Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion

Bodies at Prayer

Naya Tsentourou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351736398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Religious Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Miton and Early Modern Devotional Culture analyses the representation of public and private prayer in John Milton's poetry and prose, paying particular attention to the ways seventeenth-century prayer is imagined as embodied in sounds, gestures, postures, and emotional responses. Naya Tsentourou demonstrates Milton's profound engagement with prayer, and how this is driven by a consistent and ardent effort to experience one's address to God as inclusive of body and spirit and as loaded with affective potential. The book aims to become the first interdisciplinary study to show how Milton participates in and challenges early modern debates about authentic and insincere worship in public, set and spontaneous prayers in private, and gesture and voice in devotion.

1 Dressing the Devotional Body

In one of Areopagitica’s enduring visual metaphors, Milton describes the effect of unchecked conformity to the Church’s rituals on the individual’s faith and practice:

To him he adheres, resigns the whole ware-house of his religion, with all the locks and keyes into his custody; and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion; esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and commendatory of his own piety. So that a man may say his religion is now no more within himself, but is becom a dividuall movable […] his religion comes home at night, praies, is liberally supt, and sumptuously laid to sleep […] his religion walks abroad at eight, and leavs his kind entertainer in the shop trading all day without his religion.

(CPW 2:544)

His purpose being to explain how “a man may be a heretic in truth […] if he believe things only because his pastor says so” (CPW 2:543), and to alert the Parliament in 1644 to the threat of ecclesiastical uniformity and control over the licensing the press, Milton condemns reliance on external aids for devotional performance. The established Church’s “muddy pool of conformity and tradition” (CPW 2:543) is shown to permit personal absolution of responsibility for one’s own faith and discharge of salvation to the divines. The inevitable outcome of this model is an out-of-body religious experience: “religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividuall movable.” The self undergoes a split, by which the inward and outward are no longer reconciled. Religion is reduced to an extractable entity and spiritual faith is replaced by material coordinates. “No more within himself,” religion adopts a managerial role as a superintendent that directs and surveys the churchgoer and his trade activities, while conformity develops into wilful enslavement and subjugation to the institution that holds “the locks and keyes into his custody.”

This chapter investigates the “dividuall movables” that Milton identifies within the Church and that he enlists in his antiprelatical prose to deconstruct the embodied religion of Laud’s liturgical innovations. J. C. Davis has summarized the danger of formality, as seen by Milton and his contemporaries: it “could invert religious priorities, divert pious effort into idolatry or atheism, and trap in immaturity those sincerely pursuing godliness.”¹ For Milton, the material manifestation of this danger is the ecclesiastical dress worn by the Church of England ministers, and re-enacting Catholic practices that “sought to transform an active and engaged congregation into a passive and pliant flock.”² The chapter traces Milton’s references to linen as examples of an embodied uniformity in public devotion, which paradoxically leads to a disembodied experience of religion, as in the example of Areopagitica. It reads Milton’s lists of linen vestments as a rhetorical strategy of inventorying that brings to the foreground the commodification of faith and that fragments the unified body of the Church the bishops seek to uphold. The last part of the chapter juxtaposes the disembodied devotion of congregations to the Lady’s role in A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, performed in 1634 and first published in 1637, and reads her performance as Milton’s early vision of an alternative model of embodied faith whereby the integrity of the Lady’s body remains constant, material, and whole, against Comus’s materialistic and divided theatricality. Although it is tempting to study the dishonest conjurer, Comus, as the stage alter-ego of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, the juxtaposition does not intend to map Milton’s reformation politics as they emerge from his polemic writing on to his early work, especially given that “in 1634, so far as we know, Milton had not yet broken with the established church.”³ In placing his masque next to his radical early prose, and demonstrating the role he carves in both for the body in worship, the chapter argues that Milton does not treat dramatic and devotional experiences as segregated but seeks their mutual reform by advancing a participatory and self-governing audience.

“A Linnen Sock over It”: Material Bodies in Church

From May 1641 to April 1642, Milton produced five tracts castigating the state of the English church for cultivating a disparity between the letter and the spirit of worship, and calling for the abolition of the bishops and any form of customary worship that spiritually impoverished the people driving them to idolatrous piety. Milton’s rhetorical strategy in these tracts is deemed to be one of excess, fraught with images of disease and fleshly appetites, physical violence, and vitriolic humour, all part of his attempt to confine rationality and historical reality in memorable images of “carnal rhetoric,” appealing to the senses instead of engaging with doctrinal matters, while seeking “a redefinition of the term ‘doctrine’ so as to remove it from the theoretical to the practical level.”⁴ Milton is certainly preoccupied with the excesses of the body, yet his language betrays a further fixation with what covers the body and how this body is displayed. A case in point is his argument in an Apology against a Pamphlet (1642):

A Bishops foot that hath all his toes maugre the gout, and a linnen Sock over it, is the aptest embleme of the Prelate himselfe. Who being a pluralist, may under one Surplice which is also linnen, hide foure benefices besides the metropolitan toe, and sends a fouler stench to heaven, then that which this young queasinesse reches at.

(CPW 1:894)

Noting Milton’s “unknowing obsession with the body, or the lower parts of it,” Annabel Patterson argues that “there is almost too much going on here, too fast, for the reader to take it all in, though the general effect must be distaste.”⁵ The diseased foot of the bishop is an example of Milton’s well-known metaphor of the corrupt body politic that requires amputation of its contaminated limbs to recover its health. References to the bishop’s foot are recurrent in his tracts and constitute part of the Martin-esque rhetoric, as in the example from Milton’s Of Reformation (1641), which features the most memorable instance of the metaphor: “we must first of all begin roundly to cashier, and cut away from the publick body the noysom, and diseased tumor of Prelacie” (CPW 1:598).⁶

The image of the afflicted foot in the Apology reiterates the idea that bishops are an ailment to the state, but it is the detail of the foot’s cover that heightens the effect of Milton’s attack. The “linnen Sock” is the “aptest emblem” for a Bishop because it joins stage conventions of dress with ecclesiastical dress. Commenting on this sock, Don Wolfe writes that Milton “stoops to a low level of abuse. ‘Weares a Sock’ seems to be a pun on the sock as a symbol for comedy” (CPW 1:894). Milton had used the symbolism of the sock in his early poem, L’Allegro (“Then to the well-trod stage anon, / If Jonson’s learned sock be on” ll. 131–2), and in his edition of the poem, John Carey explains the significance of the sock: “low-heeled slipper, mark of the comic actor on the Greek and Roman stage. The tragic actor wore buskins.”⁷ Critics have used the reference to Jonson and comedy as evidence of Milton’s playgoing experience, but Milton’s use of the sock in his radical prose shows that the term’s appeal is not necessarily due to direct experience, but due to the sock’s emblematic value.⁸ The symbolic associations of the sock with comedy and stage actors transform his enemies into actors and their arguments into false, theatrical statements. Earlier in the Apology, when Milton accuses Bishop Joseph Hall for “likening these grave controversies to a piece of Stagery, or Scene-worke where his owne Remonstrant whether in Buskin or Sock must of all right be counted the chiefe player” (CPW 1:879–80), he makes the connection between comedians and prelates even more explicit:⁹

For if it be unlawful to sit and behold a mercenary Comedian personating that which is least unseemely for a hireling to doe, how much more blamefull is it to endure the sight of as vile things acted by persons either enter’d, or presently to enter into the ministery, and how much more foule and ignominious for them to be the actors.

(CPW 1:888)

Ministers are here denounced as actors in front of an imagined audience that has to suffer ‘the sight’ of their spiritual leaders’ dishonest actions.

In the years after the Reformation, the church and the stage came to occupy the same arena “being in competition for essentially the same audiences and a good deal of the same ideological and cultural terrain.”¹⁰ Arnold Hunt’s study has shown that a sermon audience can be recreated by following the clues offered by the early modern playhouse’s audience, while Frank Kermode has connected the two groups based on their ability “to listen to long, structured discourses […] with better memory and more patience than we can boast.”¹¹ Moreover, Jeffrey Knapp has discussed the connections between liturgy and theatre in the second half of the sixteenth century: “theatre people seized on this official toleration of mere outward conformity in religion as a golden opportunity to extenuate their professional stake in ‘hypocrisy.’”¹² As institutions deeply embedded in everyday life, addressing the same people and tolerating falsehood, whether in the form of passive conformity or professional deception, the church and the stage discourse mingled, especially with regard to the vestments of the clergy, which were seen as facilitating theatricality. William Tyndale denounced the importance the Catholic church attached to clothes and condemned their obsession with dress using a theatrical vocabulary to mark priests as actors: “so that in one thing or other, what in the garments, and what in the gestures all is played, in so much that before he will go to mass, he will be sure to sell him, lest Judas’s part should be left out.”¹³ “Play” in the period was often used for the actors on stage, and the reference to Judas’s “part” intentionally foregrounds the hypocritical attitude of the priests.¹⁴ Thomas Becon, a reformer writing during Mary’s Catholic regime, made the connection more explicit: “Yee [priests] come unto your altars, as a game-player unto his stage” in “gay, gawdie, gallant, gorgious game-player’s garments.”¹⁵ For these writers, as for Milton, prelacy meets theatricality in the liturgical dress. His emphasis in the Apology is as much on identifying the ministers as comedians as it is on warning of the moral consequences (“blamefull”) their performance has for the spectators.

The conscience of the congregation is threatened not only by the theatrical tradition of the “linnen Sock” and the stage spectacles of the Church, but by the embodied material practices of the bishops, and in particular their linen vestments. Recent work by social historians such as John Styles and Alice Dolan has demonstrated the centrality of linen in the early modern period and its importance for national and international commercial, as well as domestic, bonds. “Touching linen was a universal experience in daily life,” and in the form of dress, linen came in direct and intimate contact with the body, covering it, and endowing it with a sense of decency and respectability that became most prominent in the eighteenth-century use of the fabric.¹⁶ Linen’s significant value is evident from the period’s inventories that catalogue it straight after silver plate, making it a luxury item:¹⁷ “white linen was an expensive commodity, expensive to produce and to keep clean and was thus a statement of reasonable wealth and status.”¹⁸ The import of linen in the years leading up to the Reformation constituted a major portion of the English trade, and it was one of the main activities of the Mercers of London, the company that dominated the English import and export operations from the early Middle Ages up to the end of the sixteenth century.¹⁹ The large extent of linen’s commercial and industrial use was due to the fabric’s adaptability: “Without it[linen],” argues Leslie Clarkson, “the range of textile materials to clothe the body, to keep it warm, comfortable and fashionable, would have been much restricted.”²⁰ Linen’s versatile character and the long-standing tradition of its trade and exploitation made it an important asset for the English state.

As church vestments were predominantly made of linen, ecclesiastical apparel was one of the luxurious goods on display in the context of early modern worship. If linen and its trade were seen as a profitable national enterprise, however, the continuation of the fabric’s prominent use in church was unwelcome. In medieval times, Thomas Aquinas had defended the extravagance of the clerical dress because of its potential “to signify the nobility of their (priests) office and of divine worship.”²¹ Nevertheless, early in the years of the Reformation, Tyndale attacked the bishops in terms that anticipate Milton’s rhetoric not only in terms of the theatricality of the bishops but in their extravagant garments: “Behold the monsters, how they are disguised with mitres, crosiers, and hats: with crosses, pillars, and poleaxes; and with three crowns!”²² In Reformation England, liturgical dress’s “highly visible” nature and set of hierarchies that complemented it became a regular point of disputati...