Retelling the Siege of Jerusalem in Early Modern England

Vanita Neelakanta

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781644530139, 9781644530122
• eBook ISBN: 9781644530146
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

This compelling book explores sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English retellings of the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the way they informed and were informed by religious and political developments. The siege featured prominently in many early modern English sermons, ballads, plays, histories, and pamphlets, functioning as a touchstone for writers who sought to locate their own national drama of civil and religious tumult within a larger biblical and post-biblical context. Reformed England identified with besieged Jerusalem, establishing an equivalency between the Protestant church and the ancient Jewish nation but exposing fears that a displeased God could destroy his beloved nation. As print culture grew, secular interpretations of the siege ran alongside once-dominant providentialist narratives and spoke to the political anxieties in England as it was beginning to fashion a conception of itself as a nation.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide byRutgers University Press.

Chapter 1

Unholy Ghosts

In 1584, the Puritan preacher and schoolmaster John Stockwood published A very fruitfull and necessarye Sermon of the moste lamemtable destruction of Ierusalem, and the heauy iudgements of God, executed vppon that people for their sinne and disobedience. This was nothing less than an anxious diatribe directed against the Jews overcome by the Roman legions in 70 C.E., which predicted a consonant dire fate for the English should they fail to live up to the promises of the newly reformed Protestant Church. In it, the plain-speaking Stockwood advocated passionately for a book “which . . . in english, I wold wish euery man to buie, that reading in him the most fearfull examples of God his wrath upon the people for their sinnes, they may for feare at least, of like punishments be moued to repentaunce. . . . ”1 The book Stockwood identified as crucial to the retention of divine favor was Peter Morwen’s (or Morwyng’s) A compendious and most marueilous Historie of the latter times of the Iewes common weale, begynnyng where the Bible or Scriptures leaue, and continuing to the vtter subuertion and last destruction of that countrey and people.

Morwen, a Protestant theologian at Magdalen College at Oxford, and later Canon at Lichfield, composed A compendious and most marueilous Historie while in Germany to escape the persecutions of the Catholic Mary Tudor. So ardently did Morwen support the Protestant cause that he was even expelled from Magdalen for his convictions by Bishop Stephen Gardiner. Living out Mary’s reign on the Continent, Morwen was one of the first to return to England with Elizabeth’s accession in 1558. Published that same year, his history would become one of the most popular, if not definitive, English renditions of Jerusalem’s destruction that allowed Protestants to at once reframe the fall of God’s Chosen People as giving way to the triumphant rise of the English Reformed Church as well as caution the latter of a similar decline should they fail to live up to their new covenanted status. Like his more famous counterpart, John Foxe—a fellow at Magdalen who also fled to Germany to compile his magisterial account of Protestant persecution, Actes and Monuments (1563)—Morwen employed the argument that God sometimes elevates idolators (the Romans/the Catholic Church) in order to punish the sins of his Chosen People (the Jews/the Protestants). In so doing, he cemented a critical, often unsettling identification between Ancient Jews and reformed Christians, both, in their own way, under threat from Rome.2

Morwen’s prefatory “Epistle to the Reader” assigned the impetus for his vernacular translation to Richard Jugge, “a certaine honest man, a Printer of London, studious in his vocation of the commoditie of this our countrey.”3 Jugge, printer to Queen Elizabeth, whose shop could be found “at the signe of the Bible,” was energetic in that trade. Not only was he licensed to produce an edition of William Tyndale’s New Testament, but he also published the first edition of the Bishops’ Bible in the vernacular a decade after printing A compendious and most marueilous Historie.4 Jugge’s investment in England’s “commoditie,” here understood as spiritual advantage or profit, established his commitment to advancing English interests. Indeed, Morwen evinced a similar altruism when he offered his translation as a warning to his countrymen and women: “As when thou seeest the Iewes here afflicted with diuers kindes of miserie, because they fell from GOD: then maiest thou be admonished hereby, to see the better to thyne owne wayes, lest the lyke calamities lyght vpon thee.”5 As Morwen elaborates, it was imperative that “an vnderstanding and declaration to all menne in the Englishe tongue, as wel as in other, of the destruction of so famous a common weale” be accessible to the English people for their “inestimable profit.”6

Jacob Reiner has suggested that Jugge, “a most enterprising businessman with much foresight,” had “capitalized upon this prevalent interest in the Jews, and the numerous republications of this volume evidence the success of his venture.”7 But even the most cursory perusal of Morwen’s preface reveals a far more principled and urgent commitment. Although he strategically employed the justification for producing secular history, attractive both for the “pleasauntnesse of the matter” and to satisfy the curiosity of those “delighted and desirous to vnderstande the ende,” this was not his primary motivation in translating the narrative of Jerusalem’s destruction.8 Rather, Morwen’s effort was “most marueilous,” not least because it was full of “inestimable profit” given the author’s meticulous attention to England’s “commoditie.” Just as Stockwood’s own sermon was “fruitfull and necessarye,” so was the history he so passionately advocated. Simply put, this was not merely casual entertainment proffered to an increasingly literate people hankering after the latest fashion in print. Rather, as per Stockwood’s advertisement, this was the one “book in English” that every God-fearing Protestant had to know in order to secure their nation’s continued well-being before God.

The value of Morwen’s admonitory history is clear not just from the extravagant praise it drew from the likes of Stockwood but also from its impressive number of reprints in a short span of time, appearing in 1558, 1561, 1567, 1575, 1579, 1593, 1596, 1602, 1608, and 1615. Louis Feldman’s bibliography on the Josippon, Morwen’s source, lists thirteen editions between 1558 and 1602 that include a staggering four reprints in 1579 alone. In 1652, the translation was republished with a new title—The Wonderful and Most Deplorable History of the Latter Times of the Jews—and would become an important polemical weapon in the bitter controversy over the readmission of the Jews into England. A compendious and most marueilous Historie and its mid-seventeenth-century editions alike served as the source and inspiration for countless narratives of Jerusalem’s fall, including poems like T.D.’s Canaan’s Calamitie (1618), prose tracts such as Thomas Nashe’s Christs Teares over Iervsalem (1593), as well as plays such as William Heminge’s The Jewes Tragedy (composed c.1626, published 1662), and John Crowne’s The Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian (1677). If the story of the siege was begging to be introduced to a newly reformed readership, then Morwen, it would seem, hit upon just the right way to tell it.

Despite its claims of authenticity, Morwen’s translation was not actually based on the revered eyewitness account of Jerusalem’s devastation—Flavius Josephus’s Jewish War of 75 C.E. Although his title claims the veracity of one “who saw the most thinges him selfe, and was aucthor and doer of a great part of the same,” the author of Morwen’s original source was, rather, the tenth-century writer Joseph ben Gorion. Morwen introduced ben Gorion to his early modern English readers as Josephus by the simple expedient of claiming that “Joseph ben Gorion” was Josephus’s name rendered in Hebrew—a belief that had gained popularity in medieval Europe.9 Yet, ben Gorion was actually the author of the Josippon (or Sefer Josippon), a Hebrew chronicle derived from a Latin abridgement of Josephus that had been heavily Christianized. Even so, the popular notion prevailed that Josippon was the original Hebrew version of the Jewish War that Josephus alluded to having written in his “owne language.”10

Modern scholarship suggests that Morwen’s history was even further removed from the source, being based on Sebastian Munster’s Latin version of Abraham ibn Daud’s twelfth-century abstract of the Josippon.11 Despite its tangled antecedents, Morwen’s text was often regarded as the authoritative version of the siege until Thomas Lodge brought out his “authentic” translation of Josephus’s complete works in 1602. Though the cleric Samuel Purchas (1575–1626) in Purchas His Pilgrimage (1626) recommended both the Jewish War and Josippon for a comprehensive account of Jerusalem’s destruction, earlier preachers such as Stockwood made no distinction between the two texts. Even after the publication of Lodge’s scrupulous edition, Morwen’s translation remained the favored account—one that not only answered the early Protestant demand for Ancient Hebrew texts but, relatedly, also affirmed the explicit and unambiguous link between Ancient Jerusalem and the early modern Reformed Church. As Beatrice Groves observes, the second part of Morwen’s title (“begynnynge where the Bible or Scriptures leaue, and continuing to the vtter subuertion and last destruction of that countrey and people”) suggests one reason for this version’s popularity given that it “explicitly presents the text as a continuation of scriptural history.”12 Erin E. Kelly, affirming that English Protestants used Josephus’s history of Jewish decline to justify “the recent triumph of the true—English Protestant—church,” notes that Morwen’s translation “combines, condenses, and edits the many versions of the same events presented in Josephus’s texts into one linear Protestant narrative of world history,” which he advances “as a lesson in proper behavior for his Protestant readers.” Citing implicit parallels between the oppression of the sinful Jews by the idolatrous Romans and the oppression of the true Church by Catholics, Kelly suggests that Morwen makes “the history of humanity since the time of Christ comprehensible as a Protestant narrative.”13

I would argue that there is a specific and highly influential aspect of this requisite history that merits even closer attention: namely, the way that descriptions of ruined and famished Jerusalem function as allegories for the scarred religious landscape of post-Reformation England. Seen in this light, A compendious and most marueilous Historie is interesting as a Protestant narrative not just for its providentialist view of history, nor even for the analogous relationship it reinforces between Jerusalem and reformed England. Rather, the text is singularly Protestant because of the complex ways it is both haunted by and resists the specter of Catholic ritual/theology, recently reanimated under Mary Tudor. The most obvious instance of this is the Catholic symbolism that pervades one of the most notorious episodes of the history: the killing and consumption of a little boy by his mother at the height of the famine provoked by the siege. As Josephus had it, the gruesome instance of cannibalism was perpetrated by a widow, Mary (or Miriam or Mariam), who—trapped within the city walls—killed, ate, and served up her own son.

As may be imagined, this story exerted a perverse fascination upon centuries of readers familiar with Josephus’s history, and heavily Christianized versions of the Jewish War (that interpreted Jerusalem’s destruction as divine vengeance for the Jews’ rejection of Christ) inevitably identified Mary’s actions as precipitating the city’s final devastation. As Groves also observes, Jerusalem’s extreme suffering was “encapsulated by this act which simultaneously broke the ultimate taboo of eating human flesh and the closest human bond.” Miriam’s act thereby became an “enduring image of the unimaginable horror of life trapped within the city.”14 I further agree with her claim that, in a striking appropriation of Josephus/Josippon, Morwen’s history and the adaptations it inspired through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries freight Miriam’s cannibalism with disturbing Eucharistic implications.15 Miriam’s son offers up his flesh and blood to save his mother but he is also served by her in turn to other members of the community. Miriam thus becomes the distorted mirror image of her Virgin namesake—a point also noted by Merrall Llewellyn Price.16 If the sacrifice of the Son of God grants eternal life, then Miriam’s consumption of her son brings only death and damnation.

Yet I would hold that the retelling of Miriam’s story by Morwen and his emulators reveals something more—namely, the degree to which this episode and its buildup are imbued with both the trauma of Henry VIII’s spli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “Hierusalems Destruction: Our Instruction”
• 1. Unholy Ghosts
• 2. Bodies Besieged
• 3. Jerusalem in Jamestown
• 4. From Providence to Politics
• 5. Exile and Restoration
• Epilogue: “Worthy to Be Known and Read of All Men”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index