“Blest Be the Architect”: Church-Building in Foxe, Spenser, Lanyer, and Herbert Kathryn Carol Fore Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Kathryn Carol Fore All rights reserved ABSTRACT “Blest Be the Architect”: Church-Building in Foxe, Spenser, Lanyer, and Herbert Kathryn Carol Fore My dissertation examines the imagery of church building in early modern English literature. It spans from Henry VIII’s Dissolution of monastic houses in the 1530s to the poetry of George Herbert in the 1630s, and traces the influence of theological writings, architectural history, and religious doctrine on the formation of a formal thematic element. In studies of architectural images that appear in English literature after the Dissolution, the focus is often on ruins, which are read as a representation of anxiety about the lastingness of literary works in the wake of the vast social upheavals of the Reformation. However, given the importance of the Resurrection and redemptive history to the English Church in the early modern period, ruination in a religious context can also symbolize eternal redemption. To that end, I trace images of churches in disrepair in early modern poetry, and examine how those images are used by the authors to rebuild figuratively their subject following personal or political loss, and through that activity, to defend their work’s effectiveness. I first examine the theological and historical associations of the church as a space of communal redemption in the English Church, and how those associations become thematic features in John Foxe’s seminal Actes and Monuments (1570). I then examine manifestations of this theme in three major Protestant poetic works: Edmund Spenser’s lament for Philip Sidney in The Ruines of Time (1591), Aemilia Lanyer’s praise of the disinherited Margaret Clifford in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), and George Herbert’s pastoral struggles in The Temple (1633). In excavating the redemptive connotations of church imagery in these works, I demonstrate how early modern English authors borrow from church practice and narrative to craft their own literary identities and purposes. CONTENTS List of Illustrations ii Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 1. The English Church as Resurrection Space, the “Great Rebuilding,” and the Church of John Foxe 17 1. Introduction 2. The Redemptive Historical Narrative and the English Church 3. Monasteries and Material Culture in the Early English Reformation 4. John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1570): Building a Textual Church 2. The Church of Philip Sidney: Resurrection and the City of God in Spenser’s Ruines of Time 71 1. Introduction 2. Verulamium and the City of Man 3. Sidney, Poetry, and the City of God 4. The Church of Philip Sidney and Spenser’s Defense 3. The Church of Margaret Clifford: or, the “Cookeham” That Lanyer Built 114 1. Introduction 2. Margaret Clifford as the Bride of Christ: The Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum 3. Cookeham 4. Introductory Epistles 4. The Church of George Herbert: Rebuilding the Poet in The Temple 161 1. Introduction 2. The Poet’s Heart and Work: Spaces of God’s Presence 3. Rebuilding the Poet’s Heart-Church 4. Reifying the Heart-Church: Inviting the Reader In 5. Epilogue 210 Bibliography 214 i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Frontispiece for the Geneva Bible, 1560 66 2. Plan of Tichfield Abbey 67 3. Present day photo of Tichfield Abbey 68 4. Frontispiece to Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, 1570 69 5. Kentish brass grave marker, 1590s 70 6. Map of Hartfordshire from Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, 1622 113 7. Rosicrucian emblem of Daniel Cramer, 1617 208 8. Layout of Barnoldswick, Yorkshire parish church 209 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Much like the images of churches upon which I focus, my dissertation owes its completion to the ministrations of many. My debt to Alan Stewart as advisor, mentor, and chair is incalculable; without his guidance and advocacy I could never have finished. At a critical moment, Anne Prescott and Achsah Guibbory provided the support necessary for this project to continue, and they have been indispensable sources of knowledge, advice, and good cheer. Molly Murray and Julie Crawford taught me the value of listening to my own voice before those of others. Jean Howard and Jenny Davidson have been models of professionalism and pedagogy, and I have learned much from them. Many thanks are due to Rebeca Helfer for her gracious feedback on my Spenser chapter. I owe much to my friends and colleagues at Columbia, who provided constructive criticism, compassion, good conversation, and support: Candace Cunard, Chris McKeen, Ruen-Chuan Ma, Seth Williams, Ariel Franklin-Hudson, Sara Murphy, Sarah Minsloff, and Emily Shortslef. I am grateful for the mentorship of Doug Pfeiffer and Victoria Silver, whose teachings at UC Irvine transformed my early career, and whose continued wisdom and guidance is a source of comfort. Thanks go above all to my family and friends in California and New York, whose belief in me allowed for my belief in myself. My mother’s care packages and encouragement were particularly needed. As this project began to cohere, I met David, and as my dissertation developed, our shared life confirmed the hope of restoration I sought within my archive of texts. His patience, encouragement, and longsuffering support were vital to all aspects of this project, and I look forward to our future with joy. iii 1 INTRODUCTION This is a dissertation about images of churches in early modern English literature, and how authors build on the religious implications of those images to shape their understanding of the lastingness of their work. It examines four representative literary works in the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline periods between 1570 and 1633, and also looks to their origins in the Henrican era of English religion in the 1530s. To be more specific, the images examined in this dissertation are of ruined or broken churches in the process of rebuilding, which transforms them into viable, functional structures. These images are used to describe the author’s subject in instances when that subject is threatened by ruin or misfortune – be it John Foxe’s imagined audience, the English Protestant Church, in the Actes and Monuments (1570); Philip Sidney, the late revered poet for whom Edmund Spenser mourns in the Ruines of Time (1591); the landless Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611); or the speaker whose sinful heart mars his poetic endeavors in George Herbert’s The Temple (1633). Portrayals of these subjects as churches provide an imaginative space for Foxe, Spenser, Lanyer, and Herbert to create poetic representations of those subjects that might transcend ruination. This project attempts to engage, and in some ways reframe, a critical dialogue in early modern literary studies about the use of ruins in early modern poetic instantiations of the classical immortality-of-poetry topos. Since Horace described his poetry as a “monument more lasting than bronze” (exegi monumentum aere perennius) in the Odes, poets in the Western tradition have relied on this topos both to assert poetry's capacity to preserve the memory of worthy subjects forever where physical monuments might be obliterated, and to express anxiety 2 about its capacity to do so.1 The English literary tradition in particular evinces an uncertainty about the truth of these claims by depicting monuments that have already been ruined. Anne Janowitz defines this English trend as a genre, which she calls “the Ruin Poem,” and which often subverts the immortality-of-poetry topos to accomplish its purposes.2 Janowitz argues that ruined buildings in English literature function as spaces to re-imagine Britain during historical periods of transition, as they “provide a historical provenance for the conception of the British nation as immemorially ancient.”3 For her, ruins poems enact this purpose by fixating on the past as a marker of present English identity, and paradoxically by mourning the transience of physical buildings. In recent years, literary scholars have demonstrated that ruination imagery in late Elizabethan literature responds in particular to the major transitional period of the English Reformation, exemplified itself by an act of wholesale destruction – Henry VIII's Dissolution of 1. “Ode 3.30” in Horace’s Odes and Epodes, trans. David Mulroy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 127. 2. Janowitz, England's Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1990), 7-10. Her focus specifically is on nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, and how ruination “through its naturalization subsumes cultural and class difference into a conflated representation of Britain as nature's inevitable product.” There is an inherent conflict in execution almost from its inception, according to Janowitz, as this topos is “often linked” to the similarly ambivalent “inexpressibility topos,” and by the Romantic period immortality-of- poetry “approaches and then merges with its ruined objects of observation, drawing in its wake a collapse of the distinction between poem and building, self and object of contemplation” (7-9). Janowitz' work is one of many critical examinations of architectural themes in English poetry as means of reassessing the past in order to define national identity in the present. See Anne Myers' more recent work on the “consciously perceived” relationship between “written text and built environment” in the seventeenth century, in which she claims that early modern writing about architecture “belonged more properly to the fields of literature and historiography” because buildings were understood as another way “to tell human stories” (Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 5-7). See also David Galbraith's work on how Daniel, Dryden and Sidney use spatial structure metaphors – buildings, architecture, landscape more generally – to create an imaginative space where boundaries of poetry and history can be collapsed (Architectonics of Imitation in Dryden, Sidney, Daniel.