diss intro

This essay is an introduction to a study of Tudor attitudes towards language, and especially about disputes over its proper use. Shaped by Renaissance humanism and Reformation politics, the clash centered on a network of ideas about rhetoric and Christianity rooted in humanist curricula of the schools, and often universities, that most of the disputants had attended.[1] If you spent much time in Tudor public schools (places where otherwise unrelated students learned in a group—in “public”—rather than “private” instruction at home) you came to adulthood as convinced that language is God’s special grace to human well-being as modern Westerners believe in popularized notions of Freud and Einstein. Brought to England via continental humanism, platitudes about the power of language had permeated your schooling, and you could likely make witty (in your eyes, at least) allusions to the best-known of them at social gatherings or in the corridors of court.

Citing different, often divergent, myths, your classic and Christian sources informed you that under divine inspiration some great personage (always male) “discovered” language and bequeathed it to humankind to further our well-being—and that thanks to the inevitability of worldly decay, your contemporary language was a shadow of its former greatness. Your primary classical supports were Cicero and Horace, who described a dismal, antique time when humanity lived entirely like beasts, governed only by emotion (today we might say id) unmediated by the divine spark of reason. Happily, however, a great master of language appeared and taught these barbarians[2] how to speak, and so how to share reason. Shared speech in turn prompted the invention of the arts and made possible a shared community, a “civil” society: the very meaning of civilization has its roots in linguistic skill. For Cicero (106-43 B.C.), oratory was the primal civilizing tool;[3] for Horace (65-8 B.C.), it was poetry (which embodies imaginative literature in general), as exemplified by the musical prowess of Orpheus and Amphion. [4]

In early Christian writers you encountered a similar spirit argued on quite different grounds. Language was still a divine gift, but from a Christian God.[5] It did not begin in some unspecified barbaric clime but in Eden when Adam named the animals under God’s guidance. Instead of pagan orators and poets, great preachers and prophets of scriptural history, like Moses (a law-giver) and David (a musician—and hence poet— who played the harp), “civilized” humanity by bringing it divine truth.[6]

Whatever pieces of either tradition you embraced, you also believed that thanks to the Fall all worldly things decay. In historic times, the pure Latin of Cicero began deteriorating soon after his death, accelerated in its decline by medieval ignorance, while from the beginning of the world, the spiritual language Adam spoke in Eden was lost at the Fall along with human innocence. But because good language promotes social and religious virtue while wicked language undermines all civil order, you yearned for ways to regenerate the original power of speech.

This common heritage about the origin and fate of language diverged in two general directions. On one side were the pietists: basing themselves on patristic thought, convinced that human sin too readily abuses the truly spiritual power of language, adamant about the incompatibility of pagan and Christian thought, they condemned artful language—orations, poetry, fictions, theater—and promoted a Christian rhetoric to replace classical rhetoric.[7] On the other side were the secularists, who ranged from the supposedly irreligious like Christopher Marlowe to deeply pious political figures like Thomas More and divines like George Herbert: no less concerned with the victory of true faith (whatever it might be) but believing that rhetoric, which includes any kind of artful language, figures forth divine truth, they felt no conflict in enhancing truth with artifice and integrating pagan thought into their Christianity.[8] “Secular” here does not mean non-religious: like pietists, secularists were always religious in some way, which in England, as the sixteenth century proceeded, increasingly meant Protestant, with Catholics more and more marginalized and repressed. But pietists distanced themselves from both secularism and humanism, which they anyway considered synonymous and prone to be unChristian.[9]

What was incompatible between pietists and secularists wasn’t entirely what they supposed. Whichever side drew your sympathy, as far as you knew you were arguing about who was moral and who wasn’t, whose interpretation of true piety was correct and whose wasn’t. In fact, however, you were often also collaborating to accelerate a drift away from long-standing attitudes about political, religious and intellectual roles.[10]

For starters, there was the problem of political and religious authority. When the Reformation reached Tudor England, plenty of people were still alive who could remember the crisis of authority raised by the Wars of the Roses that after decades of civil strife (historians differ on just when they “began”) ended with the defeat of Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485. The Reformation brought with it dilemmas about obedience and conscience that the English approach aggravated in fusing Church and State. What would happen to your soul if you repudiated the anointed clergy who interceded with God on your behalf? What was your spiritual duty when you swore a holy oath to the Pope and then came to realize that Catholicism was the Antichrist? Where did your true loyalty and obedience lie when your religious conscience conflicted with the reigning monarch’s?[11] Living through these times, you witnessed periodic armed rebellions, intrigues that seemed as inevitable in the political soil as weeds in a garden, a clouded succession after Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon (assuming you accepted Tudor victory at Bosworth Field in the first place), a traumatizing national shift from Protestantism to Catholicism and back to Protestantism within five years at the middle of the sixteenth century, and constant backbiting over orthodoxy among Protestants themselves.

As an educated person, whatever else prompted you to question authority— even before the Reformation you couldn't long remain blind, for example, to widespread corruption in the papacy and among many Catholic clerics—humanist textual and interpretive criticism had been key influences. When you re-examined the texts of your beloved pre-Christian Latin and Greek authorities to make sure you had their true meaning, you ended up reducing their dominance and authority as you saw modern minds shining in their own right—cleansing old texts of corruptions accreted over the centuries, interpreting the hidden meanings of those texts, bringing to light lost texts that amplified ancient thought, and even exposing spurious texts like the Donation of Constantine.[12] When you shifted your attention to religious matters—the need for reform, whether from within Catholicism or by breaking from it—your humanist bias towards returning to original sources in original languages gave you tools and a frame of mind for reading sacred texts in ways that helped you justify your cause. Your ability as a Reformer to renounce papal authority while affirming the ascendancy of the individual conscience to interpret scripture without clerical mediation was implicit in the psychology that allowed a humanist scholar, on his (or very occasionally her) own authority, to establish texts and what they meant.[13]

Alongside often overt challenge to political and religious authority was an unconscious challenge to the intellectual authority of the centuries-old belief in a universe of correspondences, or resemblances, where you saw everything as a mirror or metaphor of everything else: you knew that God placed the earth at the center of the universe because the drama of human salvation is the center of heavenly concern; that comets presage earthly catastrophe; that mandrake roots look human because they have an occult affinity with human beings; that crawling serpents call attention to the lowliness of sin, and flying birds figure forth the aspirations of the soul; that the earth has changing seasons and lions devour lambs because the Fall destroyed terrestrial equanimity; that puns reveal a deep affinity among a word’s disparate meanings; that wicked people are physically ugly to reflect their moral natures…or that wicked people are physically appealing because material appearance is deceptive and sin must be attractive or else no would sin; that a tyrant is a visitation from God upon a wicked society...or a test of worthy souls; and so on, and on. This habit of mind made you, however selectively, interconnect all areas of human thought—religion, morality, government, law, diplomacy, history, literature and gender roles (though of course this last construct wasn’t part of your consciousness), to name a few.[14]

As a secularist, you delighted in a universe filled with ambiguity and multiple truths that challenged your wit to endless searches for new connections that would unify seemingly disparate phenomena, a pursuit that reached its English literary climax with metaphysical conceits in secular and sacred poetry. At the same time, as you went about your critical business you were unintentionally undermining this world view by developing analytical tools and perspectives that assumed you could undo inherited corruptions in language, received texts, religion, natural philosophy (what came to be called “science” in the 19^th century). You were furthering a sense of unitary order, a sense that there are pure, lost or hidden truths free of ambiguity.

This way of viewing reality, however, contained an unrealized contradiction that humanism and Protestantism inherited from the medieval thought they both largely held in contempt. On the one hand, the universe of correspondences made you view “truth” as multiple and ambiguous, expressible only indirectly (as through metaphor) and in endless ways. On the other hand, however complex the order of the universe might be, you could imagine all correspondences neatly nesting together, as Pico della Mirandola embraced in aspiring to integrate the thought of all major cultures,[15] and as the new natural philosophy was about to attempt by seeking universal laws that would eventually produce the image of a clockmaker God. Scholasticism, seeking supreme syntheses while also taking the universe of correspondences for granted, yoked the two tendencies together; the Renaissance, and especially the Reformation within (or overlapping) it, gradually pulled them asunder.

If Reform was your primary concern, you never consciously renounced the universe of correspondences—that framework was so taken for granted that no one could dismiss its influence altogether; and noticing contradictions in the bedrock of one’s thought in the midst of shifting world views has never been an easy business. But you could not afford to live with the resulting ambiguity. Caught up in life-and-death disputes with Catholicism (and before long with competing Protestant theologies), you felt driven to seek an argumentative conclusiveness forbidden to a universe of multiple truths. You invoked correspondences when you could make them fit your case and demanded unitary truth elsewhere.

The universe of correspondences did not suddenly vanish[16]; indeed, it coexisted with the 16^th and 17^th centuries’ evolving quest for single truth. Instead of reflecting on the essential nature of reality, what you saw yourself arguing about were questions like whether secularists were promoting falsehood when they wrote fictions or argued both sides of a moral question, or whether pietists were tyrants intent on polarizing society or foisting solipsistic visions of religiosity on everyone. Looking back from the twenty-first century, we can identify a pattern which contemporaries could not recognize, that the elegant and comforting explanations which had accompanied a universe of multi-layered meaning in which novelty was anathema were becoming decreasingly tenable as they encountered more and more contradictions in the changing times: a New World, new peoples, new mores, new animals, new plants; new (exploding) stars that appeared in the supposedly immutable heavens; new ways to make money that were bringing wealth to some people while overthrowing traditional methods of husbandry, land use and labor; a new natural philosophy that used mathematics and personal observation to explain nature and affirm a new kind of harmony and order to the universe, based on dispassionate, immutable laws—while simultaneously threatening the reassuring presence of active, involved divinity in daily life.[17]

Of all novelties, new religion was the most disturbing: Protestantism was challenging Catholic authority and corruptions. Catholicism felt itself battling to retain stability, continuity and familiarity in Christian belief. In the name of Christianity, as a few contemporaries like Montaigne realized,[18] Christians were slaughtering Christians all across Europe. An old order was disappearing, a new one rising, but neither was entrenched. Regardless of your intellectual stripe, even as you jerry-rigged newfangled responses to the instability of the times, you insisted that you were protecting tradition while your enemies were encouraging…novelty.[19]

One sign of growing interest in single, definitive truth was a comeback for logic—or what passed for it. While you had never thrown it out of the curriculum altogether, [20] as a humanist you had subjugated logic to rhetoric when setting your sights on the will rather than the intellect in your quest to fire audiences to virtuous action. That the spirit of truth was more important than its rigorous verifiability was a profoundly felt belief not only of educated people but also of religious people who may have had difficulty arguing theological nuances. Writing about the world, you went through the motions of consistent, step-by-step argumentation without making it your ultimate concern. You felt a commitment to promulgating beliefs, arguments and moral prescriptions regardless of “logical” c—onsistency. Besides, you could never forget that logic was the core of scholasticism, a sterile Aristotelian heritage full of abstract, otherworldly concerns which minimized the value you placed in temporal affairs. If you were also a Reformer, whether pietist or secularist, you had other, theological reasons for scorning scholasticism and so, by association, the classical logic that otherwise had the enviable virtue of forcing the mind to single conclusions: the schoolmen had contributed to “modern” Catholic corruptions—practices going back, depending on the polemicist you were reading, to anywhere from the death of Christ to the reign of Charlemagne.

What you needed was a new logic that would capture a spirit of systematic thinking while spurning Aristotle and the scholastics, and this you could find in Peter Ramus, a French Protestant who had taught eloquence and was killed in the St. Bartholomew’s massacre of 1572.[21] Ramistic logic filled two key needs. On the one hand it gave you a “logic” without syllogisms, replacing them with endless dichotomies. On the other hand, it included a theory of rhetoric based on Cicero.[22] Ramism spread largely in Protestant countries and came to England in the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, where it was embraced not only by pietists but also by thinkers like Philip Sidney who, secular in temperament and puritan in religion, needed a way to revel in the rhetorical world of endless meaning while simultaneously keeping a sense of rigor about their religion.[23]

The new natural philosophy echoed a humanist habit of looking for secret meaning. Growing in part from humanist empiricism (personal experience of reality, as in looking at ancient texts for yourself)[24] and love of classical philosophy (for example, belief in universal laws, the geometrization of space, and application of mathematics to nature, which all owed debts to the revival of Platonism[25]), the new philosophy sought to “read” nature as humanists read texts, scurrying to outwit her and penetrate to her carefully-hidden secrets.[26] At the same time, the new philosophy, seeking orderly, singular, inexorable laws and explanations for natural phenomena, gradually repudiated the multi-layered universe of correspondences. One form of that repudiation was the program first proposed by Bacon, most famously urged by Thomas Sprat, and ridiculed by Jonathan Swift in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels: to reform language (and implicitly, rhetoric and all of humanist wit) so that one word would come to stand for only one thing.[27]

A key link between old and emerging approaches to the world was the continuing importance of interpretation or perspective—the awareness that the way you “looked” at something, with physical or mental eyes, determined your understanding of it—and through it the capture or re-capture of hidden truth. Painters had learned to re-examine the world by playing with perspective to reproduce both physical and spiritual realities (a distinction blurred by attitudes towards allegory, as discussed below). In Tudor England, because your schooling was founded on rhetoric, because your educated consciousness assumed that texts shape experience the way the modern Westerner assumes matter is made up of atoms, you re-examined the world by seeing texts everywhere and reading them—or more importantly, re-reading them: the word of God, the writings of the Church Fathers, the wisdom of classical thought, the myths of pagan Greece and Rome, the “signatures” embedded in worldly things,[28] God’s table of laws as a source for earthly ones,[29] the narratives and teachings of history, the book of nature, the language of mathematics. The very salvation of your soul depended on which scriptural text you chose to read and how you interpreted its key words and phrases—for Catholicism, Jerome’s Vulgate; for Protestantism the original scriptural languages (insofar as you could reconstruct them) and their (contentious) vernacular translations.

You penetrated the secrets of the text by unlocking the rhetorical strategies of ancient writers, exposing interrelated truths expressed through etymological plays on words, recognizing a grand design behind kindred meanings in puns and variant spellings, appreciating multiple meaning in ambiguous syntax. You read—you interpreted, you established your text—and like a painter adding visual perspective to fashion a new canvas,[30] you fashioned new texts. You might emend an existing text to purge its (supposed) corruptions and restore its original purity, or you might pass along your discoveries by writing your own text, whether sermon, oration, commentary, polemic, homily, poem, play or narrative fiction. Always, you were “imitating” form and content of the past: you shaped your writing with rhetorical techniques, whether from a classical or Christian rhetoric (to the extent they could be totally distinguished), and you re-shaped—we might say edited—old accounts to make them applicable to modern times, whether you were a preacher drawing contemporary lessons from scripture or a dramatist re-shaping borrowed plots or history. Always, you were revealing the inner workings, the inner secrets, of your world. And always, you were revealing the depth and integrity of your own virtue, your own wit. (Usually, you were also writing for select, wise readers who could penetrate and appreciate your clever meanings.) What started as a desire to redeem pagan greatness to Christian service became the discovery of a new way to communicate among contemporaries.

This habit of mind began in school, where correct reading was the core of the Tudor humanist rhetorical curriculum and where you came to expect hidden meaning and surprises in what you read—and gradually learned to achieve similar effects in your own writing. Although we first think of rhetoric[31] as an approach to writing, for Tudor humanism it was at least as much a way of reading, which then provided a way of writing. Humanism, after all, doted on re-discovering texts; the literal fact of the discovery of ancient manuscripts, as with the fifteenth-century retrieval of texts long buried in a Greek monastery, was an emblem of the larger spirit of re-discovering classical texts and scripture by re-reading them to extract their lost or hidden meanings. Your quest was a holy one, to regenerate meaning placed in texts by their authors, and so to regenerate language—and because texts shape the world, to regenerate the world itself.

In training you as a reader, Tudor rhetoric conditioned you to expect texts to surprise you, to expect them to play with mental perspectives as painters played with visual ones and to convey truth only when you apprehended all the levels of meaning simultaneously—only, finally, when you gave yourself up to the text and its tricks, became one with the text.[32] Tudor rhetorical theory encouraged exactly these sorts of reading, for it placed self-consciousness at the center of the literary experience, whether as a conditioned reflex or deliberate strategy.[33] As a result, the essence of rhetoric was to make language work in ways you did not expect—to “turn” (a translation of “trope”—and “verse”

[34]

) meaning from its accustomed content and thereby force you constantly to monitor your responses, so that the message was in the very movement of the rhetoric at least as much as in the diction. [35] With this attitude as a foundation, you and other Tudor writers stressed reading at least as much as writing or oral exercises, setting out to teach readers how to penetrate to hidden meanings through re-examining their own responses. Union of reader and text could appear in ruminations on a plain style as well as secularist approaches to rhetoric: for Thomas Cranmer, John King writes, the text of scripture “in effect creates its own audience of readers who adopt its ideal pattern of Christian life. In understanding the Bible, the Christian should explicate himself.”[36]

If ease of shifting between meanings had not already existed, Tudor writers would have had to invent it. This kind of attitude demanded that you expect tricks in the rhetoric, expect to have ordinary experience of language and meaning violated, expect to keep reassessing the text and contrasting first and subsequent responses. The essence of rhetorical devices demanded that you have simultaneous consciousness of technique and meaning, whether as a writer or reader.[37] This fusion of rhetoric and meaning, of the experience of reading with the meaning of the text, is one more example of how the theory of correspondences prodded your mind to view everything in the universe as a figure or metaphor or shadow of everything else. Form and content were not merely like correspondences in the universe; they were an example of correspondence. Levels of reality were superimposed upon one another. Principles on one plane of reality might be higher than those on another, but no more or less true, no more or less readable. You did not create new ideas but brought to consciousness ones already there.[38]

Concern with reading showed up in how proposals for setting up schools stressed the importance of choosing “good” texts. This was central, say, to pedagogical guidelines of the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives, a Tudor favorite: “He who would thus settle the choice of books [within a school], supported by a great knowledge and discriminating judgment would, in my opinion, truly confer a great benefit upon the whole race of mankind.”[39]

Reading demanded re-reading. Tudor texts sought to startle by setting readers up to expect one thing and then giving them another. Rhetorical figures were “turns,” “alterations,” “translations,” even “transmutations.” They were intended to “estrange” and “deceive,” “abuse” (with a root meaning of being applied away from or out of normal usage).[40] Tudor writers were helped in promoting such definitions because their rhetorical vocabulary conveniently inherited a history of imprecision. Even the ancient originators of rhetorical theory, E. R. Curtius tells us, waffled about their basic terminology. While Greek schemata—the same as Latin figurae—in classical times were “conventionally divided into figures of language and figures of thought” (the first referring to patterns that words make and the second to ideas the words suggest), these seemingly clear distinctions quickly lose precision:

Besides figures of language and thought, grammatical figures (that is, figures occurring in the exegesis of the poets) and rhetorical figures have been distinguished. Furthermore, antique and later textbooks commonly call many figures of speech tropoi (“turns”), tropi. This lack of a settled terminology, and, in short, the endless variations in enumerating and defining the figures, are to be explained historically by contacts between various schools.[41]

For Tudor writers, “turns” applied to three general categories common to rhetoric and poetry. Because they were making up the English terminology as they went along, writers varied on exactly how they grouped the categories and sometimes disagreed on the label for each. Writing in 1553, Thomas Wilson offered a typical breakdown:

There are three kinds of figures, the one is when the nature of words is changed from one signification to another called a Trope of the Grecians: The other serveth for words when they are not changed by nature, but only altered by speaking, called of the Grecians a Scheme: The third is when by diversity of invention, a sentence is many ways spoken, and also matters are amplified by heaping examples, by dilating arguments, by comparing of things together, by similitudes, by contraries, and by diverse other like, called by Tully Exornation of sentences, or colors of rhetoric.[42]

Tropes included metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, circumlocution, allegory, enigma. Schemes included syntactical rearrangements, which could lead to multiple meaning through ambiguity, and puns resulting from the fluidity of Tudor spelling.[43] Orthographical schemes created deliberate changes in spelling—adding letters or syllables to or subtracting them from words. Finally, colors or exornations included description, apostrophe, personification, temporary interruption in a narrative, digression, and other methods of narration.[44]

A multi-layered universe with no distinction between primary and secondary meaning was supremely, simultaneously, rhetorical and allegorical,[45] as Michael Murrin indicates when he explains that Renaissance allegorists expected (elite) readers to re-assess every detail of the surface meaning in the text to penetrate to hidden meaning: “a poet is exploiting in his allegorical myths the interrelationship of the three worlds which make up the universe: the supercelestial, the celestial, and the sublunary... [He] talks about many things at the same time, using an image in one world to signify its corollaries in the other two.”[46] As we have seen, “reading” relied on the same assumption, that more should be behind the words than meets the eye, and that one way or another, the text should end up surprising you.

When put this way the labels you placed upon Renaissance thought processes—rhetoric, allegory, wit, poetry, drama, history, exegesis—ended up as inseparable mirrors of one another, as synonyms for one another. Each area of thought might focus on a different cultural tradition, but they all applied the same quintessentially literary habit of mind to illuminate their subject matter and when combined with devotion to rhetoric as understood by Renaissance theorists, made the universe a kind of linguistic allegory. Just as in rhetoric there was no way to say whether the movement of the language or its content was “truer,” so in allegory you could not say which level was “surface,” which superimposed. The principle here is the same as those children’s picture puzzles that “hide” animals in the landscape: until found, the animals are maddening in their elusiveness, but once recognized, they keep jumping out at you. Is the “purpose” to hide the animals from the traditional eye, to reveal them to the astute eye that can rearrange experience, or to coerce the eye through delightful challenge to learn how to rearrange that experience? (Is any game only a game?) Is the “real” picture the one that hides the animals, or the cleverly concealed animals themselves? When you have finished, you stand back and look at both, admire both in their interrelationship—and admire yourself for having “read” the picture in its totality.[47]

Patristic traditions of allegorizing scripture[48] with their insistence on hidden meanings in ancient Christian texts exactly mirrored the way you saw rhetoric working. Here was William Golding in 1567 explaining Ovidian fables:

Poets then with leasings and with fables shadowed so
The certain truth, [and therefore] what letteth us to pluck those visors fro
Their doings, and to bring again the darkened truth to light,
That all men may behold thereof the clearness shining bright?
The readers therefore earnestly admonished are to be
To seek a further meaning than the letter gives to see.[49]

In scripture and pagan literature alike, you assumed that the study of Truth involved a quest for hidden meanings, a need to look at the surface narrative and read the superimposed truth apprehensible only to the mind specially trained or guided to virtue as a result of practice in analyzing texts. Learning the formulae of the rhetoric handbooks made you constantly aware of yourself as an audience evaluating texts, as an understander of texts, and encouraged a habit of mind that reinforced traditional rhetorical admonitions to consider one’s audience: when you yourself wrote, you had keen consciousness of whom you wanted to address. In experiencing a culture so aware of audience response, of rhetorical organization, of mystery figured forth in words, of “turning” words to unexpected meanings, it should not be surprising that when experiencing the great works of literature of the time, we today still find ourselves drawn into a text and thrown off guard, re-evaluating our responses as we proceed through the text, struggling to absorb meaning from the very flow of the rhetoric.

Tudor intellectual culture was in the early throes of a shift away from stressing multi-valent truth (which we associate with Renaissance humanism) and towards unambiguous, unitary truth. In their dispute over the proper role of language that I examine in other chapters, secularists and pietists may have used different sources for their arguments but they were responding to a shared sense of breakdown in their familiar universe of orderly multiple meaning. As humanist pedagogy came to pervade Tudor schools and universities in the first half of the 16^th century, secularists and pietists typically shared the same intellectual upbringing, which included the overarching commonality we have seen in treating all phenomena as texts to be interpreted. Such broad shared contexts point to an underlying empathy intermingled with temperamental antagonisms, suggesting that ultimately each “side” was unconsciously uneasy that its opponents might actually be right.

This was especially true because, of course, religious integrity trumped all other matters. If you were a Protestant pietist schooled to read and write in the context of humanist rhetorical principles, you nonetheless came to spurn classical rhetoric. You came to denounce its artifice and subterfuge, and you sought a Christian rhetoric with a “simple” or “plain” style that reproduced the supposedly “plain” techniques of scripture, that is, devoid of the involved, multiple meanings your schooling had taught you to expect. Whereas secularist rhetorical wit saw a world of complex texts filled with hidden meanings, you aimed for unpretentious, straightforward truth in texts—especially in scripture, so long victimized by Catholic sophistry that corrupted it with the multi-layered meaning of allegorical wit (as opposed to presumably “simple” scriptural allegory) penetrable only by a specially-trained priestly elite. Indeed, one unconscious reason you needed to renounce your humanist roots may well have been that humanist ways of reading felt Catholic, a sense reinforced by humanism’s origins in Italy, a country which Protestant England made synonymous with vice and corruption.

Similarly, secularists, raised in the religions culture of their times, attending schools no less preoccupied with religion than with rhetoric, could not be entirely comfortable about their criticisms of pietism. For whatever else it does, schooling seeks to impose—or assumes—common cultural attitudes and expectations.[50] So it was that as an adult, whether pietiest or secularist, however much you genuinely disagreed with your worst ideological enemies,[51] you shared cultural assumptions with them that blurred the distinctions you both tried to draw.[52] All of that seems pretty self-evident in cultural history, if not always out in the open. Less obvious but psychologically just as true is that when you opted for one received value or set of values over another, or when you disagreed about the exact meaning of a common value, you inevitably had some empathy for the position you were opposing.[53] This was especially true if you were confronting an articulate opponent. I’m not saying that you disbelieved what you were saying, or that your belief was insincere, or that your opinion was wrong (though is any opinion ever “right”?), but that because your childhood training conditioned you to favor principles embedded in your opponent’s case, some (usually unacknowledged) part of yourself felt drawn to that view, felt some disquieting doubt about the legitimacy of your own position. The more compelling the issue, the more contempt you and your opponent were likely to display for each other—precisely because you sensed but tried to deny a part of your own psyche in each other.[54]

[1] Not all Tudor writers went to universities; and although certain colleges (especially a few Cambridge colleges attended by many Puritans) embraced the new learning, the universities in general were much more resistant than schools to adopting it. On Tudor educational curricula, see Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1966), Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London, 1965), and T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, 1944).

[2] The source of “barbarian” is Greek, used to identify those who did not speak Greek and appeared to be babbling “bar-bar-bar.” For an engaging (and so far as I know, unique) Renaissance response to this history, see Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals.”

[3] For example, “...eloquence is so potent a force that it embraces the origin and operation and developments of all things, all the virtues and duties, all the natural principles governing the morals and minds and life of mankind, and also determines their customs and laws and rights, and controls the government of the state, and expresses everything that concerns whatever topic in a graceful and flowing style.” [De Oratore, III.xx.7] For the alliance of reason, speech, divinity and the origin of society, see De Officiis, I.iii.4, XXX.cv and cvii, and De Inventione, I.iv.5.

[4] When primitive men roamed the forests,

Orpheus, the sacred interpreter of heavenly will,

Turned them away from killing and living like beasts

And hence is said to have tamed wild lions and tigers.

Amphion is said, as founder of the city of Thebes,

To have moved the stones and led them wherever he wished

By the sound of his lyre and the winning appeal of his voice.

This was the wisdom of former times: to distinguish

Public from private concerns and sacred from common,

To forbid impromptu liaisons and make rules for marriage,

To build towns and carve out the laws on pillars of wood.

The poets who taught by expressing these things were acclaimed:

They and their works were considered divine.

[Ars Poetica, tr. Smith Palmer Bovie, in The Satires and Epistles of Horace (Chicago, 1959), 287.]

A “naturalistic” account of the origin of language appears in Lucretius (99-55 B.C.), who dismissed the notion that a single person invented language or poetry. Of language in general he wrote, “For why should this particular man be able to denote all things by words and to utter the various sounds of the tongue, and yet at the same time others be supposed not to have been able to do so?” [On the Nature of Things, trans. H. A. J. Munro, in The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, ed. Whitney J. Oates (New York, 1957), 183] Poetry and music evolved from sources that included “imitating with the mouth the clear notes of birds” and “the whistlings of the zephyr through the hollows of reeds.” [p. 190] Lucretius did, however, see an interrelation between the rise of civilization and the creation of arts, of which language is one form.

Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1962), chapter 2, has an excellent discussion of ancient myths about the origin of language, the arts and society in classical and humanist thought. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York, 1969), discusses traditions that saw the supposedly real and ancient Hermes Trismegistus as the first master of wisdom and eloquence.

[5] See, for example, Lactantius, The Works of Lactantius, tr. William Fletcher Edinburgh, 1872), 2 vols., II.29.

[6] Lactantius, for example, argued that pagan philosophers, in introducing “not one origin only, and cause of building a city,” violated the sacred principle that truth is singular. [Ibid., I.375-6] More saliently, speech did not begin after the creation of humankind, but at the same time (“that there were never men on the earth who could not speak except those who were infants every one who is possessed of sense will understand” [Ibid., I.377]), and therefore, pagan claims that speech “evolved” are blasphemous:

O wretched and pitiable men, who committed to writing and handed down to men the record of their own folly; who, when they saw that the plan of assembling themselves together, or of mutual intercourse, or of avoiding danger, or of guarding against evil, or of preparing for themselves sleeping-places and lairs, was natural even to the dumb animals, thought, however, that men could not be admonished and learned, except by examples, what they ought to fear, what to avoid, and what to do, or that they would never have assembled together, or have discovered the method of speech, had not the beasts devoured them! [Ibid., I.376]

You could find an occasional patristic reference to classical accounts of the importance of language, as when Jerome underscored the importance of speech for Christian community by invoking Cicero’s reverence for the social role of language and then hinting at an alliance between the civilizing power of language and the origin of the arts: “What is there so present...when we are absent from each other, as to be able to speak to and to hear those you love through correspondence? Take even those primitive Italian people whom Ennius calls the casci, who, as Cicero states in his books on rhetoric, hunted their food like wild animals: before papyrus and parchment came into use, they used to exchange conversation through notes hewed into wood or the bark of trees.... Under how great obligation are we, living in a world civilized by the arts, not to discontinue a practice afforded them by men living in a state of stark savagery and, to an extent, ignorant of human ways!” [5etter 8 in Letters of St. Jerome, tr. Charles Christopher Mierow (London, 1963), 46]

Patristic writers scorned classical myths that linked the origin of society and language. See for example Chrysostom, who, while not explicitly rejecting the pagan myths, echoes Lactantius’ claim that society is a gift of God. Speech, society and humanity were coterminous:

Seest thou by how many ways He hath bound us together?... He...made us stand in need of one another, that thus...He might bring us together, because necessities above all create friendships.... But having set us in need of one another, He on the other hand made the intercourse easy. Since if this were not so, the matter would have turned out painful and difficult in another way. For if one that wanted a physician, or a carpenter, or any other workman, had need to set off on a long foreign sojourn, the whole had come to nought. Here then is why He founded cities also, and brought all into one place. [The Homilies of Saint John Chrysostom Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians, tr. Talbot W. Chambers (Grand Rapids, 1956), 205]

[7] Rather than “Puritan,” I have chosen to use the looser “pietist” to convey a notion of moral rigor without commitment to any given sect. “Puritan” would be an apt term (though not used until Elizabeth’s reign) if we applied it with M. M. Knappen’s caution to use it in a generalized way. He cites G. M. Trevelyan: puritanism was “‘the religion of all those who wished either to ‘purify’ the usage of the established church from taint of poetry or to worship separately by forms so ‘purified.’” [Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1965; original edition 1939), 489] Even that definition is not sufficiently generalized for my purposes, since high Churchmen with sympathies for much in Catholicism could be thoroughly “puritan” about moral rigor in general and the perniciousness of artful language in particular. Lawrence Sasek, though echoing Knappen’s generalization (“The term [puritanism] is most useful if we apply it to the great force opposing the established church” [The Literary Temper of the English Puritans (Baton Rouge, 1961), 17]), comes closer to my notion in noting that “A ‘puritan’ opponent of the stage may be an orthodox Anglican who fought the puritans and, conversely, an active puritan opponent of the established church can, in literary history, turn out to be quite unpuritanical.” [Ibid., 15]

A stern moral rectitude that we associate with puritanism was not unique to England or continental Protestantism but part of a larger consciousness in Western Europe. Here, for example, is a statement in a 1565 Italian dialogue on country living that could as readily have appeared in an English Protestant polemic against urban vice:

I know many women who are so involved with life in the city that they...want to dress up in the latest fashions, make themselves beautiful and wear perfume. They go around, bursting with vanity, wishing to be admired and flattered by everyone that sees them, thinking of nothing but dashing here and there wherever their fancy takes them. They turn up wherever there is a dance, a company, a tragedy, a joust, a feast or a tournament.

Another speaker develops this theme:

People here [in the country as opposed to the city] are not ambitious, envious, proud or underhand; they are not disloyal, hot-tempered, vindictive or murderous; they are not cuckolded by their wives; still less will you find them acting as false witnesses, dishonest notaries, lying officials, false lawyers, unjust judges or devious clerks.

This speaker catalogues city ills (and zealously describes the harsh punishment appropriate to each), starting with streetsweepers, garbage collectors, porters and wine-carriers, whose immorality is in their general demeanor, and then moving to bawds, whores, crooks, sorcerers, soothsayers, diviners, cheats, cutpurses, mercenaries, swaggering soldiers, hypocrites, confidence men, debtors, swindlers, murderers and traitors. Along the way, he mentions abusers of language and their punishments: “slanderers having their eyes put out, blasphemers having their tongues slit,...false witnesses having their hands cut off.” [from Agostino Gallo, Le dieci giornate della vera agricoltura e piaceri della villa... (Venice, 1565); I obtained these passages at a Harvard Center for Literary Studies gathering in March, 1990, conducted by James S. Ackerman, who wrote the translation.]

This text is informative precisely because it is so historically trivial; we may suppose that its criticisms, whether or not held by a majority, were commonly voiced. The writer, a judge, dotes on images of harsh punishments, which English pietist writings constantly demanded from magistrates. Gallo writes, for example: “Unfaithful wives should have their eyes gouged out, their tongues cut out, and their hands chopped off—or rather they should be wiped off the faces of the earth altogether—burned alive!” The misogyny and sexual repression in this text often appear in English pietist writing; the theme of sexual repression, at least, was a common anti-puritan charge of the day and appeared at least as late as Jonathan Swift’s satire in A Tale of a Tub.

Professor Ackerman’s presentation focused on misogyny in a genre of advice to middle-class city folk about the merits of villas and how to run them. At the good villa:

[Y]ou do not hear people being slandered, as you often do under the loggia in the city, or in workshops or other places. I am not speaking now of vicious people but of ordinary respectable men and women who have no hesitation in blackening the reputation of honest wives, chaste widows, well-brought-up girls and even nuns! And they seem to enjoy talking about sordid things…

“Puritan” tendencies everywhere were closely allied with running debates over pastoral vs. urban, country vs. court, contemplative vs. active, ignorance vs. learning, simplicity vs. civilization, nature vs. art, nature vs. nurture, and so on; in many ways, of course, they were all the same debate. True to their schoolboy training that required arguing both sides of a case, secularists tended to set forth arguments for both positions in these dichotomies (see, e.g., Loves Labours lost or the Pastorella episode in Book VI of The Faerie Queene); pietists tended to press the first argument in each pair (as in stressing Christ’s role as a shepherd and insisting on the “plain” meaning of scripture).

[8] An epitome of secular writing was Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, an elusive, quintessentially rhetorical text steeped in classicism and full of concern for piety by a man who had been a monk. Written in Latin in 1509 in Thomas More’s house, it was popular throughout Europe. Erasmus made several trips to England, starting in 1499, and as far as early Tudor humanists were concerned, was practically an honorary Englishman.

[9] In modern America, of course, we see this tradition continuing in Christian fundamentalists who contemn something they call “secular humanism.”

[10] Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1960), addresses the Renaissance challenge to the Renaissance. The basis of ruling authority became muddy, the heavens appeared to be an extension of the earth rather than an unchanging realm all their own, modern observers seemed capable of discovering things unknown to the ancients.

Here’s a modern example of such a change over a very short period of time: During the 1950s and most of the 1960s in America, there was general agreement among mainstream political parties and the dissenting left that resources for national growth were essentially unlimited; any disagreement was over how to allocate those resources, and who deserved them. In the late 60s, a few people on the left—a minority within a minority—began to organize around the idea that resources are not unlimited. (When I first encountered such people in 1968 at a California Peace and Freedom Party meeting, I thought they were nuts.) As I edit this note in 2007, only in recent years, and especially since Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, have such notions begun to become widespread, although implementing meaningful change still seems elusive.

[11] The climax of all this came a century later with regicide and a novel, albeit brief, period of rule without a monarchy.

[12] The Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla in 1440 exposed this medieval hoax that purported to be from Roman emperor Constantine in the early 4^th century, “donating” the Roman Empire to the Catholic church. For details, consult e.g. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05118a.htm.

[13] Eventually, the contemporary, or “modern,” mind came to see itself superior to the ancient, most obviously when natural philosophy re-interpreted nature and exposed fallacies of the ancients: consider, for example, Galileo, who by the personal authority of measuring the speed of balls rolling down inclined planes (not by dropping things from the Leaning Tower of Pisa) repudiated Aristotle’s ex cathedra affirmation that the heavier an object, the faster it falls. Commentaries on the ancients-moderns controversy include R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965) and Hans Baron, “The Quenelle of the Ancients and the Moderns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship,” in P. O. Kristeller and P. P. Wiener, eds, Renaissance Essays from the Journal of the History of Ideas (New York, 1968).

[14] This frame of mind is the antithesis of our modern Western penchant for specialization, but we cannot understand Renaissance thought until we can empathize with a habit of thinking that does not see cultural or intellectual topics as discrete but rather as restatements of one another. For a particularly concise and thoughtful exposition of this way of thinking, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things [no translator listed] (New York, 1970), chapter 2. Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being (New York, 1960) is the classic intellectual history into which the universe of correspondences fits. The most familiar statement for students of Renaissance English literature when I was in graduate school was E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (New York, n.d.); My major problem with Tillyard is that he sees this synthesis as firmly entrenched in the “Elizabethan” mind, whereas I believe it is under constant assault from both daily events and the intellectual ferment of the Reformation.

[15] Pico della Mirandola’s most famous work is On the Dignity of Man, for the full text of which see, e.g., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Chicago, 1948). An on-line edition is at http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Mirandola/. An on-line synopsis of Pico’s importance is at http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/REN/PICO.HTM.

[16] Nor has it entirely disappeared to this day. One way in which that universe endured was in evolutionary theory, as Lovejoy describes in The Great Chain of Being. Another is echoed when we hear claims about AIDS that it is a divine judgment on our sinful society or on a putative “homosexual life style.”

[17] The new philosophy, especially in England, aspired after certainty without expecting to get it—see Henry G. Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought 1630-1690 (The Hague, 1963)—a problem which reinforced the religious compromise that opposed puritan pietism: as there could be no certainty in the study of nature, so uncertainty in religious doctrine could promote a via media in doctrinal matters. This conclusion of mediated certainty might have been encouraged by the multiple-truth outlook of the universe of correspondences, but it was also very different, for it strove for a single truth, offered an approximation of one, and lamented any need to fall short of one.

The importance of doubt in the new philosophy’s quest for laws of nature interwove with the rise of the philosophy of scepticism, another product of humanist revival of ancient thought that was congenial to a disposition to re-examine old texts. Scepticism contributed to the new natural philosophy (by offering Epicurus’ atomism as a mechanical explanation for the behavior of natural phenomena) and to religious hostility to it (because atomism seems to dismiss God by promoting a belief that randomness controls the universe). On the history of scepticism as it pertains to the Renaissance, see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (New York, 1964). Studies that variously discuss skepticism, atheism and religious attitudes include George T. Buckley, Atheism in the English Renaissance (Chicago, 1932), Don Cameron Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea: Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1964), and Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England (New Haven, 1958).

[18] See “Of Cannibals.”

[19] A typical irony was William Tyndale’s writing a treatise to define Christian obedience in the midst of—because of—rampant disobedience to the old Church.

[20] The Renaissance inherited from medieval educational theory the division of curricula into the trivium and quadrivium. The former consisted of grammar, logic and rhetoric. Since the later Middle Ages, the primary importance within the trivium had shifted from grammar to logic to (in the Renaissance) rhetoric. (The quadrivium was made up of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and music.)

[21] Standard works on Ramus include Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass., 1958) and Wilbur S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England: 1500-1700 (Princeton, 1957). For summaries of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, try http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13333b.htm (Catholic interpretation) or http://www.reformation.org/bart.html (a much less detached, Protestant account).

[22] Ramism reduced Cicero’s five rhetorical divisions to two, integrating the first, second and fourth parts of classical rhetoric (invention, disposition and memory) into the third and fifth divisions (style, on which Ramism put great stress, and delivery).

[23] It is no accident that in seventeenth-century France, the Port-Royal school of logic was founded by Jansenists, the French Catholics most like Calvinists. A summary of the appeal of logic to Jansenism would apply equally well to sixteenth-century English pietism:

The logician aims to eliminate controversy, since it is a sign of inadequate knowledge; and he distrusts unresolved dialogue, since the truth is one—or, at least, he hopes to make it so. The rhetorician thrives on controversy; and in moments of leisure—one thinks at once of Cicero—he takes pleasure in dialogue. [Hugh M. Davidson, Audience, Words and Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Rhetoric (Ohio State University, 1965), 100]

Jesuit “casuistry” reflects continuity with a multi-valent universe; depending on where you stand, casuistry may look like flexibility or hypocrisy.

[24] See, e.g., Hiram Haydn’s discussion of the hand-in-the-wound school in The Counter-Renaissance.

[25] See, e.g., Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1957) and E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (New York, 1954).

[26] The gender was no accident; see, e.g., Evelyn Fox Keller on Bacon, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven and London, 1985), chapter 2.

[27] A humanist precursor of this notion was efforts of Elizabethan orthographic reformers to create an alphabet in which one letter stood for one sound only.

The tension within the new philosophy that at once felt bonds with humanist tradition yet trapped by it was a key source of the split in intellectual history between the humanities and sciences, and continues today to reinforce that division. At first, because of its incompatibility with fundamental religious principles—miracles, for example, seem to disallow regularity in nature; a universe governed by immutable laws destroys the efficacy of prayer, which assumes God’s ability to intervene in the natural order at any time—the new philosophy felt its strongest bonds with humanism and was attacked by religion. But belief in a singular, unambiguous reality also produced an affinity between Protestantism and the new philosophy that helps account for their rapid reconciliation between the beginning and end of the seventeenth century. The source of their split never ceased; the Enlightenment’s approach to Newtonianism, for example, appeared to fulfill the dire warnings that the new way of natural philosophy would dismiss an active God from the universe. We see continuing evidence of religious uneasiness with science in the modern American heirs of Reformation pietism who denounce evolution (which requires considerable interpretive leger-de-main to be reconciled with Genesis) for its contrariness to the plain, direct meaning of scripture.

[28] Citing Oswaldus Crollius’ Paracelsian book on pharmacology and signatures, first published in 1609, Michel Foucault points to the need to read (“decipher”) the world to discover its secrets:

...the face of the world is covered with blazons, with characters, with ciphers and obscure words—with hieroglyphics... And the space inhabited by immediate resemblances becomes like a vast open book; it bristles with written signs; every page is seen to be filled with strange figures that intertwine and in some places repeat themselves. All that remains is to decipher them: ‘Is it not true that all herbs, plants, trees and other things issuing from the bowels of the earth are so many magic books and signs?’ [The Order of Things, 27. This passage is based on a French translation of Crollius’ Latin text: Trait� des signatures (Rouen, 1650), 50.]

[29] Richard Hooker, writing in 1593, sees human law as based on “that high everlasting law... Not as if men did behold that book and accordingly frame their laws; but because it worketh in them, because it discovereth and (as it were) readeth itself to the world by them...” [Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London, 1965), 2 vols., I.225; emphasis added]

[30] That art is better with visual perspective than without is not an intrinsic truth (as we have learned, say, from cubism or abstract expressionism). The visual “distortion” of perspective in medieval painting that Renaissance art seeks to “correct” underscores different truths. An outsized Christ child, for example, may remind the viewer of the relative importance of Christ over material objects or ordinary human beings. A painting with multiple scenes, such as the stations of the Cross or key scenes from the life of Christ, can serve as a visual primer for the illiterate.

[31] I am, of course, referring to rhetoric as understood at the time, not its modern use as a synonym for empty language, spoken or written—a usage that likely grows from the anti-rhetorical tradition that I will address in succeeding chapters.

[32] Modern critics have discovered this experience in a variety of ways. For Paul Alpers, the verse in The Faerie Queene “makes sense only as a rhetorical instrument, a means of modifying the reader’s feelings,” to promote Philip Sidney’s goal of creating “a world of heroic readers.” [“Narrative and Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene,” in Alpers, Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York, 1967), 388] Stephen Booth, repudiating those who seek straightforward structural principles in Shakespeare’s sonnets, believes that “the individual poems are multiply ordered[;]...the elements of each poem exist in more than one intended order” to keep the reader “engaged and active” in the world the sonnets describe. [An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven, 1969), 1 , 187. (Cf.: “...in all their details the sonnets set a reader’s mind in motion, demanding intellectual energy as they read, and...that effect, the effect of the actual experience of passing from word to word for fourteen lines, is unusual and valuable. Each reading of a Shakespeare sonnet is...the experience not of recognizing the mutable nature of the human condition but of participating in an actual experience of mutability.” [49]) Stanley Fish argues that Francis Bacon, by encouraging us to beliefs which he suddenly sweeps away, teaches us in the Essays by a kind of rhetorical behaviorism to shun the Idols of the Mind: “his primary concern is with the experience that form provides, and, further,...this experience, rather than the materials of which it is combined, is what is scientific about the Essays.” [Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley, 1972), 81] Fish sees the same principle enduring at least as late as Milton, who wishes “to re-create in the mind of the reader...the drama of the Fall, to make him fall again exactly as Adam did and with Adam’s troubled clarity, that is to say, ‘not deceived.’” [Surprised by Sin (Berkeley, 1971), 1]

[33] This concern appears in Tudor writings about all language matters.

Eloquence in general: In 1577, Henry Peacham’s long text on eloquence announced in its extended title that it is “very profitable for all those that be studious of Eloquence, and that read most Eloquent Poets and Orators, and also helpeth much for the better understanding of the holy Scriptures.” [The Garden of Eloquence (Menston, 1971)]

Rhetoric: In his book on rhetorical devices, published in 1550, Richard Sherry’s title page addressed “all that be studious of eloquence, and in especial for such as in grammar schools do read most eloquent poets and orators.” [A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, ed. Herbert W. Hildebrandt (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1961)] While acknolwedging the value of learning rhetoric to speak “with some grace and elegancy,” Dudley Fenner in 1584 stressed its role of helping us to understand others’ ideas: all men should use the rhetorical arts “with some study as their callings may suffer and strengthen their judgment, to discern of the sayings and writings of other men, to keep better that which they learn.” [The Artes of Logike and Rethorike, in Robert D. Pepper, ed., Four Tudor Books on Education (Gainesville, Fla., 1966), 146]

Reading and writing:The subtitle of Edmund Coote’s primer in 1596 to prepare pupils to enter grammar schools called equal attention to reading and writing: his book was to teach “the most easy, short and perfect order of distinct reading and true writing our English tongue” and show “how any unskillful person may easily both understand hard English words, which they shall in the scriptures, sermons, or elsewhere hear or read: and also how to use the same aptly themselves.” [The Englishe Schoole-Maister (London, 1596; Scolar Press reprint)]

Logic: Ralph Lever reminded you in 1573 that the person who teaches how to read books, as remains true in British education to this day, bears the title of “reader”: “Verily it is requisite in all them, which shall be readers to men of noble birth, that besides knowledge and diligence to teach, they have also a certain sleight and cunning to cause their scholars to delight in learning: and so to use the matter, that personages of high estate be neither drawn from the love of their book.” [The Art of Reason, Rightly Termed Witcraft, Teaching a Perfect Way to Argue and Dispute (London, 1573), i4]

Spelling and grammar: Good orthography, William Bullokar’s title page insists, is crucial “for the easy, speedy, and perfect reading and writing of English” [Booke at Large in The Works of William Bullokar, ed. J. R. Turner (Leeds, 1970); original edition 1580] and obedience to grammar rules will ensure that “each volume, [in] time to come, may be read as it was”—that is, for its original meaning [Pamplet for Grammar, in The Works of William Bullokar, ed. J. R. Turner (Leeds, 1980), vol. II, A4^r; original edition 1586]

Prefaces to works of imaginative literature equally showed concern with their readers’ comprehension: in his translation of Homer, published in 1598, George Chapman not only penned a section “To the Reader” but also one “To the Understander,” a member of an elite within an elite: “You are not everybody; to you (as to one of my very few friends) I may be bold to utter my mind. But idle capacities are not comprehensible to an elaborate Poem.” [In G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays (London, 1904), 2 vols., II.304] Chapman highlighted the close interaction between reader and text through the syntax of “are not comprehensible” to make it sound as though the text “reads”—passes judgment on—the reader.

[34] From classical times poetry had been categorized as a form of rhetoric.

[35] This point of view, as I am addressing it, has nothing to do with theories of reading that make the reader a creator of meaning in the text. Renaissance writers speak to readers with minds trained to sense and extract embedded messages, even if those messages involve paradox or ambiguity.

[36]English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, 1982), somewhere between 45 and 65.

[37] Our modern critical insistence on the fusion of form and content has its roots in a view that words and what they identify are exact and inseparable reflections of each other. Discussing them separately, which we do all the time, is akin to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle problem of isolating speed or mass of an electron.

[38] This attitude easily blends with Renaissance distaste for novelty and newfangledness or theories that art must be an “imitation” (a term of great complexity reflected, for example, in plays’ “re-writing” history and old stories) of nature

[39] Foster Watson, ed. and tr., Vives: On Education (Totowa, NJ, 1971), 45. Vives was almost as popular in England as Erasmus; he befriended Henry VIII in 1521, tutored Princess Mary and taught at Corpus College, Oxford, in 1523. He visited England again in 1527, was jailed by Henry for siding with Catherine in the divorce, and then offended Catherine by recanting. The De Tradendis was first published in Latin at Antwerp, 1531, and was translated as The Transmission of Knowledge. Vives adds here that you should not just list books, but the relevant parts in them: “But such an one must not be satisfied with merely making a note of the worth of the books, but he should also indicate the passages in the books where topics one by one should be sought.” Since Vives’ book was about to set forth such readings, he is anticipating praise for himself.

[40] See Puttenham for “deceive,” “trespass,” “guileful” (all in Smith, II.160), “abuse” and “estrange” (both in II.165). See Puttenham (II.165), Peacham (Bi^v ) and Sherry (Ciiii^r) for “alteration,” Wilson for “translation” (Ziv^r ) and “transmutation” (Aai^r ). In Peacham, Bi^v , see also “removed from common custom” and “change of signification.”

[41] European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1953), 44-45.

[42] The Arte of Rhetorique, ed. Robert Hood Bowers (Gainesville, Fla., 1962), z iii^v.

[43] While William Bullokar may have yearned for standard spelling (see note 33 re grammar and spelling), the reality was otherwise.

[44] Even the term “figure” was used differently by different writers. In 1550 Richard Sherry rejected “figure” in favor of “scheme,” “a Greek word...taken for the form, fashion, and shape of anything expressed in writing or painting: the fashion of a word, saying, or sentence, otherwise written or spoken than after the vulgar and common usage.” “Figure” is here one of three general kinds of scheme, “a behavior, manner, or fashion either of sentence, oration, or words after some new wise, other than men do commonly use to write or speak.” Sherry complained that tropes have often been included under “figures” but should not be. [Bv^r , Ciiii^r] Henry Peacham suggested the same three general rhetorical categories as Wilson and Sherry, though he violated the latter’s warning not to categorize tropes as figures. [Bi^r-v, Ei^v] Similar divisions held in poetic theory. See also George Puttenham, in Smith, II.160. Modern literary scholars retain much of this general attitude. We devote an enormous amount of our own literary criticism, from courses in freshman literature on, to probing the full potential of “figures” or “tropes” or whatever we choose to call them. That our rhetorical vocabulary is rarely as detailed as a Renaissance scholar’s does not change the fact that we have inherited a powerful propensity to seek out hidden mysteries in texts. From writing a term paper to preparing for a seminar discussion to giving a lecture to colleagues to writing an essay like this one, we tend to be highly conscious of having our own ingenuity recognized by what we can expose of hidden meanings in the texts we analyze—and often by doing so via specialized vocabulary, occult allusions and witticisms that we expect only the cognoscenti like ourselves to understand.

[45] As Thomas P. Roche explains, allegorical reading “postulates a verbal universe at every point correspondent with the physical world in which we live.” [“The Nature of the Allegory,” in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York, 1967), 404] Because it juxtaposed disparate, often contradictory perspectives on the same subject, allegory inevitably appealed to the humanist mind that delighted in multiple realities. In its broad Renaissance meaning, allegory used (among other things) symbolism, scriptural and classical allusions, wordplay, rhetorical games. You could only fully experience its literary character if you opened yourself to a holistic impact: the author did not expect a reader to catalogue the multiple levels in the text (though that might be helpful towards gaining full appreciation), but rather to experience all levels at once, to become infused with the moral truth that the rhetoric intends to convey.

[46] The Veil of Allegory (Chicago, 1969), 48. Rosemund Tuve warns us that we misconstrue allegory when we separate its literal and symbolic level (see “Imitation and Images,” reprinted from her Allegorical Imagery, in Alpers, Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, especially 510 and 512). Cf. Roche:

As soon as the critic begins to talk about poets telling stories on the allegorical level, he confuses the tenor and vehicle of this continued metaphor and misses the beauty and economy of the allegorical mode. To leap at random from the concrete embodiment of the universal in the narrative to an abstract statement of it can only flatten out the narrative and dull the experience that the allegorical narrative is attempting to create in the reader. [“The Nature of the Allegory,” in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, 403]

[47] Foucault makes a similar point when explaining aemulatio, one of the four categories he assigns to correspondences:

There is something in emulation of the reflection and the mirror... But which of these reflections coursing through space are the original images? Which is the reality and which the projection? It is often not possible to say... [The Order of Things, 19]

[48] For a good summary of the history of allegory, see Curtius, 204ff. For the imprecise meaning of allegory in the English Renaissance, see Joshua McClennen, “On the Meaning and Function of Allegory in the English Renaissance,” The University of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology (April, 1947: No. 6).

[49] The XV bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis (London, 1567), biii^v.

[50] Such an assumption has always been present, as we have seenin recent decades in the U.S., for example, in wranglings over school prayer or the proper content of biology courses. Details of curricula may vary from region to region and even school to school, and we may think there are fundamental differences if one school bans books that another doesn’t, or if one school has 50 kids in a class or guns carried into the school while another averages 15 per class and the worst discipline problems are occasional fistfights. Certainly no decent society can countenance such differences, which have compelling consequences for each person’s quality of life both as a child and adult. But the differences mask an underlying commonality across the nation’s schooling, a kind of collective unconscious for the cultural moment: everyone is exposed to some kind of reading and writing and arithmetic and basics of State and national government and history; after-school sports or language clubs or music are (or used to be not so many years ago) available; you raise your hand if you want to speak; you know there will be vacations at Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter; and so on.

Schooling is not, of course, the only way members of a society develop common attitudes; home life, peer values and media images, for example, are also important. But schooling presents a kind of “official” set of social norms that I am choosing to stress in this essay.

[51] “Ideological” here identifies any social or political attitude, even if based on ignorance. For example, a school dropout who looks forward to drunken brawls at the weekend is being ideological when opposing gun control or voting against taxes (or the opposite). While this essay focuses on a small, educated elite in Tudor England, there were plenty of members of that elite who gained little from their schooling yet shared a range of experiences not available to illiterate or barely literate people in their culture.

[52] Whether you favor or oppose social welfare programs, you debate the case in terms of equality of opportunity, the state’s duty to its citizens, individual responsibility and initiative, rights of the majority, and so on. Disagreements expose ambiguous meaning of a value you have always taken for granted, or highlight how one principle you especially favor is incompatible with others you were equally conditioned to embrace. Do you promote peace and security by building up arms, or by negotiating with your “enemies”? Which weighs more heavily—your right as a taxpayer to the fruits of your labor (or your inherited wealth), or your need as an indigent AIDS sufferer for drugs that can prolong your life? Should free speech or a child’s security take precedence if a magazine or internet site promotes pederasty? And so on.

[53] The general principle to which I’m pointing is the way key childhood conditioning never stops affecting us, as in the way we now take for granted that we can find psychological roots of adult problems in childhood experiences. We can become aware of what these experiences were and how they affect us, and we can teach ourselves to stop letting them control our lives, but we are never completely free of the feelings they produce within us.

[54] For the theater, Jonas Barish has established self-doubts among playwrights. See, for example, “The Antitheatrical Prejudice,” CQ (vol. 8, 1966), pp. 329-48, “Exhibitionism and the Anti-Theatrical Prejudice,” ELH (vol. XXXVI, No. 1, 1969), 1-29, and “Jonson and the Loathed Stage,” in A Celebration of Ben Jonson, ed. William Blisset, Julian Patrick and R. W. Van Fossen (Toronto, 1973), 27-53. In fact, as I shall argue in succeeding essays, the same uneasiness finds its way into all imaginative literature—theater, poetry, prose fiction—as well as pietist writing.