Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England

By Robert E. Stillman

This book challenges the adequacy of identifying religious identity with confessional identity.

The Reformation complicated the issue of religious identity, especially among Christians for whom confessional violence at home and religious wars on the continent had made the darkness of confessionalization visible. Robert E. Stillman explores the identity of “Christians without names,” as well as their agency as cultural actors in order to recover their consequence for early modern religious, political, and poetic history.

Stillman argues that questions of religious identity have dominated historical and literary studies of the early modern period for over a decade. But his aim is not to resolve the controversies about early modern religious identity by negotiating new definitions of English Protestants, Catholics, or “moderate” and “radical” Puritans. Instead, he provides an understanding of the culture that produced such a heterogeneous range of believers by attending to particular figures, such as Antonio del Corro, John Harington, Henry Constable, and Aemilia Lanyer, who defined their pious identity by refusing to assume a partisan label for themselves. All of the figures in this study attempted as Christians to situate themselves beyond, between, or against particular confessions for reasons that both foreground pious motivations and inspire critical scrutiny. The desire to move beyond confessions enabled the birth of new political rhetorics promising inclusivity for the full range of England’s Christians and gained special prominence in the pursuit of a still-imaginary Great Britain. Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England is a book that early modern literary scholars need to read. It will also interest students and scholars of history and religion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780268200435

Robert E. Stillman

Robert E. Stillman is professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is author and editor of a number of books, including Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism.

Book preview

Christian Identity, Piety,

and Politics in Early Modern England

ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern

Series Editors:

David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson

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Jill P. Ingram

CHRISTIAN IDENTITY,

PIETY, AND POLITICS

IN EARLY

MODERN ENGLAND

ROBERT E. STILLMAN

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941549

ISBN: 978-0-268-20041-1 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20040-4 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20043-5 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

For Sam and Alex and Denise

I do love nothing in the world so much as you

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Introduction: Peace-Wars on the Continent and in Britain

PART 1

THE IDENTITY OF CHRISTIANS WITHOUT NAMES

CHAPTER ONE

John Harington and the Confessional Beyond

CHAPTER TWO

Neuters and the Politics of Language in Early Modern Polemic, or How to Trouble the Confessional Divide

PART 2

CROSSING CONFESSIONAL ROADS TO CHRISTENDOM: PIETY AND POLITICS

CHAPTER THREE

Imagining Christendom in Britain: Political Romance in 1589 and Disenchantment

CHAPTER FOUR

Enacting the Politics of Christendom: After the Scottish Mission (1590), James VI and I

PART 3

POETRY TURNING FROM THE CONFESSIONS: SIDNEY, CONSTABLE, AND LANYER

CHAPTER FIVE

Poetic Energy and Poetic Economy in the Post-Reformation

CHAPTER SIX

Examining Constable’s Sonnets, or The Pleasures of Pious Miscegenation

CHAPTER SEVEN

Reading the Critical Conversation about Aemilia Lanyer: Performing Presence in the Confessional Beyond

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some books spring up like mushrooms in the night, and some cycle toward eventual completion like the long quests of Spenserian romance. Humphrey Tonkin first taught me to read Philip Sidney as an international poet, and Roger Kuin to read him against the background of those cosmopolitan humanists who supplied his education in politics and piety, and who taught him how to read and to write books. Learning to understand Philip Sidney among the Philippists excited my curiosity about wider networks of irenically minded Christians seeking the peace of Christendom. In the course of exploring those networks and their potential for illuminating England’s post-Reformation culture, I have been supported mightily by some attentive guides and friends.

Roger Kuin commented on a rough draft of this manuscript, and his probing comments enabled me to understand what this book could become. I have had regular advice from two of my brilliant younger colleagues, Nandra Perry and Timothy Crowley, who gave up time from book projects of their own to help mine. I am grateful for their time and for their unfailingly fine insights. Anne Lake Prescott has helped me to learn how grace presses through the seams of even the most seemingly secular poetry of the early modern era. I have benefited at different stages of composition from the sharp editorial skills and intellectual agility and kindness of Mary Ellen Lamb, as well as from conversations about Renaissance rhetoric with Gavin Alexander; about the Renaissance Aristotle with Micah Lazarus; about scholarly narratives with Christian Gerard; about energeia with Daniel Lochman; about Sidney and Scotland with Arthur Williamson; about Catholic women with Susannah Monta; and about religious identity and the Psalms with Hannibal Hamlin. I am grateful too for the support of David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson, the editors of the University of Notre Dame Press’s series ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern, and for the Press’s anonymous readers, who inspired a better book than I first sent them. Last, I want to express my appreciation of the Humanities Center at the University of Tennessee for awarding me a fellowship to pursue my research and writing, and the good conversation it enabled with colleagues like Misty Anderson and Anthony Welch.

Part of Chapter 5 appeared previously as ‘I Am Not I’: Philip Sidney and the Energy of Fiction, Sidney Journal 30, no. 1 (2012): 1–26. I am grateful to the Journal for permission to reprint this material. My manuscript preserves the idiosyncrasies of early modern English print except when they threaten clarity. I have silently transposed u to v, and i to j, and the long (ſ) to the lower case s in book titles and citations when comprehension is at stake.

Prologue

THE TORN VESTURE OF SALVATION: CONFESSING WITHOUT NAMES

The Reformation fragmented the once-whole and holy body of Christendom, a locus of spiritual and political unity whose loss was universally lamented, even if that unity had never been fully complete or fully holy.¹ Such fragmentation seems now the inevitable consequence of its genesis and its discontinuous development across Europe’s nation-states. In the course of the sixteenth century’s Reformation and Counter-Reformation, divisions among the Christian churches proliferated inside what historians call the era of confessionalization—that era when the various religious institutions most visibly distinguished themselves by their divided confessions (or published formularies) of belief.² Exceptional for other reasons, England’s Reformation was marked by divisions that seem now just as inevitable and irreparable as those of the Reformation writ large. Many of the religious identities that we still acknowledge descend from the confessional categories established after England’s break from Rome, or from categories newly identified inside England because of religious upheavals on the Continent. Roman Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, Calvinist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Quaker, and Anglican (a latecomer) are confessional names that monumentalize divisions among early moderns as both irreparable and inevitable in no small part because of their familiarity. They name us to ourselves.³

This is a book about Christians in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England who espoused forms of piety, who engaged in politics, and who wrote bodies of fiction informed by a wholly different understanding about repairing Christendom and remediating conflict among the divided confessions. These figures were educators, jurists, poets, men of business and courtiers, diplomats and divines, women of consequence and women aspiring to consequence. My book studies their identity as Christians without names and their agency as cultural actors in order to recover their consequence for early modern religious, political, and poetic history.⁴ At the same historical moment in which England became a battleground for competing factions, sects, and churches—especially in the decades between 1580 and 1610, when the polemical use of labels like Protestant and church papist and Puritan first turned the public domain into a coliseum for confessional combat—a significant number of figures voiced their opposition to the confessionalization of Christianity.⁵ All expressed horror at confessional names—refusing any name but Christian—and puzzled thereby every category that might explain or explain them away. From the vantage of these early moderns, the division among the churches seemed neither irreparable nor self-evidently permanent. It seemed like something altogether more startling.

Division was itself a term that provoked divided responses. Thomas Nashe knew whom to blame for shredding the church (that vesture of salvation) into so many pieces, thereby soiling its parts—the Anabaptists and adulterous Familists and Martinists with a hood with two faces, to hide their hypocrisy; and the barrowists and greenwoodians a garment full of the plague, which is not to be worne before it be new washed.⁶ As a verbally dexterous hit man in the service of the Elizabethan church, Nashe employed polemic to police its boundaries. Separatists and nonconformists were heretics, no better than Roman soldiers gambling away Christ’s clothes beneath the cross. On the other side of the confessional abyss, the brilliant propagandist and Jesuit Father Robert Persons also reasoned about division. With a devastating logic of his own, Persons routinely instructed the Reformed about division’s real meaning, since the Reformation itself was the original schism, so that all the Reformers were schismatics and all the schismatics heretics. Puritans like George Gifford thought about division differently too. The eruption of some fifty sects inside England might trouble sober Christians, Gifford admitted, but rightly understood their number merely confirmed the rightness of the godly in separating themselves. Division kept the pure pure for the gathering of the saints.⁷ The rhetoric of division sometimes even sponsored ecumenical visions about England’s church. The wildly popular writer of devotional literature Edmund Bunny counseled about the potential reconciliation between England and Rome (conceived piously as branches of a single church), if only Rome would sue for divorce from Satan.⁸ Your If is your only peacemaker, says Shakespeare’s Touchstone. Ecumenism had its politics, ecclesiastical and otherwise, and the rhetoric of division was regularly co-opted for institutional ends.

The Christians without names who are the subject of this book represented division differently. Instead of turning division into weaponry against confessional enemies, such Christians were distinctive precisely because they represented the contemporary division among the confessions as itself—startling to say—a species of impiety. Confessionalization was a recent eruption into the cultural order, and a ready object of attack. To identify oneself as a Protestant, a Catholic, or a Puritan—rather than as a Christian—offended against the universalism of the gospel and Christendom’s unity of the faithful in the body of Christ. Restoring the peace of Christendom meant removing or repairing or transcending the confessional divide. Yet even among these Christians who deplored the confessional divide, division was interpreted differently. The divide that mattered most to a great many (to Philip Sidney, for instance, and to those humanists who tutored him in Vienna) was the one troubling the Reformed churches. It turned Calvinists, crypto-Calvinists, Lutherans, and gnesio-Lutherans against each other—an impiety and a political danger (and a confusion of Babel!) because of the imminent, geopolitical threat from the Spanish Philip II and the Catholic League. The Reformed needed a united front.⁹ For others, the division that mattered most was that principal abyss separating Catholic and Protestant, and assailing the impiety of confessionalization found its express motive in repairing that divide or finding some causeway across the abyss.

Such figures complicate recent scholarly narratives about distinguishing (among others) Protestants from Catholics, politics from religion, and so-called secular from sacred fictions, and they do so as a network of historical actors engaged in complementary activities who sought to reenergize a Christianity imperiled by embattled churches and by the imminent threat of religious war. Turning away from confessions was the distinctive mark of a Christianity seeking to turn pure again—or pretending to purity. A scandalous satire of the 1580s like Leicester’s Commonwealth could parody arguments for reconciliation with an uncanny finesse—and a cross-confessional rhetoric to boot—but its real confessional commitments to Roman Catholicism were no more secret than Edmund Bunny’s to the Church of England, silver-tongued conciliator as its author wanted to appear.¹⁰ Whatever the homiletic force of Thomas Cranmer’s counsel against Christians of the new faith dividing themselves from Christians of the old, the cultural reality of exclusion, penury, imprisonment, and execution exposed a chasm between that rhetoric and the lived experience of English Catholics.¹¹

This book locates itself, then, at the flash point of confessional debate with the promise of recovering largely unstudied varieties of religious identity available to early modern Christians who chose to avoid the doctrinal extremes of Geneva and Rome. Such choices stemmed from their desire for reconciliation, however differently interpreted—for a restoration, that is, of some pure version of Christianity beyond confessional strife. Such longing was connected often to the consensus antiquitatis, that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all, and the deep sense of urgency to restore that consensus by way of peacemaking (or irenical) activities of several kinds. The desire to move beyond enabled the birth of new political rhetorics promising inclusivity for all of England’s Christians and gained special prominence in the pursuit of a still-imaginary Great Britain. What’s more, fiction’s imaginative energy and conceptual force enabled its makers to craft piously rich experiences appealing deliberately to Christians of every variety. Taken together, as individual believers, actors on the public stage, and fiction makers, such Christians challenge the adequacy of equating confessional identity with religious identity, the intelligibility of secular characterizations of early modern politics and culture, and the coherence of lingering critical claims about England’s putatively Protestant poetry. Or to state the argument more positively, such Christians provide conspicuous evidence that irenicism—seeking the peace of Christendom—was a force in the early modern era that invites new thinking about England’s religious, political, and poetic culture.

This study makes no effort to resolve the controversies about early modern religious identity by negotiating new definitions of English Protestants, Catholics, or moderate and radical Puritans, much less England’s many dissenters, separatists, or nonconformists. Instead, it provides a unique vantage from which to understand the culture that produced such a heterogeneous range of believers by attending to particular figures—like the neutral observer of Europe’s religious conflicts Edwin Sandys, the conciliatory jurist Jean Hotman, and the polemically acerbic Antonio del Corro—who chose to define their pious identity by refusing to assume a partisan label for themselves. In the process, this study puzzles and complicates the confessional labels of current scholarship with the goal of better historical understanding. All of the figures in this study were conforming churchgoers, and all attempted as Christians—by various means and for various purposes—to situate themselves beyond, between, or against the confessions for reasons that both foreground pious motivations and inspire critical scrutiny.

AGAINST SEPARATIONS AND PARTIALITIES: ANTONIO DEL CORRO AND ENGLAND’S FALL INTO BABEL

Plainly expressed in its most uncompromising form—the one that spurns all varieties of confessions, institutions, catechisms, or commentaries—opposition to the confessions reads like this:

We will be Christians, and so bee called, we will folow the confession of faith whyche oure GOD the father, and Jesus Chryste hys Sonne have lefte unto us: that ys to saye, the dyvyne worde in the olde and newe Testamente the summe of oure Religion. . . . We have not bin baptised in the names of Martine, Zwinglius or Calvin, but in the name of the Father and the Sonne and the holye Ghoste: by whyche meanes wee detest and abhore all those names and surnames of Partialities, that is to saye, Martinistes, Zwinglians and, Calvinists, with other lyke, knowing very well that GOD is greately displeased wyth suche separations and partialities in the doctrine of religion. And I wish with al my heart, that the doctours whiche have taught here before, and suche as at this daye doe preache the Gospel, were of more modestie and wisedome, and purely consecrated to search the glorie of the Lorde, and not theyr owne proper praise: then should the people bee in more lybertye of conscience, and the worshippers of one onely God, and not of mortall men, ignoraunte and blynde.¹²

The voice of the speaker wishing to secure the liberty of Christians from the separations and partialities of confessional doctrine belongs to a Spanish exile in England named Antonio del Corro.¹³ The citation is to his Epistle or Godlie Admonition, a polemical text that predates his flight from the Spanish Netherlands to England. Corro’s Epistle was first sent to the pastors of the Flemish church in Antwerp in 1567 and subsequently translated into English and republished twice, once in 1569 and again in 1577. The specific circumstances occasioning these publications varied, from Corro’s engagement in sharp disputes among varieties of Lutherans and Calvinists in Antwerp, to his participation in equally sharp doctrinal divisions among London’s Stranger Churches in the late 1560s, to his participation in a continuation of those same doctrinal disputes at Oxford in 1575, as Corro was prevented from pursuing a theological degree for himself because of his heterodox beliefs and confrontational style.¹⁴ For an irenicist (a figure preaching the peace of Christ), Corro was peculiarly adept at making enemies. He was a Pelagian (a believer in free will) before Pelagians had a substantial voice in England’s church, and an utterly undogmatic Christian who held that salvation was available to all Christian believers—as well as to Jews and Muslims.

Corro’s circumstances changed, but the anticonfessional character of his response to each crisis stayed the same: he blamed churchmen addicted to partialities for oppressing the lybertye of Christians to believe according to the dictates of their conscience, and he blamed those partialities for the frustration of his own vocational ambitions. What’s more, to add bite to his scourge, Corro prefaced the publication of his Epistle in 1577 with a second tract, a translation of his plea to his compatriot Philip II of Spain to spare the Netherlands from the Inquisition’s tyranny.¹⁵ Recent history could be just as instructive as ancient history. Corro’s implicit comparison of England’s church to Spain’s Inquisition was audacious and presented with just enough deniability to keep the rhetorically shrewd controversialist safe. One of the ironies among these circumstances is that Corro republished this assault against the impieties of confessional Christianity at the very moment that he pursued employment at Oxford in the service of the church. Fortunately for Corro, he was also adept at cultivating powerful patrons. Only because Corro was a favorite of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, did he gain the employment that he sought in 1578—employment that he lost again in early 1586 at the end of Leicester’s chancellorship of the University and departure for the Netherlands. As late as 1587, Corro was making plans to reconcile Christendom’s warring churches; his preface to the Dialogus in Epistolam D. Pauli ad Romanos states that he has written a small treatise demonstrating how all of the religious controversies of his time can be resolved (Habeo enim paratum opusculum de ratione conciliandi controversias nostri temporis, quae Christianas ecclesias vexant atque discerpunt).¹⁶ The same preface simultaneously disavows any possibility—amid his chosen exile and the extreme bitterness of these times (exulceratissima nostra tempora)—of publishing anything of the sort.¹⁷ Corro writes like a man who has been censored or, at the very least, fears recrimination for expressing his conscience freely.

Antonio del Corro was a cosmopolitan Christian, a sixteenthcentury Zelig who experienced firsthand life as a Spanish monk and the terror of the Inquisition; who received a Reformed education from Beza at the Academy of Lausanne and had Calvin’s personal approval to minister in Bordeaux; who taught Spanish to the future Henry IV of France at the court of Navarre and later perhaps to Philip Sidney in England; who received a Reformed reeducation at Montargis at the irenical court of Renée, Duchess of Ferrara, patroness of poets as skilled as Vittoria Colonna and Clément Marot; who witnessed to his disgust the slaughter of one thousand Anabaptists under Antwerp’s walls; and who went head to head against the uncompromising Mathias Flacius Illyricus to excoriate his confession as a tool of Partiality.¹⁸ Corro’s anticonfessionalism was the hard-won product of his lived experience of doctrinal intolerance, mass murder, and religious war. When he accounted for his beliefs, he did so, not by alluding to contemporary humanists, but by citing Matthew’s parable of the Good Samaritan and Paul’s epistles preaching a universalizing Christianity that subsumes all forms of human identification within the Christian’s new identity in Christ.¹⁹

While Corro’s opposition to confessional Christianity is best explained by his international experience—experience that would be repeated with a difference by a variety of world travelers also important to this study (Philip Sidney, Henry Constable, Jean Hotman, Edwin Sandys, and Alberico Gentili)—England’s post-Reformation emerged, I will argue, as a peculiarly efficient crucible for forging new religious identities within confessional walls and simultaneously outside them. Put more plainly, my argument will be that England’s continuing reformations exacerbated the conditions in which opposition to confessionalization could take root. While the metaphor of the crucible is borrowed from Peter Marshall’s scholarship, this reading of the Reformation derives in greater part from the analytical savvy of John Harington’s Tract on the Succession.²⁰ For Harington, England’s Reformation was nothing short of spiritual whiplash, an extended series of religious disruptions arbitrarily imposed from above by state power. The quick changes of religion during the sixteenth century provide one reason for Patrick Collinson’s insistence that the distinguishing feature of England’s Reformation was the teeming plurality and diversity of religious views that it enabled, or what I will call the irrepressible heterogeneity of religious opinions and pious attitudes available in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean culture.²¹ This is a view I share with Peter Lake and Michael Questier, among other religious historians. I am persuaded by Alec Ryrie’s scholarly account of the Protestant experience in early modern England as a cultural ideal whose impact was profound, but not as a homogeneous cultural reality.²² There were always differences, other forms of Christian belief both attractive and available. With Alexandra Walsham, I am persuaded that those quick, multiple changes of religion that Harington laments were a major cause for the proliferating sects, factions, and churches whose existence nearly everyone in early modern England bemoaned.²³ They were one cause too of that indeterminably large portion of crypto-Catholics who experienced with special agony the chasm between state-enforced conformity of worship and the inward reality of their spiritual commitments to the old faith.

Such changes also explain the need for a contemporary historical and critical vocabulary adequate for distinguishing between theological doctrines and church practices that belong to institutions, and those beliefs that are private to individual conscience. Hence, this study will persistently foreground piety as a term distinguishing the individual’s lived experience of religion from religion in its other meanings. What that distinction seeks to enable is access to another distinctive and indeterminably large body of early modern Christians (not adequately labeled Nicodemites or crypto-Catholics) who resisted confessionalization and who had their own desires to speak, act, and pray differently. Out of the gap between the institutional confession of belief and the personal experience of belief emerged new schisms and new crypto-Catholics and Christians without names who professed allegiance to no confession at all. One primary challenge of this study, then, is to access exactly those varieties of inward belief that resisted ordinary institutional (and social/historical) categories, and that challenge is one primary reason why this book follows Peter Lake’s practice in privileging literature as a source of knowledge about England’s politico-religious culture. Only, in place of the stage and tenuous claims about topical allegory, my study turns persistently to poetry of diverse kinds—to epics in translation, epigrams, sonnet sequences, and Passion narratives—to fictive constructs in which the authorial I registers its lived experience of the world.²⁴ The self-understanding of my subjects is most sharply highlighted by the stories that they tell about themselves.

When Corro rants against the names and surnames of Partialities in a contemporary chorus excoriating those "carnal appellations of Lutherans and Calvinists," there is reason to remember how persistently arguments about religion in early modern England were translated into arguments about words.²⁵ The myth of Babel was always available as a screen through which to represent that steadily expanding realm of England’s public domain—a space for books, broadsheets, pamphlets, proclamations and declamations, monumental tomes and scribbled manuscripts—to compete for attention and authority. Proliferating sectarian, factional, and confessional names hurled in verbal combat excited protests against libel, carnality, and Christian decency and excited thereby new occasions for hurling libels just as scurrilous as the old, or more so when Thomas Nashe put pen to paper. Inside a public domain turned coliseum for confessional combat, there was little room for neutrality in the contemporary sense of the word—even though early modern England numbered in its semantic register large hordes of neuters.

Those Christians refusing names who are my subject were most often identified as neuters, when identified at all, but neuter was a polemical term applied with dizzying imprecision to many early modern Christians, only some of whom shared a Corro’s or a Harington’s piety, learning, and resolve to write. Neuter was a stubbornly enduring, catch-all polemical category that took hold in the English presses before crypto-Catholic ever surfaced and that continued in use throughout the period because it performed, as I will argue, a different kind of cultural work. The label identified—as it labored to disempower, even castrate—a whole host of spiritually indifferent Laodiceans, lukewarm churchgoers, linsey-woolsey nullifidians, both-and, neither-nor, politically ambitious misbelievers, as well as pointyheaded conciliators. The neuters inspired anything but a neutral response from their enemies among the godly Puritans or their Catholic counterparts. At the moment that Shakespeare’s Gloucester declares himself a neutral in the coming war between France and England, he has his eyes gouged out. The place of the neuter was perilous, especially the neuter voicing hope for reconciliation between and among the churches or opposition to confessionalization itself.

Part of the challenge of interpreting such Christians well is preserving neutrality with respect to their claims to pure motives and freedom from polemical intent. All of the key figures in this book were practiced rhetoricians, all were members of the educated elite, and all of the claims voiced in the support of a Christianity undivided by names—published and private, prosaic, and poetic—were claims circulating inside a rhetorical domain whose truth value is subject to the same standards of evaluation as any other. Most of them had identifiable political allegiances, stakes in the larger games of the public world intimately related to their pious commitments. They do not invite suspension of disbelief or of hermeneutic suspicion, even though (as I will argue) their neutrality stakes some serious claims to critical attention and analytic power. Their neutral position possesses its own value, even when the effort to achieve it was (as postmoderns recognize) inevitably partial and contingent.

NAMING CHRISTIANS WITHOUT NAMES

Peter Marshall is right to call for a linguistic turn in contemporary Reformation studies. As his own work shows, the politics of language and labelling has real historical power to enable access to the self-understandings of the Reformation movement in a national and international context.²⁶ Professing a confession is a verbal performance. Refusing a confessional label is also emphatically a verbal performance and profoundly revealing about the self-understandings of those early moderns in question. Inside a public domain corrupted by the linguistic impieties of Babel, amid the noise of confessional warfare, refusing any name but Christian became a meaningful act of self-definition.

But what are we to call Christians who would find any label that we apply to them an act of misprision and an impiety? The stakes of naming are high. To call them neuters would risk tarring them with the contempt of their adversaries. It might be feasible to identify them as C. S. Lewis’s mere Christians, but the phrase carries too many associations with Anglicanism and the suspect history of the English church as a via media.²⁷ It might be possible to absorb them into the history of crypto-Catholicism, except that none of these Christians were committed either to Rome or to any other church—other than that invisible church of the believers to which Corro and Constable in the 1580s and the young Jack Donne and Erasmus’s Saint Socrates belonged.²⁸ Constable did turn ecumenical Catholic, and Donne did become an inclusively Protestant minister, while Corro maintained to the end his own pious Christianity without a need or desire for confessional legitimacy. All early modern religious identities were subject to mutability, and this one no less than the others.

Instead of a single label to describe these Christians who despised labels, I will use a complex of terms whose flexibility complements the diverse self-understandings of my subjects. They are nonconfessional, cross-confessional, or anticonfessional figures whose identity coheres in their determination to achieve a pure Christianity beyond—to borrow a term not always best left to Puritans. This complex of terms inscribes accurately some of their built-in oppositionality as they relate, compare, and contrast themselves to the Babel of confessional noisemakers. As individuals, they can seem as radically idiosyncratic as John Harington building a better flush toilet to purify England’s post-Reformation or as spectacularly normative as a Philip Sidney, who writes the kind of poetry that nearly everyone wanted to write. In every instance, these are labels that need historical redefinition and refinement according to the specificities of the individual’s pious and political commitments, since these figures have no common core of doctrinal beliefs. Any label would require as much. For simplicity’s sake, when other emphases are not required, they are nameable as a-confessional Christians. The term’s expansiveness proves especially helpful as it applies to that pan-European variety of libertines, moderators, conciliators, irenicists, and the like, who might otherwise go silent amid the Babel of scholarly naming. A-confessional is an umbrella term, or, more descriptively, a tent for accommodating that full, heterogeneous range of figures who sought the peace of Christendom, whether sweetly singing psalms of Salem or wielding God’s sledgehammer when the peace-wars turned agonistic.

Such Christians pose then with particular clarity one of the central challenges confronting both religious historians and literary scholars of England’s post-Reformation, how to adjust our roughand-ready labels, terms, and categories to pious experiences that frequently elude or defy them. They are historical witnesses to a continuing crisis about naming, whose pursuit of some pure Christianity between or beyond confessional conflict made them mingle-manglers of the old and the new faiths, both Catholic and Protestant and neither Catholic nor Protestant. It is notorious, write Peter Lake and Michael Questier, that the religious history of the post-Reformation period has been written almost entirely with reference to a series of binary oppositions.²⁹ A-confessional Christians trouble those boundaries in ways that disturb taxonomical purity.

Among the most important of Lake and Questier’s binaries are the twin terms puritanism and Anglicanism, Calvinism and Arminianism, conformity and Laudianism, and what they describe as the most stark of these divisions, that between Protestantism and Catholicism.³⁰ The cool Protestant mind—rational, verbally engaging, at once ascetically disembodied and iconoclastic—gets juxtaposed conventionally to the hot Catholic body—passionate, visually alluring, at once wholly embodied and incarnational. Cliché breeds cliché. In the process, the historian or critic is thus confronted with an either/ or choice between a number of opposing groups or labels into which all of the relevant material under discussion (political factions, ideological groupings, discursive structures or polemical maneuvers, ‘attitudes’ toward this, that or the other) are supposed to be categorized and distributed.³¹ History calcifies into convenient definitions, as if it were possible to identify what is essentially Protestant or Catholic in post-Reformation Europe as a whole or England in particular. What gets obscured in the process are the diverse identities of early modern believers and the particular textures of the individual’s beliefs, complicated always by difficult-to-distinguish pious commitments at the core of an ancient and enduring Christian faith and the new crisis of ecclesial reform that propelled Protestants and Catholics alike to the reformation of their spiritual lives. It is one thing to long for the universalism of the Vincentian Canon’s all places and all times and all believers and quite another to gain consensus about the content of that unity. A-confessional Christians throw these confusions of Babel into relief, as they puzzle and taunt us with the challenge of exploring their identities. The value of assuming that interpretive challenge is to expand the scope and clarify the field inside which early moderns made choices—pious, political, and poetic.

Sometimes the attachment of these Christians to a particular community is strong enough to require a historical label. For instance, Philip Sidney’s education among Philip Melanchthon’s students in Vienna argues powerfully for his identification as a Philippist—a term that denotes, not a confessional identity, but rather membership in a particular community—a community of like-minded, educated elites, internationally diverse and loosely conjoined—with a specific history of opposition to intraconfessional conflicts among Reformed Christians.³² At other times, such Christians are best studied by attending to the variety of rhetorical forms in which they wrote and rhetorical turns that they take in practicing them—including those awkward ellipses (like Corro’s) that gesture toward what they could not write or eloquent articulations of opposition to division clearly intended (like Bunny’s or Persons’s) to divide. In relation to figures so aware about the power and peril of words, their rhetorical maneuvers have a cultural context that bears teasing out.

Cross-confessional contacts between Protestants and Catholics have received new historical attention. Late sixteenth-century Europe gave birth to an international elite of humanists inside a new republic of letters, who were fully committed to civil communication divorced from religious partisanship.³³ Philip Sidney’s correspondence with Hubert Languet made an early contribution to that world, as did the archival labors of Jean Hotman, a great compiler of conciliation literature, and the historical and religious labors of Jacques Auguste de Thou, whose pleas for James I to reunite all Christendom (penned in eloquent Latin) Hotman quickly translated into serviceable French.³⁴ Closer to home, Anthony Milton has shown persuasively that "while confessionally driven anti-Catholicism was a prominent discourse in early modern England, it was not the single dominant one; for reasons of family, piety, politics, intellectual life, and the arts, as Milton shows, Life in Protestant England was in fact littered with Roman Catholic ideas, books, images and people."³⁵ The mingle-mangle of old faith and new was as ordinary as it was inevitable, a point highlighted by the continuing recuperation of England’s Catholics as vital participants in the culture at large. As Victor Houliston has called attention to the Protestant fascination with Robert Persons’s Christian Directory, Alison Shell has detailed a wholescale appropriation and reappropriation of literary kinds, forms, and techniques by authors on both sides of the confessional divide.³⁶ Ian Green has accumulated volumes of evidence among early modern catechisms to showcase (as he argues) the inclusivity of England’s church; Christopher Marsh has argued for the presence of popular piety in English parishes that created the charitable bonding of neighbors, both Catholic and Protestant.³⁷ These are notably idealistic estimations about cross-confessional exchange, which will need and receive qualification.

Alexandra Walsham’s groundbreaking study of post-Reformation attitudes about providence has highlighted a large terrain of shared beliefs among traditional and Reformed English Christians, one that coheres well with the emphasis of Sarah Beckwith and Nancy Warren on significant continuities between symbolic forms of religious expression, medieval to early modern, Catholic to Reformed.³⁸ Alec Ryrie’s insistence on the attractiveness of Catholic devotional literature among Protestants has now been expansively documented by Theodore Bozeman and John Yamamoto-Wilson.³⁹ In turn, Nandra Perry has shed light on the cross-confessional literary exchanges enabled by these common sources of devotional practice, with their genesis in the common tradition of imitatio Christi.⁴⁰ Kimberly Johnson has complemented her work by studying incarnational poetics as a transconfessional practice among seventeenth-century lyric poets, from Donne and Taylor to Herbert and Crashaw. Such scholarship would have delighted Louis Martz, who long ago drew attention to the literary importance of those meditative commonalities.⁴¹ As scholars of the Psalms from Jan Van Dorsten to Hannibal Hamlin have taught, the body of sacred Christian literature imparted a mutual body of spiritual matter and spiritual styles, forms, and vocabulary to all early moderns within or between or opposed to the confessions.⁴²

What’s more, for scholars at work on women and literature, like Micheline White and Susannah Monta, the interwoven networks of exchange (sometimes unintended) between Catholic and Protestant readers of devotional literature or individual communities of aristocratic women have created new tapestries for scholarly research.⁴³ In an era of succession crisis, with the threat of religious war always impending, it makes sense that women crossed boundaries to assert the preeminence of family, commonwealth, and piety over confession. The women are not an afterthought. In many important ways, they are the culmination of these scholarly efforts as they are the culmination of this book.

Considered in summary form, then, from Milton and Lake to Walsham and Monta, more and more scholars have started to explore what Debora Shuger has best described as the still largely unknown field where Catholic and Protestant vectors intersect and merge; where they absorb, deflect, distort, amplify, or diffuse each other; where they do something besides merely collide.⁴⁴ My study of England’s a-confessional Christians seeks to contribute to that same scholarly project with a difference. There are no studies of England’s a-confessional Christians—partly because of their built-in challenge to identification and partly because their piety defies as it refuses conventional categorizations.⁴⁵ Similar to Richard Strier’s cultural renegades and resisting writers, these are Christians thinking what we have considered impossible thoughts.

My study takes seriously the particular challenges posed by these early moderns by placing questions about identity and piety at its forefront, not its periphery, and argues that early modern fictions constantly highlight such questions. Inside a public domain turned confessional battleground, writing fictions promised a ready relief from religious combats, and even energy to address and redress those combats. When Philip Sidney gave expression to the first English account about the value of fiction making, he did so inside a counterfactual poetics that complemented his counterconfessional piety, and he opened thereby a genuinely inclusive domain that attracted writers of every confessional variety—and writers of none.⁴⁶ It would be possible to explore connections between Sidney’s Christianity and the broadly tolerant religious beliefs sometimes attributed to a variety of early modern writers: to William Shakespeare, for instance, whose personal and principled attachment to Raphael Holinshed’s confessionally diverse, piously inclusive, antityrannical circle of writers Annabel Patterson has detailed persuasively; or to John Donne, whose avantgarde conformism in his postordination years, less in opposition to Rome than to Geneva, Richard Strier has convincingly described; or to Ben Jonson and Thomas Browne, whose Erasmian religious postures—however differently represented—contrast just as sharply with the strident Protestantism of a Stephen Gosson or a Thomas Middleton.⁴⁷ Again, for fiction makers as for ordinary polemicists, the network of connections among those writers placing themselves between or against the confessions or attempting to imagine into being a confessional beyond was extensive. As fiction makers, they matter to this study most powerfully because of the unique access to the representation of lived experience that poetic voices and literary narratives supply. It is one thing to read Henry Constable’s impressively argued Examen pacifique on making peace between Catholics and the Reformed. It is quite another to know the affective experience and cognitive reality of pious irenicism undone when that piety becomes the subject of his Sonnets. The first promises intelligibility, the second a degree of phenomenological understanding that eludes ordinary discourse.

Not all religious historians or literary scholars, for that matter, have been as welcoming as Debora Shuger to the study of early modern Christians who trouble the boundaries among the confessions. Too much recent work in early modern religion has dismissed from consideration the potential for positive and piously motivated pursuits of cross-confessional unity. This may have something to do with the aggressively secular formulations of contemporary scholars and with an expanding suspicion about staking claims (either then in the early modern era or now in scholarship) to a middle ground of political or religious concord and compromise. Moderation is the kind of term that screams for definition and contextualization, and frustration about its frequently fuzzy misapplication is warranted. What has less warrant is its near-total evacuation as a potentially meaningful category.

Ethan Shagan’s The Rule of Moderation is intellectually challenging scholarship that seeks (simply stated) to take the moderate out of moderation. Moderation and temperance had a magnetic attraction inside early modern England’s public domain, as Shagan impressively documents. Such concepts could and did function as instrumental discourse for the enactment of institutional violence by another name: the politics of restraint (at court and in the church) were tempered to the interest of government. There is plenty of evidence at the extremes of England’s warring confessions—from the occasional virulence of the Puritan Thomas Cartwright to the post-Tridentine acerbity of Cardinal Allen—that the rhetoric of moderation could be co-opted for ideological and institutional purposes. No principle was proof against repurposing of that kind. There is plenty of evidence to indicate, too, at the intellectual foundations of this systematic co-optation, that temperance in Aristotle could be read as a bridle of both the passions and the people, as Shagan argues at length. And yet, contemporaneously, there is reason to know that Aristotle’s politics could just as effectively spur the horse of tyrannomachy and threaten state control (for Protestants and for Catholics), just as his ethics could energize cosmopolitan perspectives contesting institutional orthodoxies, political and religious.⁴⁸ English culture is a more complicated beast than Shagan allows or than any totalizing thesis is likely to get right. Christians articulated more positive and more pious expressions of moderation than Shagan concedes, and they did so often outside, between, and against the confessions. Figures like Antonio del Corro, Jacopo Aconcio, and Henry Constable find no place in Shagan’s Rule of Moderation—much less Philip Sidney, John Harington, Jean Hotman, Edwin Sandys, or Alberico Gentili—and such figures both demand and reward attention.

The edging out of religious motivations in current historical studies has consequences for recovering the history of Christians resisting the confessions, since it obscures the reality at issue, even sometimes among first-rate English historians. Peter Lake’s Bad Queen Bess? has anatomized a whole body of confessionally shared paradigms for waging political warfare in the public domain—from the libelous romance to the scandalous history—and showed their force in prosecuting more warfare still. The exacerbation of confessional conflict is as important to the study of Christians crossing or opposing the confessions as any effort to achieve conciliation. Bad Queen Bess? illuminates the sustained interplay between literary fictions and political-religious polemics in Elizabethan England’s public domain, and most significantly it makes Catholics important again to state politics. As Lake’s study moves back and forth between various forms of public rhetoric, literary and polemical, he uncovers the facility with which early moderns switched registers (from the political to the religious, or from the religious to the political) according to their purposes in targeting one audience or another.

While such switching is rightly characterized as the mark of rhetorical sophistication and political finesse, Lake’s assumption that either politics or rhetoric subsumes or adequately accounts for the religious is unfounded—especially inside a culture in which the ultimate guarantor of meaning remained stubbornly religious.⁴⁹ Early modern England’s savviest rhetoricians (from Thomas More to John Donne to Thomas Browne) were arguably its most piously disposed. Or to make the argument more pointed, rhetorical and poetic sophistication could perform piety in ways that political explanation cannot wholly explain or fully exhaust. This study privileges those performances because they matter profoundly to the historical actors in question and because their verbal performances work so well to reframe the question of what is really real in early modern culture—real, that is, as a force determining behavior, producing consequences, providing authority, or promising understanding and meaning. Political analysis cannot subsume all claims about historical reality to itself. Religion stakes claims of its own that are not translatable or reducible to questions of rhetoric or politics, any more than understandings about the religious in early modern Europe can be confined to those confessions for which true religion existed only inside the doctrinal walls of their own churches. If the domain of the religious includes properly that heterogeneity of spiritual beliefs, experiences, judgments, and practices constituting the full religious culture—not full as the register of church orthodoxy or ecclesiastical consensus but full as the always incomplete register of individual kinds of piety, its lived experience and practice—then plainly the confessions are insufficient registers for understanding religion either in early modern England or on the Continent. Scholars, too, have a need to move beyond the confessions, and to do so without evacuating moderation as an explanatory category or edging out the religious as a robust domain of meaning and experience with its own claims to historical reality.

Antonio del Corro’s opposition to the separations and partialities of confessional Christianity emerged against a wide horizon of religious beliefs and within an international network of similarly minded intellectuals. Expanding wars among the confessions in the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire, and France made the darkness of confessionalization visible and, for irenicists like Corro, an urgent threat to the peace of the gospel. Recovering the intellectual foundations of those Christians resisting and reaching across confessional boundaries brings clarity about who they were and why they matter for the study of early modern religion. The Introduction that follows makes that historical recovery in order to bring Europe’s peace-wars home to England.

Introduction

Peace-Wars on the Continent and in Britain

CONTINENTAL NETWORKS OF A-CONFESSIONAL CHRISTIANS

Recovering the intellectual foundations of those Christians reaching across confessional boundaries begins properly by attending to recent scholarly treatments of Europe’s multiple confessions; it proceeds to the ongoing transformation of toleration studies among religious historians; and it then supplies an overview of its subjects’ intellectual foundations in light of their search for the peace of Christendom. In the geographical movement among the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire, and France, there is remarkable diversity among Christians pursuing what scholars variously term union or reunion, moderation or concord, conciliation or ‘irenicism," both in their beliefs and in their new politics developed to complement those beliefs. They were all a-confessionals. It takes a large tent to accommodate this full range of Christians and, while making the necessary distinctions between and among them, to give sufficient rigor to analysis. What startles attention from the first is how many early modern Christians refused, resisted, or opposed the confessions for the sake of repairing the torn body of Christendom.

Multiconfessionalism was a reality in the early modern era, however much individual churches and states attempted to deny it, or to contain and control its potential for violence, or to set aside its opportunities for reimagining Christian communities of a different kind.¹ A confessional hegemony could obtain near exclusivity in certain corners of Europe—in Catholic Spain and Portugal, later in Lutheran Sweden and Denmark—but rarely elsewhere. Early in the century, Switzerland achieved a long-lasting peace between its Catholic and Protestant cantons in the Second Peace of Kappel (1531) by permitting the individual cantons to maintain the religion of their choice. Some states like Poland achieved fame for the attempt to legislate harmony across the divided confessions—among Calvinists, Lutherans, and the Bohemian Brethren in the Polish-Lithuanian Consensus of Sandomir (1570), the product of John Laski’s call for Protestant unity to forestall Catholic tyranny. Three years later in the far more comprehensive Warsaw Confederation, freedom of worship was granted to nearly all of the kingdom’s churches. Stephen Bathory, the famously inclusive and zealously Catholic king of Poland, sustained the agreement during his reign (1576–86). Even antitrinitarians and Anabaptists, refugees from confessional oppression elsewhere, were able to live more or less peacefully in Poland and Lithuania—until, that is, the monarchy allied with Jesuits in the early seventeenth century to eradicate the Confederation’s power.² Central Europe set no great example for sovereigns in the West, who inclined to interpret compromise and conciliation as signs of weakness—unless or until, that is, the weight of religious war became unbearable for princes like William of Orange, Maximilian II, and Henry of Navarre.

The German irenicist David Pareus maintained his admiration for Poland’s Consensus as late as 1614, as did those twin British conciliators John Dury and Samuel Hartlib as they exchanged letters about the pacification of England’s church in 1628.³ The early modern era was replete with synods, councils, and proposals for new synods and new councils to restore Christendom to wholeness, which rarely met and rarely achieved much success. The chronicle of such failures has led historians to study Europe’s multiple confessions mainly from the perspective of those early modern institutional networks whose job was to contain, to control, and—God