Imitatio Christi, livre ebook

In Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England, Nandra Perry explores the relationship of the traditional devotional paradigm of imitatio Christi to the theory and practice of literary imitation in early modern England. While imitation has long been recognized as a central feature of the period’s pedagogy and poetics, the devotional practice of imitating Christ’s life and Passion has been historically regarded as a minor element in English Protestant piety. Perry reconsiders the role of the imitatio Christi not only within English devotional culture but within the broader culture of literary imitation. She traces continuities and discontinuities between sacred and secular notions of proper imitation, showing how imitation worked in both contexts to address anxieties, widespread after the Protestant Reformation, about the reliability of “fallen” human language and the epistemological value of the body and the material world.

The figure of Sir Philip Sidney—Elizabethan England’s premier defender of poetry and internationally recognized paragon of Christian knighthood—functions as a nexus for Perry’s treatment of a wide variety of contemporary literary and religious genres, all of them concerned in one way or another with the ethical and religious implications of imitation. Throughout the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, the Sidney legacy was appropriated by men and women, Catholics and Protestants alike, making it an especially useful vehicle for tracing the complicated relationship of imitatio Christi to the various literary, confessional, and cultural contexts within and across which it often operated. Situating her project within a generously drawn version of the Sidney “circle” allows Perry to move freely across the boundaries that often delimit treatments of early modern English piety. Her book is a call for renewed attention to the imitation of Christ as a productive category of literary analysis, one that resists overly neat distinctions between Catholic and Protestant, sacred and secular, literary art and cultural artifact.

In the introductory epistle to his 1580 translation and Protestantization of Thomas à Kempis’s devotional treatise Imitatio Christi, Thomas Rogers makes a case for the continued relevance of this Continental, latemedieval text to his English Protestant audience: “A shame were it therefore for us to imitate so painfulie as manie do in eloquence Cicero; in philosophie Aristotle; in law Justinian; in Physick Galen for worldlie wisdome; yet to imitate, as most do, the French in vanitie, the Dutch in luxerie, in braverie the Spanish, the Papists in idolatrie, in impietie and al impuritie of life the Atheists, and not to folowe our Savior Christ in heavenlie wisdome and in al Godlines of manners.” Rogers could have saved himself the trouble. As it turned out, Elizabethan readers needed little persuading to appreciate the enduring appeal of Thomas à Kempis. Rogers’s translation of the Imitation of Christ—just one of thirteen English translations and three paraphrases of the text undertaken between 1500 and 1700— was one of the steadiest devotional sellers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was printed seventeen times between 1580 and 1640 and nearly every other year between 1580 and 1609.2

The popularity of the Imitation of Christ, not to mention the wide popularity of other religious how-to manuals like Arthur Dent’s Plaine Man’s Path-way to Heaven (printed at least twenty-seven times between 1601 and 1682) and Edmund Bunny’s Protestantization of the first part of Robert Persons’s First booke of the Christian exercise (which sold at least thirty editions between 1582 and 1640), is a powerful testament to the religious significance attached to the imitation of models in the period. However, while the imitative mode has long been recognized as a “central and pervasive” feature of early modern English literary and intellectual culture, imitatio Christi, the traditional devotional practice of imitating Christ in his person and Passion, has received comparatively little attention in scholarly accounts of post-Reformation English devotional culture. This disjunction in the critical histories of literary imitatio and imitatio Christi is at least partly attributable to a tendency among an earlier generation of scholars to organize treatments of early modern English piety along rigidly drawn confessional lines, privileging Protestant over Catholic, and “Puritan” over “Anglican,” as representative of what is most distinctive about the period and therefore most worthy of close critical attention. In more recent years, revisionist and postrevisionist historiographical approaches have yielded a more nuanced picture of English lay religiosity that—among other things—invites fresh attention to traditional devotional practices like the imitation of Christ.

Even the most cursory examination of the period’s devotional print culture affirms the cross-confessional appeal of Christian imitatio. Ian Green’s critical survey of the period’s best and steadiest devotional sellers includes a significant number of sermons and devotional works that emphasize meditating on or modeling oneself after the person of Christ, among them works by “godly” authors like William Perkins (A Declaration of the True Manner of Knowing Christ Crucified, 1596), John Preston (The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love, 1630), Daniel Dyke (the second of his Two Treatises, 1616), Edward Reynolds (the third of his Three Treatises, 1631), James Ussher (Immanuel, 1638), and Richard Sibbes (The Bruised Reede, and Smoaking Flax, 1630). The very existence of these works should put to rest the old Anglican/Puritan binary, suggesting that any “dichotomy between a puritan focus on Christ’s atoning work and an Anglican one on his moral example is far from clear cut.” Their circulation alongside “Anglican” and Catholic steady sellers that focused on Christ’s life and passion—such as Lancelot Andrewes’s Passion and Nativity sermons, Luis de Granada’s Of Prayer and Meditation (first printed legally in England in 1592), and Robert Southwell’s Marie Magdalen’s Funeral Teares (l591)— suggests something of the scope of recovery remaining to be done on the meaning or range of meanings attached to the imitation of Christ in post-Reformation England.

Rogers’s decision, in the passage quoted above, to contextualize Protestant anxieties about the propriety of patterning oneself after Christ within humanist debates about the positive and negative potential of imitation suggests why and how scholars of English literature should participate in this project of recovery. The ease with which Rogers moves here between categories of imitation we would tend to separate out as “sacred” and “secular” is a reminder that the literary imitations of authors like Sidney and Milton, whose careers mark the literary poles of this study, spoke from and to a culture that—insofar as it recognized a sacred/secular binary at all—tended to identify it as an unfortunate and at least partially reparable consequence of Original Sin. The “turn to religion” so remarked upon in surveys of recent scholarship on early modern English literature reflects a growing consensus within the discipline that the literary innovations and anxieties of the period cannot be understood properly apart from the theological innovations and anxieties that preceded, accompanied, and sometimes grew out of them. As Brian Cummings puts it in his important treatment of this subject, Grammar and Grace, the Reformation was a “reformation in and of words, a linguistic, literary, and textual revolution.” Its literature is thus inseparable from the literary program of humanism that produced the early modern canon and that, as Cummings points out, “itself developed in response to the need to solve certain kinds of theological problem [sic].” Pursuing the converse of Cummings’s argument that the Reformation is ultimately a linguistic revolution, this book takes as its point of departure the thesis that early modern imitatio is always, even if at some remove, a religious project, a tribute to and (partial) rehabilitation of humanity’s original creation in the image and likeness of God. Accordingly, it reads the debates surrounding literary imitatio as corollaries of broader theological questions about the role of natural human signs in the supernatural processes of salvation and sanctification. These questions, I will argue, constitute the deep structure of Philip Sidney’s poetics and that of the many writers who inherited his literary legacy—John Milton chief among them. A brief overview of the critical history of the debates surrounding literary imitatio, particularly as they played out in early modern England, will help to clarify the complementary relationship between literary and theological categories of analysis in this study.

(Excerpted from Introduction)

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Church Eloquent: Thomas Rogers, Philip Sidney, and the Reformed Body Visible

• The Word Made Text: Thomas Rogers and Early Modern Imitatio
• The Word Made Flesh: Philip Sidney and the Defence of Poesy

2. The Sound of Silence: Elizabeth Cary and the Christian Hero

• The Tragedy of Mariam: Hagiographical Contexts and Subtexts
• Cary the (Heroic) Author

3. The “Book of Virtue”: Reading the Royal Body in The New Arcadia and Eikon Basilike

• Reading the Body Natural in The Practice of Pietie
• Reading the Royal Body in Eikon Basilike
• Pamela, Charles, and the Royal “Book of Virtue”

4. The Church (P)articulate: Breaking the Body Visible in Eikonoklastes 157

• Altars, Mothers, Fathers, and Martyrs: Reading the Body in Ceremonialist and Anticeremonialist Polemic
• Gross Anatomy: Milton Dissects the King’s Book
• Postscript: A Voice in the Wilderness

Notes

Bibliography

Index