Abstract
This chapter examines the role of sinister aesthetics in depictions of divine punishment in two kinds of Renaissance cheap print texts: broadside ballads and sermons. Although ballads are often seen as sensationalist entertainments opposed to the moral and religious didacticism of sermons, the two genres share important subjects, techniques, and goals. Ballads about so-called monstrous births not only present them as pleasurably fearful spectacles but they also treat them as texts written by God. Depicting God as a monster-maker has important implications for early modern English conceptions of God and his relationship to evil. The second part of the chapter analyzes seventeenth-century sermons that further explore this relationship and try to cultivate an appreciation for the monstrous and infernal forms of divine punishment.
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Notes
- 1.
A full analysis of the causes of the English Civil War is beyond the scope of this chapter. J. P. Sommerville’s Royalists & Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (1999) identifies certain “royal policies” as particular bones of contention: “taxation without consent, imprisonment without cause shown, and the government of the church without Parliamentary advice” (4). See also Christopher Hill’s The Century of Revolution: 1603–1714 (1980), Glenn Burgess’s British Political Thought, 1500–1660 (2009), and Michael Braddick’s God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (2009). Braddick highlights the connections between the political upheavals of the civil war and a perceived “chaos of religious opinion” in England (xxii).
- 2.
Historian Alexandra Walsham’s Providence in Early Modern England (1999) argues that “Providentialism became a dangerously politicized discourse in the decades preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, not in the sense that it became the exclusive property of one party or faction, but because it operated as a catalyst for criticism and as a weapon and tool wielded with increasing aggression and crudity” (5–6). Moreover, Walsham essentially equates the operations of providence (as it was understood in the period) with horrific prodigies and disasters.
- 3.
Julie Crawford (2005) identifies “thirty broadsheets and pamphlets” describing monstrous births (187n4), and presumably many more have not survived to the present day. On the popularity of monsters, see also Mark Thornton Burnett’s Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (2002), whose introduction and first chapter provide a useful overview of where and how monsters were displayed and written about in early modern England. On the persistence of the idea of the monster as a portent, see Stephen Pender’s “‘No Monsters at the Resurrection’: Inside Some Conjoined Twins,” published in Jeffrey J. Cohen’s Monster Theory (1996; e.g., page 145).
- 4.
For explanations of early modern births in modern medical terms, see A. W. Bates’s Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births in Early Modern Europe (2005), which provides a list of “Human Monstrous Births, 1500–1700” (215).
- 5.
See Rosamund Oates’s review article, “Sermons and Sermon-going in Early Modern England” (2012) for a concise overview.
- 6.
For a helpful description of the sermon form, see Peter McCullough’s introduction to his 2005 edition of Andrewes (McCullough xxxi–xxxiii).
- 7.
Walsham’s book, like this chapter, is “Based on an integrated analysis of sermons and tracts by Protestant ministers and ballads and pamphlets reporting ‘strange and wonderful newes’” (6), but she is engaged in a much broader survey of English providentialism. One additional major category of texts that Walsham identifies is the “English judgment book.” She describes these books as “encyclopedias of providential punishments” and collections of “grisly stories of supernatural justice,” and she cites Thomas Beard’s The theatre of Gods judgements, published in 1597, as a seminal example (65).
- 8.
See Burnett on the connection between the fairground exhibition of monsters and the theatrical stage (10). Burnett also suggests that Shakespeare’s Richard III has some of the appeal of a fairground monster (66).
- 9.
Watt classifies texts as either “worldly” or “godly” (46) in an effort to “separate the religious element” from “the public interest in macabre stories” (108), although she rightly acknowledges that “it is almost impossible to find a straight ‘news’ ballad in the sixteenth century which does not refer to the greater ‘religious’ significance of the individual ‘secular’ event” (46–47).
- 10.
The Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (hereafter DNB, cited by volume and page number) notes that “After the accession of James I he [Leigh] preached at the court, and the king appointed him tutor to his eldest son, Prince Henry, over whom Leigh had great influence” (11.879). Despite this evidence of James’s approval, Crawford characterizes Leigh as having a “Puritan agenda” (98; see also 110).
- 11.
For more on the relationship between pamphlets, plays, and sermons, including their competition for audiences, their reciprocal appropriation of each others’ tropes, and their strategies for combining sensationalism and providentialism, see Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat (2002).
- 12.
As Walsham argues, “Notwithstanding the tirades of the clergy, sermons and ephemeral literature…both were saturated with references to divine providence; both shared a preoccupation with the blessings and punishments God showered down upon mankind to reward virtue and correct vice; both cried in unison for repentance and amendment” (32–33).
- 13.
A similar formulation occurs in a ballad by John Barker, The true description of a monsterous chylde, borne in the Ile of Wight (1564).
- 14.
Crawford also observes how these accounts combine entertainment and religious instruction, arguing that monsters functioned as “advertising…attracting readers to the texts’ godly content through the appeal of marvelous images.” Compared to this chapter, however, her study takes a more “micropolitical” approach (9).
- 15.
For a variety of reasons, it is not always practical to offer line numbers or other numerical locators for quotations from broadside ballads.
- 16.
For Shakespeare plays other than Richard III, see The Complete Works, edited by Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (Penguin, 2002).
- 17.
Art historian Sandra Cheng’s “The Cult of the Monstrous: Caricature, Physiognomy, and Monsters in Early Modern Italy” (2012) notes that “monsters made frequent appearances in Renaissance art in which pleasure was their primary function” (202). She also discusses the popularity of monster texts (see esp. 200–203, 220–222).
- 18.
Multipage early modern texts from Early English Books Online are cited by signature number when no page numbers are available.
- 19.
On the lusus naturae, Daston and Park cite Fortunio Liceti’s 1616 treatise De monstrorum natura, caussis et differentiis libri duo and other “medical writers” (200). Sandra Cheng cites Liceti but notes that “the source of Liceti’s opinion is Pliny’s Natural History” (211, 228). See also Paula Findlen’s “Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe” (1990).
- 20.
The translation is mine, from Jean Céard’s French edition (Librarie Droz, 1971, page 4).
- 21.
Johnson was a botanist and apothecary who fought on the royalist side in the English Civil War and died in 1644 (DNB 10.935).
- 22.
A.W. Bates (2005) similarly argues that early modern society’s significant investment in monsters—they were “routinely exhibited,” and “people were prepared to travel and pay to see monsters, and then to buy and keep images of them”—had to be motivated by something more than the “Horror and repugnance” they supposedly inspired. He suggests a value placed on transgressive hybridity: “human-animal intermediates, hermaphrodites and physical deformities have all been revered as well as tabooed” (21).
- 23.
Crawford discusses the Puritan disapproval of cockfighting in her analysis of this passage (97).
- 24.
Parts of this passage are quoted in Knapp (118) and Walsham (315). Thomas Wilson (c. 1525–1581) was a scholar whose political career culminated in his appointment as secretary of state in 1577 (DNB 21.603–607).
- 25.
Debora Shuger suggests that the sermon teaches an affective position more than a set of theological principles: “As the preacher shares in the divine power, so the sermon recapitulates the strategies of sacred absolutism. It does not teach a doctrine but operates rhetorically, affectively—a sort of psychagogic warfare” (Habits 208). In contrast, Kevin Sharpe (2000) categorizes the “polemical sermon” as a genre that excludes the “visual, sensual and emotional experience” of religion (390). Within the early modern period, Spenser’s “Letter to Raleigh” also seems to contrast ideas that are "sermoned" from those expressed poetically and allegorically (see Chapter 2).
- 26.
Moira P. Baker (1995) notes that Thomas Adams was “Vilified by John Vicars in a 1647 Puritan tract” as a lover of ceremonious religion and an enemy of Parliament, but “acclaimed in the nineteenth century as…an eminent Puritan divine” (4). According to Baker, Adams “maintained a moderate position within the Church of England” but “could appease neither High Church Laudians nor Puritans,” because he combined “strongly Calvinist doctrines” with “His loyalty to the king, his tolerance of ceremony, and his support of an Episcopalian form of church government” (7).
- 27.
Gwalther was a protégé of Heinrich Bullinger, a son-in-law of Huldrych Zwingli, and he followed them as the third bishop of the Reformed Church of Zurich. According to J. Wayne Baker, Gwalther “was very influential” in England, “particularly as an advocate of the Zurich model of the state church.… and Gwalther regularly corresponded with English bishops and others” (Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation [1996] volume 2, page 203).
- 28.
A surprisingly large percentage of the moralized monsters in ballads and other texts were examples of what Crawford calls “fashion monsters” (33), that is to say, “monsters whose deformities resembled human fashion excesses” (28).
- 29.
According to Baird Tipson (1984), “While a student at Queens College, Cambridge, Bedford had come under the influence of the Calvinist Master of Queens, John Davenant” (316). In the late 1640s, Bedford “received the rectorship of St. Martin Outwich in the city of London” (DNB 2.112). Crawford characterizes Bedford’s monster pamphlet as “popular casuistry” and notes that Bedford defends the consideration of monsters as “a religious duty,” not a blasphemous form of curiosity (22). Bedford’s other writings include The Sinne unto Death (1621), Luthers Predecessours (1624), an attack on antinomianism (1647), and two works on the sacraments (1638, 1649). Despite Bedford’s repeated recourse to the authority of Calvin, The Sinne unto Death and the monster pamphlet make somewhat anti-Calvinist claims about the legibility of God’s displeasure to mortals.
- 30.
According to David Bevington’s introduction to Webster’s play in English Renaissance Drama, it was “first performed in early 1612” (page 1659). Thomas Adams published his sermon in 1613 as The White Devil, or the Hypocrite Uncased: In a Sermon Preached at Pauls Crosse, March 7, 1612.
- 31.
For example, Moira Baker cites Thomas Adams’s sermon Mystical Bedlam (1615) as employing “grotesque images of death and bodily decay with as chilling an effect as the bitter musings of Vindice on his dead mistress’s beauty in Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1608).… The macabre array of dancing madmen in the same sermon evokes…the morris of bedlamites cavorting in the lurid half-light of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, which was performed sometime before December 1614” (6).
- 32.
Moira Baker quotes excerpts from this passage and notes that “Adams exploits the affective force of lurid images to initiate a process of meditation in his auditors” (6).
- 33.
The phrase “besides all this” is from Luke 16:26, the Biblical verse that Bunyan is explicating. Including the epigraph, it appears eleven times in the section (76–82) and once in the next section (83).
- 34.
Edmund Miller (1995) describes Taylor as an Episcopalian royalist who preached toleration during the Interregnum and was well-positioned to return to the church hierarchy during the Restoration (294–305). In chapter 3 of Milton and the Idea of the Fall (2005), William Poole discusses Taylor’s “extremely heterodox” ideas about original sin (50).
- 35.
Donne sermons are cited by volume number, sermon number, and line number in The Sermons of John Donne, edited by George Potter and Evelyn Simpson. I want to credit “Absolutist Theology,” the fifth chapter of Debora Shuger’s Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (1994) for bringing to my attention this and other relevant passages from Donne’s vast corpus of sermons. For this passage, see Shuger 170. Shuger argues that “Divine power fascinates Donne largely in its destructive and catastrophic aspect” (171), but she examines this fascination to elucidate issues such as the politics of absolute monarchy and the psychology of guilt.
- 36.
See Tertullian book 2, chapter 14, which contrasts “malis delicti et malis supplicii, malis culpae et malis poenae” (page 126), that is to say “evils of sin and evils of punishment…evils of guilt and evils of penalty” (page 127). Tertullian also attempts to address some of the subsidiary moral questions that result from this paradigm, such as whether God’s punishments are always just, and why he allows the evil of crime in the first place. For Aquinas’s use of malum culpae and malum poenae, see Brian Davies’s The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (1993; 92) and Thomas Aquinas’s De Malo, question 1 article 4.
- 37.
The title of Hampton’s sermon suggests a certain radicalism, and the sermon itself expresses concern that the king might not sufficiently repress English Catholics (22). But Hampton’s “Epistle Dedicatory” makes a point of wishing for the king’s "safetie" (A3), and after the Restoration, Hampton published Lacrymae Ecclesiae (1661), a pair of sermons praising Charles I as a martyr.
- 38.
Andrewes, XCVI. Sermons (1629), “Certaine Sermons Preached At sundry times, upon severall occasions,” “One of the Sermons upon the III. Commandement Preached in the Parish Church of St. Giles Cripplegate, Jun. XI. An. Dom. MDXCII,” page 44, Early English Books Online image 539.
- 39.
Shuger quotes this passage and contrasts it with “the mythic dualism of Andrewes’s Christus Victor theology, in which responsibility for ‘ill action’ devolves onto Satan and the powers of darkness, thus eliminating the paradox of a good God who directly causes evil” (Habits 170). Whatever theological differences Donne and Andrewes may have, however, they share the distinction between malum culpae, of which God is innocent, and malum poenae, for which God is responsible.
- 40.
Or, as The forme and shape of a monstrous child (1568) puts it: “In Gods power/all flesh stands,/As the clay in the/Potters hands./To fashion even/as he wyll,/In good shape/or in yll.”
- 41.
Andrewes, XCVI. Sermons (1629), “A Sermon Preached Before the King’s Majestie at White-Hall, on the V. of November, Anno Domini, MDCXVI,” page 976, Early English Books Online image 497.
- 42.
Crawford notes that early modern legal punishments were often “meant not only to punish a crime but to illustrate it,” for example, by mutilating or branding criminals in a manner that reflected their crimes (22).
- 43.
In discussing Spenser, Joseph Campana (2009) describes a similar virtuous perversity that he sees as a consequence of Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of goodness and pleasure: “True virtue, acquired through education and maintained through action, requires that pain and pleasure be experienced counterintuitively (pain as pleasure and pleasure as pain) or in some circumstances not at all” (468).
- 44.
Donne’s Holy Sonnet 13 (“What if this present were the world’s last night?”) also engages in complex ways with the normativity (or lack thereof) of Christian devotional aesthetics. The spiritual reassurance the speaker offers is contingent on two assertions that the poem itself calls into question: first, that the visual spectacle of Christ’s tortured, weeping, and frowning body is inherently and unambiguously beautiful; and second, that outer beauty is always proof of inner goodness.
- 45.
Shuger quotes this passage in the context of a psychological analysis of guilt (Habits 190).
- 46.
On this quote, see Shuger (Habits 200). She argues that “fear and love are inextricable rather than antithetical responses to the holy” (194). See Michael Lieb’s Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon (2006) for more on the early modern “theology of dread” (191).
- 47.
As we have seen in Sidney, bitterness and sweetness are central to early modern conceptions of the relationship between morality and aesthetics in literature, but they are deployed inconsistently: bitterness can be toxic or medicinal, and sweetness can be nourishing or deceptive and corrupting. Indeed, Donne’s model for learning how to appreciate God’s sinister aesthetics resembles other preachers’ accounts of how the taste for sin develops. A sermon by the royalist preacher Richard Allestree (1619–1681), published in a 1669 collection, describes—and condemns—wine connoisseurship as an acquired taste, developed through training, that ultimately produces “unnatural and monstrous satisfactions and appetites” (38). Like Thomas Adams, who rejects the claim that sin is sweet, Allestree figures virtuous temperance as the normative source of pleasure. Donne proposes an essentially similar procedure for the inculcation of a sinister Christian sensibility that learns to appreciate and take pleasure in whipping, putrescence, and other such horrors. Both strategies presume that Christian aesthetics are at odds with conventional secular ones.
- 48.
Shuger quotes a portion of this passage (Habits 199).
- 49.
Shuger provides a detailed account of this seemingly perverse response in Donne; see Habits 195 for her reading of this passage. Donne’s most famous embrace of divine violence is not a sermon but a poem: his Holy Sonnet 14, “Batter my heart three-personed God,” in which the speaker asks God to “break,” “imprison,” and “ravish” him (lines 4, 12, 14).
- 50.
Bruce R. Smith’s Phenomenal Shakespeare (2010) discusses the complex ways in which early modern representations of torture might encourage readers to see themselves as punishers and/or victims. For example, Macbeth’s comparison of himself to a baited bear (5.7.1–2) creates “the possibility of the spectator/listener’s feeling one of two things: the punisher’s ardor and the victim’s suffering” (154). Smith makes a similar claim about Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), which highlights “the exhilaration of experiencing such violence from multiple points of view” (154).
- 51.
In The Renaissance Bible (1994), Shuger provides other examples of early modern English Protestant writers who encourage a triumphant identification with the malice of a vengeful God. For example, Joseph Hall’s (1574–1656) account of God’s destruction of Jerusalem presents Christ as a figure of “horror”; it is a “fantasy of retribution” that “betrays its exultant cruelty” (Shuger 94). Similarly, Claudia Richter cites “aesthetic manifestations of violence” by “a wrathful God” as central to a “Calvinist rhetoric and theology of terror” (52).
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Slotkin, J.E. (2017). Monsters and the Pleasures of Divine Justice in English Popular Print, 1560–1675. In: Sinister Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52797-0_4
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