The turn to religion in Early Modern English studies

Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Ken Jackson, Arthur F. Marotti

Similarly, Michael O'Connell's The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England is an important and rewarding study because it is willing to look for religion rather than how religion was superseded. And, like Clopper, O'Connell carefully reconnects the Renaissance English stage to its medieval roots, in his case by tracing a line of "incarnational" thinking from earlier times into the post-Reformation era. For example, O'Connell helps explain the notorious violence of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage by linking it to the violence done to Christ's body on the medieval stage, a violence itself stemming from twelfth-century incarnational revisions in Christianity. Like the historians Eamon Dully and Christopher Haigh, O'Connell highlights aspects of a residual Catholic culture within the new English polity, (41) respecting the religious sensibilities of early modern Christians in ways alien to the dominant modes of political criticism. He is particularly persuasive in discussing a residual, Catholic visual culture that we need to "look" for on the stage rather than "read" in texts. We suffer, he hints, from a latent Protestant iconophobia. The anthropologist Mary Douglas's complaint about what she calls the "anti-ritualist prejudice" inscribed in the work of British (Protestant) anthropologists, the inability to appreciate the fact that "it is impossible to have social relations without symbolic acts," (42) applies to most studies of early modern English literature and culture. A Protestant aesthetic of "less is more," Enlightenment rationality, and cultural-materialist abstraction have combined to denigrate or ignore what O'Connell has called the "incarnational aesthetic" of the older, but residual, Catholic culture whose "symbolic residue" was everywhere in early modern England. His use of the work of sophisticated contemporary Medievalists such as Carolyn Bynum and Sarah Beckwith suggests that some of the ways scholars of the earlier period have dealt with religious culture might profitably be imitated by those in the field of early modern studies. (43) In fact, O'Connell's study proves that early modern specialists need to reconnect with medieval culture in order to make better sense of what happens in the post-Reformation era. By the time of the reign of the second Stuart king, Charles I, however, there was a sufficient alienation in Protestant England from a Catholic aesthetic to set apart Queen Henrietta Maria and her preferred artistic, performative, and devotional modes as foreign. (44)

Having mapped some of the terrain of the turn to religion, it is perhaps now useful to speculate more specifically on what prompted this turn, a turn that seems to mark something new in early modern study but which quite clearly still occurs largely within a New Historical context. Given that, we might begin again with Greenblatt's own turn suggested at the outset. In the first of the two chapters of Practicing New Historicism devoted to Eucharistic issues, Greenblatt (drawing on the meticulous work of several art historians) offers a detailed reading of Joos van Gent's Communion of the Apostles and the accompanying narrative painting serving as its praedilla, Paulo Uccello's Profanation of the Host, to explain a pernicious projection of doubts about and opposition to official Eucharistic doctrine onto Jews as scapegoated others, who are then mercilessly persecuted. In the second chapter, Reformers' ridicule of Catholic Eucharistic beliefs and superstitions provides the route to an interpretation of a key Shakespearean text, Hamlet, and serves as an illustration of three of Greenblatt's contentions about the importance of the Eucharist for understanding early modern culture: