Brian Cummings

Animal Passions and Human Sciences: Shame, Blushing and Nakedness in Early Modern Europe and the New World

‘What is it to be human?’ This most Aristotelian of questions divided the Aristotelian sciences. Early modern discourses of the passions (what might now be called the emotions) occupied an uneasy borderland between the mental and the bodily, the rational and the physiological, the intellectual and the appetitive. Neither one thing nor the other, the passions moved ambiguously in a state of constant liminality. ‘These passions then be certaine internall actes or operations of the soule bordering vpon reason and sense … causing therewithall some alterations in the body.’1 Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde of 1601, the longest treatment in English of the period, struggles even to locate its subject: are the passions properly of the body (since they are expressed in physical movements of, say, the blood in the face or the heart) or of the mind (since they appear to be caused nonetheless by some mental motivation)? The association with psychological activity raises the passions above mere instinct or mechanism, and yet in the process drags the mind down into an indecorous connection with organic pathology. For the passions are uncertainly rational, and intrinsically unruly, threatening to spread their disease to the highest faculties: ‘the inordinate motions of the Passions, their preuenting of reason, their rebellion to virtue are thornie briars sprung from the infected roote of original sinne.’2

Swearing in Public: More and Shakespeare

n August I 6 , I 5 3 I , Thomas Bilney, one-time fellow of Trinity Hall in Cambridge, was taken to the place of public execution just outside the city gates in Norwich, commonly known as Lollard’s Pit, and burned to death as a heretic. At the stake he took a piece of paper and read aloud a recantation of all his heresies, swearing in public to the error of his ways. Kneeling in front of the bishop’s chancellor, in the presence of all the people of Norwich, he sought absolution from his excommunication and held himself content with his punishment. He recited the collect Domine Iesu Christe, emphasizing the words ecclesiae tuae pacem et concordiam, made some ritual gestures of penance, “tunsyons & knokkynges vppon hys breste,” before receiving the sacrament and a final blessing fi-om the priest in attendance, and submitting himself willingly to the torment of the fire as a newly reconverted Catholic Christian.’ Or did he? According to a second version of the story, on the way to Lollard’s Pit on August 16, Bilney distributed gifts of alms to passers-by and extended words of comfort to some friends who accompanied him. At the stake he made no speech of recantation, but instead rehearsed the articles of his faith in order, justifying the sermons that had been deemed heretical. Kneeling down, but in full public view, he immersed himself for a few moments in earnest private prayer and silent contemplative devotion. At length he ended, calling out in a clear voice the first words of Psalm 143, “Heare my prayer 0 Lord, consider my desire. And enter not into Iudgement with thy seruaunt: for in thy sight shall no man liuyng be iustified.” Removing his jacket and doublet, he made his peace with the executioners and submitted himself to the fire. The flames

Erasmus and the Invention of Literature

Before 1980, a consensus existed that Erasmian humanism lay at the basis of the liberal arts education system. Within that system, literary studies had the prime position, embodied in the concepts of bonae litterae and litterae humaniores. In recent years the idea of a liberal education has taken a battering. The principles of humanism are often treated defensively. The study of Erasmus’s literary writings, meanwhile, has happily devolved into other areas: into philology, grammar, and rhetoric. This article argues that the retreat in the wake of anti-humanism has led to some misunderstanding of Erasmus. An idea of the “literary” is central to his theoretical position. Erasmus’ concept of literature is here re-examined, both as a theory of imitation and as a medium of subjectivity. He emerges as more radical a literary interpreter than the pre-1980 consensus allowed. At the same time, it is argued that in riding the wave of the educational storm of the late twentieth century, the post-1980 attack on literary humanism has missed something of the power, imagination, and subtlety of Erasmus’ thought.

“Dead March”: Liturgy and Mimesis in Shakespeare's Funerals

This essay considers the dramatic topos of the “dead march”, a form of funeral procession used on the stage which enjoyed a peculiar vogue at the end of the sixteenth century. The “dead march” mimics religious ritual, and also seems to have inspired some borrowing in the opposite direction, as a form of procession used in later state funerals in historical reality, in which (we might say) death imitates art. This also raises some general questions about the interpretation of religious ritual in the Reformation, and also about the interpretation of religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. In what way is ritual an “event” and in what way is it a “representation”? Some anthropologists have used the theatre to create a rigid distinction between “participation” in ritual and the “spectatorship” of the theatre. They thus invoke the concept of “mimesis” to define ritual practice in reverse. Historians of theatre have then applied a version of the same theory to explain Elizabethan theatre as an “emptying out” of medieval functions of religion. As Stephen Greenblatt puts it, “King Lear is haunted by a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been emptied out”. This essay questions the boundaries used in such discussions between ritual and mimesis, and uses Shakespeares dramatic representation of medieval religion to suggest new ways of interpreting the relation between religion and theatre.

The Problem of Protestant Culture

Abstract Protestant culture, Patrick Collinson wrote, is often seen as a problem, or even a “nonentity.” The difficulty centres on the cultural value of the post-Reformation Bible. Charles Taylor has written eloquently of the gulf between scriptural truth and secular truth, and the slow death of literalism that this has entailed. James Simpson has endorsed this thesis in reverse, by decrying the literalism of Protestant readings as a curse on modern liberal values. This article offers to restructure the relationship between “literary” and “literal,” both by questioning the secularization thesis which equates modernity with the defeat of literalism, and also by asking how far early modern literary culture was “literalist.” It examines ideas of the figurative in Protestant culture to re-evaluate biblical culture and its relation to literary culture, especially Shakespeare.

William Tyndale and Erasmus on How to Read the Bible : A Newly Discovered Manuscript of the English Enchiridion

British Library MS Additional 89149, newly discovered in 2015 at Alnwick Castle, is a previously unknown translation of Erasmus’ Enchiridion militis Christiani into English. Dated 1523, it now represents the earliest surviving English translation of any work by Erasmus. This article presents detailed verbal evidence that associates the vocabulary of imitatio in the translation with William Tyndale’s hermeneutic work on scripture, including his New Testament of 1525–1526. It thus offers the strongest evidence to date of Tyndales hand in the English Enchiridion, long the subject of scholarly enquiry. It also provides a fresh interpretation of Tyndale’s engagement with Erasmian humanism, and his position on disputes over literal and figurative senses in early Protestantism. At the heart of this is the distinctive English word ‘counterfeit’, the meanings of which are traced through a range of medieval and Renaissance sources, from Chaucer onwards.

Erasmus on Literature and Knowledge

‘What we desire is that nothing may stand forth with greater certainty than the truth itself, whose expression is the more powerful, the simpler it is’. Erasmus’ preface to his edition of the Greek New Testament makes a claim that is at once unexceptional and radical. He appears to be doing something entirely traditional: basing the claims to Christian ‘truth’ on scripture. But what does he mean by ‘scripture’? Scripture, he asserts, is a type of literature, and therefore embodies a distinctive form of knowledge. It requires understanding of languages; of history, geography, the human sciences; also of rhetoric and the figures of speech; and indeed a theory of mimesis or representation and an account of affect. This essay addresses the relationship between sacrae litterae and bonae litterae in a range of works from the Enchiridion (1501) to the Convivium religiosum (1522), looking especially at the New Testament works on literary meaning and the practice of Theology: Paraclesis (1516) and Ratio seu methodus verae theologiae (1518).

Shakespeare’s First Folio and the fetish of the book:

Prospero’s renunciation of his book in The Tempest acknowledges its power as a kind of ‘fetish’. This essay traces the idea of the book as ‘commodity fetish’ and as material text. The argument examines how post-Marxist thought, in a new reading of Louis Althusser, might be used to challenge the Shakespeare of late capitalism. It suggests how a complex reading of the fetish in historiography, combining a history of the material book in Shakespeare, with a theoretical reading of William Pietz, Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Stallybrass, sheds light on the First Folio, one of the most famous – and fetishized – books in history.