Abstract
The poems of the last chapter introduced us to a singularly rewarding and cohesive phase in Crashaw’s life. Yet the repose which began in 1635, when he had been elected to a Fellowship at Peterhouse and felt authorised to cooperate in the high-flown work of restoring Mary to her former glory in the English Church, lasted only a few years beyond 1638, when he became ‘chaplaine of the virgine myld’ as curate of Little St Mary’s. In The Femall Glory, Anthony Stafford reminded readers of this period that ‘a fatalle sadnesse haunted [Mary] from the birth of her onely Sonne to his buriall’ (p. 176). A premonitory sadness also cast its shadow over the vigilants in Crashaw’s circle who, while content to live in peace apart from the world, were perhaps tried, in return, with greater foresight. Nicholas Ferrar, ‘fearing and foreseeing the ill times to come, about a year before he dyed, wch was anno 1637’,1 gave vent not only to innate melancholy but to a more general apprehension that unnatural custodial calm prevailed under Laudian rule.2 In 1641, the Little Gidding community would, as he had foreboded, suffer alongside Crashaw when the Parliamentarians ‘offered violence to the Family & House’ and spread ‘abominable falshoods’ of the Ferrars’ ‘Arminian Nunnery’.
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Notes
Ferrar, A Life of Nicholas Ferrar, p. 63.
Laud dictated ecclesiastical law in the decade when no Parliament sat.
Ferrar, Life of Nicholas Ferrar, p. 62.
As Davis argues in his article ‘The Meditative Hymnody’, pp. 108, 124–7.
Bethell, ‘The Adoro Te’, pp. 40–41, concludes: ‘there is at times an unhealthiness in Crashaw which we never detect in the more intellectual devotion of St. Thomas’.
See the comments of Braden, ‘Recent Studies’, pp. 192, 220–21, and Gardner, Religion and Literature, pp. 173–7.
The point which he makes repeatedly in his chapter, ‘William Crashaw’s Influence on his Son’ , is that the poet’s father is wrongly described as a Puritan because of his polemical obsession with papism when, in theology, politics and liturgical practices, he was mainstream Anglican. See Chapter VIII of Poets and Mystics, pp. 164–87, especially p. 178.
This was a passion shared with men as different as John Donne and Nicholas Ferrar.
Crashaw, Manuall for True Catholickes, p. A5.
No one, to my knowledge, has speculated that the authors contained in his father’s library may have actively incited Crashaw’s feminine spirituality. The remarkable similarity between the key authors that Bynum notes, Jesus as Mother, p. 140, for their conviction of the motherhood of God and those enumerated by Warren, Richard Crashaw, pp. 210–11, n. 2, as chief examples of William Crashaw’s eclectic taste in religious works, is too close to be passed over as simple coincidence.
Crashaw, The Jesuit Gospel, pp. 15–16.
See, Camden, ‘Richard Crashaw’s Poetry’, p. 260, as well as Geha, ‘The Ego’s Soft Fall’, pp. 164–5; and Livio Dobrez, ‘The Crashaw-Teresa Relationship’, Southern Review: Literary and Inter-disciplinary Essays (Adelaide) (SORA), vol. I (1972) pp. 32, 36–7.
The special devotion shown by the Maiden Sisters of Little Gidding to the Purification enhanced its importance for this poet. See ‘Note’ to The Winding-Sheet, The Ferrar Papers, pp. 97–8.
See Bird, ‘Images of Women in the Old Testament’, in Ruether (ed.), Religion and Sexism, p. 54.
See Crashaw, The Jesuit Gospel, p. 32.
See the most recent Catholic formulation of the nature of Mary’s mediation in Redemptoris Mater, pp. 88–9, 123–5.
See Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 120.
See Mollenkott’s discussion of this point in The Divine Feminine, p. 16.
Garnet, The Societie, p. 24.
Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985) p. 253.
I have used the word ‘vulnerable’ advisedly; for as Camden rightly observed (‘Richard Crashaw’s Poetry’, p. 269), when Crashaw translated this hymn, the Latin ‘vulnus’ suggested to him the vulnerability of the victim through his open wounds: ‘Fac me plagis vulnerari, / Cruce fac inebriari / Et cruore filii’. As Janet Adelman also points out in her discussion of Coriolanus, in Parker and Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, pp. 254–6, and as the legend of the mother pelican feeding its young with the blood of self-induced wounds suggests, vulnerability is inherent to nursing and maternal nurture is implicit in the Eucharistic mystery: hence Corpus Christi College, Oxford, has the pelican as its emblem.
See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Willard R. Trask (trans.) (Princeton University Press, 1974) pp. 170–72, and Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, pp. 213–14, for discussion of Crashaw’s source.
See the Latin epigram, ‘Sancto Joanni, dilecto discipulo’, in Williams (ed.), The Complete Poetry, pp. 376–7.
See Praz, The Flaming Heart, p. 261; Bertonasco, The Intellectual Element, p. 169; Warren, Richard Crashaw, pp. 147–8, 201–206; Coburn Freer, ‘Mirth in Funeral’, in Cooper (ed.), Essays on Richard Crashaw, pp. 78–97. The gist of their remarks is that Crashaw depicts mystical rapture without effort or struggle in his poetry, and may not, some conclude, have known this state at all. Wallerstein, Style and Poetic Development, pp. 37–8, 55, Williams, Image and Symbol, p. 11, and Young, Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age, pp. 79–86, remain open-minded.
See George Walton Williams, ‘Richard Crashaw and the Little Gidding Bookbinders’, N&Q, Jan. 1956 pp. 9–10.
See Milhaupts discussion of the ways in which the poet played with red letter days and rubrics in the Church calendar, The Latin Epigrams, pp. 29, 118, n. 1, and Docherty, Donne, Undone, p. 206.
As Warner notes in Alone of All Her Sex, pp. 14–15, and both the recent apostolic letter, Mulieris Dignitatem, pp. 71–3, and the papal encyclical, Redemptoris Mater, pp. 81–9, address.
Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, p. 267.
Of the dozen or more sacred epigrams which commemorate the encounters of the Saviour with women, only three do not derive from the Gospels of Matthew or Luke. They are ‘Obolum Viduæ’ based on Mark, ‘Primo mane venit ad sepulchrum’ based on John, and ‘In die Resurrectionis Dominicæ’ from Mark.
Williams (ed.), The Complete Poetry, p. 14.
See Mark Frank in Allchin, The Blessed Virgin Mary, p. 73, as well as Stafford, The Femall Glory, p. 45.
See Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 221, and Robert Martin Adams, who remarks: ‘the poet here comes close to a direct statement that the Incarnation was a revolting joke on Jesus and Mary; incest, perversion, cannibalism, and the extra incongruity of “tabled at thy Teates” make the quatrain a little gem of encrusted grotesquerie. Most striking of all is the neat, swift, rather pleased tone of the antithesis; in notions not only lovely but familiar, it seems, horrid possibilities may lurk’ (‘Taste and Bad Taste’, in Keast (ed.), Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, p. 271).
Mark Frank, Fellow of Pembroke from 1634 to 1644, is quoted in Allchin, The Blessed Virgin Mary, p. 74.
See the remarks of Bertonasco, Crashaw and the Baroque, pp. 32, 80; Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, pp. 143–4; Williams, Image and Symbol, p. 14.
See Anthony Raspa’s account of this devotional controversy in ‘Crashaw and the Jesuit Poetic’, University of Toronto Quarterly (UTQ), vol. XXXVI (1966) pp. 39–40.
See Martin Luther, What Luther Says: An Anthology, Vol. 3, compiled by Ewald M. Plass (St Louis, Missouri: Concordia, 1959) p. 1256. Luther’s great attachment to the Blessed Mother as a late medieval monk is now recognised as shaping the totality of the man. See Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim, p. 205, and Balthasar’s commentary to Redemptoris Mater, pp. 168–9.
See Marcus’ interpretation of this statement in Childhood and Cultural Despair, p. 86.
As in the famous lines from the Song of Songs: ‘My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him’ (5:4).
See ‘An Apologie for the fore-going Hymne’, 1. 33, p. 60; Coburn Freer’s discussion in Cooper (ed.), Essays on Richard Crashaw, pp. 90–92; Jung and Von Franz, The Grail Legend, pp. 112–15.
Ian Maclean discusses the changing theological as well as medical view of the womb in The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge University Press, 1985) pp. 17–18, 27–43.
Discussed by Raspa, ‘Crashaw and the Jesuit Poetic’, p. 43.
See Southwell, An Humble Supplication, p. 34, where he describes the Catholic martyr’s death by ‘hanging, drawing and unbowelling’ as ‘more releasing than increasing our miseries’ (my emphasis).
Stafford’s grandiloquence to Mary is generally regarded as illustrative of the high-flown spirit of the Anniversaries. Yet it is Crashaw, not Donne, who is usually criticised for his poetic extravagance to Mary.
Quoted by Gold in The Lady and the Virgin, p. 69.
Milhaupt, The Latin Epigrams, p. 188, n. 1, notes that in Greek the Angel’s salute, translated into English as ‘hail’, is both a greeting and an imperative meaning ‘be well’ (hence Crashaw’s notion of welcome and health) and ‘rejoice’.
See the corroboration of the Puritan inspectors in Pritchard, ‘Puritan Charges’, fol. 71.
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© 1992 Maureen Sabine
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Sabine, M. (1992). All Made Maries. In: Feminine Engendered Faith. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372580_6
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