Abstract
The level of current interest in interpreting texts as registers of cultural change in early modern England bespeaks an increasingly shared perspective in literary studies which again seeks to take history seriously. As we literary-historical types now go about our usual business of intertextuality — analysing texts in relation other texts — we avoid dealing solely in textual formulations of our concerns. For, unless they are tethered to extralinguistic referents of context, relations among texts seemingly cannot be freed from the spectre of an indefinite regress of signifiers in play. Many of us have accordingly turned to an almost hallowed triad — race (or ethnicity), class and gender — as anchors for our work on historical texts in historical contexts. Taken over from our social science colleagues in the current vogue of interdisciplinary method-swapping, these factors look so promising because race, class and gender are powerfully material in their bases and potently ideological in their social encodings and decodings.
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Notes
In my view too little notice has been given to Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley and London, 1983), with its cogent definition of ‘the literary system’ in terms of generational patterns. Robert O. Evans has my thanks for calling my attention to the pioneering work of Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham, NC, 1966).
For these biographical particulars, see Anthony Martienssen, Queen Katherine Parr (London and New York, 1973), pp. 18–28.
See the treatment of the (uneven) gradation from translation to original authorship in Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1987), chs. 1–3 and the essays on Margaret More Roper, Elizabeth Tudor and Anne Askew, in Margaret P. Hannay, ed., Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, OH, 1985).
Julian of Norwich’s scholarly editors take the view that she dictated her Showings of Divine Love (c. 1393), while the Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1436–8) was unquestionably dictated by its illiterate author. See Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, eds, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich (Toronto, 1978), Vol. I: Introduction; and The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford B. Meech, with annotation by Hope Emily Allen, EETS orig. ser. 212 (London, 1940), p. 153, for an extended passage in which Margery’s scribe asserts his presence and describes his misgivings about some of what she dictates to him. The Book of St Albans (1486), attributed in its earliest printings to Dame Juliana Berners, traditionally identified as the prioress of the nunnery of Sopwell in Hertfordshire, contains treatises on hawking, hunting and heraldry which have been analysed as compilations by different hands. See The Boke of Saint Albans by Dame Juliana Berners, ed. William Blades (London, 1901), pp. 6–14.
On the relation between Askew and Parr, see Martienssen, 189–223, building on John Foxe, ‘The Trouble of Queene Katherine Parre’, Actes and Monuments (London, 1570), 2: 1422–5. On the historical significance of this case, see Paula McQuade, ‘“Except that they had offended the Lawe”: Gender and Jurisprudence in The Examinations of Anne Askew’, Literature & History, 3rd ser., 3.2 (1994): 1–14 and Elaine Beilin’s edition of Askew’s Examinations, forthcoming in the Oxford University Press series, Women Writers in English, 1350–1850.
Henry VIII died in January 1547. Parr’s reference to him as an English Moses who has led God’s people out of captivity to Pharaoh, the bishop of Rome, clearly indicates that the King is still alive (Katherine Parr, The lamentacion of a sinner, made by the most vertuous Ladie, Quene Caterin, … (London, 1547), sigs. Dvv-Dvir). Further citations will be abbreviated L and incorporated parenthetically in my text. For discussion, see Janel Mueller, ‘A Tudor Queen Finds Voice: Katherine Parr’s Lamentation of a Sinner’, in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, eds, The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago, 1988) pp. 15–47.
F. Rose-Troup, ‘Two Book Bills of Katherine Parr’, The Library, 3rd ser., 2 (1911): 40–8;
James K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1965), ch. 7; John N. King, ‘Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr’, in Hannay, ed., Silent but for the Word, p. 48.
Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani: An English Version, ed. Anne M. O’Donnell, S.N.D., Early English Text Society. o.s., no. 282 (Oxford, 1981): 178–9. In quoting I have modernized s and u/v and expanded printers’ contractions.
Convocation first acceded to the royal supremacy in February 1531 after Fisher managed to lodge his famous qualification ‘as far as Christ’s law allows’ and the formal submission of the clergy to the King’s headship took place in May 1532, presumably with Fisher’s mounting discomfiture. When the Act of Supremacy began to be enforced by oath in the spring of 1534, Fisher explicitly refused to take the oath and was confined to the Tower of London in April. He was executed on 22 June 1535, with More following him to the block on 6 July. See John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 128, 131, 135 and
Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge, 1991), p. 9.
The Short-Title Catalogue lists one edition only (STC 10899) of A spirituall consolation, written by John Fyssher to hys sister Elizabeth, to which A sermon … very aptely applyed unto the passion of Christ: preached upon a good Friday is appended in continuous pagination. The ascription of printer and date [W. Carter, 1578?] is derived from the annotated catalogue by A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640, vol. 2 (Aldershot, 1994), where this item is no. 273. This Good Friday sermon has attracted much less critical attention than others by Fisher — his defiance of Luther, his memorial sermon on Henry VII and his series on the Penitential Psalms, for example. Rex, Theology of John Fisher, p. 217, notes the cursory discussions by J. W. Blench and Edward Surtz, S. J., but offers only a brief synopsis of his own (46–9).
For an authoritative account of Lollardy, see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation (Oxford, 1988).
On the importance of the Enchiridion as the best single source for Erasmus’s conception of the Christian life, see Preserved Smith, Erasmus: A Study of His Life, Ideals and Place in History (New York, 1923), pp. 55, 58;
John Joseph Mangan, Life, Character and Influence of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (New York, 1927): 1:174; and
Johan Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation, trans. F. Hopman (New York, 1924; New York, 1957), p. 54. Rex, Theology of John Fisher, 47, records that Fisher owned a copy of the Enchiridion. For Parr, see n. 11.
For a probing discussion of problems of methodology and subject-matter, see Dominick La Capra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY, 1983), ch. 1.
On the importance of justification by faith as a confessional difference as early as the 1540s, see William P. Haugaard, ‘Katherine Parr: The Religious Convictions of a Renaissance Queen’, Renaissance Quarterly, 22 (1969): 346–59.
For a sharply reasoned, historically acute argument that religion was the principal category in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors ‘thought through’ a whole range of vital concerns, see Debora K. Shuger’s Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990).
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ, 1979), provides a pathbreaking account of the composite features of this Protestant subjectivity, revising that of Louis L. Martz in The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, rev. edn (New Haven, CT, 1962).
See, especially, Judith P. Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York, 1993).
Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Introduction: The Complexity of Symbols’, in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell and Paula Richman (Boston, 1986), p. 2.
See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990), ch. 2.
See Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY, 1990), pp. 131, 202.
This literature notably includes Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (New York, 1988),
John R. Phillips, The Reformation of Images (Chicago, 1970) and
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, ca. 1400-ca. 1580 (New Haven, CT, 1992), as well as work on literary implications, especially in Milton studies: see Lana Cable, Carnal Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Durham, NC, 1995), Ernest B. Gilman, Down Went Dagon: Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (Chicago, 1986) and David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm and the Literary Imagination (New York, 1990).
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Mueller, J. (1997). Complications of Intertextuality: John Fisher, Katherine Parr and ‘The Book of the Crucifix’. In: Brown, C.C., Marotti, A.F. (eds) Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25994-6_2
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