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Copyright by Arlen Dale Nydam 2009 The Dissertation Committee for Arlen Dale Nydam certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Speaking Pictures: The Sacramental Vision of Philip Sidney Committee: _______________________________________ Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, Supervisor _______________________________________ Kate Gartner Frost, Co-Supervisor _______________________________________ Douglas Bruster _______________________________________ Jeffrey Chipps Smith _______________________________________ John Rumrich Speaking Pictures: The Sacramental Vision of Philip Sidney by Arlen Dale Nydam, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2009 Speaking Pictures: The Sacramental Vision of Philip Sidney Arlen Dale Nydam, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2009 Supervisors: Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski Kate Gartner Frost This dissertation examines some of the Catholic ideas and people found in the life and writings of Philip Sidney. Due to Sidney’s aggressive advocacy of a pro-Protestant English foreign policy during the 1570s and 1580s, and to the anti-Catholic biases of many British and American academics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, previous studies have almost unanimously approached Sidney from an exclusively Protestant angle. This Sidney is the hero of English Protestant nationalism, the perfect poet-knight. The Sidney that emerges from the present study is much less unified: thoroughly anti- papal and anti-Spanish in his politics but warmly Catholic in his apparent metaphysical convictions. Catholic theology and devotional traditions were far from dead in Sidney’s England, and he was far from hostile toward them. By recovering Sidney’s engagement with Catholicism, from his consistent generosity to individual Catholics to the numerous sympathetic allusions to Catholic tradition in all his major works, this dissertation provides a new yet historically grounded way of reading Sidney. It also encourages a broader understanding of confessional diversity in the Elizabethan period. iv Table of Contents List of Tables and Figures............................................................................................... vi Abbreviations................................................................................................................. vii Introduction.......................................................................................................................1 Outline of the Dissertation ...................................................................................10 Chapter 1: Sidney’s Extended Family and the Catholic Petition of 1585 ......................16 Chapter 2: Poetry and the Sacraments ............................................................................53 The Sacraments: Baptism.....................................................................................68 The Sacraments: Eucharist ...................................................................................73 Alan Sinfield: Political Protestantism ..................................................................80 Robert Stillman: Cosmopolitan Protestantism .....................................................84 Chapter 3: Sacramental Mentality in the Arcadias.........................................................98 Three Preliminary Objections Answered ...........................................................100 Past Assessments of Religion in the Arcadias: Introduction .........................................................................106 First Category: Political Religion.......................................................................107 Second Category: Anthropological Religion .....................................................109 Third Category: Polemical / Theological Religion ............................................116 First Problem: Contrary Evidence......................................................................117 Second Problem: Identifying Politics and Religion ...........................................122 The Old Arcadia.................................................................................................124 “Sincerity”: A Possible Alternative?..................................................................134 The New Arcadia................................................................................................140 Conclusion..........................................................................................................152 Chapter 4: Astrophil and Stella.....................................................................................156 Sleeping and Rising............................................................................................158 “Our Thorny Soil”: Astrophil’s Parable.............................................................162 Esau and Astrophil’s “Race”..............................................................................165 Sidney and Southwell.........................................................................................169 “Hidden Beauties”..............................................................................................172 Significance of the Numbers ..............................................................................176 Epilogue..............................................................................................................190 Chapter 5: Effectual Signs: The Catholic Semiotic of the Sidney Psalms ...................192 Philip Sidney’s Psalms .......................................................................................204 The Nature of Signification: Two Views ...........................................................216 Mary Sidney Herbert’s Psalms...........................................................................222 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................232 Bibliography .................................................................................................................235 Vita................................................................................................................................248 v List of Tables and Figures Table 1: Calculation of the World Soul Intervals .........................................................180 vi Abbreviations AS Astrophil and Stella Catechismus Catholic Church. Catechismvs, ex decreto Concilii Tridentini, ad parochos, Pii Qvinti Pont. Max. ivssv editvs. Rome: Paulus Manutius, 1566. CCC Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church. Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1994. This is the first major revision of the catechism since 1566. MP Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten, eds. The Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973 NA Sidney, Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia). Ed. Victor Skretkowicz. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. OA Sidney, Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia). Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. The World's Classics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. RC Catholic Church. The Roman Catechism: Translated and Annotated in Accord with Vatican II and Post-Conciliar Documents and the New Code of Canon Law. Trans. Robert I. Bradley and Eugene Kevane. Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1985. A translation of the 1566 Catechismus, at times rather loose but mostly faithful to the general sense of the Latin. STC Pollard, A. W., et al. A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475-1640. Second ed. Vol. 2. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1976. vii Introduction At the end of The Lady of May, Philip Sidney describes his uncle, Robert Dudley, as if he were the champion in England of all things Catholic. He is: foully commaculated with the papistical enormity, o heu Aedipus Aecastor. The bonus vir is a huge catholicam, wherewith my conscience being replenished, could no longer refrain it from you, proba dominus doctor, probo inveni. I have found unum par, a pair, papisticorum bedorus, of Papistian beads, cum quis, with the which, omnium dierum, every day, next after his pater noster he semper suits ‘and Elizabeth’, as many lines as there be beads on this string. (MP 31) Worship of Elizabeth as a new Virgin Mary may have been, as Alan Hager suggests, an ironic “cure” for recusancy (Hager “Rhomboid” 495), and was no doubt meant to provoke laughter in the audience at Wanstead. But when one of Sidney’s Arcadian heroes prays kneeling to an image of “the lady of us all,” should that too be taken as ironic? Are all of Sidney’s references to Catholic devotional practice similarly ironic? Is it possible to tell? In this dissertation I argue that what appears as irony in The Lady of May was, at some level, taken seriously by its author. Although Sidney was a committed Protestant on the international stage, his writings nevertheless manifest a Catholic sacramental worldview, one in which physical reality is seen as the normal means for the communication of spiritual gifts and graces. In Catholic thought these physical means belong to two categories: sacraments and sacramentals. The sacraments are those ceremonies of the Church instituted by Christ as “the proper channels through which the 1 efficacy of Christ’s Passion