How to Remember Thee?: Problems of Memorialization in English Writing

Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2008 How to remember thee?: problems of memorialization in english writing, 1558-1625 Sean Flory Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Flory, Sean, "How to remember thee?: problems of memorialization in english writing, 1558-1625" (2008). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 226. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/226 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. HOW TO REMEMBER THEE? PROBLEMS OF MEMORIALIZATION IN ENGLISH WRITING, 1558-1625 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Sean Flory B.A., Sam Houston State University, 2000 December 2008 Table of Contents Abstract.......................................................................................................................................... iii Introduction. The Culture of Death in Early Modern England........................................................1 Chapter One. Protestant Preachers and Protestant Saints: The Politics of Commemoration in Reformation England, 1558-1603..................................................................................................27 Chapter Two. Vernacular Elegies for Sir Philip Sidney: The Knight as Martyr and Author........75 Chapter Three. Spenser, Preachers, and the Commemoration of Justice: The Lords Deputy of Ireland and Book V of The Faerie Queene..................................................................................115 Chapter Four. “Our Succeeding Charlemagne”: Funeral Sermons for Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales and the Education of Charles I..........................................................................................158 Chapter Five. David, Moses, or Solomon?: The Funeral Sermons for James I...........................196 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................231 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................235 Vita ..............................................................................................................................................252 ii Abstract This dissertation focuses on the use of funeral commemoration in religious and political controversies in early modern England. By examining the rhetoric used in funeral sermons and elegies, I show that commemorative writers use figural interpretation of the Bible to legitimize praise by linking the deceased to characters from scripture. Figural interpretation places the dead into a framework of ecclesiastical history and creates Protestant saints used as exempla in political and religious debates. This dissertation examines funeral sermons, elegies, and other commemorative poems written between 1558 and 1625. Chapter one discusses the development of figural interpretation in Elizabethan funeral sermons. By reading sermons by Edmund Grindal, Thomas Sparke, Matthew Parker, and William Barlow, I show that figural interpretation allows preachers to use funeral sermons as reformed counterparts to medieval cults of political saints. Chapter two examines elegies written by George Whetstone, Thomas Churchyard, John Phillips, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Sidney after Sir Philip Sidney’s death in 1586. These poets support military intervention on the continent against Roman Catholic States by using figural interpretation to represent Sidney as a martyr. Chapter three discusses commemoration as a polemical tool for militant Protestants in Elizabethan Ireland by discussing funeral sermons for three Lords Deputy of Ireland and Book V of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Chapter four considers the commemoration of Prince Henry in 1612 and argues that poets George Wither, Joshua Sylvester, and Henry Peacham, and the preacher Daniel Price use biblical figurae of kings David and Josiah to represent Henry as a militant Protestant saint. I also show that John Donne uses figural interpretation in his elegy to advance an agenda of religious pacifism. Chapter five examines funeral sermons preached after James I’s 1625 death. I argue that militant Protestant preachers like Daniel Price and Phineas Hodson and conformist preachers like John iii Donne and James Williams used different sets of figurae to support their sides in the debate over ceremonies in the English church. The conclusion calls for further research on the role of commemoration in early modern England as a whole, and in Donne’s work in particular. iv Introduction: The Culture of Death in Early Modern England For people in early modern England, some of the more troubling consequences of the Reformation were sudden changes in the rites and doctrines surrounding death. These changes encompassed everything from accepted views about the afterlife to the material trappings of funerals. According to historian Ralph Houlbrooke, one of the major effects of the Reformation was a radical destabilization of the relationship between the living and the dead. The dismantling of the Catholic penitential system under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I brought “[c]hanges in the last rites and funeral ceremonies” that “left both the dying and the survivors with much-diminished ritual support” (374).1 One of the major effects of this collapse in ritual support involved the issue of the memorialization of the dead. With the removal of the penitential system, traditional means of commemoration, including the building of funeral monuments and the endowment of penitential prayers, became legally and theologically problematic. Caught in the shifting winds of theological debate in the 16th and 17th centuries, believers both lay and clerical were left uncertain of how, or even whether, they should commemorate the dead. The issue of commemoration was critically important given the role of funeral practices in the political life of early modern English society. Anthropological research on early modern funerals shows that “[e]laborate rituals survived the Reformation, not because they found justification in Protestant theology, but because they served deep-rooted social and familial 1 See Houlbrooke’s Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480-1750, as well as Clare Gittings’s Death, Burial, and the Individual in Early Modern England, Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars, Richard L. Greaves’s Society and Religion in Elizabethan England, and Vanessa Harding’s The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500-1670 for more discussion of the Reformation’s impact on funeral services. 1 needs” (Cressy 99). Many of these social needs were political, as commemoration helped bind political communities in a variety of ways. Funeral rites served the needs of political authorities. According to Gittings, “the main reason for holding the ritual was to stress the continuing power of the aristocracy and to prove that it remained unaffected by the death of one of its members” (175), the funerals of aristocrats and gentry “served to illustrate order and hierarchy and to evoke respect and deference from onlookers” (Harding 214). In addition, funeral rituals helped create and maintain broader political and ecclesiastical communities, for the funeral and commemoration of the dead gave communities “moment[s] of self-definition and […] opportunit[ies] to witness a shared belief in a social and confessional order” (Harding 234).2 Funeral monuments and commemorative writing like funeral elegies and funeral sermons played a crucial role in the creation of political and religious communities. According to Richard Greaves, funeral monuments “reinforced the social hierarchy” by providing “future generations of worshippers […] with a sort of secularized Elizabethan saint” that provided objects for political emulation (731). Printed elegies and printed funeral sermons fulfilled a similar function 2 According to Jennifer Woodbridge, the heraldic funeral procession “was thus a microcosm of the social unit of the kingdom, hierarchically organized according to status and degree. Overall the spatial organization of the funeral procession functioned as a statement of continued order and stability” (Woodward 17). Much of the discussion of the early modern funeral as a tool of social and political control focuses on the heraldic funeral, often using Sir Philip Sidney’s 1586 funeral as a prime example. See Dominic Baker-Smith’s “’Great Expectation’: Sidney’s Death and the Poets,” Sander Bos, Marianne Lange-Meyers, and Jeanine Six’s “Sidney’s Funeral Portrayed,” John Buxton’s “The Mourning for Sidney,” Elizabeth Goldring’s “The Funeral of Sir Philip Sidney and the Politics of Elizabethan Festival,” Alan Hager’s “The Exemplary Mirage: Fabrication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Biographical Image and the Sidney Reader,” and Ronald Strickland’s “Pageantry and Poetry as Discourse: The Production of Subjectivity

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