Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England

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Author: Sarah Covington

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WOUNDS, FLESH, AND METAPHOR IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

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WOUNDS, FLESH, AND METAPHOR IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Sarah Covington

WOUNDS, FLESH, AND METAPHOR IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Copyright © Sarah Covington, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61601–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For my sister, Emily


CON T E N T S

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

One

The Wounded Body Politic

19

Two

Law’s Breakages

55

Three The Wounds of War

83

Four

The Lesions of Love

117

Five

Wounds of the Soul

145

Conclusion

175

Notes

181

Bibliography

219

Index

235


AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

This book was longer in the making than I intended, and left its own particular wounds on me. The following institutions and individuals have helped me considerably, however, especially in their support of a project that to many seemed obtuse and strange. I wish to thank the Theodora Bosanquet Bursary for making my initial research at the British Library possible; in addition, I am tremendously indebted to Dr. Susan McClary and the Ahmanson-Getty Fellowship at UCLA for allowing me the time and resources to conduct lengthy and concentrated research, particularly at the William Andrews Clark Library. The librarians at the Clark, particularly Scott Jacobs, were particularly helpful. I also wish to thank Dr. Derek Hughes and the Center for Early Modern Studies at the University of Aberdeen for its Honorary Research Fellowship, as well the Huntington Library and the CUNY Research Foundation for the grants that made further research possible. Finally, the seminars I attended as a fellow were extremely important in the development of the book in terms of the feedback I received; I am especially grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute led by Vincent Carey, Ralph Bauer, Adele Seeff, and Karen Nelson, and especially to my colleagues Thea Lindquist and Andrew Fleck, and also to the Mellon Fellowship at CUNY’s Center for the Humanities, and especially Aoibheann Sweeney, Jeff Allred, Karen Strassler, and Alina Gharabegian. I wish to also thank Brij Singh and the group in the Faculty Fellowship Writing Program at CUNY for their incisive remarks. As the lone historian in a seminar of literary scholars, anthropologists, and philosophers, I gained tremendous insight from them, and am grateful that they allowed me in. On an individual level, I am indebted to Edgar McManus for his sharp, sometimes painful and always important, criticisms; in addition, I wish to thank Vincent Carey for his insights into the book, as well

x

Acknowledgments

as Clare Carroll, Margaret L. King, Sheila Rabin, Gail Spindell, Frank Warren, Gabriella Oldham, and Susan Wabuda for their general support over the years. I am finally indebted to my family, most notably my mother who understood and encouraged this project from the start; above all, however, I am grateful to my sister Emily Covington and to a friendship forged on a summer rooftop in mutual teenage misery. She is my comrade-in-arms, in happiness and woundedness, and it is to her, my stalwart horsewoman, that this book is dedicated.

Introduction

In a book that explores the symbolic and metaphoric power of woundedness, one might well begin with the story of the warrior Philoctetes. Suffering from a grievous and seemingly incurable snakebite injury on the foot, Philoctetes is abandoned on an island by his men to the pain that results “from the warm body f lux of the trickling ulcers.” Equipped with “bloody rags,” anesthetizing herbs, and a unique sword he has inherited, Philoctetes is seized with an unexpected spasm of pain, from a wound that constitutes a literary character in its own right—a parasitical life form feeding off its incapacitated and “soul-corroded” host. “Oh! It pierces, it pierces! Ill-fated, O wretched am I . . . this gory blood trickles for me from the deep [part of the sore], and I expect some new attack. Oh! Alas! Oh, dreadfully! O foot!”1 The abscess of Philoctetes not only festers and explodes unexpectedly, but, in an important aspect of woundedness, so does it leak abhorrent vapors and blood from “a black bleeding vein of the extremity of his foot,” leaving Philoctetes almost postcoitally depleted and oblivious to all else, as the pain recedes and he falls asleep. But as the other characters recognize, there is something heroic about Philoctetes’ endurance in the face of such an onslaught, and one that merits a degree of awe. On the one hand, Philoctetes’ suffering, as Drew Leder has written, tells us that “the world itself is not in harmony,” that the world, like his wounds, is “senseless.”2 At the same time, as Edmund Wilson once pointed out, in the character of Philoctetes, “strength and mutilation . . . may be inextricably bound up together,” as the conception of superior strength becomes “inseparable from disability”3 —an idea that evokes William James’ statement that “our infirmities help us unexpectedly.”4 In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, many writers perceived England to be Philoctetes embodied, beset on all sides by civil war, political turbulence, legal confusion, religious conf lict, and

2

Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor

psychological melancholy. Before then, writers had adhered, however fictitiously, to a vision of a united and integrated microcosmic system in which a divinely ordained hierarchy or chain of being extended from the lowliest beasts through the highest planetary spheres of heaven.5 The king’s role corresponded to God’s role in heaven, binding the commonweal together and maintaining it in political as well as moral balance; in a related analogy, if the state was a body, or body politic, the king comprised the head (or in some cases the heart, or blood) of the organism. As Kevin Sharpe has pointed out, these ideals were represented and asserted in a common language of unity and order, even if an implicit recognition also existed of a potentially threatening “division and dislocation” underneath.6 Events of the 1640s, however, shattered these visions of organic unity altogether, and with it the ideas that had once upheld such a unity together—however fictive that unity might have actually been. As Sharpe puts it, “When the world in 1642 was undone, its authorizing texts were dethroned along with the king”; but so, one might add, were the very languages of the law, politics, scripture, war, and religion, even the self and love, turned upside down by the events of the time.7 The predominant expression of this breakdown was the metaphor of physical and symbolic woundedness and its related themes of brokenness and fragmentation, all of which reached obsessive levels of interest and mention across every range of discourse, from the law through theology, politics, and war. The image was well-suited for an age of crisis and violence, with writers repeatedly expounding on the “broken” body politic, the “bleeding” nation, the “wounded” soul, or (in Donne’s earlier phrase) the “battered” heart. As with Philoctetes, even language itself seemed to fail, or shatter, with traditional modes of writing, such as the epic or elegy, no longer able to capture what seemed to be the unprecedented events at hand.8 This was the perception, in any case: if England was once whole, contained as a body by the ancient law, or the king, or the church—illusory as all that wholeness might have been— then it was now wounded, “wretched” and “bloody” like Philoctetes, left to its condition in a senseless world. Yet, as this book will argue, the image of a wounded nation (or soul, or law) could also be productive in the process of self-definition, as writers utilized the metaphor to explain and understand England as well as to forge new creative transformations in such disparate genres as poetry or polemical treatises. At the risk of psychologizing mid-seventeenthcentury England, it is William James’ “infirmities . . . helping unexpectedly,” with the metaphor of “broken England” actually serving to pivot

Introduction

3

the nation, at least for a time, into new directions in religious and political thought, or in the formal demands of poetic genres. Wounds were especially valuable in this process of creative reconstitution, serving not only as a powerful visual artifact, but also as a central image for writers who sought to convey the human (and divine) condition in a state of physical, moral, and psychological crisis. An abstract metaphor was not only made concrete when applied to nations or the law, however; individuals such as soldiers or condemned martyrs and even traitors elevated to symbolic levels their own actual, physical wounds by labeling them righteous (in the manner of Christ) or framing them in epic, Homeric, or providential terms, despite the blunt trauma they actually carried. Wounds as a metaphor and as literal things were thus positively defining of identity—the identity of the soldier, or the nation; though they portended an identity that had broken down or been violated and stigmatized, they were no less revealing of what that identity had become. This book, in short, traces the myriad journeys that one metaphor took across political, legal, military, psychological, and religious writings. As such, it is a study of language and representation, of perceptions rather than historical reality; for England was not really Philoctetes, nor was it “wounded” in any literal sense (to even speak of “wounded” or “scarred” battlefields is to still speak metaphorically, after all). But this book also studies a particular language, or metaphor, that became so common in the titles of pamphlets, poems, and treatises as to become hackneyed, and indeed one may question whether “wounded England” was even noticeable any more as a literary description. That it was so prevalent, or perhaps unnoticeable, however, reveals the manner in which language, however overused (and perhaps because it was overused), “encoded” the beliefs, values, assumptions, and self-perceptions of an age.9 Moreover, while it would be a simpler and certainly less ambitious task to trace the metaphorical life of woundedness only in, say, mid-century poetry or in sermons before parliament in the 1640s, one must look to a broad range of discourses in order to understand how widespread the image was, and how it connected those very discourses to each other to create a larger normative picture, or self-perception, of the age. History and Metaphorology In order to understand the power of the metaphor of woundedness in seventeenth-century England, it is important to explore the function

4


that metaphor as a whole served, especially as it was embedded in a particular time and place. Certain metaphors—“light” and “darkness,” or “burning rage,” for example—may appear timeless in that they recur throughout history and literature, while others (the “broken law,” the “eye of the needle”) are so common as to constitute “dead” metaphors. Yet as will be seen, metaphors, no matter how “dead” they are, have a history, resonating in their own context at the same time that they hold transcendent and self-conscious connections to the past.10 The Israel of the Bible was also a “wounded” or “bloodied” realm, as seventeenthcentury writers well knew; borrowing the same image and metaphor thus connected England to Israel at the same time that it ref lected the particular concerns of division, sedition, or sectarianism that defined the state at one particular moment in its history. The functional or imagistic aspects of metaphor have long provoked philosophical debate, with metaphor treated as either as an illuminating linguistic tool of knowledge or as a grave or suspicious misuse of language.11 Seventeenth-century writers were highly attuned to the philosophical and linguistic aspects of metaphor in general, and to the manner in which it could be extended to produce new meanings (or deceptions).12 The metaphysical poets, and Donne most particularly, were famously given over to metaphorical extension, variation, and elaboration, as they yoked together wildly incongruent, disparate, and sometimes perverse images to generate new poetic hybrids or syntheses. For Catholic converts such as Richard Crashaw, metaphor was particularly spiritualized, resulting in a process of metamorphosis, as high and low, sacred and profane images were brought together, resulting in a newly created, almost transubstantiated entity. This unification of the spiritual and the physical was labeled by Calvin as sacramental, and to be rejected, with the spiritual and physical maintained in their own distinct spheres;13 for protestants, metaphor, if it was not rejected altogether, was therefore to be avoided in its metaphysical sense as implying any kind of transubstantiating process. Still, as Kathleen Blake has written, for puritans such as the English/American poet Edward Taylor, metaphor was still perceived as a “spiritual conductor”14 able to convey the qualities of God even if the different terms that comprised metaphor were to maintain their original, “untransubstantiated” positions in the concrete or abstract realms.15 Not all writers, however, were inclined to the potentiality of metaphor, viewing it instead as ornamentation that led away from the truth. Hobbes recognized that some “special uses of speech” could “please and delight ourselves and others, by playing with our words, for pleasure or

Introduction

5

ornament, innocently;” but when used metaphorically, “that is, in other senses than they are ordained for,” words “thereby deceive others” and constitute an abuse.16 Conal Condren has argued that metaphor for Hobbes was a “political concern,” in the sense that it had expressed and inf lamed the strife and seditious rhetoric of the civil wars and therefore had to be restricted in order to “stabilize the political, render it more ‘solid’ and ‘certain.’ ”17 Locke similarly was critical of metaphor, or the “artificial and figurative application of words” that “move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment, and so indeed, are perfect cheats, and therefore, however laudable . . . or [however they] pretend to inform or instruct, [are] wholly to be avoided.”18 For Hobbes and Locke, metaphor, or even ornamental language, obstructed the clarity of empirical truth (or what Paul de Man once called “an enlightened rhetorical self-discipline”)19 even if, as will be seen in chapter one, Hobbes did not entirely avoid metaphor himself. A mode of empirical prose to which Hobbes and Locke ostensibly adhered, and which was opposed to “f launting metaphors,”20 was the plain style as advocated by the Royal Society; as one of its members, Joseph Glanvill, wrote, “A man does not shew his wit or learning by rolling in metaphors, and scattering his sentences of Greek and Latin, by abounding in high expressions, and talking in clouds.” Instead, the goal of true, rational understanding is to make “hard things plain”—as opposed to metaphor perhaps making plain things hard: an imperative that could not have been more opposed to the deliberate obscurity of the metaphysical poets, or even of the earlier enjoinments of a Francis Bacon, who wrote that “Poesy Allusive, or Parabolicall, excels the rest.”21 In contrast to Hobbes and Locke’s views, Paul Ricoeur once argued that while metaphor does not itself “make” reality, it conveys meaning by enriching experience, or in his famous term having the “extraordinary power of redescribing reality.” Its purpose, he wrote, “is neither to improve communication nor to insure univocal argumentation, but to shatter and to increase our sense of reality by shattering and increasing our language.”22 A linguistic imagination “generates and regenerates meaning through the living power of metaphoricity,” revealing new ways of seeing; where Hobbes and Locke saw metaphor as deceiving linguistic ornamentation, Ricoeur claimed its cognitive importance in producing new meaning.23 In addition, metaphor, as in Ricoeur’s estimation of ideology, “mediates” social reality in the sense that “images which a social group forms of itself are interpretations which belong immediately to the constitution of the social bond.”24 Though in the case of seventeenth-century England the “social bond” (or social body)

6


was itself perceived as “wounded,” it nevertheless evoked an image of cohesion, albeit debilitated cohesion: a wounded social bond, a wounded political body, was still a bond, and a body, after all. This book favors Ricoeur’s view of metaphor, and argues against Hobbes, Locke, and others who deny that metaphor “does” any such thing as convey ideas or provide cognitive content.25 As the following chapters will attempt to demonstrate, the metaphor of woundedness, at least in the seventeenth century, did not simply provide a vivid bodily picture or description of the age; nor did it, as some metaphorologists have argued, simply present (as well as refer to) “an experience.”26 Instead, the metaphor of “wounded England” explained the age, and as such it served to reinforce the words of Hans Blumenberg, who once described metaphor as a “powerful means for understanding the rationally ungraspable or indescribable,” as well as a means to “visualize the invisible.”27 For the art historian Barbara Stafford, recalling Ricoeur, metaphors “function in the imaginative manner of artistic and clinical diagnosis;” they “call on the beholder to combine and synthesize experiences that analysis has fragmented or dissected.”28 In the case of England, not only did the metaphor of a “wounded nation” allow individuals to frame or “combine and synthesize” meaning, but so did it offer within itself a solution for writers who sought, in common parlance, to “repair” those wounds or “anatomize” them, to offer “salves” or “remedies” to restore the nation (or the self, the soldier, the law, the soul)—to restore the wholeness that had been ruptured by strife. As Donald C. MacRae has pointed out, the body in general has long given us metaphor, and indeed “many metaphorical words and phrases that look stone-dead are in fact quick with life and derive specifically and primarily from our experience of the human body.”29 Thus one speaks of “upright morals,” evoking the posture of the body, or “backwards,” referring to bodily position, or spatial direction. As will be seen in the following chapter, the idea of the body politic, which is an analogy as well as a metaphor, offered perhaps the most resonant application of the corporal metaphor in order to explain and justify political power, relegating members of society to their proper subordinate positions. But if the body offers us an essential root metaphor, the “wounded body” perhaps constitutes its disabled (though no less powerful) offshoot. To write, however abstractly, of the “wounded land,” the “wounded name,”30 or the “wounded soul,” is to evoke a bodily metaphor in that very image of “wounded”; even more, to speak of a body broken or injured is to deepen the image of the body, or body metaphor, by reminding us of its vulnerabilities in bleeding, experiencing pain, or dying.31

Introduction

7

One must take care, however, not to project modern psychology onto the term “wounded” as it was used in the seventeenth century. The term “psychic woundedness,” or woundedness in a “psychic” sense, is a post-Freudian one, and more applicable to World War I soldiers, for example, than to their fighting brethren of three hundred years earlier.32 Similarly, the idea of a self-divided, alienated psyche was also foreign to seventeenth-century writers, even if Thomas Browne could write of the “battle of Lepanto” that was raging in his mind.33 As will be seen in chapter four, emerging, proto-modern notions of interiority did arise in the seventeenth century, but the psychological world of a Browne or a Burton was not our own. Still, writers of “wounded England” nevertheless depicted a nation in a state of dire disability, turning disability itself into metaphor—a metaphor that would come to represent in its materiality and rich symbolic possibilities what Sharon Snyder and David T. Mitchell have described in a different context as a society’s larger “social ills.”34 As Theodore Ziolowski has written, a literary image is a “[thing] with a tangible reality,” while metaphor serves to “illuminate the essence of things by exposing previously unrecognized analogies.”35 Woundedness, finally, did both, but it was also broad enough to assume different meanings and functions according to the object it was describing. The image of woundedness, however, varied according to the object it was describing: in the context of war, the “wounded warrior” was in fact an image with a sensible and even literal—as well as metaphoric—meaning, while the “wounded soul” constituted a mental image; the “body politic,” in yoking together two things, was an analogizing metaphor, though its long use hardly qualified it as a “previously unrecognizable” analogy. Each of the following chapters will explore the different shapes that metaphor assumed in accordance with the particular demands of a genre or discourse. That the metaphor of woundedness could adapt to so many different modes of discourse attests to its f lexibility as a literary device; but it also contained within itself a uniquely rich resonance of meaning that should be explored in its own right in order to understand the very power that compelled writers to it in the first place. A History of Wounds When writers described and metaphorized England as “wounded,” or elevated the actual wounds of civil war soldiers to heightened levels of

8


symbolism, they were, again, utilizing an image that seemed apt for the age. But it was also an image that carried its own inherent power, and that had resonated in art, religion, literature, and politics for centuries. It is therefore beneficial to brief ly explore what the power of the wounded body, and by extension the wounded metaphor, carried for those who lived before the seventeenth century; whether it was a soldier describing his war wounds, a puritan attempting to convey the nature of his “wounding” conversion, or a legal theorist likening the traitor to a literally “wounding” force, all borrowed from past motifs of injury while also harnessing and transforming those motifs toward their own contemporaneous purposes. In religious discourses—which shall be the focus of this brief survey—one of the most compelling aspects of the wounded body, and the source of its great literary power, was its sheer ambiguity. A body whose boundaries were cut, slashed, punctured, or disfigured—a body, in other words, whose perimeters had been literally breached— was shrouded in multidimensional meanings, with bodily brokenness constituting a symbol and a physical aff liction that was as revealing as much as it was unsettling. Though the appearance of wounds could be highly sacralized if they arrived in the form of stigmata or other miracles, they could also manifest themselves in the lacerations of syphilis or the blisters of leprosy, as sin or (relatedly) disease, and provoke horror and disgust among those who bore or witnessed them. In a state of injury the body’s f lesh (and by extension, one’s identity) was thus literally marked by inscriptions that could identify the self as blessed, disfigured, saved, or damned.36 As a result, fate itself rested on the membrane of the skin, a luminescent tissue that enclosed the body even if it constituted a fragile and permeable protection, and one as ephemeral, as Isaiah 40:6 put it, as grass. For all their spiritual connotations, bodily breakages could also be met with conf licting emotional responses, including uncertainty and ambivalence, fascination and repulsion. As Mitchell Merback has written, wounds “may be the paradigmatic generators of horror . . . because of the way they locate perception at the pulsing boundaries of the body. Once a wound appears before our eyes, it is as if a fault line has opened up across the body’s topography, one that threatens to tear open ever wider expanses of the body’s hidden interior.”37 Julia Kristeva has similarly written that “[a] wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat or decay” may not signify death; but it “[shows] me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live” and is a reminder that “[t]here I am at the border of my condition as a living

Introduction 38

9

being.” Even more than the shock of a ruptured body is the uncertainty provoked by such a body—or abject body—whose borders are collapsed, “as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s ‘own and clean self ’ but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents . . . urine, blood, sperm, excrement.”39 If skin, according to Kristeva, constitutes “the essential if not initial boundary of biological and psychic individuation,” then “impairment of the cover that guarantees corporeal integrity . . . [represents] intermixture, erasing of differences, threat to identity.”40 Since wounds were openings that ruptured the boundaries or, in anthropological terms, the limen or “threshold” between exterior and interior,41 medieval people, for example, guarded them in the same manner that entranceways (or eyes, or mouths) had to be guarded, since they opened the body to the outside world, and the outside world to the inner recesses. More importantly, through those openings could enter or exit any number of elements—contagion, grace, demons, angels, filth, purity, blood, pus, sweet smells, holy oil, shame, salvation.42 The site where wounds occurred thus became infused with the most bodily theater (or theatrical bodiliness), for it existed at the crossroads—a place of possibility as well as fear, in an unclearly defined zone where the devil especially lurked. Nevertheless, what Michael Camille once wrote about the margins of medieval art might well apply to the scrawlings that took place on the skin. “If these edges were dangerous,” he wrote, “they were also powerful places,” with “betwixt and between” constituting “[an] important zone of transformation.”43 It was not only the skin of the human body, however, that could be “breakable,” but, as this book will demonstrate, the heart, reason, honor, the state, and the law.44 As Donne recognized in likening his lover to America, the body (or landscape) could contain a variety of crossable or woundable barriers. For St. Augustine, notions of the wounded heart, and all its erotic connotations, were especially evident in the Confessions, just as St. Bernard would expand upon the preoccupation, evoking the wounded heart as an object of worship. According to Eric Jager, the wounding, inscription, and penetration of the heart were also indicative of the “transfer of Christ’s wounds to the believer’s heart;” as Gertrude of Helfta once prayed, “Most merciful Lord write your wounds in my heart with your precious blood, that I may read in them your suffering and your love alike.”45 Equally important, the language of woundedness was also extended to include openings that appeared or were wrought on the

10


borders of inanimate objects or entities, whose very woundedness rendered them, in turn, alive. Places—Oedipus’ city of Thebes, Old Testament Jerusalem, the American south in the Civil War, the firebombed Dresden of W. G. Sebald’s description, the New York of September 1146 —could be mortally “wounded” or described in those terms. Buildings were also portrayed as wounded, as in Piranesi who, in Stafford’s words, “artistically unearthed the mutilated corpus of Italian antiquity,” exploring “accidental holds or ‘wounds’ gaping in the sides of deteriorating masonry to allow glimpses of their internal structures.”47 Inanimate objects were surrogates for human beings, and therefore woundable: in ancient Greece or Rome, impressions made by departing lovers, in the form of footprints in sand, for example, could be maliciously “wounded,” which in turn wounded those lovers at a distance; in addition, statues were themselves thought to be on the verge of life in the manner of Pygmalion’s alabaster masterpiece, and therefore vulnerable to wounding.48 Shrines and paintings could be defaced as an act of odium or memory erasure (or memory manipulation); thus, in a display of “pious vandalism,” spectators often gouged out the eyes of Judas in representations of the Last Supper,49 while in another case, an angry viewer similarly “wounded” the eyes of James’ executioner in Andrea Mantegna’s “Martyrdom of St James” (1455).50 In wielding such symbolic powers, broken skin (or wounded lands) thus held inordinate fascination among writers and artists from antiquity on, though the meanings in which those wounds were infused could vary considerably and in accordance with changing religious, philosophical, and medical understandings. The rich metaphorical and all-too-real qualities of the body’s wounds were expressed most vividly by the ancients, who provided a vivid template of suffering for seventeenth-century writers. The Greeks were particularly aware of the potential of wounds in “savagely rupturing the fabric of being,” not only among their warriors but their lovers.51 The Iliad is a tale of (primarily) masculine wounds depicted in graphic extremis; wounds can either be heroic or abject, but in both cases they mark the man as a warrior, even in death (later one sees this when Dante encounters Manfred, the grandson of the Empress Constance, in purgatory, his “beautiful and . . . noble” presence only marred by a cloven eyebrow and a “wound high on his breast”—signs of the two mortal strokes that felled a good soldier and prince).52 In ancient literature, heroes as well as the defeated suffer from mortal and incurable (or in Prometheus’ case, continuous) wounds, which could be self-inf licted, in the case of Oedipus, or meted out by the gods; for Marsyas, the punishment for musically challenging

Introduction

11

Apollo is to be f layed of his skin—an act that evokes St Bartholomew, though Marsyas differs from the Christian model of suffering, as Nigel Spivey has written, in that he was “f layed alive to punish vanity, and his slow agony redeemed no one.”53 Judaic traditions also convey woundedness as a kind of fatal depletion—as in the case of Delilah’s wounding-like cutting of Samson’s hair—although wounds could also be life-giving, as when Eve was created out of a wound in Adam’s side. As Elaine Scarry once pointed out, Yahweh himself, in his various smitings, is the great wounder of wounders, wrecking his injuries as an expression of justice or vengeance.54 The most famous (and perhaps inf luential) godly rendering of bodily woundedness occurs in the book of Job, which contains some of the most vivid expressions of abject suffering in all of literature. After his goods and property have been decimated and his children have been killed, Job is dealt a new level of suffering, perhaps the worst of all, in a physical debasement where (to quote Nigel Spivey) he is “blasted with sores” and reduced to “squat[ting] at the base of the human condition.”55 Pathetically, a beaten Job then “[takes] a shard to scrape himself with” and sits down “in the ashes” (2.8)—an act associated not only with the treatment of skin diseases (including leprosy) in accordance with Leviticus 13:45, but also a traditional gesture of bereavement. For Job, whose “skin is cracked and oozing,” overlaid with “scabs and worms,” disease is consuming him alive, effacing his identity with wounds, leaving him to dream of the day when “I shall be surrounded again with my skin and in my f lesh I shall see God” (19:26). Job’s wounds are a kind of embodied theodicy, raising the question of suffering in the world;56 though seemingly restored at the end, those wounds have become an inextricable part of himself, defining him as a bearer of suffering—Isaiah’s “man of sorrow, and acquainted with grief ” (50:3).57 The distillation and manifestation of suffering in Job would provide a model and symbol that would be supplanted by Christ and his great howling lacerations, “ultra concrete and ultra fantastic,” in Johan Huizinga’s words, leaving him intensely closed and open to the world.58 This preoccupation, if not obsession, was somewhat different in emphasis from the early centuries of Christianity, however. Apart from the crucifixion, relatively little was said in the four gospels on the minute details of Christ’s sufferings,59 though a new discourse of torment would emerge in subsequent narratives that depicted early Christian martyrs and saints at the more wretched end of human anguish. On the one hand, not all early saints and martyrs were represented as wounded

12


or in pain; at Polycarp’s burning, for example, his f lesh remained unchanged, “not like f lesh that burns but like bread that bakes or gold and silver burning in a furnace.”60 For the most part, however, the graphic wounds that were described as attending such holy people led, according to Judith Perkins (following Foucault), to a new “cultural consciousness” of suffering, centered around the exemplar of Christ—a discursive shift that in turn became incorporated into new forms of power and with them, “emerging social and political institutions.”61 Like Jesus, saints in the traditional canon also became distinguished by signature wounds, reinforcing the notion that bodily abrasions could become integral to, and even inseparable from, identity. St Sebastian is unimaginable without the multiple arrows that rendered him “like a hedgehog,” the visual possibilities of which would infuse all subsequent iconography, notably in the paintings of Carravagio and Guido Reni. Since saints’ injuries were so central to their identity, the act of woundedness had to remain at the forefront, framed and highlighted in the same manner that Jesus directed the viewer’s gaze to his lance injury in Bramantino’s late fifteenth-century panel entitled “The Risen Christ.” It was as if the wounds of saints had become detached from them, to be born by them as sanctified reminders of their suffering and holiness; thus St Francis most famously carried the “unique privilege,” according to Bonaventure, of “[bearing] the stigmata of our Lord Jesus Christ”—a phenomenon that also ref lected the especially intense devotion of the Franciscans to the corporal aspects of the Passion.62 Those who were not wounded externally by persecutors—or by God—inf licted wounds on themselves, partly in an act of imitatio Christi. Self-mortification in this sense was connected with identity-formation (or deformation), for it wrought changes upon one’s self, often irrefutably. Women especially, albeit a minority of them, could assert their autonomy by starving their bodies or disfiguring their faces, thus rendering their attractiveness, and with it their prospects of marriage, negligible.63 While sanctification sometimes proceeded from selfmortification, such acts were not accepted without protest, especially when women were violating the corporal integrity that preserved their bodies. Indeed, writes Karma Lochrie, for women especially, religious life consisted of “adopting and maintaining an unbroken body,” and above all in preserving the “seal which binds the virgin to Christ.”64 Nevertheless, it was also women who were identified with “breeches in boundaries,” with Hildegard of Bingen especially distressed, according to Caroline Bynum, at the “idea of bodily breeches,” as evidenced by “her complex discussion of bodily intercourse and menstruation.”65

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In wounding themselves, though the seal of their virginity might have remained, women’s boundaries had been transgressed, and a kind of sovereignty declared in the attempt, in Julian of Norwich’s words, that “[Christ’s] pains” might be “my pains.”66 Wounds also appeared to mark their bearer in the afterlife. When he enters purgatory, Dante receives seven wounds on his brow, inf licted by the angelic warder. Carved by a sword into seven “P’s,” they represent the seven sins that were associated in part with wounds, though it was thought that the devil, not angelic warders, inscribed them. As Dante moves through the levels of purgation, each of the wounds, or Ps, are successively erased, or healed, by an angel with the stroke of its wing, as Dante proceeds to overcome pride, envy, avarice, and the remaining wounds on his body and soul. Wounds—representing sins, after all—are to be extinguished here,67 and in fact one of Dante’s first encounters is with Matilda, who sings, in echo of Psalm 32, “blessed are they whose sins,” or wounds, “are covered.”68 Resurrected f lesh was thus to be incorruptible, its injurious defects undone as when Job had proclaimed, “And I shall be surrounded again with my skin and in my f lesh I shall see God” (19:36).69 Dante, however, represented only one position in the complex and technical debate over heavenly, bodily resurrection, and one that echoed Peter Lombard’s claim that the bodies of saints “will rise without any defect, shining like the sun, all deformities they had here [on earth] being cut off.”70 Bonaventure too had embraced a similar position, though as Caroline Bynum has pointed out, he also believed that “the scars of martyrs will shine forever as ‘signs of merit and triumph.’ ”71 More than any saint on earth or in heaven, Christ was above all, at least in the late middle ages, unthinkable without his injuries. Each welt, puncture wound, bruise or gash received singular devotional attention, especially in meditations on the passion; while to modern sensibilities the elevation of Christ’s wounds could reach nearidolatrous (if not fetishistic) levels, the emphasis was not necessarily incorrect theologically either. Christ after all had identified himself to the apostle Thomas by displaying his bloodied hands, inviting the doubter not only to behold those wounds but to touch them and even, as in Caravaggio’s painting, to kiss and taste them.72 In his painfully exposed stance of outstretched injury, Christ finally embodied a vulnerability, representing not five wounds but one human and divine wound, glistening in fragility on the cross and spewing forth the blood that represented atonement as well as kenosis, an emptying out “on behalf of the world.” 73

14


The effect of portraying Christ’s body in such visually forensic terms by artists such as Matthias Grunewald or the early Lucas Cranach was to provoke the viewer into religious contemplation ref lective of a faith that constituted both bodily and spiritual suffering. As Sarah Beckwith and others have pointed out, for medieval people wounds acted as a literal entranceway into Christ, a means of gaining access to him as all boundaries were collapsed;74 referring to the sword wound exacted by Longinus, the late-medieval devotional text known as the “Prickynge of Love,” attributed to James of Milan, described the opening as a place “where my own heart enter[ed] and joined His.” 75 Indeed, the sores and lesions of Christ were “sweet savoring to a devouring soul,” wrote Richard Rolle, or “wholesome herbs to a sinful man”: “What can be so effective a cure for the wound of conscience,” Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, “as steady meditation on the wounds of Christ?” 76 For Henry Suso, Christ appeared, “preserving still the marks of [his] cross and holding them out between the eternal Father’s stern judgment and all your sins,” leading Suso to ask, “how I may bear in my body your sweetest and gentlest wounds, how I ought to keep them always in mind?” 77 During the reformation, protestants took radically different (though not necessarily less symbolic) stances on the matter of Christ’s bodily brokenness, as well as on matters having to do with mortification of the f lesh and the sacred meanings of torn, bruised, or cut skin. For Luther, the wounds of Christ were not to be meditated upon in and of themselves, or to be embraced as an entryway into Christ, as had been emphasized in the late middle ages (moreover, for Luther and Calvin both, Christ did not bear his marks in heaven).78 Nevertheless, wounds could still serve as a channel by which one ref lected on one’s own spiritual deformities. Individuals could dwell long and obsessively on Christ’s wounds, Luther wrote, but the problem was that such people “never [progressed] beyond that,” and therefore continued to meditate, idolatrously, on wounds rather than where those wounds salvifically led. Christ’s anguish, as manifested in his wounds, was therefore not an end in itself for Luther but rather a means in which the faithful could focus on the idea that “you are the one who is torturing Christ thus, for your sins have surely wrought this . . . [therefore], for every nail that pierces Christ, more than one hundred thousand should in justice pierce you, yes, they should prick you forever and ever more painfully.” 79 Luther’s contemporary, Lucas Cranach, ref lected this shift when he embarked on new representations of the passion that conveyed a more abstracted austerity, forsaking the copious amount of blood in

Introduction

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his previous depictions; while not too much should be made of this growing abstraction, which had been effected before the reformation, it nevertheless, as Mitchell Merback has written, ref lected an “attenuation of visual experience” that included the depiction of wounds in that experience.80 Elsewhere, Calvinists condemned images in general or sought to expunge the idea of wounds insofar as they had been elevated to idolatrous levels or associated with miracles and other popish aspects—none of which is to say, however, that Calvin or others were indifferent to the body and to ailments in general.81 Still, the power of bodily injury was too powerful in an age that witnessed a resurgence of martyrdom, and few dwelled on the materiality and symbolism of woundedness more than the martyrologists. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments focused at length on the visual horror of a body under torture (in his description of Anne Askew’s examination) or a body licked by f lames (most notably in his famous description of John Hooper, blood-drenched and dismembered by fire).82 As Thomas Betteridge has written, Foxe stressed “the absolute reality of the corporeal, material burning of the Marian martyrs, while at the same time arguing that the ‘truth’ of the martyrs’ experience was directly related to their membership of the invisible body of the ‘true church.’ ” While Foxe pointedly avoids, for the most part, traditional associations with woundedness—none of his martyrs, for example, commit overt miracles or emerge beatifically in the midst of their suffering, though they do behave with fortitude— his martyrs nevertheless earn their ultimate status as the godly elect through the testimony of a bodily suffering made intensely visible, and transcendent. For all their richly symbolic power throughout the centuries, one must also keep in mind that wounds were also simply wounds, unsymbolized, unmetaphorized. As Roy Rappaport has written in a critique of Clifford Geertz’ notion of ritual, “in their eagerness to plumb ritual’s dark symbolic or functional depths, to find in ritual more than meets the eye, anthropologists have, perhaps increasingly, tended to overlook ritual’s surface, that which does meet the eye.”83 As Bob Scribner has similarly written, while symbols in their multivalence and ambiguity can “not just [be] a matter of mentalities but a complex social practice,” “sometimes a pipe is just a pipe”—and a wound just a wound.84 Wounds in this case carry no transformative value in shaping identity; rather, they simply represent a diminishment and a throbbing evoker of mortality—Emily Dickinson’s “pain—so utter/It swallows substance up.”85 Once again we return to Philoctetes and his senseless,

16


self-eviscerating wounds. But meaning and metaphor, as the following chapters will illustrate, could not help but accrue around the materiality of woundedness, especially when seventeenth-century writers had available to them a powerful inheritance of like imagery with which to draw. To frame an experience of crisis with language, metaphor and meaning was to lay claim to it—all of which was imperative when the old self-definitions of what England once was seemed to crumble around it. *

*

*

Exploring a variety of writings and genres, the following chapters will each illustrate the manner in which metaphor took on particular rhetorical permutations in accordance with the demands of a specific discourse. While each chapter discretely examines the metaphor of woundedness in its own formal and thematic context, all are connected by a common underlying image that resonated across the unstable period from 1640 through 1660, with some writings—such as Coke’s, or Robert Burton’s—receiving mention as they prefigured the period in their foreshadowings of conf lict. Chapter one will explore the manner in which the idea of the “body politic” was transformed by the realities of the 1640s and 1650s, with the death of the king and the emergence of the commonwealth appearing to render it obsolete. Though the “body politic” did not seem to apply any more as a metaphor or analogy, I will argue that it was instead creatively reimagined as a “wounded” body politic by preachers and polemicists who sought to cast their opponents—royalists, parliamentarians, sectarians—as the injurious force of almost apocalyptic destruction. A new rhetoric of fragmentation and brokenness emerged alongside more vivid evocations not only of wounds to the land but also of blood that pervaded that land; indeed, Charles’ own execution was framed as an essential wound to England—a positive cleansing for his opponents, a martyrdom for royalists. Finally, the afterlife of the body politic idea will be examined during the commonwealth, as will the numerous treatises that sought to restore England by postulating various political and religious remedies that could “cure” its “wounds.” The metaphor of brokenness and fragmentation also permeated legal writings on a number of theoretical and empirical levels, with the law itself imagined as a unified, coherent (and for Coke, “ancient”) body that could nevertheless be subject to corporeal woundings. The beginning of chapter two will examine the extent of this language and its

Introduction

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meaning in the writings of Edward Coke through John Selden, particularly as they concerned the most grievous “wounding” force of all in the crime of treason. The chapter, however, will also focus on the manner in which the law manifested itself as a performance of wounding, as those traitors were dealt judicial injuries by the state in the form of disfigurement or ritualized execution. As I will argue, however, such wounds were often subverted by criminals who suffered from them, as they were transformed instead into badges of defiance, or imbued with larger metaphorical significances than what the state had intended. Chapter three focuses on the representation of soldiers’ wounds through a variety of war writings, from surgical treatises and firsthand chronicles of battles through the epics of Milton and Cowley. Despite the apparent meaninglessness of battle, and the blunt reality of trauma, wounds could not help but become imbued with a larger aura of imposed significance, even at their most plainly represented. In exploring how wounds accrued meaning after their initial inf liction and found their place in the genre of the news pamphlet, the surgeon’s manual, the genre of the epic or the elegy, one may understand the mutual reciprocity that existed between the real and the imaginary, the reality of the battlefield and its literary representations, actual wounds and their mythologization, especially as “honorable,” “dishonorable,” or even “godly” wounds. In the philosophical and psychological writings that pervaded the seventeenth century, the self was also conceived of as an entity that was vulnerable to many dangerous incursions. Chapter four will examine the ways in which writers such as Robert Burton, Andrew Marvell, William Davenant, or even Hobbes specifically construed love, or eros, as a passion that “wounded” the self—or rather the qualities (reason, honor, conscience) that most defined the self. Borrowing heavily from the ancients, such writers also utilized contemporary medical terminology to imagine Cupid’s terrifying “arrows” of love as leading to melancholy, jealousy, and madness—forces that further wound. Such concerns were intimately connected with their historical context, as larger political instabilities could not help but intrude and in some cases “wound” even the most pastoral settings of love, or introspection. Three types of narratives will be examined in the fifth chapter for the recurring image of woundedness they convey in describing the spiritual state of the believer (or unbeliever): puritan conversion stories, as evidenced in autobiographies and other spiritual writings, took their cue from Saint Paul in imagining conversion and faith as a frequently violent process, a necessary wounding of the soul or heart that led to

18


spiritual regeneration; by contrast, Catholics, notably the poet Richard Crashaw, perceived faith in altogether more physicalized terms, as they dwelled obsessively upon Christ’s (or their own martyrs’) actual wounds, including the charged, sacramental f luids—blood, tears—that were emitted from those wounds. Finally, treatises and poems about spiritual despair will be explored for the manner in which they described a state of inner woundedness, but one that did not carry the same transcendence that it did for beliefs as different from each other as Calvinism (with puritans) or Catholics. Exploring a richly evocative metaphor across religious persuasions—as well as other discourses—thus illuminates the ways in which writers of the seventeenth century borrowed from the past at the same time that they expressed current anxieties about the present and, by doing so, paradoxically forged entirely new and creative representations for the times.

CH A P T E R

ON E


Images of bodily trauma suffused the political language of midseventeenth-century England, particularly when it came to describing a world fractured by civil war. Likened by royalists and parliamentarians to fallen nations such as the Israel of Isaiah or the Thebes of Oedipus, the state was imagined as a realm whose identity, once hedged by boundaries, had been irreparably breeched, leaving it in a state of bloody and defiled collapse. Abraham Cowley, a royalist, was one of the more vivid writers to describe how “England dyes us red in blood and blushes too”;1 such images were not simply metaphorical, however, but perceived as all too real. When writers referred to Charles I as “that man of blood,”2 for example, they really did mean that the king had wounded the nation by causing innocent blood to be spilled; by the same token, royalists, in addition to describing a land soaked in “Young Men’s Blood . . . and Mother’s Tears,” accused the regicides of literally breaking apart the seal of the corpus mysticum as well as the corpus materium, both of which constituted the very essence of the king (and relatedly, the kingdom).3 The vocabulary of injury, fracture, or brokenness that pervaded the rhetoric of civil war did not simply describe the times, but also shaped perceptions and interpretations of the unprecedented events at hand.4 The specific comparison of England to a wounded entity, torn apart from within and on its margins, captured more than anything else the nation’s political breakages, just as the idea of England as a body politic had once theoretically bound it together in a collective unity;5 while the analogy of England to a body may have been traditionally overstated in its usage,6 the image remained a powerful and emotive symbol, and not merely a decorative metaphor, that spoke to ideals and underlaid

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theoretical understandings.7 Indeed, one of the advantages in postulating the body politic was its very f lexibility as a metaphor and an analogy, and its ability to take on different permutations or variations according to circumstance.8 The metaphor-analogy of the body politic could also be ideologically adaptable and harnessed to competing polemical interests, which served to shape and transform the metaphor in turn.9 As Jeremy Rayner has written, the very familiarity of a conventional political metaphor (or metaphorical “field”) such as the body politic “could be used in apparently daring and unfamiliar ways”—for example, one could present a wounded body politic—“precisely because there was an existing structure of interpretation which an author could count upon to support his new usage.”10 The metaphorical f lexibility of the body politic thus accounted for its interpretive richness, even after the idea behind it had apparently exhausted its historical and political relevance in the climate of the 1640s. On the one hand, valid claims may be made that the execution of Charles—as king the head, heart, or soul of the body—seemed to render the organic analogy meaningless and signal its decline, as evidenced by the famous depiction by royalists of England as a headless body or a many-headed monster. Such an entity of bodily monstrosity could also revert to little more than an empty carcass, as when Richard Lovelace wrote that, “Now the Thighs of the Crown/ And the Arms are lopp’d down,/ And the body is all but a Belly,” or Charles himself spoke of a body deprived of its head as a “dead, uselesse, and neglected trunk.”11 Some writers argued otherwise, however, asserting (with some strain of logic) that the head could be replaced, or that the body alone was self-sustaining; as Henry Parker wrote in 1642, since the “Head Politicall” was “subservient” to the body (meaning the parliament), then its disappearance would not necessarily herald the end of the organism, since the body “may be preserved after its dissolution.”12 From a different political perspective, George Wither would echo Parker’s idea by arguing that if the head of the body reneged on its duty, the people could “Take one off, and set another on.”13 But another writer captured the potential confusion by countering, “Who could endure such a metaphor, that a Body may cut off its own Head, that it may remain a Body?”14 Political discourses that shifted toward notions of the contract, or embraced mechanistic visions of the body, would also seem to signal the body politic’s rhetorical ineffectiveness and fossilization. Hobbes wished to do away with the body analogy or metaphor altogether, or at least as it applied to the “people.”15 But contrary to deteriorating during


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and immediately after the death of Charles or in light of new questions regarding Scotland and Ireland, the analogy and metaphor of the nation as a body lived on, assuming new force and meaning, and becoming central to the rhetoric of crisis in a nation undergoing unprecedented tumult. The manner in which early modern writers twisted and even subverted the image, turning the body politic into a bruised spectacle and thus projecting it into new interpretive directions, only affirmed the metaphor’s lasting power, as it resonated within a world where unity had been fractured, the order of things upended, and blood spilled from an originary wholeness or unity. Indeed, Lovelace’s idea of a body that “is all but a Belly,” or the “useless trunk” of Charles, still remained a body, after all. The fact that it was so abject only gave further fuel to writers, who could then articulate the problems of the realm as a manifestation of interior disease or pathology, of contamination and pollution.16 John Pym, for example, would speak of the “grievances which afflict the Commonwealth, which disable us,”17 while others wrote metaphorically of humoral imbalances or of pathological infiltrations into the nation’s body. Discourses of medicine and politics freely interacted with and against each other, as writers extended and elaborated upon the symbolic image they were attempting to evoke.18 The related image of damage wrought on the edges of the organism was as potent, however, as that of disease, especially as it pointed to the importance of boundaries in defining the body politic that was England. As Mary Douglas famously wrote, if the body as a model can represent “any bounded system,” then “all margins are dangerous,” for they exist as thresholds, and as such may be transgressed, thus destabilizing the entire structure or at the very least causing anxiety about its internal orderings.19 A body is in fact defined by its boundaries or enclosures, though equally important are the internal disruptable boundaries within that body—in the case of the body politic, the boundaries that exist between the social classes and their functions. The crises preceding the outbreak of the civil war were themselves perceived to consist of a series of political and legal infringements upon boundaries, even if those boundaries were located in varying places or meant different things to different people.20 Descriptions of a wounded body politic were thus prevalent even in the pre-civil war period, when writers sought to encapsulate the conf licts between and within the parliament, the church, and the court. But the rhetoric reached a heightened level of violent intensity when the internal boundaries of the nation were ruptured altogether, affecting not simply its political, moral, and social stability, but the larger

22


transcendent realms to which it had always been cosmically connected. Many felt the cosmos was coming apart; God was being wounded— offended—by the actions and sins of man; history itself was being shattered or even, among the apocalyptically minded, coming to an end; even language itself was described as wounded or disordered. But brokenness also implied that repair was still possible, that the correct diagnosis and application could heal the wounds of the nation. In this sense, the vocabulary of fracture, to quote J. G. A. Pocock in another context, “not merely [indicated] the solution to problems, but the kinds of problems which [were] to be conceptualized as requiring solution.”21 All was not lost, since in detailing who did the wounding and what precisely was being wounded, writers could attempt, by their postulated remedies, to bind together all that had been previously, and irreparably, fractured, in a nation that continued to perceive itself in bodily, organic terms. The Body Politic, Whole and Wounded The image of the realm as a body was not new to the early modern period: for centuries the analogy (or metaphor) served to explain and justify political authority and to delineate the relationships that existed among members of society, particularly as they fit within a framework of political hierarchy. Along with other archetypal metaphors—the ship of state, the machine, the theatrum mundi, the building, the patriarchal family, and in a different sense the Great Chain of Being 22 — the organic conception of the state as a body served as a powerful rhetorical device in advocating and in some ways enforcing the manner in which the social and political elements of a society should be defined and controlled. From writers beginning with Aristotle and Plato (who differed from one another in their approaches to the body politic),23 and continuing through John of Salisbury, the state was thus conceived as a corpus quoddam, in which the head, heart, limbs, sinews and even eyes, ears, tongues, toes, and knees were analogous to members of the social orders within the state, while other qualities such as the soul or reason were granted equal, if somewhat ambiguous, correspondences as well.24 The entity that allowed all these parts to move as one differed, of course; for some, it was the soul, as embodied by the church (or the king),25 while for others the law served as the great unifier. The result was social cohesion and integration, even if those entities of wholeness were a fiction—in actuality, “shreds and


23

patches” that did not really explain how society ultimately functioned or cohered at all.26 On a religious level, one of the most important foundational texts for the justification of the body politic (or body ecclesia), and an inf luence on such works as Peter Heylyn’s The Rebels Catechism (1643), was Paul’s twelfth letter to the Corinthians, which established a framework of accord for a notoriously factious community. Christians, he wrote, were baptized into the body of Christ, yet within the oneness of that body existed “many members.” Paul’s intention was to define the manner in which these parts, or “many members,” could function as a coherent whole through a God-ordained system of hierarchy, with Christ as the head; in this, Paul was similar to other theorists of the body politic for his insistence on the hierarchical interdependence of all the body’s parts, including those parts that assumed the lower orders of the mechanism. Pursuing a distinctly Christian stance, Paul, however, goes further in elevating the more “feeble” members of the body by urging that in accordance with Christ, “those parts of the body, which we think to be less honorable, upon these we bestow more honor; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.” Repeatedly utilizing a vocabulary of schism, division, and fracture, Paul therefore set out to counter the problems of various communities, in this case Corinth, by postulating the ideal of a body whose different parts knew and accepted their respective places and functions; indeed, Christ’s body was a model of unity, at the same time that it was worshipped in its various parts, or divisions.27 With the exception of Paul, the implications of the body politic idea as applied to the ecclesia or the polis would seem to carry distinctly monarchical or authoritarian (and certainly unequal) elements, since the body required a head, which in turn appeared to preside over the entire organism.28 Thus would John Fortescue write in the fifteenth century that “just as in natural things, what is left over after decapitation is not a body, but what we call a trunk, so in political things a community without a head is not by any means a body.”29 But Fortescue’s emphatic advocacy of monarchical government did not negate his belief in the necessity of the other parts, as he located the will of the people in the heart, which contained blood (and “political forethought”) that was conveyed in turn to the head.30 Each element therefore had its necessary role to play in order to ensure the functioning of the entire organism; even the peasants, who in John of Salisbury’s formulation served as the equivalent of the body’s feet, provided an essential purpose, since a body deprived of its feet “does not proceed under its own

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power, but either crawls shamefully, uselessly and offensively on its hands, or else is moved with the assistance of animals.”31 The analogy of the body politic would appear frequently in tracts throughout the Tudor period, assuming different permutations according to historical circumstances. Particularly in the later century, writers “forged” a new sense of nationhood at the same time that they conjoined the monarch’s body with it;32 but to postulate such discursive wholeness was to also imply its disruption, particularly as far as that nation was concerned. Anti-rebellion homilies and treatises, for example, ref lected a deep concern with the presence or possibility of discord within the body politic, which was exacerbated by the convincing resistance treatises of a John Knox or George Buchanan, or by the more insidious presence during the reign of Elizabeth of Jesuits, whose allegiances presented a distinct threat to the religious and political identity of the realm. New understandings of the cosmos or of anatomy and medicine also did little to dislodge the image from its position of rhetorical primacy, but only served to enrich it. As Jonathan Gil-Harris has demonstrated, for example, the early modern Paracelsian reconceptualization of disease as a force of foreign invasion rather than of internal humors did much to inform the work of polemicists and dramatists who wished to use the analogy of the state as a body to warn against such outside pestilents as Catholics, Jews, and witches.33 In the early reign of James, Edward Forset’s treatise entitled A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique, represented in its detailed expositions the extreme end to which the body politic analogy could go; while it was not an important work in its own right, the work contributed significantly to its larger historical context. Written in 1606, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, Forset’s tract used the analogy of the body, particularly in its vulnerability to disorder, to assert the sole sovereignty of the king, who corresponded not only to the head but to the soul in the scheme of the organism; just as the body is utterly subject to “the rule of [its] soule,” Forset wrote, so should all citizens defer to the kingly authority, or risk the “utter destruction” of the whole body.34 The nature of the Gunpowder Plot was itself apt, for the planned “blowing up” and “shivering into peeces” conveyed the manner in which literal assassination could symbolize the killing, or wounding, of a larger, more transcendent political body.35 In its vivid depictions of disorder, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, also written in the first decade of the century, conveyed an emerging unease about rulership, hierarchy, correspondence, and the analogy itself. Hamlet and Macbeth were both portrayed as presiding over rotted and


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fractured realms, and Coriolanus too is a play fraught with images of illness and violent wounding. But the related notions of fragmentation and tearage also captured the nature of politics in a more precise way— politics being not only about pathology but also division. Wounds exist on two levels in the play, on the body of the protagonist and on the body of the realm, fragmented by the competing voices of different interests. Nothing coheres or connects the body’s parts to each other in the republic of Coriolanus; when Mennius attempts to sway the clamoring people with the fable of the belly, in which the belly asserts its altruistic digestive functions, its beneficence to the rest of the organism’s parts, his speech is met with skepticism if not hostility. Images of free-f loating body parts—not only mouths and bellies, but wounds in and of themselves—represent, as one writer has put it, a body politic “chopped up into grotesquely independent limbs and organs that refuse to become a complete body even though political orthodoxy says that this is what they must do.”36 The body of Coriolanus himself, as will be seen, exists on a level of its own, though it also relates to the political body of Rome, which descends into a broken fragmentation that recalls but can never achieve the wholeness it once ostensibly had.37 The accession to the English throne of James, king of Scotland, complicated the notion of the body politic, as the realm or commonwealth of England was extended to include other kingdoms, including Ireland, with the latter already long (if problematically) claimed in ownership. The body politic, however, was not synonymous with the idea of kingdom, and in any case Scotland would remain distinctly apart from England, at least from the perspective of most English and Scots, who had adhered to their own traditions of a distinct and separate body politic.38 As Jenny Wormald has pointed out, the idea of “Great Britain,” to which James adhered, “totally lacked any clear and defined constitutional existence”—a key component that underlay many definitions of the body politic in England—even if James styled himself “una rex” presiding over “una grex” and “una lex,” or one king over one people and one law.39 James and certain elite writers such as Ben Jonson certainly attempted to extend the notion of Britishness to include Scotland, but until the union of 1707 the monarch would remain the head of “two mightie nations” and body politics, with their own proud traditions of the law and parliament, or kirk.40 While James did much to achieve a certain degree of union, the differences nevertheless remained stark, particularly in later rhetoric that reinforced the difference in describing Ireland or Scotland as “wounding” the body of England, or the three kingdoms during the civil wars as fully separate and “bleeding.”

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Whether the discord rested in religion, debates over unification with Scotland, foreign policy, evil councilors, the volatile multitude, or financial matters and the true cost of government, the analogy of the body politic and its larger cosmic harmony nevertheless continued to be utilized in however a strained manner, despite the fact that, as one writer has stated, that analogy “had less and less to say when it no longer ref lected underlying realities.”41 What the analogy had represented was a key component in the continued language of consensus,42 even if ideological divisions were fundamentally different from the harmonious ideal. James’s assertions of divine right were integral to a larger political struggle, and while it would be too simple to define that struggle as existing between a stark dichotomy of absolutism and constitutionalism, profound disagreements did exist,43 ref lecting different visions of the ancient constitution.44 But all sides in the debates harkened to the same ostensible ideals of unity, balance, order, and the law, just as partisans of opposing opinions utilized the same analogies and metaphors and continued to understand the kingdom in organic terms. As long as the language they deployed remained vague enough, the real conf lict that they masked—over how a polity was to be balanced, or what exactly constituted its driving essence—could be overlooked. While the political body could be presented as damaged, the extent of the damage was thus contained within roughly the same perimeters of accepted hierarchy and the fiction of unity more or less preserved. In general, political treatises in the years from 1603 to 1625 tend as a result to be limited in their presentation of a seriously damaged body politic, particularly in comparison to later decades. However, notable exceptions existed; in the literary sphere, the translation and reception of the Pharsalia, written by Lucan in the first century, ref lected an emerging, if at that point very limited, sentiment of republicanism.45 The poem, which described the Roman civil wars, the fall of the republic, and the triumph of Caesar’s party, was a kind of anti-epic46 that condemned the bloodshed of civil war as well as the peace of tyranny that resulted. Lucan’s own life, which he ended in order to avoid the persecution of Nero, also resounded with echoes of resistance to imperial rule, though his crime—a conspiracy to overthrow the emperor—was not entertained as a possibility in England before the 1640s. The parliamentarian Thomas May, for example, may have dedicated his 1627 Lucan translation to prominent figures who refused to pay the forced loan or otherwise found themselves alienated from the crown; yet May also dedicated his continued version of the Pharsalia to Charles I, and


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proceeded in the 1630s and later to assume a more moderate republicanism that very much accommodated the presence of monarchy.47 As will be seen in chapter three, the Pharsalia would also undergo a fusion with biblical language in the 1640s and 1650s to create a full-out apocalyptic for the times. But preachers earlier on could also pick up Lucan’s rhetoric and even quote from him directly, with the Puritan Thomas Adams describing in Englands sicknes, comparatively conferred with Israels (1614) the state of England’s body as it succumbed to “the bleare eye of ignorance,” “the eare deafe to [God’s] word,” the “tongue dumbe in his praise,” and above all the “bleeding wounds of voluntary sinnes.” As “Lucan speakes of the wounded body,” Adams stated, “Totum est pro vulnere corpus—the whole body [of a nation transgressed] is as one wound.” Adams further appropriates and biblicizes Lucan when he echoes the Roman poet’s condemnation of war as leaving behind a land “like Sodome and Gomorrah, a desolate and forsaken wilderness.” Yet Adams adds, “Happy are we that cannot judge the terrors of war, but by report & heare-say”—though by the time war did break out, England would no longer be “strangers to this misery in passion.”48 Adams’ successors would seize the rhetoric to create sermons and pamphlets that were not spiritual warnings but direct incendiary missiles that pointed to the political and spiritual heart of the nation. In the 1620s, however, the source of disunity was perceived as resting not in the center, in the person of the king, but in his councilors. Most famously, the Duke of Buckingham was represented as a more violent force of wounding disruption, though for Charles, to attack Buckingham “directly wound[s] the honor and judgment of himself and his father.”49 For others, to expel a figure such as Buckingham was to cleanse the body politic of a debilitating force, since “A rotten member, that can have no cure,/ Must be cut off to save the body sure.”50 Poems extolling John Felton, Buckingham’s assassin, also reiterated the Old Testament analogies by comparing him to a “stout Machabee” or a Hebrew tyrannicide dealing a “blow” to “the evil done” in the realm. Where Buckingham was an “Achan,” the Judahite who had trespassed on “our English Israel,”51 Felton was the necessary shedder of blood, and perhaps even a Joshua figure, who preserved justice and liberty.52 Other individuals were also perceived as weakening the body politic of the kingdom, and described through a language of breakage and injury as well as pathology and “ill humors.” Roger Manwaring, who had spoken and published a sermon in favor of Charles’s forced loan policy in 1626–1627 and became the subject of an attempted parliamentary impeachment as a result, was accused by the Commons in 1628

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of “divid[ing] the King from the body and the body from the head”; other absolutist-minded clerics “set dissension betwixt the King and us.”53 For Sir George Digby, once an opponent of the king, the “irregular and tumultuous assemblies of people” responsible for the Root and Branch Petition were also a divisive force, since “no man of the least insight into Nature or History” knows the danger when “contemptible Things swarm.”54 What Charles and his opponents could not envision within the debate over responsibility, however, was the extent to which the king himself would be deemed the wounding force, encapsulating in his own being a nation in a state of disintegration. Civil War Wounds and Three Bloodied Kingdoms Though images of injury and brokenness had been deployed in the early decades, the years of Charles’s personal rule in the 1630s represented a relative cooling of the political rhetoric as well as attempts to reassert notions of hierarchy and universal concord through forums such as the masque.55 But the return of parliament in 1640, the loosening of the licensing laws, and the aggressiveness of newsbooks would in the decade to follow raise the temperature of such rhetoric, with war adding a cruel irony to descriptions of a bloodied, wounded land.56 In their attempts to account for the times, writers pushed their language to excess, as when Nathaniel Hardy overdosed on metaphor in comparing the present-day commonwealth of 1647 to a “wilde Forrest” (“wherein like beasts one devoures another”), and a pond (“wherein the greater fish swallow up the lesse”), as well as a heap of stones, whirlpools, and pyramids without foundations. The Church, meanwhile, was a “forlorn Damosell” with “disheveled haire and . . . bleeding wounds [who lay] prostrate at your feet.”57 By the time war itself had broken out in 1642, writers were speaking of pens as literal weapons in the arsenal of godly and civil warfare, with the power of the word standing alongside the power of the sword; the ex-military man and poet-polemicist George Wither would thus describe his pen as “more strengthen[ing] [the parliament’s] army then a full Regiment of horse,”58 while Milton would state of an opponent that “I met him in single combat and plunged into his reviling throat this pen, the weapon of his own choice.”59 That a rhetoric of wounding would represent a nation undergoing civil war is not surprising, nor original, to mid-seventeenth century England, of course. But the self-conscious borrowings from biblical and classical descriptions of divided nations, as well as an expansion in print


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culture, gave the metaphor and analogy a renewed power that could shape and even determine public perception. Metaphor in this sense created a frame of meaning that could explain upheaval in familiar and emotionally resonant terms; perhaps for this reason, and despite their differences, opposing sides in the political battles borrowed from the same storehouse of fracture in describing political tumult, whether it came in the form of a fault line that had been created in the land, a cleaving in half, or a grave injury dealt by divisive forces. Images of woundedness also served to explain the various causes that were perceived to be behind the outbreak of hostilities. Evil councilors, once again, continued to be blamed as injurious or divisive to the body politic, though they could exist in the Commons as well as by the king’s side. In 1643 the royalist Edward Dorset, for example, spoke of “bad Councellors”—significantly, not all of parliament—whose continued presence would dash all hope that “[Charles’s] Kingdomes can be settled, the wounds of which it hath so long bled be imbalmed, much less perfectly cured.”60 Bishops and the prelacy were for their part described, most vividly in 1641 by Milton,61 less as figures of wounding than as gangrenous and cancerous growths on the body,62 which could be combated and counteracted, once again, by his pen, likened to an “axe” or “iron scepter.”63 Such men, as Laud had stated earlier with regard to the puritan preachers, were figures “whose mouthes are spears and arrowes, & their Tongues a sharpe sword,” as they strike through the “sides” of bishops as well as the king.64 The conf licts and subsequent war with Scotland over the prayer book were also often framed in a language of division, when Charles referred to Scotland’s “factious spirits,” or, from the other side, Robert Baillie described the Book of Common Prayer, which Charles tried to impose on the presbyterian northern kingdom, as one that could “wound the Kings Monarchicall government at the very heart” and “work farther disturbance in the church and country.”65 In England, writers such as Henry Marten reinforced what they believed to be national self-interest against the very different political and religious realities of Scotland;66 the often hostile tracts that resulted conveyed an accompanying rhetoric which asserted a “profound disproportion between our Nation and Scotland, in our enjoyments and priviledges.”67 In the 1640s, when these tracts were written, most authors still imagined a coherent body in which the king remained the head and parliament a necessary, bodily correlate; as the crises proceeded, that entity or “body” was no longer defined, understood, or accepted in the

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same terms by increasingly polarized factions. It should be pointed out, however, that individuals who espoused a middle course between the king and parliament did exist amidst the extremities. Even mainstream preachers who exhorted parliament in the 1640s, however, ascribed to sins the cause of the nation’s bloodied and torn body, with God as the righteous wounder. England could also be compared to Job rather than sinning Israel; wounds created “wasting divisions,”68 or Job-like body sores that evoked images of seepage and putrescence. Instead of being punished for its sins, England was being tested by a God, in Nicholas Lockyer’s words, who sought to “strip us of all,” to “set us upon a dunghill, licking our wounds,” to “poure Vinegar into our wounds when we cry for mercy.” What England needed, according to Lockyer, was patience to endure such a condition, for “as God takes time to administer Justice to publike bodies, so he takes time to administer mercy to publike bodies.”69 Stephen Marshall, one of the most inf luential and at times fervid preachers of the civil war, was an especially notable example of a preacher who drew heavily on the more bloodthirsty, injurious elements of the Old Testament to advocate godly rule, even though he was also a member of the middle ground.70 The death of Laud seems to have particularly inspired Marshall to millennialist ends, as he spoke in one parliamentary sermon of the “time of times,” the “hopes and beginnings of a Jubilee and Resurrection.” 71 Marshall’s biblical wrath, and his very pointed use of wound imagery, was raised to more heightened levels in the wake of events that promoted an increasingly heated anti-Catholicism. In December of 1641, during the height of English hysteria over the murders of protestants during the Catholic uprising in Ireland,72 Marshall thus presented parliament with a sermon in which he quoted the biblical Yahweh as exclaiming that “I have seen a horrible thing in the house of Israel”—“sins and abominations that would bring on the wrath of Nebuchadnezzar or sink the nation in Ahabs apostacy,” as “a people [grew] ripe apace for destruction.”73 The Irish uprising was for Marshall just one of the many misfortunes to befall England due to sins—whoredom, drink, and other grave ills—that literally tore its body open. Corrupt f lesh then begat more corrupt f lesh, to the point where “the whole body was full of wounds, and bruises, and putrified sores” until finally “God [poured] out his indignation, and consum[ed] [it] with the fire of his wrath.”74 With the boundaries of Israelite England literally eaten away, God himself would be unwilling to save the beast, instead consigning the entire carcass to the apocalyptic f lames.

The Wounded Body Politic 75

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Labelled the “Trumpet” of the house, Marshall was not a field preacher exhorting from the dark corners of the land, but a moderate member of the Westminster Assembly of divines, an advisory body to parliament that was founded in 1643 to attend to matters of liturgical and ecclesiastical reform. Marshall, however, like many of his fellow sermonizers, utilized a language that inspired not only parliamentarians but soldiers in the field. That the language could be so repetitive or hackneyed at times—with its invocations of Antichrist (usually Archbishop Laud) or Babylon/ Sodom (present-day England)—should not distract from the power those words and images did yield, particularly for a people with an intensely alive relation to the symbolisms and emotional resonance of the Bible. Furthermore, when Marshall, in perhaps his most famous sermon, spoke of God setting a curse upon the people of Meroz, the reverberations were especially powerful in an age when curses, by a witch or beggar, held a not inconsiderable power as “edged tooles” that could, quite literally, wound.76 As mentioned, the biblical texts that preachers chose to expound upon were culled in an overwhelming number of cases from the Old Testament, which provided a model in Israel and articulated a series of explanations and parallels for contemporary political and religious matters. Preachers such as Marshall could assume the role of prophets, and thereby take on a prophetic language, including heavy use of metaphor, irony, and hyperbole. Like Amos or Malachi, antiroyalist preachers in particular could invoke tyrannical biblical kings such as Belshazzar or Nimrod, or proclaim on history, especially the story of the Exodus, in order to illuminate England’s present-day guilt and ultimate godly victory. Above all, however, the Old Testament provided a storehouse of violent imagery and language whose power engendered a sometimes overwhelming response, particularly when one spoke of “the strokes of God’s hand,” the “smiting” of Israel, or the manner in which Yahweh’s right hand “shatters the enemy”—all reinforcing of God’s destructive power.77 The sword, of course, was itself centrally deployed as an image and metaphor in the Old Testament, and could rouse militancy among the population, including soldiers. When Gideon, in Judges 7, seeks deliverance for Israel from the attacks of the Amalekites, Yahweh, for example, invests him not only with the sword but with a ruthless martial power that leaves devastation in its wake. Gideon and Joshua were in fact defined by the swords they wielded and the wounds they inf licted in the name of Yahweh; yet the sword was also purifying, representing an external cleansing alongside the Word’s internal regeneration.78 The sword could also

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contain within itself a power of imminence, as when the clergyman William Bridge would exclaim to parliament, in the wake of the 1641 events in Ireland, that “The sword is now drawing” and would “not be pacified till Babylon be down and Sion rais’d” (thus foreshadowing Cromwell’s vengeful invasion of 1649–1650); similarly charged was the reference to “a quiver so full of chosen and polished shafts for the Lord’s work.” 79 For parliamentarian soldiers, many of whom had “For the commonwealth of England” engraved on their swords, such words, exhorted by preachers or chaplains who would accompany the army on its march, resulted in a martial power that was utterly animated by a closely held religious and providential energy.80 With its themes of vengeance and social justice and its imagery of wounds, the Old Testament also proved alluring to more radical preachers, who took its spiritual and political messages to the farther reaches of ideology and rhetoric. In the 1650s, Jasper Mayne would describe such preachers as “[keeping] the wounds of our divided Kingdome bleeding” by citing a piece of Esau or Ezekiel, or one of the Prophets and “breath[ing] nothing but thunder, and ruine, and desolation, and destruction.”81 Critical observers were also bothered by the subversiveness of the violent rhetoric spoken or written by sectaries who, in the royalist Peter Heylyn’s words, were agents of division, or “putredinous vermine of bold Schismaticks and frantick Sectaries.”82 Cain’s killing of Abel, for example, could be read by some as a tale of exploitation rising from covetousness (particularly regarding property), with Abel representing the figure of the oppressed; such a reading appealed to groups such as the Diggers, with their emphasis on the abolition of property or the struggle for freedom.83 Conversely, tales of Yahweh investing leadership and crushing might in simple and obscure men such as Gideon—“the least important in his family in the weakest clan in Manassah” ( Judges 6: 15)—held undoubted appeal as well for those who questioned the basis of social hierarchies. Meanwhile, from the New Testament, the apocalypse of John in the book of Revelation might have echoed Daniel and other prophets, but in its sheer excess of wounding violence, it held a category of its own, particularly as historical events took more extreme turns in the later 1640s. Echoing the admonitions of the prophets, and continuing with analogies of injury, writers and preachers repeatedly described England during the war, in a kind of anti-pastoral mode, as a land of blood—a land, literally, wounded. One of the most common pronouncements in sermons and pamphlets was the prophet’s admonition, “Oh bleeding England”—though the words that followed could be condemnatory or


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consolatory (“Your buried glorie and honour shall returne to you”).84 A realm profaned by blood did not please Yahweh, particularly when that realm was the chosen one; according to the commandment in Numbers 35, “You must not defile the land you inhabit, the land in which I live, for I, Yahweh, live among the sons of Israel.” John Goodwin’s Anti-Cavalierisme (1642) magnified the millenarian hue of bloodshed, as it called for the godly of the nation to meet the “inhuman butchering” of the enemy with its own blood, to fight Antichrist to the death, forsaking one’s self to martyrdom, if need be.85 For “whosoever shall consider what bloody and horrid intendments and attempts against this nation,” Goodwin wrote, “may truly say, There hath no such thing been done or seen in the Land, since God first caused men to dwell on the face of it.”86 The result of these transgressions was evident in the copious amounts of blood spilled, and not only in England. Indeed, reference abounded to three bleeding kingdoms, which both reinforced their national distinctions while also connecting them through a commonly shed blood. In England, however, the blood that spilled was also perceived as symbolic of the people (as Charles himself had recognized, though with the proviso that he embodied the all-directing heart). The metaphor of the injured body in this sense served an additional purpose for the pamphleteers, for if Charles was responsible for wounding the kingdom, or kingdoms, then he ceased to be monarch and was instead Charles Stuart, the “Man of Blood,” who had defiled the lands (for most writers, England above all), and therefore called down upon himself divine retribution or vengeance. As Patricia Crawford has written, the blood guilt that accrued around Charles, especially in the year 1648, served as a “justifying argument” and “creat[ed] an atmosphere in which Charles could be attacked.”87 Conservatives used it “to [rationalize] action[s] deemed politically expedient,” while “radicals appealed to the idea to urge a new course of action.”88 In both cases, the Bible provided unimpeachable sanction for the disposing of such a man, since if, according to the book of Numbers, “blood defileth the land,” the land could only be cleansed by “the blood of him that shed it.”89 But the metaphorical and literal blood that spilled from England’s wounds was healing as well as defiling, as royalists and antiroyalists both believed; war itself, in fact, could be double-sided in its effects, as much purging and cleansing as it was annihilating. Blood, if shed toward the godly ends of martyrdom, could also be a badge not of sin but of divine election, not of debasement but salvation; blood, in other words, could redeem as well as condemn. As Nicholas Lockyer

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wrote in a preface to his readers, “Love [can be found] in the bottome of a bloody Cup, and the deeper a man drinks, the sweeter,” just as “a spirit of glory, is a bleeding Christians glory.”90 England’s shedding of its blood through war and suffering thus constituted an act of collective national martyrdom in a process of transformation necessary for the eradication of sin and the reclaiming of the special covenant with God. Though the religious and political were often entwined in the 1640s, not all writers chose to frame the troubles of the day in purely biblical language. Henry Parker, for example, emphasized the secular nature of government, with the people investing their governance with the king or other “politique corporations” for the greater “might and vigour” of society.91 Writers such as Parker tended to turn to the same ancient texts, using a common rhetorical storehouse of metaphor and analogy to interpret historical events that were unfolding at the time; instead of the Bible—or in many cases existing alongside it92—was the classical poetry of a Lucan, who now provided another channel to turn to in expressing the incomprehensibility of events at hand. One would assume that royalists, as in the earlier part of the century, would f linch at any republican-oriented work as the Pharsalia93 but Abraham Cowley, for one, referred to Lucan as well as Virgil when he penned his epic entitled The Civil War in 1643. In Book One, Cowley describes the process by which the body politic of England, the unity it once enjoyed from the age of Henry II through the “happy Yeares” of James I and Charles, was fractured, rendering it at war with itself. Cowley’s “What rage does England from itselfe divide” recalls Lucan’s description of a kingdom “burst asunder”; more than Lucan, however, Cowley attributes the nation’s fragmentation to infernal forces in which the devil guides the actions of agents such as John Pym. In the name of curing the nation’s ills, a segment of parliament instead “[brought] in a fever”; preventing the king from invading Ireland’s “weeping shore” to quell the “lewd Rebells there,” the “Surgeons” of parliament “yield” yet more wounds.94 In the second book of the Civil War and in another echo of Lucan, Cowley portrays hell itself as a place where rebels throughout history (and present-day puritans and parliamentarians) have been relegated, subject to eternal punishment; thus does Absalom, the mutinous son of David, hang as he did in death, by his hair, but this time embedded in f lames, as “A thowsand Fiends stand round and wound him there/ Still with fresh darts his dropping limbs they tore.”95 The figure of Absalom would appear again in Charles’ own writings, as he was likened to the rebels of the kingdom: “I never had


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any victory which was without my sorrow,” the king wrote, “because it was on Mine own Subjects who, like Absalom, died many of them in their sin.” On the other hand, the king added, in acknowledging the peculiarities of his war against the rebels, “I never suffered any Defeat, which made Me despair of God’s mercy and defense.”96 Man of Blood, Man of Tears Though the incorporation of the trope of woundedness into political, literary, and polemical discourses could lead to conceptually powerful results, the personalization of injury, whether in the form of actual wounds suffered or recurring claims that one’s conscience was “wounded,” carried the image to entirely new levels. The famous case of the parliamentarians William Prynne, Henry Burton, and John Bastwick, for example, demonstrated the extent to which the inf liction of injury by persecuting authorities could be transformed into badges of glory evocative of John Foxe’s martyrs in the previous century. For all three men, ordered to be mutilated in 1637 by Star Chamber and Archbishop Laud, suffering was to be embraced, with judicial wounds transformed into real and metaphorical emblems of display, defiance, and public persuasion. Even Prynne, a lawyer and a man presumably less given to theatrics, would conclude his speech and offer up his ear as a sacrifice to the executioner by proclaiming, “Come, friend, come, burn me, cut me, I fear not . . . come sear me, scar me, I shall bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” If wounds could serve as a testament to their bearers’ Christlike ordeals, they also acted as a visible advertisement for the unjust regime that inf licted them. Thus would Prynne describe how “my face descries/ Laud’s searching SCARS” as well as “God’s grateful sacrifice;” with his “Stigmata Laudis” proclaimed loud and clear, Prynne cannily incorporated wounds into his persona, locating them as central to who he was as both a man and as liberty’s valorous saint.97 Though his own whippings and dramatic ordeals preceded the 1640s, John Lilburne nevertheless deserves brief mention for the way in which he also fashioned larger martyrological meanings out of his wounds in his tract entitled The Worke of the Beaste (1638). Thus would he recount in the Worke how, in punishment for planning to publish the writings of Bastwick, he bore his stripes “with patience and cherefullness,” since “God hardened my backe . . . and made me Triumphe & with a holy disdaine [prevail] over my torments.”98 At the same time—and

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in a traditional martyrological coupling—suffering was balanced with militance, as Lilburne claimed a defiant impermeability against his enemies’ inf lictions: “I neither feare an Axe at Tower hill, nor a Stake in Smithfield, not a Halter at Tyburne, nor Whipping at a Carts-arse, nor a Pillory in the Pallice-yeard,” he wrote, before further comparing his plight to the exile of John, author of the book of Revelation. Lilburne might have been at that time little more than a “tortured and resentful young man,”99 but he also tapped into new rhetorical currents that would allow him to establish himself and his Leveller movement at the same time that he borrowed from the older language of a Foxe or the writers of the Martin Marprelate tracts. On the one hand, he could utilize a traditional, if by now hackneyed, image in describing the day of his punishment when he wrote that “ . . . I counted [this] my wedding day in which I was married to the Lord Jesus Christ: for now I knowe he loves me in that he hath bestowed soe rich apparel this day upon me, and counted me worthie to suffer for his sake.”100 Unlike earlier Marian martyrs such as Nicholas Ridley or Hugh Latimer, however, Lilburne’s words were borrowed from the religious sphere to describe, again, an essentially political offense, and as such, they were directed—perhaps distorted—toward incendiary, quasi-populist ends. As Thomas Corns has pointed out, Lilburne’s narrative is divided between following the formula established by Foxe and establishing itself as an account that was deeply specific to his own individual, conf licted experience; in this sense, the wounds he suffered at the whipping post were like those of other martyrological accounts, in being both universal in their godly connection to Christ’s wounded pain, and unique to and defining of the martyr’s, or Lilburne’s, own particular identity.101 Effective as such quasi (or pseudo) martyrological tracts as Lilburne’s could be, the most powerful and enduring work would be written by (or in the name of ) the king himself.102 In his series of meditations entitled the Eikon Basilike, Charles (or John Gauden, who reworked the manuscript) would counteract the language of righteousness, suffering, blood and woundedness developed by Foxe by appropriating it to his own polemical purposes.103 The events of the civil war are likened to a conf lagration (the “f lames of civil dissentions” or the “f lames of discontent”) or to natural disasters such as storms or turbulent seas.104 What perhaps needs more consideration, however, is the extent to which Charles utilizes recurring images of wounds in fashioning himself as England’s royal martyr. To incorporate wounds into his own identity was a surprising choice on Charles’ part and one that would ultimately contribute to the transformation of royalist rhetoric; in a career of cultivating a


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façade of impenetrable distance, Charles would not only embrace the image of a wounded king—an open, apparently vulnerable king—but risk reducing the majesty of his kingship in doing so. In his early approach to kingship, Charles might be compared with Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, for example, who is determined not to follow Roman custom by displaying his wounds to the rabble of the people, since to do so would be a capitulation, a spectacle of humiliation. Though wounds are part of him, he also knows they serve as tokens of war heroism in the political marketplace, as he uses them to gather the people’s vote; not only are the people content to gaze on his wounds, however, but they also demand to claim them as their own. “If he shows us his wounds,” the Third Citizen proclaims, “we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them.” But, Coriolanus states, “I will not do’t/ Lest I surcease to honour my own truth.” Wounds thus come alive; they hold truth and memory; and for Coriolanus at least, they are an integral part of his aristocratic and honorable identity that must be held or guarded by him alone. In the end, however, his refusal to display his wounds brings on the wrath of the people, and in a final ironic display, the crowd shouts, “Tear him to pieces!” as his body is stabbed repeatedly by Aufidius and the conspirators, his wounds unloosened in a grisly sacrificial display of defeat.105 The Coriolanus of Shakespeare differs in significant ways from Charles, of course, but the king’s self-projections through paintings and masques during the first decade of his reign also presented to the world a highly opaque, polished, and impenetrable—woundless— façade of royal distance.106 Charles’s embrace of a “wounded” identity in the Eikon Basilike thus represented a major shift not only in his public image, but in the political and emotional language that described that image. The image of a realm “injured” by civil war actually worked to Charles’s advantage, for it allowed him to personalize the body politic and insist that his own being was intimately bound up with it. The nation’s wounds, which he insisted were not of his making, were his wounds, or wounds on his mortal and mystical body; the blood shed in the realm was blood that spilled forth from him, since his person constituted the very heart of the body politic. As he once claimed, “there is not a drop of blood [that] hath fallen from a true royall subject . . . [that] I have [not] sympathized with”; when “all the blood is lost . . . my wounds [open] the wider.”107 “I bleed in your wounds,” he wrote; “The heart of a Prince is kept warme with the blood of his subjects.”108 In the Eikon Basilike, Charles would thus declare his Christlike sufferings to be the nation’s, at the same time that those sufferings belonged

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in a highly subjective manner to him alone. Charles, however, was not entirely original here, since he followed the path laid down for him by the preachers, most notably the royalist Edward Symmons, who also utilized the same biblical metaphors and images employed by the opposing side. Symmons shifted the images and associations around, however: though the English were the new Israelites, Charles was not the Old Testament tyrant as his enemies had claimed; instead, he was Jesus, persecuted to his death by the Judases, Pilates, and everyone else who sought the king’s “extinction” to “satisfie the malice . . . in this Age.”109 Symmons’ Vindication was itself a response to the publication in 1645 of The Kings Cabinet Opened, an attempt by parliamentarians to weaken Charles by publishing his private correspondence, and, in Kevin Sharpe’s words, to “undermine all royal discourse as utterance possessed of higher authority”;110 the initial response by royalists had been Coriolanus-like horror at the king’s public exposure, particularly in the publication of letters between himself and the queen. Rather than dispute the letters, Symmons, however, exploited the unexpected sympathy generated by their personal aspects—the first time that the public had been witness to the king in this light. Now Charles was, in Symmons words, to be “set . . . forth in [Christ’s] Robes, as clothed with sorrows [to show] what a perfect similitude there hath been and is, between our Saviour and our Soveraign in the foure last yeares of both their sufferings.”111 In strategically humbling the king, royalists such as Symmons (and the king himself ) were able to draw on themes of compassion, though the effect was not to provoke pity for the king so much as to confront readers with the faith they claimed to profess and the sins they were possibly committing. “Do [the king’s accusers] thinke it was well done of the Priest and Levite to afford no compassion to the wounded man?” Symmons asked. “[Will] no man lay to Heart, or take notice of the sufferings of their Soveraigne?” In a kind of variation on traditional modes of Christian meditation, Symmons then asks the readers to place themselves in the position of Charles; “suppose themselves were in the Kings condition, aff licted and wrong’d on every side as He is?”112 he wrote, warning them in the meantime of the “Sin of Jobs friends,” who abandoned the aff licted in the greatest hour of need. In the Eikon Basilike Charles also emphasized themes of betrayal, isolation, and wounded sorrow, using religious language to evade what was essentially a political conf lict between king and parliament. The political aspect is not exactly hidden in Charles’s book, however, As Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler has pointed out, a continuity even existed


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between the language of the parliamentarians in 1642 and Charles’s own use of a rhetoric of balance, harmony, and rights in describing the relations between king and parliament.113 Still, an aura of piety suffuses the political in the Eikon Basilike, just as the encompassing theme that pervades the treatise is “tender conscience,” described repeatedly as “wounded conscience.”114 Significantly, utilizing the intimate firstperson, Charles describes how conscience—the great theme of the seventeenth century115 —becomes the standard by which he acts as king and bestows goodness upon his subjects, for example in his negotiations with parliament on the Nineteen Propositions, “which I cannot yield to . . . without violating My Conscience.”116 Conscience in fact stands as the dramatic focal point to the entire work and a key to Charles’s “martyrdom,” as his choice not to be wounded at the core of his being constitutes the first step to his sanctification. The Eikon Basilike mimics in parts a psalmistry, and particularly the psalms of lamentation, as Charles also seeks to align himself with David, the foreshadowing prototype of Christ.117 David could be a contentious figure to claim as a model, but Charles embraces the association, stating (disingenuously) that while he may lack David’s “piety,” he equals his “aff lictions.”118 David, of course, reinforced Charles’s claims to be divinely anointed by God, but he also served other purposes: Charles, for example, would seek to emulate the great king of Israel, who chose to maintain his conscience “rather than to fall into the hands of men,” since “Better [the enemies] destroy Me, then [Yahweh] should damne Me.” Charles also prayed for—and thus associated himself with—David’s patience as well as his forgiveness of opponents, asking God to spare them, despite their “false and lying tongues,” the “hot burning coals of eternal fire.”119 Though the example of David additionally justified Charles’s outbursts of wrath, imbuing that wrath with the righteousness of the chosen one assailed by enemies, it was David’s language of vulnerability, and the frequent use of the idea and metaphor of wounds throughout the psalms that, in the end, carried the most resonance. The speaker of Psalm 6, for example, describes to God “The wounds thy heavy hand hath made” (followed by “O let thy gentler touches heal”), while Psalm 129 states of enemies that “Hourly they vex my wounds afresh.” Some of this appropriation could be problematic, since David’s sufferings are often the product of sin (most notably in his lust for Bethsheba). Acknowledging that he must attribute his own misfortunes to some sin, Charles looks to his betrayal of his chief minister, the Earl of Strafford, who he turned over to parliament in 1640 and whose death warrant he signed. For that, Charles wrote, “I never bare any

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touch of Conscience with greater regret,” though repentance, as with David, is at hand, since “I have often and with sorrow confessed both to God and men.”120 Ultimately, of course, sin is finally washed away when Charles is in turn “betrayed” by the Scots, who handed him over to the parliament after his surrender, thus ensuring their role as Judas and his as Christ (still, Charles writes, Christlike, “O Father forgive them, for they knew not what they did”).121 The furious determination with which Milton set out to attack Charles’s treatise point-by-point in the Eikonoklastes is a testament to the power and extraordinary popularity that the “king’s book” held.122 Milton was affronted by Charles’s claims to martyrdom, since martyrs “bear witness to the truth, not to themselves,” and furthermore, they do not die for a religion “because it is establish’t.”123 More devoted, at least at that point, to martyrdom in its militant rather than its suffering aspects, Milton also sought to undercut Charles’s language of sorrow and the bad “Stage-work” by which he exhibited his piety (“Pietie grounded upon error”).124 Indeed, Charles’s very language, and the manner in which he dwelled on suffering, specifically through woundedness, was an offense, a worthless and empty wielding of “Sophistry f lashing with Rhetoricke” that undermined the meaning of what martyrdom truly was. In his dishonesty, Charles was actually martyring not himself but the truth, and in fact one could turn to Milton’s Areopagitica to find truth presented as itself an embodied and wounded martyr, under siege by censorship, personified as a “torn body” persecuted by Typhon.125 Despite Milton’s discrediting efforts, Charles, Symmons, and others succeeded in part by exploiting the powerful paradoxes of Christ—reconfirming majesty within abjectness, the lowest in the highest, the highest in the lowest. In this sense, divine right was alive and well in these royalist-martyrological tracts, which drew upon internal states of sorrow and woundedness to create a saint as untouchable as the kingly Davidic model that preceded it. Like David, Charles is absolute, majestic, marked by wounds but not diminished by them; if Charles is the savior of the nation, “He and none but He, can make up the sad and wide breaches of poor England.” Even more, in a statement that continued to carry great weight in the realm, Symmons wrote that only Charles—like Christ—was capable of “pardoning injuries; yea and in praying too” for “His aff licters” and the nation as a whole.126 Such statements, again, tapped into a fear that many had of God’s wrath and “the general sin of the land,” both of which would become heightened after the execution of the


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king who, like Josiah, was punished, or sacrificed, for the sin of his people.127 After Charles’s death, royalist writers reinforced the associations of the king with Christ, and utilized the imagery of wounds for their emotional resonance. “Our loss is finite when we can compute,” wrote Henry King, “But that strikes us speechlesse, which is past recruite.”128 Theatrical metaphors and analogies were commonly invoked to describe and frame the actual execution, while the image of the injured body politic was employed as well, with more insistence than ever. For some, the killing of the king, the head of the body politic, was an act of collective suicide; thus did the blow that struck off Charles’s head “set Limbe/ By dislocation,” leaving “three Bleeding Bodies”—England, Scotland, and Ireland—“without a soul.”129 Indeed, Thomas Jordan would write, with the “Head on’t off,” the body of the state “lost its form, and turn’d a Lump.”130 Fabian Philipps described how the king’s opponents “have not only slaine the King who was their Father, but like Nero rip’t up the belly of the Common-Wealth which was their Mother.” Philipps’s abundant use of mixed metaphor and historical analogy—wounding (“rip’t”), belly, Nero, Father/Mother—was not a ref lection of bad writing so much as linguistic fragmentation, as writers attempted and failed to reach for meaning wherever they could find it. Walter Montagu also strained the limits of language and the mixing of metaphor, wounding and otherwise, when he described how with Charles’s execution “This stroke hath cut the only neck of land/ Which between us, and this Red Sea did stand,/ That covers now our world.”131 In elegizing the king—which was not an easy task, given the political dangers involved132—writers also resorted to traditional imagery of blood (“this Red f loud,/ Which ne’r o’erf lowes us all”) and plagues, which connected the rhetoric, once again, back to the Bible. In the state of anguish that Charles’s death provoked, blood assumed a different meaning than the apocalyptic, as it was now said to f low as copiously as tears: grief, Henry King wrote, “bleeds inward.”133 Intimately connected to wounds, tears were also central to the devotional poems on the death of Charles, harkening as they did to the elegiac tradition as well as—and uncomfortably—to traditional meditative (and Catholic) practices and the work at the turn of the century of the Jesuit Robert Southwell.134 Charles himself is quoted by one writer as describing how “with watery rivulets both mine eyes overf low,”135 while another wrote how the king spoke “with a sad and melancholy heart, and tears trickling down his sacred cheeks.”136 The Marquis of Montrose’s epitaph, entitled “Upon the Death of King Charles the

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First,” conveyed how the author’s grief caused him to “weep the world to such a strain” that deluge would f lood it once again; later, however, a more militant tone would be conveyed as tears turned to blood—or when Montrose stated that he would “write [Charles’s] epitaph with blood and wounds.”137 Charles’s death was quite literally wounding, provoking for Henry King “amazed thoughts, a wounded sense”;138 but tears, like blood, could also be purgative, washing through the nation to prepare it for the return of a new king, in Charles II. In another common and highly symbolized image, the oak tree— the ancient symbol of English kingship—was also described as mortally “wounded” or uprooted: in one engraving, Cromwell is depicted as ordering his men to rip up the roots of an oak tree from whose branches hang the Bible, Magna Carta, legal texts, and even the Eikon Basilike. “Kill and take possession,” Cromwell states in the caption, in a distortion of the Old Testament words, while soldiers wield axes against the trunk, others pull down the entire edifice with ropes, and pigs “fatted for slaughter” feed hungrily on the fallen acorns.139 The royalist Henry Vaughan meanwhile described how the oak tree’s branches “from the trembling top/ To the firm brink” were cut down, as “the pride and beauty of the plain lay dead.”140 Responding to such images, republicans turned the metaphor around as they set out to justify the emergent commonwealth: the tree, they wrote, had not been “cut down” but “pruned,” its rotten members eliminated in order that the greater arboreal edifice could grow unencumbered. While a shared rhetoric or linguistic consensus was thus shattered in 1649, common metaphors nevertheless remained, if in a highly attenuated form, proving useful to those who sought to build a rhetoric appropriate to entirely new political, social, and religious conditions. Commonwealth Wounds and Protectorate Lashings Throughout the years of the commonwealth and the protectorate, royalists continued to deploy analogies of violation, breakage, and injuriousness to describe the state of a nation without a king. While the formal conceptual framework that undergirded the body politic analogy may have been seriously weakened with the absence of a king, political language, even among nonroyalists, was still often couched in organic terms whenever one spoke of the body of the people, or the body of the commonwealth. Thus did Edward Sexby write of “the two Bodies of the people, the representative and the represented . . . [which] make up

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the body of the Common-wealth.” Concomitantly, any time a threat was posed or a dangerous critique aimed at that body, images of disease or woundedness continued to be utilized to describe the nature of what had gone wrong and the cure best to remedy it. Complicating matters, and further challenging the idea of the body politic, was the question of Scotland and Ireland, and their role in the new order. The atrocity stories that accompanied descriptions of the 1641 violence by Catholics against Protestants in Ireland continued to propel partisans who urged an invasion in 1649, inf luenced as they had been by eight years of pamphlets that repeatedly decried the “bloody” rebels and papists, who existed as distinctly apart from the godly realm of England.142 Even as late as 1652, three years after the Cromwellian invasion, newsbooks could thus proclaim that “the only way to save that Land is to destroy it.”143Meanwhile, in 1649, the recognition by Scotland of Charles’s son as “King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland,” with its implicit acceptance of the heir’s claim to the English throne and a potential royalist invasion, brought on continued suspicion and hostility by English republicans toward their northern neighbor. Propagandists were enlisted to encourage the possibility of invasion, with James Rew’s The Wounds of the Kirk of Scotland (1650) attacking not only the kirk, but also connecting Charles II to nefarious dealings with Rome.144 Not surprisingly, on the eve of Cromwell’s invasion, such rhetoric reached a pitch of fervency,145 as Scotland had to be “dismembered” at the same time that it was to be later incorporated, at least in 1651–1652, or made into “one nation,” according to Cromwell’s plans.146 Despite the confusions that the body politic analogy could take in such an environment, supporters of Cromwell, and the Rump Parliament especially, tended to repeatedly return to architectural analogies as the most effective way of describing the new republican order that was emerging, at least in England, from the ashes of the old monarchical rule. Still, the organic encroached upon the architectural: one of the most striking uses of the architectural metaphor, and one that brings in organic analogies (and the memory of Charles), occurred in Andrew Marvell’s “Horatian Ode.” Based on the account in Livy of builders coming across a severed head as they were laying foundations for the Temple of Jupiter, the earlier part of Marvell’s poem deepens the story by describing how “A bleeding Head, where they begun/ Did fright the Architects to run”—“architects” in this case being members of the Rump Parliament who recoiled, queasily, from the execution and were reluctant to proceed further to enact a new program. The organic

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metaphor of the body politic—or in this case the bleeding head—can even be said to have made a cameo appearance, or certainly an awkward or unwelcome intrusion, upon the new architectural field of imagery that Marvell’s parliamentarians were attempting to construct.147 The architectural image in and of itself was not new to the age, but like many metaphors it underwent unique transfigurations in the upheavals—linguistic as well as political and religious—of the 1640s and 1650s. Evocative of ancient Rome, the architectural analogy was amenable to a rhetoric of republicanism, especially insofar as it evoked a stable fortresslike structure of collective parts reliant on balance, but without any overarching head to dominate it monarchically. It could also, needless to say, make the regicide that occurred more palatable or less morally problematic, since a building (Charles’s kingdom and the episcopacy) being pulled down offered up the possibility of a new, better (republican) structure being constructed in its stead, or in Marvell’s words, “Into another mold.” A headless body, on the other hand, not only testified to a previous act of violence but also carried no logical hope for resuscitation or rebirth. Unlike bodies, buildings could finally evoke history, summoning the Rome of the republic, even the Temple of Jerusalem, transplanted to the grounds of England, the natural inheritor of those lost worlds’ ideals. Constructive yet also defensive in nature, the architectural fortification was also as f lexible an analogy as the body politic, for it too could be altered, “injured,” and subject to repair. Just as the borders of a body could be breeched with injurious openings, so could a building or fortification be penetrated by outside forces, or undermined insidiously from structural weaknesses within. On the one hand, Milton believed that a little Concordia discors was healthy for the state, or in architectural terms, those who fear divisive “schismaticks and sectaries” don’t understand that “out of the many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional arises the goodly and the gracefull symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure.”148 George Wither, like Milton, also tolerated the existence within the building of parts that were higher, lower, “Some pyramids, some f lats, some rounds, some squares,” though he warned against such diversity, which could cause “every man, at pleasure, to deface/ those Outworks,” to “Teare down the Piles, and breake the old Foundation.”149 Most parliamentary writers who deployed organic analogies, however, would have disagreed with Milton or Wither’s unorthodox acceptance of discordant elements within the structure, especially when that structure, as they imagined it, was built in part to hold anarchic elements


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at bay. While James Harrington in the Oceana also found architecture conducive to his purposes in advocating political balance, he wrote that “Book or Building hath not been known to attaine to perfection, if it have not had a sole Author, or Architect: a Common-wealth, as to the Fabrick of it, is of the like nature.”150 Indeed, he warned, stability in that structure’s foundations could only be attained if that structure established the centrality of the people’s interest and their investment in the process, using collaborative efforts of workmen who could best “[square] the marble.”151 In the Leviathan, Hobbes also pursues the architectural metaphor, even though he was suspicious of rhetoric (particularly republican rhetoric) and came to scorn its subcategory of linguistic adornment and elocutio.152 Still, he partook of certain literary f lourishes, including metaphor, transforming them to his own ends.153 In the architectural metaphor, Hobbes thus insists that builders should construct a commonwealth as they do the foundations of a house, with skill according to certain rules, “as doth Arithmetique and Geometry.” By the same token, and again characteristic of Hobbes, is the argument that men by their nature are not equipped on their own to come together as a collective and equitably construct a “lasting edifice”; instead, they must give themselves over to a higher and more skilled authority, “a very able Architect” with better knowledge of the rules by which the building of that edifice are governed.154 In the Leviathan (as well as his earlier work), Hobbes also utilized the body politic analogy, though again he harnessed it to his own political philosophy and ostensibly wished to bury the fiction that the people were a body, or the state a body politic. The so-called “artificial man” was thus created by Hobbes to depict a state in which the sovereign acted as the soul that imbued the body with “life and motion,” determining the decisions made by the parts, or public ministers—judges (voices), receivers of petitions (ears), overseas spies (eyes)—of which it was comprised.155 For Hobbes, the metaphor of the body politic, however, yields a much richer analysis (and analogy) when it is damaged; thus does Hobbes, shifting metaphors, pay an inordinate amount of attention to the internal aff lictions, or the “infirmities,” that could assail an “imperfect” commonwealth. Apart from the discordant, undermining presence of the passions, a diseased commonwealth indicates that power has been wielded inadequately, or civil law weakly legislated or enforced. Thus, a commonwealth in which rebellion has broken out, due to a monarch who tries to resume his full power after having been content with less, produces unhealthy progeny, much like

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a malformed parent gives birth to a diseased child, broken out in “biles and scabs.”156 When resources f low out of the treasury and accumulate into the hands of only a few men, pleurisy results; those in the commonwealth who emphatically desire change become the equivalent of the itch; or, Hobbes writes, “corporations, which are as it were many lesser Commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, [become] like worms in the entrails of a natural man.”157 When Hobbes describes his artificial man as containing “strings,” “Joynts,” and “Wheeles,” he also collapses one metaphor—the body— into another powerful one, the machine.158 As Quentin Skinner has pointed out, Hobbes’ mechanization of the body (or the metaphor) thus “underpin[s] his claim that commonwealths can in no sense be regarded as God-given creations or natural occurrences.” Instead, “They are wholly man-made contrivances, mechanisms we construct with the sole aim of furthering our own purposes.”159 The body politic is therefore upended from its basis in “nature,” which justified it in the first place, in all its hierarchical social and political aspects. Still, the fact that the mechanism is created like a body nevertheless represents an attachment to the old organic idea, even if the body is now a midseventeenth-century mechanistic version. Hobbes was largely responsible for changing the terms of the political reference world in creating such transformations in political symbolism by his use of this machinebody, or body-in-motion, to formulate a new philosophical system; but a machine-body nevertheless remained a body, however approximate, that was shaped by experience of fragmentation, historical brokenness, and civil war. Hobbes was one of many writers of the 1650s who devised unorthodox political philosophies and creative metaphors to accord with the upheavals of the time; on a less elevated plane were others, often pamphleteers, who used images of injury to convey their protest after the protectorate was established in 1653. In the 1640s, Levellers had sometimes conveyed their confrontational positions in language of woundedness, with Lilburne, for all his martyrological imagery, also threatening physical violence, in 1653, on Cromwell.160 While Levellers, like their mainstream counterparts, deployed common metaphors such as the ship of state, they also imagined “the people” or the commonwealth as a body, whose “principall vitals, the heart, the braine, [and] the liver” were bound together by laws that could be subject in turn to breakage.161 Levellers gave way in the 1650s to more radicalized and millenarian groups, though the defiant rhetoric of their earlier tracts continued to inf luence oppositional politics, with anonymous


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authors describing the “Monsters who succeeded” the age of “Roman liberty.”162 Instead of Charles, Cromwell now came to be described in biblical terms as a man of blood and violence, a “bastard of Ashdod”— according to the Fifth Monarchy Man John Rogers—as well as the “seed of the Dragon, begotten in darkness, brought forth in weakness, nourished with unreasonableness, growing up in wickedness, to continue with shortness, and to be confounded with the fierceness of the wrath of God.”163 For others, such as the Fifth Monarchy Man John Tillinghurst, Cromwell was no less than the little horn, which the book of Revelations had prophesized would accompany the dreaded tenhorned beast; it did not help that Cromwell’s pocked, homely face and bulbous nose gave way to devilish iconographic associations.164 The problem of blasting the king or the lord protector with the label of antichrist, as opposed to simple tyrant, rested on the fact that while the classical tyrant, driven by his individual hubris, was easily extinguishable, the kingly antichrist, whose power spread cunningly outward, was not. Tyrannicide thus expanded into something much larger than the murder of one man, as the entire framework that supported antichrist—even the age he represented—had to be expunged root and branch in order to usher in a new providential order, or to cure the wounds of sin that aff licted the land. Cures The imaginative richness embedded in the analogy of a wounded kingdom or body politic not only allowed writers to diagnose the ills of the nation but also to suggest remedies that could bind up the injuries suffered through conf lict and war. Indeed, Cromwell himself, like Charles elsewhere, described to his first parliament a goal of “healing and settling;”165 “it is high time for our Government,” he stated, “to lay a healing hand to these mortal wounds and breaches, by holding forth the Truths of Christ to the Nation in some solid Establishment.”166 The claim that one was bringing forth a “cure” to treat England’s wounds was in fact used so often by all sides in the ideological debates throughout the 1640s and 1650s that titles such as “A Balm for England’s Wounds,” “A Healing Question Propounded,” or “An Eye Salve for Englishmen” became nearly unnoticeable in their metaphorical usages. But no discussion of the body politic, or the crisis-ridden body politic, had used such curative terms to this extent before, despite the example of writers such

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as Thomas Elyot, who in the sixteenth century described the monarch as a doctor who alone could heal a nation undergoing decay.167 For one, the variation of the metaphor to include woundedness and healing was extremely rich: “wounds” that could be healed by prayer or the king’s royal touch reinforced enjoinments to godliness or divine right, for example, while innovative analogies, as will be seen, could also emerge from contemporary medical and surgical understandings. Equally important, the invocation of curable wounds was conducive to establishing the legitimacy of writers in a time of upheaval: in suggesting remedies that could bind up the nation’s real and symbolic injuries—a war, a dead king, partisan battles—the writer was able to assert his own religious or ideological program for change, though under the guise of a physician who was self lessly and neutrally examining the problem and issuing a prescription as an expert, from a medical distance. By the same token, polemical antagonists could also be attacked on the same medical grounds, with a royalist such as John Taylor describing an opponent as “an unskilfull Physitian, that shall apply a Medicine before he hath searched out the Disease,”168 or the anonymous writer of Essayes upon several subjects lamenting that quacks and “empericks” rather than skilled physicians had been most vocal with their remedies for a diseased polity, worsening the nation’s wounds by—in a commonly used analogy—pouring vitriol, mercury, and other poisons into the breach.169 If the causes of England’s divisions were due, for many, to the sins of the nation, it is not surprising that a great number of pamphlets would advocate a message of divine healing, which was especially conducive to the genre of the sermon. In 1643, the preacher Brian Duppa, for example, beseeched God to “spare . . . thou most sinfull Nation” and “heale up those wounds which our sinnes have made so wide,”170 while the royalist John Bramhall urged his listeners to “cease from sin” and express contrition through “prayers and tears” in order to find a cure for rebellion.171 For the puritan Edmund Calamy, only genuine repentance could cure the “plague” of civil war, and “deliver us from this man-devouring, and land-devouring Judgement that is now upon us.” Referring to an ordinance passed by parliament in 1644 for the nation to repent of “fourteen” sins, those fourteen sins, Calamy declares, “are like unto fourteen Iron whips, with which God is now whipping England to the very bloud” in order that “we be deeply humbled,” “mourn with a godly mourning,” and “with a hearty abhorrency [detest] these sins.” Only then could reconciliation with God be effected and the “breaches” of the kingdom repaired.172


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A more militant stance was taken by the preacher Edward Staunton, who in a 1644 sermon to the House of Lords responded to a petition that had sought to display no mercy or quarter to papists or Irish soldiers captured in the first civil war. While it was true that remedies such as the expression of faith and humiliation were needed to repair a “bleeding England [that] groaneth and cryeth,” he stated, other measures were necessary as well, in line with Israel’s dealings with its own “Benjamite” delinquents. Just as “Phineas . . . executed Justice, and then the plague was stayed,” “quench[ing] God’s wrath,” the Lords, as God’s agents, or the “Moses and Judges” (as well as England’s “StatePhysitians and Kingdom-Chirurgions”) must exercise justice and “sentence [opponents] to the axe, or to the halter.” Mixing his metaphors, Staunton then proclaims that “There is a fire of civil war kindled in England, still burning in the bowels of it”; but only “two bloods will quench it, the blood of Christ and of his desperate enemies: free grace in God hath powered the one, full Justice in your Honours should help to power the other.”173 Closely related to (if not synonymous with) divine healing, for Charles’s adherents, was the king’s own power in his royal touch— now extended to the entire wounded nation. The traditional belief that kings of England could cure the disease of scrofula by the laying on of the royal hand had been given a renewed power with Charles I and was used quite frequently in the 1640s, since it reinforced the divine nature of kingship. According to John Browne later in the century, “As [the king] takes in him the ruling power of his people by which he governeth by an hereditary right from his royal ancestors, so he confirms the same to us by his balsamick and sanative power, derived to him from his royal forefathers inherent in him.”174 Charles’s extensive use of the royal touch thus served to convey the notion that the actions of parliament had not been quests for liberties or the true religion but manifestations of a cankerous woundinfested national illness that only the king in his sacred power could heal. Moreover, the royal touch also strengthened the notion that the king stood apart from the body politic, whose ills he felt but was not responsible for. As the royalist poet Robert Herrick would write, “Adored Caesar! And my Faith is such,/ I shall be healed, if that my KING but touch./ The Evil is not Yours: my sorrow sings,/ Mine is the Evil, but the Cure, the KING’S.”175 Not only does Herrick thus sever the king from the evils of the realm, but he also implies that the entire realm could be so healed, if it returned to its faith in the king himself.

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On a more overtly secular level, writers could find curative analogies by following the symbolic potential of the wound analogy to the boundaries of medical understanding. Discussions of “salves” and “plaisters” applied to a ruptured kingdom, for example, could ref lect different directions in contemporary medical or surgical practices. Edmund Calamy, for one, stated that certain elements in the kingdom should not “have the plaister taken away before the wound be healed,” which was determinative of traditional wound management, requiring complete coverage of the injury and sometimes the application of unguents (including oil, which was why the connotation was not always negative when a writer described “pouring oil into the wounds” of the nation). By contrast, William Chillingworth displayed a quasi-Paracelsian approach when he enjoined the kingdom to practice patience in the face of its “distempers,” and allow “the wound [to] heal of itself,”176 while Charles’s belief that he could heal through prayers and benedictions made at a distance would echo such experiments as the curing of wounds by sympathy, as developed by Sir Kenelm Digby.177 Traditionally, treatment for the body’s ills rested with the physician, who in the body politic metaphor was often imagined as the king, who shared his healing powers with that other great physician, Christ. Later, however, the parliament or army was said to assume the role of “State Physician.”178 Less utilized was the analogy of the king (or parliament) as a surgeon, perhaps because the profession would not become entirely respectable until later in the seventeenth century; surgery’s association with kingship was thus somewhat narrower, though the king, Forset once wrote, should have the surgeon’s “Hawks eye,” as well as a “Ladies hand, and a Lions hart,” just as “his eye must piercingly spie into all sores and disorders reformable.”179 Nevertheless, as the profession that involved the cutting away or removal of limbs or organs, or the stitching together of wounds,180 surgery was frequently evoked in a generalized manner as the best measure to take in purifying the body of the kingdom—in severing, to use the traditional vocabulary, the gangrenous limb or the cancerous growth, and suturing the wound. The notion that wounds could be purgative, “letting out all their corruption,”181 constituted another aspect of the analogy that was carried over from current medical discourse. Blood from a religious perspective, as mentioned, could be healing as well as defiling; but in a purely medical sense, the letting of blood was also thought to be literally restorative of the nation—an idea that, as Jerome de Groot has pointed out, could justify, at least on a metaphorical level, the blood spilled in warfare.182 If some felt that the draining of blood from a body


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(or England’s body) led to dissipation, others believed that the release of corrupt blood—personified by the king, parliamentarians, royalists, roundheads, traitors, papists, or others—was necessary for the wellbeing of the larger bio-political entity as a whole. The royalist Thomas Warmstry, however, warned that in order to prevent the spilled “bloud of a nation” from debilitating the entire being, the “carefull and skilfull hand of a Physician or Surgeon,” and not the “rude hand of the multitude,” must constitute the sole being entrusted to that nation’s fate.183 For Henry Parker, on the other hand, only a parliament that met frequently could staunch the wounds of a bleeding kingdom,184 while John Lilburne considered the army “the only and alone salve to heal and cure the wounds of this distracted and dying nation.”185 Seventeenth-century chemical philosophy, and alchemy in particular, also entered the political discourse through royalists such as Walter Charleton, the physician to Charles I and translator of the iatrochemical philosopher Jean Baptista van Helmont, whose works included “The Magnetic Cure of Wounds.” The occasion of Charles’ death prompted Charleton, for example, to expound upon wounds, which rendered the invaded body in a state of faction, putrefaction, “revolted” elements— descriptions that were not lost on readers who perceived a state of civil war described through chemical terms.186 This language and practice of alchemy could appeal to writers across the political spectrum; as J. Andrew Mendelsohn has written, the language of physic “could be used, in its chemical form, to force the question of what was natural,” and to reveal those aspects of nature’s essences that could be “manipulated” to attain full health—all of which could be accomplished by parliament (according to partisans) as well by the king (for royalists).187 Long after the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s had passed, writers continued to refer to the nation’s “healing,” though now it was to be effected through the process of retrospection, commemoration, and the writing of history. By composing a history of the civil war, in prose or poetry, writers could distance (or even “cure”) the nation of its past wounds by placing it into a larger frame of meaning that contained a beginning, middle, and—most important—an end. Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, wrote his own history in order that “the wounds [of the nation] may be again bound up”; still, he added, “many must first bleed to death.”188 Beginning his work in 1646, Clarendon was not the first to compose a narrative of the events of the civil war, having been preceded by the near-contemporaneous, parliamentarian-centered accounts of Bulstrode Whitelocke or Thomas May, who once more turned to Lucan as a guide.189 Others such as Edward Chamberlayne

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sought to view the present-day troubles through a larger lens, citing the rebellions during the reign of Henry III as a parallel, or even more, the tribulations of ancient Greece and Rome. Clarendon, however, sought to counter the history—particularly the republican history—of Thomas May, but from a more self-consciously distanced perspective that referred to mid-century England, in medical terms, as a land of “infirmities” “tempers” or “dispositions.”190 For Clarendon, civil war England was a place that had providentially succumbed to the fever or the injuries of rebellion, which, in the end, could be finally stilled by the quieter, “curative” pen—so he claimed—of the historian. The Restoration signaled a relative quelling of the violent language that prevailed before,191 including language that imagined the body, or body politic, as gravely fractured. A restored order needed a new set of rhetorical tools, after all, even if bodily imagery (including damaged bodily imagery) continued to be deployed in an age that was still coming to terms with the larger causes and meanings behind the upheaval that had occurred. While the trope of injury and violation to the “body” of England was not the only metaphor of crisis that was utilized as a description of the former times—England as a realm on fire, its incineration all-destroying yet all-cleansing, was also powerful, particularly in its biblical evocations—the body politic, or wounded body politic, was historically contingent in a particularly acute way. Indeed, though comparisons could be made between England and Lucan’s damaged Rome, or Charles I could present his own body as a site of timeless martyrdom, all images were deployed to serve a nation at a precise moment in its history and toward specific polemical and ideological ends.192 The body politic was in fact unique in that it had existed for centuries as a means to assert political legitimacy; when presented in damaged form, it therefore represented a challenge not only to the stability of the metaphor, but also to the political realm it was said to represent. Whether or not the nation perceived itself as a body politic in the previous sense of the term, ideas of national and religious enclosure that contained and defined a people thus remained, and with it the danger that the enclosure could, in fact, be breeched. The image of woundedness that was embedded within the metaphorical field of the body therefore continued as a vital image or expression of fragmentation, division, and crisis; just as the threat of dissent and disorder shadowed early modern ideals of harmony and order, so did the destabilizing force of injury and vulnerability lurk behind assertions of the nation’s body and its coordinating parts. Yet every wound dealt to the nation


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could also carry grace within its destructive power, just as brokenness could lead to wholeness, and mutilation incorporated into strength: in this sense, writers across the spectrum believed that the England of the mid-seventeenth century, like ancient Israel, could rise once more— redeemed by the very disabilities that had once torn it so violently apart.


CH A P T E R

T WO

Law’s Breakages

The language of the law has always been rich in metaphor, and nowhere more so than in the seventeenth century.1 Law was invariably, if not quite originally, described as a map, a monument, a “darke and melancholy” “ancient palace,”2 a ship (according to Francis Bacon), a Janus (John Selden’s description of the common law), or, in echo of Virgil, a cypress “among the pliant shrubs.”3 Coke’s own motto as serjeantat-law was Lex Est Tutissima Cassis, or Law is the Safest Helmet—an image that ref lected a defensive and protective rather than an aggressive approach to the law’s borders.4 Borrowing from the organic model of the body politic, early seventeenth-century writers such as Nicholas Fuller could describe the laws of a realm in Fortescuean terms as the sinews of a body, just as John Davies likened a nation’s laws to the body’s organs.5 Like reason, honor, or love, law was also said to be indelibly inscribed in the heart, an image that extended back to biblical descriptions of Yahweh stating in the book of Jeremiah that “I will put my law within [the children of Israel], and I will write it upon their hearts.”6 Even Hobbes, ostensibly resistant to metaphor,7 would describe the law of nature, echoing Psalm 36.31, as “written in every man’s heart.”8 Metaphorical and analogical usages were important to these writers, which served to strengthen their argumentations, assertions of distinction, and skills of persuasion; not coincidentally, many contemporary and metaphorically sophisticated poets, most famously John Donne, were trained at the Inns of Court, with their emphasis on aural exercises and the use of logic, rhetoric, and literary accomplishment.9 Not all usages of metaphor in the law were necessarily welcomed, particularly in later periods, as they were said to carry with them the tendency to mislead.10 Nevertheless, metaphor was implicitly recognized

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not only for its literary value, but for its power to shape perceptions and even actions, even (or especially) when a metaphor was utilized so frequently as to become unnoticeable as such. In addition, as Bernard Hibbitts has written, “In law, a shift in metaphor”—for example, from visual to aural metaphors—“may indicate or promote a new doctrine or even a new jurisprudential theory that cannot easily be brought into the fold of existing figures of speech.”11 Products of historical circumstance, metaphors employed in the legal realm thus advanced particular constructions of the law at the same time that they were embedded in a language that sought legitimation from references to past—and in England, the past of “ancient”— writers. More than the previous examples cited, perhaps the most insistent metaphor when it came to legal matters in early modern England was the law as a wall, which often lent it the aura of a static and adamantine force—a particularly useful idea in an age that witnessed the consolidation of the common law, and with it assertions of national identity.12 Legal treatises or actual judgments were especially pervaded with the language of borders, edges, containment, and walls, beginning with Cicero and continuing through ecclesiastical discourses that rendered, for example, the heretic excommunicated, or “outside” the laws and doctrines of the one true church.13 Despite such imaginings of a tightly bounded law, however, the metaphor of a coherent boundedness was not synonymous with objective reality, since the law consisted of something more dynamic and internally contested than a fortressed, hegemonic, rampart-like structure would imply. Contemporary seventeenth-century playwrights and theorists, particularly those critical of common law tradition, recognized these more indeterminate and unstable aspects of law and jurisprudence when they evoked the metaphor of the labyrinth, with its connotations of chaos, uncertainty, and deceit (even if a labyrinth was still walled).14 Though ideals of a unified law, and realm, were thus upheld through language and metaphor, the reality could be an altogether different matter, with the 1640s constituting a dramatic illustration of the manner in which that law could actually rest on relatively fragile, or malleable, foundations. For jurists who advocated an absolutist vision of the law, especially in its capacity as a perfect “science,” the law as an impermeable and enclosed spatial body or entity nevertheless continued to be upheld; such a stance created one of law’s greatest fictions, as was the very definition of law being bound up in unity “based upon an absolute source or origin.”15 But even writers such as Coke recognized that wherever borders (or walls) existed, so did vulnerability, and it was in discussing

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the imposition upon this vulnerability where extended metaphors of woundedness entered into the discourse. Indeed, the notion of “breaking” a law or contract was so prevalent as to constitute a dead, or unnoticeable, metaphor. The question, however, centered upon who, exactly, “broke,” “subverted,” “infringed upon,” and “wounded” the law, and toward what entity or body—an issue that assumed heightened importance when the wounder of the law, and by extension the kingdom, became the king himself. In such an atmosphere, the law was, again, no longer so sturdy or protectively walled as it had been claimed, with different interests propounding their own version of the law, and accusing others of breaking the unity that the law was once said to uphold. If traditional understandings of the law, and the metaphorical language with which the law was framed, underwent severe challenges in the political upheavals and civil wars of the 1640s and 1650s, nowhere was this more the case than in the area of treason. Legal theorists, closely connected to political ideologies, attempted to reclaim a continuity with the past in their attempt to propound or reinforce treason law, but the death of the king on charges of high treason, and the subsequent establishment of a more impersonal commonwealth (and later a once-again personalized protectorate), nevertheless presented a situation in which, as Alan Orr has put it, “events drove ideas,” and the radicalism of writers such as Hobbes or Milton constituted their “fruit.”16 Coke continued to be cited, just as concepts of the king’s two bodies, sovereignty, the nature of the state and other key ideological issues with which the law was intertwined, remained points of reference; the language of treason also recalled the past, with its evocation of legal subversion of the king’s (or now, commonwealth’s and protectorate’s) body. But the language also became more insistent in the mid-seventeenth century, and with it images of a renewed threat to the laws of the realm, often assuming quite literal (or threateningly literal) forms that were unprecedented in their virulence. The first half of this chapter will examine the metaphorical usage of woundedness, and relatedly violation or breakage, in those midcentury legal texts and court records, particularly as they addressed the greatest legal challenge of treason. In the learned treatises of ideologically diverse jurists, the use of the wounding metaphor not only conveyed a sense of danger to one’s own law (and nation), but also paradoxically strengthened that law by naming who did the wounding, and what was needed to prevent any further incursions upon it. As the second part of this chapter will demonstrate, the law was not simply a

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text, however, but a performance of ritual and aesthetics, and one that depended upon behavioral protocols, appropriate costume, court ceremony, and bodily deportment, all of which were expected to uphold the law’s professed and foundational legitimacy. The law in its theatrical aspect had long been manifested in trials and punishments, as well as dramas and masques, assuming a more literal or physicalized dimension to illustrate concepts of justice or the presence of the state. In the case of traitors, disfigurement, dismemberment, or beheading by agents of the state sought to mark the body of the transgressor with its own permanent imprint of power— to wound the body of the individual who had wounded the law. Wounding was therefore central to the performance of the law, which was rendered visible by its workings on the body; indeed, the law itself became known by its wounding force, imposing the kind of coercive power necessary for its upholding. The idea of power—and the law—acting upon the body of the transgressor would seem to break down the victim’s identity, rendering him powerless in the face of such an onslaught.17 But traitors subject to such woundings could also invert the meanings intended by authorities, by claiming those wounds as metaphorical badges of pride and thereby transforming themselves to a new level of identity, for good or ill. In speeches and gestures—and the seventeenth century was a world of gestures—power moved in a multivalent rather than a one-way direction, belying the model of the body being simply and passively acted upon. While the theater of execution has been extensively interpreted in recent years,18 what is important here is the essential and overlooked role that individuals played in “performing” their wounds of law, and in doing so, metaphorizing them in turn. What had begun as judicial markings, in other words, were transformed by many into wounds of atonement or defiance, and represented not the law’s breakage, but something almost worse: its subversion. Wounds, the Language of the Law, and the Traitor’s Heart Treason in the seventeenth century could vary in its meaning, but advocates of different ideological leanings nevertheless borrowed from a common storehouse of language to describe the crime through forums such as pamphlets, sermons, dramas, and chronicles, as well as purely legal and official literature.19 Treason, as an offense that was especially infused with metaphor of incursion and injuriousness,

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became increasingly important in the middle decades of the century, particularly when it remained debatable whether the entity wounded was the king’s natural and immortal body,20 parliament, the law itself, the state, or some combination thereof. Such language of extremity, in representing the king, parliament, or the law as clearly well-delineated bodies that could be “wounded” by an external (or internal) hand, served to create a sense of clarity around the perceived crime that had been committed—even if that clarity was something of an illusion in the political and legal confusion of the times. Moreover, if traitors were described as the law’s most grievous wounders, they therefore legitimated, as will be seen, the severest punishments that could be meted out by the state. Whereas rapists, highway robbers, or even murderers certainly undermined the state by transgressing the laws within, the attack by the traitor was more directly harmful in its motives and aims, and threatened to carry others along with it—a notion that was, again, captured through the vehicle of metaphor. The vocabulary used to describe treason, and the law behind treason itself, was most inf luentially established in the 1352 statute of Edward III, which Coke cited as a “blessed act,” and one that continued to carry a foundational basis through the 1640s.21 Among other stipulations, the act stated that treason occurred “when a man doth compasse or imagine the death of our Lord the King,” or when he levied war against the king in his realm—two deeds that dealt severe blows against the integrity of the kingdom, even if the meanings behind words such as “compasse” or “imagine,” or between words and acts, remained indeterminate.22 Treason in the 1352 statute was above all personalized against the king as well as his heir, his family in general, and his servants, and, as such, was framed in a language of injury toward his body. This was problematic, at least in the 1640s; according to the medieval analogy, the king had two bodies,23 his natural, mortal body and his political body, which Coke described as “immortal, invisible, not subject to any death, infirmity, infancy, nonage, etc.”24 In the controversial Calvin’s case of 1608, judges also determined that allegiance was due to the king’s natural person as well as his abstract political capacities.25 By 1642, however, events strained this dual allegiance, particularly when war was levied against the natural body of the king at the same time that adherence to his mystical body was upheld by most.26 Toward the end of the sixteenth century, and particularly in the 1640s, the target of treason came to increasingly denote the more impersonal body of the “state,” in which the ruler and the ruled were bound together through the fundamental rule of the law, or common

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Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor 27

law. Traitors were thus perceived by many as acting not against the king’s natural body—though that could be the case as well, as with Strafford—but above all against the law (or the idea of the law- deferring king-in-parliament). Once again, however, such notions became contentious in the years of the civil wars, played out as they were in treason trials in which the law, as one writer has put it, proved somewhat “f lexible.”28 In Strafford’s case, the idea of the traitor making a division 29 between the king and the people had served as the doctrine for treason trials in the past, and would proceed to form one of the bases for the charges against him, even if in other cases such divisions constituted high crimes and misdemeanors rather than treason.30 But laws too could be treasoned against, for if laws served as the seal that bound the realm together, or were considered the “very subsistence of kings,”31 then those who broke the law and were not felt to be bound to it were agents of disunity and thus worthy of punishment. Important to the case against the traitor was the cognizant and conscious intent that lay behind his actions. But ambiguities around issues of intent had persisted throughout the sixteenth century, when treason legislation reached an unprecedented level of intensity, particularly during the reign of Henry VIII.32 It was Henry’s concern, in 26 Henry VIII c. 13, to extend the crime of treason to include “bare words,” which were themselves described as divisive, wounding forces, even if the king’s law was itself also depicted, by treason defendant Nicholas Throckmorton, as “Draco’s laws . . . written in blood.”33 While aspects of Henry’s legislative innovations were repealed or modified over the course of the succeeding Tudor reigns, including the reign of Edward VI, treasonable words nevertheless continued to be used in the prosecutorial arsenal against alleged traitors. The prosecution of the Duke of Norfolk in 1571, for example, accused him of “declaration of mind” in committing treason through “letters, tokens, speeches, messages” rather than overt acts of treason34 —all of which would be echoed later on in the impeachments against Laud and Strafford, though the latter’s treason, stated Pym, went “beyond words.”35 Treason could be committed not simply through “wounding” words or actions against the body of the king, but also through physical and symbolic uses of images. In the sixteenth century, the third charge against Brian O’Rourke, lord of West Breifne in Ireland, was that he had allowed Elizabeth’s name “to be set on an image of a woman, which he caused to be tied to a horse’s tail and drawn through the mire; and afterwards caused his galliglasses with their axes to hew, cut and mangle the same, uttering traitorous, rebellious and most wicked

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speeches against her Majesty.” This “treason of the image,” as it came to be described, was suspicious in that it was not reported until two years after it had supposedly occurred. Nevertheless, by allegedly defacing, or wounding, the image of the queen, O’Rourke was provoking a response by the authorities that was based upon rational and superstitious grounds (if one may utilize those anachronistic terms): “rational,” because such image destruction could dangerously and suggestively derogate the queen in the eyes of others privy to the spectacle, and “superstitious” because to wound the image was to symbolically wound the person through properties of sympathetic magic—to extend into the symbolic realm the idea, expressed in 13 Elizabeth c. 1, that the traitor would tend to the “death, destruction, maim[ing] or wounding of the royal person of . . . our sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth.” Based on these and other charges, O’Rourke was convicted, and lost his life over the matter.37 As in the case of O’Rourke, images of wounding with regard to treason were, like the king’s two bodies, highly literal as well as metaphorical. Most notoriously, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 reinforced the widespread perception of treason as a violent spectacle originating from a demonic or monstrous source.38 As Coke stated, the traitors intended to “kill” not only the king but the “kingdom”; they “might as it were with one blow, not wound, but kill and destroy the whole state.”39 Metaphorical usages also served to counterpose unity against division, wholeness against transgression; as Conrad Russell once wrote, unity was the “great obsession” for royalist as well as parliamentarian-oriented legal thinkers throughout the seventeenth century,40 yet unity could only be defined in opposition to the potentiality of breakage, which merited equal amounts of obsessive unease. Traitors were thus said to create “partitions” between the king and the people,41 or in the case of the impeachments of Strafford and Laud, between king and parliament, in a rhetorical trope that recurred as frequently as the insistent terminology of royal usurpation. Treason, in addition to related terms such as sedition or high crimes and misdemeanors,42 was said to be a crime of “severing” the people from the king,” “making a division” (including “making a division by giving ill counsel” to the king), or creating a “breach” against parliament;43 elsewhere, it meant not only wounding or even “killing” the government’s laws metaphorically, but again, also literally, requiring weapons for its enactments and blood for its ends.44 On the level of language, treason, as well as allegiance, could also be extended to the analogy of the body, as Coke famously stated: “[ just] as the ligatures or strings do knit together the joints of all the parts of the

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body,” he wrote, “so doth ligeance join together the sovereign and all his subjects.”45 It was the oath that confirmed this legal and “natural” allegiance, and which bound the subject to the king, until “the last drop of our dearest hearts blood.”46 To break this oath was therefore to contravene one’s own physiological as well as political identity as a subject, and to forfeit one’s position in the natural order.47 As Coke stated elsewhere, treason was itself located in the heart—the organ where inward thoughts, including criminal thoughts, were hatched or imagined—but also “in the hand, in the mouth, in consummation”; combining arboreal and bodily analogies, the heart was the root of the tree, the mouth was the bud, the hand was the blossom, and “in consummation” the fruit.”48 Coke could move even farther, at least in his capacity as prosecutor, in his renderings of treason in metaphorical terms that carried larger f leshly implications. Raleigh at his trial, for example, was described repeatedly by Coke as a “[vile] viper,” full of “viperous treasons,” thus bringing in associations of venom and its slow and insidious dispersion.49 Just as treason could spread like poison or branches, so could it sprawl out to manifest itself across the body. The branches and roots of a tree sickened by treason could wind their way weedily and toxically through the landscape; thus did Coke state, “treason is like a tree whose root is full of poison, and lieth secret and hid within the earth.” It was finally the “wisdom of the law,” he continued, that one sets about “blasting and nipping both of the leaves, blossoms, and buds which proceed from this root of treason, wither by words which are like to leaves, or by some overt act which may be resembled to buds or blossoms before it cometh to such fruit and ripeness as would bring utter destruction and desolation upon the whole state.”50 As Coke had implied with his poison imagery, the traitor was dangerous not simply in his imaginings and actions, but in his ability to convey his idea to others; at his treason trial in 1642, Edward Dering was thus described as “Having set the cards, he plays the game very foully: he leads his fellows out of the way; and makes them, like ill hunters, instead of following the chase, at the quest of one ill mouth, to fall upon a f lock of sheep.”51 But while treasonous ideas might have a subjective origination, they were also perceived as autonomous in their power to “infect” or contaminate the realm, or more specifically the “rude multitude.” In this sense, the traitor was simply the agent of a divisive idea whose force then proceeded to assume a life of its own; the inf lictor of a wound, he then played, or had the potential to play, a secondary role as the wound spread outward, bathing the realm in blood. As Ben Jonson once put it in his treason play, Catiline, “Let the

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long-hid seeds/ Of treason in thee now shoot forth in deeds/ Ranker than horror” (1.2.25–27).52 While treason itself, among other things, was agreed to be an injurious force, the object of its destruction could be open to contestation, particularly in the crisis atmosphere of the 1640s. Indeed, what precisely was being “treasoned” against (or wounded), particularly in an age when the matter was not entirely clear?53 Debates over the object of treason ref lected upon ongoing (and in the 1640s, highly pressing) matters of sovereignty, or the so-called marks of sovereignty— specifically, over who, in Jean Bodin’s formulation, could “give lawes to all . . . subjects in generall . . . without consent of any other greater, equall, or lesser than himselfe.”54 For Oliver St. John, writing in 1640– 1641, treason could be committed against parliament itself (which also, he added, had the limited right to suspend the common law if need be).55 As the trial of Strafford made clear, treason could also be made against the king and the state, even if such a twinning also represented an alteration, already in the making before the 1640s, toward imagining the polity as a more impersonal, abstract body.56 Treason could, by extension of the king and parliament (or king-in-parliament), be committed against the “laws,” or common laws as well; in detailing the impeachment charges against notable participants in the wake of the 1641 Irish Catholic revolt, including the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Richard Bolton, Audley Mervin expanded on the metaphor by stating that the “tragedy” entailed “gray-headed Common Laws funeral; and the active Statutes death and obsequies”—all of which were comparable to “the prefiguring type of Caesar’s murder, wounded to the death in the Senate.”57 Magna Carta itself, Mervin added, “lies prostrated, besmeared and groveling in her own gore,” yet “shall we desire to search the mortal wounds inf licted upon the Statute Laws?” Treason against the law was complicated, however, by long-standing differences in defining that very law. During the trial of Strafford in 1641, John Pym would write that “the Law is the boundary, the measure between the King’s Prerogative, and the People’s Liberty”;58 but the boundaries were quickly collapsing in the 1640s, or at the very least blurring, resulting in legal meanings becoming altogether more f luid.59 Seventeen years earlier, John Eliot had expressed the dilemma of law’s contestability by stating that “his Ma[jes]tie [was] perswaded that [Parliament’s] liberties did entrench upon him, [whereas] the feares the Parliaments had of the Kinge were that by his prerogative he sought to retrench and block up the antient priveledges and liberties of the house.”60 Much of the confusion lay in differing visions of the law itself,

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even if an uneasy atmosphere of political and legal consensus existed between the crown and parliament in the early part of the century.61 On one level, the legal position held by James I, as well as royalist lawyers such as Francis Bacon or Henry Finch, tended to privilege the king’s legal standing, jurisdiction, and the length and extent to which he could exercise his prerogative powers. Just as Bacon insisted that it was within the king’s domain to write and determine the law in the first place,62 so did James argue that “[K]ings were the authors and makers of the laws,” and not “the laws the makers and authors of kings.”63 Parliamentary-centered visions of the common law, however, drove the writings of seventeenth-century jurists such as Edward Coke and John Selden, even if they differed profoundly from each other.64 For Coke, the common law was a coherent entity extending back through time immemorial, and resting upon a communally shared memory that in Paul Goodrich’s words “exist[ed] beyond” all texts.”65 It did not matter that the common law or “ancient constitution” was actually composed of what were perceived to be authoritarian continental and civil law inf luences as well as English elements;66 for William Lambarde, English law “was like a wall built of stone to defend a city,” with the besieging barbarians consisting of civil and canon law.67 For Coke, reason, or rather the “artificial” reason applied by learned judges,68 was synonymous with the common body of law and its tradition, even if legal rationality was, like the “ancient constitution,” actually infused with an array of mythical meanings. Selden, on the other hand, rejected such a notion of the ancient common law founded upon reason—or ultimate origins, for that matter69—arguing for its historical contingency and discontinuities as well as Roman law inf luences, based in part on language.70 Nevertheless, the “current” law remained a bulwark as much for Selden as it had been for Coke, with parliament remaining the undisputed authority in matters both martial and legal.71 But when the law itself was uncertain, as it became in the 1640s, and both sides committed acts that were decidedly ambiguous if not questionable, then writers (including Selden) came forward to claim, and not without validity, that the law itself could be overridden. Issues of safety became especially pressing during an atmosphere of political crisis, particularly if England was left vulnerable by the divisions between king and parliament (“If the King draw one way, and the parliament another, we shall all be sunk,” said Benjamin Rudyerd).72 The argument that the common law could be suspended “from necessity,” while an old and perhaps justifiable idea (even to Coke),73 was also based

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upon the fears of men such as Pym, who suspected that a papist conspiracy threatened England, and Oliver St. John, who believed instead in a legal conspiracy directed by men such as Lord Keeper John Finch, impeached for his role as prosecutor in the Ship Money case.74 Henry Parker’s writings of the early 1640s also advocated in favor of political considerations overriding the legal reality, even if such advocacy, again, was within the bounds of common law traditions.75 For Parker, who was the probable author of a response to the treason case of Lord George Digby, the “safety of the people,” ensured by parliament, constituted the “supreme Law,” while to change their government without their consent was the “highest treason that can be committed against a State.” Indeed, Parker continued, parliament was not bound by law “where the safety of the whole commeth into question.”76 The idea that treason existed against the stability, or safety, of the kingdom extended back to the 1352 statute, even if the law technically restricted itself to personal offenses against the king.77 Parker, however, appeared to overlook the presence of the king in the equation, claiming that the issue of safety held predominance, even over the existing law—itself a challenge to the legal identity of England. Treason was also a more contested matter when defendants themselves claimed—again, not without some validity—that it was they who were being treasoned against, as they cited the law, or false or abused law, as wounding them in turn.78 For William Laud, the law that condemned him was the same one that determined the fates of Paul (or Stephen); like his holy predecessors, Laud adhered to the truer, higher, spiritual law that overrode the existing one, and which therefore justified his actions.79 John Lilburne, tried in 1649, spoke on his part of the “bloody judges” who prosecuted him (and by extension their bloody laws), and while the terminology had been used by past defendants, his directing such ire to state judges—and gaining the support of substantial crowds in the process80 —nevertheless represented a new turn in defiance. John Gerhard, speaking at his own trial in 1654, also represented false law as a wounding force when he exclaimed that “The Law which I am now tried by, is no Law, but what is cut out by the Point of a rebellious Sword,” adding elsewhere that “I observe treason in this age to be . . . like the Wind in the Gospel, which bloweth where it listeth; for that shall be Treason in me to-day, which shall be none in another to-morrow.”81 Meanwhile, Colonel John Morris, accused of treason in 1649 for his part in the second civil war, claimed that he had received “hard measure . . . for none could have found me guilty of treason had they gone according to the letter of the law, which

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they did not.” Morris had a point, since he was being tried according to a new treason act passed in the same year, and believed in any case that he should have been charged according to the standards of military, not civilian, justice.82 Strafford’s own “treason” was unusual in the context of other trials, due in part to the fact that he was essentially being tried for the role he played during Charles I’s personal rule of 1629–1640. The trial itself revealed a law that was highly contestable, particularly in the claim that he had attacked the king by making him “odious to his people” through his designs; in also attacking the common law itself, Strafford destroyed loyalty between the king and his people. The language spoken by John Pym, the chief prosecutor at the trial, used language of weaponry and corporality in describing direct threats not only to the “peace and prosperity” of the realm, but to the “Being of the Kingdom.” Strafford was “an Incendiary” to the “Quiet of the subjects”; indeed, “he hath Armed us amongst ourselves, and made us weak and naked to all the World besides.”83 These words spoke as much to the vulnerability of the kingdom, manifested in internal division, as to the wounding force that threatened it; even the laws of the land were no protection against a “Will [that] is set above Law, when the Laws have force to bind and restrain the Subject, but no force to Relieve and Comfort him.” The result of Strafford’s “mischievous” design is “that we must surrender the Liberties of the Kingdom in Parliament, or see them oppressed with Force and Violence out of Parliament.”84 Strafford was accused of effecting not only a division but a perpetual division, in which, according to Pym, the treason was “constant and permanent,” as opposed to “confined within . . . particular actions and proportions” in the manner of the Gunpowder Plot.85 The effect of Strafford’s “arbitrary and tyrannical government” was to cause a permanent alteration of government and the laws on which it was based, and by doing so to commit treason against the king by causing a division between himself and the people. As Pym put it, again utilizing bodily metaphors, “there cannot be a greater lesion or diminuation of majesty than to bereave a king of the glory of his goodness.”86 Pym’s metaphorical usage allowed for other extensions; if Strafford, for example, had wounded the kingdom or “offended” the law, then only parliament could cure the matter. In Oliver St. John’s words, if the body of the realm and the laws were “distempered,” then parliament “hath the power to open a vein, to let out the corrupt blood for curing itself; if one member be poisoned or gangred, it hath the power to cut it off for the preservation of the rest.”87

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Strafford’s effective speech to the House of Lords, upon being impeached for treason, drew upon an existing metaphorical field when he stated that the “poisoned arrow of Treason” against “the statute, another by the common law,” was “though now, perhaps, by sinister information, sticking to my clothes.” The proceedings, he claimed, contained more “prejudice” than “equity”; utilizing an architectural metaphor, he upheld the unity of the realm by stating that England’s common ancestors “have so fixed the pillars of this monarchy that each of them keeps a due proportion and measure with the others.” Moreover, those “ancestors” “have so admirably bound together the nerves and sinews of the state, that the straining of any one may bring danger and sorrow to the whole economy.” Reversing the treason charge, he then described “private” words being “drawn to my injury in this place”; somewhat disingenuously, in light of past treason laws under Henry, he further claimed that “Opinions may make a heretic, but that they make a traitor I have never heard till now.” If he had been an “incendiary,” as Pym argued, then it was contradictorily being stated that he moved “against the Scots” while being a “confederate” to them elsewhere; in the end, the cumulative charges against him, centering upon the idea of “constructive” treason, were actually “destructive,” and even “bloody.” “These gentlemen tell us that they speak in defense of the commonwealth against my arbitrary laws,” he added; “Give me leave to say it, I speak in defense of the commonwealth against their arbitrary treason.” In the end, many of the charges were dropped, and Strafford was executed not on a formal conviction of treason, but by an act of attainder.88 Laud was tried on the basis of similar charges to those of Strafford, particularly in Article Fourteen, which stated that he had “made false and malicious slanders to incense his Majesty against Parliaments.” Not only had he “endaevour[ed] to subvert the Fundamental Laws of the realm”—and religion of the realm89 —but in so doing had “traitorously and contrary to his allegiance, laboured to alienate the hearts of the King’s liege people from his Majesty, to set a division between them, and . . . ruin and destroy his Majesty’s kingdoms.” Unlike the case with Strafford, Laud’s offenses also rested in the clerical realm, and as such encroached upon the crime not of treason but praemunire, or in appealing to matters of religion outside the legal jurisdiction of the realm.90 In any case, Laud’s downfall, as Alan Cromartie has put it, owed as much to the fact that he was “operating in a world where common law had come to dominate,” and where, in Laud’s

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words, common lawyers were now as “great in this Kingdom” as churchmen once were (though they would not be for long, Laud foolishly added).91 The civil wars that proceeded in the wake of Laud and Strafford’s trials, and that foreshadowed Charles’ own sentencing, had been not so much about one coherent set of laws being breeched, though each side presented the conf lict as such, but rather two entirely different visions of the law (as well as of the nation, which for Coke were one and the same) clashing against the other. Figurative and literal bloodshed resulted, as the king or parliament claimed that his or its most essential legal privileges had been “wounded” by the other; and since the two visions of the law and nation could not coexist, the only way to uphold the one law’s integrity as well as dominance was to not simply drive out but to extinguish the wounding force that threatened it, by dissolving the parliament, or killing the king. Images of wounds and bloodshed were appropriately prevalent, with Marchamont Nedham later writing, “Rebellion makes our nation bleed” (though “it is not well agreed/ Who must the Rebel be”).92 Strafford and Laud were royal ministers, but the trial of Charles no longer upheld the idea that the king (or man) was himself immune from committing injurious treasons against his own kingdom. Above all, Charles’s actions, backed by the decisions of his judges in the Ship Money and other cases, were perceived to have seriously undermined the law; as Denzil Holles stated in 1641, the laws under Charles “[were] made weak and impotent, to betray us into the hands of violence; instead of props to support us, [they had] become broken reeds to deceive us.” 93 By 1648, the indictment against Charles held that he had thus transgressed the laws of the realm, and had not only cast himself out of the legal entity that defined the nation, but also challenged that entity to its very core. Charles Stuart, the allegations stated, “hath had a wicked Design totally to Subvert the Ancient and Fundamental Laws,” prosecuted with “Fire and Sword” and resulting in “thousands of People murdered, and infinite other mischiefs committed.” 94 The king was charged with having committed real and metaphorical violence; thus was he condemned by natural law as well as by “the Fundamental Law of this kingdom, by the general law of all nations, and the unanimous consent of all rational men in the world.” 95 According to his own defense, however, “I do stand more for the Liberty of my people, than any here that come to be my pretended Judges,” and that “I do plead more for the Liberties of the People of England more than you do.” 96

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If the state was now no longer attached to the king’s (or his heir’s) own natural body97—as the prosecutors in Charles’ treason trial asserted, though not necessarily for the first time98 —it nevertheless lived on as a “single, abstract, juristic person,” and one that remained in corporal terms “woundable” by the traitor.99 For Charles, such allegations of treason were absurd on their face, since the highest symbol of the law, which he still asserted himself to be, could not break away from itself, or its own body. Indeed, the true treasonous wounds, he claimed, had been made upon both his mortal and immortal being, by men who abused scriptural authority as well as the “[ancient] lawes and Constitutions of this Realme” in levying their accusations against their rightful sovereign. In the end, of course, the resolve of the court had it that Charles was a “Tyrant, Traytor and Murtherer and a Publique Enemy to the Common Wealth of England”; as John Bradshaw, the president of the court, put it, just as Caligula had allegedly expressed a desire that the Roman people had one neck “That at one blowe hee might haue cutt it off,” so did Charles, taking to the “Body of the People . . . in the Parliam[ent],” seek “at one blowe [to] cutt off the Necke of England.”100 After the death of Charles and during the interregnum, legal notions of treason underwent a transformation in procedure and interpretation, not least because the originary statute of 1352 had applied above all to loyalty to the king. But treason legislation would in fact proliferate after Charles, with thirteen new statutes passed between 1649 and 1659, primarily targeting royalists who professed allegiance to Charles’s heir.101 As in the trials in the earlier years of the 1640s, relatively few treason actions were actually carried through to the execution of the traitor;102 but perceptions remained, shaped by language, that dangers nevertheless existed in the realm. On the one hand, in adapting to new political realities, the legal language of treason had to change, as allegiance was now to be given to the “Government of the Commonwealth” or the supreme authority of the Commons in parliament.”103 But continuities in the legal rhetoric also remained consistent with the past. Disobedience to parliament constituted a “high breach”;104 John Lilburne’s insistence at his own trial that he was not being accorded proper procedure “by the fundamental law of the land” not only upheld the idea of a bounded and unified legal entity, but also implied that his prosecutors were infringing upon, or wounding, that law by trying him.105 The Duke of Hamilton, under charges for “assist[ing] the King against the Kingdom and People of England” in 1649, for his part spoke of the “deep resentment of injury” by the witnesses against him, “who wounded his honour so much.”106

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Even the apparent absence of the king’s mystical and mortal body did not prevent the new state entity from being defined in corporal terms, and therefore subject to injury, as in the earlier case of twelve bishops, charged in 1641 with treason against the “being of Parliaments” after they had absented themselves from the parliament and declared its laws nullified.107 The reference to kingship in Edward III’s statute was discarded, only to be replaced by language that located treason as harm against the chief magistrate or parliament; as jurists such as John Glynn stated, the “king” in Edward’s statute merely referred to the supreme governor of the state, not necessarily the king himself. The establishment of the Protectorate in 1653, however, returned the language to its previous corporal imagery (and the 1352 statute of Edward) once again, with one act, of 1656, declaring it to be treason to “Attempt, Compass, or Imagine the death of the Lord Protector,” or his “person.”108 Responding to Levellers and royalists, Cromwell himself described traitors who would have to “cut throats beyond human calculation before they could have been able to effect their design.”109 In this statement, Cromwell was thus conveying a vision of the protectorate as invulnerable to incursions, or woundings, even if his own body—despite his disparaging treatment of traitors as “little fiddling things”—remained subject to danger.110 Individuals who actually committed treason in words or speeches also adopted a language of wounding, thus confirming the worst fears of men such as Coke. The treasonous words directed at Cromwell, however, differed from the earlier incendiary literature of the 1640s in their overt call for killing the Lord Protector; indeed, in many pamphlets metaphor was bleached away from the language altogether, leaving a core of literalness at its center. In 1654, royalists thus issued a bounty of five hundred pounds for any one who succeeded in killing Cromwell “by pistol, sword or poison,” or “cutting such a detestable villain from the face of the earth.”111 The royalist colonel John Gerhard, indicted in 1654, was also held on charges of conspiring with two others to besiege and kill Cromwell.112 Not all references to wounding, and by extension killing, were solely literal, however, as they borrowed from biblical language to justify and add greater symbolic resonance to murderous acts of treason. Specifically, the language of deliverance that the Bible provided resounded heavily among individuals such as Edward Sexby, whose Killing Noe Murder (1657) echoed the cries of the books of Exodus and Samuel (as well as more classical texts). Thus were the officers and soldiers of Cromwell’s army, Sexby wrote, to rise up and seek liberation from the slavery to which they had been rendered, and in

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fact it was Sexby’s calling to do so; for “if we had read in Scripture that the Israelites had cried unto the Lord not for their own deliverance,” he wrote, “we [would] have thought Moses had done them a great deal of wrong . . . [suffering] them to enjoy their slavery, and [leaving] them to their tasks.”113 Moving on to his next reference, Sexby proceeded to argue that David’s power might have been given by God but it was also restricted by the fact that “God”—according to Sexby—“allowed [the people] not only David’s confirmation, but likewise the limitation of his power . . . for before his inauguration [the people] made a league with him: that is, obliged him by compact to the performance of such conditions as they thought necessary for the securing of [their] liberty.”114 This somewhat innovative reading of the nature of David’s kingship, which was buttressed by examples of Cromwell’s tyrannical iniquities, compelled Sexby to state that if a leader was not to submit to God’s justice, “Who can . . . think a tyrant ought to live?” Thus, he concluded, “All remedy against a tyrant is Ehud’s dagger,” acting in a “High Court of justice where Moses brought the Egyptian; whither Ehud brought Eglon; Samson, the Philistines; Samuel, Agag; and Jehoiada, the shetyrant Athaliah.”115 Sexby’s target was one man, but for others a new revolutionary order was called for, with the inspiration of such texts as the book of Revelation (and particularly its twentieth chapter) providing images of blood and wounds and its smiting directives that echoed its equally fraught twin, the seventh chapter of the book of Daniel. Such heavily studied texts, equipped with vivid images of weapons and wounds, were important not simply because of the messianism they inspired in the middle decades of the century, but because of the implications embedded in words and images that compelled more extremist individuals to act toward overtly homicidal ends. Limited to the “righteous remnant,” radical messianic groups such as the Fifth Monarchy Men or the early Quakers ostensibly sought to take up arms in the name of the kingdom of heaven, whose arrival was imminent. The Fifth Monarchist John Rogers thus enjoined his readers to “prepare your companies for King Jesus, his Mount Zion. Musterday is at hand, his Magazine and Artillery, yea his most excellent mortar pieces and batteries be ready, we wait only for the Word from on high to fall on.”116 Though the day of awakening was not to come, insurrectionists such as Sexby, in his use of an aspiring assassin surrogate by the name of Miles Sindercombe, continued to strive for clearing the religiously wayward brush to a new theocratic republic. With the government “as Babylonish as ever,” to quote the preacher Christopher Feake,117 the

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time was ripe to summon arms and even raise a standard (in the case of Venner’s men, a standard bearing the red lion of the tribe of Judah)—an enjoinment that was duly fulfilled, with the battle (or the disorder) raging for three days in January of 1661, before being somewhat humiliatingly crushed by the authorities.118 As for Sexby, while his treatise was described as “the most dangerous pamphlet that ever has been printed in these times,”119 the effect of the work was unsuccessful, with Sexby relegated in 1658 to the Tower, where he died without trial.120 Sexby was a traitor from the perspective of the authorities, though his assertions and biblical rhetoric sought to bypass charges of treason and justify his call to arms against the state. The failure of rhetoric such as Sexby’s to transform itself into successful action should not, however, distract from the power that these right-to-kill texts did, in fact, wield, particularly in the extent to which they frightened contemporaries. Building upon the resistance literature of the sixteenth century and evolving into an overt and militant embrace of the more combustible biblical passages, such texts served minority groups whose aims— assassination, incitement, insurrection—were to inf lict mortal wounds on an illegitimate state that itself had dealt the most grievous wounds to the godly nation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, such apocalyptic groups were composed of individuals who had come from the ranks of the military; yet even Quakers sought the downfall of the world, at least in their rhetoric, with George Fox promising that “A day of howling is coming. The glittering sword is drawn, it is furbished for the slaughter.”121 But it was not a Fifth Monarchy Man or a Quaker who was, in the end, to take on the bulk of the killing; rather, it was Christ himself, justified by his very being, who was to wield the sharpest and most lethal sword of all when the “day of howling” would come. Thus did seventeenthcentury preachers prophesy the moment when the most glorious, most righteous, killing would arrive, when Christ, above all others and the most fearsome warrior of all, would proceed in blood, leaving kings, princes, and “mighty ones” in his wake. Men in the mold of Sexby, however, existed at a far remove from the legal templates established by such disparate thinkers as Coke and Bacon. Law on a textual, trial, and—as will be seen—performative level served to reinforce the myth of social order and stability; Sexby, on the other hand, rejected such legal assertions, adhering instead to a higher biblical law that was itself inherently destabilizing. The realm, for others such as the Fifth Monarchy Men, needed in fact to be wounded and bloodied, happily so in order to usher in the new age. This was quite different from the interest of the earthly law, which

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sought to perpetuate or legitimate itself as logical and rational, even if, as Peter Goodrich has written, the common law in particular was also a construction of rhetoric, including usage of linguistic symbols, rather than of reason. The earlier legal writings of a Coke or a Hale nevertheless did much to bring forward a particular interpretation of the world, and one that melded the law, values, and literary forms and aesthetics together constitutively and through metaphorical language; such writings forged the legal zones of an emerging nation, infusing them with myth, history, and philosophical notions such as reason. To claim that the law could be “wounded,” by traitors, for example, was to uphold a vision of the law as a coherent, if vulnerable, entity. Yet as the turbulent decades of the 1640s and 1650s demonstrated, the law was actually more contested, and even rejected, in an atmosphere of uncertain authority and religious antinomianism. Even more, the way in which such legal understandings played themselves out in performance could also subvert the intentions of the jurists, as it extended beyond the textual to other levels of meaning. It therefore remains to be seen how wounds—actual rather than metaphorical wounds—manifested themselves in a formal judicial setting, as well as upon the skin of the body itself. Bodies of Law Treason was never merely a legal entity, but as Curt Breight has written, “a quite tangible cultural product—simultaneously reducible and irreducible to text and f lesh.”122 Symbolic and physical judicial wounding, enacted at the execution site, was central in revealing the purely aesthetic as well as non-textual aspect of the law; and while punishment practices were not unique to the mid-seventeenth century, they took on significances of their own, particularly when the charges had been so open to question. In execution, the actions of officials and victims became central in displaying the assertions (and ambiguities) of the law, which in fact could only become tangible and even legitimated—as well as applied, interpreted, fulfilled, or subverted—in performance.123 The language of treason had always taken place within a larger context of performance, whether it was Coke’s speeches as a prosecutor in the early seventeenth century, Charles’s performance as a defendant in 1649, or other traitors’ behavior in defending themselves and justifying their actions before their own executions. But in the end, though physical deportment and protocols of speech were important in such

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displays, it was in the moment when the sword or rope met the skin that the law most intimately made itself visible, and was, quite literally, a wounding force. It is a commonplace that punishments and executions had long resembled theatrical spectacles designed for the edification of a crowd that could, depending upon one’s interpretation, erupt in spontaneous displays or become subsumed under the formality and ritual scripted by the majestic force of the state.124 The theatrical and the punitive, the stage and the scaffold, were, in Molly Smith’s words, “communal worlds,”125 and it is not surprising that one could therefore slide imperceptibly into another, at the same time that important distinctions remained. Important to the process was the inf luence on the law of the larger culture, which could play a significant part in the decisions and rituals undertaken in what may seem an otherwise arbitrary display of abuse. Particularly if the law, to quote Clifford Geertz, was a “distinctive manner of imagining the real,” then it is not surprising that the scaffold and gallows were constituted by “a whole range of other cultural realities,” including past theatrical traditions.126 In the depiction of bodily tortures as both brutally base and salvific,127 and its theological narrative of suffering and atonement,128 the late medieval mystery play, for example, might have inf luenced the actual proceedings that took place on the scaffold;129 early seventeenth-century dramas of revenge—though the proper legal word was retribution130 —were also intertwined with the judicial process of punishment, as Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights gave themselves over to a general preoccupation with public spectacles of the law that manifested themselves in gruesome death.131 In the same period, the common law was dramatically symbolized in masques and other dramatic entertainments authored by men trained in the law and presented before James or Charles, or at the Inns of Court; if the “law was presented as theater” in illustrating or dramatizing the ancient constitution or the royal prerogative as divine and naturally ordained, the action occurring at the pillory or the gallows could be no less theatrical and scripted in its way.132 From the middle ages on, English authorities had also sought to infuse penal performance, and the performance of treason executions above all, with symbolic meanings that coexisted with the physical enactment of the law. Ceremony and ritual created and reinforced these symbolic and social projections of power, but it was during Henry VIII’s reign that an act was passed rendering penal punishments even more formal and ritualized, and overseen by a number of titled, if bizarre, officials.133 Though the penal stage would soon

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become less populated with the sovereign’s titled agents—the executioner, his assistant, and crowd-controlling sheriffs and bailiffs would be sufficient—the elaborate nature of Henry’s act is significant, for it reveals the extent to which greater legalism, characteristic of the Tudors, was accompanied by an increasingly heightened ceremony and stage direction, as well as a change in consciousness brought about in part by a new kind of language that permeated legal discourse.134 Law thus became intimately connected with performance, with the latter not upholding the former, but rather serving as a vital and mutually supporting force alongside it. In his inf luential law dictionary entitled The Interpreter (1607), John Cowell took care to reiterate the traditional punishments for treason, which included being drawn through the streets and then hanged, after which “thys living thou shalt be cut downe, thy bowels to be cut out and burnt before thy face, thy head cut off, and thy body to be divided in foure quarters, and disposed at the Kings Majesties pleasure,” and “God have mercy upon thee.”135 Coke, for his part, was also a prosecutor, and in that capacity displayed no mercy to what he (and others) believed to be a crime not simply against laws and the reason they embodied, but against God and nature itself. Treason, as mentioned, was imagined by Coke to reside metaphorically (if not actually) in the body; it therefore resulted in punishments that should precisely target those symbolic parts. The traitor’s blood is “stained and corrupted,”136 Coke wrote, and added elsewhere that “it is the physic of state and government to let out corrupt blood from the heart.”137 As the heart was the originator and instigator of the traitorous deed and the corrupted blood (“Thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart,” Coke told Raleigh),138 its removal was therefore not arbitrary, but an integral part of a larger symbolization at work. Other woundable body parts were also charged with traitorous significance and therefore targeted in punishment, with Coke advocating that the traitor’s “privy parts [be] cut off and burnt before his face as being unworthily begotten”—and to further insure that no generation would follow him.139 Likewise, the head “that imagined the treason” would have to be severed.140 The traitor’s body was finally to be quartered and its parts spread far and wide, not simply to provide biblical feed for the fowl and to demonstrate the punishments that lay in wait for traitors, but to destroy the body (and soul) once and for all by denying it stability and integrity in death. Coke was simply echoing others in his advocacy of such execution devices, while also recalling the rhetorical tradition of Romans such as Cicero, who similarly

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wrote of depriving the traitor’s body of proper burial, since the goal was to “cut the culprit off and shut him out of the entire sphere of nature.”141 Modes of punishment as well as the traitor’s physical comportment during his tortures were equally important to authorities who presented for the public the sight—the visual rhetoric—of bodies in extremis. Being dragged through the streets from the back of a horse was a particularly evocative form of injury, not simply wounding and mutilating but also effacing in its effects on the skin, which constituted the borders of one’s identity. The punishment of hanging, meanwhile, offered for full viewing a body whose f lesh pulled ever downward in resignation, dislodged from any fixed zone of being, belonging neither to earth nor heaven, in a fate of suspension that was greeted with particular horror in early modern Europe. Hanging had been the traditional punishment for enemies of the church, evoking as it did the death of Judas; even early Christian hagiographers were loathe to associate such a fate with their heroic martyrs, with mutilating deaths privileged over all.142 While the heavily Christian associations were perhaps lessened by the seventeenth century, the stigma remained; hanging was not a death that was desired, as testified by John Gerhard, who in 1654 successfully petitioned that he receive a beheading instead. Traitors of the upper ranks had long been accorded the more “dignified” beheading; in this sense, class and gender determined the punishment of the offender, as the stage carried “[an] implicit hierarchization of theatrical violence [that] correspond[ed] to the social codes that governed the distribution of judicial penalties.”143 But punishment, and the law enacted in performance, could also intentionally diminish the class, and therefore the identity, of the victim. The execution for treason of James Graham, the Marquis of Montrose, was a case in point. While many of his Scottish associates were hanged for treason by the covenanters—again, a highly dishonorable punishment—Montrose was dealt the classic treatment of being hanged and quartered; though he was not drawn through the streets, and he died upon hanging, his limbs were distributed among the towns, his trunk buried in the public gallows, and his head placed upon a pike.144 Such dismemberment served to ostensibly deter the public, but it also pointedly reduced the majesty of the person, effecting a transformation in which physical dismantlement ref lected the diminishment of identity and, in a military sense, of honor. The 1661 state funeral granted to the remains of Montrose, the Scottish Hector, was in a sense an act of redemption not only for his unjust fate, but for the degraded manner in which he had died.

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In the face of such power, and with the law so thick with historical meaning in its performance of mutilation and humiliation, one may well question whether resistance by the transgressor himself was possible. For many scholars the answer has been a distinct no, since the scaffold was a ceremonial and ritualistic “mode of repression,” that successfully “served to underline the power of the rulers.”145 But the role of the body in a state of injurious death and dismemberment also reveals the manner in which the law in early modern England resided on particularly tenuous ground, reinforcing the claims of Raymond Williams that the law was a “moving hegemony,” its “cultural aspects “alive with the push and pull of contestation,” negotiation, and f luidity of meaning.146 Contrary to the body of the criminal being thoroughly stamped with the “unrestrained presence of the sovereign,”147 a counterreaction by the transgressor could emerge that was often just as powerful, with the antagonisms playing themselves out in displays of gashes, slashes, severed limbs, and other forms of bodily demolition. Wounds, in and of themselves, could thus be seized upon as tokens of empowerment, and subverted in the meaning intended. On the one hand, wounds were representative of vulnerability and humility;148 yet injuries were also, of course, born by Christ, even in heaven, and therefore could be infused with godly meaning, not only by more overtly religious figures but even by traitors themselves. In this sense, on the stage of judicial injuries, bodily wounds inspired not one but two performances, running counter to each other: on one level was the official performance, scripted and acted by the authorities and their representatives, who sought to cut into the unsealed body in a manner that resonated with symbolic meaning; in a world in which the law was still lacking the kind of policing and other enforcing machinery of a later age, such formal gestures of projection were important. At the same time, however, the very wounds inf licted could be transformed into badges of resistance and agency, when a traitor claimed those wounds as tokens of spiritual identity, revealing not bodily abjection but, on the contrary, emblems of a final defiant stand against the world. As Montrose himself famously wrote, in a foreshadowing of his death: Let them bestow on ev’ry airt [direction] a limb; Open all my veins, that I may swim To Thee my Saviour, in that crimson lake; Then place my pur-boiled head upon a stake; Scatter my ashes, throw them in the air: Lord, since Thou know’st where all these atoms are,

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Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor I’m hopeful, once Thou’lt recollect my dust, And confident Thou’lt raise me with the just.149

Montrose thus utilized and even embraced his debasement to affirm not only his own salvation but the justness of God who would raise him once more to full spiritual integrity. Earthly and sinful men may wound and separate him, literally, from himself; yet in an inversion of the famous Crusade maxim (“Kill them all; God will know his own”), Montrose would be recognized and even saved by his scattered body parts, since “Thou know’st where all these atoms are.” Montrose, however, did not have to wait for divine intervention to restore him, or a semblance of him, that lived through his body or its parts; after his death, and in addition to his state burial, his heart was allegedly retrieved by supporters, and placed in a gold casket—a relic for the ages. Executions were thus pervaded with Christian symbolism that could easily turn martyrological. Last speeches were extremely important in this regard, for if the victim was given the opportunity to reinforce the state’s justice, he could also exploit his last words to frame the meaning of his death in accordance with his own ends.150 In his sermon before death, for example, Laud cited his “predecessors” and therefore attempted to elevate himself to the martyred level of John the Baptist or Bishop Cyprian who “submitted his head to a persecuting sword”; moreover, “my charge . . . lookes somewhat like that against Saint Paul [in Acts] . . . for he was accused for the Law and as well as the Temple that is the Law and Religion.”151 From the opposite religious spectum, the death in 1651 of Christopher Love, convicted for treason in allegedly planning to raise money for the restoration of the monarchy, was equally martyrological and deploying of religious iconography. Love’s last speech, however, differed from previous martyrological set-pieces, such as those conveyed in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, in the level of its defiance and overt and proclamatory political nature. Appearing at the scaffold to “pay the wages of Death,” he stated that “I am not in the least sorry”; more typically, he insisted on his innocence against the charges that he had a correspondence with the “King of Scots”—the future Charles II—even though he had desired “nothing more then [his] restoration to Honour and Freedom.” As for his pending death, “formerly I have been in more terror and fear for the drawing of a Tooth, then I am at his present, being in a moment of time ready to have my head severed from my shoulders.” But, he added in a typical last speech trope, “I beseech God to forgive my enemies, as I freely do.” A prayer then

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followed, in which Love combined sacrificial language (“I am now ready to be offered, and the Vine of my departure is at hand”) with Christian soldierliness (“I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course”). The scarf that he gave to the executioner to lay on the block was red, signifying martyrdom; as the sympathetic pamphleteer described it, “he would not change his condition from the Block for any Emperors throne, if he might get ten thousand worlds by it.”152 Strafford’s death speech also looked ahead to martyrdom, and in fact was the earliest contribution to shaping his fate as the first royalist sacrifice.153 Forgiveness of one’s enemy, as mentioned, was a common trope in such speeches, at the same time that it harkened to, and associated itself with, Jesus’ forgiveness on the cross; in accepting his judgment, “I do it with a very quiet and contented mind,” Strafford claimed. “I thank God I do freely forgive all the world.” But Strafford’s repeated insistence on his innocence, before a crowd of perhaps 200,000, distinguished him from other martyrs, or perhaps rendered him a martyr of the political sphere, requiring a professed upholding of parliament, religion, and above all the king—principles that had been hotly contested during his trial. Moreover, as with the Duke of Hamilton—who, like Christopher Love, also carried a crimson scarf with him to the execution—the religious element of Strafford’s death was mingled with other principles of martial honor and stoicism, as well as defiance. “I know how to look death in the face, and the people too,” Strafford is reported to have said before his execution; “I thank God I am no more afraid of death, but as cheerfully put off my doublet at this time as ever I did when I went to bed.”154 According to friends, he resembled a general marching to victory rather than a condemned traitor or even martyr;155 by contrast, the king who had signed Strafford’s death warrant, and was haunted by it, faced his own death in more overtly martyrological terms, stating, in another common death-side trope, that “this is my second marriage day; I would be as trim today as may be, for before tonight I hope to be espoused to my blessed Jesus.156 Spectators who had witnessed Charles’s death famously dipped their hands in his blood, which was thought to carry life in its healing properties. In this respect, and even in the case of traitors, the body after it had been wounded or dismembered could live on in miraculously revived and theatricalized form, undermining the authority—and above all the law—that had sought to disgrace and kill it. On the one hand, as Desmond Manderson has written, the mutilated bodies of traitors “were displayed as if they were statues or icons on which state power had been etched”; indeed, “their wounds were symbols for which

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their bodies had become a canvas of dissemination.”157 The posting of a severed head on London Bridge, or the public display of a corpse’s fragmented parts over the course of weeks, thus presented—or so it was hoped—an exhibit commemorating the theater of justice and an advertisement for the law’s majesty, designed to dominate the ideological struggle that could sometimes ensue.158 But posthumous, wounded body parts could, like much else, subvert the intentions of authorities. Certainly a power continued for many to emanate from body parts, which necessitated their quick removal to prevent their collection and transformation into relics. In addition, early modern sensibilities were particularly subject to fear of posthumous reanimation, and the sight of severed heads apparently continuing to breathe and to even speak on the scaffold did not alleviate the dread, even if at other times severed heads were used for sport before they were thrown into the kettle for parboiling, or hideously disfigured in a kind of posthumous iconoclasm that nevertheless testified to their continued power.159 Such revivifications, as well as the general power of the eloquent if severed head, had been a long-held theatrical trope, but popular belief, pamphlets, and broadsides also continued to utilize the image, perhaps borrowing from the theatrical and dramatic tradition. Thomas Bensted, executed in 1640 for conspiring against Laud, was utilized in one such (anti-Laudian) pamphlet, his severed head depicted as engaged in an ecumenical discussion with the head of another, a Jesuit.160 The miracle of a body fragment or a severed head that had remained preserved and uncorrupted long after its detachment from the corpse also attested to secular authority being overridden by the God in whose name the government had claimed to act. Montrose’s heart, as mentioned, was carefully preserved in an urn, and therefore redeemed, not only carrying with it the symbol of the man but of his inward self and thoughts, now purified in their golden containment. Cromwell’s own body was exhumed, hanged, and disfigured in 1661, along with other regicides—an act that accorded with the intentions of authorities, even if it still attested to unease over the power of the corpse, particularly as it could autonomously control and direct memory.161 In many respects, however, the authorities sought not to annihilate so much as reconfigure memory, to bring the transgressor’s death and life to accord with its own controlled narrative. What authorities feared that these seventeenth-century body parts and wounds could memorialize was not the particular sin or deed of the criminal or traitor, but rather the performance of pain and joy, victory and disability, and the injustice of the law itself. As the bearer of treason, the offender had

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wounded the realm, and born that offense in a body, or in body parts, that could live on after death; just as treason had to be utterly extirpated for the purification of the law, so did the body that carried, and threatened to contaminate others, have to die. Utilizing the bodily metaphor to describe treason in the wake of World War II, Rebecca West wrote that “all men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if the nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.”162 By the same token, in the early seventeenth century at least, treason, however defined, might have been the worst threat to befall England, yet it also served to strengthen the legal nation by defining, through language, metaphor, and performance, what those laws, and that nation, were perceived to be. The middle decades of the century, however, muddled the distinctions, even if the language still adhered to past statutes and jurists; in this sense, the case made by Pym or Strafford, Bradshaw or Charles, revealed the law to be at its most nakedly ideological and contestable, equipped with rival vocabularies whose legitimation could be tenuous at best. The only clear and common factor between these polemical legal usages was that some entity had been grievously wounded; beyond that, who did the wounding, and to what sovereign entity, remained increasingly tangled. The performances of the law that ensued, particularly in the execution spectacle, further exposed the force and even brutality that had always resided behind the law, which became a metaphorically and literally wounding force. But while the subversions in these performances were not unique to the mid-seventeenth century, their exploitation of existing confusions and political fragmentations undoubtedly were. Even Edward Sexby carried some degree of reasoned motivation in his assassinating, godly visions. Neither a Judas nor Ben Jonson’s monstrous Catiline, the traitor of the 1640s instead worked in the interstices of ambiguous or conf licting laws: the very place where the law, and the rhetoric of the law, had not intended him to be.


CH A P T E R

T H R E E

The Wounds of War

In 1849 the historian Thomas Macaulay set out to describe the character of the English country gentleman of the later seventeenth century—a man withered by age, “unlettered,” “unpolished,” and genealogyobsessed, rattling about in his Restoration estate with “old swords and holsters” and a long-overdue pension from the king. Although mindful of his continued patrician status, the ex-cavalier, Macaulay wrote, found himself quite literally marked by the battlefields of Naseby or Marston Moor, which he wore on his body in the form of an eyepatch, a gash on the cheek, or a single bullet still lodged in his head. His scars were not simply scars but royalist badges, just as those who once fought against him bore traces, parliamentary traces, on their own bodies. In this sense, more than any story he could tell, the ex-soldier’s body was itself a record of war-making, though one that was imbued with its own romantic mythology; equally important was the role that disfigurement played in shaping his identity, as he continued to define himself through the prism of the past—a past that was memorialized in his own mutilations.1 Macaulay’s description of the disfigured cavalier ref lects the mentalities of a later, Victorian world, but it also reveals the manner in which individuals inscribed meaning onto physical reality, particularly when that physical reality existed in the form of otherwise abject bodily trauma. As Macaulay’s cavalier attests, wounds formulated meaning through their symbolically rich power, in this case by embodying qualities of honor and loss. Yet wounds were also historically contingent upon the values and conditions of a given time and place, of England (or later perceptions of England) in the mid-seventeenth century. Of course, the injuries and scars of warriors had long existed as

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a central, if not timeless, trope in the lives of soldiers and narratives of war;2 as badges of pride or shame, physical wretchedness or romantic elevation, the body’s injuries were given a multitude of meanings by Homer and maimed veterans alike. In the seventeenth century, however, a particularly acute kind of ambivalence attached itself to the warrior’s battered f lesh, which was damaged by devastating weaponry and sacrificed for a not always heroic war. As a result, while many veterans or writers attempted to find in wounds a kind of elevating masculine power and grace, others failed in the face of interpreting injuries that stood as reminders of the soldier’s, and the country’s, own deep fragilities. This chapter focuses on historical and literary representations of battle wounds through parallel and at times competing modes of discourses, from realistic accounts of soldiers and medical practitioners who treated them, through battlefield ghost stories, narratives of providence or honor, and finally the literary mode of the epic or elegy. All types of writing were profoundly affected by the impact of the war, with wounds serving as a pivot of expressive possibility: the journal accounts of soldiers or surgeons might have constituted an emerging mode of naturalistic rhetoric, but the war epic and elegy also continued to live on in Milton, Abraham Cowley, and other poets. In the mid-seventeenth century, however, such traditional depictions of wounds also seemed to conf lict with the crude reality, not only for soldiers and eyewitnesses but poets who lived through and attempted to convey a difficult, bloody, and frequently demoralizing war. Indeed, the civil wars in England constituted an especially significant moment in the history of wounds as well as war, since organized fighting of such magnitude and intensity had not occurred on English soil for generations. The prevalence of swords and pikes, combined with the viciousness of the fighting, left “scarce a man without a cut over the head or face”;3 as a result, men such as Sir John Byron—or Macaulay’s cavalier—would live the rest of their days with prominent sword scars on their cheeks, or other deeper disfigurements. More significant was the impact of gunpowder, which could fragment and scatter a body to the point where, according to one ballad, it was common to “see legs and arms torn ragged f ly/ And bodies gasping all dismembered lie.”4 The protection men wore against such a mechanical barrage was questionable, as cumbersome or generally inadequate armor left them exposed and even frail in the face of artillery onslaughts.5 “If I had a pot for the head that were pistol proof, it may be I would use it, if it were

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light,” wrote Sir Edmund Verney to his son; “but my whole helmet will be of no use to me at all.”6 Though injury by cannon or musket was not itself new, especially to officers who had already gained experience in the Thirty Years’ War, for most of the soldiers or writer-witnesses who had never engaged in or seen this extent of violence before, such technology was unprecedented and strange, particularly in the way that it wrought its unique damage on the body.7 Cannons in their eviscerating power continued to trouble those who still adhered to chivalric ideals of warfare, while muskets issued lead balls whose weight, softness, and slow trajectory created especially gruesome injuries, which had to be enlarged by surgeons in order that the damage could be removed. In addition, systems of care for the wounded—transport, hospitalization, immediate medical help—were themselves largely haphazard and improvised, despite official measures or heroic efforts on the part of doctors and individuals such as Anne Murray, whose charitable actions did little to mitigate the suffering of wounded men lying in the battlefield, in visible, bloody disarray.8 While many insisted that providence or honor guided the actions of men, and that the wounds or deaths that soldiers suffered had a higher purpose and meaning, the blunt reality of violence, not to mention loss on the battlefield, would seem to have rendered consolation tenuous at best. Language, however, did not always fail writers who described traumatic events, but was in fact transformed by such dislocations and disruptions. While a crisis of representation may have occurred for those who attempted to convey such violence, recourse to traditional narrative bearings was still at hand, if in a more fragile (and creative) form.9 As one reads through accounts of war, it becomes clear that despite the apparent meaninglessness of battle, wounds could not help but become imbued with a larger aura of imposed significance, even at their most plainly represented. The soldier crafted narratives that described the physical and psychological impact of his wounds; in this sense, he was a storyteller in line with Walter Benjamin’s description, belonging as he did to a craft or tribe that “combined the lore of faraway places . . . with the lore of the past”—the faraway place being his own body rendered foreign by its pain and wounds, and the past lore constituting models of warrior behavior expected of him.10 The wounds suffered in war were therefore never entirely free from their symbolically enriched representation, first in the accounts of eyewitnesses (including, problematically, eyewitnesses writing long after the fact), and followed by their subsequent exaltation in literature as they were incorporated into the elaborate epics of high literature.11

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The meanings that wounds gained in the genre of the news pamphlet, the surgeon’s manual, or the elegy reveal in a larger sense the mutual reciprocity that existed between the real and the imaginary, the reality of the battlefield and its literary representations, actual wounds and their mythologized shadows. For just as literature could indirectly inf luence the perceptions of the soldier, so could reality—or the soldier’s perceptions of reality—coil back to inf luence literature, with pamphlets and poems detailing the brute (and mute) reality of pain. In the process of this mutual inf luence, notions of heroism, honor, and, in a religious sense, providence, were also transformed by the new realities of war and the injured body—the evidence of which could appear on Milton’s scarred Satan, and down to the Restoration-era beggar who had only the traces of his wounds with which to bargain for government aid, or public mercy. By following the manner in which wounds were depicted in their most apparently raw state, up through their elaborate depiction in epics, this chapter in a sense follows the trajectory of wounds themselves, as they are first experienced as blunt inarticulate trauma— and conveyed as such in firsthand accounts—and eventually become more abstracted and mythologized into the supposedly settled form of a scar. A wound is open, unresolved, a coming apart, a shock, its meaning indeterminate; a scar or disfigurement, on the other hand, stands at a greater temporal distance from the original inf liction. Wounds suffered in battle left the soldier in an abject, unresolved position in relation to the world, his body literally opened, his life and death dependent on the course of healing or decline his wounds would take; scars, on the other hand, were corporal evidence of healing as well as damage—a memorializing faultline on the body that reminded the veteran of the “before” and “after” that his life had taken upon the injury he suffered. Like settled or closed narratives, scars healed over ruptures and reintegrated the body back to its state of wholeness—but not entirely; despite traces of healing, and the myths that accrued around scars, the vestiges of an originary violence itself remained. Shock Wounds The relaxation of royal censorship laws in the 1640s led to a proliferation of writing that circulated widely from within a highly receptive and literate marketplace. Among the reinvigorated or transformed

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modes of writing was war-related prose, with news reports, soldiers’ letters, cheap pamphlets, contemporary histories, political broadsides and memoirs crafting a language appropriate to the impact and immediacy of battles as they were taking place.12 War writing, or the particular form it took, was not altogether new to the 1640s, since military literature, including battlefield reports from the continent, had enjoyed nearly a century of popularity, in the process establishing an accessible and apparently unencumbered style of rhetoric.13 But in the 1640s the discourse of war writing as a whole was itself reconfigured to fit new realities, including the fact that England had not witnessed such fighting on its own soil for over a century. If previous battle accounts from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries familiarized readers to a standard mode of description, they were at least located in different landscapes such as the continent, or Ireland, and depicted opponents as firmly different in their identity or religion.14 Not only were reports now embedded in domestic settings, conveying large numbers of dead, but they also attempted to capture the most feared kind of warfare of all: civil and internecine. Though the newsbook, letter, and broadside report were each distinct in their literary or polemical purposes,15 all can be grouped together in their common preoccupation with describing the wounds of war, particularly at their most horrific. Indeed, war injuries, both major and minor, are ubiquitous in these accounts—which is not surprising when one considers the bloody carnage at Marston Moor and Bolton. Surgeons or medical practitioners also belong to this group in their similar rhetoric of woundedness, even if their purpose was to create a language of empirical observation toward entirely medical, not journalistic or memoiristic, ends. War writers, soldiers, and surgeons thus shared an intimate connection, not only for the obvious reasons— one writer describes how after Naseby there was “[crying] for surgeons as never was the like heard”16 —but because of a preoccupation with the fractured, injured body and how to depict it. It is important to point out that the continuous commentary on wounds, however, did not ref lect a larger disillusionment, which would emerge in the war writings of later centuries; while injuries and technologies provoked a response of awe and sorrow, cultural expectations of war in general differed and were widely accepted, even if the battles themselves seemed unprecedented.17 Though written in 1672, long after the conf lict had ended, Richard Wiseman’s Treatise of Wounds referred to the civil wars as it set out to frame wounds in a naturalistic and immediate as well as scientifically

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empirical language, with Wiseman describing his treatment of gangrenous, open lacerations and other injuries that he encountered at the battle of Taunton and the siege at Weymouth years before.18 On the most obvious level the text was instructional: describing an amputation he conducted, Wiseman (self-aggrandizingly) detailed how “with a good knife I cut off the f lesh by a quick turn of my hand, [an assistant] putting up the f lesh while I sawed the bones. After which with a few motions of my saw I separated the bone, [with] the patient not so much as whimpering the while.” But Wiseman’s treatise also conveyed narratives of suffering warriors, written in a dramatic, graphic vocabulary: sword wounds could leave soldiers “cruelly mangled,” with gashes to the “thighs, back, shoulders, and neck,” while he describes himself, in such adjectives as “cruelly,” as commiserating with the pain of his patients.19 Such anatomical language also infiltrated nonmedical accounts, as when Commander Philip Skippon of the New Model Army was described in forensic terms as receiving, among other injuries, “one most deepe and dangerous wound which was credibly reported to be about 8 inches long in his body on the left side, under his short ribs by a bullet which had most dangerously battered his Armour and broken and beaten a piece of it into his belly.”20 The physiological fate of a wounded man, including his cure, could also fascinate warriors as well as practitioners, with Richard Bulstrode giving an account of one man, “with very dangerous wounds,” who was “presently dressed by the King’s chiurgeons . . . and lived many years after, tho’ he had seventeen wounds.” Though the man had virtually “died upon the place,” Bulstrode continued, “the coldness of the weather [had] stopp’d the bleeding of his wounds, which saved also several other men’s lives that were wounded.”21 Despite such apparently straightforward or neutral accounts, the political and religious fragmentation of the 1640s could not help but altar traditional forms of writing in general,22 radically changing the way wounds and battlefield experiences were depicted by soldiers and surgeons alike. Indeed, even the commercial valuation of wounds was not without potential for deeper readings into how injury was perceived and organized into levels of meaning and priority. The army doctor George Blagrave, in his bill to parliament, charged ten shillings to treat a soldier’s bruised leg, a pound for “a cut over the eye and a sore thrust in the arm,” and one pound ten for “a very sore cut in the fore part of his head, which caused a piece of his skull,” “the breadth of a half-crown piece,” to be “taken

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forth.” Though Blagrave calculated the bill based upon his labor and medical supplies, he also appears to have distinguished between the value of the wounds as “good” and “bad” wounds, albeit in monetary terms of “expensive” and “inexpensive.” Frontal wounds were more expensive to treat than those dealt from the rear, for example; an amputated arm was less worthy than a leg. The importance of limbs and skin in terms of their functionality was central, of course, yet their respective prices created a hierarchy of the body’s parts, expressed in terms of the worthiness—the literal cost—that such wounds generated. Blagrave’s was perhaps the most basic treatment of wounds, but elsewhere the trauma of war and the shock of weaponry demanded a new style of writing for observers and participants to record the horrors they had witnessed; by casting the wounds suffered in protojournalistic form, as opposed to placing them within more ornate, colorful, or melodramatic first-person narratives, soldiers or the writers who described them sought to describe wounds in a new mode that could most effectively capture their immediacy and significance. It is problematic, however, to claim that transparency or apparent lack of style in writing—under the guise of a “plain style,” or “workaday” or “spoken” prose—was necessarily more “realistic” or truthful in its representations of wounds than its more crafted and poetic counterparts. 24 All depictions of the war, even the most naturalistic, were texts, after all, and as such mediated to some extent; apart from the partisan or self-interested purposes they may have served, in advancing the surgical profession or reporting from a scene of battle, the accounts’ plain style was not without its own conventions, however erased those conventions may have appeared to be.25 Though a “first-hand” account by a writer-soldier such as Henry Foster may have been more “fact-based” than Cowley’s epic The Civil War, the wounds he describes are still represented with the conventions of a prose that attempts to align style with the realities of war as it was savagely and shockingly experienced in a specific time and place. If the depiction of wounds in a plain style was itself a kind of rhetorical pretense, questions remain as to why the style f lourished at this historical moment. On the most obvious level, the simplicity of the prose was necessary in circulating the latest news to a wider and less educated readership. But the shock of new technology (for England) was also a factor. From the ancient shield through the medieval longbow, technologies of war had been amplified with meaning; gunpowder was itself

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likened to malignant forces, with Milton describing the cannon as “a devilish machination” to “plague the Sons of men”—a “deep-throated” instrument that “belched” and “disgorged” its “iron globes.”26 For all its diabolism, however, cannon also resisted poetic descriptions, just as the wounds it produced were neither chivalrous, glorious, or diabolic. As John Gwyn described it, in one instance “a whole file of men, six deep, [had] their heads all struck off with one cannon shot of ours”; little was expanded on this description.27 Bullets also ricocheted in a freakish manner, killing some and sparing others; “it was somewhat dreadful,” the roundhead Henry Foster wrote, “when bowels and brains f lew in our faces.”28 The frequent barbarity of the fighting between armies locked in close combat also contributed to a discourse that departed from established martial tropes in conveying the reality of battle. The vocabulary of war itself shifted, as a battle became a “fight,” or “bloody fight”; and those fights, unlike their equivalents in high chivalric or epic literature, were represented (and experienced) as disordered and prolonged. Military memoirs conveyed the brutality in stark factual terms, even if those facts often tended to be unclear.29 The skirmish between Richard Atkyns and the parliamentarian Sir Arthur Haslerigge was, for example, described (in Atkyns’ Vindication) as particularly confusing: after shooting and striking Haslerigge at a close distance, Haslerigge “gave me such a blow on the inside of my arm amongst the veins that I could hardly hold my sword,” Atkins wrote. Meanwhile, “I’m sure I hit his head,” he added uncertainly. The bloody mayhem could involve animals as well; Atkyns’ own horse was dealt a wound to the nose so deep that “you might put your finger in the wound” and then was “struck . . . upon the cheek”; but “I ran [Haslerigge’s] horse into the body and resolved to attempt nothing further than to kill [it].” Meanwhile, “in all this time we [Haslerigge and Atkyns] were together hand to fist,”30 until eventually, in exhaustion, Haslerigge was taken away as a prisoner and Atkyns retired to tend another pistol wound, “which only took off the skin upon the blade bone of my shoulder.”31 Honor played little role in these accounts, with wounds to the back a commonly noted inf liction—evidence either that the warrior attempted to f lee his attacker, or that the attacker was not playing by honorable rules of fighting head-on. 32 Wiseman, for example, describes a f leeing soldier running away, with “a gash [that] thwart the nape of his neck”—a wound “full of maggots; and so were those of all the rest that were inf licted on the hinder parts, they having

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been some days undressed.” In an indication that codes of war might have been breached, unarmed men who had fallen off their horses also suffered from numerous sword wounds on their arms when they attempted to shelter their heads or “hinder parts” when they tried to escape the enemy. A different kind of dishonorable, effacing abnormality was also pervasive in the reportage of wounds: Lieutenant William Holles, for example, was shot in the face and bled profusely, but continued to remain in the field to fight, according to his chronicler; still, “the extremity of his anguish increased by the sharpness of the season and want of present application [to the wound], shut up both his eyes, and swell[ed] his face for some days to a strange deformity.”34 The description of Holles’ “strange deformity” and disfigurement is consistent with Elaine Scarry’s thesis that war is profoundly altering if not obliterating of identity. 35 Gunpowder in this sense could easily effect such alteration, if not annihilation, charring men black as it exploded, or blasting away the entire face, as with a soldier who lost his jaw, chin, eyes, nose, and mouth, and still survived. 36 Newsbook and pamphlet accounts of the new warfare also tended to dwell not on individual heroism but on the startling anonymity of death in a land where the peace of over a century had been completely upended. One witness wrote of Edgehill that “the field was covered with the dead, yet no one could tell to what party they belonged,” while another, George Wither, encapsulated all that he had seen, of “men sprawling in their blood,” “grim postures, of the dying, and the slain.”37 Corpses “lay upon the ground like rotten sheep”;38 especially distressing, for noble and gentry families, were cases of disappeared bodies buried anonymously among the multitudes. As Abraham Cowley put it in regard to the Earl of Sunderland, “Thy very Tombe is [robbed] of Thee.”39 The body of Sir Edmund Verney, the king’s standard bearer, was also never recovered, as it was probably thrown into a mass grave with dozens of others; Lord Falkland’s corpse, though “trod upon and mangled,” was at least found and finally interred in the family burial ground, providing some degree of finality for those who mourned his death.40 The lack of resolution or uncertainty over the fate of bodies thus left the battlefield (and narrative accounts) open-ended, further distinguishing them from traditional representations. Seventeenth-century life-writings, as mentioned, have been characterized by modern critics and historians as resisting psychological interiority or emotion, particularly when it came to conveying the horrors

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of war; and certainly, rhetorical performance—in this case, realistic reportage—took precedence over the conveyance of internal states of mind.42 For all their apparent detachment, however, such writings were not without emotion, particularly when a wounded body came into play.43 Comradeship is evident, for example, in reports of Gabriel Ludlow asking Edmund, his cousin, to kiss him before he died, as he lay “with his belly broken and bowels torn, his hip-bone broken, all the shivers.”44 Accounts also attempt to convey the full impact of war’s horrors, as when the parliamentarian soldier Henry Foster, after the battle of Newbury, described one soldier, shot in the face and body, as presenting a picture that “would make any true heart bleed.”45 That the soldier was a French mercenary fighting for the king made Foster’s compassion all the more moving.46 Indeed, even the most dispassionate observer could succumb to the despair of the battlefield, with one parliamentarian surgeon writing of an all-encompassing “one death, who doth and will prevail.”47 Men were also depicted as recoiling from the effects of battle: according to the royalist Mercurius Rusticus, a thigh wound suffered by Colonel Sandys in 1643 turned gangrenous, and proceeded to “rot and putrefy . . . in so loathsome a manner that . . . he was a burden to himself and so to his friends.” The friends then found themselves unable to endure Sandys’s presence, “so intolerable was the stench, and so offensive”48 —an image that recalls the plight of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, abandoned on an island by his men to his festering foot and pain. Where Philoctetes carries about him a heroism in his suffering, however, nothing elevates Sandys from his own mundane if searing distress.49 Despite the focus on the collective anonymity of the suffering dead, the wounds suffered by more notable actors such as Sandys received special coverage, particularly for the way they could be interpreted by different sides in the partisan struggle. Indeed, the wounds of notable figures could also serve ideological ends: Clarendon, writing long after the fact, recorded that Cromwell suffered a neck wound “above the shoulders,” during a charge at Marston Moor; where the parliamentarian Bulstrode Whitelocke asserted that it derived from a pistol shot, Marcus Trevor claimed to have injured Cromwell with his sword, thus imbuing it, perhaps, with more chivalric or noble associations.50 Apart from the advantage Cromwell’s short absence from the battlefield gave to the opposing side, the wound dressing episode gave supporters or opponents the opportunity to claim cowardice or heroism on the part of the lieutenant-general in the face of his own injury. Though Cromwell’s wound—which may have been apocryphal51—played a

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negligible role in the larger outcome of the war, it was nevertheless significant to both sides in the ideological war, with royalist writers claiming that he retreated in cowardice to have it dressed, while parliamentarians cited it as an example of his fortitude and bravery, since he quickly returned to the field.52 As the case of Cromwell attests, the manner in which men reacted to their own wounds was widely believed to provide insight into their true character. While stoic serenity in the face of pain—of being “cheerfully” wounded—was the ideal, soldiers, as Wiseman reported, could be hit with a cannonball fragment, suffer from lacerations, and languish for days, until they “fell into a spasm and died, howling like a dog; as most of those who have been so wounded.”53 Atkyns reported another case in which an ammunition wagon carrying wounded men alighted, resulting in the victims making “lamentable screeches.”54 Captain John Birth, on the other hand, after suffering a stomach wound during the assault on Arundel Castle, managed to prevent his guts from spilling out by holding them in place with his fingers, while he continued to slay men and take prisoners; after the adrenaline had worn off, however, even he was “lain with so many others on the f loor, groveling.”55 Fear is also described in these accounts: when Colonel Hewson, the royalist governor of Dublin, was “bruised in the shoulder with a bullet” during Cromwell’s 1649–1650 campaign, he “beshitt himself ”;56 meanwhile, the royalist Richard Symonds described captured parliamentary soldiers as “stricken with such a dismal feare that as soon as the colour of the regiment was passt . . . the rout of soldjers of that regiment presst all of a heape like sheep, though not so innocent.”57 The range of soldiers’ emotional responses to their wounds was also carried over into the realm of the supernatural, in the popular subgenre of the ghost story. Pamphlet literature in general tended to make little distinction between the real and the unreal, and conveyed both dimensions in the same plain, naturalistic prose. For one, such stories were popular: protestants, for example, may have come to more attenuated understandings of what such specters were,58 but belief in ghosts continued to pervade culture, in plays such as Hamlet and Macbeth,59 as well as in tracts that depicted ghosts as enforcers of moral and social codes, intercessors in earthly affairs, settlers of specific disputes, or arbiters of one kind or another.60 Still, as Peter Marshall has pointed out, despite the many functions they assumed, spectral interventions were “open, hazardous, and uncertain” in their meanings,61 and no more so than on the ruins of a battlefield,

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where they functioned as memorializers of an unhappy war. With their insistence on being remembered, such apparitions resembled Patroclus and his haunting of Troy in the Iliad: a ghost offended by his own oblivion, particularly when Achilles seemed to be forgetting him, at least in sleep. “Sleepest thou, and me hast thou forgotten?,” the spirit mourned to his friend; “Not in my life wert thou neglectful of me, but in death.”62 For all their immateriality, ghosts could be observed in physical and sensory form in sudden bursts of cold, a breeze that blew out a f lame, slammed doors, a voice, a vision. Ghosts at Edgehill were said to make great clamors in their sky battles—“Musqets going off, Cannons discharged, Horses neighing,” and “cries of souldiers so amazing and terrifying that [spectators] could not believe they were mortall.”63 Such death fields as Edgehill were also haunted by the bodies of specter-soldiers who wandered in the nocturnal hours, still bearing “the king’s and parliament’s colours.”64 The soldier John Greene thus reported in his diary that after the battle of Edgehill “strange sights [were] seen, and strange noyses heard . . . in the place where the King’s army stood terrible outcries; where the Parliaments [stood], music and singing Psalms.”65 More significantly, many ghosts bore their wounds on them; at Edgehill, a particularly haunted battlefield, spectral soldiers wandered in a state of disfigurement, “walking with one legge, and one arme, and the like, passing to and fro in the night.”66 Their visible injuries were memorializers of war’s brutality, but also an assertion of identity, a bodily, wounding mark of recognition like Jesus’ own bloodied hands presented to Thomas. Hector, the tragic figure from the Iliad, would also make his reappearance in Virgil as a wounded ghost, appearing before Aeneus in a dream, “such as he was, when, by Pelides slain/ Thessalian coursers dragg’d him o’er the plain.” Hector can only be known by the calamity that has destroyed his body, rather than “that Hector who return’d from toils/Of war, triumphant.” Only his wounds (“that for his country bore”) remain, “now stream’d afresh, and with new purple ran.” “I wept,” Aeneus says, beholding them, “to see the visionary man.”67 Other non-warrior ghosts also appeared in the physical condition at the moment of their death, with smallpox disfigurements, or deep and bloody homicidal slashes extending across their throats.68 Soldiers were an addition to this pantheon of the “bad death,” as specters living in suffering limbo since their mortality was not given the proper ritualized closing of burial. But soldier-ghosts could also delineate boundaries

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of meaning rather than just convey indeterminacy; by haunting old battlefields, they created what the anthropologist Allen Feldman has elsewhere called a “cartography of death events,” or “spaces of death.”69 By creating such spaces, or at least reinforcing them as sites of woundedness and mortality, ghost soldiers grounded the larger meanings of war in a particular space of memory.70 But so many deaths also rendered that space a defiled one, with ghosts representing the overf low of such debasement. The wounding and wounded ghosts in the night sky were thought to appear as reminders of man’s sinfulness in time as well as space; one observer speculated in 1642 that entire armies, “strange and portentious,” battled each other during “Christmas time,” as if “the Saviour of the world, who died to redeeme mankinde, had beene angry that so much Christian blood was there spilt, and so had permitted these infernall Armies to appeare.” 71 Beginning as journalistic accounts, these pamphlets thus elevated “eyewitness” visions of wounded ghost-armies to levels of theological significance, in which England was urged to remember the specters of war, and the meanings that arose from the battles they fought. Broken figures still washed in blood, bearing wounds that would never heal, these spectral Hectors of Naseby’s fields would eventually fade from the scene where they left the world; but the memory of them, or the land they haunted, would remain for generations after, preserving the trauma in their own bodies’ disfigurements. Honorable Wounds, Providential Wounds Despite the apparently straightforward nature of many reports— including journalistic reports of ghosts—other, larger meanings could not help but creep into the discourse of martial woundedness. The idea of honor, for example, continued to inf luence soldiers who sought meaning and justification for the violence they inf licted and the wounds they suffered;72 although principles of martial honor and chivalry had been downplayed in the court culture of the 1630s,73 the outbreak of hostilities in the 1640s revived ideals traditionally associated with the field of battle, even if much of the romantic literature was treated, according to Barbara Donagan, as “a joke when applied in the circumstances of real war.” 74 Writing long before the war, Henry Peacham thus expressed the conviction that honor was “the reward of virtue and glorious action only.” 75 But only the conditions of the 1640s could test this principle, as a contemporary poem proclaimed,

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“Honour takes date from action not from time/ and he whose bloud in his Kings cause is spent/ outlives an Everlasting Parliament.” 76 Qualities of courage, integrity, and reputation, as well as loyalty to the king, the parliament, or one’s family, were thus harnessed toward practical and professional ends, at the same time that the ideals expressed in manuals and guidebooks of honor continued to prevail in pamphlets and other descriptions of battle.77 Since honor did not derive solely from action and virtue but also from birth and social status, the notion of the “honourable wound” came to be associated with the cavalier rather than the allegedly more meritocratic, “plain russet-coated” roundhead.78 This was not always the case, as parliamentarians and figures such as Thomas Fairfax also embraced codes of honor as fervently as any royalist. But in an aristocratic culture, both rank and honor traditionally descended from the king, and were reinforced by the divine right theory to which Charles subscribed.79 For royalists, wounds received in defense of the king (as well as the family) thus became badges of royal service, like a coat of arms, but worn, as it were, more closely to one’s heart. In a larger sense, Christian self-renunciation and honor were also inextricably commingled when the wounds of royalists were given sacrificially for Charles, who would offer up his own body to achieve the higher heavenly crown of martyrdom. Royalist accounts of the wounding (and killing) of the Earl of Northampton at the battle of Hopton Heath especially emphasize the conjoinment of identity with honor. Though he was attacked by “multitudes,” who fought dishonorably, using muskets as blunt weapons, injuring him from behind, or “on the hinder part of his head,” Northampton fought back, face to face with his enemy, “striking [a captain] into the brest with his Poleax” until he was overcome by the mob—itself dishonorable in its collectivity. Offered quarter after being “grievously wounded,” Northampton replied that “he scorned to take quarter from such base rogues and Rebels as they were,” and continued to fight on to the death. His body was never recovered, but his example inspired one writer to observe that his heroism “cannot but make all those that are desirous of honour to follow in his steps”; indeed, better to die such an “honourable death” instead of languishing in “vile, wretched, unprofitable captivity,” he said.80 Similar accounts of other battles treat wounds rendered significantly to the face, the chest, or the shoulders, all evidence of the warrior facing the enemy stoically and head on (as opposed to those soldiers earlier described by Richard Wiseman, with wounds on

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their backs). Wounds inf licted by sword or pike were also more frequently mentioned than those by gunpowder, which dealt a less honorable kind of wound in its relatively distant, fragmentary, and equalizing power. But ambivalence also resided in the interpretation of wounds: the injuries on Northampton’s back, for example, would seem to indicate that he had run from his opponents or at least not faced them directly; yet royalist writers insisted that it was his enemies who renounced the warrior’s code with their chaotic attacks from behind, their blunt and unskillful woundings. Northampton attempted to face those enemies, but his ultimate rejection of their offer of quarter (and of their dishonorable code) represented, once again, a sacrifice of his own body to larger moral and heroic, kingly and aristocratic, standards. On a bodily level, to be wounded was the highest expression of the warrior’s self (or, by the same token, self lessness). By contrast, the mercenary was distinguished by his refusal to offer up his own body for wounding, as one fictional man of arms asserted instead, in one ballad, that “I doe not mean my body ere shall swing/ Between a pare of crutches, tottering.” 81 How one approached one’s wounds was also a measure of the man and his code of masculinity as well as honor: ideals were represented and glorified in wounds willingly embraced, in line with Seneca’s dictum that “valiant soldiers glory in their wounds, and joyfully show the blood that runneth from them, if it be spent in a good cause.” 82 Battlefield realities in the 1640s, however, once again tended to undermine traditional notions of honor, just as a cavalier howling in pain was at odds with the stoic standard he was expected to maintain. Indeed, if honor was one of the ostensible ideals that drove the king’s men in battle, the reality of the battlefield tended to undermine it, with Richard Baxter—a puritan, and perhaps not as attached to honor—writing, “So miserable were those bloody days, in which he was most honourable that could kill most of his enemies.” 83 Though Baxter, like other religious thinkers, found war to be permissible as long as it was in accordance with God’s will, the internal conf licts of the 1640s could veer dangerously close to the unlawful and morally unjust, even unchristian, as one writer stated that “nothing under heaven [is] more ghastly and dreadful than the face of an intestine war, nothing that so nearly resembles hell.” 84 If honor, as anthropologists have written, formed a “nexus between the ideals of a society and their reproduction in the individual through his aspiration to personify them,” 85 then wounds

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were central in representing that embodied, personified ideal. But in many if not most, cases honor did not work in such a context of “blood to blood, self against self ”;86 weapons themselves—muskets, cannons—could in this sense even ruin war as a “finishing school for knightly character.” 87 While the cavalier, as mentioned, was empowered by the social solidarities of his caste—including a form of caste-honor88 —his injuries, while maintained as distinct on a public level and contributive of a collective class identity, were not unique, particularly in terms of the pain they extracted. After all, if captains were ennobled by indiscriminate bullets, then fishmongersoldiers could be too.89 Despite these realities, in their continued attempts to frame the war experience with a language of honor, contemporary writers borrowed heavily from existing literary tropes belonging to the elegy: praise for the fallen military hero and his qualities of courage, the balance between the public and the personal, the expression of subjective and collective grief.90 Royalist literature particularly exploited the elegy that expressed realities of military defeat, fusing the examples of present-day soldiers with the deeds and martial valor of ancient heroes. But in the context of civil war, and the leveling effects of gunpowder, the results could be awkward. In a report from Colchester in 1648, the besieged royalists Charles Lucas and George Goring, the first Earl of Norwich, were described as resolved to die “like Sonnes of Mars in the field, then to submit basely to the mercy of [the roundheads], and to surrender the town upon dishonourable conditions.”91 Captain John Stiles, a royalist, also described his superior officer in stiff terms, “waving his conquering steel,” as though “From Mars [he] had got the sole monopoly/ Of never-failing courage.”92 Other writers, however, recoiled from literary artifice that bleached all life from its subjects in reducing them to an impersonal and sometimes dehumanized, if idealized, archetype. In a tribute to his friend “R. W.,” Henry Vaughan thus railed against the “dumb piles of chested brass and stones” that encumbered such poems, and sought instead to extol the personal qualities simply of a “loyall, upright life.”93 Postwar royalist elegies in fact worked best when they toned down the f lorid language of epic heroes and battles and focused instead on their central purpose of lament, or what James Loxley has called the “narrative of loss.”94 The death of the king figures prominently in these narratives, though the eulogies had to be covert, given the risks of upholding the memory of Charles and royalists during the commonwealth. Still, funerary elegies were the most eloquent preservers (and

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manipulators) of memory, with Edward Walsingham’s tribute to the dead royalist Sir John Smith even printed to resemble the words on a gravestone, framed by columns.95 Where the bodies of the fallen were never recovered, such tombstones of words asserted the physical and spiritual presence of those who could no longer be corporally mourned from their resting place in the ground.96 The elegy gave memory to the dead in images of tears and weeping,97 of blood and a metaphoric and real woundedness. Thus would an elegy for Charles, mentioned in the previous chapter, and attributed to the Marquis of Montrose, state that it had been written “with the point of a sword,” with “blood and wounds”;98 words were said to be composed in tears but also in wounds, with some poems printed in red ink, to symbolize blood. Such descriptions appropriated the poetic traditions of an ancient linguistic heritage, but they also conveyed a sense of language as failing to convey grief and the shock of loss. Only wounds (or tears) could “write” sorrow, even if authors continued to question their adequacy for the task. “How can I,/ Who want myself, write him an Elegie?” asked one.99 The memory of such men was also manipulated to martyrological ends, their wounds becoming sacralized in the shedding of blood as the warrior renounced his life for Christian honor and the king. In one royalist report, Sir Charles Lucas is described as facing his executioners head-on, “rip[ping] open his doublet and [inviting] the soldiers to shoot”100 —a scene that recalls St Sebastian, particularly in the multitude of wounds that ensue; as if to drive the point home, the writer describes Lucas and his fellow royalist Sir George Lisle in death “as Martyrs, neare the throne of grace.”101 Blood is always central in these accounts, not only in its evocation of Christ, but in the Old Testament sense of demanding vengeance for its shedding. Puritans could certainly adhere to notions of honor as well,102 as when the parliamentarian sergeant Nehemiah Wharton wrote that “I told [my enemies] that I would either have my sword or die in the field.”103 Thomas, Lord Fairfax, conveyed his own honor and stoicism of character in writing that even though his “Body [was] so full of pain, and . . . Mind yet fuller of anxiety and trouble . . . my Spirit was nothing at all discouraged from doing that which I thought to be my Duty.”104 Though republicans preferred the panegyric over the elegiac mode in the 1640s and 1650s,105 many of their poems accorded with the elegy’s emphasis on honor: thus was the mettle of New Model Army colonel Thomas Rainsborough tested when he was said to have extracted the assassin’s sword—discharged by royalists—from his own stomach and then continued the fight; as

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one elegy concludes, “Nor would He yeeld, till in the street he dyes,/ With twice ten wounds, the Armies Sacrifice.”106 Elsewhere, Rainsborough is presented as a model of masculine fortitude and valor; mortally wounded yet calling for a sword with which to defend himself, he instead is faced with, in this case, a pistol-whipping that “[bruised] his forehead very much, and made him stagger”—though not, of course, dishonorably fall.107 If parliamentarians, like cavaliers, also emphasized honor in woundedness, it was the Puritans and Independents serving in the New Model Army who focused more intently on providence, at least in regard to wounds that were perceived as God-given rather than king-given.108 This claim should also be heavily qualified, particularly since honor and providence were not antithetical or mutually exclusive. As Alexandra Walsham has demonstrated, the idea of providence, or “the immutability of the Lord’s eternal and unchangeable decree” as well as his foreknowledge of events to come, existed for the entire nation as a cohesive force in society, regardless of ideology or political allegiance.109 Royalist memoirists or poets such as Atkyns or Cowley certainly framed descriptions of battles in the idiom of providence,110 similar to parliamentary elegists who explained the killing of Rainsborough, present at the execution of Lucas and Lisle, as providentially ordained, since “blood no doubt for blood doth cry.”111 Despite their embrace of honor when it applied, however, those who fought for parliament were far more likely than royalists to elevate the war as a spiritual struggle against God’s enemies, justify firearms through the sayings of St Paul,112 declare God himself “an excellent Man of War,” and the Old Testament “the best handbook on war.”113 Few pamphlets from the parliamentarian side are free from references to the divine will at work in the struggle. “Truly he is more then blinde which could not see God manifestly in every particular working deliverance for us,” wrote one writer, typically.114 Even military setbacks failed to shake many soldiers’ faith that God was on their side. For Cromwell and others, God’s will ensured victory on the English battlefield, as it once had Israel’s; if defeat occurred, then it was for the greater edification of the soldiers, and part of God’s larger design. Indeed, wrote one, if food and provisions were scarce, at least God “fed us with the bread of our enemies.”115 Preachers incited the troops from the sidelines, and their published sermons contributed to a discourse that imposed larger, even readymade meanings on the events at hand.116 William Dell, for example, spoke of the sufferings of the church, declaring that “the more it is

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aff licted in the f lesh, the more it thrives in the spirit.” For Dell, “this aff liction stirres us up to the exercise of our faith and prayers most fervent, till they fill the whole heavens again.”117 Dell was referring primarily to the spiritual aff liction of the church, but the language employed, borrowed from Isaiah 54, also resonated in physical terms, just as references to tempests, from verse eleven, seemed to refer to the fields of battle on which soldiers died. By the end of his exposition on Isaiah, Dell even likens verse sixteen (“Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coals in the fire”) to the artillery of battle, just as the next verse is glossed as “God blunts the edge of the weapon, and weakens the hand, and puts feare into the heart of him that useth it”—fighting words to instill courage, if not zeal, into the godly parliamentary soldier.118 The result of men heeding these words, Dell would state elsewhere, was that “I have seen more of the presence of God in [the New Model Army] then amongst any people that ever I conversed with in my life.”119 In the description of wounds, writers supportive of the parliamentarian forces, inf luenced by decades of sermons,120 combined realism with providence in a sometimes awkward hybrid rhetoric. In a wellknown letter to his brother-in-law Valentine Walton, Cromwell conveyed how the man’s son had died by cannonshot. “It brake his leg,” Cromwell wrote, in f lat-rhetoric mode; “We were necessitated to have it cut off, whereof he died.” But God’s will had determined the boy’s death and made his wounds providential, so that now “He is a glorious saint in heaven.” Indeed, wounds allowed the soldier to die the good death, in a kind of martial ars moriendi, since as he perished, his final words to Cromwell were that “God had not suffered him to be no more than the executioner of His enemies.”121 Such a statement was significantly infused with martyrological overtones, with the soldier in his last breath claiming that he had not only died for the true faith but also killed for it. Indeed, to die on the battlefield, for the ideal of the militia Christi, was, at least for the more zealous soldiers, the highest martyrdom of all; as the puritan William Gouge had once stated, “For a souldier to die in the field in a good cause, it is as for a Preacher to die in a pulpit . . . His soul shall be more than a conquerour, triumphing in heaven over all sorts of enemies.”122 Apocalyptic language was also utilized to great effect, with George Wither’s Campo Musae referencing the number of the beast, the four horses of the apocalypse, and antichrist.123 If the language was not directly borrowed from the book of Revelation and other texts, it nevertheless evoked biblical images of an earth that “wept with blood” or

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a battlefield that appeared as a “Marian Golgotha,” as death “triumphed in his colours” and “reveled in the fight,”124 leaving the soldier’s “Blood distil[ed]/ Sprinkling the Ground, and Hallowing the Hill.”125 The agricultural metaphor in the last imagery—the evocation of distilling and sprinkling—did not present war as meaningless or hopeless, but quite the contrary: blood tilled the earth to generate a new harvest, a new spiritual realm; as Christ spilled his blood sacrificially in the forgiveness of sins, so did soldiers release their own bodies in order to effect God’s larger plan of destruction and creation necessary to usher in the next age. If such accounts conveyed hope for the pending apocalypse, others borrowed from a language of biblical lamentation to present a more brutal vision of battle, as when, after the siege of Bolton, one writer described the sight of “children crying for their fathers, of women crying out for their husbands . . . the rending, tearing and turning of people naked . . . the massacring, dismembering, cutting of dying or dead bodies.”126 The reference to tearing and rending— biblical expressions of mourning127—did not simply conjoin present realties with a biblical past, but so did it connect England to Israel, particularly in the mourning, and perhaps the preordained necessity of bloodshed. As in the Old Testament, language, like the covenantal relationship between God and the Jews, was heavily connected to the land; when that land was itself presented as “wounded” or “broken,” it conveyed the sufferings of the chosen people at the hands of others (and at times of themselves), while also foretelling the imminent appearance of God, who had intervened, in accordance with his promise, in the past. In a time of war, this was both comforting as well as reaffirming of the new destiny that God’s nation was to take; as with all theodicy, while metaphorically rich laments explained and addressed suffering, grief, violence, and fidelity, they also carried the promise of divine rescue and restoration for a broken land, and the idea that woundedness of the land portended redemption for a fallen race. But if a sense of providence could comfort and motivate soldiers in the field, it also justified the inf liction of violence on others: “Cursed be he that doth the Lord’s Work negligently,” Major Thomas Harrison was quoted as saying before fatally shooting Major Robinson.128 Nehemiah Wallington himself likened one atrocity to all the “marvelous works [the Lord] hath done.”129 Of course, not all atrocities were committed by parliamentary soldiers in the name of providence. After the sack of Bolton in 1643, royalists were said to have mutilated dying or dead

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bodies, though desecrating the dead was considered dishonorable.130 But mutilating the living and the dead could also be providentially construed as an act of iconoclasm, in which the body of the victim— often opposing soldiers, many times innocent civilians—was literally cut into as one would slash at an impious object. In this, bodily mutilation was an extension of belief, and intended for specific targets. In the aftermath of Naseby, roundheads thus slashed the faces of women, marking them in a kind of perverse act of ownership, leaving their disfigurements forever visible. The fact that many victims, particularly in the Scottish campaigns, were Catholic or Irish, or that royalists were frequently perceived as papist, grounded such violence in righteous fury; as enemies of God, these victims were deserving of their wounds, just as soldiers were only following the enjoinments of a wrathful lord who sought revenge upon these present-day Amalakites. Epic Wounds For the reader to turn from the (deceptively) plain words of average eyewitnesses or providential pamphlets and enter into the epic mode is to encounter a different world, with wounds embodying central images of that difference. It was not simply the distance from battle and the inf luence of high literary conventions that imbued wounds with a different quality in the epic; John Milton never experienced battle personally, but he was well-read in ancient and more contemporary accounts and theories of war, and was inf luenced by the language of battle vividly conveyed in present-day news accounts.131 Not all writers of high literature composed from a distance, either. One figure who bridged the divide between experience and literature was George Wither, a soldier-poet who described the interchangeability of his pen and sword, his actions and his writings (“My practice never prov’d my words untrue”).132 In his lengthy poem and apologia entitled Campo Musae, Wither writes as if from the field, where “Interruptions and Confusions be,” to address his muse; but throughout he metaphorizes the process of battle, including its weaponry, as when “I made my Pray’rs my shot, Firm-faith my shield;/ My Breast-works are Good-Conscience, and the Lawes.”133 The battles themselves drip with enf lourishing rhetoric, as when he describes how “many whizzing thunder-bolts were shot:/ Our glittering swords, like f lashing lightning stroke/Each others eyes, and bloudy showers begot.”134 By the end of the poem, Wither puts down his pen to resume his fighting: “But hark! The Trumpet calls me to the

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field:/ My horses are already at the door./ Place to the Sword, my Pen, againe, must yield.”135 In this poem at least, Wither maintains a traditional stance toward the historical epic, with its elevated, teleological language depicting acts of great men in battle. But for all its continuities with past literary formulas, the genre would be thrown into a state of crisis in the 1640s, precipitated by events of an actually less-than-glorious civil or “intestine” war.136 The epic’s function, at least in the case of Virgil’s Aeneid, was ostensibly to legitimate political authority; when such authority was rendered unstable, as it was in the 1640s and 1650s, the genre itself underwent a crisis. As one writer has also put it, the reality of war’s horror combined with the artifice and self-consciousness of the style to “disable [the] epic frame.”137 Though lament for military calamities was hardly missing from the traditional epic, and in fact was central to it, the genre had also served to glorify (as well as question) qualities of heroes.138 Epic writers such as Abraham Cowley sought to follow such models, but the vicious and unnatural nature of the conf lict, and the negative outcome of the war for the royalists, only led him to abandon his effort in the end—though not without some creative results along the way. For all the generic upendings and subsequent transformations, deep continuities also existed in the language of the classical epic and the seventeenth-century equivalent, which attempted to elevate the times, though to problematic effect. War’s transcendent heroism and its crude horrors, its affirming as well as negating qualities, had long provoked ambivalence, as not even Homer fully embraced the bloody costs of war. As Rachel Bespaloff once wrote, Homer had both a “virile love of war and a virile horror of it,” and, one might add, used wounds as the corporal repository to contain that horror (and love).139 Seventeenth-century poets who aspired to the epic style emulated Homer in exploiting the emotive, imaginative, and even elegiac possibilities of the warrior’s wound, as well as battle itself, while metaphors and images in general were also freely borrowed from Homer: in his depiction of the war in heaven in book six of Paradise Lost, when Satan and his followers battle against the Almighty, Milton compares the march of his rebellious angels to the f light of birds—a trope found in Homer and Virgil.140 Similar was the comparison of Satan (and armies) to animals, with Satan described as a “prowling wolf ” ready to “seek new haunt for prey,” echoing Homer’s “ravenous wolves” who “swoop down on lambs or kids.”141 In Milton’s depiction of the supernal heavenly battle—which in many

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respects refers to the civil wars—a language of wounds also retains its steady classical allusions, with the rebel angels “mangled with ghastly wounds through plate and mail,” leaving the ground of heaven “shivered with armour strewn.”142 Like Homer’s gods, Milton’s angels, including Satan, are immaterial, even omnipotent, and therefore seemingly immune in an ultimate sense from a woundedness that portends mortality. Such apparent absurdity, in celestial spirits bleeding or bearing armor, has provoked critics to argue that Milton’s narrative and imaginative choices were inappropriate for his poem’s spiritual purposes, just as his technological update in arming Satan with artillery (or anachronistically adding cannon to the picture) was unsavory and unrealistic, or intended to be satiric, comic, metaphorical, parodic, or even critical of the epic form.143 But Homer’s gods could also bleed, though their blood was “ichor,” and their wounds quickly healed with the aid of others such as Paieon, their physician. Indeed, status as a god does not protect one from the pain that ensues from a wound, as when Hades is shot by Heracles “with a f lying arrow at Hell’s gate,” and is hurt “very badly” when the “arrow [plunges] into his shoulder muscles.”144 Though Hades, and elsewhere Ares, are restored to their previous condition, the memory of pain’s experience remains an indelible part of them, and represents the haunted aftermath of the conf lict as a whole. The inf liction of injuries on Homer’s mortals (and immortals) not only served as an expression or signature of war, but also stood as a testament to the inarticulate senselessness of battle—a theme that played especially well to later poets critical of war. The Iliad provided the ambivalent template for future epic writers in its heroic (and abject) woundings, with its myriad depictions of “man-tearing” spear thrusts (Amphiclus, Areilycus), close stabbings (Pandocus, Lysander), slashing swords (Aeneus), or thrown rocks (Hector), which penetrate thighs, hip joints, jaws, elbows, bellies, eyes, hands, and of course heads.145 Wounds literally unfasten bodies, as interior parts spill from their f leshly enclosure or become loosened from their interior positions: thus does the liver of Tros “slip out” when Achilles strikes him in the belly with his sword, or a stone hitting the forehead of Peisandrus causes his “eyes, all bloody, [to drop] in the dust at his feet.” In the case of the warrior Sarpedon, life is coequal with his injured bodily fragments, when the spear of Patroclus that assails him is withdrawn and “the innards came with it: [Patroclus] had drawn out the spear-point and the man’s life together” (16.503–505). This

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latter incident was, incidentally, not simply poetic conceit but a matter of common belief, as the soul to many ancients was thought to f ly out of a victim’s wound (or mouth, or limbs), to dwell in the house of Hades.146 What brings Homer’s depictions of bodily violence to higher levels of art and meaning, however, is the way in which wounds become integrated into the fate of characters, and defining of those characters. The aforementioned tragedy of Hector, the great Trojan prince, resides in the manner in which his body is “despoiled” as it is dragged from the back of a chariot—a catastrophic fall in which he is exposed, his head turned downward “in the dust.”147 After Achilles returns the corpse to the Trojans upon the enjoinment by the gods, Hector’s nobility, and bodily integrity, is restored when he is given the due funeral befitting a prince. Still, as mentioned earlier, Hector’s mutilations remain to haunt Aeneas and others, portending as they do the fall of Troy. The connection between character and woundedness is evident in Milton’s depiction of Satan in Paradise Lost, with Satan resembling, among other figures, Achilles in his determination to restore an honor lost to him. Satan is a figure of epic, and wounded, proportions, as Milton describes the pain of his thunder-scarred antihero who is pierced by the archangel Michael’s sword. In a language of graphic Homeric realism, Milton conveys Satan writhing, convulsing, bleeding “nectrous humour” and “first [knowing] pain” from the wound dealt him148 —even if, as Nigel Smith has put it, Milton then proceeds to “reconstitute (and reformulate) Satan’s body and knits up his wound,” leaving only a scar behind.149 That scar, however, holds a number of meanings: on one level, as with Hector, the original wounding of Satan is a kind of exposure, in this case a tearing away of the evil one’s mask in a moment when he is in fact most physically present in “gnashing for anguish,” before his “liquid texture” restores him to his former spiritual (or anti-spiritual) stature. Satan’s woundedness thus represents a halt on his power, but it is not altogether evident, as some have suggested, that all heroism then drains from him.150 Rightly or wrongly, many readers’ perceptions of Satan as heroic might in fact directly relate to his woundedness, or his status as a “Beaten Warrior” in the sense that Leonardo once meant it as he directed painters to create a figure whose brows were “raised and knit, and the skin above [his] brows furrowed with pain.”151 As James Freeman has written, “defeat, care, courage, pride, vengefulness, cruelty, remorse, passion—all announce their presence on [Satan’s]

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visage,” and while most of these qualities are manifested in facial expression, his scar remains central to his character in the process of its elevation and degradation.152 Milton differs from Homer, however, in critiquing the epic hero, or antihero, which he seems to fashion in the figure of Satan.153 For one, his Satan commits an act of theologically and even cosmically unjustifiable disobedience in rebelling against the kingdom of heaven—an act as egoistical as it is malevolent. Equally pernicious is his ability as a master dissimulator, if a convincing and eloquent one: to his troops, he speaks the language of resistance and (very un-Homeric) radical rebellion, assailing the “Tyranny of Heav’n” in an echo of contemporary radical pamphlets of Milton’s own day. But they are “ambiguous words” of a “counterfeit truth,” and shift seamlessly into royalist rhetoric and behavior when he is away from those troops, and from the necessity to captivate hearts.154 Satan’s dissimulation as well as his tyrannical ambitions thus disqualify him as a true epic hero, and might even constitute a critique on Milton’s part of the manipulated fictions of epic conventions as they apply, or no longer apply, to his own turbulent age.155 Every aspect of Satan in this sense upends or questions traditional epic form, as he uses speech and self-presentation to cover his actual aspirations to tyranny;156 in this sense, his scar also pivots in another direction, for it is not a heroic and metaphoric scar but an anti-scar, not a f leshly trace of a character’s deeds and inner greatness but itself a kind of wound-mask that covers the character’s actual malignance. It bears the heroism of an embattled warrior, an Achilles, yet it also, on another level, resembles the beast in the thirteenth chapter of Revelation, who suffers a “deadly wound” that heals yet still marks him as the agent of evil. A figure as ambiguous in his way as Milton’s Satan, and imbued with equally epic properties, is Oliver Cromwell as presented by Andrew Marvell in his “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.” Marvell was not writing in an epic mode, though he certainly used a particular language to relate contemporary events to transcendent and timeless states of being.157 The poem’s intentions in paying tribute to Cromwell have long been questioned by scholars, particularly since Marvell was a royalist, at least in inclination, before 1650.158 The ambiguity of purpose is reinforced by the portrait itself: on the one hand, Cromwell is presented as a hero in the ancient mold, an unstoppable and heroically wounding force, “breaking the clouds” through which he traverses, “burning through the air” in the name of “angry Heaven’s f lame” (lines 14, 20, 21).159 In his f light, Cromwell

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resembles, if not quite a Horatian figure, those ancient warriors who plunged through the firmament in their chariots. Yet Marvell might have been complicating his portrait of Cromwell in the same way that Milton did with Satan, by lending it irony and inverting the words of the ancients by applying them to a more questionable figure. After all, Satan in Paradise Lost also f lew through the air after his other f light—or spectacular plunge—from heaven.160 Like Julius Caesar (or Satan), Cromwell wounds the landscape, his vanquishing juggernaut through the land depicted as an act of ownership, since on every field of battle he leaves “the deepest scar.” The wounds he inf licts on the land carry his presence with them, constituting an echo of him—“war’s and fortune’s son”—left behind.161 But as Milton demonstrated with Satan, scars could be multifaceted in their meanings, both heroic and something more problematic. The landscape that Marvell described Cromwell as “wounding” or “leaving the deepest scar” was Ireland in 1650; while Marvell shed few tears for Ireland, he could have been referring as well to the scars that existed in England after Cromwell had finished with it on the battlefield, conveying the pain of “Our Civil Wars [having] lost the Civic crowne.”162 If the commonwealth was being born, then it came with blood (or Charles’s severed head) on its hands, Marvell seemed to say, just as the forgers of the new republic, in his ode—as mentioned in chapter one—begin to lay foundations in the capitol, only to encounter a “bleeding head” that causes them to “run.” Royalist and parliamentarian writers who sought to uncover the deeper meaning of wounds and violence also looked to (and reconfigured) the first-century Roman writer Lucan as a model in representing graphic violence. In his Pharsalia, which depicted the war between Caesar and the forces of the republic, Lucan’s language and violent, lurid imagery are almost as important as the poem’s political content, as it lent words to what England, like Rome, could or in fact did become in the 1640s: a broken land, literally blood-splattered. Infused with a sense of prophetic doom, the Pharsalia thus portrays a Rome that “distaines/In her own bowels her victorious swords”; wounds are central on a literal and metaphorical level throughout the poem—life-ending but also life-giving, as when the witch Erictho revives a dead soldier by opening fresh wounds on his body and filling his breast with warm blood until “the clotted gore warmed” and “new life” was thereupon granted him.163 Wounds for Lucan literally embody the reality of civil war, though they also carry metaphoric significance in conveying the political and moral consequences of a

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land that has succumbed to the evil and unnatural political condition of internal strife—a land and people virtually alienated, or fractured, from themselves. The battle scenes in Abraham Cowley’s unfinished epic poem, The Civil War, borrow heavily from Lucan in representing grisly dismemberments, gangrenous diseases, and wounds tragically dealt. Set in his own day and written at a point in the war when he thought his favored royalists to be victorious, Cowley’s poem also owed its inf luence to Virgil’s Aeneid, another poem that dealt with internecine conf lict if not outright civil war. But Cowley tended to be at a variance with Virgil in writing an epic for his time, even if he might have hoped that the Virgilian model of national (and royalist) exaltations prevailed. The confusion conveyed by Lucan was a better model for writing about the actual events of civil slaughter; even on the level of language, Cowley followed Lucan by writing in a fragmented, broken, and “wounded” voice that paralleled events in the field. What Jamie Masters has written of the Pharsalia can thus be applied to Cowley: the “paradigm . . . [of ] Lucan’s] narrative technique [is] the conf lict between the will to tell the story and the horror which shies from telling it.”164 Parliamentarian deaths may have been treated satirically in Cowley, and royalists upheld in elegiac tribute; but the carnage was also obliterating, not only of England, but of any sort of comprehensive representation of the events at hand.165 Cowley evokes Lucan (and Homer) in describing the madness and “clouds of pale Diseases” into which the country descends, the “rage” by which England “from itself divides” (II, 160, I, 1). But wounds most acutely enact the fierceness of this division. Cowley uses Lucan to expand upon his images; where Lucan describes how the centurion Saeva fought off Pompey’s assault on the ramparts when he “sliced off [the besiegers’] hands with his sword,” Cowley takes the image farther, likening the besieging royalists to Pompey’s army and the parliamentarians to Caesar’s as Lucan described them: in attempting to scale the walls of Lichfield, royalists “leave their parted hands on th’highest wall,/ The joints hold fast a while, then quake, and fall.”166 Wounded, severed limbs become in Cowley’s treatment a more animated if ghoulish embodiment of determination, while also revealing dishonorable behavior on the opposing side, as it is “Driven on by Ill” (II, 132). The language used to describe the battle of Newbury also echoes Lucan’s treatment of Pharsalia: war and woundedness quite literally bleed into the sky and the land, as when Lucan writes of the air “woven with weapons,”

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and Cowley conveys the neighs of horses, groans of men, and fire of cannons mingling in the “trembling aire.” Wounds are finally both collective and individual, with Lucan describing how “all was slaughter and groaning,/ As from one vast throat,” and Cowley dislocates injury from its base in individual suffering to write that “Noe place but saw some unexpected wound/ Noe part of Man but some wild bullet found.”167 Cowley’s depiction of the inconclusive battle of Newbury was evocative of Lucan, but it was also based upon sources such as Mercurius Aulicus, the official and vividly written royalist news journal published in Oxford. Though he probably did not witness battles firsthand,168 Cowley’s reading of the news accounts and the loss of men with whom he had been on close terms provided him with dramatic portraits of suffering and a picture of war’s ruinousness that provided the background, and tension, to the rhetoric he was adopting. As Henry Power has suggested, his failure to reconcile the reality and the rhetoric becomes evident in the Virgilian half-lines, or hemistiches, he adopts;169 thus does he write in honor of his fallen warriors, “Godolphin thee, thee Greenvill I’de rehearse/ But teares break off my verse.” Those hemistiches, however, are themselves broken, injured sentences—the equivalent of severed limbs in their incompleteness, their division from any larger unitary body. Indeed, in the end, Cowley justified his reason for refuting his poem by stating that “I would have accounted it no less unlawful to rip up old wounds than to give new ones.”170 Writers such as Milton and Cowley were pushed in the direction of their ancient predecessors not only on a formal level, but in conveying, however indirectly, what seemed to be the unprecedented events at hand. The depiction of wounds and pain in a convincing manner, never an easy task, was available to them through the linguistic descriptive models of Lucan and Homer, which further allowed them to connect their works to a legitimate and heroic literary tradition. But emulation was also complicated by the need to advance or at least adopt the epic form to suit the more problematic present times, in politics as well as battle. The seditions, rebellions, anarchy, and warfare that shaped Cowley and Milton did not exactly accord with a straight epic form; while much of the Homeric, Virgilian, or Lucanic language remained, and in fact was directly alluded to, it was imbued with ambiguity and new creative permutations that allowed writers to capture the times, however incompletely. The representation of wounds was of a piece with this linguistic change: in Milton,

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Satan’s wounds obfuscate his intentions at the same time that they openly display the taint of evil. For Cowley, the language of wounds directly evokes Lucan at the same time that those wounds lead nowhere, least of all to an epic resolution. Cowley could attempt to extract glory from his heroes’ wounds, to sheathe his men in the mantle of the romantic loser. But this was elegy, not epic, even if elegy was contained within the epic. The battle of Newbury was no Pharsalia, as it did not carry the latter’s historic decisiveness, except to represent a very bad turn of fortune for the king. Acknowledging this, Cowley put aside his epic in late 1643. The Civil War was not the book he had intended, or wished, to write. “Seam’d with Scars” Long after the war had ended in 1649, its battles continued to live on in the many blind, maimed, and limbless veterans who roamed the landscape of England bearing their scars upon them. These were not the romantic cavaliers of Macaulay’s imagination, but diminished individuals whose heroic wounds were now transformed into a reminder and, for others, a nuisance. The visibility of such men, or their wounds, compelled churchwardens to provide parish relief, justices of the peace to offer assistance, or the government to release pensions for those who petitioned or those who died, leaving destitute widows and families behind.171 National military hospitals for maimed soldiers were also established later in the century in Chelsea and Greenwich, even if the results, as Geoffrey Hudson has argued, were an increased regulation over the bodies of veterans—including, one might add, “their scarred disabilities.”172 It is in the testimonies that one witnesses the crippled aftermath of the war: Thomas Pritchard thus describes himself as “poor maimed soldier under Cap. Hopkins, shot in the leg at Edgehill,” who now “can’t use it, and prays for almsman place at Christchurch, Off ”; elsewhere, Captain Floyd of Colonel Gerrard’s regiment was “shot in the knee and lost the whole limb.” In later years, Charles II was greeted with petitions, now by ex-cavaliers, who were given aid and perhaps the healing royal touch;173 as one royalist veteran stated in a petition, “the times altering, your petitioners pension hath been kept from him full fourteen years.”174 Whether the soldier had been royalist or roundhead, the petitions brought forward by these men constitute the real anti-epic in every sense of the term, just as they condense the war

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memoir—and the soldier’s wounds—into a few plaintive and pleading sentences. For all their pathos, those men who had served in “that bloody fight” or the “unhappy wars” were at least granted some assistance through their petitions.175 Less fortunate were those with few means available to them in finding compensation for their incapacitations. While aid policies improved somewhat in the Restoration,176 at least for royalist soldiers, neglect was still prevalent, and left some with no alternatives except to beg. Many destitute ex-soldiers, particularly those without pensions, bore little more than the evidence of their damaged bodies and a request to passersby for alms. As one ballad puts it, sung from the viewpoint of a beggar, I pray your worship, think on me, That am what I do seeme to be, No rooking rascall, nor no cheat, But a souldier every way compleat: I have wounds to show That prove it so, Then courteous good sir, ease my woe, And I for you will pray . . . That your substance never may decay.177 For the fictional balladeer, commodified scars offered confirmation in the marketplace of alms, proof that money spent would go to a recipient who was worthy by dint of his evident disability. In this sense, even the inarticulate beggar, however involuntarily, represented his wounds, this time as one facet in a kind of gift exchange that had the capability of provoking an emotional response of pity, suspicion, or anger.178 Scars may have been signifiers in a visual and cultural discourse, records of war-making and evidence of the crippled aftermath of those wars; but for those who did not wish to remember the war, or to give aid to its survivors, such veterans also represented a rupture to and in society when they were perceived as constituting a drain to that society. The status of beggars who were veterans was somewhat unclear in the hierarchy of the poor as it had been traditionally laid out and reconfirmed in the late sixteenth-century relief legislation of Elizabeth, with the “worthy poor” constituting widows, orphans, the elderly, or those who had succumbed to illness or accident.179 It has been argued that the wounded soldier transcended these categories, as he was given government aid on the basis of membership in

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a “community of honour,” with “hospitality extended to him in a way reminiscent of traditional noble hospitality.”180 Still, veterans— particularly those of a lower status—could easily slip into the category of the “unworthy poor” consisting of idlers and vagrants who were strangers to the region they now dwelled in, however transiently. Veterans who found themselves vagrant thus relied upon their wounds as the sole currency with which they could be brought over to the category of worthiness. While this hardly guaranteed aid, wounds— even forged wounds181—could therefore serve to elevate one, however small the elevation, in the social hierarchy. But perceptions by outsiders of the soldier’s scars depended on the status of the man who bore them. Pity or contempt could redound upon the beggar, or the petitioner; by contrast, the scarred cavalier in the time of Charles II was afforded more respect, imbued as he or his disability was with qualities of fidelity and courage. This was of a piece with the culture: during the Restoration, cavalier mythology served, if not always successfully, to bolster the conservative values of Anglicanism, the monarchy, hierarchy, and tradition, particularly when some of those values were under strain. Of course, the mythology of the cavalier, like the Restoration itself, was not without its deep complications, including an ambivalence toward the royalist soldier’s place in the scheme of a brutal war. Writing in the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe would convey this irresolution in his fictional Memoirs of a Cavalier, which emphasized the role that fear and panic played in battle, and critiqued unified narratives of glory and honor.182 But the veteran who was known to have born his scars as a badge of his service to king and country was also reinforcing the nation undergoing reintegration and consolidation. Like the triumphal arches and monuments that were erected in the period, the ex-cavalier’s scars thus served as a material artifact of remembrance and national promotion that idealized what was lost, and now restored. For beggars and petitioners who could not articulate the story of their own experience in battle, their bodies also offered a material artifact of memorialization, a means in which England could remember the past. Other forums of memory also existed; wounded ghosts, as mentioned, might have been fated to forever remain in a state of suspension, or f lux, as they wandered legless through the charred battlefields or continued to fight sky battles in the night. But their very presence, and the wounds that individuated them, were a consolation as well, reminding survivors that they were still present, and not vanished in a mass grave like so many others.

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Veterans of the wars also perceived their scars not only as a f leshly vehicle of remembrance but as visible marks intimately connected with geography. One veteran, petitioning for relief during the Restoration, reported that he was dealt not only a sword wound, but “one [gun] shott through the hand . . . one . . . through the Legg at Kidlington . . . one wound in the knee at Banbury, one wounde in the left Arme in Cornwall . . . one great cutt with a sword in the handrist att the taking [of ] Bristoll . . . [and] a great blow with a musket in the mouth which beate out almost all his teeth before, besides the cutting of his Lippes att the sidge at Reading.”183 Though the petitioner was not consciously constructing a literary self-fashioning, but instead pleading for royal aid after the war, his rhetoric nevertheless was a self-representation in which the war’s campaigns were literally tracked on his body—the wounded knee from Banbury, the musket assault in Bristol. His body is thus imbued with cartographical wounds, each city and its attendant battle mapped on his injured f lesh, revealing his own individual, bloody trajectory through the war. But he also transcends his own particularity by presenting his geographic wounds as an accumulation of cities and battles, rendering his body as England corporally unified, or reconstituted through the testaments of his wounds. Not only was his identity thus enjoined to a larger national identity, but so was he worthy of aid in a time when new notions of the British nation were being promoted and consolidated.184 Memory was central to the consolidation of national identity, but it was not clear that scars, once again, always served as an entirely positive vehicle of remembrance.185 Henry V (or rather, Shakespeare) had once enjoined his soldiers that any man who fought at Agincourt would one day “strip his sleeve and show his scars./ And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’ ” But Edgehill was not Agincourt, and romanticized cavaliers notwithstanding, personal pride for a glorious victory was not always evident when those “glorious victories” referred to a civil carnage best left forgotten. Most veterans of those wars remained silent, and not because they were illiterate; in such silence, only their scars continued to insistently “speak” the traces of battle, whether in the pain they extracted or in the blemishes of bodily remembrance, with battered f lesh the only monument left, after all else—and everything the soldier once was—had passed away. They represented the temporal and corporal journey his body had taken, the boundary that had been crossed from civilian to soldier,186 and from soldier to wounded veteran: all facets of his life were conveyed on his f lesh, even his f lesh in regained health, since his scar implicitly evoked the moment when

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those once-pristine barriers were sundered. For all the representations and interpretations that could be projected onto these “abominations on the body,”187 however, the scarred soldier could also simply be abject in his “dumb wounds,” which marked not a turn in his life but an end to it. “In red-coated attire I wander up and down,” one fictional, scarred veteran-balladeer of those wars plaintively sang. “Alas, poor souldier, whither wilt thou march?”188


CH A P T E R

FOU R

The Lesions of Love

The symbolically rich imagery of wounds was fitting for descriptions of civil strife, legal crisis, or war, and therefore became something of a linguistic commonplace in various modes of mid-century writing. England was broken, its earth literally wounded, its soldiers injured, its identity reconfigured to a more fractured (if perhaps redeemable) condition. But on a more personal level, the image of woundedness could be applied no less fervently to what anthropologists call the “emotional universe” of the individual, with its myriad psychological conditions that threatened to disrupt that universe with their immoderate power.1 If personal identity was defined, like the state and the law, by its boundaries, then it could just as easily be upended by incursions on those boundaries. More precisely, it was a passion such as love, sorrow, jealousy, or hatred that internally and externally dealt such damage to the individual’s psychological integrity, as it “wounded” reason, “lashed” the conscience, or “broke” the heart of the individual relegated to a state of high, and fragile, extremity. This chapter will explore how one emotion, love, was represented in poetry, treatises, and medical writings as central to yet also disruptive of the human condition, particularly as it was philosophically defined and subjected to the historical conditions of the mid-seventeenth century. While love, or specifically erotic, wounding love, may stand at the extreme end of the emotional spectrum, it nevertheless reveals the extent to which seventeenth-century philosophical, religious, and literary discourses held deep continuities with past representations while also forging a new terrain of language and meaning. Various groups

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of the time, from cavaliers to puritans, held their own distinct notions of love, while Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621 with final revisions in 1640, found in the subject of love a pivot around which to attach his many philosophical and psychological ruminations. In all cases, treatments of love belonged to their historical moment, with the metaphor of the injurious, fragmented self serving to delineate the manner in which contemporaries worked off their Christian or classical inheritance from within a larger contemporary context of instability. Indeed, to speak of “seditious” or “divisive” passions, or “civil disorders” of the soul held more resonance during and after the civil war; as Angus Gowland has written, “discourses on the passions and on melancholy served as outlets for anxieties that were in many cases shaped, and in some cases provoked, by the consciousness of those conf licts.”2 Anthony Low has argued that treatment of a love that was both secular and sacred underwent profound changes beginning with Sidney and extending through Donne and Milton; though biblical and classical references continued to pervade the language of love, notions of Petrarchan desire, for example—in which love is suffered from a distance—gave way to more privatized, mutual, and transactional treatments that ref lected, in the case of Thomas Carew, “the new economic reality just coming to the fore in England’s agricultural marketplace.” If Donne “invented” or at least uniquely promulgated the idealized, romantic union of the “loving couple,” Carew “validate[d] the more pragmatic, market-driven notion of the individual lover who serves his (or her) own freedom and happiness by replacing courtly loyalty with libertine mobility.”3 Shaped by personal conf lict and political and religious (and economic) circumstance, such poets thus conveyed their vision of love; but in the seventeenth century, love, or its grim affiliate love melancholy, was also approached and pathologized in new ways, necessitating treatment advocated by writers inf luenced by emerging medical understandings. The idea not only of love but love as a metaphoric and sometimes literally wounding force extended back through Plato, Ovid, and other ancients; seventeenth-century poets or philosophers took up the image, in which love caused and produced “wounds” to the self or soul, dissolving boundaries in the process. As will be seen, midseventeenth-century writers could also convey benevolent or sacred representations of love. But love was at the same time a dangerous

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and ensnaring (or, in the case of mystical love, transcendent) force of wounding, a perpetual grief for all its painful pleasures. Taking many of their cues from Lucretius—whose De Rerum Natura was, in one edition, translated by the puritan Lucy Hutchinson in the 1650s4 — writers described love as gushing forth from a wound, or lovers as wounded and stricken, leaving each other bloodied and ravenous, or wasted away in punishment or passion. Even worse, if the love was unrequited—and according to the physician Richard Napier’s midcentury casebooks, many patients fell under that category5 —then lovers were reduced to a Tantalus-like state, driven insane by their hunger for the insubstantial and unattainable. Whatever their nature, most discourses tended to share in common a proclivity to speak of the self, however perceived, as subject in love to alienation, breakage, sudden incursion, and irreparable damage. Such terminology assumes the interruption of what had once been a unified and integral, if not quite pure and sinless, entity of the self. Once that self had been broken, however, reassemblage was as impossible as it would have been to return to Eden after the Fall. In some cases the self could live on and the wound could “heal,” albeit in reconstituted, if perennially disappointed, circumstances. But in other cases, the result of these breakages to the self (or soul, or heart) was despondency and sometimes suicide, or “love madness,” which preoccupied seventeenthcentury medical, religious, and literary authors to an inordinate degree. If metaphor provides “an intensity of awareness” and a “coherent vision of all reality” by applying sensory and emotional images to otherwise inexplicable psychological events in one’s life,6 then wounds as a metaphor of injured love transformed understandings of the self in love during a time of creative and philosophical change. The Philosophy of Love When seventeenth-century writers referred to love (as well as despair, fear, hate, or sadness), it was as a “passion” or “affection” rather than an emotion, a word not coined until 1660.7 Love, however, tended to take precedence in its power, at least in poetic imaginations. Abraham Cowley, for example, listed his freedom from “Hate, Fear, Anger and Envy/ And all the Passions else that be,” only to find himself subject to the “Tyrant” of love.8 Of course, there were many different types of love, even if the same metaphors tended to accrue to them.

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Contemporary writers drew on ancient traditions in describing these different types, and in framing love with particular yet seemingly timeless significances. In his classifications of the emotions, Aristotle included varieties of love, though he had relatively little to say about erotic love;9 more inf luentially to the Caroline poets, Plato, on the other hand, connected eros, and the erotic, to a larger transcendent vision of the divine, though he advocated a fully non-corporal kind of love, with “common “ love, dominated by sexual considerations, to be scorned.10 Even Aristotle and Plato, however, could hold ambivalent and contradictory, or at least darker, ideas about an emotion at once pleasurable and madness-inducing, benevolent and destructive—all of which extended into the mid-seventeenth century. The negative qualities were expressed vividly, with eros itself a Greek term synonymous with “want” or “lack.”11 In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes thus recounts an originary wounding myth in which human beings, conjoined as one, were punished for their ambition to reach the heights of Olympus by having to suffer the fate of being severed in two. As a result of being “cut in half like a f latfish,” according to Aristophanes, “each of us is looking for his own matching half.”12 Ovid, who held considerable inf luence in early modern conceptions of gender, sexuality, and the body, as well as love,13 believed for his part that “Cupid wounds my heart with his arrows”; but “still he is only a boy, tender and easily swayed,” and love will thus “yield to me.”14 (At the same time, in his Remedies for Love, Ovid states that not Cupid but “Mine is the hand that will bring the wounds,” as well as “the cure for the wound”).15 Cupid’s arrow, however, was so terrifying not simply for its power, but for the fact that Cupid was himself blind and his targets therefore arbitrary: one did not know whether the attack would come one’s way, or with whom one would be conjoined in torment. Cupid, in Ovidian form, would continue on as one of the more prevalent devices in representing the source of blind onslaught, with William Drage writing in the later seventeenth century that “Some call it [love], the nobleman’s madness, but poor are struck with cupid’s dart as well as rich.”16 To be so wounded by love was therefore not usually a good thing, even if such wounding was referred to in a religious sense, and even beckoned. The internal opening—usually the opening of the heart— that attended a wounding created and increased desire, which could either fall under Augustine’s distinction of caritas, defined as the love of God “for His own sake and one’s self and one’s neighbor for the sake of

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God,” or cupidity, understood as “enjoying one’s self, one’s neighbor, and any creature without reference to God.”17 The latter would inevitably lead to physical, mental, and spiritual disorder, based as the love had been on carnality, lust, and other f leeting and ultimately unsatisfied desires. Still, as Robert Burton concluded pessimistically, “human [and] divine laws, precepts, exhortations, fear of God and man, fair, foul means, fame, fortunes, shame, disgrace, honor, cannot oppose, stave off, or withstand the fury of [carnal love],” just as “No cord nor cable can so forcibly draw, or hold so fast, as love can do with a twined thread.”18 Writers in the seventeenth century continued to describe love as at once idealized and earthy, redemptive and destroying. In the 1630s, the courtly culture of Charles and his wife Henrietta Maria advanced eros as a dimension of neoplatonic love, which ascribed to a non-corporal love the true essence or form of virtue.19 As Kevin Sharpe has pointed out, such a doctrine of love was upheld as a means in which to regulate appetites at court, and to advance a larger program of political rule and philosophical harmony. In this sense, “love expressed the perfection of nature and man’s nature,” as it constituted the force “that held the entire universe in cohesion and order,”20 with the king serving as an essential component, often as the “soul,” in that order. Of course, the possibility of injury or disorder to that love-cosmos was possible and acknowledged; but that was not part of the ideal as it was expressed or resolved in masques and court poetry. A somewhat typical offering was Ben Jonson’s paired masques entitled Love’s Triumph and Chloridia, with the king appearing in the former and the queen and her ladies-in-waiting in the latter. As Erica Veevers has written, the neoplatonic masque, including Jonson’s, was “built on a structure of complementary opposites personifying the masculine and feminine principles of the universe.” If the masculine embodies power, the feminine, according to Veevers, at least “brings [to the opposition] the beauty and variety which belongs to the universal order, as ineluctably as the beauty and variety of the seasons and elements belong to the natural order.”21 Still, an uneasy relationship existed between ideals of neoplatonism and the chaotic potentiality of the passions to disrupt those ideals, as when early on in Love’s Triumph, twelve “depraved lovers” dance a “distracted comedy of love . . . in the scenical persons and habits of the four prime European nations.” Such figures, Jonson wrote, “neither knew the name, or nature, of love rightly, yet boasted themselves his followers, when they were fitter to be called his furies; their whole life being a continued vertigo, or rather a torture on the

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wheel of love, than a motion either of order or nature.” The “furies,” appearing without dialogue, in the end function in part to reinforce the ideals expressed in the masque, particularly as “such monsters [must be driven] from the labyrinth of love,” in order to uphold the genuine, courtly vision of a measured, harmonious eros.22 In addition to neoplatonism, neo-stoicism was also imported into the court of Henrietta Maria, even if Erasmus once described the stoic man who avoided the emotions, and above all eros, as “no more moved by love or pity than a chunk of f lint.”23 But for many, the philosophy of neo-stoicism, which had already prevailed for a time in England, became particularly resonant in the strife-ridden conf licts of the 1640s and after. Borrowing from Lipsius, Marvell thus wrote of a “delicious solitude,” but one that also carried evidence of “Fond lovers, cruel as their f lame,” in names of the beloved scratched on trees; but “Fair Trees! Where s’eer your barks I wound,/ No name shall but your own be found.” Love is thus experienced at a distance, in trees wounded by evidence of passionate love, though Marvell himself will maintain a watchful distance, honoring the trees for their own, not others’, names. The ongoing fashion in neo-stoicism also presented reason as a standard by which the passions, including love, could be prevented from encroaching upon the heart or self. The idea of love as a wounding force played a role in this philosophical scheme, as it was perceived to be a particularly distressing passion that had to be overcome by barricading the self with the defense of rational indifference. In accordance with the attempt by neo-stoics to fuse ancient stoicism with Christianity, love itself was not denied if it was channeled towards God and (Christian) virtue. But the stoic’s attempt to define himself by his impermeability or inability to be wounded also implicitly accepted and even welcomed the potential wounding force of passions as necessary in order for him to exert his will and maintain that impermeability. As Seneca had put it, “[In] order that the very injury might prove useful to him, he does not draw back from collisions with circumstances or other people. In this way he makes trial of himself and tests his virtue.” “I do not say that the wise man does not feel these [emotions], for we do not ascribe to him the hardness of stone or iron,” he continued, but “there is no virtue but is conscious of its own endurance.” 24 If disruptive passions, including their wounding results, did not exist, then the stoic would similarly be denied his identity in countering them with the shield of his constancy.

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Stoics themselves seemed to acknowledge the precarious woundability that their selves could be subject to if they did not exert recto ratio, or “right reason,” in their practice. Lipsius himself had stated that he embraced reason, constancy, and God in order to “[guard] and fence against all external things” and to “bring in subjection this broken and distressed mind of mine.”25 In the early seventeenth century, the Anglican Joseph Hall, known as the “English Seneca” for his writings, sermons, and general dissemination of neo-stoic ideas, also conveyed a sense of fragility when he compared himself to the ancient stoics and “blushed for shame” and envy at their resolution in comparison to the “faintheartedness in myself at the first conceit of death.”26 Neostoicism thus enjoyed popularity in the early century, but as Marvell demonstrated, it continued to persist through the civil war years and after, its philosophy of constancy, fortitude, and patience appealing to individuals living in a religiously and politically turbulent period that appeared to resemble first-century Rome. In this sense, reason was, like honor, a social as well as personal quality, for it located the individual in a world of erupting passions that were manifested in religious and political turmoil. Still, the personal remained paramount, with Jeremy Taylor, in his Holy Living and Holy Dying of 1650 and 1651, continuing aspects of the neo-stoic tradition by decrying the individual who neglects his reason and therefore opens himself up to the possibility of being wounded by passion. Taylor, however, also acknowledged the allurements of such wounds, imagined as sins; but it is wicked men who give themselves over “to the Devil, to a passion, and to an imperious woman,”27 all of whom reign down the idol eros on him. Love “is the greatest thing that God can give,” he wrote elsewhere; but “love to sin . . . makes a man sin against his own reason.” Love of God, on the other hand, allows the individual to pass “from passion to reason,” and to thereby avoid the despair that can ensue.28 Royalist poets of the 1630s such as William Davenant, Thomas Carew, and John Suckling found room within such a neoplatonic (if not neo-stoic) culture to criticize its conventions, particularly when those conventions spurned the worldly and sensual aspects of love.29 While unbridled passions and appetites were not to be condoned, the denial of them altogether—in favor of a “Love abstracted from all corporal gross impressions”30 —constituted a rejection of man’s integrative self in all its earthly and spiritual manifestations.31 True neoplatonism, of course, did not necessarily deny these earthly aspects of love, as the metaphysical poets, and Donne in particular, sought to follow some of

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its precepts in forging connections between physical and divine beauty, with a poem such as “The Canonization” bringing sexuality into play. Donne envisioned love in particularly physicalized forms, even if he also conveyed a reality that platonic love by definition excluded: love’s transience, and decay.32 The neoplatonism as it was expressed at court, with its emphasis on chaste marriage or nonphysical, stoic love between courtly friends, denigrated these bodily dimensions in favor of ethereal spirituality, particularly in conveying the ideals of Caroline womanhood.33 The goal in such a universe was for lovers, in other words, to “converse [their] Purer Souls” without the impediments of carnal considerations.34 But, again, there were critics, even within the court. In plays such as The Platonic Lovers (1636), William Davenant thus produced a satiric critique of platonic love—at least as expressed at court—and, even more, of individuals who hypocritically and snobbishly assumed the fashionable pretense of that form of behavior and morals.35 In the characters of Theander and Eurithea—the platonic lovers of the title—love is chaste, courtly, and intellectual, until “natural” or physical and sexual love is restored by means of a medicinal cure (and by the “husband’s government”).36 Davenant’s own ideal was the fusion of the sensual and the non-corporal through the institution of marriage, an entity that represented for him not merely the conjoinment of the two natures of love, the spiritual and the sensual, but a higher conciliation that brought out the best in the individuals who embarked upon love correctly.37 If the wounding, raging passions of love threatened to infringe on the individual’s soul and reason, then marriage was a fortress that could keep it at bay. Writing during and after the war and commenting upon Davenant, Hobbes disliked idealizing neoplatonism (and neo-stoicism), but he also presented a critique of the passions, including love, framing them in a language of debilitation and woundedness, with imagination— intimately commingled with the passions—dominating his nasty and brutish state of nature. On the one hand, passions were necessary, for without passion a man is “indifferent; though he may be so farre a good man, as to be free from giving offense; yet he cannot possibly have either a great Fancy, or much Judgment.”38 Indeed, in countering the stoics, he wrote that “there is no such thing as perpetuall Tranquility of mind, while we live here; because Life itselfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.”39 Passions give rise to political action for Hobbes, fear (and love) being the basis for the social contract. But passions such as desire also disturb civil order, induce a drive to secure

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power and self-preservation, reinforce self-love, and as such stand as the source of conf lict. If the unbounded potentiality of eros resulted in continued chaos, then regulation necessitated that it be replaced by the contract.40 In his early work that attempted to criticize or at least redefine the romance, Hobbes further likened love to an abuse of the imagination that led to rivalrous madness and a tendency toward violent death in the form of dueling. Thus he would condemn “impenetrable Armors, Inchanted Castles, invulnerable bodies, Iron men, f lying horses, and a thousand other such things, which are easily feigned by them that dare.”41 Despite the (sarcastic) “invulnerable bodies,” wounding and death were in this sense an extension, or expression, of passion. “The great theme of poets,” love was in Hobbes’ mechanistic treatment what one writer has described as a “movement or inclination of a subject toward what it takes to be an object,”42 and resulted in a desire to master as well as imitate others, often to severely detrimental effect. Similarly, vainglory was likened in Hobbes to a kind of egotism that in the romance led to disastrous consequences, such as the violence of the duel; at the same time, self-love—to paraphrase Joseph Butler, was also “the general desire that man hath of his own happiness, or pleasure,” and as such was the basis for all action.43 An expression of man’s drive for self-preservation, the “fundamental law of nature,” love was also the basis for conf lict; a social emotion, it promoted self-division. Hobbes was responding in part—and favorably—to Davenant, who, as mentioned, praised and attempted to recuperate for love a sense of decency and moderation. By the late 1640s, Davenant found himself exiled in Paris and disordered by the wars, which compelled him to write Gondibert, a heroic epic that describes the life of the king of the Lombards. Containing allusions to contemporary figures,44 Gondibert advances a notion of love that exalts virtue and unites the soul and body; properly constituted, love may govern the passions, though the passions could still erupt if not properly restrained. But in presenting an amatory golden means, and extolling a chaste and moderate love, Davenant also utilized a language of violence at times in describing the manner in which the hero, Gondibert, falls in love with Birtha. Already wounded in battle, Gondibert is wounded again when he beholds the maiden (“In these old wounds, worse wounds from him endures”); though the love is chaste, it is also presented with earthly metaphor, just as she remains innocent even though “The wounds she gave, as from those from Love she took.” Love is a force that does not emanate

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from her, but rather from a higher being, as when “Love lifts high each secret Shaft he drew.” The metaphor of love as an intruder—before a wounder—is continued when Davenant likens it to a lodger “Who climbes to windowes, when we shut the Dore;/ And enter’d, never lets the Master rest” (and she too “feeles the stealth” of the robber). Now stricken twice, Gondibert’s war wounds are eventually “healthful grown,” but “To cure Love’s wounds,” he must “[seek] Birtha where she walks,”45 as if his amorous wounds can only be healed by returning to their originary cause, or source. Puritans also critiqued the love propounded at Henrietta’s court, even if they appeared to share many of the same chaste and non-corporal ideals as the neoplatonists.46 But in contrast to court culture, puritans were also wary of the power of the beautiful image, and in some cases expressed their confrontation with such idolatry by indulging in iconoclastic acts of destruction—or wounding the object that threatened to wound the soul.47 Yet while paintings and glittering crucifixes might have seemed objects of popery and idolatry, to destroy objects, however theologically correct it might have been, was to also acknowledge the power of eyes to be seduced, and of beauty to wound. In the 1640s, the target of one group’s iconoclastic fury was, fittingly enough, Henrietta Maria’s chapel. The world of order and vision of love so preserved within, especially in material forms of objects and paintings, was confronted, and indeed injured and destroyed, by what many called the base appetites that drove on the mob; for the mob, on the other hand—often simply a few parliamentarians accompanied by soldiers—the destruction of paintings and altarpieces could be interpreted as not only an attack on “diabolical” popery, but beyond that an attack on the Queen’s vision of love, for which her religion, as Erica Veevers has pointed out, was inextricably linked.48 Designed by Inigo Jones, the chapel and its objects were destroyed with a significant degree of violence, of smashing, defiling, breaking and burning; but the intensity of the destruction was, once again, an implicit recognition on the part of puritans of the power and life that resided in those objects, and which had to be destroyed to appease God, particularly at one moment, in 1643, when the outcome of the war appeared to be headed in the royalists’ direction.49 The Queen’s neoplatonic ideal of love, as mentioned, also repudiated the senses (if not beautiful objects) as obstructive in attaining the transcendent beauty of forms, or essences. But for puritans, perverted love in the form of “spiritual adultery” ensued from the

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worship of images, and, like all adultery, wounded and incapacitated the love that could only be known in true faith. A more prevalent image than woundedness was utilized in descriptions of the idolator as polluting, as he bowed to “filthy objects in pictures” and the like, thus “corrupting” his nature.50 In this sense, Henrietta Maria’s chapel—or the physicalized “beauty of holiness” advocated by men such as Archbishop Laud—were hives of corrosive seduction, leaving the spectator dangerously vulnerable to the devilish incursions brought about by sight. In the mid-century years, it was logical that a critique of the king would thus include the neoplatonic (if not neo-stoic) values that he upheld and represented, which encompassed notions of love as a metaphor and form of political obligation, among other traits. But the fragmentation that typified the years of the civil war, including its literature, also generated a further questioning of the values in which love, and especially erotic love, were so bound up with visions of an insubstantial cosmic order where eros served as the binding force and the king fashioned himself as both its recipient and central bequeather. Such love, despite its presentation (or containment) in masques and other forums, was thus fragile, breakable, and woundable—as the very execution of Charles himself demonstrated. Not only did the king’s death take his (and his queen’s) vision of love down with it, but so did it leave royalist poets to reconfigure what love meant in an altogether more melancholic and loss-imbued age. Love in a “Verseless Age” If the element of strife in love was not new to the age, one of the more acute expressions of a wounding eros occurred in royalist writings of the later 1640s and 1650s when poets attempted to adjust to an atmosphere of political disfavor, military loss, and internal or external exile. On one level, the death of Charles, again, represented the decline of the cult of love that he (and his wife) encouraged, and with it the harmonious visions of eros that were of a piece with a larger transcendent framework of order and a now extinct (or exiled) court. But writing about love, and particularly its more turbulent forms, also allowed royalist writers to work within the bounds of censorship and other restrictions by exploring a “safe” subject that could allude at the same time to more dangerous concerns and continued affinities.51

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The difficult realities of their lives in “the untunable Times” after the war52 compelled many royalist writers to embrace a life of retirement or at least an internally oriented, self-imposed quietude, which, in James Loxley’s words, was “celebrated as a form of security against external threats and an opportunity for meditation.”53 Alexander Brome, utilizing common metaphorical imagery, described the times as “full of Tempests and Whirlewinds . . . you were like one passing through a boisterous working Frete, having on the Star-board side dangerous Rocks and Craggs, and on the Larboard, ill-favour’d Shelfs of Quicksands.”54 In reaction to such strife, Mildmay Fane wrote, “But full contented with my owne,/ I let all other things alone,” adding, “Which better to enjoy ‘thout strife,/ I settle to a Countrey life.”55 An art that conveyed, in Robert Herrick’s words, “Brooks . . . Blossomes, Birds and Bowers”56 offered refuge against the incursions of such turbulence;57 yet as Laura Lunger Knoppers has pointed out, the celebration of wine, women, song, and retirement also “played an oppositional role in the English republic, helping to keep a royalist ethos alive,” particularly in continued professions, however veiled, of loyalty to the king, or his heir.58 Certainly the hardship faced by such poets was real: Fane himself, after serving in Charles’s army, was imprisoned for some months in the Tower, after which he was allowed to retire; Robert Herrick, who managed to publish his 1200-poem Hesperides in 1648, was sequestered and then expelled from his position as Dean Prior in Exeter, in 1646–1647. Richard Lovelace was himself imprisoned and similarly sequestered in 1648, and while the charges against him involved his holding “seditious papers,” soldiers who apprehended him might have also seized his goods in the process.59 Described as having sunk into melancholy after his release from prison in 1649, Lovelace died in relative obscurity and poverty nine years later.60 Edmund Waller found himself placed on trial for high treason, after which he was fined and exiled overseas, only to return in 1652, while John Suckling ended his life exiled in Europe, crushed by debt, rather than fulfilling his (selfcreated) persona as the ideal cavalier. The deaths not only of Charles but of “heroic” royalists such as Henry Hastings called on such writers to perfect the expression of loss (and love) through elegy and other forms of writing.61 Moreover, for all their vaunted celebratory verse, melancholy infused their existence, and was reinforced by the inf luence of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which appeared to articulate the condition that many of them experienced or perceived in that period. While their verse

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seemed to ref lect an escape from melancholy through mistresses or nature, melancholy’s presence nevertheless was palpable when writers asked, in the face of defeat, “For what is left to Sing, our Glorie’s gon,/ Our loves are Lost, or not worth thinking on.”62 The first published newspaper after defeat in 1647 was Mercurius Melancholius, written by a man who had “[come] forth from my sad and Loathsome cell”; Francis Wortley prefaced one of his own works by stating that his “fruits of Phansie” distracted him from “the melancholy thoughts of my imprisonment.”63 Withdrawal, even into melancholy, was a heavily qualified term, and many elements of the civil war crept into their poetry, however allusively. Eros for its own sake continued to be conveyed in the works of Herrick, who utilized a physicalized, wounding passion to describe God’s love, as when he invited God to “Beat me, bruise me, wrack me, rend me/ Yet in torments I’le commend thee.”64 But the notion that love in general could be wounding assumed more meaning when the larger implication was that the new world of outside disruptions and covenanting soldiers served as the wounders, not bringing love this time but injury to its innocent idyll. Jaspar Mayne’s play, entitled The Amorous Warre (1648), conveyed such parallelism in the arrival of a lover to a land now “more tempestuous then the Sea,” in contrast to the “Halcyon” world—the world, referred to indirectly, of Charles and Henrietta—from which she came.65 Meanwhile, plays written during the years from 1642 to 1660—when theater was banned—conjoined love and war in tales of soldiers separated from their ladies, as in Henry Burkhead’s Cola’s Fury (1645), which was typical of the “amatory-military” plays of the times.66 The classic example was Andrew Marvell, whose work in the 1650s was traceable to (yet also intentionally evasive of ) its larger historical and religious context. In the case of “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun,” the impact of war on his poetry could be related to the poem’s larger themes of violence, disorder, and death intruding upon a world of apparently verdant if post-eros calm. In the poem, the nymph has been abandoned by her lover, though after he has given her a faun as a gift; the consolation she manages to find in the faun, however, is disrupted when “wanton troopers” appear and proceed to murder it. The faun has been interpreted in a number of ways, but it could also be seen in this context, perhaps reductively, as representative of love’s truest manifestation, or, as Earl Miner has suggested, innocence,67 especially since the love of Sylvio revealed itself to be

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“counterfeit” and he “took his heart” with him. The nymph transfers her love from Sylvio to the faun (“O I cannot be/ unkind t’ a Beast that loveth me”),68 and it proceeds to grow; but its fatal wounding by troopers—long regarded, albeit not unproblematically, as stand-ins for the covenanter or parliamentarian forces—depicts bloody intrusion on a pastoral world of love and death to the old order, including its higher ideals of love. The blood of the faun, of the most virtuous kind of love, will thus be replaced by the nymph’s tears—the wound’s fallout—as the nymph one day will be frozen with it in alabaster, “White as I can, though not as Thee.”69 Marvell’s “The Unfortunate Lover” also depicts the disruption and physical wounding of an idyllic setting, though the metaphors of raging storms and seas, shipwrecks, and battles that describe the lover’s soul (and heart) in the world of passions lend the poem a more consistently dramatic tenor. The poem describes the birth and troubled fate of the central character, particularly his encounter with the passion of love, and as such it represents one (darker) facet of Marvell’s amatory philosophy of love. As Stephen Zwicker and Derek Hirst have written, “The danger of annihilation, wounds, and incapacity together dominate Marvell’s litany” of love, as he takes particular interest “in the somatic—and surely also aesthetic—character of wounding love.” Presented as emerging into the world of passions through a wound—the injured ship was “split against the stone,” he was born of a “Caesarian section” (either to an actual mother or to the mother-ship)—the “orphan of the hurricane” embarks upon an impassioned life cursed by “the Malignant Starrs.” 70 The poem has been read as a direct commentary on Marvell’s experiences in troubled times of “Storms and Warrs,” or as an allegory, with the unfortunate lover a representation of Christ incarnated into the human realm of passions and inf lictions.71 But the central significance of wounds—wounds upon Christ, or the victim of Fate, or the writer besieged by troubles—remains constant throughout the various readings, not simply because they are visible in the poem, but because they carry an uneluctable weight of meaning, representing a force in their own right as well as a key demarcation between the phases of life: birth, love, battle, and death. A central image in the poem is the “num’rous f leet of Corm’rants black” that feed upon the shipwrecked lover, now vulnerable and “abject” before them. Interpreted variously as stand-ins for the devil or the clergy, particularly since the clergy were associated with black coats, the cormerants proceed to wound or “famish him” from all

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sides: “And as one Corm’rant fed him, still/ Another on his Heart did bill.” 72 As Zwicker and Hirst have written, in this sense the lover is the “site of wounding attention,” though the language itself is amatory: “[The] action [of the feeding] is consuming, desirous, and at the same time rapacious, devastating, even unto death.” 73 At least on the level of language, Marvell thus captures the paradoxes of love’s agony and ecstasy that wounds especially reveal. By the end of the sixth stanza, however, the lover has recovered and turned heroic, defiantly battling the storm “betwixt the f lames and waves.” Still, the gods, as well as Cupid and his “winged artillery,” fight back, and the battle will turn fatal for the hero. “Torn into f lames”—which could be allegorized as the f lames of love—“and ragg’d with wounds,” the lover nevertheless “in his own blood does relish best.” 74 In such a state he dies, suffering and triumphant, shot through with wounds that are evidence of his heroism as much as his anguish. Marvell’s “Unfortunate Lover” is oblique and strange, but its imagery was conventional enough. Battles and militaristic adventure were part of the romance and epic genre, just as desire had long been figured as a wounding breach upon the fortress of chastity. But the manner in which poets likened love to warfare represented a darker, all-tooreal turn in the civil war years, with the lover standing little chance of shielding himself against the wounding attack. This was, again, an old thematic motif, but it carried resonance in a time of war, when the older, calmer conventions of love no longer applied. Richard Lovelace’s collection of poems entitled Lucasta captured what has been called Lovelace’s “twining of love, alliance, and war,”75 with the erotic presented as a distinctly ideological choice, particularly from within a larger historical context of a prevailing puritanism.76 In “To Lucasta, Going to the Warres,” Lovelace famously wrote to his love that “a new Mistresse now I chase/ The first Foe in the Field,” with ideals of honor standing above love for his mistress. Lucasta herself, as Randy Robertson has argued, “camouf lage[d] a royalist agenda” for all its “studied moderation”; indeed, “Lucasta”—whose name means “holy light”—could be read as the king himself, “the great ‘Ball of Day on Earth’ [from the twelfth stanza of ‘To Lucasta. From Prison. An Epode’], which stands over against misguided liberty.”77 In “A loose Saraband,” Lovelace also assumes a darker pose, evoking a larger wounding imagery by writing, “See all the World how’t staggers,/ More ugly drunk then we/ As if far gone in daggers.” While “We drink our glass of roses,/ Which nought but sweets discloses,” the disillusionment and even bitterness remain.78

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References to war prevailed in other love poems, with Cowley writing of being “overthrown” by love, by an enemy “Who has not only Sack’t, but quite burnt down the Town.” 79 In such poems the woman was often presented as an opponent, whose wounding potential overpowered her victim, despite her apparent passivity. Edmund Waller would thus plead, “No, Flavia, ‘tis your love I fear;/ Love’s surest darts”—darts whose “very shadows make us yield.”80 On the one hand, it was common to portray such women as the psychologically superior wounders in the battle of love, with Marvell utilizing a language of conquest to convey his own surrender. In “The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers” the narrator contemplates the potential aggressiveness of a toddler-nymph in quasi-martial terms, stating that he wishes to “parly with those conquering eyes;/ Ere they have try’d their force to wound,/ Ere, with their glancing wheels they drive/ In triumph over hearts that strive.”81 This likening of a female beloved from afar would appear to accord with the Petrarchan theme of unrequited pining, in which, according to Petrarch himself, “I desire to perish, and yet I ask health./ I love another and thus I hate myself.”82 In “The Story of Phoebus and Daphne, Applied,” Edmund Waller depicts the Petrarchan dilemma when he describes Phoebus pursuing the nymph through “craggy mountains” and “f low’ry meads,” “Urg’d with his fury, like a wounded deer.” Or Cowley: “Now my desires are worse, and f ly/ At an impossibility.”83 Cavalier poets, however, tended to spurn such longings from a distance, even if their more active participation in the game of love could be no less wounding. Most notoriously, Thomas Carew, in his famous “A Rapture,” works against, or at least complicates, the Petrarchan tradition in its libertine eroticism and witticism, as when he even has Petrarch’s Laura attained: “Laura lyes/ In Petrarchs learned armes, drying those eyes/ That did in such sweet smooth-pac’d numbers f low,/ As made the world enamour’d of his woe” (lines 139–142).84 The Petrarchan notion of a love that was trailed by loss, or at least unattainability, would appear to resound among poets who longed for more halcyon days, or for the presence once again of a loveembodied king. But tropes of war, long common in love poetry, also brought a more active and confrontational approach on the part of the lover that belied Petrarch and perhaps carried evocative associations of not yet giving up the fight. In the many neo-chivalric descriptions that likened love to a military campaign,85 for example, the male narrator often described himself as attempting to actively

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conquer the one who had wounded him with her beauty. Seen this way, while the woman would appear to carry power by the force of her injurious beauty, the man’s attempt to reconquer her through his words and actions constituted an attempt on his part to regain dominance on the field of battle by wounding her in turn. Wounding thus begat a counter-wounding in a larger war where the male hero would regain his superior position. In this sense, the nature of power, and the violence that always lay below the surface of such courtships, was thus exposed. But the fortress could also remain impenetrable, its greatest defense being continued indifference to the soldier-lover who stood outside its gates, ready with his wounding weapons. Petrarch thus reasserted himself, with female superiority residing in that indifference, since the male pursuer desired a love that never came, leaving his heart unwanted—a wound in its own right.86 John Suckling, in “The Siege of a Female Heart,” would thus utilize the Petrarchan notion of the unwanted heart, if to comic effect, as he wrote of being camped out “a year and more” before his lady’s “foolish fort, a heart.” Though “the language of her eyes” may signal something else, she remains immune, provoking him to “undermine” her heart-defense with whispers, rely on the force of “Great cannon oaths,” or schemes to “starve” her out by withdrawing his kisses and gazes. But “the enemy lay quiet,” and when the narrator finds that honor prevails in that fortress, he turns away, submitting to the ultimate impenetrability that honor maintains—even more so if it is a questionable honor fed by pride.87 In the end the failed besieger reclaims his dignity, though it is a melancholy dignity born by one who seeks to wound, who longs to be more greatly wounded himself, but who has only encountered a loveless opacity, leaving him little choice but to depart, alone. Eros Somatized The wounds of love, with their earthly and injurious connotations, did not have a place in representing the platonic realm of ideal forms, but in other contexts—as with Donne, or the cavaliers—they could uniquely bridge the two worlds of the senses and the spirit, beginning as an image of base passion while extending into more transcendent meanings. On the most fundamental level, love, of course, did not just act upon the abstract qualities of the heart; it could pervade the whole body and be corporalized in vivid terms. Cowley, for

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example, would write that love “ ‘twas not onely in my Heart,/ But like a God by pow’rful Art,/ ‘Twas all in all, and all in every Part;” “For thy Love, like a Mark, is stamp’d on all.”88 Passions, in general, altered the body; anger, wrote Joseph Hall, caused the “shaking of the hands and lips, paleness or rednesses, or swelling of the face, glaring of the eyes, stammering of the tongue, stamping with the feet” and other “rash actions we remember not to have done.” 89 The passion of love was conveyed by seventeenth-century writers with particular eloquence in its physical manifestations: bodies grew “cold” or “stiff ” at the sight of the beloved, one fell into a trance or was rendered speechless.90 Burton once again was expansive on the subject, describing love in less exalted terms as entering into the victim’s “pores” or “nostrils,” much like an act of beguiling sorcery; the implication was that one was helpless in the face of such an onslaught, that the body had revealed its vulnerable corruption, with the individual helpless to do anything about it. Indeed, as Lucretius had once stated, it was the body more than the mind where the “love-wound” planted itself, and it was the body that would thus take the mind down (or up) with it. Once inf licted, wounds were not simply passive injuries but also active agents in reminding their bearer of the continued presence— often a burning presence—of love. Desire had long been imagined as “hot,” or “f laming,” causing the self, construed as wax, to melt. In the Aeneid, Dido is thus described as “stricken” like a deer upon beholding Aeneus, after which, “deep in her veins/ The wound is fed; she burns with hidden fire.” 91 Burton described one culture that treated love’s malignant effects by taking “burning torches, and extinguishing them in the river,” 92 thus utilizing torches as a ritualistic and symbolic stand-in for love, only to be appeased and cured by its being quenched in the water. Herrick for his part imagined love in variable forms, but it also entered his being through fire, despite his reluctance: “But if horror cannot slake/ Flames which would an entrance make,” he wrote, “Then the next thing I desire/ Is, to love and live i’ th’ fire.” 93 Love, as Lucretius had once pointed out, was by its very nature a ravenous and near-cannibalistic affair, as lovers go at it “with indrawn breath, hungrily breast to breast/ With mingling of spittle, and teeth against mouth hard pressed.”94 In this world, as Maurizio Bettini has written in an allusion to Lucretius, lovers were “enthralled by an unstoppable dementia, forcing themselves on the object of their desire, digging their teeth into the other’s lips, inf licting kisses.”95 A kiss, as

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one writer has put it, “tantalizes, frustrates as it fulfills,” even if it is “consummation’s supplement.”96 Borrowing from the “kiss poems” of Jonson, Cavalier poets were transported by kisses—“exalted pleasures, crowning blisses,” according to Henry Vaughan. But the idealized Jonsonian kiss could also be darkened to include what Herrick called “Kisses Loathsome,” “slimy,” whose “wimbling tongue admit.” Lovelace, meanwhile, described “Love’s fiery darts,/ Till tipt with kisses, never kindle hearts,” thus conveying kisses as weaponry that produced the fire necessary for a larger conf lagration.97 Poets also repeatedly utilized the image of eyes as an instrument of love, an idea that was traceable back to Plato as well as Plotinus, who attributed love or eros to the power of a vision both emanative and penetrative. Herrick thus would write that “Many a glance, too, has been sent/ From out of the eye, love’s firmament.” 98 But eyes were also represented in poetry and psychological treatises as a wounding force, even if they did not set one af lame; thus would Lovelace write that “I ne’r must dye/ By any scorching, but a melting eye,” or “Her eyes a double-f laming torch/ That always shine, and never scorch.”99 That the gaze in its power could annihilate another was also evident in Cowley’s “wounded sight,”100 or even in the Orpheus and Lot stories, recounted throughout the century by Milton and others,101 in which Orpheus loses Eurydice when he looks back to the world of the dead (or relatedly, when Lot’s wife is reduced to a pillar of salt when she departs Sodom). Perhaps as a way in which to prevent the distracting power of the gaze, Democritus, the ancient melancholic, “put out both his eyes voluntarily,” Thomas Walkington wrote, “to be given more to contemplation”; such an act, Walkington continued, simply ref lected the foolishness of the “melancholick man,” who was, despite his occasional wit, merely the very “sponge of all sad Humors.”102 As orifices, eyes were therefore recipients—as well as transmitters—of love; indeed, as “faithfull spies and intelligencers of the soule,” eyes were the channels through which love passed, imprinting “an ardent desire of the Object” in the heart, as well as incorporating itself in the very marrow, veins, liver, and spleen of the now-besotted individual.103 Eyes could also indicate the presence of love itself, as doctors were enjoined to look for signs through the eyes’ “modest cast,” or, more melancholically, their hollow and dry, or conversely, their moist and tearful aspects. Burton had much to say on the subject of eyes as a vehicle through which the wounds of love traversed, or settled. Eyes were one of the perceived causes of love melancholy;

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citing Giraldus, Burton stated that in the realm of religious devotion, eyes “are as two sluices [that] let in the inf luences of that divine, powerful, soul-ravishing and captivating beauty, which, as one saith, is sharper than any dart or needle, wounds deeper into the heart, and opens a gap through our eyes to that lovely wound, which pierceth the soul itself.”104 Beholding a vision of beauty in the form of a woman could move empires, Burton wrote, and while he acknowledges the awe-inspiring qualities of such a world historical force, he also recognizes its destructive impact, and both the power and the vulnerability where it proceeds in the eyes. “Eye betrays the soul, and is both Active and Passive in this business,” he wrote. “It wounds and is wounded, is an especial cause and instrument, both in the subject and the object.” Drawing once again on ancient notions of sight and love, Burton also corporalizes love’s wounding power when he describes love, like tears, as an entity of movement that “begins in the eyes, descends to the breast, it conveys these beauteous rays . . . unto the heart.” Eyes might have been the conduit and even at times the cause of love, but love was also perceived as originating from the object of desire, itself imagined as wounding. Thus did the poet Henry King write of the fairness of his love that “By sad experience I have found/ That her perfection is my wound.”105 Beauty, as Burton pointed out, was most “eminent” in the face, in “vermillion” cheeks or a “high brow like unto the heavens.”106 But seeing is an obliteration as well as an opening to beauty: “I saw,” Burton (and Cowley) wrote. “I was undone.”107 Body and mind were finally brought together in the psychological and philosophical realm of melancholy, which was thought to both cause and inf lict a generalized state of woundedness on the individual. As Michael Macdonald and others have pointed out, interest in melancholy reached near-obsessive levels in the mid-seventeenth century due to a changing medical culture (and perhaps due to the disruptive times as well); adding to this was the perception that suicide had reached epidemic proportions,108 and the result was melancholy and madness becoming something of a literary growth industry, of which Burton’s tract was only the most noteworthy contribution. Even if the condition itself did not necessarily correspond to a high rate of actual melancholy in England and elsewhere,109 interest in melancholy nevertheless revealed the preoccupations of an age in which individuals, and particularly royalists as mentioned, functioned within a larger world of turmoil and sought explanation or consolation in stoic philosophy, puritan self-examination, or the increasing number of treatises on the passions that addressed their perceived malaise.

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Melancholy itself was such a f lexible concept that it could encompass a number of conditions, including love-sickness, just as it could straddle the boundaries between the body and the soul or mind, as when Donne once played with this idea in writing, by asking, “Did I infuse, did I drinke in Melancholly into my self?”110 On one level, sadness, as Douglas Trevor has written, came to be associated with the “writing life” by authors such as Donne, Spenser, and Milton,111 each of whom would explore, albeit in different ways, the nature of what was, for them, the most predominant emotion of the age. The subject was rich in metaphorical potential: the melancholic mind could thus be a prison, a tomb, a graveyard, a gloomy nightscape, haunted by evil spirits or animals.112 But the sense of the mind as a fragile, breakable or woundable entity was equally recurrent in melancholic portraits and self-portraits, with the insane imagining themselves to be made of glass, or dismembered, or self-dissolving, or composed of a fragile covering, like an earthenware pot. Thomas Walkington would recount such types, including one individual who “thought his shoulders and buttocks were made of brittle glass,” and who therefore refused to sit down “lest he should have broken his crackling hinderparts.”113 By the same token, Burton recounts the cases of those who felt themselves to be impermeable emperors of Macedon, or the world—thus unwittingly calling attention to the fragility and woundability of identity that actually resided beneath. “Love melancholy” was thought to result from eros, but at times, in Burton and elsewhere, it would seem that the reverse was the case, that the individual of a melancholic disposition caused his own woundedness, so psychologically permeable was he to passion’s attack. But in either case, melancholy was now imagined as a wound to the soul and body, necessitating examination and treatment both philosophically and medically. As Macdonald has demonstrated, many of the cases that were treated by Richard Napier fell under the category of lovesickness, usually of the unreturned variety.114 In the tradition of courtly literature, inaccessibility and its attendant frustrations were almost a precondition for love, with seventeenth-century poets, as mentioned, building new variants around the theme of perpetually unsatisfied longing. Such pining, while poetically rich, could also lead to injurious languor; thus would Thomas Watson in 1593 famously write of his “Plaints that bewraid my sicke harts bitter wounding:/ Loue sicke harts deepe wounds with dispaire me paining.”115 Napier’s own casebook records the grief of one patient, Jane Travell, who “sometimes will sigh three hours until as sad as can [be] . . . She knoweth that she will never have him.”116

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Related to love melancholy were other conditions that further corroded the mind. Burton, for example, expended a large amount of text on the theme of jealousy—the “furious passion” or “love’s bastard”— which he treated poetically and philosophically rather than scientifically, but which nevertheless was known to compound melancholy and even madness, as both a cause and a symptom, an emotional state and a bodily experience. Though Burton typically ranged across a wide swath of territory in describing jealousy according to biblical, ancient, and animal examples, it was the jealousy within the state of marriage (particularly cuckold-laden marriages of old men to young women) that most preoccupied his interest. Quoting Ariosto’s description of jealousy as a “martyrdom, a mirth-marring monster,”117 Burton proceeds to borrow from other common metaphors, including the “feral malady” of jealousy as a fever, a plague, a pestilence, or “a blinding fire scorching everything in its wake.”118 Wounding as a description of jealousy was also prevalent, particularly when applied to the idea of poisonous incursion—in the manner of Iago whispering his bile into Othello’s ear. While jealousy could wrack its injuries upon the human body and soul, it was also described more prevalently in terms of nature or biology, connoting aridity and parchedness—the fire, or fever—rather than the descriptive associations that attended the idea of wounds and their unbounded liquidity. Thus did John Suckling, in “Love’s World” (“Earth”), write that “as the Earth may sometimes shake/ (For winds shut up will cause a quake),/ So often jealousy and fear, Stol’n into mine, cause tremblings there.” Indeed, elsewhere he asks why, if nature ensured “that every thing should give the monster nourishment,” it should “[leave] us nothing to destroy it with.”119 Medical practitioners also perceived the body (or its most important part, the heart or brain) as an entity vulnerable to incursions, resulting in love pathologies that included jealousy. Melancholy itself, of course, was not a vague, free-f loating, non-corporal entity; rather, even physicians affected by new medical developments and Cartesian thought continued the ancient tradition of postulating a deep reciprocity between the workings of the body and the mind—whether the mind worked on the body, or the body worked on the mind. For Thomas Willis, writing in the 1650s and 1660s, melancholy, including love melancholy, came increasingly to be seen as a condition of the nerves and brain (as well as the heart), rather than simply the heart and blood vessels, as had been traditionally postulated by Hippocrates. Of the more serious types of melancholy, Willis described an overabundant “restlessness”

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among animal spirits, which penetrate—or one could say “wound”— the “pores” of the brain while also “beat[ing] out for themselves new [openings], and construct[ing] new roads for themselves.” As for the accompanying symptom of sadness, causation was seen to have rested in “stagnation” of the blood in the heart, as well as improper rhythm, resulting from the malfunction of the aforementioned animal spirits. “Hence,” he writes, “you may observe the sudden sighing of melancholics as they endeavour to contract the lungs with great deep expirations to draw off and decant the blood stagnating in the heart.”120 According to Willis, the brain’s own boundaries were thus permeable, subject to the deleterious onslaught of wounding animal spirits or “waste products of the blood” that in turn affected the nerves and hastened mental disturbance.121 But the disruptions and incursions wrought on the mind of the melancholic also played themselves out in external bodily form as well, not simply in terms of gesture, physical restlessness, sighing or blushing, but also in the leakages that issued forth from the individual suffering mental disarray.122 In describing a forty-eight-year-old noblewoman “of melancholic temperament”—though she also slid into “hysterical and hypochondriachal states”—Willis described their manifestations in the sweat and “vapours” her skin emitted, as well as the “ichorous blood and bloody matter” that leaked from a “scaly eruption” on her face.123 Melancholy in this sense seems to have seeped out from the openings of her very pores, even if such emissions were perceived as having healthy, purgative effects.124 But the woman also presents a vision of bloodied woundedness, now medicalized and pathologized and far from all poeticization, save for the fact that her depletion, even stripped of all poetry, remains the same. The End of Love As Anne Carson once wrote in describing Greek lyric, eros is an experience that “comes out of nowhere, on wings, to invest the lover from without and proceeds to take control, to deprive his body of vital organs and material substance, to enfeeble his mind and distort his thinking.” It is “an invasion, an illness, an insanity, a wild animal, a natural disaster,” causing its victim to “melt, break down, bite into, burn, devour, wear away, whirl around” as well as “sting, pierce, wound, poison, suffocate, drag off or grind the lover to a powder.” Eros employs “nets, arrows, fire, hammers, hurricanes, fevers, boxing

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gloves or bits and bridles in making his assault”; but in the end, “no one can fight [him] off.”125 No one may even want to fight off such “extremities of mighty Love”: “ . . . do not touch my heart, and so be gone,” wrote Cowley, “Strike deep thy burning arrows in.”126 For mid-seventeenth-century writers, rather than bring relief, the multitudinous wounds wrought by love nevertheless brought on yet another inf liction in the anguish of its failed aftermath. Love had opened the body and heart, often uninvited and violently, but left in its wake a further festering, this time in its departure. Many poets and writers of psychological and medical treatises had something to say about the anguish of loss, claiming that it stood at the apex of the passion hierarchy. Edward Taylor, for example, described grief as a force that “stoppeth the voice, looseth the joints, withereth the f lesh, shrivelleth the skinne, dimmeth the eyes, troubleth the bowels, in one word, disordereth the whole frame.”127 The “dimmeth the eyes” is particularly telling, since if love, as mentioned, wounded through eyes that were particularly acute in beholding the object (and of the object in wrecking its damage), then their dimming ref lected an inability to see—an aff liction in its own right, and one that ref lected a turn inward as the self could no longer extend itself outward, even if in painful beguilement.128 Reynolds also reaches for a quasi-biblical language— the withereth, the looseth (he might have added the tearing and rendering) to locate grief on a more elevated spiritual plane, at the same time that he pathologizes the condition by writing of the bodily distempers and diseases that it brings.129 In many cases it was not necessarily the love that killed, but the grief that resulted from it. In 1661, John Graunt attributed a number of deaths to grief of an unspecified sort,130 though some must have been love-related, if Richard Napier could record, as he did, that 40 percent of his patients described their melancholy as due to courtship or marriage struggles.131 Grief, of course, derived from many forms of loss, including the loss of children132 or, as seen in the previous chapter, the loss of a great man in battle; but grief from love’s damages or failures constituted one of the primary results. If love wounded the heart, grief broke it, and broke the self that encompassed it. But if eros was the primary wound from which grief emerged like a deformed offspring, was it entirely incurable? On one end of the spectrum, suicide was a possibility,133 in the manner of Virgil’s Dido, who, atop her funeral pyre, stabs herself with Aeneus’s sword—the actual and symbolic weapon that had wounded her (though it was Venus whose directive was originally behind that wounding). Despite precedent in

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pagan antiquity or in chivalric cases of suicide undertaken for the sake of honor, the act, at least before the civil war, was considered the worst form of self-murder, a product either of the devil or the sin of despair through which he worked. Burton did much to connect melancholy, and therefore a “valid” or at least less sinful causality, to suicide, however, just as Donne also argued that it did not necessarily impinge upon divine or civil law.134 The upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century, including the abolition of Star Chamber and an increasing number of court verdicts based upon “unsound mind,” also lessened the legal penalties and moral stigmas, including the forfeiture of goods, for suicide. In this sense, Michel Foucault was correct in stating that “[The] sacrilege of suicide was annexed to the neutral domain of insanity”135 —with medicalization of the malady also becoming increasingly important in relegating suicide to the category of mental rather than spiritual disorder. In the poetic imagination, suicide illustrated the end toward which an individual could go for love, or a lover. In this sense, self-murder was a display of admirable, if tragically admirable, martyrdom. As Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy have written, love and death were inextricably entwined in the Renaissance, with love-suicide a common “ennobling” act ref lective of courtly culture. Plays of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries further abounded with the dictum of John Ford, from The Broken Heart, that “Love’s martyrs must be ever, ever dying.”136 Margaret Cavendish’s play, The Unnatural Tragedy (c. 1650), complicates the theme of honor and martyrdom, however, since the reason behind the double suicide of Monsieur Frere and his married sister is never in the end “publicly” explained or known, based as it is in the shameful secret, or love, between the two.137 The sister, Soeur, enjoins her brother, Frere, that “ ‘Tis better you should die, and in the grave be laid, than live to damn your soul”; “Death, thou art my grief,” she says; “Reprieve, and wilt unlade my Soul from heavy thoughts that miserable life throws on, and sinks me to the earth.” In a final act of sacrificial honor, as well as love, she bids farewell to her brother, and “may all your crimes be buried in my grave, and may my shame and yours be never known” (V.lxiv).138 Remedies for love other than suicide, however, were a possibility, as Ovid had long before recognized love’s snares when he advised the love-struck reader on how to immunize or—as far as woundability was concerned—shield himself by refraining from theater, “pantomime shows,” and love poetry, all of which could lead to enlargement of the injury. Again, the power of the eye (as well as the ear) is invoked,

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at least in the case of theatrical spectacles, as the recovering lover is instructed to avoid the sensual provocations that could reopen himself to further amatory incursions. But love poetry represents something equally material, as Ovid warns the reader against “physical contact with the poets.”139 In this sense, poetry acts as the surrogate for the object of desire, its images and enjoinments serving to ignite or restrike the lover, particularly through the aurality of the verse. Of course, love could be avoided altogether, as when Cowley wrote that one should “scorn that Bow” of love, and “resist and cure thy darts,” in a remedy “More than skilful Ovid ere did know.”140 Ovid’s inf luential treatise on remedies was also echoed in Burton, who cited the Roman poet’s other urgings to avoid physical contact with the exlover or to even put a barrier between himself and his wounder through distance. Suggesting another remedy, he wrote that if eyes caused the destruction, then “Gaze not on a Maid,” since “ ‘tis by this food [sight] that love grows fat, Love as a snowball inlargeth itself.”141 One may also, Burton wrote, transfer the passion, turning love to hate, though, in echo of the stoics, it is perhaps best that one exert reason against all passions, or find a Davenant-like harmony and moderation in the institution of marriage. More concretely, Burton, again echoing past authorities (“for I light my Candle from their Torches”), advises the recovering lover to refrain from wine, to fast, avoid certain foods, or adhere to humoral treatments (including bloodletting). Contemporary physicians also had their remedies: in 1652 the London physician John Marriott advocated a “new Dish, called Frigazee,” as an antidote to “all sadness and melancholy,”142 thus continuing a tradition that had extended back through folk tradition and the professed ancient healings of love. One could finally attempt to seek a cure in the one who caused it, as when Herrick wrote that, “If my Julie kisse me, there will be a sovereign balme found out to cure me.”143 On a deeper level, as Emmanuel Levinas once wrote, while the lover seeks to wound the other by aiming “at him in his frailty,” when desire has turned to love, the lover may, in recognition of the other’s vulnerability, come “to the assistance of his [victim’s] frailty.”144 The idea of mutual frailty and support in the wake of a wound’s torment can be seen, perhaps, in the story of Milton’s Adam and Eve. Urged on by the serpent, Eve’s biting of the apple itself constitutes a kind of wounding, resulting in the earth’s, and indeed the cosmic order’s, parallel injury. Prompted by Eve’s urgings, Adam too bites the apple, compelled by “blind zeal in human love,” which, in Margaret Justice Dean’s reading, is mistaken by him for martyrdom.145

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Cast out of the true realm of love, left to roam through the new world, the couple find consolation in each other, as well as in the promise of redemption that lay ahead. But they seem lesser beings too, as they leave “Paradise, so late their happy seat”; though God remains with them through providence, it is also “with hand in hand they go,” mutual in their solitude and woundedness, in their descending walk away.


CH A P T E R

F I V E

Wounds of the Soul

Varieties of religious experience are at once universal, particularly as they continually reenact biblical models, and historically contingent, or dependent upon the particular culture and time in which they are embedded. Put another way, if religious images and metaphors have remained stable through the ages—light and darkness, sheep and shepherds, the pilgrimage—the expression and emphasis of those images in language ref lect the preoccupations of an age and its own approach to the relationship between the self and the divine.1 In the seventeenth century, biblical ideas of sin, conversion, and faith were inseparable from the notion of a soul, a heart, and even a physical body whose debilitation served as the precondition to a higher state of being; while the connection between the wounded body and spiritual transformation had roots in scripture, most obviously the psalms or book of Job, this did not diminish the intensely personal nature and formal literary power of an image that continued to be utilized as both an abstract symbol and a concrete, material description of abjectness.2 The Bible provided what Jerome Brunner has elsewhere described as a kind of “folk psychology” of personal narratives representing the often inexpressible realities of religious experience.3 Three very different modes of religious narrative that will be examined in this chapter— the puritan conversion story, Catholic devotional texts, and writings on spiritual despair—found in biblical archetypes a power that was both resonant of a sacred past and contemporaneous to experiences of the day. For protestants, and puritans especially, conversion often represented a symbolic or actual inf liction on the body and soul, with woundedness serving as a precondition to God’s higher workings of grace; Catholics inspired by counter-reformation or Jesuit practices, on

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the other hand, found a more literalized, physicalized attachment to wounds—Christ’s wounds, the wounded heart, even bodily f luids that emanated from wounded orifices—as a conduit in which to meditate on larger meanings of suffering and salvation. But if the conversion experience and ongoing devotional practices utilized a state of woundedness as a confirmation of faith, the very opposite—religious despair or doubt—could also appropriate the metaphor of brokenness to represent the soul in a state of a different kind of crisis. In conversion and devotional accounts, wounds of the soul, heart, or body at least served a positive function, as channels to a reborn, regenerated state of being. But in cases of spiritual malaise, the invocation of a state of spiritual brokenness and injury ended in itself, as unresolved and indeterminate, resistant to all transcendence despite the metaphorical power such images contained. In exploring the manner in which images of woundedness served to describe various states of religious experience—conversion, practicing faith, doubt—this chapter argues for the centrality of psychological, physical, and spiritual fracture and suffering in seventeenth-century religious narratives. Older images of woundedness were not simply borrowed to suit the present state of religious expression; by utilizing the metaphor, writers were also transforming it in turn, generating new images and meanings, and creating variations that became central in their own right. Part of this was due to the f lexibility of the metaphor itself and its resonance among religious groups experiencing different states of crisis. New meanings were extracted that not only ref lected contemporary concerns but also brought religious writings to new heights of literary and artistic development. John Donne was both typical and unique in the use of biblical figurative language with regard to woundedness. Certain texts, notably a psalm such as 38:2 (“For thine arrows stick fast in me, and thy hand presses me sore”), carried a metaphorical resonance that allowed him to expand on themes of spiritual injury, temptation, and struggle that ultimately resolved themselves in divine remedy. For Donne, such inf lictions by arrows or other weapons were to be welcomed, most famously when he enjoined God to “batter my heart,” or “punish mee/ Burne off my rusts, and my deformity.”4 Donne’s ability rested in part on his ability to extend metaphor into realms of inventive detail—a testament of his own genius, but also of the potential within the metaphor itself; regarding the aforementioned arrows of tribulation, Donne wrote that instead of pulling them out, “we fix them faster and faster in us; we assist our temptations: yea, we take preparatives and fomentations,

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we supple our selves by provocations, lest our f lesh should be of proof against these arrows, that death may enter the surer, and the deeper into us by them.” Though the sufferer may attempt to “pull back the arrow a little way,” he becomes frightened when “he feels [the] spirit to goe out with it, and lets it alone”; he may “[leave] the head [of the arrow] in his body,” forcing “a divorce from that sinne . . . yet he surfets upon cold meat, upon the sinfull remembrance, of former sins.”5 The images of bodily and spiritual brokenness so prevalent in Donne and seventeenth-century poetry generally belonged to a larger literary and theological context in which the Bible was not simply a repository of resonant images, but images that also, in accordance with traditional hermeneutics, contained larger allegorical, moral, and analogical meanings. In the early modern period, as Barbara Lewalski has argued, the protestant focus on scripture generated a central interest in the language and poetics of the Bible in their literal as well as figurative dimensions;6 but Catholics also continued to uphold their own Augustinian-derived preoccupations with scriptural language, all of which used archetypal images of woundedness to point to larger sacred patterns that echoed the drama of sin, fallenness, redemption, and faith. At the same time, and as this chapter will also argue, the years of the mid-seventeenth century also represented a destablization of metaphor, or the metaphor of woundedness, as it became inextricably connected, directly or indirectly, with real states of being or the actual political and religious environment.7 No longer, in other words, did woundedness rest in an abstract realm, but so did it convey the political and religious realities that shadowed the realm. The Bible itself, of course, never lacked images of wounding and aff liction in its depictions of individuals biting their hands, tearing their faces, or ripping their hair, in wild, frantic gesticulations of lament. As Elaine Scarry has pointed out, the foremost injurer of the Old Testament—the direct or indirect instigator of this necessary pain— was Yahweh himself, made visible through injurious mechanisms of fire, plague, f lood, f laming torches, and disembodied injunctions (“I will spend my arrows upon them”). Punished for their disbelief or disobedience, his chosen people feel the divine wrath—and the divine being himself—in their bodies, which God in turn reclaims by indelibly marking them with his literally agonizing and sensory presence.8 Their woundedness, however, is not simply a mark of God’s reproach but a sign of chosenness, and, quite literally, a token of the “everlasting covenant” between Yahweh and his people. In the wound of circumcision, beginning with Abraham, the wounded badge, for example,

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becomes the signature of God, as well as his people’s triumph as the chosen ones. By the New Testament, God, now embodied in Jesus, even assumes the pain himself, to effect the larger redemption of mankind. But his wounds, too, become a sign of victory in sacrifice, and are carried by him into paradise. While many in the middle ages (and John Bunyan later) held to the notion of a body restored to perfection in heaven,9 others argued that the wounds of Christ and the martyrs became an irredeemable part of themselves—the only trace of humanity left in the alchemical process of their resurrection. The focus on the many-layered meaning of psychic and physical wounds, as both an embodiment and a refutation of abjection, was— like so many other discourses—not unique to the seventeenth century, of course. Three centuries later Simone Weil would write that aff liction was necessary in order that “the human creature may un-create itself ”; in such a state, every innocent being “feels himself accursed,” yet only by bearing and even loving the “Cross of Christ” can truth be attained in the very depths of the soul. Aff liction is thus mutilating, a “pulverization of the soul by the mechanical brutality of circumstances”; but if the sufferer remains constant, “what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.”10 Weil was writing in the charged context of her own life and its external trials; yet she was also capturing a central truth of the ages: that while wounds (or, relatedly, illness) were a mark of suffering, they also opened the soul to grace. But not always: for many, the despair that resulted from a sense of woundedness ended in itself, without possibility of any higher meaning or transcendence. What resulted was the opposite of conversion or religious affirmation, as the sufferer remained with wounds that led nowhere at all, like Donne’s “heart of rags” after love had gone, full of broken glasses that “be not unite.” “Make Me New” Conversion into what was perceived as the true faith was often a long and difficult process and not experienced in a uniform manner by everyone. Whether Catholic or protestant, conversions in the seventeenth century could be quiet or dramatic, gradual or sudden, induced by sermons, illness, the teachings of preachers or priests, the death of a loved one, readings in the gospels, some external calamity, or even foul weather.11 But for many, and for protestants especially, to

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be converted also meant to be shocked into faith, to be reminded of the force of one’s own sinfulness and appalling nature, and the scandalous asymmetry, or undeservedness, of the salvation that could then ensue. In this, the model of Paul’s violent conversion on the road to Damascus was paramount, even if the transformation was in actuality a more extended and doubting process.12 To evoke a state of spiritual woundedness, or relatedly, disease (or in Paul’s case, actual blindness), was an acknowledgement that the shock existed or was felt most profoundly on a bodily level; by the same token, however, illness also challenged one to a profound questioning of faith—which could itself serve as a preparatory stage in the soul’s rebirth. Job, after all, withstood the loss of wealth and family but did not break in his spiritual resolve until his own body was wracked with sores and boils. To be wounded in the soul or body thus meant that one could be opened to grace (or, in Job’s case, opened to the larger, more mysterious workings of God).13 If God had hardened the hearts of the pharaohs, closing them off to any possibility of spiritual awakening, a metaphorical or actual wounding to the soul and body offered up an essential softening in which a new relationship with the divine could be effected. To be transformed in a spiritual as well as psychological sense led in turn to a regeneration into an entirely other self that lived, thought, and experienced life and faith wholly differently from the state of sin of before.14 As Calvin put it, “nothing good can ever be wrung from our own heart, unless it become wholly other.”15 Puritans, or those who insisted on their status as godly people who opposed the establishment of the Anglican church,16 placed a special emphasis on conversion, which had been central to their reformer forebears17 and thus to the subsequent narratives they constructed as Christians. Not only a matter of faith and salvation, conversion also, in the decades preceding the 1640s, required a choice of fealty—or conversion—to a gathered church of preacher-led believers, and in this sense transformation was effected on a political as well as personal level.18 But the personal was essential: early puritans such as William Perkins formulated theories of conversion that proceeded by stages in a “golden chain” that led from the initial calling, through to justification, sanctification, and glorification; equally important for Perkins, however—and a spur to autobiographical writing—was the emphasis he placed on individuals discerning the predestined workings of election in their own lives through the process of extended self-examination.19 With Perkins forging the template, conversion narratives and spiritual autobiographies were not new to the mid-seventeenth century,

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but the age nevertheless witnessed their consolidation as a viable and even required genre in puritan religious life. Edmund Morgan once argued that such narratives were more firmly elucidated in the Congregationalist culture of 1630s New England, under the leadership of John Cotton,20 though simultaneous efforts (and publications) also took place in England. In addition, the Cambridge Platform of 1648, drawn up in colonial New England, nevertheless ref lected common interests with the English puritans in declaring that “A personal and public confession and declaring of God’s manner of working upon the soul, is both lawful, expedient and useful, in sundry respects and upon sundry grounds.” As Patricia Caldwell has pointed out, the personal was to follow the individual’s own inner experience, while the public meant that such a confession “was required of all who would become church members in full communion . . . and because it had to be delivered before and voted upon by the entire membership.”21 The language of the Cambridge Platform even utilized a particular rhetoric to convey why such confessions were necessary, since the apostles, being “pricked at the heart by Peter’s sermon, together with earnest desire to be delivered from their sins” were “wounded [in] their consciences, and [ready to receive] the word of promise and exhortation.”22 In England, between 1645 and 1660, the puritan ascendancy pushed such writings to the foreground, not least because they reinforced a program of moral regeneration and cultural reform that puritans were attempting to enforce across the land.23 Print versions of spiritual autobiographies, including the inf luential older works of Richard Sibbes, proliferated with liberty of the press and the encouragement of leading divines,24 while some of the best known diaries, including Ralph Josselin’s somewhat tortured (and unpublished) journal recounting his ministry at Earls Colne, Essex, were undertaken in this time.25 The civil wars themselves, while ultimately victorious for the puritan cause, nevertheless made battle—even godly, providential battle—palpably real, as the external tribulations ref lected the inner turmoils of a hardwon faith. John Bunyan experienced his spiritual awakening in the 1650s, though he fell under the inf luence of puritan ideas during his service in the English civil war, and underwent frightening experiences that would affect his subsequent religious worldview.26 Others, including Josselin and Richard Baxter, also served in the war as clergymen or chaplains, and were shaped by the experience.27 Baxter himself played a more prominent role in the war and emerged with such notable works as Aphorisms of Justification (1649) and The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650). Baxter’s allusions to war and wounding in the latter work, and his

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reference to a “cruel peace,” were not abstractedly spiritual when he wrote that the soul is met by Christ who “gives it terrible alarms of judgment and hell, and batters it with the ordnance of his threats and terrors, forces it to yield to his mere mercy . . . then doth he cast out Satan . . . and establish a lasting peace.”28 In the spiritual autobiographies and conversion narratives that proliferated after the 1640s, such puritans followed Perkins and Sibbes in forging a confessional formula by which individual spiritual progress and the workings of grace, as well as painstaking explorations of conscience, were mapped out in detailed narratives so central to their practice as Christians.29 In examining their lives in such minute detail, puritans fused the spiritual with the psychological to fashion a new self that at least partly assured them in their salvation and allowed them to fulfill their missions in the gathered church.30 As personal or individual as these written testimonies could be, they were also inf luenced, if not edited, by preachers,31 who might have shaped them in accordance with particular conversion theories, or toward images and tropes that elevated the narrative to scriptural levels of importance. Indeed, scriptural language itself was embedded in truths and inner states of being deeper than words available in the everyday realm. Autobiographies, for this reason, relied upon biblical prototypes and images, and scriptural language generally, to represent spiritual realities and experience; metaphors involving “wayfaring and warfaring,” so prevalent in the Old Testament and the letters of Paul, were particularly conducive in descriptions of battles with Satan, or the often tumultuous journey of the Christian through life.32 The Old Testament was particularly appealing to puritans who imagined themselves in acute terms as the godly, chosen, and embattled remnant.33 But images of spiritual brokenness, debilitation, injury, and illness were also deployed to convey the healing process of faith after the old self had been shattered. While such imagery was hardly unique to puritans—Donne, as mentioned, repeatedly utilized tropes of corporal fracture and violence, as did Catholics—puritans placed such imagery at the center of the conversion story as they constructed it to convey in biblical terms the drama of death and renewal at hand. But the very language of the Bible also provided a rhetoric that represented the often unrepresentable, as pain was conjoined with the divine encounter. While physical suffering itself could be perceived in secular, medicalized terms, it was also imbued with a providentialism, or held overtones of theodicy; pain, in other words, had to originate in some place beyond the self, or at least it instigated a quest for larger symbolic

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meanings or supernatural presences—God, Satan—that lay behind it. In the descriptions of physical and spiritual woundedness, Paul again served as the seminal inf luence in the violence of the rhetoric he used to convey the process of faith. While his own experience, he emphasized, was not typical, the spiritual accounts of puritans and radicals embedded such tropes in a larger theological and stylistic framework that also deployed images of brokenness and debilitation as a precondition of belief. Though puritans were by no means monolithic in their beliefs and practices, the Calvinism that most of them embraced was in fact conducive to such a rhetoric, with its emphasis on sin (and the likening of sin to bodily corruption) as the overwhelming condition of man’s soul, which was so debased as to necessitate an all-powerful divine intervention. To be wounded into faith not only caused the undoing of the old self, but an awakening to a new and higher state of being. Indeed, the process of unclenching the sinful habits of being and loosening the adamantine hold of one’s self could only be violent. John Bunyan was particularly fervid in emphasizing the workings of faith in the form of bodily tortures and aff lictions, particularly as they were experienced by individuals who were either on the verge or already well established in attaining a true, unshakeable faith. For Bunyan, it was necessary that the “people of God” be “thrown into the burning Fiery Furnace of Aff liction and Temptation,” for “there they are tried, purged, and purified.”34 The models of the early Christian martyrs, as well as later ones detailed by John Foxe in his Acts and Monuments, were beacons of fortitude and even joy in the face of the gruesome injuries of their bodies that, in Bunyan’s words, “sometimes were torn/ And bones that broken were.”35 The faithful were to imitate Christ in what Samuel Ward had once called “crosses and aff lictions . . . in being marked.”36 Yet such joy was shadowed by the doubt and despair that Bunyan, in Grace Abounding, experienced himself, as his own state of mind, “tortured on a Rack for whole dayes together,” led him not closer to but farther away from Christ, not toward a larger meaning but to no meaning at all.37 Bunyan was particularly emphatic in utilizing biblical metaphors and events, whether directly or allusively, to describe his own state of mind, as he was “trembling under the mighty hand of God,” “torn and rent by the thunderings of his Justice,”38 with scriptural texts likened to darts, pikes, spears, or f laming swords that “wounded” his conscience and obstructed his progress toward true conversion to the Word. While puritans were wary of lapsing by their writings into displays of pride, the evocation of pain and spiritual batterment also served

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to define and legitimize identity, as one could liken oneself not only to the early martyrs, but to biblical figures such as Job. The radical prophet Abiezer Coppe thus wrote in 1650 of being “forsook” by his mother and father, “loathed” by his wife, and “utterly plagued, consumed, damned, rammed, and sunke into nothing, into the bowels of the still Eternity.” Yet this humility also served, paradoxically, as his claim to elevation, even to the status of a prophet who could warn the reader in one of his tracts, “[L]augh not at it; if thou dost I’ll destroy thee, and laugh at thy destruction.”39 Puritans imagined the heart as a central object of wounding, not only because it evoked the psalms and other key biblical texts, but also because it was considered the core of personal identity and in a biblical sense the center of one’s inner being. For puritans, self-examination began with the heart, “the spring of all our desires,”40 which turned on such states as pride or jealousy, and could, in the words of the early puritan Richard Rogers, become “overspread with unbelief and prone to evil.”41 If true conversion was to take place, the heart had to be impressed upon with faith,42 but first laid bare, or in Richard Sibbes’ word, “bruised.”43 As William Perkins once put it, “he that will believe in Christ must be annihilated, that is he must be bruised and battered to a f lat nothing.”44 God’s laws were particularly important for conversionary enforcement (or discipline), as when Richard Sibbes wrote of those who relapsed that “because men never smarted for sinne at the first, they were not long enough under the lash of the law.”45 Meanwhile, Baxter stated that “He that truly discerns that he hath killed Christ, and killed himself, will surely in some measure be pricked to the heart;” only until “his heart feels what his understanding sees” can the soul be redeemed.46 Not all inf lictions on the heart could be so violent or dramatic as many described, however. As Jeremiah Burroughs wrote in An Exposition of the Prophecy of Hosea (1643), God could even “take” the heart “before it thinks of him”; indeed, Christ “sometimes gives such a glance of his eye upon the heart of a sinner, as takes the sinner before he is aware.”47 Still, full transformation had to conform with the injunctions of Ezekiel 11, when Yahweh stated of the people of Israel that “I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them,” though first their existing “stony heart” must be taken “out of their f lesh”—or at least be inscribed upon by the divine presence, as God had enjoined his followers to “write my commandments on the tablet of your heart.” For Paul, the “tablets of human hearts” were to replace “tablets of stone” (2 Cor, 3.2); inscription was in this sense to serve as a

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kind of wounding, though the spirit was to replace the letter of the law in its indelible heart-marking.48 Augustine once spoke of the heart as “circumcised,” as it cast away impurities and temptations in order to prepare itself afresh for God’s transforming power to work on the inner self.49 As the Book of Jeremiah had put it, in order for the believer to become open to the Lord, “Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, and take away the foreskins of your heart,” since all the house of Israel are uncircumcised in the heart” ( Jeremiah, 4:4, 9:26). Indeed, in a trope embraced less by puritans than by Catholics, Christ’s own wounded heart, pierced through by the Roman’s lance, became a kind of circumcision, though a circumcision that opened him, or rather the believer, to salvation. As Richard Sibbes would write, the Christian must “circumcise himself, his heart, and those parts that are uncircumcised, before he can ever think to go to heaven”; while “Mortification is very hard,” “[c]orruption must be cut off, though the blood follow, else it will kill thee at length.” Only when “we are to labour for circumcised hearts” can the believer “understand God’s truth, his will, and commandments.”50 The humbling of one’s being was one of the first steps in the process of conversion, with the heart perceived as requiring the necessary softening—and opening, or wounding—through suffering. Believers were enjoined to “seek and labor for godly sorrow, for an aff licted and humble heart”;51 they were even encouraged to “prevent the Lord from wounding and aff licting our souls,” and suffering a “terrible” and “ intolerable” sorrow as a result, and instead to “smite and aff lict our own hearts for our sins.”52 This did not ensure salvation, of course, since one could not ascend by degrees to grace on one’s own. Still, the Old Testament was cited in its commands that individuals were to “rend” or “tear” their hearts ( Joel 2:13) in order to effect the necessary malleability that would make grace possible. Puritan writers and spiritual autobiographers from the 1630s through 1650s would work off the language and conversion theories of predecessors such as Perkins and the biblical writers, with Sibbes providing one of the more notable instances of a poetic and biblically derived language of woundedness serving spiritual and conversionary ends. Sibbes offered a more nuanced perspective and metaphorical extension on the conversion idea, stating that for many only violence could lead to transformation, since “the will is nought”; yet the “sweet motions” of the Holy Spirit could also effect change, and in fact were to be encouraged as a valid possibility, since some individuals were “like glasses which are hurt with the least violent usage” and are therefore rendered

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vulnerable to an irreparable despair that leads only to itself (indeed, he writes elsewhere, “a pot may be broken in pieces, and yet be good for nothing”).53 Whether the inf liction was violent or not, however, for Sibbes the believer must aspire to become, in his own hands with the aid of God—and in echo of Matthew 12:20 or Isaiah 42:3—a “bruised reed.” While the sinner must not “press too much and too long this bruising,” since he could “die under the wound,” only by becoming “rendered low” and cultivating a “tender heart” could he hope to create an opening for God’s grace to shine through. “Art thou bruised?” Sibbes would ask his readers and listeners, before answering “Be of good comfort, he calleth thee; conceal not thy wounds, open all before him, keep not Satan’s counsel.”54 To speak in terms of the wounded heart presupposed that something or someone was behind the inf liction. On the one hand, Satan was perceived as embedding sin into the hearts of sinners, as when Richard Kilby once described how “the Devill had leisure to take full possession of my heart.”55 For John Fessenden, conversion was stalled when the Devil continued to cast “filthy notions into my heart and so I thought I had committed the unpardonable sin.”56 More than the devil, however, was the individual who exacted pain on himself,57 with Perkins observing that “sinne bruise the heart of a poore sinner and bring it to nothing,” sin being defined not simply as a deed but as a state of being, an alienation from the divine.58 The anger of God could also exact its injuries on the individual, as when Joanna Sill felt “nothing but death and wrath” after being pierced by one sermon, or Hannah Brewer became “saddened and sick” in her heart from a sense of God’s fury.59 But God as an angry judge also strikes and aff licts the soul with sorrow for sin, thereby leading the sufferer out of his spiritual morass, even if that sorrow is “terrible.”60 In this sense, the wounding of the heart was not always intended toward ends that were destructive of the self, even if the self was confronted with its own incapacity, corruption, and debilitations. The heart could even be dealt a beneficial wounding when it was written upon; indeed, salvation, or true faith and rebirth, was not assured for individuals until, as Bunyan put it, the “work of God” was inscribed “on their hearts.” For Bunyan, as mentioned, scripture especially was perceived as a kind of woundable, terrifying yet necessary force, as he described reading the sixth chapter of Hebrews, “trembling for fear it should strike me” like a spear or with the force of “an army of 40,000 men.” Other passages carried such impact that Bunyan felt “as if one hand clapt me on the back.” Utilizing extensive storm imagery to describe his spiritual turmoil, he described

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“a hot thunder-bolt” piercing his conscience, or his self being “torn and rent by the thunderings of Justice.”61 For all his smiting, however, God was also the healer as well as the inflictor of spiritual, or spiritually beneficent, violence. According to Samuel Rutherford, the “Physician” Christ “will not slay you, but purge you, seeing He calleth Himself the Chirugeon who maketh the wound and bindeth it up again; for to lance a wound is not to kill, but to cure the patient.” Indeed, “to kiss a striking Lord” is to “acknowledge the sovereignty of God.”62 Some puritan preachers were also said to have a wounding eloquence that inspired fear, exaltation, and healing. The sermons of Robert Bolton were so powerful that after terrifying his audience (as a “Sonne of thunder”), “with a very tender and pitifull heart [he] powred the oyle of mercy into [his listeners’] bleeding wounds.”63 Meanwhile, the church itself was a “common hospital, wherein all are in some measure sick,” but it served the purpose of bringing forth the work of the Spirit, “infusing new life into us, and strengthening us, and quickening us when we droop and hang the wing, and never leaving us till perfect conquest.”64 A more concrete variance within the field of imagery concerning bodily brokenness (and healing) were writings—and they were legion—concerning actual illness, and the role it played in the conversion process.65 Though illness was not synonymous with woundedness, since it could come upon one slowly and from the inside, it was often described as an onslaught on the body, and therefore belonged indirectly in the repertoire of wound imagery. For puritans, illness was frequently likened to the rod of God, a form of correction that wounded the individual toward ultimately edifying ends; for Paul Bayne, after apprehending God’s correcting inf lictions of illness, “you must labour to find the cause why and to what purpose God doth follow you in such a kind.” While God then applies physic to heal illnesses, “the physic must make us sick that doth us any good.”66 Divines such as Richard Baxter vividly conveyed the paradoxical nature of illness as a metaphor and an actuality: illness, pain, and woundedness debased the body but reminded the sinner of the equivalent condition of his soul. Pain, or woundedness, was also the channel, and in many cases the only channel, through which redemption could be effected. It closed the body off from a state of health and from the communal bonds of humanity; yet for puritans whose hearts had been softened by illness, redemption could follow if God’s grace was so inclined to touch them at the lowest, most vulnerable point they had descended. If puritan conversion narratives constituted a form of self-construction, in which layers of one’s identity—carnal, social, worldly—were presented

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as being forsaken in order for the “new man” of Colossians 3:10 to emerge, the deployment of metaphor was central in conveying both the process and the end result of these narratives. Puritans borrowed from a storehouse of biblical images, but in placing a state of brokenness as central to their story and identity, they illuminated the flexibility and transformational potential of the metaphor itself, especially in conveying a selfhood that was to be destroyed and then reconstituted afresh in Christ. According to the preacher Thomas Taylor, “all self-respects, self-seeking, self-aymes must be renounced and the Christian wholly vanish into nothing.”67 But as Tom Webster has also pointed out, “The disciplines of self-denial and self-examination are designed to turn the necessary condition of selfishness to the creation of a self-abnegating self-hood.” The paradoxes continued, with the metaphor of woundedness able to hold them in plenitude: one was broken yet only a state of brokenness could lead to wholeness in Christ; illness depleted and wounded, but it could also serve as the necessary reconstitution of the self in a state of faith. In defining themselves as spiritually struggling and in some cases spiritually reborn souls, writers were also placing woundedness in the center of that drama of identity, subverting a state of passive suffering into an active conduit of grace. The Bible was the repository of this imagery, yet puritans, in pushing their spiritual examinations to the forefront, also appropriated the trope of woundedness to their own purposes in fashioning or reconfirming their faith through a narrative that was as much a personal testimonial as it was a contribution to a larger collective or communal identity. For them, woundedness was a reality as well as a metaphor, just as the worldly was intimately bound up with the spiritual,68 and the physical world itself was perceived symbolically, particularly in its stormy tempests.69 The very act of writing was a marking, if not quite a wounding—a way in which one attained (or grasped at) faith by recording its workings upon one’s life a second time around, in textual form. If medieval saints had once practiced confession and penitence through physical mortification on their bodies, the process of laying down words on the part of seventeenth-century puritan Saints was no less physical in that it left behind traces of one’s faith, this time in the form of print that served as an “everlasting monument” of struggle, and steadfastness, in Christ.70 The Sacred, Bleeding Tales of the Heart For all their vivid borrowings from scriptural metaphors and the deployment of them in conversion narratives and meditations, protestants

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did not give themselves over to the sensuous and highly visualized re-creations embarked upon by Catholics inf luenced by Jesuit meditative practices or baroque poetics. The Catholic focus on the body in a state of pain acquired a more physicalized character, with wounds charged with an almost sacramental meaning in their direct evocation of Christ; in this, the inf luence in England of the counter-reformation was paramount, as well as its attendant continuities with late-medieval pieties and contemporary expressions of the baroque.71 Whether attention (and meditation, and prayer) rested upon the tortured bodies of Elizabethan Catholic martyrs or the injurious display contained in blood relics or miraculously bleeding crucifixes, English Catholics in the seventeenth century expressed a form of devotion that was shared by others while also remaining distinctly their own. Indeed, while the embrace of bodily brokenness and injury was not wholly unique to them as Catholics or even as Christians, English recusants, Jesuits, or crypto-Catholics found in the image of woundedness a metaphor for their own particular condition as a community besieged, and a focus of consolation for the sustenance of faith. The Catholic community in England during the middle decades of the seventeenth century, for all its shared, minority sense of adhering to a beleaguered faith, was varied in the level of its allegiances to the church in Rome and to the ardency of its confessional attachments. Under the patronage of Henrietta Maria,72 Catholicism enjoyed a revival in the 1630s at least at the level of the court and its two London chapels, particularly as it followed the Franciscan order known as the Capuchins;73 mystics such as Francis de Sales also inf luenced Henrietta’s circle, with his advocacy of an expansive, affective piety and assiduous method of mental prayer.74 At Cambridge, where Richard Crashaw remained in the Anglican fold before his later conversion to Catholicism,75 the beautification and liturgical reforms effected by Archbishop Laud enabled Matthew Wren, John Cosin, and others to equip the chapel at Peterhouse with paintings and stained glass windows that included a depiction modeled upon Rubens’ Le Coup de Lance, depicting the lance wound in Christ’s side.76 The measures enacted at the Council of Trent (1543–1563) not only reaffirmed older devotional practices but also generated energies that would reinvigorate Catholic art, writing, education, and thought well into the next century.77 A focus on images of woundedness—of Christ, or in the spirit of divine love—was part of this spiritual renewal, appealing to Catholics inf luenced by strains of Salesian piety or Jesuit practices. The emphasis on God’s love embraced by de Sales was frequently

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imagined in terms of violence; yet the violence of the crucifixion was de Sales a kind of healing and a manifestation of God’s overwhelming love for mankind. By contrast, the sense of woundedness embraced by the sixteenth-century Spanish mystics Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross assumed a darker and more austere though no less ardent and physically manifested dimension. John of the Cross thus wrote that the “wounds of love” that God inf licts “so inf lame the will, that the soul . . . [goes] out of itself, and [is] renewed, and enter[s] on another life, as the phoenix from the fire.” 78 Jesuits, for their part, emphasized continental practices of piety since their arrival in England in the 1580s, after extensive training at the English College in Rome or at the seminary in Douai.79 While preparing to embark upon the dangerous task of missionizing in England—and of surviving the process of that missionizing—a focus on martyrdom, on dying “righteously” if need be, was also emphasized and reinforced through visual and meditative means.80 The frescos at the English College81 were particularly vivid representations of woundedness, depicting not only the physical agonies of Edmund Campion, but a long tradition of English martyrs who had suffered the violence of arrows (Saint Edmund), swords (Thomas Becket), or self-inf licting knives (Saint Ebba slashing off her nose to avoid the wrath of pirates). Jesuits incorporated meditations on wounds not only through such frescos but in their aesthetic program as a whole, which was in turn inf luenced by the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. Jesuit emblem books, many of which would inf luence poets such as Crashaw, also provided visual depictions of religious ideas, though emblems in themselves were protestant in derivation.82 The English Jesuit Henry Hawkins would reclaim the emblem book from protestants such as Francis Quarles by publishing a translation of Etienne Luzvic’s Le Coeur Devot and composing his own Partheneia Sacra in 1633.83 More meditative in its purpose, particularly as it was written for a society devoted to a Marian sodality, the Partheneia contained twenty-four symbols associated with a garden—f lowers, trees, birds—that accorded with the qualities of the Virgin; unlike protestant emblematists, however, Hawkins sought to draw his readers into the sensual aspect of the image as a reality in itself, not just an intellectualized symbol having abstract significance.84 In other works, emblematic wounds magnified the base and literal onto a larger theological plane of meaning, in which they represented sacrifice, atonement, redemption, and salvation. Intended to rouse the emotions, such emblems included images of men pierced with seven sword wounds, to symbolize the seven deadly sins, and

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the ever-present heart, stabbed through with arrows and streaming blood.85 Such simultaneously material and spiritual images were, again, intended to accord with an ongoing Jesuit emphasis on attaining intense levels of affective meditation based upon the cultivation of the senses and imagination. Thus did Robert Southwell, decades before, imagine himself “nailed to the same cross with the same nails, and in the same place; my heart should be wounded with the same spear, my head with his thorns, my body with his whips . . . I would taste all his torments and tread all his embrued and bloody steps.”86 The Exercises also ref lected such inf luences as the fifteenth-century Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, in which the author imagined himself as “[living] willingly in [Christ’s] holy wounds,” and desiring to join the apostle Thomas so he could “put our fingers into the print of his nail and thrust our hands into his side” in order to “know his sufferings” and “[taste] the astonishing greatness of his love.”87 The Imitation of Christ enjoyed wide popular favor among Catholics in the 1640s,88 but it was the Jesuit meditative emphasis that also reinforced an affective, bodily attachment to Christ’s sufferings through the senses. Wounds also resonated in an atmosphere of persecution and exile, in the “publick and private calamities,” many were undergoing.89 On the one hand, the middle decades of the seventeenth century were relatively favorable for Jesuits,90 at least to the extent that they were not as harrowing as the latter part of Elizabeth’s later reign when priests were hauled through the streets on their way to the grim theater of death. But executions still occurred, albeit in markedly less numbers, which continued to inspire an extensive martyrological literature conveyed through letters and pamphlets, and published surreptitiously abroad by publishers such as the St Omers Press.91 Descriptions of Catholics dying for the faith were hardly new, with William Allen, Richard Verstegan, Robert Southwell, and other late Elizabethan Catholics having set the template for the genre decades earlier.92 Nor was an emphasis on the martyr’s wounded body unique to the age: in the fourth century, Eusebius described cases of gruesome torments, while John Foxe dwelled on the pain of his own protestant sufferers in his Acts and Monuments, compiled during the reign of Elizabeth.93 Catholic martyrologists such as Allen, however, differed from Foxe in the larger emphasis they tended to place on the martyr’s wounded body. Part of this was due to the nature of the death, which required that the bodies of Catholic priests, tried as traitors, be cut open at the death site, after being dragged through the streets and then hanged; but such executions, in their spectacular

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cruelty, also served a distinctly Catholic purpose in focusing on the corporal or incarnational aspects of the martyr’s body—in identifying him, that is, not only as a Christian who exhibited traits of patience and endurance in the face of a required violence, but as a Catholic whose very body was an echo of Christ’s own bloody presence on the cross. That followers of such martyrs proceeded to collect their relics as a religious and even quasi-sacramental imperative only further reinforced the specifically Catholic dimension of the martyrological enterprise, with such relics—an elbow, a hand, a lock of bloody hair— recalling the originary wound, or state of woundedness, from which those fragments emerged. Even in death, the fragmented body of the martyr thus lived on; but if the martyr was also the stand-in for the persecuted church, as some early martyrologists insisted, then the Catholic church itself—besieged, in fragments, wounded, underground—would also ultimately and paradoxically prevail, not submitting but in fact triumphing over the violence with which it found itself. Martyrological texts continued to be read by the faithful as well as potential converts, for in them were messages in which woundedness portended victory, and death the ultimate conquest, at least in the Christian scheme. Recusant Catholics, as well as Catholics overseas, were especially prone to perceiving martyrs as holier than others not called upon to make similar choices to die, and were therefore avid readers of such accounts. Such texts also taught readers to prevail in an atmosphere fraught with polemical and at times personal onslaughts leveled at them by antagonists such as the now powerful puritans. Robert Southwell in the late decades of the previous century borrowed military metaphors from Ignatius of Loyola, with the Christian life represented as a battle to be endured and sometimes actively undertaken: if followers professed themselves to be “Christ’s champions,” then “your life is warfare; your weapons, patience; your captain, Christ; your standard, the Cross.”94 Such accounts as the English Martyrologe, a calendar of saints published at St Omer in 1608 and compiled by John Wilson, a priest, or the Roman Martyrology (1627), included hundreds of Catholic martyrs presented in answer to the protestant account by Foxe.95 Relatedly, more ephemeral pamphlet-written eyewitness accounts also circulated not only the last dying speeches of martyrs, but the fate of their ripped, bloodied, and dismembered bodies down to the last grotesque detail. The account of two Catholics, Thomas Reynolds and Bartholomew Roe, executed in 1642, is in many respects typical of such martyrologies in detailing the behavior of followers after death. Thus did many in the crowd, after witnessing Roe’s death, “[vie] with each other in

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taking away relics of the Martyrs”: “Many dipped handkerchiefs in the dismembered bodies; others carefully collected straw from off the ground; while some snatched from the f lames the intestines, which, as usual, had been thrown into the cauldron, and carried them home.”96 The posthumous scene after the 1642 butchery of Edward Morgan, another priest, witnessed officers themselves “calling for the people’s handkerchiefs and gloves to wet in the blood, which they did, and delivered them again to their owners, and one got almost his whole heart out of the fire.”97 These relic collections, however, occurred in a largely unofficial capacity, while authorities themselves sought to control the fragmentary parts and display them in shame rather than claim them in glory; thus were the quarters of Thomas Holland “fixed up at the gates of the city, and his head on the great bridge, according to the custom.”98 In visual and textual martyrological accounts or through emblems or paintings, wounds were themselves a fusion of the material and the spiritual, and contained within themselves the central paradoxes of Christianity, in being base and transcendent, shameful and triumphant. But the image of wounds was also expansive enough to accommodate the different devotional programs and aims of Catholic orders. Wounds could, again, encompass both the positive spirit of the Salesians and the darker (yet no less hopeful) theology of a John of the Cross. Yet the wound was also an emblem that contained within itself contradictions and oppositions that fit within the purposes of the parallel movement labeled baroque, with its bringing together the sacred and the profane, the extravagant and the homely, all under the guise of a complex and penetrative emotionalism.99 In England, the baroque was manifested less in visually graphic terms than in literature, with an early forerunner, Robert Southwell, continuing to enjoy posthumous popularity and inf luence through the civil war period.100 The poems of Crashaw were particularly infused with an obsessive, baroque concentration on wounds—Christ’s wounds, the wounded heart—as a symbolic device and a literal embodiment of suffering and salvation, the grotesque and the sublime.101 It should be pointed out that many of Crashaw’s poems, including verses to Mary, were written before his conversion to Catholicism, just as the Laudian Church of England, of which he was a member, also practiced Marian veneration. As Alison Shell has pointed out, defining a “Catholic poem” is complicated by a number of questions, not least of which is the fact that many such poems were written by protestants (who remained protestants) inf luenced by Ignatian or other meditative traditions. In his poems

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on Mary or the Assumption, Crashaw might have been indulging in “imaginative experimentation,” or the reader might interpret his early poems as “retrospectively” Catholic.102 This does not lessen the problem of the poems’ pre- and post-conversion status, however, even if their imagery harkens to a more Catholic realm, particularly in their insistence on religion’s purely incarnational aspects. Images of wounds were central in steering Crashaw’s poems in a Catholic direction, particularly in terms of their vividly conveyed sacramental aspects. On the one hand, Crashaw was not original in comparing wounds, for example, to mouths—Shakespeare had described them as “dumb mouths” with “ruby lips,” in Julius Caesar.103 But Crashaw was more insistent on amplifying their carnal (or incarnational) aspects, and conveying their capacity to emit f luids, and above all to bleed.104 Crashaw’s treatment of wounds, comparing them to “blood-shot eye[s]” or “full bloom,’d lips,” has provoked some of the most heated responses among critics averse to their almost gaudy descriptions. Yet Crashaw’s wounds were vividly evoked to draw out their larger theological implications, whether those implications were to illuminate their physical (and also symbolic) aspects, or to, according to one critic, “expose [through them] a certain kind of horror” that is evident, in accordance with Capuchin doctrine, in a world “without God.” In this sense, the shock evoked by such wounds allows the reader to initially dwell in “brute” physical realities in preparation for “the real significance of what we have seen in God.”105 The wounds of Christ for Crashaw were even to be tasted, consumed; while the image may seem to border on the strange or the cannibalistic, it was not new, having been evoked by St Bernard when he wrote of Christ’s “fissures” (and prefigured the Jesuit emphasis on the senses) that through them “I can suck honey from the rock and oil from the f linty stones—I can taste and see that the Lord is good.”106 As Ryan Netzley has pointed out, for Crashaw, such ingestions, in their (Catholic) Eucharistic implications, represented a communion between the recipient and the divine presence, embodied by that blood-giving wound and effected through its secreted liquids. The mouth, and taste, thus have for Crashaw a “devotional privilege” over the other senses, with wounds—the locus of the Eucharistic taste encounter—not only representing orifices to be entered into but openings that in turn diffuse a divine liquidity, a nourishing corporality that results, for the recipient, in mystical dissolution.107 Wounds were above all somatic emblems that allowed Crashaw to construct a dense compilation of imagery and scriptural association,

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as he explored, sometimes originally and sometimes not, their metaphorical possibility: echoing John 10:7-9, wounds were thus doors or gates to the enclosure of Christ; the lance wound “has thrown back the bolt of your heart/ And the nails as keys unlock you on all sides.”108 As openings, wounds were portals or passageways, not simply windows to Christ’s “temple of the heart” (or, in Bonaventure’s formulation, Christ’s “wombe”);109 instead, one was to both dwell in them and pass their threshold, to experience the suffering they provoked while also gaining access to paradise—of which they were the “gates.”110 Such language, drawn from devotional manuals, encouraged this kind of meditative imagery, enjoining worshippers to ponder as they prepared to take the holy sacrament, to “layst thy mouthe to the wounds of our Saviours side.”111 Crashaw’s devotion to St Teresa of Avila, who was canonized in 1622, also focused upon the theme of woundedness, which she had embraced as a central facet of her faith. In her Life, she defined God’s presence as a “great golden spear” plunged into her heart, leaving her in a state of painful and joyful rapture.112 Crashaw’s “Hymn to Sainte Teresa” as well as his “Flaming Heart,” depict this state of being “love-slain” by God, with Teresa presented as “love’s victime” (charitatis victima). To be a recipient of the “wound of love” dealt by God, and described not only by Teresa but by John of the Cross and Francis de Sales, is to be conjoined to the divine while also reminded of the distance of the union; one receives the wound of his presence but cannot endure the pain of that presence in one’s body—that love—for any length of time. Only in death (Crashaw’s “death more misticall and high”) can the soul be mystically united to God. But in the meantime consolation can be had by knowing that the “delicious wounds” carry grace, the paradoxical fusion of joy and pain, and that the imprint of God’s hurt, and presence, will never wane. Crashaw borrowed the language of Teresa, the “delicious Wounds” and the “sweet-killing Dart”; but what pained her on earth is preserved in heaven, as her wounds continue to “blush to such bright scars” and her “pains sit bright” as badges of her spiritual triumph.113 Crashaw’s emphasis on the heart, or the heart that is “Bigge alike with wounds and darts,”114 also foreshadowed the devotional cult of the sacred heart that emerged in the later seventeenth century.115 But private adorations of Jesus’ heart, which was frequently represented as broken or pierced, had existed for centuries, with the heart representing His love for humanity, its wound an opening to that beating, palpable love. Devotion to the Five Wounds, reconfirmed by the

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counter-reformation, further compelled Jesuits in the sixteenth century to place images of the sacred heart, and its wound, on the walls of their churches or the title pages of their books. According to traditional theological readings, the piercing of Jesus’ heart by a Roman soldier’s lance thrust was itself a fulfillment of the prophecy in Zechariah 12:10 that the messiah had come (“and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son”). In this reading, according to Christians, the very wound was not just the marker of the lord’s arrival and presence, but a sign that God had “pour[ed] out His Spirit of grace upon the house of David.” (12:8-10).117 Indeed, the blood and water that issued from the wounded heart, and cited by John 19:34, were for men such as Augustine symbolic of the sacraments that bound the church together under God, with blood standing in for God’s forgiveness of sins and water for baptism into the true body of the lord.118 In this sense, while Christ suffered a multitude of wounds that included not only the five primary injuries but the beatings undergone during his f lagellation and crowning of thorns, the heart’s wound was paramount in its ability to best convey the paradoxical Christian pairings of death and life, the crucified and the exalted. Equally important to the imagery of woundedness, however, were the f luids—tears, blood, sweat, milk, semen—that issued forth from such orifices, and which themselves served as liquifatious expressions of a keen, if to modern (and to many contemporaries) a bizarre and sometimes repulsive, religiosity. If wounds—Jesus’ lance cut or perforations from the crown of thorns, the arrow gashes of St Sebastian, Teresa of Avila’s “wound of love”—were bodily icons in their own right, then the f luids they emitted were in many ways the vitalizing principles that animated them, enabling the worshipper to experience more fully the power, force, and dynamism of their presence and meaning.119 The power of f luids to represent and transmit spiritual meaning was itself central to Christian theology, and not simply a late-medieval or baroque literary conceit: bodily eff luvia120 had existed, for example, in the New Testament (as when Jesus cured a woman, in the gospel of Mark, of a hemorrhage),121 and in miracle stories from Gregory onward, where healing of the deaf, dumb, blind, or demonically possessed was accompanied by the ingestion or expulsion of blood, tears, and other interior substances. The most sacramental ingestion took place in the drinking of the wine, or the blood, of Christ, but blood also served as the connective f luid that brought individuals, and above all martyrs, to a higher realm

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of divinity. As a kind of liquefied torment, blood was not only evocative of the crucified Christ but also his circumcision, as in Crashaw’s description of circumcision’s weapon as “the knife [that] foreshadow[s] the spear.”123 Jesuits may have inf luenced Crashaw’s invocation of Christ’s circumcision, central as it had been to their iconography and devotional texts. Though Christ’s name as savior had been proclaimed at the annunciation, it had been formally confirmed at his circumcision, thus conjoining woundedness and blood with identity, or Christ’s identity as redeemer. As mentioned, the idea of spiritual circumcision, associated with puritans, was not new, but Jesuits gave it a theological impetus all their own, as it provided a further example of Imitatio Christi, as well as a metaphor—and a concrete material reality—for the necessity of cutting off the “superf luities” of the f lesh.124 In the middle years of the seventeenth century, when mystically inclined individuals such as Augustine Baker or his disciple, Gertrude More, referred in their writings to the Fountain of Life, they not only evoked a continuing devotional motif but also attested to the mystical and salvific properties of Christ’s blood. As a hymn in the Roman Breviary put it, the blood of Christ was “the bath of souls, the bathingpool of the sick, the fountain of purity.”125 As a holy relic, blood memorialized the life and triumph of the martyr, keeping alive that martyr and thus fortifying the community of the faithful. Indeed, blood (as well as fragmented body parts) allowed martyrs such as Southwell or Campion to come alive, as they called upon the believer to experience as well as meditate upon the kind of bodily wounds that Ignatius had enjoined them to do in the Spiritual Exercises. While not as holy as Christ’s blood, though its evocations served as a kind of imitatio christi, the stained shirt of a martyr provided a mystical connection between the martyr and the community that was now being persecuted for the same faith in which he had died. Blood’s metaphorical mutability made it a powerful vehicle for promoting older devotional practices and images. It could f low as a river (as in Crashaw’s “Song upon the Bleeding Crucifix”);126 or, in a kind of reverse transubstantiation, be reversed into wine—a common trope among writers, though Catholics tended to emphasize the older theme of Jesus, crushed like grapes in a wine press (the so-called “Mystic Wine Press”), oozing intoxicating juices into a Eucharistic vat.127 In other imagistic transformations, devotional writers followed traditional iconographic models, likening blood to gems,128 or to f lowers, with the latter imagery deriving in part from Bonaventure, widely read in midseventeenth-century England; according to Bonaventure, “[just] as the

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rose throughout the chill of the night is closed, but in the warmth of the rising sun unfurls again in full joy,” so does the “crimsoned Jesus” [blossom] forth [as a] rose.” Indeed, Bonaventure enjoined his readers to “examine the wound of His side, for the rose is still there . . . how manifold and well adorned is this rose with its innumerable petals.”129 Thus were English Catholics, in devotional and meditative books, urged to contemplate not only the actuality of Christ’s wounds but their mystical connection with f lowers; similarly, Crashaw wrote of the “showers” that spewed forth from Christ’s crown of thorns as “a cruel and costly spring,” yet one that “conceiv[ed] proud hopes of proving roses.”130 Roses and other f lora could also emit a kind of bodily f luid, including blood—in the manner of Bernard’s comparison of the passion to a bleeding rose131—or sweat, as in Crashaw’s twenty-seventh stanza of “The Weeper,” which speaks of the f lower’s “perfumed sweating” (or, in Stanza nine, the “balsam-sweating bough”).132 Meditations on Christ’s passion depicted Gethsemane as a place of nocturnal and even miasmic sweat, which, for Southwell, “stream[ed],” “pour[ed]” and “distill[ed].”133 Moreover, sweat could transmute into blood, most notably in Southwell’s further depiction of “Christ’s bloody sweat,” which echoed the words of Luke, “In his anguish he prayed even more earnestly, and his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood.”134 Bloody Gethsemane sweat, for those who meditated on the subject, was fraught with meanings central to the larger passion narrative. In one, Christ’s sweating blood or bloody sweat was, on the one hand, laden with larger spiritual implications, as Christ shed sweat, or sweat-blood, in anticipation of his larger f lesh-dissolving self-sacrifice. But in other cases Christ’s moist emanations—the result in part of ardent prayer— were also perceived as indicative of crisis, of strain embodied and liquefied in the anguished struggle with his foreknowledge of what awaited him. In the end, however, if the original curse of Adam was to toil “by the sweat of his brow,” then the sweat of Christ, the “second Adam,” represented the voluntary acceptance of this burden, as he strained to release man of this curse, and sin.135 Charged as bodily f luids were with secondary meanings, one may question the extent to which English Catholics, or at least those inf luenced by Jesuit spirituality, differed in their devotional practices from their brethren on the continent. Though certain iconographic models of Christianity—the cross, the wounds, the blood or tears—bore a universal attraction and demanded an equally universal allegiance for all Christians (or Roman Catholic Christians), one could nevertheless

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argue that historical, political, geographical, and social conditions determined the specific nature and impact of such object worship. If liquid could be characterized by its mutability and, in theological terms, its convertibility, then body f luids were, for English Catholics, especially acute metaphors for transforming sorrow into joy, execution into martyrdom, death into resurrection, and a besieged community into the triumphant spiritual remnant of God’s unremitting grace. And this was no small matter: whether as sources of consolation or memorialization, such liquids bore witness to love, charity, faith redemption, grace, and a theology of fierce transubstantiation—all of which needed to be urgently upheld for the reinforcement of one particular community under attack. Many protestants also utilized the rich imagery of f luids electrified by faith: thus did earlier writers such as Spenser describe Orgoglio’s dungeon, its f loor splashed with the blood of martyrs, or Donne in Holy Sonnet Nine write of Christ’s “onely worthy blood,” and his own tears, which “make a heavenly Lethean f lood.”136 But Catholics, whether Crashaw in his more extravagant mode or Thomas Worthington in his meditations, were distinctly given over to the focus on such f luids; their soteriological theology was further sharpened by the Ignatian emphasis on belief meditated upon through the senses, particularly, in the case of blood, tears, or milk, the senses of sight and of taste. In this regard, the Catholic dwelled in a liquid world, with wounds—the wounds of Jesus, the wounds of Mary’s tearful eyes—not only serving as the originating point of those f luids, but as the source that charged those f luids with a sacramental meaning, and thereby projected the spirit of Christ, through blood or tears, to the souls of sinners ready to receive him. The Sick-Minded Soul While spiritual woundedness could open the sinner to God’s redeeming grace, it could also lead in the opposite direction. When Richard Sibbes stated that “a pot may be broken in pieces, and yet be good for nothing,” he referred to the despair that resulted from being fractured without any hope of return to an originary wholeness (one recalls here William James’ description of the sick-minded soul as “a bell with a crack”).137 But despair, though a sin in Catholic doctrine,138 was also an acknowledged part of the Christian experience and psychology, though it was to be accompanied (if not quite conjoined) with its opposite, religious joy, or in other cases lead to conversion. As Romans 8:18 puts it, aff lictions

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would be followed by glory, for “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Many writers thus pointed out that the soul in a state of dividedness, rather than irreparable brokenness, could contain the possibility of unity in a way that pure brokenness could not. To imagine despair as the result of a satanic wounding also paradoxically led to a way out, for if the devil could be resisted, the wound could heal, or the weak spot that the devil first targeted could be shielded by spiritual self-fortification (“It is not the demon that causes sorrow,” John Chrysostom had once stated, “but sorrow that directs one to the demon”).139 Still, despair haunted: as Michael MacDonald has pointed out, a key text in seventeenth-century religious writings was Nathaniel Bacon’s 1637 or 1638 publication of the historical narrative of Francis Spira, an Italian protestant who recanted his faith before the Inquisition and subsequently endured a despair so deep as to lead to his death by starvation in 1548.140 Puritans were especially attracted to the story of Spira and its depictions of psychological and spiritual suffering,141 which inf luenced later writers such as Bunyan. The latter even went so far as to describe Spira’s account as “a book that was to my troubled spirit as salt, when rubbed into a fresh wound: every sentence in that book, every groan of that man . . . as knives and daggers in my Soul.”142 The heart once again makes an appearance in the context of despair, but while it opens, it does not portend grace: Robert Bolton, commenting on the Spira story in 1631, wrote that Spira’s “heavy heart immediately melts away in his breast, and becomes as water. Hee faints and failes, both in the strengeth of his bodie, and stoutness of his minde.”143 Spira was a suicide, and it was often imagined that the devil induced his victims to a mortal self-wounding, in the manner of Judas, the preeminent figure of despair and self-killing. Indeed the allegorical image of despair, from the middle ages through Spenser, equipped him with weaponry—knives, ropes—and a tongue that could pierce any soul (though Spenser equips Despair with “a subtile tong like dropping honey mealt’th,” that delves “Into the heart, and searcheth every vein”). In medieval iconography, despair, or “Desperatio,” appears as a woman stabbing or attacking herself, or as a figure inducing others to tear their hair, stab themselves, and engage in various acts of self destruction, or homicida animae. Da Vinci, continuing this tradition, advised painters to depict the despairing man as essentially broken: “Let one of his hands be shown in the act of tearing open his wound, he himself standing on his feet, but with his legs somewhat bent, and his whole body bent toward the ground; his hair torn and disarrayed.”144 For the artist it is

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not simply the wound but its effects in pushing the man ever downward, rendering his entire body, and being, as contorted, earthbound, unredeemed. Spenser’s depiction of despair is particularly instructive, ref lecting both medieval continuities and contemporary poetic and thematic concerns.145 As the Red Cross Knight enters the subterranean domain known as the Cave of Despair, the landscape itself appears topographically wounded, with “craggie” cliffs, “stubs of trees,” and rockiness; wearing “ragged” clothes patched together by thorns, Despair is above all marked by “luke-warme blood,/ That from his wound yet welled fresh alas; In which a rusty knife fast fixed stood,/ And made an open passage for the gushing f lood.”146 Weakened by Despair’s hopeless but bewitching words, the Red Cross Knight receives a dagger with which to kill himself, only to be saved by Una, whose salvific power in the end prevails.147 Spenser’s (and his predecessors’) representation of Despair as a desolate spirit of wounding and suicidal incitement found resonances throughout the seventeenth century, and not simply in the melancholic of Robert Burton’s study. Giles Fletcher, in Christ’s Victory and Triumph (1610), would describe Despair as also clothed in rags and thorns, dwelling in a “doleful” and “greedy” grave. Though Christ escapes through Despair’s “door,” he still feels the harpies’ “grapples tear/ Him by the heels to his ugly den.”148 Bunyan’s character of Giant Despair in the Pilgrim’s Progress is also identified in large part by his weaponry—the “knife, halter, or poison” that will attempt to make an end of Christian and Hopeful, who ultimately escape the clutches of his dungeon. First, however, they suffer his physical thrashings, at the counsel of his wife Diffidence, as Despair grabs a “Crab-tree Cudgel” and “beats them fearfully.” Lamenting their condition and “very sore with the stripes,” Christian and Hopeful the next day encounter Despair, again equipped with his wounding weaponry and words of sorrow: “For why, said he, should you chuse life, seeing it is attended with so much bitterness[?]”149 As mentioned, Bunyan’s own experience with despair, as he described it in Grace Abounding, mirrored this imagery of being beaten, though the woundedness smarted all the more for the tenderness of his soul and conscience, as he wrote, “I durst not take a pin or stick, though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch.”150 Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, as seen in the last chapter, was in part a polemical response to religious controversies of the day, as well as an attempt to construct a quasi-medical and philosophical treatise.151 But Burton also treated the matter of despair, or religious melancholy,

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with great seriousness, defining it as the work of the devil, particularly as it related to man’s Fall—a position that was in line with thinking that had extended back through Augustine. For the patristics, spiritual despair, or acedia and its related tristitia, resulted in part from demons playing on their passions;152 Burton continued this tradition when he stated that the devil was the great divider, partitioning this world from God and using “Hereticks, blind guides, Impostors, pseudo-Prophets” and others to “propagate his superstition.” Even “rest, fasting, contemplation, solitariness, are as it were certain rams by which the devil doth batter and work upon the strongest constitutions.”153 Like Cupid, the devil could even exert his evil through the shooting of arrows, usually poisoned, which wounded the victim and opened him to despair.154 Other times, and more menacingly, the devil, like Iago, could whisper what seemed to be logic and reasoning into the vulnerable individual’s ear, implanting fear and doubt and the seeming impossibility of grace before the law’s transgression. As Burton noted, “Sometimes the devil stands without and talks with [the discomfited],” but “sometimes he is within them, as they think, and there speaks and talks, as to such as are possessed.” Wherever the devil might position himself, Burton was not optimistic in the “physick” or cure of religious despair.155 Instead, only repentance worked in healing the kind of religious anxiety that had been brought on by the devil or one’s own conscience. Since “sin made the breach,” he wrote, “repentance must help it.” Burton was echoing the words of theologians and moralists who had long advocated spiritual submission to God’s grace as the only way out of religious melancholy; at the same time, he also recognized the power to wound through weaknesses in the victims’ defenses—weaknesses that derived from melancholy in the victims’ particular physical “compleccions.”156 While despair was inherent in the Christian worldview, seventeenth-century Puritans, as mentioned, were especially given over to religious unease and to satanic attributions. Despair for them was, more than melancholy, a generalized condition of fallenness. According to Richard Baxter, it is “an enemy to thankfulness. It rather reproacheth God for his mercies, as if they were injuries, than giveth him any hearty thanks.” Not only is it contrary to the Holy Ghost and to the gospel, but it “is a distemper which greatly advantageth Satan to cast in blasphemous thoughts of God, as if he were bad, and a hater and destroyer even of such as fain would please him.” Satan, Baxter continued, is in fact the cause of such melancholy, for, among other reasons, “as a tempter, he is the cause of the sinful and

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troublesome thoughts, and doubts, and fears, and passions, which the melancholy causeth,” even if “The devil cannot do what he will with us, but what we give him advantage to do.” Yet individuals who have repented may also be haunted by sins they subsequently commit; “And when men truly converted yet dally with the bait, and renew the wounds of their consciences by their lapses,” Baxter wrote, “it is no wonder if their sorrow and terrors are renewed. Grievous sins have fastened so on the conscience of many, as have cast them into incurable melancholy and distraction.”157 For Hannah Allen, writing in 1683, the devil, “the enemy of my soul,” had haunted her with blasphemous thoughts since childhood—a standard trope in every Christian autobiography from Augustine onward. Allen wrote of her physical ailments and “despairing condition,” which were tempered only by “hopes of the love of God in Christ towards me.”158 But, the devil “had the more advantage, I being much inclined to Melancholy”; thus did he “assault” or more insidiously “suggest” thoughts to her that impelled her further to despair. Allen, however, differentiated herself from her medieval predecessors in connecting her spiritual condition to her medical (as opposed to simply physical or bodily) condition, just as the combination of prayer and a “course of Physick” led to a cure in the end. “As my melancholy came by degrees,” she wrote, “so it wore off by degrees, and as my dark Melancholy bodily distempers abated, so did my spiritual Maladies also.” She was not to blame, God informed her; rather, “all this was from Satan, his delusions and temptations,” but a Satan “working in those dark and black humors [within me].”159 Only meditation upon God would heal Satan’s woundings; as John Moore, the bishop of Norwich, stated in a sermon, “if [despairing individuals] would . . . engage their minds in Contemplations about the Divine Attributes, and the Infinite Perfections of the Nature of God, it would strangely help to deliver them from that drowsy Stupidity, of which they so sadly complain.” Still, the physiological could prevail, just as Moore could not promise that “innocent Persons should meet with a compleat cure of their Grief.”160 “Behold this Spectacle Lamentable” The wound is religion’s indexical image supreme, a metaphor whose power resides in its ability to pivot in any number of meaningful directions. As a synechdoche, Christ’s fragmented wounds represent his body and the larger incarnational meaning behind it; but wounds also

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kaleidoscopically revolve from within a larger web of meaning, as paradoxical—and imbued with tension—as Christianity itself. A symbol of brokenness, they also lead to wholeness, as represented by conversion and faith; embodying suffering, they represent joy as well, as they emit the blood of redemption and are even carried into heaven as marks of victorious resurrection. Seemingly violating the body, soul, and identity of their bearer, they also reconstitute that identity to a more genuine state of being in accordance with divine purpose. But where wounds give hope when they are imagined as emanating from Christ or divinely opening the heart, in the context of despair they are depleting and destructive, emblematic of anguish and malignancy. Still, even despair, however unredemptive it could be, belonged in a religious category, its absence of hope attesting to the presence of a hope that existed somewhere, however unattainable that somewhere might be. In the seventeenth century, the symbol and image of wounds were expansive enough to accommodate radically different visions of Christianity, from Puritanism to a deeply affective form of Catholicism. In Crashaw, wounds became ravishing and desirous yet also intensely theological, a compelling image that grounded meditative efforts; wounds were aff liction and benefaction to the utmost degree, virtuous yet debase, disintegrative yet restorative. Puritans on the other hand diminished the image of woundedness in its physicalized aspect, only to retain its metaphorical possibilities. For them, the idea of brokenness implicit in the image provided a fitting metaphor for the soul, or heart, in a state of bruised vulnerability, itself a necessary precondition for faith. Borrowing from a storehouse of biblical tropes, writers with vastly different religious beliefs were able to fit woundedness to their own confessional needs, particularly as they felt themselves besieged by Satan, despair, or even persecution. For them, aff liction was transformed into a necessary trial, even a badge of honor, that allowed them to gain closer proximity to hope and the attainment of grace. Wounds as an image were, finally, and above all, distinct in their ferocious oddity and even nightmarish beauty, qualities that were recognized by poets such as Donne and Crashaw, who sought to capture and even sensationalize the jolting power of Christianity itself. To modern nonbelievers, the focus on a suffering, wounded Christ may seem perverse at best; and certainly protestants, and puritans especially, recoiled at what they perceived as the idolatrous worship of blood and wounds so prevalent, they thought, in a Christianity gone awry. But wounds were, and to some extent had always been, central to Christianity, the key to uncovering the mystery of Christ as man and

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God. Wounds in fact connected God and man, just as Jesus contained the two within himself. To diminish the wounds of Christ and the wounds of the Christian was, and is, to dilute Christianity itself, for it is to remove both the horror and the redemptive joy that exists at the religion’s core. For it was immersion in this wounded realm where consolation and even salvation lay, where the devout could shed their selves for something higher. Thus would Crashaw enjoin in prayer, “O teach these wounds to bleed in me,” or Southwell would find in wounded tears the strength to take leave of his transgressing ways. “Come deep remorse, [which] possess my sinful breast,” he would write; “Delights adue, I harboured you too long.”161

Conclusion

Seventeenth-century writers, including the least poetic of them, inhabited a world of metaphor even if they could overindulge in its usage. But they also understood, as James Wood has written, the “independent, generative life that comes from likening something to something else.” Metaphor in its transformative capacities ref lects and explains, yet it also “changes thought,” and in England’s case, even action at times.1 To speak insistently of “bloody” and “wounding” traitors or enemies, no matter how ubiquitously, is an implicit call to action, since wounds and blood must be answered for a body’s own reconstitution. The fact that the Bible often sanctioned blood for blood also legitimated a struggle that carried larger and more providential implications; unique to the seventeenth century, however, were the competing accusations of who caused the blood, with even the king himself ultimately killed for his own part in the shedding. The fact that the metaphor was claimed by so many in the ideological (or psychological, religious, legal, and military) struggles only testified to how powerful and capacious that metaphor was in accommodating the different discourses of a turbulent age, even if it served as an incendiary image as much as it could also console in its explanatory power. Though the seemingly debilitating imagery of woundedness was invoked to describe states of love-grief, religious despair, or enemy incursion, it was also a paradoxically optimistic metaphor in its profoundly religious implications. A wounded land and people not only opened themselves to curative possibilities but they also recalled metaphorical precedents that ref lected a larger belief in the potential of redemption. The wounds would, or could, be healed when the king (or King Jesus) returned, or conversion was finally effected, or love was returned in a kiss; the wounds inf licted by the traitor, however grievous his treason, could be restored by the ancient law. Even if left

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opened and bleeding, wounds for writers such as Crashaw were beckoned for the way in which they could lead to a larger comprehension of the divine. The body—of Christ, the church, the law, the kingdom, the commonwealth, the lover, the soldier—may have been abject, but it remained a body in the end, and therefore was contained in a meaning that all recognized. This metaphorical likening could be deceiving, however, as Hobbes believed to some extent; and certainly metaphor, and above all unawareness of metaphors at work, may mask the fictions and ideologies that actually reside behind entities such as the state or the law. No matter how connected to “reality” they are, metaphors also assume a parallel life beyond that reality; in this sense, as James Wood has again written, metaphor becomes a “fictional alternative, a likeness, another life.” Such was the case in the seventeenth century, with its bloody inf lictions as well as its balms and its salves, or in modern times, its hackneyed use of metaphors such as “healing.” Yet in a time of turbulence, the parallel, fictional life of the metaphor—and the insistence that the times related to something else, and something higher—also allowed for the self-explanations of an age, transforming contemporary misery into something akin to hope by framing it in meaning. Woundedness continued to live on as a rich metaphorical image in the centuries that followed the 1640s and 1650s, though it would assume different guises according to changing historical circumstances. After the Restoration in 1660, political and religious conf licts such as the Popish Plot might have compelled writers to utilize a rhetoric of woundedness in pamphlets, but with nowhere near the frequency, intensity, or centrality—and so consistently across discourses—as it had before.2 Metaphorical usages of woundedness also differed in the centuries to come as they became subject to differing notions of the self, or to the psychology of the modern world.3 In the context of war, wounds continued to yield the key to identity; the character of Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy, retired from a wound to the groin, dedicated to his hobby horse and military fortification projects to relieve him of the pain that he still bears, is one of the more classic literary examples of figures defined by their disability, raising questions of the relationship of wounds to militarism, or something deeper.4 Later on, the wounds of war were more blatantly addressed in the context of senseless wars, through such modern works as Walt Whitman’s American Civil War poem “The Wound Dresser” (“The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,/ I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young”). World War I appears to have brought about the most

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interesting treatments of wounds, through the work of poets such as Wilfred Owen or Robert Service (“Grim gashes dolorously healed,/ And inner ailings unrevealed”).5 The Great War has also yielded much scholarship centering upon the nature of masculinity and woundedness, with Joanna Bourke’s seminal Dismembering the Male exploring the subjectivities of the male body in a state of training, fighting, rehabilitation, and, of course, injury.6 In the premodern era, the wounded veteran was often enhanced by his mutilations, bearing as he did profoundly masculine (as well as honorable) wounds; but if wounds defined the man, then the nature of masculinity itself would change with the more ambiguous military theaters of later wars—or experiences of those wars. No longer was this the world of Macaulay’s cavalier, as the physical diminishment of the veteran came to embody the age itself. Images of wounds even pervaded later writings and performances of the law; though the seventeenth century witnessed the decline of a penal philosophy that had lasted for centuries, for example, the relationship between morality, death, punishment, and judgment—and wounds— would not, of course, end either. In Kaf ka’s exceedingly disturbing story entitled “In the Penal Colony,” an unnamed officer in an unnamed land sings the praises of what he calls a “harrow” machine—an execution contraption that utilizes a series of jabbing and moving needles to literally inscribe judgment onto the body of the condemned over the course of twelve excruciating hours—long enough for the victim to comprehend his judgment in the very marrow of his being. Called the “great twentieth-century fabulist of judicial stigmatization,” Kaf ka treated the law as both absurd and utterly serious,7 with the torture machine representing, perhaps, a kind of “mechanical” jurisprudence that ultimately goes horribly awry, as it proceeds at the end of the story to stab the now prostrate officer indiscriminately across the body and finish him off with a single spike through the head.8 It could be said that the officer shares his fate with the fate of the machine, and by extension with “justice” itself, and is ultimately destroyed by it. But while Kaf ka’s justice is a profoundly twentieth-century conception, one could also argue that many who were punished or went to their deaths in seventeenth-century England were also, like the officer, implicated in (if not quite responsible for) the mechanics of their own suffering and judgment, particularly when they sought to exploit their punishments and transform their identity toward a larger abstract and no less ideological goal. Wounds also continued to be depicted in religious iconography, with art of even the most ostensibly secular variety using wounds to create

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a kind of martyrology; such was the case with Jacques-Louis David’s painting of “The Death of Marat,” a “secular Pieta” that draws attention to the simple wound of the dead hero.9 Today, Kiki Smith is one of the more notable examples of an artist whose work, like Richard Crashaw’s, is essentially sacramental in its focus on bodily fragments, reddened or bruised skin, and the “permeable body that leaks and dissolves,” even if one female figure’s milk “nourishes nothing, and [her male figure’s] semen propagates nothing.” In her portrait of the Virgin Mary, on the other hand, the mother’s body becomes “a vessel of divine spirit,” with her divinity existing most “insistently and defiantly in the f lesh.”10 In the same spirit, Michael Clark, inf luenced by Francis Bacon’s paintings of bloody, decayed, or abject bodies, has also borrowed from a devotional tradition, particularly in his work entitled the “Five Wounds” (1994), which treats wounds as passages into deeper meanings while also acknowledging the medieval cult of the five wounds. Finally, one comes full circle when noting the inf luence of war’s devastations on a wound-laden art turned religious; such examples include Otto Dix’s paintings of World War I, which depict the horrific world of wounds and trenches with the same vivid quasireligiosity as Grünewald’s late medieval Issenheim Altarpiece. Graham Sutherland’s Thorn pictures, as well as Hans Feibusch’s modern-day Pieta and the quasi-religious or atoning works of Anselm Kiefer, all of which were inf luenced by the devastations and emotional aftermath of World War II, also found in religious woundedness the visual and symbolic expression of those ravages.11 Cathy Caruth has written that trauma is “always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality of truth that is otherwise not available.” Yet the wound (or metaphorical wound), in Sarah Cole’s exposition of Caruth, may “also [return] a fundamental productivity to the sufferer, in the form of his/her urgent storytelling.”12 Trauma is itself a post-Freudian term that should not be applied to the seventeenth century; at the same time, Caruth and Cole nevertheless offer insight into the manner in which woundedness can extend itself into meaning and storytelling, interpretation and narrative. Wounds are both unique and collectively experienced, both repulsive and soul-opening—and in scars, memory inducing—as they provoke the witness to look, and to look away; they are, finally, most intimately known to everyone in their redeeming debilitation—as infirmities, to quote William James, that carry the potential to “help us unexpectedly.” Yet wounds as continually living things also are rich with variable metaphorical possibility,

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and in the most surprising of places, in one’s body, heart, soul, or in nations at war. Through England’s wounds, seventeenth-century writers asked their contemporaries to remember the times; and it is by their wounds—those abject, bloody, and redemptive conduits—that we should remember them too.


NOT E S

Introduction 1. Sophocles, Philoctetes, in Four Plays, ed. T.H. Banks (Oxford, 1966), 140 and idem. See also Oscar Mandel, Philoctetes and the Fall of Troy: Documents, Iconography, Interpretations (Lincoln, NE, 1981). 2. Drew Leder, “Illness and Exile: Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” Literature and Medicine 9 (1990), 1–11. 3. See also Roselyne Rey, who writes, “When pain is at its worse, Philoctetes is in a sort of delirious state where he can neither recognize nor communicate with those closest to him.” Roselyn Rey, The History of Pain, trans. Louise Elliott Wallace (Cambridge, MA, 1995). 4. Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (Oxford, 1947), 289; William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London, 1902), 25. 5. See, for example, the classic accounts: A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA, 1936); E. W. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York, 1943). 6. Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge, 2000), 63. 7. Ibid., 114ff. 8. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994), introduction. 9. Kevin Sharpe, 40. See also Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969), 3–53; idem, “On Performing and Explaining Linguistic Actions,” Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1971), 1–21; J. G. A. Pocock, “Verbalizing a Political Act: Towards a Politics of Language,” Political Theory 1 (1973), 27–45; J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (Cambridge, 1989). 10. See Kevin Sharpe, 45. 11. See Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York, 1946); I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1936); Paul Ricoeur; On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago, 1979); Mark Johnson, Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor (Minneapolis, 1981); idem, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, 1987); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980); Samuel R. Levin, Metaphoric Worlds: Conceptions of a Romantic Nature (New Haven, 1988); Weller Embler, Metaphor and Meaning (Deland, FLA, 1966); A. Goatly, A Language of Metaphors (London 1997); Z. Kovecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Oxford, 2002); 12. Kevin Sharpe, 42–44.

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13. See Ronald S. Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament (Grand Rapids, MI, 1957), 78–161, 229. 14. Edward Taylor, “Preparatory Meditations before My Approach to the Lords Supper,” in The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford (New Haven, 1960), II, 101, 7–8. 15. Kathleen Blake, “Edward Taylor’s Protestant Poetic: Non-transubstantiating Metaphor,” American Literature 43 (1971), 1–24. 16. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London, 1968), Part 1, chap. 4, 102–103ff. 17. Conal Condrun, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (New York, 1994), 71. See also David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan (Princeton, 1986). 18. Locke, “Of Human Understanding,” in Philosophical Works, ed. James Augustis St. John (London, 1877), 2: 112. 19. Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago, 1979), 12. 20. Quoted from Roy Daniells, “English Baroque and Deliberate Obscurity,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5 (1946), 118–119; see also Peter Dear, “Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in Early Royal Society,” Isis 76 (1985), 145–161. 21. Quoted in Daniells, 119. 22. Paul Ricoeur, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewaer (Boston, 1978), 44. 23. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S. J. (London, 1978). 24. Ibid., 237. 25. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in On Metaphor, 29–45. 26. Marcus B. Hester, Meaning of Poetic Metaphor: An Analysis in the Light of Wittgenstein’s Claim that Meaning is Use (The Hague, 1967), 68. 27. Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism (Cambridge, MA, 1991), introduction. 28. Quoted in Stafford, 4. 29. Donald G. MacRae, “The Body and Social Metaphor,” in The Body as a Medium of Expression, ed. Jonathan Benthall and Ted Polhemus (London, 1975), 62. 30. Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Words and Wounds,” Medicine and Literature, ed. Enid Rhodes Peschel (New York, 1980), 181–186. 31. Ibid., 63. 32. See, for example, Jean-Yves Le Naour, The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War, trans. Penny Allen (New York, 2004), 8–9 and ff. 33. Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in The Works of Thomas Browne, ed. Simon Wilkin (London, 1852), 2: 433. 34. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, “Introduction: Disability Studies and the Double Bind of Representation,” in The Body and Physical Difference, ed. Snyder and Mitchell (Ann Arbor, 2000); see also David T. Mitchell, “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Susan L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, (New York, 2002), 15ff; Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High Middle Ages, 1100–1400 (New York, 2007), introduction; Social Histories of Disability and Deformity, ed. David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg (New York, 2006). 35. Thedore Ziolowski, Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconology, 8, 10; see also Phillip Stambovsky, The Depictive Image: Metaphor and Literary Experience (Amherst, 1988), 71–72. 36. Stephen Greenblatt, “Mutilation and Meaning,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Carlo Mazzio and David Hillman (London: Routledge), 221–241.

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37. Mitchell Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 1999), 113. 38. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York, 1982), 3–4. 39. Ibid., 53. 40. Ibid., 101. 41. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (London, 1960), 21. See also Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (New York, 2002). 42. See Miri Rubin, “The Body, Whole and Vulnerable, in Fifteenth-Century England,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis, 1996), 19–29. 43. Michael Camille, Images on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992), 16. 44. See Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago, 2000). 45. Quoted from Jager, 122. 46. See W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (New York, 2003). 47. Stafford, 58. 48. Maurizio Bettini, Portrait of the Lover, trans. Laura Gibbs (Berkeley, CA, 1999), 17. 49. Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London, 2001). 50. Samuel Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1985). 51. See Andrew Stewart, Attalos, Athens, and the Akropolis: The Pergamene ‘Little Barbarians’ and their Roman and Renaissance Legacy (Cambridge, 2004), 166. 52. Purgatorio, Canto III (51). 53. Nigel Spivey, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude (Berkeley, CA, 2001), Spivey, 28. 54. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985), 198ff. 55. Spivey, 62. 56. For an exploration of Job, see Helene Cixous, “Stigmata, or Job the Dog,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, Philosophy Today (1997), 12–17. 57. It was Leviticus and Uzzah’s description of leprosy that provided the template for medieval meditation on Christ’s own woundedness. See 2 Chronicle 26: 16–21 and Leviticus 13: 45. 58. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London, 1955), 200. See also Frederick C. Bauerschmidt, “The Wounds of Christ,” Journal of Literature and Theology 5 (1991), 83–100. 59. Since some Gnostics, for example, did not recognize the physical body of Christ, the meaning of his passion—and with it, the woundedness it entailed—was likewise not real. One Gnostic text, The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, quotes Jesus as saying to Simon that “it was another . . . who drank the gall and vinegar, it was not I . . . [It] was another upon whom they placed the crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the height over . . . their error . . . And I was laughing at their ignorance.” This Gnostic Jesus bore no footprints, never blinked, stood “fair” and physically unbroken; others might have seen the wounds inf licted by nails and thorns, but those wounds were “his f leshly part, which is the substitute,” and thus not real. For upholders of the orthodoxy, such as Irenaeus, Ignatius, or Justin, such claims not only denied the bodily experience of crucifixion and martyrdom, but also denied Jesus a central component of his very identity. Second Treatise of the Great Seth, trans. Roger A. Bullard and Joseph A. Gibbons. In The Nag Hammadi Library in English, eds. James McConkey Robinson, Richard Smith, et al. 4th ed. (New York and London, 1996). 60. See the Martyrdom of Polycarp, in Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna, Lettres: Martyre de Polycarpe, ed. and trans. P.T. Camelot, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1958), 264. 61. Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (New York, 1995), 10.

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62. Bonaventure, The Discipline and the Master: St. Bonaventure’s Sermons on St. Francis of Assisi, trans. Eric Doyle (Chicago, 1983), 82. See also Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in LateMedieval Italy (Cambridge, 1996). 63. “The identification of women with the body demands that their sanctification occur in and through that body . . . the medieval hagiographer wants externally sensible signs of visionary and mystical experience in order to verify the claims to sanctity of the woman saint.” Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, 1995), 35. 64. Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and the Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia, 1991), 24–26. 65. Caroline Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York, 1994), 161, 224. 66. Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love, ed. Elisabeth Dutton (London, 2008), 147. Wounds were not simply gendered in favor of the female, since they could belong to the province of men as well. In the case of Origen’s alleged self-castration—though the procedure was apparently performed by a doctor—Peter Brown has written that what Origen sought was more “unsettling” than simply unsexing himself, for by becoming a eunuch he “had dared to shift the massive boundary between the sexes” and had, in effect, become “exiled from either gender,” a “walking lesson in the basic indeterminacy of the body.” Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988), 169. 67. Dante, Divine Comedy: Purgatory, trans. Mark Musa (New York, 1985), canto xxix, 1.2. See also Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutilation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, trans. Tania Croft-Murray (Cambridge, 1988), chap. two. 68. Canto xxix 1.3, “Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata!” In Dante. 69. Aquinas refers to Job’s statement when he writes, “There are those who assert that we weill rise with celestial bodies, but Job excludes this when he says, ‘And my skin will surround me again,’ . . . for in this way of speaking he gives the reason of the resurrection, that the soul not remain denuded forever of its proper clothing.” See Aquinas, Expositions on Job, chap. 19, lecio 2, Opera omnia, ed. Frette (Paris, 1976), 18: 119–120. 70. Quoted from Caroline Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York, 1995), 123. 71. Ibid., 254. 72. See also Vladimir Gurewich, “Observations on the Iconography of the Wound in Christ’s Side, with Special Reference to its Position,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957), 358–362. 73. Spivey, 63. 74. Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York, 1996), 42. 75. Quoted from Beckwith, 56. 76. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 62 on the Song of Songs, in Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Writings, trans. G. R. Evans (New York, 1987), 250–251. 77. Henry Suso, Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, trans. Edmund Colledge (Washington, DC, 1994), 96, 99. 78. Peter Widdicombe, “The Wounds and the Ascended Body :The Marks of Crucifixion in the Glorified Christ from Justin Martyr to John Calvin,” Laval théologique et philosophique 59 (2003). 79. Martin Luther, “A Meditation on Christ’s Passion,” in Luther, Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, Daniel E. Poellot, Walter A. Hansen, et al. (St Louis, 1955–1969), 42: 8–9. 80. Mitchell Merback, 299–301; see also 70–73. 81. For Calvin on Christ’s wounds, see John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, trans. W. Pringle (Grand Rapids, MI, 1979), 2: 265; and idem, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. II, ed. J. Neill and trans. F. Battles (Philadelphia, 1960), Bk III.25.3, 990–991, and Bk IV.17.29, 1398–1399.

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82. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of Matters Most Speciall and Memorable . . . (London, 1583), 1511. 83. Roy Rappaport, “The Obvious Aspects of Ritual,” in Ecology, Meaning and Religion (Richmond, CA, 1979), 173–222. 84. Bob Scribner, “Reformation and Desacralization: From Sacramental World to Moralized Universe,” in Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia and R. W. Scribner (Wiesbaden, 1997), 75–92. 85. Emily Dickinson, Poem #599, “There is a Pain So Utter,” in Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems, ed. Helen McNeil (London, 1996), 57.

One


1. Abraham Cowley, The Civil War, ed. Allan Pritchard (Toronto, 1973), 73. 2. William Allen, “A faithful Memorial of That Remarkable Meeting of Many Officers of the Army” (1659), in Somers Tracts, ed. Sir W. Scott (London, 1809–1815), 5: 501. 3. Patricia Crawford, “Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood,” Journal of British Studies 16 (1977), 41–61. 4. For the means by which metaphors persuade and shape attitudes, see Elliot Zashin and Phillip C. Chapman, “The Uses of Metaphor and Analogy: Toward a Renewal of Political Language,” in The Journal of Politics 36 (1974), 309; see also Jeremy Rayner, “Between Meaning and Event: An Historical Approach to Political Metaphors,” Political Studies 32 (1984), 537–550; Eugene F. Miller, “Metaphor and Political Knowledge,” The American Political Science Review 73 (1974), 290–326; Giuseppa Saccaro-Battisti, “Changing Metaphors of Political Structures,” Journal of the History of Ideas (1983), 31–54; James Daly, “Cosmic Harmony and Political Thinking in Early Stuart England,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 69 (1979), 3–41; Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge, 1969); Jacques LeGoff, “Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Three, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadio Tazi, Zone 5 (New York, 1989), 13–25. 5. Derek Hirst, England in Conflict, 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1999), introduction. 6. See J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London, 1986), 48–49. 7. Michael Walzer, “On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought,” Political Science Quarterly 82 (1967), 191–204. 8. For definitions of metaphor and analogy, see Daly, “Cosmic Harmony,” 7. The target of injury was usually perceived to be the body politic, which was not simply a metaphor, or a rhetorical device, but an analogy, which “discovered new truth by arguing from the known to unknown.” 9. Giuseppa Saccaro-Battisti, “Changing Metaphors of Political Structures,” 33. 10. Rayner, “Between Meaning and Event,” 537–544. 11. Richard Lovelace, Lucasta: Poems Addressed or Relating to Lucasta,” II, lines 4–6, in Miscellaneous Poems, ed. W. L. Phelps (London, 1921), 2: 48. 12. Henry Parker, Observations upon some of his Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (1642), reprinted in Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, ed. William Haller (New York, 1934), 2: 167–213. 13. George Wither, Vox Pacifica (1645), 138. 14. Thomas Craig, Concerning the Right of Succession to the Crowne of England (1594); quoted in David George Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (Mouton, 1971), 81. 15. See, however, Conal Condren, “On Rhetorical Foundations of Leviathan,” History of Political Thought 11 (1990), 715.

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16. Jonathan Gil-Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1998), chap. two. 17. Pym’s speech on grievances, April 17, 1640, in The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, ed. J. P. Kenyon, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1966), 183. 18. See Gil Harris, 19. 19. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (repr. London, 1992). 114–115. 20. See Kevin Sharpe, “A Commonwealth of Meanings,” in Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge, 2000), 86. 21. J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History 13 (1989), 13. 22. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA, 1936). 23. See for example Plato, Republic, Bk. Two; Laws, 628ff; Timaeus; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Robert Williams (London, 1869), 287–288. 24. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. Cary Needham (Cambridge, 1991), 67. 25. See, for example, Thomas Floyd, The Picture of a Perfect Commonwealth (London, 1600). 26. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977), 218, n7. 27. For Paul’s use and rhetoric of the body politic, see Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven, 1999), 38–54. 28. Shklar, 199. 29. John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Raymond Geuss and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1997), 20. 30. See Paul Archambault, “The Analogy of the ‘Body’ in Renaissance Political Literature,” Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 29 (1967), 21–52. 31. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. and trans. C. J. Nederman (Cambridge, 1990), Bk V, chap. 2, 67. 32. See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1994), introduction. 33. Gil-Harris, esp. chapter two. 34. Edward Forset, A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606). 35. Quoted from David Jardine, Criminal Trials (London, 1835), 2: 216. 36. Zvi Jagendorf, “Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990), 458. 37. See David Hale, “Coriolanus: The Death of a Political Metaphor,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 197–202; Hale, The Body Politic, 96–107; Tetsuya Motohashi, “Body Politic and Political Body in Coriolanus,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 30 (1994), 97–112. 38. Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison, WI, 1991), esp. 142, 242. 39. Jenny Wormald, “James VI, James I and the Identity of Britain,” in The British Problem, c. 1534–1707, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (New York, 1996), 148–149. 40. Ibid., 165. 41. James Daly, “Cosmic Harmony and Political Thinking in Early Stuart England,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 69 (1979), 37–38. 42. Margaret Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution (New Brunswick, 1949); Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (London, 1992), 165–167. 43. Sommerville, 137. 44. See Burgess, 111–112. 45. See David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge, 2000), chap. one, especially 39ff. 46. Ibid., 33. 47. Ibid., 44–45.

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48. Thomas Adams, Englands Sickness, Comparatively Conferred with Israels. Divided into Two Sermons (London, 1614). 49. Quoted in John Forster, Sir John Eliot: A Biography, 1590–1632 (London, 1864), 1: 545, 549, 552. 50. Quoted from James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (New York, 2002), 180. 51. “The Duke Returned Again” in Holstun, 181–182; see also Michael Fixler, Milton and the Kingdoms of God (Evanston, 1964), 117–118. 52. See Holstun, 513–552. For other poetry on Buckingham and Felton, see Gerald Hammond, Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems 1616–1660 (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 51–66. 53. Sommerville, 138. 54. George Digby, The Third Speech of the Lord George Digby (1641), 8–9. 55. Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge, 1987), 179–264. 56. See Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford, 2005). 57. Nathaniel Hardy, The Arraignment of Licentious Liberty . . . (1647), 16. 58. George Wither, Campo-Musae: Or the Field-Musings of Captain George Wither (1643), sig. A3r. 59. John Milton, “The Second Defence of the English People,” in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. D. M. Wolfe (New Haven, 1953–1982), 4: 556. 60. Edward Dorset, Two Speeches Spoken at Oxford by the Right Honourable Edward, Earle of Dorset before His Majesty . . . (1643). 61. John Milton, “The Reason of Church-Government,” in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. D. M. Wolfe (New Haven, 1953–1982), 1: 781. 62. John Milton, “Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England,” in The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Patterson (New York, 1931–1938), 3: 47–48. 63. For Milton’s “rhetorical iconoclasm,” see David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, 1990), esp. 21–25; and Lana Cable, Carnal Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Durham, NC and London, 1995), 160, esp. 21–25. 64. William Laud, A Speech (1637), 2–3. 65. Robert Baillie, Letters and Journals: Containing an Impartial Account of Public Transactions, Civil, Ecclesiastical and Military in England and Scotland (Edinburgh, 1775), 1: 40. Montrose described Scotland to Charles in terms of disease in a letter: “Your antient and native kingdom of Scotland is in a mighty distemper. It is incumbent to your Majesty to find out the disease, remove the causes, and apply convenient remedies. The disease, in my opinion, is contagious, and may infect the rest of your Majesty’s dominions. It is the falling sickness; for they are like to fall from you, and the obedience due to you.” News Out of Scotland: Being a Miscellaneous Collection of Verse and Prose, ed. E. M. V. Brougham (London, 1926), 168. 66. Sarah Barber, “Scotland and Ireland under the Commonwealth: A Question of Loyalty,” in Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725, ed. Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (London, 1995), 197–198, 201. See also Hirst, “The English Republic,” 198–199. 67. Cuthbert Sydenham, The False Brother or, A New Map of Scotland Drawn . . . (1651), 4, 5–9. 68. Brian Duppa, A Collection of Prayers and Thanksgivings, used in His Majesties Chapel, and in His Armies (Oxford, 1643), 2. 69. Nicholas Lockyer, Baulme for Bleeding England (London, 1644), 90. 70. See Hirst, “The English Republic,” 178. 71. Stephen Marshall, A Peace Offering to God (1641), 40. 72. See, for example, Ethan Shagan, “Constructing Discord: Ideology, Propaganda and the English Response to the Irish Rebellion of 1641,” Journal of British Studies 36 (1997), 4–34. 73. Marshall, Reformation and Desolation: A Sermon Tending to the Discovery of the Symptoms of a People (London, 1642), 36.

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74. Ibid., 35. 75. Thomas Fuller, England’s Worthies in Church and State (London, 1684), 391. 76. Stephen Marshall, Meroz Cursed (London, 1641); Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 82–85. 77. Exodus, 15: 6–7. 78. Ethyn Williams Kirby, “Sermons before the Commons, 1640–42,” in The American Historical Review 3 (1939), 537. 79. William Bridge, Babylons Downfall . . . (London, 1641), 21. See also Kirby, 535–536. 80. Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (London, 1994), chap. 4. 81. Jasper Mayne, Certain Sermons and Letters of Defence and Resolution to some of the Late Controversies of Our Times (1653), 18. 82. Kirby, 546–547. 83. See Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London, 1993), 208–215. 84. Nicholas Lockyer, Balm for England: Or, Useful Instructions for Evil Times (rep. London, 1831), 4, 83–84ff. 85. John Goodwin, Anti-Cavalierisme, or, Truth Pleading as well as the Necessity, as the Lawfulness of This Present Warre . . . (London, 1642), 30. 86. Ibid. 87. Crawford, 58. 88. Ibid., 52. 89. Ibid., 43. 90. Nicholas Lockyer, A Baulme for Bleeding England and Ireland (London, 1646), A2. 91. Henry Parker, Observations upon some of His Majesties Late Answers . . . (London, 1642), 1. 92. See Norbrook, 39, 53, 154. 93. Norbrook points out, however, that Lucan’s “more orthodox and humorless readers could persuade themselves that the invocation to Nero [in the Pharsalia] was the expression of a genuine monarchism.” See Norbrook, 36. 94. Cowley, 76–77. 95. Cowley, 95. 96. Charles I, Eikon Basilike, ed. Jim Daems and Holly Faith Nelson (Peterborough, ON, 2006), 152. 97. It was a persona so strong, in fact, that the anonymous author of A Helpe to the Right Understanding (1645)—probably the Leveller William Walwyn—had to carefully navigate it in order to lodge his criticisms of the later Prynne’s writings. Anon., “A Helpe to the Right Understanding of a Discourse Concerning Independency” (London, 1644), in Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution 1638–1647, ed. William Haller (New York, 1933), 3: 193–201. 98. John Lilburne, A Work of the Beast, or a Relation of a Most Unchristian Censure . . . (1638), 5–7 ff. 99. Thomas Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1992), 134–146. 100. Joseph Frank, The Levellers: A History of the Writings of Three Seventeenth-Century Social Democrats (Cambridge, MA, 1955), 18. 101. Corns, 138. 102. For issues of authorship in the Eikon Basilike, see Corns, 80–81. 103. See Andrew Lacey, “Charles the First and Christ the Second,” in Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c. 1400–1700, eds. Thomas Freeman and Thomas Mayer (London, 2007), esp. 207–208. 104. Eikon Basilike, 52, 58, 62. Corns, 86–87. 105. See Zvi Jagendorf, “Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts,” esp. 464–469.

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106. See Kevin Sharpe, “ ‘So Hard a Text’: Images of Charles I, 1612–1700,” The Historical Journal 43 (2000), esp. 383–394; Joad Raymond, “Popular Representations of Charles I,” in Thomas Corns, ed., Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge, 1999), 47–73. 107. The Kings Maiesties Speech, As It was Delivered the Second of November . . . (Oxford, 1642), 4. 108. Ibid, 5. 109. Edward Symmons, A Vindication of King Charles: Or, A Loyal Subjects Duty (London, 1648), 250. 110. Sharpe, “ ‘So Hard a Text?,’ ” 383–405; see also Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), 57–62. 111. Symmons, 241ff. See also Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660 (Cambridge, 2001), 268. 112. Wilcher, 241. 113. Skerpan-Wheeler, The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution, 1642–1660 (Columbia, MO, 1992), 109. 114. See, for example, Eikon Basilike, 24. 115. See Keith Thomas, “Cases of Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (Oxford, 1993), 29–56. 116. See Eikon Basilike, ed. Faith Nelson et al., 94. 117. See Potter, 161–163. 118. Eikon Basilike, 149. 119. Ibid., 130. 120. Ibid., 54. 121. Ibid., 183. 122. See, for example, Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1997), 112ff; Laura Blair McKnight, “Crucifixion or Apocalypse? Refiguring the Eikon Basilike,” in Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge, 1996), 139. 123. John Milton, Eikonklastes, in The Complete Prose Works, 3: 575. 124. Ibid., 3: 508. 125. Milton, Areopagitica, in The Complete Prose Works, 2: 549ff. 126. Symmons, Vindication, 250ff. 127. The Subjects Sorrow or Lamentations upon the Death of Britain’s Josiah (1649), E546/16. See also Sharpe, Images of Charles I, 392. 128. Henry King, A Deep Groane, Fetch’d at the Funerall of the Incomparable and Glorious Monarch Charles the First (London, 1649), II, lines 9–10. 129. Quoted from de Groot, 167. 130. Thomas Jordan, A Litany for the New Year, with a Description of the New State (London, 1660). 131. Quoted from Wilcher, 295. 132. Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), 186–187. 133. Henry King, A Deepe Groane Fetched. 134. See Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford, 1990), esp. chap. 1. 135. His Majesties Complaint Occasioned by His Late Sufferings (1647), E393/38, 4. 136. A Message from the Royal Prisoner at Windsor, to the Kingdom of Scotland (London, 1649), sigs. A2-A2v. 137. Poems of James Graham, Marquis of Montrose (1612–1650), ed. J. L. Weir (London, 1938), 45. 138. Henry King, A Deep Groane, Fetch’d at the Funerall, l. 1–10. 139. See Clement Walker, Anarchia Anglicana: Or, The History of Independency. The Second Part (1649). See also Wilcher, 290–292.

190

Notes

140. Henry Vaughan, Silex Scintillans: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (Cambridge, MA, 1847), 227. 141. Edward Sexby, Englands Miserie and Remedie (1645), 1. 142. Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil War and Interregnum (Burlington, VT, 2004), 240–242. 143. Ibid., 195. 144. See Ibid., 267. 145. Barber, 207. 146. Derek Hirst, “The English Republic and the Meaning of Britain,” in The British Problem, 203. 147. See for example Blair Worden, “The Politics of Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode,’ “ Historical Journal 27 (1984), 525–547. 148. Norbrook, 134. 149. George Wither, “Vox Pacifica,” in Miscellaneous Works (London, 1872), 72. 150. James Harrington, Oceana: And Other Works (London, 1747), 78. 151. Ibid. 152. See Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), esp. 267–284. 153. Norbrook, 60. See also Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660 (Cambridge, 2001), 279. 154. See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 386–387. 155. Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge, 1991), 166, 169. 156. Ibid., 222. 157. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London, 1985), II, chap. 29, 375. 158. See “Organic and Mechanical Metaphors in Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” Harvard Law Review 110 (1997), esp. 1845. See also, for the persistence of the body politic, metaphor beyond the end date as postulated by David Hale. 159. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 387. 160. John Lilburne, L. Colonel JOHN LILBURNE revived (1653), 1–3. 161. Wildman, The Lawes Subversion (1648), 2. 162. R. G., A Copy of a Letter from an Officer of the Army in Ireland (1656), 19. 163. John Rogers, Mene, Tekel, Perez, or, A Little Appearance of the Handwriting . . . against the Powers and Apostates of the Times (London), 1654. See also C. H. Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate, 1656–1658 (London, 1909), 1: 212. 164. Laura Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge, 2000), 178 and idem. 165. Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: With Elucidations, ed. Thomas Carlyle (London, 1861), 3: 214. 166. Oliver Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, ed. W. C. Abbott (Oxford, 1937–1947), 3: 435. 167. Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (London, 1580), 5–6. 168. John Taylor, The Disease of the Times, or The Distempers of the Common-wealth . . . (1642), A2. 169. Anon, Essayes upon Several Subjects not Unworthy [of] Consideration in These Times (1651), 8, 27. 170. Brian Duppa, A Collection of Prayers and Thanksgivings, Used in His Majesties Chapel, and in His Armies (Oxford, 1643), 2. 171. See J. W. Daly, “John Bramhall and the Theoretical Problems of Royalist Moderation,” Journal of British Studies 11 (1971), 26–44; John Sanderson, “Serpent-Salve, 1643: The Royalism of John Bramhall,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 25 (1974), 1–14. 172. Edmund Calamy, Englands Looking-Glasse Presented in a Sermon . . . (London, 1642), 1–3. 173. Edmund Staunton, Phinehas’s Zeal in Execution of Judgement. Or, A Divine Remedy for Englands Misery. A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable House of Lords in the Abby of Westminster (London, 1645), 7, 24.

Notes

191

174. John Browne, Adenochoiradelogia, or, An Anatomick-Chirurgical Treatise of Glandules & Strumaes, or Kings-Evil-Swellings Together with the Royal Gift of Healing . . . (London, 1684), 77. 175. Robert Herrick, “To the King, To Cure the Evil,” in Hesperides; Or, Works both Human and Divine (London, 1852), 160. 176. William Chillingworth, The Petition of the Most Substantiall Inhabitants of the City of London, and the Liberties Thereof, to the Lords and Commons for Peace Together with the Answer to the Same, and the Replye of the Petitioners (London, 1642), 9. 177. Elizabeth Hedrick, “Romancing the Salve: Sir Kenelm Digby and the Powder of Sympathy,” British Journal for the History of Science 41 (2008), 161–185. 178. See Archambault, 29. 179. Forset, 93. 180. See John Taylor, “I will Stitch the Wounds Afresh that They may Heale the Better,” in The Diseases of the Time (1645), A3–A4. 181. William Prynne, Hidden Workes of Darknes Brought to Publike Light (1645), A2. 182. Jerome de Groot, Royalist Identities (London, 2004), 15–16. 183. Thomas Warmstry, Ramus Olivae; or, an Humble Motion for Peace (Oxford, 1641), 20–21; see also de Groot, 15. 184. Henry Parker, The Case of Shipmoney Briefly Discoursed (1640). 185. John Lilburne, “The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England (1649),” in The Leveller Tracts: 1647–1653, ed. William A. Haller and Godfrey Davies (New York, 1944), 442. 186. J. Andrew Mendelsohn, “Alchemy and Politics in England, 1649–1665,” Past and Present 135 (1992), 44. 187. Ibid., 47–48. 188. Edward Hyde, The History of the Rebellion, ed. W. Dunn Macray (Oxford, 1979), 1: 2. 189. Thomas May, The History of the Parliament of England: Which began November the Third, M.DC. XL (1647); See, in general, Gerald M. MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660 (Madison, WI, 1990), esp. 139–176; Smith, esp. 336–355 190. See, for example, Hyde, 2: 57, 59, 126, 167. 191. Jonathan Rogers, “ ‘We Saw a New Created Day’: Restoration Revisions of Civil War Apocalypse,” in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, MA, 1999), 189–190. 192. See Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, 7; Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, 79.

Two

Law’s Breakages

1. For recent work on the role of metaphor in the law, see, for example, Peter Brook, “The Law as Narrative and Rhetoric,” Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, ed. Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz (New Haven, 1996), 14–23; Yon Maley, “The Language of the Law,” in Language and the Law, ed. John Gibbons (London, 1994), 11–50; Bernard J. Hibbitts, “Making Sense of Metaphor: Visuality, Aurality, and the Reconfiguration of American Legal Discourse,” Cardozo Law Review 229 (1994); Milner S. Ball, Lying Down Together: Law, Metaphor and Theology (1985), 23–27; Haig Bosmajian, Metaphor and Reason in Judicial Opinions (1992); James E. Murray, “Understanding Law as Metaphor,” Journal of Legal Education 34 (1984), 714; Thomas Ross, “Metaphor and Paradox,” Georgia Law Review 23 (1989), 1053, 1055–1063. 2. John Cowell, The Interpreter (Cambridge, 1607), sig. *3. 3. See Henry Finch, Nomotexnia (1613), sig. Jiiiv. Quoted from Richard Helgerson, “Writing the Law,” in Law, Liberty, and Parliament: Selected Essays on the Writings of Sir Edward Coke, ed. Allen D. Boyer (Indianapolis, 2004), 39.

192

Notes

4. Thomas G. Barnes, “Introduction to Coke’s Commentary on Littleton,” in Law, Liberty, and Parliament, 2. Coke also used metaphorical language of illumination to convey the law; thus could treason laws be “darke and hard [to understand]” necessitating that he “[open] such windowes, and [make] them so lightsome, and easie to be understood “ Third Institutes, “Proeme” (London, 1809). 5. D. Alan Orr, Treason and the State: Law, Politics, and Ideology in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 2002), 46–47. 6. Jer. 31.33. 7. See Karen S. Feldman, Binding Words: Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel and Heidegger (Chicago, 2006). See also John Locke on figurative language: “If we must speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, all the figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment, and so indeed are a perfect cheat . . .” John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Philadelphia), 327. 8. Hobbes, Leviathan, 3.42, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1996), 290. See also Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago, 2000), 153. 9. See, in general, Wilfred R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640 (Totowa, NJ, 1972). 10. See, for example, James Boyd White, Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (Madison, WI, 1989), 67. 11. Hibbitts, 229–235. 12. For the interface between language, literature, and the law, see James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination (Boston, 1973); Richard Posner, Law and Literature (Cambridge, MA, 1988); John Hollander, “Legal Rhetoric,” in Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, ed. Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz (New Haven, 1996), 187–205. 13. Indeed, such language pervades modern judicial discourse today when a legal concept such as freedom of expression is described as having to be “ringed about with adequate bulwarks.” For a discussion of law and metaphors of boundaries, see Jennifer Nedelsky, “Law, Boundaries, and the Bounded Self,” in Law and the Order of Culture, ed. Robert Post (Berkeley, CA, 1991), 162–189. 14. See Subha Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2006), esp. 233–242. 15. Peter Goodrich, Reading the Law (Oxford, 1986), 4. 16. Orr, 5. 17. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985), esp. 27–38. 18. See, for example, Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 153 (November 1996), 64–107; J. A. Sharpe, “Last Dying Speeches: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England.” Past and Present 107 (1986), 144–167; Thomas Laqueur, “Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868,” The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge, 1989), 305–356; Molly Smith, “The Theater and the Scaffold: Death as Spectacle in the Spanish Tragedy,” Studies in English Literature 32 (1992), 219– 232; Katharine Royer, “Dead Men Talking: Truth, Texts and the Scaffold in Early Modern England,” Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900: Punishing the English, ed. Simon Devereaux and Paul Griffiths (London, 2004), 63–84; Andrea McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675–1775 (New York, 2007); Randall McGowen, “The Body and Punishment in EighteenthCentury England,” The Journal of Modern History 59 (1987), 651–679. 19. Curt Breight, “ ‘Treason Doth Never Prosper’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Treason,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990), 3. 20. See Orr, 48–49.

Notes

193

21. Much of the statute, despite Coke, was derived from Roman law. See J. G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1970), 14. 22. See Gerald Bodet, Sir Edward Coke’s Third Institutes: A Primer for Treason Defendants (Toronto, 1970), 472. Other treasonous acts included the violation of the king’s relatives, counterfeiting money, murdering the treasurer or justices. 23. See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957). 24. Coke, The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, Knt. In Thirteen Parts, ed. John Henry Thomas and John Farquhar Fraser (London, 1826), 7 Reports, fol. 10a. 25. Coke, 7 Reports, fol. 10a; see also Polly J. Price, “Natural Law and Birthright Citizenship” in Calvin’s Case, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 9 (1997), 73–145. 26. As Orr has pointed out, parliamentarians such as Prynne continued to insist upon the inseperability of the king’s bodies, however. See Orr, 109–110. 27. See, for example, Quentin Skinner, “The State,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge, 1989), 90–131. 28. Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450– 1642 (Cambridge, 2006), 257. 29. Conrad Russell, “The Theory of Treason in the Trial of Strafford,” English Historical Review 80 (1965), 33–34. 30. Russell points out that in the case of Strafford, the charge that Strafford made not a division but a perpetual division, was new. See Russell, 33. 31. In Answer to the Earle of Strafford’s Conclusion (1641), 1. 32. Bellamy, Tudor Law of Treason. 33. See Orr, 18; G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge, 1985), 263–326. 34. A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783, ed. Thomas Bayly Howell and William Cobbett (London, 1816), 1: 1003. 35. William Palmer, “Oliver St. John and the Legal Language of Revolution in England: 1640– 1642,” The Historian 51 (2007), 276. 36. “The Substance of The Several Treasons found by Inquest against O’Rourke” (1591); quoted from Hiram Morgan, “Extradition and Treason-Trial of a Gaelic Lord: The Case of Brian O’Rourke,” in The Irish Jurist (1987), 293. I wish to thank Dr. Edgar McManus for directing me to this reference. 37. Morgan, 301. 38. See Julie Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (Baltimore, MD, 2005), 104. 39. State Trials, 2: 167, 177. 40. Russell, 31–32. 41. Jonathan K. van Patten, “Magic, Prophecy, and the Law of Treason in Reformation England,” The American Journal of Legal History 27 (1983), 9. See also Russell, 31. 42. See, for example, the case of Sir Francis Windebank, Charles’ Secretary of State, in State Trials, 4: 42. 43. Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), 286. See also the case against Manwaring, who was charged with “set[ting] division between the head and the members, and between the members themselves.” See Thomas B. Howell, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and other Crimes and Misdemeanours (London, 1809–1826), 2: 336–337, 2: 156. 44. See Nathaniel Fiennes, “If It be Treason to Kill the Governor, Then Sure ‘Tis Treason to Kill the Government,” Verney’s Notes of the Long Parliament, Camden Society, 1st ser., xxi (1845), ed. Bruce, 54. See also Robert Berkeley’s statement that sedition, “severs the people

194 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67. 68.

69. 70.

Notes

from the king is treason,” in State Trials, ed. T. B. Howell (21 vols., London, 1836), 3: 257–258 and 246–229. Quoted from David Martin Jones, “Sir Edward Coke and the Interpretation of Lawful Allegiance in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Law, Liberty, and Parliament, 91. State Trials, 2: 614. For an example of an oath of allegiance regarding Catholics, see 3 James 1, c.4, sec. 15. Ibid., 351. Arbor imagery was also extended by Coke to the Gunpowder Plot trial: the plot had “three roots all planted and watered by Jesuits and English Romish Catholicks, the first root in England in December and March, the second in Flanders in June, the third in Spain in July. In England it had two branches” See State Trials, 378. State Trials 2: 26–27. A Selection of Cases from the State Trials, ed. J. W. W. Bund (Cambridge, 1879), 1: 359. State Trials, ed. Howell, 2: 157 For Jonson’s treatment of treason, see Lemon, 145–149. See Orr, 44–45. Jean Bodin, Six Bookes of the Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles and ed. Kenneth D. McRae (Cambridge, MA, 1962), book I, 159, 162. See also David Parker, “Law, Society and the State in the Thought of Jean Bodin,” History of Political Thought 2 (1981), 252–285; George L. Mosse, “The Inf luence of Jean Bodin’s République on English Political Thought,” Medievalia et Humanistica 5 (1948), 73–83. See Palmer, “Oliver St. John” and the Legal Language of Revolution in England, 1640– 1642,” The Historian 57 (1989), 273. W. R. Stacy, “Matter of Fact, Matter of Law, and the Attainder of the Earl of Strafford,” American Journal of Legal History 29 (1985), 343–344. State Trials, ed. Howell, 4: 51. J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge, 1966), 214. See Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, “The Cultural Lives of Law,” in Law in the Domains of Culture, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), 9. John Eliot, Negotium Posterorum, ed. A. B. Grosart (1881), 1: 130–139. Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven, 1996), chap. one. For Bacon, in general, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992), 73–78. James I, “The True Laws of Free Monarchies,” in The Political Work of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, MA, 1918), 62. Paul Christenson, “Royal and Parliamentary Voices on the Ancient Constitution,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge, 1991), 71–95; Richard Cust, “ ‘The Ancient Law of Freedom’: John Selden and the Civil War,” in Reactions to the English Civil War, 1642–1649 (New York, 1983), 140–142. Peter Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London, 1990), 117. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1987), chap. two; see also Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution, chap. 2. Goodrich, Reading the Law, 131; and Languages of Law, 83; Donald Kelley, “English Law and the Renaissance,” Past and Present 65 (1974), 37. See Coke, Reports, 6: 282; see also John Underwood Lewis, “Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634): His Theory of ‘Artificial Reason’ as a Context for Modern Basic Legal Theory,” in Law Quarterly Review 84 (1968), 330–342. See, for example, Tuck, 138–140. John Selden, Opera omnia (London, 1725), iii, col. 2. 040.

Notes

195

71. Tuck, 145, 153; see also Alan Cromartie, Sir Matthew Hale, 1609–1676: Law, Religion and Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, 1995), 30, 32. 72. State Trials, ed. Howell, 3: 62. 73. Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven, 1996), 50. 74. See Jeffrey Goldsworthy, The Sovereignty of Parliament: History and Philosophy (Oxford, 1999), 95–96. 75. Alan Cromartie, “The Constitutionalist Revolution: The Transformation of Political Culture in Early Stuart England,” Past and Present 163 (1999), 81. 76. Henry Parker, An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech in the House of Commons (London, 1641), 21. 77. Russell, 31. 78. William Laud [and John Hinde], The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Speech, Or His Funerall Sermon: Preacht by Himself on the Scaffold on Tower-Hill, on Friday the 10 of Ianuary 1644 (1644), 9–10. 79. Ibid. 80. State Trials, ed. Howell , 3: 1344. 81. A Selection of Cases, ed. Bund, 680–681. 82. State Trials, ed. Howell, 7: 13; see also Barbara Donagan, “Atrocity, War Crime and Treason in the English Civil War,” The American Historical Review 99 (1994), 1162. 83. John Pym, “On Grievances in the Reign of Charles I,” in Representative British Orations, ed. Charles Kendall Adams (London, 1884), 50–67. 84. Two Speeches by John Pym (1641), 3. 85. John Pym, “The Speech or Declaration of John Pym,” Historical Collections of Private Passages of State (1721), 8: 661–671. 86. J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688 (Cambridge, 1966), 206. 87. Oliver St John, An Argument of Law Concerning the Bill of Attainder of High Treason of Thomas, Earle of Strafford, Thomason Tracts, E 208 (7), 71–72. 88. Stacy, 324; Orr, 98ff. 89. State Trials, ed. Howell, 5: 904. 90. Orr, 120. 91. Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution, 90. 92. Marchamont Nedham, “A Short History of the English Rebellion (1661),” in The Harleian Miscellany: A Collection of Scarce, Curious, and Entertaining Pamphlets and Tracts, 10 vols. (London, 1808–1813), 2: 528. 93. Quoted in Barthomley in Letters from a Former Rector (London, 1856), 232. 94. Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, 1: 1253–1254. 95. State Trials, ed. Howell, 4: 1033–1035. 96. H. L. Stephen, State Trials Political and Social (London, 1899), 1: 81, 86. 97. Orr, 171. 98. See Francis Oakley, “Anxieties of Inf luence: Skinner, Figgis, Conciliarism and Early Modern Constitutionalism,” Past and Present (1996), 60–110. 99. Stephanus Junius Brutus, Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos: Or, Concerning the Legitimate Power of a Prince over the People, and of the People over a Prince, ed. and trans. George Garnett (Cambridge, 1994), xxiii. 100. The Trials of Charles the First (London, 1861), 83. 101. Adele Hast, “State Treason Trials during the Puritan Revolution, 1640–1660,” The Historical Journal 15 (1972), 37–53. 102. Ibid., 45. 103. Firth and Rait, 2: 120–121, 194. 104. Ibid., III: 15. 105. State Trials, ed. Howell, 3: 604. 106. State Trials, 3: 1155, 1158.

196 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125. 126. 127.

128. 129. 130. 131.

132. 133. 134.

Notes

Hast, 45. Firth and Rait, 2: 1038–1039. Cromwell, ed. Thomas Carlyle, 3: 403. Ibid., 3: 410. State Trials, 4: 1321. State Trials, 5: 518–538. Edward Sexby [William Allen], Killing, No Murder (London, 1659), 3. See also Robert Zaller, “The Figure of the Tyrant in English Revolutionary Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54 (1993), 585–610; David C. Rappaport, “Messianic Sanctions for Terror,” Comparative Politics 20 (1988), 195–213; David George, “Distinguishing Classical Tyrannicide from Modern Terror,” The Review of Politics 50 (1988), 390–419. Ibid., 4 Ibid., 9. John Rogers, Jegar-Sahadytha (n.p., 1657), 140. “A Relation of Some Passages at the Meeting at Alhallowes, on Monday, Jan. 5, 1656/7,” in A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe (1742), vol. xlvi. 69. “A Relation of the Arraignment and Trial of Those Who Made the Late Rebellious Insurrections in London, 1661,” in Somers Tracts (London, 1748), 4: 520–523. Robert Vaughan, The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1838), ii, 184; esp. Ii, 199. James Holstun, “Ehud’s Dagger: Patronage, Tyrannicide, and ‘Killing No Murder,’ ” Cultural Critique 22 (Autumn, 1992), 99–142. George Fox, The Works of George Fox (Cambridge, MA, 1831), 4: 30. Curt Breight, “ ‘Treason doth never Prosper’: ‘The Tempest’ and the Discourse of Treason,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990), 2. John Briggs, Christopher Harrison, Angus McInnes and David Vincent, eds., Crime and Punishment in England (London, 1996), 73. See Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Oxford, 1996); V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People (Oxford, 1994); Thomas W. Laqueur, “Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604– 1868,” in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim, eds., The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 305–355. Molly Smith, “the Theater and the Scaffold: Death as Spectacle,” in The Spanish Tragedy, Studies in English Literature 32 (1992), 218. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983), 173–174. See John Spalding Gatton, “ ‘There Must be Blood’: Mutilation and Martyrdom on the Medieval Stage,” in Violence in Drama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge, 1991), 79–91; Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 136–160. Randall McGowen, “The Body and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of Modern History 59 (1987), 654–656. Margaret E. Owens, Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Newark, DE, 2005), 34–44. Merback, 134. See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, 1988), 15; see also Molly Easo Smith, “Spectacles of Torment in Titus Andronicus,” SEL 36 (1996), 315–331. Paul Raffield, Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2004), esp. chaps. one and five. Christopher Hippert, The Roots of Evil. A Social History of Crime and Punishment, (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1963). Desmond Manderson, Songs without Music, 76–81.

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135. John Cowell, The Interpreter: or Booke Containing the Signification of Words (Cambridge, 1607), Vol. 2. 136. Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (Philadelphia, 1853), 391b, 210a. 137. State Trials, ed. Bund, 1: 396. 138. Ibid., 1: 351. 139. Trial of Guy Fawkes and Others, ed. Donald Carswell (1934), 89–90. 140. State Trials, ed. Bund, 1: 396. 141. Quoted from Allen D. Boyer, “Sir Edward Coke, Ciceronianus,” 229. 142. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution During the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca, NY), 1985, XX. 143. Owens, 145. 144. See, for example, Mark Napier, Montrose and Covenanters (London, 1838), 559ff. 145. Spierenberg, 207. 146. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 112. 147. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), 49. 148. Zvi Jagendorf, “Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990), 466–467. 149. The Memoirs of James, Marquis of Montrose, 1639–1650, ed. George Wishart (London, 1893), 534. 150. See Lake and Questier, 64–107; see also Sharpe, “ ‘Last Dying Speeches’ ”, 144–167. 151. Archbishop of Canterbury’s Speech, 9. 152. Mr Love His Funeral Sermon Preached by Himself on the Scaffold on Tower Hill (London, 1651), 2–6. 153. Terence Kilburne and Anthony Milton, “The Public Context of the Trial and Execution of Strafford,” in The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641, ed. J. F. Merritt (Cambridge, 2003), 230–251. 154. State Trials, 3: 1523–1524. 155. See John H. Timmis, Thine is the Kingdom: The Trial for Treason of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, First Minister to King Charles I and Last Hope of the English Crown (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1975), 171. 156. Roger Lockyer, ed. Trial of Charles I (London, 1959), 126. 157. Manderson, 114. 158. Merback, 139. 159. Hippert, 27; Lake and Questier, 102. 160. See Canterburies Amazement: Or The Ghost of the Yong Fellow Thomas Bensted (London, 1641), 8v. In the pamphlet, the head of the youth, Thomas Bensted–executed for conspiring against Archbishop Laud—engaged in a surprisingly ecumenical discourse with the head of a Jesuit: “who art thou, that dares come up without my consent, and stand[s] thus cheek to cheek with me?,” asks Bensted’s head, posted on London Bridge; both heads proceed to speak of their respective crimes, though Bensted insists that his crime was only against the archbishop of Canterbury, whereas the Jesuit acted against the entire kingdom. 161. Peter Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell (London, 1996), 4. 162. Rebecca West, The New Meaning of Treason (New York, 1964), 361.

Three

The Wounds of War

1. Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II (Champaign, Ill), 204.

198

Notes

2. For other accounts and analyses of soldiers narrating their own wounds, see, for example, Andrew Roy, Fallen Soldier: Memoir of a Civil War Casualty, ed. William J. Miller (1996); Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975), 243–246, 310–315ff; Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago, 1996), chap. five; Richard Tobias, “Don’t Kill the Messenger: Writing History and War,” Critical Quarterly 47 (2005), 106–114; David Gerber, ed., Disabled Veterans in History (Ann Arbor, 2000). 3. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (Oxford, 1888), 4: 218. 4. Quoted from Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (New York, 1993), 139. 5. Guy Francis Laking, A Record of European Armour and Arms through Seven Centuries (London, 1920–1922), 2: 242, 244; 5: 45; C. H. Firth, Cromwell’s Army, 4th ed. (1992), 72, 121. 6. J. Bruce, ed. Verney Papers (1853), II: 210. 7. John Hale, “Gunpowder and the Renaissance: An Essay in the History of Ideas,” in Renaissance War Studies, ed. John Hale (London, 1983), 389–415. 8. Barbara Donagan, “The Casualties of War: Treatment of the Dead and Wounded in the English Civil War,” in Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Civil Wars, ed. Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden (Cambridge, 1998), 114–132. For an example of a parliamentary ordinance for the relief of maimed soldiers, see Informator Rusticus: Or, The Countrey Intelligencer, No. 1 (1643), 7. 9. Jerome de Groot, Royalist Identities (London, 2004), 141–144. 10. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Ref lections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (London, 1992), 83–107. 11. See J. R. Hale, War, Literature and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (New York, 1989), 190–196. 12. For military memoirs, see Yuval Noah Harari, “Martial Illusions: War and Disillusionment in Twentieth-Century and Renaissance Military Memoirs,” The Journal of Military History 69 (2005), 43–72; Philippe Contamine, “The War Literature of the Late Middle Ages: The Treatises of Robert de Balsac and Béraud Stuart, Lord of Aubigny,” in War, Literature, and Politics in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Christopher T. Allmand (Liverpool, 1976), 102– 121; Robert J. Knecht, “Military Autobiography in Sixteenth-Century France,” in War, Literature and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (New York, 1989), 3–21; Henry J. Cohn, “Götz von Berlichingen and the Art of Military Autobiography,” in War, Literature and the Arts, ed. Mulryne and Shewring, 22–40. 13. David Randall, “Providence, Fortune, and the Experience of Combat: English Printed Battlefield Reports, circa 1570–1637, Sixteenth Century Journal 35 (2004), 1053–1077. 14. For the case of Ireland, see the introduction in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660, ed. Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (Cambridge, 1993), esp. 7–8. 15. Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford, 1996), esp. chap. three. 16. [Anon], A True Relation of the Late Battle Neere Newbery (1643), 5. 17. See Harari, “Martial Illusions” 43–72. 18. For Wiseman, see Michael McVaugh, “Richard Wiseman and the Medical Practitioners of Restoration London,” Journal of the History of Medicine and the Allied Sciences 62 (2006), 125–140; Donald Simpson, “Trauma Surgery during the Military Revolution: The Career of Richard Wiseman,” Surgical History 69 (1999), 291–296; L. Bakey, “Richard Wiseman, a Royalist Surgeon of the English Civil War,” Surgical Neurology 27 (1987), 415–418; Thomas Longmore, Richard Wiseman, Surgeon and Sergeant to Charles II: A Biographical (London, 1891). 19. Richard Wiseman, Severall Chirugicall Treatises (London, 1676), 348–349.

Notes

199

20. John Vicars, England’s Worthies: Under Whom All the Civill and Bloudy Warres Since Anno 1642 . . . (London 1845), 55–56. 21. Sir Richard Bulstrode, Memoirs and Reflections upon the Reign and Government of King Charles I and King Charles II, Part III (1721), 85. 22. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994), 3; for writings that liken the civil war to insanity and mental breakdown, see Jonathan Sawday, “ ‘Mysteriously divided’: Civil War, Madness, and the Divided Self,” in Literature and the English Civil War, ed. Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (Cambridge, 1990), 127–146. 23. Quoted in C. H. Firth, Cromwell’s Army (London, 1901), 255–256. 24. Joan Bennett, “An Aspect of the Evolution of Seventeenth-Century Prose,” The Review of English Studies 17 (1941), 281–297; Hugh Macdonald, “Another Aspect of SeventeenthCentury Prose,” The Review of English Studies 19 (1943), 33–43. 25. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (Ann Arbor, 1996), 8. 26. John Milton, Paradise Lost (New York, 1869), 185, lines 590, 586, 504, 404. 27. John Gwyn, “Military Memoirs,” in Military Memoirs: The Civil War (Hamden, CT, 1968), 53. 28. Henry Foster, “A True and Exact Relation of the Marchings of the Two Regiments of the Trained Bands of the City of London (1643),” in Bibliotheca Gloucesterinsis, ed. James Washbourne (Gloucester, 1828), 1: 267. 29. Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1969), 116–118; Yuval Noah Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History, and Identity, 1450–1600 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2004), 65–68. 30. Richard Atkyns, “Vindication,” in Military Memoirs: The Civil War, 24–25. 31. Ibid. 32. Andrew Stewart, Attalos, Athens, and the Akropolis (Cambridge, 2006), 166–170. I wish to thank Dr. Joel Allen for pointing me to this reference. 33. Richard Wiseman, Chiurgicall Treatises (London, 1676), 348–349. 34. Purkiss, 182. 35. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985), esp. 63–81. 36. See Carlton, Going to the Wars, 207–208. 37. George Wither, Campo Musae; or the Field Musings of Captain George Wither (1643), 16. 38. Atkyns, 28. 39. Cowley, Civil War, Book III, line 470, in Pritchard, 119. 40. See Purkiss, 218–219. 41. See, for example, Paul Delany, British Autobiography, 118–119. 42. See Debora Shuger, “Life-writing in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Patrick Coleman, Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Jill Anne Kowalik (Cambridge, 2000), 63–65. 43. See Yuval Noah Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs, 68; see also Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1969), 116–118; Sharon Alker, “The Soldierly Imagination: Narrating Fear in Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19 (2007), 47–51. 44. Edmund Ludlow, Memoirs (London, 1720), I: 82. 45. Henry Foster, “A True and Exact Relation,” 1: 267. 46. Purkiss, 299. 47. Quoted from Carlton, “Impact,” 29. 48. Carlton, Going to the Wars, 222. 49. See Martha Edwards, “Philoctetes in Historical Context,” in Disabled Veterans in History, 55–68. 50. See, for example, Frank Kitson, Old Ironsides: The Military Biography of Oliver Cromwell (London, 2004), 80–90.

200

Notes

51. Cromwell himself, for example, does not mention any wound in his letters from the summer of 1644, nor are any obvious and related scars visible in his later portraits. Still, see Antonia Fraser, Cromwell (New York, 2001), 126ff. 52. Carlton, Going to the Wars, 221. 53. Quoted from Richard Wiseman: Surgeon General to Charles II (1891), 45. 54. Richard Atkyns, Vindication (1968), 20. 55. Carlton, 221. 56. Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (London, 2007), 220. 57. Richard Symonds, Diary of the Marches of the Royal Army, ed. C. V. E. Long (Cambridge, 1997), 67. 58. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), 587–595. 59. See John Astington, “Macbeth and the Rowe Illustrations,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998), 83. 60. Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), esp. 261–262. 61. Ibid., 262. 62. Homer, The Iliad, trans. G. Thompson (Oxford, 1847), Bk. XXIII., ll. 69–70, 377. 63. A Great Wonder in Heaven Shewing The late Apparitions and Prodigious Noyses of War and Battels, see on Edge-Hill . . . (London, 1642), 5. 64. For ghosts at Edgehill, see Diane Purkiss, “Dismembering and Remembering: The English Civil War and Male Identity,” in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, esp. 220–222. 65. E. M. Symonds, “The Diary of John Greene,” The English Historical Review 43 (1928), 150, 391. 66. Anon, Speciall passages and certain informations 24 (London, 1643). 67. Virgil, Aeneid, trans. John Dryden (London, 1997), 42. 68. Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus, 4th ed., 1726, 349–351. 69. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago, 1991), 65. 70. Ibid. 71. A Great Wonder in Heaven, 4. 72. See G. E. Aylmer’s argument that soldiers fighting for the king might have been impelled less by royalist ideology than by notions of honor and loyalty. Aylmer, “Collective Mentalities in Mid-Seventeenth Century England, ii. Royalist Attitudes,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 37 (1987), 1–30. 73. See J. S.A. Adamson, “Chivalry and Political Culture in Caroline England,” 170–182; Manning, 59–61. 74. Barbara Donagan, “The Web of Honour: Soldiers, Christians, and Gentlemen in the English Civil War,” The Historical Journal (2001), 370. See also Mervyn James, “English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642,” in Society, Politics and Culture, ed. Mervyn James (Cambridge, 1988), esp. 310–314. For a critique of James’ thesis of a transformation in honor cultures, see Cynthia Herrup, “ ‘To Pluck Bright Honour from the Pale-Faced Moon’: Gender and Honour in the Castlehaven Story,” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Cambridge, 1997), 138; Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness, and Honour (Cambridge, 2003), 7ff; Roger B. Manning, Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms (Oxford, 2003), 61. For notions of sexual honor (or dishonor), see Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London, 1999), 18–23, 44–48, 55ff. 75. Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London, 1622), 2–3. See also Manning, 52. 76. Quoted from James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 2001), 76. 77. Donagan, “The Web of Honour,” 371, 374.

Notes

201

78. For the manner in which ideas of honor began to cohere around the crown in the sixteenth century, see James, Society, Politics andCulture, esp. 310–381. 79. As J. G. Marston has pointed out, family was also a heavy consideration in the issuance of honor, even if the king was the ultimate source. J. G. Marston, “Gentry Honor and Royalism in Early Stuart England,” Journal of British Studies 13 (1973), 27, 35–40. 80. Battel on Hopton Heath (London, 1643), 4–5. 81. Anon, “The Mercenary Soldier,” in Cavalier and Puritan: Ballads and Broadsides Illustrating the Period of the Great Rebellion, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (New York, 1923), 168–169. 82. Seneca, “On Providence,” iv. 4–6, in Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore (London, 1928– 1035), 1: 27.For soldiers who desired to be wounded as a measure against cowardice, see Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York, 1989), 31–33. 83. Richard Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (Vancouver, 2004), 4. 84. Joseph Hall, “The Balm of Giliad,” chap. six, Select Pieces from the Practical and Devotional Writings (London, 1846), 47–48. 85. Julian Pitt-Rivers, “The Concept of Honour,” in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J. G. Péristiany (Chicago, 1966), 22. See also Cust, 58. 86. Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. Janus Lull, Act II, scene iv. l. 66, p. 116 (Cambridge, 1999). 87. J. R. Hale, “Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Public Opinion and War,” Past and Present, 22 (1962), 23. See also Malcolm Vale, War and Chivalry: Warfare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France, and Burgundy at the End of the Middle Ages (Athens, GA, 1981), 129ff. 88. See the notion of caste-honor, or Stadesehre, in later German dueling societies. Kevin McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of Honour in Fin-de-Siecle Germany (Princeton, 1994), 35. 89. A True Relation of a Late Skirmish at Henley upon Thames (London, 1643), 5. 90. Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), 184–193; James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (London, 1997), 192–201; Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford, 1990). 91. Another Bloudy Fight at Colchester (London, 1648), 2. 92. Carlton, 186. 93. Loxley, 193. 94. Ibid., 199. 95. See de Groot, 149–150. 96. See, for example, Henry Vaughan’s elegy on his friend R. W., whose body was never recovered. “An Elegy on the Death of Mr R.W. Slain in the Unfortunate Differences at Routon Heath, near Chester, 1645,” in Henry Vaughan, Poems of Henry Vaughan (London, 1896), ed. H. C. Beeching. 2: 79. 97. Susan Clarke, “Royalists Write the Death of Lord Hastings: Post-Regicide Funerary Propaganda, Parergon 22 (2005), esp. 125ff. 98. George Wishart, Memoirs of James, Marquis of Montrose (London, 1893), 505–506. 99. John Cleveland, “Caroli,” in Monumentum Regale (1649), 21. 100. For Lucas and Lisle, see Andrea Brady, “Dying with Honour: Literary Propaganda and the Second English Civil War, Journal of Military History 70 (2006), 9–30. 101. The Parliament-Porter (1648), 4; see also Brady, 19. 102. See, for example, the elegies to Colonel Rainsborough in Mercurius Militaris or the Armies Schout (1648), 38: “What glorious Fool had vaunted honours bought/ By gold or practise, or by rapine brought/ From his forefathers, had he understood/ How Rainsbrough valued not the greatest blood.” 103. Nehemiah Wharton, “Letters from a Subaltern Officer of the Earl of Essex’s Army, Written in the Summer and Autumn of 1642,” Archaeologia 35 (1853), 315. 104. Thomas Lord Fairfax, Short Memorials, ed. Brian Fairfax (London, 1699), 54–56.

202

Notes

105. See Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994), 277–286. 106. In Memoriam Thomae Rainsbrough (London, 1648); see also Brady, 25. 107. The Moderate 17 (October 31–November 7, 1648), 17. 108. Blair Worden, “Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England,” Past and Present (1985), esp. 81–88; Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1999), 67–70. 109. Walsham, Providence,, 9–10, 326–334. 110. Richard Akins, “The Vindication,” 16. 111. “Colonell Rainsborowes Ghost,” in Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages (London, 1841), 107–111. 112. See Hale, “Incitement to Violence? English Divines on the Theme of War, 1578 to 1631,” in Renaissance War Studies, 487–517. 113. Alexander Leighton, Speculum Belli Sacri; Or the Looking-Glasse of the Holy Warre (1624), 100. 114. A True Relation of a Late Skirmish at Henley upon Thames . . . (London, 1643), 5. 115. Henry Foster, A True and Exact Relation of the Marchings of the Two Regiments of the Trained Bands of the City of London (London, 1643), 13. 116. William Haller, “The Word of God in the New Model Army,” Church History 19 (1950), 15–33; Timothy George, “War and Peace in the Puritan Tradition,” Church History 53 (1984), 498. 117. William Dell, An Exposition of the 54 Chapter of Isaiah from Vers. 11 to end, 5. 118. Ibid., 29. 119. William Dell, The Building and Glory of the truly Christian and Spiritual Church (1646), 144. 120. Hale, “Incitement to Violence? English Divines on the Theme of War, 1578–1631,” in Renaissance War Studies, 487–517; Timothy George, “War and Peace in the Puritan Tradition,” Church History 53 (1984), 492–503. 121. Thomas Carlyle, ed., The Cromwell Letters (London, 1908), 1: 151. 122. William Gouge, Gods Three Arrowes: Plague, Famine, Sword (London, 1631), 217. 123. Wither, Campo Musae, 25, 28ff, 68. 124. Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (London, 2006), 299ff. 125. G. Bernard, ed., “Edward Walsingham’s Life of Sir John Digby 1605–1645,” Camden Miscellany 12 (Camden Soc., 3rd ser., 18, 1910), 118–119. 126. Purkiss, 295. 127. See Moshe Barasch, Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art (New York, 1976). 128. Carlton, “Impact,” 31. 129. Carlton, Going to the Wars, 226. 130. See Donagan, “The Casulties of War,” 129; see also Donagan, War in England, 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2008), 341–342. 131. James Hanford, “Milton and the Art of War,” in John Milton Poet and Humanist (Cleveland, 1966), 185–223; James A. Freeman, Milton and the Martial Muse: Paradise Lost and European Traditions of War (Princeton, 1980), 51. 132. George Wither, Campo Musae, 6. 133. Ibid., 9. 134. Ibid., 30. 135. Ibid., 73. 136. John Milton, Of Reformation Touching Church-discipline in England (New Haven, 1916), 73. 137. De Groot, 161–162; Loxley, 87; Gerald Maclean, 209; Smith, 233. 138. For the nature of epic, see, for example, Peter Toohey, Reading Epic (London, 1992); Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representaion of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, 2003), chap. one; Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, 1993); David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, 1993).

Notes

203

139. Rachel Bespaloff, On the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy (New York, 1947), 83. 140. Stella Revard, “Milton’s Critique of Heroic Warfare in Paradise Lost V and VI,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 7 (1967), 131. 141. Milton, Paradise Lost, in John Milton’s Complete Poetical Works, Vol. 2: First Edition of Paradise Lost, ed. H.F. Fletcher (Urbana, Ill, 1945), 339 (Bk. IV, l. 183); Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York, 1990), 424, l. 415. 142. Paradise Lost, 423 (Bk. VI, l. 368, 388–391). 143. For treatments of the War in Heaven, see Roland Frye, Milton’s Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic Poems (Princeton, 1979), 43–185. Austin Dobbins, Milton and the Book of Revelation (Alabama, 1975), 26–52; Revard, “The War in Heaven,” esp. 15–27 and 15n.; Idem, “Milton’s Critique of Heroic Warfare in Paradise Lost V and VI, Studies in English Literature 7 (1967), 133; Robert Thomas Fallon, Captain or Colonel: The Soldier in Milton’s Life and Art (Columbia, MO, 1984), 216. 144. See Iliad, ed. Fagles, 177 (Bk V, ll. 449–467). 145. Ibid., 175 (Bk V, ll. 375, 377); 175 (Bk V, ll. 380–381)), 552 (Bk XXII, ll. 383–384). See also K. B. Saunders, “The Wounds in Iliad 13–16,” The Classical Quarterly 49 (1000), 349–363. 146. Arthur Fairbanks, “The Conception of the Future Life in Homer,” The American Journal of Theology 1 (1897), 742.] 147. The Iliad, ed. Fagles, 555 (Bk XXII, l. 474). 148. Milton, Paradise Lost, 421 (Bk VI, l. 332). 149. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution. 150. Revard, “Milton’s Critique,” 133. 151. See the analogy made in James Freeman, Milton and the Martial Muse: Paradise Lost and European Traditions of War (Prnceton, 1981), 181ff. 152. Freeman, 182. 153. See, for example, John E. Seaman, “Homeric Parody at the Gates of Milton’s Hell,” The Modern Language Review 62 (1967), 212–213. 154. David Loewenstein, “ ‘An Ambiguous Monster’: Representing Rebellion in Milton’s Polemics and Paradise Lost,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 55 207. (1992), 306ff. 155. For Milton’s critique of epic, see Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1987), chap. seven. 156. Joan S. Bennett, “God, Satan, and King Charles: Milton’s Royal Portraits,” PMLA 92 (1977), 441–457; see also Lawrence W. Hyman and Joan Bennett, “Satan and Charles I,” PMLA 93 (1978), 118–120. 157. Blair Worden, “The Politics of Marvell’s Horatian Ode,” The Historical Journal 27 (1984), 525–547. 158. Wilding, chap. five, and 115; J. A. Mazzeo, “Cromwell as Machiavellian Prince in Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas (1960), 1–17; Barbara Everett, “The Shooting of the Bears: Poetry and Politics in Andrew Marvell,” in Andrew Marvell: Essays on the Tercentenary of his Death, ed. R. L. Brett (Oxford, 1979), 62–103. 159. Andrew Marvell, “Horation Ode” (ll. 21, 26), 20, 21, in The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London, 1985). 160. David Quint, “Fear of Falling: Icarus, Phaethon, and Lucretius in Paradise Lost.” Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004), 847–881. 161. Marvell, “Horatian Ode,” 58, l. 58. 162. Marvell, “To His Noble Friend Mr Richard Lovelace,” in Complete Poems, 33 (l. 12). 163. Lucan’s Civil War, ed. P.F. Widdows (Bloomington, IN, 1988), 145–147 (Bk VI, ll. 551– 616,); 148–149 (ll. 676–696). 164. Jamie Masters, Poetry and Civil War in Lucan’s Bellum Civile (Cambridge, 1992), 9. 165. De Groot, chap. six.

204 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171.

172. 173. 174. 175. 176.

177. 178. 179.

180. 181.

182.

183. 184. 185.

186. 187. 188.

Notes

Lucan, VI, l. 193, 136; Cowley, Bk. II, l. 111, 93. Lucan, 73 (Bk. VII, ll. 625–626); Cowley, 116 (Bk. III, 340–345, 355–356). See Pritchard, introduction, in Cowley, The Civil War, 21. See Henry Power, “ ‘Teares breake off my Verse’: The Virgilian Incompleteness of Abraham Cowley’s The Civil War,” Translation and Literature 16 (2007), esp. 141–159. Abraham Cowley, Poems, 4 parts (London, 1656) I, sig. A4r–v. See Geoffrey Hudson, “Negotiating for Blood Money: War Widows and the Courts in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (Raleigh-Durham, 1994), 146–169; and “Arguing Disability: Ex-Servicemen’s Stories in Early Modern England,” in Medicine, Madness and Social History, ed. Roberta Bivins and John Pickstone (London, 2007); Mark Stoyle, “ ‘Memories of the Maimed’: The Testimony of Charles I’s Former Soldiers, 1660–1730,” History 88 (2003), 208. Geoffrey L. Hudson, “Disabled Veterans and the State in Early Modern England,” in Disabled Veterans in History, 121–123. Carlton, 346ff; See “October 1653: An Act for the Relief of Creditors and Poor Prisoners,” Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660 (1911), 753–764. Stoyle, 208, 18n. Ibid., 213; See Hudson, “Disabled Veterans,” 117–144. See the 1662 Act of Parliament, “for the reliefe of poore and maimed officers and souldiers who have faithfully served His Majesty and His Late Father in the late wars.” The Statutes of the Realm (London, 1819), 5: 390–390. Quoted in C.H. Firth, Cromwell’s Army (London, 1902), 273–274. Natalie Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison, 2000), 9. Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 56 and 10n.; see also his “Vagrants and Vagrancy in England,” in Migration and Society in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Clark and David Souden (London, 1987), 49–76; Charles James Ribton-Turner, A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy, Beggars and Begging (London, 1887), chap. five, and 164ff. Hudson, “Disabled Veterans,” 119–120. See, for example, the ballad entitled “The Cunning Northern Beggar,” which captures the words of a veteran imposter, in C. H. Firth, Cromwell’s Army: A History of the English Soldier during the Civil Wars (London, 1902), 274. Sharon Alker, “The Soldierly Imagination: Narrating Fear in Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19 (2007); see also Maximillian E. Novak, “Defoe and the Art of War,” Philological Quarterly 75 (1996), 197–213; Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (Lexington, 1986), 125. Quoted in Stoyle, 214. Linda Colley, “Introduction,” in Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, 2nd ed. (New Haven, 2005). See, however, Kathryn A. Burnett and Mary Holmes, “Bodies, Battlefields and Biographies: Scars and the Construction of the Body as Heritage,” in Exploring the Body (London, 2001), 21–36. See Stoyle, 211. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York, 1963), 4. Firth, 274.

Four

The Lesions of Love

1. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of the Emotions (Philadelphia, 2004), 1;

Notes

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

205

“Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling,” in Culture Theory: Essays on the Mind, Self, and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. Levine (Cambridge, 1984), 137–157; Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 3–20. For “structures of feeling,” see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 128–135. Angus Gowland, “The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy,” Past and Present 191 (2006), 119–120. Anthony Low, The Reinvention of Love: Poetry, Politics and Culture from Sidney to Milton (Cambridge, 1993), 4. With the exception of Milton, Low does not treat the poets of the 1640s and 1650s. See Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius’ “De Rerum Natura,” ed. De Quehen (London, 1996); David Norbrook, Order and Disorder (London, 2001), xii–lii. Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), 88ff; Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), 291; see also Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca, NY, 2004), 161. James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, 1972), introduction; Debora Shuger, “Life-writing in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Patrick Coleman, Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Jill Anne Kowalik (Cambridge, 2000), 63–78; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1989); Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices, ed. Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, Philippa Kelly (Ann Arbor, 2006). Steven Mullaney, “Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 144. Abraham Cowley, “The Passions,” in Collected Works, ed. Thomas O. Calhoun (Newark, DE, 1999), 41. Juha Shivola, “Aristotle on Sex and Love,” in The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Juha Shivola (Chicago, 2002), 200–225. Plato, The Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (New York, 2003), 17. For a literary treatment of the idea of eros as a lack, see Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton, 1986), 10–12. Plato, The Symposium (New York, 2003), 24. See, for example, Richard F. Hardin, “Ovid in Seventeenth-Century England,” Comparative Literature 24 (1972), 44–62; Richard J. DuRocher, Milton and Ovid (Ithaca, NY, 1985); Goran V. Stanivukovic, Ovid and the Renaissance Body (Toronto, 2001). Ovid, The Art of Love, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington, IV, 1957), 105. Ibid., 182. Quoted from MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, 92. Augustine, Christian Instruction (De doctrina Christiana), trans. John J. Gavigan (New York, 1947), 130. Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1881), 500. Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge, 1989), 17–21; 33ff. Kevin Sharpe. Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge, 1987), 270. Veevers, 176; Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge, 2006), 76. Ben Jonson, “Love’s Triumph,” in The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. W. Gifford (London, 1816), 8: 91ff.

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23. Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, 1979), 46. 24. Quoted from A. D. Nuttall, The Stoic in Love: Essays on Literature and Ideas (London, 1990), 59. 25. Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. Sir John Stradling, ed. Rudolf Kirk (New Brunswick, 1939), 1, 4; II, 3. 26. Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (London, 1876), 41. 27. Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living and Dying Together with Prayers: Containing the Whole Duty (London, 1839), 188, 193. 28. Mary Edmond, Rare Sir William Davenant (New York, 1987), chap. four. 29. James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae, 11th ed. (London, 1754), 255. 30. Ibid., 288ff. 31. Louis Martz, The Wit of Love (Notre Dame, 1969), 35. 32. See Lawrence Venuti, Our Halcyon Dayes: English Prerevolutionary Texts and Postmodern Culture (Madison, WI, 1989), 220–260. 33. See John Hall, “Platonick Love,” in Poems (Cambridge, 1646), 30. 34. Kevin Sharpe, 65–67. 35. See Lesel Dawson, “ ‘New Sects of Love’: Neoplatonism and Constructions of Gender in Davenant’s The Temple of Love and The Platonick Lovers,” Early Modern Literary Studies 8.1 (May, 2002), 1–36. 36. Ibid., 81ff. 37. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1996), 53. For Hobbes’ treatment of the passions, see Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetorics to Modern Brain Science (Chicago, 2006), 43–50; Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford, 1997), 131–136. 38. Hobbes, Leviathan, 46. 39. See Victoria Kahn, “The Duty to Love: Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory,” Representations 68 (1999), 84–107. 40. Quoted from Richard Hillyer, “Hobbes’s Explicated Fables and the Legacy of the Ancient,” Philosophy and Literature 28 (2004), 276. 41. Thomas Docherty, Criticism and Modernity: Aesthetics, Literature, and Nations in Europe and its Academies (Oxford, 1999), 48. 42. Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution (London, 1850), 278. 43. See Kevin Sharpe, 102. 44. Sir William D’avenant, Gondibert: An Heroick Poem (London, 1651), Canto VII, #21, 22, 47, 202–203, 207. 45. See G. F. Sensabaugh, “Platonic Love and the Puritan Rebellion,” Studies in Philology 37 (1940), 457–481. 46. For iconoclasm in an earlier period, see Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson and Nicolatte Zeeman (Oxford, 2002), 43. 47. For accounts of the 1643 attack on the chapel, see Margaret Aston, “Puritans and Iconoclasm, 1560–1660,” in The Culture of English Puritanism (London and New York, 1996), 113–121; Albert J. Loomie, “The Destruction of Rubens’s ‘Crucifixion’ in the Queen’s Chapel, Somerset House,” The Burlington Magazine 140 (1998), 680–682. 48. Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm During the English Civil War (London, 2003), 73. 49. Ibid., 15. 50. See, for example, Gerald Hammond, “Richard Lovelace and the Uses of Obscurity,” Chatterton Lecture on Poetry, 1985, Proceedings of the British Academy 71 (1985), 203–234.

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51. Herrick, “To His Friend, on the Untunable Times,” in Poems of Robert Herrick, ed. Thomas Bailey Aldrich (London, 1900), 55. See also John L. Kimmey, “Robert Herrick’s Persona,” Studies in Philology 67 (1970), 221–236. 52. James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (London, 1997), 224. 53. Quoted in Dolores Palomo, “The Halcyon Moment of Stillness in Royalist Poetry,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 44 (1981), 208. 54. Quoted in Loxley, 224–225. 55. Robert Herrick, Complete Poetry, ed. J. Max Patrick (Garden City, NJ, 1963), 11. 56. See, for example, John L. Kimmey, “Robert Herrick’s Persona.” Studies in Philology 67 (1970), 221–236. 57. Laura Lunger Knoppers, “Cavalier Poetry and Civil War,” in Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion, ed. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. (Oxford, 2007), 29. 58. Randy Robertson, “Lovelace and the ‘Barbed Censurers’: Lucasta and Civil War Censorship,” Studies in Philology 103 (2006), 471–472. 59. Raymond A. Anselment, Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War (Newark, DE, 1988), 111. 60. John McWilliams, “ ‘A Storm of Lamentations Writ’: Lachrymae Musarum and Royalist Culture after the Civil War,” The Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003), 273–289. 61. Quoted from Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660 (Cambridge, 2001), 134. 62. Ibid., 253–254. 63. Robert Herrick, Hesperides, of the Works both Humane and Divine (Boston, 1856), 2: 219. 64. Jaspar Mayne, The Amorous Warre (London, 1648), 10. 65. See Dale B. Randall, Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642–1660 (Lexington, KY, 1995), 74. 66. See, for example, Morgan Holmes, “A Garden of Her Own: Marvell’s Nymph and the Order of Nature,” in Ovid and the Renaissance Body, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (Toronto, 2001), 77–93; Jonathan Goldberg; Jonathan Crewe. 67. Earl Miner, “The Death of Innocence in Marvell’s Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn, Modern Philology 65 (1967), 9–16; see also Phoebe S. Spinrad, “Death, Loss, and Marvell’s Nymph,” PMLA 97 (1982), 50–59. 68. “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun,” in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (London, 2003), 70 ll. 46–47. 69. Ibid., 71 l. 122. 70. Andrew Marvell, “The Unfortunate Lover,” in The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York, 1985), (II, ll. 15–16; IV, l. 32; VIII, l. 59). 71. On the poem as allegory, see Ann E. Berthoff, The Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvell’s Major Poems (Princeton, 1970), 75–88; Bruce King, Marvell’s Allegorical Poetry (New York, 1977), 77–88; on its possible historical connections, see Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (New York, 1958), 344–345; Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, 1978), 20–25; Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell (Brighten, 1986), 267–305. See also Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (London, 1939). 72. “Unfortunate Lover, IV, l. 27, 30; V, ll. 35–36. 73. Zwicker and Hirst, 375 and 392n13. 74. Ibid., 376; “Unfortunate Lover,” VI, l. 47; VII, l. 54–56. 75. Robertson, “Lovelace and the ‘Barbed Censurers’,” 483. 76. Corns, 79. 77. Robertson, 468, 488. 78. Richard Lovelace, Lucasta: The Poems of Richard Lovelace, Esq, ed. William Carew Hazlitt (Cambridge, MA, 1897), “A Loose Saraband,” 175.

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79. Abraham Cowley, “Love Given Over,” in Collected Works, ed. Thomas O’Calhoun, Laurence Heyworth, J. Robert King, Allan Pritchard (Newark, DE, 1993), 125. 80. Edmund Waller, John Denham, and George Gilfillan, The Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham (Oxford, 1857), 162. 81. Andrew Marvell, “The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers,” in Poems, 114–115 (ll. 18–21); see also Dorothy Stephens, The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell (Cambridge, 1998), 190. 82. Sonnet #134, in Petrarch, Canzoniere, trans, and ed. A. Mortimer (London, 2002), 79; see also Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the English Renaissance, trans. Anthony Mortimer (2005), 80. 83. Cowley, “The Vain Love,” in Collected Works, 39. 84. Thomas Carew, The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford, 1949), 49–53; see also Gordon Braden, “Beyond Frustration: Petrarchan Laurels in the Seventeenth Century,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 26 (1986), 12–13. 85. See Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London, 1990), 188–190. 86. For the trope of the unwanted heart, see Sylvia Ruffo-Fiore, “The Unwanted Heart in Petrarch and Donne,” Comparative Literature 24 (1971), 319, 327. 87. John Suckling, “The Siege of a Female Heart,” in Selections from the Works of Sir John Suckling, ed. Alfred Suckling (London, 1836), 65. 88. Cowley, “All-Over Love,” in Collected Works, 49. 89. Joseph Hall, The Works of Jospeh Hall . . . (Oxford, 1837), 8: 114. 90. H. M. Richmond, The School of Love: The Evolution of the Stuart Love Lyric (Princeton, 1964), 46–47. 91. Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Rolfe Humphries (New York, 1987), 75. 92. Burton, 797. 93. Robert Herrick, “Upon Love,” in Complete Poems (London, 1876), 3: 46 (l. 9–12). 94. Quoted form Burton, 725. 95. Maurizio Bettini, The Portrait of the Lover (Berkeley, CA, 1999), 90. 96. William Kerrigan, “Milton’s Kisses,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John Peter Rumrich (Cambridge, 1998), 122. 97. Richard Lovelace, Lucasta, ed. William Lyon Phelps (London, 1921), 2: 25. 98. Robert Herrick, Poems (London, 1902), 66. 99. Richard Lovelace, “Amyntor’s Grove, His Chloris, Arigo, and Gratiana: An Elegie,” in Poems of Richard Lovelace (London, 1906), 63. 100. Cowley, “The Despair,” in Collected Works, 44. 101. See, for example, Kenneth R. R. and Gros Louis, “The Triumph and Death of Orpheus in the English Renaissance,” Studies in English Literature 9 (1969), 63–80; Charles Martindale, “Paradise Metamorphosed: Ovid in Milton,” Comparative Literature 37 (1985), 323; Caroline Mayerson, “The Orpheus Image in Lycidas,” PMLA 64 (1949), 189–207; Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance: Tradition in English Poetry (New York, 1963). 102. Thomas Walkington, The Opticke Glasse of Humors (London, 1607), 67, 130. 103. Jacques Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness (London, 1623), sig. E2r. 104. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan Smith (New York, 1938), 665. 105. Henry King, Poems, Elegies, Paradoxes and Sonets (London, 1664), 10. 106. Burton, 677. 107. Burton, 674; Cowley, “The Thraldome,” from The Mistress, Poems (1656). 108. See Georges Minois, History of Suicide (Baltimore, MD, 1999), 148–151. 109. Angus Gowland, “The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy,” Past and Present 191 (2006), 80–84.

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110. John Donne, “Meditation 12,” in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Oxford, 1987), 62–64. 111. See Douglas Trevor, “John Donne and Scholarly Melancholy,” in Studies in English Literature 40 (2000), 81–102. 112. Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (New York, 1971), 44–57. 113. Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors (London, 1607), 71. 114. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, 88. 115. Thomas Watson, “The Tears of Fancie,” in Sydney Lee, ed. Elizabethan Sonnets (Westminster, 1904), I: 147. 116. Quoted from MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, 89. 117. Burton., 826. 118. Ibid., 251. 119. “Brennoralt: A Tragedy,” in Suckling, Selections from the Works of Sir John Suckling (London, 1836), 300. 120. Thomas Willis, Thomas Willis’s Oxford Lectures, ed. Kenneth Dewhurst (Oxford, 1980), 124. The other symptom, fear, is a “regurgitating back to the heart of the blood which was expanding itself in other parts. It does not come from any feeling in the blood, but from the animal spirits, because of some terrifying objects which are excited into such a motion that they contract the fibres and membranes of the body.” 121. See Jeremy Schmidt, “Melancholy and the Therapeutic Language of Moral Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65 (2004), 583–601. 122. See also chaps. 21–31, on tears and other melancholic alterations of the body, in Timothie Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586). 123. Thomas Willis, Willis’s Oxford Casebook (1650–52), ed. Kenneth Dewhurst (Oxford, 1981), 97. 124. Willis, for example, utilized bloodletting in the case of a forty-five-year-old “countrywomen” seized by the more severe malady of mania. See Willis, 126–127. 125. Carson, 148. 126. Abraham Cowley, “The Request,” in Collected Works, 19–21. 127. See, for example, Thomas Marion Davis, A Reading of Edward Taylor (Newark, DE, 1992), 110–111. 128. Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (London, 1640), 232. 129. See also Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Madness (Burlington, VT, 2007), 30–31. 130. Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge, 2000), 107. 131. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, 88. 132. Margaret L., King, Death of the Child Valerio Marcello (Chicago, 1994), chap. six; Wear, 163, 133. On love-suicide, see MacDonald and Murphy, 101–102; on early modern suicide in general, see also Andrew, Donna and Michael MacDonald, “Debate: The Secularization of Suicide in England, 1660–1800,” Past & Present 119 (1988), 158–170; and idem, “The Inner Side of Wisdom: Suicide in Early Modern England,” Psychological Medicine 7 (1977), 565–582; Rowland Wymer, Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (New York, 1986). 134. John Donne, Biathanatos: A Declaration of That Paradoxe or Thesis That Self-Homicide is Not So Naturally Sin, That It May Never be Otherwise, (London, 1648); see also Sleepless Souls, 360–366. 135. Michel Foucault, Histoire de Folie à l’âge Classique (Paris, 1972), 108–109. 136. John Ford, “The Broken Heart,” in John Ford: Three Plays, ed. K. Sturgess (Harmondsworth, 1970), iv. iii. 153.

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137. Karen Raber, “The Unnatural Tragedy and Familial Absolutisms,” in Cavendish and Shakespeare: Interconnections, ed. Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice (Burlington, VT, 2006), 179–192. 138. Margaret Cavendish, The Unnatural Tragedie, in Playes (London, 1662). 139. See Christopher Brunelle, “Form vs. Function in Ovid’s ‘Remedia Amoris,’ ” The Classical Journal 96 (2000), 126. 140. Cowley, “The Request,” in Collected Works, 20. 141. Burton, 771. 142. Gowland, “The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy,” 85. 143. Herrick, “Upon Love,” Hesperides, 100. 144. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphosno Linghis (The Hague, 1979), 256. 145. Margaret Justice Dean, “Choosing Death: Adam’s Temptation to Martyrdom in Paradise Lost,” in Milton Studies, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh, 2006), 41. Others, however, have argued that the love is purely Platonic. See Irene Samuel, Plato and Milton (Ithaca, NY, 1947), 163.

Five Wounds of the Soul 1. For discussions of biblical metaphor, myth, and imagery, see Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957), 141–150, 324–326. 2. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, 1979), 103. 3. Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA, 1990), esp. chap. two. 4. For a treatment of Donne’s wounding (or “masochistic”) imagery, see John Stachniewski, “John Donne: The Despair of the ‘Holy Sonnets,’ ” English Literary History 48 (1981), 688–689. 5. John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. E. Simpson and G. Potter (Berkeley, 1955), 2: 63–64, and 49–71 generally; see also “The Second of my Prebend Sermons upon my five Psalmes” (1625), in Donne’s Prebend Sermons, ed. Janel M. Mueller (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 96–97. See also Dennis Quinn, “Donne’s Christian Eloquence,” ELH 27 (1960), 276–297. 6. Lewalski, 72–78. 7. See, for example, Helen Wilcox, “Exploring the Language of Devotion in the English Revolution,” Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge, 2001), 75–88. 8. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985), 198–205. 9. See, in general, Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh : Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore (Cambridge, 1988), chap. two. Camporesi, however, argues that paradise in the middle ages and Renaissance was a region of the “incorruptibility of the f lesh,” a “laboratory of physical restoration, a clinic where the boldest plastic surgery achieves a one hundred percent success rate,” 25. 10. Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Aff liction,” in Simone Weil, Writings, ed. Eric O. Springsted (Maryknoll, NY, 1998), 41–71. 11. See J. Sears McGee, “Conversion and the Imitation of Christ in Anglican and Puritan Writing,” Journal of British Studies 15 (1976), 21–39. 12. For the inf luence of Paul, see William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (Columbia, M.O., 1938), 87. 13. See Helene Cixous, “Stigmata, or Job the Dog,” in Helene Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London, 1998), 181–194. 14. See Michael MacDonald, “The Fearfull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 31 (1992), 56.

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15. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill (Westminster, 1960), 1: 297. 16. For puritans (and the debate over the validity of the term), see David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford, 2004), 10ff. 17. Peter Wilcox, “Conversion in the Thought and Experience of John Calvin,” Anvil 14 (1997), 113–128; Judith Pollmann, “A Different Road to God: The Protestant Experience of Conversion in the Sixteenth Century,” in Conversion to Modernities, ed. Peter van der Veer (New York, 1996), 47–64; David C. Steinmetz, “Reformation and Conversion,” Theology Today 35 (1978), 25–32. 18. See Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), 3–4. 19. William Perkins, A Golden Chain, or the Description of Theology, in The Work of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward (Berkshire, 1970); see also Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, in Thomas Merrill, William Perkins 1558–1602, English Puritanist . . . (The Hague, 1966), 79–240. 20. Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, NY, 1965), 45–79. 21. Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge, 1985), 46–47. 22. Willison Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (Philadelphia, 1960), 23; See also Caldwell, 46. 23. See Christopher Durston, “Puritan Rule and the Failure of Cultural Revolution, 1645– 1660,” in The Culture of English Puritanism, ed. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (New York, 1996), 210–233. 24. For the popular harnessing of the puritan conversion narrative to the murder/execution pamphlets, see Peter Lake, “Popular Form, Puritan Content? Two Puritan Appropriations of the Murder Pamphlet from Mid-Seventeenth-Century London,” in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge, 2006), 313–324. 25. For the later publishing history, see Ralph Josselin, The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (Oxford, 1991), xviii–xx. 26. See, for example, Edmund Venables, Life of John Bunyan (London, 1888), 24–27. 27. Josselin, 13–14. 28. Richard Baxter, The Saint’s Everlasting Rest (Cambridge, MA, 1833), 145. 29. See Charles Lloyd Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (Oxford, 1986), esp. chap. seven; see also Tom Webster, “Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality,” The Historical Journal 39 (1996), 33–56. 30. See John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Despair (Oxford, 1991), 104; L. D. Lerner, “Puritanism and the Spiritual Autobiography,” in The Hibbert Journal 55 (1956–1957), 373–386, 377. 31. For the way in which preachers “massaged” the experience of followers, see Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination, 87; see also Charles Lloyd Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (Oxford, 1986), 201–202. 32. Haller, 142ff. 33. See John R. Knott, The Sword of the Spirit: Puritan Responses to the Bible (Chicago, 1980), 7. 34. John Bunyan, “The New Jerusalem,” in The Whole Works of John Bunyan, ed. George Offor (London, 1862), 3: 431. 35. Bunyan, “One Thing is Needful,” in Ibid., 3: 732. 36. Quoted in Todd, 249. 37. See John Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Chicago, 1993), chap. six.

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38. John Bunyan, Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Oxford, 1962), 77. See also U. Milo Kaufmann,The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (New Haven, 1966), chap. seven. 39. Quoted in Watkins, 146–147. 40. Richard Sibbes, Complete Works, ed. A.B. Grosart (London, 1864), 7: 187; see also Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven, 1966), 66–75. 41. Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises (London, 1610), 99, 103; see also Pettit, 52. 42. Pettit, chap. one. 43. Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reede and Smoking Flax (London, 1630), 8. 44. William Perkins, The Works, ed. John Legat (Cambridge, 1605), 501. 45. Sibbes, The Bruised Reede, 15. 46. Baxter, Saint’s Everlasting Rest, 110. 47. Jeremiah Burroughs, An Exposition of the Prophesie of Hosea: Begun in Divers Lectures, Upon the First Three Chapters, at Michaels, Cornhill, London (London, 1643), 487. 48. Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago, 2000), 30–33. 49. Robert A. Erickson, The Language of the Heart, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia, 1997), 38–42. 50. Richard Sibbes, Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London, 1862–1864), 5: 69–70. 51. Arthur Hildersam, The Doctrine of Fasting and Prayer, and Humiliation for Sin (London, 1633), 88–89, 92–93, 99. 52. Doctrine of Fasting, 100. 53. Richard Sibbes, Works, 1: 53, 25. 54. Ibid., 1: 46. 55. Richard Kilby, Hallelu-iah: Praise Yee the Lord, for the Unburthening of a London Conscience (Cambridge, 1618), 1, 37. 56. Shephard, Confessions (Boston, 1981), 176. 57. Cohen, 219. 58. William Perkins, A Treatise Tending unto a Declaration, Whether a Man Be in the Estate of Damnation, or in the Estate of Grace (London, 1597), 38. 59. Shephard, Confessions, 141. 60. Ibid., 51. 61. Quoted in William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 116–118. 62. Samuel Rutherford, “Letter XXXV,” in Letters of Samuel Rutherford, ed. Andrew Alexander Bonar (London,1891), 97–98. 63. Edward Bagshaw, “The Life and Death of Mr Bolton,” prefaced to Mr Bolton’s Last and Learned Worke of the Foure Last Things (1635), 20. 64. Sibbes, The Bruised Reed, 1: 57, 95. 65. Alan MacFarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin: A Seventeenth-Century Clergyman (Cambridge, 1970), 170–179. 66. Nehemiah Wallington, Letters on Religious Topics. Brit. Lib., Sloane MS 922, fo. 66r. Quoted in Wear, 71, 73. 67. Thomas Taylor, “The Principles of Christian Practice,” in Works (1653), 5. 68. See the case of Samuel Ward in Margo Todd, “Puritan Self-Fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward,” in The Journal of British Studies 31 (1992), esp. 247–248. 69. Watkins, 66. 70. Quoted in Watkins, 24. 71. See for example Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago, 2002), 178–195; Roy Daniells, “English Baroque and Deliberate Obscurity,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5 (1946), 115–121; Mario Praz, “Baroque in England,” Modern Philology 61 (1964), 169–179.

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72. Karen Britland, Drama at the Court of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge, 2006), 6–13; Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge, 1989), esp. chaps. three and nine. 73. See Cuthbert, The Capucins: A Contribution to the History of the Counter-Reformation, 2 vols. (London, 1928); Francis Borgia Steck, Franciscans and the Protestant Revolution in England (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1920). 74. For the chapels of Henrietta Maria, see Frances E. Dolan, “Gender and the ‘Lost Spaces’ of Catholicism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32 (2002), 648–649. 75. See Richard Crashaw, “Peterhouse Praying for its House of God,” in The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, ed. George Walton Williams (New York, 1972), 440. 76. For the inf luence of Peterhouse on poets such as Crashaw, see Grant, 118. For the significance of the wound in Rubens’ portrait, see Vladimir Gurewich, “Rubens and the Wound in Christ’s Side, with Special Reference to its Position,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957), 358–362. 77. See Michael A. Mullett, The Catholic Reformation (London, 1999), chap. two. 78. John of the Cross, “Explanation of Stanza I, #23,” in A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ, trans. David Lewis (London, 1909), 28. 79. Thomas M. McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England: “Our Way of Proceeding” (New York, 1996), 100, 123, 124. 80. Robert Persons, “Confession,” in Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, ed. L. Hicks (Catholic Record Society 39, 1942), 40. For the testimonies of the early Jesuit martyrs, see Bozius, De Signis Ecclesiae (1592), Book XII, chap. xxli, 1075ff. For missionary activity in general, see Michael L. Carrafiello, “English Catholicism and the Jesuit Mission of 1580– 1581, The Historical Journal 37 (1994), 761–774; John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (Oxford, 1976), chap. ten. 81. For the frescos, see Thomas Buser, “Jerome Nadal and Early Jesuit Art in Rome,” The Art Bulletin 58 (1976), 424–433; A. Hyatt Mayor, “The Art of the Counter Reformation,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 4 (1945), 101–105; see also Leif Holm Monssen, “Rex Gloriose Martyrum: A Contribution to Jesuit Iconography,” The Art Bulletin 63 (1981), 130–137; H. Hibbard, “ ‘Ut Picturae Sermones: The First Painted Decorations of the Gesu,’ ” in Baroque Art: The Jesuit Contribution, ed. R. Wittkower and I. Jaffe (New York, 1972), 29–49. 82. Huston Diehl, “Graven Images: Protestant Emblem Books in England,” Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986), 49–66. 83. Henry Hawkins, Partheneia Sacra, ed. John Horden (Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1971). For Hawkins, see Wolfgang Lottes, “Henry Hawkins and Partheneia Sacra,” The Review of English Studies 26 (1975), 144–153; see also Peter M. Daly, “England and the Emblem: The Cultural Context of English Emblem Books,” in The English Emblem and the Continental Tradition, ed. Peter M. Daly (New York, 1988), 1–60; Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London, 1948), chap. seven. 84. Diehl, 62–63. 85. See, for example, Alan Young, The English Emblem Tradition (Toronto, 1988), 65, 133; Karl Josef Holtgen, Aspects of the Emblem: Studies in the English Emblem Tradition (Kassel, 1986), chap. one. 86. Robert Southwell, “Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears,” in Robert Southwell, Works, ed. W. J. Walter (London, 1822), 28. 87. Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ, trans. William Benham Book II, #4, 38. 88. Ceri Sullivan, Dismembered Rhetoric: English Recusant Writing, 1580–1603 (London, 1995), 29. 89. John Abbot Rivers, Devout Rhapsodies (London, 1647), sig. A3. 90. Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006), 499–511.

214

Notes

91. See Alexandra Walsham, “ ‘Domme Preachers’? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print,” Past and Present 168 (2000), 81ff, 102. St Omers Press ceased publishing, however, from approximately 1642 through 1671, due to difficulties stemming from the Thirty Years’ War—which ravaged the town of St Omer—as well as the civil war itself. See also Sullivan, 36–39. 92. G. B. Petti, “Richard Verstegan and Catholic Martyrologies,” Recusant History 5 (1959), 72; Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), chap. seven; Susannah Brietz Monta, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005). 93. See John King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge, 2006). 94. Southwell, Epistle of Comfort; for Southwell, see Scott R. Pilarz, Robert Southwell and the Mission of Literature, 1561–1595 (Burlington, VT, 2004), esp. 72ff. 95. John Wilson, The English Martyrologe: Conteyning a Summary of the Most Renowned and Illustrious Saints of the Three Kingdomes England, Ireland, & Scotland, ed. I. W. P. (St Omer: English College Press, 1640); The Roman Martyrologe: According to the Reformed Calendar Faithfully Translated out of Latin into English, by G.K. of the Society of Iesus, (Saint-Omer, 1627). 96. Acts of English Martyrs, Hitherto Unpublished (London, 1891), ed. J. H. Pollen, 343. 97. Ibid., 352. 98. Ibid., 367. 99. See, for example, Helen C. White, “Southwell: Metaphysical and Baroque,” Modern Philology (1964), 159–168; Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination (Cambridge, 1999), 19, 70ff. 100. Shell, 61; Arthur F. Marotti, “Southwell’s Remains: Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern England,” in Text and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, ed. Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (Basingstoke, 1997). 101. For Crashaw, see Thomas F. Healy, Richard Crashaw (Leiden, 1986); John R. Roberts, ed. New Perspectives on the Life and Work of Richard Crashaw (Columbia, MO, 1990); for older accounts, see Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility (University, LA, 1939); Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart (Gloucester, MA, 1966), chap. seven; William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 1947), esp. 217–224; see also Richard Rambuss, “Sacred Subjects and the Aversive Metaphysical Conceit: Crashaw, Serrano, Ofili,” ELH (2004), 497–530; David Punter, Writing the Passions (Harlow, 2001), chap. three; Maureen Sabone, “Crashaw and Abjection: Reading the Unthinkable in his Devotinal Verse,” American Imago 63 (2007), 423–443; Patrick Grant, Images and Ideas in Literature of the English Renaissance (Boston, 1979), chap. four; Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, 93–104. 102. Alison Shell, “What is a Catholic Poem?: Explicitness and Censorship in Tudor and Stuart Religious Verse,” in Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England, ed. Andrew Hadfield (London, 2001), 97–99. 103. It should also be pointed out that “lips” referred, in contemporary medical terms, to the edges of a wound. Shakespeare thus would have been punning on the usage. 104. Crashaw, Complete Poetry, 43. 105. Patrick Grant, Images and Ideas in Literature of the English Renaissance (Amherst, MA, 1979), 95, 114. 106. St Bernard, On the Song of Songs III, trans. Kilian Walsh and Irene M. Edmonds (Kalamazoo, MI, 1979), 141–150. 107. See Ryan Netzley, “Oral Devotion: Eucharistic Theology and Richard Crashaw’s Religious Lyrics,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 (2002), 247–272. 108. Crashaw, “John 10-7-9. I Am the Door,” Divine Epigram #205, in Complete Poetry, lines 1–2, 346. 109. Bonaventure, Stimulus Divini amoris: That is, The Goode of Divine Love (Douay, 1642), 12.

Notes

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110. Eugene R. Cunnar, “Opening the Religious Lyric: Crashaw’s Ritual, Liminal, and Visual Wounds,” in New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious Lyric, ed. John R. Roberts (Columbia, MO, 1994), 237–267. 111. Certaine Devout Considerations of Frequenting the Blessed Sacrament (Douay, 1615), 40. 112. Teresa of Avila, The Life of Teresa of Jesus, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York, 1991), 274–275. 113. Complete Poetry, “Hymn to Sainte Teresa,” lines 75–76, 108, 146, 153, 56–58. 114. Ibid., “The Flaming Heart,” line 76, 64. 115. For the cult of the sacred heart as Jesuits adopted it, see Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, trans. William J. Young (Chicago, 1964), 392–402. 116. See “Wounds of Our Lord,” The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1967), 14: 1035–1037; Douglas Gray, “The Five Wounds of Our Lord,” Notes & Queries n.s. 10 (1963), 50–51, 82–89, 127–134, 163–168; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, 1992), 238–248. 117. For the significance of the lance wound, particularly as it shifts from piercing Christ’s side to his heart, see Gurewich, 360ff. 118. Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI, 1956), 434–435. 119. For the role of the miraculous in the earlier counter-reformation mission, see Alexandra Walsham, “Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England,” The Historical Journal 46 (2003), 779–815. 120. Patrick J. Nugent, “Bodily Eff luvia and Liturgical Interpretation in Medieval Miracle Stories,” History of Religions 41 (2001), 49–70. 121. Grant, 120–121. 122. For the significance of blood in the middle ages, see Miri Rubin, “The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily ‘Order,’ ” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester, 1994), 113–116; Caroline Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany (Philadelphia, 2007); and “The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” Church History 71 (2992), 685–714; Nicholas Vincent, The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic (New York and Cambridge, 2001), esp. chap. four. 123. Crashaw, “Sacred Poem 101,” in Complete Poetry, 270. 124. For the wounded aspect of circumcision, see Caroline Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991), 86. 125. Gertrude More, The Inner Life and Writings of Dame Gertrude More, ed. Dom Benedict Weld-Blundell (London, 1910), 120–188. 126. Complete Poetry, 111. 127. See, for example, M. Aronberg Lavin, “The Mystic Winepress in the Merode Altarpiece,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Painting in Honor of Millard Meiss, ed. I. Lavin and J. Plummer (New York, 1977), 297–301. 128. Emile Male, Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages, 100–101. 129. Bonaventure, The Works of Bonvanture: Cardinal, Seraphic Doctor, and Saint, trans. Jose de Vinck (Paterson, NJ, 1960), 1: 199–201; see also Cunnar, 247. The imagery, it might be said, was not unique to Christians; Ovid, whose Venus grieves for the dying Adonis, exclaims, “now your blood shall change into a f lower.” 130. “Song upon the Bleeding Crucifix,” in Complete Poetry, 110–112. 131. Charles Joret, La Rose dans l’Antiquite et au Moyen Age: Histoire, Legende et Symbolisme (Paris, 1892), 46; Barbara Seward, The Symbolic Rose (New York, 1960), 12. 132. Crashaw, “The Weeper,” Complete Poetry, 137, 129. 133. Robert Southwell, “Christ’s Bloody Sweat,” in The Poetical Works of Robert Southwell, ed. William B. Turnbull (London, 1856), 119. 134. Ibid., 119–120.

216 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155.

156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161.

Notes

See Southwell, “Sin’s Heavy Load,” in Poetical Works, 90. The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York, 1968), 341. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1936), 134. See Susan Snyder, “The Left Hand of God: Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Tradition,” Studies in the Renaissance 12 (1965), esp. 35–43. Snyder, 35. Michael MacDonald, “The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 31 (1992), 32–61. See Paul S. Seaver, Wallington’s World (Stanford, CA, 1985), 202. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (London, 1966), 51. Robert Bolton, Instructions for a Right Comforting [of] Afflicted Consciences, 2nd ed. (London, 1635), 80. Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, trans. A. Philip McMahon (Princeton, 1956), 156. See Frederic Ives Carpenter, “Spenser’s Cave of Despair,” Modern Language Notes 12 (1897), 129–137; Harold Skulsky, “Spenser’s Despair and the Theology of Doubt,” Modern Philology 78 (1981), 227–242. Edmund Spenser, The Fairie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche Jr. (London, 1979), canto ix, stanza 34, 36. Moshe Barasch, “Despair in the Medieval Imagination,” Social Research 66 (1999). Giles Fletcher, “Christ’s Victory and Triumph, Part 2, stanza 23ff, in Sacred Poetry of the Seventeenth Century, ed. R. Cattermole (London, 1836), 1: 121 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That which is to Come, ed. James Blanton Wharey, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1960), 113–118. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1962), 26–27. Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge, 2006), esp. 174–192. See for example Augustine, City of God, 14.8.; Siegfried Wenzel, “ ‘Acedia 700–1200,” Traditio 22 (1967), 73–102. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell (New York, 1938), 878–880ff. See the medieval Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1956), 19–25. Burton, 947; Burton, as Susan Snyder has indicated, pointed out that “melancholy and despair, though often, do not always concur;” thus, Snyder writes, Burton “[allows] for the direct action of God’s heavy hand and [avoids] the charge of physical determinism.” Snyder, 39. See Snyder, 38. Richard Baxter, Preservatives against Melancholy and Overmuch Sorrow, by Faith (London, 1683). Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings . . . (London, 1683), 6. Ibid., 72. John Moore, A Sermon Preach’d before the Queen (London, 1691), 10. Complete Poetry, “Sancta Maria Dolorum,” VI, line 1–2, 167; Robert Southwell, “Come Deep Remorse,” The Poetical Works of the Rev. Robert Southwell, ed. William B. Turnbull (London, 1856), 139–142.

Conclusion 1. For continued images of the body politic in a wounded or dismembered state, see M. S. R. Jenner, “The Roasting of the Rump: Scatology and the Body Politic in Restoration England,” Past and Present 177 (2002), 84–120.

Notes

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2. James Wood, “The All and the If: God and Metaphor in Melville,” in The Broken Estate: Essays in Literature and Belief (New York, 1999), 51–52. 3. Barbara Strafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 465. 4. Richard Macksey, “ ‘Alas, Poor Yorick’: Sterne Thoughts,” Modern Language Notes 98 (1983), 1008. 5. Sarah Cole, “The Poetry of Pain,” The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford, 2007), 484; see also Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995), 204–222. 6. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London, 1996). 7. See Richard A. Posner, Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 118. 8. Lida Kirchberger, Franz Kafka’s Use of Law in Fiction (1986), chap. two. 9. Nigel Spivey, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain and Fortitude (Berkeley, CA, 2001), 188–190. 10. Helaine Posner, Kiki Smith (Boston, 1998), 19, 22. 11. Graham Howes, The Art of the Sacred: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Art and Belief (New York, 2007). 12. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History (Baltimore, MD, 1996), 4; Cole, 484; see also Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Ref lections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (London, 1992), 83–107.


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I N DE X

Abel (biblical figure), 32 Abraham (biblical figure), 147–48 Absalom (biblical figure), 34–35 Absolutism vs. constitutionalism, 26 Achilles (Greek mythology), 94, 105, 106 Acts and Monuments (Foxe), 15, 78, 152, 160 Adam (biblical figure), 142–43 Adams, Thomas, 27 Aeneid (Virgil), 104, 109, 134 Aeneus (Aeneid), 94, 134, 140 afterlife, wounds in, 14 alchemy, 51 allegiance, 61–62, 69 Allen, Hannah, 172 Allen, William, 160 America, 9, 150 The Amorous Warre (Mayne), 129 amputations, 88 analogies, 7, 61–62, 186n11 See also body politic analogy Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 118, 128–29, 170–71 anger, 134 Anglicanism, 113 Anti-Cavalierisme (Goodwin), 33 Aphorisms of Justification (Baxter), 150–51 apocalypse, 101–2 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 184n69 architectural metaphors, 10, 43–45, 67

Areopagitica (Milton), 40 Ares (Greek mythology), 105 Ariosto, Ludovico, 138 Aristophanes (Symposium), 120 Aristotle, 22, 120 armor, 84–85, 88 Arundel Castle, assault on, 93 Askew, Anne, 15 Atkyns, Richard, 90, 93, 100 attainder, act of, 67 Augustine, Saint, 9, 120–21, 154, 165 Aylmer, G. E., 200n72 Bacon, Francis, 5, 55, 64, 178 Bacon, Nathaniel, 169 Baillie, Robert, 29 Baker, Augustine, 166 baroque movement, 158, 162 Bartholomew, Saint, 11 Bastwick, John, 35 battlefields, haunting of, 95 battles, 90, 96, 97, 104, 131 See also civil wars, English; names of battles; war Baxter, Richard, 97, 150–51, 153, 156, 171–72 Bayne, Paul, 156 beauty as wounding force, 126, 133, 136 Becket, Thomas, 159 beheading, 76 See also executions Benjamin, Walter, 85

236 Bensted, Thomas, 80 Bernard, Saint, 9, 163, 167 Bespaloff, Rachel, 104 Betteridge, Thomas, 15 Bettini, Maurizio, 134 Bible, the, 102 bodily f luids in, 165 book of Daniel, 71 book of Jeremiah, 154 book of Job, 11, 30, 149, 184n69 book of Revelation, 32, 71, 101 Charles I execution and, 33 Corinthians, 23 emotional resonance of, 31 Jesus Christ and, 165 as justification for war, 100 political rhetoric and, 32 protestants and, 147 psalms, 39 woundedness metaphor in, 147–48, 151–52, 157 wounds in, 71, 147–48 Bingen, Hildegard of, 12 Birth, John, 93 Blagrave, George, 88–89 Blake, Kathleen, 4 blood, 32–33, 130 as call to action, 175 death of Charles I and, 41–42 elegies and, 99 identity and, 166 of Jesus Christ, 165–66 martyrdom and, 99, 165–66 meanings of, 167 paradoxes of, 33–34, 173 power of, 79 purgative nature of, 50–51 sacramental meaning of, 165 treason and, 75 See also f luids, body; wounds Blumenberg, Hans, 6 Bodin, Jean, 63 body, the, 9, 21, 134 analogies of, 61–62 Catholic focus on, 158

Index heads of, 20, 23, 75 king’s dual, 59, 61 law and, 16–17, 46 love and, 133 metaphors of, 6, 66, 69–70, 75, 81 minds and, 136, 138 as nations, 22, 46 power of, 8, 80 as record of war, 83–84 religion and, 145 vulnerability of, 6, 138 of women, 12, 184n63 wounds and, 25 See also eyes, love and; f luids, body; heads; hearts; skin; wounds body politic analogy, 6, 16, 42–43, 185n8 boundaries and, 21 changes in, 69–70 Charles I and, 20, 41 compostion of, 23–24 Corinthians and, 23 discord within, 24 disease and, 27–28, 45–46, 49 England and, 19–22, 27 fragmentation of, 34 historical contingence of, 52 king and, 23, 24, 29–30, 37 laws and, 46, 55 meaning and, 20–21 metaphorical f lexibility of, 20 parliament and, 29–30 political hierarchies and, 22–28 in pre-civil war period, 21–22 purification of, 50 unity and, 19–22 wounding and, 24, 25, 26, 47–53 See also England; metaphors Bolton, Richard, 63 Bolton, Robert, 156, 169 Bolton, siege of, 87, 102–3 Bonaventure, Saint, 12, 13, 164, 166–67 boundaries, 8, 9, 12–13, 19, 21, 117, 139 love and, 118 Bourke, Joanna, 177

Index Bradshaw, John, 69 Bramantino, 12 Bramhall, John, 48 Breight, Curt, 73 Brewer, Hannah, 155 Bridge, William, 32 The Broken Heart (Ford), 141 brokenness. See woundedness metaphor Brome, Alexander, 128 Brown, Peter, 184n66 Browne, John, 49 Browne, Thomas, 7 Brunner, Jerome, 145 Buchanan, George, 24 Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 27 Bulstrode, Richard, 88 Bunyan, John, 148, 150, 152, 155, 169, 170 Burkhead, Henry, 129 Burroughs, Jeremiah, 153 Burton, Henry, 35 Burton, Robert, 16 jealousy and, 138 love and, 17, 118, 121, 134, 135–36, 142 melancholy and, 128–29, 137, 141 religious despair and, 170–71 Butler, Joseph, 125 Bynum, Caroline, 12, 13 Byron, John, 84 Caesar, Julius, 26, 108 Cain (biblical figure), 32 Calamy, Edmund, 48, 50 Caldwell, Patricia, 150 Calvin, John, 4, 14, 149 Calvinists, 15, 18, 152 Calvin’s Case (1608), 59 Cambridge Platform of 1648, 150 Camille, Michael, 9 Campion, Edmund, 159, 166 Campo Musae (Wither), 101–2, 103 Camporesi, Piero, 210n9

237

cannons, 85, 90, 93, 98 Capuchins, 158 Caravaggio, 12, 13 Carew, Thomas, 118, 123, 132 caritas, 120–21 Carson, Anne, 139 Caruth, Cathy, 178 Catholicism, 161, 162–63, 167–68, 173 See also Jesuits; religion Catholics, 43, 63, 160–61 anti-Catholicism and, 30 blood and, 166 body f luids and, 18, 168 conversions of, 148, 158 focus on the body of, 158 hearts and, 154 Jesus Christ and, 18, 145–46, 160 metaphor and, 4 war and, 151 woundedness metaphor and, 147 See also Jesuits; religion Catiline ( Jonson), 62–63 cavaliers, 96, 98, 113, 114 See also soldiers Cavendish, Margaret, 141 censorship, 40, 86, 127 Chamberlayne, Edward, 51–52 Charles I, 34–35 betrayal of, 39–40 body politic analogy and, 20, 41 councilors to, 27 critiques of, 127 David and, 39, 40 elegies of, 98–99 execution of, 16, 41–42, 79 forced loan policy of, 26, 27–28 Jesus Christ and, 38, 40 letters of, 38 martyrdom of, 39, 40 negotiations with parliament of, 39 neoplatonism and, 121–22, 127 personal rule of, 28 as physician, 51 royal touch and, 40, 49 Scotland and, 29, 187n65

238 Charles I—Continued Strafford and, 66 treason and, 57 trial of, 68–69 woundedness metaphor and, 19, 33, 36–40 as wounding force, 28, 33 See also kings Charles II, 42, 78, 111–12 Charleton, Walter, 51 Chillingworth, William, 50 Chloridia ( Jonson), 121 Christianity. See Catholicism; Catholics; protestants; puritans; religion Christians, conversion narratives of, 151–57 Christ’s Victory and Triumph (Fletcher), 170 Chrysostom, Saint John, 169 Church of England, 162 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 56, 75–76 circumcision, 147–48, 154, 166 Civil War, American, 176 civil war, Roman, 26–27 The Civil War (Cowley), 34–35, 89, 109–10, 111 civil wars, English, 19, 28–35, 84, 108, 109–10 alchemy and, 51 allusions to, 129 causes of, 21, 29, 30 as conf lagrations, 36 depictions of, 19, 118 epics and, 104–5 histories of, 51–52 honor and, 98–99 Ireland and, 43 law and, 67–68 love and, 131 neo-stoicism and, 123 preachers and, 30–31 puritans and, 150 religion and, 150–51

Index woundedness metaphor and, 21–22, 28–29, 68, 108–9 See also soldiers; war Clairvaux, Bernard of, 14 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 51–52, 92 Clark, Michael, 178 Le Coeur Devot (Luzvic), 159 Coke, Edward, 16–17, 55, 56–57, 73 allegiance and, 61–62 common law and, 64 law and, 192n4 metaphor and, 194n48 as model for other writers, 57 treason and, 59, 61, 62, 75 Cola’s Fury (Burkhead), 129 Colchester, siege of, 98 Cole, Sarah, 178 common law, 56, 63, 64–65, 67–68, 73, 74 See also law Common Prayer, Book of, 29 commonwealth of England, 42–47, 108 See also Cromwell, Oliver; England A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (Forset), 24 Condren, Conal, 5 Confessions (Augustine), 9 Congregationalism, 150 conscience, 39 constitutionalismvs. absolutism, 26 conversion, religious, 148–57 disease and, 156 metaphors and, 151, 154–55, 156 narratives of, 149–50, 151–57 public confession and, 150 puritans and, 145, 149, 156–57 stages of, 149 violence of, 17–18 woundedness metaphor and, 152, 154–55 See also religion Coppe, Abiezer, 153 Corinthians, 23

Index Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 24–25, 37, 186n11 Corns, Thomas, 36 Cosin, John, 158 Cotton, John, 150 councilors to the king, 27, 29 Le Coup de Lance (Rubesn), 158 Cowell, John, 75 Cowley, Abraham, 17, 89 anonymity of death and, 91 civil wars and, 34–35, 104, 109–10 love and, 119, 132, 133–34, 135, 140, 142 providence and, 100 woundedness metaphor and, 19 wounds and, 111 Cranach, Lucas, 14 Crashaw, Richard, 4, 18 circumcision and, 166 heart and, 164–65 religion and, 158, 159 wounds and, 162–64, 173, 174, 178 Crawford, Patricia, 33 Cromartie, Alan, 67–68 Cromwell, Oliver, 42, 46, 80–81, 107–8 healing and, 47 opposition to, 70–71 providence and, 100, 101 Scotland and, 43 treason and, 70 war wounds of, 92–93, 200n51 as wounding force, 108 Cross, John of the, 159, 162, 164 crucifixion, 11, 159, 183n59 See also Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ, wounds of culture, 74, 145 Cupid (Greek mythology), 17, 120, 131 cupidity, 120–21 curses, 31 Daniel, book of, 71 See also Bible, the Dante Alighieri, 10, 13

239

Davenant, William, 17, 123, 124, 125–26 David (bilbical king), 39, 40, 71 David, Jacques-Louis, 178 Davies, John, 55 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 106, 169 Dean, Margaret Justice, 142 “The Death of Marat” (David), 178 Defoe, Daniel, 113 Dell, William, 100–101 Democritus, 135 De Rerum Natura (Lucretius), 119 Dering, Edward, 62 despair, religious, 18, 146, 168–72, 173 devil, the, 104, 106–7, 108, 155, 169, 171–72 diaries, 150 Dickinson, Emily, 15 Dido (Aenid), 134, 140 Digby, George, 28, 65 Digby, Kenelm, 50 Diggers, the, 32 disease, 11, 24, 149 body politic analogy and, 27–28, 45–46, 49 conversion and, 156 treason and, 62 See also body, the; woundedness metaphor Dismembering the Male (Bourke), 177 divine right, 40, 96 See also kings Dix, Otto, 178 doctors, 48, 50, 85, 88–89, 135, 142 See also medicine Donagan, Barbara, 95 Donne, John, 2, 4, 55, 168 body and, 9 love and, 118 melancholy and, 137, 141 neoplatonism and, 123–24 war and, 151 woundedness metaphor and, 146–47, 173 Dorset, Edward, 29

240

Index

Douglas, Mary, 21 Drage, William, 120 dueling, 125 Duppa, Brian, 48 Ebba, Saint, 159 Edgehill, battle of, 91, 94, 111 Edmund, Saint, 159 Eikon Basilike (Charles I), 36–40 Eikonoklastes (Milton), 40 elderly, the, 112 elegies, 2, 86, 98–99, 109, 111, 128–29 Eliot, John, 63 Elizabeth I, 24 Elyot, Thomas, 48 emblem books, 159 emotion, 91–92, 119 See also love; passions England as Babylon, 31 baroque movement in, 162 body metaphors and, 20–21, 22 body politic and, 19–22, 27 commonwealth of, 42–47, 108 differing visions of, 68 fragmentation of, 34 Ireland and, 25, 30, 43, 108 Israel and, 4, 102 Job compared with, 30 martyrdom of, 34 metaphors and, 28 protectorate of, 46–47, 70 puritans in, 150 Rome compared with, 52 salvation and, 33–34 Scotland and, 25, 29, 43 treason and, 59–60 unity of, 2, 19–22, 61 See also body politic analogy England, as wounded nation, 9, 43, 48 Charles I and, 16, 19 civil wars and, 32–33, 109, 117 creative reconstitution and, 1–3, 6 healing and, 6, 175–76 metaphorical f lexibility and, 7, 69–70

sins and, 27 treason and, 69–70, 72 England, Church of, 162 Englands sicknes, comparatively conferred with Israels (Adams), 27 English Martyrologe (1608), 161 epics, 2, 103–11 battle depictions in, 131 conventions of, 107 vs. elegies, 111 elevated language of, 104 vs. plain style, 103 war and, 109–10, 129–31 woundedness metaphor and, 104–5, 106–7, 110–11 Essayes upon several subjects (anon), 48 Eucharist, 163, 166 Eusebius, 160 Eve (biblical figure), 142–43 executions, 177 of Catholics, 160–62 of Charles I, 16, 41–42, 79 martyrdom and, 78–79 performance of, 17, 58, 73–76, 80–81, 162 See also punishment An Exposition of the Prophecy of Hosea (Burroughs), 153 eyes, love and, 135–36, 140, 141–42 See also body, the Fairfax, Thomas, 96, 99 Falkland, Lucius Cary, Lord, 91 Fane, Mildmay, 128 Feake, Christopher, 71–72 fear, 93 Feibusch, Hans, 178 Feldman, Allen, 95 Felton, John, 27 Fessenden, John, 155 Fifth Monarchy Men, 47, 71, 72 Finch, Henry, 64 Finch, John, 65 Five Wounds, 164–65, 178 See also Jesus Christ, wounds of

Index “Flaming Heart” (Crashaw), 164 Fletcher, Giles, 170 Floyd, Captain, 111 f luids, body, 1, 41–42, 130, 165, 167–68 See also blood Forced Loan (1626), 26, 27–28 Ford, John, 141 Forset, Edward, 24, 50 Fortescue, John, 23 Foster, Henry, 89, 90, 92 Foucalt, Michel, 141 Fountain of Life, 166 Fox, George, 72 Foxe, John, 15, 35, 36, 78, 152, 160, 161 fragmentation. See woundedness metaphor Francis, Saint, 12 Freeman, James, 106–7 Fuller, Nicholas, 55 Gauden, John, 36 Geertz, Clifford, 15, 74 gender, 76, 184n66 See also masculinity; women Gerhard, John, 65, 70, 76 ghosts, 93–95, 113 Gideon (biblical figure), 31, 32 Gil-Harris, Jonathan, 24 Giraldus Cambrensis, 136 Glanvill, Joseph, 5 Glynn, John, 70 Gnostics, 183n59 God, 11, 30, 31, 102, 155 healing and, 156 love for, 120–21, 123 love of, 129, 164 neo-stoicism and, 122 as wounding force, 146, 147 wounds and, 174 See also Jesus Christ; religion gods, wounds and, 105 Gondibert (Davenant), 125–26 Goodrich, Paul, 64 Goodrich, Peter, 73 Goodwin, John, 33

241

Goring, George (Earl of Norwich), 98 Gouge, William, 101 Gowland, Angus, 118 Grace Abounding (Bunyan), 152, 170 Graunt, John, 140 Great Britain concept, 25 Greene, John, 94 Groot, Jerome de, 50–51 Grunewald, Matthias, 14 gunpowder, 84–85, 89–90, 91, 97, 98–99 Gunpowder Plot of 1605, 24, 61, 66, 194n48 Gwyn, John, 90 Hades (Greek mythology), 105 Hale, Matthew, 73, 186n11 Hall, Joseph, 123, 134 Hamilton, James, Duke of, 69–70, 79 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 93 hanging, 76 See also executions Hardy, Nathaniel, 28 Harrington, James, 45 Harrison, Thomas, 102 Haslerigge, Arthur, 90 Hastings, Henry, 128 Hawkins, Henry, 159 heads, 20, 23, 75, 76, 80, 138, 139 See also body, the healing despair and, 171 God and, 156 history and, 51–52 medicine and, 50 religion and, 151 souls and, 169 woundedness metaphor and, 22, 47–53, 66, 175–76 See also wounds hearts circumcision and, 154 despair and, 169 identity and, 153–54 law and, 55

242 hearts—Continued love and, 133 as openings, 120–21 as relics, 80 religion and, 145, 173 treason and, 62, 75 vulnerability of, 138 will of the people and, 23 woundedness metaphor and, 9, 155, 162, 164–65 See also body, the; love Hector (Trojan prince), 94, 106 Helfta, Gertrude of, 9 Helmont, Jean Baptista von, 51 hemistitches, 110 Henrietta Maria, 121, 122, 126–27, 158 Henry V, 114 Henry VIII, 60, 74 heroes, 10, 106–7 Herrick, Robert, 49, 128, 129, 134, 135, 142 Hesperides (Herrick), 128 Hewson, John, 93 Heylyn, Peter, 23, 32 Hibbitts, Bernard, 56 Hippocrates, 138 Hirst, Derek, 130, 131 Hobbes, Thomas, 4–5, 176 architectural metaphors and, 45 body politic analogy and, 20–21, 45–46 law metaphors and, 55 love and, 17, 124–25 machine metaphors and, 46 radicalism of, 57 romance genre and, 125 Holland, Thomas, 162 Holles, Denzil, 68 Holles, William, 91 Hollywood, Amy, 184n63 Holy Dying (Taylor), 123 Holy Living (Taylor), 123 Holy Sonnet Nine (Donne), 168 Homer, 84, 104, 105–6, 110–11

Index honor, 9 aspiration to, 97–98 family and, 201n79 parliamentarians and, 99–100, 109 royalist and, 96–97, 200n72 social status and, 96 soldiers and, 95, 200n72 undermining of, 97 in war, 90–91, 95, 98, 109 wounds and, 90–91, 96–97, 97–98 Hooper, John, 15 Hopton Heath, battle of, 96 “Horation Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” (Marvell), 43–44, 107–8 hospitals, military, 111 Hudson, Geoffrey, 111 Huizinga, Johan, 11 Hutchinson, Lucy, 119 “Hymn to Sainte Teresa” (Crashaw), 164 identity, 17 blood and, 166 boundaries and, 117 hearts and, 153–54 war and, 91 wounds defining, 3, 11–12, 37, 106, 148, 166, 176, 183n59 The Iliad (Homer), 10, 94, 105–6 Imitation of Christ (Kempis), 160 Independents, the, 100 Inns of Court, 55, 74 insanity, 136, 141 The Interpreter (Cowell), 75 “In the Penal Colony” (Kaf ka), 177 Ireland, 25, 30, 43, 108 Irish Catholic revolt (1641), 63 Israel, 4, 102 Jager, Eric, 9 James, William, 1, 2, 168, 178 James I, 25, 64 Jeremiah, book of, 154 See also Bible, the

Index Jesuits, 158–59, 160, 165, 166 See also Catholics Jesus Christ access to, 164 blood of, 165–66 Charles I and, 38, 40 depictions of, 14 imitation of, 152 martyrs and, 36, 161 paradoxes of, 40 physical body of, 183n59 as physician, 50 soldiers and, 102 suffering of, 11–12, 160 Jesus Christ, wounds of, 77, 158, 183n59 Catholicism and, 145–46, 162, 167 identity and, 148 literary use of, 162, 163 paradoxes of, 165, 173–74 tasting of, 163 Job (biblical figure), 11, 30, 149, 184n69 Jones, Inigo, 126 Jonson, Ben, 25, 62–63, 121, 135 Jordan, Thomas, 41 Joshua (biblical leader), 31 Josselin, Ralph, 150 Judaism, 11 Judas (apostle), 169 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 163 Kaf ka, Franz, 177 Kempis, Thomas à, 160 Kilby, Richard, 155 Killing Noe Murder (Sexby), 70–72 King, Henry, 41, 42, 136 kings, 2, 42 body politic analogy and, 23, 24, 29–30, 37 dual body of, 59, 61 honor and, 96 parliament and, 64–65 as physician, 50 royal touch of, 40, 48, 49, 79, 111 as souls, 22 treason and, 63, 68–69

243

as wounding force, 57 See also Charles I; Charles II; James I The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645), 38 kisses, 134–35 Knoppers, Laura Lunger, 128 Knox, John, 24 Kristeva, Julia, 8–9 labyrinths, metaphors of, 56 Lambarde, William, 64 lands, wounding of, 10, 102, 108, 130, 175–76 See also England, as wounded nation; woundedness metaphor Last Supper, representations of, 10 Latimer, Hugh, 36 Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 29, 35, 65, 127, 158 Antichrist and, 31 execution of, 30, 78 treason of, 61 trial of, 60, 67–68 law, 72 ambiguity of, 63–64 body and, 16–17, 46 censorship, 86 civil wars and, 67–68 common law, 56, 63, 64–65, 67–68, 73, 74 culture and, 74 injustice and, 80–81 king and, 64, 68 metaphors and, 55–56, 57, 73, 192n4, 194n48 performance of, 17, 58, 73–76, 80–81 vs. safety, 65 as science, 56 souls and, 22 subversion of, 79–80 treason and, 59, 60, 63–66 vulnerability of, 56–57 wall metaphor of, 56, 64, 192n13 woundedness metaphor and, 9, 57–58, 59, 63, 65, 74, 177 Le Coeur Devot (Luzvic), 159

244

Index

Le Coup de Lance (Rubesn), 158 Leder, Drew, 1 Levellers, the, 36, 46–47, 70 Leviathon (Hobbes), 45 Levinas, Emmanuel, 142 Lewalski, Barbara, 147 Lichfield, siege of, 109 Life (Saint Teresa of Avila), 164 Lilburne, John, 35–36, 46, 51, 65, 69 Lipsius, Justus, 122, 123 Lisle, George, 99 literature, military, 87, 89–90, 91–92, 93–95 See also civil wars, English; war Lochrie, Karma, 12 Locke, John, 5, 192n7 Lockyer, Nicholas, 30, 33–34 Lombard, Peter, 13 Longinus, 14 love avoidance of, 142 body and, 133 boundaries and, 118 depictions of, 118 elegies and, 128–29 eyes as instrument of, 135–36, 140, 141–42 as fire, 134 grief and, 140 as intruder, 126 jealousy and, 138 lovesickness and, 137 marriage and, 124, 142 metaphor and, 119–20, 126, 127, 134 neoplatonic, 121–22, 123–24, 127 neo-stoicism and, 122–23 paradoxes of, 131 vs. passion, 125 remedies for, 141–42 royalist writers and, 127 of self, 125 suicide and, 140–41 types of, 119–20 unrequited, 132, 133 war and, 129, 132, 133

Love, Christopher, 78 love, woundedness metaphor and, 17, 118–19, 120–21, 124–26, 130–31 body and, 134, 135–36, 139–40 civil wars and, 129, 132–33 God and, 164 identity and, 117 neo-stoicism and, 122–23 Lovelace, Richard, 20, 128, 131, 135 Love’s Triumph ( Jonson), 121 Low, Anthony, 118 Loxley, James, 98, 128 Loyola, Ignatius of, 159, 161, 166, 168 Lucan, 26–27, 34, 51, 108, 109–10, 110–11, 188n93 Lucas, Charles, 98, 99 Lucasta (Lovelace), 131 Lucretius, 119, 134 Ludlow, Gabriel, 92 Luther, Martin, 14 Luzvic, Etienne, 159 Macaulay, Thomas, 83 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 93 MacDonald, Michael, 136, 137, 141, 169 machines, as metaphors, 46 MacRae, Donald C., 6 madness, 136, 141 Man, Paul de, 5 Manderson, Desmond, 79 Mantegna, Andrea, 10 Manwaring, Roger, 27–28 Marian veneration, 162 marriage, 124, 138, 142 Marriot, John, 142 Marshall, Peter, 93–94 Marshall, Stephen, 30–31 Marston, J. G., 201n79 Marston Moor, battle of, 87, 92 Marsyas (Greek mythology), 10–11 Marten, Henry, 29 martyrdom, 159 blood and, 99 Catholic, 158 Charles I and, 39, 40

Index executions and, 78–79 of nation, 34 suicide and, 141 texts of, 160–62 war and, 101 wounds and, 35–36, 99, 160–62, 177–78 “Martyrdom of St. James” (Mantegna), 10 martyrs, 40 blood of, 165–66 conversion and, 152–53 Jesus Christ and, 36, 161 relics and, 166 scars of, 13 suffering of, 15 wounds of, 11–12 Marvell, Andrew, 107–8 architectural metaphors and, 43–44 love and, 17, 130, 132 neo-stoicism and, 122, 123 war and, 129–31 Mary (biblical figure), 178 masculinity, 97, 100, 121, 177, 184n66 masques, 74, 121, 127 Masters, Jamie, 109 May, Thomas, 26, 51–52 Mayne, Jasper, 32, 129 medicine, 21, 119, 136, 137–39, 141 military hospitals and, 111 physicians and, 48, 50, 85, 88–89, 135, 142 surgeons and, 50, 85, 86, 87, 92 melancholy, 128–29, 136–39, 140–41 Memoirs of a Cavalier (Defoe), 113 Mendelsohn, J. Andrew, 51 Merback, Mitchell, 8, 15 mercenaries, 92, 97 Mercurius Aulicus, 110 Mercurius Melancholius, 129 Mercurius Rusticus, 92 Mervin, Audley, 63 messianism, 71–72 metaphors, 4–7, 28, 41, 145, 147, 175 alchemical, 51

245

architectural, 10, 43–45, 67 blood as, 166 body as, 6, 66, 69–70, 75, 81 body politic as, 20, 185n8 borrowing of, 104 conversion and, 151, 154–55, 156 deceptive properties of, 4–5, 176, 192n7 fire as, 52, 134 f lexibility of, 7, 20, 146, 172–73 law and, 55–56, 57, 64, 73, 192n4, 194n48 light as, 192n4 love and, 119–20, 126, 127, 134 machines as, 46 meaning and, 2–3, 5–6, 16, 29 melancholy and, 137 physicians as, 48, 50 power of, 55–56 preachers and, 31 religion and, 28, 161, 172–73 religious despair and, 146 treason and, 59, 81 of war, 103–4 See also England, as wounded nation; love, woundedness metaphor and; woundedness metaphor metaphysical poets, 4, 5, 123–24 See also names of poets Milan, James of, 14 Milton, John, 17, 108, 142–43 architectural metaphors and, 44 bishops and, 29 cannons and, 90 Charles I and, 40 love and, 118, 135 melancholy and, 137 radicalism of, 57 scars and, 86 war and, 103 woundedness metaphor and, 104–5, 106–7, 110–11 writing as weapon and, 28 Miner, Earl, 129–30 missionizing, 159

246

Index

Mitchell, David T., 7 Montagu, Walter, 41 Montrose, James Graham, Marquis of, 41–42, 76, 77–78, 80, 99, 187n65 Moore, John, 172 More, Gertrude, 166 Morgan, Edmund, 150 Morgan, Edward, 162 Morris, John, 65–66 Moses (biblical figure), 71 mourning, 102 Murphy, Terence R., 141 Murray, Anne, 85 muskets, 85, 98 mystics, 158, 159 Napier, Richard, 119, 137, 140 narratives, conversion, 149–50, 151–57, 156–57 Naseby, battle of, 103 nations. See England Nedham, Marchamont, 68 neoplatonism, 121–22, 123–24, 127 neo-stoicism, 122–23 Netzley, Ryan, 163 Newbury, battle of, 92, 109–10, 111 New England, 150 New Model Army, 99, 100 Nineteen Propositions (1642), 39 Norbrook, David, 188n93 Norfolk, Thomas Howard, Duke of, 60 Northampton, William Compton, Earl of, 96, 97 Norwich, George Goring, Earl of, 98 Norwich, Julian of, 13 oak tree, as symbol of English king, 42 objects, wounding of, 10, 126 Oceana (Harrington), 45 O’Rourke, Brian, 60–61 orphans, 112 Orpheus (Greek mythology), 135 Orr, Alan, 57 Ovid, 118–19, 120, 141–42 Owen, Wilfred, 177

paintings, wounding of, 10 panegyrics, 99 Paradise Lost (Milton), 104–5, 106–7, 108 Parker, Henry, 20, 34, 51, 65 parliament, 28, 31 body politic analogy and, 29–30 Charles I and, 39 common law and, 63, 64 healing and, 51, 66 king and, 64–65 as physician, 50 Rump Parliament, 43–33, 43–44 safety and, 65 treason and, 63, 69–70 as wounding force, 34, 49 parliamentarians, 96, 103 architectural metaphors and, 43–45 Charles I and, 38 honor and, 99–100, 109 persecution of, 35 providence and, 100, 101 woundedness metaphor and, 19 See also republicanism Partheneia Sacra (Quarles), 159 passions, 117, 121–22, 124–25, 134, 138 Patroclus (Iliad), 94, 105–6 Paul (apostle), 23, 149, 152, 153 Peacham, Henry, 95 Peisandrus (Iliad), 105 Perkins, Judith, 12 Perkins, William, 149, 153, 155 Petrarch, 132, 133 Pharsalia (Lucan), 26–27, 34, 108, 188n93 Philipps, Fabian, 41 Philoctetes (Greek hero), 1, 15–16, 92 Phoebus (sun god), 132 physicians, 48, 50, 85, 88–89, 135, 142 See also medicine Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 170 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 10 plain style, 5, 89–90, 103 Plato, 22, 118–19, 120, 135 The Platonic Lovers (Davenant), 124

Index Plotinus, 135 Pocock J. G. A., 22 poison imagery, 62 politics, 21, 31, 32 Polycarp, Saint, 12 poor, the, 112–13 Popish Plot (1678), 176 Power, Henry, 110 praemunire, 67 prayer, 48 preachers, 30–31, 32, 38, 100–101, 151, 156 “Prickynge of Love” (Milan), 14 Pritchard, Thomas, 111 protectorate of England, 46–47, 70 protestants, 4, 14, 30, 43, 147, 148–49, 168 See also puritans; religion providence, 100–103 Prynne, William, 35 psalms, woundedness metaphor and, 39 punishment, 10–11, 58, 73–76, 77 See also executions purgatory, 13 puritans, 4, 100, 150, 151–57, 169, 173 conversion and, 145, 149, 156–57 despair and, 171–72 disease and, 156 honor and, 99–100 idolatry and, 126–27 love and, 126 power of, 161 sin and, 48 woundedness metaphor and, 153–54 Pym, John, 21, 34, 60, 63, 66 Quakers, 71, 72 Quarles, Francis, 159 Rainsborough, Thomas, 99–100 Raleigh, Walter, 62, 75 Rappaport, Roy, 15 Rayner, Jeremy, 20 reason, 9, 122–23 The rebels catechism (Heylyn), 23

247

Reformation, the, 14 relics, 80, 158, 161, 162, 166 religion aff lictions to, 101 body and, 145, 173 circumcision and, 154 civil wars and, 150–51 vs. common law, 67–68 conversion narratives and, 151–57 culture and, 145 despair and, 168–72 healing and, 151 Jesus Christ’s wounds and, 11–12 love madness and, 119 martyrdom and, 78–79 metaphors of, 28, 161, 172–73 missionizing and, 159 mystics, 158, 159 neo-stoicism and, 122 preachers and, 30–31, 32, 38, 100–101, 151, 156 protestants, 4, 14, 30, 43, 147, 148–49, 168 souls and, 22, 145, 173 spiritual autobiographies and, 149–50, 151 war and, 97 woundedness metaphor and, 17–18, 145–48, 173, 177–78 See also Catholicism; Catholics; conversion, religious; Jesuits; puritans Remedies for Love (Ovid), 120 Reni, Guido, 12 republicanism, 26–27, 42, 43–45, 99–100 See also parliamentarians Restoration, the, 52, 112, 113–14, 176 Revelation, book of, 32, 71, 101 See also Bible, the revolution, Cromwell and, 71–72 Rew, James, 43 Reynolds, Edward, 140 Reynolds, Thomas, 161–62 Ricoeur, Paul, 5–6

248 Ridley, Nicholas, 36 ritual, 58, 74 See also law Robertson, Randy, 131 Roe, Bartholomew, 161–62 Rogers, John, 47, 71 Rogers, Richard, 153 Rolle, Richard, 14 romance genre, 125, 131 Roman Martyrology (1627), 161 Rome, 52 Root and Branch Petition (1640), 28 roundheads. See parliamentarians royalists, 34–35, 38, 110 cavaliers, 96, 98, 113, 114 Cromwell and, 70 depictions of, 20, 109 elegies and, 98–99, 109 honor and, 96–97, 200n72 love metaphors and, 127 melancholy and, 128–29, 136–39 oak tree symbol and, 42 providence and, 100, 103 sin and, 48 treason and, 69 unrequited love and, 132 woundedness metaphor and, 19, 41 wounds and, 96 royal touch, 40, 48, 49, 79, 111 Rubens, Peter Paul, 158 Rudyerd, Benjamin, 64 Rump Parliament (1648), 43–44 Russell, Conrad, 61 Rutherford, Samuel, 156 sacred heart, cult of the, 164–65 safety vs. law, 65 St. John, Oliver, 63, 65, 66 St. Omers Press, 160, 161, 214n91 saints, 12 See also under names of saints The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (Baxter), 150–51 Sales, Francis de, 158–59, 162, 164 Salisbury, John of, 22, 23–24

Index Sandys, Colonel Edwin, 92 Sarpedon (Iliad), 105–6 Satan, 104, 106–7, 108, 155, 169, 171–72 Scarry, Elaine, 11, 91, 147 scars, 13, 86 as badges, 35, 83, 113 as geographies of war, 114 meanings of, 106–7, 108, 112 soldiers and, 83, 111 See also wounds Scotland, 25, 29, 43, 76, 187n65 Scribner, Bob, 15 scrofula, 49 Sebastian, Saint, 12, 99 Selden, John, 17, 55, 64 Seneca (Roman philosopher), 97, 122 senses, Catholic devotion and, 163, 168 Service, Robert, 177 Sexby, Edward, 42–43, 70–72, 81 Shakespeare, William, 24–25, 37, 114, 163, 186n11 Sharpe, Kevin, 2, 38, 121 Shell, Alison, 162–63 Ship Money case (1637), 65, 68 shrines, wounding of, 10 Sibbes, Richard, 150, 153, 154–55, 168 Sidney, Philip, 118 “The Siege of a Female Heart” (Suckling), 133 sieges. See names of sieges Sill, Joanna, 155 Sindercombe, Miles, 71 sins, 152, 155 as cause of England’s crises, 40–41, 48 civil war causes and, 30 despair and, 168, 171 suffering and, 39 woundedness metaphor and, 123 wounds and, 13, 27, 30 Skerpan-Wheeler, Elizabeth, 38–39 skin, 8, 9, 10, 11, 49, 76, 89 See also body, the Skinner, Quentin, 46 Skippon, Philip, 88 Smith, John, 99

Index Smith, Kiki, 178 Smith, Molly, 74 Smith, Nigel, 106 Snyder, Sharon, 7 social status, 21, 76, 96, 113 soldiers cavaliers, 96, 98, 113, 114 ghosts and, 94 honor and, 95, 200n72 Jesus Christ and, 102 as nation’s healers, 51 post-war silence of, 114 post-war status of, 112–13 preachers and, 100–101 providence and, 102 religious motivation of, 32 scars of, 83, 111 wounds of, 17, 85, 114, 177 See also civil wars, English; war souls, 164 disease and, 156 healing and, 169 kings as, 22 religion and, 22, 145, 173 wounds and, 106, 137 Southwell, Robert, 41, 160, 161, 162, 166, 167, 174 Spenser, Edmund, 137, 168, 169, 170 Spira, Francis, 169 spiritual autobiographies, 149–50, 151 Spiritual Exercises (Loyola), 159, 160, 166 Spivey, Nigel, 11 Stafford, Barbara, 6, 10 Star Chamber, 35, 141 state, See England statues, wounding of, 10 Staunton, Edward, 49 stigmata, 8, 12 Stiles, John, 98 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of, 39–40, 60, 61, 63, 66–67, 79 Suckling, John, 123, 128, 133, 138

249

suffering, 1, 11–12, 15, 160 See also wounds suicide, 119, 136, 140–41, 169 Sunderland, Henry Spencer, Earl of, 91 surgeons, 50, 85, 86, 87, 92 See also medicine Suso, Henry, 14 Sutherland, Graham, 178 swords, 31–32, 97 Symmons, Edward, 38, 40 Symonds, Richard, 93 Symposium (Plato), 120 taste, Catholic devotion and, 163, 168 Tauton, battle of, 88 Taylor, Edward, 4, 140 Taylor, Jeremy, 123 Taylor, John, 48 Taylor, Thomas, 157 tears, 41–42, 130 See also f luids, body Teresa of Avila, Saint, 159, 164 theater, banning of, 129 1352 statute of Edward III, 59 Throckmorton, Nicholas, 60 Tillinghurst, John, 47 torture, 76 See also punishment trauma, 178 treason, 17 ambiguity of, 65–67 blood and, 75 Charles I and, 57 Cromwell and, 70 disease and, 62 as divide between king and people, 61, 66, 67–68 executions for, 74–76 heads and, 75 hearts and, 62, 75 images and, 60–61 king and, 63, 68–69 law and, 59, 60, 63–66 legislation and, 69–70 meaning of, 58–60

250 treason—Continued messianism and, 72 poison imagery and, 62 punishments for, 58, 75 safety and, 65 woundedness metaphor and, 59–60, 61, 62, 65, 68–70, 73, 81 Treatise of Wounds (Wiseman), 87–88 Trent, Council of (1543–1563), 158 Trevor, Douglas, 137 Trevor, Marcus, 92 Tristam Shandy (Sterne), 176 Tros (Greek mythology), 105 truth, 5, 40 unity, 2, 19–22, 61 The Unnatural Tragedy (Cavendish), 141 vainglory, 125 Vaughan, Henry, 42, 98, 135 Veevers, Erica, 121, 126 Venner, Thomas, 72 Verney, Edmund, 84–85, 91 Verstegan, Richard, 160 Vindication (Atkyns), 90 Vindication (Symmons), 38 Virgil, 34, 104, 109 virginity, 12–13 Virgin Mary (biblical figure), 178 Walkington, Thomas, 135, 137 wall, law as, 56, 64, 192n13 Waller, Edmund, 128, 132 Wallington, Nehemiah, 102 Walsham, Alexandra, 100 Walsingham, Edward, 99 Walton, Valentine, 101 Walwyn, William, 188n97 war aftermath of, 111 anonymity of, 91, 92 apocalypse and, 102 atrocities of, 102 Bible as justification for, 100 changes in, 84–85

Index conversion narratives and, 151 depictions of, 89–90 epics and, 109–10, 129–31 gunpowder in, 84–85, 89–90, 91, 97, 98–99 honor and, 90–91, 95, 98, 109 hope and, 102 identity and, 91 literature of, 87, 89–90, 91–92, 93–95 love and, 129, 132, 133 martyrdom and, 101 medical care in, 85, 88–89 metaphor and, 103–4 paradoxes of, 33–34 poetry of, 129 religion and, 97 rhetoric of, 28 scars as reminders of, 83–84, 113–14 senselessness of, 105 technologies of, 85 wounds in, 87, 176–77 writing of, 87 See also civil wars, English; soldiers Ward, Samuel, 152 Warmstry, Thomas, 51 Watson, Thomas, 137 weapons, pens as, 28 Webster, Tom, 157 Weil, Simone, 148 West, Rebecca, 81 Westminster Assembly of the divines, 31 Weymouth, siege at, 88 Wharton, Nehemiah, 99 Whitelocke, Bulstrode, 51, 92 Whitman, Walt, 176 widows, 112 Williams, Raymond, 77 Willis, Thomas, 138–39 Wilson, Edmund, 1 Wilson, John, 161 Wiseman, Richard, 87–88, 90–91, 93, 96–97 Wither, George, 20, 28, 44, 91, 101–2, 103 women, 12–13, 132–33, 184nn63, 66

Index Wood, James, 175, 176 The Worke of the Beaste (Lilburne), 35–36 World War I, 176–77, 178 Wormald, Jenny, 25 Worthington, Thomas, 168 Wortley, Francis, 129 “The Wound Dresser” (Whitman), 176 woundedness metaphor, 2, 3, 6 beauty and, 126, 133, 136 Bible and, 39, 71, 147–48, 151–52, 157 body politic analogy and, 24, 26, 47–53 Catholicism and, 158–59, 167–68 Charles I and, 19, 28, 33, 36–40 civil war and, 21–22, 28–29, 68, 108–9 conversion and, 145, 152, 153–55 devil and, 171 elegies and, 99 England and (See England, as wounded nation) epics and, 104–5, 106–7, 110–11 f lexibility of, 7, 172–73 gender and, 184n66 healing and, 22, 47–53, 66, 175–76 hearts and, 9, 155, 162, 164–65 jealousy and, 138 land and, 10, 102, 108, 130, 175–76 law and, 9, 57–58, 59, 63, 65, 74, 177 Levellers and, 46–47 love and (See love, woundedness metaphor and) medicine and, 50 melancholy and, 137, 139 modern psychology and, 7 parliament and, 34, 49 puritans and, 153–54 religion and, 17–18, 145–48, 173, 177–78 religious despair and, 169–70 Restoration and, 52 royalists and, 19, 41 sins and, 123

251

treason and, 59–60, 61, 62, 65, 68–70, 73, 81 wounds, 1, 15–16 afterlife and, 13, 14 angels and, 105 as badges, 35, 58, 77, 96, 102–3 beggars and, 112 Bible and, 32, 71, 147–48 body and, 24, 25, 26, 47–53 boundaries and, 8–9 as calls to action, 175 circumcision and, 147–48 collective experience of, 110 Cromwell and, 92–93, 108, 200n51 as currency, 113 depictions of, 89–90, 92–94, 104, 110–11, 162 emblems of, 159–60 ghosts and, 93–95 God and, 174 guarding of, 9 heroism and, 10, 106–7 honor and, 90–91, 96–97, 97–98 identity and, 3, 11–12, 37, 106, 166, 176, 183n59 inanimate objects and, 10, 126 Jesuit meditations on, 159 of Jesus Christ (See Jesus Christ, wounds of ) martyrdom and, 11–12, 15, 35–36, 99, 160–62, 177–78 masculinity and, 97, 100, 177, 184n66 meanings of, 83–84, 85–86, 95, 108, 147 as mouths, 163 nations and, 9, 25 of notable figures, 92–93 as openings to grace, 14, 148, 149, 154, 164, 165 paradoxes of, 157, 162 performance of, 73–76, 77 power of, 8, 79–80 providence and, 100, 101 purgative nature of, 50–51

252 wounds—Continued reactions to, 93 as reminders, 111, 112, 113, 134 as repression, 77 sacramental meaning of, 158, 163 scars and, 86 self-inf liction of, 12, 184n66 sin and, 13, 27, 30 of soldiers, 17, 85, 114, 177 souls and, 106, 137 stigmata and, 8 subversion of, 17, 58, 77

Index as symbols of state power, 58, 79–80 trauma and, 178 valuation of, 88 as victory, 161 of war, 87, 176–77 The Wounds of the Kirk of Scotland (Rew), 43 Wren, Matthew, 158 writing as weapon, 28 Ziolowski, Theodore, 7 Zwicker, Stephen, 130, 131

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