Quidditas 24 - BYU Humanities - Brigham Young University

QUIDDITAS 

Journal of the Rocky Mountain 

Medieval and Renaissance 

Association 

Volume 24 2003

ii 

Quidditas 24 (2003) 

EDITORS 

Editor: Sharon A. Beehler, Montana State University 

Associate Editor: Eugene R. Cunnar, New Mexico State University 

Associate Editor: Margaret Harp, University of Nevada, Las Vegas 

Associate Editor: Harry Rosenberg, Colorado State University Book 

Review Editor: Lowell Gallagher, UCLA 

Associate Editor/Production: Kathryn Brammall, Truman State 

University 

MEMBERS OF THE EXECUTIVE C OUNCIL AND EDITORIAL 

ADVISORY BOARD 

Susan Aronstein, University of Wyoming 

Sylvia Bowerbank, McMasters University (through 2003) 

Jean R. Brink, Arizona State University (ex-officio) 

Stan Benfell, Brigham Young University (through 2004) 

Eugene R. Cunnar, New Mexico State University (ex-officio) 

Paul A. Dietrich, University of Montana (ex-officio) 

Thomas R. Eckenrode, Fort Lewis College (ex-officio) 

James Fitzmaurice, Northern Arizona University (ex-officio) Lowell 

Gallagher, UCLA (through 2000) 

Phebe Jensen, Utah State University (through 2001) 

Jean MacIntyre, University of Alberta (through 1999) 

Isabel Moreira, University of Utah (through 2001) 

Carol Neel, Colorado College (ex-officio) 

Glenn Olson, University of Utah (ex-officio) 

Joseph Perry, Brigham Young University (through 2004) 

Harry Rosenberg, Colorado State University (ex-officio) 

Charles Smith, State University of Colorado (ex-officio) 

Sara Jayne Steen, Montana State University (ex-officio) 

Jesse Swan, University of Northern Iowa (through 2004) 

Paul Thomas, Brigham Young University (through 2003) 

Michael Walton, University of Utah (through 1999) 

Charles Whitney, UN, Las Vegas (through 2003) 

Elspeth Whitney, UN, Las Vegas (through 2003) 

Jane Woodruff, William Jewell College (through 2004) 

© Copyright 2002 by The Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance 

Association. ISSN: 195–8453

NOTICE TO CONTRIBUTORS 

Quidditas 24 (2003 iii 

Founded in 1980 as JRMMRA (The Journal of the Rocky Mountain 

Medieval and Renaissance Association), the journal is published once a 

year and continues to be so under its current name, Quidditas. Scholars 

of the Middle Ages or Renaissance are invited to submit essays (twenty 

to thirty double-spaced manuscript pages) that would appeal to readers of 

medieval and early modern disciplines. Submissions will be refereed. 

Manuscripts written in English and dealing with medieval or renaissance 

studies, regardless of field or nationality, should follow The Chicago 

Manual of Style and be submitted without the author’s name appearing 

therein. A cover letter containing the author’s name, address, telephone 

number, e-mail address, and title of paper should accompany the 

submission. Please send four copies of the manuscript to: 

Professor Sharon A. Beehler Editor, Quidditas 

Department of English 

Montana State University Bozeman 

Bozeman, MT 59717-2300 

We regret that we are unable to accept e-mail submissions. Authors of 

accepted work will be asked to supply a copy of the manuscript on a 

computer disk compatible with Macintosh programs. 

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION 

Subscription to the journal for individuals is by membership in the 

Association at the following costs: $25 for graduate students, 

independent scholars, adjunct faculty, and retired faculty; $35 for 

Assistant Professors; $40 for Associate Professors; $45 for Full 

Professors; and an additional $5 at the appropriate level for joint 

memberships. A single back issue costs $20. For further information, 

including institution subscription rates, please contact: 

Professor Susan Aronstein Treasurer, RMMRA 

Department of English University of Wyoming 

P.O. Box 3353 Laramie, WY 82070-0001 

Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in PMLA, 

Historical Abstracts, and America: History and Life.

iv 


FROM THE EDITOR 

Quidditas. This is a Latin legal term that originally meant “the 

essential nature of a thing” and appeared in fourteenth-century 

French as “quiddite” In the Renaissance, the English adaptation, 

“quiddity,” came to mean “logical subtleties” or “a captious nicety 

in argument” (OED) and is so used in Hamlet (“Why may not that 

be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, 

his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?” 5.1.95–97). Thus, the 

original Latin meaning, together with the later implied notions of 

intense scrutiny, systematic reasoning, and witty wordplay, is well 

suited to the contents of the journal. 

Cover design by Winston Vanderhoof and Jason Daum, Truman 

State University designer. Domenico Theotokopulos, called El 

Greco. Spanish, b. Greece, 1541–1614. The Assumption of the 

Virgin, 1577, oil on canvas, 401.4 x 228.7 cm., Gift of Nancy 

Atwood Sprague in memory of Albert Sprague, 1906.99, 

unframed. Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago

ARTICLES 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Quidditas 24 (2003 v 

God As Androgyne: Jane Lead’s Rewriting of the Destiny 

of Nature 

Sylvia Bowerbank. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 

The Unfortunate Traveller and the Ramist Controversy: 

A Narrative Dilemma 

Kurtis B. Haas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 

Pain for Pen:Gaspara Stampa’s Stile Novo 

Amy R. Insalaco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 

Wise Maget 

Jolyon Timothy Hughes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55 

ALLEN D. BRECK AWARD WINNER 

The Presence of the Past: Shakespeare in South Africa 

Natasha Distiller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 

DELNO C. WEST AWARD WINNER 

Using and Abusing Delegated Power in Elizabethan 

England 

James H. Forse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

vi 


Contents 

BOOK REVIEWS 

The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the 

Scribe 

Thomas Klein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 

The Friend 

Garrett P.J. Epp. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 

The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and 

Castration in the Italian Renaissance 

Liz Horodowich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124

ARTICLES

God As Androgyne: Jane Lead’s Rewriting 

of the Destiny of Nature 

Sylvia Bowerbank 

McMaster University 

JANE 

LEAD 

[ OR LEADE] 

(1624–1704) was one of the few seventeenthcentury 

Englishwomen bold and radical enough to engage in “Godtalk”—to 

use Rosemary Ruether’s term. 1 When the power of the 

English king and church was restored in 1660, radical millenarians were 

repressed and had to face that the English revolution—“God’s cause”— 

had failed politically, at least temporarily. 2 In her recuperation of God’s 

cause, Lead argued that the revolution, properly understood, would be 

“intrinsical.” 3 In her prophecies, Lead unites a radical hermeneutics of 

Scripture with Jacob Boehme’s concept of God as androgyne in order to 

reconfigure both God and divine history. According to Lead, Wisdom’s 

disciples and eventually all of creation were to be—to use a Behmenist keyword—“tinctured” 

by the Virgin Wisdom’s creating power, until a critical 

mass was made ready for revolutionary change. The license for this strategy 

was found in Scripture, especially Proverbs and the Books of Wisdom, 

in which a Divine Feminine voice of Wisdom speaks directly: 

I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the 

earth was.… 

When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not 

pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of 

the earth: 

Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily 

his delight, rejoicing always before him; 

Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth… (Prov. 8:1, 22, 29– 

32). 

1Rosemary 

Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: 

Beacon Press, 1983). 

2The idea of the failure of “God’s cause” is found in Christopher Hill, Milton and the 

English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 199–212. 

3Jane Lead, The Enochian Walks with God, Found out by a Spiritual-Traveller, whose Face 

Towards Mount-Sion Above was set. [Gen. 5. verse. 22] ; an Experimental Account of what was 

known, Seen, and met withal there (1694), 6. 

QUIDDITAS 24 (2003) 5

6 Sylvia Bowerbank 

Lead’s God is rooted in the desire for a just and compassionate universe, 

in theological concepts based on the rhythms of woman’s body, and spiritual 

practices devised by Lead and her circle. 4 

What made the Philadelphian movement unique was the primacy it 

afforded women’s theological disclosures. As the foremost prophet of the 

Philadelphians and the writer of its foundational texts, Jane Lead spent the 

last thirty years of her eighty-year life reinterpreting certain passages from 

the Bible in order to tease out the voice and presence of a hidden part of 

God, the Virgin Wisdom. 5 In her first Message to the Philadelphian Society 

(1696), Lead points to the centrality of “woman clothed with the sun” 

passage in the founding of the Philadelphian community: 

according to John’s Prophecy, a Virgin Woman is designed of a 

pure Spirit, and of a bright Sun-like Body, all impregnated with 

the Holy Ghost, that shall travail to bring forth the First-born, 

that will multiply and propagate such a Body, as shall be filled 

with the Spirit, Power, and Temple Glory of the Lamb of God. 6 

The Philadelphian message was especially germane and empowering for 

women. According to one scholar, so many ladies joined the society 

during the late 1690s that it became “derisively known as the Taffeta Society.” 

7 The movement also attracted talented and learned men, the most 

important of whom were Francis Lee (1660–1719) and Richard Roach 

(1661–1730), both graduates of St. John’s College, Oxford. Lee not only 

became Jane Lead’s spiritual son, even marrying her widowed daughter to 

secure the relationship, he also co-founded the Philadelphian Society with 

Lead, in 1697, in order to propagate her ideas systematically, through 

organizing public meetings and publishing her writings. Reverend Rich- 

4 This argument is developed in Sylvia Bowerbank,“Millennial Bodies: The Birth of 

New Nature in the Late Seventeenth Century,” in Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies 

of Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 

5 Important studies of Jane Lead’s work are included in Paula McDowell, The Women of 

Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678–1730 

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Catherine F. Smith, “Jane Lead’s Wisdom: Women and 

Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature., ed. 

Jan Wojcik and Raymond-Jean Frontain (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 

1984), 55–63; eadem, “Jane Lead: The Feminist Mind and Art of a Seventeenth-Century 

Protestant Mystic,” in Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, 

ed. Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979): 

183–203; Joanne Magnani Sperle, “God’s Healing Angel: A Biography of Jane Lead” 

(Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Kent State University, 1985); and Nils Thune, The Behmenists 

and the Philadelphians: A Contribution to the Study of English Mysticism in the 17th 

and 18th Centuries (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1948). 

6 Jane Lead, A Message to the Philadelphian Society, Whithersoever dispersed over the whole 

Earth (London, 1696), 12. 

7 Lee C.E. Whiting, Studies in English Puritanism from the Restoration to the Revolution, 

1660–1688 (1931; repr. New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1968), 307. Unfortunately, 

Whiting gives no source for this comment.

God As Androgyne 7 

ard Roach, rector of St. Augustine’s, Hackney, was an equally steadfast 

spiritual son of Jane Lead. He acknowledged in his “Divine Communication,” 

that, although the Virgin Wisdom of God might condescend to display 

herself to men, she especially manifested herself intrinsically to 

women: “And hence favours will be indulged to the females of this day, 

both virgin and others, of like nature with that of the Virgin Mary, but in 

a more internal and spiritual way.” 8 The Philadelphian vision is a legacy of 

hope, but it is built on the spiritualization of body and earth and on the 

eschatological motifs of Revelation. What does the Christian mystical tradition 

have to offer to current debates over the destiny of the earth and its 

inhabitants? 

It remains important to study the details of the intellectual struggle of 

the Philadelphians, as well as the strategies they used to bring into effect a 

distinctive concept of an androgyne God and a corresponding history of 

nature receptive to women’s desire for a compassionate and just reality. In 

fact, the very strangeness of their ideas makes visible the range and limits 

of what has now become acceptable “nature” for us. Many educated men 

of the Restoration period, whether theologians or philosophers, agreed 

that God no longer intervened miraculously to change nature. The lesson 

learned from English revolution was that entrenched hierarchies of power, 

whether in the church or state, would be challenged and disrupted if 

God’s love was allowed to range indiscriminately and dangerously among 

people of all stations. “God” was increasingly restricted to operating only 

as Providence, according to set and knowable natural laws. Such educated 

men thus did their part to depreciate enthusiasm as a dangerous contagion. 

9 God’s intervention in history was to be considered a unique occurrence 

of the apostolic period. With the repression of prophecy, there were 

no openings for women’s theological discoveries, even among the Quakers. 

10 Nevertheless, especially during the 1690s, Jane Lead and the Philadelphians 

had some short-lived success in publishing their tracts and in 

promulgating their concept of an androgyne God with revolutionary 

plans. Chief among Lead’s contributions was her reiteration of radical 

compassion as the cosmic principle of Divine interaction with nature. By 

envisioning God as an androgyne, with Virgin Wisdom hidden eternally 

8Roach’s “Divine Communication” is reproduced in a patchwork collection of Philadelphian 

pieces, published as Mrs. Jane Lead, Divine Revelations and Prophecies (Nottingham: 

H. Wild, 1830), 81–88. 

9See George Williamson, “The Restoration Revolt Against Enthusiasm,” Studies in Philology 

30 (1933): 571–603. Two well known philosophical attacks were Henry More, Enthusiasmus 

Triumphatus (1662) and John Locke, “Of Enthusiasm,” in An Essay on Human 

Understanding, 2 vols. (1690; repr. New York: Dover, 1959), 2:429–31, 434, 436, 438. 

10 For the use of “God” as a mechanism of social control to encounter radical spirituality 

in late eighteenth-century England, see Stuart Peterfreund, “Blake, Priestley, and the 

‘Gnostic Moment,’” in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund 

(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990),142–43.


within him, Lead highlighted compassion as an essential co-existing quality 

of God the Father (not just the Son). Her aim was to discover a method 

by which earthly bodies might be made “agreeable” and “answerable” to 

the rising light of Divine Wisdom who was to remake nature, subject by 

subject, in Her own compassionate image. 11 

Christianity has bequeathed to the West a conflicted legacy regarding 

the nature of God and divine interaction with the earth and its inhabitants. 

Particularly vexing from the point of view of ecology is Christianity’s 

eschatological history of nature. 12 “Ecology” designates a range of discourses 

about life and its habitats (from Greek eco for “habitat” or “household”), 

and includes ethical discourses concerning how to coexist 

appropriately with other forms of life on earth. In contrast, “eschatology” 

designates a distinctive discourse on last things, on the end of history, on 

death and judgment; it is derived from the Greek eskhatos for “last,” plus 

the familiar logos for “discourse.” As Stephen L. Cook writes that to invoke 

the eschatological mode, whether in literature, politics, or society, is to 

instigate radical change and discontinuity; eschatology “involves an imminent 

inbreaking by God inaugurating a future age qualitatively different 

from this age. 13 For Christians, the ultimate achievement of ecological 

harmony or peaceable nature has been understood as a millennial phenomenon. 

14 In the final analysis, to appeal to an alternative reality in 

which all beings achieve perfect accord on earth is to evoke the coming of 

the end of time and space, when Divine Spirit enters material history. It is 

also to bring into play the authority of certain key Biblical texts, especially 

Revelation in which God’s version of history is enigmatically disclosed. 

Discursively, eschatology defers the ultimate overcoming of suffering and 

oppression to the end of history, when the earth will be annihilated amidst 

a series of apocalyptic horrors, but finally transcendent reality will be 

restored. Arguably, in the meantime, for Christians, contemptus mundi has 

long seemed the height of spiritual intelligence. By locating salvation else- 

11 Jane Lead’s diary, Fountain of Gardens, was published in 3 volumes; 1 and 2 in 1697; 

and volume 3 in 2 parts 1700 and 1701; for this idea, see3:68 and passim. 

12 Important ecofeminist critiques of Christian eschatology include: Ruethe, Sexism and 

God-talk, 99–102, 235–66; and Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology 

(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), esp. chap. 7, “Eschatology: A New Shape for Humanity,”197–212. 

For an appreciative analysis of Ruether & McFague’s contributions, see Peter 

C. Phan, “Woman and the Last Things: A Feminist Eschatology,” in In the Embrace of God: 

Feminist Approaches to Theological Anthropology, ed. Ann O’Hara Graff (Maryknoll, New 

York: Orbis, 1995): 206–28. 

13Stephen L. Cook, Prophecy & Apocalypticism: The Postexilic Social Setting (Minneapolis: 

Fortress Press, 1995), 24 

14 For the widespread use of millennial rhetoric in ecological writing, see M. Jimmie 

Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer. “Millennial Ecology: The Apocalypse Narrative from 

Silent Spring to Global Warming,” in Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary 

America, ed. Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown (Madison: University of Wisconsin 

Press, 1996), 21–45.


where, either in the afterlife for individuals or at the end of history for 

humanity, Christianity can be said to look forward to death of the body 

and of the planet. Such an apocalyptic pattern of history suggests, to some 

observers, that Christianity seems theologically committed to ecocide. 15 

At the very least, Christians have been charged with worshiping a transcendent 

God who appears aloof from, if not indifferent to, the well-being 

of the earth, but who will return in wrath to judge the failings of earth and 

its bodies. 

Ruether raises the provocative question of whether Christian ideas of 

eschatology can be ever be understood as compatible with an ecological or 

a feminist understanding of history. Ruether’s own strategy is, in part, to 

focus attention away from a transcendent God toward the positive doctrine 

of incarnation; the ministry of Jesus has always exemplified the revolutionary 

concept of “Divine advocacy of the Oppressed” and thus the 

promise of a new day and a new earth. 16 Interpreted as earth-friendly, the 

eschatological promise of a future time when God’s amnesty will take 

effect encourages Christians to act in order to bring about an end to suffering 

and oppression. For Bernice Marie-Daly the millennial process 

toward good change on earth is essentially gendered and dualistic: the 

“masculine” properties of domination and struggle will be overcome or be 

balanced by the “feminine” properties of compassion and co-operation. 17 

Nor have secular writers forsaken the imaginative potential of eschatological 

metaphors. Western ecological feminists still combine ideals of androgyny 

and the appeal to a lost home of “Eden” to configure the desired 

future state of ecological harmony and justice. 18 The deeply engrained 

15 One of the strongest challenges comes from Native American critics, such as Vine 

Deloria, God is Red (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1973). Ward Churchill, Struggle for the 

Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide, and Colonization (Winnipeg: 

Arbeiter Ringer, 1999) documents a number of case studies of the disastrous effects of 

Euro/Christian approaches to land use in contrast to the earth-centered practices of, for 

example, the Haudenosaunee of Upper-state New York, the Lakota of the northern plains, 

and the Lubicon Cree of Northern Alberta. 

16 Reuther, Sexism and God-talk, 25. The contradiction at the center of the Judeo- 

Christian God is captured nicely in the Rabbinical saying: “God prays to himself that his 

mercy may triumph over his severity”; In E. Stauffer, “Theos.” in Theological Dictionary of 

the New Testament, ed. Kittel, 3:110. Quoted by Blumenberg 260. 

17Bernice Marie-Daly, Ecofeminism: Sacred Matter/Sacred Mother (Chambersburg, PA: 

Anima Books, 1991). Her ideas are loosely based on Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary view 

of the “eternal feminine” as a celestial force spiritualizing nature. In 1918, he wrote: “The 

Virgin is still woman and mother: in that we may read the sign of the new age.… By its very 

nature, the Feminine must continue unremittingly to make itself progressively more felt in a 

universe that has not reached the term of its evolution.… The tender compassion, the hallowed 

charm, that radiate from woman—so naturally that it is only in her that you look for 

them, and yet so mysteriously that you cannot say whence they come—are the presence of 

God making itself felt and setting you ablaze”; The Prayer of the Universe (London: Collins, 

1973), 149–53. 

18 Marilyn Sewell, ed., Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women’s Spirituality (Boston: 

Beacon Press, 1991), 235.


pattern of the earthly “now” against the heavenly “then” is illustrated here 

in a poem which accompanied Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party”: 

And then compassion will be wedded to power 

And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind 

And then both men and women will be gentle 

And then both women and men will be strong 

And then no person will be subject to another’s will 

And then all will be rich and free and varied … 

And then all will live in harmony with each other and the Earth 

And then everywhere will be called Eden once again. 

The Philadelphian contribution to Western thought is very much about 

the opening up of the concept of God to its full and radical potential, thus, 

setting in motion a corresponding restoration of nature in the here and 

now. Jane Lead prophesied that, if Divine Feminine, obscured in the shadows 

of Judeo-Christian tradition, were given full and fair expression, a culture 

of planetary peace could soon be created. With curious prescience, 

Boehme had called the process “the greening” of creation. 19 

The Philadelphian vision of the future is articulated as a spiritualization 

of nature and, as a consequence, does not appear to anticipate either 

feminist or ecological thought. And while it may be good news for feminists 

that a Feminine Divinity appeared to an Englishwoman in the lateseventeenth 

century, this figure is stubbornly configured as a Virgin—as a 

self-generating Spirit, unpolluted by the concerns of the known world and 

weaknesses of the human body. The appeal to an ultimate future when the 

earth and humanity will be made luminous by the grace of the Virgin 

Wisdom seems to negate any immediate concern with planetary wellbeing. 

The Philadelphians aspired to be “virginized souls”; they worked to 

clarify their bodies in the “Eunuch Reservatory.” 20 The bright ethereal 

bodies that inhabit Lead’s visions seem strange and estranged from our 

current earth-based perspective that studies, reveres, and defends the 

sacred lives of whales and snails, the fecundity and variety of earth’s 

embodied progeny. Lead’s visions of a Divine Virgin seem entirely 

abstracted from the earth and its realities, grounded in otherworldly illusions 

and apparently oblivious to ecological wellbeing. Yet, understood 

within seventeenth-century political discourse, the Philadelphian “virgin 

nature” is a complicated and radical concept. The keen resemblance 

19See Jacob Boehme, Four Tables of Divine Revelation (1654), reproduced by Nigel 

Smith in “Jacob Boehme and the Sects,” in Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature 

in English Radical Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 194. 

20 Lead, Fountain of Gardens, 1:26. As Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God”: The Making of 

Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) makes clear, the use of the 

word “eunuch” has long been in use among ascetic communities to designate their preferred 

mode of subjectivity (122–24).


between the confined situation of their Divine champion (hidden in God 

the Father) and that of the humble circle of inquiring women (hidden in 

the shadows of patriarchy), waiting and working together for the liberation 

of the Virgin Wisdom and the coming of a new age suggests that the 

Philadelphian movement was not merely apolitical and otherworldly. 

Jane Lead’s version of nature’s revolutionary destiny is based on four 

main sources: 1) her continual reading of Scripture, especially the sapiential 

books and Revelation; 2) her youthful encounters with the dissenting 

conventicles of the 1640s; 3) her study of Boehme’s theosophical speculations 

especially as they were were filtered through the conversations and 

writings of English Behmenists, chiefly John Pordage (1608–81); and 4) 

her own visions of the Virgin Wisdom, starting in 1670 and continuing for 

thirty years. The influence of Revelation is pervasive in her writings, especially 

in the urgency and intensity of her prose. 21 To illustrate, on 1 February 

1678, she is startled out of sleep by a Voice: 

Awake, awake, be putting on of your Body of Strength, sleep not 

in security as others do, for distress in all Nations is coming on.… 

that Fire-Ball will kindle throughout all Nations, whereby they 

shall be consumed and devour one another. But there will be 

given again the immaculate Body to some, for a distinguishing 

and sealing Mark.… These are of the ransomed Ones…a righteous 

Seed, that shall replenish the Earth again, after Judgment 

hath done its work…. 22 

Yet, despite the influence of Revelation, the familiar series of apocalyptic 

horrors—war, famine, plague, earth quakes, and other global catastrophes, 

and even the last judgment—are rarely mentioned. 23 Instead, characteristically, 

Lead seeks a compassionate interpretation of the text; she 

21 Resonances of Revelation abound in Lead’s texts, and include everything from the 

redeemed being arrayed in white robes, washed in the blood of the Lamb; to an penchant for 

the number seven (as in the opening of the seventh seal); to having the phrase “I am Alpha 

and Omega” carved on her tombstone; Rev. 7:14; 8:1; 21:6. 

22 Lead, Fountain of Gardens, 3.1.56–57. 

23As Sperle points out, Francis Lee reported that his mother-in-law often said that 

“There are many angels of judgment but few healing angels”; quoted in Sperle, “God’s 

Healing Angel,” 30. Sperle felt the comment so crucial to an understanding of what Lead’s 

mission was about that she entitled her PhD dissertation: “God’s Healing Angel: A Biography 

of Jane Ward Lead.” In contrast, although Adam McLean also noticed Lead’s emphasis 

on healing over vengeance, he decided, notwithstanding, to illustrate his 1981 edition of her 

Revelation of Revelations with Albrecht Durer’s famous woodcuts of the Apocalypse. The 

juxtaposition of Lead’s text and Dürer’s imagery serves to show a marked difference in their 

representations of the same book of the Bible: “As a contrast to her interior images,” admits 

McLean, “[Durer’s woodcuts] symbolically capture a more male, outer vision of the Apocalypse 

events, complete with millenialist destruction and horror”; Adam McLean, introduction 

to Jane Leade, The Revelation of Revelations (Edinburgh: Magnum Opus Hermetic 

Sourceworks, 1981), 4.


focuses on “the ransomed Ones” and the positive potential of the woman 

clothed in sun, travailing to give birth, and eventually triumphing in 

bringing forth a new universe. In Lead’s second book Revelation of Revelations 

(1683), the opening of the seventh and last seal is given a positive 

spin; it will uncover the “rich bank and vast treasury of Wisdom,” and 

loosen her spirit and power to “vigorously carry on this New Jerusalembuilding.” 

24 The words of Revelation that resonate in Lead’s texts suggest 

that she is focusing her gaze well past the apocalypse; she is striving to sing 

a “new song” and even as she writes, the “living stones” are gathering 

together to build the New Jerusalem. 

Lead’s debt to the theosophy of Jacob Boehme is everywhere evident 

in her writings. This legacy was acquired between 1670 and 1681, when 

she entered into a close spiritual partnership with John Pordage. Pordage 

was a leading English commentator on Boehme’s recently translated texts 

and an initiator of a circle of Behmenist mystics. 25 In Revelation of Revelation, 

Lead reiterates Boehme’s narrative of cosmic history in which, for 

all eternity, God dwells in a deep abyss or “glassy sea” of Revelation 4:6 

(Boehme’s Ungrund), which appears as still nothingness, outside of time, 

space, or structure, but contains everything. Before time, God existed 

abstractly, writes Lead, “abiding in his own simplified Deity, before either 

the angels or other creatures were created.” 26 Following Boehme, her 

God is a God who, longing to be conscious of self, appears as in a mirror 

and beholds the Virgin Wisdom. God is revealed as an androgyne in 

whom the Virgin Wisdom abides, though hidden, for all eternity; no mention 

is made of her being created. Accordingly, Lead writes, the Virgin is a 

manifestation of the everlasting and divine creator: 

She was before all, as being the co-essential creating power in the 

Deity, which formed all things out of nothing, and hath given a 

dignified existency to all those seraphic glories which move within 

her own Sphere, who are the product of an unsearchable wisdom, 

for the replenishing of those superior worlds which are little 

known in this, where we are outcasts. 27 

24Jane Lead, Revelation of Revelations (London, 1683), 23. Catherine F. Smith does an 

astute biographical reading of Lead’s penchant for using metaphors of riches and dowries 

that cannot be snatched away. Given that, after her wealthy husband’s death, Lead was swindled 

by an overseas administrator and left destitute, she might have been “covertly protesting” 

the legal practices and limitations regarding women’s rights of inheritance. See “Jane 

Lead’s Wisdom,” 58–59. 

25In Perfection Proclaimed, Nigel Smith points out that thirty-two separate translations 

of Boehme were published between 1644 and 1662 (188). Smith’s chapter, “Jacob Boehme 

and the Sects,” is a fine assessment of Pordage’s contribution. Other important studies 

include: Thune, The Behmenists and the Philadelphians; and Serge Hutin, Les Disciples Anglais 

de Jacob Boehme aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1960). 

26 Lead, Revelation of Revelation, 28. 

27 Ibid., 54.


Thus, for Lead, as for Boehme, the Virgin Wisdom is at once God’s selfsimilation 

and dissimilation. 

In Lead’s history of nature, it is the suffering of the earth that moves 

the Virgin to proceed from the glassy sea of eternity. The until-nowhidden 

female part of God hears the groaning of the earth, and, in deep 

compassion, emerges in historical time to bring forth good change. Like 

so many of her contemporaries, Lead’s understanding of the present state 

of the world is that of a broken humanity and a degraded earth, suffering 

under the curse of the fall. In one vision, she sees the whole frame of earth, 

trembling restlessly, while “those Inhabitants that were found upon it, 

stood shaking and tottering.” 28 Likewise, in a vision of 16 March 1678, 

“a man of earth” appears to her, dressed in “plain husbandman’s garb,” 

and bows to her. Lead cries out “Woe and Alas!” in sympathy and solidarity 

with the man of the earth, afflicted in “a thousand ways.” He is the 

progeny of Adam, who generated according to the fallen kind and now, 

alas, “the Earth is over-spread with a Corrupted Seed…[we are] Creatures 

of Oppression and Violence.” 29 The time is nigh for the Virgin’s seed to 

crush the serpent’s seed, as promised in Genesis 3:15. “Solomon’s Porch,” 

the splendid poem that prefaces Lead’s Fountain of Gardens, reiterates the 

Philadelphian vision of the earth’s destiny: 

Too long, too long the wretched World 

Lies wast, in wild Confusion hurl’d 

Unhing’d in ev’ry part; each Property 

Struggling disrang’d in fiercest Enmity. 

The whole Creation groans;… 

But now shall Natures Jarr 

Cease her Intestine War…. 30 

Lead and her followers construct an historical narrative in which violence 

and suffering are to be driven out of the cosmos. This very day, in London, 

the Virgin Wisdom hidden in God is in ascendancy once more; she is 

listening to groaning creation, as a mother “who cannot but be more sympathizing 

with her Children.” She is seeking a way to redeem the earth to 

its first estate, working to create subjects answerable to her will, so that she 

may reenter history fully. 31 

By way of elucidating the Philadelphian view of the cosmos, I now 

digress briefly to the work of Anne Conway who, although she converted 

28Lead, Fountain of Gardens, 3.1.65. 

29 Ibid., 3.1.121–22. 

30 “Solomon’s Porch” was probably written by Francis Lee (see Christopher Walton, 

Notes and Materials for an Adequate Biography of the Celebrated Divine and Theosopher, William 

Law [London, 1854] ,232, 252), although for some reason Thune attributes it to Richard 

Roach; The Behmenists and the Philadelphians, 139. 

31 Lead, Enochian Walks, 26.


to Quakerism in the end, took a long term interest in Behmenist ideas. 32 

As D.P. Walker points out, one of the few books advertised in Theosophical 

Transactions (1697) of the Philadelphians was Conway’s Principles of the 

most Antient and Modern Philosophy. 33 The affinity between Conway and 

the Philadelphians can be seen in the former’s claim that the original creation 

was based on the principle of sympathy: “[God] implanted a certain 

Universal Sympathy and mutual Love in Creatures, as being all Members 

of one Body.…” 34 Conway also theorized the body as essentially one substance 

with the spirit, and therefore capable of gradually transforming 

itself into a more subtle and volatile form. 35 She dared to attack Hobbes, 

Descartes, and other modern philosophers for failing to understand the 

powers of the body and matter to transmute themselves: 

they were plainly ignorant of the noblest and most excellent 

Attributes of that Substance which they call Body and Matter… 

Spirit of Life, and Light, under which I comprehend a capacity of 

all Kind of Feeling, Sense, and Knowledge, Love, Joy and Fruition, 

and all kind of Power and Virtue, which the noblest Creatures 

have or can have; so that even the vilest and most 

contemptible Creatures; yea, dust and sand, may be capable of all 

those Perfections…through various and succedaneous Transmutations 

from the one into the other; which according to the Natural 

Order of Things, require long Periods of Time for their 

Consummation, although the Absolute Power of God…could 

have accelerated or hastened all Things and effected it in one 

moment…. 36 

Thus, like the Philadelphians, Conway thought the achievement of true 

nature was possible in history. God gave creatures time, she argues, so that 

they might pride themselves in the work required to perfect themselves by 

slow degrees: “as the Instruments of Divine Wisdom, Goodness and 

Power which operates in, and with them: for therein the Creature hath the 

32 As demonstrated in a letter of a certain Worthington [no first name given] to Henry 

More, dated 8 January 1668: “I believe had your ears full of Behmenism at Ragly [Lady 

Conway’s estate]…for when I was at London, I met with one who was to buy all Jacob Behmen’s 

works to send thither”; quoted in Margaret Lewis Bailey, Milton and Jakob Boehme: A 

Study of German Mysticism in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Haskell House, 

1964), 93. 

33Anne Conway, Principles of the most Antient and Modern Philosophy (1692). This is an 

English translation of the Latin version, Principia Philosophiae Antiquissimae & Recentissimae… 

(Amsterdam 1690). Conway’s original English version is lost. Theosophical Transactions 

(London: Philadephian Society, 1697), 98; D.P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: 

Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 

1964), 225. 

34 Conway, Principles, 56. 

35 Ibid., 140. 

36 Ibid.,154–56.


greater Joy, when it possesseth what it hath, as the Fruit of its own 

Labour.” 37 

The centrality of radical compassion to Lead’s concept of the godhead 

is indicated by the fact that only once did she disagree overtly with Boehme’s 

theosophy (and some of her followers) in vindicating the doctrine 

of apocatastasis (or universal restoration). 38 Referring to her departure 

from Boehme, she writes: 

I must own, that Jacob Behmen did open a deep Foundation of 

the Eternal Principles, and was a worthy Instrument in his Day. 

But it was not given to him, neither was it the Time for the 

unsealing of this Deep. God has in every Age something still to 

bring forth of his Secrets, to some on Gift, to some another, as 

the Age and Time grows ripe for it. 39 

Her spirit moved another degree, she tells us, when in 1693, it was 

revealed to her that God’s compassion would be extended universally to 

all those once considered lost, including the apostasized angels. On the 

title page of Enochian Walks, she announces that there is to be a fresh 

teaching on the “Immense and Infinite Latitude of God’s Love,” that is, 

that the restoration of His Whole Creation to its Original harmony will 

include even the Luciferian spirits, once the time of their due punishment 

is over. This is a cosmic compassion so radical that one of her contemporaries 

accused Lead not only of heresy but of endangering public order: 

“in this age of licentiousness, there is hardly any doctrine of hers of more 

pernicious consequence than that of her pretending Divine revelation for 

her doctrine concerning the finiteness of hell torments.” 40 

Jane Lead’s writings on the Virgin Wisdom release a volatile figure 

capable of effecting fundamental change. Lead shrewdly negotiates the 

shifty terrain between dogma and myth, theorized by Hans Blumenberg in 

his Work on Myth. Unlike holy texts which “cannot be altered one iota,” 

writes Blumenberg, myths have a high degree of constancy at their narrative 

core that makes them “recognizable,” and the capacity for variation 

and innovation on their margins. 41 On one hand, Lead is confronted with 

the fixity of Protestant orthodoxy that requires the validation of scriptural 

authority, even as it virtually disallows women to engage in theology or 

textual exegesis. On the other hand, Lead has her own visions of the 

37Ibid.,155. 

38For Lead’s adherence to the doctrine of apocatastasis, see Thune,The Behmenists and 

the Philadelphians, 72–77; and Walker, The Decline of Hell, 218–30. 

39 Jane Lead, A Revelation of the Everlasting Gospel-Message (London, 1697), 25. 

40 The comment is taken from one of Henry Dodwell’s letters to Francis Lee, cited in 

Walton,Notes and Materials, 193; emphasis in original. 

41 Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT 

Press, 1985), 34.


Virgin Wisdom which license her to tell particularized stories about God’s 

present operations and the future of the earth. Lead elaborates on the 

Word; she seeks deliberately to speak what she terms “fresh words” on 

Divine history. 42 Based on Scriptural remnants, she initiates a new narrative 

about the Virgin Wisdom entering history and situates the story in a 

particular time and place: London, April 1670. So, while she is constrained 

by the holy text, her very method of reading and rereading puts strategic 

emphasis on certain passages. Then she prays, inquires, goes on to watch, 

and elaborates on what she finds; thus even as she reasserts scripture, she 

unsettles things and opens the text to its original mythic potential. 

To illustrate just how unsettling Jane Lead’s writings were at the time, 

I will now examine some of the arguments advanced against her by the 

learned Henry Dodwell (1641–1711), a theologian and nonjuror, who 

wrote a sustained attack on Lead’s authority as a prophet. The attack 

appears in a series of letters that Dodwell was prompted to send to Francis 

Lee, a fellow non-juror, who had just become Jane Lead’s spiritual son and 

collaborator in the Philadelphian society. 43 As his letters show, Dodwell 

was clearly mystified and irritated that someone of Lee’s high caliber of 

learning, piety, and literary talent would deliberately devote his life to 

championing Lead’s prophecies. In trying to argue Lee out of his folly, 

Dodwell declares that his primary concern is to preserve the unity and 

integrity of the Church of England and to ensure that the best and brightest 

of Englishmen, including Francis Lee, should support the authorized 

church, which is the only one that can be sustained over time. Dodwell 

reiterates the church’s standard injunctions against enthusiasts: claimants 

to prophecy of all sorts are unnatural, dangerous, and divisive. As all established 

denominations agree, moreover, true prophecy was confined to the 

apostolic period. Women prophets, in particular, claims Dodwell, have 

always brought dishonour and disorder to the church, “even in Apostolic 

42 Prophets are given “fresh words” and “fresh discoveries” from time to time, says 

Lead, Fountain of Gardens 3.1.161, 166. Likewise, in Enochian Walks, she calls for “feeding 

from a fresh Pasture” (28). 

43The correspondence between Dodwell and Lee was fortunately preserved among the 

papers of the eighteenth-century religious writer William Law (1686–1761), best known for 

his A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728). These papers were published by Christopher 

Walton as Notes and Materials for an Adequate Biography of the Celebrated Divine and 

Theosopher, William Law (1854). We learn on the front page that Walton had unsuccessfully 

advertised for an editor for Law’s papers. To qualify, the applicant was to have a “sound classical 

learning” and a “masculine strength of reason and judgment.” No one suitable was to 

be found, so Walton ended up publishing the papers himself, and letting stand any number 

of prejudicial remarks to discredit Jane Lead’s reputation, such as that she had “the character 

of the piety of the Cromwell-Muggletonian-fanatic days in which she lived” (148). Despite 

three layers of misogyny—deposited by Dodwell in the seventeenth, Law in the eighteenth, 

and Walton in the nineteenth centuries—Francis Lee’s brilliant defense of his mother shines 

through in his letters.


times, when gifted women presumed to exercise their gifts in assemblies of 

men; you see how the Apostle restrains them from it.” 44 

Dodwell’s second aim is to discredit Lead herself as a deluded prophetess. 

Since he is hesitant to blacken the name of the woman Francis Lee 

calls “mother,” Dodwell would prefer to cast her as the dupe of others, 

notably John Pordage (1608–81), sometime rector of Bradfield and the 

leader of a Behmenist circle during the 1650s and 1660s and Jane Lead’s 

partner in spiritual seeking during the 1670s until his death in 1681. Her 

deep respect for Pordage is evident in all her writings; for example, in her 

preface to his Theologica Mystica, published just after his death, she calls 

him a “holy and heavenly Man,” whose mystical work was left to be completed 

by the next generation. 45 Dodwell paints a very different picture of 

the man as a spiritual opportunist; he repeats the scandalous story that, in 

1654, Pordage lost his living—even during the fanatical times of Cromwell!—because 

he was accused of having “unwarrantable conversations 

with spirits” and bewitching women to prophecy. 46 Dodwell likens Pordage 

to one of those sly heretics in history who seduced women into believing 

they were prophetesses: “so Simon Magus with his Helena, so 

Appelles with his Philumena, so Montanus with his Prisca and Maximilla. 

47 So it was, Dodwell insinuates, with Pordage and his Jane. 

But, for Dodwell, the case is worse if Jane Lead deliberately wrote her 

own books. Not only is she a usurper of hermeneutic and prophetic powers, 

she is also a heretic because she revives some of the absurd and pernicious 

notions of Gnosticism that had long been dispelled from all 

denominations of orthodox Christianity, including the notion that God is 

an androgyne. In Dodwell’s words: 

I was surprised to find her stumble on several antiquated heresies, 

condemned for such in the first and most infallible ages of Christian 

religion. She calls her Virgin Wisdom a goddess, directly contrary 

to all those purest ages have declared against the difference 

of sex in the Divinity…. 48 

The letters that Francis Lee wrote in reply to Henry Dodwell provide a 

vibrant defense of both Lead’s authorship and prophetic authority. To 

summarize, Lee argues that, far from disrupting church unity, the Philadelphians 

are a small circle within the Anglican community working to 

restore the piety of the primitive church. Jane Lead herself has lived a 

44Walton, Notes and Materials, 188. 

45 Lead, preface to John Pordage, Theologica Mystica (Amsterdam: Heinrich Wettstein, 

1698), 9. 

46 For the details of this story, see Nigel Smith, “Jacob Boehme and the Sects,” 185– 

225; and Hutin, Les Disciples Anglais de Jacob Boehme 83–84, 250–51. 

47 Walton, Notes and Materials, 192–93. 

48 Ibid., 193.


humble and holy life in voluntary poverty and in constant prayer. Nothing 

in her writings contradicts scripture or church doctrine. 

Francis Lee ridicules the very idea that Jane Lead did not write her 

own books, as he has daily experiences of her profound knowledge of 

scripture, as well as of her ease in composing her thoughts—not only in 

her books but also in an extensive correspondence with admirers on the 

continent. As for her distinctive teachings on the Virgin Wisdom, Lee 

insists, Lead never uses the word “Goddess” to refer to her visions, nor is 

she the one who introduced a female personality into the godhead: “she 

useth to speak of Wisdom in the same manner as doth Solomon in his 

Proverbs, and the author of the Book of Wisdom: yea, as Christ himself 

doth, Matt. xi.19.” 49 When push comes to shove, Lee is quite capable of 

mocking Dodwell and men’s pretensions, as for example when he writes 

that, in the highest understanding, “the appellation of male and female, 

when appropriated to the Divine Being are equally improper.” 50 Francis 

Lee’s strategy is to reclaim and to situate the writings of his spiritual 

mother well within the pale of orthodoxy. Yet, as we shall see, he in no way 

seeks to diminish the revolutionary potential of her prophecies. 

It is clear in Lead’s writings that she deliberately inquires after the 

Virgin Wisdom, looking for license to elaborate on the traces of the Being 

she has found in Scripture and in translations of Jacob Boehme’s writings. 

51 Careful to keep low and to ground her visions in the language of 

recovery of what is already there, albeit hidden, in the Holy Text, Jane 

Lead discovers what she seeks. It is worth noting that she had a life-long 

habit of exercising her thoughts while reading scripture and that everything 

she wrote was in conversation with scripture. The habit started early, 

as is indicated by an incident from her late teens. During Christmas festivities, 

when she was eighteen years old living in a respectable Anglican 

home, Lead (then Ward) went through a spiritual crisis of the sort that 

marked the coming of age of many converts to radical Puritanism. For 

three years, Lead was in great spiritual anguish, but she told no one, even 

though her family and friends were alarmed that she had become acutely 

introverted. She began a secret course of reading that one day led to her 

being “surprised” by the Chaplain of her father’s house who caught her 

surreptitiously “reading in his Study.” Fortunately, he encouraged her to 

continue in her habit of holy reading and inquiry. Her life-long preoccu- 

49Walton, Notes and Materials, 207. 

50Walton, Notes and Materials, 208; emphasis mine. 

51 These traces include the Genesis passage in which God created mankind in his own 

image and likeness (“In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them”), 

references to God’s “bosom” or “the milk of the Father,” and to the sapiential books in which 

God speaks under the rubric of the Virgin Wisdom. Based on such traces, J. Edgar Bruns, God 

as Woman, Woman as God (New York: Paulist Press, 1973), argues that it is doubtful that the 

Hebrew Yahweh is ever considered “utterly masculine by his worshipers” (35).


pation with study was considered by Francis Lee to be the cause of her 

eventual loss of sight. 52 

It is evident that Lead deliberately chose to study certain texts that 

authorize women’s freedom in spiritual matters. 53 She lays aside those 

passages that might be used to forbid her prophecies; for example, she 

overrules Paul’s oft-repeated sanction against women’s speaking: 

[it is] from a most Essential and Experimental ground from which 

this goeth forth; which if otherwise, in my Circumstances, I should 

not have rendered myself publick: For every Woman praying, or 

prophesying with her Head uncovered, dishonoureth her Head 1 

Cor. 11.5. But Christ being my Head-covering, I have both 

Commission, and Munition-strength, upon which I shall proceed, 

and go forward, and say something. 54 

Judging by her writings, it is apparent that Lead knew by heart all those 

texts wherein remains of the Feminine Divine can be found, particularly, 

in Proverbs and the Books of Wisdom. The first vision of the Virgin 

Wisdom came in April 1670, explicitly in response to an inner debate Lead 

was having over the nature of a Feminine Divine Being who left scriptural 

traces of Herself. Prompted by Solomon’s example, Lead writes, on that 

day, she was seeking Wisdom’s “Favour and Friendship; demurring in my 

self from whence she was descended, still questioning whether she was a 

distinct Being from the Deity or no?” 55 

In April 1670, two months after her husband’s death (on 5 February), 

Lead was in the countryside visiting a friend, taking solitary walks in the 

woods, desiring to have conversation with the Divine Wisdom, when the 

Virgin first appeared. Or is it that the Virgin Wisdom is produced by the 

inquiry, by Lead’s relentless research and incessant questioning of the holy 

text and the cosmos? The first words of the Virgin are: “Behold I am 

God’s Eternal Virgin-Wisdom, whom thou hast been inquiring after…. [I 

am] a true Natural Mother; for out of my Womb thou shalt be brought 

forth after the manner of a Spirit, Conceived and Born again….” 56 A few 

52Preface of the publisher to Jane Lead, The Wars of David and the Peaceable Reign of 

Solomon (London, 1700). 

53 Ann Bathurst, Lead’s sister-prophet in the Philadelphian movement, also includes 

numerous scriptural validations for woman’s speaking in her diary; on 1 June 1694 she 

writes: “O Thou birth of the Holy Ghost, a woman shall compas a man, weakness shal lay 

hold on strength” (Jer. 31:22); and on 16 June 1694: “Double thy Spirit upon thy handmaid…” 

(Joel 2:28–29). See Rhapsodical Meditations and Visions by Mrs. Ann Bathurst…. 2 

vols. Bodleian MS, Rawl. D 1262–63. Despite the obvious limitations, a vibrant argument 

for women’s freedom, based on scriptural arguments, was achieved by Quaker Margaret Fell 

Fox in her Women’s Speaking Justified (1666). 

54 Lead, “An Instruction, and Apology to the following Discourse,”Enochian Walks. 

55 Lead, Fountain of Gardens, 1:18. 

56 Ibid.


days after her first vision, Lead returned to London and went into complete 

retirement to await further revelations; they came six days later when 

the Virgin appeared with a train of Virgin spirits and an Angelical host. If 

Lead would join the Virgin train and acknowledge Wisdom as her mother, 

the Virgin promised to be to Lead as Rebecca was to Jacob: his co-conspirator 

in supplanting his brother Esau. “[Wisdom would]…contrive and put 

me in a way how I should obtain the Birth-right-Blessing. For if I would 

apply my self to her Doctrine, and draw my Life’s Food from no other 

Breast, I should then know the recovery of a lost kingdom.” 57 With her 

mystic’s eye, Lead peered into the cosmos, night after night, seeking 

beyond the cold rhythms of the stars to find a God with the dove eyes and 

tender heart of a woman. As signified by the body parts—breast, heart— 

the Voice that answers Lead’s inquiry is not that of an abstracted distant, 

law-bound Providence but a compassionate God who hears the groaning 

of creation. 58 

Lead wrote during the dawning of the “age of reason,” when the Cartesian 

subject was in its ascendancy and a diminished Deist God had only 

his absence and death to anticipate. Yet, paradoxically, it was equally the 

age of compassion, when great seekers—such as Jeanne Guyon (1648– 

1717), Antoinette Bourignon (1616–80), and Margaret Mary Alacoque 

(1647–90)—heard voices, speaking from the heart of God. 59 Sister Alacoque’s 

vision of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, wearing his crucified heart 

outside his robe, provided a throbbing symbol of a God who cares about 

the fate of creation, which endured in the popular imagination at least for 

three centuries. 60 Lead’s visions of the Virgin Wisdom provided what she 

57 Ibid., 1:25–26. 

58 For an interesting comment on the strange rhetorical polarities of patriarchy and feminine 

imagery deployed even in Puritan America, see David Leverenz, “Breasts of God, 

Whores of the Heart,” chapter 5 of The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature, 

Psychology, and Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 

138–61. 

59 Ted A. Campbell makes the important point that the Enlightenment and the religion 

of the heart movements are “nearly simultaneous cultural phenomena,” and not simply competing 

movements; The Religion of the Heart: A Study of European Religious Life in the Seventeenth 

and Eighteenth Centuries (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 

175–77. 

60Richard Roach records that Jane Lead appeared on the night of her death as a curious 

version of the sacred heart. Around the time of Lead’s death, in mid-August 1704, a woman 

at Utrecht was reading Lead’s Revelation of Revelation. She fell into a visionary dream, in 

which Lead appeared recognizably as a pale and old matron, “very pious and modest,” but 

wearing only a mourning veil of black silk. The dreamer was unnerved by the apparition and 

also ashamed because underneath the veil, the figure was naked; Lead’s breast was laid open 

with her heart visible. The dreamer tried to flee, but was drawn to the heart, where Jesus was 

hanging on his crucifix, with John and Mary on either side (Papers of Richard Roach, Bodleian 

MS, Rawl. D 833, 2:89). The report of the dream can also be found among Lee’s papers 

(Lambeth Palace MS 1559); the dreamer is tentatively identified as Joanna Halberts by 

Sperle, “God’s Healing Angel,” 43–44.


called “experimental knowledge” of a God who hears the groans of the 

earth, a God who reenters history with breasts of consolation, a God out 

of whose womb a new reality will be born. 61 Lead prophesied that “a birth 

is to be born in which nothing but joy, life, blessing and eternal power and 

dominion shall take place.” 62 Such a God-concept is inextricably linked to 

a distinctive history of nature—based on the mysteries of the female 

body—that ends not in the death and destruction of the earth but in the 

birth of a new earth restored to justice and peace among all living beings. 

What Lead articulates is an eschatology patterned on rebirth and regeneration, 

as might be expected by the grace of an androgyne God. 

The representation of God as an androgyne has direct implications for 

the Philadelphian representation of the ideal human subject. 63 As Sallie 

McFague observes, “Our tendency is not only to model God in our 

image, but to model ourselves on the models with which we imagine 

God.” 64 In a vision of 29 September 1677, Lead claims that a Voice 

passed through her, promising: “Ye shall be marked with the Father’s 

name.… Upon which word I much exercised my mind.… [I]t was thus 

given Me to understand, that to be marked with the Father’s Name, is no 

less than to be transfigured into a Virgin Body.” 65 For Lead, in correspondence 

to the Father/Virgin Wisdom, the true human subject will be an 

androgyne, or in Lead’s terms, a Virgin Body. Following Boehme, Lead 

asserts that to claim that the original Adam was created in “the image of 

God” is to claim that he was also androgynous, male and female, and had 

a Virgin hid within him: 

God Created Adam at first to bear his one Image and Figure, who 

was to represent God himself, the High and Divine Masculine, 

Male and Female: so that Adam had his Virgin in himself in imitation 

of his Creator, which in Time was brought forth in a distinct 

Figure. 66 

61 McFague argues that to embody God is to envision a God that suffers with other suffering 

bodies. It is to make ecology a sacred responsibility and a divine priority: “if God is 

embodied, then bodies become special and whatever degrades, oppresses, or destroys bodies 

affronts God”; The Body of God, 200. 

62Lead, Revelation of Revelations, 52. 

63The transformative potential of the image of an Androgyne God is defended by 

Eleanor Rae and Bernice Marie-Daly in Created in Her Image: Models of the Feminine Divine 

(New York: Crossroad, 1990). For instance, they write “if one takes seriously the experience 

of androgyny, our images of God/ess could be presented in a way that would do justice to 

the teaching in Genesis that, in some real way, our being created female and male is the basis 

for our imaging of the Divine, while at the same time paying honour to the fact that the fullness 

of humanity is present only when both male and female is represented” (85). 

64 McFague, The Body of God, 145. 

65 Lead, Foutain of Gardens, 2:409. 

66 Jane Lead, Wonders of God’s Creation (1695), 31.


Thus, in Lead’s reiteration of Boehme’s reading of the first three books of 

Genesis, Adam was able to procreate spiritually, as angels do; Virgin Adam 

was “sufficient of himself to increase and multiply for the replenishing of 

paradise.” 67 The original sin occurred when Adam chose Eve and the 

Virgin fled. 68 There seems to be some equivocation as to whether the first 

Eve was made in “the High and Divine Masculine, Male and Female,” of 

Genesis I; she was already distanced from God the androgyne. 69 The 

second Eve, in any case, is a powerful figure for Lead, representing 

restored and full human nature. The second Eve, unlike the first, will partake 

fully in divine image, male and female; her progeny will replenish the 

earth with bright, self-generating bodies. 70 To achieve the subjectivity of 

the second Eve here and now is the chief end of Lead’s mystical travails. 

The project set for Lead and Wisdom’s followers was to develop self-regulating 

techniques that would produce the desired effects, the generation 

of a society of androgynes. Lead’s writings are full of instructions for rehabilitating 

the imagination, thus leading to the “manufactory” of new subjects. 

At the end of time, Lead saw the human subject figured as the 

Second Eve, the true androgyne, the millennial body, wearing a clear andwhite 

robe, looking out on the world “through Dove eyes.” 71 

Jane Lead did not attempt to go beyond the Father (as Mary Daly did 

in recent memory) or to dethrone him and replace him with Christ, or the 

Mother or the Goddess. 72 Instead, she opened up and elaborated on the 

67 Lead, Revelation of Revelations, 38. For Boehme’s reading Genesis 2:21, in which the 

taking of the rib marks the “dissolution” the divine wholeness of Adam, see Mysterium Magnum. 

Or An Exposition of the First Book of Moses called Genesis, trans. John Sparrow (1654), 

ed. C.J.B. (London: John M. Watkins, 1965), 1:110. 

68 This idea is derived from Boehme, who connected original sin to the division of 

Adam into two sexes and away from androgynous completeness. See “Appendix II: The 

Androgyny of Adam,” in Hans L. Martensen, Jacob Boehmen (1575–1624): Studies in his Life 

and Teaching by Hans L. Martensen (1808–1884): Primate Bishop of Denmark, trans. T. Rhys 

Evans, ed. Stephen Hobhouse. (London: Rockliff, 1949), 153–54. 

69 For a various treatments of Eve, compare Lead, Fountain of Gardens, 2.110–11 with 

3.1.192–93, 3.2.311–12, and Revelation of Revelations, 38. For the rich variety of historical 

interpretations of Eve, see Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler, eds., 

Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Bloomington: 

Indiana University Press, 1999), esp. chap. 6. Both the point that the concept of an 

androgynous God and corresponding Adam is derived from a Jewish cabalistic reading of 

Genesis, and the question of whether such a concept promotes an egalitarian vision of 

woman-man relationships are raised on 165. 

70Sophia will now espouse herself to Eve, “so long barren” and bring forth “a holy 

Issue” to make up a perfect church on earth; Lead, Fountain of Gardens, 2.114. 

71Dove’s eyes” appear in the Song of Sol. 5:12; and “white raiments” (washed in the 

blood of the lamb) appear in Rev. 4:4; 7:9–13 ; Lead depicts Virgin Spirits in white robe and 

with dove’s eye in Fountain of Gardens, 3.1.114. The Philadelphians are called “the Dove- 

Flocks” in Fountain of Gardens, 1.4 and Message to the Philadelphian Society, 4. 

72 In the 1970s, Mary Daly described her ecological feminist project as a form of “deicide,” 

that would replace God the Patriarch with “God the Verb”; Beyond God the Father: 

Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 12.


sign of the true Father, as found in scripture, to discover a Virgin Wisdom 

hid in Him for all eternity. 73 The Philadelphians saw themselves as a “holy 

convocation,” fashioning their very natures to be receptive to the Virgin 

Wisdom’s mysterious operations, preparing the way for the new reality on 

earth (Enochian Walks 3). 74 They believed that nurturing a community of 

“virginized souls” or androgynes would bring about a peaceable culture, a 

precondition to the coming of natural harmony and Divine Wisdom. As a 

community, they advocated and lived according to a strict code of voluntary 

simplicity, based on repudiating wealth, limiting consumption, and 

repressing sensuality. And, their collective practice of poverty, fasting, 

prayer, and self-restraint was understood as a way of living, conducive to 

the conservation of compassionate nature in themselves, and therefore, 

beneficial to the rest of creation. 75 

73Seventeenth-century Catholic women had recourse to Mary and other female saints 

to mediate Divine power on their behalf. In The Garden of Our B[lessed]. Lady (1619), recusant 

Sabine Chambers grants the Blessed Virgin as much celestial power as orthodoxy will 

allow: “Next unto God the Father, she is most potent./Next unto God the Sonne, she is 

most wise./Next unto God the Holy Ghost of most goodnesse, and of most ardent charity” 

(272). 74Lead, Enochian Walks, 3. 

75 For a detailed study of their way of life, see Bowerbank, “Millennial Bodies.”

The Unfortunate Traveller and the Ramist 

Controversy: A Narrative Dilemma 

Kurtis B. Haas 

Mesa State College 

HE NARRATIVE AND RHETORICAL structure of Thomas Nashe’s The 

Unfortunate Traveller has vexed its critics almost since its initial 

appearance in 1593. Most modern critics have followed a line 

something akin to that of G.R. Hibbard, who sees Nashe as a writer 

unable at times to distinguish his own voice from that of the narrator, Jack 

Wilton. 1 Stephen Hilliard’s study of Nashe notes the critical tendency to 

see The Unfortunate Traveller as “a formless work, spun out by a careless 

author with no fixed purpose” and, though he chides such critics for 

ignoring its many virtues, grants that they likely “reflect a truth” about its 

composition. 2 Even ardent admirers of the work, such as Nashe biographer 

Charles Nicholl, say it presents “a sense of life as a series of episodic 

fragments.” 3 

T 

Such criticism is difficult to rebut because Jack Wilton, the beleaguered 

narrator of The Unfortunate Traveller, is without doubt a voice in 

search of a proper rhetorical mode. He careens from the discourse of the 

confidence man, to that of the aristocrat, to that of the poet, to the 

preacher, and, in the end—though only briefly—to that of the penitent 

sinner. The end result is a character who seems oddly out of joint with his 

own narrative. At one moment we see him gleefully recounting his various 

bawdy and at times malicious exploits, while at others we see him soberly 

sermonizing against Anabaptist and Papal excesses. A reader scarcely 

knows how, or even whether, to try and reconcile the two voices. Perhaps 

Hibbard is correct: the gleefully mischievous persona is the fictive Jack 

Wilton and the didactic one is Nashe, who clumsily co-opts his narrator 

occasionally. 

However, a more useful approach to Nashe’s difficult narrativity may 

be found in exploring the extraordinary degree to which the text is self- 

1 G.R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 

University Press, 1962), 154–55. 

2 Stephen Hilliard, The Singularity of Thomas Nashe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska 

Press, 1986), 122. 

3 Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe (Boston: Routledge and 

Kegan Paul, 1984), 157. 


26 Kurtis B. Haas 

consciously rhetorical. Despite the pamphleteer’s frequent praise of the 

“extemporal”, Philip Schwyzer has usefully pointed out the impossibility—given 

his rate of production—that Nashe simply cranked out whatever 

came to his mind at a given moment without any recourse to 

ornamentation and revision. 4 In fact, his work engages persistently and 

intelligently with issues of artistry and rhetorical strategy, as Jonathan 

Crewe’s book on the subject makes clear: 

Rhetoric’s simply being there and exerting a continuous force is 

enough to induce, if not a conviction of its primacy, then at least 

a profound irresolution about the nature of “reality”.… Without 

committing himself unequivocally to performance as an absolute 

value or to the systematic promulgation of an antiworld, the 

ongoing possibilities of “rhetoric” are extensively explored in his 

work. 5 

Crewe’s reading, in fact, suggests that those possibilities constitute the 

“subject” of The Unfortunate Traveller, that in some sense its narrative 

level exists simply as a foil to its rhetoric, especially at the tale’s end, as the 

brutality of the latter operates in tension with the happy ending denoted 

by the former. 

Crewe’s reading is essential in its identification of rhetoric’s centrality 

to Jack Wilton’s adventures. However, an assertion of rhetoric’s primacy 

in the tale is incomplete without careful attention to the conflicting intellectual 

notions of rhetoric operative in Elizabethan culture. I would argue 

that Nashe explores such rhetorical problems in terms of one of the most 

acrid academic debates of the Renaissance, the battle between the proponents 

of Peter Ramus—who sought with considerable arrogance and ability 

to critique classical notions of rhetoric and dialectic—and the more 

conservative thinkers who remained champions of Aristotle, Cicero, and 

Quintilian. Nashe himself weighed in on this controversy more than once 

in his pamphlets. In his Anatomie of Absurditie he praises the students 

who “wisely prefer renowned antiquitie before newe found toyes, one line 

of Alexanders Maister [Aristotle], before the large inuective Scolia of the 

Parisian Kings professor [Ramus]” 6 and warns against a student coming 

to understand logic “by the rayling of Ramus” so that he “estimats Artes 

by the insolence of Idiots.” 7 Furthermore, he uses the issue as another 

means of castigating the rival Harveys, of whom Gabriel at least was an 

4Philip Schwyzer, “Summer Fruit and Autumn Leaves: Thomas Nashe in 1593,” 

English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994): 586. 

5 Jonathan Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship 

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 23. 

6 Thomas Nashe, The Anatomie of Absurditie, in The Complete Works of Thomas Nashe 

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 1:43. 

7 Ibid., 1:45.

The Unfortunate Traveller 27 

ardent Ramist. 8 While Hibbard seems to question whether Nashe had a 

deep sense of the issues involved in the debate, he notes that Nashe always 

favored the “conservative and traditionalist” positions in such matters. 9 

No reason exists, however, to believe he did not grasp at least the general 

issues of the debate and I believe we can see the consequences of the 

dialogue between the two positions in the elements of narrative chaos of 

The Unfortunate Traveller. This essay will examine those elements, concluding 

that Jack Wilton is trying to become a speaker at an historical 

moment when the cultural and intellectual forces around him have confused 

the very notion of what it means to speak and write. The lines of 

classification of Renaissance rhetoric and poetic—drawn by classical 

authors, modified in the middle ages, then radically redrawn by Ramistic 

doctrine—have profound consequences to the self-conscious narrator type 

of Jack Wilton. As he speaks to us and to the other players of his story, he 

grants us an insight into the persistent mediation required in the Renaissance 

between speaker, style, and content. The apparent rhetorical hodgepodge 

of the text is a mirror of the conflicting currents of thinking—particularly 

those suggested by the Ramist controversy—concerning the 

rhetor and his role in the Renaissance. 

The fundamental instabilities in sixteenth and seventeenth century 

rhetorical theory occur in assessing the proper relationship between content, 

style, and speaker. The classical and medieval tradition considers all 

three of these elements to be interlocking and essential to the art of rhetoric. 

Plato’s critique of rhetoric in the Gorgias sets the stage for this linkage 

by attacking the Sophists for their lack of concern about content, for 

arguing the lesser case. Quintilian continues in this tradition by defining 

rhetoric as “the good man speaking well,” a definition which demands a 

virtuous speaker, speaking eloquently, about matters which will ultimately 

cultivate better behavior in listeners; anything else is not properly rhetoric. 

10 Similarly, when we take Cicero’s work on rhetoric as a whole we first 

find in De Inventione that eloquence and wisdom are both necessary ingredients 

to successful rhetoric. 11 De Oratore makes clear in several places 

that to produce both ingredients requires an ideal orator who, if not virtuous, 

is at least possessed of a nearly universal education. 

8See Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (New York: 

Princeton University Press, 1956) for a detailed account of Ramism in England. 196–99 

detail the exchanges between Gabriel Harvey and Nashe on the topic. 

9 Hibbard, Thomas Nashe, 6. 

10 Quintilian, On the Early Education of the Citizen-Orator: Institutio Oratoria, Book I 

and Book II, Chapters One Through Ten by Quintilian, trans. by John Selby Watson (Indianapolis: 

Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). 

11 Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Inventione, trans. by H.M. Hubbell, The Loeb Classical 

Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 21.


Medieval rhetoric, while clearly underappreciated by modern scholars 

in its contributions to rhetorical theory, does not radically change this 

notion, but it does plant the seeds of its demise. Augustine’s basic premise, 

set forth in his De Doctrina Christiana is that ornament can be found even 

in the Bible and eloquence, so long as it is used to support his notion of 

charitas, has a place in the discourse of Christian peoples. 12 The subsequent 

divisions of Ciceronian principles into the artes poetria, dictaminis, 

and praedicandi of the Middle Ages exist circumscribed in this assumption. 

D.W. Robertson Jr. demonstrates, for instance, that medieval poetics 

tends to believe in the notion that rhetorical ornament is used to protect 

and enhance a core of divine meaning. 13 However, the seeds of a split 

between speaker, style, and content are sown here; words have begun to 

be seen as “clothing” for divine ideals, with the emphasis being placed on 

whatever divine truths can be found lurking beneath. 

This very abbreviated context is necessary to emphasize the way 

Ramus and his Renaissance followers destabilized thinking about the 

nature of producing a text and, particularly in Jack Wilton’s case, the 

nature of being a producer of texts. The first point of Ramistic philosophy 

relevant to our discussion critiques Quintilian’s assertion that a rhetorician 

must be a good man. This, Ramus argues, makes no sense because “a definition 

of any artist which covers more than is included in the rules of his 

art is superfluous and defective.” 14 The position is argued in Ramus’s 

trademark heated and dismissive manner, but boils down to this: a person 

without virtue can obviously be a skilled user of language and thus, the 

Quintilian definition is useless. This would certainly seem to echo our 

twenty-first-century sense of rhetoric as well; no one today would argue, 

for instance, that Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior diminishes his capacity as a 

rhetor except insofar as it affects his ability to create a publicly viable ethos. 

Ramus not only severs the link between speaker and rhetorical practice, 

but also removes the generation of content from the art of rhetoric. 

In short, he makes invention and arrangement the province of dialectic 

and memory, style, and delivery the province of rhetoric. The most important 

English Ramistic logic and rhetoric of the sixteenth century, an adaptation 

of his Dialectica by Dudley Fenner, demonstrates the importance of 

this separation. 15 Following Ramus, Fenner divides his discussion of logi- 

12See especially the discussion of Paul’s eloquence scattered through most of Book 4. 

For this article, the edition referenced was Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. 

D.W. Robertson Jr. (New York: Macmillan, 1958). 

13 D.W. Robertson Jr., “Some Medieval Literary Terminology with Special Reference to 

Chretien de Troyes,” Studies in Philology 48 (1951): 669–92. 

14 Peter Ramus, Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian, trans. Carole Newlands 

(Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 84. 

15 See Howell, Logic and Rhetoric, 219–22 for an account of the prominence of Fenner’s 

text.


cal categories into two parts: Invention and Judgment. Within this discussion 

of invention, he discusses the importance of form as follows: 

The form is a cause by the which a thing is that which it is and so 

different from all other things, as in the example of man before 

mentioned. But the natural form of thinges, though they may be 

conceived by reason, yet they cannot well be uttered by speech. 

The artificiall forme of thinges is much more easie to be conceived 

in reason, and uttered in wordes.…16 For Fenner, form does not help to shape an idea, and words are a means 

of clouding understanding rather than achieving it. Instead, reason is the 

unclothed “pure” idea and logic is the means by which such ideas are 

achieved. 

In light of the classical stance toward rhetoric represented here by 

Cicero in De Inventione—arguably the most admired work on eloquence 

of the middle ages and beginnings of the early modern period—the shift 

in emphasis is striking: 

I have been led by reason itself to hold this opinion first and foremost, 

that wisdom without eloquence does too little for the good 

of states, but that eloquence without wisdom is generally highly 

disadvantageous and is never helpful. 17 

For Cicero, one’s reasons and one’s ability to express them are interlinking 

parts of being a good citizen; the two work in concert rather than hindering 

one another. When Fenner, on the other hand, turns to rhetoric, he 

has a subtle but profound distrust. After defining elocution as the “garnishing 

of speech,” he justifies it rather tentatively: 

This changing of words was first found out by necessitie, for the 

want of wordes, afterward confirmed by delight, because such 

wordes are pleasant and gracious to the eare. Therefore this 

chaunge of signification must be shamefast, and as it were maydenly, 

that it may seeme rather to be led by the hand to another 

signification, than to be driven by force unto the same. 18 

The goal for Fenner is obviously to reduce the amount of violence which 

ornament might do to an idea. Indeed, when he next discusses hyperbole 

and catachresis (placing a word in an odd context to gain emphasis)—two 

of the more revered rhetorical tropes of traditional rhetoric—he refers to 

the latter as “the abuse of fine speech” and the former as “the excesse of 

16Dudley Fenner, The Artes of Logike and Rhetorike, (Middelburg: R. Schilders, 1584), 

1.2. 

17Ibid., 1.1. 

18Ibid., 2.1.


this finenesse.” While it would be misrepresenting Fenner (and Ramus) to 

suggest that he treats all tropes with such suspicion—in fact, following 

Augustine he finds some of them in the Bible—his zeal for rhetoric is 

clearly lower than his zeal for logic. As Walter Ong notes, “To the Ramist, 

Dryden’s admission that he was often helped to an idea by a rhyme was an 

admission of weakness, if not outright intellectual perversion.” 19 The 

importance of this rigid division between logic and rhetoric possibly has 

been overemphasized in discussions of Ramistic philosophy; Ramus still 

believes that knowledge can be generated in and through language, but 

that the proper home of such generation is in the art of dialectic. In a 

sense, he has simply moved around the classifications. 20 

Tinkering with classifications does, however, have consequences for 

the way we think about things. When coupled with his insistence that we 

no longer consider the quality of the speaker in our consideration of oratory, 

Ramistic rhetorical doctrine requires an almost complete severance 

between speaker (or writer), content, and style. In the sixteenth century, 

this radical theory was being circulated alongside the more traditional 

Ciceronian rhetorics of Roger Ascham, Thomas Wilson, and George 

Puttenham, rhetorics which maintained the ancient Roman insistence on 

invention as rhetorical practice and on the orator as a well-educated, virtuous 

figure. This swirl of contradictory thinking on the nature of discourse 

runs through The Unfortunate Traveller consistently, manifesting itself 

through Jack Wilton’s halting and difficult attempts to become a rhetor. 

Jack’s first words on the art of persuasion indicate a strong sense of 

himself as a persuader and also an ardent disregard of classical virtue in the 

uses of his persuasive abilities. We learn very early that while the prince 

must use command to get men to do his bidding, Jack is quite capable of 

using his wits, as he says, to “make them spend al the mony they had for 

my pleasure.” 21 And in his long speech to the cider merchant we learn 

how proud he is of the complete power he has over his listener; indeed the 

man “was readie to haue striken his tapster” 22 for interrupting Jack as he 

explains the man’s (outrageously concocted) mortal danger. 

The type of rhetoric employed by Wilton here obviously does not fit 

into any sort of classification, at least not one recognized in “authorities,” 

but it does demonstrate some sound rhetorical principles. He succeeds in 

persuading the terrified vendor to give away large amounts of cider, prin- 

19Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 

Harvard University Press, 1958), 289. 

20 For a useful summary, though in some ways a dismissive one, of Ramus’ intellectual 

contributions see Pierre Alber Duhamel, “The Logic and Rhetoric of Ramus,” Modern Philology 

46 (1949): 163–71. 

21 Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, in The Complete Works of Thomas Nashe, 

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 2:210. 

22 Ibid., 2:212.


cipally through the device of narratio concerned with events, which 

Cicero classifies into fabula, historia, and argumentum. What Wilton has 

done is to construct a fabula and pass it off as a recent historia; that is to 

say, he tells a big lie. However, the execution of the lie has some rhetorically 

admirable traits. Cicero admonishes that a fabula must be told with 

brevity, clarity, and plausibility. While Jack probably slips a bit on brevity, 

he tells the story with a clarity and plausibility that shocks the “Lord of 

Misrule” into what would have previously been unthinkable to him. His 

details, down to suggesting that the king believes the merchant to be 

smuggling out intelligence in empty cider barrels, have the ring of truth to 

them despite being pure fabrication. If we read this initial rhetorical 

exploit of Jack’s in the context of the tension between Ramistic and traditional 

theories of persuasion, we see that in this instance Ramus wins. The 

virtue of the speaker and the rightness of his cause have no relationship 

whatsoever to the efficacy of his story and Wilton clearly revels in his ability 

to persuade here, regardless of consequences to himself and others. We 

couldn’t be given a clearer example of the notion that the efficacy of rhetoric 

has little relation to the nobility of its purpose. 

Jack’s next foray into discourse uses the Ramist tensions as an opportunity 

to construct a condemnatory theme sermon on the Anabaptists featuring 

Matthew 11:12 as the central scripture: 

When Christ said the kingdome of heaven must suffer violence, hee 

meant not the violence of long babling praiers, nor the violence of 

tedious inuective Sermons without wit, but the violence of faith, 

the violence of good works, the violence of patient suffering. The 

ignorant snatch the kingdom of heauen to themselves with greedines, 

when we with all our learning sinke into hell. 23 

This is the preamble to a long sermon on the evils of the Anabaptists and, 

by extension, all Protestant sects. The sermon makes sense when ascribed 

to the quite conservative Nashe, but when ascribed to the somewhat 

amoral Jack Wilton (as it clearly is), the sermon rests uneasily as a 

polemic and intrusively self-conscious rhetorical act. Are we intended to 

assume that Nashe has clumsily dropped his narrator momentarily or are 

we to assume that Wilton has a heretofore repressed interest in the tides 

of reformation? 

The criticism of “tedious, invective sermons without wit” provides a 

useful window here, I believe, for Wilton has created some tedious invective 

himself. He begins by misappropriating the passage from Matthew, 

which quite clearly claims, out of Christ’s mouth, that “from the days of 

John the Baptist until now [the time of Christ, presumably] the kingdom 

23 Ibid., 2:279.


of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matt. 

11:12). Christ is marking his own presence as a moment when the violence 

against the kingdom of heaven is stopped, thus making Wilton’s protestations 

to need the “violence” of faith and good works seem hollow at 

best. The commentary that follows, then, resting as it does on such sandy 

ground, not surprisingly washes about unevenly. The sermon fires off a 

nice round on the “dim cloud of dissimulation” with which the Anabaptists 

cover the “glorious sun of the Gospels,” but also meanders into a rant 

against the poverty of continental lands prompting the overthrow of the 

episcopacy. It finally degenerates completely into a hope, bolstered by 

quotation from Ovid, that those who weaken religion be gelded. 24 

This is silly stuff, and with Nashe’s voice we can laugh at the boldness 

of the pamphleteer. Nashe had, in fact, constructed a long sermonic pamphlet 

of his own, Christ’s Tears, that is likely his least admired work, both 

amongst moderns and his contemporaries. In Jack Wilton’s voice, earnestly 

attempting to gloss the faults of the Anabaptists, the failings of the 

sermon are troubling. He has attempted to perform several feats of persuasion 

and even exegesis; his method has been simply to follow the forms of 

his genre, but he has not applied any rigorous logic to his thinking on the 

subject. He has voiced opinions that we might presume Nashe to have 

held, but the form of presentation has failed to hold them particularly 

well. Rhetorical form here has been applied, but without any recourse to 

logic—we have sermonic ornamentation without the bare bones “reasons” 

which Fenner (via Ramus) claims. What Fenner calls “artificial 

forms” have been applied here, and uttered in words, but they lack a 

coherent “natural reason” beneath them, especially so since Ramistic rhetoric 

keeps arrangement—sorely needed in this sermon—as a part of logic. 

The resultant critique we can see here favors the Ciceronian notion of 

the need for more than just eloquent forms. However, since the content is 

likely palatable to Nashe, this represents in many ways a noncommittal representation 

of the difficulties one faces in speaking in Renaissance culture. 

His creation, the young blooming rhetor, has some grasp of ornamentation 

and a knowledge of his subject, but has been unsuccessful in negotiating 

the competing models available to him for forming the ideas. He has 

neither used the Ciceronian method for building arguments, nor has he 

adopted the medieval ars praedicandi nor has he used the Ramistic method 

of invention and judgment. The confused intellectual environment creates 

an out of control whirl in which the sermon fails properly to express its 

topic, maintain a convincing style, or even persistently maintain a consistent 

rhetorical voice. In short, the problems of the sermon are a micro-version 

of the problems of the entire text of The Unfortunate Traveller. 

24 Ibid., 2:232–38.


His difficulties with the sermon apparently prompt Nashe and/or 

Wilton to further meditate on the nature of discourse in the pages which 

follow as Jack immerses himself in Renaissance Europe. We are first urged, 

by juxtaposition, to compare the corrupted formal disputation of the university 

professors with that of the “inkhorne orator” who addresses the 

duke. A group of professors have been appointed to praise the duke, but, 

failing to surprise anyone who has attended a university graduation, their 

presentation lacked “any ostentation of wit” and was laced with so much 

Latin that the resultant sycophancy is nearly incomprehensible. 25 

The next orator whose speech is described in detail is that of “Vanderhulke” 

the inkhorn orator. “Vanderhulke” was an epithet Nashe used to 

describe Gabriel Harvey in a prior work and so we might expect an opportunity 

here for criticism. Indeed, Vanderhulke is fat, drunken, and possessed 

of “a sulpherous big swolne large face.” 26 His speech is 

inappropriate for the occasion and rambles overmuch. However, it has a 

wit lacking in the speech of the professors, particularly in its closing: 

Bonie Duke, frolike in our boure, and perswade thy selfe that 

euen as garlike hath three properties, to make a man winke, 

drinke, and stinke, so we wil winke on thy imperfections, drinke 

to thy fauorites, and al thy foes shall stinke before vs. So be it. 

Farewell. 27 

No one would claim a brilliant sort of wit here, but the use of language is 

clever and Vanderhulke has used a nice bit of troping at the end to close 

up his oration. It may be ridiculous, but the duke finds it entertaining, and 

let us not forget that entertaining and flattering the duke were the purposes 

of the entire Wittenberg pageant. 

Nashe, through Jack’s account, has created in the professors and 

Vanderhulke exemplas of the dilemma of Ramistic doctrine. The professors, 

in their use of Latin and its logical terms, perhaps have access to the 

logical truths suggested by the method of invention and judgment. However, 

they completely fail in constructing an oratory useful to their purposes; 

even the drunken students who follow them in the pageant seem to 

have greater eloquence. The “inkhorne orator” Vanderhulke, on the other 

hand, seems possessed only of vulgar ornament; there is no “there” there 

in his speech. While the Duke does receive him warmly, the text leaves no 

doubt as to his inferiority as a character. 

The entire opening of Jack’s entrance into Wittenberg serves to suggest 

the presence of Ramistic doctrine while hinting at an entirely Ciceronian 

and Quintilian remedy: eloquence could only be restored to the 

25 Ibid., 2:246–47. 

26 Ibid., 2:247. 

27 Ibid., 2:249.


occasion through reuniting speaker, content, and style. The point is reinforced 

and expanded in Jack’s assessment of the academics in attendance 

upon Luther and Carolostadius during a debate held the following day: 

A most vaine thing it is in many vniuersities at this daie, that they 

count him excellent eloquent who stealeth not whole phrases but 

whole pages out of Tully. If of a number of shreds of his sentences 

he can shape an oration, from all the world he carries it awaie, 

although in truth it be no more than a fooles coat of many 

colours. No inuention or matter haue they of theyr owne, but 

tack vp a stile of his stale galymafries. 28 

The problems of the rhetorical controversies have thus created a sort of 

discursive paralysis. The academics noted above cannot even achieve the 

artless logic that perhaps the professors of the pageant could achieve, but 

instead, faced with either a voiceless dialectic or an empty rhetoric, simply 

steal from old authorities. 

Midway through the story then, in the face of his own inadequacies as 

speaker/thinker and those of others, Wilton offers us an insight into what 

he finally feels is most admirable in a user of words. When Petro Aretino, 

“Aretine,” aids in his release from jail after being falsely accused of counterfeiting, 

Jack spends a great deal of time praising his skill with a pen. Not 

surprisingly, he first praises his tremendous wit. He then praises his boldness 

and spirit, claiming that “if out of so base a thing as inke there may 

bee extracted a spirite, hee writ with noughte but the spirite of ink.… 

[N]o leafe he wrote on but was lyke a burning glasse to set on fire all his 

readers.” 29 Rather than flattering his countrymen, he goads them, and 

“his life he contemned in comparison of the liberty of speech.” 30 No 

doubt Nashe the brazen pamphleteer—and an avowed admirer of the real 

Aretine—is coming through at this point, but Jack seems to have absorbed 

the discourse of his time in an almost cynical way. Rather than praising his 

careful thought, or good reasons, or his ability to use tropes or ornament 

his ideas—all necessary in the Ciceronian and Quintilian tradition—he has 

come to admire the rhetoric of shock. The ability to stick barbs in one’s 

opponents is the highest measure of a writer’s skill to Jack Wilton. Nashe 

employed this skill often as a pamphleteer, but one wonders whether we 

should view this uncritically as an assessment of what is admirable in the 

rhetoric of his age. 

One final type of rhetor figures prominently in Jack’s narration: the 

poet. Nashe creates the famed earl of Surrey, obsessed with his true love 

Geraldine, as Jack’s master and patron. The portrayal of the poet creates 

28 Ibid., 2:251. 

29 Ibid., 2:264. 

30 Ibid., 2:265.


several moments when Nashe is clearly satirizing Surrey’s type of poetry 

and, probably by extension, most of the poetry being produced in 

England during his day. Though lacking quality, the poems are not particularly 

distinguishable from much Renaissance poetry. As Crewe notes, one 

of the “parodic” poems actually appears in a Renaissance anthology of 

poems, England’s Parnassus, and not as a farce. 31 Nonetheless, Jack seems 

to suspect a deficiency in his master’s art, though he hesitates to come 

right out and say so. Particularly interesting, in light of the Quintilian 

insistence on the rhetor being a good man speaking well, is the way Jack 

comes to view Surrey as an ultimately ineffectual man. Wilton critiques 

Surrey’s first poem, for instance, composed in the dungeon of Mistress 

Tabitha, for being a rather idle pasttime given their dire circumstances, 

comparing it to the man who beats the bush while another gets the bird. 

Later, composing bon mots based on Ovid as he issues a challenge to the 

world, we receive this subtly scathing description of his dress: 

His armour was all intermixed with lillyes and roses…his helmet 

round proportioned lyke a gardners pot, from which seemed to 

issue forth small thrids of water.… Whereby he did import thus 

much, that the teares that issued from his braines, as those arteficiall 

distillations issued from the well counterfeit water-pot on his 

head, watered and gaue life to his mistres disdaine (resembled to 

nettles and weeds) as increase of glorie to her care-causing beauty 

(comprehended vnder the lillies and roses). 32 

Jack is witnessing his master the poet in quite humiliating garb and, following 

commentators such as Sidney who have little regard for the English 

poetry of the day, Nashe has suggested a fall of the poet from grace as an 

effective rhetorician. As Tuve suggests, failing to see the poet as a rhetor 

works against the very grain of Renaissance training in the language arts; 

thus the denigration of Surrey’s very character is an indictment against 

poetry itself as rhetoric. 33 Though different spin might be placed upon the 

portrayal of Surrey, ultimately I think we must again be drawn to the 

Quintilian notion that this poetry is ridiculous because its author is so. 

Jack has once again unwittingly implied that perhaps the classical rhetorical 

theorists are more astute than the Ramists give them credit for. 

As Wilton’s story continues, the uses of discourse become increasingly 

more toxic and less formalized in conjunction with the decidedly darker 

turn of the narrative. Heraclide, for instance, attempts to persuade the 

rapist Esdras from his intent by a moving plea to higher authority asking 

31 Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric, 82. 

32 Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, 2:271–72. 

33 Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 1947), 281–83.


“is there a power aboue thy power?” The criminal’s response amounts to 

a simple “no” and a claim that his luck supersedes the ability of divine retribution 

to punish him; the brutal rape follows. 34 Diamante is raped 

during this episode as well and Wilton is paralyzed mostly, it would seem, 

by his own lack of courage to aid her. He supposedly believes his door is 

guarded during the crimes, but his protestation is unconvincing: “Then 

threw I my selfe pensiue againe on my pallet,” he notes, “and darde all the 

deuiles in hell, nowe I was alone, to come and fight with mee one after 

another in defence of that detestable rape.” 35 

Nashe is creating a situation in which the power of words to redeem 

is almost completely negated by the horrible evil of the bandits. Jack’s useless 

howls to “all the deuiles in hell” have no more or less force in affecting 

the situation than do Heraclide’s. Far from rendering men (or women) 

able to contend—as Francis Bacon suggests as rhetoric’s role—words have 

an utterly empty force, as empty as Jack sees his own cowardly howling to 

be. While Jack may have been able to continue his attempts to become a 

rhetor in the relatively optimistic early half of the book, even in the face of 

the doubts inserted by Ramist doctrine, the dreadful circumstances of the 

latter half lead him to recognize language and its users as mere ornament, 

useless in the face of the world’s realities. 

The other particularly notable speeches in the text—that of the exiled, 

anti-travel Englishman and the venom of Cutwolfe, for instance—have 

varying tones but equally impotent results. Jack ignores and strains himself 

to escape from the Englishman; the poisonous tale of Cutwolfe is silenced 

by the ghastly tortures of the executioner. By the final paragraph, Wilton 

has learned that effectual speaking is useless in his world, a demonstration 

I believe is part of Nashe’s belief that the doctrine of Ramus erodes the 

force of discourse, while the Ciceronian model is too weak to restore its 

power. All Jack can say by book’s end is that “unsearchable is the booke of 

oure destinies.” 36 Cutwolfe’s speech, or rather perhaps its grizzly interruption, 

leaves no action available except “the straight life,” filled with a 

marriage, alms-deeds, and a return to the service of his monarch. Not a 

bad life, probably, but certainly not a very rhetorical one for a young man 

who begins his tale as a budding rhetor. 

Thus Nashe awkwardly resolves the story without actually resolving 

the rhetorical dilemmas of his narrator. These dilemmas find their source 

deep within the intellectual context of Elizabethan England and, though 

Nashe usually seems to favor conservative classical attitudes toward language, 

those attitudes prove to be as ineffectual as the more revolutionary 

Ramistic ones. Stephen Hilliard argues that this sort of paradoxical explo- 

34 Ibid., 2:289. 

35 Ibid., 2:287–88. 

36 Ibid, 2:327.


ration is typical of Nashe. Though his work often aggressively defends the 

conservative status quo, it cannot help also revealing the limitations 

imposed by the social and intellectual order of his times. 37 Jack Wilton’s 

seeming abandonment of things rhetorical, then, comes from a failure in 

his culture to clarify just what it means to use language well. Neither the 

Ciceronian tradition nor the Ramistic remedy prove sufficient to satisfy 

either Nashe’s talents or those of his young creation. 

37 Hilliard’s principle thesis, in fact, is that Nashe spends his career tripping over his own 

“singularity” as a writer even as he tries to present orthodox intellectual opinions. For 

instance, in Summer’s Last Will and Testament, his attempts to discredit Puritans and prop up 

the orthodox social order ultimately mock themselves; Singularity of Thomas Nashe, 61.

Pain for Pen: 

Gaspara Stampa’s S tile Novo 

Amy R. Insalaco 

Brigham Young University 

HE ITALIAN CRITIC AND SCHOLAR, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) 

dismisses Gaspara Stampa’s Rime (1553) thus: 

She was a woman; And usually a woman, when she is not given 

to ape men, uses poetry and submits it to her affections 

because she loves her lover or her own children more than 

poetry. The lazy practice of women is revealed in their scanty 

theoretical and contemplative power. 1 

T 

For him, Stampa’s poetry is somehow inferior to her male counterpart’s 

poetry because it lacks “theoretical and contemplative power.” This essay 

will analyze aspects of Stampa’s poetry which disprove this claim. 

As a woman, Gaspara Stampa was completely aware of the woman’s 

traditionally passive role as the object of love-making and consequently as 

the subject of poetry. For centuries, authors have assumed that the act of 

writing privileged men since the physical act of putting pen to paper paralleled 

men’s role in the sexual act. But Gaspara Stampa does not content 

herself with that metaphor. Instead of submitting her poetry to her lover 

or to her children, as Croce describes, she seeks a female counterpart of 

this pen-paper metaphor. In her poetry, Stampa replaces the masculine pen 

or penna, the instrument of conception unique to men, with the female 

pain, or pena, the culmination of conception, the travails of childbirth, 

unique to women. Significantly, she relates her experiences as a female 

poet, creating words, to the ultimate female creation of the Word, Jesus 

Christ’s birth, which does not rely on human male intervention, but on 

divine intervention and the Virgin Mary’s free will to be productive. Thus, 

Stampa creates a new, feminine style of poetry, a stile novo as she terms it, 

similar to Dante’s dolce stil novo. Her metaphor of maternal procreation 

allows Stampa to explore the tensions associated with being a female 

writer where the traditional creation, the woman, has suddenly become 

the creator. 

1 Benedetto Croce, Conversazioni Critiche, 2nd series, 2nd ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1924), 

225; my translation. 


40 Amy R. Insalaco 

Following Bembo’s injunction, she imitates Petrarch, but still underscores 

throughout her unique feminine poetical theory. Her first sonnet, 

which closely imitates Petrarch’s first sonnet, introduces several new ideas 

which are not present in Petrarch. Most of these ideas are outside the 

scope of this paper, with the exception two: Stampa’s introduction of the 

word pena and the reference to her sex. Compare the first two quatrains of 

Petrarch’s poem with the first quatrain of Stampa’s: 

Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta 1.1–42 Voi ch’ ascoltate in rime sparse il suono 

di quei sospiri ond’ io nudriva ‘l core 

n sul mio primo giovanile errore, 

iquand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’ i’ sono: 

del vario stile in ch’ io piango et ragiono 

fra le vane speranze e ‘l van dolore, 

ove sia chi per prova intenda amore 

spero trovar pietà, non che perdono. 

[You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of 

those sighs with which I nourished my heart 

during my first youthful error, when 

I was in part another man from what I am now: 

for the varied style in which I weep and speak 

between vain hopes and vain sorrow, where 

there is anyone who understands love through 

experience, I hope to find pity, not only pardon.] 

Rime 1.1–43 Voi, ch’ascoltate in queste miste rime, 

in questi mesti, in questi oscuri accenti 

il suon degli amorosi miei lamenti 

e de le pene mie tra l’altre prime. 

[You who listen in these, my sad rhymes, 

in these sad, in these dark accents 

2Hereafter RVF. All quotations and translations of Petrarch are from Petrarch’s Lyric 

Poems: the Rime sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard 

University Press, 1986). 

3 All quotations of the Rime are from Gaspara Stampa: Rime, ed. Maria Bellonci (Milano: 

Rizzoli, 1976). English translations are from Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance: 

Courtly Ladies and Courtesans, trans. Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie (New 

York: Italica, 1997), or from Gaspara Stampa: Selected Poems, ed. Laura Stortoni and Mary 

Prentice Lillie (New York: Italica Press, 1994), unless otherwise noted.

Pain for Pen 41 

the sound of my laments of love 

and of my pains amongst the other previous pains.] 

The last line in the first quatrain of Petrarch’s sonnet refers to his masculinity: 

“quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’ i’ sono” (I was in part 

another man from what I am now) (RVF 1.4). We can interpret Petrarch’s 

use of uomo (man) in the broader sense of mankind, yet, he does add “i’ 

sono” (I am). Therefore, Petrarch, as a man, is writing masculine poetry 

and using masculine metaphors. Stampa refers to her sex in a similar manner. 

She ends her first sonnet thus: “ch’anch’io n’andrei con tanta donna 

a paro” (That I would go equal to such a woman) (Rime 1.14). By 

reminding her audience of this basic difference between herself and 

Petrarch, she invites us to see a difference between Petrarch’s description 

of his anguish, using dolore (pain), and her description of her anguish, 

using pena (pain). Although both words have similar denotations, Stampa 

deliberately chooses pena because of its close resemblance to penna (pen). 

The discursive context in which Stampa writes provides ample precedent 

and, indeed, endorsement for the connection she draws between 

writing and sexuality. Many authors have used penna to refer to the penis. 

For example, in canto 20, lines 40–45 of the Inferno, Dante meets Tiresias 

who eventually regains his maschili penne (manly plumes) 4 after having 

been a woman for a time. Dante uses le penne in a similar manner in Paradiso 

32.79–81 where le innocenti penne (the innocent members) 5 are circumcised. 

Petrarch’s usage of penna as a phallic symbol, although 

discernable, is less obvious than Dante’s. For instance, Petrarch’s RVF 

13.91–92 contains a double entendre where his pen tires from long and 

sweet speech with a lady. A similar double entendre occurs earlier in the collection 

where Petrarch describes his situation: “Ma perché ‘l tempo è corto 

/ la penna al buon voler non po gir presso” (But because time is short, my 

pen cannot follow closely my good will,) (RVF 33.90–91). This particular 

poem is full of sexual imagery and double entendres, and it is, therefore, not 

difficult to assign more than a literal meaning to Petrarch’s lines; although 

his desire is there, he is not physically able to follow through. 

Although Stampa’s readers are versed in this traditional metaphor, 

They may not make an immediate connection between pena and penna; 

however, the words themselves are nearly alike, since only one letter differentiates 

them. In addition, little separates these two words in terms of the 

sexual metaphor. We have already seen how penna is used in an erotic 

4 All quotations and translations of Dante are from the The Divine Comedy, 3 vols, ed. 

and trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), unless otherwise 

noted. 

5 I have used The Divine Comedy, 3 vols. ed. and trans. Allen Mendelbaum (Berkeley: 

University of California Press, 1980–84) translation in this instance since Mendelbaum captures 

the euphemism more clearly than Singleton.


sense; but in order to understand how pena functions in this same metaphor, 

we need to remember that in this first sonnet, Stampa reminds us 

that she is a woman, so we need to examine how the Renaissance views 

women, especially the woman’s body, as that which is to be acted upon by 

the male. As is well known, Aristotle postulates that Nature always wishes 

to create the most perfect being, and that would be a man since he is 

hotter and better endowed for creation. A woman is created only if the 

elements do not come together in a perfect fashion. 6 According to Aristotle, 

the woman only provides the matter upon which the male’s principle 

of movement, the semen, can act: 

That is why wherever possible and so far as possible the male is 

separate from the female, since it is something better and more 

divine in that it is the principle of movement for generated things, 

while the female serves as their matter u{lh. 7 

Thus, according to Aristotelian theory, the active generative principle lies 

in the male while the woman provides the matter u{lh. Galen takes Aristotle’s 

claims one step further by postulating that female reproductive 

organs were simply inverted, underdeveloped male organs, and he makes 

a direct correlation between the phallus and the uterus. 8 Therefore, the 

uterus is the female equivalent of the penis. 

Renaissance physiology, following Classical precedents, enables physical 

procreation to parallel poetic creation. The male writer’s pen allows 

him to function both sexually and artistically, and the woman provides 

both the matter and the subject matter. In fact, creation cannot occur 

without a man, nor without a man’s pen, since the u{lh upon which the 

semen must act is passive and cannot act on its own. Biologically and poetically, 

then, women writers are left out of the equation. Their only role is 

to provide matter for semen or subject matter for poets. 

Stampa sees a creative possibility in this biological view of sexuality for 

a woman writer however. The uterus, which causes the woman pain while 

delivering a child, is essential for a woman to be productive; a woman 

cannot be fruitful sexually without her uterus. Gaspara Stampa refers to 

this feminine aspect of the biological process when she indicates in this first 

sonnet that loving produces pena on her part. Thinking about love-making 

as a symbol for creating poetry, Stampa’s art must also cause her pain; and 

6Ian MacLean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism 

and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (New York: Cambridge University 

Press, 1980), 8. 

7 Aristotle, De Generatione Animalium, ed. and trans. E. L. Peck, Loeb edition (Cambridge: 

Harvard University Press, 1979), 2.1.731b–32a. All English translations of Aristotle 

are from the Loeb edition. 

8 Galen, De usu partium, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca: Cornell 

University Press, 1968), 14.6. All English translations are from this edition.


since the uterus and the phallus were thought to be analogous, we can 

make a connection between pena and penna. Stampa’s pain is just as essential 

in her creative process as Petrarch’s pen is in his. When viewed in this 

light, Stampa’s choice of pena, to replace Petrarch’s dolore, becomes more 

evident. Dolore, although it means pain, is not similar enough to penna to 

fit Stampa’s poetical theories. However, she still does not make a connection 

between pen and pain this early in her collection. She only introduces 

the fact that she is a woman and that her writing causes her pain. 

Instead, Stampa continues to develop her poetical theories by introducing 

conspicuous maternal imagery in her second sonnet. In this sonnet, 

Stampa introduces her lover, Collatino, the male counterpart of 

Petrarch’s Laura. The first line of this sonnet imitates Petrarch’s third 

sonnet that describes his first encounter with Laura; the next line then 

diverges from the pattern. This change allows Stampa to broach the image 

of the creation becoming the creator. Compare the first anniversary 

sonntes of both Petrarch and Stampa: 

RVF 3.1–4; 9–11 

Era il giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro 

per la pietà del suo fattore i rai 

quando i’ fui preo, et non me ne guardai, 

ché i be’vostr’occhi, Donna, mi legaro 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

trovommi Amor del tutto disarmato, 

et aperta la via per gli occhi al core 

che di lagrime son fatti uscio et varco. 

[It was the day when the sun’s rays turned 

pale with grief for his Maker when I was 

taken, and I did not defend myself against 

it, for your lovely eyes, Lady, bound me. 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

Love found me altogether disarmed, and 

the way open through my eyes to my heart, 

my eyes which are now the portal and 

passageway of tears.] 

Rime 2.1–8 9 

Era vicino il di che ‘l Creatore, 

che ne l’ altezza sua potea restarse, 

9 Again, I have followed Stortoni and Lillie’s translation except where indicated by 

curly brackets,{},where the translation is mine.


in forma umana venne a dimostrarsi, 

dal ventre viginal uscendo fore 

quando degnò l’illustre mio signore, 

per cui ho tanti poi lamenti sparsi, 

potendo in luogo più alto arridarsi, 

farsi nido e ricetto del mio cuore. 

[It was about the day when the Creador, 

Who could have stayed in His sublime abode, 

Came down to show Himself in human form, 

Issuing from the Holy Virgin’s womb 

When…my illustrious lord 

For whom I {have shed so many tears} 

Who could have found a nobler resting place, 

{Deigned to make} his nest and {was received} in my heart.] 

Stampa’s variation from Petrarch first concerns her changing the holiday 

on which she meets her lover. Stampa first encounters Collaltino near 

Christmas, the day celebrating the birth and life of Christ, instead of Good 

Friday, the day commemorating his death. This divergence from Petrarch 

allows Stampa to introduce the femininity of her poetry, not only with 

images of birth, but also with the introduction of a female character into 

the creative process—the Virgin Mother. Without the Virgin, there would 

have been no birth and no Christmas to celebrate. In Petrarch’s poem, on 

the other hand, there is no mention of the Madonna since she has no 

active role on Good Friday. 

Petrarch only gives a two-line description to indicate on what day he 

met Laura, but Stampa’s description of her first meeting with Collatino 

lasts the entire first quatrain. Stampa could have ended her description of 

the nativity with the phrase, “in forma umana venne a dimostrarsi” (Came 

down to show Himself in human form); however, she adds “dal ventre virginal 

uscendo fore” (Issuing from the Holy Virgin’s womb). Here, 

Stampa introduces the actual physical process of birth along with a female 

character, the Virgin. Again, we are reminded of her use of pena from her 

first sonnet, since issuing from the womb necessarily brings pain. With 

both of these additions, Stampa also changes the focus of the relationship 

in her poem. What should be an intangible, god-man relationship, now in 

Stampa centers on a physical, mother-son relationship. The difference is 

obvious: man is subject to God whereas son is subject to mother. Thus, 

not only does Stampa introduce a female character in her poem, she also 

assigns her an authoritative role. 

She further emphasizes this mother-son relationship by paralleling her 

situation with Mary’s in the second quattrain. Here, Stampa simply


exchanges Creatore with the word signore (lord) in the exact position. Not 

only does signore refer to Collaltino in his role of nobleman, but signore 

can also be another title for Christ, an intentional ambiguity on the part of 

Stampa. She compares Christ and Collaltino, putting them on a level superior 

to Stampa’s. She furthers the idea of Collaltino as a figura Christi by 

adding that Collaltino “potendo in a luogo più alto arridarsi” (could have 

found a nobler resting place), but he condescends to find a place with 

Stampa instead. Such a description maintains the god-man relationship 

Stampa establishes in the first quatrain with Collaltino as god and Stampa 

the adoring worshiper. However, she abruptly returns to the mother-son 

relationship by ending this quatrain with a female image. Translating 

“potendo in a luogo più alto arridarsi” literally, Collaltino could have 

“nested” (arridarsi) in a higher place, but chooses rather to “nest” in 

Stampa’s heart. The English connotations for nesting are obviously maternal, 

but the Italian connotations of nido (nest) are also sexual. 10 Moreover, 

“farsi nido” (to nest) in the second quatrain occupies the same place 

as “ventre virginal” in the second. Thus, the mother-son relationship 

established by Stampa in the second quatrain echoes the Virgin-Christ 

child relationship established in the first quatrain. 

Furthermore, the sexual imagery contained in the line, “farsi nido e 

ricetto del mio cuore,” (Rime 2.8) reemphasizes the idea that pain is associated 

both with love-making and word-making for women. This motif 

coincides with the sexual imagery contained in Petrarch’s version. In lines 

nine to eleven, Petrarch is struck with the phallic arrow, through an 

“aperta la via” (the way open), to his heart. Here Petrarch reverses the 

sexual roles and casts himself as the female participant; however, what 

issues forth (son fatti uscio) from his sexual experience is not a child but 

tears. On the other hand, Stampa sees the irony in a male writer appropriating 

a female, procreative image. The result must be empty because the 

image will always be sterile for the male. But, when a woman uses a similar 

image, “farsi nido e recetto nel mio cuore,” where the beloved enters and 

is received in the heart, the image is fruitful, since her suffering produces 

a child—a poem, a word. The traditional creation, the woman, has now 

created. With this poetic model, Stampa sees herself in a comparable position 

to the Virgin with an opportunity to create poetry through divine 

inspiration, providing flesh for the word and becoming the means by 

which poetic incarnation can occur. 

In light of these readings, the ideas presented in Stampa’s first poem 

become more significant. In Rime 1.4, Stampa introduces the idea of 

pena, and then says in line 14: “ch’anch’io n’ andrei con tanta donna a 

10 Besides meaning “nest” in the sense where birds lay and hatch their eggs, the Grande 

Dizionario della Lingua Italiana also defines nido thus: “in senso allusivo: organo genitale 

femminile” (in an allegorical sense: the female genitalia).


paro” (That I would go equal to such a woman). Not only does she ask 

her audience to remember that she is a woman, who brings forth female 

poetry, she also foreshadows the introduction of the virgin birth, seen in 

the second poem. The “tanta donna a paro” (equal to such a woman) can 

refer both to the elevated status Stampa will receive as Collaltino’s lover, 

and to the fact that Stampa sees herself in a situation similar to that of 

Mary. She makes that comparison explicit in her second poem, when she 

introduces the imagery of the virgin birth. She here concentrates more on 

the physical process that naturally brings pain to the woman and her 

uterus, subtly referring to the pena of her first poem. In her eighth poem, 

Stampa combines all these ideas, culminating with a claim for a new style 

of poetry: 

Rime 8 

Se, così come sono abietta e vile 

conna, posso portar sì alto foco, 

perché non debbo aver almeno un poco 

di ritraggerlo al mondo e vena e stile? 

S’Amor con novo, insolito focile, 

ov’io non potea gir, m’alzò a tal loco, 

perché non può non con usato gioco 

far la pena e la penna in me simìle? 

E, se non può per forza di natura, 

puollo almen per miracolo, che spesso 

vince, trapassa e rompe ogni misura. 

Come ciò sia non posso dir espresso; 

io provo ben che per mia gran ventura 

mi sento il cor di novo stile impresso. 

[If I, who am an abject, low-born woman, 

Can bear within me such lofty fire, 

Why should I not possess at least a little 

Poetic power to tell it to the world, {both mood and style?} 

If Love, with such a new unheard-of flint 

Lifted me up where I could never climb 

Why cannot {he, outside of his usual playfulness,} 

Make pain and pen{similar in me?} 

{And if} Love cannot do this by force of nature, 

Perhaps {he can accomplish this be a miracle 

Which often conquers, crosses, and breaks every boundary.}

How that can be, I cannot well explain 

But yet I feel, because of my great fortune, 

My heart {impressed with a new style.}] 11 


In the first quatrain, she describes herself as an abject, low-born 

woman, recalling the meek, submissive Virgin Mary, reminding her audience 

that she, too, is a figura virginis. Then, engaging in a play on words, 

a gioco as she terms it, she asks why Love cannot make “la pena e la penna 

in me simìle.” As we have seen, penna equals the male reproductive organ, 

and according to the medical knowledge of the day, the uterus and the 

phallus were similar. Thus, if we associate pena with the uterus, it would 

indeed be similar to penna, and not simply because one letter has been 

added. Gaspara Stampa, in this line reduces the female act of giving birth 

into one word, pena, and the male act of conception into penna. Therefore, 

on a metaphorical level, she is asking why Love cannot make her 

female poetry similar to male poetry. By pointing out the fact that these 

two words are similar, both orthographically and biologically, she is pointing 

out that in the procreative metaphor where sexual creativity equals 

poetic creativity, the female act of giving birth is indeed similar to the male 

act of conception. It is not the pains from just any birth to which she is 

referring, however. It is the virgin birth, which Thomas Aquinas described 

as requiring a supernatural, divine power in order to be fertile. In his 

Summa Theologica, he explains that Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit, a 

miracle that crossed natural boundaries: 

in the conception of Christ, it was in nature’s way that he was 

born of a woman; it was above nature’s way that he was born of a 

virgin. Nature’s way in the generation of the animal species is that 

the female furnishes the matter [materiam] while from the male 

comes the active principle in generation, as Aristotle shows. A 

woman conceiving from a man is not a virgin. So for the supernatural 

mode of conception in Christ the active principle was a supernatural 

divine power. 12 

When talking about the female contribution to the creative process, 

Aquinas uses the Latin equivalent, materia, of the Greek word, u{lh, which 

Aristotle uses in his description. The words can refer to both physical and 

literary subject matter; a concept which continues the parallel between 

biological and poetical creation. The man creates while the woman provides 

the subject matter. A conflict arises, however, when a woman creates 

11 Exceptions from Stortoni and Lillie’s translation are indicated by curly brackets 

where the translation is mine. 

12 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologicae, 61 vols (New York: Blackfriars-McGraw Hill 

Book Company, 1694–81), 3a.31.5.


and a man provides the subject matter, as in Gaspara Stampa’s poetry. 

Such a scenario is not natural. Indeed, Stampa seems to have Aquinas’s 

passage in mind when she states: “E, se non può per forza di natura, / 

puollo almen per miracolo, che spesso / vince, trapassa e rompe ogni 

misura.” Only thus, through miraculous divine intervention, can a woman 

bring forth poetry. The three verbs Stampa chooses here a very strong 

verbs: vincere (to conquer), trapassare (to cross), and rompere, (to break). 

Such aggressive verbs indicate what Stampa will have to do to the misura, 

or boundaries, both natural and social, in order to succeed as a poet. 

These verbs also have sexual connotations, usually associated with the 

masculine role in copulation, especially involving a virgin woman. A man 

must trapassare and rompere the hymen in order to achieve sexual “victory.” 

Here Stampa has reversed the sexual roles. Stampa, as the Virgin, 

will be the one to trapassare and to rompere boundaries; she will have the 

poetic victory. And Stampa leaves no doubt that she has already crossed 

these boundaries and will succeed as a woman poet. Her final lines of this 

programmatic sonnet culminate with a claim for a new style of poetry. She 

ends with a description of her heart being impressed by a stile novo, once 

again reminding us of Dante’s dolce stil novo. Dante’s explanation of the 

theory behind his docle stil novo in Purgatorio 24 and 25 turns on divine 

inspiration. When Love inspires Dante, he writes. When God inspires the 

fetus, it moves. As John Frecero has noted, interpretation, the common 

element between human procreation and poetic creation in Dante’s dolce 

stil novo is the verb spira: 

Statius’ discussion about conception and reproduction in Canto 

XXV serves as a gloss on Canto XXIV, where the subject is literary 

creation and conception. More than that, it seems to suggest 

strongly an analogy between the act of writing and the act of procreation…. 

Sexuality is, for Dante, nature’s expression of creativity…. 

As the soul is inspired in the fetus, so the inspiration of the 

poet comes from God. The body, however, is the work of parenthood. 

In the same way, the poetic corpus is sired by the poet…. 13 

Stampa invites her reader to ask what happens when the poetic corpus is 

not sired, but mothered. Turning to Aquinas’ model of the virgin birth, 

the Holy Spirit, or divine inspiration, provides the creative impetus that 

gives life to the fetus: it is the only way for the material to become active. 

In Stampa’s model, the female poet, analogous to the Virgin, receives 

divine inspiration to create her poetic corpus which is the only way for the 

subject matter to become the active author. Likewise, the Holy Spirit, or 

13 John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Harvard 

University Press, 1986), 202.


divine inspiration, provides the creative impetus in Aquinas’ model of the 

virgin birth. 

Such an icon is problematic. Although a sense of female independence 

exists in the virgin birth metaphor, it also inherently contains a sense of 

female submission. Mary’s response to the Angel Gabriel demonstrates 

her humility, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord” (Luke 1:38), thus 

becoming a model for womanly obedience and submission. 14 Yet, Dante 

aptly expresses the paradox of the Madonna in his hymn to Mary at the 

beginning of Paradiso 33. Mary is at once virgin and mother, daughter 

and progenitor, humble and exalted (Par. 33.1–2). Thus, at times, the 

mother can require obedience from the son, as she requires a return home 

from the temple (Luke 2:51), or water turned to wine (John 2:4). Yet, 

most of the time, God requires obedience from the worshiper. Therefore, 

the Virgin is at once independent and submissive since she gives flesh to 

the Word, but still submits to the Word’s will. This paradoxical image of 

the Madonna is an appropriate one for Stampa’s poetry as Fiora A. Bassanese 

points out: 

In her dual role of lover, thus responsible for singing the praises 

of the beloved, and woman, Stampa must find an adequate 

symbol of both passivity and activity. Maternity offers the solution. 

She receives love on the one hand, but also gives life. It is 

also a metaphor for the creative act of composing poetry, urged 

on by the inspiration of love…. The [anniversary] poems reiterate 

Stampa’s readiness to love, as presented in the ancilla Domini 

theme of the first anniversary sonnet, expressing willing and fatalistic 

submission to another’s will. 15 

The irony comes from fact that the Virgin’s God to whom she is subject 

also happens to be her son. Stampa finds herself in a similar situation. She 

claims her independence by writing poetry, giving flesh to her word; however, 

Stampa still sees herself as submissive to a higher will, to her god. 

She, as the mother, the creator of the poetry, can ask for submission from 

her creation; however, Stampa also faces a paradox. She has in a sense created 

her lover through her poetry, just as Petrarch created Laura, and in 

this scenario, the created lover must feel some sort of obligation to the 

creator. But, Stampa is very much aware that she is a woman creating a 

man and not vice versa. Stampa’s creation is also her signore, her god. In 

her creation of Collaltino, Stampa has maintained both the social distance 

14 Penny Schine Gold,The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in 

Twelfth-Century France, Women in Culture and Society, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 1985), 68–69. 

15 Fiora A. Bassanese, Gaspara Stampa, ed. Carlo Golino, Twayne’s World Authors 

Series 658 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 76–77.


of her actual relationship with Collaltino and the spiritual difference of her 

symbolic relationship with her signore of poetry. As the creator of this 

character, Stampa could require submission from him, but most of the 

time her signore, her god, requires submission from her. 

The description of her new style maintains this paradox. Although she 

is the active, female writer, her imagery in the last line of the eighth sonnet 

is passive. She feels her heart “di novo stile impresso” (impressed with a 

new style). Again, Stampa refers to the parallel between writing and copulation, 

only this time replacing pen and paper with the stylus and tablet. 

Her heart becomes the tablet on which Love impresses his style, his stylus. 

As in English, the Italian words for style (stile) and stylus (stilo) are as similar 

as the words for pain (pena) and pen (penna). Again, only one letter 

separates them. Stampa here maintains her play on words throughout the 

sonnet. 

Because Stampa imitates Dante’s description of his docle stil novo, it is 

important to consider how Dante uses the word stilo to mean both “style” 

and “stylus” in the Comedia. In Purgatorio 24.58–59, Bonagiunta 

exclaims, “e qual di più a gradire oltre si nette, / non vede più da l’uno a 

l’altro stilo” (he who sets himself to seek farther and see no other difference 

between the one style and the other). Here stilo definitely stands for 

“style,” but in a later usage, Dante refers to Paul as “‘l verace stilo” (the 

veracious pen) (Par. 24.61) usually translated as “pen” or “stylus.” In 

both instances, however, style or stylus is nearly interchangeable. In the 

former instance, Bonagiunta’s use of stilo could have been a continuation 

of the idea that Dante moves his pen whenever Love dictates. Or with the 

latter instance, Dante, using metonomy with stilo standing for a male 

author, furthers the sexual imagery. Therefore, thinking of the ambiguities 

associated with the stil of the dolce stil novo, we can translate this phrase in 

two ways: “sweet new style” or “sweet new stylus.” The apocope of stil 

allows for both translations since we do not know whether the word ends 

in “o” or in “e.” Dante’s ambiguity here furthers his association of procreation 

with artistic creation. In effect, Dante has created both a new style 

and a new stylus, each one following after Love’s dictates. Either one proclaims 

a new method of writing, but each still assumes a male writer. 

Stampa’s new style answers Dante’s own. Both poets describe their 

writing style with intentional sexual references. Like the dolce stil novo, 

Stampa’s novo stile is erotic in that it is based on a procreative metaphor, 

requiring divine inspiration in order to be productive. But her style is feminine 

and aptly suited to her role as a woman writer. The placement of stile 

(style) next to impresso (impresso) reminds us of the tablet inscribed by the 

stylus. At first it would seem that Stampa is reverting to the traditional 

procreative metaphor that calls for passivity in the woman, but the preceding 

lines suggest the reverse. Stampa’s controlling metaphor in this poem


has been the virgin birth, a conception that did not require a “stylus” in 

the human terms, but relied on divine intervention instead. Therefore, the 

new style, or stylus, which Stampa feels impressing her heart is not the 

same as Dante’s pen that follows Love’s lead. Rather it is divine inspiration 

that goes beyond the bounds of nature to conceive in Stampa’s heart. 

However, active and passive tensions that reflect the conflict between her 

feminine role of a lover and her masculine role as a writer continue. While 

most of the eighth sonnet contains active, assertive imagery, Stampa ends 

this poem with a passive image. Unlike Dante who moves his pen whenever 

Love dictates, Stampa allows her heart to be impressed with this new 

style. The difference lies in the basic biological differences between the 

two authors: Dante is male and Stampa is female. Although an independent 

female poetic self is available for Stampa to exploit in her chosen metaphor, 

she returns to the accepted notion of woman as passive in nature 

and in sexual roles. Stampa is the active poet, while remaining the passive 

lover. Her novo stile maintains, first, the paradox of the Virgin, independent 

and submissive, and second, the woman’s natural role in the sex act. 

To return to Croce’s remarks, instead of Stampa demonstrating 

“scanty theoretical and contemplative power,” she has accomplished the 

opposite. Stampa has indeed contemplated the problems associated with 

women writing, and created a new poetical theory, a stile novo, that 

encompasses the tensions of female creation where the subject becomes 

artist, and where even the very act of writing itself, paralleling the sexual 

act, excludes a woman from wielding a pen. However, there is an aspect of 

the sexual act that excludes the man—the actual birth. By concentrating 

on the unique female aspect of the pain associated with childbirth and 

referring to the one birth that did not require a human, male presence, 

only divine inspiration, to be productive, Stampa has created a space in her 

sonnets for female poetry within a male metaphor.


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Wîse Maget 

Jolyon Timothy Hughes 

Colorado State University 

N MEDIEVAL GERMAN LITERATURE, the figure of the wise man occurs 

repeatedly. This can be evidenced in several primary works of literature 

from the period. In Wolframs von Eschenbach’s Parzival Trevrizent 

is shown to be a very wizened and understanding member of 

Parzival’s own family. 1 In Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan, the title 

figure is known to be wise before he is physically mature. However, in the 

critical literature on the period, there is no mention of older female characters 

exhibiting similar attributes as those qualities exemplified by the 

male figure of young Tristan, let alone younger women or girls. 2 

There is textual evidence to support the notion of a motif in German 

medieval literature of a maiden, wise before her years in many of the major 

works of the time. Four primary works, Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme 

Heinrich, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Wolfram’s Willehalm, and 

Hartmann’s Iwein offer examples of this motif. 3 I 

I will also argue that this 

usage of a woman wise ahead of her years has lived on in German literature 

even if it has not enjoyed the popularity it had in the Middle Ages. These 

later examples will be identified and compared to show a definite character 

type. The intent is to show a pattern of use for a type of character and to 

show its survival in the mainstream of German literary tradition. 

These four medieval sources all have a male character as their main 

protagonist: Heinrich, Parzival, Willehalm, and Iwein. The females identified 

in this essay are not the main characters of their respective works, but 

rather, through their wisdom, help the protagonist. In some cases the pro- 

1See J. G. Hagen, New Advent-The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11060b.htm 

and the life of Nicholas of Cusa; he is also referred to as 

“Nicolaus Trevirensis.” Wolfram was most likely knowledgeable of the saints, this shows that 

his Trevrizenz figure was not only wise but holy. 

2See Frances and Joseph Gies, Women in the Middle Ages, The Lives of Real Women in a 

Vibrant Age (New York: Thomas Crowell Co., 1978), for an in depth study on women’s lives 

in the Middle Ages. 

3 Hartmann von Aue, Gergorious/Der arme Heinrich (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche 

Buchgesellschaft, 1967) [hereafter DAR]; references are to lines. Wolfram von Eschenbach, 

Parzival (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998) [hereafter P]; references are to sections:lines. 

Wolfram von Eschenbach, Willehalm (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1968) [hereafter W]; 

references are to sections:lines. Hartmann von Aue, Iwein (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981) 

[hereafter I]; references are to lines. 


56 Jolyon Timothy Hughes 

tagonist’s very survival depends on the actions and wisdom of the girl in 

question. In the first narrative Der arme Heinrich this figure is “die kleine 

Braut” (the little bride); 4 in the second it is Wolfram’s Obilot, the third 

Alyze, and in the fourth Lûnete. These four characters supply the best 

examples of the figure in German medieval literature, and to complete the 

typology there will be supporting female figures from other well-known 

works as well. 

The young girl, in Hartmann von Aue’s Der Arme Heinrich, comes to 

her wisdom at the age of eleven. This can be deduced from the text 

because the narrator gives her age as eight, “ein kint von ahte jâren…” (a 

child of eight years) (DAR, 303). He then states that his pain increases 

three years later: “dô der arme Heinrich driu jâr dâ entwelte und im got 

gequelte mit grôzem sêre den lîp….” (When poor Henry had resided 

there for three years and God had tortured his body…) (DAR, 350–53). 

This would make her eleven years of age. The first sign of her insight 

comes after Heinrich has told her parents how he will die and that only 

one cure can be found, which is the heart’s blood of a young, willing virgin: 

“von ir herzen das bluot” (DAR, 452). After hearing this, the girl is 

kept up at night worrying about the future of her family: 

waz mac uns mê gewerren 

danne an unsern herren, 

daz wir den suln verliesen 

und mit im verkiesen 

beidiu guot und êre? 

wir gewinnen niemer mêre 

deheinen herren alsô guot, 

der uns tuo, daz er unz tuot 

DAR, 491–98 

[How can any greater tragedy befall us 

than that which is happening to our lord 

and that we should lose him, 

when with his loss 

we too lose our possessions and honor? 

We will never again 

find such a good master, 

who does so much for us and treats us well.] 

4 All translations into English are my own unless otherwise noted. These translations are 

not intended to be artisticly valuable, but are instead merely to present an interlinear translation 

for those unfamiliar with Middle High German and make these texts more accessible for 

comparative purposes. The original Middle High German text will appear first and the line 

by line English translation below.

Wîse Maget 57 

She recognizes a need that is beyond her own, and that concerns her entire 

family. She speaks more about adult concerns and how her family will not 

have a good life after the master is gone. Medieval peasants were not long 

lived and worked at a very early age, 5 which forced them to mature at an 

earlier age. This explanation, however, does not go far enough to account 

for her desire to sacrifice herself for the greater good of her family. The 

narrator speaks of her as a child and acknowledges her accelerated understanding 

of the situation. She is described as like an adult, or at least unlike 

any child the narrator has ever seen: 

wan sî trouc tougen 

nâhen in ir gemüete 

die aller meisten güete, 

die ich von kinde ie vernam. 

welch kint getete ouch ie alsam? 

des einen sî sich gar bewac, 

gelebete sî morgen den tac, 

daz sî benamen ir leben 

umbe ir herren wolde geben. 

DAR, 520–28 

[She carried hidden 

deep in her soul 

the greatest measure of goodness 

That I have ever found in a child. 

What child would have ever acted thus? 

The one thing she had decided 

should she live to see the coming day 

that she would take her life 

and would give it to her lord.] 

The thought of a cure for her beloved Heinrich makes her happy— 

“Von dem gedanke wart sî dô vil ringes muotes unde vrô” (From this 

thought she was made courageous and happy) (DAR, 529–30)—but it is 

not a decision that she has made lightly or does not understand. In the 

lines 520 to 528 one sees the beginning of her resolve to help Heinrich 

regardless of the personal consequences. This decision on her part is of 

course greeted with grave concern by her parents. They love Heinrich and 

know that they will lose everything when they lose him, but the thought of 

losing their daughter is equally painful, if not more so. The daughter tells 

5 See David Herlihy, Opera Muliebria, Woman and Work in Medieval Europe (New 

York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1990), for a study of the work that women did, from the ancient to 

the modern world.


her parents of her plan and they react as normal parents would; they think 

that her decision is the momentary willfulness of a child and not based in 

the knowledge of what the real consequences of her actions will be: 

ich bin ein maget und hân den muot, 

ê ich in sihe verderben, 

ich wil ê vür in sterben. 

Von dirre rede wurden do 

trûrec und unvrô 

beide muoter unde vater. 

sîne tohter die bater, 

daz sî die rede lieze 

und ir herren gehieze, 

daz sî geleisten möhte, 

wan ir diz niene töhte. 

er sprach: “tohter, dû bist ein kint 

und dîne triuwe die sint 

ze grôz an disen dingen.” 

DAR, 562–75 

[I am a maiden and I have the courage 

that before I see his demise 

I will die for him. 

From this speech 

both father and mother 

sad and unhappy. 

He begged his daughter 

to cease such talk 

and to tell their lord 

of her intentions 

to which she had no right. 

He said: “Daughter, you are a child 

and your faithfulness 

is too great for these things.”] 

With the words “dû bist ein kint” (you are a child) (560) her father 

hopes to show that her plan is pointless. In this manner he hopes to show 

her resolve to be nothing but a flight of fancy, which has no basis in reality. 

He hopes that she will forget the decision if he belittles it. He also states 

that she cannot be willing to follow through with her wish because she has 

never stared death in the face. She is inexperienced in the ways of the 

world and cannot possibly make a rational decision because the consequence, 

death, is simply beyond her comprehension:

du entmaht sî niht bringen, 

als dû uns hie hast verjehen. 

dû hâst des tôdes niht gesehen. 

swennez dir kumet ûf die vrist, 

daz des dehein rât ist, 

du enmüezest ersterben, 

und möhtestu daz erwerben, 

dû lebetest gerner dannoch: 

wan du enkæme nie in leider loch. 

tuo zuo dînen munt: 

und wirstû vür dise stunt 

der rede iemer mêre lût, 

ez gât dir ûf dîne hût. 

[You cannot go through with this, 

what you have spoken of. 

You have never seen death. 

When it comes to the point 

where there is no turning back 

and you must die 

but you can choose that, (a reprieve) 

you would rather live: 

because you can never escape this prison. 

Hold your tongue, 

and if you again 

speak of these things 

I will take it out on your hide.] 


DAR, 576–88 

With this manner of argument, her father hopes to put her in her place 

by intimidation and convincing her of his superior knowledge and experience. 

He honestly believes that she cannot know what she is doing. She is, 

however, no ordinary child, as the narrator has already stated. She makes 

it quite plain that she can reason and that she has perhaps more logic than 

her more experienced and knowledgeable father. She is able to bring her 

argument into the realm of the spiritual. She then speaks of eternal life and 

the rewards in heaven as well as earth bound reasons, such as Heinrich’s 

protection and goodness to them. She makes a comparison between life 

with the heavenly father and a troubled, difficult existence here on earth. 

Her arguments sound like those of an adult rather than ravings of an 

eleven-year-old girl (DAR, 593–628). 

The parents realize the validity and rational presentation of her argument, 

as they do not try to refute what she has said. It would be logical to


assume that they would make a counter argument if she had not persuaded 

them with her logical monologue. Instead of arguing the points that she 

made in her long speech her mother tries a new approach. She informs her 

daughter how the mother will hurt her if the girl goes through with her 

plan. It will break the mother’s heart to see her daughter die at such a 

young age. The daughter has already caused the mother great pain during 

childbirth and she does not want to have any more unnecessary pain. 

gedenke, tohter, liebez kint, 

wie grôz die arbeite sint, 

die ich durch dich erlitten hân, 

und lâ mich bezzern lôn emphân, 

dan ich dich hœre sprechen. 

dû wilt mîn herze brechen. 

DAR, 631–36 

[Think about this, daughter, beloved child 

how great the labor was 

that I suffered on your behalf, 

and allow me to have a better reward 

than I hear you speaking of now. 

You will break my heart.] 

The mother continues trying to persuade her daughter by similar means 

until she reaches a counter argument for the daughter’s belief in her eventual 

reward of heavenly salvation. The mother wishes to inform her daughter 

that this act of seeming selflessness and sacrifice for the family is simply 

suicide, and that no one comes into heaven who has committed suicide 

because it is a cardinal sin: 

und lâzestû uns über dîn grap 

gestân von dînen schulden, 

dû muost von guotes hulden 

iemer sîn geschieden: 

daz koufest an uns beiden. 

DAR, 658–62 

[If you allow, through 

fault of your own, 

us to stand over your grave, 

all of God’s great rewards 

will remain closed to you: 

This you will reap from us two.]


The daughter thanks her mother and father for caring for her and for 

giving her everything that she has needed. She says that God has given her 

reason: 

nû wil ich gôte gnâde sagen, 

daz er in mînen jungen tagen 

mir die sinne hât gegeben, 

daz ich ûf diz brœde leben 

ahte harte kleine. 

DAR, 693–97 

[Now I would like to thank God 

that he has given me in my early years, 

enough understanding 

not to dwell 

on this transitory life.] 

This reason, which has come at an early age, tells her that she needs not 

put so much value on life in this world. From line 681 through line 854 

she holds a monologue listing the reasons for her helping Heinrich. These 

reasons are far reaching and show a broader understanding of her family’s 

situation. She realizes that her parents do not have enough money to 

secure her a dowry for a husband. This fact alone could be seen as an argument 

for her selfishness. The torturous life of a peasant is too tedious and 

difficult for her and that eternal life in Heaven would be better. In stating 

this argument she can imagine something that is extremely difficult for an 

adult, let alone for an eleven-year-old. She also has awareness of others. 

Her parents have other children but they are poor. Her family member’s 

lives would be improved, according to her arguments, if she were to trade 

her life for their benefactor’s. She comprehends her family’s position in 

society and its economic potential, or lack thereof. 

She has listed too many good reasons for helping her lord, and by 

extension her family, and the parents can find no flaw in her logic. They 

therefore decide to follow her advice because they believe that it has been 

won through holy intervention: “der sin sî ir von gote komen” (this decision 

has come to her from God) (DAR, 874). Arguing against her divine 

logic would be as futile as arguing against God himself. It is reminiscent of 

the scene in the Bible when Abraham is told to give up his child. 6 The girl 

is even compared to Saint Nicholas in the manner of her wisdom coming 

before its time. The instance of St. Nicholas is extreme but by evoking his 

6 Genesis 22:2: He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go 

to the land of Mori’ah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of 

which I shall tell you.”


case, the narrator can demonstrate the girl’s wisdom to an audience, which 

was no-doubt knowledgeable of the Saints: 7 

Dô sprach daz kint sâhen 

zem tôde sô gâhen 

und ez sô wîslichen sprach 

unde menschlich reht zebrach, 

si begunden ahten under in, 

daz die wîsheit und den sin 

niemer erzeigen kunde 

dehein zunge in kindes munde. 

si jâhen, daz der heilic geist 

der rede wære ir volleist, 

der ouch sant Niklauses phlac. 

dô er in der wagen lac, 

und in die wîsheit lêrte, 

daz er ze gote kêrte 

sîne kintlîche güete. 

DAR, 855–69 

[When they saw the child 

running into the arms of death 

and yet speaking so wisely 

surpassing all human authority 

they began to realize together 

that the wisdom and logic 

could never appear 

from the tongue in any child’s mouth. 

They said, that the Holy Ghost 

was the author of her speech, 

who had done the same with Saint Nicholas. 

He lay in the crib 

and was taught the wisdom 

that he should turn to God 

his childish goodness.] 

7The prologue from Ochrid (4 vols.), by Bishop Nikolai Velimirovic (Birmingham: Lazarica 

Press, 1985): The Life of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, http://www.stmichael.org/ 

Nicholas/StNich.html. “After his birth, while still in the baptismal font, he stood on his feet 

for three hours, supported by no one, by this rendering honor to the Holy Trinity, of Whom 

he later would show himself to be a great servitor and intercessor. In him it was possible to 

recognize the future wonderworker even by the way in which he drew near to his mother’s 

breast, because he led on the milk only of the right breast, signifying by this his future standing 

on the right hand of the Lord together with the righteous. He gave signs of his extraordinary 

abstinence in that on Wednesdays and Fridays he took his mother’s milk only once, 

and this in the evening, after the parents’ completion of the customary prayers.”


The narrator has shown the reader a girl of little experience and years 

willing to sacrifice herself for the good of her family and lord. She has also 

been given the ability to make her point understood through arguments 

that are divine in nature. She can therefore be said to display wisdom 

beyond her years. The claim will not be made that she acts wisely in all 

ways, but merely that she has abilities that are beyond her years. It is clear 

from the text that the young bride is at times guilty of unm ze (extreme 

behavior, losing her temper). When speaking to the doctor she informs 

him that he sounds like a woman, “iuwer rede gezæme einem wîbe” (your 

words belong to a woman) (DAR, 1122), and she beats herself about the 

breasts and bewails her forced existence on earth. In this sense she is still 

somewhat childish, but this is due to that fact that the Holy Spirit has, at 

this point, left her. There is no more reason for her to be adult-like 

because there is no more sacrifice to be made. Her wisdom allowed her to 

make the argument that she and Heinrich should go to Salerno for his 

treatment. 

Once Heinrich has been saved, the divine wisdom is withdrawn and 

she returns to her normal state of childhood. While under the Holy 

Spirit’s influence she is capable of holding a lengthy, mature monologue 

for pages at a time because it allows her to make logical and reasonable 

arguments. It also gives her purpose. Once the divinely inspired wisdom 

and Holy Spirit are gone, she hardly speaks again. 

There can be little doubt that “The Maid with the Little sleeves” (La 

Pucelle aux Petites Manches) 8 in Chrétien’s text is indeed the character 

from which Wolfram von Eschenbach moulds his Obilot in Parzival. Wolfram 

seems purposefully to create confusion in his text as to whether he 

based his work on Chrétien’s Le Conte du Graal (Perceval) 9 or not, because 

Wolfram himself states in Parzival quite plainly that Chrétien told the 

story incorrectly (P, 827:1–11). Most researchers, however, believe that 

Wolfram did indeed take his story from Chrétien’s masterpiece. 10 Given 

that this influence is substantiated, there is a connection between the 

German literary figure Obilot and a larger convention from the originator 

of the genre. 11 Wolfgang Mohr also ties the figure of Obilot to the figure 

of “die kleine Braut” in Hartmann’s Der Arme Heinrich. What makes this 

8Chrétien de Troyes, Le Conte Du Graal (Perceval) (Paris: Félix Lecoy, 1973) 

9Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, or the Story of the Grail, trans. Ruth Harwood Cline 

(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985). 

10 See Joachim Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlerische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 

1991) and Neil Thomas, “Wolfram von Eschenbach: Modes of Narrative 

Presentation,” in A Companion to Wolfram’s Parzival, ed. William Hasty (Columbia, SC: 

Camden House, 1999), 131, in which he calls Chrétien’s text the “source text.” 

11 See Ruth Harwood Cline’s introduction to Troyes, Perceval.


remarkable is Wolfram’s general dislike of Hartmann’s style and methods, 

which can be seen clearly in Parzival. 12 Mohr states: 

Literarhistorish gehört die Geschichte von Obilot in den Zusammenhang 

der Entdeckung des kindlichen Ordo in der hochmittelalterlichen 

Dichtung. Hartmann von Aue war Wolfram damit 

unmittelbar vorausgegangen. Seiner kleinen Bauerstochter und 

kleinen Heiligen im >Armen Heinrich< stellt Wolfram eine kleine 

Dame gegenüber, nicht mehr ganz als Kind, schon ein wenig 

Backfisch mit Ansprüchen auf einige Meinungen und eignes Lebensrecht 

in der Gesellschaft, ja sogar schon ein wenig geneigt, 

ihre Wirkungen auf die Großen auszuüben. 13 

[In literary history the story of Obilot belongs in connection with 

the discovery of the child class in the poetry of the high Middle 

Ages. Hartmann von Aue was undoubtedly ahead of Wolfram in 

this area. Opposite his {Hartmann von Aue} little farmer’s daughter 

and little holy child in Der Arme Heinrich Wolfram places a 

little woman with claims to her own opinions and a right to life all 

her own in society. She is even predisposed to exercise her powers 

on those older than she is.] 

In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival Obilot proves herself to be 

much more aware of the world around her than her young years would 

indicate. Her older, supposedly wiser, sister Obie has insulted Gâwein, 

calling him a traveling salesman or merchant. Obilot’s insights into 

Gâwein’s character and standing are superior to her sister’s, as she is able 

to see beyond appearances. Obilot comes to Gâwein’s defense after Obie 

has wrongfully accused Gâwein of being a travelling merchant imitating a 

knight: 

diu junge muose ir spotten doln: 

si sprach er mac sich des wol erholn: 

ich gibe im noch gein ellen trôst, 

daz er dîns spottes wirt erlôst. 

er sol dienst gein mir kêren, 

unde ich wil im vröude mêren. 

12Wolfram mentions Hartmann several times in P. The first is when Wolfram speaks of 

Hartmann’s Erec (134:6–7), the second is when Wolfram names Hartmann specifically and 

has him being a courtier in Arthur’s court (143:21) insinuating that Hartmann in reality 

knows nothing about warfare, only life at court. 

13 Wolfgang Mohr, Wolfram von Eschenbach: Aufsätze (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1979), 

113. See also Xenia von Ertzdorff, “Fräulein Obilot: Zum siebten Buch von Wolframs 

Parzival,” Wirkendes Wort 12 (1962): 129–40.


sît du gihst er sî ein koufman, 

er sol mîns lônes market hân. 

P, 358:7–14 

[The young sister had to take the insult: 

She said, “ He will make up for what he missed 

and I believe whole-heartedly 

he will be delivered from your insults. 

He will turn his services to me 

and I will make him happy for it. 

If you still believe that he is a merchant 

he will have my reward for proving otherwise.] 

In this manner Obilot already shows herself to be free of the vanities to 

which her older sister has fallen prey. She also shows herself to be a good 

judge of character and less biased, which enables her to pick a combatant 

based on quality, rather than a whim or fancy. Obilot also reveals maturity 

beyond her years when her father, Lippaut, asks Gâwein for help in saving 

his besieged city. Obie’s suitor Meljanz is attacking the walls of the city 

because his Minnedienst was not rewarded. Obie is pleased with the events 

and watches gladly as Meljanz proves himself in battle. Obilot accomplishes 

what her father cannot do. She succeeds in persuading Gâwein to 

help them with the defense of their city. This despite her youth and the 

fact that Gâwein has given his word to be somewhere else in a short time, 

not leaving him enough time and energy to fight here: 

er sprach >vrouwe, iuwers mundes dôn 

wil mich von triuwen scheiden. 

untriuwe iu solde leiden. 

mîn triuwe dolt die pfandes nôt 

ist si unerloeset, ich bin tôt. 

doch lât mich dienst unde sinne 

kêren gegen iuwere minne: 

ê daz ir minne megt gegeben, 

ir müezet vünf jâr ê leben: 

deist iuwerre minne zît ein zal.< 

[He spoke “Lady, it is your wish 

that I break my word (oath, promise in good faith). 

You must despise faithlessness. 

I have given my word in promise: 

if I do not make good on it, I am dead. 

P, 370:11–17


However, if I were to serve you 

and try to earn your love: 

Before you could give me my reward, 

you would have to live another five years: 

until you would be allowed to repay me.”] 

Gâwein gives the reader a clue as to Obilot’s age. In five years time she 

will be able to reward a knight who has proven himself worthy through 

Minnedienst. If the “kleine Braut” was eleven when she was of marrying 

age then Obilot must have been six or seven years of age. She is the youngest 

of the four girls to be examined in this essay, yet she arguably accomplishes 

the most in saving her city while simultaneously saving her sister’s 

relationship. Considering the harsh treatment she receives from her sister, 

Obilot reveals exemplary charity often unseen even among adults. 

Gâwein cannot be rewarded sexually for his aid to Obilot, but he will 

be rewarded in other ways. He thinks of Parzival, who always honors 

women, even above God. This thought leads him to wear his armor in 

defense of the city on behalf of the young girl. The thought of Obilot’s 

purity and honorable behavior will bring him to even greater deeds on the 

battlefield: 

nu dâhte er des, wie Parzival 

wîben baz getrûwet den gote: 

sîn bevelhen dirre magde bote 

was Gâwân in daz herze sîn. 

dô lobte er dem vröuwelîn, 

er wolde durch si wâpen tragen. 

er begunde ir vürbaz mêre sagen 

>in iuwerre hende sî mîn swert. 

ob iemen tjoste gein mir gert, 

den poynder müezt ir rîten, 

ir sûlt dâ vür mich strîten. 

man mac mich dâ in strîte sehen: 

der muoz mînhalp von iu geschehen< 

P, 370:18–30 

[He [Gâwein] began to think about how Parzival 

trusted women more than God: 

The memory of the young girl’s message 

found its way into Gâwein’s heart. 

He praised the young girl 

and agreed to represent her with his weapons. 

He began to say to her 

“my sword is in your hands.


If someone wishes to joust against me 

you must then ride in the attack 

and fight in my place. 

One might see me in the battle 

but it will in actuality be you.”] 

Gâwein will fight for her and her honor and thereby increase his own 

reputation, possibly increasing it more because he takes on the task without 

a promise of payment. Obilot’s ability to awaken Gâwein’s honor takes 

an understanding of the system of Minnedienst although she is still playing 

with dolls. She has indirectly saved her city as well as Meljanz and Obie’s 

love. Her act accomplishes what no one else could do and she promises 

that her love will send Gâwein off to great deeds. She motivates him further 

by stating that she will be his shield and his strength. Her love will 

give him luck and safety, which will carry him through all of the morning’s 

battles (P, 371:1–16). 

Her speech of strength, courage, and love convinces her also of her 

own new-found maturity. She declares herself both wirt and wirt n, 

although in 372:1 the narrator informs the reader that Obilot leaves: 

“Dan vuor diu magt und ir gespil” (Then the maid and her playmate took 

their leave). She convinces Gâwein to save the city and informs him that 

she will help him in his fight, two daunting tasks for any grown up, yet she 

leaves with her play partner (Clauditte). She remains a child in some ways. 

She has a puppet (tocken) (P, 372:18) that she is willing to share with her 

friend Clauditte. It is also childlike that though she has persuaded Gâwein 

to help in the city’s defense, she needs help from her father in a much simpler 

manner. She has nothing to give him for his troubles because she is a 

child and has only playthings: 

vater mir wart nie sô nôt 

dîner helfe: dar zuo gip mir rât. 

der ritter mich gewert hât. 

P, 372:28–30 

[My father I have never had such need 

of your help: Please give me counsel. 

The knight has heard my plea.] 

…dâ hân ich clienote 

dem vremden ritter gelobt. 

ich waen mîn sin hât getobt. 

hân im niht ze gebenne, 

waz toug ich dan ze lebenne,


sît er mir dienst hât heboten? 

Sô muoz ich schämeliche roten, 

ob ich im niht ze gebene hân. 

nie magede wart sô liep ein man. 

P, 373:18–26 

[I have promised 

the foreign knight my love reward. 

I must have been robbed of my senses. 

I have nothing to give him, 

he has promised to serve me 

what reason have I to live? 

So must I turn red with shame, 

because I have nothing to give him. 

Never has a knight been so beloved of a maid.] 

Lippaut, her father realizes what a great service she has done to the city 

and to him personally. Gâwein can save them all and can save his position 

as master of the castle or “Burgherr”. Lippaut had failed in this task, and 

now that she has achieved it for him, he declares: 

Tohter, swes dîn wille gert, 

hân ichz, des bistu gewert. 

ôwol der vruht diu an dir lac! 

dîn geburt was der saelden tac 

P, 373:1–4 

[Daughter, whatever your heart desires, 

I have it, and you are worth it. 

What a blessing that you are to us! 

Your birth was a lucky day.] 

Obilot shows herself to be a good judge of character in her defense of 

Gâwein. He hears Obie insulting him as Obilot defends him, though shedoes 

not know him. Obie’s insults of Gâwein, although she has no idea of 

his character or station in life can be seen as an example of unm ze , a characteristic 

that Obilot does not share with her older sister. She can be seen 

to be more mature than her sister because she exhibits another characteristic 

that her older sister lacks: zuht, or manners and bearing. 

It also can be argued that in her willingness to be punished for her 

view of Gâwein demonstrates that she recognizes the necessity of paying 

the consequences of holding an unfavorable opinion. Due to Obilot’s 

stance, Obie slaps her across the face for defending Gâwein against her 

attacks. Finally Obilot achieves the ultimate safety of the city and the reconciliation 

between Meljanz and Obie, which brings Obie back to a state


of mâze and zuht, which she had been lacking before. In doing at the age 

of six or eight what others (including her own father) could not do in 

adulthood, Obilot exhibits another form of mature ability, that of problem 

solving. She manipulates the system in which she does not yet live in to 

suit her needs. She is unable physically to reward Gâwein but still manages 

to solve a situation so that all are in the end satisfied. 

In Wolfram’s later work, Willehalm, the third young female figure to 

be examined appears in verse 154. Willehalm has had a dispute with his sister, 

Alyze’s mother the queen. The two siblings are angry with one 

another because Willehalm wants his relatives to raise an army and help 

him fight the heathens who are besieging his wife and lands. The queen 

believes that he fights too often and innocent men are dead because of his 

need for honor in battle. The family is split in two by the feuding siblings. 

Alyze is a beautiful, young, and innocent girl with braided hair (W, 154:9– 

11). Her age is undetermined, but she is referred to by the narrator as 

magt (maiden) (W, 155:17; 155:28; 156:2; 156:19; 157:4), meide (virgin) 

(W, 155:13) and kint (child) (W, 156:9; 158:1). These clues provide the 

basis for judging her to be still a girl of younger years, not yet ready for 

Minnedienst. The narrator does inform the reader that Alyze is well developed 

for her age. He describes her further by saying that: 

ir brust ze nider noch ze hôch. 

der werlde vîentschaft si vlôch 

W, 155:7–8 

[Her breasts were neither too high nor too low. 

She was pleasing to all without exception.] 

This could be understood as a sign of womanhood. The earlier clues of 

Alyze being called a magt and kint seem more compelling, meaning that 

she is simply a well-endowed, early bloomer. This can be seen due to the 

repetition of the diminutive terms by the author used for the figure of 

Alyze as opposed to a feeling implied by the text. She also has special 

powers for one so young. The narrator states that her purity (kiusche) can 

work miracles of healing: 

Alyz diu sældenbære, 

man möht ûf eine wunden 

ir kiusche hân gebunden, 

dâ daz ungenande wære bî: 

beliebe diu niht vor schaden vrî, 

sî müese enkelten wunders. 

W, 154:20–25


[Alyze was the bearer of blessings and mercy, 

so that anyone who had a wound 

and brought it before her purity, 

even if it were untreatable: 

would, even if not healed, 

have been released of sin.] 

sî gap sô minneclîchen schîn, 

des lîchte ein vreuden siecher man 

wider hôhen muot gewan. 

W, 155:4–6 

[She looked so beautiful 

to look on her gladdened even the bitterest 

and made him take heart.] 

Willehalm, the experienced fighter, capable governor of his territory and 

older male begs his young and inexperienced niece for advice and aid 

when he says to her: 

niftel, nu gestate mirs, 

daz ich in dîme gebote lebe: 

dîn güete mir den rât nu gebe 

W, 156:12–14 

[Niece, now allow me 

to put myself in your hands: 

Let your goodness give me counsel.] 

Alyze can heal wounds with miraculous power despite her youth and inexperience, 

and is able to solve problems that adults cannot solve themselves. 

Her warlike uncle asks a young maiden for advice about matters that she 

should not be able to comprehend at her age or due to her sex. It was seen 

as unsightly for a woman to be in combat except for the most demanding 

of situations. 

Alyze has her uncle in a position of disadvantage when he asks her for 

help. He is distraught with the thought of Gyburg and the attack on his 

homeland, and wishes to be there to aid in the defense. With her answer 

she holds power over him and what is to happen in the rest of the narrative. 

She directly influences what will happen for better or worse for Willehalm 

and his whole family. Alyze tries to bring about a reconciliation 

between her uncle Willehalm and her mother. In doing so she heals the rift 

in the family and also makes it possible for Willehalm to defend his lands 

with the help of the armies at his relatives’ disposal. The hero of the nar-


rative is so incensed at his sister that he is about to behead her. It is only 

through the quick thinking and soothing words of his niece Alyze that her 

mother is saved (W, 157:4–30). 

Alyze claims that her mother has misbehaved and that her uncle has 

become unnaturally angry with her. This is a role reversal in which the 

young daughter scolds her mother and uncle for their childish behavior. In 

doing so she reminds her uncle of what is really important: his family. She 

brings to light the fact that Willehalm and her mother came from the same 

parents and also her own close ties with his wife Gyburg. Her monologue 

helps him find his path back to reason. Even though Alyze states that her 

mother is wrong and Willehalm is still angry she has avoided a disaster for 

her family. 

Willehalm realizes that he has been too rash in his criticism. Alyze’s 

mother and Willehalm are at peace all through the efforts of a wise, young 

child who helped him become reconciled with his sister. In doing so Willehalm 

won the approval of his family, which means that he gains an army to 

help him in his battle against his Saracen and Moorish enemies. To this 

end his mother, realizing his need and good qualities, gives the money to 

support an all out offensive against her son’s enemies (W, 160:24–26). 

Alyze, the girl who can work miracles, has worked one in keeping her 

family together. She has also saved her aunt and uncle’s very lives by creating 

an environment in which Willehalm could receive the help he needs 

from his family. If she had not been there and been unable to help in the 

manner that she did, her mother might be dead and Willehalm would have 

no army. Gyburg would have little chance of rescue. 

In Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein the protagonist, for whom the narrative 

is named, is a knight undertaking quests in order to win honor and glory. 

He is, however, quickly trapped while entering the castle of a knight, who 

he had just slain in combat during the first adventure of the narrative. 

Îwein is then trapped in the entrance between two portcullises. He will be 

discovered and killed in a very dishonorable manner if not aided by a 

young maget who realizes his worth and can see his value even though he 

killed her master. Lûnete, a young girl, gives him a ring of invisibility, 

which allows him to hide in plain sight and avoid capture: 

herre, ich erkenn iuch wol: 

iuwer vater was, deist mir erkannt, 

der künec Urjên genant. 

ir sult vor schaden sicher sîn: 

her Îwein, nemet diz vingerlîn. 

ez ist umben stein alsô gewant: 

swer in hât in blôzer hant, 

den mac nieman, al die vrist


unz er in blôzer hant ist, 

gesehen noch gevinden 

I, 1198–1209 

[Sir, I know you well: 

Your father was named, this is known to me, 

King Uriens. 

You will be safe from danger: 

Sir Îwein, take this finger-ring. 

This stone has the power that 

whosoever has it in their naked hand, 

no one , as long as 

it is in the kept in the naked hand, 

will be able to see or find him.] 

Lûnete is successful in her efforts to save Îwein, but why would a 

young girl have a ring of invisibility or know how to procure one if she is 

not a representative of the w se maget? The narrator calls her s n vriunt or 

“his protector.” He also refers to her as diu guote maget (the good maiden) 

(I, 1303). She is still a maget and also able to do for Îwein, that which he 

cannot do for himself. Îwein cannot help himself out of his first predicament 

and must rely on Lûnete. She saves the hero only to have him put 

himself at risk again. He then sees her mistress, Laudine, and immediately 

falls in love with her. He has slain this woman’s husband and she is mourning 

his death. Her vassals had been eager to slay Îwein, yet he does not 

wish to flee because of his love for Laudine. Lûnete scolds Îwein as an 

adult scolds a child acting irresponsibly. She simply cannot believe that he 

would act so foolishly when he is not yet free of danger. Îwein is older than 

Lûnete and also a knight, but her wisdom and cool-headedness allow her 

to chastise him for his irresponsible behavior: 

irn wellent mir volgen, 

sô habt ir den lîp verlorn.’ 

alsus erwant in ir zorn. 

sî sprach ‘wes was iu gedâcht? 

wær iuwer gedanc volbrâcht, 

sone hetent ir niht wol gevarn, 

ichn trûwe iu den lîp niht bewarn. 

ezn sî dan iuwer wille. 

durch got sitzent stille. 

er ist ein vil wîser man 

der tumben gedanc verdanken kan 

mit wîslîcher getât 

I, 1490–1501


[If you won’t follow me 

So must you lose your life. 

Thus, she her anger turned him from his task. 

She asked, what were you thinking? 

If you had followed through with this thought 

It would have gone badly for you. 

I am trying to save your life 

even if that isn’t your desire. 

By God, sit quietly. 

He is a much wiser man, 

who can put an end to stupid thoughts 

and continue with wiser deeds.] 

Vrou Minne has taken hold of Îwein so that he is unable to think of anything 

but the love he feels for Laudine. A younger, less experienced 

maiden must think rationally for him and be his voice of reason. The narrator 

states that she can also recognize a situation and react in a suitable 

manner hinting at her cleverness. In doing so he also states clearly the title 

of this character type: 

Dô ez halbez wart gesaget, 

do erkande wol diu wîse maget 

daz er ir vrouwen meinde, 

als sî im sît bescheinde. 

I, 1757–60 

[Hardly half had been said 

when the wise maiden recognized 

that he had her Lady in mind 

and she told him her opinion.] 

In the second sentence the author uses the term wise maget to 

describe Lûnete’s actions. Not only is Îwein impressed with Lûnete’s ability 

to handle the situations that have arisen. Gawan (Gâwein) is also 

impressed by Lûnete’s quick thinking, which saves Herr Îweins life. He 

realizes that Îwein would not have come into his present position without 

her. Gâwein is seen to represent all things positive in Arthur’s kingdom. 

The medieval audience would immediately recognize Gâwein and the 

“Tugenden” (noble qualities) that he stood for. It is this recognition of 

Lûnete’s accomplishment by Gâwein that assures the reader that this all 

was accomplished through the efforts of the w se maget and that she is 

worthy of real praise (I, 2715–29). Îwein as well as Gâwein both thank 

Lûnete for saving his life and they both speak of her cleverness and 

resourcefulness. Îwein, after a stern lecture on verligenhet by Gâwein (I, 

2790–98) departs to find further adventures and to increase his reputa-


tion. In doing so he stays out too long and loses his favor with his wife. 

This has further consequences for others in the narrative than merely those 

visited on Îwein. His madness and subsequent wanderings are at least selfinflicted, 

quite different than what happens to Lûnete. She is held responsible 

for her part in the Îwein scandal because the other citizens believe 

that she is responsible for duping Laudine and leaving them unprotected 

(I, 4119–26). 

Lûnete has risked much to bring Îwein to a point of power in her 

kingdom, yet Îwein has done all in his power to lose it as quickly as it 

came. Îwein simply lets go of his position and wife because he is out 

enhancing his honor in his own manner avoiding verligenhet. He has let 

the kingdom slip between his fingers and realizes in his next meeting with 

Lûnete that his actions are again worthy of disdain. She scolded him 

before for not realizing his situation and he now feels responsible for not 

realizing how his actions would affect her. It is, however, an opportunity 

for Îwein to save Lûnete and repay some of the debt that he owes, even if 

she is in the situation because of his failure to keep his promise to Laudine. 

Îwein is able to come to terms with the debt he owes her and states: 

swie ich zuo mir selben habe getân, 

ir sult iedoch gewis hân, 

ichn lâze iuch niht under wegen. 

I, 4255–57 

[I have always acted in the same way 

You should know this 

I will not desert you] 

ºwein is a work, which restates a message , which Hartmann von Aue 

had put forth in Erec narrative. 14 Gâwein warns Îwein of the pitfalls of a 

married, comfortable life and Îwein takes him at his word. The Erec narrative, 

together with his ºwein show that while one must not be verligen; 

one must also not forget one’s responsibilities to one’s family and estate. 

Îwein was not only a knight, he is also the leader of a community, a community 

with no head while he is at tournaments avoiding a bad reputation. 

It is Lûnete who, by saving Îwein’s life and then by orchestrating a marriage 

with Laudine, procures a kingship and great honor through high 

marriage for the hero. Îwein could do neither without her. She is also 

responsible for facilitating his return. She manages to accomplish a great 

deal for Îwein that he cannot or will not do for himself and she does so 

with no real power of her own. 

14 Hartmann von Aue, Erec (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1985).


There is a similar character type found in Gottfried von Strassburg’s 

Tristan. 15 The character of Îsôte (Isolde) is also spoken of as possessing 

some special abilities. Firstly Gottfried informs the reader that her mother, 

also named Isolde (Îsôt) is wise and beautiful: “diu wise Îsôt, diu schoene 

Îsôt” (I, 7291). She was capable of many arts, especially in medicine. The 

reader learns that the daughter Isolde is still a young maiden: “dise jungen 

maget Îsôte” (I, 7845) and wise in ways that the other w se maget figures 

have not been; she is well learned several subjects and can read (I, 7846– 

47). Isolde learned many of the talents that her mother has already mastered. 

Her family a very progressive family for the time. Isolde learns in 

many ways as much as a male would learn in a cloister. She has learned the 

art of healing from her mother as well, which makes her extremely well 

educated for that time (I, 7868–69). 

Gottfried writes of her beauty often in sentences such as, “la dûze 

Îsôt, la bêle” (I, 8071) as well as her purity and sweetness: “diu süeze Îsôt, 

diu reine (I, 8054). In the tradition of the Minnes nger Gottfried 

attributes special qualities to Isolde’s beauty (I, 8078–84). Her beauty was 

considerable, as was her ability to transform her audience with the skill she 

presented on the harp and through song. She does not have all the abilities 

of other major figures in the other narratives, but she does heal the protagonist 

and seems to have extra, almost miraculous powers due to beauty 

and wisdom. 

Another female figure capable of saving a situation seemingly doomed 

to disaster due to the honor of men in love service is Bêne in Wolfram’s 

Parzival. Although Bêne is often referred to as a “vrou” (Fräulein) (P, 

663:15) but the author indicates her age by describing her as “Bêne, 

süeziu magt” (Bene sweet maiden) (P, 718:23). It is apparent that 

Intonje, Gâwein’s sister and beloved of Gramoflanz, will die of a broken 

heart at the end of the duel between the two men she loves (although she 

has never seen Gramoflanz and is meeting Gâwein for the first time). It is 

Bêne, who sees the danger to Itonje in this situation. She makes it known 

to those responsible and first brings to consciousness the fact that 

Gramoflanz wants to marry the daughter of the man supposedly responsible 

for killing his father (King Lot). Gramoflanz then also wants to kill 

Lot’s son Gâwein, Itonje’s brother, to avenge his own dead father (P, 

693:22–25). Through her wisdom she can recognize what the older, 

experienced men, blinded by honor, cannot. They will rail at each other 

and actually cause Itonje pain. The entire situation makes no sense at all if 

they really love Itonje as they claim. Bêne is the go-between for Itonje and 

Gramoflanz as well as Itonje’s friend. It is through Bêne that the combat- 

15 Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 

1967).


ants are helped by Arthur to find a peaceful solution to the problem and 

maintain honor in doing so. 

Bêne is more than just a go-between for Gramoflanz and Itonje, 

because she alone cares for Itonje’s reputation among all of the on lookers. 

Bêne takes Gramoflanz’ message to Arthur and makes sure that no one 

sees Itonje’s pain. It is also through Bêne that Itonje came to know of 

Gramoflanz (P 716, 25). She is so important to the situation and so capable 

that Arthur askes for her help in alleviating the tension between 

Gâwein and Gramoflanz: 

Nu helfet mir, ir zwêne 

und ouch du, vriundîn Bêne, 

daz der künc her zuo mir rite 

unt den kampf doch morgen strîte. 

P, 719:1–4 

[Now help me you two 

and also you Bene my friend, 

the King [Gramoflanz] should ride to here to me 

and me ready for the battle tomorrow.] 

Bêne, the maiden, recognizes how destructive this whole situation 

will be and tries to alleviate it in a way that will be easier on Itonje and not 

hurt her reputation in the eyes of others. King Arthur himself must rely on 

her to make sure the components of his plan are in place. Even though 

Arthur is the only one with the power to solve the problems he needs a 

maiden to help him carry out his plan. If the two combatants were to find 

out about the plan they might find another way to satisfy their need for 

honor regardless of the consequences to Itonje. 

A narrative from the Middle Ages, which brings up many of the same 

topics of discussion as found in Wolfram’s Parzival, is Moritz von Cra n . 16 

The author is not known but the source is a French fable from ca 1170– 

80, “Du chevalier qui recovra l’amor de sa dame.” 17 The figure is not 

named in the tale and simply referred to as “diu juncvrouwe” (the virgin) 

and “magadîn” (maiden). 18 With the age of marriage at approximately 

thirteen, one can assume that as a “magadîn” and a “juncvrouwe” she is 

under that age. 

When Moritz goes to seek his reward for winning the tournament he 

is extremely tired and yet anxious for his long delayed reward for love service 

from the married woman he serves. He worries that he will sleep and 

miss the greetings of his lady, but the young maiden will allow him to sleep 

16 Albrecht Classen, ed., Moriz von Crâun (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 

1992). 

17Ibid., 1. 

18 Ibid., 1195, 1242; 1289, 1258.


and wake him when her mistress comes. 19 She takes responsibility allowing 

him to get much needed rest. He had not slept for many nights due to 

the building of his overland ship as well as having made great physical 

exertions winning the tournament for his lady. 20 

When the mistress comes to find Moritz, it is not clear if she really 

wants to give him his reward or not, as she merely looks for any excuse to 

get out of the situation. She finds him asleep on the maiden’s lap. The 

maiden wants to keep her promise, but her mistress commands her not to 

wake the sleeping Moritz and states that it is entirely his fault and that it is 

clear that his efforts are more intent on knightly feats of danger than on 

serving the woman he loves. She turns the situation around and blames 

him for not being rewarded as he loves sleep more than he loves her. 21 

The maiden realizes the folly of her misstress’ words. She can see that 

her mistress will earn a bad reputation for herself and love service. This 

seems difficult for a woman inexperienced in the ways of love. She gives 

her mistress sound advice on love even though she herself cannot be experienced. 

She also sees that she would be forced to break her promise to the 

knight, which can only serve to take her own honor. The young maiden 

has a sense of responsibility beyond her years and station. 22 With sense 

enough to give advice equaling the valued counsil of King Solomon, this 

“magadîn” proves that she is wise beyond her years. 

For the w se maget to be a viable topic in medieval German literature 

and one that seems to have been used in some of the greatest, most widely 

read and performed pieces of the time there has to have been some literary 

source or sources that they build on. The authors were well read, despite 

Wolfram’s protestations to the contrary, and claimed a wide knowledge of 

Greek and Roman history. Chrétien mentions the ancients as does the 

author of Moriz von Cra n , who uses his introduction to describe the 

downfall of chivalry since the antique period. The education that all of the 

authors must have enjoyed most likely stemmed from clerical education. 

They all appear well acquainted with the teaching of the church and they 

adhere to the norms set forth by the clerical standards of the time. 23 

Another source for this architype is older Germanic literature. In the 

Nibelungenlied the figure of Brünhilde is excessively strong of body, not 

simply due to her high birth and station as queen but rather because of her 

virginity. 24 Her purity and chastity allow her to be superior in strength to 

19Ibid., 1238–43. 

20Ibid., 1249–53. 

21 Ibid., 1258–84. 

22 Ibid., 1289–1338. 

23 See Wolfram’s Parzival and Parzival’s meeting the grey knight and Trevrizent on 

Good Friday in book 4. 

24 Helmut Brackert, ed. and trans., Das Nibelungenlied (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 

Taschenbuch Verlag, 1971), Bände.


a male of similar standing and birth. The king cannot subdue her, but Sigfried 

can. All three are of equal birth but Sigfried claims himself to be the 

king’s vassal. It can therefore be argued that it is her virginity alone that 

gives her such enormous strength. This strength only wanes after she has 

been deflowered and becomes mortal. The signs of her strength are shown 

clearly in the contests of strength between Brünhilde and Günther in 

which Brünhilde is described as being stronger than twelve men: 

Diu Prünhilde sterke vil grœzlîche schein. 

Man trouc ir zuo dem ringe einen swæren stein, 

grôz unt ungefüege, michel unde wel. 

in truogen kûme zwelfe, helde küene unde snel. 

Das Nibelungenlied, 449 

[Brünhilde’s strength showed itself quite clearly. 

They carried a a heavy stone to her in the ring, 

it was large, round, heavy and ungainly. 

Twelve brave, strong men carried it with difficulty.] 

Brünhilde is as strong as twelve men and proves her strength in other feats 

as well (Das Nibelungenlied, 449–66). On Brünhilde and Gunther’s wedding 

night she is able to bind him hand a foot with her belt and and hang 

him from a nail on the wall (Das Nibelungenlied, 636–37) and will not 

allow him to touch her until she has figured out how he beat her in the 

contests. In paragraph 638 Gunther has to beg her to let him go and 

promise not to touch her. Her superhuman strength only subsides once 

she has lost her virginity, the source of her magical powers: 

Er pflac ir minneclîchen, als im daz gezam 

dô muoste si verkiesen ir zorn und ouch ir scham. 

von sîner heimlîche si wart ein lützel bleich. 

hei waz ir von der mine ir grôzen kréfté gesweich! 

Das Nibelungenlied, 681 

[Tenderly, as well he should he held her in his arms. 

She then had to release her anger and chastity. 

Through his actions she bacame a little pale. 

Love caused her to lose all of her magic powers.] 

In Anglo-Saxon poetry there is a female character capable of great 

feats of faith, intelligence, and strength. The poem Judith is the story of a 

Hebrew widow, able to do what the men in her city cannot. 25 The first 

25 Mark Griffith, ed., Judith (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), 8:4–16:24.


proof of her abilities comes when she admonishes the magistrates, who are 

resigned to surrender to Holofernes in five days time (8:11–20). 26 Judith 

then tells them that she will do what they cannot; she can save the city with 

God’s help (8:32–35). Her beauty allows her access to Holofernes’s tent 

(12:16–20) and her wisdom provides a means of escape through her 

nightly prayer ritual (13:9–11). It is Judith’s faith in the Lord, which gives 

her the strength and allows her to lift Holofernes’s own sword from the 

bed-post and decapitate him with only two blows (13:6–9). 

As in the instance of Obilot in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, 

Judith saves her city from certain destruction, which no one else can do. 

Her beauty aids her as it does in many other examples of the w se maget 

figure, such as Alyze, but she is no maiden. Judith’s husband Manasseh 

had died during the barley harvest (8:2). She chose to mourn him, remain 

chaste (8: 4–8) and to never have relations with a man, 27 though she lived 

to be 105 years of age (16:22–24). Judith’s piety and devotion to God, in 

the face of insurmountable adversity, has also raised her to the status of a 

saint. Carey Moore discusses Judith’s sainthood in her translation of 

Judith, which is an objectionable term to some readers because she used 

deceit and committed murder. Nevertheless, Judith does acquire a saintly 

stature because of service to God and her people: “Like it or not, then, for 

the ancient author, Judith was a saint.” 28 

In the same manuscript, the Cotton Vitellius A XV, is the famous 

Beowulf poem. 29 In Beowulf there are references to yet another w se maget 

figure and an instance of virginal exception, showing a connection with 

later German female characters: 

Bold wæ betl īc, bregorōf cyning 

hēah in healle, Hygd swī∂e geong 

w īs wēl†ungen †ēah ∂e wintra lˆyt 

[He was a famous king, with a fitting 

High hall and a wife, Higd, young 

But wise and knowing beyind her years] 30 

Higd, the young and wise wife of Higlac is in direct opposition to 

Thrith. Thrith, in lines 1931–43 is said to be a liar (1937), a sinner (1940) 

and vicious (1932–33). Thrith is then tamed through marriage. Her wise 

26Carey A. Moore, trans. Judith (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1985). 

27Compare this to Wolfram’s Sigune figure in Parzival. 

28 Moore, Judith, 62. 

29 For an in-depth study on Beowulf and the manuscript see Kevin Kiernan, Beowulf and 

the Beowulf Manuscript ( Ann Arbor: The Univeristy of Michigan Press, 1996). 

30 Lines 1925–28. Original from Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, Beowulf, an 

Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). Translation from 

Burton Raffel, Beowulf (New York: Mentor, 1963).


father knows how to change her ways and it is only through her marriage 

to Offa, that she is made into a model wife. In a similar manner she is 

tamed, in the same way that Brünhilde is weakened, by her deflowering 

and marriage: 

Hūru †æt onhōhsnode Hemminges mæg; 

ealodrincenda ō∂er sædan 

†æt h īo lēodbealewa læs gefremede 

inwitni∂a sy∂∂an ærest wear∂ 

gyfen goldhroden geongum cempan 

æ∂elum d īore sy∂∂an h īo Offan flet 

ofer fealone flōd be fæder lāre 

s ī∂e geshōte, ∂ær h īo sy∂∂an well 

in gumstōle gōde mære 

l īfgesceafta lifigende bræc, 

h īold hēahlufan wi∂ hæle†a brego 

[But Hemming’s kinsmnan tamed her: his hall-guests 

Told a different story, spread the news 

That Thrith had forgotten her gory tricks 

Once her wise father had sent her to a wedding 

With Offa, married her to that brave young soldier 

Sent her across the yellow-green sea 

To that gold-adorned champion, a fierce fighter 

In war and peace. They praised her now 

For her generous heart, and her goodness, and the high 

And most noble paths she walked, filled 

With adoring love for that leader of warrior] 

Beowulf, 1944–54 

The idea of virginal exception, or purity giving power to a character, 

has a Germanic literary tradition that continues in the characters of later 

authors. The figure of a female of high birth taking up arms was not 

common in the literature of the times, even distasteful, yet in Wolfram’s 

Parzival Antikonie is a virgin fighting alongside Gâwân as well as any 

knight (P, 408:28–409:15). Antikonie’s virginity, as well as her triuwe, 31 

could be the facilitators of her ability to fight side by side with Gâwein 

against the angry mob intent on killing Gâwein in Schanpfanzun. 

31 See Marion Gibbs, Wîblichez Wîbes Reht (Duquesne University: Duquesne University 

Press, 1972) and eadem, “Ideas of Flesh and Blood: Women Characters in Parzival,” in A 

Companion to Wolfram’s Parzival, ed. Will Hasty (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999) for 

ideas on the importance of Triuwe in Wolfram’s narrative.


Another movement of major importance to the authors using this 

type of character in their stories was Marianism. This movement was a 

flourishing at the time of the crusades. The idea of a virginal, younger 

character in a story with the ability to show nobility and display all of the 

“Tugenden” that Wolfram and the others wanted to give voice to with 

their characters must have been appealing. All of the authors mentioned in 

this article reveal religious beliefs based on church dogma and their connection 

to the rules of chivalry. In Will Hasty’s Companion to Wolfram’s 

Parzival there is a discussion on religion in the Arthurian romances and 

the influence of religion and the crusades on chivalry. Hasty writes that: 

In this (balance between worldly demands of chivalric life and spiritual 

demands) we see signs of the Church’s increasing influence 

on the nobility’s basically military understanding of itself in the 

High Middle Ages. Around 1200 this self-understanding had 

been influenced by the ideology of the Crusades, one of the effects 

of which was to endow fighting with a higher spirtiual purpose. 32 

The literary history up to that time and the religious climate of the 

Middle Ages provided the perfect elements to necessitate a character type 

such as the w se maget. Idealizing a woman and younger maidens was 

especially attractive to the troubadors (Minnesänger). The combination of 

literary history, religious fervor, and the ideals of courtly love, or chivalry, 

combine to provide the author with a pleasant character with the power to 

help a knight in need, a maiden who is in herself not a threatening, but 

rather an all together “tugendhafte kleine Frau.” 

The actions of these four maidens, die kleine Braut, Obilot, Alyze, and 

Lûnete all interact with the protagonist in their respective narratives in 

such a way that the protagonist is able to take an otherwise dire situation 

and turn it into a positive outcome. Die kleine Braut brings Heinrich back 

to God’s good graces by offering herself as a sacrifice for her lord and family. 

Obilot helps her city, her sister’s relationship with Meljanz, her father, 

and brings greater honor to Gâwein by handling the situation in an honorable, 

intelligent manner. Alyze is able to avoid a family feud and to give her 

uncle the chance of saving his wife and lands through her mature advice. 

Lûnete is able to save Îwein as well as provide her Mistress with a husband 

and a defender for their territory. “Die kleine Braut” and Alyze have an 

additional bond of being divinely inspired in their premature wisdom. 

These four major figures in some of the major works of the time, 

included with the minor figures also outlined, constitute a great number of 

a similar character type in arguably the most important works in medieval 

German literature. If the character type appeared in only one work by each 

32 Hasty, ed. A Companion to Wolfram’s Parzival , xiii.


author or in only certain text genres, such as the Arthurian romance, then 

one could say that the character type is limited to a specific theme. This is 

not the case as Hartmann von Aue uses the figure of “die kleine Braut” in 

the moral tale Der arme Heinrich and then uses the figure in the Arthurian 

romance Iwein. Wolfram uses the figure in several different works and his 

nemesis Gottfried von Straßburg also employs the character type. 

In 1998 Kathleen Ragan collected and edited stories of heroines from 

around the world. In her book entitled Fearless Girls, Wise Women and 

Beloved Sisters, Ragan shows that there are a number of stories with wise 

women in them, nine of them having Germanic origins. 33 These tales are 

mainly old folktales, which show that women are as capable of great feats 

of wisdom, bravery, and strength as their male counterparts. When seen 

together with the Anglo-Saxon poems, Germanic narratives, and Arthurian 

romances from both French and German sources, the figure of the 

w se maget can be viewed in context of a larger literary vision. This vision 

of a a woman as holy, 34 beautiful and healing was more widespread than 

just in Wolfram and Hartmann’s area of influence in what is today Bavaria 

and northern Austria. It was also available to the authors/scribes of Judith 

and Beowulf in the area of modern day Britain as well as to Chrétien de 

Troyes in France. 

33 See Kathleen Ragan, Fearless Girls, Wise Women and Beloved Sisters (New York: W.W. 

Norton & Company, 1998). 

34 For more stories of holy women see Osbern Bokenham, A legend of Holy Women 

trans. Sheila Delany (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).

References 


Bokenham, Osbern. A Legend of Holy Women. Trans. Sheila Delany. Notre 

Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. 

Brackert, Helmut, ed and trans. Das Nibelungenlied: Mittelhochdeutscher 

Text und Übertragung. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994. 

Bumke, Joachim. Wolfram von Eschenbach. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlerische 

Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1991. 

Classen, Albrecht, ed and trans. Moriz von Craûn. Prospect Heights, IL: 

Waveland Press, Inc., 2000. 

de Troyes, Chretien. Perceval: or The Story of the Grail. Trans. Ruth Harwood 

Cline. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1985. 

-----. Le conte du Graal (Perceval). Paris: Félix Lecoy, 1973. 

Gibbs, Marion. Wîblîchez Wîbes Reht. Duquesne: Duquesne University 

Press, 1972. 

-----. “Ideals of Flesh and Blood: Women Characters in Parzival.” In A 

Companion to Wolfram’s Parzival, ed. Will Hasty. Columbia, SC: 

Camden House, 1999. 

Gies, Frances and Joseph. Women in the Middle Ages: The Lives of Real 

Women in a Vibrant Age. New York: Thomas Crowell & Co., 1978. 

Griffith, Mark. Ed. Judith. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997. 

Herlihy, David. Oprea Muliebria, Women and Work in Medieval Europe. 

New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1990. 

Hartmann von Aue, Gergorious/Der arme Heinrich, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche 

Buchgesellschaft, 1967. 

-----. Iwein. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981. 

-----. Erec. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1985. 

Mohr, Wolfgang. Wolfram von Eschenbach Aufsätze. Göppingen: Kümmerle 

Verlag, 1979. 

Moore, Carey A., trans. Judith. Garden City: Doubleday, 1985. 

Ragan, Kathleen, ed. Fearless Girls, Wise Women and Beloved Sisters. New 

York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998. 

von Ertzdorff, Xenia. “Fräulein Obilot. Zum siebten Buch von Wolfram’s 

Parzival,” Wirkendes Wort 12 (1962): 129–40. 

von Eschenbach, Wolfram. Willehalm. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 

1968. 

-----. Parzival. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998. 

von Straßburg, Gottfried. Tristan. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 

1967.

ALLEN D. BRECK 

AWARD WINNER

Page Proofs Only - Proof and Return Today 

The Presence of the Past: 

Shakespeare in South Africa 

Natasha Distiller 

University of Cape Town 

N WHAT WAYS HAS SHAKESPEARE—as a collection of texts, as cultural 

capital, as a tool of a colonial education system as powerful as the bible 

and the gun—manifest in South African culture? Today I will sketch 

the presence of the past in a way which aims to draw out the South African 

in Shakespeare as much as the Shakespearean in South Africa. I do this following 

the post-colonial call to redress the imbalance of knowledges 

between the West and the Rest, and in order to break a simplistic cultural 

binary which posits “African,” colonized culture on one side and “European,” 

high culture on the other. There are ongoing debates about the 

details of this model of, variously, cultural hybridity, creolization, or transformation. 

Nevertheless, recognition of the synergy that occurs with the 

meeting of cultures, however unequally, is central to any understanding of 

the cultural conditions of a post-colonial world, and, ultimately, of postapartheid 

South Africa. 

Bill Ashcroft has recently suggested that any kind of resistance to 

colonial domination has to create as well as resist. 1 This notion of cultural 

transformation, which stresses alternative forms of resistance, is a useful 

one in terms of conceptualizing the Shakespearean-inflected aspects of the 

work of Solomon Plaatje in the early twentieth century, and of a group of 

writers who, in the 1950s, can be seen to follow in this transformative tradition 

of writing a South African Shakespeare. 

Born in what was then the Orange Free State in 1876, Sol Plaatje was 

a politician, a writer, a linguist, and an activist: “one of South Africa’s most 

important political and literary figures.” 2 His output included five translations 

of Shakespeare’s plays, of which only two survive, Diphosophoso (Mistakes 

Upon Mistakes/A Series of Blunders, his version of A Comedy of 

Errors) and Dintshontsho tsa Bo Julius Kesara (Julius Caesar). 3 

I 

1 Bill Ashcroft, Post-colonial Transformations (London and New York: Routledge, 

2001), 2–3; 5; chap. 1. 

2 Brian Willan, introduction to Sol Plaatje: Selected Writings ed. Brian Willan (Johannesburg: 

Witwatersrand Univeristy Press, 1997), 1. See the same claim made also in Willan, “Sol 

T. Plaatje and Tswana Literature: A Preliminary Survey,” in Literature and Society in South 

Africa, ed. Langley White and Tim Couzens (Cape: Longman, 1984), 81. 


88 Natasha Distiller 

Plaatje has been read in a number of ways: as the co-opted native intellectual, 

4 and as a representative of the emerging petit-bourgeois African 

class whose love of Shakespeare becomes a delineating marker of education 

and civility. 5 A third reading is exemplified by Leon De Kock’s version 

of almost inadvertent Bhabha-ian mimicry which he finds at work in the 

writings of the mission-educated back elite, including Plaatje. 6 On the 

other hand, Njabulo Ndebele places Plaatje “firmly… in the genuine history 

of the struggle for liberation.” 7 Plaatje’s use of Shakespeare could 

also be theorized as essentially destabilizing the notion of the colonial subject, 

8 following Helen Tiffin’s vision of the colonial Other who takes up 

the challenge of the binary system and shifts himself from one side to the 

other, according to the promise of the civilizing mission. This movement 

disrupts “those very hierarchized binaries upon which the ideology of 

Empire… rests.” 9 However, David Johnson worries that this kind of postcolonial 

“Plaatje-subject” will come to define Plaatje, “given the cultural 

authority” of the major Western institutions in which such theory is 

housed. 10 

Whether his use of Shakespeare is viewed as a strategy of disruption 

(Plaatje challenges the construction of his own “otherness” by proving he 

3 Tim Couzens and Brian Willan “Solomon T. Plaatje, 1876–1932: an introduction,” 

English in Africa, Plaatje Centenary Issue, 3, no. 2 (September 1976): 2. 

4 David Johnson, Shakespeare and South Africa (Clarendon: Oxford, 1996), 96. 

5 Tim Couzens,The New African: A Study of the Life and Works of H.I.E. Dhlomo 

(Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985), 6–18. 

6 Leon De Kock, Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual 

Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University 

Press, 1996), 114. This reading can be compared to David Chanaiwa’s, who finds in Plaatje 

“perhaps the most typical of the…reform-oriented intellectuals” who made the “terrible mistake” 

of buying into humanism at the expense of more direct political activism; “African 

Humanism in Southern Africa,” in Independence without Freedom: The Political Economy of 

Colonial Education in Southern Africa, ed. Agrippah T. Mugomba and Mougo Nyaggah 

(Oxford and California: ABC-Clio, 1980), 15 and 35 respectivelys. De Kock replies that 

Chanaiwa “fails to recognise the possibility…[of] constructing counter-narratives in which 

the discourse of ‘civilisation’ was reappropriated and redeployed”; Civilising Barbarians, 

114. 7Njabalo Ndebele, “Actors and Interpreters: Popular Culture and Progressive Formalism” 

in Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers, 

1991), 82. 

8The strategy of assimilation which disrupts the simple categorization of colonizer/ 

colonized can be effective. Ania Loomba has illustrated the possibility of using Shakespeare 

“as a suitably weighty means through which [to] negotiate [a] future” in her examination of 

Kathakali drama’s adaptation of Shakespeare; Post-Colonial Shakespeares, eds. Ania Loomba 

and Martin Orkin (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 163). David Schalkwyk and 

Lerothodi Lapula have been “struck by the way in which Plaatje treats Shakespeare as material 

to be used and…rather than as an idol to be worshipped”; “Solomon Plaatje, William 

Shakespeare, and the Translation of Culture,” Pretexts: literary and cultural studies 9, no. 1 

(2000): 16. 

9 Helen Tiffin, “Plato’s Cave,” in New National and Post-colonial Literatures: An Introduction, 

ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 154. 

10 Johnson, Shakespeare and South Africa, 109.

can be “the same”), assimilation (Plaatje took what he was given and 

changed it to his own purpose), or ironic civility (whether he meant to or 

not, the gap between material conditions and colonial education’s humanist 

discourse served as implicit activist criticism), it is important to allow 

for a Plaatje who is not fooled into submission by a colonial Shakespeare. 

In addition, often inflecting the critical recognition of Plaatje’s importance 

to South African literature is the way in which Plaatje’s appreciation of 

Shakespeare legitimates Plaatje’s own importance as an artist and icon. 11 

Whether or not Plaatje’s relationship with Shakespeare can be read as 

a relationship with a series of texts (including the “narrative” of “civilization”) 

that carried with them an ultimately empty promise of political and 

social justice, one of the aims of his translations was to show that Setswana 

was a language which deserved to be protected. In his Introduction to 

Diphosophoso, Plaatje tells his reader: 

It has not been an easy task to write a book such as this in Setswana.... 

But we are driven forward by the demands of the Batswana—the…cries 

of people exclaiming, “Tau’s Setswana will be 

of no use to us! It is becoming extinct because children are not 

taught Setswana! They are taught the missionary language! They 

will lose all trace of our language!” That is why we undertook to 

tackle this task. 12 

Beyond this, what more can we say about Plaatje’s translations of Shakespeare? 

Is there a way to free the “Plaatje-subject” from the binary of either 

subversive native Other or co-opted colonial subject, in a way that might 

allow him to artistically own his relationship with “Shakespeare” without 

concomitantly catching them both in the imperialist and oppressive colonial 

education system? Is it possible to claim a hybrid Plaatje without privileging 

Shakespeare? 

In a field concerned with another Other, work has been done on 

women’s translation in the early modern period. Critics have illustrated 

11 See Tim Couzens, “A Moment in the Past: William Tsikinya-Chaka,” Shakespeare in 

Southern Africa 2 (1988): 60–66. See also Willan, “Sol T. Plaatje and Tswant Literature,” 

82–87, for a discussion of Plaatje’s relationship with Shakespeare. Willan also explores the 

political motivations and “ideological connotations” of the translations (88). In addition see 

Stephen Gray’s discussion of Mhudi, “Plaatje’s Shakespeare” English in Africa 4, no. 1 

(March 1977): 1–6: “Plaatje did ‘monkey’ Shakespeare” (1). Plaatje’s Shakespearean influence 

is discussed by Couzens and Willan in their introduction to the English in Africa, 

Plaatje Centenary Issue, where a selection of Plaatje’s writings on Shakespeare is given, entitled 

“Plaatje and Shakespeare” (7–8). See also David Chanaiwa “African Humanism in 

Southern Africa: The Utopian, Traditionalist, and Colonialist Worlds of Mission-Educated 

Elites” in Independence without Freedom: The Political Economy of Colonial Education in 

Southern Africa, ed. Agrippah T. Mugomba and Mougo Nyaggah (Oxford and California: 

ABC-Clio, 1980); and David Johnson’s account of Plaatje as “The Colonial Subject and 

Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare and South Africa, 74–110. 

12 Quoted in Willan, Sol Plaatje: Selected Writings, 383–84. 

89


that translation can be seen as an act of authoring. Danielle Clarke has 

detailed the powerful political commentary found in female-authored 

texts of the period, and shows that translation is a site of intervention and 

public involvement, pointing out the ideological implications of the act of 

rewriting inherent in translation. 13 

Similarly, Plaatje’s acts of translation may have been overstressed as 

imitation, in the modern sense, and under-recognized as creative imitation 

in the early modern sense. This suggests itself in an evaluation of Diphosophoso 

by Shole J. Shole. Shole repeatedly stresses the “fine…free…and idiomatic” 

nature of Plaatje’s translation: “Plaatje did not attempt to retain 

the original form at the expense of meaning… this is what makes Diphosophoso 

the success it is.” 14 

What emerges from Shole’s evaluation is that attempts at literal translation 

from Shakespeare’s English to Setswana fail poetically and linguistically, 

while using Shakespeare as what we may recognize to be a source is 

far more successful: “At times his freedom reaches ridiculous extremes…. 

[W]here [Plaatje] cannot translate, he creates.” 15 Shole compares Plaatje’s 

translation to Raditladi’s of Macbeth, which follows the original literally. 

The result is a piece of work at times so nonsensical “that one may wonder 

whether [Raditladi] understood his own work himself.” 16 A direct translation, 

which does not make cultural and idiomatic allowances, becomes a 

“mistranslation.” 17 

We can thus theorize a hybrid text, both Shakespearean and Plaatjean. 

Viewing Plaatje as having done something to Shakespeare, instead of reading 

Plaatje’s work as valuable because of its debt to Shakespeare, is one 

way to trace the presence of a Shakespearean influence on South African 

literature without privileging the colonial half of the hybrid. 

Ania Loomba, amongst others, has pointed out the failings of a generalized 

notion of hybridity. 18 Addressing specific cultural and historical 

conditions is imperative in order to avoid reinscribing the terms of dominance 

that hybridity as a concept first sought to counter. 19 Ulf Hannerz, 

in an article on the South African township, Sophiatown, suggests creolization 

as a framework within which to place the voices of a group of 

13Danielle Clarke, “Translation, Interpretation and Gender: Women’s Writing c.1595– 

1644” (Unpublished D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, n.d.),C.10946. 

14Shole J. Shole, “Shakespeare in Setswana: An Evaluation of Raditladi’s Macbeth and 

Plaatje’s Diphosophoso” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 4 (1990/91), 51–64, here 51 and 59. 

15Ibid., 60–61. 

16Ibid., 52. 

17 Ibid., 53. 

18 Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 

2002), 173-183. 

19 See Natasha Distiller, “A Sign that History is Happening: Shakespeare in 20th-Century 

South African Literature,” Literature Compass 2 (2005):145. See 1-18 for an overview 

of the concept of hybridity.

men who wrote for the popular Drum magazine in the 1950s. 20 Shakespeare 

permeates both the writings of, and about, Drum magazine, its 

staffers, and Sophiatown itself, which through texts including interviews, 

literature, journalism, criticism, and conference papers, has been constructed 

as a Shakespearean space. 21 

Anthony Sampson, the editor widely accredited with the changes that 

made Drum the voice of the new urban African in 1951, came to South 

Africa from Oxford with “a knowledge of 243 Elizabethan plays”. 22 In 

what by now is a familiar imposition of “structures of knowing” 23 , he thus 

brought a particular idiom to his understanding of Sophiatown. Sampson 

said, “[A]ll that frenzied activity … seemed to me to be every bit a Shakespearean 

play with terror and murder waiting in the wings.” 24 This is a sustained 

metaphor. Elsewhere, in an interview, Sampson says the mixture of 

“white characters” in the shebeens (or bars) of Sophiatown, “was marvellous. 

I always thought it was very like the Elizabethan theatre”. Similarly, 

Sampson describes the enforced class mixing amongst black South Africans 

as, “very much like a scene from Falstaff—a funny mixture of people 

with the odd pickpocket in the background. It was wildly romantic.…” 25 

Sampson brings a delighted English gaze to the politically and socially 

fraught township scene: “I can remember watching a man hide under a 

table when word came that his wife was looking for him while his mistress 

was bundled out of the window. That was like watching an Elizabethan 

play.” 26 Elsewhere, Sampson reports: 

20 Ulf Hannerz, “Sophiatown: the view from afar,” in Readings in African Popular Culture, 

ed. Karin Barber (Oxford and Bloomington: International African and Institute and 

Indiana University Press, 1997). I am grateful to Sandra Klopper for making me aware of this 

article. For a history of the development of Sophiatown see Paul Gready “The Sophiatown 

Writers of the Fifties,” Journal of Southern African Studies 16, no. 1 (March 1990); Hannerz, 

“Sophiatown”; and Tom Lodge, “The Destruction of Sophiatown,” in Town and 

Countryside in the Transvaal, ed. Belinda Bozzoli (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1983). The reasons 

for the destruction of Sophiatown are indicative of burgeoning formal apartheid in the 

new philosophy of the Nationalist regime; they are cited variously as slum clearance, the elimination 

of “black spots” from the white cities, and the “symbolic importance of eliminating 

African rights to the ownership of land”; From Protest to Challenge, ed. Thomas Karis and 

Gwendoline Carter (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1977), 24. In addition, Sophiatown 

has been read as a geographical and symbolic space of resistance, impossible to control 

on both levels; Lodge, “The Destruction of Sophiatown,” 346–48. 

21Paul Gready has called “The co-existence of an emergent black urban culture and the 

National Party’s intent to destroy such a phenomenon… both the significance and tragedy 

of Sophiatown”; “The Sophiatown Writers of the Fifties,” 139. 

22Mike Nicol, A good-looking corpse (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991), 26. 

23Anthony Fothergill, “Cannibalising Traditions: Representations and Critique in 

Heart of Darkness,” in Under Postcolonial Eyes: Joseph Conrad After Empire, ed. Gail Fincham 

and Myrtle Hooper (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1996), 94. 

24 Quoted in Nicol, A good-looking corpse, 26. 

25 Anthony Sampson, Sophiatown Speaks, ed. Pippa Stein and Ruth Jacobson (Johannesburg: 

Bertrams Avenue Press, 1986), 43. 

26 Quoted in Nicol, A good-looking corpse, 95. 

91


It came to me suddenly that I was watching an Elizabethan play. 

It was as if the characters had tripped straight from the stage of 

the Globe, lugging their dead bodies with them. Sophiatown had 

all the exuberant youth of Shakespeare’s London. It was the same 

upstart slum, with people coming from a primitive country life to 

the tawdry sophistication of the city’s fringes. Death and the 

police state were around the corner: and there was the imminent 

stage direction: 

Exuent with bodies… 27 

The theatricality of this description, which overlooks the reasons why 

people were forced into townships, and sense of enjoyment and distance it 

implies can be contrasted with Bloke Modisane’s account of living in 

Sophiatown’s violence, in his autobiography Blame Me on History. This, 

too, is done with reference to Shakespeare: 

Violence and death walk abroad in Sophiatown, striking out in 

revenge or for thrills or caprice; I have lived in my room, trembling 

with fear, wondering when it would be my turn, sweating 

away the minutes whilst somebody was screaming for help, shouting 

against the violence which was claiming for death another victim.... 

Is it a friend out there whose blood is screaming forth 

through the multiple stab wounds? A relative, perhaps?… A 

stranger?... [T]here in my room I knew that after the facts have 

been examined,…the rationalisations equated, the truth will confront 

me with a sense of shame; I would admit that no man, no 

relative or friend or stranger deserves the death of a beast. It was 

Caesar’s boast that “the skies are painted with unnumber’d 

sparks, they are all fire and every one doth shine”; if I allowed one 

spark—no matter how distant and insignificant—to be extinguished, 

then by this, my fire too would forfeit the right to 

flicker. 28 

The difference between observer and participant is inscribed in the differences 

in emotional response to the drama. For Sampson, the Shakespearean 

framework describes voyeuristic enjoyment; for Modisane 

Shakespeare’s texts become a conduit for the expression of distress, as well 

as for signifying the effect of extreme and sustained violence on himself 

and others of his community in what, because of Shakespeare’s cultural 

status, was a suitable register. 

27Anthony Sampson. Drum: A Venture into the New Africa (London: Collins, 1956), 

80. 

28Blake Mondisane, Blame Me on History (1963; repr. Craighill: AD Donker, 1986), 

59–60.

Modisane refers to Shakespeare throughout his autobiography: “Why 

not? Even in Shakespeare’s time people have been known to ‘smile and 

murder while they smile.’” 29 He ranges from quoting Laertes to exemplify 

the emotion which causes people to take part in riots and Roderigo’s 

description of Othello to illustrate the place of the black man in white society, 

to references such as: “If I am a freak it should not be interpreted as a 

failure of their education for a Caliban”; “We took up arms against the 

advance of poverty”; and “the sound and fury thrillers from Republic pictures.” 

30 Johnson characterizes Modisane’s use of Shakespeare as “using 

the words of Shakespeare’s characters in order to explain his own psychological 

processes.” 31 Given the complicated relationship Modisane presents 

himself as having with the “European” culture he loved, his use of 

Shakespeare must also signify his learning in Europe’s best. Equally important 

is his desire to use Shakespeare to normalize the chaos of his own 

milieu in terms that are both accessible to his readers and that work to 

confound their value judgment: “Even in Shakespeare’s time…” 

What Ez’kia Mphahlele has called the "grand Shakespearean image” 

manifests in pieces in Drum which describe township life. 32 A May 1953 

tabloidesque expose called “My husband was a flirt,” begins, “You know 

the old saying: ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ And I’m scared 

of hell in the first place.” 33 A December 1956 example of the creation of 

a partly Shakespearean discourse, which is energetic, urban, and specifically 

South African, is Casey Motsisi’s in “Lobola? It’s a Racket” [Lobola 

is a form of customary dowry]: “Ah, there’s the rob – oops, rub!...catch 

me paying lobola!” 34 

Shakespeare also had a meta-textual influence on the writers of Drum. 

Motsisi was known as “Shakespeare of the Shebeens.” 35 Can Themba had 

been his English teacher, thus, according to Mike Nicol, the man “who 

once taught Motsisi Shakespeare’s sonnets…went on to teach him about 

life in Sophiatown.” 36 In addition, the Shakespearean idiom has spilled 

over into critics’ descriptions of the life and times of the Drum writers, as 

in, “Despite its destruction the importance of Sophiatown as a community 

and a culture has lived beyond its death, because not all that was solid 

melted into air.” 37 

29Ibid., 89. 

30Ibid., 143, 168, 179, 103, and 65. 

31Johnson, Shakespeare and South Africa, 175–76. 

32Ez’kia Mphahlele, “My Experience as a Writer,” in Momentum: On Recent South 

African Writing, ed. M.J. Daymond, J.U. Jacobs, Margaret Lenta ( Pietermaritzburg: University 

of Natal Press, 1984), 79. 

33 Quoted in Nicol A good-looking corpse, 150–55. 

34 Quoted in Gready “The Sophiatown writers of the Fifties,” 147. 

35 Nicol, A good-looking corpse, 216–26. 

36 Nicol, A good-looking corpse, 220. 

37 Gready, “The Sophiatown writers of the Fifties,” 163. 

93


Can Themba, of all the Drum staffers the most “steeped in English 

literature,” 38 also makes use of Shakespeare in his depiction of Sophiatown 

life as both content and stylistic feature. Examples include integrating 

a slang reference as part of an illustration of tsotsi taal (gangsterspeak): 

“Weh, my sister, don’t lissen to that guy. Tell him Shakespeare 

nev’r said so!” 39 as well as in his propensity to invent words, Shakespearelike: 

“the law in all its horrificiency prohibits me.” 40 

Themba’s first short story, which was also the winning story in 

Drum’s first short story competition, has as its protagonists a young couple, 

victims of “Love[’s]…often ill-starred ways.” 41 Instead of a Montagu 

and a Capulet, we have an umXhosa and a BaSotho, but the tragic consequences 

of their communities’ irrational hatred is written in the stars, or at 

least, in the literary tradition. 

In his most sustained use of Shakespeare as both idiom and vehicle, 

and picking up on Sampson’s metaphor, Themba writes of South Africa in 

terms of Shakespeare’s plays, in “Through Shakespeare’s Africa,” written 

in 1963 for “New African.” 42 Themba begins by characterizing the violence 

of African life as something “Shakespeare would have understood 

without the interpolations of the scholars, and in this wise the world of 

Shakespeare reaches out a fraternal hand to the throbbing heart of 

Africa.” 43 Themba goes on to enlist Shakespeare as a vehicle for an expression 

of political anger, in a characteristically coolly sardonic tone. By writing 

his familiarity with Shakespeare “in this wise” into both the style and 

the story, Themba demonstrates at once his own sophistication, education, 

urbanity and intelligence, and the stupidity and brutality of the 

system that denies him equality. In form and content, Themba harnesses 

the best of British to make a point about the worst of South African. Just 

one brief example follows. 

With the help of Othello, Themba jibes at 

all the horror that one can conceive in the imagination of a backveld 

farmer who has tended his lands, jealously; guarded his 

honour, savagely; and contemplated his women in this dark 

38Michael Chapman, ed., The Drum Decade: Stories from the 1950 (Pietermaritzburg: 

University of Natal Press, 1989), 209. 

39Can Themba,“The Dube Train,” in The Will to Die, second impression (London: 

Heinemann, 1985), 59. 

40Can Themba, “Crepsicule,” in The Will to Die, 2. 

41Can Themba, “Mob Passion,” published in Drum in April 1953. Chapman, ed., The 

Drum Decade, 33, entire story 32–38. 

42 “Anthony Sampson, some-time editor of Drum, was perhaps the first person to 

remark that the turbulence of urban African life was like the stage of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan 

world…”; Can Themba, “Through Shakespeare’s Africa,” New African 2, no. 8 

(1963): 150. 

43 Ibid.

jungle of black, virile, uninhibited men, fearfully; leap up when 

these words [“Even now, now, very now, an old black ram/ Is 

tupping your white ewe!”] are hurled to afright the night.” 44 

He correlates Othello’s situation with that of his readers, not missing 

the opportunity to advise them on how to get a white girl, as he gleefully 

points out he did, and a real Desdemona at that. “Worse than that,” he 

says, Othello “made himself indispensable to the state. It is this, also, that 

the urban African is continually doing.” 45 

Themba uses the politics of sex in Othello to comment on the apartheid 

state’s policies, which in their political control of the personal overstep 

the boundaries of truly “civilized” behavior: 

By the way, let this quickly be said[:] in the world that Shakespeare 

cast for Othello and his miscegenatious doings, this kind of 

thing was not illegal. They had not yet come round to an Act of 

Immorality. The law, those days, was more concerned with 

whether charms and witchcraft were practiced on a girl to turn 

her mind to unnatural love. That was a serious crime. But we in 

the townships have long passed that stage. City-bred lover-boys 

who still use “roots” to catch the girls get laughed out of the shebang. 

46 

Themba’s irony is characteristically complex. In Shakespeare’s Venice, 

he suggests, it is only a matter of time until they would “come round” to 

implementing racist legislation, thus pointing to the truly backward inevitability 

of the white man’s racism. Furthermore, in Shakespeare’s Venice, 

witchcraft is still taken seriously, whereas “civilized” urban Africans “have 

long passed that stage.” The colonial discourse of the White Man’s 

Burden (of which “Shakespeare” is a component), which needs barbarous 

natives to civilize and which encodes Western cultural, religious, and 

moral superiority, is dismantled. 

The Drum writers can be seen to be Plaatje’s heirs in the South African 

Shakespeare they mobilized to express their frustrations. Ngugi wa 

Thiong’o has vigorously contested the authenticity of what he calls an 

“Afro-European” literary tradition. This tradition belongs to the pettybourgeoisie 

ruling classes who are a creation of colonialism, and is 

“another hybrid tradition” and not a truly African one. 47 Insofar as the 

South African Shakespeare I have sketched here belongs to an elite educated 

by colonial institutions and offered class mobility through their edu- 

44 Ibid., 153. 

45 Ibid. 

46 Ibid., 154. 

47 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature 

(London: James Curry, 1986), 26–27. 

95


cation, I have indeed described an “Afro-European” tradition. However, 

where this analysis differs from Ngugi’s is in the ascription of sites of cultural 

ownership. This is not meant to override Ngugi’s important analysis 

of cultural imperialism. Rather, it is to insist that the so-called “European” 

half of the hybrid is as African as the Africans who transform it. Thus an 

Africanized Shakespeare is a part of writing in English in South Africa.

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Independence without Freedom: The Political Economy of Colonial Education 

in Southern Africa, ed. Agrippah T. Mugomba and Mougo 

Nyaggah. Oxford and California: ABC-Clio, 1980. 

Chapman, Michael, ed. The Drum Decade: Stories from the 1950s. Pietermaritzburg: 

University of Natal Press, 1989. 

Clarke, Danielle. Translation, Interpretation and Gender: Women’s Writing 

c.1595–1644. Unpublished D.Phil. dissertation, University of 

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Couzens, Tim. “A Moment in the Past: William Tsikinya-Chaka.” Shakespeare 

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Couzens, Tim, and Brian Willan. “Solomon T. Plaatje, 1876–1932: an 

introduction.” English in Africa, Plaatje Centenary Issue, 3, no. 2 

(September 1976): 1–9. 

De Kock, Leon. Civilizing Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African 

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Distiller, Natasha. “A Sign that History is Happening: Shakespeare in 

20th-Century South African Literature,” Literature Compass 2 

(2005): SH 145, 1–18. 

Fothergill, Anthony. “Cannibalising Traditions: Representations and Critique 

in Heart of Darkness.” In Under Postcolonial Eyes: Joseph Conrad 

After Empire, ed. Gail Fincham and Myrtle Hooper. Cape Town: 

UCT Press, 1996. 

Gray, Stephen. “Plaatje’s Shakespeare.” English in Africa 4, no. 1 (March 

1977): 1–6. 

Gready, Paul. “The Sophiatown Writers of the Fifties.” Journal of Southern 

African Studies 16, no. 1 (March 1990): 139–64. 

Hannerz, Ulf. “Sophiatown: the view from afar.” In Readings in African 

Popular Culture, ed. Karin Barber. Oxford and Bloomington: International 

African and Institute and Indiana University Press, 1997. 

Johnson, David. Shakespeare and South Africa. Clarendon: Oxford, 1996. 

Karis, Thomas, and Gwendoline M. Carter, eds. From Protest to Challenge: 

A documentary history of African politics in South Africa 1882–1964 . 

Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1977. 

Lodge, Tom.“The Destruction of Sophiatown.” In Town and Countryside 

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Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge, 2002. 

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Loomba, Ania, and Martin Orkin, eds. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. 

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Modisane, Bloke. Blame Me on History. 1063. Repr. Craighall: A.D. 

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Mphahlele, Es’kia. “My Experience as a Writer.” In Momentum: On 

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Ndebele, Njabulo. Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African 

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Shole, Shole J. “Shakespeare in Setswana: An Evaluation of Raditladi’s 

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DELNO C. WEST 

AWARD WINNER

Q 

Using and Abusing Delegated Power 

in Elizabethan England 

James H. Forse 

Bowling Green State University 

UEEN ELIZABETH’S GOVERNMENT, like most early modern European 

governments, was one that sought to extend its influence and 

power throughout the realm. But at the same time it possessed 

minimal financial resources and coercive machinery of power, and therefore, 

while it issued mandates, it had to depend upon local officials and 

individuals to whom it delegated power. Nor did Elizabeth’s government 

have any machinery of oversight to “watch-dog” those delegated powers. 1 

Only when issues came to the attention of the Privy Council after-the-fact 

did the government, occasionally, intervene to redress abuses of those delegated 

powers. Two areas in which these dilemmas faced by Elizabeth’s 

government are clearly exemplified are in the delegated powers of arrest 

and of impressment. 

Lacking any organized municipal or national police force, powers of 

arrest in Elizabethan England were vested in a variety of people, most of 

whom were not under the direct supervision of the royal government. 

Local constables, justices of the peace [hereafter JP], mayors, city officials, 

agents of the courts, sergeants-at-law, customs officials, military and naval 

officers, church wardens, prison wardens, sheriffs, royal servitors, and private 

servants of Lords of the Privy Council all possessed legal rights to 

detain and arrest suspects. Needless to say such a welter of authorities with 

little or no coordination or supervision led to abuses of those powers. 

Several episodes detailing the collusion of authorities in fraudulent 

charges appear in the records of the Privy Council. In 1587 it came to the 

Privy Council’s attention that John Coping, held for debt in King’s Bench 

Prison for a year, was there because of his creditor’s perjured testimony 

concerning the size of Coping’s debt and that creditor’s collusion with the 

warden. A similar case appeared in 1589. A certain John Byss at Marshalsea 

Prison complained his enemies had falsely accused him as a recusant, 

and when brought before the sheriff of Somerset was then falsely 

charged also with a debt of a thousand marks. Byss had been a prisoner at 

Marshalsea Prison for four years, his case never coming before any court. 

1 Christopher Haigh, Elizabeth I (London: Longman, 1998), 3–11, 514, 70–72, 130–37. 


102 James H. Forse 

And yet another such case appeared before the Council in 1592. Robert 

Clytherowe of Norfolk complained that using a false charge of recusancy 

the sheriff had seized all his cattle and grain stores. 2 

In other cases authorities used their authority to circumvent justice for 

personal gain. In 1580, a Dorset JP, upon receiving payments from the 

prisoners, bailed out several men committed to prison by the marquess of 

Winchester on the serious charge of piracy. A letter from the Council to 

the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1591 offers another example of misuse 

of delegated authority. Complaints had finally reached the Council that 

“Mr. Bealson, her Majesty’s Attorney for that Province [Munster] dothe 

mysbehave hime selfe in th’execution of his office.” Mr. Bealson was 

imposing unreasonably high fines for minor offenses, pocketing much of 

the money, and then using false charges to jail those who dared complain 

against him. 3 

Some officials issued arrest warrants without listing any specific 

charges. In December 1591, the Recorder of the City of London swore 

out a warrant against a certain Mr. Paine, and sent a constable in the 

middle of the night to haul Paine, one of his servants, and a dozen others 

off to the Counter. Only after they were locked up did the Recorder come 

up with a vague charge: matters “touching high treason.” What saved Mr. 

Paine and the others and brought the arrests to the attention of the government 

was that the victims were friends and servants of Sir Francis Willoughby, 

with whom the Queen had once stayed, and who was knighted 

personally by her in 1587. The Privy Council intervened and reprimanded 

the City Recorder for exceeding his authority. Nor was this the Recorder’s 

first abuse of authority in that manner. In 1590 Thomas Toolie complained 

he had been committed to Newgate Prison by the City Recorder, 

but no charges had been filed. 4 The Recorder’s real reasons for these 

arrests are not known. Perhaps he had a personal vendetta; perhaps he was 

attempting to pry bail money out of the prisoners; perhaps he was retaliating, 

like Mr. Bealson of Ireland, on people who had complained about 

him. Nevertheless, in the case of Mr. Paine and his friends, the Recorder 

had reached too high. His victims had connections at Court. 

Even a member of the aristocracy could be at the mercy of a greater 

noble, especially if that noble also possessed delegated legal powers. Sir 

2Acts of the Privy Council, ed. J. R. Dasent (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1890– 

1907) [hereafter APC], 15:392, 19:190, 22:94. For discussions of how Elizabeth’s government 

relied upon ceremonial displays of power to make up for its lack of real power see Roy 

C. Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames 

and Hudson, 1977), and Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display (New York: Methune, 

1986). 

3APC 2:27, 23:343–34. 

4 For Willoughby’s connections to Queen Elizabeth see Arthur F. Kinney, Titled Elizabethans 

(Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973), 73, 77. APC 20:16–17, 22:151.

Using and Abusing Delegated Power 103 

Edward Dymock experienced those difficulties in 1602. Dymock held a 

lease for the manor of Horncastle, but the earl of Lincoln refused to relinquish 

the property, claiming he held a prior lease to the manor. Lincoln 

built a watch house on the property and staffed with it with his private 

retainers who drove Sir Edward’s men and cattle off the estate. Sir Edward 

retaliated by tearing down the watch house, only to find himself arrested 

for breaking the peace at the orders of the earl of Lincoln. The earl 

ordered the undersheriff to issue warrants against Dymock that would 

empower the earl’s personal servants to take Dymock into custody. Lincoln 

then called a special session of court, over which he, and his son and 

heir Lord Clinton, presided. During the proceedings the earl and Lord 

Clinton intimidated the jury, and when it withdrew for deliberations Lincoln 

stationed his own attorney and some of his retainers outside the 

doors of the church wherein the jury conferred. Needless to say, the jury 

brought in a guilty verdict against Sir Edward, and that verdict stood until 

reversed by the Star Chamber. 5 

Yet Dymock did have enough standing to warrant action on the part 

of the Council. An ordinary feltmonger had no such high standing or connections 

at Court. In June 1592, a feltmonger’s servant was seized summarily 

by servants of the Knight Marshall (warden of Marshalsea Prison). 

They entered his house at night with drawn daggers, served up a warrant 

from the Lord Chamberlain, but one without any specific charges, and 

carted off the man, his wife, and child, and everyone else present to Marshalsea. 

The feltmonger, his family, and friends were kept there for five 

days, no charges being laid against them. We only know of this incident 

because the man’s friends and several feltmakers’ apprentices “rioted,” 

bringing the issue to the attention of the city authorities. “Great multitudes,” 

we are told, caused “great disorder” when they assembled before 

Marshalsea Prison demanding the release of their co-workers; the Knight 

Marshall’s men came out of the prison and beat several in the crowd. The 

“riot” was quelled by the Lord Mayor and one of the sheriffs. The leaders 

protesting the injustice to their friend found themselves sent to prison. 

There is no record of the disposition of the original arrestees nor of the 

arrested “rioters.” 6 

A high-handed arrest did bring one of the Knight Marshall’s men to 

task in December of 1597, but it was not for abuses against the Commons. 

Again an official had overreached. In this case Parliament was sitting, and 

the person arrested was a servant of the archbishop of York. We do not 

know what charges were specified, nor why the servant came to the atten- 

5 Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury (repr., London: H. M. Stationery 

Office, 1971), 12:410. 

6 “Dramatic Records of the City of London. The Remembrancia,” Malone Society Collection 

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), 6:662.


tion of the Knight Marshall’s man. What we do know is that the Parliamentary 

privilege of freedom from arrest had been violated. The Knight 

Marshall’s man was summoned before the House of Lords and committed 

for a brief time to prison, interestingly to the Fleet, not to his own place of 

work. 7 

Perhaps these two incidents involving the Knight Marshall’s men were 

part of larger “sweeps” by the warden of Marshalsea Prison. It was not 

unknown for prison wardens to send out “sweeps,” arresting numbers of 

men from whom they could extort bail money. Since the jails were semiprivatized, 

they were expected to support themselves. The only money 

received from government was “poor bread”—bread furnished to those in 

prison who had no money to buy their own food. Wardens were not government 

employees with stipends or salaries. They were given a royal 

patent to receive prisoners and keep the jail, and expected to pay most 

prison expenses and earn their incomes from fees charged to prisoners. 

Those fees were wide reaching: for being committed to and discharged 

from prison, for being manacled and unmanacled in prison, for food and 

drink and bed and warmth in prison. In 1595 Robert Redhead, who had 

a royal patent to keep the castle and jail at York complained to the Privy 

Council that his income was being undercut by a Royal Pursivant (lawyer) 

who was taking charge of the wealthier people ordered into custody. As a 

result the only prisoners he was given in charge were the poor or condemned, 

from whom he could receive little fee-money. 8 

Some who received grants to operate prisons leased those rights to 

others. Brian Ansley was warden of the Fleet prison and leased the office 

out at £100 a year. In 1590 prisoners at the Fleet complained that the 

“substitute” warden, Joachim Newton, was extorting money from them 

by charging exorbitant fees for room and board. In 1591 Thomas Proudfoot, 

though granted a writ of Habeas Corpus by the justices of King’s 

Bench, was being kept in prison by the sub-warden of the Counter who 

was in cahoots with the man who had jailed Proudfoot over a dispute 

regarding repayment of a small debt. The Privy Council in 1593 acknowledged 

that some wardens were charging exorbitant fees for prison “services,” 

with the result that some people remained in jail long past their 

specified terms because they lacked the money to pay their prison bills. 9 

7S. D’Ewes, A Compleat Journal of the Votes, Speeches and Debates, Both of the House of 

Lords and House of Commons throughout the whole Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1693; repr. 

Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1974), 571. 

8 S. and B. Webb, History of English Local Government, vol. 6: English Prisons under 

Local Government (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1963), 1–12, and C. Dobb, “London’s Prisons,” 

Shakespeare Survey 17 (1964:, 93–99, describe the collection of fees by prison wardens for 

virtually everything. APC 25:229–30. 

9 APC 19:473, 22:309, 24:82, Haigh, Elizabeth I, 95.


We have some idea of how lucrative conducting an arrest and taking 

charge of a prisoner could be. In 1600 the earl of Lincoln was imprisoned 

for refusing to obey a Privy Council order. He also refused to pay the fees 

of the sergeant-at-arms who took him into custody and guarded the earl 

at the Fleet Prison. The sergeant appealed to the Privy Council, which set 

the following fee-schedule for noble prisoners: arrest fee for an earl £5, for 

a baron 5 marks (1 mark=13s. 4d), for each day of attendance upon the 

nobleman 4 nobles (1 noble=6s. 8d), and if the arresting officer had to 

ride out of town to collect his prisoner he also received 4 marks per travel 

day. The total owed the sergeant was the £5 fee for arrest, plus two days 

riding (8 marks), plus 52 nobles for thirteen days of attendance upon the 

earl. That makes a grand total of over £26, well over a year’s salary to the 

average artisan. 10 

Given this welter of public and private powers of arrest and the potential 

for quick and potentially large amounts of money it is no wonder that 

conmen sought to turn that confusion and potential to their advantage. 

Conmen used phony warrants to extract pretended arrest fees and travel 

expenses from those upon whom they served the warrants. In 1580 the 

earl of Shrewsbury sent a certain John Norton of Sheffield to London to 

answer charges of exacting arrest fees by posing as a royal herald. The 

Council issued an arrest warrant in 1596 against a real royal messenger 

who had been abusing his powers in that way. A royal proclamation that 

year warned subjects about conmen pretending to be “messengers of her 

Majesty’s chamber,” who wore counterfeit coats-of-arms on their clothes 

and served people with counterfeit warrants bearing forged signatures of 

Lords of the Privy Council or Church officials. The proclamation admits 

that despite ear-croppings and brandings used on some of the conmen 

who had been caught, the abuses still continued. The practice was pervasive 

enough that it brought forth a book detailing some of the unsavory 

practices used by conmen. The Knights of the Poste, ascribed to Edward 

Sharpham and printed in 1597, described conmen who pretended to be 

substantial citizens and collected rewards from prisoners on the pretense 

of paying their bail. 11 The £26 in fees owed the sergeant-at-arms for the 

arrest of the earl of Lincoln shows that the potential rewards were high 

enough for conmen to risk their ears. 

Proving that the complaints of the Privy Council’s proclamation and 

The Knights of the Poste were not exaggerations, three such episodes appear 

in Privy Council documents from those very years: William Symondes of 

Warwick was arrested in 1597 because he took people into custody pre- 

10 APC 30:598. 

11 Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James P. Larkin (New Haven: 

Yale University Press, 1969), 3:159–62. S. E. (attributed to Edward Sharpham), The Discouerie 

of the Knights of the Poste (London: G. Shaw, 1597). APC 11:448, 26:92.


tending to be a royal servant, and, in 1598, John Melloes was arrested for 

pretending to be a messenger of the Royal Chamber and forging the signatures 

of Lords of the Privy Council on counterfeit warrants. One example 

of the technique used by these conmen is detailed in the Privy Council 

documents from 1597. A man named Ross pretended to be servant to the 

Earl of Essex. Ross went to Kent and “arrested” Francis Barker, using a 

counterfeit warrant he pretended was issued by the Privy Council. Ross 

then brought Barker back to London, and shifted him from place to place 

for several days, no doubt to keep him from being found by friends or family. 

Barker finally was released when he paid Ross the whopping sum of 

£47, plus a horse. 12 Probably this case came before the Council because 

Barker was a prominent Kentishman. He certainly must have been a substantial 

one; the £47 extorted from him represents a sum more than three 

times the average yearly income of a London artisan. 13 

Almost as long a list as that comprising those with powers of arrest in 

Elizabethan England is the list of those with powers of impressment into 

royal service—JPs, mayors, city officials, military and naval officers, sheriffs, 

and sometimes royal servitors. Private or semi-private recruitment of 

soldiers and sailors also was common. Fears of invasion from Spain, the 

wars in the Low Countries in support of the Dutch Revolt, and chronic 

rebellions in Ireland made the Privy Council pressure officials for more 

and more impressments for the army and navy. 14 

Semi-official musters, recruitment, and even military campaigns by private 

subjects, such as the Cadiz expedition of 1596 which was recruited 

and financed largely by its two joint commanders the earl of Essex and the 

Lord Admiral, made Elizabeth’s military a hodgepodge of authorities, and 

ripe fruit for corruption. 15 As early as 1564 the Privy Council was complaining 

of fraudulent musters used to extract money from local citizens. In 

1573, for instance, a citizen of Cambridge was issued a private commission 

to conduct a muster, but warned he was not to impress the scholars and servants 

of the university, for fear he might turn his commission into a way to 

earn money by to forcing them to pay money to be released from service. 

Naturally, conmen sought to take advantage of the confusing muster 

system just as they did in the case of the overlapping and unsupervised 

powers of arrest. An order of arrest was sent to Kent in 1573 concerning 

a certain Edward Chester and a certain Christopher Chute, both of whom 

were collecting money and taking advantage of free hospitality by pretend- 

12APC 27:54, 137, 28:424. 

13 For average wages in late sixteenth-century London see James H. Forse, Art Imitates 

Business: Commercial and Political Influences in the Elizabethan Theatre (Bowling Green, 

OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1993), 2. 

14 For a good discussion of Elizabeth’s military, its semi-private nature, and its many 

problems and abuses see Haigh, Elizabeth I, 130–48. 

15 Haigh, Elizabeth I, 131.


ing “to have the leading of soldiours.” In 1593 authorities in Rutland 

reported to the Council that a man claiming to be “Captain Bayton” was 

using a counterfeit commission to conscript men and horses so that the 

local inhabitants would pay him money to be released from service or to 

redeem their horses. 16 

At the same time, the government was all too willing to grant exemptions 

from impressment to members of the privileged classes. Commissioners 

of Muster for Kent in 1573 were forbidden to impress the servants 

of the dowager countess of Pembroke, and in 1577 the dean and canons 

of Windsor chapel were allowed to withhold their servants from the training 

musters. As we will see below, in 1602 the Council forbade London 

officials to impress any gentlemen or their servants. 

Others simply claimed the privilege of exemption on their own. The 

Privy Council reprimanded the muster commissioners of three counties, 

Carmarthen, Cardigan, and Pembroke, in 1580 because the commissioners 

were excluding themselves, as well as their personal servants, arms, and 

horses from the levies. In 1587 it came to the Council’s attention that several 

of the Essex gentry charged with serving as cavalrymen “had absented 

them selves from their musters,” and in 1589 it learned that several men 

living in Middlesex not only refused to be called up, but also refused “to 

contribute anie thinge” in the way of arms and supplies, claiming that they 

either belonged to one of the London guilds or were “her Majesties servaunts.” 

In 1591 several gentlemen in Oxford claimed exemption from 

musters “by reason of theire service and attendance on her Majestie.” 17 

Obviously members of the privileged classes, or those close to them, were 

not about to suffer the inconveniences of losing their time, servants, or 

valuable horses. 

Naturally there was fraud and abuse in this haphazard process of mustering 

men and arms. In 1580 the Privy Council ordered the Commissioners 

for Muster in Norfolk to replace John Blackney, esquire, as captain of 

soldiers. Blackney is described as unfit for service because he was too old 

and “subject to lamenesse and sicknes.” No doubt it was his high social 

standing (the title esquire could be used only by those who were descendants 

of a knight) that secured him the commission in the first place. The 

same year men who had been impressed in Chester for service in Ireland 

received neither the travel expenses nor money for uniforms that had been 

advanced to their captains. The Council complained in 1588 that “divers 

gentlemen” in Hertford had presented good horses at the muster but then 

switched them for “very badd horses” when actually called up for service. 

In 1591 the Council asked the earl of Pembroke to investigate the musters 

16 APC 7:175, 8:98–100, 24:149. 

17 APC 8:108, 12:340, 15:12, 17:249.


in Monmouthshire. Monies collected there had disappeared, and there 

was neither record of what had been spent, nor for what it had been spent. 

In 1593 several men conscripted from counties Bedford and Cambridge 

showed up in London in tattered clothing, lacking any arms, and physically 

unfit for service. In 1597 conscripts for service in Ireland were able 

to run away because their own captains were unwilling to conduct them 

out of Cheshire to the seaports, and reports from counties Devon, Norfolk, 

Suffolk, Sussex, Somerset, and Oxford revealed other widespread 

abuses. Some men were impressed solely to extort money from them by 

making them buy their way out of service. Some men were bribing the 

Commissioners of Muster to impress others in their place, and money 

appropriated to captains to buy food, arms, and equipment was disappearing 

without a trace. 18 

Captains of soldiers serving in Ireland were pocketing the money 

allotted them for their soldiers’ pay and food, forcing their troops to loot 

the surrounding countryside. Many captains neglected to report men who 

had died or been mustered-out in order to pocket their pay. To make companies 

appear at full strength in order to receive money from the government, 

sometimes captains allowed Irish rebels to join musters called to 

determine company strength, collect the pay meant for the missing 

English soldiers, and then leave after the official count had been taken. 

Food provided for some ships in the navy was so spoiled it was feared it 

would poison the sailors. Most of the 800 men from twelve different 

counties awaiting transport to Ireland at Bristol in 1602 were found to be 

ill-equipped and clothed, weak, sick, lame, old, or young boys. All of them 

had been impressed so that substantial citizens would not have to serve, 

and it was assumed that any respectable men among them had been 

impressed because they had run afoul of the local authorities. 19 Obviously 

authorities in most counties were desperate to meet their quotas, but they 

also were using their impressment powers to rid their counties of indigents 

and undesirables. 

There was especially heavy pressure on officials between 1599 and 

1602 to raise troops for the campaigns going on simultaneously in Ireland 

and the Low Countries. JPs in Dorset in 1599 are described as frantically 

scouring the county for men. In early May 1602, the Lord Mayor of 

London used his warrant for impressment to take advantage of a certain 

Captain Allen. Allen personally had raised and equipped a company of 400 

men. While in London awaiting transport, many of his men were seized by 

city officials and used to help fill the city’s impressment quota. 20 This was 

doubly advantageous to the city. In the first place it was an easy source of 

18 APC 12:103, 286–87, 16:212–13, 17, 328, 24:62, 65–66, 25:351. 

19 Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury , 9:336–38, 12:144. 

20 Ibid.


soldiers, and in the second, the soldiers already were equipped, thus avoiding 

the complaints from the Privy Council that too many unequipped and 

unfit men were being impressed into military service. 

That incident was followed later in the month by a spectacular abuse 

of impressment powers. Ordered by the Privy Council to raise troops for 

the campaign in the Low Countries by impressing vagrants and vagabonds 

from taverns, bawdy houses, and bowling alleys, the Lord Mayor instead 

directed a coordinated sweep of all the playhouses, impressing a total of 

4000 men, including “gentlemen and servingmen…lawyers, clerks, countrymen 

that had law causes, aye the Queen’s men, knights, and as it was 

credibly reported one Earl.” Naturally the impressment of so many men 

of “quality” brought the action to the attention of the Privy Council. The 

result was a proclamation that henceforth no gentlemen or serving men 

should be impressed in London. 21 

The pressures on London officials to impress troops for the Dutch 

and Irish campaigns, or perhaps an attempt to extort “buy-out” money, 

may not have been the only reasons for the Lord Mayor’s sweep of the 

theatres in May 1602. Officially, at least, the London authorities had 

opposed the theatres in and around London from their inception. Petitions 

from the Lord Mayor and City Council to the Privy Council to ban 

or restrict playing and theatres, and prevent the opening of new ones, were 

numerous, and date to as early as 1549. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign 

such petitions were sent to the Privy Council almost annually. Despite 

these yearly requests to restrict playing, the number of public theatres and 

resident acting companies had increased in the London area, from three 

theatres and two resident companies in 1594 to five theatres and three resident 

companies, plus the Boys’ Companies at Blackfriars and St. Paul’s, in 

1602. Earlier, in 1582 city authorities had tried another tack to restrict 

playing in London, prohibiting children, servants, apprentices, and journeymen 

from attendance at plays, but the prohibition had no effect. Perhaps, 

then, this massive sweep was simply a frustrated mayor attempting to 

use impressment powers as harassment designed to intimidate playgoers 

and playing companies alike since official petitions against playhouses and 

playing had proved so ineffective. To be fair to the London authorities, 

some concern about large gatherings of diverse people at the theatres, perhaps 

on some days as much as three or four percent of the city’s total population, 

is understandable. London and its suburbs had no police or fire 

departments, and crowd control essentially meant swearing out a posse of 

citizens. 22 

21 I. H., Jeayes, ed., Letters of Phillip Gawdy (London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1906), 

120-22. 

22 E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 

2:400–12, 4:261–93, 287, 298–322; Forse, Art Imitates Business, 18–22.


Elizabeth also granted powers of impressment into royal service for 

reasons other than military duty, and a case of its abuse is famous in the 

annals of theatre-history. On 13 December 1600, James Robinson, agent 

of Nathaniel Giles, choirmaster of the Royal Chapel, and Giles’s partner 

Henry Evans, used Giles’ patent issued under the Great Seal, commanding 

“every one of you to whom this our commission shall come, to be helping, 

aiding, and assisting to the uttermost of your powers, as you will answer at 

your uttermost perils,” to “haul, pull, drag, and carry away,” Thomas Clifton, 

the thirteen-year old son and heir of Henry Clifton, esquire, from 

Toftrees in Norfolk, ostensibly to impress Thomas into the Queen’s boys’ 

choir. Henry Clifton immediately went to Blackfriars to demand the 

return of his son. His demand not only was refused, but Giles and Evans 

brought young Thomas into the room, handed him a playscript, and, in 

front of his father, threatened to beat him if he did not learn his part. 23 

Henry Clifton, however, was no mere country bumpkin. He was a 

member of the Norfolk upper gentry. He descended from John Clyfton, 

knight, listed in the Commissioners’ List of 1433 of the gentry of Norfolk. 

His Nottinghamshire cousins had achieved prominence during the reigns 

of Henry VII and Henry VIII. By Elizabeth’s reign the Clifton family had 

sufficient status that William Cecil, Lord Burghley, personally drew up a 

Clifton genealogy for inclusion in his personal papers. No records link 

Henry Clifton directly to the magistracy of Norfolk, but his grandson 

became JP. Henry himself may have been a local master of the posts. Since 

Toftrees lies on a postal road, Henry’s manor possessed large stables, and 

his name is conspicuously absent from Norfolk Muster Rolls. Only JPs, 

clergy, and postmasters were exempt from musters, and Clifton was neither 

JP nor clergyman. 24 

If he were a postmaster, he was acquainted with Sir John Stanhope, 

Master of the Royal Posts. Even if he were not, he had indirect ties to 

Stanhope through Clifton’s friendship with his neighbor Sir Roger Townshend 

of Raynam, who had married Stanhope’s sister. Stanhope was especially 

close associate of Sir Robert Cecil, the Lord Secretary, and the Lord 

Admiral Charles Howard. Henry Clifton’s status within the Norfolk elite 

also would have brought contacts not only with the Howard family, which 

held extensive lands there, but with Attorney General Sir Edward Coke, 

and Sir Francis Bacon—all prominent members of the Norfolk aristocracy. 

Clifton’s friend Townshend had been knighted for services during the 

Armada by Lord Admiral Charles Howard, and his son John was married 

to Nathaniel Bacon’s daughter. Clifton’s manor at Toftrees was less than 

23 Irwin Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse (New York: New York Univeristy 

Press, 1964), 482–86. 

24 Forse, Art Imitates Business, 193–94.


three miles from Mileham, the primary Norfolk residence of Sir Edward 

Coke, who also was chief patron of the parish church at Toftrees. 25 

These connections secured an order from the Privy Council signed by 

Sir John Fortescue, Chancellor of the Exchequer, that Thomas Clifton be 

returned to his father. But Clifton sought additional justice, or vengeance. 

About a year later he introduced a complaint in the Star Chamber that 

resulted in Evans’s censure by the Privy Council, forcing him to hide his 

investments in the Blackfriars Boys Company, withdraw from active participation, 

and leave London for the space of at least one year. 26 

What was the purpose of Thomas Clifton’s impressment? At this time 

Giles and Evans were attempting to start up a boys’ acting company at 

Blackfriars. In his deposition before the Star Chamber, Clifton testified 

that rather than “recruiting” for new talent for the Queen’s choir, his son, 

and most of the others boys he names, were impressed so that Giles and 

Evans could “furnish their said plays and interludes with children….” He 

claimed that most of those boys seized, including his son, possessed no 

musical talent or training. We know of only three boys Clifton named in 

his deposition that had musical training: Alvery Trussell, Salmon Pavey, 

and Nathan Field, who were apprenticed to the choirmasters of St. Paul’s 

Cathedral. Paul’s Boys already were presenting masques and interludes at 

court and public performances at Paul’s. 27 In the instances of Trussell, 

Pavey, and Field, perhaps, Giles and Evans were using their powers of 

impressment to steal talent from the rival company. Yet how does that 

explain the impressment of Thomas Clifton? Perhaps he was a handsome 

boy, but there were plenty of handsome boys without well-connected 

fathers who could be impressed without fear of reprisal. Perhaps instead of 

thinking about Thomas Clifton’s impressment as “talent-scouting,” we 

should think about his impressment as a means of making money. 

Estimates of start-up costs at Blackfriars for the boys’ acting company 

suggest they were enormous. Annual rent was £40, due in quarterly 

installments of £10. Richard Burbage, the landlord, also demanded a 

£400 security bond, a sum equal to twenty-seven years wages to the skilled 

artisan. All maintenance and repair costs were to be borne by Giles and 

Evans. Henslowe’s accounts and the “Sharer Papers” tell us those costs 

could amount to £100 per year. We also need to add at least another £40 

or £50 to clean and spruce up the facility at Blackfriars, which had lain 

vacant for four years. Evans later asserted he bore the cost of converting 

25 Ibid. 

26 Forse, Art Imitates Business, 194. 

27 H. N. Hillebrand, The Child Actors, University of Illinois Studies in Language and 

Literature 11 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1926), 160–69.


“the schoolhouse and the chamber over the same…to dine and sup in” 

and furnished it with “divers implements of household stuff.” 28 

As for costumes and properties, we can assume that Evans and Giles 

did not to lay out a sum like the £300 (twenty years’ labor to the artisan) 

Francis Langley had paid to start up his ill-fated theatre venture at the 

Swan in 1596. Yet a sum one-third that amount, £100, probably is not too 

far off, and Henslowe’s Diary tells us that least £4 probably was advanced 

to Ben Jonson and John Marston for new plays. Finally, the two would 

need to distribute discreet “gifts” to people at Court. Such “gifts” were 

accepted practice to gain favor with those with influence. Nobles paid 

them, and so did theater businessmen. We know John Heminges gave the 

Master of the Revels £5 to prohibit the Red Bull company from performing 

Shakespeare’s plays, and presented the Master annual “New Year’s 

gifts.” Christopher Beeston paid the Master £60 a year above and beyond 

the usual fees he charged to license new plays. Giles and Evans must have 

distributed at least that same amount to secure permission to reactivate the 

Blackfriars Boys. 29 

Adding these sums yields a total of about £600 (a sum representing 

forty years’ labor to the artisan), money that Evans and Giles had to raise, 

between September 1600, when they took possession of Blackfriars, and 

Christmas, when the quarterly installment on the rent was due. Nor does 

this sum include on-going costs of about £40 per year for bed and board 

for the boys housed at Blackfriars, and another £20 as salary for the 

required teacher attached to the group of boys, and whatever salary and 

room and board cost for at least two servants needed to cook and clean. 30 

Herein may lie the reason that on 13 December 1600, Giles and 

Evans “did haul, pull, drag, and carry away” young Thomas Clifton, as 

they already had done to “divers and several children from divers and 

sundry schools…and apprentices to men of trade…against the wills of the 

said children, their parents, tutors, masters and governors, and to no small 

grief and oppressions of your Majesty’s true and faithful subjects.” 31 Their 

boys’ acting company had not yet performed; Giles and Evans had no 

money coming in, and the quarterly rent was due in less than two weeks. 

Faced with a money shortfall, and the prospect of forfeiting the £400 

bond and all the money they already had invested, Evans and Giles probably 

sought a way to turn Giles’s royal commission into ready cash. 

28Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse, 509–46. 

29Gerald Eudes Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time (Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 1986), 152–53; David Starkey et al., The English Court from the Wars 

of the Roses to the Civil War (London: Longman, 1987), 162–65; Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean 

Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 217, 222; Forse, Art Imitates 

Business, 195. 

30 Forse, Art Imitates Business, 198–200. 

31 Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse, 484–46.


Given the almost endemic abuse of royal warrants for personal gain we 

have seen above, Giles and Evans would have been paragons of virtue not 

to abuse the choirmaster’s royal commission. Many of these “divers and 

several children,” including Thomas Clifton, probably were not 

impressed, as Clifton claimed, “for the acting of parts in base plays and 

interludes,” but for payment of discharge fees by their parents or masters. 

Most guildsmen would be glad to pay to regain their apprentices. Not only 

were they losing the boys’ labor, but the time and effort spent to train 

them, and the £10 fees the guildsmen had paid their guilds to register the 

apprentices. They could lose their apprentices altogether; guild regulations 

specified that apprentices could be free of their obligations to their masters 

if they were “diverted to other Occupations than his own Mystery.” 32 

Such an interpretation explains the seemingly stupid arrogance Giles 

and Evans displayed. Smug assertions “that they had authority sufficient 

to take any nobleman’s son in this land,” that Clifton could “complain to 

whom he would,” that Clifton’s son “should be employed” as a player, 

and the threat made before his father’s eyes that Thomas would be 

whipped if he did not “obey the said Evans,” were ploys designed to force 

Henry Clifton to pay for his son’s discharge. The proceedings were meant, 

as Clifton asserted, “to despite and grieve” him, 33 so that he would pay 

up. Evans and Giles probably never mentioned money; they probably 

assumed Clifton knew what was expected. 

Clifton, however, did not take the bait. Perhaps he was unused to the 

sophisticated collections of fees and favors rampant in Elizabeth’s London; 

perhaps he was so outraged he refused to play Evans’s and Giles’s 

game. In either case he was not satisfied with the release of his son. He 

made the affair a Star Chamber matter and a year later presented evidence 

he had gathered concerning other impressments and “misdemeanors and 

offences.” By that time Evans knew he might be in for trouble. Shortly 

before the case went before the Star Chamber he transferred all his goods 

to his son-in-law Alexander Hawkins. 34 

Giles and Evans had reached too high up the Elizabethan social scale. 

None of the other seven boys Clifton specified by name in his deposition, 

nor the “divers and several children” unspecified were described in Clifton’s 

deposition as sons of the gentry, and it must be remembered that we 

only know about those impressments because Clifton had both the status 

and connections to make the authorities at court take notice. In later litigations 

involving Evans we learn he was censured specifically for the 

“takinge up of gentlemens children.” 35 The Privy Council was not con- 

32 John Strype, Annals of the Reformation (London: John Wyat, 1725), 2:455–58. 

33 Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse, 486. 

34 Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 50–51; Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse, 

195.


cerned about, nor did it seek to stop, the impressment of children from 

the commons. 

Here again we see why we know about these abuses of power. Henry 

Clifton, esquire, knew the Stanhopes, the Howards, the Bacons, the 

Cokes, all with powerful connections to the Privy Council just as Mr. 

Paine knew a person with connections at court, Sir Francis Willoughby. 

The archbishop’s servant arrested by the Knight Marshall’s man had both 

legislative privilege and a powerful patron. Francis Barker of Kent must 

have been a man of substance and influence in his home county. Most 

tradesmen, artisans, schoolmasters and the like had no such connections at 

court, legislative privileges, or wealth. 

The commons was used to obeying and paying its “betters.” Tavern 

keepers had to pay Sir Walter Raleigh for licenses to operate their businesses; 

tanners had to pay Sir Edward Dyer for the privilege of practicing 

their trade; and the average person paid multitudes of others for the privileges 

of being freed from false arrest, of buying salt or drinking glasses, or 

anise seeds or spangles, or for brewing beer for export, or demolishing gig 

mills, or transporting ashes and old shoes, or filing law suits. 36 Commoners 

paid for all sorts of goods and services licensed to individuals under the 

guise of royal patents of power or privilege. 37 One can only wonder how 

much money Giles and Evans, the City Recorder of London, the Knight 

Marshall and his servants, the con-man Ross, and nameless others may 

have raised “to the great oppression and wrong of divers of your Majesty’s 

loving and faithful subjects” 38 without ever coming to the attention of the 

authorities. Many a man and woman, silently and resignedly, must have 

paid up when confronted with real or counterfeit warrants, real or counterfeit 

nobleman’s arms, real or counterfeit powers of impressment, real 

or counterfeit claims of military or legal authority, knowing that, like the 

artisans and apprentices who protested the arrest of their fellow feltworker, 

if they resisted, they too might end up in The Counter or The 

Fleet or Marshalsea. 

35 Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse, 484. 

36 Edmund Lodge, Illustrations of British History…in the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward 

VI, Mary, Elizabeth, and James I …. Selected from the MSS. of the Noble Families of Howard, 

Talbot, and Cecil (London: G. Nicol, 1791), 3:159–68. 

37 Webb, English Prisons , 1–2; Dobb, “London Prisons,” 93–99. 

38 Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse, 486.

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews 117 

Michelle P. Brown. The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the 

Scribe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. xvi, 479 pp. 

The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe by Michelle 

P. Brown is an extensive study of the famous eighth-century Latin Gospelbook. 

Originally published in 2003 by The British Library as part of their 

Studies in Medieval Culture series, the study, like the book it describes, is 

beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated, including some 32 color 

plates and over 170 figures and illustrations. Indeed the book could function 

as an introduction to early Insular culture on the basis of its pictures 

alone, and even an Anglo-Saxonist less familiar than he should be with the 

art-historical record, like the current reviewer, will recognize images 

within its pages. However, the publication of The Lindisfarne Gospels is 

timed to correspond with that of a fine art, high-quality facsimile of the 

manuscript by Faksimile Verlag Luzern and The British Library (due to 

come out in 2003), and as such it is really an exhaustive review of all that 

is known about the book’s provenance and history, the cultural and artistic 

milieu of its artist-scribe, the nature of its Latin text, the book’s construction, 

and most importantly the art of the Lindisfarne Gospels. The monograph 

is an expansion of a briefer, descriptive volume which accompanies 

the facsimile. It includes a CD-ROM appendix describing the contents 

and foliation of the manuscript with selective collation. 

The author of the monograph, Michelle Brown, is Curator of Illuminated 

Manuscripts at The British Library, and has published extensively on 

Anglo-Saxon and Celtic manuscripts, paleography, illumination, and Insular 

material culture and history. One can only envy her access to this gorgeous 

manuscript, which she clearly loves, and her seemingly encyclopedic 

expertise in all aspects of manuscript study and in Anglo-Saxon and post- 

Roman history. In her discussion, Brown brings to bear numerous recent 

archeological discoveries as well as revisitings of older ones, and her team 

used advanced laser and microscope techniques to analyze (safely) the 

manuscript’s pigments. Interestingly, Brown’s mentor, the paleographer 

Julian Brown, was one of a team of scholars involved in writing a large 

commentary volume to a facsimile edition of the Gospels published by Urs 

Graf Verlag in 1956–60. Like the new fine art facsimile, Michelle Brown’s 

monograph is meant to reappraise and perhaps replace the earlier work. It 

seems quite likely that it will. 

In her Acknowledgements, Brown states that the monograph is 

designed to be “geared to the needs of the scholarly community” as well 

as “to the informed general reader.” I would say that she is generally successful 

in addressing these two audiences, although when immersed (as in 

Chapter Two) in the minutia of seventh-century Northumbrian bishoprics, 

the general reader will need to be very well informed indeed. Occa-

118 Book Reviews 

sionally I would founder in Brown’s complex periodic sentences and look 

sometimes in vain for a definitive summary of the particular section’s argument. 

On the whole, however, The Lindisfarne Gospels is laudably readable 

and clear. 

As suggested above, the monograph is also meant to provide the technical 

detail of a facsimile commentary. Though occasionally rote (i.e. the 

book’s dimensions, its foliations), much of this detail is expanded and is 

fascinating in its own light. For instance, in Chapter Four, on the book’s 

codicology, we learn of the extraordinary care with which the skins for 

vellum were selected and prepared, and this is one of the ways in which the 

Lindisfarne Gospels represent a great outlay of resources. Similarly, the 

planning of the book, from the number of words per page to the tracing 

of the designs with leadpoint (a precursor to the pencil and not known to 

have been used again for 300 years), required immense time and energy. 

In Chapter Five, on the art of the book, we learn of the unique technical 

skill required for the creation of the pigments, which rival those used by 

Mediterranean artists. Brown shows us that these surpass the colors in any 

of the related manuscripts, such as the Durham and Echternach Gospels; 

only the Book of Kells has as broad a palette, though its colors have been 

less stable. This chapter also presents valuable descriptions of all the main 

illuminated pages, such as the carpet pages, incipits, and portraits of the 

evangelists, and it is here that one can find out, for instance, the identity 

of the mysterious man peeping from behind the curtain in the portrait of 

John (and what those odd lines on his feet are). 

However, the heart, or rather common thread, of Brown’s study 

regards the provenance, authorship, and dating of the book. Brown, as it 

turns out, endorses a traditional view of the book’s origins—i.e. that it was 

made at Lindisfarne (so its title can stand) perhaps by Bishop Eadfrith— 

though she arrives at this independently of Aldred’s colophon. In following 

this argument, made mainly in Chapters One and Two, the reader will 

need to bring some knowledge of the Columban tradition of monasteries 

and romanising reform, as this is one of the places where Brown most 

addresses her specialized audience. Essentially, she argues that the features 

of the book that link it to the center at Wearmouth / Jarrow (the alternative 

provenance most often suggested) have to be balanced against other 

features. While we will probably never be able to locate its origins with 

100 percent certainty, Brown argues that: 

the powerful affiliations with the Columban tradition, manifest 

prior and post its production, the assimilation of strong Wearmouth 

/ Jarrow influence (but avoidance of others of its methods), 

the stylistic contextual material which points to northern 

Bernician territory and to Holy Island in particular as the best


source of in situ artifacts exhibiting a close relationship to the volume, 

the exceptional quality of manufacture and subsequent 

retention as a prestigious focal point of the cult of St Cuthbert all 

concur in supporting Lindisfarne as the most likely place of production…. 

(406) 

With the book then established as a Lindisfarne product, Brown looks for 

“the most accomplished, experienced, learned and senior member” (298) 

and suggests Eadfrith, though she argues, mainly on stylistic grounds, for 

a date of composition later than the traditional 698 associated with the 

translation of St Cuthbert’s body—perhaps between 715 and 720, the 

latter corresponding with Eadfrith’s death, which might explain unfinished 

elements in the Gospels. While authorship cannot again be absolutely 

established, this reader finds her arguments compelling, particularly 

in conjunction with Brown’s notion of the act of creating the Lindisfarne 

Gospels as a kind of “sustained feat of spiritual and physical endurance,” 

“preaching with the pen in the scribal desert” (398 and passim). 

As an Anglo-Saxonist, I have mainly associated the Lindisfarne Gospels 

with their tenth-century Old English gloss by Aldred. The gloss itself 

receives relatively little attention in Brown’s commentary except with 

regard to the book’s history and the traditions of its authorship. In Chapter 

Two, Brown advances the interesting theory that Aldred may have 

completed the gloss as a means to gain membership in the monastic community 

of Chester-le-Street. In his colophon, written some two hundred 

and fifty years after the book’s original making, Aldred places himself as 

the fourth of the book’s makers, writing his gloss “to make a home for 

himself,” Eadfrith being the original author, Aethilwald the binder, and 

Billfrith the maker of its mental ornaments (subsequently lost). Brown 

argues that aside from the rubrics and Aldred’s gloss, the Lindisfarne Gospels 

are the product of one man’s devoted work over the course of five to 

ten years, and one shudders to think what Eadfrith would have thought of 

Aldred’s (to my eye) rather scratchy and unruled hand on his beautifully 

laid out book. Brown however sensibly accepts the gloss as part of the 

book’s interest. In a similar manner, she later describes the nineteenth 

century treasure binding, deliberately archaized with an elaborate metalwork 

interlace, as having “entered into the history of the manuscript and 

excit[ing] a certain amount of public interest and affection in its own 

right” (208). 

“What must it have been like to try to claw back enough time and 

energy to undertake this body-racking, muscle-aching, eye-straining task 

in a hut somewhere on the seaboard of north-west Europe with the wind 

and the rain and the distraction of a beauteous Creation all around?” (4). 

So asks Michelle Brown in her introduction. By the end of her mono-


graph, the reader will have acquired a keen sense (if not already in possession 

of same) of the marvel of this achievement. Brown is remarkably 

good at referring the reader to contemporary works that illustrate early 

medieval trends in manuscript production, textual transmission, illumination, 

metalwork decoration, and sculpture. These amply illustrate the 

diverse and cosmopolitan stands that she asserts were drawn upon by the 

artist-scribe of the Lindisfarne Gospels, as well as underlining his many 

innovations. 

Thomas Klein 

Ohio State University 

Alan Bray. The Friend. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 

2003. 380pp. Ill. 

Alan Bray is of course the author of Homosexuality in Renaissance 

England, the groundbreaking 1982 study to which this book, twenty 

years in the making, effectively serves as sequel. As the editor’s note to The 

Friend explains, “When Alan Bray died on 25 November 2001, he left this 

book in typescript. The typescript was complete.” Preparation of the notes 

and apparatus fell to one of the book’s first readers, Mark D. Jordan, 

author of several relevant volumes, most notably The Invention of Sodomy 

in Christian Theology (1997). To both a great debt is due. 

The Friend provides crucial reading for anyone with an interest in 

queer theory or in the histories of sexuality, marriage, English social and 

religious customs, literature, and much more. It is a history of (mostly 

male) friendship and its public role within English society from the later 

Middle Ages to the reign of Queen Victoria. In particular, Bray examines 

the lives of “sworn brothers” and of men who chose to be buried or 

memorialized together, as couples. The monumental imagery he describes 

often closely resembles that of married couples, and the ceremony that 

joined men in ritual brotherhood was, like betrothals, generally carried 

out before the church door. Still, those looking for a ‘hidden history’ of 

gay marriage, or simply of homosexual relationships, may be disappointed 

by this book: as Bray rightly points out, the evidence for a sexual component 

to most of the friendships here examined is conflicted at best, and 

often entirely absent. According to the summary on the book jacket, Alan 

Bray here “debunks the now-familiar readings of friendship by historians 

of sexuality who project homoerotic desires onto their subjects where 

there were none.” Yet that same brief summary begins more suggestively: 

following a brief description of the seventeenth-century tomb of John


Finch and Thomas Baines—the discovery of which provided the impetus 

for this book—and the statement that “Bray would soon learn that Finch 

commonly described his friendship with Baines as a connubium or marriage,” 

we are told, “There was a time, as made clear by this monument, 

when the English church not only revered such relations between men, 

but also blessed them.” Many readers will immediately make the assumption 

that Bray wants at least initially to avoid, namely, that “such relations” 

were indeed homoerotic. In many cases they clearly were not, but served 

nonetheless to extend and complement the ties of kinship—including heterosexual 

marriage—in socially useful ways. 

While Bray’s Introduction lays out the problems facing a study of this 

sort, and the assumptions he wishes to avoid or undermine, it does so in 

largely general terms, or in relation to specific reactions to the (as yet 

undescribed) material that follows, and so seems relatively abstract. And 

that rich material, which ranges from the common tomb of two fourteenth-century 

English knights, uncovered earlier this century in Istanbul, 

to Cardinal Newman’s burial with his friend Ambrose St John in the late 

nineteenth century, is treated with circumspection. He states: 

The account I give is cast in unrelentingly historical terms until I 

come to the chapter “Friendship and Modernity.” My task as a 

historian is to let the past speak in its own terms, not to appropriate 

it to those of the contemporary world. Only in this late chapter, 

as the account I give begins to enter the world in which I live, 

do I step forward in my own voice and say what I believe the story 

to be. Many readers will find this frustrating. (6) 

Still others will dispute the possibility of letting “the past speak in its own 

terms,” or “for itself” (11). Indeed, Bray himself states that the letters and 

poems that are among his primary sources “are not transparent windows 

through which we can now observe the past” (55); nor are tomb inscriptions. 

While most of his descriptions and transcriptions of monuments and 

texts may be as neutral as he could manage, the discussion, contextualization, 

and translation of these are obviously his own. And these have a tendency 

to tease the reader, adding to the frustration. 

It is perhaps worth noting the difference between what Bray does here 

and what David Deitcher does in his book, Dear Friends : American Photographs 

of Men Together, 1840–1918 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 

2001). Both writers deal with what Deitcher calls “stubbornly ambiguous 

objects” and “enigmatic artifacts from the past” (14) that they feel have 

something to say to the contemporary world about friendship and same 

sex relationships. Unlike Bray, however, Deitcher combines historical analysis 

with deeply personal reflection throughout his book, which deals with 

photographs in which bodies of mostly anonymous men are closely and


affectionately entwined. While he clearly and carefully asserts that such 

physical intimacy did not necessarily have an erotic meaning to the sitters, 

Deitcher is also explicitly interested in what these photographs might 

mean to their modern, mostly gay collectors: “Uncertain of anything that 

ever actually transpired between the men in such a photograph, the collector 

is free to imagine whatever he pleases” (15). This personal, erotic relation 

to those anonymous photographs is, he writes, “akin to flirtation” in 

the way it “embraces uncertainty” (16) and defers definition. While Bray 

explicitly refuses wishful thinking, he embraces the various uncertainties of 

his material, and defers definition of his own relation to that material. But 

he also has a tendency to defer simple explanation, forcing the reader into 

uncertainty. 

In his chapter on “The Body of the Friend,” Bray examines the social 

meanings of kissing and embracing between friends, and of their dining 

and sleeping together, while avoiding any mention of erotic possibility 

within what was “overwhelming a world of men” (157), namely, 

England’s great houses and colleges. Then, toward the end of the chapter, 

having explicitly rejected a homosexual reading of some erotic metaphors 

and sexual jokes in sixteenth-century familiar letters, Bray writes, “The 

shared bed and the embraces of masculine friendship suggested the sodomitical 

no more than the conventions of the familiar letter” (167). In 

deferring this comment for as long as he does, especially given that he has 

already admitted the possibility of sexual relations between some “sworn 

brothers” (38), Bray flirts with the reader, allowing and even promoting 

the very assumption regarding what he repeatedly calls “the gift of the 

friend’s body” (158, 162, 172, 209, 217) that he plans to disappoint. Nor 

is his evidence against a homoerotic reading of the familiar letters initially 

convincing. He simply notes the explicit antisodomitical stance of some of 

his sources, but such a stance in itself tells us little. Some vehemently 

homophobic men today are homosexually active; we cannot assume that 

things were notably different in earlier periods in this respect, even if we 

cannot assume that nothing has changed. Bray largely ignores this particular 

problem. Yet when he doubts the ability of the past to speak for itself, 

and so intervenes, he is generally successful. He convincingly argues, for 

instance, that the common subject of these sexually charged jokes “is not 

sexuality but manliness” (168). Anyone familiar with modern male lockerroom 

humour will undoubtedly see the parallels, although Bray of course 

does not explore these. 

Nor does he necessarily explore textual meanings that early modern 

Englishmen might have been expected to understand. At the outset of this 

same chapter, he quotes an inscription from the tomb of John Finch and 

Thomas Baines as “VNVM CORPVS ET VNVS SPIRITVS,” which he 

translates, “there is one body and one spirit” (143). While this is an appro-


priate translation of the apparent biblical source, Ephesians 4:4, the expletive 

“there is” distracts the reader from the potential marriage metaphor 

that is clearly relevant here. These two men, who referred to their relationship 

as a marriage, are in this inscription at least arguably described as 

being of “one body and one spirit.” In Ephesians 4, Paul uses the phrase 

to describe the church, but makes the marriage metaphor explicit in the 

following chapter, where he draws a parallel between Christ as head of the 

body that is the church and husbands as head of the body that is his wife. 

In 1 Corinthians 6:16–17, being of “one body” with a harlot is directly 

contrasted with being of “one spirit” with Christ. Yet Bray passes over all 

this to emphasize the Eucharistic implications of the phrase, the Eucharist 

being central to his argument, as it clearly was to the concept of ritual 

brotherhood. It is the book’s central metaphor: “the Eucharist was and 

remained the experience of a transformative rite that changed the significance 

of the bread and wine brought to it: through a mechanism of the 

same kind the table changed the stranger into the friend” (152). 

The book also describes an historical transformation of friendship 

itself—one that Bray hopes to undo. He writes, “When in 1749 an 

Englishman described the practice of two men kissing each other as a foreign 

and distasteful practice, he seems to have been unaware that it had 

ever been thought otherwise” (212). Such unawareness is hardly a thing 

of the past, even now. But that is the (still mostly implicit) point: near the 

end of the seventeenth century, around the same time that, according to 

Bray’s earlier book, the modern view of the homosexual emerged in 

England, the gestures that Bray argues as characterizing friendship— 

“those visible gestures at table or bed or in the public embrace” (209)— 

all but vanished from English social life. The monuments themselves 

remained, but “We did not see these tombs because they did not signify”; 

thanks to Bray’s rediscovery, “they are beginning to signify again” (306). 

This book is an attempt “to recover the shape of a history for which a previous 

orthodoxy had—and still has—no place” (323). Bray’s obvious 

hope, as a gay Catholic convert, is that the current or future orthodoxy 

might find a place for this history and for the rite at its centre: that is, the 

blessing of gay couples by the church. 

While the fourteenth-century “Catholic Rite for Making Brothers” 

reproduced here (130–33, in Latin with facing-page English translation) 

is unlikely to form the basis of many modern gay weddings, the revelation 

that the English church once blessed (and buried) “wedded brothers” 

severely challenges modern assertions of an unbroken tradition against 

such. Having discussed the ceremonial union and communion of two 

nineteenth-century women, Anne Lister and Ann Walker, whose relationship 

“was unquestionably sexual” (268), Bray asks, “Within this history, 

would a sexual potential have stood in the way of a sworn friendship in the

124 Book Reviews 

Eucharist? The answer must be that it would not, in that it evidently did 

not do so here” (269). A few months before his death, Bray was quoted 

(by Stephen Bates, The Guardian, 9 August 2001) as saying much the 

same thing, but with more general force: “The sexual potential of a relationship, 

which was always a possibility, was clearly not in itself a bar to 

eucharistic practice.” He then directly compares ancient and modern practice: 

“The church was taking cognisance of friendship and although its disciplines 

were the same it was more willing to take a risk.” 

The writing of The Friend constituted a risk. That it sometimes seems 

too careful hardly constitutes a problem, given the wealth of material and 

the radical challenges to received wisdom that the book offers. It is a fitting 

final monument to Alan Bray—civil servant, social historian, activist, 

and academic—and to his friend and partner, Graham Wilson. Like the 

body of the friend in Bray’s account, this book is a public gift of notable 

value. 

Garrett P.J. Epp 

University of Alberta 

Valeria Finucci. The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration 

in the Italian Renaissance . Durham and London: Duke University 

Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8223-3065-2. $24.95 paper. 

Though gender implies a consideration of the culturally constructed 

roles of men and women, gender studies, perhaps as a spin-off of women’s 

history, has traditionally concentrated on women. Valeria Finucci’s new 

work alternatively considers gender more from the perspective of men. 

The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian 

Renaissance presents a close, scholarly reading of a series of fascinating 

topics in Renaissance culture such as the conception of children, crossdressing, 

and castration. While other scholars have considered these subjects 

in studies of the history of medicine, theater, or politics, Finucci 

innovatively reveals instead what these discourses can tell us about masculinity 

in early modern Italy. Through an analysis of a selection of Renaissance 

literature deftly woven together with a variety of additional sources 

such as novellas, medical texts, and legal decrees, Finucci demonstrates 

that like femininity, masculinity was culturally determined, and sixteenthcentury 

manliness encompassed a variety of constructions ranging from 

the aggressively masculine man to the more effeminate, ornamented, sensual 

man more typically associated with the seventeenth century. In short, 

the strong, swaggering man adorned with the codpiece, sword, and


dagger was far from the only male type at large in the Italian Renaissance 

landscape, and not surprisingly, a variety of models of masculinity necessarily 

generated a greater variety of interactions and negotiations between 

men and women than we have perhaps understood up until now. 

Finucci begins with a consideration of the conception, generation and 

birth of children and the roles that men and women played in this process—a 

topic that engages the first half of her study. From high medical 

and literary thought down through popular culture, the early modern 

world believed that a variety of peculiar ways of human conception were 

possible; generation could easily involve only women or men alone, or in 

fact no mother or father at all. As the Renaissance drew on classical culture, 

it was informed by the ideas of Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen, 

who argued that women’s importance in procreation was more accidental 

and passive than that of men. Lucian suggested that men on the moon 

married each other, carried their children in their calves and gave birth by 

cesarean section. Sixteenth-century writers often corroborated such stories 

of generation by one parent or sex alone; Agnolo Firenzuola told of a 

woman whose son was conceived by eating snow. Tasso and Straparola 

recounted women interbreeding with animals such as cats, dogs, pigs or 

tuna, and numerous beings could emerge from the womb including toads, 

serpents, and the penis itself. According to a variety of writers, again ranging 

from Aristotle to Tasso and Paracelsus, humans could also feasibly be 

born out of waste and putrefaction itself. 

With such theories of generation abounding, Finucci turns to ask, just 

what exactly was the role of the father in conception? She attempts to 

answer this question by examining ideas of paternity and masculinity in a 

series of texts, beginning with Machiavelli’s La mandragola. First performed 

in Florence in 1518, Machiavelli’s tale recounts how an older lawyer, 

Nicia Calfucci, enters into a contract with Callimaco Guadagni in 

order to impregnate his infertile wife. Callimaco, disguised as a doctor, 

administers a fertility potion—the mandrake root--that will have the side 

effect of killing the man who first sexually approaches Lucrezia. A street 

boy (Callimaco in disguise) is then kidnapped to make love to Lucrezia 

and draw out this poison and impregnate her with (Callimaco’s) child. 

Finucci uses this story to explore two ideas; first, that paternity can occur 

without fertilization, since Nicia, after delegating the dangerous business 

of sex to another man, comfortably claims Callimaco’s child as his own 

and becomes a surrogate parent. Second, Finucci links the figure of Lucrezia--the 

toxic, dangerous, poisonous female--to an epidemic fear of spiders 

that swept across Italy in the early modern period. Under the spell of the 

mandrake root, Lucrezia becomes a masculine aggressor who, like the 

Freudian spider, kills with a male organ. This psychoanalytical interpretation 

aligns with the early modern medical perception that both sexes had


the same organs: that women had penises internally located. Machiavelli’s 

comedy destabilizes any one single concept of masculinity and paternity; 

paternity and patriarchy here are not linked to sperm, as Nicia become a 

legitimate father not through sex but through caretaking. If both genders 

had penises and could behave in masculine ways, manliness was not determined 

by the penis per se, but by a man “put[ting] himself in a position of 

power and showing himself virile” (106). 

Finucci also considers paternity by examining the well-known—but 

little explored—early modern concept that a woman’s imagination, 

including what she thought of and looked at during pregnancy, played a 

decisive role in the engendering of children and their resulting appearance. 

In Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1575), the white woman warrior Clorinda 

is born from two Ethiopian parents; the fact that Clorinda did not 

resemble her mother or father suggested that the father’s generative input 

was entirely canceled out by maternal imagination during pregnancy. The 

birth of monstrous children like Clorinda generated the male fear that 

men were in fact much less relevant to the gestation process than previously 

imagined. Renaissance ideas about conception, if taken to their logical 

conclusion, in fact put a child’s resemblance entirely out of the hands 

of the father; “the mother carries a fetus that will look like her husband 

not because he is the genetic father of the baby but because she chooses, 

among a number of possibilities, to have her child look like what she finds 

desirable for herself,” thereby placing the engendering of a physically similar 

child “suddenly…outside the reach of fathers” (140). Once again, 

men are perhaps not quite as manly as we thought; “at the very moment 

in which woman performs her most clear-cut role in society, and her most 

recommended one biologically—that of reproducing—she manages to set 

herself free from patriarchy” (141). 

In chapters four and five, Finucci turns to other aspects of the “masquerade” 

of masculinity. In canto 28 of Orlando furioso (1532), for 

instance, Ariosto recounts the story of King Astolfo of Lombardy and his 

noble traveling companion Jocondo traveling around Europe, making 

love to more than a thousand women in revenge for having been betrayed 

by their wives. Though this at first might appear a typically aggressive, 

masculine response to the affront of adultery, Finucci argues that Ariosto 

feminizes these men who are narcissistically obsessed with their beauty. 

The narrative, she argues, is motivated not by power (the characters never 

impregnate any of the many women they sleep with) but by eroticism as 

their obsessive sex feminizes more than masculinizes the protagonists. 

Finucci interprets this tale to show that virility does not guarantee male 

power and “masculinity is a construct, a masquerade, a display, a performance, 

just like femininity” (166). The tale of cross-dressing twins in Bibbiena’s 

La calandria (1513) further underlines the social constructedness


of gender. Santilla and Lidio, twins orphaned and separated at the age of 

six, cross-dress as a man and woman respectively in order to win the love 

of Fulvia, a Roman noblewoman; Santilla explains to Fulvia the fact of 

occasionally missing or changed organs by describing herself as a hermaphrodite. 

In this comedy, characters appear, disappear, and reappear in 

different gendered and sexual guises with a dizzying frequency, sometimes 

feminine in gender and female in sex, other times feminine in gender and 

male in sex. 

Finucci ends her study with what is perhaps her most significant contribution: 

an analysis of the castrato in Renaissance Italy. Though many 

readers will already be familiar with the phenomenon of castrati—young 

males castrated in order to maintain a suitably operatic voice—it may come 

as a surprise to learn that while this practice is commonly associated with 

baroque Italy, it actually began in large numbers in the last quarter of the 

sixteenth century. Finucci demonstrates how castration regularly happened 

in early modern Italian society for a wide variety of medical, political, 

and moral reasons in addition to theatrical ones, suggesting that 

castrated men actually regularly peopled early modern communities in 

Italy. Castrati may have been sexually mutilated, but in fact were often 

considered over-sexualized, incited feminine lust and fascination, and regularly 

established heterosexual attachments. Through a discussion of a 

papal bull passed in 1587 stating that men unable to emit seminal fluid 

could not marry, Finucci demonstrates yet another destabilization of what 

would traditionally have defined sex; it was not the penis, but the testicles 

and their power to make progeny for society that in this case defined masculinity. 

Beyond the fact that this study innovatively considers gender in terms 

of men, another contribution of this work is its destabilization of sex as 

well as gender: a concept that many scholars have suggested—such as 

Thomas Laqueur in his well-known work Making Sex: Body and Gender 

from the Greeks to Freud (1990)—but few have actually explored in more 

specific historical arenas. Finucci clearly demonstrates that not only masculinity, 

but also men themselves were culturally constructed and reconfigurable, 

as Bibbiena’s characters attached and detached sexual parts, or 

castrati became famous as adept lovers despite their damaged male organs. 

This culture understood bodily humours to be constantly in flux, and genitalia 

did not necessarily constitute sexual difference. It has long been 

understood that gender in the late medieval and early modern world was 

fluid and changeable; but stories like that of Marie Germain—a French 

woman who by running after a pig and jumping over a ditch, became a 

man (6)—demonstrate how physical, biological sex was also changeable 

and fluctuating.


Finucci’s study is provides a compelling read that dynamically overturns 

any static perceptions historians and literary scholars may have had 

about Renaissance men and masculinity. This work is timely, echoed by 

Margaret Gallucci’s Benvenuto Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic 

Identity in Renaissance Italy (Palgrave, 2003), and will surely prompt further 

scholarly musing about male culture. Her plots summaries are excellent 

and allow even outsiders to the field of Italian Renaissance literature 

to immediately enter into her discussion and analysis. Finucci’s writing 

simultaneously imparts a sense of awe and humor to her discussion of early 

modern sex, gender, and masculinity, as these sixteenth-century writers of 

comedy and farce regularly did themselves. 

Liz Horodowich 

New Mexico State University

Quidditas 24 - BYU Humanities - Brigham Young University

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