Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism

PHILIP SIDNEY AND THE POETICS OF RENAISSANCE COSMOPOLITANISM To Denise Matt Tope “who could see virtue would be wonde...

Author: Robert E. Stillman

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PHILIP SIDNEY AND THE POETICS OF RENAISSANCE COSMOPOLITANISM

To Denise Matt Tope “who could see virtue would be wonderfully ravished with the love of her beauty” —Philip Sidney

Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism

ROBERT E. STILLMAN

University of Tennessee, USA

© Robert E. Stillman 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Robert E. Stillman has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Stillman, Robert E., 1954– Philip Sidney and the poetics of Renaissance cosmopolitanism 1. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554–1586 – Criticism and interpretation 2. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554– 1586. Apologie for poetrie 3. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554–1586 – Political and social views 4. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554–1586 – Knowledge – Poetry 5. Politics and literature – England – History – 16th century 6. Literature and society – England – History – 16th century 7. Literature and morals 8. Cosmopolitanism in literature I. Title 808.1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stillman, Robert E., 1954– Philip Sidney and the poetics of Renaissance cosmopolitanism / Robert E. Stillman. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6369-0 (alk. paper) 1. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554–1586–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554– 1586. Apologie for poetrie. 3. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554–1586–Political and social views. 4. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554–1586–Knowledge–Poetry. 5. Politics and literature–England– History–16th century. 6. Literature and society–England–History–16th century. 7. Literature and morals. 8. Cosmopolitanism in literature. I. Title. PR2343.S78 2008 808.1–dc22 2007037447

ISBN 978-0-7546-6369-0

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents Preface: A Précis of the Argument Acknowledgments

vii xv

Introduction: Poetry and the Public Domain After the Massacre, St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572 Philippist Prayers and Poetry in Public Places A “more ordinary opening”: Introducing the Defence

1 1 6 28

1 “Famous preachers and teachers”: Mediating the Cause Taking Form: Philippist Representations of Philip Melanchthon Hubert Languet and the Liberal Communication of Duties

35 35 53

2 The “noblest scope”: Reading, Writing, and Early Modern Poetics Sidney’s Poetics and the Question of Allegory The Scope of Reading: Aristotle and Accommodation Reforming Hermeneutics: Reading and Writing among the Philippists The Scope of Sidney’s Golden World Poetics

63 63 72

3 “The enjoying of his own divine essence”: Poetry and Piety Why in the Church of God? “Ung Chemin du Moderation”: Philippe Duplessis-Mornay and Piety’s Public Scope Piety and the Golden World: Enter Calvin (Again) Melanchthon and the Culture Wars Philippism and the Defence: Including the Kinds of Poetry Pious Conclusions

89 103 123 123 125 140 146 154 166

4 “Captived to the truth of a foolish world”: Poetry and the Politics of Tyranny Exemplary Tyrants and Aesthetic Barbarians Natural Law and the Politics of Self-Defense Natural Law and the Politics of Intellectualism Sidney’s Cosmopology and the Poetics of Liberation Freeing the Defence (Post-Soviet Farm Culture)

169 169 180 192 204 215

Conclusion: Reproducing Cyrus: The Defence of Poesy and a Cosmopolitan Culture of Books The Train to Oblivion: Jean Bodin and the Golden Age Gone

217 217

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Reforming Cyrus: Camerarius’s Cyropaedia and Philippist Politics Cyrus the Liberator: The Hero in the Garden Select Bibliography Index

224 228 239 259

Preface: A Précis of the Argument Sidney’s Defence of Poesy is the first early modern work to argue for the preeminence of fiction-making as an autonomous form of knowledge—a form of knowledge indispensable to the well-being of the public domain. At the core of its argument is Sidney’s assumption that “all government of action is to be gotten by knowledge, and knowledge best by gathering many knowledges, which is by reading.”1 Reading is intellectual travel. Knowledge is wide familiarity with those many serving sciences (“knowledges”) necessary for the government of self and society, and poetry, in turn, the superior human science, as the full scope of Sidney’s argument maintains, because of its zodiacal range, the cosmopolitanism of its studied inclusiveness. Sidney’s travels on the Continent help to explain why and how he advances such an argument, as provocative and original then as it appears audacious now. Between 1572 and 1575—between his first-hand experience of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and his return to England to attempt a pubic career—Sidney’s education was entrusted to a group of so-called Philippists, the followers of Philip Melanchthon. The three central chapters of this book measure the impact of that education on the Defence’s poetics, piety, and politics. That impact, I will maintain from the start, was nothing short of determinative. It determined how Sidney came to conceive of government as indispensably allied both to knowledge and to reading, and how poetry—as the best of all forms of discourse—came to be conceived, in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, as the urgently required means of securing the pious and political goals of his Philippist education. This study begins not with an account of Sidney’s pious or political principles and their pre-history among the Philippists. It starts instead, appropriately for an examination of Sidney’s celebration of poetry as the preeminent vehicle of knowledge in the public domain, with an account of his hermeneutic concepts—with those operative principles about reading and writing that determine his understanding of fiction-making. Such an account is appropriate because competing vehicles of knowledge, the sciences of history or philosophy, physics or metaphysics, are conceived by Sidney as competing forms of discourse, and poetry achieves its preeminence ultimately and most importantly because it represents, within this war among the muses, discourse operating at the height of its potential. Poetics matters first because it is only by means of understanding Sidney’s claims for the value of fiction-making that it is possible to understand simultaneously his assertiveness about its agency in the public domain, and the weight of his consciousness about the crisis of public life in motivating those assertions.

1 An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Edinburgh: Nelson and Sons, 1965), p. 126–7. All further quotations from the Defence will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number.

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A small exercise in critical archaeology affords a useful means of recovering Sidney’s hermeneutic principles and appreciating how those principles shape his representation of poetry as a form of knowledge. Sidney’s Defence organizes its central arguments by means of an oratorical term, the scopus dicendi, derived specifically from his Philippist mentors. (A writer’s “scope” is his main target, aim, or purpose.) However, the recourse to a technical vocabulary distinctive of Melanchthon’s widely disseminated rhetorical and dialectical handbooks has implications far more important than the determination of sources. Scholars have argued that Sidney’s success in creating the first definitive version of an English literary criticism derives mainly from his knowledge of Italian Renaissance poetics, especially from Julius Caesar Scaliger and Antonio Minturno. By contrast, I locate the distinctiveness of Sidney’s critical practice in his accommodation of Italian poetics to a new hermeneutic that he acquired during his many months of reading in Vienna among the Philippists.2 The “new hermeneutic” refers to those remarkable transformations during the sixteenth century in practices of reading and writing identified by contemporary scholars like Kees Meerhoff, Peter Mack, and Kathy Eden. Those transformations included a commitment to reading whole books to recover complete arguments; the need to consider intention, organization and context as guides to interpretation; the reevaluation of claritas; and the importance of accommodating texts to the reader’s experience. As Meerhoff, Mack and Eden clarify Melanchthon’s key role in the humanist renewal of this classical rhetorical legacy, so I demonstrate the impact of this legacy on Sidney’s fashioning of a new poetics for the English tradition.3 Recovering Sidney’s assumptions about reading and writing comprises a necessary challenge to increasingly familiar claims about the so-called “allegorical” character of his poetry and poetics.4 Addressing such claims matters because they bear directly 2 Or that Sidney perhaps first learned in Vienna. My “perhaps” is explained by Sidney’s sojourn in the spring of 1573 with Johann Sturm, Rector of the famous Academy in Strasbourg, from whom he may well have acquired his first introduction to what I will term the new hermeneutic. Sturm’s textbook study of imitation offers one expression of those key rhetorical principles that inform Sidney’s argument in the Defence, especially his directions for the employment of Art, Imitation and Exercise, De imitatione oratoria libri tres (Strasbourg, 1574). 3 Kathy Eden’s Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 79–89; Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1993); and Kees Meerhoff, “The Significance of Melanchthon’s Rhetoric” in Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Peter Mack (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 46–62. 4 “Allegory” is an especially misleading term partly because it obscures key differences between Sidney’s fictions and those of his contemporary and rival, that allegorical poet of the supreme fiction, Edmund Spenser; partly, too, because it diminishes Sidney’s importance to an English literary history in which, post-Spenser, allegory devolved into a literary mode bereft of distinguished practitioners (John Bunyan to the contrary); and most importantly, because it effaces the history of hermeneutics to which Sidney’s Defence demonstrably belongs. See Chapter 2 for an extended argument on this topic. For a splendid account of the literary history to which Sidney gives rise, see Gavin Alexander’s Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006).

Preface: A Précis of the Argument

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upon Sidney’s understanding about how language exerts its power. If Gordon Teskey correctly identifies allegory as “an incoherent narrative,” which conventionally attends to “the difference between what it refers to and what it refers with” (as a fiction, that is, whose meaning depends on a strategic disjunction between signifier and signified in the manner of Spenser’s Faerie Queene), then Sidney’s commitment to the new hermeneutic argues for his participation in an alternative tradition of exemplary poetics.5 Meaning happens most importantly as an act of accommodation, as the quest to substantiate Ideas in words that exemplify their significance.6 The history of that tradition is provided by an examination of the lineage of Sidney’s key critical term, the scopus dicendi, its origin in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, its employment in the anti-allegorical exegesis of the Antiochene fathers, its appearance in conjunction with the newly emergent concept of literary text as literary microcosm among the neoplatonists of the Hellenic age, and its purposeful redeployment in the pointedly non-allegorical hermeneutic of Melanchthon. By comparison with contemporary Spenser studies, Sidney studies is under-theorized and under-historicized, and the recovery of the history of hermeneutics to which his exemplary poetics belongs is critically overdue. Only in light of that recovery is it possible to understand Sidney’s account about how a poem—conceived as a particular kind of fictional world created by a particular kind of oratorical invention—achieves its power. The “scope” of Sidney’s argument in the Defence—his main aim or target in identifying the source of poetry’s preeminence—appears most clearly in his description of the poet’s making of the golden world. As a reflection of his own assumptions about the world at large, the golden world is the methodically conceived imitation, counterfeit, and figuration of the Maker’s own prelapsarian creation, the world itself. Like the world, Sidney’s fiction has its own maker (an analogue to the divine Maker), its own laws (the logic internal to its organization), and its own natural power (as the representation of Ideas that speak clearly about human nature and human needs). Once more, it has its own purpose, aim, or scope—its cause for being (to have readers accommodate themselves to the maker’s intention). As the matter out of which Sidney forms his conception of fiction as a well-made world, these are key concepts that transform the Defence’s well-known engagement with Italian poetics into an argument with “scope.” Sidney’s ideas about poetic eloquence, including his several assumptions about reading—his concern with intentionality, clarity, coherence, and the all-important business of accommodation—share the optimism about eloquence that informs Melanchthon’s oratorical texts. They include Melanchthon’s regard for logic, his insistence that rhetoric be subjected to analysis of a rigorously dialectical kind. They depend, too, on a shared epistemology of innate ideas—the notitiae of Melanchthon’s philosophical works find their reflection in the notable images of virtue and vice of Sidneian poetics—as an explanation for the origin and inherent power of poetic images. In Melanchthon and his students, 5 Allegory and Violence (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), p. 5, 11. 6 I capitalize Sidney’s word “Idea[s],” here and elsewhere in relation to the Defence because it is a term of art, whose precise meaning is subject to definition as the argument proceeds. Ideas are exemplified—made substantial in poetry—as notable images of virtue and vice. For a full discussion, see especially Chapter 2, “The ‘noblest scope’.”

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Sidney located an account of eloquence that bridges the gap between sacred and secular oratory, one that so completely naturalizes the operations of language as to explain how eloquence of all kinds potentially exerts its power over readers—and hence over the readership of that public domain so crucial to Sidney’s pious and political concerns. Sidney’s piety forms the analytical core of the book’s second major section. The chastening of public discourse, freeing the body politic from the contaminations of tyrannical passion, is a pious as well as a political work. Lucretia—that classical exemplar of chastity’s triumph over Tarquin’s tyranny—affords Sidney’s first illustration of the chastening power of poetic imitation, and not accidentally so. In order to examine how and why the vocabulary of the scopus dicendi and the new hermeneutic associated with it acquired practical significance as a vehicle for intervening within (and chastening!) the confessional conflicts of sixteenth-century Europe, my argument moves immediately to the prose of another Philip, Sidney’s friend and model, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. It is one thing to recover the oratorical history of the scopus from Melanchthon’s corpus, as the first main portion of the argument sets out to do. It is quite another to examine that term mobilized for action within the public domain, as happens in this, the book’s second central section. Both in his Treatise of the Church and his De veritate religionis christianae (the Latin translation of his own philosophical treatise, the Verité—a text partially translated, in turn, by Sidney), Mornay deploys the vocabulary of the scopus dicendi in support of the true religion.7 Mornay’s use of the new hermeneutic in philosophical literature affords a complement and an alternative to Sidney’s practice in the Defence, just as his uncompromising and strategically moderate Christianity provides a reflection of Sidney’s own. Dedicated to Hubert Languet (Mornay’s mentor and Sidney’s) and inspired by his piety, the De veritate had an enormous appeal to contemporary Philippists, as a refection of their ecumenical piety, their disdain for theological controversy, and their intellectual regard for the value of humanistic studies to advance the cause of true religion. For both Mornay and Sidney, the embrace of knowledge, secular and sacred, was urgently required in a contemporary culture imperilled, on the one hand, by atheists and epicureans—Cecropians all!—and, on the other, by confessional divisions threatening the church’s very survival. For both, the nightmare was the same. The term “Cecropian” was contemporary shorthand for “beastly enemy of Reformed culture.” Cecropia no longer lived in ancient Athens. She had metamorphosed into the monster next door, as they knew because of their readings. Both Mornay and Sidney had read George Buchanan (that tyrant-killer from the north), both knew the epigrams of Philip Melanchthon, and both found those epigrams recently edited by another mutual friend in Vienna, Johannes Crato

7 A notable treatise of the church in vvhich are handled all the principall questions, that have bene moved in our time concerning that matter. By Philip of Mornay, Lord of Plessis Marlyn, gentleman of Fraunce. And translated out of French into English by Io. Feilde (London: By Christopher Barker, printer to the Queenes Maiestie, 1579); and De veritate religionis Christianae liber …Gallice primum conscriptus, Latine versus, nunc autem ab eodem accuratissime correctus (Lugduni Batavorum: Christopher Plantin, 1587).


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Von Crafftheim.8 Belonging to the same republic of letters meant, in no small part, reading the same books, sharing the same intellectual travels with an eye to private and public government. Mornay and Sidney are similar, too, because of the misapprehensions both have suffered inside a critical context within which Reformed theology has been mistakenly identified as dogma proceeding from the writings of a single person, John Calvin. In particular, while the anthropology of Sidney’s poetics is arguably specific to Reformed Christianity, the assumption that its pious principles are thereby determined by Calvin’s theology fundamentally mistakes the diversity of a Reformed tradition that discovered models for its religious thought among a vast range of sources.9 The moderate, ecumenically inclusive character of Sidney’s Philippist piety radiates throughout the Defence. Mediated by his mentor Languet, Melanchthon’s inspiration matters as it came to Sidney because of its carefully delimited optimism about human agency—its assertiveness about the strength of reason and the cooperative power of the will—and, most significantly, because of his celebration of that agency’s scope in securing freedom from the sovereignty of sin. It was Melanchthon, Professor of Greek at Wittenberg, who first fashioned Reformed Christianity’s defense of human culture in relation to faith, and Sidney’s Defence profits enormously from that legacy, in its assertiveness about poetry’s value to enhance self-knowledge—the individual’s enjoyment “of his own divine essence”— and in its chastely articulated, urgently maintained confidence about poetry’s power to liberate the public domain from the tyranny of confessional warfare. Sidney’s Philippist piety is evidenced by crucial matters of argument, especially (as I plan to demonstrate) by his discussions about the two primary categories of poets at once distinguished and related over the Defence’s full purview, the vates (sacred and prophetic writers, whose scope is the praise of God) and the “right poets” (humane writers, whose scope is to instruct readers in self-knowledge and move them to virtuous action). For all of the distinctions made between them, Sidney’s argument consistently associates humane and sacred letters—Christ’s parables and Aesop’s fables, Plautus’s comedies and Buchanan’s tragedies—because the secular and the spiritual are so intimately associated in his thinking about human nature. Infused by confidence about the goodness of human nature created in imitation of God and 8 Epigrammatum Reverendi Viri Philippi Melanthonis Libri Sex, ed. Johannis Cratonis (Wittenberg, 1579). For an attack upon Cecropians, see p. O8 (verso), Epigrammata trium statuarum ad Strymonem fluvium positarum civibus Atticis, qui Medos represserant ex Aeschinis oratione. See too George Buchanan: Tragedies, ed. P. Sharratt and P. G. Walsh (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983), Medea, l. 872, p. 193. What matters here is less the allusion itself, than the fact that Sidney’s choice of allusions is so often determined by his intellectual kinship with Languet’s extensive, international network of associates. 9 New historians of Reformed Christianity have copiously and convincingly demonstrated that diversity. See Richard A. Muller, “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’: Assessing Continuities and Discontinuities Between the Reformation and Orthodoxy, Part One,” Calvin Theological Journal 30 (1995), 345–75 and “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’, Part Two,” Calvin Theological Journal 31 (1996), 125–60; and Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 2002), p. 50–52.

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the goodness of making in imitation of the Maker, the core concepts of the Defence challenge traditionally narrow views about the limits of Reformation belief.10 Piety gives way to politics in the book’s climactic argument about the importance of poetry to the public domain. Sidney’s poetics are informed by a Philippist-inspired search for liberation—a liberation from the sinfulness of tyranny, a variety of sovereignty whose shadow everywhere challenges the Defence’s own aggressively optimistic claims about the power of fiction-making. Sidney does not argue the case for tyrannicide. Instead, he assumes tyrannicide as a good. The question posed by the recurrent examples of tyrants cited as illustrations in the text—particularly by those historical tyrants who escaped punishment for their crimes, such as Cypselus, Periander, Dionysius, and (most importantly) Phalaris—is how best to counter tyranny in the world.11 Sidney supports his position about poetry’s power to undo the worst effects of tyranny with arguments that simultaneously draw upon and contest key intellectual assumptions of his friends, Languet and Mornay—and that contest forms an important, untold story behind the Defence. Sidney shared with his friends an intellectual commitment to natural law. Or to clarify that point in more specific terms, Sidney was able to celebrate poetry as a vehicle for securing liberty from the sinfulness of sovereigns because of his employment of the natural law theory revived among that intellectual elite closely associated with Melanchthon, the proponents of tyrannomachist political philosophy. Resistance theory in the early modern era had its genesis in natural law arguments developed at Wittenberg to counter imperial tyranny during the Wars of the Schmalkaldan League. In a line of direct descent from Melanchthon’s moral philosophical texts of the 1530s to the anti-tyrannical tracts of John Ponet, George Buchanan and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, Sidney employs natural law arguments to strengthen his case for the importance of fiction-making to undo tyranny. Once more, such arguments had considerable persuasive appeal for Sidney because the logic of natural law carried the promise of legitimating acts of human making as powerful vehicles for harnessing universal (because “natural”) authority.12 As such, the logic of natural law argument supplied in principle as well as in practice a rhetoric easily accommodated to the new hermeneutic, with its ambition to craft clear, energetic and logical discourse. (The polemical writings of Melanchthon, Ponet, Buchanan, and Mornay—as well as Sidney’s political tracts—illustrate that 10 Similar to Melanchthon and to Mornay, Sidney consistently celebrates the full scope of cultural knowledge—the humane and the sacred—as instinct with pious purpose and value. For Melanchthon and the concept of a Reformed culture, see John Schneider’s essay, “Melanchthon’s Rhetoric As a Context for Understanding His Theology,” in Melanchthon in Europe: His Work and Its Influence Beyond Wittenberg, ed. Karin Maag (Cumbria and Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), p. 141–60, and Chapter 3 below. 11 Phalaris is most important among these examples because Languet’s correspondence and Mornay’s polemical texts reveal that this tyrant—the paradigmatic, anti-poetic barbarian who roasted his victims alive in a brazen bull for the pleasure of hearing their screams—was a figure repeatedly cited by Sidney and his circle when considering how to counter tyranny in practice. See Chapter 4 for an elaboration of this point. 12 Before Calvin and Luther, Melanchthon developed arguments organized on grounds of natural law to legitimize the defense against tyranny, a point I will develop in Chapter 4.


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point well). In turn, once the “scope” of such discourse is informed by logic having the inherent forcefulness of nature, such arguments would compel (not merely gain) assent. Arguments from natural law appealed as a foundation for belief (beyond their power to topple unnatural tyrants!), because they promised a confessionally neutral and potentially unifying form of public discourse. As a result, such arguments supplied both a sword in the arsenal of the tyrannomachist and an olive branch in the hands of the anti-confessionalist, and were thereby all the more easily accommodated to Sidney’s full range of public commitments. Sidney’s Philippist politics are evidenced by the location of his argument. The Vienna of its opening is a watchtower for tyranny—a prospect from which to recall the irenic, notably tolerant government of Maximilian II and a vantage toward the present-day reality of Tridentine tyranny, exemplified by Rudoph II, that new Holy Roman emperor so disastrously contaminated by Spain. Sidney’s Philippist politics are evidenced too by the exordium’s account of Pietro Pugliano. His folly, similar to the smugness of English literary provincialism, the arrogance of the historian and the philosopher, together with the brutal fanaticism of confessional warfare, exemplifies the tyranny of self-love as that chief violation of natural law from which poetry’s notable images of virtue and vice are intended to achieve freedom. Tyranny in the world is translated as tyranny in the mind, historical tyranny as monstrous tyranny, and against monsters in the world and monsters in the mind, Sidney sets the “notable” (innate and natural) power of poetic fictions as vehicles of liberation. The Defence contains not a single acknowledgment of the existence of rival Christian confessions, much less of warfare between them. As a tyrannomachist, Sidney permits himself a complaint about England’s “overfaint quietness”—alluding clearly to his hopes for Queen Elizabeth’s intervention against the tyranny of Tridentine Catholicism— but when he identifies that contemporary hero most worthy to advance poetry’s reputation, his selection of Michel de L’Hospital advances virtuous counselorship and ecumenical peace as equal, complementary, even ultimate goods inside the public domain (131). Associations do not constitute identities, and however similar Sidney’s Ideas are to those of the natural law theorist—the historian like Languet and the philosopher like Mornay—crucial distinctions exist between their deployment. Sidney liberates the Idea from its purely conceptual status in philosophy (always too abstruse) and its merely conditional locus in history (always too imperfect) in order to return it to its true home in poetry (a syncresis of the philosophical and the historical). This is a liberation that he attempts to achieve without sacrificing Mornay’s conceptual finesse or the exemplary power of Languet’s old true tales, and without descending either into the opacity of philosophical abstraction or into history’s sad captivity to the brazen world of events. Neither philosophy nor history had the power to change the course of contemporary events, or so the Defence argues darkly. In some real measure, then, for that Sidney who suffered through St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, poetry’s emergence as the preeminent science of his culture is the product of a desperately determined and ironically self-aware idealism. Poetry must work to undo tyranny because history and philosophy cannot. Tyranny cries out for heroism, and this study concludes with a summary chapter whose focus is Sidney’s unusual choice of Cyrus the Great as chief hero of

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the Defence. Why Cyrus? Who was Cyrus to Sidney? Not just a hero, Cyrus becomes the heroic exemplar of the Defence’s arguments on behalf of the preeminence of poetry. As a figure who challenges traditional boundaries between the secular and the sacred, between history and fiction, between the heroic value of military conquest and the contemplative quiet of garden-style reflection, Cyrus is just the right figure to study in relation to Sidney’s celebration of poetry’s value to the public domain. As a product of the book—the Bible and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Melanchthon’s Chronicon Carionis and the old philological commentary of Camerarius the Elder and the new historical analysis of Jean Bodin—Cyrus, too, was for Sidney a conspicuously bookish figure, and all the more meaningful to the politics of the public domain (a Cyrus to make many Cyruses), on account of his textual proclivity for production and reproduction. In turn, while Cyrus seems like the ideal poetic figure with whom to end this study, Melanchthon is unquestionably the appropriate historical person with whom to begin, since it is from Melanchthon ultimately that so much of what matters to Sidney’s poetics, piety, and politics derives. My book’s first chapter is preoccupied with explaining that “ultimately,” since Melanchthon was a figure who came to Sidney not pure, but mediated—mediated by a like-minded community of intellectuals for whom his teachings still mattered. If the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, posed the question about how Reformed Christianity was to insure its survival, then for contemporary Philippists like Hubert Languet, Melanchthon remained the answer. Chapter 1 will start with an introduction to Melanchthon in his later years, as he was represented by his followers at Wittenberg and beyond. It will conclude with Sidney’s own education in Philippism inside the correspondence with Languet. A last (preparatory) word about reading and readership. As authors of our own critical texts, we earn or fail to earn the attention of readers on the basis of merit and grace, a good Philippist conjunction. While I hope to be graced by readers who will proceed start-to-finish through the volume as a whole, I plan to merit that attention by making each portion of the argument comprehensible by itself. This is a book written with contemporary readers in mind, with readers (that is) who instead of proceeding cover-to-cover, are likely to turn their attention either to individual chapters or even (with an eye to the index) to individual discussions within those chapters. For that reason, while the full argument of this study is designedly more meaningful than the sum of its parts, each chapter is planned to be intelligible on its own. Where that intelligibility seems especially difficult to achieve, footnotes point to clarifying discussions (of context, concept, or terminology) in other chapters. If my full “scope” consists, then, in making sense of Sidney’s claim for poetry’s preeminence in the public domain, individual discussions about his poetics, his piety, and his politics (while targeting that scope) are comprehensible as accounts about the impact of Philippism on distinguishable aspects of the Defence’s larger argument and purpose. As a real introduction to that scope, I turn now from the always inadequate reductions of a précis to a fuller consideration of Philip Sidney, age 17, reformed by a massacre.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Tennessee for their support of this book’s progress, especially Jeff Mellor in the Department of Modern and Foreign Languages; David Tandy in Classics; Robert Bast in History; and, most particularly, Tina Shephardson in Religious Studies for her generosity in reading and responding to a portion of my argument about allegory in the ancient world. My thanks, too, for the labor and eloquence of Erin Read, formerly my research assistant and now a program coordinator for MARCO, the University’s new institute for medieval and Renaissance studies. I would also like to acknowledge gratefully the financial aid given to my research by the Trustees of the John C. Hodges Fund in the University’s English Department. Outside my own university, I am indebted to a variety of friends for help on this book. Carol Kaske long ago initiated me into what she politely calls the Melanchthon mafia, and I have profited from her generous advice about Reformed theology and enormous knowledge of the Bible. Germaine Warkentin has several times filled gaps in my knowledge of Sidney’s books—and tested assumptions about what I thought I knew. I have benefited, too, from conversations with Lee Piepho, who knows so much about that vast body of neo-Latin literature most of us (at our peril) neglect to read. With these, Anne Lake Prescott encouraged my work on this book, at early stages and late, with warmth and with wisdom, and I have received her attention like grace, unmerited. For the past 20 years the community that has best energized my thinking about the literary culture of the Renaissance has been the crew at Kalamazoo, whose intoxication with the serio ludere of the mind sustains me still. I cannot name them all, so a few must stand in gratitude for the rest: Bill Oram, Wayne Erickson, Jon Quitslund, Judith Anderson, Marianne Micros, Ted Steinberg, David WilsonOkamura, Beth Quitslund, Andrew Escobedo, Joel Davis, Jean Goodrich, Gavin Alexander, John Watkins, Charles Ross, Lauren Silberman, Bill Craft, John Webster, and John Ulreich. Allied to this group are my friends who have contributed to Sidney at Kalamazoo and the building of the Sidney Society, especially Arthur Kinney and Margaret Hannay, Victor Skretkowicz, Mary Ellen Lamb, Clare Kinney, Robert Shephard, Don Stump, Helen Vincent, and my former colleagues at the University of Tennessee Lisa Celovsky and Joe Black. I would be badly at fault, too, if I did not remember the person who nurtured that community into existence, Jerry Rubio, the best of shepherds, now sadly deceased. Beyond all of these, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to Roger Kuin, whose nattering and knowledge, friendship and wisdom, made this book possible. Material from “The Scope of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy: The New Hermeneutics and Early Modern Poetics,” English Literary Renaissance 32 (2002), 355–85 appears in revised form as part of Chapter 2; some portions of “‘Deadly Stinging Adders’: Sidney’s Piety, Philippism, and The Defence of Poesy,” Spenser Studies 16 (2002),

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231–69, have been revised and expanded in Chapter 3; and my essay entitled, “The Truths of a Slippery World: Poetry and History in Sidney’s Defence,” Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002), 1287–1319, has been revised and incorporated into Chapter 4. I am grateful to the editors of these journals for their permission to reprint.

Introduction Poetry and the Public Domain After the Massacre, St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572 On 24 August 1572, ordinary people in the streets of Paris exterminated their fellow human beings, as Diarmaid MacCulloch writes, “simply because they represented an idea.”1 The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was the great watershed event of late sixteenth-century Europe. The massacre of thousands of French Protestants at the hands of Catholics hardened confessional divisions and such hardening signaled a new era of ideological warfare—an era in which divisions created by religious ideas mattered as profoundly as those produced by nationality or class. Of course, people had killed and had been killed before August 1572 because of their ideas, but rarely on this scale, and never with such lasting consequence for the religious and political life of Europe. The era of confessional politics had arrived, so-to-speak, with a vengeance.2 For Philip Sidney, a young Englishman just beginning his political education abroad, the Massacre was lived experience. He witnessed the killings first hand, saw the mutilated corpse of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, leader of the Huguenots, and like his devoted friends and fellow humanists, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay and

1 The Reformation (New York: Viking, 2004), p. 328. 2 MacCulloch highlights the “extraordinary sequence of major crises and decisions across the Continent that, within no more than half a decade around 1570, set the courses of northern and southern Europe in opposite directions. The dynamic of these events made it possible for the partition of Europe to become permanent in the mid-seventeenth century. They culminated in … the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, which not only showed how unstable and divided that once-powerful kingdom had become, but also reinforced the feeling in the minds of both Catholic and Protestant that their enemies were bent on eliminating them altogether,” p. 311–12. For a broad discussion of the “Confessional Age,” see R. Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (New York: Routledge, 1989); for Germany in particular, see Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung: Eine Fallstudie über das Verhältnis von religiösem und sozialem Wandel in der Frühneuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1981), and commentary on Schilling’s challenge to the thesis linking the Empire’s second reformations to political absolutism in Benedict, p. 204–29. For a study of the Massacre in relation to Continental politics, see N.M. Sutherland, The Massacre of St. Bartholomew and the European Conflict 1559–72 (New York: Macmillan, 1973). For helpful background on the variety of confessional responses provoked by the Massacre, see Robert M. Kingdon, Myths about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacres, 1572–1576 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988).

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Hubert Languet, fled Paris in terror of his life.3 As the most spectacular instance of the tyranny of Tridentine Catholicism—or so Sidney’s circle regarded it—the Massacre was an urgent event demanding effective response. Until August 1572, tyranny could only have been experienced as an abstraction for Sidney—the subject matter of bookish philosophies or political sermons. After St. Bartholomew’s Day, tyranny was confrontation with death, and it supplied the immediate occasion for and persistent background of his most meaningful life choices. The St. Bartholomew’s Day’s Massacre helped to determine the course of Sidney’s education and the character of his piety and politics. In the aftermath of the event, he traveled to Frankfurt, where he joined his mentor Languet. First, under his tutelage and afterwards in companionship with Duplessis-Mornay, those politically active intellectuals who educated him about the Reformed cause, Sidney learned to navigate the geopolitics of Europe by cultivating specific and definable responses to tyranny. He acquired what might be concisely termed a tyrannomachist politics in conjunction with an anti-confessional piety. His political beliefs were “tyrannomachist” because they were developed out of contemporary natural law arguments aimed against the abuse of sovereignty, as an historically occasioned remedy for tyranny. His pious principles were “anti-confessional” since for Sidney, as for his closest friends, the struggle on behalf of the cause demanded unity among the faithful of every persuasion. For them, the cause was never a partisan matter—a matter of Reformed Christian against unreformed Catholic. Rather, it was a defense of the godly—the universal, truly “catholic” church—against the Antichrist. Awareness of the complexity of public, political life enhanced the need for various activities in defense of the cause. In consequence, the advocacy of “forward” military intervention on behalf of beleaguered co-religionists went hand-in-hand with diplomatic efforts to unify the often bitterly divided Reformed churches.4 3 For Sidney’s travel on the Continent, see especially James M. Osborn, The Young Sir Philip Sidney, 1572–77 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), and his whereabouts during the Massacre, p. 66–73. He may have already met Languet and Mornay in Paris before the Massacre, but it is not until the flight to Frankfurt that we are certain that Languet is acting the part of Sidney’s mentor—probably through the agency of Francis Walsingham. 4 The most comprehensive introduction to the political theory of tyrannomachy remains Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume Two: The Age of the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978). For the term “forward Protestant,” see Patrick Collinson, “Puritans, Men of Business and Elizabethan Parliaments,” Parliamentary History 7, pt. 2 (1988), 187–211. For a recent study about Sidney’s posture as a “forward Protestant” in relation to the politics of tyranny and a review of scholarship about tyranny in the Arcadias, see Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1996), p. 3–20. See too Martin N. Raitiere, Faire Bitts: Sir Philip Sidney and Renaissance Political Theory (Pittsburgh: Pittsburg Univ. Press, 1984) for an informative, if not always persuasive study of Sidney’s thought in relation to late sixteenth-century political philosophy. He reads Sidney as an English Bodin. Most often, I refer to Sidney and the members of his circle as “Reformed Christians,” attempting to submerge distinctions (unless necessary) between and among confessions—itself a rhetorically appropriate complement to a study about Philippism. I use the term “Protestant” most often in relation to Luther and to the early Melanchthon (as a means of discriminating

Introduction: Poetry and the Public Domain

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In turn, while diplomatic and military activity were essential to that defense, so too, among the committed humanists of Sidney’s closest circle, was the dissemination of good letters. Mornay was the most agile of the Huguenot’s polemicists and among its most distinguished intellectuals, and Languet, in turn, served as an indispensable factotum of political correspondence among Reformed elites in the north, as well an intimate editorial advisor of Andreas Wechel—first Paris’s, then Frankfurt’s internationally prominent printer. Whatever his suspicions about the motives of mercantile Englishmen seeking money from the press, and his own reluctance to publish, Sidney’s hunger for books appears in the constant requests to Languet for purchases abroad, and the readiness to correspond with and befriend some of Europe’s best printers, including Henri Estienne and Christopher Plantin. Like Languet and Mornay, Sidney came to appreciate the value of countering tyranny with good letters, predisposed as a humanist to the belief (easy to maintain in an ideological era) that lasting change in the world happens only through lasting change in the mind.5 All of them were committed, for that reason, to what can properly be called a politics of intellectualism—to the belief that Ideas are crucial, even determining agents of action. However, Sidney pursued that politics neither with Languet’s passion for history nor with Mornay’s devotion to moral and political philosophy, but instead with his own startling defense of poetry (of fiction-making) as a culturally preeminent discipline—in fact, as his culture’s preeminent form of knowledge. Such a defense was startling in this humanist republic of letters because while history and philosophy were forms of knowledge traditionally revered for their public consequence, no one had ever made such claims on behalf of poetry.6 between Reformers in Wittenberg and those in Geneva), on the practice of current historians of religion. Sometimes, too, it can be clarifying to maintain the term “Protestant” in relation to Sidney or Languet in reference to previous Sidney scholarship, which privileged that term in discussions about piety or politics. 5 See Donald R. Kelly, The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981). In a still-important argument, Kelly identifies the age of confessionalism with the birth of ideology, not as a specific historical event, but rather “as a general feature of the historical experience, as a problem of the human condition” that had an impact on every aspect of late sixteenth-century French and (more broadly) European cultural life, p. xi. For a study of “interventionist” discourses in the late Renaissance, and the birth of new technologies of representation promising a remedy for cultural ills, see José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986). 6 I employ that critically vexed term “humanism” in the limited and specific sense recovered for it by Paul Oskar Kristeller in reference to the studia humanitatis, namely to the study of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy—especially in Latin and Greek: “Renaissance humanism was not as such a philosophical tendency or system, but rather a cultural and educational program,” Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), p. 10. At the center of that educational program, I emphasize the importance assigned to eloquence; see Hannah J. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: the Pursuit of Eloquence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24, no. 4 (October–December 1963), 497–514 and Nancy S. Streuver, who writes “Eloquence tends, in fact, to become the final and distinctive element in Humanist learning” (The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine

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In his Defence of Poesy, Sidney celebrates the power of fiction-making to reshape the minds of its readers—and such preoccupation with mentality (the interiority of his readership) appears from the start to challenge any claims for an important public motivation behind his poetics. For all of his discussion of golden worlds, when Sidney entertains his most important proofs about the value of poetry, those proofs at the core of his argument concern what Milton would later call “the golden world within,” transformations in the readers’ inner landscape. Despite the Defence’s valuation of heroic action, action is persistently subordinated by the logic of its argument to the determining power of thought and feeling—to the allimportant dynamics of wit and will. As a result, Sidney’s reasoning seems often to leave the greater world of historical events behind. The relentless interiority of his focus in his poetics complements what his readers have often described as the characteristically obsessive preoccupation with states of mind in his fictions, his endlessly incisive discriminations among the shifting mindscapes of his characters.7 Strephon and Klaius are shepherds who moan and groan, emblems of human desire and distinctively Sidneian characters for being always more memorable because of what they say rather than what they do. Once more, as a complement to this interiority, both in theory and in practice, Sidney commits himself to the making of fictional worlds that transcend the historical—and the rejection of topical allegory, even topical allusion, is remarkably consistent in his canon. Sidney allowed himself an occasional sonnet against the Riches of the world—and one dramatically important tribute to Languet—but his corpus is strikingly free of topical references. One signal consequence both of this relentless interiority and this drive to transcendence is the opening of a seemingly large gap between the golden world of his conceptual argumentation in the Defence and the brazen world of his lived experience as a Reformed activist. That gap, in turn, provokes large and complicated questions. For an individual marked by the terror of St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572, how could the poet’s making of “notable images of virtues” ever have been thought to contribute meaningfully to the public realm, much less claim status as his culture’s preeminent form of knowledge (103)? Put more simply, how could making fictions ever have been thought to make a difference in a world so urgently dismayed by tyranny? Would it not be more credible to explain fiction-making as a retreat from the serious business of battling tyrants, pleasing and ethically uplifting in its own right, but not immediately relevant to the experience of public life? Humanism [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970], p. 54). Recently, Donald Stump has argued for Sidney’s hostility to a variety of “humanism” very different from the humanist education that he in fact received from Languet, “Sidney’s Critique of Humanism in the New Arcadia,” in Challenging Humanism, ed. Ton Hoenselaars and Arthur F. Kinney (Delaware: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2005), p. 154–78. For an account of Languet’s network of associates constituting an active republic of letters, see Beatrice Nicollier-de Weck, Hubert Languet (1518–1581), un réseau politique international de Melanchthon à Guillaume d’Orange (Geneva: Droz, 1995). 7 See, for instance, Myron Turner, “The Disfigured Face of Nature: Image and Metaphor in the Revised Arcadia,” English Literary Renaissance, 2, no. 1 (Winter 1972), 116–35 and Robert E. Stillman, “The Politics of Sidney’s Pastoral: Mystification and Mythology in The Old Arcadia,” English Literary History 52 (1985), 795–814.


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The argument of the Defence repeatedly performs a systematic downsizing of the historical within the realm of the poetic. Consider for a moment what happens rhetorically to the great world of history in the text. History’s bloody civil wars become or at least threaten to become “a civil war among the Muses” (96). Tarquin and Phalaris matter in the world of events as exemplars of tyrants who did—and did not—suffer for their tyrannies, but the tyranny that matters most to Sidney’s internal argument (his championship of poetry against rival disciplines) descends from “that tyrant in table talk,” the historian (105). The senate that counts in the text consists not of patricians or politicians, but instead “of poets” (103). “Princes” are transformed from authorities in sovereign states to authorities in sovereign disciplines (104). “Monarchs” and “sacred majesty” are titles usurped by the makers of fictions (113), and the cause one fights for is no longer “the just cause” perpetually intoned in the correspondence with friends, but instead the “just cause” of poetry (96). In the course of these verbal exchanges, poetry appears at once ironically minimized (after all these are only wars among the muses) and rhetorically enhanced (disciplinary disputes gain the grandeur of warfare), just as poetic action is made to seem both clearly distinct from the realm of events—wars among the muses produce no corpses—and urgently engaged with that world, since its presence is so constantly evoked by the very verbal moves in question. There are no Tridentine Catholics in Arcadia, and neither are there Calvinists or Lutherans, much less English longbows or Spanish pikes. Poetry only works its metamorphic power without them. In the golden world, partisan particulars are transformed to “notable images of virtues [and] vices,” historical actors to fictive exemplars, and mere ideology to Ideas of universal import (103). The alchemy of such changes is recreative in the deepest sense of the term, productive of pleasure as well as political and pious significance. As a product of the wit ranging freely amidst a zodiac of “Ideas,” poetry always brings pleasure. In turn, poetry’s transcendent mode of discourse complements as it enables the politics of anti-confessional piety: both of which by rejecting what is merely partisan and particular defend against tyranny in its full variety of forms, from the sovereignty of self-love as a sin to the tyranny of self-loving sovereigns. The very gap in question, then, the distance that opens between the golden world of poetry and the brazen world of history, explains (as the key paradox at the core of the Defence) the indispensability of those “notable images of virtues [and] vices” to reform the public realm (103). Poetry better remedies history’s ills because it escapes confinement to the historical—hence its seeming triviality and its real potential for grandeur. In the Defence, Sidney imagines a readership that is set free from history, paradoxically, in order to act upon history. Liberated from the particularity of contemporary political and religious debate, and both informed and energized by pure “Ideas” emanating from the zodiac of the poet’s wit, Sidney’s readers are imagined as a cosmopolitan elite, at once armed by natural law to adopt (as the Defence casually and logically assumes moral people must do) an anti-tyrannical politics, just as such readers are shepherded by piety to favor (as the Defence assumes naturally pious people should do) the principles of an ecumenical Christianity. Sidney’s cosmopolitanism (his self-conscious pursuit of an inclusive, even encyclopedic comprehension and representation of experience) made him both too stylish and

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too pious to entertain debate about such questions, political or pious. He leads by the mind, rather than draws by the nose—and he leads those who are predisposed to adhere to the pious and political principles that the Defence assumes at its dialectical foundations to be true. After all, Sidney’s intention is to defend the making of fictions. Such a defense demanded recourse to a realm of public principles—and such principles determine why and how Sidney defends poetry as he does. As such, they both require and repay sustained critical attention, even as the point is made that those public principles do not themselves determine the scope (the main aim or purpose) of his argument. Put more plainly, the chief burden of Sidney’s Defence is neither its political nor its pious ideals, but rather the value of the vehicle at issue— the value of fiction-making—for realizing such ideals in experience. As the most important exercise of his zodical wit, then, Sidney’s poet creates golden worlds that transcend through imagination the partisan and the particular, what the Defence calls the brazen world of history, securing freedom from that tyranny of the mind whose devolutions in the realm of events produced the spectacular violence that he had witnessed on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572. In turn, Sidney endeavors to accomplish such significant cultural labor with the stunning tonguein-cheek modesty of his own idealized makers of fiction, who “pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue” (113). Hardly any hint of contemporary religious or political debate intrudes upon Sidney’s discussion of poetry. Matter and manner engage from the start in a sophisticated and stylishly engaging competition. How did Sidney come to conceptualize poetry in such startlingly new terms? How are we to account for the distinctive character of his own political and theological views? How are we to read and interpret the matter of the Defence in relation to the cosmopolitan playfulness of its manner and the urgency of its historical circumstances? These are the core questions pursued by this book, and they are questions pursued in light of new knowledge that has utterly transformed contemporary understandings about the intellectual circle to which Philip Sidney belonged. Consider, first, one notably undistinguished member of that circle, and his publication of an equally undistinguished devotional work in 1579. Philippist Prayers and Poetry in Public Places In 1579 Richard Robinson published a short book with the long title, Godly Prayers, meete to be used in these later times: Collected out of the workes of that Godly and reverende Father, Doctor Philip Melanchthon.8 Devotional handbooks were popular 8 (London: Henry Denham for W. Seres, 1579). No factual evidence fixes the Defence’s date of composition precisely. 1580 seems likely. That date would place the Defence after Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse (1579), as one possible occasion for its composition, and close enough to The Lady of May (1578/79) to account for the large number of verbal correspondences between the two. On that point, see Robert E. Stillman, “Justice and the ‘Good Word’ in Sidney’s The Lady of May,” Studies in English Literature 24 (1984), 23–38. Katherine Duncan-Jones suggests 1582, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1991), p. 230–32.


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products of England’s post-Reformation press, and a devotional publication by Philip Melanchthon might well have been expected to enjoy some currency. Judged by the frequency of their appearance in the inventories of sixteenth-century libraries, Melanchthon’s works were more often owned than those of any other Reformed theologian, with the likely exception of Calvin. In fact, only Erasmus, Cicero, and Aristotle were found more frequently on English bookshelves.9 Godly Prayers was one of some 20 different translations of Melanchthon’s works to be published 9 My information derives indirectly from E.S. Leedham-Green’s Books in Cambridge Inventories, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Using Leedham-Green’s work, which surveys 176 inventories of sixteenth-century books, Ake Bergvall has ranked the 50 most commonly owned authors in England: Erasmus heads the list. Cicero and Aristotle are next; then come Melanchthon, Chrysostom, Augustine, Virgil and Ovid—in that order [“Melanchthon and Tudor England,” in Cultural Exchange Between European Nations During the Renaissance, ed. Gunnar Sorelius and Michael Srigley (Uppsala: Norstedts Tryckeri AB, 1994), p. 85–96]. In his count for Melanchthon, Bergvall includes Carion’s Chronicle—a work almost certainly written in large part by several of his followers. Even if one excludes the Chronicle, as Carol V. Kaske indicates, Melanchthon’s numbers are impressive: “Six pages of BCI are devoted to all his works …, as compared to seven and one-half for Calvin and three of Luther,” Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 150. No single survey of this kind is definitive, but the inventory is enough to indicate that Melanchthon’s works were better known in sixteenth-century England than contemporary scholars recognize. One explanation for that knowledge derives from the extensive history of Anglo-Schmalkaldic negotiations between 1531 and 1547—and Melanchthon’s central role in their continuation and ultimate collapse. Sidney was scarcely the first Englishman to fail at establishing a Protestant League; see Rory McEntegart, Henry VIII, The League of the Schmalkalden and the English Reformation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002). His importance to the English church is fully documented in John Schofield’s Philip Melanchthon and the English Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). See too for a brief, but useful overview of the wide variety of cultural spheres in which Melanchthon had real impact, Carl S. Meyer’s “Melanchthon’s Influence on English Thought in the Sixteenth Century,” Miscellanea Historiae Ecclesiasticae 2 (1967), 163–85. More focused on theological matters is John K. Yost’s “A Reexamination of the Development of Protestantism during the Early English Reformation,” Journal of the Medieval and Renaissance Rocky Mountain Association 2 (1981), 129–42. For Melanchthon’s renewed prominence early in the seventeenth-century English church, see Dewey D. Wallace, “The Anglican Appeal to Lutheran Sources: Philipp Melanchthon’s Reputation in Seventeenth-Century England,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 52, no. 4 (December 1983), 355–68. A more skeptical review of scholarly claims for Melanchthon’s theological influence in the period appears in Basil Hall’s “The Rise and Gradual Decline of Lutheranism in England (1500–1600),” in Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent, c1500–c1750, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), p. 355–68. Against Hall’s skepticism, Diarmaid MacCulloch indicates in his recent comprehensive biography, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (Yale Univ. Press: New Haven and London, 1996), that Cranmer lived in an era when Melanchthon’s influence on the English Reformers generally and on Henry VIII especially—he was “the one foreign evangelical for whom he [Henry] felt deep admiration”—was particularly strong, p. 237–8. For Queen Elizabeth’s much discussed regard for Melanchthon, see Clyde Manschreck’s Preface to Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci communes 1555 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. xx–xxi.

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in England during the sixteenth century and one of Robinson’s several Philippist publications—“Philippist,” because they were the products of a self-described devotee of the reverend Philip Melanchthon.10 Beyond its contribution to the surprising currency of Melanchthon’s writings during the century, what is especially noteworthy about Godly Prayers is its dedication. As a New Year’s Day gift, Richard Robinson presented his translation “To the godly, vertuous, and right worshipfull, mayster Philip Sidney Esquire.” In recognition of his gift, Robinson received from Sidney a present of four angels, better wages one guesses than Stephen Gosson got for The School of Abuse, that Puritan attack on poetry and the theater also dedicated to Sidney in 1579.11 Very likely, Robinson was better paid because he better judged his patron’s tastes, pious, political, and poetic. Close ties to the Sidney household reflected and enabled that judgment. Sir Henry Sidney, Philip’s father, contributed ten shillings to Robinson for his dedication of Melanchthon’s Godly Prayers and patronized one of Robinson’s several publications about King Arthur. Philip’s uncle, Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, paid Robinson for his literary services too, rewarding him for the dedication of a devotional work in 1582. In later years, Robinson was associated with Thomas Churchyard, a writer with longstanding ties to Sidney’s other powerful uncle Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and together with Churchyard, he cultivated literary connections with Dutch authors such as Emanuel Van Meteren, a figure also important to the Sidney circle, as Jan Van Dorsten long ago demonstrated. Once more, Philip Sidney employed Robinson as a scribe. Among the surviving manuscripts of The Old Arcadia, the first whose copier can be identified is in his hand.12 Beyond his continuing ties to the Sidney circle, what is consistent about Robinson’s otherwise undistinguished career as author, translator and scribe is the persistence of his pious commitment to Melanchthon and the Philippists. In 1580, he followed

10 Robinson’s second translation was Melanchthon’s A Godly and learned Assertion in defence of the true Church of God, and of his woorde (London: Thomas Dawson, 1580). 11 See John Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), p. 1. For information about Sidney’s payment, see the transcription of Robinson’s Eupolemia or the Good Warrfare agenst the Devill (632), in George McGill Vogt, “Richard Robinson’s Eupolemia (1603),” Studies in Philology 21 (1924), 629–48. Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse has sometimes been read as a target of real importance for Sidney’s Defence; see, for example, Arthur F. Kinney, “Parody and its Implications in Sydney’s Defense of Poesy,” Studies in English Literature 12 (1972), 1–19; it has also been read, mischievously, as a Protestant complement to Sidney’s own cleverly disguised antipoetic argument in Peter C. Herman, Squitter-Wits and Muse-Haters: Sidney, Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Antipoetic Sentiment (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1996). It seems unlikely that Sidney paid much attention to Gosson. See Michael Mack’s review of the Gosson question in Sidney’s Poetics: Imitating Creation (Washington, DC: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 2005), p. 9. 12 Robinson co-authored with Churchyard a translation of Van Meteren’s Historiae Belgicae (1602). For Sidney’s important Dutch connections, see J.A. Van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors: Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers, and the Leiden Humanists (Leiden: University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1962). For Robinson and Sidney, see Henry Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 202–3.


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the publication of Godly Prayers with a translation of Melanchthon’s Defence of the true Church of God. In the same year, he translated an exposition upon the 25th psalm by Neils Hemmingsen, Denmark’s most accomplished Reformed theologian and a devotee of Melanchthon who suffered for that devotion by the loss of his university employment. In the years following, Robinson translated both a homily and a biblical commentary by Urbanus Regius, a Lutheran scholar who cooperated with Melanchthon in authoring the Augsburg Confession. Between 1582 and 1595, Robinson also translated three separate portions of Victorinus Strigelius’s Harmony of King David’s Harp, an exposition of the Psalms by a Philippist internationally known for his defense of synergism, the freedom of the will to cooperate with God in realizing salvation. As early as 1579, then, Robinson was clearly in a position to know something about Sidney’s intimate history with contemporary Philippists—that historically distinct community of Reformed humanists, whose character was shaped by their teacher, Philip Melanchthon. Melanchthon was Luther’s most steadfast and intellectually capable ally, and among the Reformation’s most influential and frequently forgotten architects—forgotten, at least, among scholars of England’s sixteenth-century Renaissance. A figure of polymathic productivity and universal learning, he produced Protestantism’s first systematic theology, the Loci communes; he crafted its most comprehensive, most widely acclaimed statement of faith, the Augsburg Confession; and, in an age of great educators, this praeceptor Germaniae was, as Johann Sturm put it, “the father of most educated men.”13 Melanchthon was both influential and 13 “Johann Sturm to Michael Beuther,” 1565, before March 30, in Johann Sturm on Education, ed. and trans. Lewis W. Spitz and Barbara Sher Tinsley (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Press, 1995), p. 291. Melanchthon instituted in his role as praeceptor Germaniae the foundations of a comprehensive educational program that became an influential model for reform throughout the Reformed north; on his role as educator, see Heiko Augustinus Oberman, Masters of the Reformation: The Emergence of a New Intellectual Climate in Europe, trans. Dennis Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981). Melanchthon is a difficult figure to capture whole since he wrote about virtually all of the arts and sciences of the early modern period, especially theology, moral philosophy, natural philosophy, rhetoric, logic and literature. Dino Bellucci’s Science de la Nature et Réformation may provide the most comprehensive overview of the late Melanchthon, as a study of his natural philosophy, responsive to his theology, his moral and political thought, and his rhetorical and dialectical concerns (Rome: Edizioni Vivere, 1998). For a biography particularly well detailed about his career after Luther’s death, see Hans Scheible, Melanchthon: Eine Biographie (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1997); in English, see Clyde L. Manschreck, Melanchthon: The Quiet Reformer (New York: Abingdon Press, 1958). For a helpful, brief introduction to Melanchthon as humanist, see E. Gordon Rupp’s “Philip Melanchthon and Martin Bucer,” in A History of Christian Doctrine, ed. Hubert Cunliffe-Jones (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), p. 371–84. The best introduction to Melanchthon remains his Loci communes theologici, the 1521 edition available in a readable translation by Charles Leander Hill, The Loci Communes of Philip Melanchthon (Boston: Meador, 1944). For the majority of Melanchthon’s other works, readers must consult the 28 volumes in Corpus reformatorum Philippi Melanthonis opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. C.B. Bretschneider and H.E. Bindseil (Halle, 1834–52; Brunswick, 1853–60: C.A. Schwetschke et Filium). All subsequent references to the Corpus reformatorum are listed in the notes as CR, followed by volume and page number.

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controversial—and controversy accorded to his vision a distinctive focus. Especially in his later years, as the embattled guardian of Luther’s church, threatened by hostile imperial armies, Catholic enemies, and fierce opposition from rival Protestants, Melanchthon was championed by his followers as sixteenth-century Europe’s most temperate and most erudite spokesman for Christian liberty.14 Melanchthon’s championship of liberty is best understood in light of the history of the Philippists, as that history touches both on Germany specifically and the culture of northern humanism. On the one hand, the Philippists belong to the history 14 He also authored the political logic by which Anabaptists could be executed as traitors, not heretics—and traitors’ blood flowed faster in Wittenberg as a consequence. The “quiet reformer” was not always so quiet. Liberty is not license (Melanchthon warns!), but it exists for Christians in pursuit of spiritual liberty as a pious and necessary complement. In Melanchthon’s suggestive metaphor, civil liberty is the free cultivation of the garden of virtue, immured by the laws of nature and of God, and by those civil laws grounded on them. The best definition of “libertas civilis” occurs in the Definitiones multarum appellationum dated 1552/53 and appended to subsequent editions of the Loci, in which he describes such liberty as a faculty guaranteeing the right to a free exchange of goods and services (according to law), conjoined with a freedom for the defense of oneself and one’s property, CR 21, 1096. He concludes the passage with an extended metaphor, in which liberty is described as a spacious garden full of fruits, and with a quotation from Cicero, that makes the characteristic and paradoxical point: “Legum servi sumus, ut liberi esse possimus” (We serve the law, in order that we may be free). For the centrality of liberty to Melanchthon’s religious message and to Luther’s, see Rupp, p. 375, and for its importance as a topic in his early political thought, see Timothy Wengert’s chapter, “Colossians 2:23 as Melanchthon’s Politics,” in Human Freedom, Human Righteousness: Philip Melanchthon’s Exegetical Dispute with Erasmus of Rotterdam (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. p. 115–26. For its importance later in the career, as Melanchthon and the Philippists were the first to develop a theory of political resistance in the century, see Luther D. Peterson, “Melanchthon on Resisting the Emperor: The Von der Notwehr Unterricht of 1574,” in Regnum, Religio et Ratio: Essays Presented to Robert M. Kingdon, ed. Jerome Friedman (Kirksville, MO: R.V. Schnucker, 1987), p. 133–44. “Liberty” is not the first word that comes to mind for all contemporary scholars in assessing the legacy of Melanchthon’s political thought—especially in light of his early fierce condemnation (with Luther) of the Peasant Wars or his later submission in the Leipzig Interim to imperial authority when the Wars of the Schmalkaldan League ended in defeat; or his opposition (much to his public humiliation) against the successful renewal of military struggle against the Empire in 1552. Among the Philippists, however, increasingly aware of the perils of confessional combat, Melanchthon’s moderation was interpreted as a necessary means of safeguarding Christian liberty. On this point, see Nicollier-de Weck, p. 147, 292, 308. Among the Philippists, too, and their allies among the Reformed, the legacy of Melanchthon’s employment of natural law to assert the right to resistance—to self-defense against tyranny—was important to the development of early modern political thought as I will argue in some detail in Chapter 4. See Robert Von Friedeburg, Self-Defense and Religious Strife in Early Modern Europe: England and Germany 1530–1680 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). For a recent essay that highlights Daniel Rogers’s lifelong commitment to liberty and to freedom of conscience (as an English Philippist), see Arthur J. Slavin’s “Daniel Rogers in Copenhagen, 1588: Mission and Memory,” in Politics, Religion & Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Malcolm R. Thorp and Arthur J. Slavin (Kirksville, MO: Edwards Brothers, 1994), Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 27, 245–66.


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of a place. As the followers of that notoriously “quiet” reformer who was Luther’s heir-apparent, they were key players in the struggle for control of the Protestant church in imperial Germany after Luther’s death, and especially in those religious battles that scarred late sixteenth-century Saxony. Conceived in brief, their history was one of precarious survival, forced compromise, and ultimate exile. Its complete narrative would trace the efforts of Melanchthon and his followers to survive military defeat by imperial forces in the Wars of the Schmalkaldan League—Wars that enabled the triumph of Charles V over the empire’s Protestant princes, who struggled unsuccessfully to assert confessional unity against military prowess. That history would trace, too, at the conclusion of those Wars the highly controversial response of Melanchthon and the Philippists to the restrictive compromises enforced upon the Protestant church by the Interims of 1548. Threatened by what Melanchthon regarded as a choice between compromise and the extinction of the church, the Philippists chose compromise about adiaphora—matters of indifference to the essential doctrines of Christianity—and thereby precipitated decades of fierce theological disputes with their embittered rivals, the so-called Gnesio (or true) Lutherans. Theological controversies pitted Wittenberg against Jena, the Philippists against the Gnesio-Lutherans, concerning questions of justification and sanctification, the necessity of works to merit salvation, the freedom of the will, the issue of ubiquity, and (always, of course) the viability of Melanchthon’s concept of adiaphora. Once more, a complete history of the Philippists would include, after the death of Melanchthon (1560), the brief twilight of support in Saxony for Philippist causes, with Georg Cracow, Paul Eber and Caspar Peucer organizing support for Melanchthon’s pious programs in Wittenberg; and it would culminate in 1574 with the dispersal of the Philippists into exile when that formerly sympathetic Protestant prince, August of Saxony, abruptly purged them from power. By the last years of the decade, with the establishment of the Formula of Concord (1577) as the orthodoxy of a church now dominated by Gnesio-Lutherans, the Philippists had lost virtually all institutional authority in the empire.15 15 One articulate opponent of the Formula of Concord was Neils Hemmingsen, who because of his opposition, was stripped of his professorship just a year before Robinson’s English translation of his exposition upon the 25th Psalm (1580). Hemmingsen was joined in his opposition to the Formula by Charles Danzay, French ambassador to Denmark, friend to Hubert Languet and co-conspirator against the Formula with Mornay. The most useful, analytical account of Philippism appears in Ernst Koch’s “Der kursächsische Philippismus und seine Krise in den 1560er und 1570er Jahren,” in Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland—Das Problem der ‘Zweiten Reformation’, ed. Heinz Schilling (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1986), p. 60–78. He provides six categories for distinguishing the Philippists from the Gnesio-Lutherans, including the prominence of the Philippists’ educational ambitions, the moderation of their theological statements, their hope for a unification of the churches, their qualified openness to Geneva and Calvinism, their idealization of a close bond between state authority and the church, and their intellectual elitism (p. 70–73). An older history still full of helpful factual information is James I. Good’s The Origin of the Reformed Church in Germany (Reading: Daniel Miller, 1887). For a brief introduction to the Philippism as a distinctive anti-confessional movement, see Luther D. Peterson’s “Philippists,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J.

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There is a second history, too, to which the Philippists properly belong, keyplayers as they were in the story of early modern Germany. Geography alone will not contain them. It is vital to recall that Melanchthon himself was the Reformer who struggled most persistently and energetically for the reunification of a once-universal church. He was the spokesman for a cosmopolitan version of Christianity, with his deliberate cultivation of an international network of associates, his commitment to a comprehensive scope of learning in his educational reforms, and his doctrine of universally available grace. His Philippist students were similarly international in background and perspective. As such, they belong not only to the history of a place, but also to the history of a time: to that broader quest for an internationally unified Christian culture, which inspired in the late sixteenth century a diverse body of ecumenically minded, intellectually elite scholars, jurists, doctors, artists, and literati—professionally trained humanists of all sorts. Detailed fully, that history would concentrate on the cosmopolitan character of Melanchthon’s appeal—the dissemination of his texts by publishing houses from Haguenau and Wittenberg, to Antwerp and Basle, to Paris and Cologne, and the attractiveness of his teachings to an internationally diverse community of humanists.16 That community included the two Joachims Camerarius, the Elder and the Younger, both distinguished German philologists; Johannes Crato, the Silesian physician who served the Emperor Maximilian II in Vienna; Charles de l’Écluse, the French botanist; Johannes Sambucus, the Hungarian emblemmatist; Charles Danzay, French ambassador to Denmark; and Daniel Rogers, the Anglo-Dutch poet and diplomat, a frequently employed man-of-business at Elizabeth’s court, whose father was a Marian martyr and a student of Melanchthon. All of these individuals have managed to escape time’s oblivion, even Rogers (among Sidney’s close circle of associates), but none

Hillerbrand (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), vol. 3, 255–61. For a detailed study of the theological controversies in which the Philippists became immersed, see Peterson’s still unpublished dissertation, “The Philippist Theologians and the Interims of 1548: Soteriological, Ecclesiastical, and Liturgical Compromises and Controversies within German Lutheranism” (University of Wisconsin, 1974). As Peterson notes, “The much-maligned loser in its struggle with the Gnesio-Lutherans [the so-called ‘true’ Lutherans], the Philippists and their religious perspectives have since then received relatively little study of a balanced and scholarly sort,” “Philippists,” p. 256. Important new studies indicate that this neglect is ending. In addition to Peterson’s bibliography, see Robert Kolb’s Confessing the Faith: Reformers Define the Church, 1530–80 (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Press, 1991) and Bodo Nischan’s Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). For a comprehensive account of contemporary Philippism from the 1550s to 1580, from the perspective of Hubert Languet and his extensive network of associates, see Nicollier-de Weck’s biography of Languet. See, too, the wide-ranging collection of recent essays, Melanchthon in Europe, and a second more focused collection of articles on Philippism in educational circles, Luther and Melanchthon in the Educational Thought of Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Reinhard Golz and Wolfgang Mayrhofer (Münster and New Brunswick, NJ: LIT, 1998). 16 For the history of that “editorial and advertising campaign” launched to advance Melanchthon’s revolution in methodizing the study of dialectics and rhetoric (360), see Kees Meerhoff’s “Logic and Eloquence: A Ramusian Revolution?,” Argumentation 5 (1991), 357–74.


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are frequently or principally remembered as Philippists—a reminder of time’s indifference to lost causes.17 A history of endangered survival, forced compromise, and exile adds clarity both to the origins and the continuing contemporary appeal of Melanchthon’s central oratio on Christian liberty. The Philippists of the 1570s were anti-confessionalists living in an age of confessional divisions, humanists bound together by certain pious and political convictions, who remained loyal to their teacher’s precepts for decades after his death. As a body, the Philippists echoed Melanchthon’s insistence upon the universality of God’s promise of grace and his frequent calls for freedom from theological disputation—including freedom from dark pronouncements about predestination and election, matters too terrifying to the souls of unlearned Christians. When forced into theological discussions at all, they were inclined to espouse moderate positions on free will (to emphasize cooperation between sinner and savior in the acquisition of grace), to enhance the need for good works in matters of salvation, and to express an openness to compromise with rival Reformed and Catholic interpretations of the Mass. As a body, too, they shared Melanchthon’s political goal of achieving freedom from tyranny: his pragmatic regard for compromise, his irenic aversion to war, and his conservative ideal of the wellordered aristocratic state, governed by the godly prince serving the godly church. Moderation, especially on theological issues, was key to the triumph of the church, and the Philippists regarded themselves as the guardians of Melanchthon’s legacy by continuing to espouse that principle. When John of Glauburg wrote to Theodore Beza in 1576, he could think of no compliment more meaningful than to celebrate the freedom that French Reformed Christians had achieved in their moderation of theological debate from the rabies theologorum (fury of the theologians) ravaging Germany in the wake of Melanchthon’s death, Melanchtone piae memoriae.18 Simultaneously, even paradoxically, the Philippists shared Melanchthon’s providential reading of international politics and his fiercely anti-Papal convictions 17 For introductions to those irenic communities of the late sixteenth century, see J.A. Van Dorsten’s The Radical Arts (Leiden: The University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1973), Poets, Patrons, and Professors, and R.J.W. Evans’s Rudolf II and His World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). For Vienna in the early 1570s as the home of a variety of irenicists and anti-confessionalists, see Howard Louthan’s The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and his Johannis Crato and the Austrian Hapsburgs: Reforming a Counter-Reform Court (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1994). For Melanchthon’s commitment to ecumenical ideals, see Carl S. Meyer, “Melanchthon, Theologian of Ecumenism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 17, no. 2 (October 1966), 185–207. 18 Jean de Glauburg Le Jeune à Bèze, 22 September 1576 in Correspondance de Théodore de Bèze, ed. Hippolyte Aubert (Geneva: Droz, 1994), vol. 17, 163–4. For other examples of the self-conscious moderation of the Philippists and the origins of that moderation in the continuing dedication to Melanchthon, see Louthan’s Johannis Crato (p. 8–9, 26–7), and Languet’s letter to Sidney, 24 July 1574, in The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, trans. Steuart A. Pears (London: William Pickering, 1845), p. 87–9. See, too, Timothy Wengert on Melanchthon’s “hermeneutic of moderation,” Human Freedom, Human Righteousness, p. 147.

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representing Europe as a battleground between Christ’s church on the one hand and Tridentine Catholicism on the other. That battleground was no metaphor. The Council of Trent had called for the extermination of Reformed heresies, and in practice (so the Philippists believed) that call had inspired an international Catholic League, led chiefly by the Pope and Spain, dedicated to the extermination of Reformed heretics. Especially in the decades of the 1570s and 1580s, Philip II’s campaigns for military domination in the north made the darkness of the Antichrist visible, and thereby marked the Netherlands for the Reformed generally and for Philippists particularly as the central battleground in a cause whose scope and consequence were international. As a result, even after their betrayal by August of Saxony, the Philippists across Europe tended to look longingly for that Reformed prince (whether a John Casimir or a William of Orange, a Henry of Navarre or a Robert Dudley) whose authority could best be employed to defeat the tyrannical power of the Pope and his minions, just as they tirelessly lamented the failure of those real-world Reformed princes, idling in sloth and stupidity, to satisfy those expectations. Robinson’s dedication of these prayers, collected both from Melanchthon and his followers, is proof, then, of his knowledge about Sidney’s intimate association with the Philippists—intimacy that Sidney acquired because of his education under Hubert Languet during his three formative years of travel across the Continent (1572–75). Languet was a Reformed activist and a humanist, and he served first as a longtime advisor to August, Elector of Saxony, among Germany’s most powerful Lutheran princes, and later as a political advisor to William of Orange during the Dutch wars of liberation. He was also Sidney’s passionately devoted friend and mentor, and an eloquent contributor to what remains the single most intimate and revealing body of correspondence connected with any writer of the English Renaissance, the letters exchanged with Sidney between 1573 and 1580. This much about Languet is familiar. What has remained almost entirely unexamined, however, until the recent biography by Beatrice Nicollier-de Weck, is Languet’s education in Wittenberg under Philip Melanchthon and its all-important influence on his own intellectual, political, and spiritual life. As Nicollier-de Weck has demonstrated in detail, Languet’s whole sense of himself was shaped by his transformative encounter with Melanchthon, the teacher for whom he gave up everything—homeland, friends, and family—and for whose civilized vision of the Reformed cause he dedicated the entirety of his mature life. In turn, from Melanchthon came the education in piety and politics, in virtue and eloquence, that Languet labored to pass along to his pupil, Philip Sidney.19 In 1572, Sidney was a young man of great expectations—charismatic, brilliant and eminently

19 According to Nicollier-de Weck, Sidney was one of only three people, besides Melanchthon, with whom Languet maintained a lasting, intimate relationship. The others were Sidney’s friend, protégé, and model, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, and the printer Andreas Wechel. Himself the product of a life-altering conversion, Languet labored at the very moment of Philippism’s threatened demise as an institutionally secure confessional movement—the demise of the Philippists in Wittenberg with the Gnesio-Lutheran led purge of 1574—to pass the torch of the Reformed cause to Sidney. For this argument, see Chapter 1.


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well-connected as heir-apparent to the combined estates of Leicester and Warwick— and Languet looked to him as a prospective leader of the Reformed cause.20 Sidney’s intimacy with Languet matters for understanding the Defence of Poesy— for appreciating, that is, why and how Sidney came to celebrate fiction-making as a culturally superior form of knowledge—because the Defence is best understood as a Philippist text. The sustained friendships both with Languet and his vast body of associates supplied Sidney with the basis of his political and religious principles, as well with the foundational assumptions of his intellectual life, from his normative standards for reading and writing to his core concepts about the nature of knowledge and the mind. To defend the making of fictions as knowledge that can be valued in the public domain—for the pupil of Languet, that “shepherd best,” as Sidney calls him—demanded an appeal to pious and political principles that he had absorbed during his education in the cause. There is nothing new about highlighting Sidney’s commitment to the Protestant cause. His most capable biographers—Malcolm Wallace, Roger Howell, and Alan 20 Few Sidney scholars have doubted or underestimated Languet’s shaping power over Sidney’s life. John Buxton called him “the ideal mentor,” and paid tribute to his grooming of Sidney as an English Maecenas, precociously celebrated by Continental humanists and statesmen alike, p. 51. For Malcolm Wallace, Languet was the “intimate guide and friend,” the single most influential figure over Sidney’s mind and character—whose one vice was a too worldly-wise subordination of principle to practice, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), p. 118, 144–5. Roger Howell’s Languet was again the “greatest and most influential” figure in his life, but for different reasons. Distinct from Buxton’s learned groomsman or Wallace’s tutor of mind and manners, Howell’s Languet was instead Sidney’s great educator in the schoolhouse of international politics—and a figure whose molding power as a Protestant was (Howell argues) far more significant in a political than a theological sense, Sir Philip Sidney: The Shepherd Knight (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968). Out of Howell has followed that important line of Sidney scholarship extending through Fred Levy to John Osborn to Blair Worden and, most recently, to Alan Stewart that has agreed in characterizing Languet’s education of Sidney as both enormously potent and largely political in character. [See F.J. Levy, “Sir Philip Sidney Reconsidered,” in Sidney in Retrospect, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 3–14; and Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001).] Little of Languet the humanist or pious Protestant has remained, and, with the steady increase in attention to Sidney himself as an individual whose life was fully dedicated to the public arena, correspondingly little attention has been given in recent scholarship either to how Languet’s mentorship mattered in relation to Sidney’s unelected literary vocation (beyond that vocation’s political intentions) or to his religious beliefs. In fact, read Sidney’s most recent biography, Stewart’s Philip Sidney, with its fully detailed exposition of the startling imbalance between his Continental reputation (always brilliant) and his reputation at home (decidedly mixed) and it would be possible to forget that Philip Sidney ever wrote a word of fiction. It would also be possible to forget— after reading this full body of scholarship from Howell to Osborn to Stewart—that Languet was something other than the generic Protestant statesman (of the Calvinist variety, as he is most frequently represented) with a vast experience in the public realm. Scholars have never doubted Languet’s influence, but none have ever considered his devotion to Melanchthon seriously enough to understand the significance of the Philippist education that he imparted to Sidney and that Sidney’s contemporary, his family man-of-business, and his scribe, Richard Robinson, appreciated in dedicating Godly Prayers to him.

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Stewart—have demonstrated in considerable detail the seriousness of that sustained political commitment. There has been, too, no shortage of critical accounts seeking to explain the importance of that commitment to Sidney’s poetic productions or (more to the point for this study) to Sidney’s poetics—even as the claim is made that Sidney’s conspicuously Protestant politics are distinguishable from his personal piety. In fact, scholars as prominent as A.C. Hamilton continue to regard the Defence of Poesy as a crucial document in the history of a thoroughly-modern-thereforethoroughly-secular poetics.21 Some of the aversion to discussing Sidney’s poetic career in relation to his piety stems from what has been until recently a contemporary disregard for the role of religion in the making of Renaissance literature. With the new “religious turn” in early modern studies, that neglect is fast coming to an end. More important, that end is more easily hastened in relation to the Defence, since critical aversion to the religious owes less in Sidney studies to scholarly distaste for the topic than to the failure of the cultural paradigm ordinarily employed to characterize his piety. Most often, contemporary critics have sought to understand Sidney’s politics and poetics in the context of English Calvinism, a version of Protestant piety that has proved peculiarly difficult to reconcile either with Sidney’s life or his literary career.22 Calvinist piety does not work for interpreting Sidneian poetry or poetics, but Sidney’s training among the Philippists does. With its distinctive humanist program to ally the secular and the sacred, its conspicuous cultivation of moderation in religious 21 In “Sidney’s Humanism,” A.C. Hamilton argues that the Defence “marks the beginning of an emphasis on the value and autonomy of secular literature in society,” in Sir Philip Sidney’s Literary Achievements, ed. M.J.B. Allen, Dominick Baker-Smith, and Arthur F. Kinney (New York: AMS Press, 1990), p. 109. For criticism about the neglect of scholarly treatments of Sidney’s religious views, see Andrew Weiner, “Sidney, Protestantism, and Literary Critics: Reflections on Some Recent Criticism of The Defense of Poesy,” in Sidney’s Literary Achievements, p. 117–18. See too Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern Studies,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 46, no. 1 (Winter 2004), 167–90. 22 Two influential studies fostering the image of Sidney as Anglo-Calvinist are Andrew D. Weiner’s Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978) and Alan Sinfield’s “Protestantism: Questions of Subjectivity and Control,” in Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 143–80. Both are troubled by a lack of historical specificity in distinguishing between and among rival confessional allegiances: Weiner and Sinfield treat Languet, for instance, as a Calvinist; in neither text does Melanchthon’s name appear. Similar assumptions guide much recent Sidney scholarship; see, for example, Nandra Perry, “Imitatio and Identity: Thomas Rogers, Philip Sidney, and the Protestant Self,” English Literary Renaissance 35, no. 3 (2005), 365–405. Sidney’s Calvinism is a supposition contradicted by an important and still unpublished dissertation by Eileen Z. Cohen, “Gentle Knight and Pious Servant: A Study of Sidney’s Protestantism” (University of Maryland, 1965); it is a supposition deeply—if only implicitly—contradicted by the biographical work of Nicollier-de Weck on Sidney’s influential mentor, Languet; and by the ongoing research of Roger Kuin about a variety of Sidney’s intimate connections with both Huguenots in France and Philippists in Germany and the Netherlands. See, for example, Kuin’s “Querre-Muhau: Sir Philip Sidney and the New World,” Renaissance Quarterly 51, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 549–85 and his “Sir Philip Sidney’s Model of the Statesman,” Reformation 4 (1999), 93–117.


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matters, and its considerably more optimistic account of human agency—both the strategically tempered optimism of its natural theology and its frequent invocation of a human will free to cooperate with divine grace—the Philippism of Languet and his network of Melancthonian enthusiasts supplies a more promising context in which to reopen questions about the character of Sidney’s piety, the relationship of that piety to his politics, and the importance of both for appreciating the poetics of the Defence. If there is nothing new about emphasizing Sidney’s allegiance to the Protestant cause, arguing for the historical significance of his connections to the followers of Philip Melanchthon is decisively different.23 The decisiveness of that difference is appreciable in light of the impact of Melanchthon—as the teacher of Sidney’s teacher—on Languet. Often represented as a generic Protestant statesman for whom the real stuff of Protestantism was politics not piety, pragmatism rather than principle, and militant activism rather than compromise or peace, Languet emerges from Nicollier-de Weck’s biography as a wholly more complicated figure. What Fulke Greville writes about Sidney obtained also for his mentor: “he made the Religion he professed, the firm Basis of his life.”24 The product of a conversion by the book, an Augustinian-style tolle-lege encounter with the Loci communes of 1543, Languet the Burgundian found his way to Wittenberg in 1549 at the age of 31, prepared to assume the role of Melanchthon’s traveling emissary, the devotee who would preach the gospel of ecumenical-Christianity-according-to-Philip from Germany to Italy, England to Denmark, France to the Netherlands, Sweden to Poland. Just as a commitment to ecumenical Christianity—a unification of the badly splintered confessions of Reformed Christianity—inspired his cosmopolitan travels, so pious principles motivated the notable pragmatism of his professional life, his years of service to the Elector of Saxony as an “intelligencer” for the Reformed cause at the court of Maximilian II and his subsequent aid, as factotum of political correspondence in the north, to William of Orange in his struggle against Spain. There is no justification to maintain, as Sidney’s biographers have traditionally done, a division between Languet’s piety and politics, his ecumenism and cosmopolitanism. For more than 20 years, they merged in a remarkably coherent vision of the cause of Reformed Christianity. Languet’s vision of the cause consisted of two primary components, the need for unity among the Reformed churches (unity among “our own,” as he habitually referred to the members of those churches, without confessional distinction) and the militant defense of Reformed Christianity against Tridentine Catholicism. Languet was no bigot, and he actively cultivated friendships with Catholic moderates. His principal focus, however, especially after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, was 23 Among scholars of English Renaissance literature, Melanchthon and the Philippists are mainly unstudied figures. There are exceptions to this claim, among whom most notably are Debora Shuger whose scholarly work on the Augustinian tradition in early modern England includes useful examinations of Melanchthon’s rhetorical thought, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988), and Carol Kaske, who in a recent book about Spenser breaks significant new ground in measuring Melanchthon’s impact on the English literary Renaissance, Spenser and Biblical Poetics. 24 Fulke Greville, The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1984), p. 41.

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on pursuing unity among the evangelical faithful. That unity was the indispensable requirement for achieving freedom from the tyranny of the Antichrist, since only a united church could effectively mobilize against the warfare sponsored by the Pope and Spain. His ecumenism and his militancy, his irenic shepherding of moderate Christians and his diplomatic forwardness (his advocacy of active intervention by Reformed princes on behalf of Reformed churches everywhere) were complementary aspects of a comprehensive commitment to the success of the cause. Languet’s commitment to evangelical unity explains his anti-theological piety, his abhorrence of disputes among opposed confessions about matters of indifference and, in turn, the attractiveness of Melanchthon’s religious thought, with its openness to compromise and its cultivation of adiaphora as tools to exorcize confessional divisions. Philippism was pragmatic and pragmatism, in turn, indissolubly allied— in a world otherwise doomed to confessional debate and Tridentine tyranny—to piety. Such thinking (ripe with potential for paradox, even apparent contradiction) originated in Melanchthon’s split between self-conscious moderation and fierce antiPapalism, and it found its consequence, arguably, in Sidney’s best-known diplomatic engagement as a young man. Scholars are fond of recounting the story of Sidney’s embassy in 1577 to explore the creation of a league between England and Germany’s Protestant princes. As it is conventionally told, the story supplies hard evidence of his ambition to “forward” Elizabeth’s military intervention on behalf of beleaguered co-religionists. While true, that history is badly incomplete, especially when recounted only with an eye to English interests in a defensive league. Equally significant, but mainly forgotten, is the fact that Sidney’s 1577 embassy was planned in response to a perceived crisis afflicting the Reformed church. English bishops followed events on the Continent closely, and addressed with particular urgency the crisis in Saxony leading up to the Formula of Concord—that effort (largely successful) on the part of the GnesioLutherans to wrest control of the German church from Melanchthon’s followers. To English Bishops like Richard Cox, Edmund Grindal, and John Parkhurst—all opponents of the hard-line, ubiquitarian Gnesio-Lutherans—the developing crisis in Germany required Elizabeth’s intervention, and they sought help to that end from Rudolph Gwalther, Bullinger’s successor in Zurich. (Bullinger, the darling of the established English church, was dead by 1576.) The concern of the Elizabethan bishops for the fate of the Reformed in the Empire was both extensive and intense, and that concern registered pragmatically upon Elizabeth’s sympathies— pragmatically, because by dispatching Sidney to Germany with Daniel Rogers, the queen was politically interested in a reconciliation between the warring factions of Reformed Christians and Protestants that would enable a league between the princes (Reformed and Protestant) and England. By pursuing that league, the queen was attempting also to realize one of her father’s unfulfilled ambitions from the 1540s, as he failed repeatedly to persuade Melanchthon to travel to England to negotiate a similar alliance. Ecumenical unity shared the forefront of Sidney’s concerns too. In the aftermath of the embassy, Sidney himself took pains to recount his care during these travels to preach unification among the Reformed—especially where preaching that message counted most. Confronting the newly appointed Elector of the Palatinate, Prince


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Lewis—a Gnesio-Lutheran bitterly opposed to the Philippists and to the Reformed Christians of the Helvetic Confession, and equally embittered toward a brother who favored these moderates—Sidney “was bolde to adde in my speeche, to desyre him in her Majesty’s name to have mercyfull consideration of the church of the religion so notably established by his Father, as in all Jermany there is not suche a number of excellente learned men, and truly woold rue any man to see the desolation of the same.” His letter carries intimations of the Paphlagonian king, Leonatus, and Plexirtus, the tragically divided Gloucester-family of The New Arcadia’s appertif for Shakespeare’s Lear story. August of Saxony’s volte-face had been repeated by Prince Lewis in the Palatinate, and the consequent “desolation” of the church desperately required redress. Once more, upon his return to England, Languet and John Casimir—Lewis’s brother in the Reformed camp—would both remind Sidney (and Sidney’s queen!) about the urgency of a reunion among the churches, just as Greville later highlighted in his biography the significance of ecumenism to Sidney’s mission.25 Elizabeth’s political strategy in arranging Sidney’s embassy was grounded on an assumption central to Languet’s Philippist politics—the notion that unity among the churches (Reformed and Protestant) was the precondition for successful political and military opposition to powerful Catholic opponents. In turn, Sidney was precisely the right choice for this embassy (or so Elizabeth had reason to believe) because of his close association with Languet and the Philippists, with that party clearly identified with the cause of ecumenical reunion.26 25 See Languet to Sidney, 14 June 1577. In the aftermath of the embassy, Languet wrote to Sidney, reporting a “meeting of Protestant princes … at Magdeburg … in which the question of religion will be discussed,” and hoping that “your most gracious Queen” will “send some active agent to this meeting, to set before them the dangers which threaten all who have cast off their allegiance to Rome, if they persist in these contentions, and also to explain how the Papists are encouraging these disputes among us” (p. 107). A chief issue at stake, for Languet and for Sidney, was the unity of the churches. John Casimir sent Sidney a letter in June of 1577 urging the same course of action on Elizabeth; see Nicollier-de Weck, p. 376. Fulke Greville insists, too, in his account of Sidney’s embassy on its double purpose. “The defensive part … helped to support the ruines of our Church abroad,” and “the offensive,” which at “the first sound of that Drum might happily have reconciled those petty dividing Schismes which reign amongst us; not as sprung from any difference of religious Faith, but misty Opinion .…” What the times required most, Greville writes, was a “confident Moderator” (p. 53–4). Sidney’s letter to Walsingham is in Pears, p. 107, ftn. For the conflicts in the Palatinate, see Claus-Peter Clasen, The Palatinate in European History, 1559–1618 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), p. 12–19. 26 Stewart writes that “Sidney was chosen by the queen to signal to the world that this was no more than a courtesy embassy,” p. 167. I am arguing instead that Elizabeth was returning not just to her father’s policy, but also to her father’s piously preferred contacts— Melanchthon was dead, but the Philippists continued his legacy. Sidney was connected to the Philippists, and it was no mere courtesy that motivated Elizabeth’s choice of him. Elizabeth’s piety, itself, is something of a mystery, but educated as she was by Roger Ascham—Sturm’s great friend and admirer—and introduced as a young woman to the Loci, she may well have harbored personal sympathy for the Philippists, so much sympathy (in fact) that among her greatest fears about pursuing Languet’s policy or Sidney’s would have been that of appearing to choose sides in a matter of pious disputes where no sides should exist. Elizabeth refused

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I pause in order to make this point because Sidney’s “forward Protestantism” is comprehensible, in this exemplary instance, only in relation to his fervent anti-confessionalism, and his fierce anti-Papalism, only in relation to his zeal for ecumenical unity. He emerges from the history of that embassy not as the formulaic “forward Protestant” of contemporary scholarship, but instead as Fulke Greville’s “confident Moderator,” the Reformer heroically committed (as militant advocate of anti-Tridentine action) and pastorally dedicated (as ecumenical advocate of Christian unification). 27 Once more, it might be argued, the paradox of those double commitments is mirrored (and abstracted) inside those paradoxical discourses of heroic action and pastoral contemplation, the celebrations of valor and the valuations of quiet, which distinguish at every turn his Arcadian fictions.28 Piety, in turn, for the devoted student of Melanchthon, committed to evangelical unity and the defense of the church, was intimately and inextricably associated with knowledge of the sciences—of history, geography, law, natural and moral philosophy—as well as with the study of good letters, and the acquisition of that definitive skill of humanist learning, the mastery of eloquence in reading and writing. Nicollier-de Weck calls Languet one of sixteenth-century Europe’s more accomplished humanists, a claim whose justification depends—like so much else in his career—on his enormous talents as a facilitator of others’ labors, rather than as an author or actor of his own.29 The longtime facilitator for the Protestant prince was simultaneously a longtime facilitator for the Reformed publisher. Languet’s most constant and most enduring friendship was with Andreas Wechel, whose printing house in Frankfurt became the main vehicle for disseminating the scholarly publications of those Reformed humanists at the center of Languet’s network of associates—George Buchanan, Robert Beale, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, Tomáš to intervene at the assembly of anti-Formula divines originally planned for Magdeburg, and subsequently moved to Frankfurt, because (as Walsingham was instructed to inform Robert Beale) the attack against the Gnesio-Lutherans might “give some cause of doubt that they [the assembled divines] make themselves a partie,” quoted in W. Brown Patterson, “The Anglican Reaction,” in Discord, Dialogue, and Concord: Studies in the Lutheran Reformation’s Formula of Concord, ed. Lewis W. Spitz and Wenzel Lohff (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), p. 160. 27 See Greville, p. 53–4. 28 For a recent, concise account of the precipitating events on the Continent, see Benedict, p. 212–20. On Bullinger’s connections to the Palatinate and his hostility to the Gnesio-Lutherans, see MacCulloch, p. 343–7. For the English reaction to these events, my argument relies on an extensively documented, little noticed essay by W. Brown Patterson that explores Sidney’s 1577 embassy to the German Protestant princes in the context of the response of the Anglican bishops to the crisis leading up to the Formula of Concord, “The Anglican Reaction,” p. 150–66. What is informative about this essay, additionally, is its demonstration that Sidney’s European mission was primarily motivated by English fears about the consequences of the threatened demise of Philippism and the Reformed churches of Germany—that the Philippists, in short, were figures of major concern within the hierarchies of the English church and state during the period between 1574–78. 29 Nicollier-de Weck, p.12. Early in life, Languet lent his writing skills to the compilation of the Centuries, that history of the church organized according to Melanchthon’s loci method for interpreting scripture.


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Jordan, Caspar Peucer, Henri Estienne, Johannes Crato von Crafftheim, and dozens more intellectually elite members of this late sixteenth-century republic of letters. More than Wechel’s friend, Languet acted simultaneously as his editorial advisor, as he sought to enable the publication of books designed first “ad eruditorum hominum studia juvanda” (to facilitate the education of young scholars) and also—with an eye to their pious and political utility—to encourage the knowledge of history.30 Languet never published a book in his own name. He may have had a hand in authoring the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, the controversial tyrannomachist text now thought to have been written mainly by his other favorite pupil, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, Sidney’s friend and role model. But Languet was the chief facilitator in publishing a variety of other texts absolutely central to Sidney’s developing intellectual life. It was Languet who guided through Wechel’s press Camerarius’s Latin translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, with its celebration of that Cyrus who became, in combination with the biblical Cyrus—liberator of the Jews—the single most frequently cited exemplar of heroism in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy. It was Languet, too, who urged the Latin translation and republication of Mornay’s De veritate religionis christianae, the single most comprehensive and erudite expression of the anti-confessional Christianity of his network of associates and the single most important (if misunderstood) guide to the character of Sidney’s piety. And whether or not he authored the volume, it was from Languet that the anti-tyrannical, natural law politics of the Vindiciae contra tyrannos descended as a conceptual inheritance to Mornay and Sidney alike, and that natural law politics—in conjunction with his Philippist-inspired piety and his Philippist-trained principles of reading and writing—is essential matter for appreciating why and how Sidney defends the making of fictions in his poetics.31 Books mattered to Languet and to this distinctive cadre of Reformed humanists because they were both the producers and the products of liberty. Where the muses freely gathered, peace and piety were present too—or so their commitment to the politics of intellectualism inclined them to believe. This is a theme repeated from Henri Estienne’s bibliophilic celebration of Frankfurt’s book fair to Sambucus’s praise for the Vienna of the 1570s: because of Maximilian’s love of religion (“Relligionis amore tui”), Sambucus writes in a dedicatory epistle to his Emblemata, discord has ended (“discordia cesset”) and the civil arts flourish. It is a theme evoked, too, by Sidney’s first extended prose fiction, where the choice of the muses to make Arcadia “their chiefest repairing place” is attributed “to the moderate and well-tempered minds of the people.”32 From a Protestant like August of Saxony or a Catholic like 30 See Nicollier-de Weck, p. 373. 31 Each of these major texts is the subject of critical attention in the chapters that follow: Mornay’s De veritate in Chapter 3, his Vindiciae in Chapter 4, and Camerarius’s edition of the Cyropaedia in the Conclusion. 32 Estienne ends his paean to Frankfurt’s fair with the confidently irenic assertion that “at this Fair, the wars which pertain to the Muses have been increased, and those which pertain to Mars have begun to be lessened or even to disappear altogether,” p. 179, The Frankfort Book Fair: The Francofordiense Emporium of Henri Estienne, trans. James Westfall Thompson (New York: Burt Franklin, 1911). For Sambucus, see Van Dorsten, The Radical Arts, p. 56. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford:

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Maximilian II—from all of the strong princes celebrated by this circle at one time or another—one essential benefit that Languet and his associates hoped to obtain was toleration, the freedom to practice their religion and the freedom to disseminate their ideas. There was little appreciation in that wish for toleration as a good in itself. Sebastian Castellio, that patron-saint of Protestant liberty (and friend to Languet) was distinctly idiosyncratic for advocating toleration of this sort. Baron Von Schwendi, another more cynical apologist for toleration (a politique and friend to Languet), urged toleration as a means to centralize political control in the Empire.33 By contrast, Languet and Mornay valued toleration because it would enable, in the free circulation of ideas, the emergence and triumph of truth—the truth of God’s word and the reunification of bitterly divided confessions. Anti-confessionalists in pursuit of unity among the divided churches of Reformed Europe could not depend solely on military means to preserve their faith. Books mattered as profoundly in securing peace as military preparedness. When Mornay argued for the unfettered circulation of literature by Huguenots as well as Catholics, he did so because where truth is at stake: “le but et le souverain desir de nous tous qu’elle [la verité] soit cognue entre tous.”34 Truth must out and it is desirable for truth to be expressed because of the passionately maintained convictions within this circle about the natural— hence the near-compulsory—power of true ideas to persuade. Freedom from sinful sovereigns depends on freedom from the sovereignty of sin over the mind, and such commitments made writing a powerful vehicle for securing freedom. Whether advanced on behalf of an ecumenical piety or in the service of a tyrannomachist politics, the claim remained constant from the Contra tyrannos to the De veritate religionis christianae: an author accomplishes with arguments drawn from natural law what a mathematician achieves with theorems derived from geometry, the

Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 4. As the brilliantly educated product of a brilliantly connected family—what John Buxton characterizes as the intellectual power elite of Elizabethan England—Sidney is unlikely to have understood his exclusive recourse to manuscript culture as a diminishment of authority or influence. Quite the reverse must have been true. And while the Defence advertises its disdain for “base men” reaping financial rewards from printers, its pointed recommendations for the reform of the national literature—by way of art, imitation, and exercise—openly invite those right wits (Juvenal’s sons of Prometheus), in the wake of such reform, to press forward into print (132). Its admixture of the coterie and the cosmopolitan is distinctive. 33 For various wide-ranging treatments of a complex subject, see Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Distinctions between varieties of views about toleration appear in De Michel de l’Hospital à l’Édit de Nantes: Politique et religion face aux Églises, ed. Thierry Wanegffelen (Blaise-Pascal: Presses Universitaires, 2002). For Von Schwendi, see Louthan, The Quest for Compromise, p. 106–22. See too Sebastian Castellio, Concerning Heretics, trans. Roland H. Bainton (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1935). 34 Remonstrance aux Estats (1576), in Mémoires et correspondance de DuplessisMornay (Paris: Treuttel and Wurtz, 1824–25), vol. 2, 53.


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articulation of certain, demonstrably true ideas whose claims upon the assent of readers are universal.35 Books mattered, then, but not just any sort of book. The anti-confessionalists and tyrannomachists of Languet’s circle were discriminating readers, and their tastes— for reasons that are crucial to appreciate—extended as importantly to manner as to matter, to the method and mode of argumentation as well as to the substance. One exchange of correspondence between Mornay and Languet bears directly upon the issue. Toward the conclusion of a letter preoccupied expansively with larger issues about the writing of history—specifically about Languet’s request that he undertake a history of the true church—Mornay turns in an apparent shift of subjects to consider several newsworthy events, chief among which was the publication of John Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf.36 The Gaping Gulf was published in 1579 as a full-scale public assault against the proposed marriage between that “deere daughter” of the true Church Queen Elizabeth I of England and one of the Continent’s most notorious princely players, the French Catholic Francis, Duke of Anjou. Stubbs’s text is familiar matter for Sidney scholars, who cite it frequently as both a complement and a counterpoint to Sidney’s “Letter to the Queen,” urging her to abandon that same prospective marriage. Its complementary status consists (or so the critical consensus suggests) in the similarity of the arguments advanced, and its counterpoint (to the safety of Sidney’s person!) in the difference of its vehicle of transmission.37 Stubbs lost his hand as the savagely exacted price of publishing views that Sidney wisely chose to circulate more privately, in the widely (but discretely) disseminated form of a letter.38 It has even been maintained that Stubbs was acting as a front-man and hired-gun for powerful members of the privy council, such as Leicester and Walsingham, who may 35 Sidney’s Rhombus, the pedant who garrulously stumbles his way through The Lady of May, is an exemplar of that same geometrical ideal of discourse turned crooked. For Mornay’s claims to a geometrical precision of discourse, see—for example—his Preface to the Reader in the Verité in which he writes: “And what else is all this [argument], than that which is commolie done in Geometrie and Logicke, which by two lines or by two propositions that are commonlie knowen & certeine, do gather a third proposition that was unknowen .… Such are these proofes against the Atheists,” A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion, trans. Sir Philip Sidney [?] and Arthur Golding (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976), n.p. This same geometrical conception of discourse finds expression in Melanchthon’s Ennaratio libri I. ethicorum Aristotelis (1546) in CR 16, 283: “Sed ut in geometricis initia sunt perspicua, ita hic nihil est obscuritatis.” 36 Lettre …à M. Languet, 15 November 1579, Mémoires et correspondance de DuplessisMornay, vol. 2, 80–84. 37 See Leonard Tennenhouse, “Sidney and the Politics of Courtship” in Sidney’s Achievements, p. 201–13, who notes “how closely Sidney’s letter follows the argument of Stubbs’s pamphlet,” p. 205. Susan Doran finds less criticism of the potential husband and more flattery of the potential bride, but agrees that Sidney “followed the line of Stubbs,” Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London and New York; Routledge, 1996), p. 168. Woudhuysen refers to Stubbs’s text as the “companion piece” of Sidney’s letter, the public and popular version of Sidney’s courtly assault, p. 151. 38 Stewart makes much of the contrast in genre between Stubbs’s published pamphlet and Sidney’s private letter, and is inclined, like Duncan-Jones (p. 163), to attribute Sidney’s freedom from serious reprisal to that generic difference (p. 218).

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have armed him with arguments fresh from the fray of council-level discussions.39 In turn, Sidney scholars are equally familiar with Languet’s anxieties about Philip’s fate in hazarding his political future by opposing Elizabeth’s marriage to Anjou, and with his relief at discovering (as Greville’s biography maintains, too) his protégé’s escape from serious reprisal or disfavor.40 What is strangely unfamiliar to Sidney scholars—and peculiarly revealing—is that Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf was also matter for commentary between Mornay and Languet, and little about the character of that commentary suggests anything like the current scholarly consensus about how to understand the relationship between these two anti-marriage texts.41 Stubbs was clearly one of les notres, one of our own, to use Languet’s frequent locution. His fate was clearly horrifying to his coreligionists on the Continent. Mornay expressly condemns the unworthiness of his punishment, even as he submerses Anjou and the whole marriage project (with its phoney pretensions to the procuration of peace) in scalding irony. Just as clearly, however, the publication of Stubbs’s text was regarded as undesirable, even as an embarrassment to the cause, “car les libelles fameux ne se doibvent pas ainsi mettre à tous les jours” (for notorious pamphlets should not in this manner be spread abroad).42 It is the rhetorical excess of Stubbs’s polemic that troubled Mornay, and that he took for granted that Languet would abhor equally. After all, the Gaping Gulf is dedicated to the incendiary proposition that Elizabeth’s marriage to a French Catholic is sin, and that “the high sin of a highest magistrate, done and avowed in open sun, [shall] kindle the wrath of God and set fire on church and commonweal.”43 In terms all too easy to be construed as a threat of rebellion against a Reformed sovereign, Stubbs asks: “think you, I say, that the Church will easily depart with … Elizabeth the Queen of England … and will not hold her fast in her loving arms as being loath to give her to a stranger?”44 Stubbs’s xenophobia played badly for the Burgundian and the Frenchman, as did what had become quite literally the out-ofcourt biblicism of his over-heated rhetorical fulminations. When Mornay turns late in his letter to Languet to comment upon Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf, the shift in subjects is apparent rather than real. His interest in Stubbs is occasioned, to be sure, by the newsworthiness of the events surrounding his 39 For a concise account of the complex political events surrounding the publication of Stubbs’s work and the circulation of Sidney’s letter, see Peter Beal, “Philip Sidney’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth and that ‘False Knave’ Alexander Dicsone,” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 11 (January 2002), 1–51. 40 See Greville, p. 74, and Stewart—Sidney’s most reliable recent biographer—p. 220. Languet to Sidney, 22 October 1580 in Pears, p. 187. See Steven May for a concise argument that Sidney retained Elizabeth’s favor from 1577 until his death, whatever his own suspicions to the contrary, “Sir Philip Sidney and Queen Elizabeth,” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 2 (1990), 257–68. 41 Worden notes the opposition to Stubbs’s tract (as “an imprudent act of provocation”) within Languet’s circle, but does not pause to question the reasons for it, p.114. 42 Lettre …à M. Languet, vol. 2, 83. 43 John Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf with Letters and Other Relevant Documents, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1968), p. 20. 44 Stubbs, p. 8.


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text’s publication. It is occasioned too by his knowledge of Sidney’s involvement in the controversy over Elizabeth’s marriage to Anjou. However, the real reason to discuss Stubbs is provided by the full context of a letter that is about how best to devise a pragmatic—an eloquent and politically serviceable—means of writing that could enable the restoration of the true religion. Stubbs’s partisanship is not a digression. On the contrary, it is an illustration about the perils of mismanaging the dissemination of ideas in a culture where polemicism can have no consequence except to exacerbate the very confessional divisions whose proliferation militates against the triumph of the church. Johann Sleidan’s phenomenally popular history of the Schmalkaldan Wars might be piously intentioned, as Mornay argues at length in the same letter to Languet, but it is useless for moving minds—and in a world torn apart by confessional divisions, moving minds was the whole point, hoc opus, hic labor est. Stubbs’s partisanship punctuates an extended meditation (as Chapter 3 will detail) about the relative merits of various sciences as vehicles for communicating truth. Mornay’s animadversions upon that partisanship illustrate, too, the highly sophisticated awareness among Sidney’s closest friends and intellectual associates of a public domain inside which the circulation of texts—in manuscript as well as in print—carries a persuasive, even at times a determinative power to influence events in the larger realm of international politics. Ideas matter in an ideological world, and correspondingly, how one chooses among methods and modes for articulating those ideas became a subject of urgent, focused and sustained intellectual attention. This is not to import Jürgen Habermas’s conceptual machinery of the public sphere into sixteenth-century Europe—with all its potentially misleading, potentially anachronistic associations from the culture of the Enlightenment—but rather to substitute a more modest, more historically specific locution capable of highlighting the demonstrable consciousness of a public domain inside Sidney’s circle. Such a domain was conceived as a contested communications space of real pious and political consequence for waging a campaign against confessional warfare. As a product of that consciousness, Sidney’s “Letter to the Queen” could never have been mistaken for (current scholarship to the contrary) Stubbs’s-argument-discretely-published. Its status as an unpublished “private” letter (designed for public circulation at court and among friends) does speak clearly about his finesse in accommodating political rhetoric to the demands of his political world. The important point, however, lies elsewhere. As if copied from the template of Mornay’s logic, Sidney’s “Letter” turns from partisan polemic (always the ally of contemporary political history!) to the philosophical matter and rhetorical method of natural law discourse in order to construct his appeal to Elizabeth. Sidney’s “Letter to the Queen” retained its popularity among his writings—it was his most frequently copied piece of occasional prose—long after the polemical occasion for which it was designed, and it is reasonable to assume that it did so in no small part because of the startling contrast between its mode and matter of argumentation and Stubbs’s inept, impractical and out-of-court fulminations.45 Sidney provided his English 45 See Stubbs’s contempt for “smooth, delicate words” against “plain, rough truth” (p. 30), and his recognition (and rejection) of alternative modes of discourse appealing to

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contemporaries—and they knew it at once—with a means of speaking truth to power because of his domestication of a newly fashionable, cosmopolitan version of the language and logic of natural law.46

“the best politic” that might advance “sufficient authority” from “deliberating”—deliberating of the sort found in Machiavelli or, for that matter, in Sidney (p. 39). For the popularity of Sidney’s manuscript, see Beal, 1 and Woudhuysen, p.152. More than 20 copies of the manuscript are extant, several of them from the early seventeenth century. Why? The Anjou marriage was nearly a dead issue six months after the events that occasioned Sidney’s letter. Beal attributes the letter’s continuing popularity to the “abidingly relevant” character of its “political lessons,” 35. Pragmatism trumps morality every time, and I think it more likely that the letter found an audience because of its mode of argument. When Languet wrote to express his relief that his pupil suffered so little by writing against Anjou, he commented on the letter briefly, and with the perfectly arch response of the teacher who is both pleased and eager to provoke better results: no fair person can criticize you for arguing on behalf of your country’s good, “nor even for exaggerating some circumstances, in order to convince them of what you judged expedient” (Languet to Sidney, p. 187). Always the teacher with an eye to mode and manner, Languet critiques the letter’s moments of rhetorical excess. 46 A more precise definition of that cosmopolitan language—and its relevance to the articulation of Sidney’s poetic theory—unfolds in later chapters about the piety and politics of the Defence. See Worden for a contrasting argument. He interprets the “Letter” as part of the story of Sidney’s supposed disgrace and exile from court as a young “forward Protestant” compelled by his powerful uncle Leicester to risk (and possibly destroy his career) by opposing Elizabeth’s marriage plan, p. 42. Worden is wrong about Elizabeth’s reprisal, and probably wrong about Leicester’s leading role in urging Sidney’s composition of the letter. As Beal indicates, Walsingham—Languet’s longtime friend and political associate—appears to have taken the lead in organizing the opposition, 34. Worden is clearly right to argue that Sidney was “urged” to oppose the marriage plan by persons “who either did not know into what peril they were thrusting [him], or did not care for [his] danger, provided they effected their own object,” (Languet’s words, p. 187), but he neglects evidence that Sidney put “forward freely what [he] thought good for [his] country,” even when writing for “those whom [he was] bound to obey,” p. 187. Greville, too, highlights Sidney’s letter as a free exercise of thought: “In this freedome, even while the greatest spirits, and Estates seemed hood-winkt, or blind … did he enjoy the freedome of his thoughts, with all recreations worthy of them,” p. 74. Sidney’s pride in his accomplishment is reflected by his care in sending a copy of his letter to George Buchanan, the internationally famous Scottish humanist closely tied to Languet’s circle (Beal, 20). Worden asserts that Sidney and his circle regarded Elizabeth as a tyrant, and his composition as a tragically imposed burden. By contrast, I am arguing that Sidney escaped Stubbs’s fate in part because of the liberty granted to gentlemen to speak; in part, because he chose to speak in an unpublished letter; and in part, because he knew, due to his education among the Philippists, how to employ a political language and logic—the discourse of natural law—that would command respect at court. Sidney had confidence in the power of his own eloquence to persuade inside a public domain where he could assume the liberty to write. Elizabeth needed persuading, but there is no evidence to believe that either Sidney or his circle regarded the queen as a tyrant. As Nicollier-de Weck indicates, Languet saw England as the only country in Europe that enjoyed the benefits of justice and the peaceful practice of the true religion, and his opposition to the Anjou marriage derived from his hope of seeing those benefits maintained, p. 431.


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The public domain includes, first, as Peter Lake and Michael Questier argue, messages transmitted through “a variety of media,” from traditionally elite vehicles (Latin correspondence or scribally produced manuscripts) to the “full gamut of print” (from chapbooks, inexpensive tracts, and official proclamations to the costly publications of the great printing houses), to “public performances of a variety of types (sermons, show trials, disputations, executions), and rumors—to an ultimately uncontrollably general audience.” Second, the existence of a public domain presupposes that “the message sending or case making in question is legitimated either explicitly or implicitly in terms of some general public interest defined socially (as in appeals to the commonwealth), religiously (as in appeals to true religion), or politically (as in appeals to the nation, or … interests of the monarch …).” Third, the message broadcast “is framed in terms of generally knowable criteria of truth or interest, thus assuming and, in a sense, calling into being a public both legitimately interested in and able to consider and even to decide (in terms of such criteria of truth and common interest) the question or issue at hand.” Most important, Lake and Questier highlight the public domain as a space inside which “rules of entry” were continuously contested.47 While on the one hand, such contests carried to the foreground criteria of access, since access was always unequally distributed (according to the power of the potential participants), on the other, such contests highlighted issues about criteria of play, those communication codes that the domain required for its messages to circulate properly. At issue in the debate about Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf, then, among the members of Sidney’s closest circle, were concerns about its violation of the “rules of entry”—not about criteria of access (Lord Burghley fumed over Stubbs’s audacity in instructing the queen about marriage, not Philippe Duplessis-Mornay), but rather about criteria of play, its plainly inept brand of rhetorical fulmination. What Lake and Questier’s account of the public domain highlights so clearly is the motivation for Mornay’s concerns expressed in his letter to Languet. If the very existence of a public domain requires, as they indicate, the legitimation of messages by reference to some general public interest, defined socially, politically, or religiously, then Stubbs’s plain partisanship—his zealous biblicism, anti-Papal bigotry, and xenophobic melodrama—could only be understood by this circle as inappropriate to the demands of public discourse, which in order to be genuinely public, had to cross party-political lines between opposing confessions as well as opposing nationalities. Once more, 47 Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Puritans, Papists, and the ‘Public Sphere’ in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context,” The Journal of Modern History 72 (September 2000), 587–627, esp. 589–90, 623–5. I have adapted my conception of the public domain from the arguments of Lake and Questier, and expanded that domain to suit the cosmopolitan world of Sidney’s practical concerns. For a study of the concept in its original formulation, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989). For a different employment of the concept of the “public sphere” in relation to the popular press, see Alexandra Halasz, The Market Place of Print: Pamplets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997). See too A.E.B. Coldiron, “Public Sphere/Contact Zone: Häbermas, Early Print, and Verse Translation,” Criticism 46, no. 2 (Spring, 2004), 207–22.

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if the public domain requires additionally, as Lake and Questier indicate, that the criteria for the expressed interests be “knowable”—subject to generally recognized standards of what counts as knowledge—then Stubbs’s failure to appeal to some universally accessible realm of norms, capable of logical definition and available to persuasive argumentation, would simultaneously have signaled inside this circle his violation of those rules of entry. For Mornay and Languet, as for Sidney, those norms of religious and political argument were thought to derive properly from a newly revived logic of natural law, just as those norms were believed to obtain their proper expression in discourse whose body has been chastened from partisan passions—a Lucretia freed from historical tyranny—or, to introduce the argument less metaphorically, in discourse disciplined by what this study will call the sixteenthcentury’s new hermeneutic. A “more ordinary opening”: Introducing the Defence To use Sidney’s own language, a “more ordinary opening” of discussion about the Defence of Poesy would seek to locate its argument, as earlier generations of critics have done, in a history of poetics. As a coterie text designed for a highly literate audience, the Defence demands, as it repays, sustained attention to its cosmopolitan allusiveness. Joel Spingarn was among the first to “disclose” the sources of Sidney’s thought in Italian criticism (complete with tabloid-style surprise about its acts of intellectual piracy); Kenneth Myrick undertook detailed, scholarly analyses of Sidney’s debts as a literary craftsman, especially to Scaliger and Minturno, among those same Italians; and S.K. Heninger has provided more recently a comprehensive account of Sidneian mimesis in relation to those multiple metamorphoses of the concept of imitation from classical to contemporary Continental and English theory.48 48 Spingarn once called the Defence “a veritable epitome of the literary criticism of the Italian Renaissance” and Sidney’s extensive reading in that criticism is indisputable, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1899), p. 268. For an early critic who takes Sidney’s poetics seriously as a guide to his fiction-making (and Sidney’s fiction-making seriously as evidence of his dedication to poetry as a vocation, elected or otherwise), see Kenneth Myrick’s Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965). The most comprehensive treatment of the Defence in relation to the history of poetics is S.K. Heninger’s Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1989). See also Heninger’s “Sidney and Serranus’s Plato,” in Sidney in Retrospect: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 27–44. Heninger’s Aristotelian reading of Sidney has a complement in Kathy Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986) and Robert Coogan, “The Triumph of Reason: Sidney’s Defense and Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” Papers on Literature and Language 17 (1981), 255–70. For an account of Sidney’s debts to Aristotle and Plato, see D.H. Craig, “A Hybrid Growth: Sidney’s Theory of Poetry in An Apology for Poetry,” in Sidney in Retrospect, p. 62–80. See also Irene Samuel, “The Influence of Plato on Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy,” Modern Language Quarterly 1 (1940), 383–91 and Anthony Miller, “Sidney’s Apology for Poetry and Plutarch’s Moralia,” English Literary Renaissance 17 (1987), 259–75.


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Recovering Sidney’s engagements with the history of poetics is always potentially productive, and my own study will insist on the formative impact of his education in Philippist oratory—in Melanchthon’s rhetorical and dialectical thought—upon those notions about reading and writing at the core of his argument. Sidney sojourned in Florence and Venice, but he got there by way of Strasbourg and Vienna. A “more ordinary opening” of discussion about the Defence would insist, too, on locating the text in a history of ideas. Sidney anticipates a degree of conceptual sophistication from his readers that reflects again his construction of a coterie work. It makes sense, therefore, that the Defence’s best and most influential critics have been those who engage seriously the conceptual complexities of his argument. Forrest G. Robinson long ago called attention to its visualist epistemology as a product of late sixteenth-century Ramism, and is still useful in teasing out the significance of Sidney’s speaking pictures of virtue and vice (101). In another context, Ronald Levao has imagined a dialogue between the intellectual gamesmanship of Nicholas of Cusa and Sidney’s rhetorical posturing, and challenges comparison between Cusa’s art of conjecture and the deconstructive logic that he imports (mistakenly, as I will argue) into the Defence. In a dense and luminous essay, John C. Ulreich has traced Sidney’s syncretic account of the poet’s “Ideas” through the labyrinthine highways and byways of Platonic and Aristotelian epistemology.49 Examples of similar studies are easy to multiply. However, with the decline of “history of ideas,” post-Foucault, critical interest in defining Sidney’s terms of art—his conceptually packed notions about the “Idea,” about “scope,” the “foreconceit,” the distinct orders of “nature,” or notions about the “notable”—has nearly disappeared from scholarly radar. As a means of putting those terms back into critical play—and along with them, the centrality of Sidney’s hermeneutic and epistemological assumptions to the fashioning of his poetics—my study will appeal once more to his education by Languet and the Philippists, and to his intellectual friendship with Mornay. My primary emphasis, however, is elsewhere. In place of the more usual openings—of situating the Defence inside a history of poetics or a history of ideas—my study introduces Sidney’s text in relation to the public domain as it was conceived by his closest circle of friends. In large part it does 49 Forrest G. Robinson, The Shape of Things Known: Sidney’s Apology in its Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972); Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985); and John C. Ulreich, “‘The Poets Only Deliver’: Sidney’s Conception of Mimesis,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 15 (1982), 67–84. Also helpful on Sidney and Ramus is John Webster, “Temple’s Neo-Latin Commentary on Sidney’s Apology: Two Strategies for a Defense,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bononiensis, ed. Richard J. Schoeck (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1985), p. 317–24. For Sidney’s visual poetics, see too Clark Hulse, The Rule of Art: Literature and Painting in the Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), and Lawrence C. Wolfley, “Sidney’s Visual-Didactic Poetic: Some Complexities and Limitations,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1976), 217–42. See, too, A.C. Hamilton’s reading of the Defence as a “manifesto” justifying Sidney’s turn to fiction-making as a means of realizing intellectual and ethical ambitions, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of his Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), p. 17 and Mack’s study of the Defence in relation to ideas of human creativity from the patristics to the Romantics.

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so because this is precisely how Sidney himself chooses to highlight the scope— the main point and purpose—of fiction-making within the text’s most memorable moment, the argumentatively central account of the poet’s making of golden worlds. As Sidney prepares to defend his characterization of the poet as a maker and the value of poetic making, he locates his discourse not in relation to a history of poetics (not by comparison or contrast to rival accounts of fiction-making, Plato to Scaliger) and still less in relation to an abstract philosophical question (questions about meaning or the mind, for example), but instead he fashions his defense much more pragmatically by comparing poetry as a species of knowledge to rival sciences, to the traditionally valued disciplines of geometry and arithmetic, music and astronomy, law and history, moral and natural philosophy, physics and metaphysics. The Defence begins its main work by waging war among the muses. The point to highlight at once is that Sidney conducts that warfare by consciously and conspicuously modeling his introductory argument upon the introduction to what was perhaps the single best-known primer for the humanistically educated elite of sixteenth-century Europe, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Like Aristotle’s, Sidney’s argument assumes the shape of a contest among arts and sciences. Like Aristotle’s, Sidney’s argument assumes a rigorously teleological form since, again, like Aristotle’s, Sidney’s gives as that goal or target to which the arrow of argumentative logic must fly, the success of a so-called master science in achieving what one calls “the Good of man, … the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue,” and the other “the ending end of all earthly learning, … virtuous action” (104).50 Aristotle’s argument culminates quickly in the conclusion that the master science among sciences (what he calls architectonic knowledge) is politics, the practical knowledge about how best to govern private and public life. Audaciously and without precedent, Sidney argues instead for poetry as the “princely” science for promoting virtuous action within the always interconnected spheres of personal and political governance. In the space where politics reigns for Aristotle, Sidney inserts poetry, and thereby establishes at the crucial moment of the Defence’s argument poetry’s claim as a species of discourse preeminently valuable to the public domain. This study is hardly the first to attribute public and political motivations to Sidney’s poetics. Since the 1980s, new historicists and cultural materialists have regularly interrogated the Defence for evidence of its ideological labor, especially its labors on behalf of Sidney’s frequently cited Protestant activism. Margaret Ferguson has meditated at length on the text’s autobiographical display of aristocratic grumbling, its reflection of activism disappointed. Edward Berry has portrayed the Defence as “a treatise on poetry” transformed “into a call for arms.” Sidney is a “warrior-poet, whose legitimacy as a defense attorney derives from his ultimate allegiance not to poetry but to military action.” With an eye to social context, Robert Matz has claimed that his poetics seek to harmonize a militant Protestant activism 50 The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1947), p. 33. In 1578, Languet facilitated the publication of one additional book from Wechel’s Press, the commentary of Joachim Camerarius the Elder, Ethicorum Aristotelis Nicomachiorum explicatio.


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with “a nostalgic version of feudal warrior service.”51 In more sustained and more substantial arguments, Blair Worden has interpreted Sidney’s account of fictionmaking as a theoretical primer for what he represents as the topical allegorizing of The Old Arcadia (“forward Protestant” in its ideology, and anti-Anjou in its intent), and Alan Sinfield (the most influential Sidney scholar of the 1990s) interprets its poetics as the Tudor complement of Soviet-style propagandizing on behalf of a powerful Puritan faction at court.52 Worden and Sinfield deserve and receive (in later chapters) more extensive treatment than this introduction can afford them. Mentioning them here permits brief introductory distinctions between my approach to the politics of Sidney’s Defence and the historicizing critical work that has come before. Some of those distinctions should already be apparent. First, in a departure from the pervasive Anglo-centric focus of Sidney scholarship, the Defence emerges here at once as a cosmopolitan text informed by the values of a distinct, international body of Reformed humanists (the Philippists) and simultaneously as a text designed consequently to challenge at multiple levels—poetic, religious, and political—the tyranny of the provincial, the polemical and the merely partisan. Its tyrannomachy—its assumed political predisposition about the rightness of deposing tyrants—complements Sidney’s well-known forward Protestantism, even as its anti-confessional piety lends to the Defence a more complex, more tolerant, more ecumenically inclusive vision of public life than scholars have hitherto acknowledged. Throughout his career, Sidney is responsive both to heroic images of virtuous action 51 Margaret W. Ferguson makes Sidney’s vocational struggles a mirror for readers invited to “find themselves figured in [its] images,” Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), p. 156. Edward Berry represents Sidney as a man “Trained for war, and reduced to writing poetry,” attempting desperately to vindicate “the vanishing ideals of his class,” The Making of Sir Philip Sidney (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 159, 161–2. See Robert Matz, Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), p. 86–7. Richard C. McCoy reads the Sidney of the Defence in confident contrast to the irreconcilably conflicted author of the fictional works, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1979), p. 94–7. See Mary Ellen Lamb on the Defence’s anxious association of pleasure with femininity and its power to undermine virility, “Apologizing for Pleasure in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry: The Nurse of Abuse Meets the Tudor Grammar School,” Criticism 36 (1994), 499–519. 52 Worden argues that the Defence “pleads a case which its author half believes,” p. 10. In order to represent Sidney as a zealous proponent of a factional politics, Anglo-Protestant, fiercely anti-Catholic, and committed at every turn to “heroic” (i.e. military) action, Worden is compelled to explain away the persistent positive valuations of pastoral quiet that permeate the vocabulary of the Arcadia in its multiple versions. Tranquility of mind and concord in the state are commonplaces regularly celebrated by Sidney and his circle (see The Old Arcadia’s first paragraph), and such “commonplaces” mattered to this community of Philippists in no small part because of their ethical/political/pious commitments to the language and logic of natural law. (See Chapter 4 for a full discussion of the point.) “Faction” is an anachronistic term for English politics in the 1570s and 80s. For a critical response to Worden’s topical, allegorical interpretation of tyranny in the Arcadias, see Robert E. Stillman, “Allegory, Poetry, and History in Sidney’s Arcadia,” Sidney Journal 16, no. 2 (1997), 80–85. For Alan Sinfield’s critical perspective on Sidney’s poetics, see Faultlines.

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(Aeneas cradling old Anchises in his arms) and to pastoral valuations of quiet (Nathan’s tale of the beloved lamb), and it is important to recall that the heroic Cyrus idealized in the Defence is also a pastoral construct from the golden world garden of the wit. “Forward Protestant” is too narrow a category inside which to confine the Philippist Sidney, and England too limited a cultural territory within which to boundary his argument. Sidney chose to write his Defence in English and explicitly addresses himself in the well-known digression about the state of English poetry to the reformation of that state, but he does so, characteristically, by recommending the remedial application of art, imitation and exercise—the application of those principles that he acquired in his own cosmopolitan education abroad. Second, in a departure from the “presentism” of so much contemporary criticism, with its too-easy allegorizing of historically prior texts according to current political interests, Sidney’s Defence is approached here as work whose history needs recovery much more crucially than what is sometimes called interrogation. Sidney’s ties to the Philippists are not simply unexplored, they are altogether unknown. No full understanding of his canon at large or his poetics in particular is likely in the absence of knowledge about a community that contributed so massively to his education, and recovering such knowledge is a primary scholarly need. Critical discourse about Sidney and “Protestantism” or Sidney and “Protestant politics,” or Sidney and “humanism”—conducted on the assumption that such terms have stable meanings, subject to essentializing, dictionary-style definitions—results in history as predictable as its terminology. Recovering the particularity of Sidney’s ties to his Philippist community of associates—to the complications, paradoxes, and nuances of thought and action linked to that specific community—is an effort to recover for the past some portion of the particularity that gives it meaning. Historicism without historical context is just bad history. Third, less apparently perhaps but no less significantly, the political import of the Defence is conceived here differently because of the prominence assigned to Sidney’s consciousness of the public domain. Such consciousness is explored best in relation neither to the text’s infrequent topical references nor to its expressions of public principle. For Sidney, questions about modes of expression and species of knowledge are from the start fraught with pious and political significance. Manner counts as well as matter. Always conscious that the circulation of texts carries public consequence—that ideas matter in an ideological world—and conscious, too, about the perils of partisanship within a confessional age—that self-love is tyranny— Sidney constructs his defense of fiction-making as a member of an intellectual community urgently in pursuit of some means of representing Ideas that would at once disable tyranny and foster confessional harmony. Sidney’s preoccupation with the public domain demanded that he defend poetry as politically useful, just as his perception about the urgent challenges extending from that domain (the peril of new Phalarises, the ineptitude of simple Stubbses) motivated this unanticipated defense of fiction-making as a response to such challenges. It is worth indicating from the start that his friends, Languet (whose passion was for history) and Mornay (whose love was for philosophy) would have been more than a little confounded by Sidney’s


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triumphant claims on behalf of his own muse, poetry. If the best in poetry originates from arguments with ourselves, then perhaps the best in poetics finds its beginnings in arguments—real or imaginary—among friends.

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Chapter 1

“Famous preachers and teachers”: Mediating the Cause Taking Form: Philippist Representations of Philip Melanchthon Richard Robinson rightly anticipated Philip Sidney’s pleasure in having a volume of Melanchthon’s prayers dedicated to him because he knew about Sidney’s studies abroad. Godly Prayers would have been familiar matter for students of that Reformer whom Johann Sturm called “the father of most educated men,” and even for the students of those Philippist students.1 Lines of paternity counted among these educators. Sturm identified himself as Melanchthon’s student, and, in the spring of 1573, Sturm became not coincidentally the first of Sidney’s teachers on the Continent. Once more, Sturm assumed that role at Strasbourg’s Academy because of the intercession of Sidney’s mentor Hubert Languet, himself the disciple of Philip Melanchthon. (Sturm’s Academy was internationally famous for its ecumenical openness—the sons of both Catholic and Reformed gentry studied there, just as it became infamous as a breeding ground for tyrannomachy: John Calvin, Peter Martyr, Theodore Beza , François Hotman and Sidney all sharpened their pens inside its walls.) Ever the darling of old men—think of the attention lavished on him by Charles de l’Écluse, Henri Estienne, Francis Walsingham, William of Orange, in addition to the all-too-absent Henry Sidney—Philip possessed in abundance that signal luxury of youth, the promise of renewal.2 Reformed Christians in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre had great need of renewal, especially that body of Christians who looked to Melanchthon as the “father” of their cause, and who longed to educate new sons in it. Taking his cue from the Loci communes, the best known of Melanchthon’s religious works and the first methodical guide to Reformed theology, Robinson opens his dedicatory epistle to Godly Prayers with a characteristically non-sectarian, quietly non-dogmatic meditation about how God chooses to make himself present to “the inward eye of eche faythfull minde.”3 No attempt is made to engage in theological disputation. Instead, a rhetorically expansive analogy from nature

1 “Johann Sturm to Michael Beuther,” 1565, p. 291. 2 Their birth years are as follows: Henry Sidney (1524), Charles de l’Écluse (1526), Henri Estienne (1528), Francis Walsingham (c. 1530), and William of Orange (1533). Sidney’s teachers, Sturm (1507) and Languet (1518), were the oldest of the old men. 3 Godly Prayers, p. ii (verso). See Bellucci on light in Melanchthon’s natural philosophical and theological texts, p. 229–34. Light is material and spiritual, splendid evidence of the son’s (sun’s) real presence in nature and the mind.

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concerning the sun’s light affords a logical departure for reflecting about how we best arrive at a knowledge of God. Natural law is the source of moral, metaphysical, even theological knowledge, and the world, both for Melanchthon and his Philippist students, a transparent book piously accommodated to pragmatic ends.4 The “howto” quality of the text matters, as the extended title of Godly Prayers makes plain, reminding readers that the prayers are “to be used” in securing what Melanchthon calls in his Loci the practical benefits of Christ—his presence among the faithful. In one especially interesting translation, Melanchthon’s theology of presence is reproduced by a poetry of presence. Robinson’s translation of a versification of The Lord’s Prayer by Victorinus Strigelius, among the more internationally famous of Melanchthon’s students, contains a central stanza that begins with this invocation:5 Kindle our mindes with the true light, And lightnesse of thy kingdome bright: That here begin amongst us may, The golden worlde of life for ay.

This is not great poetry. In fact, Robinson prefers to call himself in this work and elsewhere “a humble and faythfull Oratour” rather than a poet, after the example of Melanchthon’s lifelong celebration of sacra oratio, the preeminent power of dialectic and rhetoric. Since an oratio is also a prayer, his self-characterization puns wittily on the subject matter. But great poetry or not, Robinson’s stanza is certainly suggestive, first, because it speaks to the customary harmony maintained in Philippist humanism between faith and eloquence, piety and poetry, and suggestive, too, especially for Sidney’s readers, since Robinson’s verse, “The golden worlde of life for ay,” resonates so teasingly with the golden world of the Defence—as an idealized microcosm, an interior landscape of the mind made present through poetry.6 Robinson’s choice of verbs matters too. “Kindle” is precisely the right term to employ in asking God to light those sparks (igniculos) of divine goodness innate within the mind. When Sidney complains to Languet about his own lack of employment in the cause, he questions the value of the mind’s divinely implanted sparks “nisi locus illius exercendae detur,” [unless some place (some opportunity or cause) for exercizing them is given]. Epistemology recapitulates theology by virtue of an intellectual paternity. Sidney, too, speaks of a mind equipped with divine 4 See Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), who is especially helpful in pointing to distinctions in his thought between nature and grace, Law and Gospel. 5 Godly Prayers, p. 65 (verso). 6 For Melanchthon’s success in stimulating the outpouring of neo-Latin literature in Germany (1540–1620), see Manfred P. Fleischer, “Melanchthon as Praeceptor of LateHumanist Poetry,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 4 (1989), esp. 577–8, where he writes about the enormous popularity among these Philippist poets, such as Melissus, Sabinus, and Lotichius, of what he calls “the all-embracing metaphor” of German late-humanism, the golden world topos. See also the highly nationalistic celebration of German poetry in the extended preface to Crato’s edition of Epigrammatum Reverendi Viri Philippi Melanthonis Libri Sex, and the central role accorded to Melanchthon in encouraging its development.

“Famous preachers and teachers”: Mediating the Cause

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sparks—the mind itself, a particle of the divine mind—just as he longs for some purpose, some locus (the geographical-rhetorical-intellectual term assuming here teleological significance) to ignite that spark in the service of the cause. No wonder Languet was so pleased by the analogy. Son passing to another son flames from the father.7 Beyond seeking to secure God’s presence to the inward eye of faithful minds, Robinson’s Philippist text engages in an equally characteristic celebration of his presence within “his militant Church upon earth, and faythful congregations dispersed throughout the whole worlde.”8 Robinson could depend on Sidney’s pleasure in receiving translations of Melanchthon’s pious personal devotions, just as he could feel confident about his patron’s public and political support of the cause—the triumph of Reformed Christianity over its enemies in the Tridentine church. Robinson’s politics are internationalist, apocalyptic, and simultaneously patriotic. For both in his dedicatory epistle to Godly Prayers and more extensively in his translation of Melanchthon’s politically important history of the church, De ecclesiae autoritate, Robinson details the historical continuity between the Protestant church of Germany and the English church under Elizabeth. Considered properly—considered, that is, from the ecumenical vantage that Melanchthon’s history supplies—the two churches have common cause. As Robinson writes in the dedicatory letter to his translation of De ecclesiae autoritate:9 And agayne, as Germany hath bin a natural nurse to the universal dispersed and afflicted church of the gospel long agone, so have wee in England greate cause (praying God for both their prosperous estates at this day) to imbrace & commemorate the doynges of such godly learned fathers there living, as have bin & yet are sound faythful furtherers of Gods glory, & constant friends of that truth, which we also now professe.

To recount Melanchthon’s efforts to use his learning in the service of the cause, in addressing his prince at Ratisbone in 1541 on behalf of the Reformed church is not to recover a foreign or distant history. Rather, Melanchthon’s “doynges” are commemorated as a fatherly example for the present, an example continued by living “faythful furtherers” whose labors supply still more examples to the benefit of the English church. Paternity counts. The Imperial Diet at Regensburg (Ratisbone) began as an effort to unite the disparate confessions of Christendom. At the outset, Melanchthon even managed to craft an agreement about the meaning of original sin with Johann Eck, that aging defender of Catholic doctrine with whom Luther had 7 Sidney to Hubert Languet, March 1578, in The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1912–26), vol. 3, 119. For Languet’s pleasure in the remark, see Languet to Sidney, 2 May 1578, in Pears, p. 147: “Make use then of that particle of the Divine Mind (as you beautifully express it) which you possess, for the preservation and not the destruction of men.” 8 Godly Prayers, p. iii (verso), epistle. 9 Ralph Keen reads the text as an address both to reform-minded Catholics and to Protestant princes and theologians in “Political Authority and Ecclesiology in Melanchthon’s ‘De Ecclesiae Autoritate’,” Church History 65, no. 1 (March 1996), 1–14. A Godly and learned Assertion, Epistle Dedicatory, n. p.

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debated furiously at Leipzig in 1519. The Diet ended, predictably, in confessional disagreement and disarray—but that ending is not Robinson’s principal concern.10 To use Robinson’s language, the summum bonum for Philippists is the triumph of the church—a church open to ecumenical compromise, but militant in defense of essential matters of doctrine—and it is a triumph depending always on the support of strong princes. As Melanchthon solicited “the Godly renowned Prince and defender of the truthe, Albertus Duke of Prusse” to aid the cause of Reformed Christianity, so Elizabeth is praised both as “the principall ornament of her owne house,” and “a light of excellent comfort unto the faithfull throughout all Christendome.”11 Robinson’s principal concern is liberty. When Robinson’s translation of Strigelius’s Lord’s Prayer concludes, he prays that “when due time shall requere,” God will our souls “Set free.”12 Godly Prayers figures as an historically specific illustration of Sidney’s continuing ties to an international body of Philippists. It matters, too, as a locus in which to note briefly the moderate, inward-looking piety of Philippist humanism, its resistance to theological disputation and the tempered optimism of its natural theology. But Robinson’s translation of Strigelius matters, also, because it is a reminder from the outset of what I will call the “mediated” character of Sidney’s Philippism. Melanchthon is remembered in the Defence as a poet, as a preacher and a teacher, and he is recommended in Philip’s letter to his brother Robert as a distinguished chronicler of universal history, but it is simply not possible to know how many or which of his works Sidney read or studied.13 Much of what he knew about Melanchthon came to him second-hand from Languet and his circle. Such mediation matters because in the “second-hand” quality of that Philippist piety reflected importantly in the Defence, Sidney was the student of a reforming, cosmopolitan, intellectually elite Christianity that enhanced considerably the optimistic account of human agency espoused by the later Melanchthon.14 One small illustration must do in preparing for the larger argument. A prayer to God to set us free is sufficiently innocent in itself. But when that prayer belonged to Victorinus Strigelius, internationally famous for publicly debating and espousing the freedom of the will to cooperate with God’s grace in the work of salvation—for being what his enemies termed a “synergist”—a call for freedom, it is reasonable to 10 Just as predictably, Robinson mentions nothing about the failure of the Diet at Ratisbone (1541) to achieve meaningful compromise. For an historical account of that Diet, see MacCulloch, The Reformation, p. 221–5. 11 A Godly and learned Assertion, Epistle Dedicatory, n.p. Robinson echoes (unintentionally) Sidney’s letter to the Count of Hanau as he returned from the Continent in 1575, where he muses darkly on an England without Elizabeth: “She is to us a Meleager’s brand; when it perishes, farewell to all our quietness,” Sidney to Count of Hanau, 12 June 1575 in Osborn, p. 309. As is customary in Sidney’s canon, the term “quietness” is unambiguously positive. 12 Godly Prayers, p. 66 (verso). 13 Letter to Robert Sidney, 18 October 1580, in Feuillerat, vol. 3, 130. 14 In a recent essay, Bruce Gordon argues for the need while studying early modern religious cultures for scholars to “become increasingly sensitive to how religion was received, appropriated, and localized” (p. 68), and demonstrates in the context of Switzerland that Melanchthon’s legacy meant very different things to different communities, “Wary Allies: Melanchthon and the Swiss Reformers,” in Melanchthon in Europe, p. 45–68.


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assume, resonated both differently and emphatically.15 Once more, when that call for freedom was contained in Richard Robinson’s translation, whose one earlier translated work was Francesco Patrizi’s De institutione reipublicae, the most staunchly republican political treatise ever published in Elizabethan England, piety in support of liberty may well have assumed political overtones at once exciting and controversial.16 Neither Strigelius’s notorious debates about the will nor Robinson’s history as a translator afford proof of Sidney’s synergism or republican political interests, but both are reminders of the distinctive filter through which Reformed piety came to Sidney. Melanchthon came to Sidney not pure, but mediated, and mediated by humanists for whom the central message of the Gospel was freedom— freedom from the twin tyrannies of self-love (man’s original sin) and self-loving powers in the state, the tyranny of the despot and the mob.17 In turn, the principal vehicle of that freedom was faith—not faith conceived simply as the self’s unreserved commitment to God, but faith obtained by the certainty of the self’s knowledge about its relationship to God. Melanchthon’s God above all else wishes to make himself known, and knowledge of him is the necessary instrument of freedom.18 15 Strigelius was opposed by Flacius Illyricus during the so-called Weimar Debates (August 2–8 1560)—a series of public disputations about the subject of the will’s freedom, which James W. Richard has called “the most violent of all the Lutheran controversies of the sixteenth century,” The Confessional History of the Lutheran Church (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1909), p. 371. As Richard writes, “the principal contention of Strigel was that sin is an accident in man, that he has been deeply wounded …”; for Flacius, by contrast, sin is a “corruption of the essence of man,” 360–61. For one, the will has a modus agendi of its own: God draws, but he draws him who is willing. For the other, the will is completely passive and without power to cooperate in the process of salvation; see esp. p. 358–72. For a recent translation of the Weimar Disputation, see Documents from the History of Lutheranism, ed. Eric Lund (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), p. 202–3. See too Luther D. Peterson’s “Synergist Controversy,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), p. 133–5. 16 Francesco Patrizi, A moral methode of ciuile policie contayninge a learned and fruictful discourse of the institution, state and gouernment of a common weale. Abridged oute of the co[m]mentaries of the reuerende and famous clerke, Franciscus Patricius, Byshop of Caieta in Italye, trans. Richard Robinson (London: Thomas Marsh, 1576). The discrepancy between the book’s marginalia (strikingly orthodox) and its contents (openly republican) suggests Robinson’s low estimation of the censor’s aptitude for careful reading. 17 I am quick to note that citing Sidney’s interest in republican political thought is different from arguing for his commitment to “republicanism”: in the campaign to liberate the Netherlands, republican literature could and did provide intellectual arms against tyranny without supplying a model for government. For scholarly documentation of those interests, see Worden, p. 227–52. That same political interest is documented, too, in Victor Skretkowicz’s “Sidney’s Defence of Poetry, Henri Estienne, and Huguenot Nationalist Satire,” Sidney Journal 16, no. 1 (Spring 1998), 3–24. My point in attending to Robinson’s republican politics in conjunction with Strigelius’s synergism is to highlight, in that spider’s web of the political and the pious, the paramount importance of liberty to Sidney’s mentors. 18 On Melanchthon’s increasing insistence in his late career on “the connection between faith and intellectual culture,” (p. 17), see Wilhelm Pauck, “Luther and Melanchthon,” in Luther and Melanchthon, ed. Vilmos Vajta (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961). For a

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In his last years, the Philippists at Wittenberg made studied efforts to publish portraits of Melanchthon motivated, in no small part, by the need to shore up his authority as the legitimate heir to Luther’s mantle. Two of those portraits make an especially good introduction to the elder Melanchthon—the Melanchthon of the late 1540s and 50s, who is particularly important, because it was this Master Teacher (“Dominum Praeceptorem”) to whom Languet dedicated his life and for whose cause (“ut eius causa”) he placed himself in the greatest dangers (“in maxima pericula”).19 The dangers of such service were real. Between the defeat of the Schmalkaldan League in 1547 and his death in 1560, the elder Melanchthon found himself besieged by rivals who bitterly resented his temporizing with the victorious Emperor Charles V, and who accused him of contaminating the legacy of Luther’s reformation. Acrimonious opposition came especially from Niklaus Von Amsdorf and Matthias Flacius Illyricus, rival theologians—so-called Gnesio-Lutherans—who distinguished themselves from the Philippists in an increasingly embittered church that could no longer agree either about how to interpret the Augsburg Confession (that all-important expression of evangelical unity first drafted by Melanchthon) or how to protect the Protestant faith, on the one hand, from its traditional adversary Roman Catholicism or, on the other, from dilution by that second wave of the Reformation, the potent Calvinism of Geneva. Melanchthon’s legendary caution and moderation appeared to his enemies as weaknesses; his pursuit of evangelical unity through political and ecclesiastical compromise, capitulation; and his regard for humanist learning, abomination of the spirit.20 Two complementary portraits of probing exposition of and assault on that connection, see Franz Hildebrandt, Melanchthon: Alien or Ally? (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1946). “Deus ipse invitet nos ad hanc Philosophiam,” (God himself invites us to this Philosophy), as Melanchthon writes, since the study of philosophy brings real knowledge about God—not the saving knowledge coming from Gospel alone, but necessary knowledge enjoined by the Gospel itself, CR 21, 370. See Bellucci on the distinction between the knowledge of God afforded by grace, and what is possible from the exercise of natural reason, p. 202–5, 646–8. For a concise treatment of the issue in relation to Melanchthon’s full career, see David C. Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), p. 49–57. For a fuller discussion of this topic, see especially Chapter 3. 19 Languet to Gaspard de Niedbruck, 1 December 1553, quoted in Nicollier-de Weck, p. 32. 20 Melanchthon’s dedication to the studia humanitatis is evidenced by his lifelong position at Wittenberg as a professor of Greek. In his collected works, there are some 93 editions, commentaries and translations of Greek and Roman texts. His “humanism” is distinguishable from Erasmus’s partly, as Wengert demonstrates, because of sharp theological differences, and partly, as John Schneider argues, because of contrasts between their understandings of language and epistemology. See Schneider’s Philip Melanchthon and the Rhetorical Construal of Biblical Authority: Oratio Sacra (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1990), p. 58–9. Schneider is right to insist on Melanchthon’s status as a humanist precisely because of his deep belief in the indispensability of the studia humanitatis for the knowledge of God. “Primum enim omnino ilias malorum est inerudita Theologia,” (the worst of all evils is an uneducated theology) wrote Melanchthon—and a lack of education meant the absence (in great measure) of knowledge obtained from humanistic studies [De philosophia (1536), CR 11, 280]. For a history of Melanchthon’s early struggle to adapt his education to his


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the late Melanchthon, one as St. Basil (1559) and, the other as Ermolao Barbaro (1565), illustrate how his Philippist followers sought to define his identity and to defend his cause. In Lucas Cranach the Younger’s plainly unhandsome portrait of Melanchthon (1559), the book tells all. Melanchthon holds an open book in his hands with two parallel texts displayed for the viewer to read. (See Figure 1). One (on the left) is a page from Desiderius Erasmus’s Greek edition of St. Basil’s Homilies; the other (on the right) is Melanchthon’s epigram, a poetic commentary on Basil’s text. As a sermon from the year prior to the portrait’s composition makes clear, Melanchthon identified strongly with Basil, as an early father of the church, because he too lived in turbulent times, oppressed by heretics and by the threat of tyranny, and because Basil, like himself, sought to defend the integrity of God’s Word from the leagues of the ignorant (“factionibus indoctorum”) by knowledge from good books (“ut doctrina philosophica non negligatur”).21 Basil is important to Melanchthon because of his longstanding history in the Reformer’s thought as a “custodem Ecclesiae” (a guardian of the Church). As early as 1539, in a polemic seeking to establish the Reformed church as the legitimate heir to a revised ecclesiastical history, De ecclesiae autoritate, Melanchthon singled out Basil as one of the fathers who best exemplify the legitimate role of the ecclesiatical leader: giving witness to the Word as the sole authority for saving doctrine. Basil is an exemplary model of commitment to the cause, and just as important, of the indispensability of humanistic service to that cause. Leonardo Bruni’s enormously popular translation of Basil’s letter in defense of classical learning, Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature, propelled Basil’s name to the forefront inside Renaissance defenses of humanist study. A God who wishes to make himself known must be studied in his Word and his works, through Gospel and through Law, through Christian and classical letters, by means of theology and history, metaphysics and physics, geometry and mathematics, dialectic and rhetoric—by means of the universal complement of arts and sciences. Saving knowledge belongs solely to the Gospel, but the Gospel requires—as part of its revealed message of salvation—knowledge about the Law. The Law is scripted in the Old Testament as evidence of sin, just as the natural law—because of the Maker’s intention to be known—is scripted both in the best writings of the ancients and in the innate ideas

Reformed theology, see Wilhelm Maurer, Der junge Melanchthon zwischen Humanismus und Reformation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967–69), 2 vols. 21 See CR 9, 442–3. An account of this portrait’s significance appears in Kusukawa, whose primary concern is the contrast between Luther and Melanchthon’s oral and visual epistemologies (p. 188–96). Kusukawa identifies Basil’s homily on humility in the particular Erasmian edition portrayed by Cranach, as well as the quotation from Corinthians. For a study of the individual portrait, see Werner Schade, Cranach, A Family of Master Painters, trans. Helen Sebba (Putnam: New York, 1980). For Melanchthon’s interest in Basil, see E.P. Meijering, Melanchthon and Patristic Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1983), p. 88–9. More recently, Joseph Leo Koerner has investigated Cranach’s representations of the theological controversy between the Philippists and the Gnesio-Lutherans in The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 388–401.

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Figure 1


Melanchthon, by Lucas Cranach the Younger. By permission of Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.


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(notitiae) of the human mind.22 The barbarians are at the gate—the legions of the ignorant, as Melanchthon incessantly complained (echoes resounding years later in Mornay’s Verité)—and knowledge is the right weapon for battling against them. At the center of the portrait, Cranach displays a book made out of many books and all of them are significant for reading a Reformer whose character is defined (even constructed) by their conjunction. There are three important books – inside-the-book that Melanchthon displays, in addition, of course, to his own epigram. The first is that primary book represented, the Homilies of St. Basil, whose call for humilitas had special significance for the moderate, ecumenically minded Melanchthon. A portion of Basil’s Homily on Humility is quoted in Greek and paraphrased in Latin. The second important book is the edition of Basil represented. Opened to “Basilius pagina 388”—the Greek text chosen is edited by Desiderius Erasmus, that Dutch humanist to whom Melanchthon owed much of his own rhetorical knowledge and much of his fascination with the sermonis vim, the power of God’s word to manifest divine presence.23 The third book of importance to Cranach’s portrait is the book quoted inside Basil’s Homily on Humility, then paraphrased again in Melanchthon’s commentary, Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. The passage cited is from I Corinthians 1:30–31, and concludes with the injunction, “your faith should not be in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” In addition to those three books by Basil, Erasmus, and Paul, the portrait highlights, most obviously and topically, Melanchthon’s own epigram (right page)—a text at once illumined by and, in turn, illuminating those other texts at hand. By associating himself with Basil, Melanchthon defends the integrity of his pious commitments and his learning against the assaults of his Gnesio-Lutheran rivals. But Melanchthon more than associates himself with Basil. The formal design of Cranach’s portrait is at once more insistent and more telling about the full repertoire of Philippist aims on display. Cranach painted three other portraits of Melanchthon during this period that speak to those aims. In paintings of The Baptism of Christ (1556), The Raising of Lazarus (1558), and posthumously, The Last Supper (1565), Melanchthon is represented as physically present at a sacred event of saving significance, as a tribute to the power of his “witnessing” in the present historical moment.24 As Cranach’s other paintings erase historical distance to illustrate the living force of the Word, so the portrait of Melanchthon works even 22 For Melanchthon’s concept of the notitiae, see Bellucci, p. 363–70. For his concept of the Law and the extraordinarily important revision in his notions about the meaning of the Law (particularly his creation of the concept of the so-called Third Law) in relation to his developing natural theology, see Wengert’s Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1997), and Chapter 3. 23 See Manfred Hoffmann, Rhetoric and Theology: The Hermeneutics of Erasmus (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1994) on Erasmus’s theologia rhetorica and the transformative power that he ascribes to bonae litterae, p. 4, 81. 24 For illustrations, see Schade. Roland H. Bainton highlights the popularity of this biblical literalism among the German Reformers in “Durer and Luther as the Man of Sorrows,” Art Bulletin 29, no. 1 (1947), 269–72. In that connection, see too the more recent study by Thomas Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in

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more abruptly to close the gap between sacred Word and present history. Cranach’s painting establishes an association, or even what one might call more accurately an identity between Basil and Melanchthon, as if the representation of Melanchthon book-in-hand is a revelation of the Reformer’s true identity as another Basil. To see Melanchthon as St. Basil is to understand his real self—a self whose reality lies, like Basil’s, in his humble service to the Word. Once more, the invitation to see Melanchthon as Basil is produced as a visual complement to the operation of Melanchthonian oratio. Put more simply, Cranach’s painting requires “reading” as if it were a text organized according to the dictates of the preceptor’s distinctive and detailed system of hermeneutic interpretation. Like a well-methodized oration, the painting is arranged perspicuously (Melanchthon’s favorite oratorical goal) according to a logical scheme (assured by the presence of what are, arguably, the iconographic equivalents of loci communes).25 The book-in-hand is fully legible, as a painterly complement of rhetorical claritas. Consider the logical places upon which Cranach’s portrait is organized as the spectator is invited to contemplate those books-inside-the-book. The humility of Basil’s homily, the fideism of Paul’s Corinthians, and the philological learning of Erasmus’s scholarship are connected logically as well as pictorially, since humility is that fundamental virtue taught by the knowledge that faith (not human works) grants salvation, a knowledge dependent on understanding God’s Word ad fontes, through the diligent recovery of the scripture in its pure form (Erasmus’s act of editing) and in its true character (Melanchthon’s exegetical method treating the Bible as divine oratory, a Word only really understood when understood as rhetoric and dialectic).26 Moreover, as the portrait dramatizes visually, the act of reading itself possesses considerable power. The book both informs and transforms. Melanchthon has become one with Basil, the arrangement of the portrait logically denotes, because of his faithful apprehension of the Word, and it is the power of that Word to Representation (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. Chapter 1, “‘Not I, but Christ’: The Puritan Self–Escape from Allegory?,” p. 1–33. 25 For a fuller discussion of Melanchthon’s rhetorical and dialectical thought, see Chapter 2. As Donald B. Kuspit has demonstrated, Melanchthon had an enduring interest in the visual arts as complements to the work of preaching, “Melanchthon and Durer: The Search for the Simple Style,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 1973), 177–202. Hence, the notion that a painting can be “read” as a book is familiar within an intellectual circle that conceived of loci communes—the commonplaces of rhetoric and dialectic—as “hypotyposes,” speaking pictures. When Cranach published a woodcut drawn from this same portrait a year later, he included a poem that points to the same connection between painting and books: “Philippus aber selber hat/In seinen Schrifften mit der that/Ein Muster seins verstands gar eben/Und hohen Gmüts an tag gegeben/Denn er hat selbs sein eigne gaben/Abmaln können .…” ( But Philip himself revealed in his writings indeed a model of his power of mind and of his high spirit as well, for he was able to paint a picture of his own gifts.) See Schade, Woodcut 49. Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann argues for a similar interchange between rhetoric and the visual arts at the Hapsburg court in “The Eloquent Artist: Towards an Understanding of the Stylistics of Painting at the Court of Rudolf II,” Leids kunsthistorisch jaarboek 1 (1982–83), 119–48. 26 On this point, see Schneider, Philip Melanchthon, p. 58.


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transform the self in humbling the old man into the new that serves as the portrait’s status causae (its overarching theme). Melanchthon can be seen to be another Basil because both have heard and studied the Word aright—felt its rhetorical power and understood its dialectical significance. Consistent, too, with the aims of Melanchthon’s eloquence, the portrait appears designed both to reveal the true Melanchthon (as a Basil transformed by his love and knowledge of the Word) and to inspire by means of this exemplary image new custodians of the church, new laborers for the cause. The best evidence of that inspiration is scripted within the Latin epigram on the book’s right-hand page. At its conclusion, appended to the epigram are lines that conclude: “O Gospel, be with us and set our hearts afire with thy flame.”27 Inspired by the Word, Melanchthon inspires in turn, reciprocally and cooperatively. His epigram was composed originally as a poetic commentary on a verse from the Gospel of John (3:27), in which that first witness of Christ John the Baptist declares: “Non potest sibi homo sumere quicquam, nisi datum sit ei a Deo” (A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven). John 3 comprises the Epigram’s original heading. Relocated from the Epigrammatum into the space of Cranach’s canvas, where it is stripped of its heading and set side-by-side Basil’s homily on humility, Melanchthon’s poem acquires new meaning as a commentary upon that declaration of faith key to his identification with Basil. By way of direct quotation from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Cranach’s portrait testifies eloquently to the doctrine of salvation by faith, that core teaching of the Lutheran Reformation to which Melanchthon here declares his continuing faithfulness. This is testimony with a difference, however, as Melanchthon’s appearance in the very person of St. Basil attests. Together with Chrysostom, Basil was Melanchthon’s favorite authority for his synergistic celebration of the power of human will to cooperate with divine grace in realizing salvation. Ever in search of the ecumenical middle ground, Melanchthon drew regularly upon St. Basil in illuminating the necessary cooperation of individual will and the holy spirit to make salvation possible: “God comes first toward us, but nevertheless that we should also will that he come to us.”28 That this is testimony with a difference appears more clearly still in Melanchthon’s epigrammatic commentary.29 With Pauline assertiveness, his poetry declares: “Nullius et felix conatus et utilis umquam, Consilium si non detque iuvetque Deus” (No effort is ever happy and useful unless God gives favor and gives 27 See Schade, p. 103. 28 See Loci Communes 1555: “Tantum velis, et Deus praeoccurrit. We need only to will, and God has already come to us,” in Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine, trans. and ed. Clyde L. Manschreck (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 60. 29 As E.P. Meijering writes in a useful explanation of the history of Melanchthon’s thinking about free will, the 1555 Loci contains “the most important shift in Melanchthon’s views on free will: these spiritual acts [those involved in the work of salvation] are not the work of the Holy Spirit, but they are done with the help of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, when it is at work in man, needs the Word of God through which it speaks and it needs the consent of the human will …,” p. 134. More recent and more comprehensive discussion of the topic appears in Wolfgang Matz, Der befreite Mensch: die Willenslehre in der Theologie Philipp Melanchthons (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht, 2001).

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assistance).30 But just as assertively, the epigram points to a necessary cooperation between the mind aware of rightness (“mens sibi conscia recti”) and Christ himself, whose aid is always present for those who request it (“simul auxilium praesenti a numine Christi”). Explicitly rejecting the Stoic doctrine of predetermination (“Nec Deus est Numen Parcarum carcere clausum, Quale putabatur Stoicus esse Deus”), Melanchthon frees himself from the determinism of those Reformers from Jena to Geneva who preached predestination and the utter depravity of the will. In Melanchthon’s theology, the promise of that Word is comprehended as universal— freely available to all—and correspondingly harbors no room for predestination, and no sympathy for depictions of God (to employ Melanchthon’s own vocabulary) as a tyrant.31 As the Greek prose of Basil’s Homily finds translation into Melanchthon’s Latin poetry, the eloquence of that poetic heightening testifies to the reality of such cooperation, as a reminder that the fire of the Word, setting hearts aflame, frees human words to cooperate with the divine. Cranach’s portrait is what Philip Sidney would call some years later, in different times but for related reasons, a speaking picture, a device to bestow a Melanchthon upon the world to make many Melanchthons. Melanchthon’s most celebrated theological work, the Loci communes, was subtitled in its first edition, seu Hypotyposes—or the speaking pictures. Melanchthon’s rhetorical treatment of scripture descended in part from Erasmus, with whom he shared a belief in Christ as the “verbum et sermo dei” and an accompanying conviction of God’s immediate presence to the reader in his scriptures. He shared, too, Erasmus’s moderation, his pragmatic readiness for compromise, his detestation of theological dispute, and much of his broad tolerance for difference—and these, in turn, became core principles among the Philippists. However, Erasmus’s willingness to tolerate differences of opinion derived, in large part, from his skepticism—from his conviction that we human beings are ineluctably bound to the praise of folly. By contrast, Melanchthon’s readiness to distinguish essential beliefs from adiaphora, to compromise in the interest of agreement, came precisely from his opposite conviction that the truth is ultimately knowable, and that when reasonable people learn how to employ the right reading skills to the interpretation of texts, and most importantly, to the explication of scriptural texts, 30 Epigrammatum, E3 (verso)–E4 (recto), “De Dicto Johan. Baptistae.” See too CR 10, 651. Annabel Patterson notes the poem’s first appearance among Melanchthon’s epigrams in “Philip Melanchthon: Reading the Face and the Page,” Yale Univ. Library Gazette 4, suppl. (January 2001), 139–51. 31 See the introduction to the 1555 Loci by Hans Engelland who argues, by contrast, that Melanchthon had contradictory views about predestination, which suggest that he “does not reject predestination in principle—even in the sense of reprobation, but admonishes practically and pastorally about it,” p. xli. Later Philippists, however, largely opposed the concept, as Engelland notes (while showing his own interpretive biases): “The important theological deficiencies of the time following Melanchthon are more the responsibility of students who fragmented what he had fused,” p. xli. See Bellucci on Melanchthon’s rejection of Stoic determinism, p. 57–65. On page 63, he discusses Melanchthon’s refusal of determinism, lest God be viewed as a tyrant. See too on predestination, Timothy Wengert’s “‘We Will Feast Together in Heaven Forever’: The Epistolary Friendship of John Calvin and Philip Melanchthon,” in Melanchthon in Europe, p. 13–19.


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universal agreement will be at hand. Again, Melanchthon’s God is one who desires to be known, and one who makes certain knowledge about himself available. Ever the teacher and the systems builder, the proponent of ecumenical unity and civic tranquility, Melanchthon held an absolute conviction about the logical order of the mind and the universe, an order that had its foundations, at once, in the dialectical character of language and the providential operation of the deity.32 To see Melanchthon as St. Basil is to see his true self as the faithful guardian of the church, the unhandsome custodian of the handsome cause, but what did it mean for the elder Melanchthon, during these same critical years, to have been identified publicly with Ermolao Barbaro? Barbaro (1453–93) was a Venetian poet and statesman, a representative of Italian leadership in humanistic studies during the golden age of Lorenzo Valla, Angelo Poliziano, and Pico della Mirandola. An exemplar of the brilliant intellectual cut off in his prime, the man of learning undone by political machinations, Barbaro was famous for his commentaries on Aristotle and, more important in this context, for his letters in defense of classical studies and eloquence. One such letter was Barbaro’s reply to Pico’s attack upon rhetoric as an empty discipline unworthy of attention from true philosophers, those who love wisdom. In 1534, dispensing with Barbaro’s actual reply, one of Melanchthon’s favorite students, Franz Burchard, devised his own response to Pico’s attack, providing in his extended mock-epistle a textbook example of what he would have written had he been Barbaro. Frequently reprinted with Melanchthon’s most popular rhetorical work, Elementorum rhetorices libri duo, Barbaro’s fictive letter, translated by Burchard, was, in turn, fictively attributed to Melanchthon by his son-in-law Caspar Peucer in 1565—so closely had the letter by that time, with its subsequent printings, become identified with Melanchthon himself. In none of those subsequent printings was the real author identified. Just as Burchard writes in Barbaro’s voice and assumes his persona, so too when that persona was misidentified in 1565 as the product of Melanchthon’s pen, Barbaro’s voice became officially what it had been assumed to have been for decades, the voice of Melanchthon himself.33 Considered 32 See Schneider, Philip Melanchthon, for an elaboration of this argument, p. 208–49. For an analytical account of the systematic employment of rhetorical and dialectical categories to the organization of Melanchthon’s whole range of thought—educational, philosophical, and theological—see Siegfried Wiedenhofer, Formalstrukturen humanisticher und reformatorischer Theologie bei Philipp Melanchthon (Frankfurt: Peter Lang; Bern: Herbert Lang, 1976). Wiedenhofer’s study comes complete, in the schematic tradition of German philology, with elaborately detailed charts of those interrelationships. 33 Erika Rummel correctly attributed the letter to Franz Burchard (Franciscus Vinariensis) in “Epistola Hermolai nova ac subditicia: A Declamation Falsely Ascribed to Philip Melanchthon,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 83 (1992), 302–5. My one minor disagreement with Rummel is her assertion that the printings of Burchard’s letter “clearly indicate[d] the extent of Melanchthon’s contribution,” p. 304. Insofar as the printings indicated that the book was edited “cum dispositione Philippi Melanchthonis, quia continent illustria exempla Dialectices,” the reprinting does clearly point to Melanchthon’s division of the text into sections and his annotating of its rhetorical arguments. In the absence of Burchard’s name, however, it cannot have been “clear” that the letter itself was written by someone other than Melanchthon since it was published with Melanchthon’s own Elementorum rhetorices.

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from a formal perspective, then, the letter to Barbaro is the rhetorical complement of Cranach’s portrait, as once more the elder Reformer is provided by his Philippist followers with an idealized identity that defines himself and his cause. What matters to this argument is not who wrote Barbaro’s fictive letter. What counts is the letter’s historical status as a representation of the late Melanchthon by his Philippist followers. If to see Melanchthon as Basil is to see him as the custodian of the church, then to see him as Ermolao Barbaro is to understand how eloquence empowers him in his duties. The fictive Barbaro begins his letter by lamenting the power that the barbarous scholastic philosophers have achieved over learning and by calling for the redemption of what he terms, again and again, “our cause”—the return of “the most eminent arts” of eloquence to their ancient glory.34 Eloquence receives in his reply to Pico a definition consistent with Melanchthon’s treatment of the topic in educational manuals from the Elementorum rhetorices libri duo (1531) to the Erotemata dialectices (1547)—works that became standard university texts in the latter part of the century. Eloquence (oratio) is “a peculiar power and virtue” whose object “… is to paint, as it were, and to represent the mind’s thoughts themselves in appropriate and clear language.”35 Like Rudolf Agricola, Melanchthon sponsored the complementary treatment of dialectic and rhetoric, insisting in his pedagogy on the necessary subordination of figures of speech to figures of thought and on the preeminent necessity of “method” to the invention and arrangement of arguments. In fact, so closely intertwined are language and thought for Melanchthon that the arts of eloquence assume the status of a master-discipline. Burchard closely imitates the sentiments of his teacher when he writes: eloquent authors have painted a universal gallery of knowledge and morals (“images of all things which can occur in private and public life”) and “without those arts which are comprised in eloquence it is in no wise possible to search out and illustrate the other disciplines, the subject matter of physics, ethics, and theology.”36 Sidney was not the first to challenge Aristotle’s claims for the preeminence of politics as his culture’s architectonic form of knowledge. So much of what is peculiar to the power and virtue of eloquence (oratio) in Melanchthon’s thought derives from his understanding of language as an action or Such confusion seems especially likely since the very form of the letter as a mock-oration automatically renders the question of authorship a literary game. The “real” author wouldn’t identify himself as Melanchthon, of course, readers could very well assume, because the real author is—well—Barbaro himself! 34 Quirinus Breen, “Melanchthon’s Reply to G. Pico Della Mirandola,” Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1952), 413–26. For the Latin text, see CR 9, 687–703. For a full exposition of the letter in relation to contemporary debates of its kind, see Erika Rummel, The Humanistic-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), p. 147–51. 35 “Reply,” 416. 36 For a study of Melanchthon’s interweaving of logical and theological concepts, see Kees Meerhoff, Entre logique et littérature: Autour de Philippe Melanchthon (Orleans: Paradigme, 2001). For an argument on behalf of his rigorous subordination of rhetoric to logic, see p. 66–8. “Reply,” 418, 423.


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event, and Burchard’s fictive letter highlights this quality.37 One indication of that peculiar power is found in his articulation (altogether appropriate for Barbaro’s persona) of an historically familiar defense of oratory from Aristotle to Cicero, the civilizing power of eloquence. “It has been said, with good reason, that when men were still dispersed and nomadic they were gathered together by eloquence, and that by it states were founded; by it rights, religions, legitimate marriage, and other bonds of human society were constituted.”38 This is an argument that he extends further by claiming that “the exercise of justice” (that is, the “managing the whole of our public and private life”) depends, too, on eloquence since it alone provides “for the right and proper exposition of matters of every sort.”39 True philosophy, in turn, depends on oratory since the right philosopher is “one who when he has learned things good and useful … takes a theory (doctrina) out of academic obscurity and makes it practically useful in public affairs .…”40 Even religion depends for its power and virtue on oratory. Basil and Jerome are counted among what he calls “the more eloquent theologians,” because of their clear and copious exposition of “obscure subjects.”41 But more radically still, scripture itself is treated as a form of sacred oratory, which as the foundation and model for all other forms of genuine eloquence, has as its goal the clear exposition of its mysterious doctrina and the inspiration of the mind to virtue. Scripture provides “pictures of good conduct (morum picturae) which are useful for exciting the mind to admiration.”42 Once more, it is precisely because the Bible has not been properly understood as oratory (as a rhetorical and dialectical discourse) that it is misinterpreted by the scholastics. How absurd are those philosophers who “have spent a lifetime” in dialectical studies, Barbaro opines, “never to see … what David or Paul is saying,” since what David, Paul, and the sacred writers as a body have to say is itself oratorical, both dialectical and rhetorical in mode.43

37 On the performative aspects of Reformed understandings about language, see Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002). 38 “Reply,” 416. 39 “Reply,” 417. 40 “Reply,” 417–18. 41 “Reply,” 421. 42 “Reply,” 422. 43 “Reply,” 425. See Oratio de studiis linguae Graecae (1549) in Melanchthons Werke in Auswahl, ed. Robert Stupperich (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1951– 75), vol. 3: 139, 143. In an extended defense of his own career, Melanchthon writes: “Diximus linguam Graecam magistram et quasi fontem esse non tantum caelestis doctrinae, sed et reliquarum artium …” (We assert that the Greek language is the teacher and, so to speak, the fountainhead not only of the heavenly doctrine but also of all the arts), elaborating on his assertion to demonstrate not only the importance of that knowledge (secular and sacred) contained in the fountain, but also the foundational rhetorical and dialectical tools required to access its waters. The pursuit of knowledge ad fontes goes well beyond linguistic or broad philological learning: Melanchthon’s claims are about the accessibility in the Greek language of the fountain of universal learning, divinely accommodated to human use.

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As the letter to Pico ends, the appeal of representing Melanchthon himself as Barbaro becomes more apparent. For the fictive Barbaro concludes his letter with what seems is both a prayer and a prophecy. As a remedy for the insane misinterpretations of “disputatious theology, … Christian doctrine ought to be called back to its sources.” In particular, the fictive Barbaro expresses his hope that “some Hercules will rise up to free the earth of those monsters [the scholastic philosophers] and restore the native beauty of philosophy and Christian doctrine.”44 To return Christian doctrine to its sources (ad fontes), in this context, means something more than the Erasmian restoration of scripture to its original languages and texts. Rather, the call is a Philippist summons to return to the source of scripture as oratio, as speech accommodated by God to man. Only in this way can its meaning be understood and its power for salvation harnessed. To make a prayer for, or better still, a prophecy of that return ad fontes is for Burchard in the very act of assuming the voice and persona of Ermolao Barbaro to pay tribute to his teacher, Philip Melanchthon as the new Hercules—less the Hercules of muscle and brawn, than that better favored Hercules of the early humanists, the emblematic hero of eloquence whose mouth emits golden chains to tie up powerfully the ears of his audience. Like the career prophesied for Hercules by Barbaro, the mock-epistle illustrates, Melanchthon’s has been devoted to freeing the church from the tyranny of ignorance and restoring the eloquent arts on which its health depends. Read that same prayer in the mock-epistle’s appearance as an appendix to the Elementorum rhetorices or in Caspar Peucer’s edition of 1565, and the prayer emerges even more powerfully as Melanchthon’s own act of identification with Barbaro and Hercules-the-liberator. Sidney’s Defence ends, it is interesting to note, with the promise (wittily phrased) that by praising poetry “you shall suddenly grow Herculea proles,” an off-spring of Hercules, this hero of eloquence (142). Again, paternity counts. Seen from one perspective, Melanchthon is the guardian of the church. Seen from another, Melanchthon is the champion of eloquence. Both portraits are complementary to his pursuit of the cause. St. Basil succeeds in freeing God’s church from the armies of ignorance, as Cranach’s portrait illustrates so well, because of his knowledge of and inspiration from the books—the book of God’s Word as it is illuminated by the books of God’s students, Erasmus and (more emphatically!) Melanchthon. Hercules will free Christian culture from the monsters of ignorance, Barbaro’s mock epistle makes clear, because the study of eloquence (oratio) returns us to the source of scriptural power. Knowledge about God is the vehicle of liberation, and such knowledge depends mightily on the acquisition and display of the studia humanitatis. Moreover, beyond their arguments, explicit or implied, both self-portraits complement each other in their formal designs. In both, Melanchthon assumes an identity that is an idealized revelation of his real self—as St. Basil and as Barbaro/ Hercules—and in both, that alternative or idealized self is offered as a defense of the power of oratio and an illustration of its power-in-the-making. We are asked to see (visually or with our mind’s eye) Melanchthon-as-Basil and Melanchthonas-Barbaro/Hercules as oratorical illustrations of the power of words to inform and 44 “Reply,” 425.


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to transform the self. In both self-portraits, then, we find ourselves at the juncture between Melanchthon’s notions of oratory and his concept of selfhood, or as Melanchthon might name that juncture more perspicuously, at that place where his doctrine of the Word and its indispensability for self-knowledge intersect.45 This is an intersection of some consequence, as I hope to show, for appreciating Sidney’s education in the cause under Languet. In 1555, Melanchthon published yet another in a series of expanded and regularly revised versions of the Loci communes, the book that first appeared in 1521 as both an introduction to the reading of scripture and an exposition of the Reformed theology.46 As a product of those same later years in which Cranach fashioned his self-portrait as St. Basil and in which Burchard’s mock-oration circulated his image as a second Barbaro/Hercules, the 1555 Loci articulates Melanchthon’s continued commitment to the exercise of eloquence in the service of the cause. Eloquence is at the very heart of the Bible’s meaning. Melanchthon emphasizes this point from the book’s first publication: “You can see the design of the Holy Spirit in Scripture—how sweetly and charmingly he instructs the devout with only one purpose, that we be saved. The whole of Scripture is in some parts law, in others gospel,” and Melanchthon could well have added, in all parts oratory.47 There is nothing that he desires more, Melanchthon writes in his introduction to the first Loci communes, than for Christians to read “the divine Scriptures … and be thoroughly transformed into their nature.”48 When Melanchthon marvels at the design of the Holy Spirit in shaping the biblical text, the charm of his instruction and the singleness of his saving purpose, he draws attention to the Bible’s purposeful doubleness of organization. Law and Gospel combine over and again in the scriptures to instill self-knowledge: to inform us about sin and to transform us, through the promise of the Word, into Christians reborn. Both testaments offer teaching in the Law “so that [God] may effectively punish sin and produce in our hearts genuine and dreadful fright,” and both provide the promise of the Gospel to “bring merciful consolation to the frightened conscience.”49 The whole scope of the Bible’s oratio is contained, then, in those central Pauline concepts of Law, Sin, and Gospel—the essential loci of Melanchthon’s exegesis, loci 45 In the 1550s, Melanchthon was stung by Osiander’s accusation that his adoption of the juridical language of “imputation” to his account of justification had diminished Luther’s emphasis on the transformative power of Christ’s presence inside the faithful. Against that charge, Melanchthon replied: “Haec de praesentia Dei seu inhabitatione in renatis clare affirmamus …; sed re ipsa praesentes Pater et Filius spirant Spiritum S. in cor credentis. Et haec praesentia et habitatio est hoc, quod dicitur novitas spiritualis” (We clearly affirm the presence or inward dwelling of God in the reborn …; the Father and Son are actually present, breathing the Holy Spirit into the heart of the one who believes. This presence or inward dwelling is called spiritual renewal), Condemnatio scriptorum Culmanni et Vetteri …, CR 8, 582. 46 For a chart illustrating changes from one version of the Loci to another, 1521 to 1559, see Wiedenhofer, p. 397–8. 47 Loci communes theologici (1521), trans. Lowell J. Satre and Wilhelm Pauck in Melanchthon and Bucer, ed. Wilhelm Pauck (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), p. 73. 48 Loci (1521), p. 19. 49 Loci Communes 1555, p. 59, 155.

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that function simultaneously as logical principles that organize the Bible’s argument of salvation and as existentially rooted realities that define individual identity: the story of the old man, who under the Law has lost justitia originalis and stands guilty of the sin of self-love, the story of the new man, who through faith in the scriptures, is transformed into “their nature,” into the image of Christ.50 In 1521, Melanchthon began his Loci with an attack upon the Pelagian doctrine of free will. In 1555, by contrast, the Loci orients its discussion of free will with an assault on stoic determinism. Especially in his later years, Melanchthon created the foundations of a distinctive version of Reformed selfhood inflected by his increasingly assertive convictions about the significance of natural law, its implications for the moral life, and cultural activity—artistic and civil. In 1521, the Loci opened by illustrating the utter depravity of the will as an acknowledgment of man’s weakness before God; in 1555, the Loci begins by discussing what God is and how he is known as prelude to celebrating his “boundless goodness” and “beautiful works—heaven and earth, air and water, angels and men.”51 The shift in rhetoric serves more than rhetorical purposes. In harmony with his enhanced emphasis on providence, his insistence on God’s real presence in his works as well as his Word, the elder Melanchthon elaborated a natural theology grounded on his twin convictions about the complementarity between natural law and divine law and the fundamental goodness of nature.52 As he writes in his Loci of 1555: “If the beautiful order in this wondrous edifice which God made should be a testimony of him, and truly is an open testimony, then rational people should behold and contemplate this order.”53 Melanchthon enhanced, by such means, the status inside Reformed culture of what might best be called the civilized self. More steadfastly than Luther or Calvin, Melanchthon labored to create a positive engagement between Reformed

50 To know oneself is to accept as an act of faith the promise of the Word, to receive justification by virtue of faith, and to begin a progress of sanctification by which one is transformed into Christ—a progress of the self-in-the-making always ongoing since sanctification is necessarily incomplete in this world. It is possible for a Christian to lose his salvation in Melanchthon’s thought, so the activity of renewing faith by renewing knowledge lends an urgency to his story of soteriology unique among the major Reformers. See Condemnatio, CR 8, 582. 51 Loci Communes 1555, p. 39. 52 In his encouragement especially of astrology, mathematics, geometry, and physics, from Commentarius de anima (1540) to Initia doctrinae physicae (1549) to Liber de Anima (1553), Melanchthon first elaborated a comprehensive Reformed natural philosophy. Nature is a book of God’s works, “an open testimony” parallel to the book of God’s Word. Both “testimonies” invite investigation from rational beings whose pursuit of knowledge from all sources, natural and moral, secular and sacred, is endorsed as an inspiration, at once, to private virtue and to public civility—as well a necessary complement to the work of salvation. For a fuller explication of that “necessity” in relation to Melanchthon’s introduction of the concept of the so-called “Third Law,” see Chapter 3. For necessary cautions about fundamental distinctions between natural knowledge and the revealed knowledge (of Christ) that brings salvation, see Bellucci, p. 586, 650. 53 Loci Communes 1555, p. 39.


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religion and philosophy, providing in his ongoing conversation between the secular and the sacred a model for his anti-disputatious theology and a vision of Christian culture in which the church finds support from the enlightened prince and people. A voluminously syncretic thinker, inclusive in his pedagogical and theological vision, positive in his endorsement of human agency and civil life, Melanchthon found his most ardent supporters, not surprisingly, inside the universities and intellectual circles of Reformed Europe. Hubert Languet and the Liberal Communication of Duties If Melanchthon’s God is a God who wishes to be known, then too he is a God who comes to be known chiefly by attending to causes. At every level of Melanchthon’s thought, from the identification of the sensus causae as the goal of dialectics, to the provision of affectively charged communes causae as the goal of rhetoric, to the investigation of causas … rerum in natural philosophy, to the study of first causes in metaphysics and theology, Melanchthon makes the pursuit of causes one primary object of his educational ambitions. He is a relentlessly teleological thinker, whose assayed unity of thought and universality of reference constitute a Protestant version of what he describes as the “architectonic” philosophy of Aristotle (brought into logical harmony with Plato’s!)—a philosophy that considers as a whole and in each of its parts the end that “embraces all the other ends.” As Melanchthon writes, “Thus the final gradation of goods, or the goal, ought always to be in sight, so that it may govern plans and actions.”54 Knowledge eventuates, properly and pragmatically, in action. As the public and political consequence of identifying ends to “govern plans and actions,” the “cause” of securing the triumph of God’s true church is linked, then, to the disciplined study of causes across the whole architecture of knowledge. To be a Philippist, then, in the truest sense of the word, a follower of Philip Melanchthon— and there can be no question that Hubert Languet was one—meant to have one’s sense of self shaped by the preceptor’s politics, by his piety, and by a comprehensive intellectual program. It meant, in turn, as the educator of a Philippist—and there can be no question that Languet intended to be one—imparting a knowledge of the pragmatic political struggles of the cause and, simultaneously, a regard for the value of the disciplined study of causes. Sidney refers to such study in his Defence as “the highest end of the mistress-knowledge, by the Greeks called architectonike, which stands (as I think) in the knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well-doing and not of well-knowing only” (104). The intellectual paternity of such argumentation is Philippist in kind. The conditions under which Sidney’s education took place were nothing short of extraordinary, and their extraordinary character gave that education an urgency that it would otherwise have lacked. At the very moment that Hubert Languet was seeking to recruit the young Philip Sidney into the cause, the cause to which he had dedicated his adult life was facing extinction. As Nicollier-de Weck’s account 54 Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, Book 1 (1546) in The Melanchthon Reader, trans. Ralph Keen (New York: Lang, 1988), p. 182. “Ita ultimus gradus bonorum seu finis semper in conspectu esse debet, ut consilia et actiones gubernet,” CR 16, 285.

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of Languet’s life makes plain, 1574 was a year of crisis for Philippism. It was a moment of irrevocable, catastrophic demise for a movement whose leaders would be dead within a decade (Camerarius the Elder died that year, Georg Cracow soon after, and Languet seven years later) and whose followers would be absorbed almost imperceptibly by diverse confessional allegiances. In 1574, the formerly sympathetic Protestant Prince, August of Saxony purged the Philippists from political power and theological influence, expelling them from Wittenberg and from institutional authority of any kind. Languet’s zealous dedication to Philippism, historically considered, is the afterglow of an explosion—though to consider it as such requires historical knowledge unavailable to him or to his contemporaries. What appears clearly now to have been irrevocable catastrophe seemed at that time to Languet’s providentially idealizing mind a crisis still to be averted. It is worth distinguishing between catastrophe and crisis in this instance because, again, to Languet’s providentially idealizing mind, the young Philip Sidney could well have insured the difference between them. Among Languet’s several sad lifelong refrains, the most frequently intoned is the one written in a letter to the younger Camerarius about the demise of the cause: “princes do not wish to place the public good before their own pleasures.”55 Where August of Saxony had failed, where Maximilian II would fail, and later John Casimir and William of Orange and Robert Dudley, Philip—by virtue of distinguished family connections, brilliance, charisma, piety, and (vitally important among these) a good education—would not. In any case, Languet himself would see to the education. Between February and May of 1574, Languet’s correspondence returns repeatedly to the subject of his grief over the demise of his friends in Saxony and France, the consolation that he receives from Sidney’s friendship, and the expectation that he carries about Sidney’s future, as themes that speak at once to real grief and to real measures taken to redress that grief—the education of a new leader for the cause of Reformed Christianity. That education, in turn, speaks directly to the character of Sidney’s Philippism in the Defence. In February, Languet writes about “the misfortunes of [his] native land” and how they have “overwhelmed [him] with weariness.”56 In March, he responds to Sidney’s concern that he takes too little care to protect himself against the prospect of attacks against his person by lamenting “the wretchedness in which [he] live[s]; for what can be more distressing to a man, who has the feelings of humanity, than to be a witness of such crimes, as for 10 or 12 years have been … perpetrated in my unhappy France?”57 On 1 May, he mentions again “the great misfortunes of [his] native land,”58 and writes, once more, a week later to recall the destruction of “in practically a single moment all [his] friends” in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the demise of his compatriots in Saxony, where fortune “proved most hostile to 55 “Istorum malorum fons et origo est quod nolunt suis voluptatibus quicquam Reip. causa decedere …,” Languet to Camerarius the Younger, 16 May 1569, cited by Nicollier-de Weck, p. 215–16. 56 Languet to Sidney, 19 February 1574, in Osborn, p. 149. 57 Languet to Sidney, 26 March 1574, in Pears, p. 42–3. 58 Languet to Sidney, 11 May 1574, in Osborn, p. 172.


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the men whose virtue and benevolence had made it possible for [him] to endure the burdens of [his] long exile.”59 In letter after letter composed during the same period, Languet opposes the misfortune of his grief by the consolation that he receives from Sidney’s friendship and future expectations. Amidst the tragedy of his native lands, Languet writes, “I have nothing but the memory of our friendship to cheer me.”60 Oblivious of threats against himself from the agents of the Catholic League, Languet writes, “I am anxious for your safety, because I consider your birth, your disposition, your thirst for goodness, the progress you have already made—and I know what your country has a right to hope of you.”61 In response to the misfortunes of France and Saxony, he writes, “so long as you are safe and sound, then I shall feel all is well with me too,” and a week later, praising Sidney’s eloquent letters, he remarks: “your excellent mental powers shine forth in them, and more and more they strengthen my hopes for the virtue you will attain.”62 Grief, consolation, and expectation are the commonplace themes of Languet’s early correspondence with Sidney, and for a correspondent who, even amidst his profound personal sorrows, never forgets his role as an educator (as he directs his student’s readings, praises his progress, and exclaims at his literary eloquence), commonplace seems exactly the right term to characterize a thematic pattern so deliberately maintained. I am not challenging the sincerity of Languet’s sorrows or the reality of his deep, even passionate affection for Sidney, but I do mean to challenge the post-romantic assumption that affective experience is somehow diminished rather than enhanced by evidence of rhetorical design. Something more specific and important than a general disposition of Sidney’s mind and heart to the cause is taking place in such letters, as attention to the aims of a Philippist education should make clear. Everywhere in Languet’s correspondence is evidence of language carefully organized to produce a strong affective response and to advance dialectically a particular interpretation of historical events, locating for their obviously specific reader a specific place inside them. Designed with the architectonic aim of keeping in Sidney’s sight the cause that ought to govern plans and actions (what his own teacher had taught!), Languet’s letters are best understood as the carefully calculated performances of a humanist trained in Philippist oratio.63 In short, his commonplaces are strategically organized loci communes, logical appeals that go to the heart of the argument (Sidney’s necessary pursuit of the cause) as they appeal affectively to his heart. (Languet is convinced that Sidney’s nature, his innate humanity and virtue, insures their moving power.) It is best to understand his letters in this context, not to

59 Languet to Sidney, 7 May 1574, in Osborn, p. 185–6. 60 Languet to Sidney, 19 February 1574, in Osborn, p. 149. 61 Languet to Sidney, 26 March 1574, in Pears, p. 42. 62 Languet to Sidney, 1 May 1574 (p. 173) and 7 May 1574, in Osborn, p. 186. 63 His contemporaries thought highly enough of Languet’s humanistic skills to employ him on the enormous project of composing the Centuries, a history organized according to Melanchthon’s loci scheme for methodizing the study of theology. See Nicollier-de Weck, p. 46–7.

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reemphasize what is already well known (Languet’s expectation that Sidney should some day assume the leadership in England of the international Reformed cause), but instead to demonstrate in historically real terms the meaning of that Philippistinspired expectation for Sidney‘s lived experience. For Sidney to know himself, he must recognize the story of the cause as his story, as quite literally the narrative that he must adopt in order to be himself. To become what he is, he must change into what he naturally and piously should be. His story then requires metamorphosis, change that makes one all the more oneself. Scripted into the heart of their correspondence, Languet’s urgent personal and political motivations supply a speaking picture of that story. From very early in their correspondence, Languet writes both about his expectations for Sidney’s future (Sir Henry’s hopes for a full harvest of filial virtues are recited side by side with news of papal defeats) and his resolve to place before young Philip’s eyes a model of “surpassing eloquence.”64 As Satan gnashes his teeth at the imminent collapse of papal power (to paraphrase his letter of November 1573), Languet recommends his pupil’s imitation of an especially splendid epistle from Pietro Bizarro of Perugia. Here again is the Philippist complementarity of a commitment to the cause and a devotion to oratio, with its peculiar conjunction of militantly antiTridentine, apocalyptic politics and literary stylistics. From the first, eloquence—an eloquence acquired via the traditional medium of humanistic imitation—assumes a formative role in Sidney’s vocational training. Imitation matters to Languet, first, for practical reasons. Sidney’s eventual success as a statesman, especially a statesman with an international role to play, depends on his mastery of Latin, written and spoken (and Languet nags Sidney repeatedly to improve his pronunciation), just as a knowledge of German seems more useful (particularly to a Reformed statesman) than his pupil’s academic interest in Greek and suspect flirtation with Italian. For similarly practical reasons, he discourages his pupil’s study of geometry. Languet recommends and appears often to have supplied books to Sidney, as models of style, and also (in good humanist fashion) as repositories of virtues to be imitated. In January of 1574, he writes to persuade Sidney to continue his study (for its supreme usefulness) of “that branch of moral philosophy which treats of justice and injustice”; to praise his “reading history, by which more than anything else men’s judgments are shaped”; and to advise him to pursue “the knowledge of the way of salvation, which is the most essential thing of all.”65 Imitatio, with its concern for the way of salvation and the final cause of knowledge, is here the vehicle of a pragmatic and principled biblical humanism. More than persuading Sidney of the virtues of acquiring eloquence by imitation, Languet’s letters seek to embody that virtue in themselves. Cicero’s epistles to Atticus are the classically appointed models for his correspondence with Sidney. As early as January of 1574, Languet notes his approval of his pupil’s study of the “volumes of Cicero’s letters,” imitating thereby his own preceptor’s recommendation for how to

64 Languet to Sidney, 19 November 1573, in Pears, p. 2. 65 Languet to Sidney, 22 January 1574, in Pears, p. 26.


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make imitatio the proper pedagogical basis for mastering oratio.66 As Melanchthon writes in his extended discussion of imitation in his Elementorum rhetorices, it is Cicero, as the master-imitator among imitators, who perfected in his own age Roman eloquence (“eloquentiam Romanam perfectam fuisse”), and who is, thereby, the supreme model for teaching imitation.67 Moreover, Languet’s account of the value of Cicero’s letters points again both to his broad humanistic aims (read them, he writes, “not only for the beauty of the Latin, but also for the very important matter they contain”), and the philosophical character of those aims (“There is nowhere a better statement of the causes which overthrew the Roman Republic”). Always, he insists on the necessary work of identifying causes, especially causes that enhance or threaten liberty. Similar to Cicero’s letters, with their reflections on the demise of the Republic, Languet’s are eloquently replete with warnings about the causes of Christendom’s always imminent overthrow—and though he neglects to say so here, replete with celebrations of an idealized friendship affording consolation amidst his woes. Friendship is the constant theme of their correspondence and key to Languet’s architectonic aim of keeping in Sidney’s sight the cause that ought to govern plans and actions. Cicero supplies useful matter for teaching Sidney how his “greatest happiness (next to the worship of God)” rests “in the cultivation of friendship with good men” (Languet’s pious qualification is telling).68 But in order to understand how friendship helps Languet realize his oratorical aims, the appropriate context to invoke comes again from Melanchthon. In his Epitome ethices (1532), Melanchthon defines friendship as:69 a form of justice in which benevolence is given in return for benevolence, and is made up of a certain particular and liberal communication of duties. And it must be known that friendship is a virtue, that we may cultivate friendships on account of virtue; and further it must be stated that it is also justice, so that we may religiously maintain our mutual faith and benevolence. 66 For Languet’s modeling of his letters to Sidney on Cicero’s epistles, see Berry, p. 32–48. My emphasis on Languet’s mediation of that model through his Philippist training elicits a different account of Sidney’s selfhood and education. While Berry highlights “the conservative conception of human nature” and “society” inscribed in the correspondence— peculiar terms to attach to these tyrannomachists—it is precisely the urgency to inspire change, the confidence in education to effect metamorphosis (that variety of change that makes us who we “naturally” are) that motivates Languet’s effort to educate Sidney in the meaning of the cause—and the meaning of liberty, as Cicero himself might have called it, p. 33. Languet to Sidney, 1 January 1574, in Pears, p. 20. 67 Elementorum rhetorices libri duo (1542) in CR 13, 493. Melanchthon repeats the praise in his preface to his commentary on Cicero’s epistles, explaining that their eloquence renders them “Latinae linguae parentem” (the parent of the Latin language) partly for reasons of style, partly for reasons of matter—since their moral instruction fits what he calls the “praecipuus scopus” (chief purpose) of all education, CR 17, 13 and 17. Again, paternity counts. 68 Languet to Sidney, 5 February 1574, in The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, 1573–76, ed. Charles S. Levy (Ph. D. dissertation, Cornell Univ., 1962), p. 72. 69 Summary of Ethics, in The Melanchthon Reader, p. 235.

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In view of the vast currency of the ideal in the Renaissance, there is little original about Melanchthon’s celebration of friendship as a virtue, or even as a form of justice (classical and contemporary precedents for both are legion). What does seem distinctively Philippist, however, is his insistence on the peculiar moral power of the virtue to educate—to provide for the “communication of duties”—and to secure a cosmopolitan community of pious, like-minded benefactors as a consequence. Nothing is more usual for Languet than to invoke the “laws of friendship” in order to impress upon Sidney a sense of his responsibilities—both personal and public, moral and religious. And no activist worked harder to acquire an international network (Nicolier’s “réseau”) of friends. Avuncularly intrusive, ready with advice on every subject from his diet and dress to his itinerary and companions, from his finances to his marital status, from his judgment of particular individuals to particular nations (and the list goes on and on), Languet is the very embodiment of Melanchthon’s portrait of the friend as liberal communicator of duties. Languet echoes, too, his preceptor’s insistence on the mutual faith necessary to a community of friends. Applied by Languet in an era of fiercely divisive confessionalism, the “mutual faith” enjoyed by friends is interpreted literally. He advises Sidney to choose his friends according to similarity of religious belief, just as he writes frequently about “our friends” as a means of identifying members of his political party or, sometimes more loosely, fellow Reformed Christians or (indeterminately) fellow Christians. Languet calculates coolly, too, the advantages of a friendship between Sidney and the powerful Cecil, and necessary measures to cultivate more friendly ties with Walsingham. Having powerful friends matters to Sidney’s future success as a statesman, and emphasizing their usefulness supplies one more means by which Sidney’s mind can be focused on the cause that ought to govern plans and actions. Friendship figures so prominently as a topic in their correspondence, also and just as importantly, because of Languet’s faith in the ideal economy of virtue into which true friendship affords access. It is necessary to write about an idealized economy of virtue because, inspired by conventional assumptions current among (though hardly peculiar to) Philippists, Languet views true friendship as the consequence of a mutual love of virtue, a mutual love that makes friend embrace friend (Melanchthon’s language is conventional here) as “another self.” Virtue becomes the cause of affection, and affection the cause of pleasure, and pleasure the cause of imitation inside friendship’s economy. Languet imitates Cicero by highlighting a virtue that itself operates as a species of imitation. As Melanchthon writes, “similitude is a common object of friendship. For universal nature so has it that like things are easily joined with like,” or as the point is restated, “friendship ought to bring about some similarity so that like may be friend to like.”70 In the love of virtue and the affection that proceeds from reciprocal benevolence, friend becomes like friend. This is the logic that explains, for instance, Languet’s self-congratulation for having successfully urged Sidney’s friendship with Philip, Count of Hanau (one of those several young Philips upon whose shoulders he placed the hopes of the Reformed cause), “for it is the similarity of your behavior, and your common pursuit 70 Summary of Ethics, p. 236–7.


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of virtue, that have promoted it.”71 The same logic motivates Mornay’s lament, years later, over the loss of another self in losing Sidney at Zutphen.72 And it is this same logic, too, that explains the intense affection existing between Languet as an aging Burgundian at the twilight of a ruined career and the young, English Sidney, ripe with the expectation of a brilliant future. The two are united by a love of virtue, that all-encompassing abstraction that figures inside the correspondence as shorthand in its public and political implications for love of the cause. Inside this economy of virtue, friendship is the theme most readily accommodated to Languet’s principal preoccupation, educating Sidney in the knowledge of himself. For a Philippist of Languet’s disposition and training, convinced that friendship is intimately tied to the communication of duties, the transition from one theme to the other, from friendship to identity, is easily accomplished, since the pursuit of duty (named alternatively virtue, excellence, or the way of salvation) defines who and what one is. In an early letter, Languet tells Sidney of his hope of befriending him to “those men who … love and admire excellence in any man whatsoever, since I had no doubt that by your behavior you would readily be able to win their favor.” Languet’s idealization of the young Philip is rhetorically purposeful. Sidney is both praised and held accountable to the judgment of that community of “friends” to which Languet has dedicated his life. He adds that Sidney should always succeed in having such friends “provided that you do not swerve from yourself or become a different man.”73 Similar reflections on his pupil’s success in cultivating friends lead to similar remarks about selfhood in another early letter: “My dear boy, as long as you do not swerve from yourself, nowhere will you be without good men to show you affection and courtesy.” Piously and paternally, Languet elaborates on this idealized version of Sidney’s self when he writes: “And if in early manhood your virtue bears such sweet fruit, what do you think will happen after twenty or thirty years, if you adhere steadfastly to your excellent intentions?”74 Sidney’s self is idealized, here as elsewhere in the correspondence, as a self-in-the making, a self whose excellence depends on fulfilling future expectations. That self, again, is dynamic and expansive, necessarily subject to change, even as (amidst these changes) it discovers the constancy of its own nature. Once more, as Languet is at pains to indicate throughout the early letters, his future expectations (about the changes that will make him who he truly is) proceed from divine providence: “God has bestowed mental powers on you which I do not believe have fallen to anyone else I know, and he has done so … for you to put them in the service of your country, and of all good men.” Sidney is merely “the steward of this gift,” those mental powers providentially granted for the service of his country and all good men, or to shift metaphors for the sake of clarifying the point, Sidney is merely an actor in a drama scripted by God.75

71 72 73 74 75

Languet to Sidney, 26 February 1574, in Levy, p. 89. See Chapter 3. Languet to Sidney, 4 December 1573, in Levy, p. 12. Languet to Sidney, 26 February 1574, in Levy, p. 89. Languet to Sidney, 11 June 1574, in Levy, p. 193.

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In contrast to this studied representation of Sidney’s idealized self, Languet writes with increasing frequency during the early correspondence about another, very different Philip Sidney—a Sidney too easily seduced by pleasure, luxury, ease and what his mentor refers to most often as idleness. As a Philippist, aware that salvation can be lost, that David the psalmist is also David the adulterer and murderer, Languet has fears about change as well. In the letters that date from the period of Sidney’s stay on the Continent, there are occasional references to his suspect pleasure in “lingering” too long in Italy, and constant complaints about his “negligence” as a correspondent. The volume of complaints about idleness echoes still more loudly in the later correspondence as Sidney returns to England in late 1575. As early as September, disturbed by the infrequency of his letters, Languet is already warning him to “shun that vile Siren, Idleness!” His choice of mythologies speaks to the nature of his fears: that the young heroic Philip will be seduced from his quest for what Languet elsewhere calls service to his country and all good men. It may be that Languet had real anxiety about Sidney’s taste for pleasure, and the potential sinfulness (particularly for young men) associated with such a taste. (After all, as a Philippist, Languet was schooled in Melanchthon’s reading of the fall and his distinctive emphasis on Adam’s original sin as an instance, simultaneously, of self-love and indolence.) More prominent, however, are Languet’s fears about Sidney’s continued devotion to the cause. A letter from August begins by threatening to blame his “weakness of spirit and love of leisure” should he cease “to cherish” eloquent accomplishments. It ends by detailing the threats of the Spanish and the Italians against “those in France and the Low Countries who profess the reformed faith,” concluding with the warning: “and once they are overwhelmed, I do not know how long you will be allowed to enjoy your luxurious idleness.”76 Idleness is such a dangerous siren because by threatening to seduce Sidney from his love of the cause, it threatens what Languet alludes to as his pupil’s divinely appointed story, his providentially appointed future and self: “Do not think that God bestowed so fine a mind upon you for you to let it decay through disuse; but believe instead that he demands more of you than of others to whom he has been less generous.”77 Languet’s counsels against the siren sin of idleness are of a piece, therefore, with his larger architectonic goal—to keep in Sidney’s sight the cause that ought to govern plans and actions. Christendom was threatened by tragedies, authored principally by the Pope and Spain, and the consequences of those papal arts were as plain as the death and exile of Languet’s compatriots in Saxony, the threat of renewed civil war in France, and Don John’s campaign of confessional cleansing in the Netherlands. Similarly dark plots threatened England too, as Languet reminds his pupil in letter after letter inveighing against the folly of remaining an idle spectator before Christendom’s impending catastrophe. Languet’s letters summon Sidney to assume his providentially appointed role within what he represents as urgent historical drama, to employ his “virtue,” as one early letter has it, as the salvation both of himself and his country.78 In another, he 76 Languet to Sidney, 13 August 1575, in Levy, p. 269, 274. 77 Languet to Sidney, 3 December 1575, in Levy, p. 301. 78 Languet to Sidney, 5 March 1574, in Levy, p. 102.


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writes: “see it you do not fail your country in its very grave peril.”79 By so summoning Sidney, Languet manifests, of course, his own devotion to the cause. Once more, he fulfills his responsibilities as Sidney’s teacher and friend. During his lifetime, Languet enjoyed few intimate relationships—and his most passionate relationships were the ones cultivated with Philip Melanchthon and with Philip Sidney. That fact goes some distance toward explaining the unique and fiercely personal status of this correspondence in his canon, and his evident desire to replicate in his friendship with Sidney the transformative intimacy that he enjoyed with Melanchthon, the teacher who, by his own account, both changed him and made him himself. (As that first Philip wrote: “similitude is a common object of friendship.”) More, however, than Languet’s all-too-obvious devotion to the cause, his moralizing pedagogy, and his friendship are involved in this summons to Sidney to assume his role in the drama of contemporary events. Also important is the evidence of Languet’s commitment to Philippist oratio in the formal disposition of such a summons. When the Philippists sought to provide Melanchthon with a publicly persuasive account of himself and his cause, they did so, as I have shown, by constructing complementary portraits of him as St. Basil and Ermolao di Barbaro/Hercules. Set into the footsteps of Basil and Barbaro, positioned (that is) inside the idealized narratives of these historical figures as a means of clarifying the real story about himself, Melanchthon is subject to transformation as revelation. His complementary devotion to the Word and to words represents the essence of who and what he is. In turn, those portraits of the elder Melanchthon derive their formal logic from contemporary Protestant interpretations of scripture, with their emphasis on the shaping power of the Word (embodied in the natural words of scripture) to transform the old into the new man reborn in Christ—that new man identified as, yet again, an idealized narrative inside which the individual discovers another and (paradoxically) truer self. Considered within this context, Languet’s early correspondence with Sidney appears similarly motivated. As a devotee of the cause, as a teacher and a friend, and as a humanist trained in Philippist oratio, with a belief in the transformative power of words and the Word, Languet seeks to imitate in his letters Sidney’s own virtue, so that informed and transformed by that architectonic knowledge of himself, Sidney can pass from well-knowing to well-doing in the service of his country and all good men. Invited to read in Languet’s correspondence an idealized story of himself as the potential savior of his country and his cause, to discover in self-knowledge his own devotion to liberty, Sidney is asked to see his life as a salvation narrative, even as a sort of saving fiction. Recovering the logic of selfhood that underlies the formal disposition of Languet’s correspondence matters so profoundly, on the one hand, because of its power in shaping Sidney’s sense of himself: the very fact that he gives his life for the cause is proof enough of that point.80 There is, on the other 79 Languet to Sidney, 18 April, 1574, in Levy, p. 140. 80 Sidney’s fullest expression of this vision about himself as an actor whose role in the world is scripted by God appears in a letter to Walsingham written shortly before his death at Zutphen. After declaring his “love of the caws,” he writes: “I think a wyse and constant man ought never to greev whyle he doth plai as a man mai sai his own part truly … I know there

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hand, a second reason for emphasizing the importance of the logic of selfhood that underlies the formal disposition of Languet’s letters. The identification of the self with an idealized story of the self, in representations designed at once to inform and transform, is both a Philippist principle of oratio and a foundational principle of Sidney’s poetics in the Defence. As I will show, Melanchthon is as crucial for understanding Sidney’s poetics as he is for appreciating his piety and his politics. Piety, politics, and poetry come to form a complex amalgam for Sidney, with real and unforeseeable consequences for his defense of fiction-making as the preeminent form of knowledge in the public domain.

is a hyer power that must uphold me or els I shall fall, but certainly I trust, I shall not by other mens wants be drawn from my self,” 24 March 1586, in Feuillerat, vol. 3, 166.

Chapter 2

The “noblest scope”: Reading, Writing, and Early Modern Poetics Sidney’s Poetics and the Question of Allegory When Sidney turns in the opening pages of his Defence of Poesy from a survey of those names the ancients “have given unto this now scorned skill” to his wittily phrased and argumentatively crucial endorsement of “the luck or wisdom” by which “we Englishmen have met with the Greeks in calling [the poet] a maker,” he highlights his transition by writing: “which name [a maker], how high and incomparable a title it is, I had rather were known by marking the scope of other sciences than by my partial allegation” (emphasis mine, 98–9). Sidney’s transition creates a passage into what is appropriately the most celebrated and the most controversial portion of the Defence’s argument: the account of the poet’s golden world, the definition of poetry as “an art of imitation,” the discrimination among three kinds of poets, and the culminating determination both of the main aim or purpose of the human sciences generally and the particular purpose of poetry relative to that main aim (101). As Sidney begins this portion of the argument by considerations of scope, so he returns in this determination three different times to further reflections about scope: first, he offers a defense of “right poets” by virtue of their ability “to delight and to teach,” which he terms “the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed” (103) ; second, he defines as the aim or purpose of the human sciences generally (“all, one and other”) “this scope—to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying of his own divine essence” (104); and third, he distinguishes, in a hierarchy of purposes, the divine from other learned men “for having his scope as far beyond any of these as eternity exceedeth a moment” (106, emphasis mine). In order to organize his discussion of the poet as a “maker”and to justify “his high and incomparable status” by virtue of that title, Sidney has recourse to an oratorical term of art with a long and significant history, the scopus dicendi—Englished here as “scope.” To my knowledge, this is a technical term that has never been glossed by editors of the Defence. It goes without comment even in the best of the contemporary editions, those by Geoffrey Shepherd, Katherine Duncan-Jones, and Forrest G. Robinson.1 Not surprisingly, then, it is a term likewise left unexamined 1 See the Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) and An Apology for Poetry, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). “Scope” goes unglossed too in Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Robert Kimbrough (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press,

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in the voluminous body of contemporary critical commentary, on the assumption, presumably, that Sidney’s critics have understood it to mean what Shepherd suggests when he cites “intellectual scope” as if “scope” denotes “intellectual range.”2 It is my argument that recovering some portion of the term’s history can fix the meaning of the Defence’s vocabulary of “scope” more accurately than Shepherd’s implied definition permits, and make possible, thereby, a clearer understanding of Sidney’s golden world poetics. Moreover, it is my argument that the recovery of that history will enable the restoration of Sidney’s poetics to a newly recognized tradition of hermeneutics that was having a revolutionary impact on practices of reading and writing in sixteenth-century Europe. If Sidney’s success in creating the first definitive version of an English literary criticism derives in great measure, as scholars have long understood, from his extensive knowledge of Italian Renaissance poetics, the distinctiveness of his critical practice is due, in no small part, to the accommodation of that poetics to the new hermeneutic—to those new notions of reading and writing that he acquired from his unexplored connections with the Philippists.3 1983); and Defence of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella, and other Writings, ed. Elizabeth PorgesWatson (London: Dent; Vermont: Tuttle, 1997); and in older standard versions, Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904) and Miscellaneous Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William Gray (New York: AMS Press, 1966; repr. 1829). The exception that proves the rule is found in an abridged version of the Defence, where T.W. Craik glosses the second of the four uses of “scope” (without comment) as “end, aim,” Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Poetry and Prose (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 28. Gavin Alexander follows Craik’s practice in his recent edition, Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 11. “Scope” is used once in the Defence with a different denotation, apparently meaning “freedom” or “license,” when Sidney complains about the “scope” of the “scorning humours” in their attack upon rhyming, p. 121. Not until Shakespeare’s “this man’s art, and that man’s scope” (Sonnet 29), does the OED cite “scope” as denoting “intellectual range.” 2 Shepherd, p. 167, note 25. 3 Kathy Eden’s Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition argues concisely and cogently for a humanist rehabilitation during the sixteenth century of the classical tradition of interpretatio scripti—what she calls “a loosely organized set of rules for interpreting the written materials pertinent to legal cases, such as laws, wills, and contracts,” p. 7. Formulated by Cicero and Quintilian, those rules included: attention to historical and textual context; analysis of complete works with an eye to the “economy” or the persuasive arrangement of the work’s parts; and concern for authorial intention and decorum as touchstones of analysis. Melanchthon emerges from Eden’s study as one especially influential figure in the rehabilitation of the interpretatio scripti and as northern Europe’s “most compelling advocate … for an alliance between rhetorical imitation and biblical hermeneutics,” p. 79. For Peter Mack, the revolution in sixteenth-century reading practices has a shorter, more defined history. Against a tradition of medieval and early humanist commentaries “occupied mainly with explanations of difficult words and constructions, historical background, allusions and mythology,” Mack argues that Rudolf Agricola invented in his remarkably influential De inventione dialectica a new “close reader of texts,” one who combined the dialectical analysis of natural language with strong rhetorical interests in the affective impact of language upon readers [“Rudolf Agricola’s Reading of Literature,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 48 (1985), 23–41, and for an elaboration of that point, Mack’s Renaissance Argument]. Beyond Mack’s analysis, Meerhoff supplies a detailed roadmap for understanding how this “veritable

The “noblest scope”: Reading, Writing, and Early Modern Poetics

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Interpretation always matters, but an argument about how Sidney himself interpreted texts has particular timeliness in the wake of the recent revival of Edwin Greenlaw’s seemingly outmoded allegorical readings of the Arcadian narratives. Prominent new studies by Blair Worden and Kenneth Borris have returned to the examination of Sidney’s two Arcadias as allegorical romances or epics.4 Whatever the virtues of their particular readings, the appearance of these new allegorizing interpretations of the Arcadias highlights the need for a serious reconsideration of Sidney’s own notions about hermeneutics. Sidney scholarship has much to say about writing, but very little by contrast about reading. In that important regard, it is conspicuously under-theorized in comparison, for example, to Spenser studies where the need to account for allegory has for a long time generated sophisticated, historically and theoretically complex accounts of those hermeneutic principles, those foundational concepts of reading and writing, which reciprocally enable his poetics and the fictions constructed on them.5 Perhaps there is something in the peculiarly self-conscious dynamic of allegory, and its work of saying other than it means, that helps to explain this difference. Perhaps, too, it is the renewed call for the allegorizing of Sidney’s fictions that helps to explain the desirability of raising more explicitly such issues in regard to his strikingly different corpus. For there is allegory, and then there is allegory—and there are good reasons, historically and theoretically, to keep the distinction clear. If to write allegorical fictions means to figure-forth or to embody abstractions, then all literature is allegorical and, as Northrop Frye long ago argued, “all commentary, or the relating of the events of narrative to conceptual terminology, is in one sense allegorical interpretation.”6 In one sense, Frye is both correct and prudent, especially in the implied acknowledgment of our critical need to distinguish other senses—the distinction between allegory and alternative modes tradition” of new reading practices “developed at a remarkable and incredible speed” through the influence of Melanchthon’s works, “Logic and Eloquence, A Ramusian Revolution?,” (362–3); see also Meerhoff’s “Melanchthon lecteur d’Agricola: rhétorique et analyse textuelle,” in Réforme-Humanisme-Renaissance 16, no. 30 (1990), 5–22 and his “The Significance of Melanchthon’s Rhetoric,” 46–62. 4 Edwin Greenlaw, “Sidney’s Arcadia as an Example of Elizabethan Allegory,” in Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge (Boston: Ginn, 1913), 327–37. Greenlaw argues that since Sidney represents the Arcadia as an heroic poem, and contemporary critical belief held “that the great epics should be regarded as allegories,” then it is “reasonable to infer that the book was thought to conform to the ideas of the time as to the province of this ‘kind’,” p. 327. See Worden, The Sound of Virtue and Kenneth Borris, Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000); see too Borris’s “Elizabethan Allegorical Epics: The Arcadias as Counterparts,” Spenser Studies 13 (1999), 191–222. For a response to Worden’s readings of the Arcadias, see my “Allegory, Poetry, and History,” 82–92. For another recent allegorical reading of the fiction, see Barbara Brumbaugh, “Cecropia and the Church of Antichrist in Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia,” Studies in English Literature 38 (1998), 19–43. 5 For an exception to this claim, see Ferguson’s chapter on the Defence in Trials of Desire, esp. p. 155–62. 6 “Allegory,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. A. Preminger (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), p. 12.

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of writing and reading that reflect alternative, sometimes contrasting modes of hermeneutic understanding. Sidney scholarship stands in need of that distinction. Any exploration of the “allegorical” sufficiently rigorous and inclusive to satisfy the demands of analysis would need to take into consideration the discontinuous history of allegorical reading and allegorical writing—from the search for hyponoia (secret meanings) among the ancient students of Homer to the emergence centuries later of the first fully formed allegorical fictions. It would need to distinguish between “allegory” as a rhetorical term in the so-called classical schools of Greece and Rome and its application, as early as Heraclitus, to narrative fictions considered in their entirety, to the important and uneven overlap between the employment of “allegory” as a critical term and related terms like “irony,” “personification,” “symbol,” and “figure.” It would need to distinguish between allegory considered as a genre (a specific category of literature) and allegory as a mode (a particular way of writing or reading narrative); and it would need to accommodate all of these distinctions— and more—within an historically and theoretically sophisticated framework of analysis that comprehended in advance both the necessity of the project (the need for a terminus in the critical quest productive of nominally useful definitions) and its provisionality (there are always rival definitions to consider). Finally, too, any useful approach to allegory would need to avoid those twin monsters, the Scylla of totalization and the Charybdis of essentialism. When all narratives are allegorical, or when all reading becomes pace Paul de Man an allegory of reading, the potential cost to understanding is the elimination of those historically significant boundaries that have distinguished allegory from other narrative kinds. Plutarch scoffs at the folly of grammarians who read Homer allegorically; Luther rages against Origen’s impiety for imposing allegorical fictions on the Bible—and such moments of opposition punctuate meaningfully the history of hermeneutics. By contrast, narrow the boundaries of “allegory” to a single, static definition and the monster that threatens is the Charybdis of essentialism. When only one species of writing is deemed genuinely allegorical, the cost, potentially, is the loss of that rich diversity of narrative kinds that have historically called attention to themselves as allegories. This is not to argue for the impossibility of generic or modal distinctions to characterize allegory. Instead it is to insist upon the necessity of inclusiveness in making those distinctions.7 Navigating the gap between Scylla and Charybdis demands, then, the accommodative skills of an Odysseus.8 7 Prudentius’s psychomachias achieve representation in an interior locus strikingly at odds with the material world of winning and wasting upon which Langland expends so much visionary energy, but in neither case would it be tempting or useful to challenge the allegorical character of the narrative. On the other hand, no one is likely mistake Tom Jones’s journey from innocence to experience, whatever the allure of Miss Sophie’s muff, for allegory. 8 For a bibliography useful for considering the full range of these issues, see Gordon Teskey’s “Allegory” in The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1990). For Heraclitus’s Homeric Problems (1st century, AD), see Jon Whitman’s Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), p. 36–41, and more broadly helpful, his appendices, “On the History of the Term ‘Allegory’” (263–8) and “On the History of the Term ‘Personification’”(269–72). On the distinction between generic and modal approaches to allegory, see Angus Fletcher, Allegory:


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My choice of words to denote those skills is deliberate, since “accommodation” stands historically as the rhetorical term par excellence for the activity of making what is strange familiar—what the intellectual journey toward the home of understanding rescues from loss in the quest for meaning. Accommodation seems just the right skill to apply to the interpretation of allegory, since the business of allegorizing always involves the most difficult of hermeneutic journeys—the quest to comprehend a form of “other speaking” (what allegoria means in its Greek original). There is nothing new about insisting upon the otherness of allegory or the self-consciousness by which it traditionally estranges familiar ways of using words into seemingly foreign locutions. As allegory’s best contemporary student, Gordon Teskey begins his own analytical quest in an interrogation of the word’s etymology: “An allegory means something other than what it says and says something other than it means.”9 All interpretation works on a perceived gap between the words and the sense, between what is written and what is intended. Such is the labor of schoolboys, as Cicero wryly notes.10 Allegory works traditionally to exaggerate that hermeneutic gap by widening the division between the word and the sense, the signifier and the signified, into a schism, or what Teskey prefers to call a “rift.” At the level of consciousness, allegory opens a schism “between a life and a mystery, between the real and the ideal, between a literal tale and its moral—which is repaired, or at least concealed, by imagining a hierarchy on which we ascend toward a truth.”11 In the work of creating that “rift,” allegory bestows a double evaluation on the whole project of saying something “other” than what one means. “The former, positive sense of the ‘other’ as a higher, abstract meaning reflects back on a literal narrative that is ‘other’ in a negative sense, one that implies the inability of instrumental meaning entirely to assimilate a realm that it distinguishes as ‘literal’.” For this reason, Teskey argues, allegory is best construed as a form of violence—the necessarily violent activity of “imposing on the intolerable, chaotic otherness of nature a hierarchical order in which objects will appear to have inherent ‘meanings’.”12 Once more, allegory’s estrangement of familiar words in the opening of a “rift” in consciousness is enabled by a complementary estrangement of familiar narrative The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964) and Sayre Greenfield, The Ends of Allegory (Newark, NJ: Univ. of Delaware Press; London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1998), p. 48–65. On the distinction between allegory as a rhetorical term and the allegorical narrative in a literary tradition, see Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969). For early practices of allegorical reading, see Homer’s Ancient Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes, ed. Robert Lamberton and John J. Keaney (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992). On the vexed question about the beginnings of allegorical narrative, see Gordon Teskey’s argument ascribing that origin to Christian culture, Allegory and Violence, esp. Chapter 2 and the rival arguments of John Alvis—arguing on behalf of a classical allegorical tradition—in Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Virgil: The Political Plan of Zeus (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995). 9 Allegory and Violence, p. 6. 10 See De Oratore, 1. 57. 244. 11 Allegory and Violence, p. 2. 12 Allegory and Violence, p. 6, 2.

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patterns. The strangeness of allegory depends less on the sometimes marvelous or monstrous character of its materials, which are no more and no less strange than the ordinary stuff of romance, than on the narrative’s persistent violation of our familiar sense of time, place, and the causal connections that traditionally link one part of a story to another. Such strangeness is a provocation to interpretation, to the search for meaning that lies “beyond” the literal narrative. As a result, judged by Aristotelian standards of clarity or coherence, the allegorical narrative is often “badly” constructed, or as Teskey writes, “paratactic, digressive, episodic, and replete with iconographic details that have nothing to do with the story.”13 An example can clarify the point. Consider for instance the difficulty of a cinematic representation of the opening stanzas of Book I of The Faerie Queene. One by one, Spenser introduces a knight pricking on a plain, accompanied by a damsel on her ass, leading in tow a white lamb—all of whom are followed by a dwarf. A cartoonist might comically image the circling legs of the dwarf, lamb, and ass, surrealistically speeding to keep time with the pricking of Red Cross Knight’s stallion, but the realism of the ordinary camera would be utterly frustrated to picture what defies representation. At the moment that the narrative “malfunctions,” as the story refuses even the most minimal literal sense, the necessity of interpretation intervenes: a galloping horse, a donkey, a lamb, and a dwarf cannot travel together in the world precisely as a reminder that holiness and truth and innocence must. Presumably too, we dwarfish readers are simultaneously being reminded to exercise our interpretive legs to keep pace with the allegorical sense.14 Allegorical narratives are traditionally incoherent, operating by means of a strategic disjunction between the signifier and the signified to call attention to the difference between the truths to which they refer (often conceived as a unified body of ideas or ethical or religious principles) and the estranging tools (the discontinuities of time, place, and action) by which they make such references. There is extraordinary variety among readers of allegory about how to conceive the “literal” story, from the fierce rejection of early Christian exegetes who admonish against the Judaizing “letter” that kills—the perils of a literal interpretation of the Old Testament, for instance; to St. Augustine’s adequation of the Bible’s true literal meaning with its spiritual sense; to Thomas Aquinas’s full embracement of the Bible’s literal narrative, and his complementary insistence that spiritual allegorizing is supplemental to it. Amidst this complex history of exegetical redefinitions of the literal, what remains constant from Clement of Alexandria to Aquinas is the location of a “rift” in the text between the sense of the words (read plainly) and the intention of their author (whether conceived in human or divine terms) upon which allegorical interpretation can work.15 13 The Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 18. 14 This reading of Spenser’s opening cantos will be familiar to Humphrey Tonkin’s students, and students of his students. It may well have started life as a response to John Upton’s animadversions on the “no small inaccuracies” of the narrative. See The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1932), vol. 1, 176. I am grateful to Colin Burrow for his entry on the Spenser-Sidney List Serve for this latter reference. 15 For a concise account of this variety of interpretations of the literal sense, see Gerald L. Bruns, “Allegory as Radical Interpretation,” in Hermeneutics: Ancient and Modern (New


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To be reminded that the allegorical narrative, no less than the allegorical interpretation of narrative, conventionally makes war against the literal—literal meanings and literal stories—or challenges the sufficiency of the literal by translating it into an adequation of or supplement to the spiritual, is to recall simultaneously that in the broad history of western hermeneutics there have been alternative practices of reading and writing that define themselves as specifically anti-allegorical or pointedly non-allegorical in kind. Early in the Christian era, fourth-century Antioch served as the intellectual home to an historically significant cadre of biblical exegetes who espoused a hermeneutics of “plain reading” in direct opposition to the allegorizing of the Alexandrian fathers. Again in the early modern period, the theological revolution of Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin harnessed much of its intellectual power from the semiological revolution it enacted in biblical hermeneutics. The Reformers’ battlecry of sola fide derived its meaning from its cry of sola scriptura, and scripture alone became the source of faith when it was read by the “plain sense,” recoverable through an anti-allegorical or designedly non-allegorical hermeneutics. The “plain sense” is never really plain at Antioch or at Wittenberg. The very appeal to “plainness,” to the sufficiency of the letter of the text, is always accompanied by complex assumptions about the nature of meaning and interpretation.16 However, it is valuable to allude Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), 83–103. See also, Brian Cummings, “Literally Speaking; or the Literal Sense from Augustine to Lacan,” Paragraph 21 (1998), 200–226. Not all contemporary critics would follow Teskey in identifying “rifts” as central to the work of allegorizing. Stephen Barney voices a popular alternative understanding when he writes that “‘dark conceits’ and veiled allegories are not obscure to their audiences, but pretend to be obscure,” Allegories of History, Allegories of Love (Hamden, CN: Archon, 1979), p. 41; Angus Fletcher agrees: “In most cases allegories proceed toward clarity …,” p. 81–2. Maureen Quilligan insists on a sharp distinction between allegoresis (the reading of allegory that assumes a text says something other than it means) and the allegorical narrative itself, whose clarifying commentary is already indicated by the text, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), p. 25–31. The defense of allegory against its Romantic detractors has often led contemporary critics to deflect attention from the cryptic quality of its “other-speaking.” None of these critics would deny, however, the importance of a rhetoric of obscurity to allegorical narratives—to the self-conscious way in which allegory calls attention to its “rifts” in meaning, whether actual or pretended. 16 Hans W. Frei details three main assumptions motivating “literal” reading: that the Bible “referred to and described actual historical occurrences”; that it contains “one cumulative story” to depict “a single world of one temporal sequence”; and that “it must in principle embrace the experience of any present age and reader,” The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), p. 2–3. See too Kathryn E. Tanner’s extension of Frei’s thesis to include a redefinition of the “‘plain sense’ … viewed as a function of communal use: it is the obvious or direct sense of the text according to a usus loquendi established by the community in question,” “Theology and the Plain Sense,” in Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation, ed. Garrett Green (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), p. 63. See also Frei’s defense of literal reading in a contemporary context, “The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?,” in The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, ed. Frank McConnell (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), p. 36–77. Brevard S. Childs affords a wider historical treatment, “The Sensus Literalis of Scripture: An Ancient and

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to these two historical moments, however briefly, because of their serviceability in counteracting a potential danger in reconstructing the history of an allegorical poetics that sometimes manifests itself even in the best contemporary accounts of the form: the potential of such histories to absorb the history of medieval and early modern poetics into the history of allegory. Teskey relates a now-familiar story of the impact of Homeric allegorizing on the reading of the Old Testament by Philo Judaeus, and his subsequent influence upon Origen, arguably the first great Christian allegorical exegete. At the conclusion of this history, Teskey makes the claim that: “It is this application to the Bible of an Hellenic exegetical method that produced the Christian tradition of meaning.”17 There can be no question about the seminal influence of Hellenistic exegesis upon Christian interpretation, or its crucial impact on the development of Christian allegorical poetry, or the centuries-long consequences of those developments from Origen to Augustine to Aquinas for the importation of allegorical modes of reading and writing into the western literary tradition. At the same time, Teskey’s claim about the influence of that allegorical exegetical method in producing “the Christian tradition of meaning” is manifestly incautious, both in its far-too-sweeping identification of a factitious unity (there is no such thing as a single “Christian tradition of meaning”) and in its occultation of alternative hermeneutics by which Christian interpreters from Hellenistic Antioch to Reformation Wittenberg sought to clarify the meaning of the scriptures. Teskey’s conflation of the history of Christian hermeneutics with the history of allegorical exegesis stems, at least in part, from his own theoretical predisposition: from his commitment to an allegorizing habit of mind that identifies interpretation of any kind as an act of violence, as warfare in which meaning by definition imposes itself (always through the creation of “rifts” or schisms) upon the ever-intractable stuff of material existence. If in one sense, then, Teskey’s theoretical predisposition lends itself well to the interpretation of allegory—persuasive as he is about those “rifts” so crucial to the business of allegorizing— in another sense, his suspicious hermeneutics appears less appropriate to those alternative acts of accommodation by which readers and writers in the long history of the Greco-Roman grammatical and rhetorical tradition sought to make the strange familiar, to engage in interpretive journeys by which meaning is rescued from loss through the valuation of such standards as clarity, coherence, economy and decorum. Only if we are willing to declare such journeys impossible from the outset, to deconstruct them suspiciously for evidence of epistemological failure, which the common writer disguises and the extraordinary allegorizing genius (the Dante or the Spenser) admits to vatically and intermittently, does such interpretation recommend itself. This is a willingness that prejudges interpretive Modern Problem,” in Beiträge zur alttestamentlichen Theologie, ed. Herbert Donner, Robert Hanhart, and Rudolf Smend (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1977), p. 80–87. For a précis of five kinds of “literal” reading current among the early church fathers, see Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), p. 188–9. 17 The Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 19. For a fuller study of this history, see Philip Rollinson, Classical Theories of Allegory and Christian Culture (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1981).


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issues (issues, for instance, of epistemological authority and linguistic competence) about which an historian of poetics might do better to assume an agnostic attitude— one that includes the possibility of successful quests for meaning—especially when such issues are central to the historical debates at stake. Conceived broadly, the subject of that history is the alternative hermeneutics, which emerged both early and late in the Christian era to challenge allegorical methods of reading and writing. As Hans Frei has argued, “The preeminence of a literal and historical reading of the most important biblical stories was never wholly lost in western Christendom,” and the eruption of an anti-allegorical rhetoric in Antioch and Wittenberg is illustrative of his argument’s cogency.18 In its widest purview, the necessary background to the history of those eruptions concerns the primarily literary and rhetorical education that came to dominate the Roman west and the Byzantine east in the Hellenistic age and later, and the particular assumptions about textual interpretation conveyed by it. A large body of scholars from H.I. Marrou to George Kennedy have written persuasively about the continuity of that educational tradition, even as they attend to the complexity of its transformations.19 Such a history forms a necessary background to the understanding of these historical challenges to allegorical reading because the principles informing those challenges derive from foundational tenets of the grammatical education, which has its roots in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and its most detailed elaboration in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. A second reason speaks to the necessity of recovering that historical background as immediately relevant to the primary subject of this study, the emergence of Sidney’s golden world poetics. Recent scholarship by historians of rhetoric has called attention to a remarkable series of transformations in practices of reading and writing over the course of the sixteenth century in which the revival of influential components of the classical rhetorical tradition played a major role. For Kathy Eden, those transformations are an instance of “humanist rehabilitation” of the tradition of interpretatio scripti, a practice of reading whose origins lie in judicial rhetoric. For Peter Mack and Kees Meerhoff, they comprise a dialectically inspired revolution in the art of textual interpretation, fueled once more by the resurgent humanism of the Renaissance. Eden emphasizes distinctively the importance of “accommodation” to this tradition: the emphasis of rhetorically trained exegetes from Plutarch and 18 In fact, Frei adds, “It actually received new impetus in the era of the Renaissance and the Reformation when it became the regnant mode of biblical reading,” The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, p. 1. 19 H.I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956), see p. xi–xviii; George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994): “Classical metarhetoric, as set out in Greek and Latin handbooks from the fourth century B.C. to the end of antiquity, was a standard body of knowledge. Once fully developed, it remained unaltered in its essential features, though constantly revised and often made more detailed by teachers who sought some originality,” p. 6. See too Rudolf Pfeiffer’s account of the “world-wide spread of allegorism”; the agency of Hellenistic Stoic philosophy to its diffusion; and the rise of allegoresis as a hermeneutic practice in conscious opposition to the interpretive practices of Aristarchus and his followers among the Alexandrian grammarians, History of Classical Scholarship From the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 237.

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Augustine to Erasmus and Melanchthon on interpretation as an activity that makes readers at home in the text, encouraging them toward moral or spiritual journeys of their own.20 Mack and Meerhoff concentrate distinctively on the important marriage of dialectics and rhetoric for the development of an integrated theory of reading that attends, at once, to the logical connections among words in “natural” use and their affective force upon readers. Despite these distinctive emphases, there is considerable agreement among Eden, Mack, and Meerhoff about the character of these “new” reading practices in the context of the sixteenth-century’s northern Renaissance—“new” primarily in the sense that they renew, adjust and refine (as acts of accommodation) the hermeneutic practices of an ancient grammatical and rhetorical tradition. Those “new” interpretive practices concern (what until recently) were strikingly modern assumptions about how to read: the importance of examining whole books to recover arguments in their completeness; the need to consider authorial intention, economy of organization and textual/historical context as guides to interpretation; the assumption that language exists to reveal, rather than to conceal meaning; and the usefulness of applying dialectics (logical analysis) to rhetoric (to language in “natural” use). Beyond the contributions of Eden, Mack, and Meerhoff, I plan to demonstrate that such reading assumptions are crucial to comprehending the development of an early modern poetics in England that stood apart conspicuously and self-consciously from the allegorical tradition. Sidney reconceives the activity of fiction-making in the way that he does because he is a brilliant product of the new hermeneutics that revolutionized the practice of reading and writing in the northern Renaissance. His brilliance consists in the extraordinary synthesizing skill of his critical selfconsciousness, in his ability to transform familiar concepts about how poets make meaning by reanimating those concepts according to the principles of the new hermeneutic. If Gordon Teskey is correct in defining allegory as “an incoherent narrative,” which traditionally attends to “the difference between what it refers to and what it refers with,” which operates by means of a strategic disjunction between the signifier and the signified (in the manner of Spenser’s Faerie Queene), then Sidney clearly belongs to an alternative, non-allegorical history of hermeneutics.21 That history can be recovered most usefully by an examination of the lineage of one Sidney’s key critical terms—the scopus dicendi, its roots in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the anti-allegorical exegesis of the Antiochene fathers, and the pointedly non-allegorical hermeneutic of Luther and Melanchthon. In recovering that history, my scope—my main aim or goal—is to target those principles of reading and writing that reciprocally animate Sidney’s Defence. The Scope of Reading: Aristotle and Accommodation As a term of art, the scopus dicendi derives from a Greek word, skopos, meaning the aim or mark or target at which an archer shoots his arrow. Like so many rhetorical

20 See Eden, p. 41–63, 82–5. 21 Allegory and Violence, p. 5, 11.


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terms, this one arises first in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, where in the course of arguing that “men deliberate, not about the end, but about the means to the end,” he defines “the aim [skopos] before the deliberative orator” as “that which is expedient.”22 The orator’s scope, then, is that main aim or purpose to which everything else in his speech is directed. The good orator demonstrates by probable reason that a specific aim is realizable, and he does so with a practical goal in mind: to mobilize persuasive arguments about “the things which are expedient in regard to our actions” (1.6.1). Considerations of scope are revealing about Aristotle’s main contribution to the history of rhetoric. He places argumentation at its disciplinary core by establishing a close bond, on the one hand, between rhetoric and dialectic, and on the other, between the rhetorical arts and utility, by virtue of the alliance of those arts with ethics and politics. Having chosen his target, the orator fits himself with suitable arrows for the task at hand. In the first two books of the Rhetoric, Aristotle provides in compact and characteristically systematic form (a tremendously ambitious project this!) a complete list of “the materials from which we must draw our arguments in reference to good and the expedient”(1.6.28). Central to this project is Aristotle’s compilation of rhetorical topoi (the greater and the less, the possible and the impossible) or those “places” in which one discovers the premisses (protaseis) founded on particular opinions that permit the arrow to speed to its target—which render persuasive, that is, the claim advanced by the orator and the evidence cited in support of it. In the Rhetoric’s long and enormously influential third book, Aristotle turns from matters of proof to matters of style and arrangement in order to highlight those qualities essential to the orator’s success. The emphasis falls squarely on the utility of clarity, correctness, and aptness in speech; the appropriate use of metaphor; the strategic (or economic) arrangement of the work’s parts—all of the resources of language, in short, purposefully mobilized to guide the orator’s arrow. Aristotle’s treatment of figurative language is especially revealing about his stylistic principles. While he emphasizes that “it is metaphor above all that gives perspicuity, pleasure and a foreign air [an air of the strange and the exotic]” to prose and to poetry, he demands consistently that “we must make use of metaphors and epithets that are appropriate” (3.2.9). What is foreign in the figure is placed in service of perspicuous representation, the art of accommodating what is unfamiliar or surprising, often through playfulness, enigma, or disguise, to the familiar task of making meaning clear: “metaphors must not be far-fetched, but we must give names to things that have none by deriving the metaphor from what is akin and of the same kind, so that, as soon as it is uttered, it is clearly seen to be akin” (3.2.12). Metaphors direct the arrow to its target, not opening, but flying across potential gaps or schisms between words and meaning. As a term of art, scope matters also in Aristotle’s Rhetoric because of the convergence between considerations about the orator’s “end” or “aim” and the significance assigned to intentionality in his theory of reading and writing. Kathy Eden has argued that the “history of rhetorical theory” coincides with the history of collisions between “the competing claims of voluntas [what a writer means to say] 22 Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric, ed. and trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1958), p. 58–9; 1. 6. 1.

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and scriptum [what the words say themselves]”—and that collision first achieves systematic theoretical attention in Aristotle.23 Some collisions between voluntas and scriptum are the accidents of changing times or circumstances, which deny to writings in any form the possibility of remaining permanently meaningful. Some collisions are the products of verbal ambiguity. In the face of such accidents, Aristotle turns for the repair of those collisions to considerations of scope—to the author’s final aim, end, or intention as the principal vehicle for rescuing meaning from loss. That intention is discoverable, in turn, by attending to what future grammarians and rhetoricians would call the circumstances of the text—the historical and textual field out of which the document emerged—and to the parts of the individual text considered in relation to the whole. Considerations of scope matter, then, both as a principle for conceiving how rhetorical arguments function and as a guide for reading practices that value meaning achieved through the perspicuous organization of argument and style that render the writer’s intention clear. As the rhetorical tradition of ancient Greece was transported into Latin rhetoric, Aristotle’s text remained one locus classicus for considerations of scope, even as his terminology was altered. All of the most famous rhetorics of the Roman world follow Aristotle’s practice in giving precedence to proofs over style. Argument matters first in the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium, Cicero’s De Oratore, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. The terminology may change, but the strong teleological drive of the rhetorical art remains constant—its drive toward purposeful, causally organized argumentation. The anonymous author of the Ad Herennium argues for utility or expedience as the “end” (finem) of “the orator who gives counsel.”24 By contrast, Cicero’s De Inventione substitutes as the “end” (finem) of deliberative oratory, “both honour and advantage,” adding, characteristically, an even more emphatically ethical aim to Aristotle’s seemingly more practical art.25 When Quintilian later writes about the final aims or ends of the orator, the rhetorical terminology shifts once again in ways that are ultimately consequential for Renaissance rhetorical and dialectical thought. In Book 3 of the Institutio Oratoria, he describes as the “basis” (status) of the speaker’s cause “that point which the orator sees to be the most important for him to make,” noting in the course of his description—with some evident impatience— the diversity of names (constitutionem, quaestionem, caput) imparted historically to this same or similar concept.26 For Quintilian, what the orator “aims” at can just 23 Eden, p. 10–11. 24 Rhetorica Ad Herennium, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1954), p. 160–61; 3. 2. 3. 25 De Inventione in De Inventione, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, et Topica, ed. and trans. H.M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1949), p. 324–5; 2. 51. 155–6. 26 The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, ed. and trans. H.E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1920), p. 412–13, 3. 6. 9; p. 408–9, 3. 6. 2. For Quintilian, “These different names, however, all mean the same thing, nor is it of the least importance to students by what special name things are called” (p. 413). For the historian of rhetoric, on the other hand, those different names can be enormously consequential. See Otto Alvin Loeb Dieter’s “Stasis,” for a wide-ranging, suggestive history of this vocabulary (scopus, status, and related terms) from Aristotle to Quintilian, in Speech Monographs


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as well be described by another metaphor-turned-techne, the “basis” or status upon which he builds those arguments central to the art of persuading. Once more, the persistence of that teleological drive of argumentation was accompanied by the enhancement of essential components of Aristotelian hermeneutics. As Kathy Eden has shown, the grammarians and rhetoricians of classical Rome elaborated a complex and coherent program for reading and writing, based importantly on the interpretatio scripti, the interpretation of legal writings associated with laws, wills, contracts and other judicial matters. At the core of that program, she locates expertise in the accommodative arts, including the skillful application of questions about intentionality to the determination of meaning; the careful discrimination of textual and historical circumstances for the analysis of discourse; the principled scrutiny of the parts of the text in relation to the whole; and the rigorous application of standards of decorum and energeia (forcefulness) to the employment and interpretation of language. As a tool for constructing persuasive arguments first in the courtroom, and subsequently in the wider court of public opinion (any and all argumentation in the open forum), hermeneutics carried a distinctive epistemological character—one intimately allied with equity as a standard of evaluation in judicial affairs and one marked by a predisposition in judgments of many sorts to privilege individuating circumstances as the appropriate context for the determination of meaning and value.27 17, no. 4 (1950), 345–69. For a more recent history of the rhetorical tradition that helps to contextualize these terms, see Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990). I am grateful on this topic to Germaine Warkentin for calling my attention to the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, ed. Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti (Torino: Unione typografico torinese, 1961). 27 Aristotle’s terminology in relation to scope shifted, but the target stayed the same: effective argumentation, achieved by means of perspicuous words, decorously and economically deployed. For Roman rhetoricians like Cicero and Quintilian, allegory exists largely as a figure of speech—a potential arrow in the orator’s quiver—one whose use (whether conceived as continued metaphor, on the one hand, or inversion, on the other) is perpetually circumscribed by admonitions against obscurity. In turn, allegorical interpretation, as critiqued by Cicero, emerges as the arbitrary and impious imposition of meaning upon texts by Stoic philosophers who fail to understand either the gods or the right rules of hermeneutic practice. See, for instance, Cicero’s attacks upon “those allegorizing and etymological methods of explaining” mythologies in De natura deorum, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1956), p. 345. Criticism of the impiety of Stoic allegorizing is everywhere complemented by an attack on misguided assumptions about how to read: “A great deal of quite unnecessary trouble was taken first by Zeno, then by Cleanthes and lastly by Chrysippus, to rationalize these purely fanciful myths and explain the reasons for the names by which the various deities are called.” If they had only read with an eye to intention, Cicero makes clear, they would have known such stories to be “purely fanciful” (2. 24. 63–4). Pursue the course of ancient hermeneutics from Aristotle to Quintilian, and the main trajectory of that tradition is pointedly non-allegorical. George A. Kennedy writes: “throughout antiquity allegorical interpretation remains largely a tool of philosophical or religious rhetoric, as well as a technique to rescue the Homeric poems from the strictures of critics …. Plato was opposed to allegorical interpretation of traditional myths as part of education …. Aristotle shows no interest in it either, and it is not a tool of the Alexandrian literary scholars ….”

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In the Hellenistic period, Aristotle’s skopos remained a key term of art in the Greek rhetorical schools, or so it seems reasonable to suppose, given its long currency. It survived, for instance, in the aesthetic commentaries of Philodemus of Gadara (c. 110BC–40BC), where it proved useful for evaluating the final aim or purpose of poets in pleasing readers through the skillful organization of their literary works.28 It survived, too, across the lines of a fierce disciplinary dispute with important consequences for the history of an anti-allegorical hermeneutics. Skopos recurs as a term of art among two apparently distinct bodies of textual critics: first, among the adepts belonging to the philosophical tradition, from the early Christian allegorist, Origen (185–253c.) to the later neoplatonic commentators, Iamblicus (d.c.330) and Proclus (412c.–485) ; and second, among the practitioners of the rhetorical tradition, the patristic exegetes and preachers of the Antiochene school— most importantly, Diodore of Tarsus (d.c.392), Theodore of Mopsuestia (350–428c.) and John Chrysostom (c. 347–407c.). To recount the history of an early alternative hermeneutic that marshals traditional rhetorical notions to combat explicitly the perils of allegorizing, it makes sense to turn first to Antioch, and to move afterward by way of comparison and contrast to the Alexandria of Origen and Proclus’s Athens. Distinctions between Antiochene “literalism” (so-called) and Alexandrian allegorizing are a now-suspect critical commonplace, partly because of loose claims about the foundations of Antiochene exegesis in Judaic studies, and in much greater measure because of the ascription to the Antiochenes of something far too akin to a modern historical sensibility. Recent scholars have reconfigured the familiar distinction between “literalistic” Antioch and allegorizing Alexandria into something both more problematic, by attending to important points of contact between them, and more illuminating, by generating a fresh set of perspectives about how to understand the hermeneutic differences that distinguish them.29 While for theoretical reasons, It was the Stoics who “resurrected allegory on a large scale as a way to teach their philosophical views, and it had an important future in the interpretations of neo-Platonists and Christians,” Classical Criticism, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), vol. 1, 86. For a recent review of ancient opposition to allegorizing, see David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), p. 52–72. 28 See Kennedy, Classical Criticism, p. 216. It appears as a rhetorical standard in the seventh-century Miracles of Artemios, as the purposeful organization of narratives for the celebration of God. See Derek Krueger, Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 70. 29 For a review of current scholarship on the question, see Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), p. 70–78. On the role of Judaism in Theodore of Mopsuestia’s exegesis, see Frances M. Young, Virtuoso Theology: The Bible and Interpretation (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1993), p. 100–101. On the importance of inspiration to Antiochene exegesis, see Maurice Wiles, “Theodore of Mopsuestia as Representative of the Antiochene School,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. P.R. Ackroyd and C.F. Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), p. 490–91. For the Antiochenes’ approach to history as an interpretive tool, see the balanced assessment in Margaret M. Mitchell’s The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), p. 389–94. For earlier studies reassessing points of contact—and real differences between Antioch and


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more or less persuasive according to one’s perspective on the postmodern condition, scholars of the last decade have been eager to narrow the differences between Antioch and Alexandria, there can be no question about the existence of attacks and counterattacks between the two schools. From Eustathius’ early assault against Origen in On the Witch of Endor to the sharp anti-allegorizing commentaries of Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia and John Chrysostom, explicit hermeneutic combat between Antioch and Alexandria was a fact of rhetorical life. The question is how to account for the relationship between Antiochene “literalism” and Alexandrian allegorizing without explaining the fact of that rhetorical combat away.30 For Margaret M. Mitchell in her study of Chrysostom’s Pauline interpretation and, more comprehensively, for Frances Young in her revisionary analysis of patristic hermeneutics, the important distinction between Antioch and Alexandria derives from rival understandings about language and reference. Two contrasting versions of mimesis collide. The Antiochenes practice what Young calls “ikonic” exegesis, as an effort to explicate the “deeper meaning” of a narrative that is assumed to be reflected by or mirrored in “the text taken as a coherent whole.” For them, the Bible is educational literature, and good moral and doctrinal lessons are to be drawn from it, on the principle that scriptural language mirrors, embodies or figures forth its teachings in ways that enable true understanding. By contrast, the Alexandrians engage in “symbolic” interpretation, as an attempt to discover the occult meanings of a text whose words are assumed to be “symbols or tokens,” pointing obliquely to “other realities,” in a work often conceived to be without “narrative, or surface coherence.”31 The Bible is no less educational for the Alexandrians than the Antiochenes, but its deepest spiritual lessons are available only to the adept who are Alexandria—see Jacques Grillet’s “Les exégeses d’Alexandrie et d’Antioche: conflit ou malentendu?,” Récherches de science réligieuse 34 (1947), 257–302, and D.S. WallaceHadrill’s ch. 2, “The Interpretation of the Biblical Record,” in Christian Antioch: A Study of Early Christian Thought in the East (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982). 30 When Theodore of Mopsuestia raged that his rivals “dream up silly fables in their own heads and give their folly the name of allegory,” his verbal barb had a hermeneutic point in an historical combat. See Karlfried Froehlich, Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), p. 96. The best single introduction to that combat remains Frances M. Young’s “The Rhetorical Schools and Their Influence on Patristic Exegesis,” in The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, ed. Rowan Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 182–99, and her more recent and complex refinement of that work in Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, esp. ch. 8, p. 161–85. Clark’s effort to deny—because of her theoretical predisposition—any “real” distinction between Alexandria and Antioch ignores the historical reality of the dispute. For an effort to ground the explanation for those distinctions in theological disputes, see Rowan A. Greer, The Captain of Our Salvation: A Study of the Patristic Exegesis of Hebrews (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1973). For Young’s reading of the theological distinctions motivating the debate, and the Antiochene alternative to the “excessive spiritualizing” of the Origenists in response to Anthropomorphite issues, see “The Fourth Century Reaction Against Allegory,” Studia Patristica 30 (1994), 120–25. 31 Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, p. 162. For a lucid illustration about how another exegete belonging to the Antiochene tradition insists explicitly on meaning as organically embodied by texts, which must be analyzed in their entirety to be

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skilled in cracking its secret code, the “rift” (to use Teskey’s term) between sense and intention. As an explanation for the division between these contrasting assumptions about language and reference, and the contrasting hermeneutic practices derived from them, Young appeals to the institutional conflicts of Hellenistic culture that traditionally pitched grammarians and rhetoricians—on the lower rungs of the educational ladder— against the philosophical elites who occupied its apex. She argues persuasively for associating the Antiochene exegetes with a rhetorical approach to texts, and the rival Alexandrians with the reading practices of the philosophical schools. In the process, Young engineers a wholescale redefinition of Antiochene “literalism.” In place of “literal interpretation” and “historical criticism,” the emphasis falls squarely on Antiochene exegesis as the accommodation of traditional grammatical and rhetorical principles of reading to the analysis of the Bible. Those principles, in turn, are detailed by reference to that primary definitive source for documenting how students in Hellenistic grammar schools were taught to read, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.32 Among those principles of reading, Young highlights especially: the primacy of close textual analysis, with “methodical” attention to questions of vocabulary and parts of speech; stylistic considerations of word usage, figures of speech, and organization, with regard to aptness or decorum; the reading of whole texts to interpret one part in relation to another; the use of historike, historical facts or received narratives to elucidate meaning ; and the exercise of krisis, or moral-thematic analysis, in order to determine the ethical and spiritual import of the work. Such principles should by now seem familiar, drawn as they are from the same conceptual quiver that Aristotle first armed and that Cicero and Quintilian, among others, proceeded to expand and diversify. All interpretation is likely to represent itself as a rescue operation—an activity that safeguards “true meaning” from misprision—but anti-allegorical criticism is especially prone to self-representations of this variety, both because of its inherent belatedness (its reactive character as a ground-clearing assault against misinterpretation) and because of its rhetoric of conservation (its insistence on its power to preserve the “work itself,” both sensum [what the words say] and voluntas [what the writer means]). The appeal to historike among the Antiochenes—to the realm of events, narrated facts, deeds, and stories—operates in precisely this manner.33 When Diodore of Tarsus clarifies his exegetical principles in the Prologue understood, see Young’s account of Adrianos’s Isogoge ad sacras scripturas in “The Fourth Century Reaction Against Allegory,” 120–25. 32 See esp. Institutio Oratoria, Bk 1, p. 4–9. 33 When Wiles writes about Theodore of Mopsuestia’s commitment “to see the meaning of scripture in historical terms,” he clarifies the point by adding “not of course in a modern historicist sense but in terms of a divine purpose being worked out in history,” p. 509. Young notes also that although ancient readers from Lucian to Apthonius could and did sometimes insist on making distinctions between true and false stories in an “objective” way, history as a genre “embraced not just past events, but all kinds of other information—geographical, cultural, technical, strategic … and it was supposed to be useful, to explore moral issues. The Antiochenes could not have had the anxiety about history that has bothered modern scholars.” Rather their concerns about plausibility reflected, in greater measure, their commitment to


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to his Commentary of the Psalms, he does so by insisting that the application of theoria (of “insight”) to the reading of the Bible rescues the hypokeimenon (the “substance”) of the text, by careful attention to the grounding of moral and spiritual meaning in its historike, in the Bible’s “pure account of … actual event[s] of the past.”34 Allegory is misprision, he insists by contrast, a form of misinterpretation that results when narrative “substance” is discarded.35 Typological reading is justified, because of its conservation of the actuality of events, but Diodore will have nothing to do with interpretations that force “the reader to take one thing for another …, ‘demon’ for abyss, ‘devil’ for dragon, and so on.”36 When Theodore of Mopsuestia takes on “these opponents of mine” who discover in Paul’s reading of Sarah and Hagar a license for interpreting the Bible allegorically, he claims that they “turn it all to the contrary,” transposing the divine scripture into no more than “dreams in the night,” insisting that “Adam is not really Adam, paradise is not paradise, the serpent not the serpent.” The notion that apt interpretation can spring from turning words “to the contrary,” from interrogating the putative “rifts” that divide sense from intention is both alien and disturbing. Moreover, while such interpretations disturb because they “make history [narrative] serve their own ends,” they are ultimately so perilous because they threaten the truth of scripture, since scripture itself preserves “the narrative of actual events.” Like Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore is in the business of rescuing the Bible, defending it against misprision and conserving its veracity.37 That rescue proceeds so often by appeal to historike for reasons at once hermeneutic and theological: hermeneutic, because their rhetorical training predisposes them to interpret histories as coherent, economically organized narratives whose skopos is to reveal rather to conceal meaning; and theological, because their providential perspective leads them to locate the skopos of Christian truth in salvation history, the unfolding story of God’s saving purpose over time. narrative coherence and logic as standards of biblical interpretation, “The Fourth Century Reaction Against Allegory,” 124–5. 34 Froehlich, p. 91. 35 Young, Biblical Exegesis, p. 175. 36 Froehlich, p. 86. For a useful examination of Antiochene interpretation in which careful discriminations are made between allegorical and typological reading, see Robert J. Kepple, “An Analysis of Antiochene Exegesis of Galatians 4: 24–6,” Westminster Theological Journal 39 (Spring 1977), 239–49. 37 In this respect, the Antiochenes are almost wholly unoriginal. Their complaints against allegory—the seemingly arbitrariness of its decodings, its disregard for textual and narrative coherence, its sacrifice of the historical narrative for the occult sense—echo the complaints of other rhetorically trained patristic readers from Arnobius of Sicca, and his student Lactantius—the so-called Christian Cicero—to Firmicus Mater. The Antiochenes are different because they employ their rhetorical principles not to combat pagan religion and its mythologies—so often the subject of allegorical rescue—but rather to attack allegorical interpretations of the scripture. For a detailed history of how a diverse body of early Christian writers sometimes used and sometimes attacked allegorical interpretation, see Jean Pepin’s idiosyncratic but useful, Mythe et allégorie. Les origines grecques et les contestations judéochrétiennes (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1976; 1st edn, 1958). By far, the most detailed and sophisticated of these anti-allegorical critiques is found in Book 5 of Arnobius of Sicca’s The Case Against the Pagans.

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When Theodore rails against the allegorical interpreters, he fulminates with a polemical thunder that anticipates Martin Luther’s: “They dream up silly fables in their own heads and give their folly the name of allegory,” imperiling in the process the “purpose” (skopos) of the biblical author. By contrast, John Chrysostom’s resistance to allegorizing is more mildly articulated, reminiscent of the more temperate Philip Melanchthon’s. He acknowledges that the Bible contains allegories—while insisting that such allegories explain themselves—and he is explicit about his refusal to be shamed into abandoning God’s Word for the allegorist’s vain imaginations, but he is rarely polemical. What he shares with Theodore most importantly is a commitment to interpreting the scriptures in the context of their Maker’s purpose, a purpose revealed by paying close attention to the moral and doctrinal arguments targeted by the biblical parts within the biblical whole.38 Skopos remains, then, a key term of art among the Antiochenes, and it does so as one sign of the traditional rhetorical character of their hermeneutic practice, and as one indicator of their alliance with Hellenistic readers beyond the walls of Antioch. When their contemporary, Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–79), defends the study of pagan literature in his Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature, he draws upon the same rhetorical tradition to highlight its value for young Christians. As it is the goal of the helmsman to guide his ship through the winds, and the goal of the archer to shoot at his mark, Basil argues, so there is a goal in human life—an end (skopos) purposed by the “artisan”—that the individual “must keep before him in all his words and deeds.”39 That goal is moral and spiritual reformation, and the best literature of the pagans is valued by its utility in realizing at least the moral component of that end. Basil’s emphasis on the moral utility of literary study mirrors, in turn, Plutarch’s earlier defense of literary study, How a Young Man Should Study Poetry. Again, the emphasis falls plainly on the moral utility of reading—and in this instance, such emphasis is accompanied by explicit advice against “perverting” the best of the ancient fictions, Homer’s epics, by discovering “allegories” or “hidden meanings” in them. Plutarch fairly snorts as he adds by way of exclamation: “As if the poet had not interpreted these episodes!” (62).40 Educated properly, the student interprets well not by “inventing plausible misinterpretations for bad passages”—as 38 Froehlich, p. 96. See, too, Theodore’s Commentary on Galatians 4:24, in Minor Epistles of St Paul, ed. H.B. Swete (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1880–82), vol. 1, 72–87. For Chrysostom both acknowledging the presence of biblical allegories and insisting on the clarity with which these texts offer themselves to rhetorical interpretation, see his Interpretatio In Isaiah Prophetam, ch. 5 in Joannis Chrysostomi, Opera Omnia Quae Extant (Paris: Gaume Fratres, 1836) or, more briefly, his defense of Matthew against allegorical interpretation in Homily 16, The Preaching of Chrysostom: Homilies on the Sermon on the Mount, ed. and trans. Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967), p. 92. 39 Frederick M. Padelford, trans., in Essays on the Study and Use of Poetry (New York: Henry Holt, 1902), p. 111. For the Greek text, see Saint Basil on the Value of Greek Literature, ed. N.G. Wilson (London: Duckworth, 1975), 8. 14. 40 Padelford, trans., in Essays on the Study and Use of Poetry, p. 62. See Eden’s treatment of Basil’s Address both as advocacy for “an economical reception of the pagan literary tradition” and as “a paradigm of this kind of reception in its reading” of Plutarch’s treatise, p. 46.


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an allegorist might teach—but by fixing his eye on the authorial target. Literature is “an imitation of character and life,” whose purpose is moral reformation (74). Basil and Plutarch read fictions in much the same way that the Antiochenes read the Bible, as narratives whose scope of moral reformation requires no allegorical interpretation because no “rift” exists between what the words say and what their authors mean. This is not to argue that rhetorical readers saw interpretation as unnecessary. Whatever Plutarch’s snorting over Homer’s lucidity or Chrysostom’s hyperbolic claims about the self-interpreting powers of the biblical narrative, both are self-conscious, artfully trained readers. It is to argue, instead, that the tools appropriate to interpretation—careful attention to textual and historical context, to organization and argument—are deployed on the assumption that words function to reveal, rather than to conceal meaning, and that the rhetorician’s accommodative skills can succeed in rescuing meaning from loss because they illuminate the coherence between what the words say and what the author intends. If skopos begins its rhetorical life in Aristotle as a simple metaphor turned techne, a term of art, that term of art has acquired by Basil’s time new and surprisingly expansive metaphorical power. That power is worth noting, in turn, because it anticipates so eloquently the term’s renewed appeal for Melanchthon and his Philippist students. The elder Melanchthon admired Basil’s humility, and found enormously sympathetic Basil’s vision of a cosmos created by the divine maker who is also the divine artist. In a work traditionally conceived to have been written at the end of his life, On the Hexaemeron, Basil pauses during his commentary on Genesis to reflect about God’s pleasure in his own creation:41 ‘And God saw that it was good’. It is not to the eyes of God that things made by Him afford pleasure, nor is His approbation of beautiful objects such as it is with us; but, beauty is that which is brought to perfection according to the principle of art and which contributes to the usefulness of its end. He, therefore, who proposed to Himself a clear aim (σκoπov) for His works, having recourse to His own artistic principles, approved them individually as fulfilling His aim. In fact, a hand by itself or an eye alone or any of the members of a statue, lying about separately, would not appear beautiful to one chancing upon them; but, set in their proper place, they exhibit beauty of relationship, scarcely evident formerly, but now easily recognized by the uncultured man. Yet, the artist, even before the combination of the parts knows the beauty of each and approves them individually, directing his judgment to the final aim.

Basil turns exegesis into aesthetic meditation and celebration, piously intended. There is nothing “plain” about his prose, except in its explicit adherence to biblical words as plain guides to biblical sense, and in the explicitness of his rejection of the “dream interpretations” of allegorizing readers.42 Instead, one clause builds periodically upon another in an elegant rhetorical imitation of its argument: the beauty of purposeful organization, both in the universe at large—where it is the very nature of things to 41 Sister Agnes Clare Way, trans., in Saint Basil: Exegetic Homilies (Washington, DC: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1963), p. 53. For the Greek text, see Patrologiae Graecae, vol. 29, Homilia 3, ch. 10, 76. 42 Saint Basil: Exegetic Homilies, p. 52.

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combine and relate, to fashion proper and coherent contexts—and in the mind of that Maker who supplies the model for the rhetorical making on display throughout the Hexaemeron.43 Basil’s God operates as the most economical of all rhetoricians because of his divine powers of accommodation: if the world is a well-made oration, it is an oration made well because it is accommodated to human needs.44 Its beauty exists not to give God pleasure, but to provide pleasure to humankind for moral and spiritual ends. Again, the strong teleological drive of the argument denotes the depth of Basil’s debts to the classical rhetorical tradition deriving from Aristotle, as does the decidedly Aristotelian cast of his conception of beauty: only what is useful can be considered beautiful. Basil’s natural theology— bolstered throughout by the vast quantities of natural philosophical learning that he brings to bear upon his exegesis of Genesis—has no need and no room for allegory.45 With a conception of divine purpose manifest both in the created world and in the Bible’s creative Word, the pious response from the person of faith is meditation and celebration—meditation of macrocosmic beauty as inspiration to microcosmic praise. Basil’s skopos, then, is more than Aristotelian: it is a term of art metaphorically expanded into a Christian hermeneutics of praise and persuasion.

43 See George L. Kustas, “Saint Basil and the Rhetorical Tradition,” in Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic, ed. Paul Jonathan Fedwick (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981), Part 1, p. 221–80. 44 For Basil and the relationship between economy (oikonomia) and accommodation, see Kustas, p. 223–33. He argues that central to “oikonomia is the notion of accommodation to circumstance, whether in the daily management of an estate, as originally, or in church affairs, or in God’s providential concern …” (227–8). For a wider historical consideration of “economy” as a rhetorical term, see J. Reumann, “Oikonomia as ‘Ethical Accommodation’ in the Fathers, and Its Pagan Backgrounds,” Studia Patristica 3 (1961), 370–79 and Ladislas Orsy, “In Search of the Meaning of Oikonomia: Report on a Convention,” Theological Studies 43 (1982), 312–19. 45 For Basil and Aristotle, see Leo V. Jacks, St. Basil and Greek Literature (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1922), p. 110–11. For Basil’s natural theology, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), esp. “Natural Theology as Apologetics,” p. 22–39, and on Basil’s exegetical practice, his essay “The ‘Spiritual Sense’ of Scripture: The Exegetical Basis for St. Basil’s Doctrine of the Holy Spirit,” in Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic, p. 337–60; and on the Hexaemeron’s aggressively anti-allegorical rhetoric, see Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: Univ. of California Press, 1994), p. 318–50 and the introduction to Basile de Césarée, Sur l’origine de l’homme, trans. Alexis Smets and Michel Van Esbroeck (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1970), p. 83–119. For another perspective on Basil and allegory, see Richard Lim, “The Politics of Interpretation in Basil of Caesarea’s Hexaemeron,” Vigiliae Christianae 44 (1990), 351–70. See too, Frances Young on the belief among the Cappadocians about “the poverty of human language to express the divine reality” coupled paradoxically with faith in “the evocative power of the true metaphor,” a paradox enabled by “the notion of a transcendent God choosing to accommodate the divine self to the limitations of the human condition in the incarnation and eucharist,” Biblical Exegesis, p. 160.


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Basil of Caesarea was also called Basil the Great, and he earned that appellation among his contemporaries because he conjoined in his life and his works the two main cultural currents of the Hellenistic world, rhetoric and philosophy.46 Basil’s connections with Antioch were enduring. He corresponded both with Libanius, the city’s greatest rhetor, and with Diodore of Tarsus, who made gifts of two of his own books to him.47 Basil’s education, however, took place in Athens, where he absorbed ancient philosophy, particularly that of the platonists, and he later traveled east to Alexandria, where both the memory and the writings of Origen survived.48 Arising from this conjunction of rhetorical and philosophical training, Basil’s “greatness” supplies an especially good vantage from which to make distinctions between the skopos of the Antiochene school and the skopos that organizes the allegorizing practices of the Alexandrian Origen (c. 185–254) and those of the Alexandrian educated Proclus (c. 410–485), a neoplatonist who afterwards made Athens his school. In turn, Basil’s vantage is especially educational because his metaphorical expansion of skopos from a term of art into a principle of Christian hermeneutics anticipates—as a syncresis of the rhetorical and the philosophical—both important aspects of Melanchthon’s oratio sacra and the Philippist poetics of Sidney. For a Christian exegete, the encounter with philosophy did not necessarily entail the embrace of allegory. No one in the Hellenistic world endows narrative with a more rigorously teleological drive than Origen. For him, exegesis is theology, and theology exegesis, and both activities are determined by a single goal: askesis, the ascent of the individual toward spiritual union with the divine. Accordingly, everywhere in his discussion of “How Divine Scripture Should Be Read and Interpreted”—his fullest exposition of hermeneutics in On First Principles—Origen organizes his arguments according to the familiar, culturally pervasive vocabulary of the skopos of the classical rhetorical tradition.49 When he discusses “the marks of a true understanding of the scriptures,” he does so first by summoning attention to “the aim of the Spirit” who enlightened the prophets and apostles (282); when he explores scriptural “stumbling blocks,” he does so by reference to their “principal aim” of announcing “the connexion that exists among spiritual events” (286); and when he exposes the insufficiency of the body of scripture, its literal significance, he points to “the aim of the divine power” in highlighting that fact (293). Like the Antiochenes later, he attributes a striking unity of design to the Bible, insisting on the meaningfulness of its every word. Like them, he attends to historike—to the narrative of actual events—and to the contexts, philological and historical, that sometimes explain scriptural meaning. An eminent biblical scholar, Origen displays conspicuously his thorough mastery of the grammatical and rhetorical traditions.50 46 See Kustas, p. 223–6. 47 See Lim, 352–3. 48 See Rousseau, p. 82–5. 49 On First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). Additional references are cited in parentheses by page number. 50 On Origen’s interpretive practices, see Young, Biblical Exegesis, esp., “The advent of scholarship,” p. 76–96. See, too, Karen Jo Torjesen, Hermeneutical Procedures and

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For all that, no one in the Hellenistic world reads biblical narrative with a sharper eye for its incoherence than Origen. Repeatedly he calls attention to its elements of the “absurd and impossible” or what Gordon Teskey would characterize as its “rifts” between sense and intention (294). With an audacity rivaling that of a pagan critic like Celsus, Origen fairly revels in his disclosure of the Bible’s moments of palpable malfunction: its reasoning that is not reasonable, its laws that are not useful, its record of events that are historically not true (294). Such revels are possible, in turn, because narrative discontinuity of this kind is not an accident of composition; instead, it is the chief arrow in the Spirit’s rhetorical quiver, the very means by which the text achieves its purpose. “[C]ertain stumbling-blocks, as it were, and hindrances and impossibilities” are inscribed in the text so that “the more skilful and inquiring readers … may gain a sound conviction of the necessity of seeking in such instances a meaning worthy of God” (285, 287). Inspired by such stumbling blocks to ascend toward spiritual truths, Origen’s most skillful readers surmount the blocks of that sometimes absurd and impossible narrative to apprehend the truth beyond it. The text conceals, rather than reveals meaning—so that meaning will be revealed (the Spirit willing!) beyond rather than through words. In the radical dualism of Origen’s thought, spirit stands apart from body, spiritual significance from literal meaning—a “rift” in consciousness reflected by a verbal “rift” between sense and intention. Speaking other than what it means, estranging the familiar sense of words, familiar times and places, and familiar patterns of cause and effect, the scripture demands allegorical interpretation. At a moment of especially intense reveling amidst the “impossibilities” of scripture, Origen queries rhetorically: “And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, ‘planted a paradise eastward in Eden’, and set in it a visible and palpable ‘tree of life’? … I do not think that anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events” (288).51 For all of the real ties that bind Origen to the Antiochenes, his hermeneutic assumptions are fundamentally alien, as evidenced by the contrast between how Theological Method in Origen’s Exegesis (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985); and the still provocative R.P.C. Hanson, Allegory and Event: A Study of the Sources and Significance of Origen’s Interpretation of Scripture (Richmond: John Knox; London: SCM, 1959). 51 Diodore of Tarsus would have answered Origen’s question easily enough: anyone wishing to safeguard the “substance” of scripture must be so “silly.” For Origen, the unity of scripture is conserved by reference to the unity of its spiritual truth. For the Antiochenes, the allegorical pursuit of such unity threatened to become the factitious construct of a perilous imagination, perilous because it denied to scripture’s account of the past a veracity that had to be preserved if the real unity of Bible was to be conserved: its narrative of salvation history. Conceive of truth as “scattered” everywhere through the scriptures, like some fragmentary Osiris whose body Isis must reassemble, and the familiar principles of classical grammatical and rhetorical analysis are rendered secondary to the primary task of allegorical assembly: historike is significant—but only if the events are actual; contextual analysis counts—but only if “a meaning worthy of God” fails to demand altered contexts; economy of design matters—but narrative incoherence matters more (296).


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Origen and the Antiochenes apply skopos as a term of art. When Origen writes about the scriptures’ aim, goal, or mark, he does so by direct reference to the authorial agency of the oft-encrypting Spirit. Comprehending Origen’s Spirit means carrying in hand (as Spenser’s Arthur carries his shield!) an allegorical decoder because spiritual meanings always assume a figural form. By contrast, when Theodore of Mopsuestia comments on the Psalms, he does so by reference to David as their author, who writes as a man (inspired as he may be), living in a particular time and place, with a particular aim or mark at which he directs his bow.52 To recover David’s intention is not to divine an occult truth; instead it is to comprehend, perspicuously in full vision of the relation of his story to the story of salvation history at large, a human experience of value for understanding one’s own place in the providential scheme of things. For Theodore and the Antiochenes, the realm of the non-figural has plenty of room for spiritual meaning. Basil would have counted himself among those “silly” enough to believe that God planted a paradise eastward in Eden. Like Diodore of Tarsus, the Basil of the Hexaemeron found troubling the transformation of scriptural “substance” into allegorical dream. In fact, he may well have had Origen’s Hexaemeron in mind when he dismisses the assignment of allegorical significance to events like God’s separation of the waters and the firmament: “let us consider water as water,” Basil replies, as exegetical reaction and conservation (52). Basil is a more nimble, stylish, and imaginative reader than the Antiochenes—there is more room for intertextual allusion, more energy in figurative expression and depth in philosophical rumination—but his sense of the authenticity of the scriptural narrative is, again, too pronounced to allow for Origen’s reveling in textual stumbling blocks. Narrative coherence is something he assumes. As the handiwork of God, the world does not need a figural reading in order to reveal spiritual meanings. Consider its origins and ends, in natural philosophical terms, and water itself speaks to godly purposes. Such contrasts notwithstanding, Basil’s metaphorical employment of the vocabulary of skopos is tellingly similar to Origen’s in at least one respect. When he writes about the ultimate aim, purpose or intention of the Genesis story, he consistently identifies Moses’s “words of truth” with “the teachings of the Spirit,” substituting a divine for a human context of authorship, and in that cosmological expansion of scope he addresses those multitudinous correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm of such persistent fascination to him.53 As that cosmological expansion illustrates, Basil was also, like Origen, a student of Plato’s. For all of the real ties, rhetorical and philosophical, between the Hexaemeron and Aristotelianism, the portrait of God as sculptor/artisan, fashioning the cosmos from his own divinely conceived idea, had its origins in Plato’s Timaeus, a favorite among the Cappadocians.54 Some centuries after Plato, Cicero attributed a strikingly similar process of creation to the orator, also by way of analogy between rhetorical labor and the artistry of the sculptor. This brief history has a point beyond noting 52 For an exposition of Theodore’s reading of the Psalms, see Rowan A. Greer, Theodore of Mopsuestia: Exegete and Theologian (Westminster: Faith Press, 1961). 53 On the Hexaemeron, p. 4–5. 54 See Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, p. 22–39.

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Basil’s intertextual prowess or syncretic skill. When Basil imparted an expanded metaphorical range to the traditional vocabulary of scope, celebrating God’s making of the cosmos in the familiar vocabulary of rhetorical making, he anticipated a moment of extraordinary importance in the history of poetics. The Hexaemeron signals a seachange in the conceptualization of narrative. As James A. Coulter has demonstrated in an historically detailed study, among the later neoplatonists of the fourth and fifth centuries, the culturally pervasive vocabulary of skopos returned as the solution to a particular philosophical problem with large aesthetic consequence. Identified with the conscious intention of its author, the skopos guaranteed to the text, in its work of shadowing truths by mysteriously evocative allegorical symbols, what the neoplatonists liked to call a unity amidst multeity. It gave to the world of the text— conceived as a microcosm—an intellectual coherence among its variously related elements.55 As Coulter shows, the neoplatonists engineered a “definitive transference of an already existing complex of ideas to a literary artifact. The consequence of this was a systematic elaboration of the notion that a work of literature organically conceived should also be viewed as a microcosmic organism, and as a corollary, its creator as a microcosmic demiurge.”56 It became possible for the first time, then, to speak of a literary work as a world, and the author as its maker—a history of no small consequence, in the conjunction between the vocabulary of skopos and the concept of the literary microcosm, for Sidney’s golden world poetics. When Proclus begins his commentary on Plato’s Alcibiades, he moves systematically from an identification of its scope (“the chief purpose and principal object of the whole conversation is the consideration of our being”); to a determination of its status as a microcosm (“as we have said elsewhere about the dialogues, each one must possess what the whole cosmos possesses”); to a précis of its conceptual coherence; to the detailed exegesis, sentence by sentence, often word by word, of those sentences and words in relation to its all-encompassing scope.57 Socrates opens the dialogue by addressing his young lover as “son of Kleinias” (15). In response, Proclus weighs methodically the affective force of this apostrophe in rendering Alcibiades “more accommodating” (15). As a detail of historike, he narrates the father’s achievement of “high repute at the battle of Coronea,” and notes critically the aptness of virtue memorialized to spur similar achievements in the son (15). Such exposition is traditional grammatical fare. It is when Proclus proceeds to elaborate on the apostrophe’s significance, commenting that Kleinias “is a symbol of the recall of souls to their true father,” and the Pythagorean-inspired “symbol of the turning around of souls to their invisible causes,” that allegorizing crowds from the page the more traditional krisis (moral-

55 For skopos among the neoplatonists, see James A. Coulter, The Literary Microcosm: Theories of Interpretation of the Later Neoplatonists (Leiden: Brill, 1976), p. 77–94 and George A. Kennedy, Greek Rhetoric Under Christian Emperors (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), p. 126–32. 56 Coulter, p. 102. 57 Alcibiades I: A Translation and Commentary, trans. William O’Neill (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), p. 6–7. Additional references are cited by page number in parentheses.


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thematic analysis) of the Hellenistic grammarian (p. 16). When Origen allegorizes the scriptures, he fairly revels in its narrative “stumbling blocks,” finding alternative pathways to the spiritual with an eye to the specificity of the text. When Proclus allegorizes Plato’s dialogues, he is leaping on a trampoline, not vaulting over stumbling blocks—leaping, that is, from secondary textual details (the text is always secondary for the neoplatonist) to that primary unity of philosophical ideas that gives purpose and meaning to the whole.58 The “rifts” of allegorical reading are located first and foremost in images. Images may signify conventionally, as simple markers of meaning, but the preferred mode of symbolic expression from Plotinus to Iamblicus to Proclus is one in which representation occurs through external forms so antithetical to meaning that enigma (for all but the philosophically adept) is the necessary result. (Who but the adept could know that Kleinias is the soul’s invisible cause?) In the gap between what the words say and what the author intends, symbols leap into action to propel the philosophically inspired mind from the multeity of verbal matter to the unity of intellectual scope. Allegory is more than an appropriate reading tool. It is an indispensable one. It takes no great leap of historical imagination to know how the Antiochenes would have judged the allegorizing of Proclus and the neoplatonists. For reasons both hermeneutic and theological, they would have dismissed it as perilous dream interpretation. Basil’s response, however, would have been more complicated and more revealing. For a Christian exegete already inclined to accommodate the Timaeus’s demiurge to the characterization of an artisan God and already conversant with the vocabulary of the microcosm, it might well have been possible to assume an analogy between the divine Maker and the maker of fictions, the created world and the created text. Already in the Hexaemeron, the Word who makes the world by scope has oratorical powers at once reflecting and providing a model for human orations, albeit imperfect by comparison. Already too, in Basil’s defense of reading pagan fictions, considerations of divine scope figure heavily in evaluating the appropriate moral “scope” of interpretation. This is not to suggest that Basil had a microcosmic conception of fictions. Rather it is an argument that Basil’s cosmology, however elaborated by analogy, would have left him with no more sympathy for Proclus’s allegorizing than for Origen’s. Like Origen, Basil attributes the “scope” of scripture to God or the Holy Spirit— as the “demiurge” (to use the platonic and gnostic term) who creates both the world and the Word from his own divine idea. Moses’s words of truth are the teachings 58 For an analysis of the status of symbols in neoplatonic commentary and an argument that “the separation of aesthetic from intellective objects of knowledge finds its natural counterpart in the separation of the ‘external’ verbal or visual form from the ‘internal’ significance which the form expresses” (237), see Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and Its Continuity (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), p. 164–240. Trimpi argues, too, that once a concept of purification becomes the primary objective of prudential wisdom, “any theory of literary decorum becomes impoverished with respect to its cognitive obligations to analyze qualitative experience and to its judicative obligations to guide emotions,” p. 237. It is to the rhetorical tradition that Trimpi points for the recovery of the value of representing experience.

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of the Spirit. For Origen, the consequence of conceiving of divine authorship in such terms is allegory. The Spirit speaks, at his highest flights, a spiritual—a figural and symbolic—language, whose meanings are veiled. For Basil, divine authorship has no such consequences because divine authorship has been reconceived in more traditional grammatical and rhetorical terms. God’s purpose is perspicuously and beautifully revealed in the multitudinous connections and relations—the contexts— that comprise the Word and the world, and such contexts are interpretable through the exercise of reason, complemented by faith, for the purpose of pious praise and reflection. For Basil, spiritual meaning is invested in and embodied by natural objects, historical events, and scriptural words—meanings that accommodate divine ends to human comprehension within the limits appropriate to its capacity. As the products of God’s economical artistry, things themselves have spiritual significance. Employed to independent and sometimes contrasting purposes by Origen and the Antiochenes and by Basil and the later neoplatonists, skopos appears to have originated for all in a common tradition of rhetorical education deriving from Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Similar to any term whose meaning alters by the changing circumstances of its use and whose multiple meanings are complicated by large-scale transformations in religious and philosophical perspective, “scope” is one whose history could be retold in several different ways. For a student of early modern allegory like Gordon Teskey, Origen and Proclus would assume far greater prominence in such an account—and properly so. Their achievements in negotiating “stumbling blocks” of narrative analysis and engineering leaps of symbolic interpretation are enabled considerably by the restorative promise of an allegorical scope promising repair for textual “rifts.” Those achievements, in turn, are enormously consequential for understanding the poetic practice of an Edmund Spenser. In Teskey’s history, the Antiochenes would scarcely merit a footnote, and Gregory of Nazianzus—the most philosophically adept among the allegorizing Cappadocians—would prove a more likely subject of study than Basil. By contrast, the brief history recounted here brings to the center Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, John Chrysostom, and their contemporary, Basil of Caesarea, because of the different goal that orients its scholarship—to recover a tradition of anti-allegorical or sometimes pointedly non-allegorical hermeneutics of importance for understanding Sidney’s poetics. Focusing on a specific body of classical ideas about reading and writing, which originated in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and which were extended in the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium, Cicero’s De Oratore and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, that history illustrates the power of the rhetorical tradition to animate both the anti-allegorical hermeneutics of Antiochene exegetes like Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, and the less polemical hermeneutics of the pointedly non-allegorical Chrysostom and Basil. It is that same rhetorical tradition, as the next portion of this argument will show, that animates Melanchthon’s oratio sacra, as the first systematic formulation of a Reformation hermeneutic, and that fuels Sidney’s notions about reading and writing in his domestication of Italian Renaissance poetics inside the English context. A more compact and more tidy version of this history might have dispensed with Basil of Caesarea altogether. This one does not, both because of the later Melanchthon’s intensely personal identification with him, and because of the importance of the


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“greatness” (the complexity) of his response to the hermeneutic questions at issue. In the Hexaemeron’s exuberantly composed synthesis of rhetorical and philosophical traditions, with its explicit pursuit of the perspicuous scope of scripture and its concomitant celebration of the artisan Maker who fashions both world and Word, its accommodation of rival paradigms of reading and writing comprises a telling precedent for the similarly syncretic golden world poetics of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy. Reforming Hermeneutics: Reading and Writing among the Philippists Sidney may well have translated a portion of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, if John Hoskins’s claim is correct that he saw in Henry Wotton’s hands “the two first books Englished by him.”59 It was, of course, “the right virtuous Edward Wotton,” Henry’s halfbrother, who accompanied Sidney on his first visit to the imperial court in Vienna, and who endured, too, Pugliano’s lessons in horsemanship so comically recounted in the opening sentences of the Defence (95). There is a point to forging a genealogical connection here, Edward to Henry Wotton, Aristotle’s Rhetoric to the Defence of Poesy, because it was during Sidney’s three-year tour of the Continent (1572–75), and especially during two long stays in Vienna, that he received first-hand the education in Philippist humanism that contributed so significantly to the development of his poetics. His education translated Aristotle’s skopos from a rhetorical term into a vital component of a larger, influential framework of interpretation—a hermeneutic, if you will, at once oratorical and ethical, political and pious. Reading mattered for Sidney’s closest acquaintances because books were powerful. It is well to recall that Sidney’s education was placed chiefly in the hands of Languet, and that Languet’s long life of service to his “magister” (his teacher Melanchthon, as he almost always called him) was the product of a conversion by the book—a chance encounter, “tollelege-style,” with Melanchthon’s Loci communes. A letter from December of 1575 says much about how the two spent their time together and the character of that primary education undergone by Sidney. Languet reminds him about “how many excellent writers” he studied during the mere “three or four months” he spent in Vienna the previous year, and how “many things” he learned from them “which concern the right ordering of man’s life.”60 Those readings, Languet’s correspondence suggests, included history (Sidney’s progress in the discipline is the frequent subject of Languet’s praise); moral philosophy (since “nothing is more beneficial” than that which “teaches what is right and wrong”); and “Holy Scripture” (since “the knowledge which is most necessary for us is that of our salvation”).61 The hierarchy of the readings—scripture, moral philosophy, and history—speaks to a hierarchy of aims, its rhetorical organization. That Sidney understood his own education in similar terms might best be illustrated by the letter he wrote to Robert Sidney, his younger brother, just as Robert was beginning his own 59 John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1935), p. 41. 60 Languet to Sidney, 3 December 1575, in Levy, p. 300. 61 Languet to Sidney, 22 January1574, in Levy, p. 59.

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education on the Continent (1578), traveling as Philip had done, in Languet’s care. Sidney organizes his reflections in that letter by reference to Aristotle (this time, the Ethics) and the need for Robert to “have imprinted in your minde” what he calls first “the good ende which everie man doth & ought to bend his greatest actions.” It is one thing to travel “but to travaile or to saie you have travailed”; it is another to travel for the purpose of furnishing “your selfe with … knowledge,” or what he terms “the scope and marke, you meane by your paines to shoote at.”62 Scope, the rhetorical term, assumes ethical implications, and even a distinctive cosmopolitan aura characteristic of Sidney generally, in the association of good judgment (in its “mixed and correlitive knowledge of things”) with wide horizons (“the most excellent waies of worldlie wisdome”). Sidney’s “scope” sounds like a fit target for an Odysseus: at once a goal for the practical traveller, a moral end for ethical journeys, and an intellectual mark of wide-ranging discrimination. Scope is a word whose etymology Sidney knows well, as his elaboration of its latent metaphorical significance indicates: a “scope” is a mark or target one takes pains (studies hard!) to shoot at. It is achieved by skill and learning, not by the accident or privilege of birth. Sidney has one of his later fictive travelers, the Musidorus of The Old Arcadia, reflect in a similar manner that “well doing was … his scope, from which no faint pleasures could withhold him,” just as he has Philanax admonish the princes in their trial that “strangers have scope to know the customs of a country before they put themselves in it”—the term “scope” loaded in both instances with a strong sense of right reason acquired from the purposeful acquisition of knowledge.63 Or to return from the ethical to the rhetorical, so as to illustrate how quickly the passage between them is made, it is well to recall too Philanax’s summary fulminations against the princes during that same trial: “Shall we doubt so many secret conferences with Gynecia, such feigned favour to the over-soon beguiled Basilius …, lastly such changes and traverses as a quiet poet could scarce fill a poem withal, were directed to any less scope than to this monstrous murder?”64 If murder is the scope or purpose of the princes’ actions (as Philanax rather crudely imagines them), as an event it is simultaneously the rhetorical object of the quiet poet, an additional and characteristically Sidneian extension of that term’s significance to the realm of the literary. This is an extension not unique to Sidney, but one continued in the Sidney circle. In completing Philip’s translation of the Psalms, Mary Sidney opens the volume, with sisterly familiarity and verbal tribute, by announcing that her work “hath no further scope to goe,/nor other purpose but to honor thee.”65 When Fulke Greville looked back several years after Sidney’s death to remember what was most important to “all these creatures of his making,” he remembered that “his intent, and 62 Philip Sidney to Robert Sidney, in Feuillerat, iii, 124. 63 Philip Sidney to Robert Sidney, iii, 124–5; The Old Arcadia, p. 104 and 385. 64 The Old Arcadia, p. 389. 65 The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and The Countess of Pembroke, ed. J.C.A. Rathmell (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1963), p. xxxvi. In Philip’s translation of Psalm 26, he has David “setting Thee [God] for scope,/Of all my trustfull hope ….” See Greville, p. 18. For Mary’s translation of the Psalms, see the now standard edition, The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Michael G. Brennan, and Noel J. Kinnamon (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).


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scope” was to turn barren philosophy into pregnant images of life. Both Sidney’s sister and friend knew the terms that counted most. As a term of art, the scopus dicendi appears in Melanchthon’s rhetorical works in conjunction with his concept of status—a concept that lies right at the heart of his theory of eloquence and his assumptions about interpretation. Together with his attention to the loci communes—textual “commonplaces”—these are the terms that made his work distinctive, that put his distinguishable imprint on the study of oratio in the northern Renaissance.66 Melanchthon was not the first in Renaissance Europe to revive the vocabulary of scopus and status: Erasmus appears to have set the precedent, but it was Melanchthon who developed that vocabulary into a systematic hermeneutic—into a new institutionalized practice of reading and writing.67 As Melanchthon writes in the Elementorum rhetorices libri duo (1531; 66 For a comprehensive overview of Melanchthon’s rhetorical and dialectical principles, see John R. Schneider’s Philip Melanchthon and his “The Hermeneutics of Commentary: Origins of Melanchthon’s Integration of Dialectic into Rhetoric,” in Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) and the Commentary, ed. Timothy J. Wengert and M. Patrick Graham (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), p. 20–47. My debts to Schneider’s scholarship are apparent throughout. For the distinctiveness of Melanchthon’s terminology, see Eden’s useful chapter on Melanchthon, p. 79–89. See too Timothy J. Wengert’s “Philip Melanchthon’s 1522 Annotations on Romans and the Lutheran Origins of Rhetorical Criticism,” in Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation, ed. Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), p. 118–40, and Carl Joachim Classen’s scholarly study, Rhetorical Criticism of the New Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). 67 For Erasmus’s use of scopus, see Manfred Hoffmann’s Rhetoric and Theology, p. 48, 251–2, note 104. For a more speculative reading of scopus in Erasmus, see Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto and London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 72–81. For a lucid account of how Melanchthon’s use of the term differs from that of Erasmus, see Schneider, Philip Melanchthon, p. 94. It is a term used, too, with great frequency by Luther, from 1518—the date of Melanchthon’s arrival in Wittenberg—to 1540. In England, “scope” appeared first as a term of art in an exegetical context: Thomas Cranmer wrote to Henry VIII in August of 1536 defending the “scope [the aim, purpose] and effect” of two recent sermons whose arguments he then detailed, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1846), p. 326. In 1552, Hugh Latimer conjoined the twin vocabulary of status and scopus in a sermon that preaches that “every parable hath certum statum, ‘a certain scope’, to the which we must have a respect …,” “A Sermon Preached … On the Sunday Called Septuagesima, The 14th Day of February,” in Sermons By Hugh Latimer, ed. George Elwes Corrie (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1844), vol. 2, 199. Latimer gave Melanchthon credit for his conversion to the “Word of God”; see his “First Sermon on the Lord’s Prayer,” in Selected Sermons of Hugh Latimer, ed. Allan G. Chester (Charlottesville, VA: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1968), p. 167. In 1553, Thomas Wilson introduced “scope” into the English oratorical vocabulary as he wrote, paraphrasing Melanchthon, “Not onely it is needefull in causes of iudgement, to consider the scope whereunto we must leavell our reasons, and direct our invention: but also we ought in every cause to have a respect unto some one especiall point and chiefe article: that the rather the whole drift of our doinges, may seeme to agree with our first devised purpose,” Arte of Rhetorique, ed. G.H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909; 1560 edn), p. 86. A close associate of Leicester and his circle, Wilson is clearly one source for Sidney’s domestication of this vocabulary inside English poetics.

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rev. 1542), the most widely published and most extensively elaborated of his three rhetorical textbooks, “No part of the art [of rhetoric] is more necessary than the precepts dealing with the status of the case, in respect of which, this is first and foremost: in relation to every problem or controversial question we consider what the status is, that is, what is the chief subject of inquiry, the proposition that contains the gist of the matter toward which all arguments are aimed, in other words, the main conclusion.”68 Pursuing the status is what supplies dialectical rigor to rhetorical acts of invention and the work of interpretation. That pursuit, in turn, has as its final goal, the location of what Melanchthon calls the scopus dicendi. Locating the scopus is so important because, “No matter of debate can be comprehended, nothing can be explained, stated or grasped in an orderly fashion, except some proposition be formulated which includes the sum total of the case.”69 (As root and branch, Melanchthon’s “orderly fashion” links rhetorically with Languet’s educational concerns about “right ordering.”) Melanchthon’s success in demonstrating that vocabulary’s utility for enabling a coherent theory of reading and writing can be measured partly by the influential educators who adapted it as the foundation for their own teaching practice: most important among them, Johann Sturm, the irenic, ecumenically minded rector of the Strasbourg Academy, who numbered among his pupils—the elite of northern Europe, Protestant and Catholic—François Hotman, Peter Martyr, Theodore Beza, and Philip Sidney. It can measured, too, with no small historical irony, by its appeal to his most vociferous enemies, like Matthias Flacius Illyricus, who as the most capable of the exegetes among the Gnesio-Lutherans, reworked Melanchthon’s terminology of the scopus into a psychologically penetrating vehicle for exploring the reader’s experience of the Bible.70 That success is measurable, moreover, by the deployment of the terminology of the scopus in the exegetical writings of John Calvin, by far the most influential among Melanchthon’s rivals. Unlike so many of the Reformers who came before and after, Calvin was strikingly reticent about explaining or espousing his hermeneutic principles: he wrote no rhetorical or dialectical treatises, no textbooks on exegesis, and demonstrated no interest in developing a theory of reading as such.71 It would have been possible in the century’s 68 Sister Mary Joan La Fontaine, A Critical Translation of Philip Melanchthon’s Elementorum rhetorices libri duo (University of Michigan, Ph. D. Dissertation, 1968), p. 115. Melanchthon’s earlier rhetorical treatises are De Rhetorica libri tres (1519) and Institutiones Rhetoricae (1521). For a brief review of those texts and their publication history, see Classen, p. 111–35. 69 Elementorum, p. 115. 70 For Flacius’s reworking of the vocabulary of the scopus in his Clavis scripturae sacrae (1567), see Eden, p. 96–8. 71 John L. Thompson calls Calvin’s “‘theoretical’” pronoucements about biblical interpretation “somewhat scattered” (60), the most important of which consists of a few introductory paragraphs in the preface of his 1539 commentary on Romans, “Calvin as a Biblical Interpreter” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), p. 58–73. Among these few pronouncements, in turn, “there is little he says by way of methodology or the theory of interpretation that cannot be traced to others before him,” including Melanchthon, Bullinger and Bucer (71). For a more


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last decades to discover intermittently in Calvin a hands-on application of scopus to biblical exegesis, but for a comprehensive theory of hermeneutics that explains how and why books of all kinds—secular and sacred—should be read with an eye to the scopus dicendi, it was necessary to turn to Melanchthon. It is one thing to identify the centrality of these key terms, scope and status, within Melanchthon’s rhetorical thought. It is quite another to consider the aim or purpose that they were designed to serve. Recovering that “scope” matters, in turn, for appreciating the new hermeneutic that Melanchthon helped to devise and disseminate throughout the Protestant north, and that was demonstrably so crucial to Sidney’s education—its comprehensive range (it is a “method” designed for all books), its stunning optimism (its enegetic celebration of Greek and Roman eloquence), and its pervasive urgency (its assumption that the salvation of society and souls depends on such skills). Giorgio Agamben has argued that “The appearance of a new religion always coincides with a new revelation of language and a new religion means above all a new experience of language.”72 Whatever the merits of that claim about other religious movements in other times and places, there can be no question about its rightness in regard to the Reformation of sixteenth-century Europe. Martin Luther inspired a revolution that was semiological as well as theological. As Samuel James Preus explains in a lucid account of his exegetical thought, the early Luther devised in his exposition of the Psalms a new understanding of the language of the Bible, which both complemented and enabled his new understanding of faith. Preus recovers the process whereby Luther turned to a vocabulary of plain sense as a vehicle for reuniting the Bible’s grammatical and theological significance, and the distinctive character of his linguistic turn from a vision of the scriptures as shadow to a discovery of their character as promise.73 The signs of God are mysterious and shadowy. They require interpretation. By contrast, promises present themselves

comprehensive study of Calvin’s exegesis, see Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000). 72 Giorgio Agamben, “Propos …,” Bulletin de l’Association freudienne 2 (1983): 27. Quoted in Gabriel Vahanian, “God and the Utopianism of Language,” in Lacan and Theological Discourse, ed. Edith Wyschogrod, David Crownfield, and Carl A. Raschke (Albany, NY: State Univ. of New York Press, 1989), p. 119. 73 From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969). On Luther’s exegetical principles, see Gerhard Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to his Thought, trans. R.A. Wilson (London: Collins, 1970) and Jaroslav Pelikan, Luther the Expositor: Introduction to the Reformer’s Exegetical Writings, in Luther’s Works (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1959). For Luther’s exegetical inheritance, see Manfred Schulze’s “Martin Luther and the Church Fathers,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1997), vol. 2, 573–626. For Luther in the context of contemporary exegetical practice, see David C. Steinmetz’s concise overview, “Divided by a Common Past: The Reshaping of the Christian Exegetical Tradition in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27, no. 2 (Spring 1997), 245–64.

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plainly and demand a choice—the refusal or acceptance of faith.74 In Luther’s vision, as Roland Bainton memorably phrases the point, “One does not chat with the most high. God is a consuming flame.”75 For Luther, then, the reality of God’s Word was God’s action in making himself known to humankind—and this action best characterizes what was new about the Reformation’s “experience of language” (to use Agamben’s phrase). Drawn habitually to the organization of his thought by antinomies—theology and philosophy, faith and works, freedom and bondage, the deus absconditus et revelatus—Luther identified Law and Gospel as the central dialectic pulsing through the Bible, Old Testament as well as New. The Bible’s meaning was its action, its dialectic of words inspiring consciousness of sin and faith in salvation. God’s promise was universal, and it gave to the text its unity (as the narrative of the promise’s unfolding over time), its decorum (a promise implies no desert on the part of the recipient), and its persuasive power (a promise bends the heart toward hope of fulfillment). Like Erasmus, the rhetorically trained Luther identified Christ as the Bible’s scopus dicendi—its main aim, purpose, and target. His exegesis is punctuated frequently by the grammatical and rhetorical terminology of the humanists. However, if for humanist scholars like Erasmus, God could be seen as a type of the Renaissance orator, who unites in himself knowledge and eloquence, and who manifests his concern for mankind by the persuasive power of his Word, for the less philologically and textually oriented Luther, God was better understood as a preacher. What God preached was the terror

74 To call Luther’s theology of the promise new by virtue of its conception of the Wordas-event is not to claim that it is unprecedented. As Rudolf Bultmann indicates in his powerful study of Paul’s epistles, Pauline theology too, in its transformation of the soteriology of the ancient Greek mystery religions and gnostic sects, locates “the salvation-occurrence … in the proclamation of the word,” The Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 302. The theology of reconciliation—so important to Paul because the risen Christ makes possible the reborn Christian self—is enabled by the “word of reconciliation” (II Cor. 5:18f.). To recall, in turn, Paul’s importance to this history, is also to remember the fundamental importance of the “fulfillment” narratives so crucial to the history of Christianity—the fulfillment of the Jewish prophecies from the Old Testament in the New, as Christ the Word becomes present in the Incarnation—and, behind Paul, ancient anticipations of that longing for the “presentness” of the divine from the Greek mystery rites. Such longings, motivated as they are by the desire for words that make contact with an ultimate reality, are the enduring, characteristically human products of what Paul Ricoeur might call “the ontological vehemence of semantic aims”—the drive of the reference to make its power felt in the realm of the sense [The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1975), p. 299–300]; or what Kenneth Burke might refer to more simply as the rhetorical concomitants of form (A Rhetoric of Motives [Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 1969], p. 65–78). Mornay would call them evidence of natural law. On the performative character of the Reformers’ linguistic assumptions, see Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation, ch. 3. 75 Roland H. Bainton, “The Bible in the Reformation,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1963), vol. 3, 36.


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of the Law and the joy of the Gospel by words whose power was best unleashed by speech. If Luther was the inspiration for that theological and semantic revolution that we now call the Reformation, then Melanchthon was the first systematic expositor of the character, meaning and consequence of the Word regarded as promise. As Luther’s lieutenant, the task of creating a coherent account of the new theology fell squarely on Melanchthon’s shoulders—and in a Reformed church so centrally committed to authorizing itself on the rightness of its understanding of scripture (sola scriptura!), no small part of Melanchthon’s burden was to devise a practice of reading sufficient to the challenge of the Reformed faith. That challenge is represented most formidably by Luther’s insistence that since the Holy Spirit is the clearest and hence “the simplest writer and adviser in heaven and on earth. That is why his words could have no more than the one simplest meaning which we call the written one, or the literal meaning of the tongue.”76 Luther rejected the traditional medieval vision of scriptural words as mysterious sacramental signs that require grace for understanding (intellectus), and discarded the fourfold method of allegorical interpretation associated with it. As Beryl Smalley and Samuel James Preus have shown, Luther’s recourse to the “letter” of the scriptures emerges less as a break than as punctuation mark at the end of a long history of decline in the authority of allegorical readings of the Bible. The story of exegesis in the late Middle Ages is one of progressively coherent literalism gradually displacing the traditional fourfold method of interpretation—a method so thoroughly constricted by fears among church fathers about subjective allegorizing as to be rendered post-Aquinas, in Smalley’s phrase, an interpretive practice bereft of distinguished practitioners.77 There are precedents, then, for Luther’s turn to the “plain sense” of the Bible from Nicholas of Lyra to Lorenzo Valla—to mention only two of the most prominent exegetes who contributed variously to the cause—but Luther typically acknowledged no ancestors. The Bible taught him to read, not Lyra or Valla or even Augustine.78 As the late Melanchthon constructed a summary account of his own reading principles during the decade of the 1550s, again and again he chose to situate himself in a particular historical tradition. The tradition in which this life-long professor of Greek asked to be seen was Hellenistic and Christian, the world of fourth-century Antioch and its historically significant combat between heretics and true believers, 76 Answer to the Hyperchristian, Hyperspiritual, and Hyperlearned Book by Goat Emser in Leipzig (1521) in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), p. 78. 77 Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), esp. “The Spiritual Exposition in Decline,” p. 281–355, and Preus, p. 123–49. 78 True to the character of anti-allegorical polemic, he insisted instead on the unique quality of both his inspiration and his conservation of the Bible’s real meaning. Once more, he identified the villain who contaminated Church doctrine by the corruption of biblical interpretation: “Origen played the fool, and led St. Jerome and many others astray with him.” Luther was grammarian enough to believe that corrupt modes of reading make for corrupt theology, and more than sufficiently polemical to push the point. “Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacrifice,” in Selected Writings of Martin Luther, 1523– 26, ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967), p. 268.

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between allegorizers and what Melanchthon clearly understood as pious students of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Melanchthon searched for an early Church father whose authority would be useful in clarifying the principles chiefly at issue in reading the Bible. To that end, he identified an obscure, fourth-century Bishop of Salamis, named Epiphanius, best known, first, for an anti-heretical work, entitled the Panarion and, second, for his vituperative assaults against Chrysostom’s defense of Origen’s theology. Obscure as he might seem, Epiphanius was useful because he espoused the rhetorical hermeneutic of Antioch while maintaining a safe distance from the history of heresy historically associated with that city. In the two sentences of anti-allegorical dicta that Melanchthon quoted on at least seven separate occasions in the 1550s, this praeceptor Germaniae discovered what was clearly dear to his pedagogical heart: a compact statement about the fundamentals of his own reading practice. The quotation is one that Melanchthon copied into books intended as gifts for friends.79 While discoursing on Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, Melanchthon cites Epiphanius approvingly: “Divinus sermo non indiget allegorica interpretatione, sed in propria sententia intelligatur. Indiget autem speculatione et sensu, ut materiae discernantur, et recte accipiantur.” (The divine word [sermo] is not suited to allegorical interpretation, but should be understood in its proper meaning. Instead it should be read by analysis and sense, so that its material arguments may be discerned and rightly received.)80 What matters here, what drew Melanchthon to the citation so frequently, is its economy in encapsulating so perspicuously what it means to read “speculatione et sensu” (by analysis and sense)—its summary character as a statement about interpretation. Of course, the Bible contains allegories! But the essential reading practices required for biblical interpretation are acquired from rigorous humanistic training in grammar, rhetoric and dialectics, and such practices need to be distinguished from the allegorical, since they are founded on hermeneutic assumptions utterly different in kind. Language exists to reveal, not to conceal meaning: “the benevolent Spirit of God intended this: that he might be understood by all pious people with as little difficulty as possible.”81 Language is available to understanding without the exercise of some special grace. The Word has causative power as a vehicle of saving faith not because of some mysterious grace it carries or contains. Instead, the Word has power because words themselves—in Melanchthon’s view as well as Luther’s—are naturally and inherently powerful. They cause things to happen.82 79 See CR 8, 59. 80 On other occasions, he quotes the same passage, slightly modified, to argue that not all of scripture is to be interpreted allegorically. “De dicto: Sermo Christi habitet etc.” (1550), CR 11, 899–900. See the extended footnote about the variety of Melanchthon’s references to this passage from Epiphanius in Meijering, p. 57. 81 Melanchthons Werke, i. 47. “Immo hoc benignus dei spiritus agebat, ut omnibus piis quanto minimo negotio intelligeretur.” The translation is from Schneider, Philip Melanchthon, p. 179. 82 As Preus writes regarding Luther, “Words … do not, like signs, need some hidden ‘grace’ to be ‘causal’. Words are intrinsically causal: they cause expectation, fear, doubt, hope, or trust, in the one who hears what they say. Not because a concealed grace comes with them, but simply from what they say as ‘naked words’,” From Shadow to Promise, p. 254. Schneider


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As Melanchthon unpacks the significance of Epiphanius’s key terms, he focuses first on reading “by analysis” (the Latin translation is speculatione; in the Greek, nominat Theorian). Out of the lexicon of traditional Antiochene anti-allegorical polemic, Melanchthon defines such reading as the “viam docendi” (the way of teaching) of true dialectic—to be distinguished from the garrulous and trifling logic of scholastic philosophy. Here dialectic works on complete texts that are conceptually coherent, as a means of understanding the “totum corpus doctrinae” (the full body of teaching)—not Lombard-wise, on the logic of individual propositions excerpted in mutilated form and transposed into “alienas sententias” (foreign notions). Real dialectic concerns itself with the art of argumentation and persuasion as a whole, with questions of genre; matters of definition, distinction, and consequence, as well as issues of organization—all of those elaborately detailed considerations that avoid “confounding universal doctrine into chaos.” Viewed in these terms, Melanchthon’s dialectic is virtually indistinguishable from grammar and rhetoric—as the art that teaches how to understand the persuasive power of communications of any kind, a convergence of the rhetorical and the dialectical originating in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and newly elaborated in Agricola’s De inventione dialectica.83 Basil-like, it is a convergence, too, representing Melanchthon’s ambition to create a single instrument for procuring knowledge from the harmony of philosophy and rhetoric.84 extends this argument to Melanchthon, Philip Melanchthon, p. 227–9. Melanchthon insists: “For God wants to be sought in his Word, not outside of the Word in human imaginings. We do not attribute to words any magical powers, but hold that the will of God cannot be known except through the Word,” Commentary on Romans, trans. Fred Kramer (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1992), p. 287. 83 On Agricola, see Mack’s Renaissance Argument, p. 117–302; for Agricola’s importance to Melanchthon, see Meerhoff, Entre logique et littérature, p. 9–71. Meerhoff’s effort to subordinate all things rhetorical in Melanchthon to dialectics diminishes what seems most important here: the deliberate effort to synthesize one art with the other. 84 So when Epiphanius’s speculatione is glossed in the Chronicon Carionis, its definition is expanded unsurprisingly to “Grammatica et Dialectica, videlicet consideratione phrasis, collatione locorum, definitionibus, distinctionibus, et iusta consequentia in argumentis” (to Grammar and Rhetoric, namely, to a consideration of word-choice, a collation of commonplaces, with definitions, distinctions, and true consequences in arguments) CR 12, 940. Like the world, the Word is fashioned by a divine wisdom organizing all of its parts by number, measure, and order (“numerum, distinctionem, ordinem”), and it is the business of the wise reader to exercise the speculative powers of his mind to discover the logic of its making—to go in search of the Maker’s scope. Reading well requires, too, a careful weighing of the significance of words, by adhering to the sense (“sensum vult adhiberi”) or what Melanchthon identifies as the grounding of those words in “mediocrem experientiam” (ordinary experience) CR 11, 900. Melanchthon’s understanding of the power of oratio sacra, of God’s sacred oratory in the Bible, transcends the category of speculation or intellection. In his mind, no really useful summary of the essential components of right reading could fail to emphasize, too, the emotional and experiential dimension of an encounter with the Word—the blindness of the person, for instance, who never having experienced “magnos dolores” (great sufferings), can have no understanding of the true exercise of faith and hope; or conversely, the power of the experiences recorded by biblical words to teach us “quid significent, Vita, Mors, Dolor, Timor, Consolatio, Laeticia, Fides,” (the meaning of Life, Death, Grief, Fear,

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If Luther left to Melanchthon the challenge of creating a new hermeneutic by which to read the Bible according to its “plain sense,” his answer to that challenge was to recuperate that loosely organized body of principles for reading that originated in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which were elaborated (among others) by Cicero and Quintilian, and which persisted as a powerful influence in the Hellenistic era among rhetorical adepts from the Antiochenes to Basil to Epiphanius. Once more, recuperation assumed textual form in the production and dissemination of three books of rhetoric and three books of logic—with their transformation of loose principles into methodical arts suitable for the training of a new Protestant elite—and the publication of voluminous commentaries on classical and Christian texts, exemplifying how to turn such principles into action.85 Like Erasmus, Luther Consolation, Happiness, and Faith), CR 12, 940. In Melanchthon’s comprehensive vision of the arts of communication, the purpose of reading is not merely “understanding” correctly, but also “receiving” rightly (affectively integrating into one’s own experience) the meaning expressed. Reading is accommodation. With his understanding of affections as themselves intimately engaged with the process of understanding, Melanchthon belongs, then, to the great Augustinian tradition of Christian rhetoric, and before Augustine, to Aristotle’s line, for whom emotion also played a constitutive role in argument. For a recent study of Melanchthon in relation to the Augustinian tradition, see Michael B. Aune, Philip Melanchthon’s Rhetorical View of Rite and its Implications for Contemporary Ritual Theory (San Francisco: Christian Universities Press, 1994). That rhetorical tradition in the Renaissance at large is best presented in Shuger’s Sacred Rhetoric. 85 Melanchthon’s principles of reading did not exclude allegorical interpretation. Instead, they redefine it, and in the process strip allegoresis of its meaning. More plainly, the new hermeneutic transformed Origen’s unruly agent of spiritual askesis into the safely domesticated servant of perspicuous communication. Melanchthon explicitly allows a role for allegorical interpretations of the Bible in his Rhetoric of 1519 and his Loci communes of 1521—and carefully circumscribes that role in the process. Allegorical interpretations are to be undertaken by the learned, and pursued with an understanding about how allegory functions: it functions didactically as a vehicle for illustrating those commonplaces (loci communes) that secure textual meaning. (See Classen, p. 113–25.) The didactic translation of allegory achieves its clearest statement later in Melanchthon’s career, after the issue of allegorical reading had lost much of its polemical urgency. (In the Loci of 1521, Melanchthon begins with an attack on Origen; in the Loci of 1555, he offers instead a textbook-style articulation of the principles of good rhetorical reading.) In so far as the later Melanchthon concerns himself with allegorical interpretation at all (and even the limited justification for allegorizing the scriptures disappears in the later rhetorics), allegory matters as a “mutilatum enthymema” (a truncated enthymeme ). For example, when the Bible enjoins “Do not throw pearls before swine,” it offers “a kind of comparison in which something is indicated yet without the rest of the comparison being expressly stated” (Elementorum, p. 241). What is indicated, always and importantly, are commonplaces of biblical wisdom. Allegory as “otherspeaking” is banished, then, in the course of being redefined. It exists in the Bible only as a continued metaphor or truncated enthymeme, subservient to the logic of the loci. Allegory certainly was not dead, but allegorical reading in the style of Origen was rendered superfluous because of those fundamental disagreements about how language communicates meaning that distinguish Melanchthon from exegetes in the allegorical tradition. The notion that the best books reveal rather than conceal meaning by virtue of their perspicacity, coherence, economy and affective power, makes it impossible to read allegorically—to read with the expectation of


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employed rhetorical terminology in reading the Bible. It was Melanchthon, however, who for the first time insisted that the Bible is rhetoric and must therefore be read in rhetorical (and dialectical) terms—and because of that insistence narrative came to assume a place of critical importance in his reading practice, one which endows the “literal” story with renewed argumentative power and experiential significance. In place of allegoresis, Melanchthon emphasized instead the preeminent significance of the Bible’s use of what he calls histories or examples. One instance can illustrate my point. All teachers have their prized examples, the stories to which they return time after time in order to illustrate the key principles of their discipline. Melanchthon was no exception. Early and late in his long career as theologian and biblical exegete, natural and moral philosopher, rhetorician and dialectician, he makes extensive reference to the story of Nathan and David. Consider just a few of these references from the theological and exegetical works. In the Loci communes of 1521, David’s repentance is recited to highlight “the design of the Holy Spirit in Scripture,” the action of the redemptive Gospel to “raise up, animate and fill the tottering conscience with … lively promises about Christ.” Its message of mercy is shrouded not in mysterious figures of speech, but instead pictured clearly as “that which the text obviously declares.”86 When Melanchthon published his revised version of the Loci in 1555, David’s repentance illustrates God’s activity “through the external word” that “kindles faith in the heart,” the necessity both to believe the divine promise of salvation and to apply that promise to oneself in recognizing “My sins are forgiven me.”87 A more extensive set of references to the story punctuates Melanchthon’s early critically important commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. “Plain and clear” is the message of David’s repentance, Melanchthon argues, in its exemplary proof “that liberation from sin and death is promised on account of the Liberator who will come.”88 This is a promise that demands more than readerly recognition. It requires active accommodation: “Let us include ourselves individually,” Melanchthon writes, “in these universal statements, and declare that the promised benefits truly pertain to us.”89 Or to cite one additional example from his commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Colossians (1527), Melanchthon refers to David’s rebuke and repentance with an emphasis on the history’s transcendence of ordinary ethical instruction. The scripture exists “not just for the purpose of imitating better moral behaviour,” but to effect real transformation: “a circumcision made without hands—the putting off of the body of the sins of the flesh.”90 In Melanchthon’s reading, the story of Nathan and David is a history or example that pictures to the mind God’s forgiveness of sins (one of the summary meanings of scripture as a whole). It is an exemplary moment finding “rifts” between sense and intention—unless, of course, one is reading texts that openly declare themselves to be allegorical. 86 Loci communes (1521), p. 73–4. 87 Loci communes 1555, p. 158–9. 88 Commentary on Romans, p. 16–17. 89 Commentary on Romans, p. 20. Later, Nathan’s rebuke shows how David, confronted by his sins, “felt true and dreadful terrors,” proof that the Law enshrined by scriptural words “accuses, terrifies, and condemns.” See too p. 48, 56, 142, 158. 90 Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, trans. D.C. Parker (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1989), p. 61.

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of particular power because in its depiction of David’s shame by Nathan’s tale of rebuke, it portrays both the terror of the Law (as David anguishes over sin) and the redemptive agency of the Gospel (as David prays for forgiveness). Understanding proceeds not just by analysis, but also by receiving the story rightly, by accommodating oneself to the experience of forgiveness embodied by the narrative. As an emotionally charged story, it at once informs the mind and transforms the heart with its lesson of consolation, and both its power to inform and transform derive from the significance attached to commonplaces (loci communes) in Melanchthon’s reading practice. On the one hand, Melanchthon conceives of loci as those logical-foundational principles supplying the unity of the biblical argument— principles, like that of David’s repentance, to which reason will respond in its quest for order and that analysis will uncover in the course of studied investigation. But Melanchthon also conceives of loci as those innate-experiential laws of nature that govern universal human experience—laws, like David’s hunger for repentance, to which human nature responds because of our common need for salvation.91 Biblical loci are logical/rhetorical principles and existential truths—truths grounded in the deepest laws of nature governing human experience. Hence, the extraordinary eloquence of biblical narratives at once to teach and to persuade, to speak to the mind about what reason requires and to address the heart about the realities of its own nature. When Melanchthon published the expanded version of his Elementorum rhetorices libri duo in 1542, he had recourse to a favorite narrative, one that recurs obsessively in the exegetical writings—the story of Nathan and David—but this time he treats it in the distinctive context of his educational work. In the first modern European textbook designed to teach students the principles of correct reading as an introduction to the knowledge of correct writing, it is fascinating to investigate why and how Melanchthon reads the story of Nathan and David. Again, no effort is made to search for hidden allegories or to derive, scholastic style, logical propositions from the biblical text. Instead, Melanchthon interprets the narrative as an extended example of a commonplace-at-work. It illustrates the oratorical art of demonstrating and amplifying (ad probandum et ad amplicandum) a universal truth from experience, the human need for penitence. Penitence, then, is the commonplace that David’s exemplary history embodies as a doctrine (as doctrina, what is taught and what teaches), a history that simultaneously instructs and moves its audience to virtue as they learn aright how to understand and to receive the textual scopus. Around and about the exemplary history of David, then, circle the terms of an elaborately detailed art of communication.92 What is especially interesting about the history of Nathan and David in this context is its prominence inside a comprehensive rhetorical 91 Commonplaces are not arguments, nor even the conclusions of arguments; they are those universal truths at the seat of argumentation from which the main logical and rhetorical power of the text stems or what Melanchthon calls concisely the “main points [of every doctrine] which contain the sources and the sum total of the art,” Elementorum, p. 193. The Bible is more than perspicuous. It is also a unified whole, fashioned in all of its parts as illustration of a single argument of salvation. 92 Elementorum, p. 191–4.


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textbook designed not as an instrument of religious or exegetical education, but instead as a general primer in those arts of communication crucial to the governing class—dialectic and rhetoric. The history of Nathan and David, as Melanchthon’s reading shows, can be studied for its oratorical benefits because it is itself oratorical. The search for scopus belongs equally to the analysis of Paul’s Epistles and the plays of Terence, the Gospel of Matthew and the orations of Demosthenes. As a professor of Greek at Wittenberg, Melanchthon found himself in any given year lecturing upon a broad array of texts, from Paul’s Romans and Homer’s Iliad to Aristotle’s Organon and Ethics. Typically, Melanchthon also made room for lectures about his favorites among Latin literature, Cicero’s orations or Virgil’s Eclogues. Move from Melanchthon’s analysis of enthymemes in the Ethics to his identification of status and scopus in Cicero’s Pro Archia or Virgil’s second eclogue, and the continuity of reading strategies is striking. That continuity occasionally has interesting consequences for how Melanchthon reads individual texts—Paul’s Romans, for instance—and those consequences speak volumes about the enormous significance that Melanchthon conferred upon the art of reading itself. While commenting on Romans, Melanchthon can write about the Bible’s scope in ways that are reminiscent of Erasmus and Luther—as a means of identifying, that is, some main purpose that the whole story of salvation targets, Christological in kind. More often, Melanchthon writes about scopus in ways that particularize the intention of the argument as Paul’s—as the purpose or target, that is, of a particular man writing a particular text. (Arguments interest him more than philological considerations or historical circumstances.) But Melanchthon can write about Paul’s epistles, too, not only as having a particular scope, but also as containing in their own argumentation the scopus of the scriptures as a whole. As he argues, “You will have learned Church history in vain, unless you observe the scope and use of history [nisi historiae scopos et usum] shown by [Paul]. Where he discourses about the abrogation of the law, about sin, about flesh, about spirit … what other thing does he do except bring to light universal Scripture, as by a certain method [ceu methodo quadam, universae scripturae]?”93 Only Paul has the key to unlock the Bible’s meaning, Melanchthon maintains! And Paul has that key only because he knows how to read the scriptures in the right way—by utilizing “a certain method,” employing, that is, the best skills of the Greek and Roman grammatical tradition. What matters here about Melanchthon’s commentary on Paul—what matters that is to an appreciation of the new hermeneutic that Melanchthon devised and disseminated throughout the Protestant north, and that was so crucial to Sidney’s education—is its comprehensiveness (it is a “method” designed for all reading), its optimism (its unqualified admiration for Greek and Roman eloquence), and its urgency (its implicit argument that health of society— even of souls!—depends on such skills). Some years ago, Paul Oscar Kristeller observed that “Melanchthon, the defender of rhetoric against philosophy, … had more influence on many aspects of Lutheran Germany than Luther himself and … was responsible for the humanistic tradition of the German Protestant schools down to the nineteenth century.”94 Recent scholarship by 93 De studio doctrinae Paul, in CR 11, 38 (1520). 94 See Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, p. 87.

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historians of rhetoric has both confirmed, and in some respects, extended Kristeller’s claims for Melanchthon’s importance to the educational tradition, especially as that tradition made its impact felt on reading and interpretation. Kathy Eden, Peter Mack and Kees Meerhoff have drawn attention to fundamental transformations in reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century in which Melanchthon played a major role. For Eden, those transformations are an instance of “humanist rehabilitation” of the classical tradition of intepretatio scripti, a practice of reading whose origins lie in judicial rhetoric. For Mack and Meerhoff, they comprise a dialectically inspired revolution in the art of textual interpretation.95 In each of their readings, Melanchthon occupies a central role in developing and disseminating key interpretive practices that fostered (what until recently) were some strikingly modern assumptions about how to read: the importance of examining whole books to recover arguments in their completeness; the need to consider authorial intention, textual/ historical circumstances, and economy of organization as guides to interpretation; the assumption that language exists to reveal, rather than to conceal meaning; and the usefulness of applying dialectics (logical analysis) to rhetoric (to language in “natural” use). Whether regarded as a rehabilitation or as a revolution, Melanchthon’s methodical teaching of eloquence reflects what these recent scholars of the history of rhetoric are agreed was a whole new set of ideas about how to read. All are agreed, too, about the significance of what Kathy Eden calls “the profound interaction between rhetoric and hermeneutics” in sixteenth-century Europe, “especially between writing and reading.”96 Eloquence was taught first by Melanchthon and his students through textual analysis, and then through composition or pronunciation—a pedagogical reflection in miniature of that larger history in which the Reformers’ biblical exegesis motivated the creation of new notions first of interpretation, then of composition. What emerges most forcefully from Melanchthon’s ideas about reading is a tremendous confidence about eloquence—in the sacred and secular domains alike—and a striking rigor about the business of interpretation, in his demand that eloquence be mediated and evaluated at every turn by logic. To the analyses of Eden, Mack, and Meerhoff, I would add, as an argument crucial to the history of poetics in England, the formative impact of that new confident set of assumptions (about reading and writing) on the Defence of Poesy. Developed as an alternative method of interpreting texts inside a culture still swarming with the old-style philological commentaries of the early humanists on the one hand and the remarkably enduring practices of the allegorizing commentators on the other, the new ideas of reading are as essential to Sidney’s poetics as a theory of allegory is to Spenser’s poetry.97 They are key to understanding, in short, how Sidney sought 95 See Eden, p. 41–63, 82–5; Mack, “Rudolf Agricola’s Reading,” 23–41; and Meerhoff, “Logic and Eloquence,” 357–74. 96 Eden, p. 102. 97 For a detailed account of “old style” humanist commentaries, with their vast quantities of paraphrase, moral reflection, rhetorical analysis, and copious lexical and historical detail, see Anthony Grafton’s “Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts,” in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.


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to authorize his claims on behalf of the metamorphic power (remarkably) not of orations, but of fictions. The Scope of Sidney’s Golden World Poetics In 1935 Kenneth Myrick argued that Sidney’s Defence is structured on the model of the classical judicial oration, complete in its seven parts from its witty exordium to its comically hyperbolic conclusio. Other critics have revised (sometimes usefully) Myrick’s account about exactly where Sidney incorporates his narratio, propositio, and divisio, and where, therefore, the main business of confirmation and refutation begins, but there have been few challenges to Myrick’s main argument.98 Some attention has been paid to Sidney’s motives for crafting his Defence as a judicial oration. Geoffrey Shepherd notes, for instance, that Sidney follows the traditional pattern of university disputations by his choice of forms and Arthur Kinney suggests that this display of humanist elocutio was one potent means of whipping Gosson back to school.99 On the other hand, little attention has been given to specific models for Sidney’s judicial oration—and for good reason. Its structure appears so orthodox as to be generic, and would have been readily available from Cicero or any number of his imitators. As several critics note, Sidney would have had English models ready-to-hand for his choice of oratorical structures, including one from an influential figure in the Sidney circle, The Arte of Rhetoric by Thomas Wilson. There is another good reason to resist a search for specific models, oratorical or otherwise, for the Defence. Sidney’s eclecticism is legendary. A shrewd, practiced, and often brilliant syncretizer, Sidney habitually travels across the most disparate critical and philosophical terrains—from Plato to Aristotle, Plutarch to Basil, Landino to Scaliger—in search of the materials that he weaves with metamorphic complexity into the argument of the Defence. Source hunters come to the Defence both certain to find riches, and just as certain to experience frustration by attributing Sidney’s practice (however conceived) to any one source. While arguments refusing to attribute a single source to the oratorical structure of the Defence seem wise, they are scarcely exhaustive in explaining the significance of Sidney’s choice to organize his work as a judicial oration. Sidney’s choice of form, as always, is a strong indicator of meaning. An oration is the appropriate vehicle for defending poetry because poetry, as Sidney redefines the art, is intimately informed by oratio, by the twin arts of rhetoric and dialectic. By privileging oratorical ideas Press, 1991), p. 23–46. In an English context, E.K.’s prefatory epistle to The Shepheardes Calendar belongs (by way of parody?) far more to this tradition than to the new hermeneutic making its impact felt on Sidney’s Defence. 98 Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman, p. 46–83. As an exception, see Coogan’s argument that the Defence is structured less formally on the precepts of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, “The Triumph of Reason,” 255–70. For an alternative to Myrick’s account of the text’s oratorical structure, see O.B. Hardison, Jr., “The Two Voices of Sidney’s Apology for Poetry,” English Literary Renaissance 2 (1972), 83–99. 99 Shepherd, p. 46; Kinney, “Parody and Its Implications in Sydney’s Defense of Poesie,” 1–19.

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in this way, especially Melanchthon’s, I do not mean to diminish appreciation for Sidney’s real eclecticism. Quite the opposite is true. For the cosmopolitan Sidney, nurtured in cosmopolitan Vienna among an internationally minded elite of cultured moderates, few things could be more important than to display his wide and stylish learning across a vast array of times, places, and disciplines. What I do mean to argue, however, is that Sidney’s eclecticism was never that of a dilettante. As the most self-conscious and critically aware writer of his generation, he was driven just as tenaciously to organize the eclecticism he so eagerly displayed. What the judicial oration is to the structure of the Defence, Melanchthon’s concepts of reading and writing are to its arguments—the very means by which its critical and philosophical eclecticism achieves purpose through “methodical” arrangement, as well as the source of important matter that Sidney transforms in the alchemy of his wit into major conceptual arguments.100 Sidney foregrounds the oratorical quality of his Defence by a variety of means other than its formal organization. Intrusively, wittily, energetically, the narrative voice of the work repeatedly imitates the spoken discourse of the orator, sustaining the illusion throughout that we are not so much readers of a text, as auditors of a speech. Summoned to defend poor poetry, Sidney is “provoked” not to write “but to say something unto you …” (95, emphasis mine). Challenged to name a poet whose imitations surpass the exemplary stories of the historian, Sidney objects, “yet say I and say again, I speak of the art, and not of the artificer” (111, emphasis mine). By such strategies, his speaking voice maintains a presence and sets a standard by which to value (by contrast) the speaking of others. The historian is devalued as a “tyrant in table talk,” the philosopher ridiculed for “sophistically speaking against subtlety” and for being “so hard of utterance and so misty to be conceived” (105–6). Oratorical standards surface repeatedly to enforce key distinctions. Like good senators, Sidney writes, poets traditionally dress their matter in verse, “not speaking (table talk fashion or like men in a dream) words as they chanceably fall from the mouth, but peizing each syllable of each word by just proportion according to the dignity of the subject” (103). The decorum appropriate to the senatorial oration dignifies the poet’s versification. Orators themselves are sometimes brought forward to add their weight of cultural authority to the value of poetry. Among that list of worthies from “our nearer times” who “not only … read others’ poesies, but … poetise for others’ reading,” Sidney summons the “great orators,” Pontanus (Giovanni Pontano) and Muretus (Marc-Antonie Muret)—the latter, an ecumenically interesting witness for poetry, since this French humanist wrote a defense of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (131). Sidney can be even more explicit about the close relationship that obtains between poetry and oratory. Toward the conclusion of his pointedly critical digression on the state of English letters, he develops a sustained critique of contemporary diction that 100 Like a good student of Philippist oratio, Thomas Wilson (a Marian exile who studied in Germany) published in the same year as his rhetoric a third edition of a companion logic, with the significant reminder: “Melanchthon liveth and readeth. Therefore there is greate learnyng to bee had, where he is,” The Rule of Reason Conteinying the Arte of Logique, ed. Richard S. Sprague (Northridge, CA: San Fernando Valley State College, 1972), p. 104.


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expands from a complaint against corruptions of language common to “versifiers” into a more wide-ranging assault against the diction of “prose-printers,” “scholars,” and “preachers” (138–9). He castigates his countrymen for their “courtesan-like painted affectation,” their overuse of “far-fetched [imported] words,” too frequent “coursing of the letter,” and “winter-starved” figures of speech. But when Sidney cites authorities for corrective examples to imitate, it is interesting to note that he turns at this moment not to poets, but to orators: Demosthenes and Cicero (“most worthy to be imitated”) and Cicero’s “great forefathers … in eloquence,” Antonius and Crassus (138–9). He does so, clearly, because Sidney’s standards for evaluating the success of language-use of any kind (poetry or prose, academic or ecclesiastical) are oratorical in origin. Words succeed as they “persuade” and as they “prove,” as they marshall effectively the arts of rhetoric and dialectic for “the uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the mind” (140). With a characteristic lightness of touch, Sidney calls explicit attention to his own argumentative procedures, at first modestly exclaiming that “methinks I deserve to be pounded for straying from Poetry to Oratory,” and then subsequently justifying himself by reminding his readers of the “affinity” these arts possess in this “wordish consideration.” If it is the business of writers—writers of all sorts—to provide for “the right use both of matter and manner” (the traditional res et verba), then oratory is a useful discipline by which to guide and reform the poet’s art, imitation, and exercise (139–40).101 The Defence is organized as a judicial oration; it frequently mimics the voice of the orator; it enlists famous orators, classical and contemporary, as advocates for poetry; and it employs explicitly oratorical standards for the reform of poetic diction. By so doing, the text clearly bears the imprint of Sidney’s humanist training, but that training is more immediately visible on the style and structure of its arguments than on the matter of its poetics. If oratorical practices really matter for understanding the Defence—the new practices of reading and writing that he learned from his education abroad—then it is necessary to demonstrate how they matter in regard to the substance of Sidney’s poetic theory. To begin that examination, it will be helpful to focus again on Sidney’s central argument about the “scope” of poetry— the poet’s making of golden worlds—as an illustration of the hermeneutic skills that he acquired from his oratorical education. Sidney’s critical brilliance is enabled, in no small measure, by the methodical brilliance of his reading skills, and there is no better example of Sidney’s skill in “methodizing” the eclectic matter of his Defence than his treatment at the very center of his golden world poetics of Julius Caesar Scaliger. As the author of the Poetices, the best known of the sixteenthcentury Italian treatises on poetry, Scaliger was a figure with whom Sidney was eager to be associated (he refers him by name four times, and always politely). His presence in the Defence lends a cosmopolitan air to the discussion, and sometimes, 101 It is telling about his primary concerns that Sidney focuses so heavily in this “wordish consideration” on preachers. Like Thomas Wilson, among the first Tudor critics of such “seeming fineness” from the pulpit, and like Melanchthon, who advocated repeatedly for a plain style eloquence among preachers, Sidney calls for a more artfully “natural” (and, thereby, more persuasive) style of speech in God’s church. See Shepherd on Wilson and plain speaking, p. 229.

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too, suggestive matter to be reshaped for other purposes. As Sidney reads Scaliger to raid the fashionable Italian master for ideas about poetics, for terminology and conceptual categories, what emerge so clearly are his own distinctive assumptions about writing and reading. Sidney’s reshaping of Scaliger is particularly instructive in the Defence’s “accommodation” of the Poetices’s first chapter, a discussion of poetry in relation to various, culturally significant disciplines that concludes with the suggestive characterization of the poet as “almost … a second deity.”102 The main aim of Scaliger’s chapter is to distinguish poetry from the traditionally more revered sciences of philosophy, oratory, and history—a discussion that proceeds in terms that must have seemed familiar to Sidney by creating categories among the sciences as distinguishable modes of cultivating language. A branch of learning is a species of discourse, and the various branches of learning can be distinguished by the different ways in which they employ language, the different ends to which language is employed, and the relative value of those ends. Hence, philosophers, orators, historians and poets are first categorized according to the degree of precision each obtains in his employment of words. Philosophers are most precise; orators, less so; historians and poets “employ narration, and use much embellishment.”103 Having grouped historians and poets together, Scaliger then distinguishes the poet from the historian. This is a distinction that he makes, first, by referring to poetic imitation—a bit uncertainly, since poets are said to imitate “actual” and fictitious events—and, subsequently, by appealing to the Horatian dictum that poetry is really to be understood according to its end (finem), “the giving of instruction in pleasurable form.”104 Regrouping somewhat, Scaliger proceeds to define a single end for “philosophical exposition,” “oratory,” and “the drama”—the act of persuasion, a definition that occasions both a digression on poetic eloquence as the means to persuasive effects and a revision of Quintilian’s categories of speaking.105 That discussion concludes when Scaliger suggests that poets differ from philosophers, historians, and the rest because while these others “represent things just as they are, … the poet depicts quite another sort of nature,” and, therefore, is justly called by the Greeks a maker.106 Suggestive as it may have been, Scaliger’s “second deity” passage is a digression from the main discussion about how to categorize the sciences (“while we are on the subject,” he writes), and a digression that leaves uncertain just how the poet’s status as a maker relates either to the business of persuasion or to another main issue at stake, the value of poetry. So what if the poet is a maker of “images more beautiful than life”?107 Scaliger never says, and for a Sidney intellectually disposed

102 Frederick M. Padelford, Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1905), p. 8. 103 Scaliger, p. 2. 104 “Hic enim finis est medius ad illum ultimum, qui est docendi cum delectatione,” Poetices libri septem (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1964), p. 1. 105 Scaliger, p. 3. 106 Scaliger, p. 7–8. 107 Scaliger, p. 2–3.


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to pursue final causes, that silence must have seemed strangely empty. Once more, for a Sidney equally disposed to regard “methodical order” in argument, the whole of this chapter must have seemed as conceptually incoherent as it was imaginatively stimulating. In a gesture of accommodation, then, with a familiar nod toward the fashionable, Sidney proceeds to devour Scaliger’s text and make it wholly his own. What Sidney adds to Scaliger’s discussion of golden worlds is “scope.” As Sidney sets out to distinguish poetry as an art from other arts, he promises to do so “by marking the scope of other sciences than by my partial allegation” (99). Note the claim to objectivity contained in the promise, as if the appeal to considerations of scope guaranteed a logical rigor to argument superseding the merely “partial”—a prophylactic against, one might say, the Pugliano problem, and the always troubling biases that extend from self-love. He promises, in short, an analysis that accounts for what Melanchthon would call the final aim or mark of each art, considered comprehensively, or what the Defence terms in its very next sentence its “principal object” (99). For example, it is the “scope” of the astronomer “to look upon the stars” and set “down what order Nature hath taken therein” or the scope of the musician “in times [to] tell you which by nature agree, which not” (100). Sidney accommodates, then, a technical term customarily applied by contemporary rhetoricians to individual texts to his discussion of individual arts, and secures in the process an enormous expansion of range and significance for the discussion at hand. For Sidney’s innovation functions paradoxically as a restoration, the gesture of an erudite display of learning. With more than a little cosmopolitan fanfare, as I noted in the Introduction, Sidney constructs the entire frame of his central argument in conspicuous imitation of Aristotle’s treatment of the diverse aims of diverse sciences at the start of The Nicomachean Ethics. What Sidney gains by this act of imitation is both appropriate philosophical rigor and immediate moral purposefulness: the drive of argumentation to a consideration of ends, where the “ending end” of human learning is kept in sight from the start. Sidney’s addition of “scope” to Scaliger’s argument secures, too, another consequential expansion of meaning and significance for his account of the poet’s making. In place of Scaliger’s ever-shifting and rather incoherently defined categories, Sidney’s attention to the “scope” of the arts permits him to distinguish clearly between those whose “principal object” consists in their dependence on “the works of Nature,” on the one hand—all of the other humane arts, in brief, from astronomy to metaphysics—and the “scope” of the poet, who “lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature” in order to make “things better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature” (100). Sidney’s language is close to Scaliger’s, who writes about the poet’s depiction of “quite another sort of nature.” However, Sidney transforms the Italian’s rather loose, more broadly associative phrase “another sort of nature” into the fully realized metaphor of the poem as a golden world. The context of this transformation is both important and fascinating. For Sidney’s appeal to the concept of fiction-as-microcosm coincides exactly with that moment of the text in which he introduces the terminology of the scopus dicendi. The concept of the literary work as a microcosm was already present in the history of the term as it was derived from Proclus and the neoplatonists—in

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fact, the concept is original to the late neoplatonists. It was Sidney, however, who for the first time in early modern Europe explicitly reintroduces the notion of the literary work as a little world, and that reintroduction seems more likely the product of his demonstrable fascination with the vocabulary of scopus than his presumed familiarity with the unpublished theoretical works of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo and the Italian mannerist aestheticians.108 If “scope” was a rhetorical term that came loaded for Sidney with a sense of Aristotelian purposefulness, “scope” was also a term—as Sidney well realized—that could be used in the expansive conceptual sense of the neoplatonists to define the distinctive world of fiction. Adding “scope” to Scaliger’s discussion of the poet’s making of “another sort of nature,” Sidney adds methodically a sense of precision, purposefulness and philosophical range to the discussion that are utterly without anticipation in his source. Sidney’s predisposition to read methodically—to search for “scope”—is a self-conscious product of his Philippist education, one fraught with significance for understanding the reciprocal enabling of his concepts about writing fictions by his assumptions about how to read. “Scope” is more than a convenient rhetorical vehicle by which to tidy up the decidedly unkempt Scaliger. With its deep history in Aristotelian rhetorical and ethical thought and neoplatonic hermeneutics, “scope” lends layers of conceptual significance to Sidney’s poetics that expand to the core of his defense of poetic making. Put more plainly, Sidney borrows from Philippist oratory not just a term, but also a set of concepts that helps to explain why and how he characterizes the well-made poem as a well-made world.109 As the Defence makes clear, the superiority of the poet’s world to history’s (the explanation for its golden quality) stands “not in the work itself,” but in “that Idea or fore-conceit” represented, counterfeited or figured forth by the poem (101). Conceived in such terms, Sidney’s poetics can be described as “intellectualist” in kind, and because of that orientation, explaining the purposefulness or “scope” of those fictional worlds that Sidney seeks to defend depends in no small measure on understanding how he conceived of “that Idea or fore-conceit” out of which fictions are generated. A great deal of critical discussion has attempted to account for the philosophical origins of Sidney’s Idea, ordinarily taking shape as debate between Aristotelian or neoplatonic poetics, or 108 See Shepherd, p.155–6 and, on mannerism, Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph J.S. Peake (Columbia, SC: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1968), p. 69–100. Sidney’s knowledge about Proclus and Iamblicus may derive from his friend, Mornay, whose Verité de la religion chrestienne (dedicated to Languet and partially translated by Sidney) makes constant reference to them, especially in its first book. Sidney and Mornay were closely connected by 1578. Coincidences are possible, but that Sidney introduces for the first time in early modern Europe an explicit conceptualization of the literary work as microcosm, using the vocabulary (skopos) central to the formulation of that concept by its originators, at the moment that his most important intellectual compatriot is himself immersed in their texts, is just too neat to be an accident. 109 Richard Waswo anticipates my argument by writing: “The fundamental dynamic of Sidney’s defense … seems to proceed much more directly from reformed ways of treating Scripture than from Italian theoretical debates about literature,” Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), p. 228. Waswo has nothing to say, however, about Melanchthon or the oratorical theory underlying his exegetical practice.


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some syncretically realized position between or distinct from them. That discussion is worth revisiting because it shows how Sidney’s concern for the poet’s “scope” led to the conceptualization of fiction not just as a world, but also as a particular kind of world. Clearly, Sidney is not easily described as an Aristotelian. For all of the Defence’s attention to the vocabulary of mimesis, its deep diminishment of the truths to be derived from a slippery world makes small sense out of ordinary claims to induction or empiricism, and hence to the value of that Aristotelian project of locating forms (or ideas) embodied in the material realm. Clearly, too, Sidney is not readily characterized as a neoplatonist. He does not conceive of Ideas as deriving from or participating in some transcendent realm of meaning and value, and he specifically disclaims any source for the poet’s Ideas in divine inspiration.110 What Sidney insists upon, by contrast, is the poet’s possession of the Idea—a possession made “manifest” by his delivering it forth “in such excellency” in the poem’s activity of figuring-forth (101). (As he writes later: “the poet only bringeth his own stuff” [120].) Moreover, the poet’s possession of that “Idea” is interestingly complicated by its identification with the “fore-conceit,” a notion that requires some attention. John Ulreich has written helpfully about Sidney’s epistemology as a syncretically brilliant compromise between the Aristotelian and the Platonic, showing how “imitation” assumes new meaning in the Defence’s “actual transplanting of … Aristotelian organicism into the fertile soil of Neoplatonic cosmogony.” As it is described by Sidney, the process of poetic imitation can be conceived, Ulreich argues, in Platonic or Aristotelian terms, as an “actualization of matter by form” (the Idea figured-forth through speaking pictures) “or the infusion of form into matter” (speaking pictures figuring-forth the Idea).111 Balanced and scholarly, Ulreich’s depiction of the complex philosophical background of Sidney’s poetics makes good sense of a text whose famous eclecticism refuses easy categorizations. Once more, it is a depiction that helps to situate the Defence in the historical context of the scopus dicendi, as a term of art variously employed. Restated differently, with an 110 See Heninger, by contrast, for an extended argument identifying Sidney’s poetics with Aristotle’s, esp. p. 223–307, and my review of Heninger’s Sidney and Spenser in Sidney Newsletter 10, no. 2 (1990), 34–43. 111 “‘The Poets Only Deliver’: Sidney’s Conception of Mimesis,” 83, 79. With Ulreich, then, I support A.C. Hamilton’s argument about the Defence as “closely reasoned and logical in all of its parts,” Sir Philip Sidney, p. 111. See, too, John Hunt’s contention that the coherence of the text is “allusively” created, “Allusive Coherence in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry,” Studies in English Literature 27 (1987), 1–16. Arguments for coherence cut against the grain of much current criticism. See O.B. Hardison’s argument in “The Two Voices of Sidney’s Apology for Poetry” that its incoherence derives from two stages of composition, 83–99. See D.H. Craig on the incoherence of Sidney’s effort to reconcile Plato and Aristotle, “A Hybrid Growth,” 62– 80; and Ronald Levao’s argument that Sidney deliberately and deconstructively sets Aristotle against Plato in “Sidney’s Feigned Apology,” 223–33. For an extension of that position into a position designed to expose the Defence as a treatise against poetry, see Herman’s SquitterWits and Muse-Haters. More subtly and persuasively, Skretkowicz stresses its combination of “humour, admonition, logical rigour, [and] whimsical sophistry” in “Sidney’s Defence of Poetry, Henri Estienne, and Huguenot Nationalist Satire,” 3.

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eye to the history of the text’s critical terminology, appealing to the syncretism of its philosophical backgrounds can highlight usefully Sidney’s skill in employing the scopus of the Aristotelian rhetorical tradition, with its regard for the this-worldly activity of demonstrable argument, to the neoplatonically conceived microcosm of the text. In this light, the Defence emerges as an especially skillful synthesis of competing traditions since the force of that scopus is simultaneously to discipline and to give purpose to the world of imagination. Sidney gains the exhilaration and expansiveness of the neoplatonic vision (what zodiacal range!), without sacrificing the clarity or control of Aristotelian standards of demonstrable reason. Aristotle’s scope, at once rhetorical and ethical, shapes a fictional world answerable to the demands of clarity, coherence, economy and decorum—to the full range of those standards of expression most important to the rhetorical tradition extending so variously from Aristotle to Quintilian to Basil to Melanchthon. A point of considerable importance can be made in relation to this argument. For while it is possible to write meaningfully about Sidney’s debts to neoplatonism, especially in his conception of the fiction as a microcosm, poetry does not shadow forth transcendent realities behind a fictive veil—as an instrument to build causeways across that dualistic universe (the phenomenal and the epi-phenomenal) traditionally implied by neoplatonic allegorists. Instead, Ideas are realized by substantive images exemplified paradigmatically as pictures of the poet’s making. The figuring-forth of the Sidneian poet works “substantially” in his depiction of a “perfect picture … of a true and lively knowledge”—knowledge that makes a reality available for the reader (101, 107). I emphasize the important activity of the poem in presenting a “reality” in order to foreground the extraordinary intellectual and affective power that Sidney attributes to the Idea as it is figured forth—the capacity of the poet’s “perfect” pictures to unleash real powers that exist at once in Nature and in the erected wit, and the dramatic metamorphic potential of those Ideas as they are comprehended by the reader. Sidney does not conceive of writing as allegory because he does not conceive of reality in allegorical terms, an argument best elaborated in regard to Sidney’s own purposefully organized account of the world of poetry. As an epistemic construct, the poet’s golden world is one reliable guide to his epistemological assumptions about the world at large. Or to restate that argument in other terms, Sidney’s golden world is something more than a loosely constructed, rhetorically suggestive metaphor. Instead, as I will show, it is the methodically conceived imitation, counterfeit, and figuration of the Maker’s own prelapsarian creation, the world itself—one that has a maker who works by intention, one that possesses its own natural goodness and power, and one that is constructed according to a specific purpose, aim or scope. Once more, like the macrocosm itself, it is a world in which the maker’s intentions, at once clear and demonstrably coherent, both can and must be recovered by the best hermeneutic means available—by means, that is, of dialectic and rhetoric. Useful, then, as Ulreich’s analysis is in detailing a history to explain the syncretic philosophical provenance of Sidney’s Idea, understanding its eloquent function and philosophical foundation requires that we travel from Aristotle’s Greece beyond Scaliger’s Italy to Renaissance Vienna—to that circle of Philippists from whom Sidney derived his key concepts about how to read and write.


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These concepts are key because the Idea of Sidney’s poetics functions as an eloquent device in precisely similar terms to the locus of Philippist oratory. It is “a universal truth” about experience—a representation of virtue or vice—which stands at the foundation of the narrative, generating speaking pictures and providing unity to the whole. It is simultaneously associated, like Melanchthon’s loci, with the author’s intention (voluptas), chief cause (summam causam) or main argument (status dicendi). When Sidney offers examples of these Ideas in the Defence—the chastity of Lucretia, the piety of Aeneas, the courage of Turnus—they are invariably represented as the moral commonplaces of his education, or differently stated, not so much as arguments, but as the seats upon which arguments are built. (The metaphor is Sidney’s, and standard to the rhetoric of commonplaces: poets display to our view “all virtues, vices, and passions so in their own natural seats” [108].) As the world has a Maker, who realizes his intentions by the creative power of the Logos (at once his reason and his Word), so too the Sidneian poet has his aim: to make poetic matter from the conceits of his wit. Since it is the poet’s scopus “to teach and to delight,” his Ideas are always motivated—fraught with intention. It is no surprise, then, consistent with these assumptions about writing, that reading for intention is a strategy that Sidney employs on writers across the disciplines throughout the Defence. Defending Aesop from the charge of lying, Sidney comically diminishes those who would read the fables “for actually true,” instead of considering the intention (the moral purpose) that is their meaning (124). So too, Sidney rescues Erasmus and Agrippa from the charge of mere “playing” in their satiric and parodic works by claiming that they had “another foundation [another moral intention], than the superficial part [the ‘playing’] would promise” (121). He even rescues Plato from Plato by means of intentionality, as he inquires about his “meaning,” arguing craftily that it was Plato’s aim to undo blasphemy in Athens by attacking the abuse, not the right use of poetry (129). In every instance, Sidney assumes that such intentions are readily recoverable by the exercise of good reading skills. They are the province not of the spiritually adept, but rather of the rhetorically informed. Like the well-made oration, Sidney’s poetic world is governed by laws internal to its organization, and can be read with the same kind of attention to its logical coherence and economy of argumentation. In this respect, too, the logic of the poetic world reflects Sidney’s assumptions about the rational design of the cosmos. Dialectics matters to poetry. Hence, Sidney’s call in his description of the golden world for active readers who will “learn aright why and how that maker made” his poem (101). As an extension of this concept, the Defence offers what to post-romantic audiences is startling advice about how to read poetry well. O.B. Hardison was so startled by the evidence of these logical/analytical demands in a text committed to the celebration of golden worlds of poetry that he hypothesized the existence of two defenses inside the Defence—one romantic, one neo-classical. Hardison was the victim of his own romantic assumptions about world-making. For Sidney, the poetic maker is an image of that divine maker—a maker who shapes the world rationally, by number, measure and order. To test for genuine “poetical sinews,” Sidney suggests putting verse into prose, “and then ask the meaning”; in bad poetry, one verse will “but beget another, without ordering at the first what should be last, which becomes a confused mass of words … barely accompanied with reason” (133).

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His sentence is a foreshadowing of Ezra Pound’s dictum that poetry ought to be as well written as prose. The philosopher may have some degree of superiority in “methodical proceeding” (112), Sidney allows, but this does not prevent him from demanding that the poet use the “unflattering glass of reason” to marshal the matter of his work into an “assured rank” (132–3). A demand of this sort is especially revealing about Sidney’s assumptions in regard to how meaning is made. Poetic meaning proceeds from authorial intention (any allegoresis would insist as much also); but poetic meaning, in addition, must be recoverable by reason, since—Sidney clearly assumes—words exist in order to reveal, not to conceal meaning. Once more, when key examples of the poet’s power to teach and delight are supplied—the tales of Agrippa and Nathan—they are cited not as illustrations, but as “proofs” of the forcefulness of poetical invention, proofs that carry real conceptual and affective force with them (114). Affective force matters also to the Defence’s representation of the poem as a golden world, since, like the loci of the well-made oration, the Ideas figured-forth by Sidney’s poetic world are associated closely and consistently with the power of Nature—the great creating nature of the Maker (natura naturans), not the fallen nature of the postlapsarian world (natura naturata). It is important to stress this cooperation, the fact that the poet “goeth hand in hand with Nature,” because that cooperation secures for the poet’s Ideas a whole separate order of persuasiveness related to, but distinct from their logical power (100). It secures the added dimension of existential affectiveness, the persuasiveness of the Ideas depicted by fictions that derives from their power to speak to the needs of human nature. We respond to fictions—especially to the characters represented by narrative fictions—because we see ourselves mirrored in them, “ourselves” as teleologically considered we naturally are. Such insight suggests, in turn, some key assumptions about what it means for the poet “to deliver forth in such excellency” Ideas just “as he hath imagined them” (101). Consider for a moment how much power Sidney attributes to nature in the Defence, not just as that great creating force with which the poet walks hand in hand—itself a speaking picture of the cooperation of the maker and his Maker, the human and the divine—but also the power attributed to human nature in its appetite for goodness. The Ideas figured forth by poets have power, Sidney argues repeatedly, because “poetry ever setteth virtue so out in her best colours … that one must needs be enamoured of her” (111). When the reader is made to see Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, the “form of goodness” poetically depicted, “cannot but” be loved (114). So similarly, in his discussion of heroic characters like Cyrus, Turnus, and Achilles, Sidney cites Plato and Cicero’s opinion “that who could see virtue would be wonderfully ravished with the love of her beauty” (119). Poetry has such power to “plant goodness even in the secretest cabinet of our souls” only because of the human appetite for virtue (106). Sidney is not so naive as to think poetry always effective. The tyrant Alexander Pheraeus, as Plutarch relates, was moved to tears by tragedy, but “in despite of himself” continued to perpetrate tragedies (118). The phrase “in despite of himself” makes Sidney’s point for him. Pheraeus acted against his own nature.


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The force of poetry’s natural power assumes always the value of clarity. Hence Sidney’s praise for that long list of fictional characters from Homer’s Ulysses to Chaucer’s Pandar, in whom “all virtues, vices, and passions [are] so … laid to the view, that we seem not to hear of them, but clearly to see through them” (108). An imitation of Lucretia exists not to conceal but to reveal her chastity, as a means of “counterfeiting, or figuring forth” what he calls the “beauty of such a virtue” (101–2). Sidney reads the Bible with this expectation of claritas, just as he reads fictions. Like a good student of Philippist exegesis, Sidney cites Christ’s use of “the divine narration of Dives and Lazarus” as proof of divine eloquence: the story presents “the moral commonplaces [the loci communes] of uncharitableness and humbleness” so that they better inhabit “the memory and judgment” (108–9). There is no hint of allegorizing in his language. In fact, when Sidney moves in the next sentences to his consideration of Aesop’s tales and their “pretty allegories,” he represents those fables as “the formal tales of beasts”—accommodating the traditional dark poetics of the allegorical tradition to the standard of claritas enshrined by the new reading practice. As formal tales, their purpose is to illuminate clearly the “forms” of virtue and vice. Aesop is mentioned here, like Christ, as specific counterpoint to the philosopher who “teacheth obscurely” (109).112 Claritas is a particular virtue of the poet by reason of his recourse to energeia (classical rhetorical skills for amplifying arguments) and to speaking pictures—the exemplary narratives and metaphors that 112 Sidney treats “allegory” as he treats so many other traditional terms in the Defence (e.g. “imitation”) as the object of his own magical inclusivity: the term’s use fosters the appearance of agreement, while context utterly transforms its meaning. In every case that Sidney writes about allegory, he does so while recalling tales for children—the sort of literature represented by Aesop’s Fables in which stories announce their skopos explicitly; Sidney’s edition of Aesop was that of Joachim Camerarius, another Philippist practicing the new hermeneutic, whose edition was specifically designed for little boys learning to parse their Latin [Fabulae Aesopicae (Lugduni: Ioan. Tornaesium, 1571)]. When late in his argument, while defending the poet from accusations about lying, Sidney writes about stories as “allegorically and figuratively written,” he can do so innocuously because of the specificity with which he has already characterized the process by which the poet constructs his golden world fictions. By “allegorically,” Sidney means nothing more than that poets figure-forth— give body to—abstractions. Considered in modal terms, therefore, the allegorical is absorbed into the figurative. Considered in historical terms, Sidney’s reference affords a recognition, too, that allegorical writing comprises one tradition of fiction-making, puerile as it may be. (One of Sidney’s few allegorical poems, the “Ister bank” of The Old Arcadia’s third book is decorously adapted to Philisides’s youth—as the sort of poem one gives to children—just as its archaic language is a joke both at Spenser’s expense and the “archaic” mentality of the young, unfallen Philisides. Its clarity of theme—startlingly statemental as it is [see stanza five]—is a patent rejection of allegory’s traditional obscurity.) The concluding conjuration of the Defence that readers “believe with me, that there are many mysteries contained in Poetry, which of purpose were written darkly,” is characteristically witty Sidneian humor at the expense of an allegorical tradition that he has so conspicuously rewritten and diminished (142). Borris makes much of William Temple’s use of the term allegorica fictio in his contemporary analysis of the Defence, but applied as that term is to the stories of Nathan and David and Aesop’s fables, clearly it indicates once more only their figurative status (197). Temple’s Ramistic reading methods are diametrically opposed to anything that we could intelligibly call “allegorical.”

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permit readers to visualize poetic conceits. The first editions of Melanchthon’s Loci communes included in their titles, it is useful to recall, the words seu hypotyposes— or the speaking pictures. Like the well-made oration of the Philippist tradition, Sidney’s golden world has in common with the great world of its Maker one more important characteristic. As a world fashioned purposefully, which gives perspicuous representation to ideas of virtue and vice, the poem invites accommodation. Accommodation (becoming at home in the world of the fiction) is a process described doubly, suggesting a necessary cooperation between two ways of finding oneself at home in the work. On the one hand, Sidney writes about the need for readers who actively engage texts for the real benefits to be mined from them, as they analyze “why and how” the work gets made (101). When Sidney recruits Plutarch’s authority for his praise of fictions, he cites his success in teaching “the use to be gathered out of them”—the moral utility of those ideas or conceits that they embody (130). In turn, when he discusses readers who turn to “History looking for truth”—Sidney parodies that search by the hyperbolical claim that they go away from histories “full fraught with falsehood” (124). They would do better to look in poetry for fictions, “where they shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention” (124). Readers are advised imaginatively to invent (literally, to reinvent) the making of the poem, to reconstruct the conceptual design of its fictional landscape in order to profit, in the very act of so doing, from its teaching. Accommodation, in the first instance, sounds mainly like the conceptual activity of adapting the text to the reader’s own needs. But accommodation to the poetic text requires simultaneously something else of equal importance. To make oneself fully at home in the poetic text, to accommodate oneself to the poet’s invention, requires too an affective identification—the wish to become an Aeneas in his pious rescue of Anchises or a Turnus in his courageous stand for honor. The distinctive power of the Sidneian golden world is its power to make acts of identification possible. For the world of the poetic text is golden not because it represents an “earth more lovely,” nor even that it counterfeits more “excellent” kinds of heroes—heroes like Xenophon’s Cyrus—but rather the “golden” eloquence of the fiction is signaled by its power to bestow “a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses” (101). Like the world, then, a fiction has its own maker (an analogue to the divine Maker), its own laws (the logic internal to its organization), its own natural power (as the representation of Ideas that speak clearly about human nature and human needs), and its own purpose, aim, or scope—its cause for being (to have readers accommodate themselves to the maker’s intention). The golden world of poetry bears one more telling resemblance to the world—at least to the unfallen world of creation—in that it, too, is a supreme example of eloquence-in-action, an instance of words (like the Word) working at the very height of their power. As the very matter out of which Sidney forms his conception of fiction as a well-made world, these are the ideas that transform the Defence’s well-known engagement with Italian poetics into an argument with “scope.” Considered comprehensively, Sidney’s ideas about poetic eloquence, including his several assumptions about reading—his concern with intentionality, clarity, coherence, and the all-important business of accommodation—share the optimism about eloquence that informs Melanchthon’s


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account of oratory. They include, too, Melanchthon’s tough-minded regard for logic, his insistence that rhetoric be guided by and subjected to analysis of a rigorously dialectical kind. Once more, they suggest an answer to a question that Ulreich’s analysis of the Defence leaves unresolved: How does one explain the authority of Ideas presumed by the textual argument, their authority to carry truth with them? For a theoretician as self-consciously methodical as Sidney, the status of the Idea could hardly have escaped attention. Answering this question can reveal a good deal about the implicit epistemology governing Sidney’s poetics. Certain key categories of Ideas were for Melanchthon innate. Throughout his career, he refers consistently to those Ideas as notitiae—innate notions inscribed inside the mind at birth by God, as a consequence of mankind’s creation in the image of the deity. They are not evidence of the soul’s preexistence or mystical powers of reminiscence. Instead, they manifest the continuity of the Maker’s love for the beings whom he has made in his own image. Seek out a summary principle that best embodies the central project of Melanchthon’s career and it might be: to reawaken his contemporaries to the knowledge that humankind is created in the image of God. Melanchthon’s natural philosophy best illuminates his understanding of the notitiae.113 In an evangelical revision of Aristotelian anthropology, Liber de anima (1553), he develops a detailed and complex portrait of the mind as a “wise architect,” already furnished by that heavenly architect with the knowledge necessary to honor its creator: innate mathematical understanding (numbers), the capacity to fashion and to comprehend syllogistic reasoning, the fundamentals of geometry and physics, and the foundational tenets of moral philosophical judgment—inclusive in its detail from specific distinctions between good and evil to knowledge about the existence of God and the afterlife.114 The notitiae secure multiple advantages for Melanchthon’s philosophy. Authored by God, they represent a defense against skepticism. Inspired by the doctrines of an unusual Philippist trinity—Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Paul—they secure the legitimacy of exemplary ideas existing inside the mind; the authenticity of those universal essences that the mind abstracts from the particulars of the sensible world; and the goodness of a God who has designed nature as a book from which knowledge about himself can and must be obtained. God’s purposes for Melanchthon, as for that Basil he so admired, are fully accommodated 113 For Melanchthon’s concept of the notitiae, see Bellucci, esp. p. 363–96. 114 In the De anima (1553), within an argument designed to show that God made man with rational skills so that an awareness of the deity will shine in him, Melanchthon writes: “Est igitur mens architectatrix sapiens,” (Therefore the mind [of man] is a wise architect) CR 13, 138; he proceeds to point out that: “Architectus cogitans domum, pingit imaginem eius, et de ea iudicat. Tantum propemodum dici potest, cum quaerimus, quid sit noticia. Mirando autem consilio Deus noticias voluit esse imagines, quia in nobis umbras esse voluit significantes aliquid de ipso” (An architect thinking about a house depicts an image of it and judges it. So in a similar sense we can say, when we question it, what perception is. By his wonderful design God wished perceptions to be images, because he wished reflections in us to signify something of himself, CR 13, 145). Once more, this architectonic power of the mind—a reflection in man of the Maker’s power—is the source, Melanchthon argues, of all arts: “Et fontes omnium artium sunt in hac potentia” (And the fountain of all the arts is in this power [of making] CR 13, 138).

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and transparently manifest to the natural capacities of the creatures made to know and love him. Knowledge of the good becomes in the natural theology of the late Melanchthon an awakening of the good, recalling us to our own natures, and that recall, in turn, highlights the extraordinary importance that his concept of the notitiae accords to learning of all kinds, and especially to the arts. At birth, the notitiae are mere vestiges or obscure notions, which exist below the threshold of consciousness— mere “sparks” of potential knowledge that await illumination. It is the business of the active intellect, by means of its power to invent, order and analyze images, to fan the sparks of those notitiae into flames, to make them conscious possessions of a mind steadily enriched by knowledge both of its own natural treasures and the treasures of the natural world. Knowledge is literally an awakening, a process of taking note of those notitiae scripted by the divine author. The active intellect, then, with a likeness appropriately similar to its Maker, is conceived by Melanchthon as an artist imposing form upon matter, shaping to its divinely appointed end natural powers inside as well as outside the self. In turn, the notitiae are identified as the source of all of the human arts—as those exemplary ideas, moral goods, and certainties about God, which serve simultaneously as the truth obtainable through reason and the power to obtain that truth. The more active the intellect becomes, the more “illustrious” its images of universals, the more closely human nature is fulfilled in its divinely appointed end to know itself and God.115 Such universals, in turn, are characterizable as such, not because of their status as transcendent Ideas emanating from the One and the Good, as the obscure objects of esoteric desire and intellection; they are instead “universal,” because they are the here-and-now commonplaces of human experience, the universally shared truths of reason responding rightly to created nature. The argument of the Defence assumes both the autonomy of the Idea and its authority (legitimacy). It assumes, too, the “commonplace” status of the poet’s Idea—its availability as a universal principle of moral knowledge. Always when Sidney makes reference to the poet’s figuring forth of specific Ideas of virtue and vice, those Ideas are the familiar tenets of his own moral philosophical education— justice, chastity, piety and the like. They belong to the common fund of human experience, and exist without pretension (philosophical, allegorical, or Spenserian!) to an esoteric status. The Defence assumes much more besides about the nature of Ideas, and those assumptions indicate again Sidney’s profound engagement with Melanchthon’s thought in his Philippist education. Within the Defence’s poetics, it is possible to imagine the poem’s generative Idea (its “stuff’) as the creation of the poet’s own “erected” wit, but Sidney never writes about the poet as the creator 115 See Bellucci, quoting from Melanchthon’s Commentarius: “Interea hae ipsae noticiae etiam ratiocinando fiunt illustriores. Mens naturaliter intelliget esse Deum, veritatem esse amandam. Et tamen accedere ratiocinatio potest, qua fiunt hae sententiae illustriores.” (Meanwhile, these notions become more illuminating still because of reasoning [about them]. The mind understands naturally that God exists, that it needs to love the truth. But reasoning that comes to add itself [to this understanding], renders these principles more illuminating), p. 376.


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of Ideas.116 He comically sneers at neoplatonists who attribute poetic Ideas to inspiration, just as he seems to strip the foundations from an Aristotelian reading of poetic making by his assaults upon the folly of empiricism. The poet, Sidney writes, “doth not learn a conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter for a conceit” (120). The “conceit” is the Idea that the poet possesses; the poet’s “matter” (in turn) is that sensible material with which he “figures forth” or embodies (like creating nature) the “conceit” that is already present. How then does the wit come into possession of an Idea? And why is the Idea identified from the first in Sidney’s argument with the “fore-conceit”? Maintaining his independence from Plato and Aristotle alike, similar to Melanchthon Sidney conceives of the Idea as innate to that same erected wit as an impression remaining from his Maker inscribed within (hence, innate to) what the Defence calls (in good Philippist fashion) the mind’s own divine essence. When Sidney agrees with those “learned men who have learnedly thought” that “in Nature we know it is well to doe well, and what is well and what is evil,” he does so by appealing to a belief in natural law written in the mind that has the potential to teach individuals, as a body of innate knowledge, truths that extend from basic tenets of moral philosophy to the recognition of the soul’s immortality and the existence of a providential God— exactly the recognition provided, for instance, to his “pagan” Arcadian princes on the eve of their trial and feared death (113). In a sixteenth-century context, most prominent among those “learned men” who espoused a theory of innate ideas as the cornerstone both of moral and natural philosophy was Philip Melanchthon. Such knowledge is potential because for Sidney as for Melanchthon learning is a process of awakening, one in which Ideas become visible to consciousness as the images of things.117 Forrest G. Robinson argued some years ago on behalf of the visualist epistemology everywhere evident in Sidney’s Defence, the readiness with which his poetics identifies knowing with seeing in his celebration of “the speaking picture of poesy” (107), and the concomitant significance bestowed by that poetics upon image-making. What Sidney’s debts to Melanchthon add to Robinson’s analysis is an understanding about why the poet’s powers of illumination should assume such 116 In a still-useful article, Leigh DeNeef proposes that Sidney’s “fore-conceit” is the “mediating term” between the Idea and the “textually bodied” conceit, “Rereading Sidney’s Apology,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 10 (1980), 155–91. What DeNeef does not understand is the epistemology that imparts to the “fore-conceit” its mediating role: the science of how-the-mind-comes-to-know, one originating in Melanchthon’s natural philosophy, and one whose vocabulary (see Chapter 3) derives directly from Mornay. By turn, Mack’s central argument about the pious operation of Sidney’s poetics (that Sidney’s “maker” imitates “the method of God, who created matter out of nothing”) misrepresents the epistemological foundations of Sidneian making altogether, p. 37. 117 Liber de anima, in CR 13, 145: “Noticia est mentis actio, qua rem adspicit, quasi formans imaginem rei, quam cogitat. Nec aliud sunt imagines illae seu ideae, nisi actus intelligendi. Nec huius admirandae actionis alia potest tradi illustrior descriptio, quam quod sit formatio imaginis” (The notion is an action of the mind, which sees something, as though forming an image of the thing which it is thinking about. Nor are these images or ideas anything except acts of the person who is thinking. Nor is it possible to give any clearer illustration about this wonderful action than that it is the formation of an image).

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enormous significance over the course of his argument. At the conclusion of a crucial consideration of the value of poetry relative to the value of history and philosophy, Sidney sounds a note of triumph by attributing to the poet “perfect picture[s],” whose perfection consists in their coupling of the philosopher’s “general notion” with the historian’s “particular example.” His purpose is transparent. Obviously, he is setting his opponents up for the argumentative kill, as he prepares to declare the syncretic superiority of poets who (beyond their rivals) can both teach and move. However, the rhetorical preparations are also revealing about the epistemological assumptions at work. Proceeding to illustrate his point about how pictures teach more effectively than “wordish description,” Sidney cites as examples the superiority of paintings to instruct “a man that had never seen an elephant or rhinoceros” and visual models to clarify the architecture “of a gorgeous palace” (107). The emphasis falls squarely on the liveliness of visual presentation. But Sidney’s language makes just as clear that the issue at hand is complicated by issues that supersede presentation. Philosophy “replenisheth” the memory “with many infallible grounds of wisdom”—concerning “virtue, vices, matters of public policy or private government,” he concedes (emphasis mine). But the replenishing of memory is not sufficient for obtaining wisdom, Sidney adds; for wisdom is apt to “lie[s] dark before the imaginative and judging power” unless “illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poetry” (107). Knowledge is better understood as representation than presentation—hence the vocabulary of replenishment, the recourse to a language of concealment (wisdom lies dark) and disclosure (poetry illumines and figures forth). Sidney’s allegorizers make much of that vocabulary of concealment, but misunderstand its place inside the dynamics of disclosure because of their failure to grasp the epistemological assumptions governing his argument.118 Hence, too, the frequent recourse inside the Defence to the vocabulary of the “fore-conceit,” and its distinctive identification with the “Idea.” The “fore-conceit” of Sidney’s poetics comes be-fore, has priority in a double sense, which is revealing about the always important dynamic relationship in his Defence between writing and reading. The fore-conceit has priority both as the model that is prior to the poet’s figuring forth—the Idea of chastity that becomes Lucretia as she achieves visual embodiment, and also as the notion of chastity that is prior to the reader’s consciousness, as the natural seat upon which active virtue is built when the mind is instructed and moved by the Lucretia it sees—“all virtues, vices, 118 Annabel Patterson claims that fears about censorship inspired what she represents as the intentionally devised obscurity of the romance’s political expression, “‘Under Pretty Tales’: Intention in Sidney’s Arcadia,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 15, no. 1 (Spring 1982), esp. 6–14. Patterson’s critique of Geron’s fable (OA 9) is a good example of the misreadings that critical assumptions of this kind promote: when the old shepherd tells the story of a swan who lost its voice to Mastix (a bitter satirist whose name means “scourge”), he does so not to warn him “to keep quiet for his own good,” as Patterson asserts (14), but instead to chide his excess in speaking out of a moral self-righteousness to which he has no rightful claim (see The Old Arcadia, p. 79, lines 2–10). Heninger’s distinction between Spenser’s allegorical and Sidney’s exemplary poetics makes good sense; in the former, truth lies “behind the veil of words”; in the latter, it “inheres in the verbal system itself …[;] meaning is inseparable from the poem, integral to it,” p. 274–5.


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and passions so in their own natural seats laid to the view, that we seem not to hear of them, but clearly to see through them” (108). When Sidney writes about “notions” of virtue and vice, he treats them as notitiae (innate ideas), which poetic images are best able to bring to consciousness. Meaning is not something separable from the poem—lodged in some transcendental order of Ideas veiled by textual symbols that require allegorical decoding. Meaning happens in the verbal dynamics of the poem itself, as sparks of truth are fanned into flames of knowledge, as speaking pictures give substance to Ideas innately unknowable apart from their exemplification. His text puns etymologically, then, in ways that are philosophically telling. Sidney constantly points our attention to what is “notable,” whether that is Plato’s “notable fable of the Atlantic Island” (97)—good poet, that Plato, Sidney wryly notes—or David’s “notable prosopopeias” of the divine (99)—speaking pictures of God’s majesty; or Plutarch’s “notable testimonie of the abominable tyrant Alexander Pheraeus” (118), his heart moved by poetry; or “notable examples” of moral painting “as Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac” (125). (The word “notable” occurs eleven times in the Defence.) There is a point to all this noting of the notable. In his argumentatively central definition of the art, Sidney refers (as a variation upon a theme) to the poet’s making of “notable images of virtues, vices, and what else” (103). Such images should be noted because they derive their authority, power, and necessity from the notitiae within. Such “notions,” in turn, are authoritative because they are inscribed by the divine hand; they are powerful because they recall us to our nature (our Nature as the Maker first made it); and they are necessary, because they enable what Sidney calls architectonike, “the knowledge of a man’s self” (104). Sidney assumes a sort of Chomsky-like “deep grammar” of Ideas inscribed within the mind both animating in their innate potential and reanimated through the agency of images, or (to switch metaphors) an internet of the wit, hard-wired, expansive, cosmopolitan in scope, whose pathways become traceable as notable images—the forcibleness of the poet’s fictions—lead us home, Ulysses-wise, to discover our own natures—to discover why and how that Maker made us. Sidney’s terminology speaks to the purposefulness of his argument—to his preoccupation with final aims and marks—and to the wisdom of attending carefully to the “scope” of the Defence’s own argument, especially as it relates the distinctive characteristics of fictions conceived as golden worlds, the nature of the poet’s Ideas or fore-conceits, and the urgency of its claims about fiction’s real consequences for its readers. Considerations of scope always point toward that “ending end” of virtuous action, and the real consequences that derive from those acts of accommodation— those moments of readerly identification with fictional narratives—that Sidney and the Philippist rhetorical tradition to which he belongs emphasize so powerfully. Acts of identification matter so profoundly because of the anthropology that underlies the Defence’s critical positions. At the very heart of his enterprise, Sidney transforms the metamorphic art of Philippist oratio (the power of words and the Word to renew the old Adam) into the strangely similar metamorphic art of the poet. That fashionable Italian aesthetician, Scaliger, attends to poetry’s making “of another sort … of nature,” but he could never claim—no more than Plato or Aristotle—that poets make another sort of human being. Let me explain my point by reference to a key passage in Sidney’s argument where he supplies by way of his new hermeneutic—his new

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reading skills—two “proofs” of the “strange effects of … poetical invention” (115). As Sidney explicates his proof texts, one about Menenius Agrippa and the other about Nathan and David, he transforms “two often remembered” tales into speaking pictures of the preeminent power of poetry (115). The tales of Agrippa and Nathan are introduced at an especially crucial juncture in the methodically designed economy of Sidney’s argument. They are situated at the climactic moment of the Defence’s demonstration of poetry’s “most excellent work”—the “high argument” of its confirmatio—just before the turn to justify poetry by an examination of its parts (115). So situated, the tales supply summary proofs of the main burden of Sidney’s claim on behalf of the superiority of the poet’s “works”—its effects upon the reader—over those of his chief rivals for cultural authority, the historian and the philosopher. A single standard measures the relative value of the disciplines: the success of each in hitting the “scope,” the ultimate aim or mark of the humane sciences in their pursuit of architectonic knowledge—what Sidney describes alternately as the lifting up of the mind “to the enjoying of his own divine essence” and “the knowledge of man’s self, in the ethic and politique consideration, with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only” (104).119 The tales of Agrippa and Nathan supply an interesting pair of proof texts. One is drawn from classical history, the other from sacred. One illustrates the power of a fable to provide “a perfect reconcilement” in the public domain, as Agrippa’s tale of the belly heals the divisions in Rome’s body politic, when a crowd of hungry and disgruntled plebeians is persuaded to abandon its incipient rebellion against the state. The other fable illustrates the power of feigning in the private sphere, as David is shamed by Nathan’s story of the lamb “as in a glass [to] see his own filthiness,” and reclaim (“as that psalm of mercy well testifieth”) his role as God’s chosen servant (114–15). David’s shame derives from his adultery with Bathsheba and his plot to dispose of her husband. One narrative illustrates the power of a feigned tale over the people, one over the prince. Paired in this manner, the twin tales seem deliberately chosen in order to illustrate comprehensively, across the domains of pagan and sacred history, public and private life, among the low and the high, the superior effects of poetry’s “most excellent work” in teaching and persuading. As a prelude to his illustrations of that work, in the paragraph immediately preceding, Sidney cites Aristotle’s claim on behalf of poetry’s “conveniency to Nature” as a way of highlighting those strong acts of identification that make readers want to see themselves as Aeneas piously carrying old Anchises on his back or as Turnus heroically preferring death to dishonor (114). But, as the tales of Agrippa and Nathan make clear, Sidney makes more-than-Aristotelian claims about the transformative power of those readerly acts of identification. Readers do not merely identify with virtuous characters. Instead, they are metamorphosed by love of those virtues pictured by such characters. Both “the whole people of Rome” collectively and David individually are brought to an architectonic knowledge of 119 See the Enarrationes Aliquot Librorum Ethicorum Aristotelis in CR 16, 284, note 2, where Melanchthon, writing as a teacher, highlights the conjunction between Aristotle’s concept of architectonic knowledge and the knowledge Christians require “ut cognoscamus Deum” (in order that we know God).


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themselves. They are taught fictions that heighten understanding about their natures and that move them by reason of such knowledge to virtuous action (114). In both cases, that architectonic knowledge is metamorphic in character, since knowledge about their real natures (the nature of the body politic’s necessary interdependence of parts, the nature of the self’s dependence on God) sparks change that renders them, paradoxically, both different from their former selves and what they truly are (a whole people, a chosen servant). The works of poetry are “strange effects,” as Sidney writes, precisely because of this metamorphic power (114).120 At its most important moments, in passages like this, the Defence advances arguments on behalf of the preeminence of poetry that are unprecedented in the history of European poetics—if we consider, that is, critical arguments made for what Sidney calls “right poetry,” the fictive products of human imagination. Certainly, no Englishman had ever advanced such claims on behalf of poetry’s metamorphic power. And yet, it is critically important to recognize that such claims are not without precedent in other contexts. Anne Lake Prescott has written persuasively about a long tradition of commentary on the Psalms, descending from Athanasius and Basil among the church fathers and echoed by numbers of contemporary biblical commentaries, Reformed and Catholic, which celebrates similarly metamorphic powers of the Davidic poet; so too, Debora Shuger has argued learnedly for the creation of a tradition of sacred rhetoric in the late sixteenth century, deriving from Augustine’s remaking of classical notions of eloquence, which advances kindred claims for the power of sacred speech to inspire godly transformations in the audience.121 While I acknowledge the importance of their work, neither points to the more specific, more historically and biographically probable origin for Sidney’s metamorphic poetics, the oratorical ideas of Melanchthon. For in Melanchthon, Sidney found what neither commentators on the Psalms, nor the creators of Shuger’s sacred rhetorics ever interested themselves in: an account of eloquence that bridges the gap between sacred and secular oratory, that so completely naturalizes the operations of rhetorical and dialectical language as to explain how eloquence of all kinds potentially exerts power over readers. That account was something Melanchthon spent a lifetime making: it was integral, not adventitious to his labors. Moreover, such an account presupposed, in order to be called genuinely explanatory, a theory of reading, one that could explain how Agrippa’s tale and Nathan’s story can serve as complementary examples of eloquence.122 Sidney could find in Italy much of the great poetry that inspired his own productions, and much of 120 For an analysis of this passage in relation to Sidney’s political concerns, see Ferguson, p. 159–65. Her argument that the Defence itself can be read as an allegory, because of the desire to have readers “find themselves figured in [its] images,” mistakes the historical origins of Sidney’s interest in accommodation (p. 156). See also Anne Lake Prescott’s incisive commentary on Sidney’s biblically inspired effort “to turn the reader’s own gaze inward,” in “King David as a ‘Right Poet’: Sidney and the Psalmist,” English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989), no. 2, 131–51. For a parallel argument about the relationship between Sidney and Amyot in their respective representations of Cyrus, see Anthony Miller, p. 267. 121 See Prescott, 131–51, and Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric. 122 As Sidney writes regarding David’s metamorphosis, “the application [was] most divinely true, but the discourse [the oratio] itself feigned” (115).

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the theoretical matter that he needed to construct a defense of fiction-making, but for a theory of reading and a sense of the scopus that gives meaning and value to human acts of making, he turned to Vienna and his education by the Philippists. An account of Sidney’s critical theory has implications for how we read Sidney’s fictions, particularly during the current revival of allegorizing interpretations of his Arcadias. As the implications of my argument suggest, there are good reasons why Sidney, among all the major Renaissance poets, in spite of the potency of his political and pious objectives, is the least topical, the least likely to load his fictions with specific allusions to specific historical persons or events. Hence, the peculiar and distinctive doubleness that surrounds the Sidneian fiction: its deliberately maintained remoteness from history (in its desire to locate those “Ideas” that underwrite experience) and its urgent quest to make contact with history (in its rhetorical movement to impress upon its readers, clearly, coherently, and forcefully, the virtue and necessity of such Ideas). Consider, for a moment, the rhetorical strategy of his friends, Mornay and Languet, as they organize politically charged works like the De veritatis and the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, and the decision both make deliberately to advance what they portray as universalizing philosophical arguments against atheists, on the one hand, and Machiavellians, on the other (rather than, say, party-political assaults on Tridentine Catholics), and it is possible to see just how much contemporary political power Sidney’s compatriots could assume universalizing ideas to contain. The move from topical allegory to speaking pictures of (universal Ideas of) virtue and vice is not a remove from history or politics in such a cultural milieu, but instead the very means by which to effect the most important kind of political-historical transformation: the kind that transforms the way people think. To call The Old and The New Arcadia allegories is not so much a mistake about literary significance (though it is that), it is far more a mistake about their private and political import. Sidney, I assume, would have been pleased by current accommodations of his fiction to the world of Elizabethan politics—this is precisely the right response to the urgency of its making—but Sidney, too, would have been dismayed to have been called an allegorizer—for in confusing his hermeneutic with the allegorical, the reader would have missed from whence those fictions gain their real power: from those very Ideas, rich with contemporary, political-historical significance (Ideas, for instance, about nature, justice, chastity, humility and the like) designed to transform both self and society in our discovery of both why and how their maker made poetry from them.

Chapter 3

“The enjoying of his own divine essence”: Poetry and Piety Why in the Church of God? Sidney begins his account of poetry’s major aim or purpose, as I have shown, with a piece of rhetorical fanfare. He models his argument on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics by “marking the scope of other sciences,” by contrasting, that is, poetry’s aims with those of rival disciplines (99). Sidney’s fanfare has a purpose: it heightens emphatically the status of the poet’s golden world as a vehicle of knowledge. It makes sense, then, in the allusive economy of the text that Sidney should conclude the central portion of the Defence of Poesy by returning to Aristotle’s Ethics. In order to establish a principle for weighing poetry’s value relative to that of rival sciences, he employs the Aristotelian term, architectonike or “master-science,” the science best suitable for “knowledge of a man’s self” (104). Poetry rather than history or philosophy, Sidney proceeds to argue, best suits that goal. The apparent simplicity of this movement from an Aristotelian structure of argument to an Aristotelian term of art is complicated, however, by the assertively non-Aristotelian character of Sidney’s conclusion. Aristotelian argument and terminology are placed in the service of a nonAristotelian aim, most importantly, because of Sidney’s fundamentally nonAristotelian conception about what it means for human beings to have selfknowledge. While self-knowledge includes “ethic and politic consideration[s],” and results in the goal of “well-doing and not of well-knowing only” as “the ending end of all earthly doing,” it is a virtue simultaneously “having this scope—to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind … to the enjoying of his own divine essence” (104). Self-knowledge, for Sidney, is knowledge about the self created in the image of God. That is what it means to have a “divine essence.” But what knowledge about God is possible to fallen man—to “degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings”—beyond what the deity has chosen to reveal about himself in the Bible (104)? Closely connected to this question about knowledge are crucial issues concerning anthropology and culture. If salvation comes to human kind sola scriptura and sola fide, as an act of faith empowered by grace, then what sort of agency (if any) does the individual possess to realize his or her own salvation? What would be the point of “well-knowing” that leads to “well-doing” if works (practical or poetic) are without redemptive merit? And what kind of value could be claimed for the works of a classical tradition that precedes the knowledge of Christ? Pursuing answers to these questions about the scope of human agency in relation to the divine can clarify the character of that distinctive version of Christian piety animating

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Sidney’s poetics. Such clarity is necessary because when Sidney argues that poetry deserves “not to be scourged out of the Church of God,” he refers inclusively to the fictions of divine makers, such as David and Christ, as well as to the fictions of Homer, Virgil, Xenophon—all the bonae litterae of the classical tradition (99). At stake here is nothing less than the value of culture for Reformed Christianity. Considerations of scope always matter for the interpretation of Sidney’s Defence, and such considerations have particular power to shed light on the piety of his poetics, in part because of the pious purposes to which the vocabulary of the scopus dicendi was prominently employed among his network of friends. As the preceding chapter has demonstrated, it is useful to turn first to Philip Melanchthon’s corpus to recover the rhetorical and dialectical significance of the term, but to understand how and why the scopus dicendi assumed significance among the confessional conflicts of late sixteenth-century Europe, it helps to move to the prose of another, more contemporary Philip, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. In Mornay’s first theological work, the Traicté de l’Église—written and published in London in 1578, and subsequently translated into English as the Treatise of the Church—the scopus dicendi furnishes argumentative power to a Reformed Christianity that is both soberly uncompromising and strategically moderate. It is the chief term in Mornay’s display of what I have characterized in Chapter 2 as the new hermeneutic. Three years later, in his most celebrated and erudite work, translated from the French into Latin as De veritate religionis christianae (1581), Mornay turns the oratorical scopus dicendi into a philosophical metaphor structuring his copiously documented, ecumenically inclusive demonstration of the truthfulness of the Christian religion.1 God is the target to which all right action aims. The scope of humankind, rightly understood, is knowledge about the self in relation to God—what Sidney calls “architectonic knowledge,” and such knowledge includes the “Reasons” and the “Testimonies” of the ancients. They are indispensable means for the Christian to survive within a world threatened by the ignorant—atheists, epicureans, Turks, Jews, and Christians indifferent to or unmindful of the truth of their own religion. Amidst the crises of confessional dispute, blasphemy, atheism and spiritual lassitude—all products of ignorance—the promise of the scopus dicendi is its power to create causeways across the spiritual abyss. Amidst such crises, too, questions about knowledge— knowledge about the self and about the relationship between the secular and the sacred—are more than abstract theological issues or questions for poetic debate. They are pressing matters of present-tense cultural concern. Mornay’s Verité has long served as a touchstone for Sidney scholars eager to characterize the relationship between his piety, on the one hand, and his poetry and poetics, on the other. This eagerness extends from the close relationship between the two Philips, both friends and both champions of the cause of Reformed Christianity. The eagerness to identify Sidney’s pious beliefs with those of the Verité derives also from Sidney’s translation of some portion of the work, and the tacit approval of its 1 A notable treatise of the church, 1579. For the Latin translation of Mornay’s De la verité de la religion chrestienne, I have used De veritate religionis Christianae liber …Gallice primum conscriptus, Latine versus, nunc autem ab eodem accuratissime correctus (Lugduni Batavorum: Christopher Plantin, 1587; 1st pub., 1581).

“The enjoying of his own divine essence”: Poetry and Piety

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piety that his translation implies.2 Over the past half-century, however, the Verité has proven an unusually slippery touchstone—and therefore an unusually difficult tool to employ in characterizing Sidney’s piety—because of the complexity of its own religious perspectives. D.P. Walker and Frances Yates have sought to align the Verité with various versions of Christian hermeticism, cabalism, and Rosicrucianism—as a sort of Protestantization of Pico della Mirandola’s aggressively optimistic “Oration on the Dignity of Man.” This reading has been pointedly rebuffed, in turn, by Andrew Weiner and Alan Sinfield, who insist on the Verité’s articulation of a darker, more pessimistic “Calvinist” orthodoxy.3 Whatever the merits of either position—or their several variants—the eagerness to identify the Verité with any single philosophical school, theological camp or confessional identity is already a misinterpretation of a text whose primary ambition is to remedy a cultural order ravaged by confessional conflict. The transcendence of the sixteenth-century’s identity politics is both its message and its mode. Turn from the Verité to the De veritate—the Latin translation of the work undertaken by Mornay in tribute to his Philippist mentor, Hubert Languet—and it is possible to locate its “scope” (its main aim or purpose) with far more clarity, and hence its utility as a touchstone for appreciating the ecumenical, moderate, cosmopolitan Christianity that informs Sidney’s Defence.4 “Ung Chemin du Moderation”: Philippe Duplessis-Mornay and Piety’s Public Scope Early in 1577 Mornay arrived in London for a stay of some 18 months, and established an intimate, enduring friendship with Sidney. Always a favorite among Continental Reformers, Sidney would be remembered by Mornay’s devoutly learned wife Charlotte d’Arbaleste as “the most highly accomplished gentleman in England.”5 Sidney became godfather to Mornay’s infant daughter, baptized in June of 1578 as 2 No agreement currently obtains about Sidney’s role in the English translation “completed” by Arthur Golding, A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion. Mack cites Feuillerat (vol. 3, viii–ix) approvingly in attributing the first six books to Sidney [Sidney’s Poetics, p. 100]; D.P. Walker challenges those claims on semantic grounds in “Atheism, the Ancient Theology, and Sidney’s Arcadia” in The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972), p. 133–4. 3 Walker, “Atheism,” p. 132–63; Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 176–9. (For a more recent version of the argument, see Howell, p. 112.) See also Weiner’s Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism, p. 11–17; and Sinfield’s “Sidney, Du Plessis-Mornay and the Pagans,” Philological Quarterly 58, no. 1 (Winter 1979), 26–39. See too Sinfield’s extension of these arguments in “Protestantism: Questions of Subjectivity and Control,” in Faultlines, p. 143–80. 4 That “turn” has never been made in contemporary critical accounts of Mornay’s text. The Latin version of the Verité has gone without scholarly comment, even though it is clearly this version of the text upon which both Mornay and Languet depended to disseminate its message most widely. 5 The Memoirs of Philippe de Mornay Sieur du Plessis Marly, in A Huguenot Family in the XVI Century, trans. Lucy Crump (London: G. Routledge, 1926), p. 169.

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the politically correct Elizabeth. Mornay and Sidney established and continued a correspondence that lasted until the latter’s death, an event that provoked Mornay to write to Francis Walsingham, Sidney’s grieving father-in-law: “I have had troubles and labours enough in these sad days but none that touched me more to the heart so nearly. Henceforth I am resolved either to love no one, or to hate myself.”6 Amidst the “sad days” of turmoil for Reformed Christians, the loss of Sidney was experienced—so closely had the two become identified—as a loss of self. No one would have been less surprised or more pleased by the intimacy of their friendship than Languet, that Burgundian humanist and statesman whom Melanchthon praised so highly for his successful education of the Reformed elite.7 (High praise for the teacher from the teacher.) Five years older than Sidney, Mornay too was Languet’s studiously cultivated protégé, and as Roger Kuin has shown, Languet helped to plan for both young men similar cosmopolitan travels across similar political terrain.8 Like Sidney, Mornay undertook a three-year tour of Continental Europe. He studied at the University of Padua, as Sidney would do. Like Sidney, he spent time in Venice in the ecumenically enlightened circle of the French ambassador, Arnaud Du Ferrier, a learned Catholic who some believed had secretly converted to Reformed Christianity, and there (like Sidney again) he made friends with François Perrot de Mézières, a Huguenot poet who several years after translated the Psalms.9 As Sidney would do, Mornay traveled to Florence and Genoa, he sojourned in Vienna among Languet’s circle of confessionally moderate humanists, and he ventured dangerously into Hungary. He too experienced first-hand the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in August of 1572, and he even facilitated Languet’s escape from the city. Both Sidney and Mornay enjoyed an intellectual companionship with George Buchanan, Scotland’s leading Reformed humanist. Both contemplated military service in Ireland. Both were fascinated by the prospect of establishing plantations in the New World to defend against Spanish tyranny and to cultivate the freedom of the Gospel. Both shared a taste, too, for Sannazaro’s Arcadia, a pleasure acquired (one guesses) among the hills of Tuscany.10 In short, both were brilliantly educated, cosmopolitan humanists whose friendship was grounded first and foremost upon their shared commitment to the cause of a Reformed Christianity. Once more, their commitment to the cause of a Reformed Christianity was impacted profoundly by their education under Languet—always the student and devotee of Philip Melanchthon. In a recent, extensive biography of Mornay’s political career, from the early years of the grand tour to his subsequent political suicide at the court of Henry IV, Hugues Daussy has brought new clarity to the convictions guiding 6 Cited by Buxton, p. 172. 7 See “Testim. de Langueto” (1 June 1555) in CR 8, 491–2, in which Languet is celebrated as a Ulysses in the service of good doctrine. 8 “Sir Philip Sidney’s Model of the Statesman,” 93–117. For Mornay’s biography, see Raoul Patry, Philippe Du Plessis-Mornay: Un huguenot homme d’État, 1549–1623 (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1933). 9 See Alain Tallon for a discussion of the complex and anti-confessional character of du Ferrier’s religious beliefs, “Diplomate et ‘politique’: Arnaud Du Ferrier,” in De Michel de l’Hospital à l’Édit de Nantes, p. 305–36. 10 Worden, p. 54.


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his public life.11 In his detailed account of Mornay’s emergence during the 1570s as a diplomat and apologist for the Huguenot cause, Daussy attributes Mornay’s core political principles squarely to Languet’s tutelage. Those political principles merit attention here because of what they reveal about the character of Mornay’s personal piety and about that core of Christian beliefs shared among this circle of friends— beliefs with a shaping power over Sidney’s Defence. Mornay profited from his access to Languet’s extensive international network of allies—from the politically important contacts made (among many others) with Arnaud Du Ferrier in Venice, Admiral Coligny in Paris, and William of Orange in the Netherlands. What he learned from Languet, however, in Daussy’s memorable phrase, was partisanship on behalf of “une moderation sans compromission” (a moderation without compromise).12 The uncompromising quality of Mornay’s commitment to the cause of international Protestantism is widely recognized. He shared Languet’s profound fears about the perils of the Catholic League—that militant coalition of Tridentine Catholic powers intent (as Languet’s réseau believed) upon the destruction of Reformed Christianity—and he advocated, among the godly driven to despair in defense of the church, militant opposition to those powers.13 In turn, he authored the century’s most sophisticated and most notorious defense of active resistance to tyranny, his Vindiciae contra tyrannos—a tyrannomachist tract with strong roots (as Chapter 4 will demonstrate) in the natural law politics of Languet’s circle. Mornay himself was a soldier, several times wounded, captured, and ransomed. By action and by word, Mornay’s uncompromising commitment allied him to those “forward Protestants” in England, who, as Blair Worden documents, urged active military intervention from Queen Elizabeth on behalf of beleaguered co-religionists on the Continent. Less widely recognized, but equally crucial for understanding his public principles, was Mornay’s commitment to “moderation,” a term whose potential vagueness calls for historical contextualization. From Languet, Mornay learned the value of cultivating friendships with broad-minded and well-educated Catholics like the historian, Jacques Auguste de Thou, and the architect (years later) of the Edict of Nantes, Paul de Foix. Like those other moderate Catholics, Michel de l’Hospital and Arnaud Du Ferrier, both de Thou and de Foix were jurists educated at Padua, spokesmen for toleration (however variously conceived), and products of that classical rhetorical tradition of the interpretatio scripti, which mattered so profoundly for the creation of the new hermeneutic and which lent itself so readily (by its encouragement of accommodation and equity) to a politics of toleration. Just like Languet also, Mornay indulged tirelessly in lamenting the wounds that the

11 Les Huguenots et Le Roi: Le combat politique de Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, 1572–1600 (Geneva: Droz, 2002). For Languet’s shaping power over the young Mornay, see p. 52–6, and p. 149, where Daussy summarizes their shared political principles. 12 Daussy, p. 117. 13 For Mornay on war as the inevitable response of the Huguenots to despair about winning freedom to practice their religion, see his Remonstrance aux estats (1576) in Mémoires et correspondance, vol. 2: “La defiance les mettra au desespoir, et le desespoir aulx armes …,” 72.

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French wars of religion had inflicted upon his homeland. He had a genuine, irenic horror of warfare. Once more, with the publication of his Exhortation á la paix aux catholiques françois (1574) and his Remonstrance aux Estats pour la paix (1576), Mornay emerged by the late 1570s as the Huguenot’s most avid and most capable advocate of toleration. As a minority within France, the Reformed could never expect a military triumph, and his promotion of mutual toleration between Catholics and the Reformed—parties united by their belief in the same Bible and the same God—was the product of strategic political calculation. Such advocacy was equally, however, the product of Mornay’s moderation—his irenicism and his principled conviction about the ultimate power of truth to triumph over falsehood. Toleration would enable civil conversation, and civil conversation (the discourse of right reason) would create concord among Christians of all persuasions.14 At the turn of the decade, Mornay reproduced those arguments on behalf of toleration for William of Orange in the Netherlands and on behalf of Philippists fighting to undo their demise under the Formula of Concord.15 “Forward Protestant” is too narrow a category inside which to situate the more complex and more nuanced public principles either of Mornay or, as I will show, of Sidney himself. Mornay’s Christianity was uncompromising in its militant opposition to Tridentine Catholicism and in its defense of those beliefs that he deemed essential to the Christian faith, but it was simultaneously moderate by virtue of its ecumenically inclusive appeal to all Christians for assent and its unqualified optimism about the power of reason, rightly articulated, to secure such assent. In January of 1577, yet another French civil war appeared imminent because of Henri III’s determination to procure peace by returning to what he called “the unity of faith,” royalist code for the capitulation of the Estates General to the destruction of the Reformed church. To counter that threat, two rival factions of Huguenots arrived in London in order to pry loose the purse strings of the parsimonious Elizabeth. One of these factions came on behalf of Henri I de Bourbon, Prince de Condé. Condé was a hard-liner, a “forward Protestant” in Worden’s sense of the term. What he hoped to secure through his envoy, Michel de La Huguerye, was English money to finance an 14 See Daussy quoting the irenic Mornay: “Il n’y a telle paix qui ne vaille mieux que la meillure guerre du monde” (There is no peace that is not better than the best war), p. 122. In his Remonstrance, Mornay assumes the persona of a moderate Catholic to argue: “Si nous les regardons, ce sont hommes de mesme nature et condition que nous … ils sont chretiens, adorans un mesme Dieu, cherchans salut en un mesme Christ, croiant une mesme bible …” (If we consider them, they are men of the same nature and condition as us … [T]hey are Christians, adoring the same God, seeking salvation in the same Christ, believing in one same Bible), 46. See Mornay’s call for “douceur et aimable conversation” (sweet and amiable conversation) and the conjoining of a council to create ecumenical unity, where “tous soions réunis en une relligion” (all would be reunited in one religion), in Remonstrance, 47, 60. 15 For Mornay’s contributions as a polemicist to William of Orange, see Daussy on his Discours sur la permission de liberté de religion, p. 160–61. For his alliance against the Gnesio-Lutheran Formula of Concord with Charles Quissarme, seigneur de Danzay (France’s ambassador to Denmark and Languet’s friend), see Daussy, p. 205–8 and Robert D. Linder, “The French Calvinist Response to the Formula of Concord,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 19, no.1 (Winter 1982), 18–37.


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immediate military campaign against Henri III with the intent of acquiring concessions for the faithful. The second faction of Huguenots came to London on behalf of Henri de Navarre, whose ambition to succeed to the French throne determined a wholly distinct plan of action. What Navarre plotted was a strategically moderate response to Henri III’s declaration of 3 January 1577 demanding “unity.” He would request money from Elizabeth for levying troops in Germany, but he would use those troops only if the threat of foreign military intervention failed to secure concessions from the king. Navarre, then, could represent himself to the nation as a force for unity—as a future sovereign genuinely interested in the welfare of all (he succeeded to the throne as Henri IV)—while preserving his image among the faithful as protector of the Reformed. Wave the olive branch, but brandish a great big stick. This history is worth recounting (however briefly) because Mornay came to London in 1577 as a diplomat in the service of Henri de Navarre.16 In Navarre’s politically self-interested calculations, Mornay believed that he had discovered a powerful expression of that uncompromising moderation that would eventuate in the triumph of the Reformed church. “God hath called you,” Mornay wrote to Navarre, “for the establishing his kingdome, that you may thinke then to reigne most safely, when he shall reigne by his worde in the middest of you.”17 Navarre’s subsequent betrayal of that faith, similar to the Elector of Saxony’s betrayal of Languet and Elizabeth’s persistent frustration of Sidney’s political hopes, was experienced all the more acutely because of the fervor of Mornay’s conviction. That history also deserves recounting because it supplies the necessary cultural context for understanding Mornay’s first sustained contribution to contemporary theological discourse, his Treatise of the Church—a discourse composed as he first cultivated Sidney’s friendship. Amidst the political turmoil of 1577 and 1578, the ferocity of confessional divisions, and the imminence of war, the Treatise is a temperate, even a cool and calculated disquisition upon the nature of the church. Organized upon a set of binary distinctions between the invisible and visible churches, the pure and the impure, the Reformed and the schismatic (the Roman Catholic!), Mornay’s Treatise subordinates at every turn ecclesiastical controversies to theological questions whose ultimate determination depends upon the correct interpretation of scripture. Rather 16 For this history, see Daussy, p. 144–52. Worden’s account of Mornay in London pictures him as a “forward Protestant” scorned by Queen Elizabeth in his search for financial support to wage war against the Spaniards in the Netherlands. His political position was utterly more complicated than this interpretation supports. Mornay was not present in London to gain money for an immediate war, but rather for Navarre’s scheme of finance-and-delay. If he was initially scorned by Elizabeth in his pursuit of money for Navarre’s political project, that scorn was very likely the product of La Huguerye’s successful campaign against Condé’s rival, Navarre (and thereby against Mornay). It is worth mentioning, too, that Mornay did later receive money from Elizabeth on Navarre’s behalf (whatever her first response) and that disapproving as Mornay may have been of Anjou’s pursuit of Elizabeth’s hand in marriage, like Languet, Mornay labored immediately after his departure from England in Anjou’s service in the Netherlands. For an account of those services, see Mack P. Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), p. 129–30. 17 Dedicatory epistle, Treatise of the Church, n. p.

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than a call to arms, the Treatise of the Church is a call to knowledge, a summons for Christians to acquire those “certaine principles” of right reading, which secure the truth—and hence the ecumenical unity—transcending confessional debate. Its three central chapters constitute a single, detailed exposition of exegetical hermeneutics— right reading employed in the new hermeneutic to target the public domain.18 Whatever else he shared with John Calvin, Mornay had none of his theoretical reticence about matters of biblical interpretation. If Mornay’s purpose in the Treatise is to arm his readers with those “certaine principles” of right reading to secure the truth, then the armory from which he derives those principles is manifestly that same “new hermeneutic” whose features I have detailed in Chapter 2. He assumes the coherence of the biblical text and the importance of interpreting scripture as a whole. Against claims by Roman Catholics that the Bible is “imperfect,” Mornay argues at length for its authority and unity, equipped as the scriptures are with “a doctrine sufficient to salvation.”19 He reads constantly with an eye to authorial intention, citing frequently the Holy Ghost’s design to make his message “plaine and evident.”20 Against allegations of the Bible’s obscurity, its supposed “riddles or dark speaches,” Mornay argues extensively that “there is nothing more cleare and more simple than the doctrine of salvation.”21 He writes explicitly against the self-serving hermeneutic of the Church of Rome, ridiculing the application of “colde Allegorie” on behalf of such palpable “inventions” as purgatory and papal supremacy. 22 What is most revealing about Mornay’s commitment to the new hermeneutic, however, is his contention that just as “Geometry hath her Axiomes, Physicke her Aphorismes, and the Civill and Canon lawe their generall rules,” so too divinity “hath her certaine principles, able to decide al controversies which are amongst us,” and that those rules admit “no kinde of doubt, contradiction, or contraritie in them.”23 Those “certaine principles” consist of the rational, geometrically precise inquiry into what he calls “the scope and butt of the Scripture,” or those “two markes to direct our selves by, to which the whole Scripture tendeth: and they are, the glorie of God, and charitie towardes our neighbour.” All scripture teaches the rule of charity, as Mornay knows from Augustine, and all scripture contains a single, complementary purpose or “scope,” as Mornay recognizes in harmony with that exegetical line from Antioch to Wittenberg.24 In Mornay’s Treatise of the Church, the scopus dicendi is something more than an item in a schoolboy’s lexicon, a feature of purely rhetorical or dialectical significance. Its importance derives instead, as a distinctive component of his exegetical criticism, from its serviceability on behalf of an uncompromising moderation. Scope is the right tool for fortifying readers in the knowledge of the true church, a church threatened 18 See Treatise, Chapters 4, 5, and 6. 19 Treatise, F. vi (recto). 20 Treatise, I. iii (recto). 21 Treatise, F. vii (verso). 22 Treatise, G. v (verso). 23 Treatise, H. viii (verso). 24 And beyond, even to Geneva. Scope is a term familiar to Reformed Christians of several churches, and its lack of a particular confessional stamp comprises some of its appeal for the ecumenically minded Mornay. Treatise, I. iv (verso); I. iii (verso).


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by the armies—and the falsehoods—of the Antichrist. Later in 1578, dismayed by the prospect of Queen Elizabeth’s marriage to the Catholic—and more troubling to Mornay and his friends—the grandiloquently self-seeking Anjou, Mornay left England for the Netherlands to serve as Navarre’s diplomatic representative to William of Orange. By doing so, he left Sidney to join Languet, and began work almost immediately on his Verité (1579–80), an extended scholarly meditation about the truthfulness of Christianity. If this is the work that secured Mornay’s international reputation as a master of Christian apologetics, among Reformed Christians and Catholics alike, it is also a book, demonstrably, with a special appeal to a particular community of Reformers, those followers of Melanchthon with whom Mornay was closely associated.25 After Languet’s death in 1581, Mornay dedicated to his memory its Latin translation, De veritate (1581), both as fulfillment of his mentor’s deathbed request and as tribute to his embodiment of those virtues of erudition and piety, knowledge and conscience, art and nature, which the work chiefly celebrates.26 In an era of dedicatory epistles assigned almost exclusively to the great and the powerful, his tribute signals an extraordinary devotion. Mornay’s dedicatory letter attributes to Languet (that Reformed Odysseus) the inspiration for the Verité’s first publication as well as for its translation into a medium (Latin, still the universal language of the learned) fit for dissemination “in omnes orbis partes” (in every portion of the world). In addition, the De veritate would be translated subsequently by two members of Languet’s circle, by Perrot de Mézières into Italian and by Philip Sidney (in some undetermined part) into English. Moreover—and this is a point both new and crucial for its interpretation—it is a text, similar to the Treatise of the Church, that organizes its central arguments upon the oratorical vocabulary of the scopus dicendi. A letter from Mornay dated 15 November 1579 is telling about why the De veritate achieved its status among Languet’s wide network of friends. Based partly on his own preference among the sciences, Languet had been urging Mornay to write a history of the Christian religion that would have “pour principale matiere et per se la restauration de la vraie relligion en nos temps, apres tant de confusions dont l’ignorance des siecles precedens l’avoit remplie” (for its principle matter and purpose the restoration of the true religion in our times, after such great confusions which ignorance had so filled the preceding ages).27 What the mentor wanted from his pupil, then, on the basis of Languet’s own epistemic optimism about the power of knowledge to dispel ignorance, was a more comprehensive version of Johann Sleidan’s history of the wars of the Schmalkaldan League, a history with the presentist ambition of restoring God’s church.28 Mornay, however, refused to write that history, 25 For documentation about its wide appeal among Catholics and the Reformed, see Patry, p. 299–300. 26 The whole of the dedicatory letter celebrates Languet as the very embodiment of the cosmopolitan Christian Reformer, and directly attributes the inspiration for the De veritate’s translation and the agency for its dissemination to him: “Auctor vertendi nobis, idem qui edendi fuit. Hubertus Languetus V.C. toto orbe Christiano, in primis notus.” 27 Lettre de M. Duplessis à M. Languet, 15 November 1579, in Mémoires et correspondance, vol. 2, 81. 28 Sleidan’s Commentaries on the Condition of Religion and Politics under the Emperor Charles V was, as Thomas A. Brady, Jr. notes, the “most widely read history by a German-

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as he explains in detail, because of the impossibility while narrating events and their causes of appearing both truthful and unbiased. Captive to the truth of the foolish world (as Sidney would say), imprisoned by the accidents of mere contingency, the historian like Sleidan is quickly dismissed as a polemical partisan “par plusieurs de passion” (by an excess of passion). This is the same letter in which Mornay attacks the rhetorical excesses of John Stubbs—and with the same consideration about the need for moderation in the public domain. To bring about “the restoration of the true religion in our times,” it would be necessary to remedy passion “de dire la verité” (by speaking the truth) without blazoning one’s own colors—without waving the flag of one’s own confessional identity. In pursuit of what he calls “ung chemin du moderation” (a road of moderation), Mornay determined upon moving from history to philosophy about God, man and religion in the De veritate.29 The De veritate’s appeal to Languet’s circle derived not from its articulation of a party-political position or from its exposition of the theology of a particular confession. Precisely the opposite is true. Arthur Golding’s English translation of the Verité extends to 641 pages, and contains no references to Roman Catholics or Reformed Christians, much less to Huguenots, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anabaptists, or (in a nod to Christopher Plantin, the celebrated printer of its French and Latin versions) the Family of Love. There are no allusions to the bloody St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre or to the piratical raids of the Sea Beggars. Mornay spends no time in disputes over the Eucharist or the value of good works, the matter of ubiquity or the question of predestination (single or double). His moderation is apparent, for example, in his treatment of human agency—particularly “this Question whether it lye in us to choose the way of Salvation or no” (223). Choice belongs to the faculty of the will, and arguments about the freedom or bondage of the will provoked many of the most divisive theological debates of the century, both between Catholics and Protestants and between rival camps among the Reformed. As a characteristic gesture of disdain for rabid theologians, Mornay pleads the weakness of human understanding about ultimate matters of divine disposition, and refuses even to address the question. As in the De veritate as a whole, his argument blunts the blade of the topical in order to sharpen the edge of the theoretical—since the crucial issue, considered as a question about the restoration of true religion in contemporary culture, is one of knowledge. Mornay goes on the attack not against the Antichrist of the Roman Church (as he had done in the Treatise of the Church), but against the ignorant— atheists, epicureans, Turks, Jews, and Christians indifferent to the truth of their own religion. The De veritate is an anti-confessional text in an age of confessionalism, whose appeal for Languet and the Philippists—given their ecumenical piety, their hatred for theological controversy, and their cosmopolitan regard for the value of humanistic studies—consisted in its scrupulously maintained moderation, its erudite

speaking author during the entire early modern era,” and, I would add, among the most partisan, The Politics of the Reformation in Germany: Jacob Sturm (1489–1553) of Strasbourg (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), p. 137–8. Mornay is clearly on Sleidan’s side, but he wants none of his partisanship. 29 Lettre … à M. Languet, vol. 2, 81.


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and principled avoidance of theological contentiousness.30 It consisted also, of course, in its pious targeting of the scope of Christian truthfulness. With enormous deliberation and scholarly care, Mornay labors for several hundred pages in order to bring into focus his argument’s main purpose. Then he lets fly the arrow. Arthur Golding’s translation reads:31 Of the Creatures here beneathe, some have but sence and appetite, and other some but only a bare inclination of nature: only man hath witte and will, which make him a man. Now all these are unfallibly directed whethersoever it pleaseth God, as the arrowe is leveled at some marke [scopum] by the Archer, who shooteth the Arrow streyght though it have no eye to see with. But man by a peculiar priviledge hath an understanding wit which was given unto him cleeresighted and cleane, that he might see the marke [scopum] whereat he is leveled; and will, which he receyved frank and free, that he myght repose all his delyght therein: the one to knowe and discerne it, the other to love and imbrace it; the one to see, and behold it, the other to obteyne and enjoy it. Nowthen, as the hither end [finis] of all Creatures here beneathe is man, and the furthest end of them is God: so the neerest and immediat end of man [summum & unicum eius bonum] is to knowe God, and his only welfare is to sticke wholy unto him.

Mornay translates an oratorical term of art (scopus dicendi) into its metaphorical tenor (the shooter’s mark) in order to articulate his theological point: God is an archer, and humankind is his target. So targeted, the human being must target in turn—by reason of his likeness to the deity—the knowledge and love of God as his highest and distinctive good [summum & unicum eius bonum]. In the De veritate, God is sometimes likened to a gardener, a craftsman, an architect, a painter, even a dramatist, but the representation of God as a divine archer is reserved for this definitive moment of argumentation, as a metaphorical incarnation of that vocabulary of the scopus to which Mornay repeatedly returns in his discussions about the ultimate purposes of God and man. Mornay has recourse to the vocabulary of scope partly, of course, because of his own commitment to the new hermeneutic: it lends a teleological drive to arguments, shaping rhetoric with dialectical point and rhetorical power.32 As Sidney transforms oratorical terminology into the key elements of a poetics, Mornay in the very same years employs that same terminology at the foundation of his theology.33 Sidney’s poet is the maker of a golden world that has its own laws (the logic internal to its 30 For Mornay’s hatred of theological contentiousness—and expressions thereof in his alliance with Danzay against the Formula of Concord—see Daussy, p. 206–8. 31 Golding tr., p. 325. De veritate, p. 400. Note Mornay’s distinction between a finem for living creatures and a scopum for humankind and for God. All further citations of Golding’s translation will be included parenthetically in the text. 32 For another passage about God as an archer, see Mornay’s discussion of providence, p. 174. His use of the term “scope” is especially prevalent in Chapters XVIII–XXI, the heart of the argument. In parallel to his Treatise of the Church, Mornay includes in the De veritate extended exegetical discussions of the Bible; see Chapters XXV and XXVI. 33 See Ernesto Grassi on the philosophical implications of humanist rhetorical programs, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1980).

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arrangement), its own natural power (in its substantiation of Ideas that speak clearly about human nature and human needs), and its own purpose, aim, or scope—its cause for being (to have readers accommodate themselves to the maker’s intention). In turn, Mornay employs the vocabulary of the scopus because in his vision of the true religion God is best understood as an archer—as a divine orator, that is, whose understanding gives providential purpose to nature and to history, whose Word (Christ, the logos) is accommodated to human reason by means of scripture, and whose will (the Holy Spirit, divine energeia) forcibly summons the human will “to sticke wholy unto him.” Sidney’s maker closely resembles Mornay’s because both have a common conception of the divine Maker and those truths essential to Christian religion. This is not an argument about influence. Instead, it is an illustration of parallel and mutually illuminating intellectual engagements by members of the same republic of letters who possessed a common core of pious beliefs, a common vocabulary, and a common commitment to the new hermeneutic as a means of reforming the public domain. Mornay’s De veritate does not simply advance an argument. Instead, as a remedy for the very ignorance it seeks to combat, it performs a dialectical and rhetorical enactment of its own argument on behalf of self-knowledge. The work is divided into three main parts.34 In the first part, Mornay considers the extent to which natural reason and the testimonies of the ancients can afford real knowledge about God. He moves next to a consideration of mankind and to the consequences of sin for human nature. In part three, he identifies the chief characteristics by which to obtain knowledge about the true religion. Considered in its summary form, the De veritate guides its readers to a theological destination by way of an extensive historical and anthropological journey. Right reason demonstrates both the truth and the necessity of the Christian religion. Once more, the power of reason is enhanced by the knowledge of that religion: “the truth beeing revealed, enlighteneth reason” (Preface, n.p.). Reason guides, but faith reveals. The debilitating consequences of the fall require that salvation comes from divine revelation, and such revelation is the unique gift of God’s Word in the Gospel, the sole authority for and distinguishing mark of the true faith. This is argument by design. First, Mornay illustrates the vast range of human knowledge about God and his creation; next, how powerless (by itself) such knowledge is to satisfy the deepest human needs; and finally, how Christianity secures that knowledge indispensable for salvation. First, the anatomy of the disease, then the remedy. First the Law that brings consciousness of sin, then the Gospel that affords faith to justify the sinner. As an act of praise and love for the divine archer, the oratorical shape of the De veritate counterfeits, imitates and figures forth the biblical strategy of the Maker of that maker. Toward the end of his Preface, Mornay likens his argument to a ladder, urging us “to read this booke throughout, for without mounting by degrees, a man cannot 34 For a concise account of Mornay’s argument, see Henri Holstein, “Aux origines de l’apologétique moderne: La verité de la religion chrétienne de Duplessis-Mornay,” in L’homme devant Dieu: mélanges offerts au pêre Henri de Lubac (Paris: Aubier, 1964), p. 235–48.


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attaine to high things” (Preface, n.p.). (Always in the new hermeneutic, attention is focused on the whole book.) If the knowledge of Christ, as the “scope” of the scriptures, occupies that ladder’s summit, then its base stands upon reason—rational knowledge acquired from natural law (ius naturae) and embodied in that universal consent of mankind (ius gentium) whose testimonies are inscribed within the writings of the ancients. In its main outline, Mornay’s argument is traditional. As John McNeill demonstrated some 60 years ago, all of the so-called magisterial Reformers from Luther and Melanchthon to Calvin and Bullinger appeal (though in complex and diverse ways) to the authority of natural law. What makes Mornay’s argument distinctive, in part, is his copious display of erudition in assembling a massive body of “Reasons” and “Testimonies” among the ancients as proof of the truthfulness of the Christian religion. No wonder that Charlotte d’Arbaleste describes the De veritate as the book “all his early studies had been only a preparation for writing.”35 Moses, Hermes Trismegistus, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus—the vast networks of citation extend across cultures and across centuries, as heralds bearing universal witness to the most basic of Christian truths: the existence of one almighty God, his creation of the world, the operation of providence, the immortality of the soul, the disposition of punishments and rewards in the afterlife, even intimations of the doctrine of the Trinity. (Read Mornay, and who can remember that Olympus housed a polymorphous profusion of deities?) Made in the likeness of God, the human being discovers “naturally” among his own faculties of understanding, reason, and will a trinity reflecting, however dimly, the divine. The soul, he writes, “is immortall, divine, yea and almost a very God” (272). Just as Melanchthon and Calvin do (in the venerable tradition of scholastic theology from Bede to Aquinas), and just as Sidney does in his Defence, Mornay appeals to a theory of innate ideas. The ancients afford true “Reasons” and “Testimonies” of the right religion, he argues, because they have learned them “in one Schoole, and at the mouth of one Teacher, namely even their owne knowledge in themselves” (217). And just as other Reformers do, Mornay appeals repeatedly (in good Pauline fashion) to arguments from design for evidence of God in his creation: “the whole world … is a plaine booke laide open to all men, yea even unto Children to reade, and (as yee would say) even to spell God therein” (9). (Claritas, for a proponent of the new hermeneutic, is a mark of the divine Maker as well as the human.) Moreover, as one more illustration of his deep investment in arguments from nature, Mornay appeals to στoργὴ (storge)—a term from Greek, signifying “natural love or affection,” deployed several times in the De veritate to demonstrate the goodness of all beings in their original creation, designed as they are naturally with a “certain inclination” to love.36 In light of such arguments and in 35 See John McNeill, “Natural Law in the Teaching of the Reformers,” Journal of Religion 26 (1946), where he notes, too, that there is “no real discontinuity between the teaching of the reformers and that of their predecessors with respect to natural law,” 168. Memoirs, p. 173. 36 For Mornay on the virtue of στoργὴ, see De veritate, p. 217, 384. The term does not appear in Golding’s translation. Beyond its copious display of erudition, Mornay’s appeal to natural law is distinguished also by its sometimes startling assertions of epistemic optimism. Such assertions are often most startling in those extended passages of translation from Hermes

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light of Mornay’s enthusiasm for quoting whole heaps of Iamblichus, Proclus, and Plotinus in support of them, the eagerness of D.P. Walker and Frances Yates to align the De veritate with the revival of the prisca theologica in Renaissance hermeticism is comprehensible, however unpersuasive ultimately. Such an alignment is unpersuasive, partly, as Alan Sinfield and Andrew Weiner have argued, because it fails to measure the weight of sin upon Mornay’s depiction of anthropology and soteriology. That weight is profound. In Sinfield’s nicely turned phrase, “by the middle of the book he [Mornay] has brought both the heathen and his readers inexorably to the fall.”37 The law of nature teaches conscience, but it is consciousness of an “infinite gulfe” yawning between the individual at “Hellgate” and the “shewing of Paradise … farre of[f]” (356). In Mornay’s theology of the fall, seemingly small room is afforded to humankind to acquire the knowledge, much less the willpower, necessary for salvation: “by the same fall we be falne from our sovereine welfare into a bottomlesse pit of misery, where we creepe so lame as it is not possible for us to returne ageine to our former state” (348). Even Mornay’s claims for the efficacy of natural reason are apparently unmasked if not wholly erased by his representations of mankind’s impairment: “we may well deeme of our reason, as of an eysight that is either impayred or inchaunted. It hath the ground of sight still; but yet it standeth the partie in no stead, but onely to beguyle him by false images and illusions” (295). Only the Christian religion, founded upon “the worship of the true God,” “according to his worde,” has the power to “reconcyle … the man

Trismegistus, Proclus, Iamblichus—or nearer to home—Pico della Mirandola, interwoven among the arguments (primarily) of the De veritate’s first section. It is one thing simply to assert reason’s power to apprehend truths from nature; it is quite another to quote “against those which pretend a weaknesse of the Soule” long passages from Plotinus in proof of the mind’s power, as it adjusts its aim from mortal to immortal things, to become “after a sort a very World of understanding & light,” Golding tr., p. 273. Mornay’s phrase “after a sort” is a rhetorically and piously prudent qualification of that optimism—and such qualifications count, both in individual sentences and in the book as a whole—but the phrase falls considerably short of deflation. In one of the most intriguing sentences in the De veritate, Mornay writes: “And so farre off is Reason from abasying fayth, to make us attaine thereto, that contrariwise she lifteth us up as it were upon her shoulders, to make us to see it, and to take it for our guide, as the onely thing that can bring us to God; and the onely schoolemistresse of whome we ought to learne our salvation” (Preface, n. p.). What makes this sentence so intriguing is its purposeful ambiguity. When Reason places us upon the shoulders of faith, and makes us see faith and take faith for our guide, she does so—and here the semantic sense hovers amidst syntactical uncertainties—either because Reason is the only “schoolmistresse” from whom we ought to learn our salvation or because faith is that sole “schoolmistresse.” (The sentence can be read both ways.) Only on second reading, after a reasoned analysis of the sentence’s sense, does it become clear that Mornay must have the latter meaning in mind, not the former: only faith is the “schoolmistresse” who “can bring us to God,” and only because of faith can one so reason. Such confusion is purposeful because of the intimate cooperation that Mornay asserts between human reason as a guide toward faith, and the power of faith once achieved to enhance reason (“the truth beeing revealed, enlighteneth reason”). His sentence, then, elicits from his readers the very cooperation that is its subject. 37 “Sidney… and the Pagans,” 29.


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that followeth it” (365). As he weighs the heavy consequences of the fall, Mornay has clearly—or so Sinfield’s argument runs—“left the pagans behind.”38 There can be no question about Mornay’s orthodoxy among the Reformed in attributing to the Gospel the unique power of salvation, or the profound weight he attaches to sin in his Christian anthropology. It is no great surprise, then, when read selectively, that the De veritate has been identified as the partisan expression of what an earlier generation of scholars called “Calvinism”—on the assumption that Reformed Christianity is best explained as a dogmatic theology whose principles can be referred to writings of a single person, John Calvin. There can be no question either, however, that Mornay did not and could not construct an argument about the truthfulness of the Christian religion that “left the pagans behind”—if that phrase signifies a rejection of natural law or its “testimonies” inscribed in the bonae litterae of classical culture. The De veritate is a ladder—all of whose steps count—not a precursor of Stanley Fish’s self-consuming artifact. Reading the book “throughout,” and interpreting it as a whole, is necessary for understanding its “scope”—its main aim or purpose. Another analogy employed toward the De veritate’s conclusion is helpful in recuperating that understanding. Toward the climax of his argument about human knowledge of Christ as God, salvation history is likened to the stages of an individual life. As a lesson in divine accommodation, Mornay writes that at mankind’s birth “Nature” was provided “to be a Lawe unto us”; after our transgressions, like stumbling “yoong Scholers,” we received “the Law written” (God’s codification of natural law in the decalogue, “the Copie of a good Skrivener”); and in our maturity, after finding that we “cannot atteyne to the fashioning of one letter [of the Law] aright, furtherfoorth than his maister guideth his hand,” humankind was graced by Christ and the Gospel (588–9). Ontogeny recapitulates theology—those incremental measures by which humanity’s knowledge of God has grown by providential design. Human history is a book unfolding from divine intention. If Lawe is “the Interpreter of Nature,” and Gospel the plain exposition and fulfillment of the Law (Christ “did not change or abolish it, but more plainly expounded and fulfilled it”), then natural law remains a text demanding attention, and a notion that Mornay can ill afford to jettison (589). For Gospel rightly understood includes Law, and Law rightly understood is the interpretation of Nature—and the best of the “pagans” in turn indispensable witnesses about those natural laws inscribed in humankind. In an age of antinomianism, of chaos threatened by the lawlessness of the ignorant (of epicureans, atheists, Turks and “false naturalists” who acknowledge no law but lust, of Jews who misunderstand the Law, and of “ignorant” Christians who preach Christ’s coming as an abrogation of and liberation from the Law) saving ius naturae meant saving the foundations of moral and political order (Preface, n.p.). The challenge for Mornay—and for all of the magisterial Reformers—was to discover the “right” balance between the authority of nature (with its traditionally strong claims for human agency) and the core beliefs of a Reformed Christianity that made salvation available sola fide and sola scriptura. Instead of adjuring readers to leave the ancients behind, by precept and example Mornay demands repeatedly 38 “Sidney … and the Pagans,” 29.

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that they “take the peynes to reade them whole, that they may see how conformable the things which Christians teache, are to the wisedome of the best sort among the Heathen” (216). God is the scopus to which all right action aims, and Christ, as the incarnation of saving knowledge, is the truth before which all other forms of human knowledge must appear folly. Even Christ’s entrance into history was calculated to coincide with “the tyme when learning did moste flourish … to the end that all worldly wisdome should acknowledge it self to be foolishnes” (627). Mornay’s insistence on the unique value of revealed truth is uncompromising—but so too is his insistence upon the Archer’s (the divine Orator’s) accommodation of his Word to human needs. As the scope of salvation history who imparts purpose and meaning to God’s continuing act of communication with mankind, Christ is a savior who wishes to be known. Mornay’s characterization of God in the classical vocabulary of the scopus dicendi is an illustration, at once, of divine accommodation (his perception that the ontological order of the universe is designed for the rational capacities of those creatures made to praise and love him) and of the indispensability of the classical tradition for knowing how and why that Maker made him. God, too, employs the language and logic of classical oratory in speaking to mankind through his world and his Word. No reading of Plato or Aristotle, Cicero or Seneca, could ever have rescued the pagan from the sadness of life without grace.39 But such reading could teach him, as it teaches the Christian, to discern the disease of his fallen condition, to yearn for a remedy of that condition, to discover the marks of the true religion, and in the wake of that religion’s revelation—in his knowledge of Christ—to recognize the complementarity of moral and political knowledge from a classical culture with the needs of Christian civilization. Plato before Christ is folly. Plato after Christ is wisdom. Once the scope of human knowledge is obtained, then all forms of knowledge can and must be enthusiastically embraced. (Knowledge of the whole self—the whole text of history, human and divine, as well as the very logic and language of that history—demands it.) Like the De veritate itself, then, providential 39 Mornay represents human beings before Christ as incurably sad. Like the Africans of his own day, “they feele a mischief within them, whereinto neither the eye of the Phisition can see, nor the medicine that he ministreth can atteyne” (318). The best sort of ancients asked the right question—how the individual can acquire self-knowledge, what Sidney calls “architectonic knowledge,” and what Mornay terms “the first precept” of the “arte of healing the Soule” (309). They provided the right analysis of the soul’s disease—its sinfulness, pride, and corruption by the passions of self-love (311). They understood mankind’s fallen condition and yearned for relief from it: “The philosophers were sore combered in finding a meane to cleanse Mankynd from his filthinesse; some would have done it by the Morals; some by the Mathematicals; and some by Religious Ceremonies; but in the end they confesse that all these things can doe nothing in that behalf” (318). Their knowledge extended, then, even to an awareness of their impotence and sadness in the absence of the true religion, which they could wish for, but not obtain. In sum, as Mornay writes, the ancients were “fooles in their remedies, but wise in discerning the disease” (318). Reading “them whole,” in turn, undermines the too-easy rhetoric that might oppose foolish pagans to wise Christians, a dispensable classical tradition of secular letters to a uniquely valuable sacred one. Right argument complicates such oppositions because of the inseparability of folly and wisdom among the ancients.


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history is a book requiring reading “throughout,” and it has—by analogy—the unity of a ladder and the stages of a life. Only as we reach its summit or come to maturity in the discovery of that purpose organizing the whole, do we appreciate the value of each of the steps or stages—none of which, in this remarkably inclusive, remarkably cosmopolitan celebration of the truth of the revealed religion, contemporary culture can afford to “leave behind.” In his Epistle Dedicatorie, Mornay sounds the same theme. Either because of “ignorance” or “negligence,” he writes: we consider not the incomparable worke of our Creator and Recreator, but by piecemeale, without laying the one of them to the other: like as if a man would judge of the Whole space of time by the night, or by some one season of the yeare, or by some one of the Elementes: or as if he would judge of a building by some one quarter: or of an Oration by some syllables thereof: whereas notwithstanding, God’s wisedome in creating thinges cannot be considered, but in the union of the partes with the whole, and of themselves among themselves: nor his goodness in recreating or renewing them, and in regenerating of mankind for whom he made the world, but by the heedfull conferring of all times from the first byrth of Man unto the seconde byrth, and repairing of him againe, which it hath pleased God to ordaine and make for him. (n.p.)

Mornay’s treatment of the “Reasons” and the “Testimonies” of the ancients bears upon issues about Sidney’s piety in the Defence because of the still-current assumption that Reformed Christians found pagan and secular literature inherently suspect. Even as Sidney appears to defend such literature in his poetics—so the argument runs—he was already predisposed to dedicate himself exclusively to the making of divine poetry. That argument rests upon a misreading of Mornay’s De veritate, as an analysis of the full text makes clear, and it extends to a misreading of Sidney. In the years following the Defence, Sidney did proceed to write divine poetry—he began a translation of the Psalms and translated, too, one book of Guillaume Du Bartas’s La semaine, but during those same years, he also produced some portion of Certain Sonnets, Astrophil and Stella and the unfinished revision of his major life’s work, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Sidney never abandoned the making of “right poetry”—fiction that has another scope than the praise or petition of God—and he continued those labors for reasons that Reformed Christians like Mornay (even with his decided preference for philosophy over poetry!) could well have understood. For Mornay and Sidney both, a cosmopolitan inclusiveness counts. For both, the embrace of knowledge, secular and sacred, was urgently required in a contemporary culture imperilled by atheists and epicureans on the one hand—Cecropians all!—and by confessional divisions threatening the church’s very survival on the other. Out of a perceived need to avoid partisan debate, Mornay targets his wide-ranging knowledge toward a single mark: the restoration of the true religion after the ignorance of so many ages. This was the kind of moderation that won Languet’s enthusiastic endorsement and that speaks so plainly about the character of Sidney’s piety in the Defence. It is also the kind of moderation that distinguishes the De veritate as sixteenth-century Europe’s masterpiece of Philippist argumentation, its most erudite and cosmopolitan expression of anti-confessional piety by a Huguenot who knew, from first-hand experience, the horrors of confessional combat. And who in a moment, in defense

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of Christian truthfulness, was prepared to rejoin that combat (like Sidney—his other “self”), if words should fail. Sidney’s personal coat of arms, it is well to recall, featured an arrowhead (always his eye on scope!)—a pointer to his own status as a confident moderator, simultaneously the militant soldier of Christ taming tyranny by the bow and the cosmopolitan poet targeting the public domain by the word. Piety and the Golden World: Enter Calvin (Again) Sidney knew the impact of a conditional clause, especially its power to temper cautiously and appropriately the claims of idealism. Right at the finish of the Defence’s central celebratory account of the making of golden worlds and the human consequence of that making in bestowing ideal heroes like Cyrus upon the world in order to make many Cyruses, he diverts rhetorical flourish into critical attention by a qualifying remark: such remarkable consequences are forthcoming “if” his readers “will learn aright why and how that maker made him” (101). His “if” has impact precisely because, if left to their own devices, people will not learn aright—given the nature of human nature. Sidney advances to the crucial stage of the argument on behalf of the poet’s powers. He writes, “with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam: … our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it” (101). Impelled by his own conditional clause to outline that breach in the human condition that defines us—the division between wit and will—Sidney provides an account of natural defects that gives purpose to all human actions and all species of knowledge, poetry chief among them. Sidney works in this central discussion both methodically and teleologically, by defining, that is, essential characteristics of his subject with reference to what he calls its “scope,” its main aim or function. Clearly a Christian anthropology motivates the subsequent definition of the poet’s “noblest scope”: both to delight and to teach, “to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly … and … to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved” (103). The phrasing itself is biblically stylized. A Christian anthropology is again invoked, just paragraphs later, as Sidney revists the question of poetry’s relationship to the other sciences. What counts now to the argument is sameness, rather than difference, as Sidney sets a target all of them must hit: “all, one and the other, [have] this scope—to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying of his own divine essence” (104). The body is a dungeon because the will is infected, the mind a seat with its own divine essence because the wit remains “erect”—upright and uncontaminated in this unqualified characterization of its continued efficacy. The whole of the Defence’s subsequent argument depends on demonstrating that the poet targets this “scope” more successfully than his rivals—that poetry heals that breach in nature or, at least, matters profoundly to its remediation. Viewed piously, then, the poet’s job is one of liberation, of securing some portion of freedom from the consequences of original sin, the ordinary “dungeon” of the human condition. But how much success can it promise in that task? What is the extent of the claims made on behalf of poetry’s real


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power in human affairs? And what pious beliefs does Sidney bring to this discussion that explain the claims made for poetry? Sidney’s premises presuppose substantial claims for the power of poetry, and those claims have been both especially important and especially troubling for contemporary scholars eager to establish claims of their own on behalf of the Defence’s Protestant poetics. They have been important because those assumptions about human nature at the foundation of Sidney’s claims for poetry are clearly Christian in character. The Defence is a document written in the shadow of the fall, and no account of its poetics ignoring that fact can explain (to accommodate Sidney’s rhetoric to an argument of my own) its “scope”—that overarching purpose to which its arguments relate. However, the claim that its poetics are Protestant—when Protestant poetics are assumed to be uniquely inspired by a Puritan or broadly Calvinistic theology—rests on historical assumptions very different in kind, and very difficult to square either with contemporary scholarly understandings about Reformed Christianity or with the actual arguments of the Defence. The assumption that Reformed theology can be understood as dogma proceeding from the writings of a single person, John Calvin, has done much to obscure the plurality of its origins, the eclecticism of its employment of sources, and the diversity of philosophical and theological tenets espoused historically by its proponents.40 Mornay’s De veritate supplies only one outstanding example of such diversity. Sidney’s piety in the Defence supplies another. For while the anthropology of his poetics is indisputably Christian, and arguably specific to Reformed Christianity, the assumption that its pious principles are to be determined by reference to Calvin’s theology is from the outset a fundamental error about the variety and independence of a Reformed tradition that discovered models for its religious thought among a vast range of sources. Moreover, the assumption that Sidney’s pious principles are somehow inspired by or reasonably consistent with the theology of Calvin, however broadly construed, has from the first proved troubling to its proponents. For the new generation of religious historians from Richard Muller to Philip Benedict, “Calvinism” as such (as a corpus of dogmatic theology emanating exclusively from Calvin himself) is a dead issue. Only the history of critical debates about Sidney’s piety in the Defence requires that the body be exhumed—at least briefly—to define more accurately the confessional character of Sidney’s piety. Consider briefly the troubles encountered by attempting to square Sidney’s conception of the “erected wit” with Calvin’s pronouncements on the state of postlapsarian mankind. The fall wreaks destruction on the whole nature of man. As Calvin puts it grimly in his Institutes:41 40 For a concise elaboration of this argument, see Carl R. Trueman, “Calvin and Calvinism,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), p. 225–44. For an extended scholarly treatment of the diversity of Reformed theology, see Richard A. Muller, “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’, Part One,” 345–75 and “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’, Part Two,” 125–60. For similar emphasis on the doctrinal diversity of the Reformed tradition, with a focus on its social and cultural history, see Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed. 41 Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), vol. 1, 270 (II. 2. 12). All additional citations

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Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism For even though something of understanding and judgment remains as a residue along with the will, yet we shall not call a mind whole and sound that is both weak and plunged into deep darkness .… Since reason, therefore, by which man distinguishes between good and evil, and by which he understands and judges, is a natural gift, it could not be completely wiped out; but was partly weakened and partly corrupted, so that its misshapen ruins appear.

Even a doctrine of total depravity does not exclude from the intellect a residue of efficacy—and Calvin writes with considerable ambiguity about reason’s postlapsarian power. However, without the assistance of the Law (God’s written word), reason is a mere ruin.42 Mornay’s De veritate echoes those sentiments in its account of the fall, but there is little in Calvin to match Mornay’s strikingly assertive claims for reason as a guide to faith. More difficult still is the task of reconciling Sidney’s claims on behalf of the individual’s still erected wit with Calvin’s characterization of the intellect as a misshapen ruin, and the recognition of that difficulty has prompted several different accounts of those pious principles at work here. Andrew Weiner, one influential critic espousing the significance of the Defence’s Protestant poetics, argues that Sidney must have assumed that the ideas of the golden world poet are inspired, like David’s, by “the promptings of the Holy Spirit.”43 After all, no “Calvinist” could endorse belief in a still-erected wit. Michael Raiger is even more assertive on the subject of inspiration. He too argues for a version of Sidney’s right poet as empowered by “the aid of the Holy Spirit,” not directly inspired like the writers of Scripture, but still remaining the Spirit’s instrument by ministering “to the word, through fidelity to Scripture.”44 As a consequence, he argues that Sidney’s aesthetic consciously “privileges the Christian initiate, while confounding those outside the special dispensation of Christ.”45 More recently, Michael Mack has claimed that Sidney characterizes fiction as “the channel of grace.”46 Such explanations have the sound of special pleading. For when Sidney writes about the ideas of the golden world poet, he explicitly dismisses claims to divine inspiration, just as he eagerly displays for admiration the exemplary ideas of pagan poets—Homer, Virgil, and Xenophon (not the traditional writers whom the Holy Spirit might be thought to prompt, and still less pagans whom he seeks to confound).47 More subtle variations on this theme have been attempted by later critics, specifically by Ake Bergvall. Writing in the frame of William Bouwsma’s portrait of a complex and conflicted Calvin-as-humanist, Bergvall appeals to the notion of will be presented in the text inside parentheses. 42 For a concise view of Calvin’s treatment of reason in respect to issues of conscience and the Law, see William Klempa, “Calvin and Natural Law,” Calvin Studies 4 (1988), 1–23. See too, Guenther H. Haas, “Calvin’s Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, p. 93–105. 43 Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism, p. 36. 44 “Sidney’s Defense of Plato,” Religion and Literature 30, no. 2 (1998), 41–2. 45 Raiger 40. 46 Mack, p. 127. 47 On Plato, Sidney writes (tongue-in-cheek), “he attributeth unto Poesy more than myself do, namely, to be a very inspiring of a divine force, far above man’s wit,” 130.


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“general grace” as a means of explaining how the Holy Spirit could illuminate even the minds of pagans “to produce writings of enduring value.”48 Praise for Xenophon is no recognition of the powers of the erected wit, Bergvall contends. Instead, such praise instances the divine operation of what Calvin conceived as “general grace.”49 Calvin’s own humanistic credentials were of a high order, and he writes approvingly of what those “regenerated by the Spirit” can accomplish by means of the human arts and sciences [v. 1, 189–90 (I. 15. 4)]. Even so, Calvin might very well have been both astounded and dismayed by the Defence’s claims on behalf of the wit, its luminosity and its zodiacal range.50 Nowhere in the Institutes can such optimism about the natural powers of human beings be paralleled, and, of course, nowhere does Sidney ever mention general grace. When Sidney makes his analogy between the zodiac and the wit, drawing upon that long familiar fascination with zodical compendages of universal knowledge from Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia to Marcus Stellatus Palingenius’s Zodiacus vitae, he sounds less like a theologian from Geneva, and more like his own teacher at Strasbourg, Johann Sturm. In a letter to Conrad Dasypodius, a newly appointed administrator at the Academy, Sturm seeks to energize his colleague by highlighting the capaciousness of the intellect: “There exists in us, though mortals, a natural energy or rather a divine force and power, to which nothing is impossible, nothing remains inaccessible .… It is marvelous that things that our senses cannot count, nor grasp, our spirit can nevertheless embrace, like the whole world, the sky, the seas, land. How many things astronomy taught you! What a variety of knowledge cosmography offers!”51 Reformers do not speak with a single voice. Sometimes they sing the praises of the wit. Consider, too, the difficulty of reconciling Sidney’s account of the will with Calvin’s theology. At first glance, the “infected will” of the Defence sounds sufficiently bleak to serve as an echo of the Institutes’ recounting of the fall’s consequences: “As to the will, its depravity is but too well known” [1, 270 (II. 2. 12)]. As an anvil for his hammer, Calvin strikes heavily and liberally upon depravity in repeated portions of the argument: the utter corruption of the will, its insatiable appetite for sin, and its total incapacity to facilitate the process of justification and sanctification. The will is a cornucopia of concupiscence, and what the will wills is sin. As a theological tenet, the rigor—even the ferocity—of Calvin’s emphasis upon the individual’s complete dependence on grace for salvation sounds inconsistent with a critical argument like Sidney’s that relies so heavily on the poet’s power to 48 “Reason in Luther, Calvin, and Sidney,” Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no. 1 (1992), 120. See William J. Bouwsma’s fine biography of Calvin as conflicted humanist, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 49 Bergvall, 120–21. 50 For learning about virtue and vice, when passion has been mastered, Sidney writes, “the inward light each mind hath in itself is as good as a philosopher’s book”—or even better, he adds, since that light speaks clearly from “natural conceit” (113). The notion that Ideas contain authority—genuine authority—by virtue of “natural conceit” rather than divine grace seems inconsistent with Calvin’s theology, however broadly conceived. Calvin does write about “natural law,” but he defines its purpose darkly (“to render man inexcusable”), (vol. 1, 282; II. 2. 22). 51 Letter of March, 1565 in Johann Sturm on Education, p. 295–6.

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move the will in order to advance its claims. In the De veritate, Mornay bypasses considerations about the will’s agency as a detour from theological contentiousness. The topic is too hot to handle—far too productive of confessional division. In his poetics, Sidney is considerably more assertive. For him, the will is clearly infected, but just as clearly, it is not terminally depraved. The whole of the Defence targets as its scope the activity of moving people to take goodness in hand, and its credibility depends on successfully demonstrating that such moving happens. There is goodness, however, and then there is goodness, and all of the advocates for Sidney’s Protestant poetics have been eager to distinguish between Calvin’s rigorous denial of the capacities of man in spiritual affairs, and his more eager recognition of them in secular and social matters. That exception seems important, according to Weiner and Alan Sinfield—one more prominent advocate of Sidney’s Protestant poetics—because the Defence restricts the poet’s moving power to matters of “ethic and politic consideration,” to the this-worldly negotiation of moral and political activity. Sidney can celebrate the poet’s power to move, then, in a manner consistent with Calvin, they indicate, because he is only arguing about ethics and politics, matters appropriate to “human conceipt.”52 Even that restriction of the scope of Sidney’s Defence to the realm of the moral and the political, however, grants considerably more autonomy to the arts and sciences than Calvin permits. When Calvin expands in his famous chapter on the sciences as God’s gift to man, from his praise of “ancient jurists who established civic order” and “philosophers” who supplied “artful description of nature,” to his celebration of the skilled practioners of oratory and mathematics, he leaves out one crucially important category of humanist study: moral philosophy. For if Calvin clearly relegated statecraft and household economy to the realm of the earthly kingdom, as subject to human control, moral action belonged to the kingdom of God, and was beyond the scope of individual ability to control or master. Calvin can write positively about man’s ingenuity in obtaining “somewhat more understanding” of the five moral laws of Moses’s commandments (the latter five) than he possesses of those commandments of the First Table (about which he is wholly blind), but even that minor gesture toward authorizing moral knowledge recedes quickly before the dark vision of natural man refusing “to be led to recognize the diseases of his lusts. The light of nature is extinguished before he even enters upon this abyss” [1, 284 (II. 2. 24)]. Sidney’s whole argument rests squarely on the power of the poet to create, as a species of moral persuasion and instruction, “speaking pictures of virtue and vice,” and there is precious little room in Calvin’s theology for moral empowerment of that kind without the agency of “special grace.” The difficulties of reconciling the arguments of the Defence with Calvin’s theology, however broadly construed, lead Weiner, Bergvall and Raiger, on the one hand, into appeals on behalf of divine inspiration to guarantee their consistency. On 52 Sinfield, Faultlines, p. 202–3 and Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney. Weiner writes as a paraphrase of Sidney’s central argument, “If poets cannot make all things well, at least they can make some things better by making some men act better,” p. 48. This is a strangely flat restatement of the Defence’s metamorphic claims about the power of poetry to transform individuals (to make a Cyrus who makes many Cyruses).


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the other, those same difficulties lead Sinfield into historicizing arguments about the text’s inherent contradictions as a product of an oxymoronically described “puritan humanist project.”53 According to Sinfield, Sidney is a “puritan humanist” because he “experienced with special intensity the disjunction between humane letters and protestantism”—so intensely, in fact, that the Defence’s “sometimes forced” arguments on behalf of “secular” poetry demonstrate Sidney’s only partly occulted desire to follow Guillaume Du Bartas in heralding “the exclusive validity of divine poetry.”54 Such a disjunction, in turn, is grounded historically in what Sinfield characterizes as the cultural opposition between, on the one hand, Catholicism and humanism, which “encouraged belief in a continuity between human and divine experience,” and, on the other, Protestantism, which insisted “on the gap between the two, emphasizing the utter degradation of humankind and the total power of God to determine who shall be saved.”55 Like Weiner, Sinfield identifies Protestantism with a “Calvinistically” inspired Puritanism, and seeks on the basis of that identification to account for what he rightly argues are major discontinuites between Sidney’s arguments and Calvin’s beliefs. The question becomes how best to account for those discontinuities. In pursuit of his answer, Sinfield employs a critical terminology inadequate for explaining the cultural history at issue. Understood in context, “humanism” (in all of its multiple versions) implies an attitude toward texts—a disposition toward educational practices of reading and writing that have their origin in classical culture— not a philosophy, unless one wishes to talk broadly about a “humanist” tendency to celebrate eloquence and the potentially “enriching character” (vague stuff that) of the eloquent arts. Critical talk about “humanism” in opposition to “Protestantism”—in a culture whose most erudite practitioners of the studia humanitatis included (among hundreds more) Calvin and Beza—is essentially empty. Once more, Sinfield employs as a vehicle of historical explanation what contemporary historians of religion have rejected as a too-totalizing model of “Protestantism.” That model requires adjustment to the real historical complexity of the later Reformation’s religious beliefs—an adjustment making room for various forms of faith that included, to think only of the Elizabethans, the radical apocalyptic Christianity of a John Foxe, the unbending institutional orthodoxy of a John Whitgift, the pragmatically flexible piety of a Henry Sidney, the celebrated moderation of a Richard Hooker, and the zealous Philippism of a Richard Robinson and a Daniel Rogers. The difficulties encountered by scholars 53 Sinfield, Faultlines, p. 198. For complementary articulations of similar contradictions in the Defence, see Gary F. Waller, “‘This Matching of Contraries’, Bruno, Calvin, and the Sidney Circle,” Neophilologus 56 (1972), 334 and D.H. Craig, “A Hybrid Growth,” 68–70. Alan Hager writes about the Defence in relation to “the sonneteer’s mock encomium of self” in Dazzling Images: The Masks of Sir Philip Sidney (Newark, NJ: Univ. of Delaware Press; London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1991), p. 103–14. As an alternative perspective, see Martin Raitiere, “The Unity of Sidney’s Apology for Poetry,” Studies in English Literature 21, no. 1 (1981), 37–58. 54 Sinfield, Faultlines, p. 187. For Du Bartas’s popularity in England, with particular reference to Sidney, see Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), p. 167–234. 55 Sinfield, Faultlines, p. 144.

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in reconciling Sidney’s Defence with “Calvinism” speak much less clearly about the contradictions of the text, than about the failure of the critical paradigm imposed upon it. Such historicizing, in short, is just bad history. Melanchthon and the Culture Wars Melanchthon devoted much of his extended career as an educator and theologian, as a student of classical and Christian literature, and as a mediator among confessionally divided factions of Catholics and Protestants, toward affirming crucial aspects of continuity between the human and the divine that Sinfield dismisses as inimical to Protestantism. Melanchthon was an educational giant at Wittenberg, and he is still useful as an educator in broadening awareness about the multiplicity of beliefs maintained among the so-called “magisterial” Reformers of the Reformation’s first generation, and the Reformed Christians of its second. He was both a systematic expositor of Reformation theology, and a committed humanist who produced during his career some 93 commentaries and editions of classical texts. The sheer volume of his labors is nothing short of astonishing. His commentaries on Virgil were among the most widely read in Europe—more popular even than Cristoforo Landino’s—and a number of his texts became international best-sellers, including his commentaries on Demosthenes’s orations and Cicero’s epistles.56 Constantly embattled by confessionally hostile imperial powers, Melanchthon had a taste for classical letters in defense of liberty. Melanchthon was also a poet, as Sidney recognizes in the Defence. His volume of epigrams was published posthumously by Languet’s compatriot in Vienna, Johannes Crato, complete with a celebration of Melanchthon’s encouragement of a distinguished cadre of neo-Latin poets at Wittenberg (among them Georg Sabinus and Petrus Lotichius), and the value of literary study itself, “quam sonant Dei beneficio Ecclesiae” (which our Churches sound to the benefit of God).57 Crato’s celebration is the summary of a continuing devotion. As early as 1527, in his commentary on Colossians, Melanchthon began a lifelong championship of Philosophy—all of the arts and sciences, including poetry, oratory, mathematics, and jurisprudence, in addition to natural, moral, and political philosophy—as “a genuine and good creature of God.”58 By 1532, in his commentary on Romans, Melanchthon extended this celebration of the arts and sciences (always best exemplified by the classics) into theological arguments on behalf of those nine proofs afforded by natural reason of God’s existence as “the founder and preserver of things.”59 Three years later those proofs found their way into his revised edition of the Loci. Melanchthon’s persistent efforts to reanimate scholasticism (the method of the schools) in the service of Protestant truth are as evident as his debts—as the student of Johann Reuchlin—to the studia humanitatis, and the appeal of that methodology can be 56 For a study of the dissemination of Melanchthon’s commentaries through northern Europe’s major intellectual centers, see Meerhoff’s “Logic and Eloquence,” 357–74. 57 Epigrammatum …Melanthonis, p. A2 (verso). 58 Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, p. 46. 59 Commentary on Romans, p. 77.


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instanced by the replication of his scholastic arguments on behalf of reason’s power to apprehend God by Reformed Christians from Zacharias Ursinus to Pierre Du Moulin.60 Particularly in the last years, after the death of Luther and the Wars of the Schmalkaldan League, Melanchthon’s theology made room for a version of human agency considerably stronger than anything to be found in Calvin, while sufficiently tempered to adhere—at least in the view of his own circle—to the boundaries of Protestant orthodoxy. (Melanchthon went to his grave persuaded of his loyalty to God’s Word and to Luther’s.) As John R. Schneider argues so well in light of that continuing search to reconcile secular learning to sacred letters, “Melanchthon’s burden thus was not merely to forge what was the first Protestant summary of the faith, as is commonly acknowledged. It was (more profoundly) to hammer out its first model of human culture—in relation to that faith.”61 This is not to forget the formative years at Wittenberg. No convert of Luther’s was ever likely to slight the reality of sin, or that darkness to which Sidney alludes in his reference to “the dungeon of the body.” Melanchthon’s doctrine of the fall is sufficient proof of that. In the beginning, the Loci of 1555 makes clear, Adam and Eve enjoyed what he calls—together with Anselm, Augustine, and Aquinas— “justitia originalis,” when the heart “was full of the divine spirit and light and joy in God.”62 Original justice was a result of the “sweetest of harmonies” between man’s native faculties, or to use Sidney’s language, a product of concord between wit and will, both the intellect and the affections united in love of God.63 At the fall, original justice was corrupted by original sin. Man’s love was displaced from God onto himself, and in consequence, Adam and Eve experienced “great wounds and shame,” even a corruption of the “wonderful image of God” implanted in them. His account of the fall is traditionally dark. In his very next sentence, however, Melanchthon hastens to add in his reassuring style: “However, we should pause and contemplate the great love in the divine Majesty toward human nature,” a love manifested by the promise of his “likeness” again restored to us when we come to “know the eternal Father, eternal Son, and the Holy Spirit.” That reassurance is afforded both by natural and spiritual means. To gain saving knowledge, God “in the creation placed a light in man, through which we might and should acknowledge him” and “for the

60 See Muller, “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’, Part Two,” 135. 61 “Melanchthon’s Rhetoric As a Context for Understanding His Theology,” in Melanchthon in Europe, p. 142. 62 Loci communes 1555, p. 76. 63 For Melanchthon’s detailed elaboration of the concept of original justice, see his De anima (1553) in A Melanchthon Reader, p. 277. All further citations are documented in the text parenthetically. For Sidney on the need for “jump concord” between the wit and will and his direct attribution of that idealized harmony to principles that he acquired from Languet, see his beast fable, “As I my little flock on Ister bank …”, among the Eclogues which conclude the third book of The Old Arcadia. See, too, for an earlier discussion of concord as a guiding principle in Sidney’s poetics, Stillman’s Sidney’s Poetic Justice: The Old Arcadia, Its Eclogues, and Renaissance Pastoral Traditions (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1986), p. 192–213.

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natural light he also expressed his word, that therein we should know him.”64 The argument is orthodox, yet the reassuring rhetoric—in the deliberation with which Melanchthon pauses to balance the promise of the Word against the depravity of sin—is characteristically (though not uniquely) his own. God’s providence in supplying man with both natural light and saving Word points to important elements of continuity between nature and spirit, the secular and the sacred, the human and the divine, already familiar to that late Melanchthon depicted so plainly Basil-like in the portrait by Cranach. As an essential component of his natural philosophy, from the Initia (1549) to the Liber de Anima (1553), Melanchthon constructed a discourse for describing what natural man can comprehend about God by the exercise of “earthly learning.”65 Reason can determine that God exists and that God will determine the disposition of souls in the afterlife, just as reason can discern essential attributes about the deity’s nature: for instance, that he is perfectly just, good, free, and chaste. Melanchthon stopped short of Mornay’s subsequent, less cautious claims for natural knowledge about original sin and intimations of the trinity, but the analysis is otherwise similar—root and branch. Once more, a pagan author like Aristotle affords real wisdom, not because of indirect revelation—the work of Calvin’s “general grace”—but because reason itself is naturally equipped to discern key truths.66 His belief that God fashioned the human intellect “to be the clearest testimony of his existence” speaks directly to the epistemic optimism suffusing his work, which even as it acknowledges shadows cast by the fall, insists that we can “discern what it is like in the eternal light.”67 Melanchthon’s later canon grows quietly assertive, too, about the power of human will to cooperate with God in securing salvation. (Again, this is a crucial conviction illustrated by Cranach’s portrait of the aging Reformer.) Retelling the story of Joseph’s triumph over his desire for his son’s wife, Melanchthon writes in the De anima: “Thus the holy spirit did not take away the freedom of the will, but corrected it and turned it 64 Loci communes 1555, p. 71–3. Melanchthon’s preference—like that of Strigelius in his debates with Flacius—is for the vocabulary of sickness or injury applied to the consequences of the fall (he writes here of Adam and Eve’s wounding), rather than for Calvin’s harsher language of ruination. Like Calvin, he can write about those consequences in terms of “destruction,” but the emphasis and meaning are elsewhere. 65 See Bellucci, p. 199–217. 66 For an extension of this argument, see Schneider’s Philip Melanchthon, p. 141. 67 De anima, p. 254–5. Melanchthon asserts powerfully the real existence of true discernment in the mind. Such optimism is qualified—epistemically moderated—as Melanchthon’s well-known commitment to the concept of adiaphora indicates. Matters essential to salvation can be known with certainty, while the mysteries of God’s providence remain unsearchable; but matters about which rational argument cannot secure agreement, like the divisive trivialities of debates about ceremony, are, at once, deemed undecidable and hence dismissible as topics for the civil conversation required among Christians. See Wengert, Human Freedom, p. 146–7 and Schneider, Philip Melanchthon p. 124–5. For that same “epistemic moderation” linked to anti-tyrannical argumentation in an English context, see Bernard J. Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English Reformation to 1554 (Athens, OH: Ohio Univ. Press; Detroit, MI: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1977), esp. “The Truth of Adiaphoristic Liberty,” p. 32–114.


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toward God, according to the saying: ‘He who wills will find a plan’.”68 At the very moment that the human reaches toward the divine, the divine extends its saving hand toward the human. Melanchthon’s saying is adapted from that most eloquent of the early Antiochene fathers, “the golden-mouthed” Chrysostom—what his name means literally—and its source is a reminder that what is true in little about the will obtains at large in respect to culture, the potential remediating power of human agency in the public domain.69 Once more, just as Mornay’s De veritate does, Melanchthon’s De anima has recourse both to Augustinian ideas about the trinitarian construction of the mind and to the Pauline conception of στoργὴ—animate creation’s natural inclination to love—locating inside the human organism itself a natural foundation for the fulfillment of God’s promise to restore the ruins of his image. Restoring the ruins of God’s image, igniting sparks of the divine fire innate to the human mind—Melanchthon’s passion for reading Greek and Roman texts is more than the appreciative rhetoric of that tired cliché, the “Christian humanist.” Instead, his reading represents the sixteenth-century’s most fully conceived technology for the transformation of classical hermeneutics into a vehicle for spiritual reawakening. Just one example must illustrate the point about Melanchthon’s success in imagining, by way of such readings, a vision of human culture in relation to Reformed faith. When Melanchthon writes about Virgil’s Aeneas in the Liber de anima, he does so in an extended passage intended to illuminate the power, authority, and necessity of the notitiae—those innate notions of knowledge implanted in the mind by God, and (as he habitually repeats) the source of all the arts. In this particular passage, Melanchthon’s object is to illuminate what we might call the lived experience of such “notions” in the mind, their pious inscription. “Just as Virgil said about Aeneas, perceiving the course of Roman history sculpted on his shield, that he was amazed and delighted by that image of events about which he was unaware, so we ourselves, even though we do not discern the substance of human minds with our eyes, nor hardly understand wonderful actions, are however delighted by the image.”70 As Aeneas gazes at his shield, in the Aeneid’s best known prophetic moment, he delights in a future good (the triumph of Augustan Rome). It is a future good, as Melanchthon takes pains to emphasize, that he both contemplates and heroically strives to achieve.

68 De anima, p. 276. 69 See Bellucci, p. 63. The incarnation of the Word in the best of human words, the classical rhetoric of Greece and Rome, makes cooperation between the realm of the secular and sacred, the human and the divine, indispensable to the cultivation of the mind and civilization. The same Aristotelian philosophy that Melanchthon reviled in his first lectures at Wittenberg, he later rehabilitates (with an eclectic mix of Plato and Cicero, Paul and Augustine) in expository treatises like the Epitome moralis as the foundation of a Christian moral philosophy. Aristotle’s celebration of justice as “queen of all the virtues,” a harmony of elements in the soul and a parallel harmony of members in the family and factions in the state, is compared to and contrasted with the “universal justice” to be discovered in revealed scripture. See his Summary of Ethics (Epitome ethices, 1532), trans. Keen, p. 219. 70 “Ut de Aenea intuente seriem Romanae historiae in clypeo sculptam Virgilius inquit, Miratur, rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet: ita nos, etsi nec humanae animae substantiam oculis cernimus, nec mirandas actiones penitus intelligimus, tamen imagine laetemur,” CR 13, 5.

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In an exemplary moment then, imaged in an exemplary poem, Aeneas becomes in Melanchthon’s reading the exemplar of our human experience of coming-to-know those goods that God makes available to reason through the active contemplation of innate ideas (notitiae). Character enacts mind, as mind enacts natural law, as human culture enables (through the enabling power of God and nature) the action of both. Such connections are intricate and elegant, and bear explanation. As Aeneas is separated from a triumph of Rome that he only dimly understands by an expanse of history, so we are separated from the goodness of the notitiae (inborn notions of the good that we barely comprehend) by an expanse of time— the time of fallen experience. As those “notions” are illuminated by consciousness, progressively fanned from sparks into flame by poetic images, such images produce for us, as for Aeneas in his quest to found the Roman empire, progressive knowledge about the good. Once more, just as Aeneas delights in an historical ideal fulfilled, those ideal notions inherent to the mind procure delight, since those images fulfill the demands of human nature as fully as the images of imparting a history to Rome satisfy the longings of Aeneas. Finally too, just as Aeneas is responsible for undoing the separation between present and future by heroic action, so the law of nature requires us to restore those goods inscribed by God in our minds. In a reading like Melanchthon’s, heroism is no longer the business of dead Greeks or Romans or poetry the empty matter of tired aesthetic celebration. Heroism, instead, is reawakened as the ordinary and extraordinary vocation of all people, called to rebuild the ruins of Troy, of the church, of their own fallen worlds and selves. As Melanchthon reads Virgil, so he illuminates comprehensively and elegantly his understanding of the mind, of history, and of the necessary knowledge to be gained from the bonae litterae of the classical tradition—knowledge that restores our likeness to God. Always in Melanchthon, philosophy remains subordinate to Gospel, and has no saving power of its own, but always, too, its wisdom is acknowledged as essential for individual Christians and the commonwealth. Real knowledge about God as a Mens Architectrix is supplied by natural reason, the best of the ancient tradition, and God’s written Law. Saving knowledge, by contrast, comes solely from the Gospel’s revelation of the person of Christ. If the broad outlines of this double attitude toward the Law and “Philosophy”—the bonae litterae of classical culture— are familiar from Mornay’s treatment of the ancients’ Reasons and Testimonies in the De veritate, Melanchthon’s treatment of the topic merits attention partly because of his originality in devising the logic that shaped so much of Reformed Christianity’s approach to the classical past and partly because—once more—of the strong sense of cultural urgency that motivated his articulation of that logic. Urgency counts to that post-Bartholomew’s Day culture of the late 1570s. In a detailed study of Reformation debates about poenitentia (repentance), Timothy Wengert traces a crucial turn in Melanchthon’s thought from the mid-1520s to the late 1530s toward the development of a forensic theory of justification—an essentially legal understanding about God’s mercy in freely justifying the sinner by an “imputation” of righteousness.71 The faithful are saved not by merit, but instead by the “imputation” of justice—sola fide, again. Imputed righteous, the sinner is freed 71 See Wengert, Law and Gospel.


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from the accusations of the Law, but the individual remains—and this is the crucial point—still contaminated by the remnants of sin. The justified sinner’s continuing sinfulness is crucial because of Melanchthon’s need, consequently, to supplement Luther’s conception of the uses of the Law. Within Luther’s distinctively Protestant vocabulary, the Law had two uses, and two uses alone—to terrify the conscience and to coerce the flesh of the sinner. Within Melanchthon’s theology of forensic justification, an entirely new third use of the Law emerges: the Law’s employment as a vehicle whereby individuals must practice obedience (“ut exerceant obedientiam”), however imperfectly (even for the justified!) that practice proceeds—think of David and Bathsheba!72 Most importantly, the Law that has continuing importance for justified sinners is the Decalogue of Moses and its reflection in natural law, that law inscribed on the heart by God as notitiae: the innate notions of the mind, the true origins (as we have seen) of all of the arts, and the foundations for the bonae litterae of the classical tradition. The Gospel no more frees individuals from the Law, than it frees them from the need to breathe. Instead it requires and enables Christians to pursue obedience as the always-ongoing work of sanctification proceeds. By virtue of the weighty significance attached to natural law, the consequences of Melanchthon’s conceptual development were profound, then, both for his theology and his philosophy. Within these same years, Melanchthon initiated arguments on behalf of the necessity of good works for salvation (shades of the Majorist conflict!) and on behalf of the will’s necessary cooperation to achieve salvation (shades of the synergist controversy!). And Melanchthon continued, too, to produce his editions of Virgil and Ovid, his commentaries on Demosthenes and Cicero, and his teaching of Greek at Wittenberg—as necessary works of Christian obedience.73 Such works, too, were the necessary response to a deep sense of cultural urgency. Melanchthon’s theological development took place against a background of renewed peasant rebellions of the late 1520s, and such lawlessness gave renewed point and power to charges of antinomianism leveled against the Lutherans. No wonder he would seek to enhance the role of law in Protestant theology.74 His development took place, too, against the background of renewed efforts among the Protestant princes of Germany to form an alliance with Catholic France against the imperial powers of Charles V. In conversation with moderates like that fiercely independent Gallic Catholic, Guillaume Du Bellay, Melanchthon equipped himself with a revised theology, which by enhancing individual agency in the work of salvation, might bridge the confessional divide between Rome and Wittenberg. Such efforts proved fruitless, but the pursuit of order against lawlessness and ecumenical reunion against confessional division remained constant in the following decades, and they continued 72 Wengert quotes the phrase from Melanchthon’s Scholia 1534 in Law and Gospel, p. 196. 73 For a history of those debates, see Scheible’s copiously detailed biography and Peterson’s The Philippist Theologians. For recent translations of primary texts relevant to those debates, see Lund, Documents from the History of Lutheranism, 1517–1750. See, too, Carl E. Maxcey, Bona Opera: A Study in the Development of the Doctrine in Philip Melanchthon (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1980). 74 Kusukawa details the historical background for these theological concerns during the 1520s in his chapter, “Law and Gospel,” p. 27–74.

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as major themes among his Philippist followers, Languet among them. Calvin, too, adopted the third use of the Law in his Institutes, and Mornay employed the concept in his treatment of the Reasons and Testimonies of the ancients. Of equal importance for comprehending the piety of Sidney’s poetics, however, are the laments for the decay of culture that accompany these theological developments, as immediate background and continuing theme. With ever-more melancholy eloquence, Melanchthon’s celebrations of Philosophy, from his 1527 commentary on Colossians to his 1557 Oratio de studiis veteris philosophiae (Oration on the Ancient Studies of Philosophy), expressed his horror at the barbarians at the gates— from his early attacks against the “completely corrupted” minds of the ignorant who neglect God’s “best gifts” to his later, increasingly strident lamentations upon “the calamity of the most turbulent times” that threaten to reduce “the treasure house of the good arts” into the “trash and the squalor of primeval barbarity.” Like Mornay’s, Melanchthon’s defense of culture was never the product of a merely nostalgic humanism. Instead, it was a defense of knowledge against ignorance, fraught with a sense of that knowledge’s urgency for healing “the wounds of the Church” and freeing the public domain from confessional dispute.75 Melanchthon’s differences with Calvin were pronounced, sometimes sharply so. These two major architects of the Reformation disagreed about eucharistic theology—Melanchthon maintaining a position closer to Luther’s in regard to Christ’s real presence; they disagreed about the relation of state to church government— Melanchthon never supported the subordination of the state’s magistrates to the church hierarchy; they disagreed about issues of predestination and free will— Melanchthon was scrupulously cautious about pronouncements on theology that might lead Christians into despair, and that scrupulosity itself, one consequence of his epistemic moderation, made Calvin at times furiously impatient.76 Melanchthon, too, espoused a theology of liberation, with its constant celebration of the Gospel as the means for achieving freedom from sin that is without parallel in Calvin.77 Yet in spite of these disagreements in doctrine and differences in rhetorical emphasis, Melanchthon and Calvin maintained for decades a correspondence— replete with accusation and recrimination—that preserved a semblance of civility. That civility is comprehensible in terms of shared commitments: Calvin adopted many of his exegetical assumptions and much of his hermeneutic terminology from Melanchthon; he made extensive use of the Loci in organizing his Institutes; Melanchthon, in turn, moved increasingly to an interpretation of the Eucharist closer to Calvin’s than to Luther’s; both shared the concept of the third use of the law and a

75 Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, p. 50; and De studiis veteris philosophiae (CR 12) for these reflections on “calamitate[m] turbulentissimorum temporum,” the descent of the “thesaurum bonarum artium … in sordes et squalorem pristinae barbarieri” and the desired restoration of the arts “ut his Ecclesiae vulneribus ipse [Christ] medeatur …” (240–42). 76 For a comprehensive account of that relationship, see Timothy Wengert’s “‘We Will Feast Together in Heaven Forever’: The Epistolary Friendship of John Calvin and Philip Melanchthon,” in Melanchthon in Europe, p. 13–19. 77 On this point, see Bouwsma, p. 50: “Calvin’s emphasis on obedience … had a negative corollary in his distrust of liberty, even of that Christian liberty which Luther so valued.”


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strong moral emphasis in their theology.78 For all their differences, these similarities were sufficient to have their enemies revile Melanchthon’s followers not merely as Philippists, but also as crypto-Calvinists. With respect to Sidney’s mentor, Hubert Languet, however, the case was altered. Languet shared Melanchthon’s theological differences with Calvin. Once more, he made himself a despised figure in Geneva, a man whom Calvin came to revile as a dog and a heretic. Calvin’s fury descended on Languet because of his success in 1558 in rescuing that Protestant apostle of freedom, Sebastian Castellio, from a charge of heresy leveled against him by the Council and University of Basle. Castellio was a champion of religious toleration, a vigorous critic of predestination and church discipline, a spokesman for what seemed to his enemies a radically Pelagian concept of free will, and a perpetual thorn in the side of Calvin. Only because of Languet’s success in procuring a letter of support for Castellio from Melanchthon did this much beleaguered “heretic” manage to escape the fate of other renegades like Michael Servetus, death by fire. Castellio was Languet’s close friend, as Nicollier-de Weck describes him, and a figure admired by other figures intimately tied to Languet’s circle, including Camerarius the Younger and Robert Beale.79 Alluding briefly to Languet’s troubled history with Calvin and his close friendship with Castellio is one means of localizing and historicizing that version of Reformed Christianity into which Sidney was introduced during his education on the Continent. For, sharp as the disagreements were between Melanchthon and Calvin, Languet and his circle—while faithful to the teachings of Luther as they were filtered through Philippist Wittenberg—both practiced a version of piety wholly divorced from speculative theology and cultivated friendly relationships with figures at what can only be called the liberal fringe of contemporary Reformed Christianity. Of course, Languet cultivated friendly relationships with moderate Catholics too—he even made overtures to the Gnesio-Lutherans—but highlighting the contact with Castellio enhances a major point: the studied pursuit of freedom from confessional conflict, the urgent quest for agreement on fundamentals, through reasoned argument and limited toleration, that defined the Philippists in their pragmatic quest for freedom from the oppressive tyranny of ignorance and Rome.80

78 For Calvin’s debts to Melanchthon’s exegetical practice, see John L. Thompson, “Calvin as a Biblical Interpreter,” in The Cambridge Companion to Calvin, p. 58–73 and Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin, p. 108–17. 79 For a full discussion of Languet’s involvement in the Castellio affair, see Nicollierde Weck, p. 59–73. Castellio was dead by 1563, but he remained a figure of considerable importance for at least one of Sidney’s close associates. Robert Beale, while Clerk of the Queen’s council, received a pointed letter of rebuke for distributing to London’s schools a translation of Castellio’s De fide; see Sebastien Castellion: Sa Vie et Son Oeuvre, ed. Ferdinand Buisson (Paris: Libraire Hachette, 1892), vol. 2, 499. For Beale’s use of adiaphora in defense of “a Christian toleration” and liberty of conscience, see John Strype, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), vol. 1, 283–8; vol. 3, 87–98. 80 In view of their apocalyptic politics, the Philippists’ ready identification of the Pope with the Antichrist and their hatred for Tridentine Catholicism, it is necessary to write, almost oxymoronically, about their dedication to a “limited toleration”—limited to Christian

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In light of the pious intentions that motivated this studied pursuit, it is well to recall once more that Vienna was Sidney’s chief home during his three-year Continental tour, and that he spent many months there reading and studying in the company of Languet and a variety of other Philippists and so-called irenicists—intellectuals active in seeking escape from confessional warfare. In the 1570s, the city was home to Johannes Crato Von Crafftheim, Johannes Sambucus, and Charles de l’Écluse, as well as to the medical doctor and natural philosopher, Tomáš Jordan, a Moravian resident of Vienna—all of them devotees of Melanchthon. As the court physician to Maximilian II and a Silesian by birth, Crato devoted much of his later life attempting to persuade the Emperor to grant freedom of worship to the Bohemian Brethren, just as he labored to ally the Brethren to the international Reformed community in Wittenberg, Geneva, and Heidelberg. Toleration was more than a guiding principle for Crato. It was an active political goal. At Vienna, too, Sidney came into close contact with Lazarus Von Schwendi, a committed Catholic, a former military officer in the service of Charles V, and a powerful advocate in the early 1570s of religious toleration for the Empire’s churches espousing the Augsburg Confession. Horrified by the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and persuaded that the Empire would be wracked by the bloody civil wars that had afflicted France for more than a decade, Von Schwendi urged Maximilian to secure peace for the Empire by granting the kind of religious freedom enjoyed by the various confessions of Poland.81 Crato, the Reformed Christian, and Von Schwendi, the moderate Catholic, spoke in Vienna with different voices to the same purpose: pleading the indispensability of toleration for peace. Together with that wider network of Languet’s friends, such a community reinforced both by example and by precept one central message of Melanchthon’s career, the value of secular studies for pious purposes, and their collective labors as artists, natural and political philosophers, educators and politicians, enhanced his characteristically tempered estimate of the real agency of good letters and those skilled in good letters to promote moderation in the public domain. Philippism and the Defence: Including the Kinds of Poetry The moderate, ecumenically inclusive character of Sidney’s Philippist piety is everywhere apparent in the Defence. It is implicit in the text’s very setting. When Sidney opens his argument, he evokes the memory of the irenic Vienna of the Philippists and Maximilian II (the Holy Roman Emperor famous for calling himself not a Catholic but a Christian). Such moderation is implicit too in the witnesses summoned to testify on poetry’s behalf. Late in the Defence, Sidney composes a roll call of history’s worthies in order to dignify the status of poetry by highlighting the dignity of those notable individuals who have engaged in its practice. His roll-call is a model of inclusiveness. He summons to memory Hebrews and pagans (David perspectives that excluded the Antichrist of Rome, the lawless Anabaptist, the Jew, the Turk, and the atheist. 81 In addition to Louthan’s The Quest for Compromise, see Olivier Christin’s “Lazarus von Schwendi, ‘Politique’ allemand?,” in De Michel de L’Hospital, p. 85–96. Christin charts his development from a militant Catholic to a politically pragmatic proponent of toleration.


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and Sophocles), as well as ancients and moderns (the Emperor Hadrian and Robert, King of Sicily). He names “Such cardinals as Bembus and Bibiena” in parallel to the preachers and teachers, Theodore Beza and Philip Melanchthon—Roman Catholics balanced ecumenically with Protestants, and Calvin’s right-hand man with Luther’s. When Sidney expands the list, he incorporates “learned philosophers,” “great orators,” and “piercing wits,” only to conclude his roll-call by the rhetorically heightened celebration of a “grave” counsellor to be preferred “before all”: “that Hospital of France, than whom (I think) that realm never brought forth a more accomplished judgment, more firmly builded upon virtue” (131). Sidney’s praise for Michel de l’Hospital is the appropriate and pointed culmination of this internationally and ecumenically inclusive parade of worthies in honor of poetry. L’Hospital was renowned as a champion of toleration. A longtime chancellor appointed by Catherine de Medici and a Catholic, L’Hospital spent the decade of the 1560s attempting to moderate the power of the Guises against the Huguenots. As an embrace of Gallican liberty, he authored the Edict of St. Germain, the most liberal grant of toleration to the Reformed prior to the Edict of Nantes, and he opposed (at the price of his political career) the anti-Protestant acts of the Council of Trent. Praise for L’Hospital is, also, in Sidney’s Defence, praise for the friend of his friends. L’Hospital was among Mornay’s chief mentors in devising his rhetorical appeals for toleration and he was personally instrumental to Languet in his efforts to secure a lasting peace for the Huguenots in the treaty that ended the slaughters at Amboise. Languet, in turn, thought L’Hospital both a great statesman and France’s greatest living poet, an opinion whose regard for the complementarity of civil polity and the civil arts points again to his pious education by Melanchthon. This is not to imply that Sidney’s praise for L’Hospital is unprecedented. Lionized as a great statesman and humanist by his French contemporaries, Andre Thevet and Theodore Beza, L’Hospital was celebrated by the former as a devout Catholic and by the latter as a crypto-Calvinist. There are no worthies proof against refashioning, particularly in a culture where the competition among confessions made the purchase price on humanist virtue enormously high. Such efforts to cash in on his virtue are worth calling to mind, however, because they highlight all the more powerfully Sidney’s calculated ecumenicism in refusing to make L’Hospital’s confessional identity an issue.82 His virtue is celebrated above and beyond the partisanship of confessional debate, and such celebration points decisively to the Philippist character of Sidney’s piety. L’Hospital was a figure whom Sidney knew personally. The two met in Paris in 1572 just prior to the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, an event that Sidney

82 For a full discussion of the contrasting portraits, see Frank Lestringant, “Autour du portrait de Michel de l’Hospital: Bèze et Thevet,” in De Michel de L’Hospital, p. 137–50. Michel de Montaigne knew a talented Latinist when he read one, and he too lavishes praise in his essay, “Of Presumption,” on L’Hospital’s Carmina. For Languet and L’Hospital, see Nicollier-de Weck, p. 156–60. For Languet’s appreciative and amusing comments on L’Hospital, see Simon Proxenus’s Commentarii de itinere francogallico, ed. Dana Martinkova (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1979), p. 32. For Mornay’s debts to L’Hospital’s rhetoric of toleration, see Daussy, p. 308–10.

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fortunately survived, and an event that cost L’Hospital his life some six months later, so shaken was he by the ransacking of his house by the Guises’s troops and by the public humiliation of his Reformed spouse compelled to take Roman communion. There is no mention of those events in the Defence, and (remarkable for this putatively “forward Protestant”) only one mention of the Massacre in all of Sidney’s writings, and that one occurs in a private letter to Queen Elizabeth. The pious response to confessional conflict is uncompromising moderation, always the celebration of virtue transcending the divisiveness of theological wrangling. Memories of that divisiveness shadow Sidney’s celebrations of poetry’s worthy defenders: L’Hospital is long dead, the Emperor Maximilian now buried, and the Spanish influence in Prague a powerful reminder about the threat of the Catholic League against the Netherlands, the New World, and England itself. Similar to Mornay’s, Sidney’s consciously pious effort to transcend confessional debate assumes its meaning against a background of urgent cultural conflict. Sidney sympathized with the constantly reiterated aversion of his moderate friends in Vienna to religious wrangling, and he indulges in none in the Defence of Poesy and precious little elsewhere in his works. (The contrast with the sometimes splenetic Spenser or, in the next century, with the militant Milton could hardly be more dramatic.)83 Among his recent biographers, in fact, Katherine Duncan-Jones is so struck by the absence from his canon of the familiar papist-bashing of his contemporaries that she goes one step further than that contemporary Jesuit with whom Sidney conversed in Prague, Edmund Campion, to suggest that Sidney was not merely susceptible to conversion to Catholicism, but also that he actually became a crypto-Catholic.84 Other biographical connections are cited in support of this claim, including Sidney’s subsequent kindness to Lady Kytson, a Roman Catholic, in his (mistaken) efforts to reassure her that “a general mitigation” in recusancy laws would ease her family’s burden, and Sidney’s role as facilitator for some well-known Catholic gentry to establish a plantation in the New World, promising liberty of conscience as well as a handsome financial return.85 Evident in his literary 83 Militant Milton needs no illustration, but splenetic Spenser may. As Error’s “Impes of heaven accurst” drink their mother’s blood until their full bellies burst and bowels gush forth, Spenser launches what is arguably one of his more grisly assaults on the monstrosity of Roman Catholic error (Faerie Queene, I. i. 26). Sidney usually avoids, by pious and political principle, even the appearance of this sort of partisan attack. 84 Duncan-Jones writes that “Perhaps Sidney really was a discreet Catholic fellow traveler for a while after his meetings with Campion,” p. 127. 85 For the letter to Lady Kytson, see Feuillerat, vol. 3, 134–5. Wallace, too, notes Sidney’s aversion to anti-Catholic prejudice, but ascribes that aversion—less sensationally, if more sentimentally—to his “natural goodness of heart,” p. 287. For fuller accounts of these incidents from the life (without the suspicion of cryto-Catholicism), see Stewart, p. 242–3 and p. 265–76. It is interesting to note Stewart’s real surprise that Sidney could have supported “freedom of conscience” for Catholics, and his ascription—by consequence—of Sidney’s involvement in the plantation scheme to patriotic, not to pious motives. For a more detailed, more recent version of Sidney as crypto-Catholic, see Duncan-Jones, “Sir Philip Sidney’s Debt to Edmund Campion,” in The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits, ed. Thomas M. McCoog (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1996), p. 85–102.


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productions as well as in his sometimes unusually kind treatment of contemporary English Catholics, Sidney’s moderation scarcely needs explanation, however, as the product of some putative crypto-Catholicism. His moderation is better explained by its consistency with the practice of his friends, Languet and Mornay—who themselves regularly cultivated friendships with distinguished Catholics—and by its accord with one of the guiding principles of his Philippism, its studied aversion to confessional divisions among Christians. Those principles are everywhere on display in the Defence, especially at crucial moments of the argument that threaten to occasion theological wrangling. For instance, when Sidney concludes his discussion of the golden world by signaling the poet’s distinctive power to address humankind’s fallen condition, he can do so intelligibly, as this argument has indicated, only because he shares the optimism of a Melanchthon and the Philippists about human agency—the zodiacal range of the wit, the ameliorative potential of the will. But in good Philippist style, no theological arguments are forthcoming to bolster these optimistic assumptions. Sidney was too courtly, too urbane, and too pious to indulge in wrangling—his piety complementing here as everywhere in the Defence his stylish, humanistically inflected cosmopolitanism. Instead, in acknowledgment of the minority status of his own convictions, pious and poetic, knowing how his arguments will by few either be understood or granted, he moves “to a more ordinary” consideration of the matter— to the definition of poetry as an art of imitation and the delimitation of three varieties of poets (101). As Sidney constructs those categories, accommodating as he so often does Scaliger’s immensely influential Italianate Poetics to his own English ends, his work again sheds light on the anthropological assumptions of the Defence, and their origins in Philippist piety. It is revealing to note changes that Sidney makes while accommodating Scaliger’s categories to his argument. Even by the loose standards of the Poetics, Scaliger’s discriminations among the major kinds of poets are shifting and provisional. Introductory discussions suggesting distinctions to be drawn according to “poetical inspiration,” give way to proposed groupings by historical age, and to a final attempt to achieve a scheme for understanding kinds of poetry by a consideration of “subjects.”86 That final attempt promises a three-fold grouping, one that consists of religious poets (pagan), one of philosophical poets, and some never-named group that Scaliger apparently forgets to discuss as he wanders into considerations about famous women writers and the Sibylls. A moment later, when considering whether Lucan was a real poet, Scaliger asserts that he must be one, since “Verse is the property of the poet.”87 For the methodically minded Sidney, educated in the new hermeneutic, this sort of vagary simply would not do. Sidney chooses to discriminate among kinds of poets by attending to their scope— clarified in this instance by attention to the different targets of their imitations. Sidney transforms Scaliger’s category of pagan prophetic poets into “the first and most noble 86 Padelford, Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics, p. 16. On Sidney’s debts to Scaliger, see S.K. Heninger’s Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker, esp. Chapter 4, “Critics on Imitation,” p. 127–222. 87 Scaliger, p. 17.

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sort,” vates, by adding sacred poets to the discussion—for instance, the David of the Psalms and the Solomon of the Song of Songs. Their objects of imitation are “the inconceivable excellencies of God”—excellencies that they are enabled poetically to conceive, like David, because they have “eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith,” and excellencies, in turn, that become conceivable to the mind as faith (energized by the poetic image) performs its work of clarification (99). Sidney’s second group is as derivative as it is ultimately dismissible, consisting of those philosophical, historical, natural and moral poets whose imitations stay “wrapped within the fold of the proposed subject”—who counterfeit, that is, only by copying the brazen world of nature (102). The third category consists of those “right poets,” who imitating nothing but “what may be and should be,” create speaking pictures of virtue and vice, both to move and to instruct as “the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed” (102–3). Sidney’s vocabulary brings several specific advantages to his argument. As a method by which to create distinctions, it concentrates attention on the “right poets, of whom chiefly this question ariseth”—the poets who work by “human conceit,” and who by reason of their debased reputation, most need defending (102). While making distinctions, his attention to scope also signals priorities. David’s Psalms are more excellent poetry than even, say, Virgil’s Aeneid, “as eternity exceedeth a moment” (Sidney writes later in considering the scope of the divine), and his judgment about their excellence is consistent both with his personal piety and with his sense about poetic excellency residing in the Idea or foreconceit imitated by the writer (106).88 The inconceivable excellencies of God—at once conceived by the eyes cleared by faith and at the same time clearing the eyes for faith—are more excellent than the Idea of magnanimity figured forth in Aeneas. By comparison with Scaliger’s, Sidney’s categorization of poets is a model of clarity. But the categories are considerably more tricky to distinguish than might at first appear, depending on assumptions that we bring to them about the boundary lines between the sacred and the secular. Assumptions are crucial here. For instance, in the same sentence that Sidney calls his prophetic poets or vates the “most noble sort,” he claims for the “right poets … the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed” (102–3). Perhaps prophecy is not to be considered a form of learning, or perhaps (more likely) Sidney is for the moment restricting his attention to human learning. More tricky still is the claim made just before these remarks on nobility. In the sentence immediately prior, Sidney defines the characteristic activity of the right poet as ranging “into the divine consideration” of what may be and should be (102). This remark seems more difficult to explain—or to explain away, since it is 88 For Prescott’s commentary on Sidney’s Davidic-inspired effort “to turn the reader’s own gaze inward,” see “King David as a ‘Right Poet’: Sidney and the Psalmist,” 131–51. She is correct in disagreeing with Robinson’s assertion that “There could be no speaking picture … of wisdom received through grace” p. 101, since Sidney’s whole purpose is to argue the poet’s skill in creating such speaking pictures. This is a point illustrating at the conjunction of aesthetics and theology another enormous gap between Sidney and Calvin—for whom, of course, any effort to image the excellencies of God would have been idolatry. Raiger attempts (for obvious reasons) to have Sidney retract that point (“despite what Sidney himself suggests”), 47.


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difficult to know in what sense the term “divine” applies to the inventions of human conceit. These are just two of the many statements in the Defence that trouble the neatly conceived boundary lines established between the vates on the one hand and the “right poets” on the other—trouble, that is, if we assume that those boundary lines between the first and the third categories of poets (between the vates and the right poets) reflect a division between the sacred and the secular. This is precisely the assumption that needs to be undone in order to understand better how Sidney’s Philippist piety informs his poetics. Sidney clearly does not attribute inspiration to the right poet (he explicitly rejects the Ion’s characterization of poetry as the “very inspiring of a divine force”), yet he claims that the right poet creates “with the force of a divine breath” (130, 101). Poetic making bears a likeness to divine making, but does not proceed from divine inspiration. Sidney just as clearly acknowledges real distinctions between the ethic and politic ends that define the humane sciences and the scope of divinity (knowledge about God), but when he discusses “the knowledge of a man’s self,” he describes that architectonic knowledge in close conjunction with humane learning that leads the individual to “the enjoying of his own divine essence” (104). It has been suggested that such statements are purely the products of rhetoric—the right poet benefiting from verbal association with his higher-ups.89 Sidney is not above employing such rhetorical tactics here or elsewhere in the canon, but there are other, more coherent explanations for those associations. At key moments like these, Sidney is a considerably more careful and methodical thinker than he is ordinarily credited for being. Right poets and vates are so frequently associated in the Defence, first, because of the intimate connections that Sidney identifies between humane and sacred poetry. Both are species of eloquence, and as his education in the new hermeneutic taught him, both employ the best tools of the Greco-Roman tradition in order to achieve their best effects. David’s “notable prosopopeias” which “make you, as it were, see God coming in His majesty,” are textbook examples of a rhetorical device for amplifying poetic power, one available to humane and sacred poets alike (99). Hence, David is an altogether appropriate model for right poets, just as Sidney reminds us that the divine orator, Paul, can turn to classical tragedy for exemplary matter of his own. So too, Sidney balances a discussion of energeia in love poetry with a call for piously intentioned songs and sonnets, partly because the oratorical strategy in both categories of poetry is one and the same. Again, that same logic emerges in a later portion of the Defence’s discussion of admiration, so crucial to the “delightful teaching which is the end of Poesy” (137). Even though Plautus and Terence are the traditional authorities for illustrating delight in the theater, Sidney reserves his highest praise for “the tragedies of Buchanan” since they “do justly bring forth a divine admiration” (137). Plautus and Buchanan are distinguishable (perhaps) by their different “scopes,” but because the oratorical tools available to both are the same, they can be associated in the always syncretic, always inclusive web of Sidney’s critical argument. It is necessary to add a “perhaps” to that 89 See Sinfield’s Faultlines, for example, p. 202–3 on Sidney’s effort to encourage “confusion.”

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observation, however, in order to challenge more pointedly those usual assumptions about how to discriminate between the right poet and the vates. On what basis do we assume that Sidney would have judged Buchanan’s work prophetic or inspired? Or the poetry of Melanchthon and Beza, also singled out for praise in the Defence? And if not inspired, are those examples of poetry (although sacred in subject) better considered true species of right poetry? If the distinctions among kinds of poets are constructed on the basis of scope—the difference between their imitative marks or objects—what scope does Sidney imagine for human conceit? When Sidney attends to the moral commonplaces of Christ employed in his parables, he does so in conjunction with the pretty allegories of Aesop (both illustrate the virtues of claritas). When he offers exemplary proofs of the “strange effects” of poetry in working its metamorphic power over the plebeian and the prince, the public man and the private, the community and the individual, he again balances, deliberately and self-consciously, humane and sacred texts—the stories of Agrippa and Nathan (114). The metamorphic power of humane letters is paired with the metamorphic power of the divine, as Agrippa’s agency in transforming the unruly members of Rome’s body politic into what it naturally should be (“the whole people”) is made coincident with Nathan’s skill in creating a story to restore the adulterous David to holiness (wholeness of nature) [114]. The pattern of association is too frequent not to be intentional, and while pointing in illustrative style to Sidney’s deep Philippist convictions about the close relationship between humane and sacred letters, the closeness of that relationship matters, in turn, for reasons that at once motivate and transcend considerations about poetics. Humane and sacred letters are so closely associated in art because the human and the divine are so closely bound together in Sidney’s thinking about nature. An absolute division between the secular and the sacred—the gulf that yawns in Calvin’s theology between helpless man and omnipotent God—is irreconcilable with a conception of “human conceit” presented in terms of a still-erect Adamic wit, ranging in a zodiac of Ideas, whose authority is attributed to “natural conceit” and whose self-knowledge entails a discovery of “divine essence.” Instead, Sidney’s thinking about human nature models the pious epistemology of both Melanchthon and Mornay, two of those “learned men” to whom the Defence quietly alludes as having “learnedly thought that … the inward light each mind hath in itself is as good as a philosopher’s book; seeing in Nature we know it is well to do well, and what is well and what is evil” (113). That epistemology is “pious” since it assumes that God is the author of those innate ideas implanted in the mind, and “pious” too since those notitiae—those “notable images of virtue and vice” (everywhere the subject of Sidney’s puns)—convey truths ascending from moral commonplaces to knowledge about the soul’s afterlife. The scope of human conceit is not limited, then, to matters of ethic and politic consideration (as they are classically understood), and is not be confused, anachronistically, with a contemporary understanding of the secular. It is a scope limited, in fact, only by its inability to conceive (until eyes are cleared by faith) the inconceivable excellencies of God—not all of which, including his justice, goodness, providence and chastity—are beyond our natural power to “see” and to know.


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The nature of the human story reflects the divine character of nature itself. The Defence’s opening narration celebrates poetry as “the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse” and poets as the first “deliverers of their knowledge to posterity,” the antiquity of poetry underscored by its adaptation among the ancient philosophers, who originally went “under the masks of poets,” and then by ancient historians, who “have been glad” to borrow its fashion and “perchance weight” (96–7). Sidney’s purpose in narrating this background is less historical than anthropological, as his further reflections about the popularity of poetry among the Turks, the Irish, and the “most barbarous and simple Indians” indicate. As he attends to the power of its “sweet delights” to soften and sharpen “hard dull wits,” the point is not that poetry is primitive, but instead that it is primary (98). And this is a point Sidney makes “notably” about an art “not more notable in soon beginning than in long continuing” because of poetry’s intimate identification with the notitiae, those sparks of natural knowledge innate to the mind that are, at once, the source of the arts and evidence of God’s providence inscribed in his creations (96, 98). Poetry is as primary to the nurturing of civilization as the notitiae are to the growth of the mind. Here, in Sidney’s narration about the growth of human civilizations, phylogeny (the history of the species) recapitulates ontogeny (the development of the individual). Nature is destiny, and epistemology the prophetic map of cultural— not just individual—history. Or to proceed one step further in his strategically organized reflections, that identification of the primitive with the primary, of notable arts with the notitiae, accounts too for Sidney’s willingness—in the face of “vain and godless superstition”—to acknowledge that it was not “altogether without ground” that pagans recognized in poetry “some divine force” (98–9). As in Mornay and Melanchthon, historical anthropology shadows providential purposes. The pre-Christian past is always instinct with meaning for the present because nature speaks eloquently at all times about God, even as poetry’s natural eloquence (with its “number and measure in words and … high flying liberty of conceit”) appears godlike in delivering the knowledge upon which civilization depends for its maturity. Poetry is no more dispensable to culture than mother’s milk to infants or ancestors’ deeds to heroes. Consider again how much power Sidney attributes to nature in the Defence. Nature (natura naturans) is that great creating force with which the poet walks hand in hand—a speaking picture of the cooperation of the maker and his Maker, the human and the divine. It is also, as the previous chapter has indicated, the force energizing humankind in its appetite for goodness. While Melanchthon and Mornay write about the goodness of natural love implanted in all animate beings by God as στoργὴ—best exemplified by the mutual love of parents and children—Sidney substitutes for the abstract philosophical term (as poets are apt to do) speaking pictures of the virtue. When the reader is made to see Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, the “form of goodness,” poetically depicted, “cannot but” be loved, he argues. That argument, in turn, has force both because Sidney knows something about the power of Virgilian verse (as a rhetorical construction) and also because Sidney realizes that Virgil has tapped into power that exists at once “naturally” and divinely, those feelings of στoργὴ that bind one family member to another. Poets are able “to plant goodness even in the secretest cabinet of our souls” only because of

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the human appetite for virtue, and that human appetite for virtue is asserted only because of the remarkable pious assumptions about nature at play in the text. What the will wills—by nature—is virtue. Sin, by contrast, is the unnatural consequence of the infected will—from whose tyrannical consequences it is the poet’s special business to liberate us. From which of those consequences, however? Only from the moral and political forms of tyranny— however strange that only should sound? Or does the Defence imply stronger saving powers for the right poets? When Sidney discusses the persuasive power of poetic delight, he does so with reference to the dramatist’s portrayal of “things that have a conveniency to ourselves or to the general nature” (136). His discussion of delight is fascinating, partly because it permits him to explore psychologically the existential basis for the poet’s power to move and teach his readers—what it is about ourselves by nature that enables delight to be elicited. Partly, too, the discussion merits attention because of the transition that it affords between praise of classical comedy and (to recall the passage once more) the celebration of Buchanan’s tragedies for justly bringing forth “a divine admiration” (137). Unpacking Sidney’s divine pun is instructive. In the best known of Buchanan’s dramas, his tragedy of John the Baptist, Buchanan inspires the highest (or “divine”) admiration because of his poetic talent—his skill in delighting us with a narrative that speaks to (has a conveniency) “to ourselves or the general nature.” At the same time, Buchanan inspires “a divine admiration” because that narrative speaks to our nature about real human needs—the need to be liberated from the tyranny of illegitimate sovereigns and sovereign sin, and thereby inspires, too, an admiration for the “divine.” The tragedy is divine in method and in matter, as Sidney’s pun reveals, and that pun has a revealing consequence. For if admiration is a virtue that moves the will—as clearly it does—then Buchanan’s right poetry is a vehicle, in the language of Chrysostom and Melanchthon, for “he who wills to find a way.” The old boundaries will not do. Sidney’s distinction between the vates and the “right poets” simply does not answer to anachronistically conceived boundaries between the sacred and the secular. Against Scaliger’s effort to make “verse” the distinctive characteristic of the poet, Sidney identifies the enjoyment of selfknowledge—the knowledge sparked into life by fiction’s notable images of virtue and vice—as poetry’s distinguishing activity. Such knowledge transcends the categories of the sacred and the secular since its scope is awareness of one’s own divine essence, an “architectonic” species of knowledge whose history begins with Aristotle but whose determinative significance derives from Melanchthon. The God who reveals himself to human beings through the exercise of reason is what Melanchthon calls repeatedly the Mens Architectatrix (the architectural mind). At once reminiscent of the demiurge from Plato’s Timaeus and the prime mover from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Melanchthon’s Mens Architectatrix manifests himself first and foremost as a maker, the maker of rational beings who inhabit a rationally constructed universe whose purpose is everywhere the same: to invite those beings to discover how and why their maker made them. Sidney’s phrase, “how and why their maker made them,” applied to readers of poetry, makes a fair translation of this central argument from the Liber de Anima: “Ita condita est hominum natura divinitus, ut fieri cogitationes in nobis, et formari ac ordinari imagines sciamus.”


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(Thus did God make human nature: so that we should come to know how thoughts and images are formed and ordered in ourselves.)90 If it is important to recognize, as Chapter 2 has argued, that Sidney’s golden world is more than a mere metaphor, that it is a concept determining the structure of fictions shaped according to specific philosophical (and pious!) assumptions— assumptions, for instance, about the rational design of the cosmos, its transparency to interpretation, and its purposefulness—then it matters, too, to recognize cognate conceptions about the Maker both in Mornay’s vision of God as the Divine Archer and in Melanchthon’s depictions of the creator as Mens Architectatrix. These are conceptions—infused by confidence about the goodness of nature—circulating among Protestants and Reformed Christians alike that challenge the adequacy of traditionally narrow views (within Sidney studies) about the limits of Reformation belief. When Sidney writes about self-knowledge as the scope of human learning, and identifies the discovery of our “divine essence” as key to obtaining that scope, he prepares the groundwork for celebrating poetry as architectonike, “the highest end of mistress knowledge.” That groundwork is prepared because Sidney endows the poet with the attribute most distinctive of the human being conceived as a mimesis—a representing, counterfeiting or figuring forth—of the “divine essence.” The poet is a maker who best imitates the divine as he imitates aright. The distinction between Sidney’s vates and his “right poet” is configured strictly and characteristically in terms of the scope that the Defence defines for each. The main purpose of the vates, like David in his Psalms or like those pious lyric poets whom Sidney hopes to summon into being during his review of English poetry, is to write in praise of God, providing thereby an outlet for joy in the divine and relief from affliction: “this poesy must be used by whosoever will follow St James’s counsel in singing psalms when they are merry, and I know is used with the fruit of comfort by some, when, in sorrowful pangs of their death-bringing sins, they find the consolation of the never-leaving goodness” (102). By contrast, the main purpose of the right poet, like Virgil in his Aeneid or like Christ in his parables, is to fashion speaking pictures of virtue and vice that restore through the art of the poet’s zodiacal wit the now infected (and de-natured) will to its original—its truly Natural—condition of goodness. The subject of the vates is God, the subject of the right poet is humankind. The vates creates a poetry of contemplation—we see in David’s Psalms the otherwise inconceivable excellencies of God. The right poet creates a poetry of action—we are moved by speaking pictures of virtue and vice to act virtuously ourselves. However, just as the vates is credited in his contemplative work with the power to inspire actions of good consequence (expressions of joy and consolation), so too the right poet’s ability to move depends, first, on his architectonic power to impart 90 CR 13, 121. Once more, the power of the Gospel awakens in the mind its own natural likeness to the trinity of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—an Augustinian expression of the argument that Melanchthon proceeds to elaborate. For Melanchthon, the mind’s very power to create images is a reflection of its innate divinity, a shadow of that divine act of creation in which God the Father produces from his own intellection the Son, as a perfect image of himself.

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(contemplatively) real self-knowledge. And, once more, just as the vates is regarded from the vantage of the human (with human needs for joy and consolation in mind), so too “the right poet” has a purpose inextricably connected to God—since selfknowledge entails in Sidney’s distinctively Christian anthropology, an enjoyment of what is divine in one’s own nature. Both kinds of poetry have the power to relate the human to the divine, each with its own scope—its own distinctive end—each with its own distinctive and appropriate balance of action and contemplation.91 In the most carefully considered sense of the term, then, Sidney’s categories of poets are a mutually complementary instance of his Philippism at work, as the reflection of his piety and the instrument of that humanism by which piety assumes poetic form in enhancing our liberation from the sovereignty of sin. It is well to emphasize Sidney’s energy in reinforcing by message and by manner the “enjoyment” of divine essence as key to piety and poetics. The playfulness of his text is irrepressible, constant, and nowhere more visible or more serious than in his purposeful toying with the boundary lines between the secular and the sacred. At times, he seems bent on startling his readers into attention—the juxtaposition of Christ and Aesop as types of the right poet surprises, and such surprises are frequent. David the Psalmist is poetry’s hero, David the adulterer is a poetry’s patient, and those dual roles register, by their surprising contrast, Sidney’s Philippist vision of sanctification as an ongoing process—the reality of sin even for the saintly, the recurrent need always for Law (natural law embodied in Nathan’s tale of the sheep). At other moments, Sidney cultivates a teasing, deliberately coy mode of discourse that relates while refusing to equate. In weighing poetry’s value to human nature, core concerns about the erected wit and the infected will resonate theologically because of the explicit recall of Adam’s “first accursed fall,” but when Sidney characterizes the world of the poet’s making as superior to the fallen one, he describes it as “golden” not Edenic. Classical language and mythology enter the argument as a means, at once, of relating that idealized and potentially restorative world of the poet’s making to the Christian paradise—to that place where Adam and Eve enjoyed a natural concord between their wits and wills—without equating the poet’s golden world to Eden or, one step further removed, to a Miltonic “paradise within, happier far.” Classical allusion asserts relationship, as it cools identification in acts of rhetorical gamesmanship that tease us into discovering significant relationships even as we are admonished to refuse easy equivalences. It is significant that the “right poet” is empowered, by his instruction of the wit and his moving of the will, to bring new concord to those faculties disrupted by the fall, but the justice that the poet restores (as the classical framing reminds us) is akin to Edenic concord, 91 Raiger has several interesting pages on Sidney’s three categories of poets that attempt to make sense of those categories—as my own do—by reference to the final end, aim, or mark of the poets’ mimetic acts, 28–32. His discussion anticipates mine, and I gratefully acknowledge his lead. However, attempting to impose a Calvinist paradigm on Sidney’s text, Raiger interprets those categories very differently, as he argues on behalf of an unbridgeable gap between the vates “who marks the separation between Creation and God” and the right poet “who presents an image of goodness that is within reach of the human” (30).


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not equivalent to that justification imputed by God’s grace. Just as the Romans are made a “whole people” again by Agrippa’s tale, so David is made whole again by Nathan’s story—but, Sidney cautiously adds, poetry is the “second and instrumental cause” of that event in which God’s grace figures first (115). Again, gamesmanship refuses to equate what it relates, so that we discover how and why that maker made his text in the process of sorting through and making distinctions between what belongs to humane conceit and what to divine, what concord attends to Law, what comes from Gospel. Refuse to play that game and heavy-handed irony can quickly discover in Sidney’s classical allusions or their Christian counterparts evidence of the Defence’s parodic deconstruction of its own arguments. Refuse to play that game and supremely sober assertions about Sidney’s “Calvinism” or “Protestantism” or “evangelical Christianity” can just as quickly twist his argument into an exclusive celebration of divine poetry or a celebration of right poetry as exclusively valued by its channeling of grace. Sometimes poetic energy is channeled into wooing a mistress, and Sidney’s piety is sufficiently cosmopolitan to be unembarrassed by that fact, just as Sidney is sufficiently savvy to appreciate the analogy between human love and the divine. Amidst the serious gamesmanship of the Defence, enjoying our divine essence means appreciating both the relatedness and the distinction—our likeness to God and our (fallen) difference from him. The right historical context for recovering the rules of that game is indicated briefly and best by Sidney’s own serious gamesmanship on the eve of his death. In Fulke Greville’s account of the event, Sidney entreated the “quire of divine Philosophers” assembled about his deathbed: “to deliver the opinion of the ancient Heathen, touching the immortality of the soul: First, to see what true knowledge she retains of her own essence, out of the light of her self; then to parallel with it the most pregnant authorities of the old and new Testament, as supernatural revelations, sealed up from our flesh, for the divine light of faith to reveal, and work by.”92 Only Sidney’s most intimate friends could have been aware of the complexity of the game he was playing. Readers of his poetry recognize his gamesmanship at once. At the moment of his death, Sidney was attempting to step from life into fiction, by inserting himself into the fourth book of his own Old Arcadia and rehearsing the actions of his princely heroes, who confronting death, like him contemplate arguments on behalf of the soul’s immortality. In the face of impending mortality, they contemplate the soul’s destiny to preserve quiet of mind. So too their maker. A Cyrus made by his own Cyruses, Sidney becomes on his deathbed the exemplary image of his own creations, Pyrocles and Musidorus. It is not only readers of the Defence who are expected to take seriously his poetics of accommodation. Sidney himself enacted that poetics in his death—and enacted that poetics with a difference that speaks to the character and quality of his piety. Beyond the arguments of the pagans and his own Arcadia, through a process of sorting and refining, of relating without equating knowledge that comes from the soul’s own light with knowledge that comes from divine light, Sidney had that “quire of … Philosophers”—an appropriately cosmopolitan assembly of “excellent men, of divers Nations”—proceed to “the most pregnant authorities of the old, and new 92 Greville, p. 157.

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Testament.” Beyond the “ancient Heathen,” he requests the divines assembled about his deathbed to proceed to “the most pregnant authorities” of the Bible. Sidney’s serious gamesmanship extended as it enacted his own Arcadia, as a recapitulation at his deathbed of the inclusive, cosmopolitan Christianity of that other Philip whom he loved and admired, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. For Sidney’s wish to have been granted, that same choir of “divine Philosophers” would only had to have opened a copy of Mornay’s De veritate, and proceeded past its dedication to Hubert Languet, to rehearse the desired argument, step-by-step, in its full scope—inclusively, and with cosmopolitan piety, rehearsing arguments from the ancient heathens to the divine scriptures. Pious Conclusions When Sidney promises at his argument’s outset an account of poetry “such as, being rightly applied, deserveth not to be scourged out of the Church of God,” he seems at once both to enable and to foreclose a description of the Defence as a Protestant poetics (99). That is a paradox worth exploring. His promise is so obviously enabling, on the one hand, because if poetry, rightly applied, has a place in the work of the church—and even that exegetically inflected “applied” speaks to pious purposes— then poetry has the power both potentially (in an imagined future of English verse) and actually (in the Psalms of David, the parables of Christ, and the tragedies of Buchanan) to do God’s work. On the other hand, even as it is expressed, Sidney’s promise seems simultaneously to foreclose such a description because of what can only be called the perceptibly hesitant, carefully delimited character of its rhetorical construction. Sidney’s argument that the poet deserves not to be scourged from the Church (witness Christ and the money changers) is different in kind from a Du Bartas-style delimitation of poetic scope to a strictly divine aim or purpose. Poetry rightly applied belongs in church, but it seems very well to belong too in court, in the university, in the schoolrooms where Aesop is taught, in the camps of warriors, and in the by-ways of cities where blind crowders sing the deeds of Percy and Douglas. Perhaps Alan Sinfield, by virtue of special revelation, has better insight into the text’s “only partly occulted desires,” but it does seem that had Sidney wished to write a Protestant poetics—a poetics uniquely dedicated to the celebration of godly matters—he would have done so. Sidney was, by education and disposition, too committed a humanist to restrict poetry to that end, and to dispense with the pleasure and the profit of that large and cosmopolitan body of humane letters that he cites everywhere in support of the value of poetry and as a model for the production of a contemporary English literature. Those critics who have advocated a description of the Defence as a Protestant poetics take wrong ways, then, not only in their misapplication of an historically inaccurate “Calvinist” paradigm to the text, but also in their underestimation of Sidney’s humanism. One appeal of replacing the traditional critical vocabulary of “Protestant poetics” by the new historically specific terminology of “Philippism,” is the usefulness of that terminology in preserving the demonstrable power of Sidney’s humanist commitments to the argument of the Defence. To define the Defence as a “Philippist,”


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not a Calvinist, text is a special kind of critical proposition, very different from appealing for a trade-off of one label of confessional allegiance for another. For, properly considered in terms of their own historical activities and commitments, Languet and his circle in Vienna did not constitute a distinct religious confession— much less a Robinson or a Rogers in England. First and foremost, the Philippists were humanists—and anti-confessional humanists at that—whose labors across a full spectrum of arts and sciences (a sort of zodiac of elite disciplinary enterprises) were both inspired and informed by the deeply civilized piety of Philip Melanchthon—for so many of them, their “teacher,” as Languet most often calls him. Melanchthon’s inspiration, in turn, provides a second major reason why applying a “Philippist” label to the Defence carries persuasive critical appeal. For while grounding the text inside a community whose labors served to contextualize and, no doubt, to validate Sidney’s assertiveness about the worth of secular studies, “Philippism” has explanatory force, also, in accounting for the importance of piety to its arguments. Against the too general neglect of the religious in Sidney studies as a whole and the too forward-looking characterization of his critical work as fully modern and therefore fully secularized—the argument of A.C. Hamilton among others—Sidney’s Philippist education accounts for the Christian anthropology of the Defence’s key arguments about poetic scope and for its persistent reference to the divine as the ultimate standard by which to value all things human.93 Once more, Melanchthon’s inspiration matters, as it came to Sidney through the mediation of his Philippist mentor and friends, because its carefully moderated optimism about human agency—its assertiveness about the strength of reason and the cooperative power of the will and, most signally, its celebration of that agency’s scope in securing freedom from the sovereignty of sin—supplies precisely the right context for understanding the purpose of Sidney’s argument. And how would Sidney himself have characterized the role of piety in his own Defence of Poesy? Speculative as the answer to this question must be, it is one worth posing seriously. It is unlikely that he would have called himself a Calvinist, a Lutheran, or even—surprising as this admission must initially sound—a Philippist. Although current in the vocabulary of sixteenth-century Europe, “Philippism” was not a term employed by Languet and his circle. As Beatrice Nicollier-de Weck indicates, “Philippism” was most often used as a term of abuse by rival factions of Gnesio-Lutherans to stigmatize those who remained faithful to Melanchthon’s teachings. The Philippists as a group were disinclined to identify themselves by a party-political label, and this disinclination is fully comprehensible in terms of their repeated expressions of horror about disputatious theology, and their studied pursuit of evangelical unity. To follow Melanchthon, according to such logic, and the tendency to identify Melanchthonian Lutheranism with true Lutheranism, and true Lutheranism, in turn, with the “cause”—with the triumph of God’s true church—meant, at least in principle, being a true Christian, rather than a sectarian or a party advocate. Sidney’s answer to the question would have been the same as Maximilian II’s. He would have ascribed the piety of his Defence neither to Calvin 93 See his essay, “Sidney’s Humanism,” in Sir Philip Sidney’s Literary Achievements, p. 117–18.

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nor to Melanchthon, but to Christ. In this important regard, as in others, he shared Mornay’s ambition to create a pathway of moderation beyond the confessional disputes of late sixteenth-century Europe. Even if such an estimation is right, however, the answers that scholars give to questions of this kind are sometimes necessarily different from the answers that might be supplied by the actors in those historical dramas we study. With increasing frequency and greater historical specificity and precision, contemporary scholars of early modern Europe have revived the vocabulary of Philippism in order to identify an important body of humanists who held in common distinctive political, religious, and educational convictions, and who so readily, like Languet, ascribed their debt for those convictions to their preceptor, Melanchthon. Without that vocabulary, that community would go nameless, and its labors—to borrow a phrase from Sidney— would die from the earth for want of an epitaph.

Chapter 4

“Captived to the truth of a foolish world”: Poetry and the Politics of Tyranny Exemplary Tyrants and Aesthetic Barbarians While prosecuting what the Defence of Poesy calls a “civil war among the Muses,” Sidney marshals an especially crucial argument against the muse of history (96). “Many times a terror from well-doing, and an encouragement to unbridled wickedness,” the historical muse sounds the voice not of truth and moral persuasion, but instead of political turpitude (111). Just consider the kinds of stories that fill history’s “old mouse-eaten records,” Sidney asks (105). Cypselus, Periander, Phalaris, and Dionysius were all real-world tyrants who enjoyed quiet deaths, unpunished for their crimes. Discredited by its own mouse-eaten records, history’s culturally familiar moral power emerges from the Defence as considerably less than exemplary, both because of the existence of such stories and also more importantly because of the character of historical narrative itself. “Captived to the truth of a foolish world,” history is condemned to narrating over and again the triumphs of tyranny (111). With an audacity as sly as it is comically hyperbolic, the Defence disposes in a few curt, ironically pointed sentences of centuries of humanistically inspired commentary on history’s exemplary moral power. It is hardly the historian’s fault that he is compelled to tell the truth, Sidney might have admitted if pressed, but therein lies the critical point. Historical truth is simply inadequate, given the foolishness of the world, to the demands of historical life. It is useful to begin with renewed attention to how Sidney configures the relationship between poetry and history in his Defence since that relationship is crucial for understanding his preoccupation with tyranny in the text as a whole and for reevaluating the connection between his poetics and his politics. Tyranny has attracted a great deal of attention in studies of The New Arcadia, but little has been written about the tyrants who populate the Defence in such numbers.1 It is not only

1 For a recent review of scholarship about tyranny in the Arcadias, see Worden, p. 3–20. See William D. Briggs, “Political Ideas in Sidney’s Arcadia,” Studies in Philology 28 (1931), 137–61; Irving B. Ribner, “Sir Philip Sidney on Civil Insurrection,” Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1952), 257–65; Ernest W. Talbert, The Problem of Order: Elizabethan Political Commonplaces and an Example of Shakespeare’s Art (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1962); Martin Bergbusch, “Rebellion in The New Arcadia,” Philological Quarterly 53 (1974), 29–41 and “The ‘Subalterne Magistrate’ in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia: A Study of the

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when taking the historian to task for his disciplinary shortfalls that Sidney interests us in tyranny. He muses too upon the failures of the philosopher. Plato’s real-life enslavement at the hands of Dionysius, the Sicilian tyrant whose education in virtue he failed to procure, becomes shorthand for the failure of philosophy generally in its confrontation with tyranny. In turn, the metamorphosis of Hiero I from tyrant to just king is credited to Simonides and Pindar, as another tribute to the superior powers of the poet (128). When Sidney wants to exemplify the “eikastic” powers of poetry— its capacity to “‘figure forth good things’”—he does so, centrally, by alluding to a portrait of “Judith killing Holofernes,” one of the great biblical prototypes of tyrannicide (125). When he seeks to illustrate the power of the stage to create “divine admiration,” he highlights the accomplishments of George Buchanan, that Scottish humanist whose specialty was tyrannicidal tragedy (137).2 The success of poets in confounding tyrants takes center stage in Sidney’s defense of tragedy as a genre. What the Defence terms “the high and excellent Tragedy … maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours” (117). Moreover, tyranny supplies the critical context for Sidney’s most prominent and most telling exposition of poetic imitation, his illustration of the “speaking picture” of poetic mimesis by reference to the rape of Lucretia. It is the Defence’s first detailed illustration of Sidney’s complex argument about imitation—one of those abstract discussions in the text’s thick exposition that fairly screams for clarification by way of example. Its placement, then, is rhetorically significant just as its conjunction of historical event and poetic-making appears deeply purposeful. As the rape of Lucretia was the originating moment of Rome’s freedom from tyranny—since it was the historical occasion motivating Lucius Junius Brutus to extinguish the line of Tarquinius Superbus—that rape secures in Sidney’s text the foundation for a detailed account of how the “right poet” writes. While historically Lucretia’s story marks the beginning of the Roman republic, here poetically her story serves as the moment of genesis for an argumentatively crucial illustration of how mimesis works. Adopting as an analogy the practice of “the more excellent” painter who avoids merely counterfeiting “such faces as are set before” him, Sidney proceeds to illustrate how mimesis ought to function by asking his readers to extrapolate an ideal poetic practice from the example of the painter (102). Set free from history (unlike those historical and philosophical poets confined “within the fold of the proposed subject”), the right poet ranges with “no law but wit … into the divine consideration of what may be and should be,” depicting a Lucretia equally free from historical constraint (102). She is represented not as she appeared in life, but as the “outward beauty of” her chastity (102). Her chastity is the “Idea” out of which the speaking picture is made, a universal whose reality is guaranteed by the access of the erected wit to truths that transcend the always corrupt and mutable world of historical events. Character of Philanax,” English Studies in Canada 7 (1981), 27–37; and Richard C. McCoy’s still useful study, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia. 2 The best known of his tragedies is Baptistes sive calumnia tragoedia (pub. 1577) in George Buchanan: Tragedies. For Buchanan’s (1506–82) close ties to Sidney, see the well-documented essay by James E. Phillips, “George Buchanan and the Sidney Circle,” Huntington Library Quarterly 12 (1948), 23–56.

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In Sidney’s version of the story, Lucretia is liberated twice, both times by the agency of her own virtue. In one instance, her chastity frees her from the tyranny of Tarquin (“when she punished in herself another’s fault”) and in a second instance, that chastity frees her from the tyranny of historical verisimilitude (when the speaking picture declines to copy her body in order to imitate her virtue ) [102]. When history itself emerges as a form of tyranny—both history conceived as the brazen world of events, and history conceived as a science captive to the folly of the world of events—then the conjunction of poetics and politics is startlingly complete. Real freedom from tyranny becomes more than a possible subject of poetry. It emerges instead as its necessary and important work. So often when Sidney writes about poetic action in idealizing terms, he does so with metaphors of the chaste body: in the portrait of Lucretia, in the repetition of Agrippa’s tale about the divided body politic, and in the complementary stories of David’s lust for Bathsheba’s body and Nathan’s healing fiction. The chastening of the body—its government, its discipline, and its purgation—goes hand-in-hand with Sidney’s desire to liberate history from tyranny.3 It joins hands too with Sidney’s desire to chasten the discourse of the public domain, to free Ideas from contamination by tyrannical passions. To argue that Sidney understood history itself as a kind of tyranny and “right poetry” as a vehicle of liberation is to move from the outset against the mainstream of critical interpretation about the politics of Sidney’s poetics—at least as that mainstream is measured by the critical literature of the 1990s. The argument presented here is a departure, centrally, from the most detailed and most influential of the cultural materialist readings of the Defence, Alan Sinfield’s once startling depiction of Sidney’s “puritan humanist” project as the originary text of a Sovietstyle literary criticism haunting the tradition of English studies. As the product of what Sinfield terms “aesthetic absolutism,” because of its pretensions to represent 3 Chastity is always a political issue, and lends itself to various interpretations. Seen from Stephanie H. Jed’s perspective, Sidney’s grounding of his poetics upon the rape of Lucrece stands as another illustration of the compulsive desire of partriarchal culture to control women’s bodies, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucrece and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989). By contrast, Debora Shuger has argued for the story’s significance in highlighting what she describes as considerably greater contemporary fears about the control of male bodies, specifically the dangerous bodily desires of young aristocrats, “Castigating Livy: The Rape of Lucretia and The Old Arcadia,” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998), 526–48. Shuger’s larger point—that Sidney elevates poetry (and his poetic heroes) above the law—complements an extended argument of my own, which I complicate by drawing attention to the operation simultaneously of providential law at the romance’s conclusion, Sidney’s Poetic Justice, p. 175–228. Sidney’s fictions are filled with fictive beings overwhelmed by desire, from Plangus and Erona to Pyrocles and Philoclea. His Cupid, pointing arrows in all directions, seems not very picky about gender distinctions. I should recall, too, in order to highlight the tyrannomachist perspective of the passage, the coincidence between Sidney’s choice of a historical moment ripe with memories of that tyrant-slayer Brutus and the telling pseudonym of Stephanus Junius Brutus, the Celt, “author” of the most infamous of all the anti-tyrannical texts of the age, the Vindiciae. For Buchanan’s celebration of chastity as a primary Pauline virtue, see “In Castitatem,” in Philip J. Ford, George Buchanan: Prince of Poets (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1982), p. 138. See too Epigrammatum Melanthonis, “Deus est casta mens,” p. 3C (verso).

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universals, the Defence is really propaganda (he claims) on behalf of “sectional interests”—Sidney’s personal commitments as the member of a “puritan faction” that pursued an “earnest protestantism.” A prisoner of irremediable tensions between humanism and Protestantism, Sidney’s aesthetic emerges in Sinfield’s reading as an ideologically driven vehicle “correlated broadly with the absolutist aspirations of the Elizabethan state” and focused narrowly on driving that state “in a particular direction in order to reinforce a sectional stance.”4 A decade after its publication, Sinfield’s reading is now only “once” startling. The proliferation of new historicist and cultural materialist readings of Renaissance texts has made the historical move between Sidney and the Soviets a common rhetorical maneuver, a familiar leap on the historical trampoline achieved for persuasive effect, and no doubt intended for critical enlightenment.5 A genuinely historical appreciation of the politics of the Defence demands renewed scholarly attention to the history shaping Sidney’s intellectual life. Sinfield is clearly right about both Sidney’s commitment to a universalizing epistemology and the importance of his association with a specific community (informed by specific political and pious values). But Sinfield’s essay, apart from some broad generalizing paragraphs about earnest puritans, never attempts to locate Sidney inside a historically specific community of that sort. Once more, by constructing a too-ready association between the Defence’s universalizing epistemology and the oppressive absolutism of Soviet-style propaganda, he disregards those very historical conditions that lent Sidney’s epistemology its political significance.6 This chapter attempts a different 4 Alan Sinfield, “Sidney’s Defence and the Collective-Farm Chairman: Puritan Humanism and the Cultural Apparatus,” in Faultlines, p. 181–214. Sinfield’s essay raises questions, too, about the nature of Sidney’s piety explored more fully in the previous chapter. 5 For a similar application of the Sidney–Soviet analogy, see Gary F. Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (London and New York: Longman, 1986), p. 42. A decade later, such startling shifts between widely divergent times, places, and cultures have increasingly been called to account for endangering the very historical understanding that they sought to promote. For a critique of “presentism” (the ready application of present-day analogues and political standards to the distant past) in new historical and cultural materialist criticism, see David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (London and New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), p. 15–19. A better balanced introduction to the politics of Sidney’s poetics can be found in David Norbrook’s chapter, “Sidney and Political Pastoral,” in Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 91–108; Norbrook argues that Sidney’s celebration of poetry’s “freedom from subjection to empirical fact allows a detachment from traditional ideas and the free exploration of alternatives” (p. 94). For an argument that Sidney’s aim is to restrict and make “more class-bound a varied vernacular tradition” and “to establish a dominant form of national literature” (p. 145), see Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), esp. “Whose bloody country is it anyway? Sir Philip Sidney, the nation and the public,” p. 132–69. By contrast to Hadfield’s Anglo-centric reading, I stress the importance of the Defence’s studied and self-conscious cosmopolitanism. 6 Sinfield’s argument assumes (and a strangely essentializing assumption it is!) that a similarity in conceptual form somehow determines similarity in political significance, as if all appeals to universal ideas were inherently invitations to absolutism. See Oscar Kenshur’s


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approach by calling attention once again to Sidney’s connections to the Philippists. More specifically, I will argue that the epistemology of the Defence needs to be recontextualized as a governing body of assumptions about knowledge that Sidney derived from the revival of natural law theory among that intellectual elite closely associated with the late Philip Melanchthon—the so-called Philippists—and the early proponents of tyrannomachist political philosophy. When the universalizing imperative of the Defence is seen in light of the historical conditions that supplied it with its meaning and its lived sense of urgency, Sidney’s text emerges, surprisingly and with a genuinely historical power to startle, as the politically significant vehicle of a poetics of liberation. What Sidney learned from his months of study in Vienna and his lifelong friendship with Hubert Languet—and all the personal and public relationships enabled by that friendship—went beyond an education about how to read and to write or even an education about Christian piety. From the first, Sidney’s Continental stay was designed to further the prospect of what many in the leadership of Reformed Europe came to expect would be a brilliant political career. William of Orange even eyed him as a son-in-law. Whatever the fate of that career, its frustrations and untimely demise, the education designed to prepare Sidney for public life imparted to the full range of his studies—his sophisticated training in the new hermeneutic as well as his exposure to the principles of Philippist piety—an equivalent public and political orientation. Considered as a discrete subject of analysis, Sidney’s poetics are comprehensible as an extraordinary application of the new hermeneutic inscribed in Melanchthon’s oratorical theory to an original and revolutionary conception of fiction-making. Free from the constraint of verisimilitude (mere counterfeiting) and the opacity of traditional allegory, the metamorphic power of Sidney’s golden world poetics secures an unprecedented cultural preeminence for poetry as that form of knowledge best able to realize the scope of all humane learning, virtuous action. Once more, Sidney’s poetics are open to comprehension, in a similarly discrete kind of analysis, as the equally extraordinary outgrowth of his training in Philippist piety. Unburdened by the constraints of a Reformed theology sometimes hostile to the fictive products of human imagination, Sidney’s poetics are inspired by Melanchthon’s carefully moderated optimism about human agency—an assertiveness about the strength of reason and the cooperative power of the will—and, most signally, by his celebration of that agency’s scope, however limited, to secure freedom from the sovereignty of sin. For a writer like Sidney, who opines about mistress-knowledge in one breath as the tough stuff of virtuous action, and in another as the joyful apprehension of one’s own “divine essence,” human learning was by definition inseparably bound to a pious anthropology. Moreover, for a writer like Sidney, whose Philippist humanism taught him to regard virtuous action as linked to a knowledge about what is godlike inside oneself, as an awakening of those small sparks of the divine innate to the mind, no hard boundaries could be maintained between humanist learning and Reformed piety, cogent critique of essentialist notions about epistemological principles, “An Exchange on Ideological Criticism: (Avoidable) Snares and Avoidable Muddles,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 3 (Spring 1989), 658–68.


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any more than such boundaries could be maintained between a Philippist humanism and a Philippist politics. Virtuous action is public action in a political world. To consider Sidney’s politics in the Defence, then, is to approach more centrally the scope that defines the whole—to understand more specifically how and why Sidney celebrated poetry as a pious means of realizing virtue in the public domain. Similar to its hermeneutics and its piety, the politics of Sidney’s poetics are informed by a Philippist-inspired search for liberation—a liberation from the sinfulness of sovereigns, a variety of sinful sovereignty whose shadow seems everywhere to haunt, challenge, and nearly to tyrannize over the Defence’s aggressively optimistic claims about fiction-making. Tyranny was a topic of enduring concern for Sidney. It shadowed everywhere that remarkable correspondence he pursued with Languet during the decade of the 1570s. As mentor and student exchanged information, analysis, even prayer about the machinations of papal and Spanish power, it was tyranny and the resistance to tyranny (not national interest or state affairs) that constituted their primary vocabulary for analyzing European politics. State affairs clearly mattered. In the correspondence between Languet and Sidney, letter after letter reported the news from Spain, Italy, France, the Low Countries, England, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere, but always with attention to the international consequences of events. One typically wide-ranging letter from the correspondence illustrates the point well. In December of 1575, Languet wrote to Sidney, reminding him that “Spain was the first of the overseas provinces which submitted to the Roman yoke, but that now the Spaniards rule a good part of Italy.” His remarks were a prelude to reflections about France, where he predicted—wryly, with the occasional cynicism that punctuates his political reflections—that the French Catholics “wearied by calamities … will [eventually] send to the Spanish of their own accord, and put themselves under their protection”—as soon, that is, as the Spanish have settled their affairs in the Low Countries. Such reflections, in turn, had consequences for the English, who dreaming upon the lost heroes of their past—the Chandoses and the Talbots—had forgotten the need to fear Spanish tyranny. Italy, France, the Netherlands, England—all were dominoes poised for the fall. “As for the Pope,” Languet continued, “you know what you have to hope for from his good will.”7 Christendom was the anvil upon which papal power beat, and Rome the workshop responsible (in Languet’s words) for so “many Christian princes …, in our memory and that of our fathers, turn[ing] moderated and well-ordered princedoms into tyrannies.”8 Such disasters required analysis on an international scale, and in light always of the divisions that mattered most—the ones that divided confessions, not nations. When Fulke Greville later remembered his friend, Philip Sidney, as a prescient analyst of international politics—one with an eye, especially, to the dangers of “papist” Spain—he was remembering Languet’s influence upon him. In the face of such dangers, beyond analysis, Languet sought comfort from the pious knowledge that “our calamities provide a splendid example of divine justice.”9 Sidney, in turn, 7 8 9

Languet to Sidney, 3 December 1575, in Levy, p. 303, 305, 307. Languet to Sidney, 9 April 1574, in Levy, p. 122. Languet to Sidney, 16 April 1574, in Levy, p. 137.


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puzzled by how to interpret the always fluctuating fortunes of the cause, replied characteristically to his mentor’s solemn reports, “Almighty and gracious God rules Christendom with wonderful providence in our time.”10 The shared vocabulary indicates how mentor and student conceived of their own historical moment. Contemporary history was apocalyptically burdened, as a battleground between the forces of light and darkness—the liberating power of true church, on the one hand, imperilled by the tyranny of Tridentine Catholicism, on the other. In turn, that sense of impending apocalypse had practical consequences for Sidney’s own actions. Real tyrants abroad led Sidney to accept his diplomatic mission to organize a Protestant League to counter them. In turn, the perceived threat of tyranny at home influenced his decision to write against Queen Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to Francis, Duke of Anjou. Spanish tyranny helped to motivate Sidney’s fascination with the Americas and his interest in Huguenot schemes for colonizing the New World. In view of such threats, Languet once joked that his pupil needed to change his name from one Spanish tyrant’s to another’s (from Philip to John), when John of Austria appeared to threaten England with invasion from the Netherlands. Such humor was the anxious by-product of a perilous international crisis that extended through the whole of Sidney’s adult life.11 The Netherlands was the crossroads where Armageddon appeared most imminent. Several times in the early 1580s, Sidney seemed poised to launch into action there with or without Elizabeth’s blessing. When that blessing finally came in the form of Leicester’s poorly conceived and poorly executed mission, he rushed headlong to the defense of Dutch freedom and to his death.12 In turn, Sidney’s lifelong preoccupation with tyranny found expression especially in his most important life-work: the elaboration of his New Arcadia, populated by notable numbers of tyrannical villains and by his twin tyrannomachist heroes, Pyrocles and Musidorus. Tyranny, then, was a familiar issue for Sidney, but Phalaris’s inclusion in the Defence’s rhetorically extended catalogue of history’s bad exemplars is an especially pointed reminder about the personal character of those political concerns at stake for him in addressing the challenge of contemporary tyrants. Sidney had a history with Phalaris that is worth recounting. Phalaris was a tyrant of Acragas in Sicily in the sixth century BC, who became legendary for roasting his victims alive in a brazen bull. As a result, his name became a byword for tyranny. In July of 1574, in a letter addressed to Languet, Sidney bitterly attacked a French humanist and politique, Guy du Faur, Sire de Pibrac (1529–84), for publishing a justification of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre—that current event supplying the most notorious evidence of Catholic tyranny at work.13 Languet responded in a remarkable letter, which is at once a defense of Pibrac and a moral education for 10 Languet to Sidney, 18? June, 1574, in Levy, p. 204. 11 See Languet to Sidney, 13 May 1574, in Levy, p. 163. 12 For Sidney and the New World, and the fascination with colonization both among the Huguenots in France and the Philippists in Germany, see Roger Kuin’s “Querre-Muhau,” 549–85. 13 I write “appears” because the letter is now lost; mention of the letter regarding Pibrac is found in Languet to Sidney, 24 July 1574, in Levy, p. 230.

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Sidney. In that letter, Languet represents himself as unwilling to hold either Pibrac’s Catholicism or his apology for the Massacre against him. Instead and surprisingly for Sidney to be sure, he praises Pibrac as “a man of such talent, such learning, and eloquence too, that I do not know whether France possesses his equal.”14 With the usual pointedness of the teacher, Languet proceeds to extrapolate from the particular instance of Pibrac’s fault—writing a letter that fear for his own death provoked—to a general lesson to be learned from his behavior.15 He was compelled to ransom his life with that letter, for which you so grievously reproach him, and I by no means approve of his action, for, as the poet says, ... Phalaris licet imperet ut sis falsus et admoto dictet periuria tauro, summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori, et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. (… though Phalaris himself should command you to tell lies and bring up his bull and dictate to you a perjury, believe it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and to lose for the sake of life, the cause of living.)

Good letters supply good lessons. At the moment that Languet urges Sidney’s tolerance for Pibrac’s all-too-human weakness, he supplies by way of Juvenal’s Satires a corrective example to follow. Tyranny must be resisted, even as one must recognize the inevitable weakness of people who are oppressed by its power. The ignorant fail to understand tyranny, and the learned are compelled to complicity by a natural instinct to preserve themselves. Phalaris came to Sidney as a moral example in Languet’s letters, and he figured prominently at a crucial moment in the political philosophy of another intimate friend, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. As the previous chapter showed, Languet mentored the two Philips, Mornay and Sidney, as twin students of the Reformed cause, and it is some evidence about the continuity of their education that they employ the same historical vocabulary, even in response to the same historical events. Mornay’s Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1576) was the most carefully argued and the most notorious of all those resistance tracts produced in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and Phalaris appears in that tract precisely at one of those few moments in which the memory of the Massacre is specifically invoked. Moreover, the reference to Phalaris occurs in exactly the same literary context recalled by Languet’s letter, Juvenal’s Satire VIII. In an argument in which Mornay imagines the response of the people to “a prince [who] commands that any innocent be killed, or that he be despoiled,” he conjures into memory the example of “some Papinian [who] … will reproach Caracalla to his face and will choose death rather than obedience: ‘Even if Phalaris himself orders him to be false, and to dictate 14 Levy, p. 230. For the bitterness of the Reformers’ response to the Massacre, see M.-Th. Courtial, “George Buchanan et la Saint-Bartholemy: la ‘Satyr in Carolun Lotharingum cardinalem’,” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance 58, no. 1 (1996), 151–63. 15 Levy, p. 231–2; Juvenal and Persius, trans. G.G. Ramsay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann 1918; repr. 1961), p. 165. The translation of Juvenal has been modified for accuracy.


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perjuries under threat of roasting alive …’.”16 Drawing from the Scriptores historiae Augustae, Mornay inserts his allusion to the beastly Phalaris within the context of Roman imperial history—the story of the Emperor Caracalla’s murder of his brother Geta, and the refusal of the praetorian prefect, Aemilius Papinianus, to compose a speech to the senate in justification of that murder.17 The Roman imperial allusion secures a heightened grandeur and significance for the contemporary event as an obvious parallel to Huguenot interpretations of the Massacre (one more fratricidal tragedy in peril of a whitewash). Once more, the allusion functions didactically as the expression simultaneously of pointed optimism about the inevitability of resistance to tyranny. Papinian-style heroes always appear to undo tyrants, Mornay’s text clearly implies—an echo of that long tradition of anti-tyrannical literature extending back to Cicero, then Christianized by John of Salisbury and Thomas Aquinas, in which tyrants providentially get their due.18 Such optimism is important to note because when it is read in light of Languet’s correspondence with Sidney, Papinian’s action becomes in Mornay’s idealizing political philosophy the story of a Pibrac who operates as a Pibrac should—as a corrective example from the realm of history that shows how “one in whom … conscience remains” will effectively counter tyranny. Its optimism is, in no small measure, intended as persuasion to the faithful to maintain the cause, confident in the triumph of virtue even after the tragic Massacre (30). By contrast, for Sidney, Mornay’s appeal to Papinian—conjoined with the allusion to Juvenal—must also have carried a sharp memory of the real-life Pibrac, a less sanguine reminder of how ineffectively tyranny found resistance both on and after St. Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1572. For all of the optimism of moral philosophy, history constantly proved itself a grim, sad, foolish business. Sidney—it is worth recalling—was himself present at the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and may even have seen the mutilated corpse of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny.19 It was for him both a life experience and the monumental political tragedy of his day. The Massacre was a watershed event in the conflict between Catholics and Reformed Christians—even perhaps, together with the assaults of the Sea Beggars, the watershed event of its era. It effectively polarized the competing confessions into armed camps, challenging and ultimately undoing the hopes of irenicists in both parties for moderation and the now more distant dream of ecumenical reunion and 16 Vindiciae, p. 30. Scholars still question the authorship of the Vindiciae, sometimes attributing the work not to Mornay, but to Languet. For the best recent discussion of the authorship question, see Nicollier-de Weck, p. 465–87. 17 “Caracalla” in Scriptores historiae Augustae, trans. David C. Magie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1953), vol. 2, 21–3. 18 For a brief historical overview of competing interpretations of tyranny, see William A. Armstrong, “The Elizabethan Conception of the Tyrant,” Review of English Studies 22 (1946), 61–81. See also, Oscar Jaszi and John D. Lewis, Against the Tyrant: The Tradition and Theory of Tyrannicide (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957). For tyranny as a political concern in the Reformed north, see Skinner, esp. “Part Three: Calvinism and the Theory of Revolution,” p. 189–348. 19 See Osborn, p. 70. For Sidney’s witty turn on the Phalaris story in Astrophil and Stella, see Alan Hager, Dazzling Images, p. 96–7.

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peace. Languet clearly understood the event’s importance and its challenge to his principles, and he met that challenge with the inevitably paradoxical response of a man whose principles struggle painfully to adjust to life. From Languet’s perspective, what Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon meant to Rome, the Massacre meant to contemporary civilization: a triumph of tyranny. As he wrote to Sidney in 1574, reminding him of “the monstrous crime of which you and I were spectators: ‘The die is cast,’ as Caesar said, and the fire which has been kindled in Christendom because of religion can be extinguished only by its destruction.” The sense of urgency was enormous, as was the complexity of the problem of knowing how best to contain or control those fires of tyranny. Languet’s letter expresses a hope that the tyrants will simply destroy themselves. He prays for providential relief, that God “in the day of his wrath, … remember mercy.” Once more, he cautiously reminds Sidney of a need for their allies to “change [their] ways” [mores], recognizing piously God’s anger at the sins of the faithful or calling pragmatically for better military preparedness— perhaps both.20 The Massacre would lead Languet, Mornay and Sidney to articulate more effective arguments for actively resisting tyranny, even—paradoxical as the response might seem—as Languet would continue to impress on his pupils, Sidney and Mornay, the importance of moderation, tolerance, and understanding as essential components of a just response to tyranny’s “monstrous crime[s].” Sidney’s allusion in the Defence to Phalaris comes complete with a history, then, one that is important, first, because it draws attention to his own lived experience with tyranny. Phalaris was a figure whom Sidney knew both from the pages of Juvenal and from the streets of Paris. The allusion matters also since Phalaris’s name came loaded in Sidney’s circle with certain specific, controversial political assumptions. In the same sentence from the Defence that Sidney writes about Phalaris, he mentions (as if in passing) that just as the poets have devised “new punishments in hell for tyrants,” so philosophy teaches “occidendos esse”—that tyrants ought to be killed (112). The “as if” quality of his phrasing is significant. He can write about tyrannicide as if it were a settled doctrine of political philosophy precisely because, for himself and for those friends with whom he was most closely connected, the doctrine needed neither argument nor proof. In fact, the whole of Sidney’s discussion of tyrants in this central passage of the Defence debunking the historian’s moral pretensions— beginning with the allusion to Marcus Junius Brutus’s slaying of Julius Caesar and proceeding to Dante’s supposed invention of new torments for tyrants—echoes a tradition of republican literature descending from fifteenth-century Italy.21 The Defence does not argue the case for tyrannicide. It assumes tyrannicide as a good. The question posed by Phalaris’s appearance in this passage and by Sidney’s Defence as a whole—considered from the vantage of its public political purpose—is how 20 Languet to Sidney, 11 March 1574, in Levy, p.105. 21 See Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966; first pub. 1955), p. 94–120. Dante’s republican descendants were more than a little embarrassed by his support of monarchy and took some notable liberties in reimagining his political sympathies; that his Defence repeats—and thereby copies—the mistake of those commentators in attributing to Dante punishments against tyrants never imposed gives some indication about Sidney’s debts to this republican tradition of anti-tyrannical thought.


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best to counter tyranny, and it is from this perspective that the allusion to Phalaris matters most. Phalaris was a name usefully invoked whenever the question arose in Sidney’s own circle about how effectively to counter tyranny in practice—whether the issue concerned the private application of a moral philosophical principle (as in Languet’s letter) or the public articulation of a political philosophy (as in Mornay’s treatise). Juvenal’s Satire VIII was a shared point of reference among Languet, Mornay and Sidney. In its original form, Juvenal’s poem is a fierce assault against the vices of the contemporary Roman nobility and a negative example—exploitable to good pedagogical ends by the mentor Languet—that “nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus” (“virtue is the one and only true nobility” [l. 20]). More important, Juvenal’s poem became inside this circle of friends a common point of reference for considering how to move from ought to is: for moving, that is, from the proposition that tyrants should be resisted to real resistance. All three were agreed that tyrants “occidendos esse.” What would have amazed, amused, and perhaps even dismayed his friends is Sidney’s argument that poetry best supplies that vehicle for resisting tyranny rather than history or philosophy. For in that argument was implied the relative inferiority of his friends’ favored intellectual pursuits—the passion of Languet for history, of Mornay for moral and political philosophy. Juvenal matters, Sidney seems to say, for better reasons than his friends would have acknowledged, and for better reasons that a second humanist text featuring Phalaris would have supported: Book II of Aristotle’s Rhetoric—among those books that Sidney himself is said to have translated. (Languet’s letters are replete with joking admonitions about Sidney’s fondness for Aristotle.) At the moment when Aristotle’s discussion turns from cataloguing the orator’s reservoir of commonplaces to a consideration of the argumentative power of examples, he narrates a story about poetry and tyranny. Aristotle’s first instance of the power of the example recalls the poet Stesichorus, and his use of a fable to dissuade the people of Himera from supplying a bodyguard to their tyrant, Phalaris, lest they become his slaves.22 As a prophylactic against tyranny, Aristotle’s celebration of the political power of the poetic example proved deeply meaningful to Sidney. In the wars against Phalaris, Sidney goes armed not with Languet’s histories or Mornay’s moral philosophies, but with Aristotle’s examples. (The “example” was from the first for Sidney a vehicle of liberation.) His point in mentioning Phalaris is really most importantly one about Juvenal, or one about poetry that is. But how he bolsters his position on behalf of poetry’s power to undo the worst effects of tyranny with arguments that simultaneously draw upon and contest key intellectual assumptions of his friends, Languet and Mornay, forms an important and untold story about his Defence of Poesy. That story begins again with the interest of Sidney and his friends in Phalaris, a figure excoriated in the language of the Defence for his “abominable injustice” and reviled as a kind of dog unleashed from history’s “kennel” (112). As Sidney’s vocabulary suggests, what made Phalaris’s tyranny so striking was its very beastliness. Roasting his victims alive within a bronze bull that turned their screams into savage bellowing, all for the pleasure of his own entertainment, made Phalaris a memorable figure inside a circle of friends who 22 See Rhetoric, Book II. xx. 5–6, p. 275–7.

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defined tyranny as a violation of nature. Phalaris is both the exemplary tyrant and the aesthetic barbarian par excellence. Screaming victims are, for him, an unnatural delight. To confound the barbarians among them, Languet, Mornay and Sidney all had recourse to that increasingly popular and potent political vocabulary coming into renewed prominence inside sixteenth-century Europe, the vocabulary of natural law. Natural Law and the Politics of Self-Defense Scholars from Robert Hoopes to R.S. White have written extensively about the pervasive influence of natural law arguments upon an early modern English culture. From John Fortescue to Richard Hooker, from Christopher St. Germain and Thomas Starkey to John Aylmer and John Ponet—that is, for a significant cadre within the intellectual elite of the English political culture—natural law arguments maintained a magnetic attraction. Once more, as historians like Robert Eccleshall and Patrick Collinson have shown, that attraction was maintained especially (though not exclusively) among an articulate minority of learned Englishmen eager to promote the vision of a limited or mixed monarchy. All of the writers named above, Fortescue to Hooker, belonged to that group—and clearly Philip Sidney did as well, as I will indicate.23 More specifically and more to the immediate point at issue, Quentin Skinner has written about the significance of natural law arguments to the development of Renaissance political discourse, and most especially to their key role in the history of resistance theory. In particular, Skinner has described the struggle among the Huguenots after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, as an embattled minority seeking religious freedom, to devise a logic and a language for defending 23 For the employment of natural law arguments among the proponents of limited monarchy, see Robert Eccleshall, Order and Reason in Politics: Theories of Absolute and Limited Monarchy in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), esp. p. 10–46. The term “limited monarchy” denotes a constitutionally limited monarchy, while “mixed monarchy” points to a mixture of three forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy) in a balanced polity. The terms were used interchangeably, as Eccleshall indicates, because those who used them assumed “English political practices were informed by objective standards of justice because the legislative process was a cooperative activity in which the monarch was constitutionally obliged to associate with representatives of the community,” p. 1, ftn. 1. On “minority” support for limited monarchy in Elizabethan England, or what he terms “quasi-republican modes of political reflection,” see Patrick Collinson, “The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I,” Rylands University Library of Manchester University Bulletin, vol. 69, no. 2 (Spring 1987), 394–424 and De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), p. 22–3; and Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), who argues that “Englishmen were to an extent able both to embrace parts of the republican vocabulary in their own context and to articulate their civic consciousness without a full-scale republican theory,” p. 7. If by “republican,” is meant “constitutional government without a king,” Elizabethan England had few, if any republicans. I prefer to refer (less anachronistically) to supporters of limited or mixed monarchy—since all of the writers whom I address are committed proponents of monarchy.


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rebellion against tyranny that would have a broad national appeal transcending confessional boundaries. As Skinner has made clear, natural law arguments, with their appeal to unwritten universal laws inherent within the individual conscience, were crucial in bolstering the persuasiveness of the new resistance theory, and once more, he has identified Mornay’s Vindiciae as that historically significant resistance text inside which natural law arguments enter first.24 The logic of natural law supplied in principle as well as in practice a rhetoric easily accommodated to the new hermeneutic, designed to craft clear, energetic, rational discourse in which argumentative “scope” acquires assent in the public domain. When the “scope” of such discourse is informed by logic having the force of natural law, such arguments would compel (not merely acquire) that universal assent so urgently desired. It is important to call attention to the renewed popularity of natural law arguments in terms both of content and form because Sidney’s poetics can be read usefully as an effort to realize the public, political promise of those arguments. Considered from a political vantage, his poetics can be read as an interventionist vehicle designed to remedy the principal disease of this first ideological era of European politics: its fracturing by the tyranny of confessional disputes.25 Poetry affords the natural 24 Skinner, p. 325–7, 334–7. Such arguments are traditionally distinctive in terms of both content and form. Employed to enforce distinctions between good and evil, they possess a moral content that distinguishes the natural from the unnatural, the normative from the monstrous—the heroes of fiction (as Sidney would note) from the Phalarises of fact. In turn, these moral distinctions load such arguments with obligatory power. To acknowledge a natural law is to acknowledge oneself as ethically obliged to obey it, and, more important, to stake a claim to natural law is to extend that same obligation to humanity as a whole, since natural law arguments are presumed to carry universal applicability. In form, natural law arguments are traditionally distinctive, too, since the laws of nature are unwritten. As such, they supply ready touchstones upon which to test the legitimacy of positive laws—those scripted products of necessarily contingent acts of human making. The appeal to natural law works analytically to separate the chaff from the wheat—the sumptuary regulations of Leviticus from the Law of Moses, or the Milesian laws from the Justinian Code—and maintains, thereby, side-by-side with its sometimes conservative regard for “the natural order of things” (however defined), a decidedly critical potential vis à vis existing moral, political or religious codes and practices. Appeals to natural law justify murdering a magistrate as readily as they do revering him, a rhetorical lesson Cicero taught well. Behind their power as touchstones, natural law arguments have the formal distinction also of claiming to be rational—available to and demonstrable by reasoned inquiry. That claim to reason provides natural law arguments with their greatest appeal as a persuasive mode of discourse since their rational edge promises simultaneously to sharpen informed reflection and to blunt merely partisan polemic. Achieving renewed popularity in early modern public discourse, natural law is the stuff out of which the ideal of civil conversation finds expression in the late sixteenth century. For a broad perspective on the importance of Aristotle’s natural philosophy and the theory of natural law in a Renaissance context, see Charles Schmitt, The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984). For a concise, densely argued study of one important aspect of the natural law tradition, see Richard Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979). 25 The concept of an “interventionist” discourse derives from Maravall’s Culture of the Baroque, and my The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-Century

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and ideal complement of an anti-confessional and anti-tyrannical politics. Sidney insists, doubly, upon the peculiar power of poets to teach the “commonplaces” (moral and political truths drawn from nature) and to realize with stunning effectiveness the advantages of natural law discourse’s reasoned, non-polemical mode of argumentation. The very freedom from history of the golden world—its autonomy—guarantees its freedom from the merely partisan polemical rhetoric that contaminated and therefore corrupted contemporary discourse. To retreat by way of fiction to Nature—to nature as it is “chastened” by the making power of the poet’s wit—is to encounter (with all of the complexities that inform Sidneian fictions) a pun writ large: a fictive landscape that sustains the illusion that a life lived in nature (amidst bushes, shrubs and trees) is equivalent to a life lived according to Nature (the dictates of natural law). It is to watch, therefore, the language and logic of natural law discourse achieve substance as a fiction, on the groundplot first conceptualized in the poetics of Sidney’s Defence. If Quentin Skinner is correct, then, in emphasizing the importance of natural law arguments to sixteenth-century resistance theory, he is demonstrably wrong—and this is a point that matters profoundly for understanding Sidney’s role in this history—to argue for the novelty of these arguments in Mornay and to attribute (as cultural historians sometimes continue to do) the source of his new language and logic to Thomas Aquinas.26 It may be an attractive historical irony to imagine the Protestant Mornay turning Catholic scholastic philosophy back against the Tridentine Church, raiding Aquinas for the philosophical weaponry to topple the Pope’s minions from the throne of France. However, there is a more plausible explanation for the renewed popularity of natural law arguments in Mornay’s Vindiciae, and for the popularity of those arguments in other resistance texts inside Britain, John Ponet’s lucidly argued A Shorte Treatise of politike power (1556) and George Buchanan’s influential De jure regni apud Scotos (1579), as well as for the thoroughgoing dependence of Sidney’s political writings and poetics on natural law theory. When Languet urged Sidney to moderate his criticisms of Pibrac in that letter written in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, he did so as a mentor “by nature and by principle averse to judgments of this sort,” explaining that “many people criticize me for this [moderation] and say that I derive it from my teacher, Melanchthon. Thus far I regret neither my teacher nor my principles, and shall not be led away from either by the criticisms of those who are naturally more captious or severe than I am.”27 Confronted by crisis, he took refuge in his teacher’s principles. In turn, by identifying himself with Melanchthon, Languet reminded Sidney about his distinctive political affiliation—the source of his own commitment to the Protestant cause—and, just as meaningfully, about the source of that political commitment in England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press; London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1995), p. 20–25. 26 Skinner, p. 321–2. In his introduction, George Garnett calls the argument “not only professedly catholic, but uncannily Catholic,” Vindiciae, contra tyrannos: or concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and of the people over a prince (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), p. 1. 27 Languet to Sidney, 24 July 1574, in Levy, p. 233.


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a distinctive brand of Protestant education.28 That influence is measurable across an extensive disciplinary domain from rhetoric and dialectics to natural philosophy, and it is an influence demonstrable, too, in Melanchthon’s pervasive employment of natural law arguments derived from Aristotle and his scholastic commentators in reshaping moral, philosophical and political learning for the Protestant north. Its employment was central to his intellectual career, as his most recent students have demonstrated in considerable detail.29 Natural law played a constitutive role in fashioning Melanchthon’s conception of oratory, most importantly (as I have emphasized) in the identification of textual loci and mental notitiae—rhetorical commonplaces and those innate ideas set ablaze by them. So also, principles of natural law figured prominently in the development of Melanchthon’s theology as primary means of saving distinctions between Gospel and Law, of clarifying the will of the Maker to make himself known, the likeness of man to God in affect and intellect, and the liberating potential of knowledge of all kinds. Most important in this context, however, was Melanchthon’s introduction of the language and logic of natural law into resistance theory during the Wars of the League of Schmalkaldan in the late 1540s. Under attack by imperial powers, the Protestant princes of Germany needed some means to justify armed defense against sovereign authority, and consequently some radically different political arguments from the ones Luther had employed against the peasant rebellions of earlier decades. The church’s survival demanded it. Confessional wars were fought as fiercely by books as by cannons, and in 1546, Wittenberg aimed a blast squarely against Charles V’s sovereignty by the republication of Luther’s Warnunge an seine lieben Deutschen (Warning to His Dear German People). Luther’s name remained the big gun in the German Protestant arsenal even after his death, and mobilizing the power of that name was crucial to the cause. His Warnunge, however, was a cautious, constitutionally based argument about the illegality of threatened imperial violence rather than a call to arms. (If no Reformer could fulminate with Luther’s zeal, no Reformer ever equivocated with his aplomb.) In 1531, active resistance was something Luther would not condemn, 28 Paul Oskar Kristeller has testified to the shaping power of that education, identifying Melanchthon as the figure most influential for establishing the humanistic tradition of Protestant Germany, p. 87. 29 Timothy Wengert supplies a good recent overview of Melanchthon’s later career that draws attention to his increasing employment of natural law theory in his last chapter, “Melanchthon at Erasmus’s Funeral: 1528–1560,” Human Freedom, Human Righteousness, p. 139–58. See, too, Schneider on Melanchthon’s development of a “natural theology” in his later years, p. 139–58 and the comprehensive study by Carl Bauer, “Melanchthons Naturrechtslehre,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 42 (1951), 64–100. For a recent study of how Aristotelian rationalism underlies Melanchthon’s understanding of nature and how that understanding relates to his theological conception of reality, see Cornelis Augustijn, “Melanchthons Suche nach Gott und Natur,” in Melanchthon und die Naturwissenschaften seiner Zeit, ed. Günther Frank and Stefan Rhein (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1998), p. 15–24. More specifically, Rolf Bernhard Huschke explores the analogy between orders of law and political order in Melanchthons Lehre vom ordo politicus: Ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis von Glauben und politischen Handeln bei Melanchthon (Gütersloh: G. Mohn, 1960), p. 31–2.

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but it was hardly a theme that he was ready to trumpet. That trumpet blast in favor of resistance by the Protestant faithful against the depredations of imperial power was left to Melanchthon, who added his own Preface to Luther’s Warning early in 1547 in which active resistance (“Gegenwehre”) is not merely tolerated or endorsed by legal argumentation, but instead piously heralded as a “true work, which God has planted in nature.”30 Luther’s political conservatism is legendary, and like most legends easily exaggerated. Throughout his career, his political thought was structured in Augustinian terms upon complex binary distinctions between the two kingdoms, the spiritual and the temporal. Few contemporaries celebrated Christian freedom more zealously than Luther, but freedom belonged wholly to the realm of the spiritual, as a gift to the faithful whose inward self-government derived from their free acceptance of the Word. By contrast, “obedience” was the watchword of the temporal realm, where the sword of government—an instrument of wrath and judgment against sinful humanity—coerced outward submission to the law.31 When the temporal realm threatened the obliteration of the spiritual, however, events forced changes in Luther’s political thought. In 1530, Charles V, having settled his affairs in Italy, crossed the Alps intending to make the Holy Roman Empire wholly Roman again by enforcing the seemingly defunct Edict of Worms (1521), that Catholic assault against Reformed religion. Luther’s political transformations in the face of that temporal threat have been well documented, from his early rejection of the legitimacy of armed resistance against the Emperor; to his sudden acceptance at Torgau (1530) of constitutional arguments in favor of resistance; to his eventual accommodation of an uneasy mixture of apocalyptic, legal and natural law arguments justifying military response on the part of Germany’s Protestant princes.32 For historians from Quentin Skinner to Robert Von Friedeburg, those 30 CR 6, 195: “ein recht Werk, das Gott in die Natur gepflanzt hat .…” In 1554 Melanchthon’s trumpet sounded again in English translation, as a blast against the monstrous “scope” of those lords and bishops abusing the faithful under Mary Tudor: Martin Luther, A faithful admonition (London: f. J. Day?, 1554). See the Preface’s warning against “the scope & end of al practices of the Lords & Bishops” to bring into power “the bishop of Rome,” n.p. Making passage to England were both a new rhetorical terminology and a new politics closely allied with it. 31 The Luther who reveled rhetorically in the bloodshed of peasants and who despised the confounding by Anabaptists of Christian liberty with worldly freedom was no friend to sedition (or any other challenge to political authority), whatever the claims of the Catholic opposition—Erasmus included—or the fears of German princes. It is in the context of Melanchthon’s defense of Luther against Erasmus’s attacks that Timothy Wengert describes Melanchthon’s emergence as the author of a “Christian” political philosophy in his commentary on Colossians of 1527/28, Human Freedom, Christian Righteousness. 32 For Luther’s political philosophy, see W.D.J. Cargill Thompson, The Political Thought of Martin Luther, ed. Philip Broadhead (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984). For detailed historical background for the development of resistance theory in early modern Germany, see Thomas A. Brady, Jr., The Politics of the Reformation in Germany, and the more concise, “Luther and the State: The Reformer’s Teaching in its Social Setting,” in Luther and the Modern State in Germany, ed. James D. Tracy (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publications, 1986).


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transformations in political thought matter largely because they help to clarify the origins of early modern resistance theory. Recovering those origins, in turn, has assigned to Lutherans—rather than to Calvinists—the pivotal role in the development of early modern “resistance” theories or (as they are now frequently called) theories of self-defense. My emphasis is different. As Cynthia Grant Schoenberger has shown, from the late 1530s to the mid-1540s German publications were replete with both constitutional and natural law arguments espousing the doctrine of resistance, though as she notes “natural law arguments came increasingly to the fore.”33 She has shown, too, that natural law arguments—allied to notions of “atrocious injury,” the legitimacy of self-defense, and the magistrate’s duty to protect his subjects—entered Melanchthon’s political thought well before Luther was ready to acknowledge any one of them, though he came eventually to acknowledge them all.34 Where questions of “Gegenwehre” were at issue, Melanchthon led the way and Luther followed, in a complex, reciprocal passage of ideas between student and teacher.35 Early modern political theory in Germany was pivotal to the development of resistance theory in northern Europe, but it was so in considerable measure because of its Philippist character. When Melanchthon added his Preface to Luther’s Warnunge in 1547, he restated in concise terms a natural law theory of resistance that he had for several years elaborated more extensively in scholarly commentaries, polemical letters, and formal position papers addressed to the Elector John Frederick of Saxony, and that he would again articulate in his extensive rewriting of one of the most influential resistance tracts of the German Reformation, the Von der Notwehr Unterricht (Instruction Concerning Self-Defense).36 Like Luther, Melanchthon’s turn in political thought, from the recommendation of passive disobedience to tyranny to the justification of active resistance against it, happened slowly, and only under the pressure of historical

33 Cynthia Grant Schoenberger, “The Development of Lutheran Theory of Resistance: 1523–1530,” Sixteenth Century Journal 8, no. 1 (April 1977), p. 75. 34 “Luther and the Justifiability of Resistance to Legitimate Authority,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40, no. 1 (Jan.–Mar. 1979), 3–20. 35 James M. Estes describes Melanchthon’s relationship to Luther in matters of political philosophy as that of a strong-minded collaborator, rather than a disciple or interpreter, “The Role of Godly Magistrates in the Church: Melanchthon as Luther’s Interpreter and Collaborator,” Church History 67, no. 3 (September 1998), 463–83. At the heart of Melanchthon’s political thought from the 1520s to the 1550s is the role of the godly magistrate, and Estes is the best guide to the changing character of that thought. See also, Estes’s earlier wide-ranging study, Christian Magistrate and State Church, and his later “Erasmus, Melanchthon and the Office of the Christian Magistrate,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 18, no. 4 (1998), 373–87. On the magistrate’s cura religionis, see Ralph Keen, “Political Authority,” 1–14. 36 Peterson, “Melanchthon on Resisting the Emperor: The Von der Notwehr Unterricht of 1547,” in Regnum, Religio, et Ratio, p. 133–44. Peterson links Melanchthon’s text with the Magdeburg Confession of 1550 (Bekenntnis, Unterricht und Wermanung). See in that connection, Esther Hildebrandt, “The Magdeburg Bekenntnis as a Possible Link between German and English Resistance Theories in the Sixteenth Century,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 71 (1980), 240–52. See, too, Peterson’s “Justus Menius, Philip Melanchthon, and the 1547 Treatise, Von der Notwehr Unterricht,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 81 (1990), 138–57.

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events. Melanchthon, too, followed Luther in preaching the blessings of government and rejecting arguments in favor of active disobedience, but Charles V had allied himself with Papal tyranny, and Papal tyranny threatened the chastity of God’s true church. Unlike Luther, who preferred the limited (therefore safer) boundaries of legal argument, the more scholarly Melanchthon returned to the familiar domain of bonae litterae—the texts of the classical literary tradition—to bolster constitutional claims on behalf of self-defense with philosophical arguments. Out of his humanist learning, he constructed both an influential and conceptually elegant case for defending active resistance against tyranny. His return to bonae litterae, however, was managed in characteristically Melancthonian fashion. At the core of his defense was a powerful Pauline conception of natural law reanimating classical political theory for the needs of contemporary culture. In 1542 Melanchthon published a second edition of his Prolegomena in Officia Ciceronis, which he supplemented for the purpose of clarifying what was fast becoming again for German Protestants the most urgent political question of the day: whether it is right vim vi repellere, to repel force by force. The passage bears quotation at length:37 Bestiae naturali inclinatione repellunt violentiam, quia cuilibet naturae insita est a Deo appetitio conservandi sese: in homine autem duae res movent ad depulsionem iniustae violentiae, στoργὴ [storge], quae est appetitio conservationis sui, altera res est notitia, quae docet, quomodo haec στoργὴ regenda sit, et docet genus humanum sic conditum esse, ut conservetur aequalitas. Sunt autem notitiae naturales leges naturae, quae sunt radii sapientiae Dei, sparsi in mentes, ut sint testimonia de Deo, ostendentia discrimen inter iusta et iniusta. Verum est igitur dictum, vim vi repellere natura concedit, sed notitia naturalis docet intelligendum esse certo modo, vim iniustam repellere licet vi ordinata, scilicet officio magistratus, cum eius auxilio uti potest, aut manu propria, si desit magistratus, ut si quis incidat in latrones. Nec Evangelium delet naturalem notitiam, non abolet politicum ordinem, cum dicit (Rom. 12. 19.): Non ulciscentes vosmet ipsos, sed magis munit politicum ordinem, quia docet petere defensionem a magistratu, et prohibet seditiones. (Animals resist violence because of a natural inclination, since God has placed in every nature whatsoever an appetite for self-preservation: in human beings, however, two things lead to the resistance of unjust violence, στoργὴ, which is the appetite for selfpreservation, [and] the other thing is notitia [an innate idea], which teaches, how these στoργὴ should be governed, and which teaches humankind that this is established in order that justice [aequalitas] be preserved. Moreover these notitiae [innate ideas] are laws of nature, which are rays of God’s wisdom, dispersed in minds, so that they might be testimonies of God, markers for discriminating between the just and the unjust. Therefore this dictum is true: nature allows force to repel force, but an idea innate in nature [notitia naturalis] teaches that this is to be understood in a certain way: that it is legitimate to repel unjust force with authoritative force, that is, by the office of the magistrate, when his help is able to be employed, or by one’s own hand, if the magistrate is absent, just as anyone would do if fallen upon by robbers. Neither does the Gospel abrogate the idea innate in nature [naturalem notitiam], nor abolish political order, when

37 CR 16, 573.


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it says: Take not vengeance upon yourselves, but rather it fortifies the political order, since it teaches [us] to seek defense from the magistrate, and it prohibits sedition.)

Even as Melanchthon sets out to authorize the use of force against force, his trademark moderation is evident. First and last, his support is for the maintenance of political order. Opposed to acts of sedition and anarchy—chaos that he associates with Anabaptist revolution—he limits his support of resistance to “just” causes (in which the injuries are, as he writes elsewhere, atrocious). Also, he expresses a strong preference for authorized magistrates to exercise force against tyranny, rather than private persons (an argument that anticipates the role of the “subaltern” magistrate in subsequent Huguenot texts). Once more, by invoking the principle of selfpreservation, Melanchthon characterizes the use of force to fight force not as active resistance—always difficult to justify in a hierarchical political order—but instead as legitimate defense, the extension of an inherent desire for self-preservation to the public realm.38 What was fundamentally new and important about Melanchthon’s employment of the natural law argument was the philosophical and theological weight that he imparted to its logic. Much of that philosophical weight descended to Melanchthon—appropriately enough in the Prolegomena in Officia Ciceronis—from Cicero himself. Cicero was Rome’s most eloquent advocate for the law of nature, and he identified true law with “right reason, in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging, everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.”39 For a humanist like Melanchthon, every word of Cicero’s argument about right reason would have been true gospel, and his eloquence itself proof of the reality of natural law. But the law of nature meant something more to Melanchthon than it did to Cicero, and hence the significance of his effort to reinvigorate classical philosophy at every juncture of this discussion by reference to Pauline theology. Not simply a principle of right reason or a moral idea that confers obligation, the law of nature is also written by God in human hearts. In Romans 2:14–15, Paul identifies “the work of the law written” in the “hearts” of the gentiles, “their conscience also

38 Legal discourse afforded a familiar technology for legitimizing self-defense, and Melanchthon clearly takes advantage of it, as he cites the increasingly popular dictum out of Roman civil law in justification of resistance: “vim vi repellere natura concedit.” There was nothing new about arguing for self-defense as the product of natural law. Johannes Bugenhagen, one of Luther’s associates, had been doing so since the 1520s. See Bugenhagen’s Brief to the Elector John of Saxony, September 1529 in Heinz Scheible, Das Widerstandsrecht als Problem der deutschen Protestanten, 1523–46 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1969), p. 25–9. See, too, Schoenberger, “The Development of the Lutheran Theory of Resistance,” 65–7. The Digest of Justinian, ed. Theodore Mommsen and Paul Krueger (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), XLIII, XVI, 27: “Vim vi repellere licere … idque ius natura comparatur.” For legal discourse and theories of self-defense, see Von Friedeburg, p. 2–36, and for the Calvinist inheritance, Robert M. Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–80,” The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), p. 159–92. 39 De re publica, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1959), III. xxii., p. 211.

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bearing witness, and their reasonings mutually accusing or even excusing them.” Cicero was right about the law, but right for reasons that no pagan could fully comprehend.40 In the Roman Digest, the appeal to natural law is a convenient legal device for allowing (always necessary) exceptions to the prohibition of violence from the civil interactions of private citizens. In Melanchthon’s reinterpretation of the Digest, the appeal to natural law is transferred from the private domain to the public. In the course of that transference, transporting the legitimacy of self-defense from private persons to the body politic, the interpretation of Cicero brings into play a fully developed Christian anthropology, one that relocates the legitimacy of defense both in the body and the mind, among those natural affections that move the heart and those ideas that govern judgment. Government for Luther was always Augustinian in kind—a product of and remedy for sin. Hence, when Luther wrote about the obligations that Christians bear toward their fellow beings, or the duties of magistrates to their people, he did so principally by reference to the “law of charity.”41 Melanchthon’s rehabilitation of natural law—more fully elaborated and detailed than Luther’s— made political obligations and duties seem as natural (hence, as desirable, reasonable and right!) as the instinct to breathe. When government is aligned with natural law, and natural law is identified with God’s love for mankind, then new possibilities for virtuous public action in defense against tyranny become available.42 40 The law of nature is inscribed by God and it is inscribed with a double complexity in Melanchthon’s argument. One natural power that draws us to employ force against force is στoργὴ, that peculiar brand of love or affection, ordinarily associated with the love of parents for children (or by extension in the patriarchy, with the love of superiors for inferiors). Στoργὴ is here represented as the love of the self for the self—a natural love of self-preservation, which human beings share with animals. That other natural power that governs the στoργὴ, and preserves natural affection for moral ends, derives from Melanchthon’s concept of the notitiae—those innate (hence natural) ideas of good implanted into the mind by God allowing for the discrimination between justice and injustice. Στoργη secures a material, biological foundation for the agency of natural law as notitiae maintain the moral and intellectual grounds of the argument. 41 See Johannes Heckel, Lex charitatis: Eine juristische Untersuchung über das Recht in der Theologie Martin Luthers (Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau, 1973; repr. 1953). 42 The elegance of Melanchthon’s argument consists partly in its easy accommodation to a variety of contexts. Equally strong expositions of natural law, extending from the vocabulary of στoργὴ and grounded upon the concept of notitiae (“Paulus expresse affirmat”) organize Melanchthon’s arguments on behalf of the defense against tyranny both in the 1543 edition of the Loci as well as in his De licita defensione, an extended polemical letter written in 1546 as another protest against imperial violence. For De licita defensione, see CR 6, 150–55; for self-defense and natural law in the Loci of 1543, see CR 21, 602–3. As the currency of academic commentary, scriptural exposition, and contemporary political debate, natural law had a purchase power of enormous appeal to Melanchthon. Already, its key terms are familiar from earlier arguments in this book, because of the significance that στoργὴ assumes as a term of art in Melanchthon’s theology, rehabilitating (against the Stoics) the goodness of natural affects; and because of the importance of notitiae for comprehending Melanchthon’s oratorical thought, due to their existentially intimate association with the essential loci of textual invention and narration. Such terms, then, evidence the elegance (the economy and


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Melanchthon’s single most influential effort to justify resistance derived much of its persuasive power, not surprisingly, from a similar application of natural law principles to political life, Von der Notwehr Unterricht (Instruction Concerning SelfDefense). This is a book with a complicated history. Von der Notwehr Unterricht was originally composed by a colleague at Wittenberg, Justus Menius, whose manuscript was partly corrected by Melanchthon before its first publication in 1547. That work was rewritten again before the publication of the second edition, also in 1547, for which Melanchthon assumed responsibility. The German text was then subsequently translated into Latin by Johannes Marcellus, another professor at Wittenberg, as De defensione concessa humano generi iure naturae (About the Defense Permitted to Humankind by the Law of Nature).43 Its original publication in German highlights its pointedly political purpose: the work was a clarion call to arms, a device to mobilize popular support for the war and to fortify the consciences of Christian soldiers battling the Emperor. However, the Latin title articulates most clearly the logic of its central argument. Self-defense derives its foundational authority from universal laws of nature inscribed in humankind—laws inscribed in the conscience by God, as this aggressively Protestant document constantly insists. The anonymous status of the publication illustrates at once the perils of the historical moment, as imperial troops descended upon Germany’s Protestant princes, and also Melanchthon’s characteristic cautiousness, especially at this moment of peril, about lending his name to incendiary, political controversies. By self-defense, what Melanchthon had in mind was more than passive disobedience or a refusal, Papinian-style, to follow the Emperor’s commands. He justified as well an active military response, even tyrannicide. In answer to his central organizing question about whether an active response against tyranny is permitted, Melanchthon wrote: “Certum est omnes homines bona conscientia sequi & amplecti, quod statuit ius Naturae, quod vere ius divinum est. Est autem omnibus hominibus haec Lex, quasi lumen quoddam, divinitus impressa, quod in atroci & notoria iniuria, cum destituimur a Magistratu, liceat nobis uti defensione, adversus pares, & adversus superiores.”44 (It is certain that all men should follow and be filled with good conscience, which is a law of nature, and which truly is a divine law. Moreover this Law is a light to all men, having been divinely impressed on them, showing in cases of atrocious and notorious injuries, when we are oppressed by a Magistrate, that it is permissible for us to act in our defense against equals and method) of his philosophical thought, his preoccupation with scope (ultimate ends considered in relation to human nature and divine purpose), and the persistence with which his writing returns, across the disciplines, to issues about the nature of nature. For a detailed account of Melanchthon’s evolving ideas about the validity of self-defense and resistance to tyranny, see Von Friedeburg, p. 56–90. 43 The original German text, the Von der Notwehr, was written by Justus Menius, and as Peterson shows, “exists in two quite different versions, the first based on Menius’s manuscript with revisions by Melanchthon, particularly in the second half, and the second for which Melanchthon in the correspondence took full credit,” “Melanchthon on Resisting the Emperor,” 135. It was that second version that served as the basis for the Latin translation. 44 De defensione concessa humano generi iure naturae (Wittenberg, 1547), sig. Eii (verso).

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against superiors.) Moreover, Melanchthon proceeded to argue that there are many cases in which natural law both permitted self-defense and also actually commanded (“sed etiam mandata”) husbands to shield wives and magistrates their subjects, and princes the church.45 The commander Thrasybulus who liberated Athens from the unchaste violations of the Thirty; the citizen Pelopidas who rescued Thebes from Spartan tyranny; even the wife of Alexander Pheraeus, who murdered her tyrannical husband, all acted according to natural law by punishing rulers who had themselves defied those appropriate (those “natural” boundaries) inside which the power appropriate to the magistrate’s calling should operate. They acted, in short, out of a natural duty to protect the chastity of the family and of the state, and consequently in defense of good order.46 By 1542, in his revised commentary on Cicero’s De officiis and his newest version of the Loci, Melanchthon had already displayed with considerable sophistication the argumentative power available to natural law discourse. What is striking about these new resistance tracts, in German and in Latin, is their self-conscious deployment of the natural law argument as a rhetorically effective mode of argumentation. When he explains in a letter of January 1547 how he came to revise and rewrite Justus Menius’s original treatise, Melanchthon recounts his aversion to Menius’s “raving and wild” words, and his desire for a more “erudite and moderate” argument. Melanchthon’s distaste for Menius prefigures Mornay’s disgruntlement with Stubbs. For both, natural law discourse provided the principal means to chasten the body politic by taming “wild” words.47 At the core of Melanchthon’s political thought is reverence for government. Like Aristotle, Melanchthon is philosophically committed to the notion that the state exists by nature, partly because of its origin in satisfying natural appetites—the desire for self-preservation, family, and society—and partly because of its goal in 45 De defensione, sig. Eii (verso). 46 Sharp distinctions are made between defense and sedition. Important qualifications maintain, too, that the power of defense resides appropriately in the hands of the magistrate not those of private citizens, but such moderating arguments impose no real limitation upon resistance in a war pitting Germany’s Protestant princes against (as Melanchthon emphasizes here) the foreign powers of the Pope. Defending the body politic against tyranny’s atrocious injuries is at once a natural and a Godly work. Melanchthon’s frequent recourse to the politics of chastity affords a second reason for highlighting the importance of the Von der Notwehr Unterricht and its Latin translation, De defensione. Natural law promises more than a conceptual foundation for argument. Persistently to associate tyranny with sexual violation is to load the forensic cannons with powerful rhetorical matter as well. See Von Friedeburg, p. 69 on Melanchthon’s predilection for examples of single individuals, “in particular women,” defending themselves. In his preface to Luther on self-defense (1547), Melanchthon warns, characteristically, against the depredations of the Italians and Spanish, calling them murderous and unchaste nations, CR 6, 361. 47 CR 6, 363. Melanchthon’s letter is dated 14 January, 1547; after complaining about Menius’s wild and raving words, he adds: “attexuimus disputationem eruditiorem et verecundiorem.” Melanchthon discovered afresh the formal distinctiveness of natural law discourse, the appeal of substituting arguments about universals for the usual polemics of topical, party-political confessional disputes, with their heady mix of name-calling, historical controversy and biblical fulmination.


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realizing natural purposes—the disposition of peace, harmony and justice.48 Beyond Aristotle, Melanchthon conceives of government as natural because it is a divinely bestowed blessing whose beauty forms one of the principal theological proofs for the existence of God. As a result, when he writes about the state in his Loci of 1543, Melanchthon seeks to enlist among the governed obedience and honor for their governors.49 Such reverence is entirely consistent with his concept of government as a divine blessing, and it helps to explain his popularity with Henry VIII and Elizabeth, sovereigns anxious to hedge their crowns with divinity. But such reverence is also fully consistent with Melanchthon’s several important elaborations of a natural law theory that endorsed active resistance to tyranny as both a lawful response and a pious duty. If government is a blessing, in its chaste disposition of the body politic, then tyranny is rape and punishable as such. To argue that Melanchthon’s variety of extended and philosophically complex defenses of resistance were written under the pressure of historical events is not to suggest that they were inconsistent with his political philosophy as a whole. Reverence for government coexists readily enough with horror for tyranny as products of the same commitment to a natural law theory of politics.50 48 There is no “state of nature” in Melanchthon’s political thought, comparable to that of John Locke. Outside of government only chaos reigns. For a concise, useful account of key terms in Melanchthon’s political philosophy, see Michel Dautry, “La Politique dans les Loci de Melanchthon,” Positions lutheriennes 22 (1974), 1–21. There is also infrequent acknowledgment of “natural rights” in Melanchthon. Instead, his political vocabulary makes room for a comprehensive endorsement of civil liberty (libertas civilis), as a human faculty ordained by law intimately associated with rights to property and to self-preservation, to the free disposition of choice among virtuous actions and the exchange of goods. Liberty is not license, but exists as a necessary complement to spiritual freedom. In Melanchthon’s suggestive metaphor, civil liberty is the free cultivation of the garden of virtue, immured by the laws of nature and of God, and by those civil laws grounded on them. See his definition of “libertas civilis” in Definitiones multarum appellationum dated 1552/53 and appended to subsequent editions of the Loci, CR 21, 1095–6. 49 These are key political virtues in his thought—and love. The chief source of this idea is, again, St. Paul, and the law of charity (platonically infused) as a principle of social organization: “et amet … ipsos magistratus, custodes politici ordinis,” CR 21, 1009–10: “and let him love the magistrates themselves, as guardians of the civil order.” In Sidney’s fiction, too, the reverence accorded by the people to “the good ruler,” Euarchus—a reverence that grows in characteristic Philippist style from fear to honor to love—harmonizes readily with the tyrannomachist exploits of his heroic son and nephew. As the politics of his Defence makes clear, such harmony extends from Sidney’s own commitment to natural law theory. The coexistence of that “conservative” reverence for government with a “radical” abhorrence of tyranny in Melanchthon’s thought and Sidney’s fiction should trouble the too-eager imposition upon sixteenth-century political philosophy of road maps for the development of republicanism on the one side or absolutism on the other. For Euarchus’s progress from the exercise of “extreme severity” to the enjoyment of his people’s love, see The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 159–61. 50 Melanchthon was no republican, and neither were his followers among the Philippists. Their specific political orientation, however, is difficult to describe by contemporary labels

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Natural Law and the Politics of Intellectualism Tyrannicide is both the natural response and the true obligation of a free people. This was an argument that Reformers eager to safeguard the liberty of the because of the character of their primary political commitment to government itself as an ordo, an order created by God and hence deserving of reverence, no matter what form it assumes—as monarchy, aristocracy, or constitutional democracy. Like most educated people of his day, Melanchthon appears to have been intellectually predisposed to monarchy as the best form of government, but to monarchy limited by law. As early as 1530, in a commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, he reflects about the diets of the Empire as modern versions of Sparta’s ephoral government, expressing a marked preference for limited or “mixed” monarchy. In a treatise on geometry, he comments favorably about mixed monarchy, on the popular analogy of a musical concord achieved among the various parts of the body politic—magistrate, aristocracy and populace. On the Spartan ephors and the necessity “ad moderandam vim regiae potestatis” (for moderating the power of the king), see CR 16, 440. On Melanchthon’s evident preference for the Aristotelian “aristocratic” state, as the just, geometrically proportioned balance between tyranny and democracy, see his Praefatio in Geometriam (1536), CR 3, 112. See, too, Scheible, Melanchthon: Eine Biographie, p. 93. Context matters to such discussions. The freedom that Melanchthon permits himself in academic commentaries intended for the learned contrasts with the orthodoxy of his pronouncements in works intended for the lewd; as Robert J. Bast indicates, Melanchthon was still preaching as late as the Catechesis Puerilis of 1540 “the old lesson that tyranny was to be counted as God’s punishment for the sins of the people,” Honor Your Fathers: Cathechisms and the Emergence of a Patriarchal Ideology in Germany, 1400–1600 ( Leiden, New York, Cologne: Brill, 1997), p. 192. Melanchthon customarily subordinates questions about “the administration of magistrates” (or the art of governing) to a more comprehensive “‘practica’, namely that [form of practical knowledge] which creates honest men, good citizens and governors.” Properly understood, politics is ethics, in Aristotle’s capacious understanding of that term—the art of governing “private manners and public responsibilities” with regard to a “final purpose”: “That nothing should be done that is contrary to virtue.” And nothing done contrary to Christian virtue. See Enarratio in CR 16, 286–7. In Melanchthon’s vision of the political order, the magistrate is defined as “the Guardian of the Two Tables” of the Decalogue, the authority empowered to enforce both those civil responsibilities that people owe to their neighbors (those of the second five commandments) and the laws imposed upon them by God (the first five commandments). Luther’s two kingdoms are effectively merged into one, and the political arena transformed into one of necessary, pious activity: the Godly magistrate serves the church (as its protector against idolatry) in cooperation with the clergy (who preach obedience to the law). Magistrates guard both church and state, and this expansion of guardianship over the universe of human affairs helps to explain, in turn, for the humanistically inclined Melanchthon, the enhanced emphasis on knowledge and the business of promoting knowledge as an instrument of government. In an age of confessional politics, Melanchthon’s “practica” emerged as a pragmatic instrument for providing education, order and liberty to a society in which the spiritual and the temporal intertwined at every turn. See Robert J. Bast, “From Two Kingdoms to the Two Tables: The Ten Commandments and the Christian Magistrate,” Archiv fűr Reformationsgeschichte 89 (1998), 79–97. James Martin Estes recounts the influence of Melanchthon’s concept in Christian Magistrate and State Church: The Reforming Career of Johannes Brenz (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 52–4. For Melanchthon’s understanding of ethics and the role of the magistrate, see Ralph Keen, “Defending the Pious: Melanchthon and the Reformation in Albertine Saxony, 1539,” Church History 60, no. 2 (June 1991), 180–95.


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church transplanted to England and to Scotland—and Quentin Skinner’s thesis notwithstanding, this was an argument that Reformed Christians of the later sixteenth century hardly needed their volumes of Aquinas to discover. In 1556, John Ponet (1514?–56) dedicated his Shorte Treatise of politike power to “all true naturall Englishe men,” and mobilized against orthodox Tudor support of Queen Mary’s sovereignty the newly potent language and logic of natural law.51 A call-toarms masquerading as a philosophical justification for tyrannicide, Ponet’s treatise appeals for authority at every stage of its methodically organized argument to natural law theory. Natural law accounts for the origins of society, it endorses the exercise of right reason in government, it explains the predations of tyranny from the primitive to the contemporary church, it guarantees citizens absolute right to the ownership of property, and it enables the Treatise’s climactic celebration of the wisdom of the ancients (to the shame of contemporary Christians!) in acknowledging that “it is naturall to cutte awaie an incurable membre, which (being suffred) wolde destroie the hole body.”52 Ponet’s point about England’s political body is plain: Mary Tudor must be excised. The “plain” character of Ponet’s point is as distinctive as its content. Natural law is “the touchestone to trye every mannes doinges (be he king or begger) whether they be good or evil,” and indispensable as that touchstone because “it is so playne and easie to be understanden that no ignoraunce can or will excuse him that therin offendeth.”53 A Pauline rigor attaches to political discrimination, as well as to scriptural interpretation. Persuaded of the importance of natural law as right reason implanted in the mind by God, Ponet means to persuade his readers by example as well as by argument. He organizes his text by a series of argumentatively key questions (e.g., “Whether it be lawful to depose an evill governour, and kill a tyranne”), and writes in response economical replies that reflect as they endorse standards of right reason in the exercise of political power. For a document so obviously polemical in purpose, the Short Treatise is remarkably temperate, even cool-headed in its rhetoric.54 Contemporaries such as Christopher Goodman and John Knox advance parallel arguments in defense (more and less) of resisting tyranny, but they do so as thoroughgoing biblicists—without appeal to the language and logic of natural law. Ponet’s pious commitments are no less powerful than Knox’s or Goodman’s. (Like Melanchthon, for his authorization of natural law as right reason, Ponet turns to Cicero filtered through the lens of Paul.)55 Ponet’s distinctiveness, rather, derives from his evident education in and absorption of the sixteenth-century’s new hermeneutic, 51 A Shorte Treatise of politicke power, and of the true Obedience which subjectes owe to kynges and other civile Governours (London, 1556), title page. 52 Ponet, p. 106. 53 Ponet, p. 3, 5. 54 The last chapter of the Shorte Treatise is fiercely personal and polemical in style; see speculation about that abrupt stylistic change in Winthrop S. Hudson, John Ponet (1516?– 1556): Advocate of Limited Monarchy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 85. 55 When Ponet expands upon his treatment of natural law toward the conclusion, he silently translates Cicero’s De re publica: “For it is no private lawe to a few or certain people, but common to all: not written in bokes, but graffed in the heartes of men: not made by man, but ordained of God: which we have not learned, receaved or redde, but have taken,

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those new methodical skills of reading and writing that here achieve “scope,” a final aim, purpose and target. The Short Treatise tethers the arrow of tyrannomachy to the bow of natural law argumentation. Goodman’s treatise, it is well to note, ended life as it began—as a sermon-in-the-works destined to be ignored. Ponet’s was reprinted twice on the eve of England’s civil war.56 A decade later and a kingdom to the north, George Buchanan naturalized fundamentally the same arguments in his anatomy of tyranny and Scottish politics, the controversial De jure regni apud Scotos (1579). Like Ponet, Buchanan grounds his argument on behalf of tyrannicide in natural law theory. Defending the right of a free people to resist tyranny or misgovernment requires, logically, an exposition of good government, “the original and cause of creating kings, and what the duties of kings are towards their people, and of people towards their kings.”57 That exposition, etiological in kind, generates an image of the state as a body whose natural condition is harmony (with king safeguarding people, and people safeguarded by law)—an image that reason has power to expose, in turn, because of that natural “LIGHT infused by GOD into our Minds.” While the “scope” of the king, as physician to the state, is to promote “the health of the body,” the tyrant operates, as unnatural monster, to corrupt that body for his own lusts.58 Buchanan’s point is made as powerfully as Ponet’s: “occidendos esse,” tyrants must be killed. Natural law demands it. Buchanan’s recourse to the vocabulary of “scope” is revealing about his rhetorical commitments. Organized on the platonic model of a dialogue, Buchanan’s treatise affords a methodical discussion about the duties of kings—and the “natural” consequences of abrogating those duties. De jure regne apud Scotos proceeds as a series of questions and answers, with orderly summary of arguments, consideration of objections, provision of historical and literary examples, definition of key terms, interpretation of scriptural texts, of positive and ecclesiastical law—the whole work on display as the finely tuned product of a cosmopolitan humanism enormously confident about the power and persuasiveness of its own eloquence. Again, that confidence proceeds in large measure from Buchanan’s assumptions about natural law. When argument succeeds in distinguishing clearly between “what doth pertain sucked, and drawne it out of nature: wherunto we are not taught, but made: not instructed, but seasoned: and (as S. Paule saieth) mannes conscience bearing witnesse of it,” p. 105–6. 56 For comparison between Goodman and Ponet on scriptural usage and polemical approach, see David H. Wollman, “The Biblical Justification for Resistance to Authority in Ponet’s and Goodman’s Polemics,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13, no. 4 (1982), 29–41. For Ponet’s vocabulary of “scope” (199–200) and its emergence among those texts from his years of exile, see C.H. Garrett, “John Ponet and the Confession of the Banished Ministers,” Church Quarterly Review 137 (Oct.–Dec., 1943), 47–74 and 138 (Jan.–Mar., 1944), 181–204. Garrett does not recognize the term’s rhetorical provenance. 57 De jure regni apud Scotos, trans. anon. (Philadelphia: 1766), p. 7. For a modern translation, see Charles Flinn Arrowood, George Buchanan on the Powers of the Crown of Scotland (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1949). 58 Buchanan, p. 11, 14. When Buchanan argues his central point, that the king is a physician who tends to the health of the body politic, he asserts: “Scopus etiam idem videtur utrique propositus” (Each also seems to have the same aim in view), De iure regni apud Scotos, Dialogus (Amsterdam, NY: Da Capo Press, 1969), p. 11.


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to the nature” of a king and a tyrant “the people will understand also, what their duty is towards both.”59 Understanding naturally secures action, and action, in turn, gives tyrants their due. Ponet’s confidence in natural law results in plainness that is both learned and polemical. By comparison, Buchanan’s confidence creates claritas that is sophisticated and studied—studied, because it secures the ground for his identification of an “art or science” of politics, as the right reason, “out of which, as from a fountain or spring, all laws provided … for the preservation of human society must proceed and be derived.”60 That reason notably is providential. Buchanan’s politics and political theory are motivated, like Ponet’s, by zeal for the international Reformed cause. Amidst the tensions of confessional warfare after St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572, the frequent call for the revival of political science among the elites of Reformed Europe, echoed in Buchanan’s work and founded in the language and logic of natural law discourse, arises as an interventionist strategy to secure relief from impending chaos. Mornay was not the first, then, to espouse a right to resistance on the foundations of natural law theory. Ponet and Buchanan developed similar arguments by the same means.61 Mornay’s Vindiciae contra tyrannos distinguishes itself mainly because of its sophistication in elaborating that theory. The pseudononymous Cono Superantius prefaces the Vindiciae’s consideration of the obligations that bind prince and people by locating the source of those reciprocal obligations—as twin constants mirrored throughout the argument’s unfolding—in “God and nature.”62 From these constants, Mornay derives his twofold consideration of the origins of kingship. Kingship is considered both as a covenant and a contract, both in relation to divine law and to natural law, depending on the summa—the major aim or scope—of those questions raised about it. Mornay proceeds, in short, as a political philosopher, not as an historian. His account of origins is logical, not factual. First, kingship is analyzed as that covenant established among God, prince, and people, which delimits popular obedience in respect to princely abrogations of divine law; and second, he analyzes kingship as that contract established between the prince and the people, which fixes the conditions under which tyrants can be resisted and the duty of foreign princes to intervene on behalf of “pure religion” and the oppressed.63 The logical connection that binds covenant to contract—that demands a necessary connection between the divine and the human—is the philosophical interpretation of natural law that informs Mornay’s argumentative matter. In his Christian Aristotelianism, “law is a mind, or rather, a gathered multitude of minds. 59 Buchanan, p. 7. 60 Buchanan, p. 18. When Daniel Rogers writes to the great Dutch printer Christopher Plantin about Buchanan’s De jure, he states that he does not know whether to praise more highly its contents (“argumentum”) or its presentation (“formam”), one contemporary piece of evidence for the distinctiveness of Buchanan’s writing practice. Rogers’s letter is quoted in I.D. McFarlane, Buchanan (London: Duckworth, 1981), p. 241. 61 For an account of the Vindiciae in the context of Mornay’s polemical writings, see Patry, p. 275–86, and the more recent political biography, with its cogent analysis of Mornay’s political suicide, see Daussy, “Les enigme des Vindiciae contra Tyrannos,” p. 229–58. 62 Vindiciae, p. 11. 63 Vindiciae, p. 5.

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For the mind is a particle of the divine breath, and he who obeys the law is seen to obey God and, in a certain way, to make God his judge.”64 Scriptural arguments about the covenant among God, prince and people (Questions One and Two) are underwritten consistently by reference to classical moral philosophy and contemporary history. In turn, political arguments about the contract between prince and people (Questions Three and Four) are persistently supported by biblical interpretations and by patristic and scholastic authorities. As the Preface proclaims, Mornay’s double “method of teaching,” by proceeding from “causes and major propositions” to “effects and consequences,” renders kingship “visible and comprehensible, as if ascending through certain degrees to the peak (ad summa) so that in the manner of geometricians—whom he seems to have wanted to imitate in this matter—from a point he draws a line, from the line a plane, and from the plane he constitutes a solid.”65 Right reason produces right knowledge about kingship—knowledge at once natural and Godly—and creates consequently right teaching reflected in the very method of its making. Mornay’s philosophical sophistication in applying natural law theory against tyranny is best displayed in a core passage from his third quaestio’s analysis of “What the Purpose of Kings is.”66 He layers text upon text in characteristic humanist fashion, moving from a brief citation of Aesop’s fable about the horse who allows himself to be mounted for defense against a boar; to Augustine’s reflections on the charitable economy of the natural household, in which husbands command wives, and parents children, not with “arrogance,” but “with compassion in providing”; to Seneca’s description of the golden age, which featured “wise men” acting as kings to protect the weak from the strong and to rule “out of duty [officium], not … regality [regnum]”; to Cicero’s account about the genesis of kingship from “conflicts … about the ownership of things [among] citizens”; to the demand of “the people of God” in I Samuel:8 for a king who would serve justly and insure “that indeed right should be done to all equitably.”67 Sacred and secular, philosophical and poetic, erudite and popular literature are assembled in neoteric style—in a highly allusive, compact 64 Vindiciae, p. 98. 65 Vindiciae, p. 10. Such complementarity of argument is (far from inconsistent!) one distinguishing characteristic of Mornay’s self-consciously proclaimed “elegance” of method—his ability to analyze, to resolve into its constitutive components the complex topic of “kingship,” understood first as covenant, then as contract. 66 Much of his argument derives here and elsewhere in the later portions of the Vindiciae, as Quentin Skinner has shown, from scholastic sources—in particular from the more “radical” followers of Thomas Aquinas, Bartolus of Saxoferrato and Baldus de Ubaldis, and from conciliarist political theorists, such as Jean Gerson, Jacques Almain and John Major. In particular, like Gerson, Mornay questions how men, who are “free by nature … have elected the command of another,” as a logical device for turning an inquiry into origins into an argument about ends: “the one purpose of command is the people’s welfare, ” Vindiciae, p. 93–4. Ponet and Buchanan are similarly well-versed in conciliarist thought, but Mornay is no more a scholastic than Ponet or Buchanan and his employment of scholastic arguments is only one element in a more comprehensive display of humanist rhetorical eloquence inflected by the sixteenth-century’s new hermeneutic. 67 Vindiciae, p. 92–4.


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fashion accommodating traditional authorities for a presentist political purpose.68 All these assembled authorities authorize the destruction of tyrants who defy that single natural law illustrated comprehensively: “the one purpose of command is the people’s welfare.”69 As an argument with scope, economically organized and rich in the commonplaces of the classical and Christian tradition, such prose is the unique product of the new hermeneutic. When Melanchthon argues for the legitimacy of self-defense against tyranny and the value of civil liberty, he derives his natural law argument from Roman Law, vim vi repellere natura concedit. When Mornay argues about the purpose of kings—in a text whose scope is tyrannicide—he derives his central argument from the same principle of Roman Law. “But clearly,” Mornay writes, kings were created so that “they should defend individuals from each other and all together as a whole from external attack, either by exercising jurisdiction [iure dicundo] or by repelling force with force [seu vim vi repellendo].”70 Kingship has its origins in the natural right of self-preservation. To threaten or to abrogate that right, then, in defiance of nature, is to open kings to the full force of tyrannicidal remedies.71 In turn, freedom is a double-edged sword in Mornay. On the one side, people are “free by nature,” but that original freedom is corrupted by the sin of self-love—and such freedom needs temperance by law and its living embodiment, the king. On the other, the king must respect the freedom of the people to maintain life and livelihood, as he must care for “pure religion,” and he does so, again, by ruling according to law. Law, at once divine and natural, chastens the tyranny of self-love and self-loving sovereigns, as the chief agent of what Cono Superantius characterizes in his Preface as the “perfect image of the governance of kingdoms … a legitimate, chaste, and blameless matron without any excessive adornment.”72 The perfect kingdom, then, is a Lucretia purged of the ravages of Tarquin, and the perfect political hero, Brutus—Tarquin’s nemesis and the chief tyrannicidal namesake of the Vindiciae’s pseudnonymous author, Stephanus Junius Brutus. Mornay’s point is rhetorical as well as political. Chastity is a figure of good rule and good discourse, whose avoidance of “excessive adornment” suggests 68 See Roland Greene on the history of the “neoteric,” Cicero’s disparaging term for the “strategic newness” of the poetae novi surrounding, first, Catullus, then Gallus, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid and Virgil, “Spenser and Contemporary Vernacular Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), p. 238. 69 Vindiciae, p. 93. 70 Vindiciae, p. 92. 71 Mornay’s argument derives its force because of the anthropological assumptions at its core: “men are free, impatient of servitude, and … born more to command than to obey,” not as noble savages, but rather as creatures infected by the sin of self-love: “each man loves and pursues his own interests.” Self-love sparks conflicts between “‘Mine and Thine’,” those Ciceronian disputes about property (livelihood and life) dictating the necessity of kingship, Vindiciae, p. 93. Such conflicts arise because “man is composed of the divine mind and that brutish spirit,” and consequently “he is often at variance with himself, and frequently becomes demented and insane,” Vindiciae, p. 98. 72 Vindiciae, p. 8.

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simultaneously something about the extraordinary promise and potential of natural law discourse itself—not just as it is methodically embodied in Mornay, but also as it finds realization in Ponet’s plainness and Buchanan’s eloquent scope. Natural law discourse is writing that has been chastened—tempered, because it avoids the excessive adornments, and because it seeks to avoid, too, in its alliance with “right reason,” those contaminating passions traditionally associated with rhetorical excess. But temperance is not limited to rhetorical issues about diction. A more important chastening of discourse takes place as Mornay and Buchanan and Ponet seek to liberate those ideas that must inform just government from the contaminating passions of party-political confessional debate and the vicissitudes of historical events. (Politics distinct from ethical ideas—politics as a business of power—is a Machiavellian anathema to these figures.) When Mornay considers “the purpose of kings,” he does so without reference to contemporary political debates (the text contains only one Huguenot-inspired allusion to the Massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day), and he writes, too, without reference to theological or religious differences. Liberated from history, and those passions that contaminate the realm of events, Mornay is set free amidst the golden age speculations of Senecan philosophy and the Augustinian vision of a natural economy to render true “kingship”—the idea of kingship as it should be, not as it is—“visible and comprehensible” to the reader. (Intimations of the Defence!). It needs to be emphasized, of course, that this temperate retreat from history, party-political controversy, and confessional wrangling (in Mornay, as in Ponet and Buchanan) is motivated by an urgent desire to engage with history. Mornay’s Vindiciae is a vehicle for liberating the oppressed from tyranny, both a call to arms to the faithful, and an appeal to moderates for the freedom that would obviate the necessity of that call. It needs to be emphasized, too, that Mornay’s retreat from religious controversy is motivated, simultaneously, by an urgent desire for religious reformation. The Vindiciae is a summons to princes everywhere to accept their duty to protect “pure religion,” and his employment of the language and logic of natural law is the very means by which he seeks to obtain his pious ends. It is a calculated, strategic, and brilliant response to the new politics of confessionalism that dominated Europe in the last half of the sixteenth century, and that achieved especially virulent form in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. For Mornay, as for Ponet and Buchanan, the recourse to right reason as a standard of discourse is an effort to demystify, not to secularize philosophical argument. Right reason is the natural and divinely empowered vehicle of reflection, and need not (to borrow a phrase from Sidney) be banished from the church of God. As a result, it is not necessary to follow Quentin Skinner in positing a sudden rekindling of scholastic enthusiasm among these devotees of Reformed Christianity in order to account for the revitalization of interest in the language and logic of natural law theory or to postulate the birth of a “secular” political discourse. An alternative explanation for their common commitments emerges clearly enough. That alternative presents itself plausibly as the product of shared historical connections— the allegiance among these writers to the same republic of letters. John Ponet was a Cambridge educated bishop and a Marian exile who by his own report discovered in


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Melanchthon one of his principal “comforters.”73 George Buchanan was a long-time friend and companion of Languet, that Burgundian who gave up friends, family, and homeland to devote his life to Melanchthon’s service. In the mid-1560s, while living in Paris, Buchanan belonged to a circle of humanists that included, in addition to Languet, Charles de l’Écluse, Paul Schede, and Johannes Sambucus—all of whom were distinguished intellectuals and Philippists, students or followers of Philip Melanchthon.74 In the late 1570s, after his return to Scotland, one of Buchanan’s closest friends in England was Daniel Rogers, himself an intimate of Languet’s circle and the son of the Marian martyr and Philippist, John Rogers (1500?–55).75 Within this international republic of letters, constituted by Reformed humanists devoted to preserving the “true” church from its international enemies, Mornay’s reliance on natural law theory could not have been interpreted as an act of ironic scholastic inversion. It would have been received instead as traditional argumentation derived from a long-standing political discourse with its roots in Melanchthon and its branches in Ponet and Buchanan.76 Since mid-century natural law theory had

73 Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, ed. Hastings Robinson (Cambridge: University Press, 1846–47), vol. 1, 116. C.H. Garrett argues that Ponet’s Short Treatise was designed in tandem with the failed Dudley conspiracy of 1556, which suggests a family relationship of another kind between Ponet’s work and Sidney’s, “John Ponet and the Confession of the Banished Ministers,” Church Quarterly Review 137 (1944), 181–204. For a reading of Ponet in light of the religious and political events of 1553, see Barrett L. Beer, “John Ponet’s Short Treatise of Politike Power Reassessed,” Sixteenth Century Journal 21, no. 3 (1990), 373–84 and, more insightful, Barbara Peardon’s “The Politics of Polemic: John Ponet’s Short Treatise of Politike Power and Contemporary Circumstance, 1553–56,” Journal of British Studies 22, no. 1 (1982), 35–49. 74 In his chapter on Buchanan’s formative years, McFarlane comments about the “similarity of outlook between Buchanan and Melanchthon,” p. 46, ftn. 11; he notes the unusual importance accorded to natural law arguments in the De jure; and he cites Buchanan’s debt here to Melanchthon’s “moderate and conciliatory views,” p. 335. For Buchanan’s extensive contacts among Languet’s circle in the 1560s, see McFarlane’s chapter, “The court and travel,” p. 225–46. 75 See, too, Francis Oakley’s “On the Road from Constance to 1688: The Political Thought of John Major and George Buchanan,” Journal of British Studies, no. 2 (May 1962), 1–31. While highlighting the importance of natural law to the De jure regni, Oakley argues persuasively for Buchanan’s debt—by way of his teacher, John Major—to medieval conciliarist thought. Familiar claims about the secular character of Buchanan’s argument coincide in the argument with absence of attention to Melanchthon and early Protestant resistance theory. 76 Buchanan explicitly cites Melanchthon as the principal source for his resistance politics, just as Mornay pays tribute to Buchanan as the “Celt” who inspired the Vindiciae’s fictively advertised place of publication as Edinburgh. For Buchanan and his debts to Melanchthon, see Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, “George Buchanan and the Ancient Scottish Constitution,” The English Historical Review, Supplement 3 (1966), 1–54. Buchanan’s first written formulation of a resistance theory is contained in a document that he authored anonymously justifying the deposition of Mary Queen of Scots to Queen Elizabeth, “A copy of a wryting delyvered by the Erle of Morton to the Commissioners for the Queen’s Majesty” (1571). See that document in Trevor-Roper (p. 40–50) for the specific citations to Melanchthon.

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itself been naturalized in the Reformed north as a response to what these humanists viewed as the threatening tempests of the Catholic League’s tyranny. Mornay, Ponet, and Buchanan were all proponents of limited monarchy, not republicans in any meaningful sense of the term. Buchanan included one of the century’s most exclamatory celebrations of that most familiar topos, just kingship, in his De jure and labored to impart substance to that celebration by tutoring one of the princes upon whom Reformed Europe placed its best hopes, James VI of Scotland.77 Mornay devoted himself to the service of that other great hope of the international evangelical cause, Henry of Navarre, his best candidate to become what the Vindiciae idealizes, that sovereign who truly embodies law by submitting himself to its dictates. Like the moderate and sometimes reluctant Melanchthon, then, they were spokesmen for limited monarchy and civil liberty, but also far more aggressive spokesmen for natural rights because of the confessionally explosive times in which they wrote.78 In the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, after decades of accumulating disasters from the Wars of the Schmalkaldan League to the martyrdoms under Mary Tudor to the atrocities of Spanish tyranny in the Netherlands, it became brutally apparent to the Reformed that Christian liberty could not survive without political liberty, that Luther’s two regimens would not stay separate. Whatever the distance between Wittenberg and Basle—the respective sites for the publication of those two cannon blasts of the Reformed cause, the Von der Notwehr Unterricht and the Vindiciae contra tyrannos—and the diversity among those rhetorical and political positions adopted by this group of thinkers, it is useful to refer to them as inhabiting the same intellectual community because of their commitment to the international Reformed cause, their opposition to the tyranny of Tridentine Catholicism, their idealization of an ecumenical Christianity, and their rigorous and thoroughgoing employment of the language and logic of natural law as a primary means to chasten the public domain amidst the confessional turmoil of European politics. It is helpful, too, to think of them as inhabiting the same community because of the personal relationships that bound one to another. The distance between Wittenberg and Basle, geographical and 77 See Buchanan, p. 47–9, with a celebration of the good king as an image of God. 78 Measure the distance between Wittenberg in 1547 and Basle in 1579—the places of publication for the Von der Notwehr Unterricht and the Vindiciae contra tyrannos—and the distance between them must be calculated by more than geography and time. Within the imperial structure of early modern Germany, it was one thing to legitimize resistance against the emperor (especially one backed by foreign armies of invasion) when there were Protestant princes of the patria who would champion resistance. In the context of the monarchies of northern Europe—England, Scotland, or France—it was quite another to justify rebellion against the king. (See Von Friedeburg, p. 7–34.) Mornay, Ponet, and Buchanan confronted different and more complicated questions about sovereignty and much of the intricacy of their discussions of representation (their preoccupation with covenants, contracts, and trusts) derives from that difference in political institutions. Melanchthon heralded civil liberty, rightly understood; he too was philosophically predisposed toward mixed monarchy and ephoral limits to sovereign authority; he too believed that the prince should be subject to the law; that governors were servants both of pure religion and the welfare of the people, but the claims for popular sovereignty in Mornay, Ponet and Buchanan threatened to impose stricter limits on the authority of magistrates than Melanchthon ever envisioned.


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temporal, was no metaphor for Hubert Languet. As chief lieutenant to Melanchthon, intellectual companion to Buchanan, and intimate friend, guide, and educator to the twin Philips, Mornay and Sidney, Languet was the living connection who made this community a reality—the teller of old “true tales” (in Sidney’s tribute) who best knew how to mark the miles between Wittenberg and Basle, between the early struggles of the cause and the later because he was “shepherd best,” best instructed in the language and logic of natural law. It was one thing to contemplate taking arms against a sea of troubles. It was quite another, for humanists writing in this republic of letters, to counter tyranny with the pen. As Skinner has shown, one major appeal of natural law arguments to such writers was their confidence in the power of universal standards of reason to secure freedom from partisan wrangling. Such confidence existed everywhere inside this circle, especially between teacher and student. It was found in the last service Languet performed for the cause, his partial authorship in 1581 of An Apologie for William of Orange (1533–84), the great Reformed champion of liberty in Europe’s most important political theater, the Netherlands. Consistently advancing arguments from natural law, Languet’s Apologie employs the “strength and soundness of reason” to demonstrate how that Spanish Phalaris, Philip II, had sacrificed his natural claims upon sovereignty.79 Sidney, too, knew the value of polemical arguments grounded upon natural law, especially as a defense against tyranny, and he employed them with seemingly similar confidence. Nothing is more typical of his early political writings, his “Discourse on Irish Affairs” and his “Letter to the Queen,” than his efforts to justify his positions by means of the language and logic of natural law. Imposing a cess tax upon Ireland, as Sidney’s father Sir Henry wished to do, was a cure for “lenity” and a bridle upon tyranny sanctioned by natural law. So when Sidney considers how much lenity ought to be employed in administering Irish affairs, he makes his judgment according to “the general nature of all countries not fully conquered”; according to his understanding of the Irish as a race subject to “a natural inconstancy”; and according to his perception of their political disposition as “a nation which live[s] tyrannously … one over the other.”80 In turn, when Sidney writes to Queen Elizabeth advising her against the marriage to Anjou, he urges her to consider “the nature of the thing done” and asks her to recognize “as in bodies natural … so in this body politic the peril of any sudden change.”81 He warns her about the “united minds” of her Catholic subjects, “as all men that deem themselves 79 An Apologie or Defence, of my Lord the Prince of Orange … Against the Proclamation …published by the King of Spaine, trans. anon. (London: 1581), p.B3 (verso). Languet’s authorship of the Apologie was partial; he was co-author with Pierre Loyseleur and Mornay; or so Mornay’s notes about the work’s composition suggest, as he recounts his desire (and Languet’s) to moderate the excessive, polemical rhetoric of Loyseleur’s original. See Daussy, p. 168–9. Languet knew something from Melanchthon’s experience with Menius about the value of editorial temperance. Pleading against the horrors of the Inquisition that Spain imposed upon the Netherlands, William of Orange states that such persecutors surmount “in crueltie, Phalaris, Busyris, Nero, Domitian, and all tyraunts …”, p. G4 (verso). 80 Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p.11. 81 “A Letter written to Queen Elizabeth,” in Miscellaneous Prose, p. 46–7.

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oppressed naturally are,” and he provides her with “natural causes” for anticipating “contempt” from her people in the event of the marriage—a marriage that is “beyond all reach of reason” and, therefore, beyond the boundaries of natural law. To counter this opposition, Sidney recommends nature’s remedies, “virtue and justice,” as “the only bonds of the people’s love.”82 The marriage to Anjou threatened England with tyranny, or to quote Greville’s account of Sidney’s “Letter to the Queen,” with the metamorphosis of “our moderate form of Monarchie into a precipitate absoluteness.”83 The stakes were high, but Greville marvels none the less at Sidney’s confidence in offering such advice to Elizabeth, attributing that confidence to his assurance that this sovereign whom he regarded as the source of England’s “quietnes” and Europe’s “onely protectour of [God’s] Church,” would grant him the liberty to speak.84 Greville was right about Sidney’s confidence (he appears not to have suffered because of his opposition to the marriage), but some of Sidney’s confidence derived, too, surely from the assumed power of his own natural law argument (modeled like Mornay’s on the example of “the Geometricians”) and its potential persuasiveness to the Queen. Leicester and Walsingham may have swayed his decision to write, but Sidney would never have written without believing that he could move the Queen’s mind. The very fact that a young aspiring author like Sidney would send a copy of his letter to George Buchanan—arguably the most distinguished intellectual among the Reformed— argues powerfully for such confidence. It is well to emphasize the letter’s methodical organization; its careful unfolding of an argument about motion in the political body by analogy with physical bodies; its conspicuous avoidance of papist-bashing (despite the excess of Catherine de Medici derided as a Jezebel); and its studied removal from the unsophisticated, out-of-court biblicism of a John Stubbs. The young Philip Sidney was already an accomplished practitioner of natural law discourse. Moreover, it is important to notice the letter’s persistent preoccupation with—as one more natural law argument seeking to counter tyranny by right reason—issues about the mind: Sidney’s concern about the “minds” of English Catholics, about the possible “contempt” of Elizabeth’s subjects, about the means for preserving the people’s love for the Queen, and the Queen’s own need to maintain stoical constancy. Sidney’s whole argument trades, in fact, upon an analogy between the tranquility of the English kingdom and the tranquility of the Queen’s mind, as if the state were merely an image of that mind (its reasons and its passions) writ large. In an age of confessionalism, in which pious ideologies so often determine personal allegiance, ideas and the mind assume enormous political significance. Beyond Skinner’s point, then, about cross-confessional purposes, at the foundations of the textual labors of this broad body of humanists committed to natural law discourse are the assumptions of what can only be termed a deeply held intellectualism: a belief that real political change derives first and foremost from changes in how people think—especially in how they think about the primary issues of moral and political philosophy. That intellectualism is reflected, for instance, in 82 “A Letter,” p. 48, 53–4. 83 Greville, p. 63. 84 See Sidney’s “A Letter,” p. 57, 60.


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Ponet’s confident assertions about the plain character of natural law, its accessibility to interpretation, imprinted (as it is) upon the conscience, and the rigor of his Pauline assertions about the indispensability of that law as touchstone to political decisionmaking. A parallel intellectualism is found in Buchanan’s characterization of natural law as a treasury for minting a new political science, the persuasiveness of right reason for discriminating between legitimate kings and tyrants, and the mimetic potency of virtuous sovereignty as a public image of political consequence. In Mornay’s most important philosophical works, the desire to transcend partisanship finds expression in even more confident assertions about the geometric precision of reason. Whether addressing the problem of atheism in the De verité (that plea for universal Christian truth in an age of confessionalism) or Machiavellianism in the Vindiciae (an assault against the corruption of political culture by corrupt books), natural law arguments appeal inclusively to readers of “whichever party or nation or condition they belong” on the optimistic assumption that reason will naturally create agreement.85 Moreover, intellectualism is reflected in the content of their shared agreements about the nature of tyranny—as a perversion (literally), an unnatural inversion of the nature of good government originating in the perversion of the individual mind or soul. Tyranny is a form of self-love—or rather, a manifestation of self-love in the public arena. Ponet’s fundamental political distinction is between the true king who maintains “justice, to the wealthe and benefite of the hole multitude” and the tyrant “that seketh his owne gayne.” Buchanan defines justice, in good classical terms, as that principle that “allow[s] every man his own,” and then deepens classical precept with Christian charity, distinguishing between the true king who “beareth rule for the subjects welfare” and the tyrant who rules “for himself.” Mornay in the Vindiciae elaborates a similar paternalism, when he cites Augustine to demonstrate that “to command is nothing other than to show concern for the people,” a selfless exercise of power mirrored in Seneca’s accounts of kingship in the golden age, and shattered—in these brazen years—by the predations of the unnatural tyrant “who serves only his own welfare and desires, who neglects and perverts all laws .…”86 Ponet, Buchanan, and Mornay represent tyranny in essentially similar ways, as one more point of agreement inside a community of humanists whose shared understandings are so often illuminated by commonplaces in Melanchthon’s thought. Toward the conclusion of the Loci communes of 1555, when contemplating worldly authority, Melanchthon argues that God “gave men light, namely, understanding of natural law through which we know that we should make and keep order in governments, and are obliged to obey natural law as God’s will.” Once more, as he writes in application of this argument, such laws distinguish true kings from tyrants—the latter consistently distinguished from the former as rulers who pursue “their own general happiness” and “seek their own tyranny, welfare, pomp, sensual pleasure, and suppression of the truth.”87 Such commonplaces are illuminating because they underscore the logic of that shared intellectualism of the resistance 85 Vindiciae, p. 9. For Buchanan’s discussion of the mimetic potency of the image of the monarch, see below, p. 212. 86 Ponet, p. 7, 13; Buchanan, p. 54; Vindiciae, p. 93, 96. 87 Loci Communes 1555, p. 325, 336–7.

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theorists. A consistent correspondence is maintained between the public and the private spheres, political and moral life, because always for the Reformed humanist the reality that counts most is the one that situates the individual in relation to God. Tyranny in the state proceeds from the tyranny of sin over the soul, as a repetition of Melanchthon’s distinctive reading of Adam’s fall as a sin of self-love. From the earliest version of the Loci communes (1521), the emphasis remains the same: “Thus it happens the soul being without celestial light and life is in darkness. As a result, it most ardently loves itself, seeks its own desires and wishes nothing but carnal things .… It cannot but be that a creature whom the love of God has not absorbed, loves itself in the highest degree.”88 The rape of Lucretia is a speaking picture of tyrannical self-love at work in the state and the soul, and chastity, rightly interpreted, the agent of tyrannicide. Recovering a history of Reformed resistance theory matters to the present argument, since it identifies the Defence as a text in dialogue with a community of texts from this same republic of letters. Like Ponet, Buchanan, Mornay and Languet, Sidney too employs the language and logic of natural law theory. Once more, recovering this history matters because it highlights in advance the enormous promise of natural law arguments for a writer like Sidney, himself haunted by the nightmare of tyranny. It is necessary to write, however, about the “promise” of this argumentative rhetoric—its serviceability in securing agreement across confessional boundaries, its employment history in support of the cause—rather than its power. In the aftermath of St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572 and the capitulations of well-educated humanists like Pibrac, Sidney acknowledged in his Defence what his friends Mornay and Languet wished to ignore altogether: the helplessness of even the best historical examples and philosophical rules to undo the Phalarises of the world. Henry Sidney did not win the right to impose his cess tax, and though Elizabeth eventually refused Anjou’s marriage suit, nobody ever credited Philip Sidney for influencing her decision. Within his republic of letters, Sidney was one among many writers employing the pen against tyranny, but he was unique for defending the poet’s pen— beyond the historian’s and the philosopher’s—as an especially fit instrument for that labor. This does not mean that his Defence is a call-to-arms against tyranny. Nothing about the history of the text’s circulation as a coterie work passing among family and friends suggests such a purpose. Sidney’s purpose, of course, was to defend poetry, and tyrants populate the text in such large numbers because poetry’s value in the public domain, among such a community of like-minded readers (readers who shared similar pious and political goals), could only be measured by reference to its value in subduing them. Sidney’s Cosmopology and the Poetics of Liberation The tyranny of self-love looms large throughout the Defence of Poesy as a theme that binds private to public considerations, the pious to the political. Its setting, again, 88 CR 21, 97–8. “Ita fit, ut anima luce, vitaque coelesti carens excecetur, et sese ardentissime amet, sua quaerat, non cupiat, non velit, nisi carnalia” …. Fieri enim nequit, quin sese maxime amet creatura, quam non absorpsit amor dei.”


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helps to foreground the point. It is appropriate that Sidney opens his Defence in the Vienna of Maximilian II, his chief place of residence during his Continental tour, where he spent those many months studying under the tutelage of Languet. As a flourishing center for the studia humanitatis, a northern European city eager to rival Venice, Padua and Rome as a capital of learning and culture, Vienna was an appropriate site for meditating about art, especially a newly conceived art of poetry with ambitions to achieve preeminence among the arts and sciences. As home to a Holy Roman Emperor, whose aversion for confessional warfare made the city safe for Spanish Jesuits, an order patronized especially by the Empress Maria, for German evangelical Reformers and humanists (like David Chyträus and Joachim Camerarius the Elder), Bohemian Protestants (like Crato Von Crafftheim), Italian Catholics (like Jacopo Strada), English Catholics (like Edmund Campion) and confessionally mercurial Dutchmen (learned gypsies like Justus Lipsius), Vienna of the early 1570s made an especially good location, too, for Philippist reflections about the pious potential of poetry rightly understood.89 Once more, during these years Vienna was still the center of the imperial court, a nexus of political activity whose historically complex ties to every theater of consequence for the Reformed cause, from counterReformation Spain to the embattled Netherlands, made it a city of considerable political consequence. Sidney’s closest friends actively engaged in political work at court during his stay. Languet served as imperial ambassador to the Elector of Saxony, before, during, and after the exile of his party at home. Crato labored both as personal physician to Maximilian, and, more zealously, as political advocate for the Reformed Bohemian church. Another member of Languet’s Viennese circle, Lazarus Von Schwendi, a moderate Catholic, a former military commander under Charles V, and a patriotic proponent of a restored Roman empire was a frequent advisor to Maximilian and author of a steady stream of polemical treatises in favor of religious toleration.90 Maximilian’s Vienna, then, was an appropriate site for relating the art of poetry to the art of government. It was also a watchtower for tyranny. Sidney opens his argument in the Defence by evoking the memory of the moderate Vienna of Maximilian II. Vienna is to Sidney what Urbino was to Castiglione, a place imbued with nostalgia for a world now lost. By the time that he composed his text, Maximilian was already dead and the potential for confessional reconciliation that Vienna embodied appeared threatened by annihilation as well. By March of 1578, Sidney lamented to Languet that “our cause” is withering away.91 In the eyes of the Philippists, Maximilian’s Vienna stood in conspicuous contrast to what Sidney described as that espaniolated counter-Reformation Prague of the new Emperor Rudolf II (1576–1612), whose Tridentine tyranny threatened to undo civil life, civil

89 Martin Eisengrein is one exception that proves the rule; as an exemplar of the “rigid Catholicism” that Maximilian opposed, this court preacher was made unwelcome in Vienna in the late 1560s when the Emperor was forming a commission to bring about ecumenical reconciliation; see Paula Sutter Fichtner, Emperor Maximilian II (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 2001), p. 148–50. 90 See Maximilian Lanzinner, “Die Denkschrift des Lazarus von Schwendi zur Reichspolitik,” Zeitscrift für historische Forschung 3 (1987), 141–85, and Louthan, p. 106–20. 91 Sidney to Languet, 10 March 1578, in Pears, p. 163.

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arts, civil everything. Spanish power, fueled by Papal machinations, was the primary source of tyranny, and an imperial court contaminated by Spanish influence was one factor contributing to Sidney’s fears about the demise of the cause. At the outset of the Defence, the main purpose in recalling Maximilian’s Vienna, of course, was to summon into mind Signor Pugliano, that horseman whose comically splendid devotion to his art nearly makes Philip wish himself a horse—a monitory fable about “self-love” as “better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves are parties” (95).92 Sidney distances himself from the mentor, and not for the last time. But as Pugliano’s self-love is located in the vanished world of Maximilian’s court, as sin threatening the unnatural metamorphosis of man into beast, the very location of the fable shadows a larger public world in which the tyranny of selfloving sovereigns operates unnaturally to darker ends. Sidney returns to the theme of tyrannical self-love frequently in the Defence, and often with a similar lightness of touch. As one chief rival to the poets, he presents the arrogant philosophers, “casting largesse as they go of definitions, divisions, and distinctions, with a scornful interrogative … soberly ask[ing] whether it be possible to find any path so ready to lead a man to virtue …” (105). As the poet’s other chief rival, Sidney ushers into view the similarly narcissistic historian, “a wonder to young folks and a tyrant in table talk, den[ying], in a great chafe, that any man for teaching of virtue … is comparable to him” (105). The parodied philosopher and historian of the Defence are portraits in pomposity, speaking pictures of self-love tyrannizing over substance as well as style—and style counts in the cosmopolitan economy of Sidney’s poetic universe. Self-love can corrupt English poetry, not just the scholarly disciplines, as happens when a surfeit of “similitudes in certain printed discourses” spawns “a most tedious prattling,” the exaggerated artificiality exercised by the native writer who “more careful to speak curiously than to speak truly … doth dance to his own music” (139). As a genre, comedy has a special concern with solipsism of this sort, when a Plautus or a Terence opens the eyes of one who not seeing “himself dance the same measure” through laughing finds “his own actions contemptibly set forth” (117). But dancing to one’s own music is precisely what poetic imitation of all sorts, properly understood, is designed to inhibit. The liberal art serves the liberal mind. As Sidney learned from Johann Sturm, his one-time teacher at the Strasbourg academy and subsequently his lifelong friend, the always cosmopolitan goal of imitation (the comparatio of great literary models) is to eliminate what this republic of letters universally regarded as the most tyrannical of vices, the sin of self-love: “Imitatio ingenium ultra naturae ducit terminos: ut se amare desinat: & meliores admirari incipiat.” (Imitation leads genius beyond the boundaries of nature: so that it ceases to love itself: and begins to admire better things.)93 92 Sidney knew first-hand the difference between these imperial courts, having served as one-time ambassador from Elizabeth to Rudolf II, offering consolations for the death of Maximilian. See Hager on “the odd autobiographical quibble on philippian tendency to horselove,” p. 113. 93 De imitatione, p. sig. Bii. My quotation comes from a fascinating, extended discussion in Chapter II about the utility of imitation in which Sturm celebrates the cosmopolitan value of the literary arts for remedying self-love. His De imitatione was published while Sidney


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The comprehensiveness of Sidney’s concerns is striking. Pugliano’s artistic folly, the philosopher’s and the historian’s disciplinary arrogance, the writer’s stylistic solipsism—all are linked as variations on the theme of self-love. In turn, all shadow that darker political tyranny of Phalaris, who roasting his victims alive for the pleasure of hearing their screams, himself (Cecropia-wise) seems like a beastly parody of the poet.94 Such comprehensiveness is especially revealing, in turn, about Sidney’s conceptual predisposition: his deeply cultivated aversion for the narrowly partisan, whether that partisanship manifests itself as the product of English literary provincialism and its quirky self-pleasing rhetoric, the disciplinary narrowness of arrogant scholars, or the brutal fanaticism of contemporary confessional politics. Against the provincialism of the English tradition, the Defence persistently illustrates its arguments from a cosmopolitan canon of Continental works, ancient and modern. Against disciplinary narrowness, it asserts the claims of poetry as a kind of masterscience, superior to history and philosophy, because it performs inclusively (moving and teaching) the work of both. Against the partisanship of confessionalism, it refuses, too, as my discussion of Sidney’s piety has shown, theological disputation and polemical name-calling. Like Mornay’s, Sidney’s mode of argument is selfconsciously “chaste,” chastened from the contaminating passions of partisan political allegiances. Compare his “Letter to the Queen” to Stubbs’s “Gaping Gulf,” and Sidney’s commitment to rhetorical temperance is easily illustrated. In turn, compare his “Letter” to the Defence and that temperance is yet again more obvious. There are no references to Catherine de Medici as “that Jezabel of our age,” or allusions to Anjou’s brutal massacre of the Huguenots at “la Charite & … Issoire,” no disturbing reflections about an English “faction of … Papists,” or foreign enemies in league with the Pope. In fact, the Defence contains not a single acknowledgment of the existence of multiple Christian confessions, much less of warfare between or among them.95 Sidney’s topic, of course, is fiction-making rather than contemporary events, but one of the public virtues of fiction-making, both as a topic and as a topically “chaste” mode of discourse (in parallel to the discourse of natural law ) is its freedom from the otherwise necessary display of partisanship. The right poet rescues poetry and learning, church and commonwealth, from the always partisan, always divisive tyranny of self-love. Conceived in this light, Sidney’s apology for poetry emerges as a sort of “cosmopology,” as a cosmopolitan defense of fiction-making in the service of freedom.96 The comprehensiveness of this cosmopology’s concerns, in turn, is revealing about Sidney’s own deep commitment to the “intellectualism” of this circle of humanist allies, and to his own belief that the high-flying liberty of the poet is exercised most vitally in the liberation of the mind. was his pupil in Strasbourg. See too Anne Lake Prescott’s entertaining analysis of Sidney’s lesson in self-love from his training under Pugliano—Philip learning (as “phil-hippus,” the horse-lover), that is, the perils of solipsism, “Tracing Astrophil’s ‘Coltish Gyres’: Sidney and the Horses of Desire,” Renaissance Papers (2005), 25–42. 94 For Cecropia as a parody of the Sidneian poet, see Levao, Renaissance Minds and their Fictions, p. 235–49. 95 Sidney’s “A Letter,” p. 52–3. 96 I owe the term “cosmopology” to Mr. Hugh Davis, one of the best and brightest of my graduate students.

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Sidney’s political beliefs were scarcely the sort that Tudor homilies enforced from the pulpet. His tyrannomachy is scripted into the Defence (“occidendos esse”) as an unorthodox, if not radical political belief. Similarly distinctive political leanings impact the argument at several turns. For example, in an important transitional moment, Sidney summons into imagination a pageant of worthies—those great men who have also been great poets—as a device for lending greater public authority to his claims. As usual, he organizes his list of those worthies with an ecumenical and political inclusiveness, incorporating Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Lutherans, “piercing wits” from Scotland and “grave counsellors” from France (131). His parade of ancients and moderns, pagans and Christians, is characteristically cosmopolitan—and simultaneously revealing not just about his pious convictions (as the previous chapter argues), but also about his distinctive political principles. Three of the worthies hailed in this passage, Beza and Melanchthon (the “preachers and teachers”), as well as Buchanan (the “piercing wit” celebrated toward its conclusion), were themselves proponents of tyrannomachy. Once more, as the transitional argument continues with its contrast between poetry’s embrace by other nations and its “hard welcome in England,” Sidney explains that “hard welcome” by reference to his nation’s “overfaint quietness” and its silencing of “the trumpet of Mars” (131). “Idle England,” he goes on to write, “can scarce endure the pain of a pen” (132). Unheroic nations, Sidney’s logic goes, do not value heroic arts—the best products of the muse. Sidney’s coterie audience may well have recognized in this complaint a specific political implication: unheroic times forestall English military intervention against the Catholic League’s tyranny, and such idleness is shameful. Once more, as the parade of worthies suggests, other nations know how to deal with tyrants. Such suggestions, however, stay submerged in a text whose rhetoric appears specifically designed to subordinate them to the demands of the argument at hand. The edge of the topical and the polemical is blunted in order to sharpen attention to principle. Tyrannomachy remains as an idea because it is a principle of right reason and natural law. Specific policy recommendations to Elizabeth are matters Sidney leaves to occasional writings like the “Letter.” Such implications, then, inside the Defence are sometimes revealing about Sidney’s intense desire for active English intervention on the Continent. Revealing as they might be, however, they can only be loosely labeled “forward Protestant” in kind. In the pageant of worthies, Sidney’s argument achieves its climax not by hailing the sometimes militant Buchanan—that hot-Scot tyrannomachist par excellence—but rather by celebrating Michel de L’Hospital, the longtime Chancellor of France and internationally revered champion of toleration.97 The Sidney who values military intervention and hails the death of tyrants is also the Sidney who recognizes—in an ascending hierarchy of goods—the preeminence of virtuous counselorship and the public peace to be achieved beyond confessional warfare. Sidney’s cosmopolitan politics are too complicated to fit neatly into a box labeled “forward Protestant.” Poised between his commitment to a militant pursuit of the cause and his idealization of ecumenical reunion, between war as the necessary response to the tyranny of the Catholic League and civil arts as irenic means for the 97 For Languet and L’Hospital, see Nicollier-de Weck, p. 156–60 and Chapter 3 here.


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restoration of civil conversation, between active virtue and contemplative quiet— those competing poles around which the heroic and pastoral worlds of his Arcadian fictions turn—Sidney’s politics are the product of his Philippist education. They are a politics, for that reason, best pursued not through the subterranean paths of his infrequent allusions to contemporary events, but rather along the open roadway that he constructs from the language and logic of his natural law argumentation. Nothing shows more profoundly Sidney’s debts to the natural law theorists of his circle than the weight his Defence places upon the anthropological arguments at its core. Returning to those arguments can highlight their important public and political power. Wonderful as the making of golden worlds may be, in their superiority to nature’s brazen one, Sidney carefully structures the conceptual center of his poetics to highlight the consequences of the poet’s making for humankind, for whom the poet’s “uttermost cunning” is employed (100). Humanity’s natural condition is a fallen one. Because of Adam’s sin, as Sidney writes in that core passage at the heart of his golden world poetics, “our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it” (101). The poet’s job— private and public—is determined by Sidney’s anthropological vision. Poetry works by attempting to restore that now corrupted will to goodness, freeing the individual from the brazen world of history—and the sins “natural” to it—as it recreates that “Natural” harmony between wit and will enjoyed in the golden world of Eden. Sidney reaps the traditional advantages of the natural law theorist’s argument in Christian form: the appeal simultaneously to nature (created nature) as corrupt and to Nature (creating Nature) as a vehicle for securing freedom from corruption.98 Consider how that freedom is gained. As the Defence makes clear, the superiority of the poet’s world to history’s (the explanation for its golden quality) consists “not in the work itself,” but in “that Idea or fore-conceit” represented, counterfeited or figured forth by the poet’s still-erect wit (101). His Idea is a universal truth about experience—a representation of virtue or vice—which stands at the foundation of the fiction, generating speaking pictures and providing unity to the whole. In this context, what is especially noteworthy about those Ideas whenever they are specifically illustrated in the Defence—the chastity of Lucretia, the piety of Aeneas, the courage of Turnus—is their invariable representation as the commonplaces of Sidney’s own education in moral (and political) philosophy. Again and again, in recalling these loci to “the tablet of … memory,” Sidney shows a particular penchant for heroes whose love of family inspires love of country—Ulysses longing to return to Ithaca—and for those (like Aeneas) whose regulation of the passions models public rule of the state, “in his inward self, and … his outward government” (120). Virtue is best illustrated in a public domain, then, as an extension of the private, and as the goal of an expansive, cosmopolitan “gathering of many knowledges”—both 98 See Ponet for example: “This rule [‘how he should behave him self, what he should doo, and what he maye not doo’] is the lawe of nature, furst planted and graffed only in the mynde of man, that after for that his mynde was through synne defiled, filled with darknesse,and encombred with many doubtes) set furthe in writing in the decaloge or ten commaundementes: and after reduced by Christ our saveour into these two wordes …,” p. 2. The best introduction to Sidney’s use of the term “nature” remains Ulreich, 79–83.

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Odysseus and Aeneas exemplary travelers (127). Once more, not only does Sidney clearly associate those Ideas given substance by right poets with the principles of natural law theory, but also he accounts for their “rightness” (legitimacy) on the basis of shared philosophical assumptions. As we have seen, the Defence assumes both the autonomy of the Idea and its legitimacy (its authority as an instance of true knowledge). Sidney draws upon the intellectual assumptions of his circle in specific ways: by adopting an anthropological framework to explain the poet’s “scope” or purpose; by associating the poet’s Ideas with the commonplaces of moral philosophy; and by assuming, as deep structure for his own arguments on behalf of poetic authority, a theory of innate ideas divinely scripted in the mind as natural law. His debts are evident, and their political consequences all the more explicit with the reminder that this argument about the anthropology of the Defence is given a specific authorial source in a poem whose real subject is tyrannicide, the beast fable from the wedding celebrations of The Old Arcadia’s third book. In Aristotle’s ethics, marriage is a species of friendship, and friendship, the virtue that best exemplifies justice. At the wedding of Lalus and Kala, two Arcadians among the native shepherds of The Old Arcadia’s Eclogues, Sidney’s fictive double, Philisides, recounts a musical fable that he reports to have learned from “old Languet,” whom he calls affectionately “the shepherd best swift Ister knew.” As fictions multiply inside fictions, with Sidney writing about Philisides performing a song remembered from the teacher of his youth, paradoxically the poem moves closer to the world of real events. Philisides attributes to him both his piety and his moral education:99 He said the music best thilke powers pleased Was jump concord between our wit and will, Where highest notes to godliness are raised, And lowest sink not down to jot of ill. With old true tales he wont mine ears to fill: How shepherds did of yore, how now, they thrive, Spoiling their flock, or while twixt them they strive.

Principles of faculty psychology secure the foundation of Philisides’ political fable about the origins of monarchy: the concord between wit and will that Languet praises as a tenet of natural law (and he is “shepherd best” because he best knows the laws of nature) corresponds exactly to the balance celebrated between sovereign and subjects in the state. When that concord is violated, with the emergence of selfloving sovereigns who “think all things … made them to please,” golden world harmony is undone by brazen world tyranny. The same division between wit and will that motivates Sidney’s aggressively optimistic poetics in the Defence achieves in his beast fable an explicitly political focus: Philisides ends by counseling his “poor beasts” either “in patience [to] bide your hell, Or know your strengths, and then you shall do well.”100 There is no real mystery about Philisides’ advice or Sidney’s 99 The Old Arcadia, p. 255. 100 The Old Arcadia, p. 257, 259.


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meaning. His Arcadias take for granted, as readily as his Defence, the necessity and virtue of tyrannicide. What matters here to the present argument is the clarification that the beast fable supplies about the relationship between the Defence and the natural law theory of Sidney’s intellectual circle. Sidney’s golden world poetic is so frequently couched in the language of natural law, and so persistently motivated by fears of self-love and tyranny, not by virtue of some loose correspondence between friend and associate, but rather—as Philisides’s fable makes clear—as the authorially explicit debt of a student to a teacher. Sidney inherited an anthropology of self-love and a politics of tyrannicide from his Philippist mentor, Hubert Languet, and Sidney means here to repay his debt for that education by means of a unique tribute: Languet is the only contemporary ever explicitly named in Sidney’s fiction. Sidney associates the Ideas of his right poet with the commonplaces of moral philosophy, this chapter has argued, because he was inspired by an old shepherd whose chief vehicle of teaching appears to have been history: “With old true tales he wont mine ears to fill.” Sidney acknowledged profound debts, especially to Languet, even while he was at work importantly in his Defence in contesting related intellectual assumptions. Associations do not constitute identities, and however alike Sidney’s Ideas are to those of the natural law theorist, a crucial distinction exists between their deployment. The distinction is crucial because that difference in deployment of the Idea explains why and how Sidney both borrows key intellectual assumptions of his circle and simultaneously contests them—explains why, in short, such shared assumptions could supply Sidney with a motive for writing poetry rather than history or philosophy. Considering Sidney’s beast fable in light of the philosophical practice of his friend Mornay or the differently styled political philosophy of that piercing wit, Buchanan, clarifies that distinction. Sidney’s fable reads like a poetic embodiment of Mornay’s exposition, “On the purpose of kings.” Philisides’s song is a moral tale about the creation of man, elected as king by a commonwealth of beasts against the advice of Jove, and his subsequent devolution into tyranny. As Mornay layers text upon text to explain the origins of kingship as philosophical prelude to sanctioning tyrannicide, so Sidney’s song narrates a tale about the birth of kingly man as poetic justification for exercising strength to achieve freedom. Mornay begins his exposition with Aesop’s tale of the horse and the bull, and ends with I Samuel 8. Sidney draws upon a different fable out of Aesop—the parliament of frogs—but chooses as his chief narrative vehicle the same story from I Samuel 8. Both assume the natural correspondence of inward government and outward, the virtue of limited monarchy, the natural law that defines kingship as service, and the harmony of natural with divine law. In short, both reason rightly as good students of their Philippist mentor, Languet. Mornay may or may not have been a “source” for Sidney. The more important point is that Sidney both admires and seeks to enhance the liberating potential of the natural philosopher’s discourse. As Mornay is set free amidst Seneca’s golden age speculations and Augustine’s vision of a natural economy to render true “kingship”— the idea of kingship as it should be—“visible and comprehensible” to the reader, so Sidney labors to give that idea of kingship real substance in the poetic character of his fiction. In view of that labor’s central importance to the Defence’s preoccupation

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with the public domain, Mornay had demonstrably far more shaping power over Sidney’s poetics than Scaliger, Minturno or any of the Italian theoreticians. But why is this lending substance to Ideas characterizable as a labor? Inside his circle, Buchanan comes closest to articulating explicitly the political problem motivating Sidney’s image-making labors. Buchanan both insists philosophically upon the mimetic potency of true kingship (“in whose image so great a force is presented to the minds of his subjects”), and despairs historically about its realization (“in these corrupt times of ours; it is hard to find this magnanimity”).101 In philosophy, Ideas remain abstractions, too remote and insubstantial either to achieve clarity or to carry affective force. In history, the Idea is always conditioned by the contaminating circumstances of an imperfect world of events (Phalaris dies quietly in bed, and tyranny goes unchastened). By contrast, Sidney argues strongly, the poet’s Ideas are substantive images exemplified as pictures of his own making. The figuring-forth of the Sidneian poet works “substantially” in his creation of a “perfect picture … of a true lively knowledge”—knowledge that makes a reality available for the reader (101, 107). It is crucial to emphasize the important activity of the poem in presenting a “reality” in order to foreground the extraordinary intellectual and affective power that Sidney attributes to the Idea as it is figured forth—the capacity of the poet’s “perfect” pictures to unleash real powers that exist at once in Nature and in the mind. This is a distinction worth maintaining because it highlights Sidney’s decision to liberate the Idea from its purely conceptual locus in philosophy and its conditional status in history and to return it to its true home in poetry—a liberation that he achieves without sacrificing the exemplary power of Languet’s “old true tales” either by descending into history’s sad captivity to the brazen world of events or by obscuring comprehension with the esoteric matter of philosophy. Since history and philosophy fail, poetry must succeed. The future, otherwise, belongs to Cecropia. In the Defence, Sidney’s poet “goeth hand in hand with Nature” because that cooperation secures for his Ideas a whole separate order of persuasiveness related to, but distinct from their logical power (100). It secures the added dimension of existential persuasiveness—the persuasiveness that derives from the power of fictions to speak to the needs of human nature. The poet’s Ideas have, therefore, a rhetorical, rather than just a conceptual power, rendering them superior both to the always conditioned examples of unsatisfying history and to the abstractions of philosophical thought. Such insight suggests, in turn, some key assumptions about what it means publicly and politically for the poet “to deliver forth in such excellency” Ideas just “as he hath imagined them” (101). Sidney attributes to Nature in the Defence extraordinary power, not just as that great creating force with which the poet walks hand in hand—itself a speaking picture of the cooperation of the maker and his Maker, the human and the divine—but also the motivating impulse attributed to human nature in its appetite for goodness. The Ideas figured forth by poets have power, Sidney argues repeatedly, because “poetry ever setteth virtue so out in her best colours … that one must needs be enamoured of her” (111). Virtue’s “best colours” are public and political. When the reader is led to imagine Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, the “form of goodness” 101 Buchanan, p. 48–9.


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poetically depicted, “cannot but” be loved (114). So similarly, in his discussion of heroic characters like Cyrus, Turnus, and Achilles, Sidney cites Plato and Cicero’s opinion “that who could see virtue would be wonderfully ravished with the love of her beauty” (119). Poetry has such power to “plant goodness even in the secretest cabinet of our souls” because of the human appetite for virtue and because of that substantive form (the imagined hero himself!) in which the Idea of virtue is made real—its substantiality at once moving and teaching, freeing the will from the tyranny of its own self-serving appetites as it recalls to the mind the goods of Nature (106). Sidney is not naive, and he scarcely thinks poetry always effective. Bartholomew’s Day 1572 and the failures of Pibrac were far too potent memories to allow him to sustain idealizations unreflectively. Sidney draws upon the anthropology of natural law theorists in order to contest the very adequacy of history and philosophy as disciplines. Or more concretely, what Sidney learned about human nature from Languet and Mornay also persuaded him—given the zodiacal powers of the wit, and the infected condition of the will— that only poetry could have the power to undo the tyranny of self-love over the soul and self-loving sovereigns in the state. Given that anthropology, the wit must be instructed, and (even more importantly) the will moved: both requirements demand a discipline beyond history and philosophy, one that including both, transcends both as his culture’s preeminent (because cosmopolitan) science. In a golden world set free from the contaminations of history—of a past that too often records the triumph of vice over virtue, or a present that too often divides Christian from Christian in endless confessional debate—the poet takes aim against the Idea of tyranny, realized as a substantial image in a fictive world beyond partisan politics, in order to chasten the public domain—to purge the body politic from the contaminations of self-love. Just as Sidney begins the important work of the Defence by illustrating imitation with the example of Tarquin’s tyranny over Lucrece, so later in the text he highlights two more tales of tyranny, the stories of Menenius Agrippa and the biblical Nathan. It is revealing to revisit those tales with tyranny in mind. The first narrates Agrippa’s success in quelling a rebellion in ancient Rome by means of a story about the interdependence of the various parts of the human body. Popular anger against patrician greed is alleviated as the working limbs of the polity (the plebeians) are made to understand the necessary function of the belly. While the belly (the patrician class) may consume, such consumption nourishes (Menenius’s exemplum insists) the whole of the body politic. Sidney’s second story narrates the prophet Nathan’s success in devising a tale for King David in the wake of his adultery with Bathsheba and his culpability in the death of her husband. Nathan’s fictive account of “a man whose beloved lamb was ungratefully taken from his bosom” quickly shames David into repentance (115). As I have shown in Chapter 2, the two stories are introduced at a crucial juncture of Sidney’s argument. They are placed at the climactic moment of the Defence’s demonstration of poetry’s “most excellent work”—the “high argument” of its confirmatio—just before the turn to justify poetry by an examination of its parts (115). So situated, the tales supply summary proofs of the main burden of Sidney’s claim on behalf of the poet’s “works”—its strangely metamorphic power over its audience. They also supply summary proofs of the poet’s superiority in the

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public domain—because of those works’ pious and political dimensions—over his chief rivals for cultural authority, the historian and the philosopher.102 The tales of Agrippa and Nathan supply a complementary pair of proof texts. One is drawn from classical history, the other from sacred. One illustrates the power of a fable to provide “a perfect reconcilement” in the public domain, as Agrippa’s tale of the belly heals the divisions in Rome’s body politic; the other illustrates the power of fiction-making in the private sphere, as David is shamed by Nathan’s story of the lamb “as in a glass to see his own filthiness,” to repent for adultery and murder, and reclaim (“as that heavenly psalm of mercy well testifieth”) his role as God’s chosen servant (114–15). As always happens in the Defence, that private story is intimately connected to the public—its “intimacy” guaranteed by David’s status as Israel’s King. One tale illustrates the power of a feigned tale over the people, one over the sovereign. In both, Sidney dramatizes the tyranny of self-love as a universal condition afflicting individuals and the state. In Agrippa’s fable, we see the tyranny of mob violence—one of the principal forms of tyranny analyzed in Buchanan’s De jure and Mornay’s Vindiciae; in Nathan’s tale, the tyranny of lust over the sovereign—one of Melanchthon’s favorite proof texts about tyrannical selflove.103 Paired in this manner, the twin tales seem deliberately chosen in order to illustrate comprehensively, across the domains of pagan and sacred history, public and private life, among the low and the high, the superior effects of poetry’s “most excellent work” in teaching and persuading the knowledge of good government. As a preface to his illustrations of that work, in the paragraph immediately preceding, Sidney recalls approvingly Aristotle’s claim on behalf of poetry’s “conveniency to Nature” as a way of highlighting those powerfully persuasive acts of identification that make readers want to see themselves as Turnus courageously preferring death to dishonor, as Aeneas piously bearing old Anchises on his back, or as Lucretia chastely resisting the tyranny of lust (114). Both “the whole people of Rome” collectively and David individually are brought to an architectonic knowledge of themselves. They are chastened by fictions that heighten understanding about their natures and that move them by reason of such knowledge to virtuous action (114). In both cases, that architectonic knowledge is liberating, since knowledge about their real natures (the nature of the body politic’s necessary interdependence of parts, the nature of the self’s dependence on God) sparks change that frees them from self-love and renders them what they truly are (a whole people, a chosen servant).104 Poetry’s “most excellent work,” Sidney’s speaking pictures eloquently declare, is liberty. When Sidney alludes to the story of Tarquin and Lucretia, he does so with an eye to the beauty of Lucretia’s chastity. There are no accompanying images of Tarquin’s punishment. When he recalls the legendary tyrant, Alexander Pheraeus, he attends to him at the moment that he watches a tragic performance. Sidney does not picture 102 See Chapter 2 above and Enarrationes Aliquot Librorum Ethicorum Aristotelis in CR 16, 283, note 2. 103 See Buchanan (1766) where he cites the “rude multitude” as one of the three principal manifestations of tyranny, p. 6. 104 For an analysis of this passage in relation to Sidney’s contemporary political concerns, see Ferguson, p. 159–65.


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him slain by his wife. No images of Holofernes’s head are brought to the poetic platter. There is a certain noticeable restraint in these representations of tyranny, which accords at once with Sidney’s deliberately chaste rhetorical manner and which complements simultaneously a reverential regard for government in all of its private and political manifestations that forestalls the graphic depiction of any sovereign’s fall, however merited. That reverence for government is evident throughout the argument. If Sidney’s exordium gathers attention wittily to the tyranny of “self-love,” it works as well by means of Pugliano’s comic elevation of the art of horsemanship above “skill of government” to focus attention (amidst the confusion of things great and small) on what counts greatly. Among the early arguments for poetry’s value, Sidney highlights with good Ciceronian precedent its civilizing consequences as the first light-giver to ignorance. In turn, when Sidney opens his key consideration of poetry’s value with respect to the cosmopolitan array of arts and sciences, using as a touchstone for his argument the relation of each to the “works of nature,” he purposefully models his discussion upon one of the best known texts in the humanist republic of letters, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle transforms ethics into a master science, the art of governing private and public life. As the allusive economy of Sidney’s text suggests, with its self-conscious evocation of Aristotle’s opening argument, his claims for poetry as a master science rest on similar grounds—on its superior power to govern that tragic discord at the heart of things, the discord between wit and will. When Sidney arrives, then, at that climactic stage of his argument in which he offers two tales in proof of poetry’s “most excellent work,” it is appropriate that those “princely” stories should warn against tyranny by exemplifying simultaneously the power of good government (115). They are “princely” stories because of their power to govern the passions of a mob and the lusts of a king, as examples of the virtue of obedience—the “perfect reconcilement” that reconciles the plebeians to their place in the body politic, and the “mercy” that restores David to God’s grace (115). On the other side of tyranny is good government. In turn, obedience—rightly understood in the divine and natural order—is liberty. Freeing the Defence (Post-Soviet Farm Culture) “Liberty” seems just the right word with which to conclude a discussion about the politics of Sidney’s poetics because it points to the need to rewrite the revisionary critical history imposed upon it by recent critics generally and by Alan Sinfield especially. In particular, it seems high time to liberate the Defence of Poesy from its guilty association with Soviet-style absolutism. There can be no question about Sidney’s intellectual commitments to a universalizing epistemology: the poet’s golden world achieves its legitimacy and power only because the Ideas to which it lends rhetorical substance have the status of natural law. However, as this chapter has argued in some detail, Sidney had recourse to the language and logic of natural law precisely in order to contest the claims of what appeared to his understanding and to his experience of the international landscape as politically abhorrent absolutism. Sidney’s natural law arguments are drawn from the rhetorical arsenal

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of Reformed tyrannomachists waging campaigns against Tridentine Catholicism, dating from Melanchthon’s appeals against the Emperor in the Wars of the League of the Schmalkaldan to Languet’s assaults against Philip II during the Dutch wars of liberation. Derived from political theorists who espoused a theory of limited monarchy, such rhetoric unsurprisingly was anathema to Tudor absolutists—the exponents of a pious orthodoxy with its own very real absolutist ideology of obedience. In light of which circumstance, assertions about Sidney’s complicity in Elizabethan absolutism seem peculiarly unhistorical, especially when unsupported by analysis. By advancing natural law arguments, Sidney and his circle hoped to have discovered a vehicle for securing reasoned political agreements beyond the partisan rhetoric of confessional debate, the “universalizing” force of its ideas most important for their putative power to reconstruct universal agreement among civil communities. If that hope seems at this historical juncture theoretically naive and pragmatically bankrupt, as the product of intellectually elite humanists who never secured the institutional authority to put purpose into practice, such a hope seems no more dismissible as the product of factional politics than it does as absolutist propagandizing. The community that matters most for understanding the politics of the Defence is not a faction at the Elizabethan court (vaguely characterizable as “earnest puritan” by Sinfield or “forward Protestant” by Worden), but an identifiable network of cosmopolitan Reformed humanists reaching from Languet to Mornay to Rogers to Buchanan to Sidney, one which found its most important “commonplace” agreements in that distinctive version of Reformed Christianity that derives from Philip Melanchthon’s vastly influential and still-obscured labors. It is to that community that Sidney owes his tyrannomachist politics, his natural law theory, his intellectualist assumptions and his anthropology, as well as his identification of tyranny with self-love. His was a community, an active “republic of letters,” if one likes, but never powerful enough in institutional terms to rise to the level of a faction. Recovering a history of ideas from that network of intellectually elite humanists with whom Sidney associated intimately throughout his adult life and from which he derived so much of his political and poetic thought has a special urgency, it might be well to conclude, because we still know too little about it.

Conclusion Reproducing Cyrus: The Defence of Poesy and a Cosmopolitan Culture of Books The Train to Oblivion: Jean Bodin and the Golden Age Gone Consider the new “critical” humanists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, scholars like Henri Estienne, Joseph Scaliger, and Isaac Casaubon, and the image conjured to mind, writes Anthony Grafton, is of a railway train:1 a train in which Greeks and Latins, spurious and genuine authorities, sit side by side until they reach a stop marked ‘Renaissance’. Then grim-faced humanists climb aboard, check tickets, and expel fakes in hordes through doors and windows alike. Their destination, of course, is Oblivion—the wrecking-yard to which History and Humanism conduct all canons—and certainly consign all fakes.

One especially grim-faced conductor speeding this cargo of fakery on its way was Jean Bodin, whose Methodus or Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1566) scrutinizes the works of historians themselves on the assumption that real history has to be rescued from those scholars, past and present, who have been bemused by fictions. With conspicuous sobriety, Bodin consigns to Oblivion such seeming relics of historical scholarship as the Four Monarchies and the Golden Age, continuing favorites among contemporary authors of so-called universal chronologies, like Philip Melanchthon, still eager to turn the dark imagery of the Book of Daniel into prophetic history, and still confident about reconciling mythic paradises with lived experience. In great huffs and puffs of rhetorical breath, Bodin fairly blows down the doors of Melanchthon’s credulity.2 Hence, especially for twenty-first century readers, it is difficult to ignore the peculiar character of the Preamble to Bodin’s Methodus, which while announcing the superiority of history to other disciplines, lavishes praise on “historical” cargo one would have thought long-ago consigned 1 Grafton, Defenders of the Text, p. 78–9. 2 Bodin’s Chapter 7 is entitled, “Refutation of Those who Postulate Four Monarchies and the Golden Age,” and his principal target of scorn is Melanchthon, first for his mistaken interpretations of “the obscure and ambiguous words of Daniel” (p. 291), and next for his credulous faith in the tales of poets: “for if anyone examines the meaning of historians, not of poets, certainly he will decide that … [t]he age which they call ‘golden’, if it be compared with ours, would seem but iron” (p. 296), Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1945). Additional citations to Bodin are noted by page number in parentheses.

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to Oblivion: Xenophon’s idealizing portrait of Cyrus the Great. In a rhetorically swollen paragraph, Bodin dilates on the “vast treasure” of Xenophon’s history (12– 13), sounding for a time less like the new critical historian that he is (the one who secures his value by stripping the present of its illusions) than like the traditional humanist that he disdains (the one who moralizes an exemplary past whose events he misrepresents). For Bodin to devote a major portion of his exposition of history’s “boundless advantages” to Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a work whose lack of authentic historicity was common knowledge from Cicero’s day to his own (even Bodin calls it “a work not true to fact”) smacks of inconsistency—an inconsistency perhaps best explained as a civil nod to humanist pieties from an ambitious historian eager to have praise because he has earned it, not necessarily because it fits (13). Bodin’s Preamble to the Methodus is a reminder that in those frequent battles raging among rival disciplines in the Renaissance, Cyrus was ammunition for whatever cause could load him in its rhetorical cannons. Plato and Xenophon had sat together at the feet of Socrates, but these twin students turned their teacher’s paideia into contrasting forms of knowledge, or so the combatants in these wars among the muses had insisted from the first. Plato wrote philosophy (everyone but Philip Sidney realized—and Sidney, of course, only feigned not to know better), but no one could agree about what kind of knowledge Xenophon’s text represented. In the traditional conflict between philosophy and rhetoric, Cicero had maintained that the Cyropaedia was great oratory, or rather history whose strengths derived from oratory, and his opinion was echoed by that distinguished Renaissance translator and philologist, Joachim Camerarius the Elder.3 For Michel de Montaigne, the Cyropaedia was educational philosophy to be absorbed not simply by the head, but also by the heart.4 For Bodin, the Cyropaedia was history tout court, a potent ally in the disciplinary wars whose authority was welcome, whatever Bodin’s reservations about its truth-to-fact. For Edmund Spenser, by contrast, the Cyropaedia was great poetry. As he explains in the prefatory letter to The Faerie Queene, Plato turned the “Commune welth such as it should be” into a philosophical republic, while Xenophon transformed the “governement such as might best be” into “the person of Cyrus and the Persians,” an act of personification that Spenser lays claim to as fiction-making.5 In turn, Spenser’s claim has the important precedent of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, where Cyrus assumes among all the champions in the “war among the Muses,” from Homer’s Achilles to Tasso’s Rinaldo, the status of preeminent hero (96). He is cited more frequently than any other hero, even Virgil’s Aeneas, and assumes a greater weight in Sidney’s crucial arguments on behalf of fiction-making 3 Cicero, Epistulae ad Quintum Fratrem, I. I. 23. Ioachimi Camerarii ad libros Xenophontis … Additiones, in Xenophontis Atheniensis de Cyri Regis Persarum Vita atque Disciplina, Libri VIII (Paris: Andreas Wechel, 1572), p. 290–97. 4 “Of Pedantry,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1958), Book 1, n. 25, p. 105. Learning must be “not merely a knowledge in their soul, but its character and content”–a point exemplified by Cyrus’s education. 5 “A Letter of the Authors,” in The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (New York: Penguin, 1987), p. 16.

Conclusion: Reproducing Cyrus

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as a form of knowledge. When Sidney celebrates the poet’s powers as a maker, in his critically important invocation of the golden world, he highlights the substantive, metamorphic agency of the fictive narrative, its power to make a Cyrus in order to bestow many Cyruses upon the world. If it is this metamorphic power that secures poetry’s greatest value (and the Cyropaedia for Sidney is great poetry), then Cyrus is the very exemplar of poetry’s real value to the public domain. The multiplication of Cyruses is crucial to the genesis of action. Go forth and multiply. But why did Sidney choose Cyrus to assume that preeminent position? Who was Cyrus to Philip Sidney?6 Cyrus’s traditional value in the war among the muses supplies only a partial answer to questions that, once fully explored, provide a useful summary account of Sidney’s poetics, piety and politics in the Defence. As the hero who best exemplifies poetry’s preeminence as knowledge leading to virtuous action, Cyrus emerges from Sidney’s argument most meaningfully as a liberator. In the first instance, then, his preeminent status is intelligible as an expression of that drive to achieve liberty that organizes so much of what matters to the Defence. Liberty matters to a poetics in which the right poet creates rightly only when freed from the tyranny of historical verisimilitude and the opacity of abstruse philosophy and topical allegory. Lucretia freed from Tarquin’s tyranny exemplifies poetry’s freedom from the prison house of history—the burden of brazen world verisimilitude. Again, liberty matters to a Philippist piety unconstrained by a Reformed theology sometimes hostile to the idols of human making, and gains inspiration instead from Melanchthon’s more optimistic assessment about agency—the zodiacal range of the wit, the ameliorative potential of the will—and that agency’s necessary chastening engagement with culture. The still-erect wit is zodiacal because of its range and inclusiveness, and the infected will subject to amelioration, because of its neverextinguished love for virtue: sparks remain (as notitiae) and those sparks are set ablaze by the poet’s notable images of virtue and vice. Menenius quiets the tyranny of the mob, as Nathan leads David to repentance, and the twin tales (secular and sacred) exemplify poetry’s pious agency against the sovereignty of sin across the full spectrum of the public domain. Again too, and most urgently, liberty matters to a Philippist politics in which the cosmopolitan poet goes armed with Ideas against ideology, universal notions of virtue and vice against the always-partisan particulars of confessional debate, to harness the innate power of natural law against sinful sovereigns. Sidney’s seeming flight from history is the strategically conceived complement of his anti-confessional and tyrannomachist politics, and the calculated celebration (amidst his catalogue of worthies) of that most accomplished spokesman

6 Most critics of the Defence comment about Sidney’s Cyrus, but there have been few attempts to account for his status as preeminent hero. Two exceptions should be mentioned. Mack’s chapter on “The Imitation of Cyrus” anticipates my argument about the biblical Cyrus’s importance for Sidney’s reinterpretation of Xenophon’s hero; Mack focuses on Cyrus’s “mystical interpretation” by way of the imitatio Christi (p. 153). By contrast, my concern centers on the historically specific (i.e. Philippist) context of Sidney’s representation. See, too, Miller on Jacques Amyot’s treatment of Cyrus in the Preface to his translation of Plutarch’s Moralia, “Sidney’s Apology for Poetry,” 259–76.

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for toleration Michel de l’Hospital affords one exemplary expression of his political commitment to liberty. Beyond summary (however useful), exploring Sidney’s fascination with Cyrus matters too because it yields new information about the complex intertextuality of that humanist network inside which the Defence is situated. I call attention to that network’s intertextual context because it is by the indirect route of Sidney’s interest in particular books—books that speak to and about other books—that his understanding of Cyrus, the Philippist hero par excellence, is best illuminated. There are several good reasons to believe that Sidney had a particular interest in Jean Bodin’s books, one of which is that at a critical moment of his career he cites the Methodus explicitly as preface to an important argument about how to weigh the value of various forms of knowledge, the “sciences” of his Defence. In a letter addressed to his brother Robert, preparing for his Continental tour, Philip begins his extended educational recommendations by advising him to ground his study upon Bodin’s “method of writing Historie.”7 There is nothing especially unusual about such advice or interest. According to Gabriel Harvey, writing in the 1570s, you could not step into an English scholar’s library, but “ten to one,” you shall find open a copy of Bodin or Le Roy, a contemporary French humanist writing a similarly upto-date historiography.8 Moreover, as scholars from F.J. Levy to Blair Worden have demonstrated at length, Sidney’s deep reading in historical literature, ancient and modern, would itself have guaranteed an interest in the fashionable Bodin. In fact, Worden cites his recommendation of the Methodus as proof of Sidney’s high regard for the discipline—whatever that cagey, ironic Defence might appear to suggest to the contrary.9 Irony is scarcely limited to the Defence, however. For reasons that Worden does not pause to consider, Sidney’s recommendation of Bodin is as fully ironized as any passage in his poetics: “For the method of writing Historie, Boden hath written at large,” Philip explains to Robert, adding with evident bite, “yow may reade him and gather out of many wordes some matter.”10 Take him, Philip might have written, with a grain of salt—or at least with a good strainer for thin soup. Bodin came complete with a history that goes some distance in explaining Sidney’s ironically strained, none-too-enthusiastic citation of the Methodus. Like so many other humanists of the 1570s, Bodin had his political principles tested by the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. For the Philippists among Sidney’s circle, the Massacre recalled the continuing necessity of their backward-looking commitment to Melanchthon’s piety and politics. To quiet Sidney’s rage against the sad capitulation to tyranny of moderate Catholics like Pibrac, Languet evoked the memory of Melanchthon’s moderation. That evocation is exemplary of his principled and pragmatic commitment at once to evangelical unity and to antiTridentine tyrannomachy. Tyrants occidendos esse (tyrants must be destroyed, 7 Letter to Robert Sidney, 18 October 1580, in Feuillerat, vol. 3, 130. 8 Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, A. D. 1573–1580, ed. Edward John Long Scott (1st edn, 1884; New York: Johnson Reprint, 1965), p. 79. 9 Worden, The Sound of Virtue, p. 256. F.J. Levy, “Sir Philip Sidney and the Idea of History,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 26 (1964), 608–17. 10 Letter to Robert Sidney, 130.


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to quote the Defence), and the unity of the Christian faithful (including moderate Catholics!) preserved—as a defense against tyranny, and as a good in itself (112). In turn, those principles achieved expression in Languet’s political service from Vienna to Antwerp, and in his studied efforts to educate new leaders for the cause. To one Philip, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, Languet recommended the creation of a universal history of the church, detailing the triumph of true Christianity. Mornay’s response to Languet’s call was predictably double: on the one hand, the production of a massively erudite tome in demonstration of the truthfulness of Christianity, the De verité (a clarion call to evangelical unity!), and on the other, the composition of the Vindiciae, that broadsword wielded against (what he and his mentor clearly regarded) as the sinfulness of Tridentine tyranny. To that other Philip (Philip Sidney), out of friendship Languet offered what Melanchthon called the liberal communication of duties, and Odysseus-wise, the counsel to resist those sirens of idleness that might lure him from himself—from that dedication to virtue that functions as short-hand in the correspondence for commitment to the cause. Beyond all expectation, and as his own reaction to the urgency of St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572, Sidney responded to Languet’s friendly communication of duties, as my argument has maintained, by devoting himself to the making of fictions. As the ideal vehicle of an anti-confessional piety and an anti-tyrannical politics, and the ideal complement of a cosmopolitan inclusivity of matter and manner (of the philosopher’s Idea and historian’s example) poetry best works to chasten the public domain. And that domain—always Sidney’s lived experience of urgency is determinative for understanding—must be chastened. By contrast, the events of St. Bartholomew’s Day were for Bodin the stimulus to a zealous, even a radical confessionalization. The Massacre was a sign of imminent political demise, the eruption of dangerous disorder in a body politic whose health could be restored only by a monarchy in which sovereignty stayed unchallenged. Bodin’s absolutism found expression in his formidably argued Six Bookes of a Commonweale (1576), which begins by attacking the incendiary publications of the tyrannomachists, “firebrands to set Commonweals ablaze.”11 The publication of those attacks, in turn, galvanized Languet and Mornay into counterattack in the French translation of the Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1581), where Bodin is derided in a marginal, unmistakable, all-but-explicit assault as a “detestable” politique sanctioning tyranny.12 Personal political attacks are rare, almost non-existent, in the Vindiciae, and this departure from the high-road of principled criticism to the lowground of private assault speaks clearly to the political animus maintained inside Sidney’s circle against Bodin. No wonder, then, when Sidney recommends that Robert continue his education abroad by reading history, he chooses to ignore the detested Six Books (that text Harvey found open on nearly every scholar’s desk), and

11 The Six Bookes of a Commonweale. A Facsimile reprint of the English translation of 1606 Corrected …, ed. and trans., Kenneth Douglas McRae (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962). Prefatory letter to the French edition dated 1577, p. A71. 12 Etienne Junius Brutus, pseudonym, Vindiciae contra tyrannos. Traduction française de 1581, ed. Arlette Jouanna et al. (Geneva: Droz, 1979), p. 39.

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points instead—learnedly and fashionably—with just enough irony to salt the soup, to Bodin’s earlier, more moderate Methodus. The very fact that Sidney cites the Methodus as an authority on history manifests his learning and, of course, his ecumenical commitment—his ability to rise above the fray of partisan confessional conflict—but that desire to blunt the edge of what is simply partisan and political complements as it sharpens important differences of principle that the letter to Robert proceeds to outline. As conflict is displaced from the personal to the theoretical, from partisan particularity to disciplinary generality, new clarity emerges about how and why such battles about books occur inside that particular humanist culture of the 1570s and 80s to which Sidney owed allegiance. Philip begins his letter to Robert with the recommendation to read Bodin’s Methodus as prelude to a fascinating, heavily abbreviated discussion of the sciences, which reads like a précis of the central disciplinary arguments of the Defence of Poesy. At the core of the letter’s educational logic is the identification of various forms of learning (what Sidney calls in the Defence serving sciences) with particular forms of discourse—simple, then increasingly complex species of narrative. In a survey of disciplinary kinds, the letter moves from the most simple species of narrative to the most complex, an argumentative movement that ascribes greater and greater value to the increasing complexity of the discourse identified. So Sidney begins his quick guide to the sciences by distinguishing chronology as “nothing but a narration of thinges done” from the historical “treatise … that addeth many thinges for profite and ornament.”13 Melanchthon’s “Chronology” gives way, for example, as a simple factual narrative to more complex histories by Herodotus and Thucydides. Sidney expostulates about the characteristics of those more complex historical treatises, with their “examples of vertue or vice” and their attention to “good or evell successes, the establishments or ruines of greate Estates, with the cawses, the tyme, and circumstances of the lawes they write of, the entrings, and endings of warrs .…”14 Then, in order to explain how such treatises profit readers through ornament, Sidney proceeds to detail how the Historian borrows from the Orator devices to create “rhetoricall remembrances” and from the Poet imaginary freedom “in painting forth the effects, the motions, the whisperings of the people,” which, “though perchance they were not so, yet it is enough they might be so.”15 The further that Sidney develops his argument about history, enlarging the traditionally elastic boundaries of the discipline with attention to the historiographer’s debts to other sciences, the more strongly the letter reveals its ties to the argumentation of the Defence. With a turn of mind having apparently little to do with the pragmatic business of preparing Robert for educational studies abroad, Sidney proceeds one further step along the route of the letter’s disciplinary meditations in order to describe the workings of another sort of practitioner, clearly distinct from the Historian, described at the letter’s argumentative climax as the “Discourser,” who:

13 Letter to Robert Sidney, 130. 14 Letter to Robert Sidney, 130–31. 15 Letter to Robert Sidney, 131.


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speakes non simpliciter de facto, sed de qualitatibus et cicumstantiis facti, [and who] not tyed to the tenor of a question as Philosophers use sometimes plaies the Divine … sometimes the Lawyer … sometimes a Naturall Philosopher …, but most commonly a Morall Philosopher, either in the ethick part when he setts forth vertues or vices and the natures of Passions, or in the Politick when he doth (as often he doth) meddle sententiouslie with matters of Estate … and so lastlie not professing any art, as his matter leades him he deales with all arts which because it carrieth the life of a lively exemple, it is wonderfull what light it gives to the arts themselves .…16

The “Discourser” of Philip’s letter to Robert is the speaking picture of Sidney’s poet of the Defence, one who enjoys superiority to his disciplinary rivals, chiefly the historian here (and the historian joined by the philosopher there) in large measure because of the inclusive character of his own discourse.17 He is granted the full range of human arts from which to profit, as well as the free exercise of zodiacal imagination. He achieves superiority because “discoursing” like “poetry” is, simply put, language working at the height of its narrative potential. It takes light (as it draws knowledge from a cosmopolitan plenitude of sciences) and gives light (as it illuminates all other sciences through its exemplary powers). What political science becomes in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and oratory in Burchard/Melanchthon’s fictive letter to Pico and fiction-making in the Defence, “discoursing” represents here: a master-discipline that by including all, transcends all. Philip, of course, has wandered from the point, a fact which his accompanying recommendation about the importance of commonplace books does little to disguise, but such wanderings are instructive and suggestive in themselves. They are instructive because they show Sidney at a moment roughly contemporaneous with the composition of the Defence, amidst a similar “war among the Muses,” struggling to articulate his conception of an idealized mode of knowledge that he calls here “discoursing” and there “poetry,” working toward that articulation by meditating about the limits of history as a discipline. They are instructive, too, because these remarks clarify how seminal Sidney’s meditations about history are to his reconceptualization of poetry as an autonomous form of knowledge—meditations inspired by history and also (as this letter makes clear) in no small part by a particular historian, Jean Bodin. Sidney’s errant reflections are suggestive, in turn, because they point to pressures from the heat of combat amidst the cool interlude of critical reflection, pressures from real partisan political conflicts that made an impact on the Defence. When Sidney elevates the poet above the historian in his poetics he justifies the move by principle and argument. The forensic rhetoric of the Defence is scrupulously and cagily impersonal. But forensic

16 Letter to Robert Sidney, 131. 17 For a contrasting interpretation , see Herman, Squitter-Wits and Muse-Haters, p. 72–8. The divine, the lawyer and the natural philosopher are not examples of “discoursers,” as Herman argues in a chapter designed to illustrate Sidney’s so-called anti-poetic sentiments; rather, the discourser incorporates into a distinct species of narrative characteristics of a whole variety of other sciences (including divinity, law and natural philosophy). The inclusiveness of the “Discourser” (and the poet) is crucial to Sidney’s conception of a master-discipline.

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rhetoric aside for a moment, the way in which books speak to books in this context suggests another, conspicuously more personal battle being waged. In the era of the new critical historian, of Estienne, Scaliger, Casaubon and Bodin, Sidney had the audacity to rescue from the train marked Oblivion one of its hoariest pieces of cargo, the golden age. That “age” is rehabilitated in the central argument of the Defence as it is transplanted from the domain of historical fact to that of imaginary fiction: the “age” of the historian is refashioned as the “world” of the poet. Once more, in the era of the new critical historian, Sidney had the daring to exemplify the golden world’s power by liberating Cyrus from history into poetry. Rightly understood, the Cyropaedia is poetry—a work of fiction—Sidney argues audaciously. In conjunction with the letter to Robert, with its specific attention to Bodin’s Methodus, Sidney’s rehabilitation of the golden age and his liberation of Cyrus point allusively to a grand battle of the books operating just beneath the surface of the Defence. It is reasonable to suppose that the Sidney who organizes the Defence’s argument, who was the intimate associate of Languet and Mornay, and who was an open proponent of tyrannomachist politics himself, may well have taken a certain personal pleasure in conducting intertextual warfare—or put more simply—a kind of battle of the books against Bodin. When Sidney liberates Cyrus from Bodin’s historical hijacking, he allusively enacts one greater argument of his poetics at large: the superiority of poetry to history. Once more, when he enacts that liberation, he restores to prominence a Cyrus whom Sidney’s closely knit community of humanist allies regarded most importantly not just as a conqueror, but also as a liberator. It is no accident either that Sidney’s recuperation of Cyrus and the golden world occurs in response to a text that so triumphantly parades its new critical superiority to the benighted Melanchthon, since Melanchthon was for Sidney’s closest friends and allies (as my argument has taken some pains to detail), the teacher of all the best teachers, the principal motivating force for the Reformed cause rightly interpreted. But that part of the story is again best told by attending to books. Reforming Cyrus: Camerarius’s Cyropaedia and Philippist Politics The Cyrus of Sidney’s circle had a special identity both related to and meaningfully distinct from that Cyrus of the Italian Renaissance restored to popularity with the reemergence of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia in the fifteenth century. Newly printed and translated, the Cyropaedia became an almost instant favorite among Italian humanists, in large part because of its new portrait of Cyrus the Great. In Herodotus, Cyrus is memorable as the tyrant who deceived the powerful Scythian queen Tomyris, and who suffered his demise as a consequence. In Xenophon, especially as he is read by the humanists from Giovanni Francesco Poggio Bracciolini to Lorenzo Valla to Baldassare Castiglione, Cyrus is the ideal ruler who governs others so well because he can govern himself.18 As a pedagogical text, the Cyropaedia (“The Education of 18 For a history of this reception, see Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, “Cyrus in Italy: From Dante to Machiavelli: Some Explorations of the Reception of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia” in Achaemenid History V: The Roots of the European Tradition, ed. H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg and J.W. Drijvers (Leiden: Brill, 1990), p. 31–52. See, too, James Tatum, Xenophon’s Imperial


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Cyrus”) was used to further newly popular instruction in the Greek language, while affording aspiring elites the exemplary model par excellence for a life of virtuous and successful government. It is this humanistically reformed Cyrus who appears in William Barker’s Tudor translation as “so well taught himself, that he … was fulfilled with all the noble virtues that may be wished with excellency in any ruler,” and to whom Sidney was most likely to have been introduced during his boyhood studies at Shrewsbury.19 Oppositional voices inside Renaissance culture sometimes construct a different Cyrus. In his Discourses, Machiavelli undertakes a characteristically de-romanticized reading of Xenophon’s narrative. Among his principal examples about how the successful ruler “Moves from Humble To Great Fortune More Often Through Fraud Than Through Force,” Machiavelli cites Cyrus, instancing his deployment of empirebuilding chicanery at crucial moments of his career, both in seizing the kingdom of Armenia and in undoing Cyaxares, king of the Medes.20 Machiavelli’s skeptical slant is refreshing, but comparatively rare. The idealized Cyrus is far more frequently encountered in humanist literature, but there are ideals and then there are ideals, and making discriminations between them sometimes matters greatly. The Cyrus whom Sidney encountered on his tour of the Continent, when he spent “many months” reading and studying in Languet’s company, was the Italian humanist’s ideal prince metamorphosed into the Reformed humanist’s idealized servant of the godly state. In the same year that Sidney arrived in Paris and just months before the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Joachim Camerarius the Elder published a new Latin translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia from the printing house of Andreas Wechel. As one of only two books to survive in the Sidney family library at Penshurst complete with Philip Sidney’s own signature, Camerarius’s Xenophon is a book with a history worth recovering.21 That history begins properly, once more, with Languet, who played the role of midwife to the work’s publication. Always, he was the facilitator. As his letters make clear, Languet was responsible both for introducing Camerarius to Wechel and for supervising, at least in some informal way, the progress of the Cyropaedia through its printing. While working as an ambassador for August, Elector of Saxony—as the Burgundian eyes and ears of the Empire’s most powerful Protestant prince—Languet was living in Wechel’s household, and such supervision would have been both easy and expected, especially on behalf of an author eager to have his new work available for the Frankfurt Book Fair. Languet had to disappoint Camerarius about the book’s availability for the Fair, but he assured his distinguished friend that Wechel was laboring in July of 1571 to complete the

Fiction: On The Education of Cyrus (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989), esp. “The Classic as Footnote,” p. 3–35, and Christopher Nadon, Xenophon’s Prince: Republic and Empire in the Cyropaedia (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2001). 19 The School of Cyrus: William Barker’s 1567 Translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedeia (The Education of Cyrus), ed. James Tatum (New York: Garland, 1987), p. 3–4. 20 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), p. 185. Book 2, Chapter 13, Paragraph 1. 21 My information comes as a professional courtesy from Germaine Warkentin, who is currently preparing for publication a catalogue of the Sidney family’s library.

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publication with “summa diligentia.”22 The fact that Wechel accorded this translation of the Cyropaedia what Languet describes to Camerarius as the “greatest diligence” points in some measure to the value ascribed to Xenophon’s work inside this circle of humanists and political activists. Andreas Wechel was the second generation of one of the great printing houses of Europe, a printer with an international reputation for erudite publications that were simultaneously Reformed in inspiration and non-dogmatic in content.23 A list of those authors whom he published between the time of Sidney’s arrival in Paris (1572) to the time of Sidney’s death (1586) reads like a Who’s Who of the Reformed cosmopolitan intelligentsia, and it includes Tomáš Jordan, the Moravian natural historian living in Vienna; George Buchanan, the Scottish historian and tyrannomachist; Johannes Crato Von Crafftheim, the Silesian physician to Maximilian II and longtime proponent of toleration for the Bohemian Church; Charles de l’Écluse, the internationally renowned botanist; Robert Beale, the enthusiastic admirer of Sebastian Castellio, private secretary to Francis Walsingham, and sometime diplomatic agent for Elizabeth I; Johannes Sambucus, one of Europe’s most accomplished emblematists; as well as the two Camerarius, Joachim the Elder and Joachim the Younger, both distinguished classical scholars. Wechel published many authors besides, from Pierre Ronsard to Giordano Bruno, but even this abbreviated list is a reminder of the shared commitments between Camerarius and Languet that secured a sense of the Cyropaedia’s true value. These authors were learned professionals, philologists, artists, jurists, natural philosophers, and political philosophers who, while witnessing to the gospel of anti-confessionalism in an age of confessional politics, sought to practice their pious ideals. Not a single work of theology was published by this group. By example and by precept, that community chose instead to reiterate one central message of Melanchthon’s career—the value of secular studies for pious, this-worldly purposes, and their collective labors as artists and philosophers, politicians and educators, enhanced that teacher-of-all-ofthe-best-teacher’s characteristically tempered estimate of the real agency of good books to promote virtue. For Camerarius the Elder and his compatriot, Languet, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia ranked high on the list of good books, and it achieved that rank in considerable measure because of Melanchthon’s distinctive interpretation of its hero. Melanchthon’s Cyrus the Great is a syncretically conceived figure. He is both Xenophon’s virtuous prince, the model of self-government of traditional humanist commentary, and something altogether more vital, the biblical Cyrus, that divinely chosen Persian king who liberated the Jews from the tyranny of the Babylonian captivity, restored them to their homeland in Palestine, and enabled them to rebuild

22 Letter of Languet to Camerarius the Elder, 2 July 1571 in Viri cl. Huberti Langueti Burgundi ad Joachimum Camerarium Patrem et Joachimum Camerarium Filium, Medicum, Scripti Epistolae (Groningue, 1646), p. 138. 23 See R.J.W. Evans, The Wechel Presses: Humanism and Calvinism in Central Europe, 1572–1627 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), esp. p. 18–19, where he comments on “the general avoidance of religious polemic or intolerance.”


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the temple in Jerusalem.24 Cyrus the liberator joins hands with Cyrus the triumphant builder of empires, the Bible’s Cyrus with Xenophon’s Cyrus, in a revisionist version of history that finds its most detailed articulation—at least inside that community of Philippists to which Sidney belonged—in a universal chronology called the Chronicon Carionis.25 Carion’s Chronicle is the single book attributed to Melanchthon that Sidney mentions by name, and he does so in the letter to Robert. Drawing from scriptural accounts of Cyrus, who is mentioned some 23 times in the Old Testament (most importantly, in Ezra, Isaiah, 2 Chronicles, and Daniel), the Chronicle focuses particular attention upon his punishment of tyrants. Cyrus was born a pagan and ruled a pagan empire, but educated by the prophet Daniel in knowledge of the Messiah, he utilized that education, the Chronicle repeatedly insists, to undo “furores tyrannicos” (tyrannical furies), just as “Multae liberationes in periculis iustorum” (many acts of liberation of just people in danger) were authored by God through him.26 Paragraph by paragraph, the Chronicle interweaves the Bible’s redemptive story of freedom with the Cyropaedia’s moralizing narrative of the education of the virtuous prince to create a new hero who fulfills a whole variety of Philippist purposes. Cyrus’s rescue of the Jews becomes an exemplum of godly sanctioned tyrannomachy, biblical underwriting for the arguments of Melanchthon’s De defensio concesso, his natural-law defense of resisting Charles V from the Wars of the Schmalkaldan League. Cyrus’s moral virtue establishes a model for piously achieved freedom from the always tyrannous passions of self-love. Once more, Cyrus’s presence in those “notissimos … libros Herodoti et Xenophontis” (most renowned books of Herodotus and Xenophon) affords real proof against the anti-humanists of Magdeburg and Jena, the Gnesio-Lutherans, about the serviceability of pagan virtue and pagan literature for the cause of godly liberation.27 So conceived, Cyrus becomes a mirror for magistrates in the Reformed north. The great prince serves the state by serving God, and good books (classical and Christian!) have genuine power to make rulers reflect upon that truth. At the conclusion of his commentary on the Book of Daniel, with its extended attention to Cyrus the liberator, Melanchthon hopes that just as Homer’s books inspired Alexander to greatness in the empire, and just as Moses’s books inspired Josiah to reform the church, so “Wolde god there were now but one”

24 See Peter R. Ackroyd, “The Biblical Portrayal of Achaemenid Rulers,” in Achaemenid History, p. 1–16. 25 The authorship of the Chronicon Carionis is disputed; some five different writers appear to have had a hand in its composition (Melanchthon among them). Both Bodin and Sidney, however, attribute the work to Melanchthon, as did their contemporaries. See Peter Fraenkel, Testimonia patrum: The Function of the Patristic Argument in the Theology of Philip Melanchthon (Geneva: Droz, 1961), p. 53–4. More recently, Irena Backus studies the Chronicon in relation to Melanchthon’s emphasis on the importance of providential history, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation, 1378–1615 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), p. 326–37. 26 CR 12, 780. 27 CR 12, 780.

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new book to inspire some great prince to “fight in these troubles dayes the just Batails for the defence of the gospell agenst these turkish anticristis.”28 By bringing Camerarius’s Cyropaedia to press, Languet sought to satisfy his teacher’s desire for that one great book to inspire a defense of the Gospel. His letters to Camerarius about its publication reveal his sense of its contemporary political significance. Side-by-side with Languet’s commentary in that correspondence about the book’s progress through Wechel’s press are expressions of great optimism about the “innumerable German adolescents” who have flooded Paris for “the cause of studies,” and great anxieties about those Jesuits in the Sorbonne who would hinder their entrance into public service.29 Cyrus’s education mattered to the right education of those young Germans. If as Melanchthon wrote in his widely disseminated rhetorical handbook, Elementorum rhetorices libri duo, “the handling of the written word is a sort of military service carried out in the toga,” then Camerarius’s Cyropaedia, like Languet’s sponsorship of it, was clearly designed as a Philippist weapon in a war of books whose goal was the liberation of hearts and minds from tyranny.30 Just months after the Cyropaedia’s publication, the most important student to find himself armed with that weapon was Philip Sidney, Languet’s freshest and most brilliant prospect for a reemergent Cyrus, a future liberator of God’s church from the oppression of tyranny. Sidney never lived to fulfill those expectations, but his Defence of Poesy wields that weapon for purposes similarly Philippist in kind, especially in its characterization of Cyrus as preeminent poetic hero. Cyrus the Liberator: The Hero in the Garden Sidney’s first recorded interest in Camerarius’s edition of the Cyropaedia dates from 1575, when Robert Dorsett, the Canon at Christ’s Church, Oxford, reported that he was attempting to secure a copy of “the Latin version of Xenophon’s Cyrus” for Philip’s lifelong friend, “Master Fulke Greville.”31 Clearly, however, Sidney’s knowledge of that edition predates Dorsett’s letter. Just how important the Cyropaedia had become to Sidney is revealed by one of the earliest and most remarkable letters to survive from his long and still critically undervalued correspondence with Languet. The letter was written in April of 1574, only a short time after the single most significant disaster to attend the Philippist cause was visited upon Languet’s party in Wittenberg. Early in 1574, in an abrupt volte face, August of Saxony purged the Philippists from political power and theological influence in favor of a newly powerful faction 28 The exposicio[n] of Daniell the prophete, gathered out of Philip Melanchthon .... A prophecie diligentlye to bee noted of al emperoures and kinges, in these last daies, trans. George Joye (London: Ihon Daye 1550), p. 177. 29 See Languet to Camerarius the Elder, 2 July 1571 in Viri cl. Huberti Langueti … ad Joachimi Camerarium …, p. 139, where he writes that “[i]nnumeri adolescentes Germani studiorum causa huc confluunt,” and the letter of 26 August 1571, where he comments disparagingly: “Studia hic paulatim resurgunt; sed ii qui nostram Religionem profitentur, arcentur a professionibus,” p. 139. 30 Elementorum rhetorices libri duo, p. 286. 31 Robert Dorsett to Philip Sidney, 15 October 1575 in Osborn, p. 369.


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of Gnesio-Lutherans. Composed in the aftermath of these events, Sidney’s letter to Languet is a finely nuanced display of sympathy on the part of a devoted pupil for his distraught teacher. Wise, compassionate, reassuring, the letter mixes political reflection about continuing hopes for the success of the cause internationally with expressions of remorse for the tragic character of those injuries that Languet had suffered personally. More remarkably, the letter tempers that sense of sorrow with Sidney’s signature skill in intermingling among its sad reflections a significant lightness of touch. Often playfully, Sidney adopts a variety of fictional roles in the course of his correspondence with Languet; on one occasion, he plays Thomas More to Languet’s Desiderius Erasmus, as he comments on the need for levity amidst the serious business of political struggle; on another, he plays the retiring Stoic to Languet’s committed Aristotelian, as he threatens to turn Cynic amidst the enforced idleness isolating him from political action. In similar fashion, at the conclusion of the April letter, Sidney writes: “my dear Hubert, you must not think that arrogance (which I hope is foreign to me), or garrulity (although Xenophon did not consider this a fault in Cyrus as a youth), but rather … a certain heartfelt impulse has made me decide to write you … so that, insofar as I can, I may relieve you of the distress I sensed you felt.”32 As the young Philip Sidney plays Cyrus to the old teacher Languet (like Xenophon, another maker of heroes), he comforts with humor and acknowledges with allusion his own deeply personal commitment to the cause. Sidney can write so eloquently in the Defence about the Cyrus who makes many Cyruses, in part because of the character of his own education during those “many months” spent reading and writing with Languet.33 Among all the citations of Cyrus the Great in the Defence of Poesy, the majority are made for the sake of prosecuting what Sidney calls “civil war among the Muses” (96). Again and again, Xenophon’s Cyrus is enlisted as the poet’s chief ally against the rival forces of the philosopher and the historian. Against the political philosopher’s claims to superiority in teaching, Sidney counters that no abstract discourse about political virtue can so “readily direct a prince, as the feigned Cyrus in Xenophon” (108). Poetic examples teach philosophical precepts with a clarity denied to philosophy itself even “in the most excellent determination of goodness” (108). Against the moral philosopher’s pretensions to teach “wisdom, valour, and justice,” which conventional argument can but “barely” and laboriously “set out,” Sidney dilates upon the always delighted response of an audience to Achilles, Cyrus, and Aeneas, as fictive embodiments of those virtues (114). The historian receives similarly rough treatment. Imaged comically as an authority upon “hearsay” and a “tyrant in table talk,” the historian is confounded by Cyrus with particular frequency, evincing Sidney’s obvious pleasure in turning a traditionally conceived historical figure against the science of history itself. The historian’s examples have educational value, Sidney allows, both to teach and to move (“hoc opus, hic labor est”), but such examples are inferior to the poet’s (113). As proof, Sidney engages in yet another battle of the books, contrasting “the feigned Cyrus of Xenophon” with “the true Cyrus in Justin.” Xenophon’s poetic Cyrus, he asserts, is “more doctrinable” and 32 Sidney to Hubert Languet, 15 April 1574 in Levy, p. 130–31. 33 See Languet to Sidney, 3 December 1575, p. 300.

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better subject to accommodation “for [the reader’s] own use and learning” (110). Sidney’s choice of the counter-text is sly. It is hardly to his argumentative advantage to situate the biblical Cyrus in the historian’s corner, so he counters, instead, with a little known historical text. The “Cyrus in Justin” refers to a brief patristic redaction of the Cyrus the Great story, drawn mainly from Herodotus’s critical account of the Persian king as befuddled tyrant.34 Weighing Xenophon’s feigned prince against Justin’s “true” tyrant, Sidney advances his chief argument on behalf of the superiority of poetry to history—its power to liberate virtue “as it should be” from the “truths of a slippery world” (110). Always and already corrupt, the brazen world of history—both history as lived experience and history as a narrative mirroring that experience—carries corruption with it. In the wars among the muses, then, Cyrus emerges from the Defence ironically and persistently as a liberator. Long before he wrote the Defence, before the letter to Robert, and before being energized by Bodin’s Methodus to free Cyrus from the chains of history, Sidney had already encountered an extensive consideration of the problem of identifying the Cyropaedia’s genre. Camerarius incorporates into his translation of the Cyropaedia a sophisticated discussion of the generic issues traditional to its interpretation, and affords, consequently, one more vantage from this network of humanist texts by which to understand Cyrus’s role in the Defence. Simply put, Camerarius’s challenge was to devise a critical strategy for assigning value to a history whose historicity (whose faithfulness to historical fact) is so questionable. Its historicity is something Camerarius worries about for obvious and noteworthy reasons. Right from the opening of his commentary, the Ad libros Xenophonti … additiones appended to his translation, Camerarius twice recalls Cicero’s strictures against the Cyropaedia’s accuracy, emphasizing that this is a work “non ad historiae fidem scriptum” (not written for faithfulness to history).35 Camerarius then supplies in brief form a “true” history of Cyrus with accounts drawn both from rival classical sources and from the Bible, only to emerge from this discussion to confront more explicitly the question of the Cyropaedia’s value. That value is explained partly in terms of its enduring popularity. The testimony of the ancients matters greatly to Camerarius. Partly, too, its value is attributed to its stylistic excellence, no minor matter for a humanist who recommends Xenophon’s smooth and sweet elegance as a model for imitation. Principally, however, Camerarius explains the value of the Cyropaedia by reference to the author’s intention (what Camerarius calls his “propositum”), main aim, purpose or scope. Different forms of history have different purposes, as distinguishable narratives organized to distinct ends. The first kind (“historiae genus”) is called political or systematic history “in which a story is interwoven, connected, and integrated with the causes of all things and matters, with the moments, method, and events unfolded one at a time along with a mention of names, and with descriptions of people and places, at certain times, and about a certain people, race,

34 Sidney’s source appears to have been Arthur Golding’s The Abridgement of the Historyes of Trogus Pompeius, gathered & written in the Latine tongue, by the famous Hystoriographer Justine … (London, 1578). 35 Camerarius, p. 290.


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kingdom or empire.”36 The second kind of history is called a life, “narrating the rise, character, fortune, actions, life and death of one king, prince, or private person, which is more restricted and limited, clinging to one person only.”37 Camerarius argues that the Cyropaedia, properly understood, “ad neutrum commemoratorem generum plane quadret” (is plainly suited to neither of the kinds mentioned).38 Instead, it stands apart as a work informed by a wholly different purpose. As the “best rules” created the best prince in Cyrus, so the Cyropaedia acquires value by imaging those best rules of public and political life in action. Written “non historiae fidem,” Xenophon’s narrative was constructed “ad effigiem iusti imperii,” (as an image of just rule)—a Ciceronian phrase also quoted in Sidney’s Defence (103). The Cyropaedia’s real value is secured by its hero’s exemplary display of “common and general” virtues of the highest order, or by what is called elsewhere, its representation of universals.39 Camerarius’s worries about the historicity of the Cyropaedia are commonplace. What is noteworthy about Camerarius’s evaluation of its greatness is his suggestion that the text achieves value as a historia—a history or narrative—not in spite of its lack of true historicity, but precisely because of its freedom to transcend historical (i.e. “true-to-fact”) categories altogether. Camerarius never does lay claim to the Cyropaedia for another discipline. Sidney’s arrogation of the text to the poet’s domain would have been unthinkable for a humanist of his generation. At the same time, his commentary was obviously useful to Sidney in waging his own war among the muses. Sidney shares with Camerarius an admiration for the power of exemplary narratives to teach and delight, as well as a predisposition to read for intention and to assign value to narratives in accord with those intentions (“the skill of the artificer standeth in that Idea or fore-conceit” out of which he makes his fiction, the Defence argues [101]). In turn, nothing about Sidney’s letter to Robert, with its attribution of merit to various sciences on the basis of their different narrative ends, would have puzzled Camerarius. Such shared principles 36 Camerarius, p. 294: “Historiae genus esse unum, quo rerum negotiorumque omnium causis, occasionibus, modo, eventis singilatim, explicatis una cum nominum mentione, et personarum locorumque descriptionibus, narratio aliquibus temporibus et aliquo de populo, gente, regno, imperio pertexitur continuata atque integra ….” 37 Camerarius, p. 294: “Alterum genus, unius regis, principis, privati ortum, mores, fortunam, actiones, vitam, mortem enarrans: quod est coactius atque angustius, uni tantum personae inhaerens.” 38 Xenophon’s history might be identified with either of the two traditional kinds of historical narrative, but Camerarius clearly senses that Xenophon’s text is something different: “Autor titulum huic fecit …: quod conaretur ostendere Cyrum haud fortuito ad tantam excellentiam pervenisse, … sed cum severissima in disciplina educatum.” (The author made the title for this reason …: because he attempted to show that Cyrus arrived at such excellence not at all by chance … but because he was educated under the most rigid discipline), p. 295. 39 When Camerarius concludes his evaluation of the Cyropaedia, he does so by pausing to defend the text from Heraclitus’s opinion that: “Praeteritarum rerum notitia non gigni in multiplice cognitione intelligentiam” (the knowledge of things that have happened does not bring forth a mind with much learning). However, Camerarius defends the work not by revaluing knowledge gained from experience, but instead by referencing, once more, Xenophon’s skill in inculcating “iudicium de universis” (judgment about universals), p. 296.

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notwithstanding, the greatest impact of Camerarius’s Cyropaedia on Sidney’s Defence lies elsewhere. It lies in Camerarius’s critically detailed interrogation of the work’s generic instability, and in his persistent, emphatic suggestion that Cyrus’s real value resides in his exemplification of universals standing apart from and beyond what Sidney had come to regard as the tyranny of the verisimilar—the tyranny of history as a science and of history as lived experience.40 Cyrus achieves his status as the preeminent hero of the Defence well before his appearance in those wars among the muses, where he battles so persistently and ironically as poetry’s champion against philosophy and history. Sidney foregrounds Cyrus first in his argumentatively central account of poetry as a distinctive form of knowledge, and revisiting that argument briefly can shed light on Sidney’s characterization of his preeminent hero. Poetic discourse is distinct from other disciplinary discourses, the Defence maintains, not by reason of its frequent employment of meter and rhyme, but rather because of its unique mode of imitation. All sciences take “the works of Nature” for their “principal object,” except for poetry (99). The poet works differently because “freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit,” he “doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops … and such like” (100). Moving quickly through complex discriminations between various of forms of nature (created and creating) and between various allusive contexts (Aristotle to Scaliger), Sidney presents a poet who is first and foremost a maker. What he makes out of those Ideas of virtue available within the zodiac of his own wit are golden worlds; or as Sidney writes in the most famous passage in the Defence, nature’s “world is brazen,” but “the poets only deliver a golden” (100). Mythology is refashioned, as Sidney defines poetic making by recasting the story of the golden age, familiar from the classical poetry of Hesiod and Virgil as well as from those universal chronologies, Bede to Melanchthon. The golden age is transposed to a golden world (the temporal to the imaginary), a world whose chief value is attributed to its metamorphic power over the minds and hearts of readers. Making better worlds is an aesthetic triumph, but making better people is the ethical, pious and political point of fiction-making in the public domain. Hence, Sidney’s choice to move ahead in his argument “to man[kind],” for whose benefit poetry’s “uttermost cunning is 40 A profound suspicion surfaces repeatedly in Camerarius’s commentary as to the value of mere historical knowledge. Like Melanchthon, Camerarius possesses a double vision of Cyrus—a double vision similarly motivated, if somewhat differently conceived. While Melanchthon represents a syncretically fashioned Cyrus—one who is both Xenophon’s conquering prince and the Bible’s divinely inspired liberator—Camerarius foregrounds two Cyruses never entirely reconciled one with another, the historical Cyrus (part liberator of the Jews, part prince, part tyrant) and the idealized Cyrus of Xenophon’s narrative (whose relationship to that historical Cyrus is, at once, difficult to determine and seemingly remote). Camerarius directs attention from historical fact to universal truth in language that testifies repeatedly to the necessary transcendence of secular history in favor of “another school … which pertains to true happiness and … which belongs to those who want to be called Christians” (Nam pertinentia ad veram felicitatem, et … quod est eorum, qui Christianos sese perhiberi volunt, alia aperitur schola …), Epistola, n. p.


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employed” and his decision to summon Cyrus into his discourse as the Defence’s chief hero (100). The poet both creates better people than nature, fictive beings like Aeneas and Cyrus, and once more and most crucially, bestows a “Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses” (101). Sidney’s argument is an audaciously conceived piece of anti-history. Against the formidable debunking of those new “critical” historians like Bodin, eager to consign all such fanciful notions to Oblivion, Sidney has the audacity to set about rehabilitating the golden age of conventional fame. The audacity is nothing short of stunning. He enacts his rehabilitation by transforming the golden age from an idealized time situated in an irrecoverable history into an imaginary golden world accessible again in the present tense of poetic making. Even more vital than Cyrus’s virtue to the past is the recuperative potential of that virtue in the present. As the golden age is transformed into the golden world, from remote time to imaginary space, the ideal once located in a now-exploded version of history is reanimated as a liberating power made available through poetry. It is necessary to identify that power as liberating because of the freedom with which the poet ranges and because of the character of those claims advanced on behalf of poetry’s remedial consequences for the minds and hearts of its readers. Sidney writes, “with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam: … our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it” (101). In the process of associating his aggressively optimistic account of the poet’s cooperation with Nature (natura naturans) with his remarks about the consequences of “that first accursed fall of Adam” ( the corruption of the will), Sidney implies that the poet’s wit has some power to alleviate the consequences of the fall. As the poet’s still-erect wit restores the now-corrupt will to goodness, his art creates a golden world within, securing some measure of freedom from the always tyrannical power of sin.41 For all of its genuine concern about the business of heroic action in the public domain, the Defence is a text—similar to all Sidneian texts—obsessively preoccupied with interiority, the justice of the inner life, its virtue and liberty. Such a preoccupation is a consequence of the politics of intellectualism, the belief among this community of elite, highly educated Philippists that heroic action is cultivated in the garden of the mind. Sidney’s Philippist inheritance may help to explain, too, the distinctively and paradoxically pastoral character of Cyrus’s heroism, as he arrives first within the Defence’s argument amidst discussions of golden ages and golden worlds, paradisal gardens, pagan and Christian. The very term “paradise” derives etymologically from the old Persian word, “para-daisos,” which denotes literally a walled garden, and the term traveled east to west first in Xenophon, where Cyrus the Great acquired his status as one of the legendary gardeners of antiquity.42 Students of the English Renaissance are familiar with that status because of Thomas Browne’s hermetic 41 See Chapter 3 for Sidney’s notion of justitia orignalis (the original justice securing concord between wit and will) and its association with the golden world, and my Sidney’s Poetic Justice, p. 192–213. 42 Cyrus elaborates on the importance of the garden in the Cyropaedia, VIII. 6. 12. See too John Brookes’s “The Concept of the Paradise Garden,” in Gardens of Paradise: The

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ruminations in The Garden of Cyrus. But Sidney had reason to remember Cyrus as the good gardener because of his extended sojourns in the Vienna of Maximilian II, that Holy Roman emperor famous and infamous across the confessional divides for calling himself not a Catholic but a Christian. In the 1570s, as I have emphasized, Vienna was a cosmopolitan city, a magnet for an international cast of moderate and irenic intellectuals. When Sidney opens his Defence, he evokes the memory of the tolerant Vienna of Maximilian II, partly as nostalgia for the remarkably tolerant world lost there, one in which so many of his Philippist friends secured freedom to pursue the cause. Partly, too, that world comes to mind because of its memorable images of Cyrus that Sidney so persistently transports into his argument. In a funeral oration written to lament the death of Maximilian II, Johannes Crato incorporates into his climactic celebration of the emperor’s virtues praise for his skill as a gardener, one who loved to arrange and plant trees with his own hands, “quasi ut in Cyro Persarum Rege,” (“just as Cyrus King of the Persians did”).43 Crato never delivered that oration (not in Rudolf’s new empire!), but Sidney would have understood the point of his friend’s lament. The praise of the good king as the good gardener, one who tends to his trees and to his state by his own hands, is a traditional humanist topos that descends again from Xenophon.44 In this instance, the image foregrounds both Crato’s sadness over Maximilian’s demise and the demise simultaneously of that tolerant, irenic culture that passed with him. In turn, Crato’s praise perpetuates an image of Maximilian that court artists had labored for decades to cultivate, most spectacularly at the emperor’s famous Neugebaude, his summer palace outside Vienna, with its extended enclosed gardens modeled on those of the Turks and the Moors, heirs of the ancient Persians. (Kalander’s gardens in The New Arcadia mirror those of Maximilian’s palace.)45 At the center of the imperial garden was a fountain designed by Jacopo Strada, one of Sidney’s compatriots in Vienna, the so-called Jamnitzer fountain, and, as a tribute to Maximilian’s imperial virtues, Strada incorporated into his design a monumental structure at the apex of the fountain featuring those leaders of the four world empires celebrated in the prophecies of History and Design of the Great Islamic Gardens (New York: New Amsterdam, 1987), p. 17–25. 43 Oratio funebris de Divo Maxaemilliano II. Imperatore Caesare Augusto, &c (Frankfurt, 1577), p. 49. 44 Oeconomicus, IV, 20–25. For an extended commentary on this topos and a full study of the political and cultural significance of the ancient Persian gardens, see Pierre Briant’s Histoire de L’Empire Perse De Cyrus à Alexandre (Paris: Fayard, 1996), esp. p. 244–7. Xenophon’s “good gardener” has his biblical complement in the Ashuerus of the Book of Esther, I, 5. 45 Similar to the “paradise” of Maximilian’s retreat, Kalander’s grounds comprise part of an estate “built for a summer retiring place,” and are clearly inspired by the eclectic Persian design of Strada’s garden with its “field, garden, and orchard,” its “mosaical floor” created by the artistic arrangement of the flowers, “its fair pond” as “a perfect mirror to all the other beauties,” and “fine fountain,” The New Arcadia, p. 14. As in Maximilian’s Neugebaude, too, Kalander’s garden sits side-by-side with an art museum stored with “delightful pictures,” whose erotic designs are provocatively reminiscent of those erotic mannerist paintings by Bartholomew Spranger housed in the emperor’s collection, p. 15.


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Daniel: Ninus the Assyrian, Cyrus the Persian and Alexander the Greek. In place of Julius Caesar, Strada’s design made room for Maximilian II, the new Christian leader of a universal empire, heralding in statuary form that syncresis of the secular and the sacred, the imperial and the divine, that which maintains power in the state and that which secures freedom for its people, central to the revisionary history of Cyrus circulating from Vienna’s cosmopolitan community of Philippists, irenicists and moderate Christians.46 Two more gardeners merit attention in regard to Maximilian’s summer palace and images of Cyrus circulating from Vienna. One is Charles de l’Écluse, who together with Strada helped to assemble that microcosmic assembly of things botanical, zoological, mineral and artistic, enclosed within the walls of the emperor’s gardens, museums, and palaces, and the other is Justus Lipsius, the Dutch irenicist, politique and philosopher who acquired from de l’Écluse his love of gardening on a trip to Vienna in the winter of 1572, just months before Sidney’s extended sojourn there. Another correspondent of Sidney, Lipsius transported a passion for irenic politics to the embattled Netherlands, together with a passion both for gardens and for Cyrus.47 In the Second Book of his De constantia, in a brief catalogue of “kings and great personages” renowned for their love of gardening, Lipsius evokes the memory of “king Cyrus [who] had gardens and Orchards planted with his owne handes,” as prelude to a defense of “the ceremonies and communion of true gardens … ordained for modest recreation.”48 The good government of the public domain mirrors the good government of the private, one that discovers its best model for order amidst the bounty of nature’s goodness, in the free contemplation of the mind: For why? the mind lifteth up and advanceth itself more to these high cogitations, when it is at libertie to beholde his owne home, heaven. Then when it is inclosed within the prisons of houses and towns. Here you learned Poets compose yee some poemes worthy of immortalitie. Here let all the learned meditate and write.49 46 On the Jamnitzer fountain and its monumental celebration of Maximilian’s reputation for “conciliation and compromise,” see Louthan, p. 42–6. For Strada’s role in “the establishing and extending of the Imperial collections” of art assembled in Vienna, see Dirk Jacob Jansen, “Example and Examples: The Potential Influence of Jacopo Strada on the Development of Rudolphine Art,” in Prag um 1600: Beiträge zur Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolfs II, ed. R.J.W. Evans and Joaneath Spicer (Freren: Luca Verlag, 1988), p. 132–46. On the pious importance attached to gardens as sites for the imaginative recreation of paradisal experience, see Fleischer, “The Garden of Laurentius Scholtz: A Cultural Landmark of Late SixteenthCentury Lutheranism,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 9 (1979), 29–48. 47 For the longstanding relationship between Lipsius and de l’Écluse, and early contacts, botanical, political, and cultural between Maximilian’s empire and the Netherlands, see Claudia Swan, Jacques de Gheyn II and the Representation of the Natural World in the Netherlands (Columbia University: Ph. D. Diss., 1997) and Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 144–50. 48 Justus Lipsius His Second Book of Constancy, trans. John Stradling (London: Richard Johns, 1595), p. 61, 64. The Latin original was published in 1584. 49 Lipsius, p. 65. The full text of Lipsius’s botanical celebration of pastoral repose is reminiscent of Dorus’s poetic reflections at the conclusion of the Second Eclogues in The Old Arcadia, p. 166:

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For the ancient Persians, the garden was a theater of power, a microcosm showcasing the extensive power of the emperor at liberty to collect and to display the prize possessions of his dominions. For the Renaissance humanist, the garden was a theater of knowledge, a microcosm of nature’s “sacred treasures” showcasing the pious learning of its maker, free to collect and to display the prize possessions of his erudition. Amidst a world ravaged by tyranny and war, and the urgent cultivation of virtue as a relief from and response to such tyranny, Lipsius’s turn inward sounds just the right note for contextualizing the Cyrus of Sidney’s Defence. Cyrus is both the good gardener reminiscent of that tolerant Maximilian celebrated by Crato and Strada, and the exemplar of freedom, a model of the mind empowered by the recreative pleasures of the muses to create a golden world within and without. Clearly, the Cyrus of Sidney’s Defence is Xenophon’s Cyrus. But just as clearly, Sidney’s Cyrus is the hero of the Cyropaedia as he was reinterpreted through the distinctive lens of his Philippist mentors. Only in light of those “many months” spent reading and writing with his teacher Languet, is it possible to explain Cyrus’s characterization in the Defence. From Camerarius’s commentary, in no small part, Sidney honed those skills of intertextual combat by which he rescues Cyrus from history through his representation of the hero as an exemplary embodiment of universal truth. If Sidney derived his vocabulary of the “universal” from Aristotle, he learned some of its strategic utility in the wars among the muses from Camerarius. More important, from Carion’s Chronicle—a text that this circle of humanists identified as Melanchthon’s own—Sidney inherited a syncretic image of Cyrus the Great, as a hero who is both the imperial prince of traditional humanist commentary (the builder of empires) and the liberator of God’s chosen people (the enemy of tyrants). His syncretic status explains Sidney’s ready identification of Cyrus both as a model for princes and an exemplar of liberation, an identification that he would have found himself so ready and eager to adopt by reason not just of education, but also of perceived political necessity. In the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, the great theater inside which God’s church seemed most imperilled by the Antichrist of Tridentine Catholicism was the Netherlands. In consequence, much of the history of Philippism was scripted as a series of frustrated attempts to locate in one candidate after another—in a Duke of Anjou or a Duke of Casimir, a William of Orange or an August of Saxony, a Queen Elizabeth or an Earl of Leicester—some powerful prince who would employ Cyrus-like strength in effecting a Cyrus-like liberation of the Dutch people from the oppression of Spanish tyranny. Only an already constituted prince (or subaltern thereof) could have the authority, as an extension of his own just rule, to effect that kind of imperial intervention into another country’s affairs. Those “many months” that Sidney spent O sweet woods, the delight of solitariness! O how much I do like your solitariness! Where man’s mind hath a freed consideration Of goodness to receive lovely direction; Where senses do behold th’order of heav’nly host, And wise thoughts do behold what the creator is.


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reading and writing with Languet educated him about a Cyrus whose history could and must be accommodated to the exigencies of the present. Cyrus is the appropriate choice as preeminent hero of the Defence partly because he facilitates an inclusive celebration of poetry, secular and sacred kinds alike, one that acknowledges the serviceability of the best classically conceived portrayals of virtue for purposes at once human and divine. A favorite of Xenophon and God, historically conceived, Cyrus the Great carries impeccable credentials for facilitation of that sort. Cyrus is an appropriate choice, also, because in his role as liberator he enables a ready exemplification of that Philippist piety that distinguishes Sidney’s manifestly anti-deterministic (and pointedly non-Calvinistic) assumptions about human agency: his heroism speaks eloquently about the will’s freedom to cooperate with God in making justice available. Cyrus’s is a piously uncontentious heroism—which is to argue, that his virtue illustrates pious principles that Sidney can uphold without indulging in the ungainly, unsophisticated and ungodly theological wrangling for which he and his compatriots had complete cosmopolitan disdain. Just at the moment that Sidney approaches theological contention in his golden world celebration of the wit’s art to chasten the will’s nature, he turns aside, promising— urbanely and modestly—“a more ordinary opening” of the subject (101). Once more, Cyrus is the appropriate hero to situate at the center of the Defence because his biblical triumphs over tyranny everywhere reinforce the authority of those tyrannomachist political principles that Sidney’s argument consistently takes for granted. In a culture ruled by Tudor orthodoxy with its absolutist standards of obedience, the Defence cites as a commonplace of moral philosophy—as a fundamental truth derived from the laws of nature—the politically charged notion that tyrants “occidendos esse” (must be destroyed) [112]. Inside a text that heralds Judith’s justice upon the tyrant Holofernes, and Lucretia’s chastening triumph over Brutus’s tyranny, that imputes to Dante imaginatively infernal pains inflicted upon the great tyrants of history, and that celebrates the tyrannomachist tragedies of George Buchanan, Cyrus is also the appropriate preeminent hero because of his history as a divinely chosen instrument of liberating oppressed peoples from tyranny. Composing a coterie text designed for a small network of like-minded family and friends, an intellectual power elite among the English Reformed, Sidney no more needed to recount that biblical history than he needed to pause in defense of tyrannomachy itself. Sidney believed in the power of writing, especially the power of poetic writing. It is worth recalling that truth because the best of Sidney’s recent biographers, from F.J. Levy to Alan Stewart, have constructed narratives of his life that significantly diminish, if not entirely discount, the centrality of his poetic vocation (“unelected” as it may have been) to his lived experience.50 Just consider the vast scope of Sidney’s literary productions from the time of his first entertainment for Elizabeth, The Lady of May (1578 or 1579), to his last revisions of the so-called New Arcadia (1585), a period that produced Elizabethan England’s most sophisticated work of poetics, its 50 Stewart’s Philip Sidney is the single best biography of Sidney available, but I question the “double” character of the life-story that he constructs, not because of his claims (fully plausible) about the divide between Sidney’s reputation at home and on the Continent, but rather because the division between the political Sidney and the poetic is drawn unintelligibly.

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most influential sonnet sequence, at least two versions of its best prose romance, an unfinished translation of the Psalms, a formidable body of lyric poetry, and a variety of now-lost translations (chiefly of religious works), and the conclusion seems indisputable that making poetry had become Sidney’s chief life work. The familiar, easy and therefore trite portrayal of Sidney-the-gentleman-dilettante fails to explain even the volume of that labor, no less its aesthetic quality, its fierce intelligence, or its scope, pious and political. One reason, then, to recapture the story of Sidney’s history with Cyrus is to recall how much books (the reading and the writing of them, in print and in manuscript) mattered to him, to remember how deep was his intellectual engagement with texts like Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Camerarius’s commentary on the Cyropaedia, as well as Carion’s Chronicle and Bodin’s Methodus. A second, and potentially paradoxical reason to recover the history of Sidney’s interest in Cyrus is that each one of these engagements with books speaks eloquently to his equally passionate engagement with the world of public, political affairs. Bodin’s attack on Melanchthon in the Methodus was simultaneously an intellectual challenge to Sidney, an inspiration to defend poetry from its detractors, and a politically charged assault upon the teacher of his own teacher, one spiced with bitter reminders about the horrors of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and those literary attacks and counterattacks that followed, pitting (from Sidney’s vantage) Bodin the intolerant Catholic absolutist against Languet and Mornay, the Reformed defenders of tyrannomachy and liberty. Among a community of humanists committed to the politics of intellectualism—to the belief that real changes in the world are predicated on real changes in the mind—Bodin’s assault on Melanchthon was no neutral instance of mere scholarly discourse. Or to state the same argument more accurately, Bodin’s assault elicited a response from this elite community of Reformed activists precisely because intellectual discourse was, by principle and necessity, one primary vehicle of political action for activists who were also humanists. Transforming the golden age to a golden world was a device for rescuing more than a historically debunked mythology. It was Sidney’s cosmopolitan means (seemingly trivial and utterly urgent, persistently playful and profoundly serious) for revitalizing a public domain in need of new heroes to prosecute the war against sovereign tyrants and new gardens to free discourse from the contamination of confessional debate. In short, it was a means for making a Cyrus to make many Cyruses. From the vantage point of Levy and Stewart—from the vantage, that is, of the main historicist tradition of contemporary scholarship—Sidney’s devotion of so much intellectual energy to poetry can be represented only as an inexplicable oddity, the product of an enforced idleness from public responsibility. From the vantage of his lifelong engagement with Cyrus, in books and in monuments, from Shrewsbury to Vienna, Sidney’s choice to write poetry emerges instead as a brilliantly inventive response to the exigencies of life (personal and political) as his Phillipist education interpreted them. If discourse is power, and power adheres best to narratives working at the height of their semantic potential, then the best vehicle of discourse, the best garden of the muses to cultivate, is poetry. And Cyrus, of course, the best gardener.

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Index

Abraham 119 absolutism 215−16, 221, 237 accommodation to poetic text 114−15, 119–20; and Sidney on his deathbed 165–6 adiaphora 11, 18, 46 Aesop’s fables 111, 113, 160, 164, 166, 196, 211 Agamben, Giorgio 93−4 agency, human xi, 17, 123−4, 132, 157, 173 Agricola, Rudolf 48, 214 Agrippa Von Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius 111 Agrippa, Menenius see Nathan and David, biblical story of Albertus, Duke of Prusse (Albert of Hohenzollern) 38 Alexander the Great 227 allegory viii−ix, 65−72, 79−88, 95−6, 100, 102, 110, 113, 118, 122; and its absorption into the figurative 110–13 Anjou, Francis, Duke of Alençon and 23−5, 131, 175, 201−4, 207, 236 Anselm, St 147 anti-confessionalism xiii, 2, 5, 13, 20–23, 31, 132, 139, 167, 219, 221, 226 antinomianism 151 Aquinas, Thomas 68, 70, 135, 147, 177, 182, 193 d’Arbaleste, Charlotte 125, 135 architectonic knowledge (architectonike) 119−21, 123, 159, 162−4, 214 arguments from design 134−5 Aristotle ix, 7, 47−9, 53, 68−82, 88−90, 97−103, 108−10, 115−20, 135, 138, 148, 162, 179, 183, 190, 214, 232, 236 Nicomachean Ethics 30, 107, 123, 215, 223 Astrophil and Stella 139 Athanasius 121 Augsburg Confession 9, 40, 154

August, Elector of Saxony 11, 14, 19−22, 54, 205, 225, 228, 236 Augustine, St 68−72, 121, 130, 147, 149, 196, 203, 211 Aylmer, John 180 Bainton, Roland H. 94 Barbaro, Ermolao di 47−50, 61 Barker, William 225 Basil, St 41−51, 61, 80−88, 98, 103, 110, 115−16, 121 Beale, Robert 20, 153, 226 Bede 135, 232 Benedict, Philip 141 Bergvall, Ake 142−4 Berry, Edward 30 Beza, Theodore 13, 35, 92, 145, 155, 160, 208 Bible, the 49, 51, 66−70, 77−84, 92−101, 113, 130, 227; see also Psalms Bizarro of Perugia, Pietro 56 Bodin, Jean xiv, 217, 220−24, 233, 238; see also Duplessis-Mornay, public domain, “war among the Muses” Borris, Kenneth 65 Bouwsma, William 142 Browne, Thomas 233−4 Bruni, Leonardo 41 Bruno, Giordano 226 Buchanan, George x, xii–xiii, 20, 126, 159−62, 166, 170, 182, 194−204, 208−16, 226, 237 Bullinger, Heinrich 18, 135 Burchard, Franz 48−9, 223; see also Barbaro Burghley, Lord 27, 58 Calvin, John xi, 7, 69, 92−3, 130, 135, 141−5, 148, 152−3, 160 Calvinism 16, 40, 137, 145−6, 153, 185 Camerarius, Joachim the Elder xiv, 12, 21, 54, 205, 218, 225−32, 236, 238; see also Xenophon

260


Camerarius, Joachim the Younger 12, 153, 226 Campion, Edmund 156, 205 Caracalla, Emperor 177 Casaubon, Isaac 217, 224 Casimir, John, Count Palatine (brother of Lewis) 14, 19, 54, 236; see also Lewis VI Castellio, Sebastian 22, 153, 226 Castiglione, Baldassare 205, 224 Catholic League 127, 156, 208 Catholicism xiii, 40, 122, 145, 156–7; Sidney as crypto-Catholic 156–7 Tridentine 2, 14, 17, 128, 175–6, 200, 216, 236; see also Papacy, the; Cecil, William see Burghley, Lord Celsus 84 Charles V, Emperor 11, 40, 151, 154, 183−6, 205, 227 chastity x, 113, 118, 170–71, 190, 197, 204, 230; see also Lucretia, public domain Chaucer, Geoffrey 113 Chomsky, Noam 119 Chrysostom, St John 45, 76−7, 80−81, 88, 96, 149, 162 Churchyard, Thomas 8 Chytraüs, David 205 Cicero 7, 49, 56−8, 67, 74, 78, 85, 88, 98−105, 112, 135, 138, 146, 151, 187−90, 193, 196, 213−15, 230 Clement of Alexandria 68 Coligny, Gaspard de 1, 127, 177 Collinson, Patrick 180 Condé, Henry of Bourbon, Prince of 128−9 cosmopolitanism 5−6, 12, 17, 22, 26, 28, 31, 90, 104, 119, 125–6, 133, 139–40, 157, 165−6, 194, 206–9, 213, 216, 219, 221, 234; aversion to partisanship 156–7, 207 and ecumenical piety 154–5, 159, 166 and inclusiveness vi, xi, 5, 31, 53, 203, 208, 237 Mornay (and Sidney’s) Christianity, in relation to 128–39 and natural law 203–6 poetry as master science, its syncretism and 30, 123, 215, 223 Sidney’s travels with Philippist travelers vii, xi, 2, 14, 18, 90, 103

and style 5, 157, 206–7 and Vienna 205 zodiacal wit, as source of 219, 223; see also anti-confessionalism, Languet, Melanchthon, Philippism, “war among the Muses” “cosmopology” 207 Coulter, James A. 86 Cox, Richard 18 Cracow, Georg 11, 54 Cranach, Lucas the Younger 41−51, 148 Crassus, Lucius Licinius 105 Crato (Von Crafftheim), Johannes x−xi, 12, 20−21, 146, 154, 205, 226, 234, 236; see also irenicism, Melanchthon, Vienna Cyrus see accommodation, golden world, Xenophon Dante Alighieri 70, 178 Danzay, Charles Quissarme, seigneur de 12, 128; see also DuplessisMornay, Formula of Concord Dasypodius, Conrad 143 Daussy, Hugues 126−7 de Foix, Paul 127 de Man, Paul 66 Demosthenes 101, 105, 146, 151 de Thou, Jacques Auguste 127 Diodore of Tarsus 76−9, 83, 85, 88 “Discourse on Irish Affairs” (Philip Sidney) 161, 201 Dorsett, Robert 228 Dorsten, J.A.Van 8 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste 139, 145, 166 Du Bellay, Guillaume 151 Dudley, Ambrose 8 Dudley, Robert 8, 14, 23−4, 54, 175, 202, 236 Du Ferrier, Arnaud 126−7 Du Moulin, Pierre 147 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 63, 156 Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe x–xiii, 1–3; and De veritate as this Huguenot’s masterpiece of Philippist argument 139–40 model for Sidney 125–6 natural law in his political theory 190, 195–207, 211–17

Index and personal identification with Sidney 59 and philosophy, history and poetry 56, 211–17 and the public domain 20–29, 32–3, 237–8 the response to Jean Bodin’s attack on 221–2, 224 and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre 176–82 the “scope” of his piety 129–68 uncompromising moderation 124–30 De veritate religionis christianae liber x–xi, 21–2, 124–5, 131–40, 149, 166 Remonstrance aux Estats 128 Traicté de l’Église x, 124, 129–34 Vindiciae contra tyrannos 21, 122, 127, 176, 181, 195–204, 214, 221; see also Languet, Melanchthon, Phalaris, public domain Eber, Paul 11 Eccleshall, Robert 180 Eck, Johann 37−8 l’Écluse, Charles de 12, 35, 154, 199, 226, 235 Eden, Kathy viii, 71−5, 102 Edict of St Germain 155 Edict of Worms 184 Elizabeth I xiii, 18−19, 23−7, 37−8, 127−31, 156, 175, 191, 202, 204, 208, 216, 226, 236−7 eloquence 49−51 Epictetus 135 Epiphanius of Salamis 96−8 Erasmus, Desiderius 7, 41−6, 50, 71−2, 91, 94, 98−9, 101, 111, 229 essentialism 66 Estienne, Henri 3, 20−21, 35, 217, 224 Eustathius of Antioch 77 example 13, 99–100, 105, 111–12, 114, 118–19, 142, 159–60, 179, 195, 202, 213, 222–3, 229, 231; and Sidney’s exemplary poetics ix Ferguson, Margaret W. 30 Fish, Stanley 137

261

Flacius Illyricus, Matthias 40, 92 foreconceit 29, 108–9, 117–19, 158, 209, 231; see also Idea, notitiae Formula of Concord (1577) 11, 18, 128 Fortescue, John 180 “forward Protestant” 2, 20, 31–2, 127–9, 156, 208, 216 Foucault, Michel 29 Foxe, John 145 free will, doctrine of 52, 152−3; see also synergism Frei, Hans W. 71 friendship, definition of 57−8 Frye, Northrop 65 Gnesio-Lutheranism 11, 18−19, 40, 43, 92, 153, 167, 227−9 golden world ix, 4–6, 30, 32, 36, 63–4, 123, 134, 140, 157, 173, 213, 215, 219; erected wit and infected will, related to 209–11 and inspiration 142 Mens Architectatrix 162–3 and microcosm 185–6 relation, not equation to Eden 164–5 and rescuing poetry from history 219, 224, 232–3, 236–8 and “scope” of 105–6, 111–15 Golding, Arthur 132−3 Goodman, Christopher 193−4 Gosson, Stephen 8 Grafton, Anthony 217 Greenlaw, Edwin 65 Gregory of Nazianzus 88 Greville, Fulke 17−20, 24, 90−91, 165, 174, 202, 228 Grindal, Edmund 18 Gwalther, Rudolph 18 Habermas, Jürgen 25 Hamilton, A.C. 16, 167 Hanau, Philip Lewis, Count of 58 Hardison, O.B. 111 Harvey, Gabriel 220−2 Hemmingsen, Neils 9, 11 ftn. 15 Heninger, S.K. 28 Henri III of France 128−9 Henry VIII 18, 191

262


Henry of Navarre 14, 129, 131, 200 Heraclitus 66 hermeneutics vii−x, 64−75, 83−9, 98, 102, 122, 149, 173−4 Hermes Trismegistus 135 Herodotus 222, 224, 230 Hesiod 232 Homer 66, 70, 80−81, 101, 113, 124, 142, 218, 227 Hooker, Richard 145, 180 Hoopes, Robert 180 Hoskins, John 89 L’Hospital, Michel de xiii, 127, 155−6, 208, 219−20 Hotman, François 35, 92 Howell, Roger 15−16 human nature xi−xii, 160, 164, 212−13 humanism 3 ftn. 6, 145, 166−8, 216, 218−20, 225, 238 Melanchthon and the cliché of 149–50 Iamblichus 76, 87, 135−6 Idea ix, xiii, 3, 5, 25, 29, 32, 68, 108–15, 170–71, 211–13; see also loci communes, foreconceit, notitiae idleness, sin of 60 imitation x, 28, 56–8, 106–10, 113, 158, 170, 206, 232; see also mimesis intellectualism, the politics of 3, 21, 192, 202–4, 207, 233, 238 interventionist discourse 3 ftn. 5, 181, 195 irenicism xiii, 13, 18, 128, 154, 177, 208 James VI of Scotland 200 Jamnitzer fountain 234−5 Jerome, St 49 Jesus Christ 94, 113, 124, 138, 163−8 John, Don of Austria 175 John of Glauburg 13 John of Salisbury 177 John Frederick, Elector of Saxony 185 Jordan, Tomáš 20−21, 154, 226 Junius Brutus, Stephanus 197 justitia originalis 52, 147; see also golden world Juvenal 176−9 Kennedy, George A. 71 kingship, theory of 195−8

Kinney, Arthur F. 103 Knox, John 193 Kristeller, Paul Oscar 101 Kuin, Roger 126 Kytson, Elizabeth Cornwallis, Lady 156 La Huguerye, Michel de 129 Lady of May, The 237 Lake, Peter 27−8 Landino, Cristoforo 103, 146 Languet, Hubert x−xiv, 1−4; concept of the public domain 18–29, 32–3, 122, 220–29, 236–8 devotion to Melanchthon, as traveling emissary for 17 and history, philosophy and poetry 56, 211–17 humanist credentials 20 and the international reading of the cause 174–5 Mornay’s political education under 125–33, 139–40 and Philippism 17–18, 35–40 and piety 14, 17, 166–8 and the politics of natural law 173–83, 199–205 response to cultural urgency 151–7 and the “scope” of reading and writing 89–92 and Sidney’s education in the Philippist cause 17–18, 35–40 Sidney’s poetic tribute to 210–11; see also August, Elector of Saxony, Calvin, cosmopolitanism, DuplessisMornay, Melanchthon, Loyseleur, Wechel, William of Orange Leicester, Earl of see Dudley, Robert Le Roy, Louis 220 “Letter to Robert Sidney” (Philip Sidney) 222–4, 227, 231 “Letter to the Queen” (Philip Sidney) 23–6, 201–3, 207 Levao, Ronald 29 Levy, F.J. 220, 237−8 Lewis VI (Ludwig), Prince of the Palatinate 19; see also Casimir Libanius 83 Lipsius, Justus 235−6

Index loci communes 44, 51–2, 55–6, 91, 100, 111–14, 183, 209; see also Idea, Melanchthon Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo 108 Lotichius, Petrus 146 Loyseleur, Pierre 201 Lucan 157 Lucretia x, 28, 113, 118, 170–71, 197, 204, 214, 230, 237; see also chastity, public domain, tyranny Luther, Martin 9−10, 37−40, 66, 69, 72, 80, 93−101, 135, 147, 151, 153, 183−8, 200 Lutheranism 167, 185 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 1 Machiavelli, Niccolò 225 Machiavellianism 203 Mack, Michael 142 Mack, Peter viii, 71−2, 102 McNeill, John C. 135 Marcellus, Johannes 189 Maria, Empress 205 Marrou, H.I. 71 Martyr, Peter 35, 92 Mary Tudor, Queen of England 193, 200 Matz, Robert 30−31 Maximilian II, Emperor 21−2, 54, 154, 156, 167, 205−6, 226, 234−6; fame and infamy as “not a Catholic, but a Christian” 234 Medici, Catherine de 155, 202, 207 Meerhoff, Kees viii, 71−2, 102 Melanchthon, Philip vii−xiv; and culture and faith 146–7, 232, 238 impact on Sidney’s reading and writing 103–21 Languet’s lifelong service to 17–18 natural law in his Preface (1547) to Luther’s Warnunge an seine lieben Deutschen 183–5 and natural law in resistance theory 182–93, 197–204, 208 natural philosophy 30, 53, 117, 148, 183 natural theology 17, 38, 52, 116 and the Philippists 10–14 and Philippist piety 41–7, 51–3, 124, 126, 131, 135, 148–63, 166–8, 173

263

Philippist representations of, as Barbaro and Basil 40–53 Philippist rhetoric and dialectics, his invention of 29, 48–50, 88–103 portraits of 40−50, 148 reputation in England, his 7–9, 35–9 the scopus dicendi, his concept of 80–93 Sidney’s education in the cause, mediated through 57–62 and the sixteenth century’s new hermeneutic viii–x, xii, 93–103, 173, 181 Chronicon Carionis xiv, 227, 236, 238 Commentary on Romans 99, 101, 146 De defensione concessa humano generi iure naturae 189–90 Elementorum rhetorices libri duo 92, 100, 228 Epigrammatum 45–6, 146 Epitome ethices 57 Exposicion of Daniell the prophete 228 Liber de anima 115, 117, 148–9, 162 Loci communes theologici (1521) 7, 9, 35, 46, 51, 99, 204 Loci communes (1543) 191 Loci communes (1555) 45, 51–2, 99, 147, 149, 203–4 Oratio de studiis veteris philosophiae 152 Paul’s Letter to the Colossians 96, 99, 146, 152 Prolegomena in Officia Ciceronis 186–8 Von der Notwehr Unterricht 185, 189–91, 200; see also adiaphora, agency, architectonic knowledge, Aristotle, Basil, Barbaro, Beza, Calvin, Cicero, cosmopolitanism, DuplessisMornay, Ephiphanius, humanism, Languet, loci communes, Luther, Nathan and David, notitiae, Philippism, scopus dicendi, St Paul, storge, synergism Menius, Justus 189−90 metamorphosis 56 metaphors, use of 73 Milton, John 4, 156

264


mimesis 77, 109, 163, 170; see also imitation Minturno, Antonio viii, 28, 212 Mitchell, Margaret M. 77 Montaigne, Michel de 218 More, Thomas 229 Mornay see Duplessis-Mornay Moses 87−8, 135, 144, 151, 227 Muller, Richard A. 141 Muret, Marc-Antonio 104 Myrick, Kenneth O. 28, 103 Nathan and David, biblical story of 32, 99–101, 120–22, 160, 164–5, 213–14, 219 natural law theory xii−xiii, 2, 5, 21−8, 36, 52, 127, 135, 137, 150−51, 164, 173, 180−216 nature, power of 112−13, 161 neoplatonism 86−8, 107−10, 117 New Arcadia, The 19, 20, 65, 122, 139, 169, 175, 209, 234, 237 Nicholas of Cusa 29 Nicholas of Lyra 95 Nicollier-de Weck, Beatrice 14, 17, 20, 53−4, 153, 167 norms of religious and political argument 28, 180–82 notitiae ix, 115−16, 119, 149−51, 160−61, 183; and Sidney’s “notable images” 119–20 Old Arcadia, The 8, 20, 21, 31, 65, 90, 117, 122, 165, 209, 210 oratio sacra , theory of 103−15 Origen 66, 70, 76−7, 83−8, 96 original sin, doctrine of 60 Ovid 151 Palingenius, Marcus Stellatus 143 Papacy, the 14, 18, 60, 174, 181, 186, 206 Parkhurst, John 18 Patrizi, Francesco 39 Paul, St 45, 79, 99, 101, 115, 149, 159, 193, 203 Pelagianism 154 Perrot de Mézières, François 126, 131 Peucer, Caspar 11, 20−21, 47, 50 Phalaris xii, 5, 32, 169, 175–81, 201, 204, 207, 212

Philip II of Spain 14, 216 Philippism vii−xiv, 7−21, 29−32, 35−62, 81, 83, 89, 108−22, 128, 132−3, 139, 145, 153−68, 173−4, 199, 205, 209, 219−20, 227−8, 233−8 representations of late Melanchthon in 35−53 Philodemus of Gadara 76 Pibrac, Sire de (Guy du Faur) 175−7, 204, 213, 220 Pico della Mirandola 47−8, 125, 223 Plantin, Christopher 3, 132 Plato 30, 53, 85−7, 103, 109−19, 135, 138, 162, 170, 213, 218 Plautus 159, 206 Plotinus 87, 136 Plutarch 66, 71, 80−81, 103, 114, 119 poetry, power and value of vii−ix, xii, xiv, 3, 123, 141, 161, 166, 173, 182, 207, 213−15, 219, 238 poets, categorization of 157−8, 164 Poggio Bracciolini, Giovanni Francesco 224 Ponet, John xii−xiii, 180−82, 193−204 Pontano, Giovanni 104 Pound, Ezra 112 predestination, doctrine of 46, 152−3; see also free will, synergism Prescott, Anne Lake 121 Preus, Samuel James 93, 95 Proclus 76, 83, 86−8, 107, 135−6 Protestant League 18, 175 Psalms 85, 93, 121, 139, 158, 163−6, 238 public domain 27−32, 128, 130–34, 149, 152, 171, 174, 181, 200–204, 209–14, 221, 235–8; and “chastening” discourse x, 171, 198, 219, 237; see also chastity, Duplessis-Mornay, Languet, Lucretia, Melanchthon, Phalaris, Sleidan, Stubbs Pugliano, Pietro xiii, 206−7, 215; and the “Pugliano problem” 107 Puritanism 31 Pythagoras 135 Questier, Michael 27−8 Quintilian 71, 74−5, 78, 88, 98, 106, 110 Raiger, Michael 142, 144

Index Reformation theology xii, 93−5, 146, 150, 152, 163 Regius, Urbanus 9 “religious turn” in modern studies 16 resistance theories 185, 204; see also tyranny Reuchlin, Johann 146 rhetoric, theory of 72−7, 82, 88−92, 99, 102, 159 “right poetry” xi, 139, 142, 158−65, 170−71, 207, 210−11 Robinson, Forrest G. 29, 63, 117−18 Robinson, Richard 6−9, 14, 35−9, 145 Rogers, Daniel 12, 18, 145, 199, 216 Rogers, John 199 Ronsard, Pierre 226 Rudolph II, Emperor xiii, 205 Sabinus, Georg 146 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre vii, xiii−xiv, 1−6, 17−18, 35, 54−5, 104, 126, 132, 154−6, 175−80, 195, 198, 200, 204, 213, 220−21, 236, 238 St Germain, Christopher 180 Sambucus, Johannes 12, 21, 154, 199, 226 Sannazaro, Jacopo 126 Scaliger, Julius Caesar viii, 28, 30, 103−10, 119, 157−8, 162, 212, 224, 232 Schede, Paul (Melissus) 199 Schmalkaldan Wars 11, 25, 131, 183, 200, 216, 227 Schneider, John R. 147 Schoenberger, Cynthia Grant 185 scholasticism 146, 183 scopus dicendi x, 63−4, 72−3, 92−4, 107, 109, 124, 130−34, 138 self-knowledge 123, 134, 160, 164 Seneca 135, 138, 196, 198, 203, 211 Servetus, Michael 153 Shepherd, Geoffrey 63−4, 103 Shuger, Debora 121 Sidney, Henry 8, 35, 56, 145, 204 Sidney, Mary 90−91 Sidney, Robert 38, 89−90, 220−24, 227, 231 Silvestris, Bernardus 143 Sinfield, Alan 31, 125, 136−7, 144−6, 166, 171−2, 215−16 Skinner, Quentin 180−85, 193, 198, 201−2 Sleidan, Johann 25, 131−2 Smalley, Beryl 95

265

Socrates 86, 135, 218 Song of Songs 157−8 Spenser, Edmund ix, 65, 68−72, 88, 156, 218 Spingarn, Joel 28 Starkey, Thomas 180 Stesichorus 179 Stewart, Alan 15−16, 237−8 storge (στοργὴ) 135, 186–7 Strada, Jacopo 205, 234−6 Strigelius, Victorinus 9, 36−9 Stubbs, John 23−8, 32, 132, 190, 202, 207 Sturm, Johann 9, 35, 92, 143, 206 synergism 9, 39, 45, 151; see also free will Tasso, Torquato 218 Terence 101, 159, 206 Teskey, Gordon ix, 67−72, 77−8, 84, 88 Theodore of Mopsuestia 76−80, 85, 88 Theophrastus 135 Thevet, Andre 155 Thucydides 222 toleration, religious 22, 128, 153−5, 226 Trent, Council of 14, 155 tyranny and tyrannomachist politics xii−xiii, 2−5, 21−3, 31−2, 35, 127, 169−80, 185−9, 194−7, 203−8, 215−16, 219, 221, 224, 237−8 Ulreich, John C. 29, 109−10, 115 Ursinus, Zacharias 147 Valla, Lorenzo 95, 224 Van Meteren, Emanuel 8 vates xi, 158−64 Vienna xiii, 12–13, 21, 89, 124, 146, 154, 167, 221, 226, 234–5; and Sidney’s nostalgia for 205–6 Virgil 101, 124, 142, 146, 149−51, 161, 163, 218, 232 visual presentation, effectiveness of 118; and hypotyposes 114 Von Amsdorf, Niklaus 40 Von Friedeburg, Robert 184−5 Von Schwendi, Lazarus 22, 154, 205 Walker, D.P. 125, 136 Wallace, Malcolm 15−16 Walsingham, Francis 23−4, 35, 58, 126, 202, 226

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“war among the Muses” vii, 5, 30, 169, 211–13, 218–19, 223, 229; and poetry as master science 30, 123, 215, 223 Wechel, Andreas 3, 20−21, 225−8; see also Languet, Xenophon Weiner, Andrew 125, 136, 142−5 Wengert, Timothy J. 150 White, R.S. 180 Whitgift, John 145 William of Orange 14, 17, 35, 54, 127−8, 131, 173, 201, 236 Wilson, Thomas 103

Worden, Blair 31, 65, 127−8, 216, 220 Wotton, Henry 89 xenophobia 24, 27 Xenophon xiv, 21, 114, 124, 142−3, 218, 224−38, 224−7 Cyropaedia xiv, 21, 218–34; see also Joachim Camerarius the Elder, Wechel Yates, Frances A. 125, 136 Young, Frances M. 77−8

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