People and piety

Protestant devotional identities in early modern England

Anne Dunan-Page, Elizabeth Clarke, Robert W. Daniel

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526150110
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Religious Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This international and interdisciplinary volume investigates Protestant devotional identities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Divided into two sections, the book examines the 'sites' where these identities were forged – the academy, printing house, household, theatre and prison – and the 'types' of texts that expressed them – spiritual autobiographies, religious poetry and writings tied to the ars moriendi – providing a broad analysis of social, material and literary forms of devotion during England's Long Reformation. Through archival and cutting-edge research, a detailed picture of 'lived religion' emerges, which re-evaluates the pietistic acts and attitudes of well-known and recently discovered figures. To those studying and teaching religion and identity in early modern England, and anyone interested in the history of religious self-expression, these chapters offer a rich and rewarding read.

SECTION I
SitesPart I: Devotional identities in religious communities

1
What was devotional writing?

Revisiting the community at Little Gidding, 1626–33^*

David Manning

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment¹

T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets turned ontological angst into a poetic meditation that begot prophetic historiographical insight in Little Gidding. This response to the modernist malaise resonated with George Herbert's sense of eschatological crisis that had been articulated over three hundred years before: ‘The second Temple could not reach the first: / And the late reformation never durst / Compare with ancient times and purer yeares; / But in the Jews and us deserveth tears.’² Such a synergy was no coincidence. During the early 1930s Eliot had been deeply affected by his reading of The Temple (1633), the original publication of which had been arranged by Herbert's close friend, Nicholas Ferrar (1593–1637), who had founded the community at Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire (act. 1626–57).³ Whilst this historical enterprise in collective piety has been the subject of romanticised Anglican apologia since the nineteenth century, any historians who seek to study the devotional culture of the Ferrar family would do well to take Eliot as their Clio.

Eliot understood all too well what academic research into early modern religion often struggles to appreciate: that the devotional culture at issue here was suffused with divinity.⁴ In this case, the ache of Saint Augustine's restless soul throbbed in the hearts and minds of Christians in a way that passed through, between and beyond both the confessional dogmatics of Catholicism, Calvinism and Arminianism and the religio-political structures of conformity and nonconformity, puritanism and anti-puritanism. The Neoplatonic metaphysics of God in Trinity transcended the power of scholastic theology, liturgical authority and biblical hermeneutic to give expression to mystical traditions in divine participation. Notwithstanding the anti-papist mantra of sola fide, the legacy of Augustine's anti-Pelagianism could be complicated by the pragmatics of activities such as communal religious learning in a way that tacitly supported the kind of synergism advocated by conformist post-Calvinist thought. Personal and cosmological experience could be conflated so that the theologico-cultural forces of thoughts, words and deeds bled into each other as they became manifest in both corporal and spiritual dimensions to highlight an intersect between past memory, present insight and future expectation in a prophetic, or timeless, moment. Considering these impulses has the potential to complicate some contemporary academic thinking on the historical progression from Catholicism to Protestantism in England;⁵ for the devotional identities that arose from them complemented modes of appropriating and adapting sixteenth-century Catholic piety to engender a new sense of Christianity as English Protestantism. Moreover, at the close of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Eliot's intervention now dares historians to re-engage with those past spiritualities of devotional culture that are all but denied by the evaluative paradigm of ‘new materialism’ that has come to dominate much of the research agenda in both literary and historical approaches to early modern religion.

In taking inspiration from the Eliot–Herbert–Ferrar nexus, this essay will draw attention to a world beyond the materialistic mediation of stimulus and response that typically shapes working assumptions about early modern religion as ‘lived experience’. What follows is not concerned with how religious writing informed devotional identity, or how religious identity informed devotional writing. Instead, its focus will be the supposed conflation of worldly endeavour and spiritual action that gave meaning to the way in which self-selecting agents came together through discourse as they dwelt in the presence of God.⁶ Given both the inevitable brevity of this essay and the complexity of its subject matter, the objective here is not to offer a fully explicated discussion with a neat conclusion, but rather to constitute a new experiment in interdisciplinary historiography (not literary studies) that will craft three interrelated provocations about how lives and writings came together at Little Gidding to engender themselves with a devotional quality.⁷

To make good with this focus, a basic appreciation of how the community at Little Gidding came into being is required. The precocious Nicholas Ferrar served as the deputy of the Virginia Company from 1622 until its demise in 1624. He subsequently found his family's capacity to save his brother from bankruptcy as something of a providential sign. Ferrar turned anew to God. In 1626 he was ordained deacon by William Laud at Westminster Abbey and then set about creating a pious community at Little Gidding with his widowed mother, Mary Ferrar (1553/54–1634), and much of his extended family, including his brother, John Ferrar (c.1588–1657), and his married sister and brother-in-law, Susanna and John Collett (d. 1657 and d. 1650, respectively), as well as their daughters, including Mary (c.1600–80) and Anna (c.1602–38/39), and their younger sons. In the same year, George Herbert (1593–1633) had been made non-resident canon of Lincoln Cathedral and prebendary of Leighton Bromswold, Huntingdonshire. The latter office served as something of a pretext for George Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar to befriend one another before embarking upon a mutually formative exploration of faith which was to last the rest of their lives. At Little Gidding a post-Calvinist spiritual aesthetic combined with the legacy of a Jacobean sensibility for pastoral care in the midst of other more idiosyncratic impulses in charity, edification and asceticism to forge an implicit rejection of the kind of supercilious religiosity advocated by the Caroline court. Crucially, it is within this setting that the Ferrars found a sense of devotion.

What was devotional writing?

As part of the multifaceted process to found the community at Little Gidding, the newly ordained Nicholas Ferrar delivered a ‘solemn vow’ to God that was ‘writ...