The End of the Age of Miracles: Substance and Accident in the

218 Pages·2009·0.82 MB·English

by  John Tangney

The End of the Age of Miracles: Substance and Accident in the English Renaissance
by John Richard Tangney
Department of English
Duke University

Date:_____________________

Approved:

___________________________
Maureen Quilligan, Chair

__________________________
Sarah Beckwith

__________________________
David Aers

__________________________
Laurie Shannon

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy in the Department of
English in the Graduate School
of Duke University

2009
ABSTRACT
The End of the Age of Miracles: Substance and Accident in the English Renaissance
by
John Richard Tangney
Department of English
Duke University

Date:_______________________
Approved:

___________________________
Maureen Quilligan, Supervisor

___________________________
Sarah Beckwith

___________________________
David Aers

___________________________
Laurie Shannon

An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
English in the Graduate School
of Duke University

2009
Copyright
John Richard Tangney
2009
Abstract

This dissertation argues that the 'realist' ontology implicit in Renaissance allegory
is both Aristotelian and neoplatonic, stemming from the need to talk about transcendence
in material terms in order to make it comprehensible to fallen human intelligence. At the
same time dramatists at the turn of the seventeenth century undermine 'realism'
altogether, contributing to the emergence of a new meaning of 'realism' as mimesis, and
with it a materialism without immanent forms. My theoretical framework is provided by
Aristotle's Metaphysics, Physics and Categories rather than his Poetics, because these
provide a better way of translating the concerns of postmodern critics back into
premodern terms. I thus avoid reducing the religious culture of premodernity to 'ideology'
or 'power' and show how premodern religion can be taken seriously as a critique of
secular modernity. My conclusion from readings of Aristotle, Augustine, Hooker,
Perkins, Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson and Tourneur is that Hell is conflated with
History during the transition to modernity, that sin is revalorized as individualism, and
that the translatability of terms argues for the continuing need for a concept of 'substance'
in this post-Aristotelian age. I end with a reading of The Cloud of Unknowing, an
anonymous contemplative work from the fourteenth century that was still being read in
the sixteenth century, which offers an alternative model of the sovereign individual, and
helps me to argue against the view that philosophical idealism is inherently totalitarian.

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Dedicated to my parents

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Contents
Abstract...............................................................................................................................iv
Acknowledgements............................................................................................................vii
Introduction..........................................................................................................................1
1. Words and Things............................................................................................................7
2. Spenser's Knights of Dialectical Reason.......................................................................61
3. The Multiplying Villainies of Nature..........................................................................102
4. Language and Matter in Nashe, Jonson and Tourneur................................................145

5. The Devil's Contemplatives.........................................................................................179
Bibliography....................................................................................................................198
Biography.........................................................................................................................211

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Acknowledgements
This dissertation is primarily an extension of the mental conversations I've had with
Maureen Quilligan's hugely stimulating seminars and books. She has been a most
generous reader of my work during six years of graduate school, for which I am very
grateful. Although my research is based in the long sixteenth century, David Aers got me
interested in the middle ages during my first semester here, and I have always felt at
home in the medievalist community at Duke. I am grateful to him for his many insightful
reading suggestions. Sarah Beckwith's classes are largely responsible for my interest in
The Winter's Tale, and for my sense of what Shakespeare's late plays can become in
performance. I'd also like to thank her for being such an encouraging and cheerful
presence in my graduate student life. Laurie Shannon's class, Mapping Early Modernity,
was seminal for this dissertation and will continue to provide a reference point in the
future. I benefitted greatly from her intricate exam-questions, and I am grateful to her for
continuing to work with me even after her departure from Duke. I'd like to thank Ranjana
Khanna for sitting on my exam committee. I'm also grateful to Fiona Somerset, whose
Chaucer course was important in the development of this project, and who taught me how
to pronounce middle English. Anne Gulick, Nathan Hensley and Aisha Peay were kind
enough to read drafts of chapter four and made insightful comments on them. Russ Leo
has been an important interlocutor, and a sharer of my interest in theology. Finally I must
thank my parents for their moral support, for occasional financial bailouts, and for all the
other ways they have enabled their children to be penniless artists and intellectuals.
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Introduction
Focussing centrally on the period between the publication of the first three books
of Spenser's Faerie Queene in 1590 and the publication of Tourneur's The Atheist's
Tragedy in 1611, this dissertation looks at how a premodern disposition towards 'realist'
ontology, as reflected in the literary genre of allegory, begins to change into a concern
with epistemology, mimesis and secular drama. Allegory is a typically medieval genre,
secular drama an early modern one, while poetry, like philosophy, spans both genres and
periods. I am interested in allegory and drama as representing human interiority, and in
poetry as their common medium. Because interiority is mediated by signs the first chapter
looks at the relationship between words and things in the sixteenth century, when they
were equivalent aspects of a material universe created in time by a transcendent God. It
argues that two contradictory orientations towards the materiality of signs, and the
meaningfulness of objects can be detected in puritan and anglican writers respectively.
One of these defines itself in continuity with the middle ages, and the other recognizes a
break. One is interested in liturgy and sacraments, while the other is more oriented
towards reading and preaching. The latter has affinities with early modern science, while
the former exists in continuity with a premodern science that was in all respects catholic.
It is my contention that allegory is readable as psychomachia. In presenting the
psychology of a typical rather than a particular individual, allegory also has much to say
about the political state in which such an individual is constituted. The interiority that
Allegory depicts is a mappable one, extended in space, and the ineffable otherness that it
points towards is God. Naturalistic drama, which I treat in the third and fourth chapters,
presents particular individuals as representative, in a political sense, of a greater whole,
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not as microcosm to macrocosm, but as manifestations of an immanent reality with no
discoverable inside or outside. The characters evince an interiority that is not spatial, but
that has much in common with the the metaphysical substance that is the telos of
allegory. Yet the actors in a Shakespearean drama often represent themselves as having
the transcendent longings of premodern Christians, while Spenserian allegory contains
the seeds of post-Aristotelian secular materialism.
The fourth chapter looks at Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, Jonson's The
Alchemist and Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy. These works manifest a relation between
words and things that is no longer realist but not entirely mimetic, or 'realist' in the
modern sense of that word. Nashe's picaresque narrative continually subverts logical
connections in favour of equivocal ones. Jonson figures language as a fungible substance,
rendered opaque by the deceitful characters who use it for ill rather than for good.
Tourneur's work is instructive because it is rendered incoherent by the same tensions that
enabled Shakespeare. These are tensions between idealism, materialism and what I call
nominalism. I qualify the term nominalism because while there is arguably a connection
between the literary fictions I am writing about, and the late medieval philosophical
tradition that is problematically termed 'nominalism', I am less concerned with tracing the
lines of filiation than with showing that these writers are thinking about a universe made
up of individuals rather than species or ideas. Aristotle subordinated the individual to the
state, and modern democracy makes the state serve the individual. In both cases there is a
productive and potentially destructive tension between individual and collective. Aristotle
and modern democracy have in common a concern with human flourishing, but their
materialism, in every sense of that term, deprives them of an ultimate meaning such as
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that provided by medieval Christianity. The rise of modern science results in what is,
from this religious perspective, a barren type of knowledge, one that describes the world
without explaining it in terms of first and final causes. As a result of its unboundedness it
lacks substance for many of its inhabitants. The loss of substance was a result of sin in
premodern Christianity, and in modern epistemology is more likely to be attributed to
God's absence than his anger.
Although it has often been argued that in modernity words came to be seen as
transparent windows on the material world, in poetry words continue to be things that
draw attention to their own being. Their irreducible materiality defeats referentiality,
while poetry's subject matter, proceeding by indirection, is a via negativa by which the
reader is invited to look for the work's substance in a non-propositional way. In the
nineteenth century Matthew Arnold turned literature into a secular religion, suitable to fill
the gap left by the receding sea of faith. The Anglican via media as explicated by Richard
Hooker, in its continuities with Aristotelian Catholicism, and with its regard for
sacraments based on things, is closer to my understanding of the value of literature as
something accidental and therefore dispensible, but as having a relationship to substance
that makes it worth paying attention to. Therefore, I read these early modern works
through the Metaphysics rather than the Poetics or the Rhetoric.
The afterword is a reading of a fourteenth century contemplative work called The
Cloud of Unknowing, that was circulating in England throughout the Tudor and Stuart
periods. It too uses the language of substance and accident, and provides a context for the
previous four chapters based on Charles Schmitt's recognition that for many fifteenth and
sixteenth century writers, Protestants as well as Catholics, physics is a contemplative
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