Attribution
In 1569 Henry Bynneman produced a slightly unusual octavo book, attractive in some
ways and messy in others:
A THEATRE | wherein be represented | as wel the miseries and calamities | that follow the voluptuous | Worldlings,
| As also the greate ioyes and
plesures which the faithfull | do
enioy.
The modern reader is liable to find the composite character of the volume strange. It
begins with an unelaborate title-page that is followed by a commendatory poem
addressed to Jan van der Noot, an Antwerp patrician (Patricio
Antuerfosi), taunts ‘Haec Babylon legat’ (‘Let
Babylon read’), a challenge it will repeat before proceeding to the excited optative
subjunctive, ‘Ut iaceant idola!’ (‘Let the idols be cast
down!’;
Theatre, Commendatory Poems 1.0.4, 1.1, 1.9,
and 1.18
). Then comes another commendatory poem, again in Latin, followed
by an epistle dedicating the book to the ‘righte Christian Princesse Elizabeth’ (
Dedicatory Epistle
0.3-0.4
); then six ‘Epigrams’ paired with six woodcut images; a concluding
seventh epigram, unillustrated; after that, fifteen ‘Sonets’, all but the first
paired with woodcut images. And after this, 214 pages remain: a vehement, largely
anti-Catholic commentary on the ‘visions’ represented by the preceding poems and
images. Bynneman’s
Theatre
very closely
resembles two others that had issued from John Day’s press late in the previous year,
one in Dutch, and one in French (hereafter,
Het
Theatre
and
Le Theatre
).
1 The basic organization of all three books is
identical, although each has slightly different front matter from the others’, and
Day’s Dutch and French volumes are illustrated with engravings instead of Bynneman’s
woodcuts.
Spenser’s name appears nowhere in the book Bynneman published. While several of
Spenser’s later works were published anonymously or pseudonymously, the
Theatre
is especially un-‘Spenserian’ in that
neither Spenser’s name, initials, nor any of his pseudonyms appear anywhere in the
book. The work is attributed to someone else, and while several contributors are
variously and explicitly acknowledged (for the
Theatre
is a work of many hands), Spenser’s contribution was not. We
accept a different tradition of attribution:
Spenser’s Complaints
, an omnibus collection of poems published in 1591,
contains a sequence of seven poems,
The Visions of
Petrarch
, which closely resemble a sequence in the earlier
Theatre
, and because
The Visions of Petrarch
are described, laconically,
as ‘formerly translated’, we take the poems in the
Theatre
that resemble those in
Petrarch
to have been translated by a much younger Spenser.
Another sequence from
Complaints
closely resembles a second sequence in
the
Theatre
:
The
Visions of Bellay
, a fifteen-sonnet sequence in the 1591 volume
appears to refine and extend a series of eleven poems in the
Theatre
, although the heading to
Bellay
makes no mention of former translation. After this second
sequence, the
Theatre
includes four more poems,
sonnets based on visions from the book of Revelation and no sequence of poems
resembling these appears in
Complaints
, nor did
they circulate in proximity to Spenser’s pseudonyms, initials, or name during his
lifetime. Like many Protestant poets of the mid- and late sixteenth century, Spenser
was fascinated by vision and apocalypse, but neither this fascination nor the
proximity of these four poems to sequences transfigured in
Complaints
is sufficient warrant to secure them a place in our
Collected Works
. The four apocalyptic
sonnets are sufficiently good that many godly poets could proudly or humbly have put
their names to them; neither in rhyme (they are unrhymed), rhythm, nor syntax do they
seem securely Spenserian. We will judge them, poetically, ‘Spenserian enough’ at the
end of this introduction, but that is slightly beside the point.
A Collected Works of Edmund Spenser
undertaken
without naiveté must include some works of indefinite, heterogeneous, and even errant
authorship.
2 Like most modern editions of
The Shepheardes
Calender
, ours includes the work of a contemporary commentator who
presents himself as not the same person as the author of the poems. (This
commentator, ‘E.K.’, may, in fact, be the same person as the author of the poems, but
he presents himself only as ‘privie to [the author’s] counsell’ [
SC, Epistle 153
].) Likewise, our edition of the
Theatre
includes the work of a
contemporary commentator, Jan van der Noot, who presents himself as not the same
person as the author of (most of) the poems, although he hints that he wrote the four
sonnets on the book of
Revelation
. For all the distinctiveness of much
of his work and for all his concern with the toils of privacy and individuality,
Spenser was a frequent and enthusiastic collaborator. It is therefore fitting that we
begin with Spenser as a translator and as a late recruit to a group project—with
‘him’ as ‘one of them’.
3
However indefinitely Spenserian, the
Theatre
exerts strong claims on the attention of scholars of Spenser and of English
Reformation culture. The evidence suggests that Spenser first saw the traces of his
own handwriting converted to print in the
Theatre
, and it is easy to imagine that the excitement of the
experience kept the
Theatre
alive in his
imagination for much of his literary career.
The Shepheardes
Calender
suggests Spenser’s embrace of the general biblio-graphic
model of the
Theatre
, in which sequenced poems
are carefully paired with images, the pairings complemented and given polemical éclat
by the erudite commentary that follows. Yet if Spenser adapted this model in the
Calender
, his enthusiasm for the
Theatre
did not persist unalloyed: the extent of the
revisions he made to
Bellay
and
Petrarch
suggests that, at some point, he grew
dissatisfied with his early translations. (This dissatisfaction will be explored
further in our edition of
Complaints
.) That he
did not revise or reprint the apocalyptic sonnets in 1591 is yet another problem:
perhaps Spenser was embarrassed that van der Noot had betrayed the millennial urgings
that would have made him seem so glamorous in the late 1560s. He had come to England
as a Reformation hero, but when he returned to the continent a few years later, his
zeal seems to have subsided, and when he returned to Antwerp in the 1580s, he did so
as a Catholic. However embarrassing or infuriating this geographical and confessional
traffic might have seemed to Spenser in long retrospect, it was hardly egregious.
Only a decade later, a still-young Spenser would project his own career as that of an heroically resolute version of van der
Noot’s:
Quæsitum imus eam per inhospita Caucasa longè,
Perque Pyrenæos montes, Babilonaque turpem,
Quòd si quæsitum nec ibi invenerimus, ingens
Æquor inexhaustis permensi erroribus, ultrâ
Fluctibus in mediis socii quæremus Ulyssis.
We go off at length to seek our fortune through the inhospitable Caucasus,
the rocky Pyrenees, and polluted Babylon. But if we shall not find there
what we seek, having crossed a huge sea in endless wandering, we will seek
it beyond, in the midst of the flood, in the company of Ulysses.
(‘Ad Ornatissimum virum’, Letters
4.210-4)
When an even older Spenser reread the
Theatre
, with its organizing motif of vanitas, the book might well have seemed, not millennial, but a lamentable
prophecy of apostasy and of lapsed or failed ambition; but a Spenser in his late
twenties, the Spenser of this 1580 verse epistle to Harvey, could imagine modeling
his life and intellectual activity on that of van der Noot and of those Englishmen
with whom van der Noot made common cause, men like John Bale and John Foxe who also
left hundreds of traces on the
Theatre
, rootless
ideologues for whom vernacular literary activity was the best form of participation
in a Reformation that was transnational in both principle and practice. Theirs is the
unfixed environment from which the
Theatre
, and
Spenser’s career, both spring.
Jan van der Noot and
Het Theatre
Van der Noot had lived through the early stages of an anti-Habsburg resistance that
eventually manifested itself in the outbreak of the Eighty Years’ War and the
founding of the Dutch Republic in 1581. The Dutch insurgency might be explained as a
tax revolt: the Dutch states were the economic powerhouse of northern Europe and
Antwerp was preeminent among the Dutch trading centers; both Charles V and his
successor Philip II worked steadily to exploit Dutch prosperity in order to increase
their own revenues, thereby eventually eroding the aristocratic loyalties that had
provided Charles with his political base in the Low Countries (
Marnef 1996:
3-7, 19-21
). Yet however important the economic motive, the resistance had
a strongly ideological character. In 1558, when van der Noot moved to Antwerp from
his birthplace in Brecht, a Calvinist community was burgeoning there, overshadowing
an older Lutheran presence and competing with the well-established community of
Anabaptists (
Prims 1929: 605
and
Marnef 1996: 78-82
). In
the fifties, Antwerp became an important communications center for the Reformed
Church and a place of refuge for Calvinists both from Flanders to the west and the
Walloon region to the south; by 1562, when van der Noot, then in his early twenties,
became an alderman in Antwerp, approximately a third of the population was
identifiably Protestant, and the city had both a French-speaking Calvinist
congregation and a Dutch-speaking one (
Prims 1929: 606
and
Jongenelen and Parsons 2008: 236
). Despite his commitment to civic
government – he served a second term as alderman in 1565-6 – van der Noot affiliated
with the Calvinist consistory, a group whose rapid radicalization would soon prove
quite disruptive to local civil order (
Prims 1929: 606
).
Shortly after departing the Netherlands in 1559, Philip II established fourteen new
dioceses and increased the episcopal presence in the States-General. It was widely
believed that this was meant as prologue to the extension of Spanish Inquisitorial
involvement in the Netherlands, although in point of fact native inquisitorial
tribunals in Antwerp were meting out their own fierce punishments, executing some 103
heretics between 1557 and 1562. But Philip was hardly aloof from this persecution,
promulgating a series of extraordinary ordinances that made adherence to the various
heresies of Protestantism a capital offense. The Antwerp Calvinists countered by
resolving to exercise force to free those of their brethren then in prison. On 5
April 1566, a league of 400 members of the lower nobility from across the Habsburg
Netherlands petitioned Philip’s regent, Margaret of Parma, for abolition of the
Inquisition and the suspension of all edicts against heresy. The petition was
forwarded to Philip II, but in the months before he responded, Antwerp erupted.
Across Flanders, open-air preaching fomented dissent. In July, between twenty and
twenty-five thousand residents of Antwerp swarmed outside the city walls to hear the
sermon of a Calvinist preacher; by August, the leaders of the Calvinist community
demanded formal confirmation of a right to preach within the city walls. The foreign
merchants who anchored the prosperity of Antwerp were sufficiently alarmed that they
threatened to leave the city if order could not be restored, but a wave of
iconoclastic riot, the Beeldenstorm, was sweeping across
Flanders. ‘Ut iaceant idola!’: on 20 August, the Protestants
of Antwerp destroyed a large portion of the interior of the Cathedral Church of Our
Lady and, for the next few days and with strikingly disciplined efficiency, they
defaced or destroyed images in churches across the city and its exurbs. Margaret
appointed William of Orange, who held the title of Burgrave of Antwerp, to find a way
to maintain her authority, to accommodate the core demands of the Reformers, and to
defend Catholic worship from interference, yet despite his remarkable political
skills, hostilities continued, eventually provoking Philip II to send troops under
the Duke of Alva to ‘pacify’ the region. No surviving records indicate whether van
der Noot was directly involved in the Beeldenstorm, but in
March 1567, a Calvinist group attempted to depose the margrave of Antwerp and to
instate van der Noot in his stead (
Prims 1929: 611
). The coup failed,
the Calvinist forces disbanded, and before the end of the month van der Noot became
one of thousands who fled the city and one of tens of thousands of Dutch- and
French-speaking Calvinists who fled the Netherlands before Alva’s approaching army.
Some sought refuge in the Huguenot cities of France, some in Wesel and Emden, and
others in Norwich, Canterbury, Southampton, and, above all, in London.
By the beginning of the next decade, 5% of London’s population was Dutch, and this
substantial proportion was kept so low only by means of sustained royal effort to
disperse the enormous influx of refugees across a number of English cities. In the
spring of 1567, London was a powerful magnet for van der Noot and many of his
countrymen. While hardly as cosmopolitan or as economically advanced as Antwerp, it
had an established Dutch community and a reasonably hospitable city government, so a
Dutch Protestant ideologue in London might think of himself less as having gone into
exile than as having secured a strategic retrenchment. Within a year of van der
Noot’s arrival in London,
Het Theatre
, ‘The
Theatre or Stage wherein are displayed both the misfortunes and miseries that befall
worldly-minded and wicked people and, on the other hand, the good fortune and rest
that the faithful enjoy’, was ready for the press.
It was a zealous undertaking. Van der Noot had composed Dutch translations of Joachim
Du Bellay’s visionary sonnet sequence,
Songe
,
and of Clément Marot’s rendering (in six douzaines and an envoy) of
Francesco
Petrarch’s Standomi un giorno (RS 323)
; he had
written 4 sonnets based on the book of
Revelation
. He had compiled a
commentary of nearly 40,000 words that aligned Petrarch’s and Du Bellay’s visions
with those of
Revelation
, making all these visions serve as occasions
for anti-Catholic polemic. He had found a publisher, rounded up commendatory poems,
and composed dedicatory epistles. And more: either he or his publisher had found an
artist to produce the engraved illustrations for the poems, engravings probably
copied, as we shall see, from woodcuts produced in anticipation of an English version
of the
Theatre
.
4
Within another month, a French version of the volume was ready for printing, a
somewhat easier task, since for this volume the engravings could be recycled, and
Du Bellay’s Songe
could be used in its
original French, as could Marot’s rendering of Petrarch; still, the four sonnets
based on
Revelation
and the long
Commentary
had to be translated. This work of translation from
Dutch into French almost certainly fell to van der Noot himself.
5
The English
Theatre
was to be produced in a
different print-shop. It was a more substantial undertaking than the French volume.
The woodcuts were ready, but the text of the entire volume had to be translated: the
verse, from French; the prose, from Dutch. Spenserians may wish to ascertain how van
der Noot – or Bynneman or Day – found and recruited the teenaged Spenser to prepare
these translations from French into English verse, but if we take the volume as a
serious collaboration (and not simply as an odd first item on the shelf of Spenser’s
works) this historical puzzle properly takes its place as one of several: we know
almost as little about how van der Noot enlisted the other translators, the
stationers, and the artist or artists who contributed to producing these three
volumes.
Take, for example, Theodore Roest, an emigré crucial to the production of
The Theatre
.
6 The heading of its
Commentary
identifies Roest as the translator of
that section, indicating that he was working from the French (
Commentary 0.5-0.6
), but that seems not to have been
the case. The English commentary preserves features of
Het
Theatre
not reflected in
Le
théatre
, so we infer that he translated directly from the Dutch,
despite the testimony of the
Commentary
.
7 That said, both his English
text and
Le théatre
feature a few cuts and
elaborations, including glosses not featured in
Het
Theatre
. This suggests that both French and English translators
were working either from a revised copy of the printed
Het
Theatre
or from a manuscript different from the one that served as
copy for the Dutch edition.
8 (Where Roest’s English version of the commentary diverges from
Le théatre
, the English sometimes falls
into minor confusion, as at
223, 1282-3, 1325-29
. Unfortunately, but
notably, one attempt to clarify a confusion in both the French and the Dutch resulted
in greater confusion; see
511-2 and n
.) While Van der Noot acknowledges
Roest’s assistance, he himself seems to take the credit for having translated the
poetry (
Commentary 375 and 413
).
9
Day’s print shop had been busy, probably since late in 1568, with preparation of the
imposing second edition of
Foxe’s Actes and
Monuments
(finally published in 1570); Bynneman’s shop was less
encumbered with complex projects, although work on the
Manutius Virgil
, the first complete Virgil to be printed in
England, no doubt made substantial claims on Bynneman and his workers.
10 Yet the presswork is
serviceable, although the marginal glosses in the commentary are frequently
misplaced. The chief flaws in the French and English versions of the book are
inaccuracies of translation.
11 In the sestet of the first of the apocalyptic sonnets,
where attention turns from the Beast from the Sea to the Beast from the Earth (‘Noch een beeste sach ick op comen wt de eerde’; ‘Then I saw a Beast
come from the Earth’;
C2v
), the French version, probably
prepared by van der Noot himself, carelessly offers ‘de Mer une
beste sauvage’ (‘a wild Beast from the Sea’;
D2v
).
12 The speed with which the production team was assembled and the
haste with which they worked may suggest the warmth with which London’s
intelligentsia received a Dutch Protestant ideologue and his projects. Perhaps
Reforming fervor was passport enough.
While the book may have been executed hastily, it is by no means incoherent. Van der
Noot’s epigrams preserves the content and sequence of the visions in Marot’s
Petrarch, but he deletes four of the sonnets of
DuBellay’s Songe
. Three of the four deletions may be explained as efforts to
reduce redundancy across all the poems included in the
Theatre
. DuBellay draws attention to his own competitive
repetition of the second vision in Petrarch’s canzone, describing the ‘Nasselle’ of his own dream as ‘plus riche
assez que ne se monstroit celle / Qui apparut au triste Florentin’
(
cvr
), but van der Noot, perhaps avoiding the challenge to his
illustrators to render two shipwrecks, with the second ship somehow more glorious
than the silken-sailed first, chose to suppress DuBellay’s vision. Similarly, van der
Noot skips over the eighth of DuBellay’s visions, in which a seven-headed ‘monstre enorme’ rises in mist from the foaming waves, a
figuration of Rome after the manner of
Revelation 13 and 17
; and in this
case van der Noot’s deletion seems calculated to avoid anticipating the apocalyptic
imagery with which the
Theatre
poems and
illustrations conclude. The same wariness over anticipation can account for the
deletion of DuBellay’s penultimate sonnet, in which the dreamer claims to have seen a
city much like the heavenly one that John saw (‘Ie uis une Cité
quasi semblable à celle | Que uit le messager de la bonne nouuelle’
[
1558, cvr
]; I saw a City that much resembled the one seen by him who
delivered the Good News). Accounting for the fourth deletion is more difficult.
DuBellay’s vision of the Roman wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, and then slaughtered
by a thousand northern invaders, her hide left weltering on an ancient tree, is
perhaps the most striking of all the sonnets in
Songe
, each of its stanzas wrested towards a different tonality. It
may be that van der Noot shies away from the theme of Northern culpability, a theme
that this vision of Lupa shares with the penultimate sonnet, which witnesses the fall
of the nearly-heavenly Roman city before a cruel storm from the North. Van der Noot’s
excisions simplify the sequence of visions, bringing it into focus as a plot that
proceeds from Petrarch’s poems, in which the visions of inconstancy display a
plangent privacy; through Du Bellay’s, in which inconstancy grows more worldly,
opening as it does to contemplation of the vulnerability of Roman imperial culture;
to van der Noot’s own fierce, radiant Johanine apocalypse.
Internationalism, Translation, and the Translators of the
Theatre
Although nationalism may be theme and motive of much Elizabethan literary history –
as it has especially been for the study of Spenser –the
Theatre
challenges us to reflect carefully on the character of
Elizabethan nationality. That challenge begins in the epistle dedicating the work to
Queen Elizabeth, where Van der Noot makes much of the welcome he has received.
Praising the polyglot cosmopolitanism of the queen and her realm, van der Noot
gratefully acknowledges that ‘every countrey and nation that will live here according
to [God’s] holy worde, is received, and findeth good entertainement’ (
Theatre, Dedicatory Epistle 92-4
). Van der Noot is
celebrating an England rendered international by its piety. When C. H. Herford
situates the
Theatre
in a national cultural
history by describing it as ‘the first English Emblem-book,’ he slightly distracts us
from the fact that the suite of Dutch, French, and English Theatres might more properly be described as an international, polyglot
Protestant publishing effort, an alloy of image, verse, and prose, of Italian,
French, Dutch, and English elements in service of a millennial European Protestantism
(
1886: 369
). The conclusion of the last of the sonnets makes clear
that van der Noot is addressing those who dwell in a northern Reformed spiritual zone
and not the citizens of three Protestant proto-nations.
13 There he describes the tree of life that grows in the midst of the heavenly
city, tot troost der gemeente (
C5v
), translating
the Vulgate’s ad sanitatem gentium (for the health of the
nations;
Rev 22.3
). The Dutch gemeente has a
nice ambiguity, capable of indicating both secular polities and the congregations
that make up a Church, but his French – au profit de l’Eglise
– and Spenser’s English – unto the Churches good – are
unambiguous (
Theatre, Son. 15.14
). Elizabethan
England is distinguished by its hospitality to the unity of this multi-cultural
Church, and to the sort of unity enshrined in the Het/Le/A
Theatre itself.
This multi-culturalism is by no means an ancillary feature of van der Noot’s
situation or his book. His early poetry, later gathered for publication as
Het Bosken
(
‘The
Grove’; London 1570
), is deeply indebted to the work of Ronsard and
the Pléiade, with their doctrinaire commitment to the cultivation of French language
and literature by deliberate imitation of Greek, Latin, and Italian models. Pléiade
poetic theorizing was staged as a contest between the practice of Ronsard and that of
Marot, between strategic imitation and incautious translation. This contest was
perhaps more notional than actual; its primary effect was to electrify, for readers
and writers, the relation of vernacular to international literary practice. A pen
like van der Noot’s, which moved within the energized literary force field of Pléiade
practice, twitches in response to the pressures of a range of ancient, modern,
foreign, and native influences.
The international traffic of that pen does not cease when the sequence of poems ends.
There follows a commentary that, although translated from Dutch, has a surprisingly
native English pedigree. After a general rehearsal of commonplaces on ‘the vanitie
and inconstancie of worldly and transitorie thyngs’ (
Commentary 356-7
), van der Noot offers summary observations on the
visionary sequences by Petrarch and Du Bellay and then proceeds to a much more
sustained commentary on the four sonnets based on Revelations. Although the
Commentary
draws on ‘holy scriptures, and dyvers
Orators, Poetes, Philosophers, and true historie’
(
0.3-0.5
), it does so indirectly, for, in fact, most of it is adapted
from
Den standt ende bilde der beyden
ghemeynten
, a Dutch translation (1555) by Carolus Regius (Karel de
Coninck) of
John Bale’s Image of Both Churches
(1545)
.
Bale’s Image
was a work of
considerable influence – on
John Foxe’s Actes and
Monuments
and on the annotations that did so much to make the
Geneva Bible a vector of Reformation doctrine and devotion. Bale offers a reading of
Revelations as a prophetic allegory of the struggle between the True Church and the
bestial Church of Rome. Like van der Noot and his
Theatre
, Bale and his
Image
operate in a culture both of border-crossings (civic, national, and linguistic) and
of trans-geographical, spiritual contest. Bale transmits to van der Noot a conception
of spiritual history that combines the Wycliffite idea that Christ and Antichrist are
locked in a sustained historical struggle and the Joachimist notion that the opening
of each seal in Revelation inaugurates a specific period in church history, from the
death of Christ to the End of Days. In Bale’s framing, the struggle between Christ
and Antichrist has an urgent historicity: it is specified to the period of the fourth
and fifth seals, the era in which the Church falls into a worldliness from which it
is soon to be violently redeemed.
14 Instead of
Eusebius’ unitary history of a Church occasionally challenged, Bale transmitted – to
van der Noot, Foxe, and Spenser -- a history dualistic to the core, a history of two
churches, the False having secured its long but temporary ascendancy by means of its
rapacious duplicity.
Bale began drafting the Image in 1541 in Antwerp, having fled
England after Cromwell, his patron, was executed; parts 1 and 2 of the Image were published in Antwerp in 1545; the expanded,
three-part version was completed and published in London shortly after Bale’s return
to England in 1547. We could say that the
Theatre
and the
Image
were both
multi-cultural books published in their final form in London; we might also speak of
them as books written in London-Antwerp; we might most aptly speak of them as having
been written in a Reformed Christendom, a northern regime whose most eminent
inhabitants – Marot, Foxe, Luther, Knox, and Calvin – were persistently itinerant,
their linguistic errancy a fact of confessional life.
15 By their polyglot effort, van der Noot, Roest, Spenser,
Day, Bynneman offer the
Theatre for Worldlings
as an artful illustrated
Image of Both Churches
.
The Reformation of the Image
This account of the genesis of the Theatre obtrudes a seeming paradox: van der Noot’s
sympathies with iconoclasm, his involvement with the notorious Beeldenstorm in the Low Countries, forced his flight to England; there he
published a suite of books each of which concludes with contentious religious images.
The paradox is perhaps only apparent, since iconoclasm and religious and
ecclesiological art are locked together in sixteenth-century Reformation culture –
witness the great
Allegory (c. 1566)
in which
Marcus Gheeraerts, the artist most likely responsible for the images in van der
Noot’s three Theatres, celebrated both the exuberances and
the spiritual complexities of a culture of iconoclasm.
16 A perplexed
relation to the image had characterized the Reformation since the 1520s. Andreas
Karlstadt, Ulrich Zwingli, and especially Jean Calvin took firm positions on the
removal of painting and sculpture from places of Christian worship, whereas Luther
argued that images must not be proscribed if they have devotional utility.
17 Luther
developed a close association with Lucas Cranach, whose press at Wittenberg published
some forty of Luther’s works between 1520 and 1526. For the
September Testament
, the first of the Luther Bibles, Cranach
designed and executed his twenty-one woodcuts illustrating the
Book of
Revelation
.
Images in books seem to have been generally tolerable.
According to Christoph Walther, press-corrector of the
Old and New Testament
Bible of 1534
, Luther insisted on a few principles of illustration: that
the figures should be large enough to be easily recognized, that marginal
grotesquerie should be eliminated, and that the content of texts should be depicted
in the simplest (einfeltigst) way possible.
18 But even this last
and unsurprising principle of subordination of image to text had been subverted in
Luther’s
Passionalbüchlein of 1529
, in which the
brief texts of condensed bible stories merely supplement the fifty full-page woodcuts
that organize the book.
Illustration thus found a place within the culture of the vernacular printed Bible
from the beginnings. There were counter-tides, of course. The
English Great
Bible of 1539
is unillustrated (although its title page has an elaborate
iconographic program) and the program of illustrations in the
Geneva
Bible
(New Testament, 1557; complete Bible, 1560) is fairly austere in
comparison to that of the
Coverdale and Matthew Bibles
. The approach to
imagery in the
Geneva Bible
may well reflect a heightened iconophobia in
the aftermath of the reign of Mary Tudor; Bishop Parkhurst’s inclusion of ‘bokes’
among the material surfaces which were to be inspected and certified as image-free
during the Norwich visitations of 1561 may reflect the same post-Marian vigilance,
further braced by Parker’s five years of Marian exile in Zürich.
19 Yet many of the committed Reformers who returned to England at the accession
of Elizabeth brought with them, not a Calvinist iconoclasm, but an enriched
experience of Protestant iconography – biblical, ecclesiastic, and, above all,
martyrological.
The experience of John Foxe is exemplary. He was in Strasbourg in 1554, when he
completed his
Commentarii
, the first version of
what would later become the
Actes and Monuments
.
Like the contemporary martyrologies of Jean Crespin, working in Geneva, and Adriaan
van Haemstede, in Emden, Foxe’s Latin
Commentarii
was an austere unillustrated book; Rabus’s vernacular
Historien der Heyligen
is distinguished by
its program of illustrations. It is well-known that Rabus would borrow heavily from
Foxe’s book for the narratives of English Lollard martyrs that would appear in his
third volume, but the influence was reciprocal, for Foxe’s subsequent expansions on
the
Commentarii
would take inspiration from
Rabus’ use of illustration.
20 Nor was it an
isolated vector of inspiration. While Ingram and Ashton have traced the images in
Actes and Monuments
to a few native
English models, they have shown that the iconographic repertoire on which the program
of illustrations in the
Actes and Monuments
depends was largely imported (
1997: 66-142
). The 1563 edition testifies
to the fact that the Protestant ideologues who returned to England at the accession
of Elizabeth were accompanied by an appreciable number of émigré craftsmen; the
substantially enriched iconographic program of the 1570 edition testifies to the
increased productive capacities made possible by the new influx of artists who fled
the Low Countries in 1567 (
Evenden 2008: 95-7
). The same may be said of
other productions of Day’s press in the late 1560s, the richly illustrated
Bishops’ Bible
of 1568, Queen Elizabeth’s Prayerbook
(
Christian Prayers and Meditations
) and
the
Theatre for Worldlings
of 1569: their
iconophilia was at least partly nourished by a sudden transformation of a skilled
labor market, one that Day, Bynneman, and their authors, the likes of Foxe and van
Der Noot, had the media savvy to exploit.
21
The Illustrations
Michael Bath has argued convincingly that the engravings in the Dutch and French Theatre volumes derive from the woodcuts and that the woodcuts
for the first six images, those illustrating the epigrams taken from
Marot’s
Petrarch
, are based on a set of watercolours in a manuscript now housed at
the University of Glasgow (
SMM2
).
22 The
watercolourist has not been identified, and there has been disagreement over the
identity of the other craftspeople involved in illustrating van der Noot’s books: the
identity of the the designer and the cutter of the woodcuts for
The Theatre
remains unsettled – if indeed there were
two distinct figures involved in producing these illustrations – nor has it been
determined who produced the engravings for
Het
Theatre
and
Le théatre
. While it
has frequently been proposed that Lukas de Heere, a painter and poet who wrote one of
the commendatory poems for
Het Theatre
, designed
and perhaps executed the images, Bath aligns himself with a number of other scholars
who believe that Marcus Gheeraerts was responsible for the design.
23 Bath points out that the
the woodcuts share several features with other series of images more securely
attributed to Gheeraerts, and while Bath has nothing to say about whether he is
likely to have cut the blocks for Bynneman’s English Theatre,
he does urge that it was Gheeraerts who executed the engravings for Day’s volumes.
The artist had arrived in London in the spring of 1568, having fled Bruges almost a
year after van der Noot left Antwerp; if Bath’s attribution and stemma of the images
are correct, Gheeraerts would have designed (and perhaps cut) the woodcuts for
Bynneman and executed the engravings for Day in about six months. He is likely then
to have proceeded to work on the series of vivid woodcuts on the virtues and vices
that illustrates Bateman’s Christall Glasse of Christian
Reformation, which issued from Day’s press sometime in 1569. A few years
later, van der Noot brought the Theatre woodcuts with him to
Cologne, where they were used to illustrate both a German translation of the Theatre published in 1572 and a bilingual French-German
edition published in 1574, but now lost. The abridgement of the German translation
changed the character of the book, reducing its vehemence by removing its anti-papal
core.
Day and Bynneman deploy these images with considerable typographic grace. At the
aesthetic core of the Theatres lie 21 openings containing the
22 poems and 20 illustrations – the single unillustrated opening contains the envoy
to the sequence of Petrarchan epigrams and the prologue to the sequence of sonnets by
Du Bellay – and the layout of the illustrated openings is such that the text block of
the poems is almost exactly the same size as the illustrations. The illustrations
have been placed on rectos, where they catch the eye first as one pages through the
octavo; the poems are on the versos, secondary glosses on the images.24
With the exception of the illustration for the fourth epigram, the Petrarch
illustrations condense the imagery of two of the twelve watercolours in the Glasgow
manuscript and thereby establish a structural norm for the imagery of the Theatre, a before and after in which ship, tree, deer, bird,
lady, temple, obelisk, and triumphal arch appear in their fullness or pride and also
in a state of despair, ruin, or failure.25 These bipartite images are usually unbalanced, with the fulsome image
dominant and that of collapse squeezed into right-hand side or pushed to the
background. That norm established, the illustrations featuring unified composition
are rendered more arresting in their ideality – the grove of Epigrams 4, Father Tiber in Sonets 7 – in their
anguish – the wailing nymph of Sonets 8 and routed nymphs of
Sonets 10 – or in the conclusive grandeur of the
illustrations for the last five sonnets.
While the immediate models for the illustrations of the epigrams from Petrarch have
been established, this is not the case for the illustrations to the poems from Du
Bellay. The iconographic components of these images – Father Tiber with Romulus and
Remus nursing at the Roman Wolf at Sonets 7, Roma Victrix at
Sonets 11 – were familiar emblems of Rome, and the images
of Roman monumental culture – temple, obelisk, and arch at Sonets 2, 3, and 4 – were equally familiar. But the illustrations for the
four sonnets based on Revelation had a different kind of typicality, since they very
closely resemble four of the illustrations in the printed Bibles that had flourished
since Luther’s September Testament. Cranach’s 21 woodcut
illustrations of Revelation, augmented by five more illustrations for the 1530
Testament (and for subsequent Luther Bibles), constituted a kind of canon of
apocalyptic illustration – all but two had served as models for the tiny woodcuts in
the 1545 edition of Bale’s Image of Both Churches. A reader
of one of the Theatre volumes who reached the woodcuts of
engravings of the Whore of Babylon, the Horseman from whose mouth comes a sword, or
the new Jerusalem, would have arrived at images that, however strange in subject, had
the closural force of biblical sanction and familiarity of design.
Because the artists who illustrated Reformation Bibles cleaved so closely to
Cranach’s designs, it is difficult to identify the particular models for the four
final illustrations in the Theatre. The first of the four
follows the design of Cranach’s thirteenth Revelation woodcut, although the
worshipper of the Beast who kneels in the left foreground of the Theatre image is more recognizably episcopal than in Cranach’s version. In
this regard the artist may seem to be drawing either on Cranach’s own model, the
comparable twelfth woodcut in Dürer’s fifteen-image Apocalypse of 1498, or on one of Cranach’s followers who had consulted
Dürer. Dürer’s influence may be felt in the final woodcut as well: just as Dürer had
relinquished the compositional turbulence of his earlier images for the lucid
rendering of the heavenly city in his final illustration, so the illustrator of the
Theatre concludes with St. John gazing on an even more
open, foursquare model of urban design, an angel more schoolmasterly than hierophanic
at his side.
Both of these features – the demonstration that it is churchmen who worship the
Beast, and the display of rectilinear order in the heavenly city – are also
distinctive features of the woodcuts in Hans Sebald Beham’s Typi in Apocalypsi Joannis (Frankfurt, 1539), a
much-reprinted set of images that had fairly wide-ranging influence. The Theatre illustrator seems to have taken the rendering of
Faithful and True in the penultimate image either directly or indirectly from Beham;
unlike Cranach and most of his followers, Beham (and Hans Burgkmair before him) takes
the occasion to render the detail of the sharp sword issuing from the rider’s mouth
(Rev 19.15), and the Theatre illustrator does so as well,
while generally reinvigorating Beham’s oddly static composition. It may be observed
that the illustrator is more responsive to the pictorial tradition in which he is
working – and his biblical source in general -- than to the poems he is illustrating:
van der Noot’s poem makes no mention of the oral sword, nor does the first of the
apocalyptic sonnets mention the woman clothed with the sun (Rev 12.1), yet the
illustrator has squeezed her into the upper right corner of the image, thus managing
to gather together the most impressive features of both the eleventh and twelfth
images in the 1522 Cranach canon.26 The illustrations return the reader to a rich, familiar
iconographic culture to which the poems only allude.
According to the scholarly tradition initiated by Herford, the Theatre might be taken as the first English emblem book.27 The case has been a strained one, for the images in the emblem
tradition are usually mysterious, sometimes even esoteric, whereas most of the
illustrations in the Theatre have very little of the tang of
mystery, of complex truths on tantalizing display.28 (The final, apocalyptic images are no exception,
really: the illustrator of the Theatre would have had warrant
to inscribe the very name of Mystery on the forehead of the woman throned on the
Beast, but to have done so would have broken aggressively with the Luther-Cranach
tradition of illustration, and, as we have seen, the sequence of images in fact
entails a process of familiarization.) Emblem texts seldom take the form of
narrative, as the poems of the Theatre do, nor do the images
in emblem books serve the merely illustrative function of those in the Theatre, which simply articulate a stage or two of the
narrative laid out in their companion poem. Only in a very casual sense, by featuring
twenty openings that pair discrete texts and discrete images, does the Theatre resemble the work of Alciati or Whitney; its more
intimate kinship is with the ambitious illustrated books moving through the godly
press at this time, the Bishops Bible and Actes and
Monuments. Indeed, van der Noot, and Spenser too, might properly imagine the
Theatre as a kind of complement to these undertakings in scholarship, design, and
Reform.
Spenser and the Theatre
If Spenser had the image of Faithful and True before him, he might well have shaken
his head over van der Noot’s failure to seize the opportunity that the illustration
and the biblical text behind it afforded, an occasion to imagine the fierce potency
of the apocalyptic word. At the key juncture, the French poem before him is
disappointing—La parolle de Dieu rendoit son nom exquis
(D4v)—and Spenser translates it with faithful blandness: ‘The worde of God made him a
noble name’ (Son. 14.4). We must assume either that van der
Noot’s Dutch original was unavailable (or beyond Spenser’s grasp) or that it never
occurred to him to probe the Dutch text that stood behind the French poems he had
been given to translate. Spenser’s version shows no trace of van der Noot’s much
racier description, ‘Een scherpsnydende sweert quam wt synen mont
bouwe’ (A sharp-edged sword came from his fearless mouth; C4v; ed. trans.), nor does his poem capture any of the conclusion
of the Dutch original, which distinguishes from the fate of the Beast and its
prophets that of the kings who fought for the Beast (simply dropped in the French
version):29
En d'ander sijn gedoot deur syns monts sweerts scherp
snijden
En de vogelen syn versayt van heur vleesch t'
eten.
(And the other [i.e., the army of the kings) is slain by the cut of his
mouth’s sharp sword / And the birds sate themselves on them, devouring
their flesh; C4v; ed. trans.)
Spenser seems to have translated from a printed copy of Le
Théatre, not from manuscript copy. In the tenth sonnet he gives us ‘a naked
rout of Faunes’ (Son. 10.11) in an attempt to translate an uncorrected misprint in
Le Théatre, the phrase ‘de faunes nue suyte’ (C8v), which
should read ‘de faunes une suyte’. (When he later revised these translations, Spenser
must have had recourse to a better copy of Du Bellay, for he corrected his error.)
That he was translating from printed copy does not require that he had the images
before him – the copperplate illustrations for Le Théatre
would have been printed separately from the letterpress printing, and Spenser could
have been given imageless sheets from which to work – but whether he was given sheets
with engravings or sheets left blank for later printing with engravings, the
recruitment of an engraver and the printing of the French poems sets the terminus a
quo for Spenser’s labor, presumably sometime after Gheeraerts arrival in England in
the spring of 1568. Spenser could easily have taken his draft translations with him
when he moved to Cambridge in April the following year, but he is more likely to have
completed his commission before he left – and before 25 May 1569, the date attached
to the English version of the dedicatory epistle which had carried, in the French
original, the date of 28 October 1568.30 So it took Spenser no more than a year to prepare these
translations – and, most likely, he prepared them between October of 1568 and April
of 1569.
To explain why someone like Spenser was recruited for the task in the first place,
we must suppose that neither van der Noot nor Roest were capable of translating
French verse into English, and that it seemed foolish to attempt to translate from
the Dutch renderings of Du Bellay and of Marot’s Petrarch. (Roest translated the Epistle and Commentary from Dutch, but
seems to have had no competence in French; van der Noot’s French was quite good, but
the enlistment of Roest suggests that van der Noot’s English was inadequate to the
task.) It has long been supposed that van der Noot found his way to Spenser by way of
van der Noot’s prosperous, well-connected cousin Emmanuel van Meteren, who had been
living in London since 1550 and counted among his friends and associates Abraham
Ortelius, Jacobus Acontius, Adriaan van Haemstede, Joris Hoefnagel, Lucas de Heere,
and such Englishmen as Daniel Rogers, the poet and diplomat, and Richard Mulcaster,
headmaster at Merchant Taylors’ School.31
Rogers would have been ideal, for his French was excellent and he had strong
connections with members of the Pléiade, but his commitments as a poet were to Latin
and, moreover, he was living in Paris when van der Noot arrived in England. The
educator, Mulcaster, could have pointed van Meteren’s cousin to his student Spenser.
If Spenser knew anything of the ideas about literary practice that would feature in
his headmaster’s later writings on education, Mulcaster’s recommendation would have
been especially flattering. Mulcaster had the humanist educator’s usual interest in
developing his pupils’ skills in the classical languages, and quite an unusual
interest in developing their use of English: the most distinguished scholar in
Spenser’s academic cohort was Lancelot Andrewes, who would eventually become perhaps
the greatest preacher in Spenser’s generation and the mastermind behind the King
James translation of the Bible, and Mulcaster almost certainly had a hand in
fostering his remarkable gifts. Renwick argues convincingly that Mulcaster’s ideas
about the cultivation of English entail the direct influence of Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse; again, if
Spenser were aware of Mulcaster’s admiration for Du Bellay, then the commission to
translate the poet’s Songe would have had special piquancy.
And while the assignment might have struck Spenser as having the honorific tincture
of a valedictorian’s graduation exercise, it would surely have seemed much more than
an academic undertaking, for his headmaster had introduced the teenaged scholar to a
bustling community of cultural and religious activists. Van der Noot – the glamorous,
perhaps self-important emigré, a poet-polemicist-political leader who anticipates the
figure who would mean so much to Spenser a decade later, Philip Sidney; Gheeraerts,
as one of the few engravers working in London effectively a pioneer of a new medium;
Day and Bynneman, ideologically committed to a godly press, and, especially in Day’s
case, cunningly professional in the pursuit of commercial advantage. These ambitious
adults had challenged him with Petrarch, Marot, Du Bellay, and the visionary John.
There are satisfying signs of Spenser’s scholarly engagement. As he worked through
the first sequence, Spenser seems to have clarified uncertainties about his French
source by glancing at the Italian that stands behind it. Yet like the others on the
production team for the three Theatres, Spenser’s work here
can sometimes be disappointingly dutiful, if not mechanical. Translating the
apocalyptic sonnets, he does not consult his own knowledge of the biblical source
when his French original departs from it: we have already observed that the French
version of the first apocalyptic sonnet mistranslates the account of the appearance
of the beast from the Earth, describing it as a beast de Mer;
Spenser carelessly reproduces the error of his French original. When he is confounded
by lexical difficulties in his original, as when the French version of the second
apocalyptic sonnet employs the slightly recondite migrainne
(a term for a less-than-rich scarlet), Spenser settles for ‘orenge’ (Son. 13.2)
instead of recurring to what he presumably knows of the biblical source, with its
woman clothed in purple and scarlet (Rev 17.4).
The scholar-poet John Hollander once warmly celebrated a line in Spenser’s
translation of the fourth of the Petrarch-Marot epigrams (1988: 173-4). The poem
describes a secluded locus amoenus, the first of many secret bowers and springs to
which Spenser’s poetry will withdraw:
Within this woold, out of the rocke did rise
A Spring of water mildely romblyng downe
Whereto approched not in any wise
The homely Shepherde, nor the ruder cloune,
But many Muses, and the Nymphes withall,
That swetely in accorde did tune their voice
Unto the gentle sounding of the waters fall.
(Epigr. 4.1-7)
Hollander noted the last of these lines with special pleasure, observing that
the line initiates Spenser’s recurrent attention to song that is both nourished (and
sometimes tainted) by its imitative accord with the gush of falling water. He also
noticed that the twelve-syllable line violates this poem’s pentameter norm. The last
line of the stanza Spenser devised for The Faerie Queene is
similarly attenuated – softened or lingered, satisfied or worried: Hollander supposed
that here in one of ‘Spenser’s’ first, but unattributed published poems, the young
poet stumbled upon an effect that would become one of his signatures.’
Stumbled upon: Hollander did not put it this way, but there is a degree of
stumbling, although not perhaps an uncharacteristic clumsiness. Some of the rhyming –
‘in any wise’, ‘withall’ -- is mere convenience and the padding in these lines
weakens one’s confidence that the effect Hollander celebrates appears before us as
something more than an accident. The uncertain good fortune of this seventh line
haunts and graces virtually all the poems of the Theatre.
Spenser accepts the constraints of the douzaines that Marot had adopted, save in the
first and third of the epigrams, in which Spenser turns to the sonnet. This may very
well be an achievement rather than a failure to meet the terms of Marot’s metrical
contract: to make a sonnet of Marot’s douzaine on the ‘fresh and lusty Laurell tree’
(Epigr. 3.2) might be an homage, a way of forging
Petrarch’s own signature form, and the same may be said of the decision to open the
sequence with a sonnet – yet the concluding couplet of that initial poem is so
ham-fisted as to reduce any homage, if it be homage, to failed compliment:
Cruel death vanquishing so noble beautie,
Oft makes me waile so harde a destinie.
(Epigr. 1.13-14)
When Spenser turns to Du Bellay and van der Noot, to translating sonnets >as sonnets, he chooses not to rhyme, a technical decision
that may be daring, but could also be desperate.32 There is good reason to
eschew rhyme in trying to translate rhymed French (or Italian) into English, for the
morphology of the source language makes rhyming quite easy and, therefore, a matter
of easily sustained euphony, whereas rhyme in English is difficult – hence Keats’s
famous observations on the ways in which rhyme fetters the sonnet: ‘the legitimate
[sonnet form] does not suit the language well, from the pouncing rhymes’.33 Having set aside rhyme, Spenser
manages to capture some of Du Bellay’s gravity, the dampened surges of fear and the
small ritardandi of awe. The rhythms of admiration are themselves admirable:
On hill, a frame an hundred cubites hie
I sawe, an hundred pillers eke about
(Son. 2.1-2)
Also admirable is the vocalic effect at the line break (hie / I) which produces a kind of visionary patience. Yet ‘eke about’ is
regrettable. Unburdened of the pounce of compulsory rhyme, Spenser allows himself
some easier half-rhymes in what follows, and he handles the line break with a variety
which he will seldom attain in his later verse:
But shining Christall, which from top to base
Out of deepe vaute threw forth a thousand rayes
Upon an hundred steps of purest golde.
Golde was the parget: and the sielyng eke
Did shine all scaly with fine golden plates.
(Son. 2.6-10)
After the compact profundity of ‘deepe vaute’, the stair-steps are an
achievement, recovering regularity without monotony. Familiar Spenserian poetic
habits take shape here, firming up the attribution of these translations to the young
man who would become ‘Immerito’ and then ‘Spenser’: the use of ‘golde / Golde’ at the
border of octave and sestet anticipates the many devices that Spenser will invent
both to mark and bridge units within his larger prosodic forms. But ‘golde / Golde .
. . / golden’: the limited palette is dictated by his source (and Spenser has
restrained Du Bellay’s egregious dorez du plus fin or d’Afrique
[‘gilded with finest gold of Africa’; B8v]), yet it must be conceded that
Spenser’s later achievement involves acceptance—his acceptance and ours—of just such
a narrowed vocabulary. And the padding of ‘sielyng eke’ is also a habit, and cannot
be explained away–as it sometimes is explained away in Spenser’s verse from The Shepheardes Calender and after–as an imitation or embrace
of rusticity. That excuse of rusticity is unavailable to the translator of Du Bellay.
These poems augur a complex future–of poems that claim their authority on the basis
of the vision they can report and that derive at least some of their affective power
from the fragility of those visions, of literary activity fervently ambitious for
spiritual renewal, of anti-Catholic zeal, of poems bound to images and to scholarly
commentary, of a biblio-graphic imaginative life in which smaller literary units and
the larger printed composites into which they are inserted energize each other.34 Subtending all this is what might be called
the predicament of willing service: that Spenser’s condition and habit would be an
ambition to write in others’ stead, as Immerito and Colin Clout, as Lord Grey (when
he writes on this employer’s behalf), as various Muses, or Clorinda, or Chaucer. This
predicament begins in counterfeiting, in English, the visions of Marot, Petrarch, Du
Bellay, John of the Apocalypse, and Jan van der Noot.
Appendix: The Structure of Van der Noot’s Commentary
The bulk of the Theatre is an attack, in prose, on the Roman
church. Van der Noot’s conceit is to mount the attack within the loose structure of a
commentary on the visionary poems that precede this much larger prose section. After
a brief introduction, in which he explains the symbolism of the Epigrams and Sonets derived from Petrarch and Du
Bellay, van der Noot turns his attention to the four final sonnets, those based on
chapters 12-13, 17-19, and 21-2 of Revelation. As he turns to the apocalyptic
sonnets, the pretense that he is explaining a set of poems recedes and commentary
gives way to prophetic denunciation of papal, curial, and monastic abuse.
Our selection is a slightly abridged version of the introductory pages of van der
Noot’s prose and of that portion of the anti-Catholic polemic organized around the
imagery of the first of the four apocalyptic sonnets. The full text of the Commentary is available at .
Van der Noot’s Commentary:
Outline
- Introduction
ll. 1-338
- The restless ambition to change social station
- The transitory character of worldly things, which wise Christians will
avoid (abridged)
- On human error and its three causes: greed, lust, and ambition
- The poems chosen to give a lively illustration of the vanity and
inconstancy of worldly things
- Commentary on Epigrams and Sonets
ll. 339-491
- On Petrarch’s visions
- On Du Bellay’s Roman visions
- Commentary on Revelation and the Apocalyptic
Sonnets
ll. 492-3289
- On the decline of Rome; signs of corruption in the Early Church
(abridged)
- The Beast from the sea
- Its ten crowns: Roman church sovereignty\
- Its ten horns: the falsehoods of the Roman church
- The names of Blasphemy: titles and rules of the Roman church
- Leopard, Lion, and Bear: the Roman Church as a summation of wicked
kingdoms
- The Dragon’s gifts to the Beast: the infernal analogues to God and
Christ
- Wounding the Beast: the Reformation
- The wounds healed: failures of Reform
- The continued charisma of the Roman church
- Roman cultishness
- Modern oppressors of the True Church; their eventual punishment
- The Beast from the Earth
- Its horns like the Lamb’s: the tradition of imposture and false
prophecy
- Modern idolatry, willing and compulsory
- Enlisting modern monarchs in support of Roman idolatry
- Numbering the Beast: the obligation to see through Roman imposture
- The Woman on the scarlet Beast
- On corrupt magistracy
- Van der Noot’s apology for his own magistracy
- The attributes of the scarlet Beast
- The Woman’s robes, cup, and name
- The intoxicated blindness of the adherents to the Roman
church
- The disgust of those no longer deceived by the whorish
church
- Divine inspiration for Reforming violence against the whorish
church
- The abhominations of the Roman church call forth Reforming
violence
- Secular rulers and the Roman church have joined forces in cruelty
against the righteous
- The violence of revenge multiplies the violence of the whorish
church
- The complacency of the Woman
- The lamentations of the adherents of the whorish church; the Woman
repudiated by people of all stations
- Faithful and True on the white Horse
- The manhood of Christ
- The warriors of Christ; their weapons
- Injunctions to the righteous in the days of vengeance
- Eating the flesh of the wicked
- Religious violence in northern Europe
- True chastity
- The Beast, the false prophet, and their adherents cast down
- The heavenly Jerusalem
- First heaven and first earth wiped away
- The newness, cleanliness, and peace of the new Jerusalem
- The design of the heavenly City
- The precious materials from which the walls and the twelve
foundations of the new City will be built
- The City’s River, the Tree of life beside it, and the healing
leaves of the Tree
- Conclusion
- The persecutions of those that seek the heavenly Jerusalem
- How the righteous are perverted
- The Infernal Begats: descendants of the Devil
- The animosity between the adherents of Christ and those of the
Devil
- Exhortation to take up the armor of light
- Righteous marriage, service, and mastership
- Patience, vigilance, philosophical self-restraint
This account of the genesis of the Theatre obtrudes a
seeming paradox: van der Noot’s sympathies with iconoclasm, his involvement with the
notorious Beeldenstorm in the Low Countries, forced his
flight to England; there he published a suite of books featuring contentious
religious images. The paradox is perhaps only apparent, since iconoclasm and
religious and ecclesiological art are locked together in sixteenth-century
Reformation culture – witness the great Allegory of
Iconoclasm (c. 1566) in which Marcus Gheeraerts, the artist most likely
responsible for the images in van der Noot’s three Theatres,
celebrated both the exuberances and the spiritual complexities of a culture of
iconoclasm.35 A perplexed relation to
the image had characterized the Reformation since the 1520s.
Protestantism had an undeniable affinity with iconoclasm: many reformers adopted a
principled commitment to the ban in the Hebrew Bible on the worship of graven images,
and that commitment reinforced, and was reinforced by, allegiances to the New
Testament ethic of poverty; both of these principled positions were braced by popular
resentment of the wealth of the clergy. Influential thinkers such as Andreas
Karlstadt, Ulrich Zwingli, and especially Jean Calvin took firm positions on the
removal of painting and sculpture from places of Christian worship. Karlstadt became
the first important ideologue of Reformation iconoclasm early in 1522, when,
exploiting his position as chancellor of Wittenberg, he persuaded the municipal
council to ban the use of images in churches; three days later, he published a
treatise, On the Removal of Images (Vom
Abtuhung der Bilder), protesting the sluggishness with which the ban had been
executed. Although Luther was Karlstadt’s colleague at the university in Wittenberg
and the two had been together threatened with excommunication in Exsurge domine (1520), the Wittenberg iconoclasm set them on separate paths.
In cautious retreat at Wartburg Castle, Luther held aloof from the Wittenberg
campaign, as he would from all later instances of iconoclasm. In the fourth of the
Lenten sermons he delivered upon his return to Wittenberg, he is meticulously
restrained, insisting that images ought to be abolished only if they are going to be
worshipped (und sonderlich von den Bildern hab ich am nehsten also
gered, das man sie solle abthun, wenn sie angebet, sonst mag man sie wol
leiden), and going on to stipulate that their use must not be proscribed if
they have devotional utility (dannocht künden wir das nit
verdammen und sollens auch nit verdammen, das noch ein mensch irgent kan wol
brauchen; WA, 10:3, 30 and 32). Indeed, he was often
more than merely tolerant of religious imagery: during the 1520s, he developed a
close association with Lucas Cranach, whose press at Wittenberg published some forty
of Luther’s works between 1520 and 1526. While Luther translated the New Testament
into German, Cranach designed and executed his own contribution to this first of the
Luther bibles – twenty-one woodcuts illustrating the Book of Revelation. Seven months
after the publication of Karlstadt’s Removal of Images, the
apocalyptic imagery of the ‘September Testament’, the
Luther-Cranach Bible, claims the image as a central prop to Reformation piety.
For many, Luther’s stipulation that images should be tolerated as long as they were
not worshipped was not to be taken lightly. Foxe quotes Stephen Gardiner’s
self-consciously Lutheran defenses of images at length in Actes
and Monuments, but treats those defenses with derisive scorn.36 For Gardiner, as for Luther, when an
image ‘worketh a godly remembraunce in us, by representacion of the thinge signifyed
unto us, then we use it worshipfully and honorably, as many do the priest, at mas,
whom they little regarde all the day after’, but for Foxe the comparison of image to
priest betrays the argument: it is, simply, ‘one idoll well compared with an other’
(Foxe, Acte, 1563: XX4v). Foxe goes on to quote Protector
Somerset’s response to Gardiner, a defense of firm iconoclasm: Somerset was one of
Foxe’s heroes, and Foxe encumbers his response with none of the hectoring marginalia
he attaches to Gardiner’s defense of religious images.37 Another apparent paradox, then, for Actes and
Monuments is itself a book notoriously reliant on illustration – 53 woodcuts
in the first edition of 1563, 105 in the second (many appearing more than once), most
of them depicting the depredations of papistry and of the torments of the Marian
martyrs.38 In the second edition, the ninth
book, on the reign of Edward VI, is introduced with a woodcut showing the papists
sent packing, while their images are fed to the flames: what warrants the
iconophobe’s unabashed commitment to illustration?
Images in books seem generally to have been tolerable. The
September Testament had joined a tradition of German-language bibles printed
with woodcut illustrations (and was quite obviously affiliated with Dürer’s great
illustrated folio Apocalypse), but it should be conceded that
challenges to biblical illustration from the Karlstadt flank would nonetheless
occasionally erupt in circumstances of special rigor – as, for example, when Bishop
Parkhurst prepared interrogatories for a visitation at Norwich in 1561. Parkhurst
instructed the visitants to inquire ‘Whether al aulters, images, holiwater stones,
pictures, paintings, as of Thassumption of the blessed virgin, of the descending of
Christ into the virgin in the fourme of a lytle boy at Thanunciacion of the Aungell,
and al other supersticious and dangerous monuments especiallie paintings &
Imagies in walle, boke, cope, Banner or els where, of the blessed trinitie or of the
father (of whom ther can be no Image made) be defaced and remoued out of the churche
and other places and are destroyed’ (Iniunctions exhibited by Iohn
by gods sufferance Bishop of Norwich in his first visitacion, 1561: B2r-B2v).
While ‘Imagies’ in books go unmentioned in the opening list of altars, fonts, and
other church decorations, they are adduced in the concluding list. Still, the context
of wall, banner, and cope suggests that the books here proscribed are pulpit bibles.
While Parkhurst expresses passing concern with ‘other places’, his scruples are
principally oriented to the purification of the church environment, and his
misgivings over book illustration seem limited to what such illustration might
contribute to an environment of spectacular worship. The goal of iconoclasm was to
remove the visual apparatus of cult, hence the terms of Edward VI’s injunctions, on
the occasion of his visitations of 1547, when he called for the destruction of ‘all
shrines, coveringe of shrines, all tables, candlestickes, tryndilles or rolles of
waxe, pictures, payntynges, and all other monumentes of fayned miracles, pilgremages,
Idolatry, and supersticion’.39 But
Edward does not proceed to Parkhurst’s afterthought; the inventory of his
proscriptions does not to extend to book-illustration.
He does, however, proscribe certain subjects. The banning of illustrations of the
Annunciation and Assumption is plainly intended to disable veneration of the Virgin
Mary.40 It has
been alleged that Luther himself made distinctions between allowable subjects – that,
for example, he scrupled over illustrations for the September
Testament, allowing them only for Revelation, and only because, doubting its
canonicity, he regarded it as somehow non-biblical and therefore available for
illustration.41 Yet in the
very next year, his translation of the Pentateuch was printed in Wittenberg with
eleven woodcut images; in 1524, his translation of the books from Joshua to Esther
appeared, with 23 illustrations; and as he proceeded with the rest of his
translation, so the work of illustration continued until, in 1534, the translation
issued from the press of Hans Lufft with 124 illustrations. According to Christoph
Walther, Lufft’s press-corrector for many years, Luther insisted on a few principles
for illustrating the bible, none of them specific to topic: that the figures should
be large enough to be easily recognized, that marginal grotesquerie should be
eliminated, and that the content of texts should be depicted in the simplest (einfeltigst) way possible.42 But even this last and unsurprising
principle of subordination is subverted in Luther’s Passionalbüchlein of 1529, in which the brief texts of condensed bible
stories merely supplement the fifty full-page woodcuts that organize the book. This
‘picture bible’, a Protestant appropriation of the traditions of the Biblia pauperum, resists iconophobia on the grounds that the
disciplined religious image can serve as a bible of the illiterate.
Luther’s attitude to the biblical image was widely, if cautiously, diffused. Thus,
in his 1538 injunctions for York Diocese, Archbishop Edward Lee concedes that visual
images are ‘as the book to them that cannot read in other books’, and he therefore
enjoins the clergy to instruct their charges in the right use of images, which should
‘be suffered only as books, by which our hearts may be kindled to follow the holy
steps and examples of the saints represented by the same.’ Whether because of a
credulity attributed to the unlettered, or because of a special power attributed to
images, Lee stipulates that the response to the depicted must be tamed, so that they
have no more affective power over the unlettered than the written has over the
literate: ‘as we do not worship our book when we have the saints’ life, so likewise,
we shall not worship the images’ (VAI 1910: II.48). 43
Tyndale, very much Luther’s protegé, embraced the use of illustration in bible
publications. His English New Testament, printed in Worms, appeared in 1526 with 12
woodcut illustrations. A decade later, Coverdale’s complete English Bible is even
more richly committed to illustration, with 158 woodcuts, many of which are recycled
in the Matthew Bible of 1537.44 Illustration thus found a place within the
culture of the English printed Bible from the beginnings. There were counter-tides,
of course. The Great Bible of 1539 is unillustrated (although its title page has an
elaborate iconographic program) and the program of illustrations in the Geneva Bible
(New Testament, 1557; complete Bible, 1560) is fairly austere in comparison to those
of the Coverdale and Matthew Bibles. The approach to imagery in the Geneva Bible may
well reflect a heightened iconophobia in the aftermath of the reign of Mary Tudor;
Bishop Parkhurst’s inclusion of ‘bokes’ among the material surfaces which were to be
inspected and certified as image-free during the Norwich visitations of 1561 may
reflect the same post-Marian vigilance, further braced by his experience of five
years of Marian exile in Zürich.45 Yet many of the committed
Reformers who returned to England at the accession of Elizabeth, brought with them,
not a Calvinist iconoclasm, but an enriched experience of Protestant iconography –
biblical, ecclesiastic, and, above all, martyrological.
The experience of John Foxe is exemplary. Foxe was in Strasbourg in 1554, when he
completed his Commentarii, the first version of what would
later become the Actes and Monuments. Like the contemporary
martyrologies of Jean Crespin, working in Geneva, and Adriaan van Haemstede, in
Emden, Foxe’s Latin Commentarii was an austere unillustrated
book; Rabus’ vernacular Historien der Heyligen is
distinguished by its program of illustrations. It is well-known that Rabus would
borrow heavily from Foxe’s book for the narratives of English Lollard martyrs that
would appear in his third volume, but the influence was reciprocal, for Foxe’s
subsequent expansion on the Commentarii would take
inspiration from Rabus’ use of illustration.46 Nor was it an
isolated vector of inspiration.
While Ingram and Ashton have traced the images to a few native English models, they
have pointed to a much more considerable range of continental ones – to anti-papal
satiric prints, especially Cranach’s Passional Christi und
Antichristi; and to even pre-Reformation martyrological prints by Cranach,
Dürer, and others (1997: 66-142). The technical and iconographic repertoire on which
the program of illustrations in the Actes and Monuments
depends was largely imported: the 1563 edition testifies to the fact that the
Protestant ideologues who returned to England at the accession of Elizabeth were
accompanied by an appreciable number of émigré craftsmen; the very substantially
enriched iconographic program of the 1570 edition testifies to the increased
productive capacities made possible by the new influx of artists who fled the Low
Countries in 1567. The same may be said of other productions of John Day’s press in
the late 1560s, the richly illustrated Bishops Bible of 1568,
Queen Elizabeth’s Prayerbook (Christian Prayers and
Meditations), or the Theatre for Worldlings of 1569:
their iconophilia was at least partly nourished by the sudden transformation of a
skilled labor market, one that Day, Bynneman, and their authors, the likes of Foxe
and van Der Noot, had the media savvy to exploit.47
Notes
1The full titles are Het Theatre (
HET | THEATRE OFT | Toon-neel, waer in ter een- | der de
ongelucken ende elen- | den die den werelts gesinden
| ende boosen menschen toeco- | men: ende op dander
syde |
tgheluck goet ende ruste die de
gheloouighe ghenieten, vertoont worden
and
LE THEATRE AV-
| quel sont exposés & mon- | strés les inconueniens & | miseres qui suiuent les | mondains & vicieux,
en- | semble les plaisirs & con- | tentements dont les fide- | les
ioüissent.
2Indefinite–e.g.
A Theatre for
Worldlings
; heterogeneous–e.g.
The
Spenser-Harvey Letters
,
The
Correspondence
,
Astrophel
;
errant–e.g.
Brittains Ida
, this latter
available at
The Spenser Archive
(URL).
3For complementary approach to the collaborative
character of the
Theatre
, see
Clement
2019: 192
.
4It was not an
accident that van der Noot turned to John Day to produce the French and Dutch
Theatres
, for Day had strong ties to
the Dutch community in London; see
Evenden (2008: 53-5)
.
5Van der
Noot wrote French fluently: his incomplete epic poem,
Olympiades
, was first published in German, and then in a
bilingual French-Dutch edition, but the German version seems to have been
translated from the French original (
Meijer 1971: 85
). That said,
there are errors in the French translations, for which see below, p. [7]]
6Forster’s account
(1967:27-34)
has not been replaced.
7This is also
Forster’s conclusion (1967: 30-2)
. The analysis of
the transmissional chain is complicated by the glosses, which may very well have
been prepared independently from the volume’s commentary proper. See
Commentary 679-83 glosses]
n
, but see also
Commentary 713-15 [glosses] n
.
8For the fidelity of the English commentary to
a version of the Dutch see
Commentary 406 n, 442 n
and 713-15 [glosses] n
; for the Dutch text on
which the French and English translations are based, see
Commentary 334-5 n, 419 n and SpA2792
n
.
9In
fact, at each of the two junctures in which the ‘speaker’ of the
Commentary
claims to have translated the poems
from Dutch into English, Roest seems to have mechanically transformed his Dutch
source: where van der Noot has spoken of translating Petrarch ‘in onse Brabantsche sprake’ (
D7r
) the English text speaks of
having ‘out of the Brabants speache, turned them [i.e. the
poems] into the Englishe tongue’; where van der Noot speaks of having taken Du
Bellay’s poems and ‘in Brabants ghemaect’
(
D8r
) the speaker of Roest’s translation claims to ‘have
translated them out of Dutch into English’ whereas the poems were plainly
Englished from Marot’s French version of Petrarch and from DuBellay’s French
original.
10
Evenden’s account of the heavy and risky commitment of resources to the production
of the first edition of
Actes
is relevant to
the second edition
(2008: 69-73)
.
11 Eager helpfully observes that whereas the
front matter for the French and English versions spills over from the A to the B
signature, the front matter for
Het Theatre
is confined to the A signature. Although this may be a coincidence, Eager suggests
that the concentration of the front matter in a single signature may have been
necessitated by its copy having been written and set late in the presswork – as is
often the case in first editions in which the introductory material is being
composed at the last minute. She also offers a different kind of evidence for
time-pressure. She notes that it made sense to print the text first and the
engravings second in printed books that incorporate engravings, since plates were
fragile and could be used to produce only a limited number of images; normally it
was not worth the risk to print the images first and hope that no misprinted text
rendered the printed images unusable. Eager offers physical evidence that shows
that
Le Théatre
violates this norm, and
argues that Day hurried the book out, arranging for the printing of the
engravings–the plates were ready, having already been used for
Het Theatre
—prior to the completion of the French
translation or, at least (as I would qualify her conclusion), prior to the setting
of the French text.
12Another odd transmissional lapse occurs when two ‘generations’ in the Dutch
genealogy of the Anti-Christ –Wreetheyt heeft voortghebracht
Wtnementheyt. / Wtnementheyt heeft voortghebracht Gewelt (‘Cruelty begot
Preeminence. / Preeminence begot Power’;
L8v
) – are transformed into
a single French one – Cruauté a engendré Domination
(‘Cruelty begot Domination’;
M8r
). This may be a calculated
condensation or an inattentive lapse: whichever it is, the change may be as easily
assigned to a translating van der Noot as to some different, unidentified
translator.
13For another
version of the distinction made here, see
Parry (1999: 167-81)
.
14The urgent historicity of Bale’s
understanding of Revelation, and the urgently institutional focus of his
imagination becomes clear when one compares the Image to
Augustine’s City of God, which frames human history as a
struggle between two cities: Bale’s book is far less centered on individual moral
and spiritual life, more concerned with the Church itself, and much urgently
apocalyptic. For more on Bale’s historiography, see
Firth (1979:
42-55)
and
Bauckham (1978: 38-53)
.
15The bibliographic
tether of Antwerp and London dates from the 1490s, when Antwerp began producing
English books for export to England. Around 1526, when the tide of books began to
include Reforming ones – including the second complete edition of Tyndale’s New
Testament – some effort was made to restrain the imports, but Protestant work came
in as contraband.
16 For searching
accounts of iconoclasm see
Koerner 2002 and 2004
.
17See
WA, 10:3, 30 and 32.
18Von unterscheid der Deudschen Biblien und anderen
Büchern, 1563: B2v
. Luther did not, finally, stand in the way of
illustrations of God or the Trinity where they might serve explanatory purpose:
his revised catechism of 1529 was illustrated by Cranach. Cranmer follows suit,
though his catechism of 1548 is illustrated by Holbein.
19A
similar scruple operated a few months later when the queen chastises Alexander
Nowell, the dean of St. Paul’s, for leaving at her customary seat, as a New Year’s
gift, a richly bound prayer-book, with illustrations tipped in next to various
scriptural passages: ‘You know I have an aversion to idolatry; to images and
pictures of this kind. . . . Have you forgot our proclamation against images,
pictures, and Romish relics in the churches?’ (
Strype 1824: I.i.409
).
20Foxe prepared the expanded martyrology, the
Rerum, in Basel, in the printing-house of Johannes Oporinus where, together with
John Bale, he served as a press-corrector. An ex-professor, Oporinus had a
reputation as a producer of scholarly books, many of them strenuously Protestant:
Foxe and Bale were no doubt involved in the production of the first of the
Magdeburg Centuries
, the
thirteen-volume Protestant church history by Matthias Flacius that resonates so
strongly with Foxe’s and Bale’s historiographic interests.
21For an account of Day’s deep
involvement in the production of illustrated books, and for the involvement of
foreign craftsmen in the production of those books, see
Hodnett (1982:
27-44)
.
22 To summarize Bath’s
argument. The watercolours and woodcuts share many details that the engravings do
not, so the watercolours and the woodcuts seem genetically related. The argument
for the priority of the watercolours to the woodcuts is based on the fact that the
images in the watercolours and in woodcuts are reversed in most instances, which
is usually the case when prints are copied from paintings, whereas paintings
copied from prints are seldom reversed. So the stemma seems to proceed from
watercolour to woodcut to engraving (
1988: 73–105
).
23Luborsky, Van Dorsten, most vehemently, Friedland, and, most cautiously, Eager
have been the partisans of de Heere; besides Bath, Hind, Smit, Popham, and van
Gelder (as consulted by Smit) regarded Gheeraerts as the most likely artist.
Hodnett (1982: 38-40)
regards the assignment of these
illustrations to Gheeraerts as beyond question.
24
This is also the pattern of the relationship of text and image in the two
editions, Latin and German, of Dürer’s folio Apocalypse
(1498), although in the Latin edition the full text of the Vulgate faces the
images and, in the German version, Dürer uses the Koberger translation.
25 Clement 2019 offers a sustained
account of the temporality implied by these images; see, especially, 190 and
194.
26The upper portion of the image for the
first of these sonnets is in fact crowded with details from Rev 12: not only the
woman clothed in the sun (12.1-2), but also God’s rescue of her newborn child from
the ravening dragon (12.4-5), and the beginnings of the angelic attack on the
dragon (12.7). The accompanying poem makes no mention of these narrative
details.
27
Herford (1886: 369) followed by de Vries (1916: 193), Selig (1955: 600), etc.
Crewe refers to the illustrations, without hesitation, as ‘emblems’ (1986:
95).
28 For a different
assessment, emphasizing the esotericism of the volume, see Mottram 2014. The
illustrations allude to the esoteric at key junctures; see the illustrations to
Son 3 (C2r) and, especially, Epigr 5 (B5r).
29 Forster supposes Spenser to have translated van der Noot’s
apocalyptic sonnets, not from the French, but from a draft translation that, he
suggests, Roest had prepared, working from van der Noot’s Dutch original (1967:
33). Given that the discrepancies between Spenser’s poem and van der Noot’s Dutch
correspond to similar discrepancies between van der Noot’s Dutch and the French
version (most likely produced by van der Noot himself), Forster’s hypothesis seems
unpersuasive.
30 Since the printing of engravings
requires a rolling press, almost certainly not part of Day’s battery of equipment,
the text and images for the Dutch and French Theatre
volumes would have been printed separately, although we have not established
priority.
31 For a survey of speculations
concerning how van der Noot came to recruit Spenser, see Mottram 2014
32 These are not the first
blank verse sonnets in English, although it is difficult to have confidence that
he had seen the blank verse sonnet that Thomas Jeney had written as a commendatory
poem to a collection of translations from Ronsard published in Paris the year
before. See Peter Ronsard [sic], A Discours of the Present
Troobles in Fraunce (Paris [with a false imprint of ‘Andwerpe’, 1568),
reprinted as Appendix I in van Dorsten (1970: 93).
33I refer here, both to Keats’ sonnet ‘If by dull rhymes’ and to his letter of 3
May 1819 to George and Georgianna Keats.
34For yet another account of the durable effects of the Theatre on Spenser’s
imagination, see Gilman 1988.
[available in the printed edition]
[available in the printed edition]
[available in the printed edition]
[end of printed selections]
[Abridged version of ‘The Reformation of the Image’ to be used
in the online Archive]
35Following Hodnett 1971, Bath 1988 makes the strongest case
for Gheeraerts’ having designed and produced the images in the Theatre. Friedland 1956 urges Lucas d’Heere as the engraver, and
Mottram’s argument that the Theatre is in many ways a Familist book depends
heavily on d’Heere’s involvement with the images.
36
For Gardiner’s appeal to the authority of Luther, see Foxe, Actes, 1563: TT5r and XX4r.
37 Somerset defends
secular imagery – coinage, coats of arms, royal portraiture – and concedes that
religious images are not constitutively corrupt, but he insists that they are more
likely to be venerated or to be misconstrued than sacred writ and that their
wholesale removal is therefore prudent (Foxe, Actes, 1563:
TT5v-6r).
38According to Evenden and Freeman, ‘None of the physical
aspects of the book are more important or more conspicuous than the scores of
woodcut illustrations that accompanied the text of each edition’ (2011: 186). For
sustained discussions of the tactics of illustration in Foxe, see King, Chapter 3,
‘Viewing the Pictures,’ (2006: 162-242), and Aston and Ingram, 'The Iconography of
the Acts and Monuments' (1997: 66-142). Ashton and Ingram
shrewdly quote the Jesuit Robert Parsons’s iconophobic strictures on Foxe’s book,
his charge that its ‘fayre pictures and painted pageants . . . delighteth many to
gaze on, who cannot read’ (1997: 70).
39
Injunccions geven by the most excellent prince, Edwarde the
Sixte, 1547, STC 10089, c2v. The king also anticipates Parkhurst’s concern
with ‘other places’, enjoining the clergy to ‘exhorte all their parishioners, to
doo the lyke within their severall houses’ (c2v-c3r). As David Davis points out,
English reformers inherit a Lollard tradition of iconoclasm that focused less on
the fact of representation than on a gaudiness that induced idolatrous affect;
most book illustration obviously lies outside this focus (2013: 49-50).
40The ban on representation of the Trinity seems differently
motivated, not only an insistence on the ineffability of divinity, but also an
effort to guard against reductive treatment of what remained a theological
difficulty, despite the Protestant will to theological plainness.
41See Edwards, 1994: 113 and 122-3.
42
Von unterscheid der Deudschen Biblien und anderen Büchern,
1563: B2v. Luther did not, finally, stand in the way of illustrations of God or
the Trinity where they might serve explanatory purpose: his revised catechism of
1529 was illustrated by Cranach. Cranmer follows suit, though his catechism of
1548 is illustrated by Holbein.
43The issue remained
controversial, of course. In Leo Jud’s Short Catechism of 1541, published in an
English translation nine years later, the catechist tests the depth of his
charge’s commitment to the ban on graven images: ‘May we not bring the children
and unlearned to God through images?’ to which the catechumen is to reply ‘In no
wise. For images draw men from God and cause them to forget him’ (cited in Dyrness
2004: 91).
44Both of these issued from printing houses
in Antwerp, and most of their woodcuts are copies from those of a picture bible
produced in Frankfurt in 1534.
45A similar scruple operated a few months
later when the queen chastises Alexander Nowell, the dean of St. Paul’s, for
leaving a richly bound prayer-book at her customary seat as a New Year’s gift. She
was put off by the illustrations she found tipped in next to various scriptural
passages: ‘You know I have an aversion to idolatry; to images and pictures of this
kind. . . . Have you forgot our proclamation against images, pictures, and Romish
relics in the churches?’ (Strype 1824: I.i.409).
46 Foxe prepared the expanded
martyrology, the Rerum, in Basel, in the printing-house of
Johannes Oporinus where, together with John Bale, he served as a press-corrector.
An ex-professor, Oporinus had a reputation as a producer of scholarly books, many
of them strenuously Protestant: Foxe and Bale were no doubt involved in the
production of the first of the Magdeburg Centuries, the
thirteen-volume Protestant church history by Matthias Flacius that resonates so
strongly with Foxe’s and Bale’s historiographic interests.
47 For an account of
Day’s deep involvement in the production of illustrated books, and for the
involvement of foreign craftsmen in the production of those books, see Hodnett
(1982: 27-44).