Elizabeth Clarke

Politics, religion and the Song of Songs in seventeenth-century England

This book investigates a surprising textual and spiritual phenomenon - the huge number of versions of the Song of Songs produced in England in the century and a half after the Reformation. The Biblical book as interpreted by Calvinist commentators is seen to encode metaphorically many of the key Reformation doctrines. The love affair which is the books main focus is interpreted allegorically (and sometimes absurdly) to advocate a particularly close relationship between the believer and Christ. This way of reading the text became controversial as the seventeenth century proceeded: however, it sustained a Puritan constituency in the religiously-driven warfare and rebellions that took place in England. The widespread nature of the metaphor of the Bride for the holy soul, especially as she was the author of much of the poetry of the Song, encouraged women to pick up the pen in an age when authorship was thought of as male.

Anne Southwell and the Pamphlet Debate: The Politics of Gender, Class, and Manuscript

Various economies of writing operate in the early part of the seventeenth century, some involving money, others not, all of them primarily male-oriented, and therefore operating in a distinctive way for individual early modern women. “Constantia Munda,” in authoring the satiric pamphlet The Worming of a mad Dog, shows herself to be in a unique relationship to male-dominated literary culture: that is, if the feminine pseudonym conceals a female author. There are few candidates for the identity of “Constantia Munda”: she had a knowledge of Latin and possibly Greek, an extensive familiarity with the formal gender debate, and a facility in the satiric mode.1 Anne, Lady Southwell, is probably one of the best we have, and this article begins with a consideration of her qualifications for authorship of The Worming of a mad Dog. Her elite education, confidence as an author, and interest in the gender debate are manifest in her manuscript poetry: but Anne Southwell also outlines in her manuscript work a previous career in “flouting,” which is rhetorically configured scorn, and is Esther Sowernam’s derogatory description of Joseph Swetriam’s pamphlet—in other words, exactly the kind of writing in The Worming of a mad Dog.2

From Annotations to Commentary: New Spectacles on the Song of Songs

This chapter investigates the peculiarly influential text of the Song of Songs in the Interregnum by looking at its representation in the aids to Biblical interpretation that proliferated in the first half of the seventeenth century. Biblical commentary was itself politicised, almost from its inception in English Reformed thought: what is charted here is a phenomenon that was at its most intellectually influential in the 1640s and 1650s after the collapse of Church of England authority. This chapter looks in detail at some of the mid-century interpretations of the Song of Songs, and then discusses the tradition of commentary that continued into the Restoration. The significance of a particular interpretation of the Song of Songs was maintained until the end of the century, and within certain Dissenting circles, well beyond.

The Seventeenth-Century Woman Writer and the Bride

This chapter charts the effect of the reading of the Song of Songs by women over nearly one hundred years of intimate engagement with the Biblical text, in the Reformed strategy of interpretation described in the previous chapter. Although the material presented here ranges widely over the whole of the seventeenth century, this chapter is placed at a particular point in the book as a whole, in the treatment of the 1650s when the tradition of interpretation of the Song of Songs described in the previous chapter became hegemonic in England. It is then, I argue, that the story of women’s use of the Song of Songs becomes part of mainstream narratives about the growth of authorship beyond elite literary circles, and therefore part of the larger subject of this book, which is not primarily about gender. Some of the entrances into authorship described here turned out not to be channels into a wider participation by women in literary authorship, but a manifestation of a particular political and religious situation, and therefore a kind of ‘dead-end’ in terms of women’s literary history, However, the important phenomenon that is the subject of this chapter takes its place alongside other paradigms of women’s authorship, in differing religious and political contexts.

The Mysticall Marriage, Martyrology and Arminianism, 1625–40

There was a whiff of politically-informed wit in the text chosen for John Donne’s sermon at Denmark House, for 26 April 1625. King James’ body was still lying in state there. The text was Canticles 3:11, ‘Goe forth ye Daughters of Sion, and behold King Solomon, with the Crown, wherewith his mother crowned him, in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladnesse of his heart.’ There followed much talk about the mystical marriage of King James with Christ, now consummated by the union of James’ soul with Christ at the King’s death: the imagery of sexual fulfilment usually accompanied the death of a martyr.1 In the equation of James with Solomon lay a distinct challenge to some of the militant Protestant ideology which had been embraced by many Puritans. Solomon was famous as the man of peace, in contrast to his father: James of course had deliberately followed a pacifist policy, in contrast to his predecessor, who was perceived as a military champion for the Protestant cause, or at least, as we saw in the last chapter, presented as such by the Protestant internationalists of James’ reign.2 Donne is deliberately detaching the rhetoric of the mystical marriage from the politics of Protestant internationalism, and perhaps from the spirituality of martyrdom itself.

Politics, Metaphor and the Song of Songs in the 1670s

The last chapter has charted extensively the influence of the Reformed interpretation of the Song of Songs on women’s writing. However, the main story of this book, to which the last chapter serves as somewhat of a subplot, is one with a broader historical import: the implications of a Reformed reading of the Song of Songs for English religious politics of the seventeenth century. This chapter shows the reaction of Anglican clergymen committed to the Restoration settlement of the Church of England to the reading of the Song of Songs that was dominant in the seventeenth century and that has been charted in this book, and describes some of their preferred alternatives. The political implications of such a reading were well recognised by many Anglican controversialists, and suspected of being one of the causes of the theological daring that inspired the Puritan Revolution. The error in Biblical interpretation, as many Anglicans saw it, that led to a personal reading of the mystical marriage trope as a love affair between Christ and the individual believer, was seen as a mistake in the reading of metaphor as well as a theological misreading of the beneficial effects of redemption and justification for the individual Christian. This Anglican revisionism, inspired by Royalist politics, involved a profound rewriting of many of the most prized theological insights of the Reformation, and this chapter charts attempts to do just that.

Epilogue: Benjamin Keach Rewriting the Bride

The discourse of the mystical marriage, which had started the century as characteristic of one influential group in the religious and political mainstream, had by the Restoration become the property of the radical wing of the Nonconformist constituency, as detailed in the last chapter. As political and religious disputes intensified in the second Restoration crisis of 1678–1682, often called the ‘Exclusion’ crisis, there was a further radicalisation of the use of the Song of Songs. The discourse of the mystical marriage was often treated by Baptists, themselves regarded as a radical and sometimes as a dangerous sect, as part of a popularising project that was part of Nonconformist propaganda in the 1670s and 1680s, in which the bestselling authors were Baptists John Bunyan and Benjamin Keach. As we shall see, the links established early in the Reformation between the discourses of the mystical marriage, anti-Catholicism and martyrology, are fully drawn upon in Keach’s writing.

Emblematic Marriage at the 1630s Court

The 1630s saw very few publications specifically concerned with the Song of Songs: as we have seen, the text was deeply implicated in a religious politics that was oppositional to Archbishop William Laud, and he was in charge of the licensing of the press in this period. Many of the publications around the court were, however, preoccupied with a marriage that was not exactly mystical but which had symbolic resonance for Royalists—the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria. The contrast between the popular Puritan discourses treated in the last chapter, and the elitist literary texts that dealt with marriage at court, goes some way towards illustrating the gulf opening up in the spiritual imagination of Puritan and courtier in the 1630s. In 1638 one ‘new’ version of the Song of Songs was licensed for publication, but it was not part of the populist Puritan tradition; it was in Latin, by Gilbert Foliot, a twelfth-century Bishop of London, selected from ancient manuscripts by the royal librarian, Patrick Young, famous reorganiser of the King’s Library. Gilbert Foliot’s concerns are those of mediaeval Catholicism, to bolster the spiritual and moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Typical of this emphasis is his interpretation of verse five of chapter one, which had become since the Reformation a proof-text for the doctrine of original sin. The bride’s ‘blackness’ in ‘Nigra sum, sed Formosa’ (I am black, but lovely): is glossed as the sufferings of the early Church through persecution, following commentators such as Bede.1

Royal Brides and National Identity, 1603–25

At the opening of the seventeenth century there is some evidence that the English church saw itself as unique—as the true Bride of Christ in a Europe increasingly encroached on by the Whore of Babylon, the Catholic Church. What in some contexts was to become an individualistic, spiritualised trope—the Bride of Christ as a single soul—thus took on a communal, and somewhat nationalistic identity. The true Bride of Christ became the Church in a nation which in its own mythology, strengthened by the defeat of the Spanish Armada and confirmed by the events of the Gunpowder Plot, was the heroic opposer of the Antichrist. Thus, via that joint national and spiritual entity, the Church of England, which could plausibly be represented as the Bride of Christ, public discourse of the Jacobean period came perilously close to assuming that the English state itself was the Bride. Fortunately, the dominant Calvinist theology, which believed in a transnational body of believers that collectively made up the true Church, did not allow for such a jingoistic identification to flourish: and in any case, towards the end of James’ reign, the discourse of the Song of Songs took on a stance that was theologically and culturally oppositional to the Crown.