Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England

Marcus Harmes, Victoria Bladen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472429407
• eBook ISBN: 9781317048367
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

For the people of early modern England, the dividing line between the natural and supernatural worlds was both negotiable and porous - particularly when it came to issues of authority. Without a precise separation between 'science' and 'magic' the realm of the supernatural was a contested one, that could be used both to bolster and challenge various forms of authority and the exercise of power in early modern England. In order to better understand these issues, this volume addresses a range of questions regarding the ways in which ideas, beliefs and constructions of the supernatural threatened and conflicted with authority, as well as how the power of the supernatural could be used by authorities (monarchical, religious, legal or familial) to reinforce established social norms. Drawing upon a range of historical, literary and dramatic texts the collection reveals intersecting early modern anxieties in relation to the supernatural, issues of control and the exercise of power at different levels of society, from the upper echelons of power at court to local and domestic spaces, and in a range of publication contexts - manuscript sources, printed prose texts and the early modern stage. Divided into three sections - 'Magic at Court', 'Performance, Text and Language' and 'Witchcraft, the Devil and the Body' - the volume offers a broad cultural approach to the subject that reflects current research by a range of early modern scholars from the disciplines of history and literature. By bringing scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue, the case studies presented here generate fresh insights within and between disciplines and different methodologies and approaches, which are mutually illuminating.

PART I

Magic at Court

Chapter 1

John Dee, Alchemy and Authority in Elizabethan England

Glyn Parry

Introduction

The tangled relationship between alchemy and authority in early modern English society demands historical explanation. By the sixteenth century, pursuit of the philosopher’s stone had developed an important role in political prophecy, which both upheld and challenged monarchical authority.¹ At the same time, alchemy entered public discussion because Elizabethan policy debates involved constant dialogue between courtier-politicians and ‘the public sphere’ within a ‘monarchical republic’. The former concept has proved more Protean in the complex politics of Elizabethan England than Jürgen Habermas’s original sociological model of an eighteenth-century zone mediating between the private sphere and the ‘Sphere of Public Authority’.² Patrick Collinson first dissected the Elizabethan ‘monarchical republic’, an oxymoronic beast most visible when the monarch’s personal agenda conflicted with the ‘residual interest’ of the political nation, one often troubled by apocalyptic dreams, and always seeking security against real and imagined international threats.³

To relieve this inherent tension in the body politic, Elizabethan policy-makers consulted interest groups through multiple channels. Some also used printed, manuscript and oral media to swing public opinion behind their proposals. Those seeking to influence politicians, and politicians trying to mould public opinion, strengthened their arguments with an array of cultural tools, including astrology, magical ceremonies to draw down angelic revelations, prophecy, accusations of witchcraft and alchemy.⁴ Situating alchemy in this broader political context better demonstrates its cultural impact – widespread while subtle and diffuse – and how its practitioners tried to influence public authority. Some who exercised power welcomed alchemical, prophetic justifications for their policies, but conservatives had political, religious, social and cultural reasons for rejecting the intrusion of alchemy into politics. In the process they developed arguments against alchemy less concerned with its irrationality than with its challenge to institutional authority.

This essay examines alchemy’s political role by contextualizing the alchemical–prophetic career of John Dee (1527–1609) at the court of Elizabeth I.⁵ Dee’s Cambridge education in Aristotelian natural philosophy, as well as medieval alchemical works foisted upon Aristotle, gave prestigious intellectual support to his alchemical beliefs, which he shared with many leading intellectual Cambridge contemporaries, including Thomas Smith (1513–1577) and William Cecil (1520–1598). As Cambridge undergraduates, Cecil and Smith avidly pursued the philosopher’s stone. Later they served Elizabeth – Cecil as the Queen’s Secretary, and a leading adviser, and Smith as Ambassador to France for numerous missions.⁶ Like Dee, their alchemical training formed part of a well-rounded education that prepared them for Court service, because, as we shall see, alchemy formed part of the prophetic cultural language in which policy was often conceptualized.

Dee, Magic and the Body Politic

Historians have only recently begun to examine the link between alchemy and prophecy or to take either topic seriously. The connection can be traced in some detail in Dee’s thought and writings because much more information survives about his library, then the largest in England, than for any of his contemporary alchemists. In addition, he applied his alchemical–prophetic reading in political advice papers, which urged Elizabeth I to pursue a global imperial role, but which provoked a conservative reaction not only against Dee’s political advice, but also against the alchemical–prophetic beliefs that inspired them. In defending established institutional authority his critics developed arguments against alchemy as a whole, which their intellectual successors would take further in the later seventeenth century.

Dee later numbered his years spent studying alchemy from his undergraduate entrance to St John’s College Cambridge in November 1541, though no direct evidence of his alchemical studies survives before July 1556. By then an ordained Catholic priest and chaplain to the bibliophile Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, he listed the alchemical authors he had ‘read through’ that month in both printed and manuscript texts. They included foundational works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and Aristotle, the great names of Islamic and European Christian alchemy, such as Geber, Rasis, Arnald of Villanova (c. 1235–1311), Ramon Lull (c. 1232–c. 1315) and John of Rupescissa (d. 1366), and the English alchemists John Dastin (c. 1293–c. 1386), Thomas Norton (bef. 1445–1513) and George Ripley (d. c.1490). The fact that other more obscure works listed remain unidentified indicates the breadth of this reading course.⁷ It had two obvious themes. The texts described practical procedures for making the philosopher’s stone. Several of them, particularly the works of Lull, Villanova and Rupescissa, also claimed great importance for alchemy in the context of the looming apocalypse.

Since Augustine of Hippo had first expressed the view, religious conservatives of different hues and periods had argued that only God knew when the brief reign of the Antichrist would bring apocalyptic troubles on the world, to be quickly followed by Christ’s victory at Armageddon, which would end all time. However, by the thirteenth century, increasing confidence in human agency enabled more radical prophetic traditions to gain traction, particularly the composite set of prophecies which originated in a text known as Pseudo-Methodius, dating from c. 674–8 AD. Written in remote Syrian Mesopotamia in response to an Islamic conquest, it reflected Jewish messianic expectations of a ruler over a period of earthly peace and plenty. Methodius promised a mighty Last World Emperor who would destroy Islam, recover Jerusalem and rule benevolently until Gog and Magog appeared from the North. Pseudo-Methodius prophesied that the Emperor would defeat them and rule in Jerusalem for another ten and a half years until the Antichrist appeared, when the Emperor would resign his powers into God’s hands and die. The short, troubled reign of the Antichrist would end with his destruction by Christ and the end of time. Together with Daniel and Revelations, this became the most widely read of medieval apocalyptic texts, exercising a powerful fascination over the Western imagination for the next thousand years.⁸

Methodius became especially influential when the thirteenth century seer Joachim of Fiore blended these predictions with similar Sibylline prophecies and his own prophetic insights to predict a future ‘third state’ of bliss, which human intervention would actively bring about. Moreover, where previously the Antichrist would defeat the Emperor, in Joachim’s vision the Last World Emperor and an Angelic Pope would successfully rule the enduring ‘third state’. The Spiritual Franciscans increasingly gave this active role to the apocalyptic Emperor, for their devotion to poverty exposed the papacy’s wealth, and prophetic alchemists amongst them contributed concrete detail to the millennial scenario. Sympathizers like Arnald of Villanova in De tempore adventu Antichristi (1300) predicted his coming in 1378, an expectation that provided a dramatic context for Arnald’s teachings about crediting visionary revelations, on improving human life through medical alchemy, and for his demands for Church reform, which earned him prison for heresy. John de Rupescissa’s extremist Franciscan ideology brought him 20 years in prison at Avignon for alleged heresy and ‘fantastic’ predictions that the papacy would lose its wealth and temporal glory. There he wrote Liber lucis and De quinta essentia, which described the coming tribulations, the downfall of oppressive worldly authority and the means that alchemy and alchemical medicine offered ultimately to defeat the Antichrist.⁹

Dee read the Liber lucis, and the alchemical works attributed to Arnald and Lull as part of the precious inheritance of medieval occult philosophy that he wanted to save from mid-Tudor indifference. In January 1556 he had vainly petitioned Queen Mary to subsidize his planned Royal Occult Institute, which would rescue and copy manuscripts of occult philosophy, including alchemy. Despite Mary’s refusal, when Dee travelled to Italy in 1563–64 he had copies made in Pavia and Venice of Rupescissa’s, Arnald’s and Lull’s texts. By then, Dee had also deeply immersed himself in Roger Bacon’s (c. 1214–1292?) alchemical and magical treatises. Like other Franciscans, Bacon had been imprisoned for intemperate criticisms of the Church that offered occult solutions, directly revealed by angels, for the imminent apocalyptic challenges.¹⁰

Dee carefully collated his Italian copies with other manuscript and printed versions of the texts, for his annotations show that he read them as detailed, practical instructions for making the philosopher’s stone. He could not have missed the context of prophesied apocalyptic tribulations and these texts’ implicit criticisms of established institutions. Though one work he read in July 1556 described a dialogue between a necromancer and a spirit, only fragmentary evidence of his invocation of angelic revelations survives from these years. However, his exceptionally detailed records of encounters with angels from late 1581 particularly emphasize revelations about the pressing apocalyptic need to reform all knowledge, and consequently all institutions, while increasingly imparting techniques to make the philosopher’s stone.¹¹

Dee’s medieval authorities had linked the philosopher’s stone with rulers of the last earthly age triumphing over the Antichrist. Bacon’s Opus maius (c. 1264) had anticipated the rule of a reforming Angelic Pope, but, as a Frenchman, Rupescissa expected a king of France to rule the world from Jerusalem as Last World Emperor, alongside the Angelic Pope. The stone or ‘medicine’ would enable the pious evangelicals to live benevolently through a millennium of apostolic simplicity – ample reward for their courage in confronting the Antichrist. Like Joachim and Arnald, Rupescissa did not claim that his predictions had the force of canonical prophecy, but that they reflected special insights into the scriptural apocalypse revealed in visionary experiences.¹²

Dee made similar claims to having been chosen to receive inspired insights in his Monas hieroglyphica (1564). By then, two centuries of prophetic interpretation had tailored the clothes of the Last World Emperor to fit many individuals. This vision of a great reforming ruler wielding the magical alchemical stone therefore enabled Renaissance alchemists like Dee to subdue fears of imminent Antichristian calamities with the positive prospect of a returning Golden Age, based on Joachimist hopes of a renovated millennium after the Antichrist, within history.¹³ At the same time, critics of alchemy could argue that this prospect, like the works of Rupescissa, Arnald and Lull, implied social turmoil and even inversion. For just as alchemical transmutation first required the death, putrefaction and purification of imperfect materials, so the Antichrist’s assaults would violently destroy the present dispensation before the downtrodden poor evangelicals brought about the millennial transmutation. Rupescissa’s followers constantly updated such lurid expectations about the cr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Intersections of Supernatural and Secular Power
• Part I Magic at Court
• Part II Performance, Text and Language
• PART III Witchcraft, the Devil and the Body
• Index