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The Harrowing of Hell in Early Modern English Literature. (2014) Directed by Dr ROMANELLI, CHRISTINA, Ph.D. Sacred Heresies: The Harrowing of Hell in Early Modern English Literature. (2014) Directed by Dr. Michelle Dowd. 325pp. Sacred Heresies traces the English literary tradition of the Harrowing of Hell out of the Catholic Middle Ages, through the Protestant Renaissance, and into the proto- scientific Restoration period. I argue that Christ’s theatrical descent into hell serves as source material for authors wishing to depict characters overcoming evil through confrontation with the devil or demonic figures. Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Margaret Cavendish draw on the narratives associated with the Harrowing in order to represent (or question) the lawful or righteous use of magic to combat spiritual, social, and political enemies. The ultimate source for these characterizations and actions is the Jesus Christ of the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, a multi-faceted version of Christ who is rebel, magician, warrior, advocate, and kinfolk simultaneously. The early modern writers who discovered this Christ in their reading of texts like William Langland’s Piers Plowman and their viewing of the vestiges of the cycle plays found a virtuous subject encountering and often debating with diabolical forces, acts that have previously denoted either witchcraft or exorcism. By offering the Harrowing Christ-figure as a third alternative to these codified subject positions, my project puts scholarship on religious change into conversation with investigations of witchcraft trials and proto-scientific discourse in a way that redefines how we understand magic in early modern England. Scholarship that connects magic and religion has focused almost exclusively on the negative aspects of the relationship. Stuart Clark observes that accusations of witchcraft were “endemic in the discourse of religious difference,” and Genevieve Guenther notes that the instrumental aesthetics of conjuring on stage threatened to damn the audience for simply observing events. Given these deleterious associations, any desire to practice magic seems blatantly ludicrous. This study contributes an alternative model for the magical practitioner, a model powerful enough to overcome the damning effects of consorting with Lucifer himself—that of the Harrowing Christ. In the investigation of the motivations for laudable uses of magic in these literary texts, it became clear that magical practice provided a sense of human agency over supernatural events that responded to the lack of agency implied by new Protestant emphases on contemplation and predestination. If as Ian McAdam states, “Radical Protestant internalization of faith placed an almost unbearable burden of responsibility on the believer,” modeling behavior on Christ’s defeat of Satan countered this tendency by empowering the subject to more fully participate in his or her own salvation by confronting damnation directly. Reading the literary texts alongside Tudor and Stuart theological debates about Christ’s descent into hell unearthed an unexpected element in the trajectory of the reinterpretations of the Harrowing of Hell. Whereas poets, playwrights, and prose writers were crafting characters based on the model of Christ, theologians were fashioning Christ himself for new contexts and audiences. For example, an image published with Adam Hill’s 1592 The Defence of the Article: Christ descended into Hell portrays Christ as climbing out of a coffin onto a dragon and a skeleton in order to connect Christ with St George, the patron saint of England. By William Allen’s 1697 sermon titled A Practical Improvement of the Articles of Christ’s Descent into Hell, the fact that scientists have the ability to prove how “the Body of Man becomes that of another” through “successive Transmigration” serves as proof that the infinitely more powerful Christ is “a most intelligent Agent” who can “order and watch the Particles of a Humane Body” in order to raise the dead to everlasting life (D3v). These surprising interpretations of the third article—Christ as nationalistic hero or Christ as scientist extraordinaire—support the claim made by scholars like Dewey Wallace and Patrick Collinson that the English used contested theological positions to separate themselves from both the Catholics and the Puritans and construct a stable identity for the Anglican Church that contributed to the emerging sense of England as a nation-state. SACRED HERESIES: THE HARROWING OF HELL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE by Christina Romanelli A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2014 Approved by _________________________________ Committee Chair © 2014 Christina Romanelli To my daughters, Mia and Sophia Sebak ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Christina Romanelli has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair __________________________________ Committee Members _____________________________________ ______________________________________ ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee _________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to a great many people for their generous donations of time and effort that helped to bring this project to its current state of completion. Without Michelle Dowd’s intellectual determination and considerable faith, this project could not have been written. Her patience with my often incomprehensible first drafts was only exceeded by her kind tolerance with me as I worked to find myself as a scholar and a writer. Jennifer Feather’s uncanny ability to ask always just the right question for which I have no immediate answer contributed immensely to the rigor of my experience and the overall value of my work. Thanks to Amy Vines’s attention to detail, I have remembered to show my work, and I have learned what it means to be a close reader of texts. I could not have asked for a more supportive committee; they operated seamlessly and reinforced each other and my work from the beginning through the defense. It has been a pleasure to work as their student, and I am honored to become their colleagues in the field. I owe in part the success of my work with my committee to my writing group. Kt Leuschen, Leah Milne, and Lauren Shook listened to the fragmentary beginnings of this project and read even more incomprehensible drafts on countless occasions. It continues to be an inspiration to work with such intelligent and responsive women. Scott Gibson’s comprehensive and generous feedback also made starting and finishing this project a more pleasant experience. The errors that undoubtedly remain are entirely my responsibility. iv In addition to the intellectual and emotional support provided by my committee and my writing group, I received generous financial support for the completion of this project. I would like to thank Ann Hodge Macomber for her donation to the William G. and Kate H. Lane Fellowship in English which I received for the last three years. The Graduate School’s Summer Assistantship funding made it possible to spend last summer exclusively on research and writing. My father, Ralph Philip Romanelli, has been and continues to be my patron and my role model. He has made it possible to immerse myself in the life of the mind in a way I thought impossible. I can only hope that my work will allow me to be as generous as he has been to me and my small family. My mother, Glorianna Romanelli, sacrificed tremendously to make this work possible and to co-raise my daughters. Their support also allowed me to visit the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Reading Room over the course of the last year. My future in-laws, Mark and Debbie Gum, also spent hours with the girls to make it possible for me to read and write. Finally, the love of my daughters, Mia and Sophie, and my fiancé, Wade Gum, continues to be my motivation to strive for continual improvement. Without their constancy I would have been lost long ago. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................1 II. CHRIST AS RITUAL MASTER IN THE HARROWING TRADITION ..........44 III. “HE THAT THE STUBBORNE SPRITES CAN WISELY TAME”: THE VILLAINS WITH SUPERNATURAL AGENCY ...............................98 IV. “IMPOSE SOME END TO MY INCESSANT PAIN”: FAUSTUS RENEGOTIATES DAMNATION ............................................154 V. “LADY MARGERY, YOUR MIDWIFE THERE”: PAULINA SAVES THE BASTARD (AND EVERYONE ELSE) .............207 VI. “A THING NOT TO BE FORCED OR PRESSED UPON THE PEOPLE”: CAVENDISH’S FEMALE CHRIST ................................262 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................310 vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In the context of this dissertation, the Harrowing of Hell refers to a specific narrative that takes a variety of forms in the Middle Ages and continues to be reimagined and reinterpreted in literature into the seventeenth century. This narrative expands the scriptural understanding of Easter weekend by telling the story of what happens between Christ’s death and his resurrection on the third day. To briefly summarize, Christ, having recently endured the Passion, descends into hell as a warrior clothed in light to deliver the righteous
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