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ОглавлениеIntroduction. Gender, Religion, and English Literary History
Tell all the truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
— Emily Dickinson
This book traces a circuitous path through English literary history and the process of canon formation—a path by which Shakespeare’s sister takes a detour en route to the suicide Virginia Woolf depicted as her likely fate, converts to Catholicism, travels beyond the seas, joins a convent, and writes devotional poems that imaginatively rebuild her brother’s bare ruined choirs. But we needn’t create our own fictions to glimpse how it would be possible to read literary history differently by recognizing Catholic women’s ongoing participation in it, as both subjects and objects of literary representation. Their stories are woven into the fabric of early modern literature and poetic theory, and we find them in both the texts that exclude them and those that foreground their authority and agency. Recent scholarly work has demonstrated that nuns and other Catholic women wrote in a range of genres and for multiple audiences;1 I show how their writings offer a fresh perspective on English literary history, enhancing our understanding of the available contexts for canonical literature and the conversations of which that literature was a part. By excavating conflicted engagements with Catholic femininity in early modern poems and plays, the following chapters enable a more nuanced interpretation of how confessional and gender identities are woven into the poetics of erasure undergirding the English literary canon.2
The exceptional work of feminist literary critics over the last three decades has done much to draw attention to the significance of female authorship in the early modern period, and the writings of Protestant women of a wide range of social positions and sectarian affiliations have been the subject of multiple monographs.3 But Catholic women’s influence on mainstream literary culture beyond the sphere of the Stuart court has yet to receive such sustained attention.4 To create a more complete picture of English literary history, we must ask how nuns and recusant women who were not central to England’s courtly life shaped its literary culture. I demonstrate that these female authors, whom we might imagine to be marginal figures because of their gender, religion, and social position, are centrally important to an enriched analysis of how literature works in the early modern period and how our own critical perspectives have been shaped by the texts at the heart of our canon that have rendered a more expansive literary history illegible. Rather than taking either conformist Protestant ideology or pamphlet literature at its word, I query the formal effects of Catholic women evident in a wide range of literary texts, thereby illuminating the fraught relationship of gender and religious change to canon formation.
By reading the revelatory works of Catholic women alongside well-known authors who were both formally and thematically engaged with similar literary, religious, and political issues, this book proposes a reassessment of the relationship between canonical literature and its intertexts. Building on the foundational work of scholars of both early modern English Catholicism and women’s writing, I show how the literary strategies of men and women of various and shifting confessional identities contributed to the exclusion of Catholic women from the main narratives of English literary history. While the monastic associations of characters like Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and William Shakespeare’s Isabella demonstrate that contemporary authors were aware of the continued relevance of nuns and recusants, such representations do not directly respond to the texts produced by those women. As a result, it is easy to imagine them writing only for themselves and one another: images of nuns quietly confined to their monastic cells and rendered inconsequential through exile spring to mind. But it is the contention of this book that the writings of post-Reformation Catholic Englishwomen profoundly engage with early modern literature. Through their incursions into contemporary literary culture, Catholic women offered alternatives not only to their country’s religious settlement but also to the forms and genres that helped to define and support that settlement. The exclusion of nuns and recusant women from literary history thus results not from an absence but from their contemporaries’ routine denials of both their presence and their relevance. In writing, compiling, and authorizing manuscripts and printed books that rejected limited or pejorative representations of their religious practices and identities, Catholic women offered their own texts as alternatives to those that cast them as relics or renegades rather than writers—texts that eventually solidified into our own canon.
As this brief summary suggests, the following chapters explore questions at the intersection of the turn to religion, historical formalism, and feminist criticism.5 Such an approach may not seem intuitive, given that early work in historical (or new) formalism was relatively silent on matters of gender: feminist scholarship on early modern literature was identified as “most conspicuous in its absence” in the introduction to one influential edited collection.6 But reading women’s writing for form is essential, and I follow Sasha Roberts in believing that “if we neglect early modern women’s interest in questions of literary form, we fail to do justice to their work as readers and writers.”7 I would add, though, that our approach to form must be attuned to the complexities of identity in the early modern period: as many critics have shown, “woman” is no more a homogeneous category than “Catholic,” and the texts I examine reveal as many instructive differences as they do provocative commonalities, even when authors share both gender and confessional identity. So, too, we need a capacious understanding of form. Many recent critics have recognized that “poetic form is a site for experimentation and engagement,” but a narrow focus on poetry would obscure the fact that Catholic women’s formal experimentation in a variety of genres offered sites for engagement in broader religious, political, and literary networks.8 And it is a central claim of this book that attention to form can reveal not only the literary sophistication and interventions of these women but also their effects on their contemporaries. Rather than simply identifying representations of nuns or recusants, I show how ideas about Catholic women got under the skin of early modern authors and into their texts. By recognizing both how Catholic women were relevant to the uses of form in early modern literature and how they responded to and adapted those forms, we can see that our canon has always been more expansive and inclusive—even in its deliberate exclusions—than it has seemed to be.
Many works that seem to have little to do with Catholicism, much less the politics and poetics of Catholic women, reveal a submerged attention to competing voices and literary histories in their very omissions and their unacknowledged intertexts. George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy is one such text. Scholars have traced how The Art constructs a literary culture focused on the Elizabethan court despite Puttenham’s marginal position in relationship to that court,9 but his concomitant exclusion of Catholic women from the production and reception of poetic forms has not provoked critical comment, perhaps because such an exclusion is neither unique nor surprising: we expect nuns and recusants to be absent from the texts that helped to define early modern poetic practice. Yet archival materials hinting at both the devotional practices of Puttenham’s wife and his potential connection with an English nun named Mary Champney suggest the importance of competing perspectives on early modern culture that his text obfuscates in glancing references to Mary Stuart and to his own extratextual predilections. Champney’s narrative survives in an anonymous manuscript—part hagiography, part romance—documenting her life and death. While the gaps in Puttenham’s self-consciously foundational text of early modern poetic and rhetorical theory cannot be filled by this manuscript’s depiction of Champney’s self-consciously literary practice of religious devotion and political resistance, together these seemingly unrelated late sixteenth-century texts reveal a process of erasure that is simultaneously historical and literary: we have lost the connective tissue that would enable a firm archival link between Mary Champneys and Mary Champney, the first raped by Puttenham and the second an English nun in exile, but that loss is written into the poetic theories and literary forms of the early modern period. Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy thus offers an extreme example of a routine erasure. His focus on Queen Elizabeth as an exceptional case works to exclude other women from the making of literary history,10 but the possible historical connection of Puttenham and Champney—and the alternative to a life of abandonment available to Champneys on the continent—suggests that we should not simply read this omission in terms of gender but also in terms of confessional identity and social position.
* * *
In The Art of English Poesy, George Puttenham represents himself as courtier, poet, and literary historian, documenting a burgeoning national poetic tradition from the inside. By writing about poetry in terms of the court and the monarch, Puttenham helped shape both the creation of the early modern canon and its perception as the product of a distinctly Elizabethan—and therefore Protestant—culture. From the frontispiece image of Elizabeth and its inscription A colei / Che se stessa rassomiglia / & non altrui (“To her who resembles herself and no other”) to the final supplication of her favor, The Art revolves around the queen: her patronage, her status, and her poetry are figured as the center of Puttenham’s treatment of English literature.11 But Puttenham’s own relationship to court and queen was never what he desired it to be, and an attentive reading of The Art’s politics hints at the very literary histories Puttenham refuses to name.
The logic of early modern political theory structures Puttenham’s textual invocations of Elizabeth, which cast her as the fulfillment of his opening declaration that “A poet is as much to say as a maker” (93). As England’s queen, she is necessarily the “most excellent poet” of her time, for she “by [her] princely purse, favors, and countenance, mak[es] in manner what [she] list, the poor man rich, the lewd well learned, the coward courageous, and vile both noble and valiant” (95). This is a neat inversion: if a poet is a maker “by way of resemblance” with God’s creative power, so too must England’s monarch, who most resembles God in her political power, be a poet (93). Praise of Elizabeth’s poetic skill thus does not depend upon her poetic production: she is the culmination of Puttenham’s genealogy of English poets at the end of Book 1 not because of what she has written but because of who she is.
But last in recital and first in degree is the Queen, our Sovereign Lady, whose learned, delicate, noble muse easily surmounteth all the rest that have written before her time or since, for sense, sweetness, and subtlety, be it in ode, elegy, epigram, or any other kind of poem heroic or lyric, wherein it shall please her Majesty to employ her pen, even by as much odds as her own excellent estate and degree exceedeth all the rest of her most humble vassals. (151)
In a grammatical sleight of hand, Puttenham transforms the list of forms that Elizabeth has mastered (she “easily surmounteth all the rest that have written”) into a conditional through the modal verb “shall”: if she were to write in these forms, then her poems would necessarily surpass all others, just as she herself surpasses her subjects.
While she was not as prolific as Puttenham suggests in Book 1 of The Art, Elizabeth was indeed a poet, and her verse exemplifies the analogy between political power and literary significance that underlies both Puttenham’s bid for patronage and his creation of an exclusive and exclusionary English literary tradition. His choice of Elizabeth’s “The Doubt of Future Foes” as the exemplar for “the last and principal figure of our poetical ornament,” exergasia or, as Puttenham defines it, “the Gorgeous,” reveals this interrelationship between literature and politics, while hinting at those silenced by Puttenham’s focus on the Protestant monarch and her court (333).12 By claiming that there is “none example in English meter so well maintaining this figure as that ditty of her Majesty’s own making,” Puttenham analogizes the figure that he defines as “the most beautiful and gorgeous of all others” and Elizabeth, “the most beautiful, or rather beauty, of queens” (334). In this analogy, the aesthetic appeal of poetry is both a sign and a function of social status and political power. Puttenham thus neglects an evaluation of the poem’s formal qualities in favor of an explanation of its political occasion: “our Sovereign Lady, perceiving how by the Sc. Q. residence within this realm at so great liberty and ease … bred secret factions among her people…. writeth this ditty most sweet and sententious, not hiding from all such aspiring minds the danger of their ambition and disloyalty” (334). “The Doubt of Future Foes” may be “sweet and sententious,” but its political message is what makes it so: the value of poetry lies in its political authority. As Puttenham explains, the threat that Elizabeth’s poem inscribes “afterward fell out most truly by the exemplary chastisement of sundry persons, who, in favor of the said Sc. Q. declining from her Majesty, sought to interrupt the quiet of the realm by many evil and undutiful practices” (334). Poems make politics, just as Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy makes a literary culture in which Mary, Queen of Scots, cannot be named in full, much less acknowledged as a poet in her own right or as just one of many nonconformist women resistant to Elizabeth’s sovereignty.13
By elevating his own status as poetic authority through repeated invocations of Elizabeth, Puttenham transforms a bid for financial patronage into a political agenda that silences dissenting literary traditions, especially those developed by women other than the queen. He locates himself as a central figure in English poetics—as historian, critic, rhetorician, and poet—at the same time that he positions Elizabeth as the culmination of an English literary history that helped shape modern understandings of Protestant poetics.14 But recent archival discoveries have revealed that this maker of English literary history was not what The Art of English Poesy made him seem to be. He was no court favorite; on the contrary, “the historical documents suggest that his public reputation was, in the eyes of most established courtiers, mainly a spectacle of disgrace.”15 For the purposes of this Introduction, it is unnecessary to detail the lawsuits, excommunications, assaults, and imprisonments that characterized Puttenham’s life.16 But his violent history with women is worth pause, especially considering how it may illuminate The Art’s erasure of Catholic women from English literary culture.
As a result of his spousal abuse and frequent adultery, Puttenham’s advantageous match to the Lady Elizabeth Windsor—ten years his senior, twice widowed, and likely a practicing Catholic—is well documented in the legal record.17 Lady Windsor initiated divorce proceedings in the ecclesiastical Court of Arches in 1575, and seventeen witnesses were deposed to support her case. We thus have a paper trail on Puttenham depicting not simply an adulterer but a sexual predator who seduced or attacked numerous young women: Izarde Cawley, Mary Champneys, and Elizabeth Johnsonne, among others, are named as victims of rape, abuse, kidnapping, and imprisonment at his hands.18 Lady Windsor hoped to “seperatte [her] selfe from the company of soe evell a man,” and urged the court not to give “creditt to his gloryous and paynted speache whose custome is all supreme aucthoritie and ordynarye civil governement as a mockarye to use.”19 Her fear of Puttenham’s “gloryous and paynted speache” suggests a long history of rhetorical embellishment that would eventually culminate in The Art’s portrait of an author at the center of court culture. Puttenham’s treatise thus offers a rhetorical practice that matches its theory: in writing, he obscures his own violent sexual history behind a rhetorically compelling text. So, too, he theorizes a poetic tradition that not only effaces women’s writing but quite literally drowns out their voices.
The relationship of historical life, writing practice, and poetic theory throws into stark relief the relish with which Puttenham describes the epithalamium, especially the possible violence of the initial sexual encounter between bride and groom. By praising the continental neo-Latin tradition of authors such as Johannes Secundus and narrating the progress of folk epithalamia, Puttenham emphasizes the aggressive and erotic elements of the genre—the very elements that seventeenth-century English poets would soon repress.20 The wedding song, he explains, must be “very loud and shrill, to the intent there might no noise be heard out of the bedchamber by the screaking and outcry of the young damsel feeling the first forces of her stiff and rigorous young man, she being as all virgins tender and weak, and inexpert in those manner of affairs” (139). For Puttenham, the first sexual encounter is an “amorous battle,” followed swiftly by “second assaults” (140), and poetry is an essential part of this ritual of sexual violence: the wedding song drowns out the voice of a woman who is lucky to “escape with so little danger of her person” (141). She is nonetheless physically transformed: “the bride must within few hours arise and apparel herself, no more as a virgin but as a wife … very demurely and stately to be seen and acknowledged of her parents and kinfolk whether she were the same woman or a changeling, or dead or alive, or maimed by any accident nocturnal” (140–41). Puttenham thus depicts a literary culture in which women are bodies to be acted upon, marked, and read by others, and one in which the transformation from virgin to wife is a violent and inevitable alteration of the self. Yet the epithalamium in Puttenham’s telling is also a form that acknowledges and is predicated on the existence of women’s resistant voices, even as it elides the possibility that they may remain virgins or choose a life without marriage. The unnamed objects of the epithalamium are not silent: instead, their words are submerged within the very poetic tradition that Puttenham celebrates for its exclusion of them. Here and elsewhere, The Art alludes to the poetic significance of those whose words it refuses to include—not only a Scottish Queen but also virgins and resistant wives.
Unlike the brides whose cries are muffled by a song, Lady Windsor’s divorce proceedings enable her to tell her own story and record the stories of others abused by Puttenham. These narratives offer an anticipatory rebuke to Puttenham’s description of the epithalamium and its social function, particularly in their attention to the relationship between pleasing rhetoric and violent physicality. In his attack on Mary Champneys, a “waitinge gentlewoman of [Lady Windsor’s] beinge of tender yeres,” Puttenham
to wynne his ungodly purpose … firste practized with faire wordes and rewardes who neverthelesse resisted the same with a verie godly mynde disposed ˄But sith he cold not so wynne her he did dayly˄ [illegible] so beate her from tyme to tyme in suche sorte that the maiden shold wax wery of her Service / After which practize he the said George assaulted the said maiden in moste wicked Maner and therewithall shewed her what thraldome and miserye she shold sustayne [illegible] and therefore the next way was to assente unto him in his Carnall Desires / And that then she shold lyve in the estate of a gentlewoman in greate quietnes and in no lesse wealeth and felicitie…. after that he begote her with child and caried her to Andiwrappe in Flanders beyoynd the Sease where she was delivered of child who is yet lyvinge and lefte her in there in grete misery as it can be Proved.21
The deposition suggests two cultures at odds: Puttenham’s desire “to Wynne his ungodly purpose” clashes with her “verie godly mynde.” As a result, he abandons his initial seduction, modeled on the “faire wordes and rewardes” of rhetorical manuals and love lyrics, and instead “dayly so beate her.” He turns from glorious and painted speeches to physical assaults, from rhetoric to violence, and thus substantiates the implicit—and sometimes quite explicit—associations that would later appear in The Art, in which a lady who “was a little perverse and not disposed to reform herself by hearing reason” must have reason “beat into [her] ignorant head” by “the well-spoken and eloquent man” (225).22 In response to Champneys’s coerced consent, Puttenham promises that she will live like a gentlewoman, but this life of “quietnes” and “felicitie” instead mutates into a life of exile on the continent: Puttenham took the pregnant Champneys to Antwerp and abandoned her there.
Champneys was not Puttenham’s only, last, or even most pitiable victim, and her brief story is simply one of the many pieces of evidence Lady Windsor marshaled to support her case for divorce. But I would suggest a literary afterlife for this young woman, an alternative to what Woolf imagined for Shakespeare’s sister and Puttenham imagined for brides on their wedding nights, in the manuscript life of an early modern English nun. The historical link between these two women is speculative and circumstantial—a coincidence of names, dates, and locations that may or may not point to a shared life—but exploring it suggests the importance of being attuned to the omissions that have erased Catholic women from English literary history and the texts written by and about nuns and recusant women that were essential to that history. Steven W. May has suggested that “Puttenham’s Art, stripped of its bogus connections with the court, now deserves a thorough reassessment of its actual, and still significant, place in literary history.”23 But I would suggest that the fabrications and exaggerations at the heart of Puttenham’s treatise have always been essential to The Art’s “actual … place in literary history.” Puttenham mythologized not only himself and his relationship to the court but also early modern England and its literature as that literature was being written. The unsavory life that lies behind the courtly work was just one of the many historical narratives that his project obscured through its choice of emphasis. In The Art, Puttenham “constructed his identity—for himself, for his readers, and for us. For himself especially, such an identity might help displace that other, decidedly historical one.”24 At the same time, he was one of many authors who constructed an identity for English literature that helped to displace another, decidedly historical one. His biography illuminates the relationship between these two literary histories: one centered on a Protestant Queen as the principal maker within a nonetheless masculine poetic culture, and the other written through, against, and by women whose religious beliefs, geographical positions, and social standing have relegated them to the footnotes of literary criticism—or, as Puttenham might describe them, “perverse” women “not disposed to reform” themselves. To recognize the latter, we must acknowledge both the silences at the heart of canonical literature and the revelations of the archive, which together enable a more nuanced understanding of how literary responses to Catholic Englishwomen and their own remarkable literary practice offered alternatives to the nascent narratives of Protestant England.
* * *
By losing an “s” and shifting from legal depositions to manuscript life, Mary Champneys transforms into Mary Champney,25 who “professed at Messaghen not farre from Antwerpe” with the English Bridgettine nuns of Syon in 1569, at twenty-one.26 Such a transformation—impregnated and abandoned woman turned bride of Christ—may seem unlikely, yet The Life and Good End of Sister Marie, an anonymous manuscript focused on Mary Champney’s life as a nun, reveals a number of striking parallels between the two young women.27 Both hold the position of “waytinge gentlewoman” and “goe over the sea” to Antwerp (2v). Champney is soon “tempted with a marveilous longinge desire to returne again into Englande, thinkinge every daye a yeare, untill shee might so doe” (2v)—a feeling akin to Champneys’s “grete misery” at being left on the continent. Their chronologies offer similar overlaps: Champneys’s pregnancy occurred sometime after September 1564,28 and her trip could have taken place in either 1565/1566 or 1567.29 Champney spent enough time in the Antwerp area prior to her profession in 1569 to seek counsel from the Jesuits and participate “in further conference of with some of the good Nunnes about Antwerpe” (3r).30 These two women also had employers with Catholic tendencies: there is evidence to suggest that Lady Windsor was a Catholic, including the “copes, vestments, mass books, and other religious contraband” found in the home she shared with Puttenham in 1569.31 While this would not necessarily determine the doctrinal allegiance of her waiting woman, the home was a powerful devotional space for nonconformists, and Catholic women worked to maintain and expand their faith through the religious education of children and servants. Mary Champneys, who resisted Puttenham with “a verie godly mynde disposed” thus may have had a formative experience like that of Mary Champney, who served “one of good worshippe” and was drawn from a young age to the religious life (2v).32
The circumstances connecting Mary Champneys to Mary Champney may not have an “actual … place in literary history,” yet allowing for the possibility that they are the same woman does offer a fresh perspective on that history. The Life and Good End of Sister Marie reveals that the literary culture constructed by Puttenham in The Art was contested in the lived practice of early modern nuns, for whom literary forms and figures did not serve as signs of royal or patriarchal authority but instead structured modes of political resistance and patterns of devotion. The rhetorical and literary skill that Puttenham located at the heart of the Elizabethan court was just as much in evidence in the nomadic book cultures supported by the English convents in exile, and, when read in relationship to The Art, texts like Champney’s manuscript life compellingly critique a poetic culture predicated on female silence.
Champney is the dynamic and articulate literary subject at the center of a text that draws heavily on hagiography and romance in its rejection of the ascendancy of a heroic narrative of English Protestantism. She was one of a number of Bridgettines to travel back into England when war in the Low Countries threatened the convent in the late 1570s. A group of young nuns left the dangers of life on the continent only to face a difficult journey across the channel and possible imprisonment in England, where they worked to secure patronage for the convent and support the Catholic cause through missionary activities.33 Champney died in England in 1580, and The Life was written in the same year. It details her calling to the Bridgettine order, the perils of her travels, and her good death. Mary Champney’s life, according to the anonymous author of the manuscript, was “well worthie to be written for the memorye of so rare a virgin, raysed upp of god in the middest of a stiff-necked nation” (2r). To a modern reader, this virgin does seem like a rarity: a pious yet outspoken early modern English nun who leaves her monastic enclosure, narrowly avoids the seduction of an English captain in the Low Countries, and inspires her countrymen in England through “the light of her good example” (2r). But the manuscript also makes clear that Champney was not alone: she was one of many women whose “good examples of their virtue since their coming over had donne more good to their Cowntrye by gods sweete disposinge, then ever their tarryinge in Machlin had bene able” (15r).34 As scholars such as Ann M. Hutchison and Claire Walker have argued, the individual circumstances of Champney’s death in an English recusant household exemplified and advanced the collective work of these early modern nuns: her deathbed demeanor inspired one of her countrymen to provide the order with printed devotional books and money for the profession of new sisters, and the account of her life was likely written in order to garner additional material and political support for the English convents in exile.35
To achieve these pragmatic ends, The Life and Good End of Sister Marie adapts a hagiographical pattern to post-Reformation Catholicism in order to offer a model for other English Catholics.36 Yet the text’s didacticism does not foreclose attention to questions of form. Instead, its didactic purpose depends upon narrative structures that undercut linear progressions—from birth to death, virgin to wife, Catholic to Protestant.37 While the manuscript begins with a brief reference to Champney’s birth and life before the convent, it turns almost immediately to the visions that anticipated her profession, along with a description of her eventual entrance into the convent and adjustment to religious life. Champney’s vows serve as the true beginning of the narrative, but the author self-consciously disrupts the expected linear progression with a first-person interjection: “Well I must yet retire backe agayne from entringe into discription of her deathe: to declare first a little more of some poyntes of her life: But first I will compare the manner of her extraordinarye callinge … unto the like callinge of an other sister of the same house, which died also in England since their cominge over” (5r). In other words, the central focus of the narrative is nominally Champney’s death, and yet the author repeatedly jumps forward and backward in time, anticipating and sometimes describing deathbed scenes in juxtaposition with details drawn from Champney’s life. This fragmented structure is further disrupted by a brief narrative of the life and death of a second nun, Anne Stapleton. Stapleton’s “like callinge” appears immediately after the story of Champney’s initial profession, and it echoes both the beginning and ending of the latter’s life, though not the narrative structure of The Life. Like Champney, Stapleton has a prophetic dream in which God prompts her to lead a religious life, and she eventually dies “also in Englande verie blessedlie” (5v). This brief interjection, which shows precisely how unremarkable Champney is, precedes a catalogue of her remarkable qualities and the incidents that exemplify them: “meeknes in spirit,” “devocyon in gods service,” “workes of penance,” and “abstinence of diett” (6r–7r). And yet even these vignettes from Champney’s life in the convent, ostensibly offered as evidence of her incomparable devotion, are in fact examples of “straighte keepinge of her rule” (6v). Champney thus demonstrates the commonalities of those women who endured exile for their faith even as she is singled out for her individual expression of communal characteristics.
Stapleton’s story is one of a number of narrative discontinuities in The Life that together underscore the tensions in writing the life of a young woman who does not actually seem all that unusual: Champney’s life in the convent is echoed in the obituaries of countless other early modern nuns.38 Even her trip to England is distinguished primarily by her death, in contrast to the varied experiences of some of her companions. Elizabeth Sander, for example, endured imprisonment by English authorities and eventually found her way back to the Syon community, where she recorded her own narrative in a letter that eventually appeared in multiple printed editions.39 To make Champney’s story seem exceptional, the author of the manuscript life borrows not simply the tropes of hagiography (visions, a calling to monastic life, an exemplary death) but also the elements of a romance, most notably in the nuns’ journey to England. After “holye gospellers” invade other convents in the area, a regiment of English soldiers offers, “ether of pollecye or of curtesie,” to escort members of the Syon community back to England (9r). The interpretive problem that accompanies this offer—is this a political maneuver or a courteous gesture?—shapes an encounter between Champney and one of the English captains that serves as a rebuke to the political and cultural values of English Protestantism under Queen Elizabeth.
In this remarkable passage of the manuscript, the captain practices with fair words and rewards, much like Puttenham with the other Mary Champneys: he claims “she shoulde not lacke for golde nor pearls, if shee would be his dearlinge” (9v). But she rejects his attempted sexual seduction and (probably specious) offer of marriage, and the author’s omniscient narration allows us to imagine a voice for Puttenham’s Champneys and an alternative to The Art’s violent image of married love:
Say you so sir (quoth shee) well cease these filthie speeches to me, wayinge my profession made (saithe shee) at your perill, well knowinge, as you will perchaunce to your payne, if you tempte god to farre, whose Spowse by solempe vowe I am professed & consecrated, though most unworthie of the honor: beholde here my weddinge ringe (quoth shee) which I weare, wherewith I am alredye wedded to my lorde & Savioure to live & die his trewe handmaide in holie chastitie for any temptinge or threatninge in this worlde, As for golde & coyne (quoth shee) I renownced the towchinge of it by my profession, which my harte is to keepe & continewe in my cloyster, and therefore I weighe it as chaffe. (9v)
Champney proclaims her marriage to Christ, reminding her Protestant interlocutor that his virgin queen is not the only woman devoted to chastity outside marriage. Her response simultaneously rejects the language of seduction—transformed here into nothing more than “filthie speeches”—and the captain’s religious politics, which he makes explicit in the suggestion that she might live like the “Princes of Orenge, which had ben a Nune” (9v). This reference to William I’s third wife, Charlotte of Bourbon, who abandoned her vows in 1572, provokes Champney to condemn the transition from Catholic to Protestant as vehemently as that from virgin to wife: “As for the paynted princes of Orenge, whome I shoulde be in such credit with, I detest her, as accursed of god, for slaunder which she hath broughte to religion: Such an other Nunne (quoth shee) belike as Luther was a frier” (9v). She compares both Charlotte of Bourbon and Luther to Judas, suggesting that their apostasy is no more a reflection on her religious life than Judas’s betrayal of the other apostles.
This dramatic encounter suggests that The Life and Good End of Sister Marie is a text with literary aspirations as well as religious and political goals—but Champney is no virgin martyr or Lucrece. Rather than providing English Catholics with a foundational transgression against which they could position themselves and a ruined body upon which they could rebuild their religion in England,40 Champney’s narrative reveals her rhetorical skills and raises the possibility that Catholic women might change perceptions of both their sex and their faith through individual oral arguments and written testimonies. Her “wise and vehement speeches,” underscored by the author’s repeated use of “quoth she,” leave the captain “so astonyed that he little thoughte to have founde such a Paragon, perceavinge nowe, and so it was told him by his counsellors, that all his labor aboute his purpose with her, or with any of the rest of that spirit woulde be but lost” (10r). The rhetorical skills of an English nun triumph over the persuasive capabilities of her countryman fighting on behalf of the Protestant forces in the Low Countries. Champney is simultaneously “such a Paragon” and one of many potential nuns “of that spirit” who could prove equally effective in a battle of wits and faith. These women would not allow themselves to be corrupted or converted by the Englishmen in the Low Countries who were fighting to advance international Protestantism. Instead, they engaged religious controversy on their own terms in manuscripts and printed books that recorded their educational and missionary activities as well as the details of life within their enclosures.
The possibility that Mary Champney, Bridgittine nun and early modern virago, is the same Mary Champneys who gave birth to George Puttenham’s illegitimate child and was left in misery on the continent is tantalizingly inconclusive. But this onomastic coincidence nonetheless suggests that competing narratives of—and alternate perspectives on—English literary history may be reconstructed with careful attention to manuscripts, local record offices, and continental archives. Literary criticism is still overwhelmingly influenced by late Elizabethan, male-authored Protestant narratives of the development of English literature and its relationship to early modern social, political, and religious change: the representations of The Art have entered and possessed our minds, making it difficult for us to recognize the influence of Catholic women on a significant chapter in the history of English literature. Yet Champney’s encounter with the captain suggests that counter narratives are possible: that not every woman is a bride and/or a victim, and that texts by and about Catholic women—the poems of the Scottish Queen, the legal documents of Puttenham’s wife, the manuscripts of early modern nuns—offer alternatives to a literary history that attempts to efface them. This book shows that uncovering the forgotten texts of Catholic women can help us learn new things about even well-known canonical literature by authors such as Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, and Marvell—and thus enable us to remake our understanding of English literary history.
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The defining narratives of early modern England, fashioned by sixteenth-and seventeenth-century authors and reified by later histories, cast nuns as the relics of an unenlightened past and equate Catholic femininity with the dangerous charms of the Whore of Babylon.41 In recent decades, as historians and literary critics have uncovered the myriad ways that Catholicism continued to matter in post-Reformation England, nuns and recusant women have been recognized for their role in maintaining Catholic religious practice,42 and manuscript recovery work has revealed a remarkable and still growing body of texts associated with the early modern English convents.43 Yet these manuscripts and printed books have not yet led to a holistic reassessment of crucial decades in the development of English literary history—decades that overlapped with the establishment of new English cloisters on the continent—or of the texts and authors foundational to our contemporary canon. While Catholic women helped to craft a language for religious and political concepts such as obedience and chastity and to shape England’s literary culture in the decades following the dissolution of the monasteries, the significance of women such as Margaret Clitherow, butcher’s wife and martyr, and Winefrid Thimelby, Augustinian prioress and letter writer, was effaced in their own time and has been mostly forgotten in ours.
England’s religion was far from settled even in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign, and at various moments it was possible to imagine a Catholic future for the state, its ruler, and its subjects.44 At the same time, doctrinal affiliation had grown increasingly complex: both English Catholicism and English Protestantism were marked by internal debates regarding liturgical practice, the space of worship, and political allegiance, to name just a few of the questions central to the shaping of confessional identities in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe.45 Thus, I use terms like “Protestant” and “Catholic” flexibly, attending to internal divisions when they are relevant to my analysis: when, for example, debates over church attendance and religious conformity shape the representation of a committed recusant like Clitherow, or when the conflicts among religious orders regarding monastic spiritual direction rise to the surface in Gertrude More’s theorization of obedience. I am especially interested in the conflicted stances taken by Protestant writers with a range of confessional identities and political affiliations—men and women who struggled to define themselves, and their period, as different from that which came before, and who did so, in part, through depictions of Catholic women as historic relics, superstitious ascetics, or hypocritical Machiavels, all but the last of which faced almost inevitable rehabilitation in a Protestant marriage relationship. But Catholic women resisted any easy demarcation between a Catholic, medieval past and a Protestant, reformed present in both their religious practice and their print and manuscript books, and their diverse engagements with English literary culture offer evidence of the complexities of early modern religious politics.
The English Reformation produced a localized Catholicism that provided women with opportunities and authority not always available to their counterparts in Italy and Spain: since priests and Jesuits were outlawed and, when caught, subject to potential torture and execution, women hid priests, facilitated mass, and took responsibility for the religious education of their children, servants, and neighbors.46 Parliament, meanwhile, had difficulty addressing the threat posed by Catholic women who managed to evade the anti-Catholic statutes because of their positions as wives: under coverture, married women could not control property and were difficult to penalize economically, and the state hesitated to punish husbands (many of whom were at least nominally Protestant) for their wives’ crimes. Thus, contrary to the tenacious notion that Protestantism liberated women from the strictures of a hierarchical and oppressive church—releasing them from the prison of the convent into loving, companionate marriages—the politically subversive choice to be Catholic in England after the Reformation could provide women with opportunities for political, religious, and literary expression that were not necessarily available to their Protestant counterparts or their coreligionists in other countries. As a result, I argue that the traditional literary critical focus on Protestant women, whether conformist or sectarian, should be supplemented with an equivalent acknowledgment of the wide variety of Catholic women who were significant to the literary culture of early modern England.
At the same time that recusant women drew political attention at home, English convents were flourishing abroad. The early seventeenth century saw the establishment of dozens of monastic communities for English women on the continent, including both enclosed, contemplative cloisters and unenclosed orders modeled on the Jesuits.47 Starting in 1598, with the first new English foundation in Brussels, a renewed interest in female monasticism prompted a surge in professions—an uptick that was evident elsewhere in the post-Tridentine church as well, but is all the more remarkable given England’s restrictions on travel beyond the seas and the financial and emotional difficulties involved in enduring exile for one’s faith.48 These two aspects of the practice and perception of female Catholicism in England—on the one hand, the importance of female recusancy to maintaining the faith and, on the other, the popularity and surprising visibility of the English cloisters—provide the central orientation for this book. I thus focus primarily on the 1590s until the 1660s: decades during which women associated with Catholic devotional practice outside the traditional corridors of religious and political power were nonetheless influential in the imaginative construction of English literature.49
In order to demonstrate Catholic women’s significance to early modern literary history, the following chapters cumulatively address three perspectives on the making of English literature. First, my Introduction and Chapter 1 explore Catholic women as objects of representation or erasure. I analyze texts written about nuns and recusant women, such as Mary Champney and Margaret Clitherow, and canonical works that express or repress figurations of Catholic femininity in order to show how writing about Catholic women not only reveals literary historical erasures but also demonstrates that even as Catholic women’s interventions were written out of the canon, their significance was registered formally in the fabric of canonical literary texts. Second, Chapters 2 and 3 explore nuns as authors, revealing their literary and political interventions through detailed close readings that show how their texts demonstrate a rigorous engagement with the very issues and questions that canonical texts represent as preventing their contributions. The monastic writings I analyze here are complex texts that do more than demonstrate nuns’ political engagement or offer clarifying context for well-known plays, and I show how reading them (rather than simply recovering them) offers fresh insights for scholars of early modern literature. Finally, in Chapter 4 and the Epilogue, I trace an alternative genealogy of English literary history, asking what we might discover if Catholic women were positioned at the center of the tradition rather than on the margins. How, for example, does reading certain strands of seventeenth-century poetry—first focusing on a particular family’s recusant and monastic literary community and then on a particular genre—help reveal both the possibility of a more flexible and fluid canon and also the literary interventions that helped to solidify the canon as we know it, erasing Catholic women’s contributions and their significance as literary agents?
Chapter 1 explores the relationship between virgin bodies and narrative insufficiency in the final decades of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander to William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. The twinned threats of female recusancy and revivified monasticism resulted in a crisis of representation centered on female virginity: in Spenser’s and Marlowe’s unfinished poems of the 1590s, female virginity is simultaneously already lost and not yet relinquished, consummation is ambiguous or preordained, and marriage or death is always just over the horizon of the poem’s narrative telos. Bringing together materialist feminist criticism and formalist literary readings, I reveal the suggestive relationship between incomplete narrative structures and vows of virginity. While many scholars have interrogated discourses of chastity in relationship to Elizabeth, I show how Spenser’s conflicted representations of virginity and marriage in The Faerie Queene demonstrate formal ruptures that point to a broader crisis of representation, which suggests that Elizabeth’s use of her virgin status as a sign of royal power did not simply supplant virginity’s close association with Catholic religious devotion. Instead, the increasing social and political importance of recusant women in the wake of Margaret Clitherow’s 1586 execution offered a bridge between monastic vowed virginity and the burgeoning post-Reformation ideal of married chastity. These heterogeneous materials—on the one hand, literary texts in which female virgins occasion textual disruptions and stalled narrative closure and, on the other, historical and legal accounts of recusant women’s political status—ground my reading of the notoriously difficult Isabella of Measure for Measure. The rhetorically powerful female virgins of The Faerie Queene, Hero and Leander, and Measure for Measure locate their social status in vows under near constant attack, whether on the battlefield, in the bedchamber, or at court. These literary depictions of virginity-in-crisis offer oblique responses to the political implications of female recusancy, and I conclude by demonstrating how Shakespeare’s account of incomplete political reform and unresolved marital status in Measure for Measure exhibits formal effects that reveal the extent to which Catholic women were recognized actors on an international stage.
My first chapter traces the discourses associated with Catholic femininity that entered and shaped canonical English literature; Chapter 2 turns to physical objects associated with religious controversy and transformation, such as books and ruins, which Protestant playwrights and pamphleteers invoked in order to obscure Catholic women’s contributions to literary culture. John Webster’s portrait of women seduced and destroyed by the Catholic clerical hierarchy in The Duchess of Malfi is one of many English revenge tragedies that builds upon the language and imagery of anti-Catholic polemic in its portrait of a corrupt religious and political hierarchy. Yet I argue that The Duchess of Malfi not only evokes the standard imagery of Protestant propaganda; it also anticipates the specific textual concerns of pamphleteers writing in the ensuing decade, as the proposed Spanish Match prompted scrutiny of the English convents in exile. Webster’s attention to the spiritual traces of the past and the material dangers of the present gives vivid life to the tenacious idea that Catholic women—and especially nuns—were at the mercy of priests and their poisonous books. Fears of a corrupt monastic book culture influenced pamphleteers such as Thomas Robinson, whose influential exposé of Syon Abbey, The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon, imagined textual control at the root of sexual depravity. The Anatomy was one of the best known anti-Catholic pamphlets in early modern England, and it remains a popular resource for both historians and literary critics. This chapter thus addresses the persistence of pejorative representations of Catholic women and the book, despite the fact that the nuns of Syon participated in both print and manuscript culture throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I identify how Robinson’s rhetorical and representational strategies work to efface female contributions to monastic book culture, and examine the strategies used by members of the convent to refute his claims in a manuscript response written in the months following the first printing of his pamphlet. By examining this rare surviving example of direct female monastic engagement with Protestant propaganda, I shed light not only on the relationship between print and manuscript publication in the early modern period, but also offer a corrective to the idea that Catholic women were victims of, rather than participants in and shapers of, early modern book culture.
Building on this exploration of monastic book culture, Chapter 3 shows how nuns’ devotional reading and writing functioned as a form of active political participation in post-Reformation religious conflicts. Members of the English Benedictine convents in Cambrai and Paris interrogated the status of women’s political and religious obedience during a particularly fraught period of approximately thirty years—from the beginning of Charles I’s reign to the aftermath of the English Civil War—when both Catholics and Puritans confronted the competing claims of temporal and spiritual authorities. Writers during this period drew on century-old debates over Henry VIII’s royal supremacy, including nuns who modified earlier writings on the limits of political authority in reflections on their own religious practice. Most striking is Dame Gertrude More, one of the founding members at Cambrai and the great-great-granddaughter of Sir Thomas More, whose The Spiritual Exercises invoked her famous ancestor and his martyrdom in order to emphasize the link between a long tradition of English Catholic political resistance and her own community in exile. Gertrude More’s defense of spiritual independence reveals that clerical authority did not produce unthinking obedience on the part of female monastics and that nuns remained central to the concept, the practice, and the subversion of obedience long after the Reformation. My analysis of More’s devotional writing not only further undermines the limited representations of Catholic femininity created by authors such as Webster and Thomas Robinson, it also helps reveal the limits of allegory in the most overtly political play of the early seventeenth century, Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess. The symbiotic relationship between Protestant propaganda and the English stage outlined in my previous chapter also fueled Middleton’s drama, a political allegory staged after marriage negotiations between Prince Charles and the Infanta Maria of Spain collapsed. Middleton borrowed extensively from Robinson, and yet the play’s only nun—the Black Queen’s Pawn—is a figure of surprising political efficacy who undermines both plot and allegory. In his pawns’ plot, Middleton imagined what an autonomous nun might look like: a religious woman alienated from Catholic hierarchies and uninfluenced by conventional alliances. By reading More’s theory of obedience alongside Middleton’s play, I demonstrate how the concept of obedience offered a rich literary resource to both nuns and their political adversaries, provoking reflections on political authority and religious faith that ultimately collapse rigid doctrinal distinctions and the conventions associated with certain genres and literary forms.
Convention and poetic tradition are more directly explored and upended in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, which incorporates both the pejorative and the celebratory strains of literature focused on female monasticism, and in the literary practice of a recusant Catholic community scattered throughout England and continental Europe. In my final chapter, I show how the manuscript poems and letters of the Aston, Fowler, and Thimelby families reveal the limits of Cavendish’s depiction of female community as the impetus for intellectually engaged and generically heterogeneous literary production. Through these poems and letters, which draw upon the theory and practice of devotional verse expounded by Catholic poet and martyr Robert Southwell, as well as the secular poetry of John Donne, a more ambiguous poetic predecessor for committed recusants, I explore the particularities of English Catholic poetic practice in the mid-seventeenth century, when networks of readers and writers mixed strictly religious poetry and prose with a broad range of written materials, from pastoral poetry to love letters. Repositioning Catholic women at the center of the literary communities to which they were so essential reveals a more capacious literary history and helps to uncover the poetic interventions that contributed to the formation of our relatively narrow canon of early modern literature, including Andrew Marvell’s striking dispossession of female monasticism in Upon Appleton House. While Marvell acknowledges that communities associated with the convent offered a space for literary production, he supplants a history of female community with the promise of exceptional Protestant individualism in his concluding portrait of the young Maria Fairfax and her future marriage. Cavendish’s representation of the convent as a space for cultural production offers a more current vision of female community but it too is quite limited when compared to the prolific writings of her Catholic female contemporaries, whose texts reveal the remarkable generic and formal complexity of recusant literary culture. Nonetheless, even as Cavendish’s utopian vision of convent life falls short of the dynamic devotional and literary practice of seventeenth-century English nuns and recusant women, The Convent of Pleasure demonstrates that Catholic women’s literary engagements remained vital to the imaginative landscape of early modern England.
Yet the vibrant literary practices of Catholic women in post-Reformation England have largely disappeared from narratives of English literary history. My Epilogue explores this oversight through a brief survey of seventeenth-century Passion poems, which reveal a moment at which a broader understanding of that history was still possible. Through brief readings of perspective and subjectivity in the work of poets of different religious aesthetics and political affiliations, I analyze the formal strategies that contributed to a critical discourse in which Catholic women were exiled from English literature as supposedly foreign intrusions into post-Reformation Protestant poetics. To read Catholic women out of this tradition is, I argue, to create an English literary history much like John Milton’s “The Passion”: unsatisfying and incomplete. Catholic women’s manuscripts and printed books necessitate a fresh look at early modern religious and literary culture, and this book demonstrates how their politically incendiary and rhetorically powerful lyrics, prayers, polemics, and hagiographical lives can reshape our understanding of both the canonical and noncanonical literature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.
