View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository DISCONTENTED CHARITY: THEOLOGY, COMMUNITY, AND HERMENEUTICS, MORE TO MILTON Evan August Gurney A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Dr. Reid Barbour Dr. David Baker Dr. Mary Floyd-Wilson Dr. Megan Matchinske Dr. Jessica Wolfe © 2013 Evan August Gurney ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT EVAN AUGUST GURNEY: “Discontented Charity: Theology, Community, and Hermeneutics, More to Milton” (Under the direction of Reid Barbour) This dissertation investigates one of the profound and pervasive ironies of early modern England: how charity, ostensibly an idealized ethic governing all human (and divine) relationships, was situated at the center of so many of the era’s most contentious disputes. This is the project’s point of origin, that charity was in fact a problem, its simple imperatives lending an urgency and power to complicated questions about devotional practice, communal identity, political economy, and literary discourse. By tracing the contours of this key nodal term’s complex history throughout the period, from the vexed inception of Reformed theologies and biblical translations in the 1520s to political and ideological controversies arriving in the wake of civil war, Discontented Charity examines the role of charity in shaping the negotiations of early modern writers who were responding to intractable social, religious, and political demands. There was consensus of a kind during the early modern period – almost everybody agreed that charity was crucial, that it was the primary force binding together communities, and that its relationship to justice required punitive discipline – but these shared beliefs merely added pressure to a vigorous debate. Rival doctrines of justification disputed the theological primacy of charity, interrogated the spiritual sanction of good works, and articulated radically new visions of church community. Humanist scholars reinvigorated a classical tradition of charitable reading, a hermeneutics that polemicists of the period would repeatedly solicit from readers even as they refused to offer the same benefit to their opponents. Local and iii national governments, meanwhile, attempted to implement practical schemes of discriminate charity to relieve the poor – charity that required magistrates to “read” and categorize their populace in various classes of need. And the looming presence of the body hovered over all of these and other concerns, as the physical embodiment of charity constantly complicated theoretical discussions of Christian love. Taking a cue from early modern English writers, who depicted charity variously as a knot, a chain, or a bond, Discontented Charity joins together a range of scholarship relevant to the problematic characteristics of charity taken up by William Tyndale, Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, Thomas Browne, and John Milton, all of whom, though motivated by and responding to widely varying circumstances, nevertheless choose to appropriate the word and recuperate, reform, or even parody its significance. iv For Rebecca, who makes the outgoings of my mornings and evenings rejoice; and little August Isaiah, the most precious harvest at the end of this long season v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There is always, no doubt, an ironic distance that separates scholar and subject. Something about our world resists the fullness of understanding. It is one thing, however, if the topic of research is dark matter in the galactic halo, or the provenance of eighteenth- century toilet fixtures, or some such thing; it is altogether more galling when the subject is charity. If my own efforts to bridge that gap have been stymied, if I know now that I still know too little about charity – its early modern English conceptions or otherwise – and if I remain even more flummoxed by how to perform charity, this project nevertheless remains a testament to a mysterious and divine traffic from the other side: I have been the recipient of countless gifts; this project has been one long lesson in receiving charity. I can read in my own feeble attempt at charity the strong works of others. If this dissertation is indeed a good work, its merit belongs to them. So, like the executor of a charitable foundation, let me, with what little grace I possess, list some of the most prominent benefactors: UNC’s Department of English and Comparative Literature, which provided generous funding and support for research as well as a collegial home in which to teach and study; UNC’s Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, which offered a travel grant that evolved into a summer crash-course in archival research at the British and Bodleian Libraries; UNC’s Creative Writing Program, which provided me the opportunity to teach poetry-writing to inspiring students; Megan Matchinske, David Baker, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, who provided sensitive, energetic, and intelligent critiques of this work; Tom Stumpf, who has been, since that first semester I arrived in Chapel Hill long ago, a model teacher, scholar, and friend; Michael and Belinda McFee, the best Tar Heel basketball fans and the best of friends; Robert Erle and Allison vi and Ryan and Berry and Jack and Goodie and Ben and Lee and many others; my Blacknall family; all of my Monday night dinner crew, Betsy and Allan in particular, for patience and grace, for good humor and good food; the big-hearted Steele and Peele clans I now proudly call my own; my family, which in the course of this project has endured a breach but also much joyous expansion; my mother, in particular, who has been a model of courage. Above all, this project is the work of three people: Reid and Jess, joint guides through the academic underworld, attendant spirits in the wild wood, spinners of straw into gold, cheerleaders and hosts and above all dear friends: may God bless your generous cup, like Baucis and Philemon, with perpetual fullness; and Rebecca, who endured years of evening walks spoiled by Spenser and Jonson, who endured years of sleep spoiled by my late-night writing, who shepherded my vocation, who laughed in the face of poverty at the altar, who teaches me daily lessons of honesty and wisdom and sacrifice, who has a servant heart and a fiercely independent brain, who sings both high and low, who makes me sing. Thank you. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: “Tokens of Charity” . 1 “In spite of myne hart”: Tyndale and More and the Problem of Charity . 22 Spenser, Charitable Admonition, and “Dear Love” . 67 “You know the use of riches”: Jonson, Charitable Use, and London Commerce . 155 Thomas Browne’s Charitable “Logicke” . 229 “All under the feet of Charity”: Milton and the Hermeneutics of Divorce . 281 Bibliography . 332 viii INTRODUCTION: “TOKENS OF CHARITY” Beholde then what loue and Charitie is emongest you, when the one calleth the other, Hereticke and Anabaptist, and he calleth hym again Papist, Ypocrite, and Pharisey. Be these tokens of charitie emongest you? Are these the signes of fraternall loue betwene you? No, no, I assure you, that this lacke of Charitie emongest your selfes, will bee the hynderaunce and asswagyng, of the feruent loue betwene vs, as I said before, except this wound be salued, and clerely made whole.1 Henry VIII’s address to parliament on Christmas Eve in 1545 culminates in an impressive panegyric to the virtues and necessities of charity. Perhaps Henry’s “finest hour,” the speech has often been interpreted as a powerful exhortation to avoid the dangers of ecclesial unrest and an early attempt to forge a middle way between religious extremes in England.2 Occasioned by the successful passage of the Chantries Act, which authorized the king to dissolve specific chantries, colleges, and hospitals and “ordre them to the glory of God, and the proffite of the common wealth,” preparing the way for the continued development of governmental distribution of charity, the parliamentary address nevertheless embodies the very problems it purports to lament, and Henry’s fine sentiment is complicated by a host of political, religious, and social tensions.3 The act was probably triggered by fiscal considerations in the wake of wars with Scotland and France, for 1 Edward Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, ed. H. Ellis (London: 1809), 864-5. 2 The phrase is Peter Marshall’s, in Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2006), 157. 3 Indeed, two years later a more expansive and doctrinally-motivated Chantries Act was passed in Edward’s new regime. Henry’s statement sounds eerily similar to the shrill complaints of Henry Brinklow, who had urged the king three years earlier to seize clerical property “by acte of Parliament so that it maye be disposed to Godes glorye and the commone welthe.” Brinklow published under the name of Roderigo Mors in The Lamentacion of a Christen Agaynst the Cytie of London (London: 1542). example, and numerous influential members of court acquired private ownership of the lands and properties by sale, casting a decidedly equivocal shade over Henry’s appeal to reforming the public good of the commonwealth. Likewise, even as he urges his subjects to reconcile their differences in behalf of charity, Henry explicitly asserts the crown’s own authority in matters of church governance,