Enshrining Idolatry in The Faerie Queene

JAMES KEARNEY

Enshrining Idolatry in The Faerie Queene

MID A SUCCESSION of quips playing on the materiality of the text A in the “Induction” to his Unfortunate Traveler (1594), Thomas Nashe stipulates that “it shalbe lawfull for anie whatsoeuer to play with false dice in a corner on the couer of this foresaid Acts and monuments.”’ Slyly subverting John Foxe’s magsterial volume, Nashe here equates the Acts and Monuments, as Jesse Lander notes, with “a piece of furniture.”2 That he does so suggests the cultural currency that the Acts and Mon- uments enjoyed. With little evidence to go on, historians and literary critics have, perhaps, over-emphasized the status of the Book of Murtyvs as a widely-read d0cument.j Not enough emphasis has been placed, however, on the book’s importance as cultural icon.4 Whether or not Eliza- bethans actually knew their Foxe, they certainly knew of it, were aware of its presence, and accorded it a significant place within the culture. Mocking its massive inertness and potentially useful surface area, Nashe’s irreverent barb not only suggests that the book is seen less as a text to be read than as a physical monument, but carries an extra sting insofar as the

I. Thomas Nashe, The Vnjortunate Traueller. or, T h e Lije ojJacke Wilton ( I 594, p. 6; sig. A4v. 2. Jesse Lander, “Foxe’s Book ojMartyrs: Printing and Popularizing the Acts and Monuments,”

Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachem and Debora Shuger (Cambridge, Eng., 199% p. 69.

3 . The evidence most often cited is the canon of I 571 that commanded that Foxe’s book, along with “the Hollie Bible in the largest volume,” should be found in the house of every bishop and the house and cathedral of every dean; but it tells us little about readmg practices, especially since there is no evidence that the injunction was enforced. See Lander, p. 70.

4. That the purpose of the massive tome was iconic is suggested by Foxe’s desire that readers not only “diligently peruse such Monuments of Martyrs” but “lay them alwayes in sight” (Actes and Monuments [London, 15961, sig. y5v). Comparing his seven-year revision ofthe Acts and Monu- ments with Solomon’s seven-year construction of the Temple, Foxe suggests that the creation of his opus was analogous to an architectural endeavor (sig. qzv).

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iconicity of books was a vexed issue for the Reformed readers of Foxe’s Protestant hagiography.

Just before Nashe establishes the lawfulness of gaming on his work, he suggests that if the reader is one who is “wont to sweare men on a pantofle,” he should “sweare them on nothing but” his Unfrtunate Traveler.’ Swearing on any object was just the kind of idolatrous practice that was anathema to the more reformed Protestants. It was decried within the pages of Acts and Monuments as both superstitious and the work of antichrist.6 And Nashe is not merely advocating swearing on objects in general, but on books in particular. Alluding to the controversial practice of swearing on the Bible, Nashe here offers his text as surrogate Scripture, lowering the stakes and ridiculing the practice by making the analogue not another book but a “pantofle,” or slipper. Swearing on a pantofle, however, was not an innocent practice, as it called to mind the “Ceremony of the Pantofle,” the kissing ofthe pope’s slipper, a practice which to the Reform-minded was an abomination. This practice appears again and again in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments as an example of idolatrous Catholic pomp. Mockingly setting up his own farcical tome as both Catholic Bible and Protestant hagiography, as both Reformation icon and Catholic idol, Nashe is acting as an equal opportunity scourge. In doing so, he suggests that Foxe’s tome is merely monumental, a statuesque text ripe for iconoclastic toppling.

That authorized Protestant works like Foxe’s Acts and Monuments might signitjr as material icons rather than as texts that transcend their own corporeality was problematic for Reformers. Protestants had attempted to “liberate” the Word of God from behind the barriers imposed by the Catholic Church: the priest’s interpretive authority, the linguistic difficul- ties imposed by Latin, the wall of scholastic commentary, and the plethora of ancillary books and texts (breviaries, horae, Psalters, missals, graduals) that circulated in the Catholic devotional universe.’ They saw themselves

5 . Nashe, p. 6; sig. A4v. 6. Among other references to swearing on the book, Foxe records the response of the godly

Lollard William Thorpe to the request of his Catholic inquisitor that he swear on the Bible: “But sir I praie you tell me, if after your bidding, I shall lay my hand vpon the booke, to what entent: to sweare thereby? And the archbishop said to me, yea, wherefore else? And I said to him: Sir a booke is nothing else but a thinge coupled together of diuers creatures, and to sweare by any creature both Gods lawe & mans lawe is against it” (p. 487; sig. 3A4.).

7. Under the rubric “Bookes of Latin seruice called in and abolished,” Foxe records Edward VI’s “cornmandement to the bishops” to “bring in and deliuer vp all Antiphoners, Missales, Grailes, Processionals, Manuals, Legendes, Pies, Pormases, Journals, and Ordinals & all other books ofsemice, the hauing whereof might be anie let to the seruice now set forth in Enghsh.” They are to “take

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as engaged in a crusade both to return to the original text and to bring that text to all Christians. Moreover, Protestant iconoclasts, repeatedly attacking Catholic images as false substitutes for the true Word, esteemed the Bible as the antithesis of, and antidote to, idolatry. Foxe’s Acts and Monuments contains a woodcut in which Justice balances “the weight and substance of Gods most blessed word against the doctrines and vanities of mans traditions”; in the woodcut the scales are clearly tipped in favor of a single Bible over and against a mass of Catholic apparatus including crosses, rosaries, and papal decretals (Figure I).

Not only did the vernacular Bible become the central symbol of the Reformed Enghsh Church, but the written word emerged as the medium of the properly iconoclastic truth. During the Edwardian Reformation, images on the walls ofchurches were whitewashed and written over with texts from Scripture, often the second commandment against the worship- ping of false gods.* The word “monument” in the title of Foxe’s Protest- ant hagiography suggests the way in which English Reformers turned to the written word as the medium of Reformed truth. In the early modem period, “monument” could refer to a “written document. . . [or] record,” or a “piece of information given in writing,” as well as a “carved figure, statue, effigy,” or a “structure, edifice, or erection intended to commem- orate a notable person, action, or event,” according to the Oxcford English Dictionary. The title of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments not only sets up his history as a continuation ofthe Acts ofthe Apostles, but (woodcuts notwith- standing) plays on the word “monument” to suggest that the memorial icons of the English Protestants properly reside in the realm of writing.

The iconoclastic act of replacing the images and idols of the Roman Church with writing and the Word of God inevitably led to the accusa- tion ofbibliolatry, the charge that Protestants had set up the Bible itself as monument.’ As a self-proclaimed religion of the book that claimed to

the same books into your hands, or into the hands ofyour deputy, and them so deface and abolish, that they never after maye serve” (p. 1211; sig. 6A6.).

8. See John N. King, Eaglish Refmation Literature: The Tudor Origins ofthe Protestant Tradition (Princeton, 1982), p. 147.

9. For an example of the iconography of the reformers’ bookish iconoclasm see Georgette de Montenay’s A Booke ofAmes, or Remembrance, Wherein Are One Hundered Godly Emblemata (Frank- furt, 1619). AsErnest Gilman records, “de Montenayjuxtaposes a plate showing the worship ofthe Golden Calfwith one showing the book of scriptures and she cautions the reader that ‘Gods desire is, that we shall look / Alwayes, in his Beebel-booke.’ ” Gilman, lconoclnrm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago, 1986). p. 92.

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eschew authority not grounded in the text, early modem Protestant- ism was clearly vulnerable to such a charge. Certainly Catholics were quick to denounce the Reformers’ bibliocentric dogma and devotional practices as a form of idolatry, an apotheosis of the book. The Catholic accusations of bibliolatry could be so vehement as to look like attacks on Scripture itself In I 569 the rebels of Durham and Yorkshire ritually burned Enghsh Bibles and prayer books and overthrew communion tables.” Catholics were documented hurling such epithets as “the booke of heretickes, the blacke Gospell, Inke-Divinitie . . . the apple of discord” at the Reformed Bible to denounce the perceived bibliolatry of the Protestants.’* And Catholics were not alone in attacking these false gods in folio. The more iconoclastic Reformers similarly indicted the more “ecclesiastical” versions of Protestantism for the sin of bibliolatry. Claiming that the individual Christian did not need the mediating presence of the Church in order to read the Word of God, the more radically-minded Reformers demonized authorized, ancillary texts as a return to popery, as an idolatrous prosthetic that in supplementing the Word displaced it. In his Shepheards Oracles, Francis Quarles mockingly depicts a radical iconoclast who decries the book most emblematic of English Protestantism, the Book of Common Prayer, as

That paper Idol; that inchaunting Spell; That printed Image, sent from Rome, from Hell; That broad-fac’d Owle, upon a carved Perch; That Be1 and Dragon of the English Church.”

Here, Quarles’s radical turns the iconoclastic fervor of the Reformation toward the insufficiently Reformed Church of England through its material manifestation in the book.

Given that Reformation theology rejected the material trappings of traditional religion in favor of a transcendent communion through the

10. See Eamon Du@, The Stripping ofthe Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven, 1992), p. 583. and Margaret Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Refarmation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), p. 143.

I I . Recorded by Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent o j Change (Cambridge, Eng., 1979), p. 326. In his Dialogue Concerning Heresies, Thomas More argues against the Reforma- tion doctrine of sola scriptura by unleashing a powerful attack on the ability of written language to transmit truth successfully. A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. Thomas M. C. Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour, and Richard C. Marius, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. VI (New Haven, 1981).

12. Francis Quarles, The Shepheards Oracles (1646), p. 91.

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Word, it seems inevitable that tensions might arise around the book as venerated object. These tensions are evident in the idolatrous books and iconoclastic texts of Book I of Spenser’s T h e Faerie Queene.13 Bracketed by Error’s book-ridden vomit (I.i.20) and Duessa’s false “letters” (I.xii.34), the “Legend of Holiness” is Spenser’s meditation on the problem the material book presents for an iconoclastic religon. But the “Legend of Holiness” is not merely a poetic reflection on the problem of bibliolatry; in its allegorical mapping of romance narrative onto Reformed history, it is also an attempt to redeem a traditional English literary language for a Protestant poetics.

It has become a commonplace of Spenser studies that the “Legend of Holiness” is a poetic revision of both Revelation and the apocalyptic version of English history championed by John Bale in his Image ofBoth Churches and dramatized by Foxe’s Acts and Mon~ments.’~ Reformation thinkers like Bale co-opted the Catholic trump card of tradition by re- reading Christian history after the purity of the early Church as the history of two Churches: the Roman Church of antichrist and the underground Church of true believers who stayed faithful to the Word. Foxe took this apocalyptic history and reworked it as an ecclesiastical history of the true English Church. Placing Acts and Monuments next to the Bible as inspira- tion and authority in his “Legend of Holiness,” Spenser rewrites Foxe’s history as a legend of wholeness in which Una, the one True Bride or Church, appears as the Woman Clothed with the Sun from Revelation (12.1-16). England, as the Redcrosse Knight or St. George, wanders in the wilderness of Catholic error until he is reformed in the House of Holiness and reunited with Una, his one Troth.

This mapping of Reformed history onto romance, however, raises an interesting problem: how is it that a poetic revision of Foxe’s iconoclastic history figures England as a knight identified with an iconic red cross, let alone St. George? During the Edwardian Reformation, crosses were systematically removed from the rood screens of churches throughout

1 3 . Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (London, 1978). Sub- sequent citations are in parentheses in the text.

14. The fiat recorded interpretation of The Faerie Queene, John Dixon’s commentary of 1597, demonstrates that readers understood that the poem was an allegory about Revelation from the beginning. See The Fir$[ Commentary on The Faerie Queene, ed. Graham Hough (Folcroft, Penn., 1969). For a foundational reading of Book I and Foxean apocalypse, see Frank Kermode’s “The Faerie Queene, I and V,” in Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (London, 1g71), pp. 33-59.



England and replaced with Edward’s royal coat of arms.15 In Elizabeth’s reign one cross in the entire kingdom stood without fear of iconoclastic reprisal: the cross in the Queen’s royal chapel.16 But the ostentatious red cross is only the most obvious instance of a problem that pervades Spenser’s poem; for the language of Catholicism-the language of pilgrimages and palmers, hermits and beadsmen, rosaries and breviaries-is everywhere in The Faerie Queene. Yet Spenser’s “Legend” is not merely a reiteration of Foxe’s history; it is a re-vision in which the poet fleshes out Foxe’s apocalyptic narrative in the realm ofromance while dwelling on its iconoclastic themes. Strewn with the false books and the scattered, empty husks of textuality that mark Spenser’s panorama of idolatrous Catholicism, the allegorical landscape of Book I is the place where Spenser attempts to negotiate a Protestant poetics that addresses directly the problem of the materiality of the signifier.

I1 From the beginning of Spenser’s “Legend of Holiness,” the problem facing the Redcrosse Knight, as the Christian Everyman and the defender of the one Truth (Una), is learning how to read. Having lost his way in the Wandering Wood, Redcrosse is always in proximity to “Errours den” and will remain so until he defeats Error in its final incarnation as the infernal dragon of Canto 12. A figure for both the fallen world and the fallen word, Spenser’s Wandering Wood is, as many commentators have noted, an allegorical offshoot of the selva oscura of Dante’s Inferno. And as Law- rence Warner has demonstrated, Dante’s sefva oscura can be read as part of the “topos of the Bible-as-forest, which enjoyed wide currency throughout the Middle Ages.”” Tracing the sylvan metaphor from Augustine to

I 5 . King records that “[iln reply to Gardiner’s defense ofthe image as a layman’s book, Seymour argued that only royal emblems deserve homage: ‘the king’s majesty’s images, arms, and ensigns, should be honored and worshipped after the decent order and invention of human laws and ceremonies’ . . . In order to avoid idolatry, Seymour interprets the royal image as a temporal mirror of truth revealed in the Bible” (p. 185) .

16. And even the insufkiently reformed Queen was occasionally subject to iconoclastic assault. Margaret Aston writes that “[iln both 1562 and 1567 some unknown reformer who had more respect for divine law than royal privilege actually carried off the daring exploit of destroying these instruments of idolatry. Iconoclasm in the queen’s own chapel!” England’s Iconoclasts. Volume I :

Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988). p. 3 1 3 . 17. Lawrence Warner, “The Dark Wood and the Dark Word in Dante’s Comrnedia,” Com-

parative Literature Studies 32 (I995), 450.


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Bonaventure, Warner argues that the trope was, by the time that Dante was writing, as appropriate to the difficulty of making one’s way through the daunting forest of biblical exegesis as it was to problems of contend- ing with the obscurities of the Word. In the Breviloquium, Bonaventure captures both senses ofthe metaphor: “These truths are so widely difhsed throughout the works of saints and doctors that they could not all be read or heard by Scriptural students even in a long time. Beginners in the study of theology, in fact, often dread the Scripture itself, feeling it to be as confusing, orderless, and uncharted as some impenetrable forest” (p. 457). In Spenser’s textual forest the Redcrosse Knight is “brought to” Error’s Cave after “hunting” for a way out of the dark wood “by tract” (I.i.1 I) .

Reading “tract” as both “Course, path, way, route . . . track” and “a book or written work” (OED) suggests that Spenser’s Wandering Wood is, among other things, an allegorical representation ofthe obscurity ofboth Scripture and the never-ending exegesis of the glossators.

Paradoxically, Spenser’s poetic “labyrinth” is a guide for godly reading, and he re-forms both Redcrosse and his reader by making them wander through the Error ofhis poem to one truth.18 Their adversary in this heuristic ewure (L. wandering) is Archimago, the Spenserian embodiment of idolatrous misreading. The reader is made aware of Archimago’s satanic nature through the sorcerer’s consultation with “His Magick bookes and artes of sundry kindes” (1.1.36). Through these “balefull bookes” (I.i.z), the black magician

choosing out few wordes most horrible, (Let none them read) thereof &d verses fi-ame With which and other spelles like temble, He bad awake blacke Plutoes psly Dame, And cursed heaven, and spake reprochfull shame Of hghest God, the Lord of life and light. (I.i.37)

Read through a Reformed lens, these “balefull bookes” figure the perverted texts of the Roman Catholic Church. They seem to ally Spenser’s

I 8. My understanding of the heuristic effects of the hermeneutic wandering of the Redcrosse Knight and the reader is indebted to Leigh DeNeef, Spenser and the Motives ofMetaphor (Durham, 1982), David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics ofthe 1590 “Faerie Queene” (Princeton, 1988), Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics o f a Mode (Princeton, 1979) and Maureen Quilligan, The Language ofrlllegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, 1979). My conception of Spenserian iconoclasm is made possible by Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Re-

formation; John N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Refomation Tradition (Princeton, 1990); and David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London, 1984).

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“Legend of Holiness” with that aspect of iconoclastic Reformation thought which read both the sacralized object and verbal incantation as belonging to the realm of antichrist. l9 Spenser’s allegory concretizes and dramatizes the common Protestant rhetorical claim that Catholic priests were wizards and sorcerers by showing Archimago as a diviner of secret and bookish knowledge. As Keith Thomas observes, in “Protestant mythology the Middle Ages became notorious as the time of darkness, when spells and charms had masqueraded as religion and when the lead in magical activity had been taken by the clergy themselves. Scholastic learning was said to have included the arts of divination, and numerous English clerics, from Dunstan to Cardinals Morton and Wolsey, were portrayed as sorcerers who had dabbled in diabolic arts. An enormous list of Popes who had been conjurers, sorcerers or enchanters was put in circulation; and it included ad eighteen pontiffs between Sylvester I1 and Gregory VII.” Moreover, in “the reign ofElizabeth I . . . the term ‘conjurer’ came to be a synonym for recusant priest. Bishop Richard Davies reminded the Welsh people of the ‘superstitions, charms and incantations’ which had formed the religion of popish times, and a Puritan manifesto described the Church of Rome as the source of ‘all wicked sorcery.’ A Yorkshire Protestant, shown a batch of Roman indulgences in 1586, could re- cognize them immediately as ‘witchcrafts, and papistry’.”20 While some Protestants maintained that the Catholic Church actually had dealings with demonic forces, other more rationalist Reformers used the accusa- tion of witchcraft to portray Catholic priests as charlatans preying upon the superstitious. Spenser’s allegory is peculiar because it attempts to have it both ways. For Archimago seems to be both powerful conjurer and duplicitous fraud.

Although the invocation of Archimago’s “Magick bookes” is the first explicit revelation ofkchimago’s diabolical practices in The Faerie Qtreene, Spenser throws suspicion on the orthodoxy of the “aged Sire” from his introduction into the poem. The two signs that mark the heterodoxy of the “godly father” are a superstitious beliefin the sanctity ofmaterial things and an equally false faith in the power of mechanical devotional practice. From his “dewly” rehearsing “holy things each morne and euentyde”

19. As Kenneth Gross argues, “within the Protestant allegory ofBook I” these “balefullbookes” through which Archimago frames his verses “must be read as figures for the falsely sacralized books, authorities, or ‘revelations’ of the Roman Church.” Spensen’an Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca, 1985), p p . 103-04.

20. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline OfMagic (New York, 1y71), pp. 68-69.


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(I.i.34) to his constant repetition of the “Aue-Mary” (I.i.3 s), Archimago’s discourse is branded as that of a Catholic hypocritically or ignorantly re- peating empty formulae. Equally erroneous to the Reformed reader are his seeming faith in the beads that he bids “all day for his trespas” (I.i.30), and the physical place of his hermitage with its “holy Chapell” and “sacred fountaine” (I.i.34). This false faith in empty words and the worthless trinkets of this world manifests itself in the first clue to Archimago’s heterodoxy, his girdle book. When the Redcrosse Knight and Una first “chaunst to meet” Archimago “vpon the way,” they see “An aged Sire, in long blacke weedes yclad, / His feete all bare, his beard all hoarie gray. / And by his belt his booke he hangng had” (I.i.29). The book which “by his belt . . . he hanging had” is not a sign of Archimago’s devotion to Scripture, but the first clue to Archimago’s affiliation with the various perversions of the Word found in Spenser’s “Legend of Holiness.” Usually a Bible, a breviary or some other devotional aid, the early modem girdle book was used in Protestant iconography as a marker both of the Catholic’s sanctimonious show of adherence to the Word and his superstitious faith in the physical elements of religious devotion (Figure 2). 1dentift.ing Archimago as either hypocritical fiaud or superstitious idolater, the girdle book allies him with the Reformed iconography of the faithless papist.

In Stephen Bateman’s Christall Glass ofRefoonnation, one finds a series of woodcuts depicting Catholic vices and reformed virtues in which the proper and improper use of books and scripture figure prominently.*’ The “proper” relation to the Word of God is depicted in a woodcut portraying Faith. In this woodcut a figure dressed in the Pauline ‘‘armor of a Christian man” stands astride the defeated devil and gazes up at a sun which blazes forth with the light of the Hebraic letters of the tetragrammaton (Figure 3).” Believing that knowledge of the original scriptural languages helped erase the distance between the faithful Christian and the Word, learned Protestants made a point of embracing Hebrew and Greek over and against the Latin of the Catholic Vulgate. And in this woodcut, the iconic force of the untranslated tetragrammaton is used to signifjr the unmediated communion between the Word of God and the believer who

21. Stephen Bateman, A Chistall Glasse ofChristian Refmation (1569). 23. In the Epistle to the Ephesians, Paul writes, “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord,

and in the power of his might. Put on the whole amour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the assauts of the deuil . . . Aboue all, take the shield of faith, wherewith ye may quench all the fyne dartes of the wicked. And take the helmet of saluation, and the sworde of the Spirit, which is the worde of God” (6.10-17, Geneva Bible 1560).


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has “put on Christ” (Romans I 3 . I 4). Similarly, the plain iconic cross on the Pauline shield is used here to signi@ both the iconoclastic simplicity of Faith as well as that icon of England, St. George. Paradoxically, the iconicity of both the tetragrammaton and St. George is used to figure a certain iconoclastic directness and transcendent immediacy.

Other woodcuts from Christull Glusse illustrate the contrast between Faith’s properly reformed relation to Scripture and that of the Catholic who turns the Word into an idol. The woodcuts depicting Envy, Slander, and Lechery portray profligate friars with conspicuous girdle books (Figures 4, 5 ,6 , and 7).23 In the illustration oflechery, not only does the lascivious friar wear a girdle book, but so does the “deuill Dicux, a re- procher ofwickednes, and a rayler agaynst the veritie” (Figure 7). Foxe’s Acts and Monuments similarly employs the girdle book as an emblem of the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the Papists (Figures 8,g, 10, I I , and 12). The woodcut depicting villainous “Friers pulling [John] Bilney out of the pulpit” dramatically illustrates the Reformers’ relationship to Scripture by showing how Bilney, the godly preacher, is literally dragged away from the holy vocation of dsseminating God’s Word by a fiiar who wears a perversion of the Word at his belt as if it were a personal charm (Figure 8). The juxtaposition of Scripture as meaningful action in the world and the Word as ossified artifact is powerfully materialized in the woodcut.24

In the text of Acts and Monuments, however, Foxe also employs the girdle book as an emblem of Protestant faithfulness to the Word of God. Depicting the degradation and execution of Hugh Latimer, Foxe lingers over a description of Latimer’s apparel. Brought before the Bishop of Lincoln for examination, Latimer appeared “wearing an old threed bare Bristow frise gown girded to his body with a peny leather girdle, at the which hanged by a long string ofleather his Testament, and his spectacles

23. In the interlude Lustyjuventus, the Vice Hypocrisy counsels the protagonist: “Let your book at your girdle be tied, / Or else in your bosom that he may be spied, / And then it will be said both with youth and age, / Yonder fellow hath an excellent knowledge.” Lustyjuventus (ISSO) in Four Tudor Interludes, ed. J. A. B. Somerset (London, 1974). pp. 687-90.

24. In another woodcut depicting “The burning ofmaister Wylliam Tindall,” Foxe dramatizes the death of the man who effectively brought the Word of God to the Enghsh language while an anonynous Gar looks on wearing a monument to that Word in the form of a girdle book (Fig. 9). And in its depiction of Cranmer’s execution, Foxe’s reformed haQography dramatizes the burning of the man whose name would become synonymous with the English Book of Common Prayer while a Friar stands by wearing a book at his belt (Fig. 10). Finally, in two quite different woodcuts-“The talke betwene M. Bradford . . . and two Spanishfiiers” (Fig. I I ) and “The maner ofthe popyshe Spanyards in carrying Nicolas Burton . . . to the burning” (Fig. 12)-Arts and Monu- ment$ links the girdle book to the despised Spanish friars of Mary’s court.


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without case, depending about his necke vpon his breast” (p. 1599). For Foxe, Latimer’s threadbare apparel signifies that he has eschewed the trappings of this world and “put on Christ.” The Testament that hangs from his girdle and the spectacles without case “depending about his necke” demonstrate that in wearing Christ he has properly divested himself of all idolatrous Ornamentation and invested himself, body and soul, in the Word. Easily accessible, always at the ready, the Bible as girdle book could be a sign of Catholic hypocrisy, but also a sign of the constant immersion in the Word that Reformers celebrated.

Turning to one of the woodcuts in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs,” one can see why the girdle book becomes such a vexed icon for Reformers. In “The talke betwene M. Bradford . . . and two Spanish friers” (Figure I I), the gn-dle book of one of the Spanish friars is juxtaposed with Bradford’s Bible-a book of similar proportions, but one which is held in the hand for use and not worn on the body for superstitous or ornamental purposes. Bradford’s Bible shows us why the girdle book might signi@ Prot- estant virtue in Foxe’s description of Latimer and Catholic vice in the woodcuts. For it is precisely because the proper veneration of the Word exemplified by Latimer’s Testament was so central to Protestants’ sense of themselves that any Catholic perversion of that devotion must be denounced and ridiculed. Archimago’s girdlebook, therefore, is a sign of either Protestant faithfulness or Catholic hypocrisy. That neither the Redcrosse Knight nor the reader can be expected to “read” the significance of Archimago’s book is simply an aspect of the poem’s invita- tion to salutary error. As Leigh DeNeef writes, in Spenser’s world, “a world in which we are saved or lost by the moral choices we make, we must be reminded of the fact that every perception potentially dooms us to such a choice. We do not simply ‘see’ another person or event; we ‘read’ them. And unless we do read them, we are likely, literally, to m i s - read them. The analogy between reading and ethical action is here to- tally collapsed” (p. 147). In the “Legend of Holiness,” Spenser not only depicts a range of idolatrous texts and books, but elaborates an iconoclastic hermeneutics that distinguishes between a proper devotion to the Word and an idolatrous veneration of the things of the world. And he does so through a meditation on the spiritual and interpretive idleness that leads to idolatry.

In Spenser’s Palace ofpride, the first of Queen Lucifera’s seven advisers, and thus the first of the seven deadly sins, is Idleness, the counselor who guides the haughty monarch’s way. The allegorical figure is described as

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being arrayed like a “holy Monck” and in his hand he carries “his Portesse” “that much was worne, but therein little red” (I.iv.19). An unread “Por- tesse” not only suggests an idle reader, but also an idolatrous book, one that is merely for show. Unread, a portesse becomes a porture, a mere image or portrait ofgodly edification. “Worne, but therein little red,” Idlenesse’s portable breviary is not only a deliberately distressed affectation, but a bit of apparel, another girdle book. Derelict in the godly duty signified by his monk‘s garb, Lucifera’s Idleness is a figure of the “idol shepherd.” Drawn fiom a passage in Zechariah (“0 idole shepherd that leueth the flocke” I I . 17 Gertwa Bible I 5 6 0 ~ ~ ) , the trope of the “idol shepherd” was frequently employed in Reformation polemic. Used, according to the OED, “sometimes with allusion to idolatry, sometimes with idol taken as ‘counterfeit’ or ‘sham’ . . . [and] sometimes associated with idle and so ‘neglectful of duty,’ ” the proverbial figure of the “idol shepherd” articulates a Spenserian pun on idle and idol, a pun that illustrates the way idle reading and idle books inevitably lead to idolatry.

I11

When the Redcrosse Knight defeats the monstrous serpent-woman Error, she spews forth “out ofher fdthy maw / A floud ofpoyson horrible and blacke” not only “Full of great lumpes of flesh and gobbets raw,” but “full ofbookes and papers” (I.i.20).~~ Critics have read these “bookes and papers” as an allegorical figure for the “theological books, tracts and pamphlets” of religious contr~versy.~’ A parodic reversal of Revelation’s strikingly material metaphor for receiving the Word-consumption of the scroll that is sweet in the mouth and bitter in the stomach28-Error’s book-ridden vomit is the antithesis of true readmg. In his Image $Both Churches, John Bale glosses this passage in Revelation: “With good harte ought the scriptures to be receyued of all men, in faith deuoured, & in a pure loue digested. . . Nothing but idelnesse worketh that man, which hath it not grafted within him, though he both fast & pray.”29 Error’s

25. T h e Geneva Bible (1560) facside, ed. Lloyd E. Berry, (Madison, 1969). 26. The dragon of Canto xi also has a mouthful of “gobbets raw” (I.xi. I 3). 27. See Roche’s note on this passage in his edition of The Faerie Queene (p. 1077). 2 8 . Revelation 10.10--11: “Then I toke the litle bake out ofthe Angels hand, and ate it vp, and

it was in my mouth as sweet as honie: but when I had eaten it, my bellie was bitter” (Geneva Bible, 1560). See also Ezekiel 2.9-3.3.

29. John Bale, Image @Both Churches (ISSO), p. 150; sig. T6v.


James Kearney I S

“bookes and papers” are not “in faith devoured” or in “pure love digested”; like the “great lumpes offlesh,” they are “gobbets raw.” The word “gobbet” is used in religous controversy of the early modern period to denounce undigested scraps of text (usually from Scripture or the Church Fathers) that are quoted out of context and thus misunderstood. Bale himself uses the word in this way in his Apology . . . agaynste a ranke Papyst when he denounces his Catholic antagonist for employing “ragged gobbettes taken out of Ambroses glose” to shore up his arg~rnent.~’ Spenser’s monstrous serpent embodies the error ofidleness in reading, an interpretive torpor that renders all other Christian works idle; the incom- pletely devoured Word leads down the pathway of error.

In a passage from Francis Quarles’s Shepheards Oracle immediately following the one quoted at the beginning of this essay, the radical Anarchus rejects the Book of Common Prayer “Because it is an Idoll, whereunto / You bend your idle knees, as Papists doe / To their lewd image^."^' The pun on idol and idle was a common one and evidently one that many Reformers could not resist.j2 In The Faerie Queene, Spenser takes this pun seriously and employs it to explore an iconoclastic hermeneutics, an ethics of reading the Word and the world. In Book 11, or the “Legend of Temperance,” Spenser explores the idolatry and iconoclasm of the visible, and he does so in part through a (punning) exploration of two pastoral idylls: Phaedria’s insular “boure” at the center ofher Lake of Idle- ness, and Acrasia’s enchanted isle on the far side of what might be called “Idol Lake.”j3

30. JohnBale, Apology . . . agaynstea rankePapyst (ISSO), fol. 74; sig. K3. Accordingto Bale, the “ranke Papyst” is always leaving the “best partes” of the Church father “behynde” (fol. 74; sig. K3). Curiously, the first entry under the OED definition of “gobbet” as “A piece of a literary or musical work removed from its context” is from I 9 I 2; nevertheless, as the passage from Bale demonstrates, this understanding of the word was current in the early modem period.

3 I . Quarles, p. 91. Emphasis mine. 32. Guillaume du Bartas was another Renaissance poet who used the pun to articulate theoret-

ical concerns. See Bartas: His Deuine Weekes and Workes, trans. Joshua Sylvester (160s). It seems quite possible that one of these two poets influenced the other in his complex understandmg of the pun on idle and idol.

33. Interestingly, “idle” and “ilde” are historical forms of “isle.” According to the OED, “the form idle was AFr., from *isdle, with d developed between s and 1, and loss ofs, as in meddle (from mesdler, mesler), medlar (from *mesdler, meslier); cf. also cider, and Fr. coudre from *cosdre, cosre, L. consuere. The form ilde contains a parasitic d, as in vilde (vile), tyld (tile), mould (mole), which was probably developed quite independently of idle, though formation from that by trans- position was also possible: cf. neld, neelde, needle.” Although the “idle” and “ilde” forms of “isle” seem to be obsolete by Spenser’s time, it is certainly possible that Spenser was aware ofthem. In his

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Through its depiction of Phaedria’s “painted bote” and “bounteous boure,” Canto vi unambiguously reveals that the Idle Lake is, as Ernest Gilman observes, “a Lake of Idolatry.”34 Similarly, at the heart ofAcrasia’s “painted” bower, Canto xii unveils a tableau vivant of idleness:

There, whence that Musick seemed heard to bee, Was the faire Witch her selfe now solacing, With a new Louer, whom through sorceree And witchcraft, she from farre did thther bring: There she had him now layd a slombering, In secret shade, after long wanton ioyes. (II.xii.72)

That the wayward knight has erred in wandering into Acrasia’s blissful bower is only too evident when the poem comes to the accouterments of his vocation:

His warlike armes, the idle instruments Of sleeping praise, were hong vpon a tree And his braue shield, full of gold moniments, Was fowly ra’st, that none the signes might see. (II.xii.80)

Having paused to dally “in the middest ofthe race” (I.vii.s), like Redcrosse before him, Verdant has abandoned his calling and had his identity as a warrior of Christ “fowly ra ’~ t . ’ ’~~ The provocative and seemingly unmotivated apostrophe within “ra’st” suggests that there is not only something missing at the heart of the word, but also at the heart of the erst- while knight. In describing the erasure of Verdant’s shield, “ra’st” plays on the early modem understanding of “race” as “genealogy.” Not only is Verdant emasculated and rendered purposeless through the neglect of his “warlike armes,” but the foul erasure of his brave shield-“that none the signes might see”-blinds him to his history and true identity.36 His

Legend of Good Women, Chaucer-Spenser’s “well ofEnglish undefy1ed”-alludes to “an ylde that called was colcos.”

34. Gilman, p. 77. My understanding of the pun on idle and idol in Book I1 is indebted to Gilman’s excellent chapter on Spenserian iconoclasm, “Spenser’s Painted Forgery,” in his Icono- clasm and Poetry in the English Reformation.

3 5 . See I Corinthians 9.24-26: “Knowe ye not, that they which runne in a race, runne all, yet one receiueth the price? so runne, that ye may obteine . . . I therefore so runne, not as vncerteinly: so fight I, not as one that beateth the ayre” (Geneva Bible, 1560).

36. In the “Letter to Ralegh,” Spenser describes the armor that Una brings to the “clownishe young man” (who will, once outfitted, be identified by his shield as the Redcrosse Knight) as “the armour of a Christian man specified by St. Paul in Ephes.” See n. 18.

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James Kearney I7

idleness has made him an idolater, one who engages in spiritual fornication, but also an idol, a static sign that fails to ~ igni f t . .~~

In the sixteenth century the word “idle” refers not only to people but to things which are “void of any real worth, usefulness, or significance . . . hence, ineffective, worthless, of no value, vain, frivolous, trifling” (OED). The denizens of the Bower of Bliss are idle in both senses of the term: not worlung toward the truth of God, they become trifling things of no value. As Calvin suggests in his Institutes, the idolater will become like his idol: “[mlany are so delighted with marble, gold, and pictures that they become marble, they turn, as it were, into metals and are like painted figures.”38 And for Spenser this is the essence of idolatry. Drawing on Augustinian theology, Spenser encompasses both “idol” (false god) and “idle” (worthless, trivial) through an understanding of “idle” (indolent) as an (idolatrous) tarrying with the material world. For Augustine, “caritas [is] . . . the motion of the soul toward the enjoyment of God for His own sake, and the enjoyment of one’s self and of one’s neighbor for the sake of God; but cupiditas is a motion of the soul toward the enjoyment of one’s self, one’s neighbor, or any corporal thing.”39 Embedded within a discussion of the proper way to read Scripture, Augustine’s definition of cupidity works its way into many of the early modern discussions of the recurrent biblical association of idolatry with fornication. For a good Augustinian, the spiritual fornication that is idolatry stems from idle reading. In the same section of his treatise Augustine goes on at length about the “carnal servitude” of those who venerate the signifier, those who leave the materiality of a sign untranscended. As he writes, “it is a carnal slavery to adhere to a . . . sign instead ofthe thing it was designed to signiv’ (3.7.11). In the pun on idlehdol in both Acrasia’s idolatrous bower and Phaedria’s Idle Lake, Spenser draws on an Augustinian henneneutic of transcendence in which any idle tarrying with the literal sign or the material world is idolatrous. For Spenser, as for Augustine, the point is not that cupidity is a form of idleness (although this is also true) but that

37. O n idolatry as spiritual fornication, see Linda Gregerson’s “Protestant Erotics: IdoIatry and Interpretation in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” ELH 58 (1991). 1-34.

38. John Calvin, Imtitrrtes ofthe Christian Religion, ed. Tony Lane and Hilary Osborne (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1987). 111.10.3. Also see Psalm 115: “Their idoles are siluer and golde, euen the worke of mens hands. / Thei have a mouth and speake not: thei haue eyes and se not. / . . . /” “Thei that make them are like vnto them: so are all who trust in them” (Geneva Bible, 1560).

39. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Princeton, 1958), 111.10.16.

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idleness in reading the Word or the world is spiritual cupidity. Read through an Augustinian lens, the idolatrous idylls of both Phaedria and Acrasia forestall the motion of the soul toward God by turning good Christian readers into idle readers, idolaters enslaved to the signs of the world. The only way to avoid this carnal slavery is to engage in caritas, and Augustine’s definition of caritas helped Reformed readers re-characterize charity and an inherited Catholic theology of good works as an essen- tially hermeneutic love. For Augustinian love is not found in charity or good works, but in the “endlesse worke” (Faerie Queene IV.xii. I) of reading toward the Truth. And through Spenser’s Augustinian understanding of idle reading as idolatry, one can begin to assess how a poetic revision of Foxe’s iconoclastic history figures England as a knight identified with an iconic red cross.

Insofar as he has “Sat downe to rest in middest of the race’’ (I.vii.5), Verdant is a type of Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight whose dalliance with idleness produced comparable manifestations of idolatry in the middle of Book Having survived Lucifera’s House of Pride, a wounded and weary Redcrosse Knight decides to pause in an idyllic site to feed “vpon the cooling shade” and rest

His sweatie forehead in the breathing wind, Which through the trembling leaues full gently playes Wherein the cherefull birds of sundry kind Do chaunt sweet musick, to delight his mind. (I.vii.3)

Like Verdant, Redcrosse is “Disarmed all of yron-coted Plate” (Lvii.~), and without the armor of a Christian man, he is faithless. Dallying with the false Duessa, the weakened knight was “Pourd out in loosnesse on the grassy grownd, / Both carelesse of his health, and ofhis fame” (I.vii.7). Redcrosse’s idleness literally gives rise to the giant Orgogho who has been read variously as a materialization of the knight’s pride, the debased corporeality and empty pomp of the Roman Catholic Church, and as a manifestation of male lust. He is all of these as well as the idol or reified sign of Redcrosse’s idleness. As the growth of spiritual idleness, Orgoglio would seem to be a materialization of that Augustinian ailment which fells Verdant: the pride of complacency and the spiritual cupidity of idleness. The remedy for this ailment is Scripture; as Bale says, “Nothing but

40. Located at the beginning of Canto vii, Redcrosse’s dalliance f d s at the midpoint of his quest in Book I.

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idleness worketh that man, which hath . . . [the Word ofGod] not grafted within him.”41

Separated from Truth (Una) and wandering through Error, the Red- crosse Knight himself is an idle reader throughout much of the “Legend of Holiness.” Like Verdant, Redcrosse is blinded to his true identity and purpose by his spiritual idleness and becomes an idol, a static sign that fails to signift.. It is not, however, that Redcrosse’s “braue shield” has, like Verdant’s, been “fowly ra’st”; rather, it is that his shield signifies too well, and the knight has become identified with his emblem. When we first encounter that “gentle” knight “pricking on the plaine,” he is clad in the “mightie annes and siluer shielde” ofthe Christian soldier “[w]herein old dints ofdeepe wounds did remaine” (I.i.1-2). Not only does he bear “a bloudie Crosse” on his “brest” for the “deare remembrance of his dying Lord” but “[vlpon his shield the like was also scor’d” (I.i.2). As Carol Kaske has established, the doubling of any image within The Faerie Queene is a marker of hermeneutic complexity and signals interpretive danger for both the Redcrosse Knight and the reader.42 In this instance, the slippage from the “bloudie Crosse” on his “brest” which the inexperienced knight properly wears for “remembrance” to “the like” marks a slippage from a sign that points explicitly to its referent to a sign that seems only to refer to another sign. “The like” that is “scor’d” on Redcrosse’s shield, doubly removed from its referent and reified by the definite article, seems to be a sign ofmetaphoricity itself.43 Given the potential duplicity that is inscribed within “the like,” it is important to note that “scor’d” in the early modern period could signifjr an object that is marked by writing/painting or marked by cutting/incising. The distance between the Redcrosse Knight’s breast plate and shield is itselfa sign of the slippery slope fkom proper signification and holy contemplation of the divine to the graven image and idolatry.44

41. Bale, Image OfBoth Churches, I so; sig. T6v. 42. See Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca, ~ggg), pp. 18-98. While I have learned much from

Kaske’s admirable study, I disagree with her critique of John King and Ernest Gilman for their readmg of The Faerie Queene as a poem informed by Reformation iconoclasm. I believe that Kaske oversimplifies the possibilities of an iconoclastic poetics when she suggests that an “iconoclastic treatment [of images within a poetic text] would be a symmetry of intrinsic, absolute good and evil and a resulting polarization of images and their demonic parodies” (p. 89).

43. I am grateful to Patrick Cheney for helping me understand the significance of this passage. 44. As DeNeef writes, in The Faerie Queene “each stage of the mimetic process provides an

occasion for &stortion. The only real defense the poet has offered against such a distortion is a negative one: as long as the imitation remains aware of its status as metaphor and thus open to further metaphoric extension, it avoids the literal closures that identitjr distortion” (p. 143).



Reified as the name of the errant knight, the red cross is split apart from its referent; unread, the red cross collapses signifier into signified and emerges as a potentially idolatrous icon.

Only when Redcrosse is taught by Fidelia to “read aright” the “booke, that was both signd and seald with blood” does the knight learn both the true meaning of the red cross, and his true identity:

Now when their wearie limbes with kindly rest, And bodies were refiesht with due repast, Faire Vna gan Fidelia faire request, To haue her knight into her schoolehouse plaste, That of her heauenly learning he might taste, And heare the wisedome of her words diuine. She graunted, and that knight so much agraste, That she him taught celestiall discipline, And opened his dull eyes, that light mote in them shine.

And that her sacred Booke, with bloud ywrit, That none could read, except she &d them teach, She vnto him disclosed euery whit, And heauenly documents thereout &d preach, That weaker wit of man could neuer reach, Of God, of grace, of iustice, of free will, That wonder was to heare her goodly speach: For she was able, with her words to kill, And raise againe to life the hart, that she did thrill. (I.x. I 8-19)

As David Lee Miller observes, “the mediation of the letter is associated here with blood, death, and blindness; transcending the letter is the way to life” (p. 89). And once Redcrosse has been re-formed by the blood of the Word, and begun his new life as a Christian man, he travels to Contemplation’s seat where his true name is revealed to him. The name “Redcrosse” never appears within the poem during the House of Holiness episode. Before Fidelia teaches him to read her sacred book, he is referred to as the “errant knight”; afterwards, as the “faithfull knight.” Finally, granted a vision of the New Jerusalem by Contemplation, Redcrosse is identified by that “aged holy man” as St. George. Grateful to be revealed as the incarnation of England, Redcrosse thanks Contem- plation “That hast my name and nation red aright” (I.x.67). That Spenser chooses to spell “read” as “red” at this particular juncture is no accident:

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he has been setting up this pun throughout the poem.45 By my count, the past tense of “read” appears sixteen times in the “Legend of Holiness”; it is spelled “read” or “reade” six times and “redd” or “red” nine times. With this pun, as with the pun on idlehdol, Spenser paradoxically uses the materiality of the signifier to embrace a hermeneutics of transcendence. Suddenly, the Christian everyman of the “Legend of Holiness” sounds like the punch line to a bad joke: When is a cross not an idol? When it’s a re(a)d cross. Ofcourse, that the knight is “read” as St. George presents a problematic twist for an iconoclastic poem that wants to reject the idolatry of Catholicism.

IV

At a seminar at the University of Pennsylvania on March 3 I , 1997, Stephen Orgel presented a paper on a copy of the 161 I edition of The Faerie Queene which contained the marginalia of a seventeenth-century reader. Decry- ing the idolatry of T h e Faerie Qtreene, the Reformed reader accuses Spenser of damnable popery. Not only does he accuse Spenser’s poem of being an “idle fiction,” but in the margins of the Error episode in Canto I, he writes that “A part of this book [i.e. The Faerie Queene itself] was there” in Error’s “vomit full ofbooks and papers” (I.i.20). And Spenser’s poem, especially the “Legend of Holiness,” is indeed a peculiar hybrid of the popish and the Protestant. A Protestant poem whose hero is an apo- cryphal Catholic saint,46 an iconoclastic poem that consistently relies on elaborate Catholic imagery, a self-consciously “medieval” romance that decries the devotional forms of the Middle Ages, the “Legend of Holi- ness” is a work whose utter strangeness has not been fully appreciated by modern readers. The House of Holiness, the place in whch the Redcrosse Knight learns to “read aright” and undergoes reformation, is a virtual fun- house of seemingly idolatrous Catholic figures. Moreover, these figures are not denounced as idolatrous but embraced as the means of Redcrosse’s reformation. I would like here to focus on two such figures-Caelia and the Bead-men-and ask why Spenser employs an obviously Catholic

45. For an analysis ofthe hermeneutic complexity and significance of the various permutations

46. Orgel’s Reformed reader calls St. George “A popish saint, devised by idle Monks.” On the ofthe word “read” in The Faerie Queene, see DeNeef, esp. pp. 142-56.

hostility ofEnghsh Reformen toward the figure of St. George, see King, pp. 149-50; 189.



devotional form, the bidding of beads, in his House of Holiness. In his godly gloss to the book, Orgel’s Reformed reader asks the same question: “Is this a signe of holynesse, to pray on beades? A papist would lyk this well.”

In Bateman’s Chridl Glasse $ Reformation, the woodcut illustrating the sin of Sloth (idleness by another name) depicts a false friar not with a girdle book, but with rosary or paternoster beads. According to the cap- tion, “the Fryers weede and Beades signifieth hypocrisie and lothsomnes of the truth” (Figure 13) . Frequently depicted along with girdle books in representations of false friars and credulous monks (Figures 5 and 7), these “superstitious” beads are just the kind of idle and idolatrous trum- pery condemned by the Reformers. In the “Homily of Good Works,” found in the authorized Elizabethan Book $Homilies, Thomas Cranmer “rehearse[s]” a catalogue of “papistical superstitions and abuses” in which he writes “of Beades, of Lady Psalters, and Rosaries, of xv. Oos, of S. Barnardes vearses, of S. Agathes letters, of Purgatorye, of Masses satisfac- tory, of Stacions, & Iubilies, of fayned Reliques, or halowed Beades, Belles, Bread, Water, Palmes, Candels, Fire, & such other.”47 The rosary is here placed amidst an abundance of idolatrously venerated objects (relics, beads, bells, breads), and a catalogue of superstitious texts. An inscription placed upon tiles, bells, or amulets, St. Agathe’s letters constituted a miraculous text traditionally said to protect homes against fire. As Keith Thomas observes, the eight verses of St. Bernard, culled from the Psalms on the authority of the devil himselfand commonly found in editions of the Cath- olic Book $Hours, were thought to “preserve fiom damnation anyone who said them every day” (pp. 23,219). Also found in many editions of the Catholic Book OfHours and one of the most popular prayers in fifieenth- and early sixteenth-century England, the “Fifteen Odes of St. Bridget” were believed to have “extraordinary power in releasing souls from p~rga to ry , ”~~ like “St. John’s Gospel”-the first fourteen lines of the Gospel ofJohn which, when “printed out in a small roundel” and worn around the neck by Catholics, were believed to have divine powers.49 These texts were condemned by Protestants for their material efficacy: the fact that they “worked” automatically, irrespective of God’s

47. Thomas Cranmer, ‘‘Homily of Good Works,” Certain Sermons or Homilies Appoinfed to be Readin Churches, Book I (1563) , sig. K 3 .

48. D u e , P. 25s. 49. Thomas, p. 31 .


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unknowable and implacable will, and the fact that the supposed extraordinary power of these texts was thought to reside in the material forms of the words themselves.

It is both the presumed efficacy ofthe material signifier and the holiness of the beads as objects that made the rosary an object of the Reformers’ wrath. Of course, as Cranmer’s list demonstrates, beads and the rosary were not synonymous: devotional beads were used for prayers other than the rosary (most famously the paternoster), and the rosary could be prayed without the assistance ofbeads. At the same time, as Anne Winston-Allen has pointed out, ‘‘[arom its inception onward, the rosary devotion was intimately tied to the string of beads that came to represent it.” Lending “the devotion an added aesthetic dimension and a certain concreteness,” the conflation of beads and prayer meant that the rosary was both text and image, a prayer intimately tied to the body and an object that one “bids” as an act ofdevotion and s~pplication.~’ It is this confusion ofword and thing, this misreading of the relation between signifier and signified, that so inhriated Protestants. With its combination of reified text and material object to be “read,” the rosary becomes for the Reformers a parodic and perverted version of the Word. That the rosary is read as a kind of “balehll book” and is seen as displacing the Bible and proper devotional guides can be seen in the title-page woodcut to Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, which depicts Foxe’s version of the “Image of Both Churches” (Figure 14). Extending down the length of the left-hand side are three different representations of the church of true believers engaged in different kinds of godly activity; extending down the right-hand side is a parallel vertical triptych ofthe Church of antichrist. For my purposes, the important parallel is drawn in the bottom two panels which depict, on the one side, the godly preaching ofthe Reformed in which the members of the congregation can be seen piously reading their Bibles and, on the other side, the benighted devotional practices ofthe Catholics in which the members of the congregation ignorantly bid their beads.

In The Faerie Queene Spenser elaborates on the problem presented by the rosary and the bidding of beads in Canto iii of the “Legend of Holiness.” In this Canto, Una, separated from the Redcrosse Knight and wandering in “wildemesse and wastfull deserts,” comes upon the

50. Anne Winston-Allen, Stories ofthe Rose: The Making ofthe Rosary in the Middle Ages (Uni- versity Park, Penn., 1g97), p. I I I .



unholy pair Abessa and Corceca. Abessa cannot “heare, nor speake, nor vnderstand”; when she first sees Una, she flees from Divine Truth and back to the dark dwelling where her blind mother, Corceca, “Sate in eternall night” (I.iii.12). Once Una reaches the benighted residence she finds both mother and daughter “in darkesome corner pent” (I.iii.13). The same comer

Where that old woman day and night did pray Vpon her beades deuoutly penitent; Nine hundred Pater nosters euery day,

And thrise nine hundred Acres she was wont to say.

And to augment her painefull pennance more, Thrise euery weeke in ashes she &d sit, And next her wrinkled skin rough sackcloth wore, And thrise three times &d fast from any bit: But now for feare her beads she did forget. (I.iii.13-14)

Defined by fear and ignorance, Corceca combines her obsessive ritual acts with compulsive iterations of “holy” formulae repeated in numerically superstitious sets of three and nine. Associated with the false devotional practices of the monastic tradition through her daughter Abessa, Corceca, or “blind heart” (L. cor caecum), is clearly emblematic of the unen- lightened Catholic who mortifies the flesh and revisits the dead letter not out of a “true and lively faith” but out of ignorance and “needlesse dread” (I .iii. I 4).

What is peculiar about Spenser’s “Legend ofHoliness,” however, is not that he portrays the idolatry inherent in the bidding of beads and the re- ification of texts, but that he depicts a virtuous instance of bead-bidding. At the begmning of Canto x, as the Redcrosse Knight is entering the House of Holiness, he comes across Corceca’s Reformed counterpart, Dame Caelia,

Whose onely ioy was to relieue the needes Of wretched soules, and helpe the helpelesse pore: All night she spent in bidding of her bedes,

And all the day in doing good and godly deedes. (I.x.3)

Certainly, the “heavenly” mother of Fidelia, Speranza, and Charissa is unlike Corceca in her altruistic attention to the problems of the fallen world. But what is the Reformed reader of Spenser to make of the

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“biddmg of . . . bedes”? For his part, Orgel’s Reformed reader asks the obvious question: “Why beades & not prayer”? Later in the same canto, the Redcrosse Knight, still moving purposehlly through the House of Holiness and havingjust met the “auncient matrone” Mercie, comes upon “an holy Hospitall”

In which seuen Bead-men that had vowed all Their life to seruice of high heauens king Did spend their dayes in doing gody thing: There gates to all were open euermore, That by the wearie way were traueiling, And one sate wayting euer them before,

To call in commers-by, that needy were and pore. (I.x.36)

Traditionally, “beadsmen” were poor Christians paid to pray for bene- factors or for the souls of the dead. Epitomizing everything that Protest- ants despised in the Catholic theology ofworks-the mechanical efficacy of prayer, the purchasing of redemption, and the performance of good works by proxy-it seems incomprehensible that Spenser would locate beadsmen in his reformed House of Holiness.

Spenser’s Bead-men, however, are beadsmen of a different stripe. Given that traditional beadsmen were associated by Reformers with a bankrupt Catholic theology of works, it is of some significance that Spenser’s Bead-men are revealed as allegorical figures for the seven corporal works of mercy. Prominent figures in a Protestant allegory, Spenser’s Bead-men embody the doctrine of the corporal works of mercy, a doctrine that might sound suspiciously Catholic to the Reformed reader. And they do so because Spenser is attempting to redeem “beadsman” for Protestantism by emptying out the signifier of its traditional Catholic content and reclaiming it for a lfferent kind of “good work” that acknowledges that only through faith in the Word and by the grace of God can one attain salvation. In a “Sermon upon the Epistle to Timothy,” Calvin (by way of Lawrence Tomson’s translation) refers to deacons as “Beade maisters”: “Knowe we, that the Deacons, that is to say, the Beade maisters, and such as see to the pore, haue not onely an earthly office, but a spiritual charge, which serueth the Church of God, and therefore that they must bee nigh the Ministers of the word of God.”51

5 I . John Calvin, “Sermon upon the Epistle to Timothy,” Sermons of M. John Caluin, on the Epistles ofS. Paule to Timothie and Titus, trans. Lawrence Tomson (I 579), p. 295.

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Here, the tradtional understanding of beadsman is turned inside out. They are not poor Christians paid to turn words into good works, but those who work to care for the poor, and whose earthly office is seen as close in spirit to the preaching of Scripture. Following Calvin, Spenser rewrites this Catholic term as a Protestant one, condemning an idolatrous Catholic practice only to recycle the traditional signifier of that practice for a Protestant purpose. At the same time he manages to redeem a vocabulary, if not a theology, of “good works” by distancing the term from the kind of “works” Catholic beadsmen traditionally did.

One would assume that the linguistic correlation of beads with prayers came about because beads as objects were so often used in the act of praying-that over time the innocuous material accessories to prayer accrued a certain amount of sacred resonance by association-eventually rivalling the importance of the prayer itself. In fact, the history is just the reverse. According to the OED, the word “bead” meant “prayer” before it ever referred to the “small ball-shaped object” with which we associate it now. As the OED puts it, “the name was transferred from ‘prayer’ to the small globular bodies used for ‘telling beads,’ i.e. counting prayers said, from which the other senses naturally followed.”52 Although E.K. characteristically garbles the etymology in his annotations to the “September” eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender, it i s clear from his gloss that Spenser would have been well aware of the connection between the bidding ofbeads and prayers: “For to bidde, is to praye, whereof commeth beades for prayers, and so they say, To bidde his beades. s. to saye his prayers.”53 When Caelia bids her beads, she can be read as merely praying. Always playing on the etymological senses ofwords, Spenser’s poem attempts to redeem “the bidding ofbeads” for a Protestant poetics not by disassociating beads from prayer but by equating them. In this fashion, Spenser attempts to redeem all the Catholic elements-beads, penance, works, St. George-of the House of Holiness.

In the Allegory ofLove C. S . Lewis accounts for the seeming Catholi- cism of Spenser’s House of Holiness by suggesting that “all allegories whatever are likely to seem Catholic to the general reader”:

52. This understanding ofthe bead as prayer was current well into the sixteenth century when

5 3 . Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, The Yale Edition ofthe Shorter Poems ofEdmund both meanings ofthe word (bead as object and bead as prayer) existed simultaneously.

Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, et al. (New Haven, 1989), pp. 161-62.

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In part, no doubt, . . . [this phenomenon] is to be explained by the fact that visible and tangible aspects of Catholicism are meheval, and therefore steeped in literary suggestion. But is this all? Do Protestant allegorists continue as in a dream to use imagery so likely to mislead their readers without noticing the danger or without better motive than laziness for incurring it? By no means. The truth is not that allegory is Catholic, but that Catholicism is allegorical. Allegory consists in giving an imagined body to the immaterial; but if, in each case, Catholicism claims already to have given it a material body, then the allegorist’s symbol will naturally resemble that material body. The whip of Penaunce is an excellent example. No Christian ever doubted that repentance involved “penaunce” and “whips” on the spiritual plane: it is when you come to material whips . . . that the controversy begins. It is the same with the “House” of Holiness . . . When Spenser writes about Protestant sanctity he gwes us something like a convent: when he is really talking about the conventual life he gives us Abessa and C~rceca.’~

Of course, Lewis overstates his case.” One would neither want to suggest that Catholicism is allegorical nor apply his thesis to all Protestant allegories as he does. Still, when applied to Spenser, his argument makes a peculiar sense. For Catholicism is allegorical in Lewis’ sense within Spenser’s poem. And Spenser does employ the material forms of Catholi- cism to embody allegorically the spiritual truths of Protestantism. To suggest, however, that “the allegorist’s symbol will naturally resemble” the material forms of Catholicism is to m i s s the point. It is not, as Lewis would have it, that there are a finite number ofmaterial signifiers and the Catholics have taken them all; it is that the material signifiers of Catholicism are the very stuff of English history and English literature. Spenser does not rely on Catholic imagery because it is “natural” for him to do so; he appropriates it in order to reclaim it for a Reformed history. Spenser’s almost obsessive incorporation of older forms-words, styles, and genres- creates an epic poem that is also a museum, a poetic anteroom that reclaims the language of English history that had been discarded by the Reforma- tion. And this incorporation of older forms, the deliberate distressing of the poetic artifact, also foregrounds the material signifier as a repository of historical meaning.

54. C. S. Lewis, Allegory oflove: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford, 1938), pp. ~zz-z~. 5 5 . When Lewis suggests that “imagmed buildings and institutions which have a strong re-

semblance to the actual buildings and institutions of the Church of Rome” will not only appear, but “ought to appear, in any Protestant allegory,” he stretches the argument beyond the breaking point (p. 323).



V

In the proem to Book I the humble poet asks for the help of his muse:

Helpe then, o holy Virgin chiefe of nine, Thy weaker Nouice to performe thy wille, Lay forth out of thine euerlasting scryne The antique rolles, which there lye hidden stdl. (I.Proem.2)

Spenser’s use of the term “scrine” here is peculiar. In the sixteenth century, according to the OED, the word referred to “a box for the safe- keeping of valuables,” specifically, “a chest in which the relics of saints are preserved, a shrine.” True to form, Spenser is not merely co-opting the Catholic language ofshrines; he is attempting to transform it. Tracing the etymology of both shrine and scrine to the Latin scrinium, Judith Anderson observes that the word refers not merely to the housing of “sacred relics” but to “books. . . [and] records”: “Both Cooper and Estienne include among their illustrations of the meaning of scrinium Catullus’s phrase ‘librariorum . . . scrinia’-the bookseller’s containers of manuscripts or rolls . . . The scrines of monasteries or churches, whether chests, cupboards, niches, or rooms, were the places where the enabling instruments and authorizing documents that pertained to the rights of the institution were kept. In this context, the scrine is equivalent to the secretum, or ‘secret place,’ the treasury of the institution and, prior to the establishment of libraries, the depository for In the proem to Book I, Spenser uses the word “scrine” to transfer the traditional resonance of the word “shrine” to the domain of writing. Like “monument” in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, “scrine” is employed because of the close resemblance to its idolatrous counterpart. Spenser plays with the proximity of shrine and scrine in order to establish the all-important difference between the idolatrous image and the written. Presenting his poem as the “antique roues” of fairy land, Spenser appropriates writing as the medium of the Reformed sacred. Despite his iconoclasm, however, writing is not a transparent or transcendent medium for Spenser. He celebrates the materiality of the letter.

That Spenser’s poetics is thoroughly wedded to the materiality of the text is evident from the beginning of his literary career with the publica- tion of The Shepheardes Calender. Written in a deliberately archaic diction,

56. Judith H. Anderson, Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford, 1996), p. 128.


James Kearney 29

printed in an intentionally antiquarian black-letter, with a textual apparatus and a visual repertoire designed to allude to the humanist editions of classical texts as well as the rustic calendars and almanacs of shepherds, Spenser’s remarkably syncretic Calender participated in an aesthetics of book production that foregrounded the text as embodied artifact.” If the physical production of The Faerie Queene was not as self-consciously elaborate as its pastoral predecessor, the stylized antiquarianism of its vocabulary and diction suggested that it was of a piece with the Calender. Moreover, The Faerie Queene’s faith in the power of learned etymologies and punning wordplay not only draws attention to language as historical and material artifact, but creates a “dark conceit” that demands allegoriza- tion and yet insists on the materiality of the text over and against any easy allegorizing. The poem thematizes the idolatry of fetishizing the letter even as it incorporates a manifestly nostalgic literary language, at once an iconoclastic negation and an historical preservation.

And here, Spenser’s peculiar poetics reproduces the logic of Christian typologcal exegesis. Steeped in Christian hermeneutic strategies, his poetics can be read as informed by the dialectical relationship between the New and Old Testaments of the Christian Bible. Just as Christianity negates but preserves the Judaic law by readmg it allegorically, so Spenser negates but preserves the Catholic language he incorporates into his “Leg- end ofHoliness.” The language of Catholicism becomes for Spenser what the language of Judaism became for Christian readers, the literal level, the mere story of history, the material signifier that must be negated even as it is preserved. And the sublation of Catholic language within The Faerie Queene is indicative of Spenser’s relation to the materiality of the signifier generally. Spenser’s Augustinian hermeneutics of transcendence suggests that right reading is the key to avoiding idolatry. As long as the reformed Christian transcends the signifier, moving on to the properly immaterial signified, he need not fear idolatry. The signifier itself is then freed from any idolatrous imputation; it is adiaphora, a thing indfferent. In other

57. R. B. McKerrow describes the use ofblack-letter in The Shepheardes Calender as an “inten- tional bit of antiquarianism” in his Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford, 1927; 1967), p. 297, n.2. In “The Allusive Presentation of The Shepheardes Calender,” Spenser Studies I (1980), Ruth Luborsky takes issue with McKerrow, arguing that black-letter was not yet obsolete and therefore not necessarily archaic in the Calender. But if the edition is as deliberately contrived as she argues, then the employment of black-letter would represent another considered deci- sion coinciding with what she describes as the “archaic aura” of the woodcuts, and “Spenser’s language-old-fashioned and, at times, rude” (p. 30).

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words, it is merely idle. Indeed, in the Dedicatory Sonnets to The Faerie Queene, Spenser proffers his epic poem as an “ydle ryme.”

As I have argued, however, Spenser’s poem itself suggests that the Christian reader should be wary of any icon that claims to be merely idle. The Faerie Queene is not merely an iconoclastic poem, but an “endlesse moniment” (III.iii.59) to a radical and quixotic attempt to redeem an English literary language for the Reformation: quixotic because Spenser’s attempt to redeem both the language of Catholicism and the materiality ofthe signifier for a Protestant poetics is doomed to failure. IfDon Quixote wills the world to conform to his books, Spenser wills language to conform to his poem. Orgel’s Reformed reader reminds us of the impossib- ility and sheer audacity of Spenser’s poetic enterprise. The materiality of the signifier is not merely idle, not a thing indifferent, but a material artifact that is both embedded within an historical moment and a repository of historical meaning. The manifestly Catholic language that Spenser attempts to reclaim for his nationalist epic, the “antiquities” of English history and literature that he attempts to subordinate to his Reformed narrative, necessarily resist his poetic wd . Spenser’s “endlesse moniment” can all too easily be read as a monument to an idle and idolatrous tarrying with the material signifier. To Orgel’s Reformed reader, Spenser’s epic poem does not transcend the merely idle world through right writing, but enshrines, or enscrynes, idolatry.

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

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Enshrining Idolatry in The Faerie Queene