Reading the Renaissance

Culture, Poetics, and Drama

Jonathan Hart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138864320
• eBook ISBN: 9781317945239
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Approaching the Renaissance from many perspectives-historicism, genre studies, close reading, anthropology, feminism, new historicism, cultural materialism and postmodernism-these original essays explore the boundaries between genre and gender, languages and literatures, reading and criticism, the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, the early modern and the post-modern, world and theater. They offer a new way of looking at the Renaissance and at literature and history generally-through the lens of cultural pluralism, which reflects the changing nature of Western society. The collection reveals that the study of literature should take into account its cultural context and that it is enriched by an examination of other literatures.

The Text, the Reader, and the Self

THOMAS M. GREENE

Ritual and Text in the Renaissance

The subject of this essay is the changing status of a certain kind of sign, and the effects of this change on literary texts, during that period we have come to call the Renaissance.¹ The changing sign is the symbolic act employed in ceremonial and ritual performances.² The symbolic act, the sign performed on repeated, formal, communal occasions, still exists in our contemporary society in various guises, but it no longer plays the dominant central role it plays in virtually all the traditional and archaic societies known to us. It no longer plays the role it played through most of the history of western civilization. The very word “ritual” today has acquired a clinical meaning; psychotherapists refer to certain neurotic compulsive habits as “private rituals.” We are divided from most of human history by the waning of the ceremonial sign, and it is that incipient, massive, slow, uneven, almost invisible process of waning that deserves our attention. To discuss this process adequately would require the labour of a lifetime, or better, of a school. The brief historical notes that follow are not intended to demonstrate a thesis, but simply to state it.

The discomfort or indifference elicited by ritual in many modern men and women can be contrasted to the decisive role it played during the Middle Ages. It would be wrong, of course, to sentimentalize or oversimplify this role. Medieval ritual was itself subject to transmutation and debate and doubtless intermittent indifference. Nonetheless, the fabric of each medieval life was woven out of symbolic occasions. Each lifetime was punctuated by innumerable ceremonial observances, just as the organization of each year depended on a ceremonial calendar. The repeated, symbolic, communal, formal, efficacious act not only focused and defined the life of the church but also the life of the court, the city, the guild, the confraternity, the law court, the university, the aristocratic house and manor, the rustic countryside. The individual knew who he or she was, found his/her place in time and society, through this fabric of symbolic occasions. It is not too much to speak of each medieval individual as endowed with a ceremonial identity.

In the acquisition of this identity, ecclesiastical liturgy had a primary function. When Peter Lombard in the twelfth century fixed the number of sacraments at seven, he codified the great over-arching punctuation marks in every Christian life. In the sacraments and lesser rituals was grounded the certainty of one’s status as Christian. Keith Thomas remarks that “The Church was important to [a medieval peasant] not because of its formalized code of belief, but because its rites were an essential accompaniment to the important events of his own life…. Religion was a ritual method of living, not a set of dogmas” (76-77). One is only tempted to question whether this view was limited to the peasant. Jean Daniélou has written that during the patristic era “les sacrements apparaissent comme les évènements essentials de l’existence chrétienne et de l’existence tout court, comme le prolongement des grandes oeuvres de Dieu, dans 1’Ancient Testament et dans le Nouveau” (26). Something of this prestige still remained during the high Middle Ages and indeed in many pockets of European society far later. Daniélou shows that the symbolism of the sacraments was saturated in the history and ceremonial of the Old Testament. This ceremonial, in turn, had its roots in the archaic, nomadic, pre-Mosaic era of Jewish history. From the rites of that archaic society to the rituals of the medieval church there is much transformation but no rupture. The basic elements of the sacraments — sacrifice, purification, commensality, initiation, death and resurrection, union with the divine — are basic elements of rituals throughout the world. The particular Christian symbolic action links the worshipper indirectly with an immemorial universal action.

This weight of shared experience takes on a special drama when the ritual act is placed radically in question, as it was most visibly and articulately during the sixteenth century. It is true that this mise en question had anticipations throughout western history. The sacraments alone had provoked plenty of debate over the centuries, arguably beginning with the New Testament itself. There do at least appear to be divergences among the sacramental conceptions of Matthew, John, and Paul. The Scholastics debated the precise modality of the sacramental symbol’s efficacity, the precise manner in which the sign instills grace. The Joachimite heresy of the thirteenth century was essentially anti-ritualist. The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards (1395) included the affirmation “that exorcisms and hallowings, made in the Church, of wine, bread, and wax, water, salt and oil and incense, the stone of the altar, upon vestments, mitre, cross, and pilgrims’ staves, be the very practice of necromancy, rather than of the holy theology” (Thomas 51). During the fifteenth century, a questioning of the centrality of ritual emerges both in the Hussite movement and the devotio moderna; gestural symbolism now begins to appear as external, empty, inessential. To find this attitude in Savonarola is perhaps not surprising, but we also hear something like it at the opening of the sixteenth century from the general of the Dominicans, the distinguished theologian Cajetan, who wrote after the sack of Rome that prelates of the Roman church had decayed until they were good for nothing beyond outward ceremonials (Hughes 474). Egidio da Viterbo, prior general of the Augustinian order under popes Julius II and Leo X, wrote repeatedly that the eucharist, performed without proper love and devotion, was a “vanum opus” (O’Malley, Giles of Viterbo 119).³ This opinion was not of course heterodox, but its recurrence in Egidio’s writing suggests a fear that the eucharist had become a mere formality. Thus the Roman sacraments were by no means untouched by ecclesiastical concern when the Reform called them into question. But it was the reformers who levelled most vigorously against sacraments and ceremonies the charge of externality and hollowness. With Luther, and earlier with Erasmus, we begin to find antitheses of inside and outside, an inner core of spiritual feeling contrasting with the outer pomp and magical hocus-pocus of the sign-in-itself. Erasmus, as Michael Screech has demonstrated, believed in the spiritual power of the sacrament but expressed scorn for ecclesiastical “ceremoniolae,” rendered by Screech as “trivial little ritual nonsenses” (119). In Luther’s Babylonian Captivity of the Church, at least two sacraments are retained (baptism and eucharist), but the repeated, symbolic act performed by the priest yields its determinant importance to the original, unique promise of Christ, a verbal act which the two remaining sacraments perpetuate. It is worth noting however that neither Luther nor Calvin nor Hooker at the end of the century could quite bring themselves to deny unambiguously any efficacious power to the sacraments retained. Calvin’s thought seems to waver slightly, far more subtle and complex than the sweeping rejections of Zwingli and other Swiss reformers. One can trace even in the greatest of the revolutionaries a reluctance to dismiss the performative, efficacious sign.

If one moves beyond the sacraments, one encounters the curious destiny of the word “ceremony” and its cognates both in Latin and the continental vernaculars during the Renaissance. We have already met its slighting distortion in Erasmus. The historical dictionaries of the modern languages all record negative usages of this word beginning to appear for the first time a little before or after the turn of the sixteenth century. The OED gives the sub-definition for the word “ceremony”: “a rite or observance regarded as merely formal or external; an empty form”; the first usage is dated 1533. In Italy there are analogous usages by Savonarola and Guicciardini, and in France by Commynes. In an ecclesiastical context, the term “ceremonies” came increasingly to designate the sensuous trappings of worship such as incense and vestments. In secular contexts, “ceremony” began to designate an excessive formality and overelaborate courtesy in social intercourse. Della Casa writes that he sees little difference between ceremonies, falsehoods, and dreams, when measured in terms of their insubstantiality (vanità) (della Casa and Castiglione 579). Du Bellay, appalled by the decadence of the mid-century papal court, wrote: “Je n’y trouve … qu’une cerimonie” (1966; Sonnet 80). Montaigne, impatient with social formalities, wrote acidly: “Nous ne sommes que ceremonie” (Essai 2: 17).⁴ Archbishop Cranmer, addressing Edward VI at his coronation in 1547, must have bewildered the boy by telling him that a king is God’s anointed through divine election and that “the oil, if added, is but a ceremony” (Kantorowicz 318). Later John Donne would remark in a sermon “I have seen the state of Princes, and all that is but a ceremony, and I would be loath to put a Master of ceremonies to define ceremony, and tell me what it is” (382).⁵ Robert Burton dismisses gentle birth as “a mere flash, a ceremony, a toy, a thing of nought” (Anatomy of Melancholy 501).

Usages like these and others suggest that a kind of crisis confronted the communal, performative sign. They do not, of course, signal any decline in the frequency of ceremonies, however the word is defined, except in Protestant worship. Arguably, in statistical terms, the sixteenth century provided more ritual and ceremonial occasions than any other century. It is also certain that large sectors of the population in every country were untouched by any ambivalence. Among the folk, the great popular festivities of Carnival, Midsummer Night, Yuletide, among others, seem to have continued unaltered. The newly powerful, centralized monarchies of the sixteenth century learned how to use ceremonial occasions brilliantly in order to aggrandize their own prestige. The medieval solemnity of the royal entry into a city received a new éclat; chivalric contests like the tilt and the joust were perpetuated; mascarades, ballets de cours, and court masques celebrated monarch and court with lavish splendour. But these brilliant fêtes heightened a manipulative element which had doubtless always been present. Despite their brilliance, we can no longer speak of the society of 1600 as we could in 1200 as a basically ceremonial society. In a growing sector of this society, we can no longer speak of ceremonial identity. During the religious wars in France, partisan mobs used ceremonial forms for their own brutal purposes, in what Natalie Davis has called “rites of violence.” The traditional performative sign was called into question, and in the long run, as we in our own century can bear witness, it would enter a long decline. We may or may not regret the decline, but we are compelled to recognize in this slow, massive, uneven process a profound reversal in human techniques of signification. This shift may possibly have produced feelings of liberation, but it would be surprising if it did not also produce feelings of anxiety.

It would also be surprising if this shift did not affect the literary imagination. In fact of course it did, both directly and indirectly, and I want to turn now to a series of literary texts where the shifting status of the ritual or ceremonial sign is most clearly reflected. The choice of texts will necessarily be arbitrary and short. In some respects, as we shall see, literary history anticipated social and institutional history. We shall also see that with the decline of ceremonial force, writers felt freer to extemporize ad hoc ceremonies of their own.

A useful point of departure is the Purgatorio of Dante, surely the canticle of the Commedia which is most open to ritual action, from the symbolic girding of the pilgrim with the reed of humility in canto 1 to the magnificent and solemn procession of canto 29. A useful brief example can be found in the ninth canto, where Dante the pilgrim is permitted to enter Purgatory proper from the ante-Purgatory. Virgil and his companion come upon a small opening in the mountainside containing three steps, each of a different colour, topped by a gate guarded by an angel holding a sword and dressed in an ash-coloured garment. Dante throws himself before the angel’s feet, strikes himself three times upon the breast, and formally requests that the gate be opened to him:

Divoto mi gittai a’ santi piedi;

misericordia chiesi e ch’el m’aprisse,

ma tre volte nel petto pria mi diedi.

Sette P ne la fronte me descrisse

col punton de la spada, e “Fa che lavi,

quando se’ dentro, queste piaghe” disse. (IX: 109-114)

The angel traces on the poet’s forehead the letter P (for peccato) seven times, and tells him to wash away these wounds after he has entered. The angel then turns two keys, one silver and one gold, instructs Dante not to look behind him once inside, and opens the gate with a mighty roar. As the gate closes, the poet hears confusedly the sound of a “Te Deum,” traditionally sung when an individual takes holy orders, although first sung spontaneously, according to an old story, by saints Ambrose and Augustine when the latter was baptised (Singleton 194). Marked as he is by his seven P’s, the pilgrim hears the hymn dimly; its words blur with the sound of the gate closing behind him. Only later, in the twelfth canto, as Dante is about to leave the first terrace, does he discover that he has lost one of the letters graven on his forehead, as he will lose the rest, one by one, ascending from terrace to terrace to the earthly paradise.

Jacques Le Goff has shown how gradually and how late the conception of Purgatory acquired firm outlines during the Middle Ages and how important a role Dante played in fleshing out this conception. The little scene at the gate of Purgatory was invented without prior authority, while harmonizing flawlessly with the doctrinal and liturgical elements already available. The three colours of the three steps correspond to the three stages of penance. The ashen colour of the angel’s vestment represents humility. The gold and silver keys have their own allegorical meaning. The “Te Deum” as we have seen recalls the sacrament of holy orders. But what is most arresting is the engraving of the seven P’s upon the pilgrim’s forehead.

Singleton interprets these as symbols of sinful inclinations to be progressively removed as Dante climbs the mountain, his ascent corresponding to that satisfaction by works which is the third stage of penance. Whether or not this is the precise meaning, it is important to recognize, as few commentators have, that the engraving recalls but reverses a symbolic gesture in the sacrament of baptism. A climactic element in that ritual is the sphragis, the marking of the catechumen’s forehead with the sign of the cross by the officiating priest. The sphragis was the invisible but indelible seal of Christ which marked the newly baptised Christian as a soldier in God’s army. In antiquity, a sphragis was a tattoo worn by a soldier or a slave to identify respectively his captain or his master, and in the slave’s case the tattoo was placed on the forehead. A sphragis was also a brand marking sheep; it was probably the mark of Cain, placed on his forehead to protect him; it appears to refer to the Tau of Ezekiel 9 placed by God on the foreheads of those to be spared from the destruction of Jerusalem; in this case it should also refer to the saints of Apocalypse 7 marked with the sign of the lamb (an episode which itself echoes Ezekiel).⁶ Dante the poet alludes to this Biblical and sacramental symbol but he also transforms it, from the T of the cross to the P of sin, from the indelible mark of Christian commitment to the delible symbol of sin overcome. Thus, in this dense evocation of a rite of passage, Dante mingles elements from at least three sacraments — penance most visibly but also holy orders and baptism. He invents a syncretic ritual, heavy with allegorical symbolism, reweaving and reconceptualizing the millennial forms of the existing sacraments. His adaptation of the sphragis even leaves ritual open to a touch of humour when, in the twelfth canto, the pilgrim has to grope with his hand on his forehead to discover his loss of the first letter while Virgil smiles. The privileged role Dante will give in the Paradiso to the Florentine baptistery with its fount, the “fonte del mio battesmo” (IX: 8-9) — ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Reading the Renaissance: An Introduction
• 1. The Text, the Reader, and the Self
• 2. Gender and Genre
• 3. Continuities and Discontinuities
• 4. Anticipations
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Contributors
• Index