. Lerner, Unknowing Fanaticism, 134–­39. 95. I am not suggesting that Samson and Jesus are spiritually opposed, as suggested for example in Derek C. Wood, Exiled from Light: Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton’s Samson Agonistes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). Education and violence are compatible features of Milton’s ideology, as explained in Stevens, “National Identity,” 356. Samson describes a human being acting against a hostile regime, while Paradise Regained explores, in a more idealistic strain, how the perfect human being establishes an ideal of prophecy and education against which to measure all regimes. 96. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 266. 97. Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 123. 98. See Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 266–­67, and Stanley E. Fish, Versions of Anithumanism: Milton and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 85–­86. 99. Victoria Kahn, “Job’s Complaint in Paradise Regained,” ELH 76, no. 3 (2009): 625–­60, 643. 100. Kahn, “Job’s Complaint in Paradise Regained,” 628. 101. Kahn, “Job’s Complaint in Paradise Regained,” 645–­46. 102. For a parallel reading of Satan’s binaries, see Hugh MacCallum, Milton and

232 Notes to Chapter 5 and the Conclusion

the Sons of God: The Divine Image in Milton’s Epic Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 257. 103. “skill, n.1b,” OED Online, December 2020 (Oxford University Press), https​ :​/​​/​ezproxy​-prd ​.bodleian ​.ox ​. ac ​.uk ​:2446​/​v iew​/​Entry​/​180865​​?​rskey​​= ​t ua ​X​oQ​& ​re​ sult​​=​1 (accessed February 3, 2021). 104. For an overview of the critical commonplaces of the pinnacle, see John Carey, Introduction to Paradise Regained in The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 417–­23, 418–­19. For the view that Jesus stands as a man without using miracles, see John Carey, Milton (London: Evans Brothers, 1969), 128–­30; Irene Samuel, “The Regaining of Paradise,” in The Prison and the Pinnacle: Papers to Commemorate the Tercentenary of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, 1671–­1971, ed. Balachandra Rajan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973) 111–­3 4, 122–­2 4; Rushdy, Empty Garden, 267–­68. Examples of the alternative view, that he is held up by a miracle, include MacCallum, Sons, 257; Lewalski, Brief Epic, 316. For the view that Jesus becomes God while retaining the God-­man tension, see Stein, “Kingdoms of This World,” 127–­30, and John Rumrich, “Milton’s Theanthropos: The Body of Christ in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 42 (2003): 50–­67. 105. Stanley E. Fish, “Inaction and Silence: The Reader in Paradise Regained,” in Calm of Mind: Tercentary Essays on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in Honor of John S. Diekhoff, ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich Jr. (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), 25–­47, 43. 106. Kahn, “Job’s Complaint in Paradise Regained,” 648. 107. For a parallel reading of “deliberate indeterminacy” in this scene, see Mary Nyquist, “The Father’s Word/Satan’s Wrath,” PMLA 100, no. 2 (1985): 187–­2 02, 200. For the view that the indeterminacy reveals that Satan’s implicit binary is unimportant, see MacCallum, Sons, 258. Conclusion 1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, ed. Gustave Thibon, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario van der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 10. 2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; Or, the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil by Thomas Hobbes (London: Printed for Andrew Crooke, 1651), 390. https​:​/​​/​ezproxy​-prd​.bodleian​.ox ​.ac ​.uk​:2082​/ ​books​/​leviathan​ -matter​-forme ​-power​- common​-wealth​/​docview​/​2 240945289​/​se ​- 2​​?​accountid​​=​ 13042.

INDEX

absolutism, 104, 194n23, 212n73, 215n10. See also sovereignty; tyranny Agricola, John, 140 Anabaptists, 141. See also antinomianism Anderson, Benedict, 5, 184n10 antinomianism, 7–­10, 135–­53; absolute sovereignty of saints of, 225n5; anticlericalism of, 146; female prophets of, 149; idea of grace of, 7–­10, 184n14, 185n17; idea of prophecy of, 141–­53; popular, 158–­59; radical, 140–­4 4, 148–­49, 157, 163, 166, 169, 173, 186n32, 223n2; seventeenth-­century, 55, 137–­39. See also Anabaptists; Quakers; Protestantism; theology anti-­Trinitarianism, 112, 122, 124, 147–­49, 221n59, 221n61; and divine sovereignty, 221n58. See also theology; Trinity Aquinas, Thomas, 27; on equity, 193n19 Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, 25–­26; Poetics, 56; Politics, 183n5

Arminianism, 13, 109–­13, 116, 147; English, 112, 189n53; of Milton, 112–­13, 133–­34, 144, 189n52, 216n12, 217n23; theories of predestination of, 113. See also Arminius, Jacobus; Calvinism; Protestantism Arminius, Jacobus, 111–­13, 217n19. See also Arminianism art: grace and, 67, 187n40; visual, 12. See also beauty; poetry Augustine: City of God, 8–­9; On Christian Doctrine, 193n15 Aylmer, John, 38; as Elizabethan propagandist, 43 Bacon, Francis, 96, 210n55 beauty: divine, 106; and divine love, 101–­2; and grace, 15, 102–­5; of Jonathan, 102, 106; Saul’s rhetorical use of, 105; transforming power of, 108; visual, 105. See also art Beza: On the Rights of Magistrates over Their Subjects, 9 233

234 Index

Bible: Abraham’s mediation in the, 124–­25; allusions to the, 35–­36, 43, 161–­62, 213n1; Ark of the Covenant in the, 105; Christ’s mediation in the, 122–­25; citations by Jesus in the, 172; civil war in the, 102; David and Goliath story in the, 196n64; David’s calming of Saul in the, 211n65; the desert in the, 158–­59; election of grace in the, 83; first prefiguration of Christ in the, 129; “golden rule” of the, 27; Job’s grief in the, 79; link between poetry and prophecy in the, 143; Magnificat in the, 72; Moabite king Balak in the, 153; origin of humanity in the, 80; Parable of the Talents in the, 19; Parable of the Ten Virgins in the, 65–­66; parting of the seas in the, 99–­101; patriarchal norms of the, 37; Pauline language of prophecy in the, 150; Pauline metaphor for interpretation in the, 133; Paul’s attempts to convert the Athenians in the, 164, 167; persecution of David by Saul in the, 101; Pilate’s wife in the, 72–­73; prohibition of divorce by Jesus in the, 115; Protestant humanist interpretation of the, 14; Saul’s disobedience in the, 108; Saul’s election as king in the, 104; Saul’s sacrifice of Jonathan in the, 106–­7; women during the Passion of Christ in the, 59–­62, 67–­68, 70–­73, 78, 158. See also Psalms Bodin, Jean, 27–­2 8 Breton, Nicholas, 54, 58–­59, 61, 65; Blessed Weeper, 60 Buchanan, George: De Jure Regni Apud Scotos, 10, 13–­14

Calvin, John, 7, 9–­10, 159; on authority of magistrates, 27, 194n28; on conscience, 27; on the general grace of God, 12; on law and grace, 140; opposition to antinomianism of, 185n26; on prophecy, 141; on the special grace of God, 12–­13. See also Calvinism Calvinism, 9–­15, 40, 109, 118; antinomian challenge to, 169; Arminian challenge to, 13, 112; English, 140, 189n53; Milton’s challenge to, 17, 148; orthodox, 57, 63, 141; on prophecy, 140–­41; range of gendered perspectives in, 199n3; saving grace of, 70. See also Arminianism; Calvin, John; Presbyterianism; Protestantism Cary, Mary, 142–­43, 156 Catholicism, 30–­31; Elizabethan propaganda against, 38; eschatological vision of English defeat of, 42; military strength and global reach of, 41; Protestant polemic against, 31, 152 Cavendish Circle, 206n12 charity, 16; equity and, 14, 16, 115–­16; virtues of interpretive equity and, 122–­23, 127 Charles I, King, 111, 152–­53 Cheke, John, 144 Cicero, 26, 94 Collegiants, 147 colonialism, 3–­4; in Ireland, 4, 16, 32. See also imperialism conscience: equity as part of the sovereign’s authority over, 35, 44; guilty, 44; of monarchs, 27 Cowley, Abraham, 2–­4, 12, 15, 54, 82–­108, 167, 178–­81, 205n1, 206n12;

Index 235

discussions of love by, 97–­98; divided political loyalties of, 212n76; on divisiveness of contemporary republicanism, 4, 84; interest in Baconian science of, 96; reconciliation of rationalism and humanism of, 207n13; religious poetics of, 206n11, 210n47; theory of translation of, 209n39; view of civil war of, 3, 5, 84–­85, 107–­8. Works: Davideis, 17, 82–­86, 89–­108, 205n3, 211n60; “The Garden,” 83–­84; The Mistress, 98; translations of Pindar’s odes, 91. See also Davideis (Cowley) creativity: gift of poetic, 19–­21; God as the pattern for human, 15, 20, 96; grace as source of, 15, 17, 90–­92, 108–­9, 128; merit and learning as source of, 109, 139; of women, 66–­67. See also imagination; liberty; poetry Cromwell, Oliver, 119 cultural capital, 17, 180; of humanism, 58, 135, 144, 173, 180. See also education Cumberland, Countess of (Margaret), 63–­64, 70–­80, 203n52; Puritanism and alchemical interests of, 204n57 Davenant, William, 17, 84, 87–­88, 92, 97, 104, 107, 207n13, 209n31, 209n33; Gondibert, 85–­86, 88–­90, 92, 94, 96 Davideis, 17, 82–­86, 89–­108; date of composition of, 205n3; friendship in, 211n60; grace as source of poetic creativity and national unification in, 17; republicanism of, 212n70. See also Cowley, Abraham divorce, 14, 115, 130, 144, 162 Donne, John, 56 Dryden, John, 97

Eden, Kathy, 26 education: as boundary of inclusion and exclusion, 158; divine illumination and, 166–­67; and eloquence in poetry, 21–­22; in equity, 52; gendered access to, 16, 55, 61, 63–­69, 145, 149; grace and, 16–­17, 63, 66, 137–­75; humanist, 3, 7, 11–­12, 16–­18, 54, 110–­15, 118–­19, 138–­39, 144–­46, 149, 173–­75; prophecy as a form of, 18, 151, 153–­74; and violence, 231n95. See also cultural capital; humanism Eighty Years’ War, 46 Elizabeth I, Queen, 37, 39, 41–­43, 46, 49, 51 Ellwood, Thomas, 128, 143, 174 Empson, William, 119 England: as budding Protestant empire, 42; election of grace of the Tudor dynasty for the rescue of, 49; influential Protestant women in Jacobean, 53; as nation of prophets, 150; providential history of, 41–­42. See also English Civil Wars; Restoration English Civil Wars, 8, 17, 88, 102; antinomians of the, 186n32, 225n17; female prophets of the, 53, 69; outbreak of the first of the, 109; political divisions of the, 84; Presbyterians of the, 10; Puritans of the, 86; religious enthusiasms of the, 17; royalists of the, 82; sectarians of the, 141–­42. See also England equality, 3; antinomian advocacy of gender, 55; social, 77. See also justice equity: and charity, 14, 115–­16; and civility, 30–­33; and conscience, 35; enabling side of, 16; and grace, 16, 23–­52; Greek, 25–­26; humanist idea

236 Index

equity (cont.) of, 14; law and, 27–­2 8, 31–­34, 37, 41, 51; legal definitions of, 189n55; Patristic idea of, 14, 26, 193n14; Protestant idea of, 14, 16, 28–­37, 44, 48, 117, 191n4, 194n26, 198n81; punitive side of, 16; Renaissance idea of, 14, 193n18; Roman, 26; as sign of grace, 25–­30; various meanings of, 24; virtues of interpretive, 32, 122–­23, 127. See also grace; justice; law Erasmus, 12, 14, 26, 189n58 Fairie Queene, The (Spenser), 3, 14, 16, 23–­52; Calvinist statements in, 40; divine justice and its moderation by grace in, 34–­39, 41; equity as sign of civility in, 14; extravagant displays of force in, 42, 47; Pauline binaries in, 40. See also Spenser, Edmund Fall, 111, 120, 128–­35, 158; Milton’s rendition of the first prayer after the, 178. See also theology Fallon, Stephen, 154, 213n2, 216n18, 219n39, 223n81 Fifth Monarchists, 137 Filmer, Sir Robert, 118, 219n40 Fish, Stanley, 60, 172 Fletcher, Giles, 54, 57–­59, 61, 65, 82 force: grace and, 2, 22; as humanist cultural capital, 179–­81; Lord Grey’s use of, 47–­48, 52, 178; of sovereign’s authority, 44; of Spenser’s combatants, 42, 47; in Weil’s reading of the Iliad, 1–­2, 176. See also violence Fox, George, 142–­43, 153, 157, 166, 226n29 France, 49 Fraunce, Abraham, 54, 58–­59, 65

freedom: antinomian emphasis on freedom of speech, 141; Arminian emphasis on human, 112–­13, 133; dignity and interpretive, 134; intellectual, 146; political, 9; republican, 103; spiritual, 9. See also free will; liberty free will: grace rehabilitates, 112, 133–­34; humanist proponents of, 12; and human liberty, 17; and virtue, 112. See also freedom gender: as “fluid,” 60; Pilate’s wife on, 72–­73, 203n51. See also women German Peasants’ rebellion (1524–­25), 7–­8, 140, 185n23 Gilbert, William, 210n53 Goodman, Christopher, 9–­10 grace: and agency, 7–­11, 41, 68, 110, 113; Arminian idea of, 116; and art, 67, 187n40; beauty and, 15, 102–­5; Christian idea of, 177; community of, 11, 21–­22, 108–­10, 119, 126, 128, 135–­36, 139–­40, 149, 172–­75; cooperative, 109–­36, 163, 222n75, 223n80; divine election by, 12, 43, 70, 83, 216n18; and divine providence, 97; and education, 16–­17, 63, 66, 139; equity and, 16, 23–­52; and force, 2, 22; and free will, 112, 133; heightening of human nature by, 89, 104, 106; illumination of, 167; Italian humanist concept of, 105; language of unmerited, 37, 47, 131–­32; law and, 123, 125, 129, 140, 165, 193n15; as liberation from works-­ righteousness, 140; limits of aristocratic, 78; and love, 71, 95; messianic, 158; Old Testament curse and the promise of, 131; orthodox Calvinist ideas on, 57, 70; paradoxes

Index 237

of, 6–­7, 18, 62, 68, 132; Pauline understanding of, 34, 38, 83; politics of, 2–­7, 10, 38–­39, 43, 51, 83, 111–­19, 136, 181; prevenient, 21, 133, 217n24, 222n78; in the Protestant tradition, 2–­3, 21, 184n14; psychological effects of, 30; radical aspects of, 6–­8; of sacred poetry, 58, 64; spiritual, 95; synergistic idea of, 13–­14, 188n49, 216n14; as the ultimate poetic miracle, 92. See also equity; salvation; theology Greek philosophy, 14 Grey de Wilton, Lord Arthur, 32–­33, 48–­50

imitation, 56; poetic, 56–­57, 201n17; problem of illegitimate, 58; Renaissance humanist adaptive, 184n9 imperialism: early British, 16, 24; Spenser’s Protestant, 24, 34, 44, 51, 192n7. See also colonialism inequality: class-­based, 54; gendered, 54, 63 Ireland: Catholic, 23–­2 4, 29–­30; cultural and legal primitivism of, 30; Elizabethan colonization of, 3–­4, 16, 23, 46, 192n7; English military expeditions in, 42; rebels of, 49

Haskin, Dayton, 114, 156, 166 Henry IV, King, 49 Hill, Christopher, 144 Hobbes, Thomas, 17, 84–­92, 97, 107, 207n13, 208n19; Leviathan, 85, 104 Homer: The Iliad, 3 Hooker, Richard, 28–­29 humanism: classic definition of, 183n3; interpretive practices of, 111, 113–­19, 125; Italian, 174; pedagogical enterprise of, 56; Protestant, 3, 7, 11–­18, 21, 54, 110, 113, 116–­19, 123, 135, 139–­45, 149, 179–­81; Renaissance, 14, 26, 184n9; tradition of public preaching and teaching of, 144–­48. See also education

Johnson, Samuel, 97 Jonson, Ben: “To Penshurst,” 76 justice: competing accounts of, 51; divine, 24–­25, 30, 34–­39, 41–­50, 179; figurative descriptions of biblical, 28; retributive, 41; superiority of English, 32. See also equality; equity; law

Iliad, or the Poem of Force, The (Weil), 1–­2 imagination, 5; Calvinist suspicion of the human, 55–­56; colonial, 180; educated, 14, 58; fallen, 60–­61; poetic, 92; in translating the Psalms, 56. See also creativity

Kahn, Victoria, 26, 92, 139, 169, 172 Kingdom of God, 8, 170; and worldly kingdoms, 7–­12. See also theology kingship, 9, 95, 104; avoidance of, 151; divine right of, 102; and episcopacy, 174. See also sovereignty Kircher, Athanasius, 93 Knox, John, 9, 38, 186n30 Lambarde, William, 27–­2 8 language: of conversion, 94; of grace, 37, 47, 85, 94; of politics, 11; of salvation, 11, 77; religious, 75. See also metaphor

238 Index

Lanyer, Aemilia, 2–­4, 12, 15–­16, 53–­82, 156–­58, 167, 177–­81, 200n7; claim to grace of, 199n5; on exclusion of women from education, 4, 16, 61, 149; idea of sacred poetry of, 3, 16, 58, 63–­64, 67–­68; vision of a nonpatriarchal community of, 16, 79–­81. Works: “The Description of Cooke-­ham,” 63–­64, 66, 75–­81; Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum, 16, 53–­75, 78–­79, 202n24; sonnets, 64. See also Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum (Lanyer) Laud, Archbishop William, 112 law: Brehon, 30–­32, 195n47, 196n62; divine, 49, 121, 124–­25; English, 30–­32, 199n99; and equity, 27–­2 8, 31–­34, 37, 41, 51; and grace, 123, 125, 129, 140, 165, 193n15; human, 49, 114; Jewish ceremonial, 140, 165; natural, 49; Old Testament, 158–­59, 165; public, 28; rigorous and politically expedient application of, 45; Roman, 14; scriptural sanction of, 39, 41. See also equity; justice Levellers, 203n40 liberty: Christian, 114–­15, 117, 140, 160, 169; free will and human, 17; interpretive, 3, 16, 111, 113–­19, 125, 127, 135, 144, 221n60; Machiavellian, 221n67; Milton’s defense of, 17, 112–­13, 117–­19, 135; “neo-­Roman” theory of, 10; political, 18, 102, 117, 162; prelapsarian, 128; republican, 111, 135; secular ideas of, 10; virtue and, 125. See also creativity; freedom Lipsius, Justus, 93 love: beauty and divine, 101–­2; divine, 71, 94, 96–­97, 210n51; erotic, 98; friendly, 210n52; and grace, 71, 95; as subjective transformation, 95

Luther, Martin, 7–­10, 13, 27, 113, 159; antinomian tendencies of the early, 225n15; on grace and the will, 217n25; on law and grace, 140; Preface to the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, 140; sola gratia message of, 141 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 10, 215n11, 221nn66–­67; idea of prophecy of, 160; Works: Discourses on Livy, 125; The Prince, 160 magistrates: authority from God of, 27–­29; equitable, 45, 49–­50; godly, 16, 33–­34, 41–­42, 51, 102; prophecy as supported by the power of the civil, 160; Protestant English, 23–­2 4, 30, 48. See also sovereignty Mary, Queen of Scots, 45, 196n64, 198n83 Melanchthon, Philip, 13–­14, 26; on grace and the will, 188n49, 189n51; humanism of, 188n47; importance for English Arminianism of, 189n53; Loci Communes, 13; “natural light” of, 188n48; use of equity of, 189n57 metaphor: feminine, 64–­67; financial support as, 53, 64; grace as, 83, 93; Hobbes on, 208n21; magnetism as, 95–­96, 210n53; nautical, 32; women’s weeping as, 60–­61. See also language Milton, John, 2–­3, 12, 15, 54, 69, 82, 181, 213nn3–­4; antinomian ideas in, 145–­46, 162, 168–­69, 172, 224n4, 225n5, 227n37; Arminianism of, 112–­13, 133–­34, 144, 189n52, 216n12, 217n23; challenge to Calvinism of, 17, 148; defense of liberty of, 112–­15; denial of the Trinity by, 147–­48, 163, 220n57; on divine necessity, 222n68;

Index 239

on divorce, 14, 115, 130, 144, 162; elitism of, 17–­18, 149, 162, 173–­74, 179, 214n7, 229n62; God of, 219n45, 220n49; heretical theology of, 17, 122, 124, 144, 147–­49; as humanist, 17, 109–­19, 139, 143–­4 4, 213n3; interpretation of scripture of, 18, 115, 130, 139, 145, 148, 152, 156–­57, 168–­69, 174–­75, 179, 219n43, 220n54, 223n83; as latter-­day Isaiah, 109, 177, 213n1; personal connection to Italian humanists of, 174; plea for religious tolerance of, 152; political writings of, 17, 110, 113–­19, 134–­35, 149–­52; prophecy as concern of, 139–­41, 143–­73; and Puritanism, 224n4; republicanism of, 4–­5, 17, 110, 114, 118–­19, 215n11, 220n48; on spiritual illumination, 165–­74. Works: Areopagitica, 117, 127, 135, 150, 152, 218nn36–­37, 221n60, 228n54, 228n60; Christian Doctrine, 111, 113–­16, 119, 122, 125, 135, 143, 145–­49, 156, 168, 173, 216n18, 218n32, 221n60; A Defense of the People of England, 117–­18, 135; The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 135; Eikonoklastes, 152–­53; Of True Religion, 152, 228n60; On Education, 17, 154, 166–­67; Paradise Lost, 17–­18, 69, 76, 82, 109–­36, 138, 153; Paradise Regained, 6, 17–­18, 69, 128, 136–­75, 231n95; The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, 151, 159; The Reason of Church-­ Government, 69, 109, 138, 143, 213n2; Samson Agonistes, 164, 231n95; The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 111, 135, 214n8, 219n40; Tetrachordon, 116, 144; “When I consider how my light is spent,” 18–­21, 191n73. See

also Paradise Lost (Milton); Paradise Regained (Milton) Mortimer, Sarah, 10–­11 Müntzer, Thomas, 7, 140 nationalism: early modern, 5, 184n10; of Milton, 228n54 naturalism, 88 Nayler, James, 142 Netherlands: English power in the, 46; Spanish, 42, 46 Nicene Creed, 124. See also theology Norris, John, 46, 49 oratory. See rhetoric original sin, 2, 54, 65, 223n86. See also theology Paradise Lost (Milton), 17–­18, 69, 76, 82, 109–­36, 153, 220nn50–­56, 223nn81–­83; the elevation of the Son in, 219n47; interpretation in Adam and Eve’s prayer in, 128–­34; as republican poem, 125; the Son’s interpretive activity in, 125–­29, 133; the Son’s judgment of humankind in, 128; the Son’s mediation in, 119–­31, 134. See also Milton, John Paradise Regained (Milton), 6, 18, 69, 128, 136–­75, 231n95; antinomian reading of, 153; Athenian learning in, 164, 166; as a georgic, 229n68; judging spiritual inspiration in, 163–­64; meaning of the “Son of God” in, 163, 171, 173, 175; messiah of, 162, 174–­75, 179; Milton’s self-­representation in, 225n6; prophecy and education in, 18, 153–­73; significance of the pinnacle in, 163–­73. See also Milton, John

240 Index

patronage, 53–­55, 58, 78; grace of, 63–­67, 81, 202n31; inaccessibility of, 81 Perkins, William, 24–­25, 28–­29, 33, 141 Philippists, 13 Phillip II, King, 46 Plato, 85 Pocock, John A.: Machiavellian Moment, 10 poetry: baroque, 211n57; biblical, 14–­15; classical epic, 85, 97; contrast of history and, 5; country house, 76; creative transformations of anxiety into, 20–­21; devotional, 53–­57; epic, 82–­86, 88–­92, 99; as faithful straying, 67–­75; as form of creative making, 5, 15; as fruit of grace, 167; heroic, 85; humanist, 5, 21–­22; as imitation of divine creativity, 15; love, 98; neoclassical, 85; of Orpheus, 98; role of grief in women’s, 55; sacred, 3, 14–­18, 56–­58, 63–­64, 67–­68, 81–­84, 89–­108, 143; scriptural epic, 91–­92, 108; supernatural inspiration of, 86–­87. See also art; creativity; Psalms political theory, 10–­12 Ponet, John, 10 Presbyterianism, 10, 144. See also Calvinism prophecy: Christian, 157; and education, 153–­74; meaning of scriptural, 171; Milton on, 18, 139–­41, 143–­74; Old Testament, 157; pedagogical function of, 153, 161, 164; predictive view of, 161; Satanic astrological idea of, 170; view of Jesus of the true purpose of, 161 Protestantism: Dutch, 46; grace as preemptive gift in, 177; legitimate use

of force in defense of, 47; unity advocated by Milton among, 152; zealous commitment of the sovereign to the interests of, 44. See also antinomianism; Arminianism; Calvinism; Puritanism; Reformation Psalms: allusions to the, 78, 101, 162; David’s composition of the, 99–­101; as first models for poetry, 14, 167, 210n48; messianic, 157, 171–­72; metrical translations of the, 15, 17, 55–­57, 190n64; Milton on the, 143; prose translations of the, 15; Satan’s citation of the, 171. See also Bible; poetry Puritanism, 86, 88–­89, 141; Milton and, 224n4. See also Protestantism Quakers, 137, 142, 147, 174; claims to simplicity of the, 157; revelations of the, 154; self-­fashioning of the, 225n8. See also antinomianism Quintilian, 144 Ranters, 137 redemption, 128–­29. See also theology Reformation, 3, 7, 11–­12, 26, 117, 164; English, 38; Protestant rulers as God’s chosen patrons of the, 51; radical fringes of the, 10, 140–­41. See also Protestantism republicanism, 17; anti-­Judaic strand of early modern, 114; early modern, 104; godly, 151, 174, 224n3; Machiavellian, 125; of Milton, 4–­5, 110, 114, 118–­19, 215n11, 220n48; politicized anti-­Judaism of, 103 resistance: Calvinist theories of, 9–­10; Lutheran theories of, 9, 185n23; right of, 10

Index 241

responsibility: and grace, 13, 159; guilt and, 54, 158; and Law, 159; repentance and, 129–­30 Restoration, 5, 82, 151, 172. See also England rhetoric, 18; of the Hebrew prophets, 167–­68; public, 181 salvation: Arminian theory of, 113; Calvinist theory of, 12–­13, 53; Lutheran theory of, 12–­13; Melanchthon’s theory of, 13; Milton’s vision of, 111, 113–­14, 131, 134; Protestant theory of, 3, 5, 7, 12, 51, 152, 177; radical arguments about, 7. See also grace; theology Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum (Lanyer), 16, 53–­81, 202n24. See also Lanyer, Aemilia Savonarola, 160 Seekers, 137 Servetus, Michael, 221n61 Shakespeare, William, 82 Sidney, Mary, 15, 56 Sidney, Philip, 5, 13, 46, 143; A Defence of Poesy, 14–­15, 56–­57, 83, 85, 92, 190n64, 201n17 Sidney, Philip and Mary: The Psalmes of David, 15, 55 Sidney-­Pembroke Psalter, 56–­57, 68, 200n9 Skinner, Quentin: Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 10; Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 208n19 slavery, 114; justification of, 18 Socinians, 146–­48, 169, 174, 228n51, 230n78 Socrates, 166 sovereignty, 10–­11; divine, 119, 121, 123,

125–­27, 134; donation of, 111; indivisible, 212n77; popular, 118. See also absolutism; kingship; magistrates Spain, Catholic, 2, 45, 196n64; military might of, 51 Spenser, Edmund, 2–­3, 12, 54, 82, 136, 177, 181, 191n2; burial in Westminster Abbey of, 82; career in Ireland of, 191n3; colonial politics of, 24–­25, 183n4, 192n7; idea of equity in, 16, 191n4; patriarchal endorsement of a “masculine political nation” by, 197n70; “practical policy” as a problem for, 199n97; on Protestant empire, 3, 16, 23–­2 4, 33, 42, 45–­48, 51, 192n7; on virtues of a Protestant magistrate, 5, 45; Works: The Fairie Queene, 3, 14, 16, 23–­52, 88, 195n56; A View of the State of Ireland, 23, 30, 32–­33, 36, 47–­50, 180, 195n51. See also Fairie Queene, The (Spenser); View of the State of Ireland, A (Spenser) Stegman, Joachim: Racovian Catechism, 146–­47 Stevens, Paul, 30, 76, 150, 222n70 St. Germain, Christopher, 27 Stoicism, 26 sympathy, 94 Synod of Dort, 112 Tanistry, 30 theology: free grace, 7, 10, 185n17, 225n17; Milton’s heretical, 17, 122, 124, 144, 147–­49; Protestant, 12–­14; radical or heterodox, 55. See also antinomianism; anti-­ Trinitarianism; Fall; grace; Kingdom of God; Nicene Creed;

242 Index

theology (cont.) original sin; redemption; salvation; Trinity Trapnel, Anna, 166 Trinity, 122; orthodox view of the, 124–­25; as question for further debate, 173. See also anti-­ Trinitarianism; theology Tyacke, Nicholas, 13, 189n53 tyranny, 102–­5; civil war and, 102; of Saul, 105; violence of, 84. See also absolutism Vane, Henry, 137, 143, 153–­54, 174; A Needfull Corrective, 151–­52 Vergil: Aeneid, 211n60 View of the State of Ireland, A (Spenser), 23, 30, 32–­33, 47–­50; English magistrates in the, 42; Irish rebels of the, 36. See also Spenser, Edmund Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, 9 violence: education and, 231n95; and oppression, 178; poetic charm and, 87; of rulers, 108; of tyranny, 84; victims of colonial, 136, 223n86. See also force virtue: civic, 3, 6, 111–­14, 118, 125, 179, 228n59; free will and, 112; grace as the foundation for the acquisition and performance of, 13, 17, 110;

inner, 104; interpretive, 116; knowledge of, 167; and liberty, 125; orthodox Calvinist ideal of ungendered, 53; of patience, 19–­21; public, 17, 118; religious, 228n59; republican, 110, 113, 117; rigorous standard of, 111 Waller, Edmund, 85 Weil, Simone: Gravity and Grace, 177; The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, 1–­2, 176 Wissowatius, Andrew: Racovian Catechism, 146–­47 women: community of, 16, 54, 77, 81, 179, 200n6; creativity of, 66–­67; Elizabethan view of the rule over men by, 37–­39; exclusion from elite education for, 16, 145, 149; grace in the lives of, 15, 53–­54, 58, 62, 67–­71, 74, 199n5, 203n51; marginalization of, 67, 71; nonpatriarchal community of, 55; in the Passion of Christ, 59–­62, 67–­68, 70–­73, 78, 158; patriarchal social structures that exclude and repress, 61, 69, 73–­76, 110, 118; patronage of aristocratic, 63–­66, 70–­81; as prophets, 142–­43; Protestant Jacobean, 53. See also gender