As this brief summary suggests, the following chapters explore questions at the intersection of the turn to religion, historical formalism, and feminist criticism.5 Such an approach may not seem intuitive, given that early work in historical (or new) formalism was relatively silent on matters of gender: feminist scholarship on early modern literature was identified as “most conspicuous in its absence” in the introduction to one influential edited collection.6 But reading women’s writing for form is essential, and I follow Sasha Roberts in believing that “if we neglect early modern women’s interest in questions of literary form, we fail to do justice to their work as readers and writers.”7 I would add, though, that our approach to form must be attuned to the complexities of identity in the early modern period: as many critics have shown, “woman” is no more a homogeneous category than “Catholic,” and the texts I examine reveal as many instructive differences as they do provocative commonalities, even when authors share both gender and confessional identity. So, too, we need a capacious understanding of form. Many recent critics have recognized that “poetic form is a site for experimentation and engagement,” but a narrow focus on poetry would obscure the fact that Catholic women’s formal experimentation in a variety of genres offered sites for engagement in broader religious, political, and literary networks.8 And it is a central claim of this book that attention to form can reveal not only the literary sophistication and interventions of these women but also their effects on their contemporaries. Rather than simply identifying representations of nuns or recusants, I show how ideas about Catholic women got under the skin of early modern authors and into their texts. By recognizing both how Catholic women were relevant to the uses of form in early modern literature and how they responded to and adapted those forms, we can see that our canon has always been more expansive and inclusive—even in its deliberate exclusions—than it has seemed to be.
Many works that seem to have little to do with Catholicism, much less the politics and poetics of Catholic women, reveal a submerged attention to competing voices and literary histories in their very omissions and their unacknowledged intertexts. George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy is one such text. Scholars have traced how The Art constructs a literary culture focused on the Elizabethan court despite Puttenham’s marginal position in relationship to that court,9 but his concomitant exclusion of Catholic women from the production and reception of poetic forms has not provoked critical comment, perhaps because such an exclusion is neither unique nor surprising: we expect nuns and recusants to be absent from the texts that helped to define early modern poetic practice. Yet archival materials hinting at both the devotional practices of Puttenham’s wife and his potential connection with an English nun named Mary Champney suggest the importance of competing perspectives on early modern culture that his text obfuscates in glancing references to Mary Stuart and to his own extratextual predilections. Champney’s narrative survives in an anonymous manuscript—part hagiography, part romance—documenting her life and death. While the gaps in Puttenham’s self-consciously foundational text of early modern poetic and rhetorical theory cannot be filled by this manuscript’s depiction of Champney’s self-consciously literary practice of religious devotion and political resistance, together these seemingly unrelated late sixteenth-century texts reveal a process of erasure that is simultaneously historical and literary: we have lost the connective tissue that would enable a firm archival link between Mary Champneys and Mary Champney, the first raped by Puttenham and the second an English nun in exile, but that loss is written into the poetic theories and literary forms of the early modern period. Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy thus offers an extreme example of a routine erasure. His focus on Queen Elizabeth as an exceptional case works to exclude other women from the making of literary history,10 but the possible historical connection of Puttenham and Champney—and the alternative to a life of abandonment available to Champneys on the continent—suggests that we should not simply read this omission in terms of gender but also in terms of confessional identity and social position.
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In The Art of English Poesy, George Puttenham represents himself as courtier, poet, and literary historian, documenting a burgeoning national poetic tradition from the inside. By writing about poetry in terms of the court and the monarch, Puttenham helped shape both the creation of the early modern canon and its perception as the product of a distinctly Elizabethan—and therefore Protestant—culture. From the frontispiece image of Elizabeth and its inscription A colei / Che se stessa rassomiglia / & non altrui (“To her who resembles herself and no other”) to the final supplication of her favor, The Art revolves around the queen: her patronage, her status, and her poetry are figured as the center of Puttenham’s treatment of English literature.11 But Puttenham’s own relationship to court and queen was never what he desired it to be, and an attentive reading of The Art’s politics hints at the very literary histories Puttenham refuses to name.
The logic of early modern political theory structures Puttenham’s textual invocations of Elizabeth, which cast her as the fulfillment of his opening declaration that “A poet is as much to say as a maker” (93). As England’s queen, she is necessarily the “most excellent poet” of her time, for she “by [her] princely purse, favors, and countenance, mak[es] in manner what [she] list, the poor man rich, the lewd well learned, the coward courageous, and vile both noble and valiant” (95). This is a neat inversion: if a poet is a maker “by way of resemblance” with God’s creative power, so too must England’s monarch, who most resembles God in her political power, be a poet (93). Praise of Elizabeth’s poetic skill thus does not depend upon her poetic production: she is the culmination of Puttenham’s genealogy of English poets at the end of Book 1 not because of what she has written but because of who she is.
But last in recital and first in degree is the Queen, our Sovereign Lady, whose learned, delicate, noble muse easily surmounteth all the rest that have written before her time or since, for sense, sweetness, and subtlety, be it in ode, elegy, epigram, or any other kind of poem heroic or lyric, wherein it shall please her Majesty to employ her pen, even by as much odds as her own excellent estate and degree exceedeth all the rest of her most humble vassals. (151)
In a grammatical sleight of hand, Puttenham transforms the list of forms that Elizabeth has mastered (she “easily surmounteth all the rest that have written”) into a conditional through the modal verb “shall”: if she were to write in these forms, then her poems would necessarily surpass all others, just as she herself surpasses her subjects.
While she was not as prolific as Puttenham suggests in Book 1 of The Art, Elizabeth was indeed a poet, and her verse exemplifies the analogy between political power and literary significance that underlies both Puttenham’s bid for patronage and his creation of an exclusive and exclusionary English literary tradition. His choice of Elizabeth’s “The Doubt of Future Foes” as the exemplar for “the last and principal figure of our poetical ornament,” exergasia or, as Puttenham defines it, “the Gorgeous,” reveals this interrelationship between literature and politics, while hinting at those silenced by Puttenham’s focus on the Protestant monarch and her court (333).12 By claiming that there is “none example in English meter so well maintaining this figure as that ditty of her Majesty’s own making,” Puttenham analogizes the figure that he defines as “the most beautiful and gorgeous of all others” and Elizabeth, “the most beautiful, or rather beauty, of queens” (334). In this analogy, the aesthetic appeal of poetry is both a sign and a function of social status and political power. Puttenham thus neglects an evaluation of the poem’s formal qualities in favor of an explanation of its political occasion: “our Sovereign Lady, perceiving how by the Sc. Q. residence within this realm at so great liberty and ease … bred secret factions among her people…. writeth this ditty most sweet and sententious, not hiding from all such aspiring minds the danger of their ambition and disloyalty” (334). “The Doubt of Future Foes” may be “sweet and sententious,” but its political message is what makes it so: the value of poetry lies in its political authority. As Puttenham explains, the threat that Elizabeth’s poem inscribes “afterward fell out most truly by the exemplary chastisement of sundry persons, who, in favor of the said Sc. Q. declining from her Majesty, sought to interrupt the quiet of the realm by many evil and undutiful practices” (334). Poems make politics,