Bold Conscience: Luther to Shakespeare to Milton

By Joshua R. Held

How the conscience in early modern England emerged as a fulcrum for public action
 
Bold Conscience chronicles the shifting conception of conscience in early modern England, as it evolved from a faculty of restraint—what Shakespeare labels “coward conscience”—to one of bold and forthright self-assertion. The concept of conscience played an important role in post-Reformation England, from clerical leaders to laymen, not least because of its central place in determining loyalties during the English Civil War and the regicide of King Charles I. Yet the most complex and lasting perspectives on conscience emerged from deliberately literary voices—William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton.

Joshua Held argues that literary texts by these authors transform the idea of conscience as a private, shameful state to one of boldness fit for navigating both royal power and common dissent in the public realm. Held tracks the increasing political power of conscience from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henry VIII to Donne’s court sermons and Milton’s Areopagitica, showing finally that in Paradise Lost, Milton roots boldness in the inner paradise of a pure, common conscience.

Applying a fine-grain analysis to literary England from about 1601 to 1667, this study also looks back to the 1520s, to Luther’s theological foundations of the concept, and forward to 1689, to Locke’s transformation of the idea alongside the term “consciousness.” Ultimately, Held’s study shows how conscience emerges at once as a bulwark against absolute sovereignty and as a stronghold of personal certainty.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jun 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9780817394486

Book preview

BOLD CONSCIENCE

STRODE STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

MICHELLE M. DOWD, SERIES EDITOR

Editorial Advisory Board

Dennis Austin Britton

Bradin Cormack

Mario DiGangi

Holly Dugan

Barbara Fuchs

Enrique García Santo-Tomás

Jessica Goethals

Karen Raber

Jyotsna G. Singh

Wendy Wall

BOLD CONSCIENCE

Luther to Shakespeare to Milton

JOSHUA R. HELD

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Minion Pro

Cover image: Detail from frontispiece of Ductor Dubitantium, or The Rule of Conscience by Jeremy Taylor (London: James Flesher for Richard Royston, 1660); courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Cover design: Sandy Turner Jr.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2155-0 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-8173-6111-2 (paper)

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9448-6

For James, George, Frederick, Mildred, and Florence

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Conscience in Luther and Henry VIII

2. Shakespearean Consciences: Hamlet in Wittenberg

3. More Shakespearean Consciences: Looking Back at Henry VIII’s Conscience

4. Supporting Conscience in Donne’s Sermons

5. The Toleration Crisis of 1644

6. Contesting Conscience in Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes

7. Revising Conscience in Paradise Lost

Conclusion

Note on Texts

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

MY CHIEF DEBTS in this book are twofold. Judith H. Anderson helped me shape the project and remained a generous, perspicuous guide. Richard Strier sharpened my argumentation tactics in this book and elsewhere and welcomed me into a wonderful group of Chicago Renaissance scholars.

For astute and lively comment on parts of this book as it was taking shape, I am grateful to several mentors at Indiana University, especially Constance M. Furey, Joan Pong Linton, and Sarah Van der Laan, as well as Linda Charnes, Ellen MacKay, and others. At Trinity International University, I am grateful for the forceful wit of Lois Fleming, the oracular counsel of William Graddy, and the friendly support of Bradley Gundlach and several other individuals.

I thank the staffs of libraries where I read for this book: the Lilly Library, the Newberry Library, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (especially Dennis Sears), and the University of Chicago Special Collections. For funding my research at the first three libraries listed, I am grateful respectively to the Everett Helm Fellowship fund, the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies, and the College Arts and Humanities Institute at Indiana University. I am deeply grateful to the staff of Trinity’s Rolfing Library for their help in obtaining books and articles.

I presented various pieces of this project at the Newberry Library and at meetings of the International Congress on Medieval Studies, the John Donne Society conference, the biennial Conference on John Milton, and the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. I am grateful to these audiences and especially to David Adkins, Rudy Almasy, Ryan Hackenbracht, András Kiséry, Esther Gilman Richey, and Sara Saylor. I also thank the Milton Society of America, particularly its first book assistance program.

My understanding of Luther is much indebted to a summer institute on the Reformation funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and led by Karin Maag and David M. Whitford. I thank my colleague in divinity David Luy for his perceptive comments on the Luther portion of chapter 1. I am in debt to my colleague in political science Greg Forster for his help with the conclusion. Lara Crowley improved my understanding of Donne presented in chapter 4, and Tim Harrison expanded my grasp of the relation between conscience and consciousness at many points. Andrew Cutrofello commented incisively on the introduction and on chapters 2 and 7. A small portion of chapter 7 was published in Studies in Philology, 114, no. 1 (Winter 2017), under the title "Eve’s ‘Paradise Within’ in Paradise Lost: A Stoic Mind, a Love Sonnet, and a Good Conscience." I thank the journal and its editor, Reid Barbour, for permission to reprint.

At the University of Alabama Press, I am grateful for Dan Waterman’s affability and sure-handedness, Irina du Quenoy’s and Joanna Jacobs’s immense help in editing, and Michelle Dowd’s support and encouragement. I am especially grateful to the anonymous readers for their sympathetic, lucid, and at times revelatory comments on the manuscript.

For their enduring encouragement and support, I thank my family, especially mein Liebchen Meagan. I dedicate the book to our children.

Introduction

THIS BOOK CHRONICLES the rise and then transmutation of the bold conscience in early modernity, from Martin Luther to John Locke, with a particular focus on the England of William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton. Because of the surplus of concepts that it housed, in Tudor and Stuart England the word conscience played an important role, from clerical leaders on down to laypeople, and from the court of chancery (also called the court of conscience) to the more open court of public opinion.¹ Most historians and scholars of Begriffsgeschichte (concept history) have concluded that the concept of conscience underwent considerable change during early modernity, especially through such figures as the early Reformer Luther and the early Enlightenment thinker Locke.² Historian of conscience Richard Sorabji pinpoints the seventeenth century as above all the century of freedom of individual conscience, while Keith Thomas, referring specifically to English history, calls this century the Age of Conscience.³ Applying a fine-grain literary analysis to England in this period, this book functions as a keyword study of conscience—especially of its politically bold dimensions—from about 1601 to 1667, with a long look backward to the 1520s and a quick glance forward to 1689.⁴ The book argues that conscience evolves from a mental faculty with new importance in the Reformation to a boldly presented, highly contested right by the 1640s; at the same time, through widespread use the term became fragmented, devolving from its high position in the mid-1600s to a more attenuated, carefully regulated privilege by the century’s close, reducing the need for boldness of conscience.

DEFINITION: BOLD CONSCIENCE AND COWARD CONSCIENCE

What, in early modern England, was conscience? And what, more specifically, was a bold conscience? Broadly defined, conscience is a moral sense that carries intense inner conviction and often demands action; a bold conscience replicates the inner dedication in the vehemence of outer expression, with comparatively little regard for the constraints or expectations of either society or government.⁵ In early modern England, conscience was a concept with several dimensions. The first is epistemological, in that conscience provides a sense of certainty to the individual. A second is emotional, in that it provides comfort and assurance, often based on epistemological certainty or attempting to approximate its effects.⁶ The third and most important dimension for this study is political, wherein conscience provides the basis for a public defense of the self’s beliefs and actions against governmental authority. The three overlap and reinforce each other in various ways but can be distinguished analytically; they appear in different combinations and receive different degrees of emphasis at different times in this book.

Boldness supported at least two kinds of broadly political assertiveness in early modern England: martyrdom and free speech. In martyrdom (from the Greek martus, witness), an oppressed minority stands firm amid persecution, witnessing to the genuineness of its faith and potentially winning adherents to it by defiant, possibly fatal, boldness.⁷ The perceived strength of a persecuted conscience led to several paradoxical attempts by English monarchs—including Henry VIII and Charles I—to emphasize their own weaknesses, at least somewhat or for some time, so they could claim the privileges of oppressed conscience. Henry VIII exercised bold conscience most successfully when he, like Luther, opposed the power of Rome; he may have been the king of England, but he was an underdog globally. Charles I, by comparison, claimed a bold conscience most persuasively in the Eikon Basilike as he (or a coauthor) made it central to his retrospective self-portrayal as martyr.

Boldness of conscience could also be claimed for a wider, nonpersecuted right of free speech, such as when, in the English Parliament in 1523, Sir Thomas More requested that he may freely, without feare of your [King Henry VIII’s] high displeasure, . . . discharge his Conscience, and boldly, in euery thing incident amongst vs, to declare his aduice.⁸ The arguments for freedom of speech have a long history, often marked by the term parrhēsia in ancient Greece (and in the New Testament), which eventually occasioned the first coinage of the phrase bold conscience in English in the sixteenth century.⁹ Yet as this book demonstrates, conscience is often conceived as bold outside that specific phrase, designated by such analogues as confidence, audacity, and freedom and revealed in various forms of public expression of ideas or outer display of emotion.

In tracing the development of bold conscience in post-Reformation England, this book provides the other half of a story that more usually focuses on coward conscience. This conscience makes its possessor cowardly from its own potent accusations, a function of conscience that reaches back to antiquity.¹⁰ From Euripides, Paul, and Augustine through the Middle Ages, thinkers proposed that conscience can operate as a distinct accusing force within a person, even as a separate person within a human subject.¹¹ In the fourteenth century, Richard Rolle’s poem Pricke of Conscience (Stimulus Conscientiae) depicts the accusing conscience as a gnawing worm, hell’s tenth pain.¹² In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, various Tudor dramatic interludes and other plays such as Conflict of Conscience (1581) present Conscience as its own accusing character.¹³ By the end of the sixteenth century, the influential Puritan William Perkins depicts conscience as an inner accuser that can betray a person: If a man would go about to hide his sinnefull thoughts from God, his conscience as an other person within him, shall discover all.¹⁴ The language of an accusing conscience pervaded early modernity, as instanced in the English proverb A guilty conscience is a self-accuser and in a Latin adage that Erasmus assigns to the first-century Roman rhetorician Quintilian: Conscientia mille testes.¹⁵ (Conscience, a thousand witnesses.) Referring to this adage in Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian implies its still earlier prominence, and obviousness, reasoning that sayings like it would not have endured for all time if they had not seemed true to everybody.¹⁶ Yet even as coward conscience reaches its alliterative apogee in Shakespeare’s Richard III (5.3.177), Shakespeare in Hamlet begins to undercut the formula (I argue), as the eponymous prince considers this cowardice but ultimately refashions it into a nascent boldness.¹⁷ Coward conscience and bold conscience are intimately connected: many historical and literary figures examined by this study took their bold stands because their consciences accused them of some error and prompted them to correct it. In many cases, inner cowardice led to outer firmness.

Filling a gap left by the emphasis on coward conscience, Bold Conscience works at the intersections of political and religious conflict in early modern England to show that conscience—long central as an accuser of the self, linked to the will, memory, and mind in faculty psychology—came to the fore during this era as an arbiter between the private self and the public realm.¹⁸ From ancient Greece through the late Middle Ages, Western civilization viewed conscience largely as an internal force, yet in early modern England it became embattled within a larger, communal sphere, as in King Henry VIII’s struggle against the pope or Milton’s against King Charles I.¹⁹ Concomitant with the increasing importance of public opinion, conscience in early modernity came to be seen as a mental faculty of boldness—an exterior expression—in addition to one of inner critique and guilt. Although conscience continued to generate many inner struggles, as evidenced by casuistry manuals and various cases of conscience discussed in print, the concept became equally usable in the public realm, with cases of conscience applied to matters of public importance and not just to individual souls. Thus, in seventeenth-century England, the many public conflicts regarding freedom of conscience intensified the need for people to act boldly based on its guidance.

FOUNDATION: RELIGIOUS CONTEXTS

For skeptical thinkers in early modern England such as Thomas Hobbes, conscience could be merely a facade for opinions, rooted in facile emotions, bold in its pursuit of selfish gain.²⁰ Yet according to many theologians, clerics, and people influenced by their views, conscience was primarily epistemological—a faculty of the soul, implanted by God, directly linked to the mind, and directing the will to act with all the boldness of divine authority. Perkins, in his foundational Discourse of Conscience (1596), asserts that conscience is a part of the minde or vnderstanding, . . . a natural power, facultie, or created qualitie from whence knowledge and iudgement proceede as effects.²¹ Many later English writers similarly presented conscience as a faculty, including Jeremiah Dyke (another Puritan) and the bishop John Prideaux, though still others held conscience to be an act.²² Regardless of the particular relation conscience was thought to have to the soul, most early modern thinkers would have agreed with Perkins’s assertion that conscience is of a diuine nature, and is a thing placed by God in the middest betweene him and man, as an arbitratour to giue sentence and to pronounce either with man or against man vnto God.²³ In the binary with or against, Perkins refers to an important Pauline treatment of conscience, near the start of the epistle to the Romans: "For when the Gentiles which haue not the Law, doe by nature the things contained in the Law: these hauing not the Law, are a Law vnto themselues, Which shew the worke of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience [syneidēseōs] also bearing witnesse, and their thoughts the meane while accusing, or else excusing one another (Rom. 2:14–15). Besides referring to Paul’s binary of accusing, or else excusing," Perkins cites this text many times, as does his student William Ames in his own lengthy treatise, Conscience with the Power and Cases thereof (1639).²⁴ Paul here explains that although the Gentiles did not receive the law written on tablets as the Israelites did, they cannot escape God’s punishment, for each possesses intuitive knowledge regarding right and wrong. Thus, inner syneidēsis, as Paul explicates it, connects to an outer, God-ordained set of laws, which cause conscience to witness for or against a person, accusing, or else excusing.²⁵

The second half of Paul’s formula, excusing, provides the theological basis for a bold conscience. Perkins explains that boldness and confidence of conscience derive from its related actions of excus[ing] and absolu[ing] and cites Proverbs 28:1: The righteous are bold as a lyon.²⁶ Although this proverb does not name the term conscience (or rather heart, lēb, since Classical Hebrew lacks a word for conscience proper), it has a long connection to thinking about the accusing, coward conscience and the excusing, bold one. In explicating the first half of the proverb, The wicked flee when no man pursueth, the fourth-century church father John Chrysostom, whose works circulated widely in early modernity, reasons, How doth he flee when no man pursueth? He hath that within which drives him on—an accuser in his conscience.²⁷ In turning to the second half, which Perkins cites, the golden-tongued preacher proclaims the obverse effect of a good conscience: But not such is the righteous man. Of what nature then is he? Hear: ‘The righteous is bold as a lion!’ Whereas the biblical verse presents a lion as a symbol for boldness, an image in a 1591 English emblem book features a rampant, crowned lion under an adage of conscience: Solatur conscientia et finis: The conscience and the end doe comfort a man.²⁸ As in the verse itself, the emblem links lion, boldness, and conscience such that only two need be mentioned to summon the whole trio. Thus the emblematist’s triumphant lion represents both the victory that a good conscience ensures in the final judgment and a boldness in the interim.

Yet, in another central biblical treatment of conscience, Paul suggests the problems of a conscience that—at least in early modern English translations—is peremptorily bold. When imploring quarreling members of the first-century Corinthian church to think twice before eating food sacrificed to idols, Paul divides the two disputing parties into those with knowledge and those with weake conscience[s]: "For if any man see thee which hast knowledge, sit at meat in the idols temple: shall not the conscience [syneidēsis] of him which is weake, be emboldened [oikodomēthēsetai] to eat those things which are offered to idols? And through thy knowledge shal the weake brother perish, for whome Christ died? But when ye sinne so against the brethren, and wound their weake conscience [syneidēsin], ye sinne against Christ (1 Cor. 8:10–12). If Paul raises the issue of sinn[ing] agaynst Christ and conscience, the translators of the King James Bible (1611), cited here, specify that this sinne comes when a weake conscience is emboldened. In naming the problem as an embolden[ing]," these translators follow the Bishops’ Bible (1568), the Geneva Bible (1557; 1560), and the Great Bible (1539), based on William Tyndale’s translation (1534).²⁹ Tyndale himself follows neither Luther’s more generic verursacht (caused) nor the Latin of either the Vulgate or of Erasmus, aedificabitur, which closely renders the Greek oikodomēthēsetai (will be built up). This is the only time the King James Bible translates the verb oikodomeō (I build up) in any of its forms as any cognate of bold. This peculiar, yet pervasive, English translation of emboldened—countered only in the Catholic Douay–Rheims Bible (1610; New Testament 1582), based on the Latin Vulgate and hence rendering edified here—emblematizes a broader struggle in early modern England for freedom of conscience, and a corresponding boldness in obtaining that freedom.³⁰

The translation emboldened, problematic for its latitude, proves still more misleading because it contrasts starkly with the rendering of the same Greek verb a few clauses earlier. Paul opens his discussion of love and knowledge with an antithesis, setting the noun knowledge against love, and the verb phusioō (puff up) against oikodomeō (build up): "knowledge puffeth up, but love edifieth [oikodomei]" (1 Cor. 8:1). Tyndale and later English translators render the verb oikodomeō as edifieth (v. 1) when it results from love, and as emboldened (v. 10) when it comes from knowledge acting in selfishness. Calvin clarifies this later negative connotation in a commentary translated into English in 1577: "He [Paul] reprehendeth them (as I sayd) because they imboldened the ignorant [audaciores reddebant imperitos] in such sort, that they ran headlong against their conscience, to enterpryse that which they thought was not lawfull for them."³¹ If this kind of clarification—presenting building as audaciores, more audacious—befits the work of a commentary, it proves more complex in the simpler format of translation, even with the help of marginal glosses. Thus, when the English translators similarly attempt to clarify the problematic results of certain kinds of oikodomeō, they obscure the similarity between the images of a building in verses 1 and 10, using first a word solidly connected to the building metaphor (edifieth), a cognate of the Vulgate/Erasmian aedificat, but then one with a more tenuous relation to the metaphor (boldened or emboldened). Although the adjective bold in English up through the fourteenth century could be used substantively to designate a building, and although the verb build comes from this usage of bold, the word bold at least by the sixteenth century and later had a more completely abstract sense—the metaphor had become numb.³² Tyndale thus highlights bold[ness] not as a building but as a problem, which may lead some to violate their weake conscience[s] and thus to synne agaynst Christ. And all subsequent early modern English translations continued to designate this troubling boldness that energized a developing struggle in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regarding conscience.

The collocation of bold and conscience, having entered English through such channels as More and translations of Paul, becomes the still more pithy phrase bold conscience in a translation of Luther’s influential Commentarie [. . .] vpon the Epistle of S. Paul to the Galathians (1575), one of Luther’s first publications to circulate widely in England. Although Luther makes conscience (conscientia) a keyword in the commentary, the translator highlights it still more, connecting it to Paul’s boldness in preaching: "But what meaneth Paule by this his boasting? I aunswere: This common Place serueth to this end, that euery minister of Gods word should be sure of his calling, that before God and man he may, with a bold conscience glory herein [fiducia gloriari possit], that he preacheth the Gospel as one that is called and sent."³³ Luther’s Latin could be translated more simply, as he should boldly glory, which sustains the keynote of boldness that Luther plays in previous paragraphs using the Greek parrhēsia.³⁴ Yet the translator adds another thematic note of Luther’s commentary here—conscience—harmonizing these two tones, bold conscience, into a chord that echoes through the next century.

Although the Swiss Reformer John Calvin emphasized boldness of conscience less than his German counterpart, he influenced the English understanding of conscience perhaps still more, given his importance for contemporary English theologians, including Perkins and Ames.³⁵ In Institutio Christianae religionis (Institutes of the Christian Religion, final edition 1559), Calvin treats conscience most extensively in his chapter on Christian liberty, looking in the early sections of the chapter at the epistle to the Galatians, a move parallel to Luther’s own focus on conscience in that epistle. Near the end of the chapter, Calvin recognizes that a Christian should be mindful of the consciences of others, referencing Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians. Yet within the bounds of this communal awareness, Calvin proclaims a boldness grounded in the answere of a good conscience toward God, mentioned in Peter’s first epistle (3:21): "Peter hath set the examination of a good co[n]science for quietnesse of minde, when beyng persuaded of the grace of Christ, we do without feare [intrepide] present ourselues before God."³⁶ Calvin’s intrepide, which his sixteenth-century translator renders as without feare and a more recent translator as boldness, amplifies the confidence that Peter suggests and that Calvin confirms in his next quotation from the biblical letter to the Hebrews, emphasizing that a conscience can be made liberatos vel absolutos (freed or absolved), which has both epistemological and emotional dimensions.³⁷ Knowledge of the grace of Christ leads to tranquility.

The idea of the bold conscience was hardly limited to specific reformed traditions following Luther or Calvin, however. The English theologian Richard Sibbes (1577–1635), a conforming Puritan, speaks of it in a sermon first published in 1639 but delivered several years earlier: Where the soule is convinced of the righteousnesse of Christ, there the conscience demands boldly: It is God that justifies, who shal condemne? It is Christ that is dead and risen againe and sits at the right hand of God; who shall lay anything to the charge of Gods chosen. So that a convinced conscience dares all creatures in Heaven and Earth, it works strongly and boldly.³⁸ The dramatic apostrophe that Sibbes culls from Romans 8:33–34 (It is God that iustifieth: Who is he that condemneth?) rings like Luther’s earlier dramatic confrontations between conscience and the law in his Galatians Commentary (further analyzed in chapter 1). Operating in a tradition of English religious leaders who were also theorists of conscience, including Perkins and Ames, Sibbes represents the concept of conscience at its boldest within a wider theological context.

Despite a reputable theological—and, thanks to More, political—pedigree, a bold conscience in England by the middle of the seventeenth century began to function more like the opinion or even pretense that Hobbes opposed, instead of expressing a divine authorization to preach the gospel or a lion-like confidence in righteous behavior. Henry Hammond, a cleric and frequent companion to Charles I during his imprisonment, declared in 1645 amid the English Civil Wars that "the mistaking of every fancie or humour, carnall or Satanicall perswasion for Conscience (the acknowledged rule of action) and the setting up upon too weak a stock for that high priviledge of a Good Conscience, hath emboldened most of the vices of the world."³⁹ Hammond deploys an agricultural (or mercantile) metaphor to illustrate precisely how the combination of conscience and boldness caused such deep problems in 1640s England. In the agricultural version of Hammond’s metaphor, the stock or trunk of a conscience tree was too weak to accommodate the limbs of confidence set up upon it. In the mercantile variation of the metaphor, insightful in that both conscience and the modern market depend on large-scale trust, people trade shares of stock in "Conscience with reserves too weak" to cover their outlay.⁴⁰ Whereas a lowered supply of a material commodity generally raises the price and thus reduces demand, a nonmaterial item such as conscience, and confidence in it, remained available to all in England, both commoners and monarchs seizing on conscience as a mechanism for asserting their right, as both prerogative and justice. When only some investors bluff in this way, the market can remain stable, but the outpouring of printed discussions of conscience—over six hundred between 1564 and 1660 in Europe—caused the conscience market to crash in the seventeenth century.⁴¹

Five years after Hammond, in an attempt to quell popular sympathies toward the executed Charles I of England, Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) likewise guards against the fallout from a conscience in danger of becoming—like Edmund Spenser’s Britomart in the House of Busirane—too bold.⁴² He warns readers against dancing divines, who have the conscience and the boldness to come with Scripture in their mouths glossed and fitted for their turns with a double contradictory sense, transforming the sacred verity of God to an idol (CPW 3:195–96). Through this dispute regarding the form of government at a crucial juncture of English history, Milton identifies one chief problem as an interpretation of scripture in a double contradictory sense; this conscience operates more in the emotional than in the epistemological realm. He focuses on the boldness of the divines who function ostensibly according to conscience but ultimately transform the sacred verity of God to an idol, approaching the theme of idolatry that would animate his later tract of 1649, Eikonoklastes. Yet he pinpoints the problem most succinctly in the conjunction of conscience and boldness. Although the conscience in question here proves ironically idolatrous, the boldness of its possessor shields it from its own putative conscientiousness. Furthermore, boldness and conscience may function in a hendiadys such that one modifies the other, suggesting the divines come with a (feigned) conscientious boldness or with a bold conscience.

As these chronologically linked examples suggest in a foretaste of the succeeding chapters, the bold conscience in early modern England exemplified what is best and worst about conscience. It could operate legitimately as God’s implanted moral compass, but its very influence tempted many to pretend it. Hobbes and other skeptics, unwilling to hover between two options, and to avoid being deceived by pretenders of conscience, presumed the second option. By contrast, some possessors of conscience hovered between these two poles, unsure of their consciences, however sincere they themselves might have been.

RATIONALE

My focus on the bold conscience and on its divagated development across the seventeenth century supplements, even as it challenges, two studies of conscience published in 2017. These monographs, unlike previous studies of conscience in early modern England, conjoin two features: they place conscience at the epicenter of seventeenth-century political and religious troubles and put literary texts in insightful relation to these contemporary troubles.⁴³ In Writing Conscience and the Nation in Revolutionary England, Giuseppina Iacono Lobo points to the Latin verb conscire (to know with) to argue that the derived English noun, conscience, forged a common English experience of the nation during the 1640s and later.⁴⁴ I agree that many people in seventeenth-century England were brought into dialogue through arguments about conscience; however, I emphasize the sharpness and boldness of these arguments, especially those in and around the Civil Wars, which drove people apart as much as they brought them together.⁴⁵ By extending Lobo’s historical-literary work on conscience back to the beginning of the century, and still earlier to Luther, I highlight an overarching divisiveness that preceded and then developed concurrent with much of the unity that might have accrued from conscience in early modern England.

With an emphasis more like mine on the potentially riving force of conscience, Abraham Stoll argues in Conscience in Early Modern English Literature that conscience experienced a destructuring in early modern England, becoming increasingly important as it becomes increasingly inchoate.⁴⁶ I agree with Stoll that conceptions of conscience were in flux during early modernity; my more distinct focus on boldness reveals that although conscience might have appeared inchoate, it carried quite definite meanings to various parties.⁴⁷ Unlike Stoll, I do not tie the development of early modern conscience to a single trajectory—even one as vague as inchoateness—but instead posit that it, and its boldness, rose and crested in the massive religious, political, and social upheaval at midcentury before receding as several of its hard-won freedoms become instantiated in law.

Attentive to larger historical trends while focusing on their literary representations, my book argues that English authors from Shakespeare to Milton illustrate—and played a part in reshaping—contemporary understandings of the concept of conscience, as it evolved in a long, multistep development. Even while the seismic upheavals of the sixteenth century settled down into everyday continuity (as historian John Bossy writes), the centrist Elizabethan Settlement was giving way to more polarizing religious positions of the Stuarts, a transition Shakespeare reflected.⁴⁸ Accordingly, as illustrated in the slightly later authors Donne and Milton, conscience gained a new prominence within the intersecting disputes for freedom on all fronts—Puritan, Catholic, and Quaker, later royalist and parliamentarian, and still later Leveller (and Digger).⁴⁹ By midcentury, as vividly evidenced in Milton’s arguments in antiprelatical and regicide tracts of the 1640s and 1650s, conscience provoked political debates, religious tensions, and pamphlet wars that questioned whether the king, Parliament, bishops, or other public authorities had the right to force conscience.

Yet as conscience grew emboldened in the public realm, it became harder to control, even by its erstwhile proponents. As a private faculty, reserved for intimate concerns, conscience could be trusted to intervene in the behavior of each person. But when brought into public use, a movement initiated by leaders such as Luther and King Henry VIII in the early sixteenth century, conscience became enmeshed within the power struggles that accelerated in England of the mid-seventeenth century and that, by the 1680s, at once preserved and limited conscience within legislation. Because people with bold consciences faced off against others who held their consciences equally dear, a bold conscience by century’s end became less clearly defined and the concept more malleable. After the 1688 Glorious Revolution and especially as a result of the 1689 Toleration Act, conscience became recognized by the government as a political force, at once realizing earlier claims for its autonomy and losing the need to set itself in bold opposition to its critics.⁵⁰ At the terminus ad quem for this study in 1689, Locke influentially used a relatively new word, consciousness, to convey one dimension of what was previously implied in the word conscience, siphoning off some of the pressure that had built up behind that linguistic bottleneck.⁵¹

Focused on the era between Luther and Locke, one a German theologian, the other an English philosopher who wrote some of his most important works in exile in the Netherlands, this book draws most of its evidence from seventeenth-century English literature. It centers on England because that country, as Brian Cummings observes, changed religion more frequently, more equivocally, and with greater political insistence than perhaps anywhere else, all considerations that bear on conscience, situated at the center of overlapping religious and political realms.⁵² I concentrate on literature because finely textured literary analysis can most fully address the needs of a dedicated attention to the precise language of conscience. Additionally, the initial rise and then attenuation of bold conscience proceeded unevenly and with great subtlety across the century, and literary texts most aptly register the sometimes barely perceptible shifts. Furthermore, the most sinuous, complex, and ultimately lasting assessments of bold conscience in seventeenth-century England emerged from deliberately literary, rhetorically artistic voices—especially Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. These authors, taken together with several others, depicted a collage of perspectives alternatively bold and ironic, a collage featuring the complex verbal structures of dramas, sermons, prose treatises, and poems. Accordingly, I examine texts that demand careful interpretation both of their own complex forms and of the convoluted consciences within them. Ultimately, this process of reading the bold claims for conscience across prominent early modern English authors suggests an axiom at once practical and theoretical: conscience, like a literary text, requires meticulous interpretation.⁵³

Many early modern English authors wrote imaginatively about conscience, including Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser in the late sixteenth century and George Herbert in the early seventeenth.⁵⁴ Yet Shakespeare and, to a lesser extent, Donne and Milton stand out both for their enduring importance in the canon of English literature and for the influential, varied texts in which they clearly depicted conscience. The prominence of these authors not only bespeaks the wide circulation of their works in their own eras but also corresponds to a continuing identification with the characters they create and the concepts they treat, including conscience. In Shakespeare, the word conscience appears most frequently in a trio of history plays, Henry VIII (twenty-four times), Henry V (fourteen), and Richard III (thirteen), followed by a tragedy, Hamlet