Allegory and Enchantment

A L L E G O R Y A N D EN C H A N T M E N T
Allegory and
Enchantment
An Early Modern Poetics
JASON CRAWFORD
1
3
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Acknowledgments
My first encounter with the texts that occupy this book took place in my
childhood, when my mother read The Pilgrim’s Progress aloud to me and
my sister. I remember well how thrilling, how charged with danger and
wonder and dark truth, Christian’s quest seemed to us then, unfolding in
my mother’s voice. The byways of writing the critical story I have to tell
here have, at times, taken me far from those early, enchanted moments.
But the abiding power of those moments in my imagination has reminded
me often that the most significant debts of this book are deeper than any
footnote can tell, and that my parents are, as they ever have been, the first
and best of my teachers.
I owe special debts of thanks to Nicholas Watson, James Simpson, and
Gordon Teskey. These three were wise and generous guides as I wrote my
doctoral dissertation in Harvard’s Department of English, and they each
taught me much then about what scholarship can mean and be. But they
have surprised me even so, in the years since, with the steadfastness of their
encouragement and support. As I have toiled at this book, each of them
has read, commented, contributed, questioned, warned, conversed, and
cheered, with untiring patience. Each has shared with me many gifts from
his own learning and writing. In plenty of ways each of them will take
issue with the pages that follow. Even at these points, each has helped to
make the book stronger, and each has done a great deal to sustain my joy
in writing it.
Along the way I have enjoyed the companionship of many colleagues
at Harvard University, at Union University, and in the Lilly Fellows
Program in Humanities and the Arts. I have been grateful in particular
for Scott Huelin and John Netland, who made themselves my friends on
my arrival at Union and who encouraged me to keep writing in the midst
of much else; for Mike Owens, who convinced me to give this book a try
and who helped me through some key phases of its making; for Joshua
King, who was there in the beginning, a fellow pilgrim in many endeavors;
for Steve Halla, who has been so very free with the gifts of his woodcut
artistry and of his good company; for Ryan Wilkinson and David
Hoogerheide, who have enriched this work with years of conversation
about matters great and strange; and for Kathy Sutherland, Joe Creech,
Sandra Visser, Gwen Urdang-Brown, Melinda Posey, Chad Schrock, and,
not least, my colleagues in the Department of English and the Honors
viii Acknowledgments
Community here at Union. Brenda Machosky has, at various conferences
on various coasts and continents, been a perceptive and hospitable inter-
locutor, and Vladimir Brljak offered me a warm welcome, in my last weeks
of writing, at a colloquium on allegory hosted by the Warburg Institute. In
the final stages of my work, I have been heartened and helped by my
commissioning editors at Oxford University Press, Jacqueline Norton and
Eleanor Collins; by the attentiveness of the press’s editorial and production
staff; and by the reports of the press’s anonymous readers, who took the
time to know my work well and whose astute readings have prompted me to
revise at a number of points.
I wrote portions of the book with the help of a Lilly Postdoctoral
Fellowship, a Pew Research Grant from Union University, and a Lindsay
Young Visiting Faculty Fellowship at the University of Tennessee’s Marco
Institute. I have been much helped by the skill and graciousness of the
librarians at Harvard’s Widener and Houghton Libraries, at Oxford’s
Bodleian Library, in the Special Collections of the University of Tennessee’s
Hodges Library, and at Union University’s Logos Library, where the ever-
forbearing Stephen Mount must be glad my work is done. Portions of
the book have appeared in journals: part of Chapter 2 as “Langland’s
Allegorical Modernity,” English Studies 95:6 (fall 2014); part of
Chapter 3 as “The Bowge of Courte and the Afterlives of Allegory,” Journal
of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 41:2 (spring 2011); and part
of Chapter 5 as “Bunyan’s Secular Allegory,” Religion & Literature 44:1
(fall 2012). I am grateful to those journals for permission to publish my
work here.
There is no way of acknowledging adequately my greatest debts of
gratitude. In Boston, Jackson, Knoxville, and Atlanta, and especially in
Charlotte (where the cup of good cheer is never dry) and in Baton Rouge
(where kindness never knows limits), my friends and family have loved me
to all excess and beyond all deserving. I cannot do justice to the depth or
breadth of what they have contributed to this book: certainly not in the
case of my two smallest helpers, who daily renew my capacity to tell stories
and love words; and least of all in the case of the one to whom this book is
dedicated. She has endured more, hoped more, believed more, and been
more than the small offering of this book can possibly answer or attest.
Caritas numquam excidit.
Contents
Introduction: A Poetics of Enchantment 1
1. Genealogies of Allegory 45
2. Incarnations of the Word: Piers Plowman 82
3. Suspicion and Solitude: The Bowge of Courte 110
4. Violence and Apocalypse: The Faerie Queene 138
5. Selfhood and Secularity: The Pilgrim’s Progress 175
Bibliography 203
Index 221
Introduction
A Poetics of Enchantment
What is enchantment? For the past century, historians and theorists of

many persuasions have used the term to say something about modernity.
Especially in the long shadow of Max Weber’s critical accounts, we have
come to conceive of modern culture as a set of interlinked projects:
empirical science, capitalist industry, constitutional government, colonial
violence, interiorized religion, instrumental rationality. And we have come
to understand these projects as exercises in what Weber calls the “disen-
chantment of the world.” “The fate of our times,” as Weber says in a 1918
lecture,
is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by
the “disenchantment of the world” [Entzauberung der Welt]. Precisely the
ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into
the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and
personal human relations.1
The projects of modernity, as Weber understands them, commit them-
selves to the enforcement of an absence, to an abandonment of the
sacramental rites, magical practices, and immanent spiritual presences of
an idolatrous past.2 Weber here imagines the old values and presences
in retreat, but “disenchantment” is also a transitive act, and many more
recent commentators have described modernity as a campaign of
1 I quote from the English version of Weber’s lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” in Max
Weber, Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1946), p. 155; and from the German text, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in
Max Weber, Schriften: 1894–1922 (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 2002), p. 510. The
German phrase appears also on p. 488. My description here of modernity’s “projects” is
indebted to Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 13.
2 In naming sacrament and magic as the linked practices modernity has repudiated,
I reiterate the terms of Weber’s analysis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), pp. 104–5, 117.
2 Allegory and Enchantment
renunciation, as what we have variously called “the elimination of magic
from the world,” “the impoverishment of the reign of the invisible,” “the
departure from religion,” “the destruction of the old enchanted cosmos,”
the “general rejection of magic,” “the abandonment of that theoretical
ideal [of ‘ontotheological synthesis’], defined more than two millennia
ago,” “the surrender of our previous meaningful, humanly suffused,
humanly responsive, if often also menacing or capricious world.”3 To
understand modernity as disenchantment is to conceive of modernity in
just these negative terms: elimination, impoverishment, departure,
destruction, rejection, abandonment, surrender. Modernity, in our narra-
tives, is the end of something, a withering of the obsolescent past in the
light of a utopian or dystopian future. Its identity depends upon the old
magic from which it is, for better or worse, persistently trying to awaken.
And enchantment is that old magic, the spell modernity has broken. In
a kind of back-formation on Weber’s language of disenchantment, some
recent narratives of modernity use “enchantment” to name a set of
premodern, and usually medieval, cultural forms.4 When we talk about
enchantment, we often talk about the medieval church, with its vast
sacramental economies and its theology of bodily presence; about medi-
eval political life, with its magical conceptions of authority and social
bond; or about the medieval natural order, with its occult affinities and its
daemonic agents. If disenchantment entails “the impoverishment of the
reign of the invisible,” enchantment, as many of our narratives imagine it,
indicates the immanent operations of the invisible, whether the invisible
agent takes the form of the God whom Akeel Bilgrami has described as
“present in nature itself and therefore providing an inner source of
3 I quote, respectively, from Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 105; Marcel Gauchet, The
Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 3; The Disenchantment of the World, p. 5 (and this
metaphor of departure permeates his book); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge,
MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 63; Keith Thomas, Religion
and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century
England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 787; Louis Dupré, Passage to
Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1993), p. 3; and Ernest Gellner, who here summarizes the Weberian thesis
in a parodic spirit, “The Rubber Cage: Disenchantment with Disenchantment,” in Culture,
Identity, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 153.
4 See, for instance, Charles Taylor’s synopsis of premodern enchantment in A Secular
Age, e.g., pp. 25–43; Akeel Bilgrami’s account of early modern alternatives to disenchant-
ment, “What is Enchantment?” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael
Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2010), pp. 145–65; and David Morgan’s comments on the uneasy persistence
of enchantment in modernity, “Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment,” in
Re-Enchantment, ed. David Morgan and James Elkins (New York and London: Routledge,
2009), pp. 9–18.
A Poetics of Enchantment 3
dynamism” or of the “host of demons, threatening from all sides” that
Charles Taylor takes as the defining mark of an enchanted cosmos.5 The
language of enchantment therefore tends to indicate forms of commerce
or of approach, channels by which the material world and the immaterial
divine come into contact with one another.
But as a term of critical discourse, “enchantment” also indicates some-
thing else. A critical account of enchantment can be possible, after all, only
to the subject who has come out from under the spell and who therefore
stands at the distance necessary to give enchantment a name. “Enchant-
ment,” as the name of an unnatural suspension out of ordinary life, has a
kind of retrospection built into it. Just as the terms “medieval” and
“premodern” define the thing they name as inherently previous, a period
that precedes and strangely presupposes the real birth or rebirth of
civilization, “enchantment,” too, precedes and presupposes the disen-
chantment that makes its spells apparent. The term signifies a condition
of otherness, a secondary state. In our narratives of modernity, it suggests
the fragility and anteriority of the dream from which the premodern world
eventually will awaken. Even when our critical accounts mean to eulogize
or rehabilitate enchantment, they tend to find enchantment already, and
perhaps necessarily, dissipated: at odds, certainly, with modernity, and
with modernity’s core projects of repudiation and departure. Enchant-
ment is premodern, and the premodern is enchanted. It seems hard,
within the terms of the Weberian narrative, to imagine a modern enchant-
ment, or an enchanted modernity.
Early modern writers would in many ways recognize this narrative of
medieval enchantment and modern disenchantment. These writers are
themselves, after all, engaged in the repudiation of an old magic. In
England, writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have their
own narratives and metaphors of disenchantment, and they invent a
variety of renunciatory postures, imagining themselves as debunkers,
skeptics, bearers of news, inquisitors and counter-inquisitors, plain-
speaking prophets against every sort of conspiracy and error. For the
main body of these English writers, the metaphor of disenchantment
undergirds a violent renunciation of the Roman church, which John
Bale in the 1540s calls the “proud church of hypocrites, the rose coloured
whore, the paramoure of Antichrist, and the sinfull sinagoge of Sathan.”6
In their efforts to expose this rose-colored whore, English writers take their
5 Bilgrami, “What is Enchantment,” p. 148; and Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 32.

6 I quote from the 1548 edition of The Image of Bothe Churches (London, 1548),
“A Preface unto the Christen Reader,” fol. A2v. Here, as in all my quotations from early
modern editions, I modernize type but retain spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.
marching orders from the biblical apocalypse, with its declaration about
Babylon the Great: “for thy marchaunts were the grett men of the erth.
And with thyne inchantment were deceaved all nacions” (Rev. 18:23).7
Bale in his commentary on this biblical passage lays bare the “preuye
legardimain,” the “iuglinge castes,” the “lyes in hipocrisye,” the “errours in
supersticion,” the “craftes, & inchauntmentes,” and the “subtyle charm-
ers” of the great Satanic impostor.8 His mission is to break the charms of
this impostor, and the terms of his commentary could serve as a kind of
lexicon for many of the anti-Roman titles that come off English presses
over the next century: A Countercharme against the Romish Enchantments,
that Labour to Bewitch the People (1630); The Spreading Evills, and
Pernicious Inchantments of Papisme, and Other Errors (1641); The Iesuites
Banner. Displaying their Original and Successe: their Vow and Othe: their
Hypocrisie and Superstition (1581); A Discouerie of the Most Secret and
Subtile Practises of the Iesuites (1610); The Vnmasking of all Popish Monks,
Friers, and Iesuits . . . Together with Some Briefe Obseruations of their Trea-
sons, Murders, Fornications, Impostures, Blasphemies, and Sundry Other
Abominable Impieties (1628); The Hatefull Hypocrisie, and Rebellion of
the Romishe Prelacie (1570); Roman Forgeries or A True Account of False
Records Discovering the Impostures and Counterfeit Antiquities of the Church
of Rome (1673).9
The skeptical zeal of these titles serves a vigorous campaign of discovery
and disbelief. Protestant prophets in England direct their efforts against an
ecclesiastical history that seems increasingly alien and against forms of
sacramental practice and word-magic that seem nothing more than idol-
atrous superstition.10 These prophets perceive the times to be perilous and
evil, and they labor to cultivate in their dissenting communities a finely
7 I quote from William Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament, reproduced as The New
Testament: A Facsimile of the 1526 Edition (London: The British Library, 2008).
8 The Image of Bothe Churches, commentary on Rev. 18:20–4, paragraph 17.
9 I quote from the title pages of, respectively, Anthony Cade, A Iustification of the
Chvrch of England (London, 1630); Anon., A Discouerie of the Most Secret and Subtile
Practises of the Iesuites (London, 1610); Lewis Evans, The Hatefull Hypocrisie, and Rebellion
of the Romishe Prelacie (London, 1570); Alexander Grosse, A Fiery Pillar of Heavenly Truth
(London, 1641); Meredith Hanmer, The Iesuites Banner (London, 1581); Lewis Owen,
The Vnmasking of all Popish Monks, Friers, and Iesuits (London, 1628); and Thomas
Traherne, Roman Forgeries (London, 1673); all in facsimile at Early English Books Online.
For the durable URLs associated with individual titles at Early English Books Online, see
my Bibliography. In my citation of early modern English titles, I regularize capitalization
and type.
10 The term “word-magic” I take from James Baumlin, whose Theologies of Language in
English Renaissance Literature: Reading Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2012) is useful on the early modern disenchantment of sacramental and
incarnational language. See, e.g., pp. xxxii–xl.
tuned apparatus of doubt. Lewis Owen, author of The Vnmasking of all
Popish Monks, Friers, and Iesuits and various other attacks against the
Jesuits, begins his treatise with Paul’s reminder that Satan can appear as
an angel of light and John’s exhortation “not to beleeue euery spirit.” He
teaches his readers that these apostles “labour to stirre up the godly to a
more continuall and earnest watchfullnesse and warinesse, when they
tell of the state of the latter dayes wherein wee liue,” and he insists that,
in these perilous days, faithful individuals and communities can survive
only by practicing a hermeneutics of suspicion, a resistance to the heresies
of Jesuitical impostors.11 Samuel Harsnett begins his A Declaration
of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) by addressing “the Seduced
Catholiques” themselves, warning these spiritual prisoners of their captivity
to a “forraine Idol Gull, composed of palpable fiction, and diabolicall
fascination, whose enchaunted chalice of heathenish drugs, & Lamian
superstition, hath the power of Circes, and Medeas cup, to metamorphose
men into asses, bayards, & swine.” Harsnett sets out to expose the
tricky methods of the Jesuit exorcist Father Edmunds, and he too exhorts
his readers to be wary and watchful, quick to inquire and disbelieve. If, he
says to them, my Declaration can unmask the Jesuit swindlers, then “what
can you, or any ingenious spirits do lesse, then bewaile your seduced
misaffection unto us, and to account them as the grand Impostors, and
enchaunters of your soules?” If Owen’s burden is to inoculate, Harsnett’s
is to rescue, but their missions in the end are more or less the same: to train
their readers in the disciplines of a disenchanted skepticism, to leave them
disabused and wide awake.12
At the outset of his The Discouerie of Witchcraft (1584), Reginald Scot,
the great enemy of the witch-hunting Inquisition, suggests that this
posture of skepticism is a mark of his generation’s modernity. “Robin
goodfellowe ceaseth now to be much feared, and poperie is sufficientlie
discouered,” he says, as if he need only remind English subjects that they
have, at this late date of 1584, become well inured to the enchantments of
older times. How is it then, he asks, that “witches charms, and coniurors
cousenages are yet thought effectuall,” so that “our cold prophets and
inchanters make vs fooles still”?13 He urges his disenchanted readers to
“defie the diuell, renounce all his works, and not so much as once thinke
or dreame vpon this supernaturall power of witches; neither let vs
11 In his “To the Gentle Reader,” The Vnmasking of all Popish Monks, Friers, and Iesuits,
fol. A2v.
12 A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London, 1603), “To the Seduced
Catholiques of England,” fol. A2v.

13 The Discouerie of Witchcraft (London, 1584), “To the Readers,” fol. B2v; in facsimile
at Early English Books Online.

prosecute them with such despight, whome our fancie condemneth, and
our reason acquiteth.”14 In doing so, he suggests, like Owen and Harsnett,
that to pursue disenchantment is to resist both unreasoning “fancie” and
the great enchanter, the devil. His inquiry into the investigative methods
and paranoiac superstitions of the witch-hunters exposes these self-
appointed enemies of Satanic enchantment as themselves agents of that
enchantment, charmers whose spells must be broken. The clarion call of
his long treatise is persistently against the “credulitie” of those who fall
prey to the “abhominable and divelish inuentions” of the witchmongers,
and he sets out to cultivate a stance of incredulity, a critique that inquires
into the inquisitors and examines the examiners.15
A writer like Scot offers, in other words, a counter-paranoia, an Inqui-
sition of his own. The contest he orchestrates between doubt and doubt,
accusation and accusation, is in many ways exemplary of an inquisitorial
age. Many writers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England are, like
Shakespeare’s Iago, “nothing if not critical,” complexly anxious about
deception, probation, and proof. Inasmuch as they make themselves the
debunkers of a corrupt tradition—crusaders against superstitions, sacra-
ments, rituals, festivals, liturgies, abbeys, icons, and relics—these early
modern dissenters are what James Simpson has described as “revolution-
ary,” engaged in a militant breaking away from history, oriented in their
efforts toward the “aggressive physical and ideological demolition of the
‘old’ order.”16 It is in this revolutionary orientation, this commitment to
radical violence, that the English reformers are modern. Some recent
observers have argued that the term “modernity,” at its base, indicates
not a stable condition or a discrete historical period but rather a revolu-
tionary temporal relationship, an assertion of difference from—or, as Paul
de Man calls it, a “ruthless forgetting” of—an inaccessible or undesirable
past.17 This militant orientation toward the past takes the form, in the
14 The Discouerie of Witchcraft, “To the Readers,” fol. B5r.

15 The Discouerie of Witchcraft, book 1, chapter 9, p. 18.
16 Reform and Cultural Revolution: 1350–1547, Oxford English Literary History, vol. 2
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 1.
17 Talal Asad observes that, though modernity is not what he calls a “verifiable object,”
the idea of modernity as a verifiable object, as a discrete ideal or enemy, directs the way
individuals and states behave and is therefore itself “part of practical and political reality.” It
is possible, then, to think of modernity as a shared fiction or goal, as “a project—or rather, a
series of interlinked projects—that certain people in power seek to achieve.” Formations of
the Secular, pp. 12–13. Italics are his. De Man is perceptive on the temporal structures of
this project when he reads “modernity” as an antonym of “history” and so exposes “the
radical impulse that stands behind all genuine modernity when it is not merely a descriptive
synonym for the contemporaneous or for a passing fashion.” “Literary History and Literary
Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 142–65; qtd. at p. 147.
English revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of what
some scholars have described as an experience of “historical solitude” and
“historical loss.”18 History in this period becomes prominently visible—
becomes history—exactly because English subjects perceive themselves to
be the citizens of a new age, an eschatological age after history. These
modern citizens regard the past with new intentness, and they articulate
their distance from the past with a complex mingling of nostalgic longing
and revolutionary dissent.19 John Skelton, who will figure centrally in my
account here, is at the turn of the sixteenth century already caught
between longing and renunciation in his hopeful invocation of the “poetes
olde” whose example he aspires to follow, and in his melancholy know-
ledge that he is cut off from these poets, a man born into evil days. The
poets of the past are lost to Skelton’s narrator because the history to which
he belongs has left them behind. He suffers the double exile that charac-
terizes many early modern writers: an exile both from a receding past and
from an inauthentic present.20
The “modernity” of these English writers is intimately bound with
metaphors of disenchantment for just this reason: disenchantment, too,
has a revolutionary temporality at its core. Narratives of disenchantment
are narratives of repudiation, of the process by which authentic know-
ledge, rational or empirical or spiritual, strips the old idols of their
18 To speak of “historical solitude” is to invoke Thomas Greene’s account of the
Renaissance humanists, with their discovery of the past as past, The Light in Troy: Imitation
and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), e. g.,
pp. 8–11. The experience of early modern “historical loss” has been explored by Andrew
Escobedo, who sensitively reads the contradictory stances of English reformers toward what
they experience as a painfully ambiguous national history, Nationalism and Historical Loss in
Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2004).
19 Some historians have observed that early modern antiquarian scholars and early
modern cultural revolutionaries are often the same people. James Simpson, to whose
account I am indebted here, notes that the “project of historical recuperation” drives the
sixteenth-century antiquarian John Leland to a mental breakdown exactly because, as Simp-
son claims, such an early modern project necessarily produces a “divided consciousness”: “the
entire past becomes visible as ‘history’ precisely because Leland is committed to the construc-
tion of a wholly new age.” Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 7–17; qtd. at p. 17.
20 The Bowge of Courte 9. Quotations from Skelton’s poetry come from The Complete
English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), and
are cited by line number. “Double exile” I take from Thomas Greene, who writes about
Petrarch’s “double exile” from both an irrecoverable past and an inadequate present.
Petrarch was, as Greene says, “neither Roman nor modern, so that he became in his own
eyes a living anachronism.” The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry,
p. 8. See also de Man, who observes in a different way that modernity’s radical impulse leads
to paradox, because modernity must discover itself as “a generative power that is itself
historical.” Modernity, says de Man, “invests its trust in the power of the present moment as
an origin, but discovers that, in severing itself from the past, it has at the same time severed
itself from the present.” “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” pp. 150, 149.
deceptive power. When reformers such as Bale, Scot, and Harsnett frame
their attacks as campaigns of disenchantment, they ask their readers to
adopt the stance of modern subjects, practitioners of suspicion in the
present wicked age. These modern subjects must be self-protective, com-
mitted to authenticity, wary examiners of themselves and others. And they
bear, in the narratives of Bale and many others, the features of what some
accounts of modernity have called the “sovereign” or “buffered” self, the
aggressively autonomous subject whose distance from both the inauthen-
tic past and the inauthentic present gives her power to resist the encroach-
ments of idolatry and error.21 She is buffered, this subject, because her
commitment to an ethics of repudiation demands elaborate mechanisms
of defense. In early modern England, the writers from whom I have
quoted are hardly alone in offering their books as necessary medicine for
an assailed and vulnerable people. Countless title pages and prefatory
epistles echo the promise of these writers to protect against enchantment:
“it forewarnes and so forearmes thee,” as John Hull promises of his anti-
Roman treatise The Vnmasking of the Politique Athiest (1602), “against
these popish charmes that now flye about the land, least unwittingly thou
be inchanted with them.”22
In the context of these projects of renunciation and self-protection, the
metaphor of disenchantment becomes central to a wide variety of early
modern discourses. Especially in the chaotic decades following the acces-
sion of Charles I, entrants into the crowded fray of English spell-breaking
direct their efforts not just against the Roman church and its corrupt
history but against Quakers (Quakers are Inchanters and Dangerous
Seducers, 1655), against Anabaptists (Anabaptismes Mysterie of Iniquity
Vnmasked, 1623), against Anglican ministers (The City-Ministers
Unmasked, or The Hypocrisie and Iniquity of Fifty Nine of the most Eminent
of the Clergy, in and about the City of London, 1649), against lawyers (The
Lawyers Bane, 1647), against witches (A Confirmation and Discovery of
Witch-Craft, 1648), against archbishops (The Grand Impostor Vnmasked,
or, A Detection of the Notorious Hypocrisie, and Desperate Impiety of the Late
Archbishop, so styled, of Canterbury, 1644), and against a whole cornucopia
of Jews, Socinians, Arminians, skeptics, schismatics, impostors, and sedu-
cers.23 And because the possibility of enchantment everywhere threatens
21 On the “sovereign self,” see Dupré, Passage to Modernity, pp. 93–144, and Asad,
Formations of the Secular, e.g., pp. 16, 52, 67–99. Charles Taylor’s extended meditation on
what he calls the “buffered self” snakes through his A Secular Age, e.g., pp. 29–41.
22 This in his “To the Reader,” The Vnmasking of the Politique Athiest (London, 1602),
fol. A4v; in facsimile at Early English Books Online.

23 I quote here from the title pages of the following volumes: Anon., Quakers are
Inchanters and Dangerous Seducers (London, 1655); I. P., Anabaptismes Mysterie of Iniquity
the purity and authenticity of the self-protective subject, this subject turns
her inquisitorial zeal, most of all, against herself. Early modern England
abounds in treatises on discerning true prayer from counterfeit prayer,
true religious emotions and experiences from counterfeit ones. Many of
these treatises direct themselves against hypocrisy, with its potential to seduce
the subject into inauthenticity. They bear titles like The Portraiture of
Hypocrisie (1589), The Hypocrite Discovered and Cvred (1643), The Chris-
tians Looking-Glasse (1615), and The Estates of the Hypocrite and Syncere
Christian (1613), and in their warnings against inauthenticity they cultivate
an anxious awareness that hypocrisy destroys not only social bonds but also
the bonds by which the self knows itself.24 They understand well that
the grand impostor can come home—“the heart of man being a Sea of
subtilty, and a Mine of deceipt, giuen to deceiue and beguile it selfe,” as The
Christians Looking-Glasse says—and they regard the vulnerable subject as her
own first potential victim.25 The manuals against hypocrisy work, therefore,
as manuals against self-enchantment, critical guides to self-examination and
self-regard. In their schemes of reflexive attention, these texts help to make
explicit the degree to which disenchantment is an orientation of the self
toward itself. For the writers who will ground my discussions here, as for so
many early modern writers, disenchantment entails an apprehension of
the self as in danger of enchantment and therefore as in need of careful
disciplines and controls. The cultivation of inquisitorial discipline serves to
keep the subject free and to keep her under control, to safeguard and police
her authentic, autonomous being. In this regard, the early modern human
subject is like the broader early modern realms of church and society, and like
the cultural projects of Max Weber’s critical narrative: she defines herself
as modern by learning the arts of critical suspicion and renunciatory dissent.
*
Our vocabulary for talking about modern disenchantment seems, then,
to issue in certain ways from the very fiction it has set out to anatomize
and explain. Weber’s accounts have an early modern genealogy, a kinship
with the narratives of disenchantment that direct so many cultural
Vnmasked (London, 1623); Anon., The City-Ministers Unmasked (London, 1649); Benjamin
Nicholson, The Lawyers Bane (London, 1647); John Sterne, A Confirmation and Discovery of
Witch-Craft (London,1648); and Henry Burton, The Grand Impostor Vnmasked (London,
1644); all in facsimile at Early English Books Online.
24 See John Bate, The Portraiture of Hypocrisie (London, 1589); Samuel Torshell, The
Hypocrite Discovered and Cvred (London, 1643); Thomas Tuke, The Christians Looking-
Glasse (London, 1615); and Thomas Cooper, The Estates of the Hypocrite and Syncere
Christian . . . Very Necessarie, for the Tryall of our Estates in Grace (London, 1613); all in
facsimile at Early English Books Online.
25 The Christians Looking-Glasse, p. 69.
enterprises in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Part of my purpose
in this book will be to explore the deep structures of these narratives as
they emerge in their seminal forms. In what ways are fictions of disen-
chantment entangled with modernity’s self-conception as a new age of, or
after, history? What other self-conceptions does early modernity entertain?
My meditations on these broad questions will suggest that our metaphors
of enchantment and disenchantment have genealogies older than early
modernity. And my account of these metaphors and their genealogies will
look for its crucial clues in one of the cultural forms that early modern
writers set out to renounce: allegory.
In the centuries before early modernity, allegory informs a diverse range
of ideals and institutions. Its medieval history begins in the work of early
Christian exegetes, who translate the techniques of ancient exegesis into
new practices of allegorical reading, partly as a way of reckoning with a
receding Hebraic and Classical past, and partly as a way of articulating the
incarnation theology that separates them from that past. These new
exegetical practices make possible a vastly intricate culture of reading in
medieval Europe, and they are constitutive, too, of a new way of making
narrative poetry. Already in the fifth century, Prudentius in his Psycho-
machia fashions a narrative that anticipates and directs its own interpret-
ation. The conceit of this poem is that its action belongs, ultimately, not
to history—not to the logic of narrative temporality—but to a moral and
cosmic order, an order not temporal but static, not historical but eternal.
In concealing and revealing this other order, the Psychomachia works
allegorically, inviting the discerning reader to strip away its veils of epic
narrative in order to discover the kernel of truth hidden (in this case, not
very subtly) beneath. This basic economy of signification comes in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries to produce the dynamics I will explore in
this book, the poetics of allegorical making. In the narrative poems of Alan
of Lille, Bernard Silvestris, and Guillaume de Lorris, narrative serves not so
much as a form of exegesis-in-reverse, a way of predetermining an act of
allegorical reading, but rather as a much more complicated negotiation
between the immaterial forms of eternity and the material orders of
history, nature, and the human subject. These negotiations are at the
heart of medieval encyclopedic poems such as the Commedia and the
Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, and it is hard to make an account of medieval
allegory without saying what many accounts of allegory have more or less
said: that allegorical thinking undergirds the things we talk about when we
talk about medieval enchantment. The dynamics of allegory are manifestly
at work in the economy of the sacraments, in the structure of liturgical
time, in the cult of saints, in the bestiaries and medical treatises, in the
disciplines of astrology and mineralogy, in the political ordering of medieval
social and ecclesiastical bodies. All these fields of discourse and practice
suppose that history is pregnant with eternity, that God is pervasively
immanent in the material cosmos. No surprise, then, if a culture bent on
repudiating its medieval past regards allegory as part of an old spell,
dissolved under the rising sun of disenchantment. The early modern
poets I will read here tend to repudiate allegorical narrative as a thing
not compatible with their modern projects. Allegory is, for them, a
dangerous enchantment, a residue of the medieval past from which they
have determined to escape.
But the efforts of these poets also raise questions that a linear narrative
of medieval allegory and modern disenchantment cannot address. If
allegory in early modernity is a dissolving enchantment, then why do
many early modern poets spend their best creative energies in the making
of allegorical fictions? And why do these poets often engage in allegorical
projects at moments when they are self-consciously engaged in projects of
disenchantment? Throughout this chapters that follow, I will claim that
the dynamics of disenchantment are in fact closely related to the dynamics
of allegory, and I will test this claim by reading, at length, some of the
most sustained, complex, and thoughtfully critical allegorical fictions of
English early modernity: Langland’s Piers Plowman, Skelton’s The Bowge
of Courte, the first book of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Bunyan’s The
Pilgrim’s Progress. One of my first observations about these texts will be
that each of them is infected by a kind of historical weariness or solitude.
That weariness might take the form of an eschatological longing to escape
the ruins of history, as in Spenser; or of a studied posture of exile from a
corrupt and dangerous age, as in Skelton; or of an intensely self-protective
religious dissent, as in Bunyan. Whatever form it takes, this posture of
weariness tends to issue, for each of these poets, in narratives of disen-
chantment. Spenser’s knight of Holiness directs his efforts against the
charms of a “guilefull great Enchaunter” who presides over a saeculum of
illusion and error.26 Bunyan’s Christian passes from inquisition to inqui-
sition in the course of his quest to escape the corrupt domestic world in
which he lives, and he resists the sleep-inducing charms of the “Inchanted
ground ” with the words of Paul’s exhortation: “wherefore let us not sleep as
do others, but let us watch and be sober.”27 If these fictions of disenchant-
ment have something to do with the conventions of romance, where the
26 The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki
(Harlow: Longman, 2001), qtd. from the argument to 1.2. The italics here are Spenser’s.
27 The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That which is to Come, ed. James Blanton
Wharey, rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 136. Italics are in the
original.
breaking of enchantments is a standard part of the heroic task—“glorious
conquestes ouer Knights, Gyants, Monsters, Enchauntments, Realmes,
and Dominions,” as one romance at the turn of the seventeenth century
summarizes itself—they also have much to do with Spenser’s and Bunyan’s
modernity, their commitment to unmasking the corrupt institutions and
traditions of an obsolescent history.28 Even Langland’s fourteenth-century
Piers Plowman, which I will argue for as a tentative, transitional experi-
ment in these early modern tendencies, ends with Peace’s melancholy
apprehension that the church in history has lost its authority—“the frere
with his phisyk this folk hath enchaunted”—and with Conscience’s
resolve to roam the earth looking for Piers and his disenchanting
remedies.29
This weary skepticism about history corresponds with an uneasy
ambivalence about narrative. Each of these poems is composed of narra-
tive matter, and each does its signifying work in the course of a narrative
progress. But each also orchestrates various contests in which meaning
pushes narrative to the point of failure. The dreaming narrator of Skelton’s
Bowge of Courte, overcome with the Dread that is his name and identity,
aborts his allegorical voyage by throwing himself overboard and bringing
the poem to a premature end; Spenser’s Despair hangs himself in endless
iterations but discovers every time that he cannot die; Langland’s dreamer
runs into his own spatial and temporal dead end when he sets out on his
pilgrimage and discovers that there is nowhere to go, except into endless
disputations about what the pilgrimage means. These allegorical agents
fail, each in his own way, to carry out a coherent narrative action. They
suspend themselves in moments that undermine their temporal, narrative
being, and they all turn strangely against themselves, figures of self-
cancellation. In their suspensions and negations, as I will argue at length
here, these self-cancelling agents intimate that the collapse of allegorical
narrative is a sign of bondage, a consequence of the spell by which
meaning bewitches and arrests the world of narrative action. Their failures
to act reveal the various ways in which allegory makes action unsustain-
able, subject to recursive short circuits and temporal paradoxes.
The readings that occupy this book will suggest that early modern
poets regard the failures of allegorical narrative as the consequence of a
specifically modern predicament. Already for Langland in the fourteenth
century, allegory’s crises are linked to the same cultural crises, the same
28 I quote from the loquacious title page of The Heroicall Aduentures of the Knight of the
Sea (London, 1600); in facsimile at Early English Books Online.

29 Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London:
J. M. Dent, Everyman, 1995), 20.379.

currents of skepticism, that come to expression in the linguistic experi-
ments of the theological nominalists, in the liturgical experiments of the
Lollard reformers, and in the inquisitorial experiments of the first witch-
hunters. All these reformers give expression to emergent forms of paranoia
and hermeneutic anxiety, and Langland’s poem responds to their new
anxieties with its own attitudes of loss, with a sense that the underpinnings
of allegorical meaning have fallen into terminal decay. That experience of
loss remains in play for Skelton, whose Bowge of Courte derives its sadness,
its melancholy articulations of solitude, from its persistent failure to attain
the harmony that its form and its literary models seem to promise.
Skelton’s poem does not just stage, but also mourns, the disintegration
of allegorical language. When he begins by meditating on “poetes old” and
on the historical solitude that separates him from them, he signals that his
vision of Fortune will try, and fail, to belong to a tradition of Boethian
allegorical poems—from the sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy to the
fifteenth-century Kingis Quair—in which a goddess tutors the poet-
dreamer in the cosmic, institutional, social, and interior harmonies of
which she is the image. His dreamer locates allegorical language in a
literary past that he cannot recover, and he shares Langland’s vague
apprehension of a historical rupture that has rendered his allegorical
project impossible. In the poets of the later sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, this awareness of revolutionary breakage becomes clearer and
more militant. Langland, Skelton, Spenser, and Bunyan all fashion them-
selves as both victims and orchestrators of allegory’s failures, but the latter
two poets, especially, turn progressively from postures of paralyzed bewil-
derment to postures of renunciatory violence. The paranoiac tendencies
nascent in Langland are on marching display in Bunyan. The troubled
allegorical idiom of The Pilgrim’s Progress is tangled up with its author’s
ardent, dangerous, world-defying participation in seventeenth-century
forms of revolutionary dissent. Bunyan seems to stand at the end of a
line of development, an escalating tendency toward violence that suggests
a deepening crisis for the poetics of allegory under the emerging pressures
of modernity.
But the poems at the center of my inquiries also have another story to
tell. Early modern poets find themselves persistently drawn to allegory as a
field for their campaigns of disenchantment, and they seem to discover
again and again that allegory has disenchantment embedded in its most
fundamental dynamics. Many of my arguments here will begin from the
possibility that allegory has in fact always tended to orchestrate its own
repudiation. A medieval poet such as Dante draws on a long tradition
when he beckons his readers to find the dottrina che s’asconde / sotto ’l
velame de li versi strani (“the doctrine that is hidden under the veil of the
strange verses”), and so likewise does Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest when he
exhorts his fellow pilgrims to “taketh the fruyt” of his beast fable, “and lat
the chaf be stille.”30 The orientation of these comments is toward the
stripping of a veil, the breaking of poetry’s spell in order that the dottrina
che s’asconde might be revealed. No accident that allegorical poems so often
begin as dreams, enchanted flights out of wakefulness from which the poet
will inevitably return. In figuring their symbolic narratives as dreams,
allegorical poets from Guillaume de Lorris and Guillaume de Machaut
through to Chaucer, Lydgate, James I, and Gavin Douglas open up
complex possibilities for self-examination and self-renunciation. The
dreaming self is after all not quite the self, and the fictions of these poets
are reflexively oriented toward a recovery of the wakeful consciousness and
a disenchantment of the dream narrative in which that consciousness has
been submerged. The convergence of allegorical making with practices of
allegorical reading, in major allegorical poems from the twelfth to the
fourteenth centuries, has something to do with this reflexive tendency.
Allegorical narrative is self-interpreting narrative, oriented toward its own
dissolution or clarification in commentary. It regards its own narrative
material as a veil, or as chaff, and so inclines oddly away from itself in a
paradox of unmaking.
It is, then, impossible to imagine that early modern poets renounce
allegory simply because they are modern rather than medieval. The
disenchantment of allegory in early modernity cannot suggest simply a
story of cultural revolution, or of ruptures so severe that they create lines of
demarcation between a medieval past and a modern future. The tendency
of modernity might be to explain itself according to the temporal linearity
of such a narrative, but the paradoxes of allegory have a remarkable way of
resisting linear narratives and of indicating the contours along which a
much more complex, and much longer, account of modern disenchant-
ment might develop. This book therefore meditates on the question of
where allegory’s early modern crises begin. Do allegorical narratives turn
against themselves, in early modernity, because they come under pressure
from modern projects and cultural forms? Or do the failures of early
modern allegory begin in much older crises, in fault lines that run deep
in the structures of allegory’s medieval poetics? What sort of genealogical
account would make it possible to respond to both these questions with a
dialectical “yes”?
30 Dante, Inferno, ed. Charles Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1970), 9.62–3; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales 7.3443, in Larry Benson, ed., The Riverside
Chaucer (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
*
There are good reasons for reading allegory’s early modern crises against
the backdrop of its ancient crises. Allegorical narratives tend, after all, to
fall persistently into self-contradiction and self-renunciation. Allegory
turns narrative away from itself, out toward its own fulfillment in a
perfection of static meaning, and it turns agents away from themselves,
out toward a state of pure signification that threatens to cancel agency
altogether. If narrative is the language of history—of chronological time,
of material causation, of contingent action—allegorical narrative attempts
an escape from time, matter, and action, into the static forms of signifi-
cance, the language of eternity. The consequences of this attempt are
evident already in the originaive experiments of Prudentius’ Psychoma-
chia, where Patience sets out to make battle against Wrath but then
freezes into inaction and “abides undisturbed” [quieta manet] while her
enemy consummates her identity as Wrath in an act of wrathful self-
destruction.31 In Patience’s patient abiding, narrative dissolves. So it is
again and again with Prudentius’ goddess-virtues. Lowliness and Soberness,
too, stand suspended in paralytic poses of lowly and sober inactivity while
their enemies, Pride and Indulgence, boast and indulge themselves to death.
Prudentius’ poem may be the primal scene of allegorical narrative, but in it
narrative in fact refuses to happen. His virtues and vices can do only what is
proper to their own definition—“remember who you are” [state . . . vestri
memores], Soberness exhorts the virtues—and their victories and deaths are
therefore not so much actions as states or identities.32 In their repetitive
gestures of patience and lowliness and wrath, these goddesses exemplify the
inertness, the interminable movements, of the allegorical agent. Their
temporality folds itself into reflexive forms and ceases from linear progress.
The inactivity of the allegorical agent can look like bondage, as it does in
endlessly circling figures such as the lustful and avaricious shades of Dante’s
hell, and it can look like a consummated unity of desire and action, as it
does in the souls who abide in Dante’s heaven d’un giro e d’un girare e d’una
sete: “with one circle, with one circling, and with one thirst.”33 Either way,
the allegorical agent savors of death, of a departure from mutable existence
into what Walter Benjamin calls “the homeland of allegory.”34 Prudentius’
31 See my more detailed discussion of the Psychomachia, and of its reputation as the first
sustained experiment in allegorical narrative, in Chapter 1. I quote Prudentius, in both

English and Latin, from the Loeb edition of the poems, ed. H. J. Thomson, vol. 1
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), Psychomachia 128.
32 Psychomachia 381. I have here slightly emended the Loeb translation.
33 Paradiso, ed. Charles Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 8.35.
34 The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York:
Verso, 1977), p. 217.

vices and Dante’s shades are quite literally dead, and one reason for their
deadness is that the gravitational field of signification pulls bodies away
from organic life. The significance of these bodies seems to lie on the
other side of a divide, across the rifts that separate the material order of
nature from the immaterial order of idea. Those deeper rifts belong to an
ancient Greek metaphysics of form and matter, and their contours do
much to determine the failures and complications of allegory. The
ancient separation of eternal form and temporal matter dictates, after
all, that a body cannot both mean and live. Allegory must do its work by
force, enslaving bodies, as Benjamin says, in the “eccentric embrace of
meaning,” and drawing them out toward an eschaton of fulfillment.35 In
this eccentric embrace, the bodies of narrative agents experience the
beckoning of an order that narrative cannot accommodate. They become
double, oriented all at once toward the material world in which they are
grounded and toward the homeland of meaning in which their perfec-
tion lies. Their operations as narrative agents are necessarily restricted, as
if meaning had subjected them to violent arrest and refashioned them,
the natives of time, in the likeness of eternity.36
The failing narratives of early modern allegory participate in these
ancient problems. The pattern of Spenser’s self-cancelling Despair is
apparent already in Prudentius’ self-murdering Wrath, and Despair’s
temporal paradoxes operate already, in ways this book will explore, in
the paradoxes of Plato’s self-predicating forms. And if this claim seems to
contradict my claim that the crises of early modern allegory are related to
crises in early modern culture, it does so because allegory itself invites two
accounts—also contradictory—of its forms and dynamics. Allegory’s
35 The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 202. Benjamin therefore reads allegory as a
destructive force directed against the body, which “could be no exception to the command-
ment which ordered the destruction of the organic so that the true meaning, as it was written
and ordained, might be picked up from its fragments. . . . For this much is self-evident: the
allegorization of the physis can only be carried through in all its vigour in respect of the corpse.
And the characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that they can enter
the homeland of allegory,” pp. 216–17. On death and allegory, see also Gordon Teskey,
“Death in an Allegory,” in Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, ed. Elizabeth Bellamy,
Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
36 In my metaphors of violence I recall Gordon Teskey’s arguments about allegory as a
“negation of the integrity of the other” which is “the first moment of allegory’s exertion of
its power to seize and to tear,” Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1996), p. 18. Teskey’s discussion of “capture,” pp. 25–31, is particularly pertinent to my
discussion here, as are Paul Suttie’s comments on the “colossal, systematic violence” that
Dante’s allegory inflicts on the bodies of its human characters, Self-Interpretation in “The
Faerie Queene” (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2006), p. 17. My Heideggerian
language of “rifts” is indebted to Teskey’s account, e.g., pp. 2–12; but see also Benjamin’s
image of the “jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance,” The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 166.
failures, absurdities, and scenes of violence are, on the one hand, signs of a
contest between narrative form and allegorical signification. “Allegorical
narrative” seems almost an oxymoron: a term, at the very least, with a
deep rift at its center. The agents of allegory strive away from narrative
because their capacity to signify puts tremendous pressure on their
capacity to act. But there is another, very different, way of accounting
for the peculiarities of allegorical narrative. Even if narrative tends
to collapse under the pressure of idea, it remains, nevertheless, crucial
to allegory’s operations. The very term “allegory”—allos agoreuein, “to
speak other”—yokes together the opposed orders of narrative and
of significance. The “other” which is spoken might seem to cancel or
transcend the material stuff of time and narrative, but allegory as other-
speaking embeds that transcendent other in the “speaking,” in a discourse
that must unfold in time.37 Allegory allows neither of its opposed
halves to escape from the other but rather forces them into a dialectic
negotiation that opens narrative to meaning and meaning to narrative.
“Allegorical narrative,” on this reading, might be less an oxymoron than
a redundancy.
The classical analysis of allegorical rhetoric comes close to saying just
this. In reading allegory as extended metaphor, Cicero and Quintilian
assign to allegory what Judith Anderson calls the “contiguous relation-
ship” of words and figures that characterizes sustained narrative.38 The
Crassus of Cicero’s De Oratore describes allegory as metaphor sustained
through a sequence of words “connected in continuity” [continuatis con-
nectitur].39 Quintilian follows Cicero in his explanation that “a continued
series of Metaphors produces Allegory” [allēgorian facit continua meta-
phora].40 And the early modern rhetorical theorists tend likewise to define
37 For a useful synopsis of the ancient term allegoria, see Jon Whitman, Allegory: The
Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1987), pp. 263–8. On the rift at the heart of “allegory,” see Teskey, who reads the two halves of
the term as “negative and positive others”: as privileging, in other words, the “meaning that is
other to its speaking” over the “speaking that is other to its meaning.” He qualifies this
suggestion of privileged meaning in his description of allegory’s “oscillating movement”
between meaning and speaking and in his reminders that any reading of the term must attend,
first of all, to the rift at its center, and not to either of its halves. Allegory and Violence, pp. 6,
10–12; qtd. at p. 6. Brenda Machosky takes Teskey’s comments as a jumping-off point for her
own discussion of allegory’s “concrete substance of words” and of the necessity of that
substance to “the language of the logos.” Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of
Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. 18–19.
38 Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 5.

39 Cicero I cite from Anderson, Reading the Allegorical Intertext, p. 5.
40 Institutio Oratoria, ed. Donald A. Russell as The Orator’s Education (Cambridge, MA:
Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 2001), 9.2.46. I have transliterated
Quintilian’s Greek characters in allēgorian and metaphora.
allegory using this language of continuity. Henry Peacham calls allegory a
“continued Metaphore,” Abraham Fraunce says that irony “continued
maketh a most sweet allegorie,” and George Puttenham describes allegory
in even more explicitly temporal terms, as a “long and perpetuall Meta-
phore.”41 Spenser, too, is close to the language of temporality when in the
Letter to Raleigh he calls The Faerie Queene a “continued Allegory, or
darke conceit.”42 His allegorical practice whispers in some ways of an
escape from time into an eschatological order of meaning, but Spenser’s
comment here suggests that his poem will discover the signs of that
timeless order only in the course of an irreducibly temporal progress,
what he elsewhere calls his “long voiage.”43 Skeletal though they are, the
rhetorical analyses of allegorical figures hint at a first basis for this
voyage, because they suggest an intimate and necessary relationship
between allegory and narrative. Allegorical significance operates, in
these analyses, not as a force that exerts itself against narrative from a
base somewhere else but rather as a force generated within the material
of narrative itself.
According to this reading, then, allegory is not just an orientation
toward meaning—certainly is not simply meaning, the allos that allegory
conjoins with agoreuein—but is rather a way of negotiating passage across
the rift that separates these two terms. Anderson has observed that some
modern theories of allegory are informed by a broadly Platonic metaphys-
ics of form imposing itself on matter, of the tyrant meaning subduing
time in its eccentric embrace. Where this metaphysics holds sway, alle-
gorical narrative tends to be a scene of absurdity and violence, and for this
reason allegory does not develop in any sustained form in the contexts of
ancient Stoicism and Platonism. Plato himself resists in complex ways the
incursions of allegorical language into his discourse, the possibility of
putting time into negotiation with eternity. Anderson has suggested that
theorists of allegory might profitably look instead to a variety of Neopla-
tonic discourses in which form strives with matter not from without but
from within, straining toward an impossible escape from its material
prison, involved, as Anderson says, in “a proximity too massive and
powerful to be broken.” These discourses embed form in the very sub-
stance out from which it strives (Plotinus writes about the process by
41 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593): A Facsimile Reproduction (Gaines-
ville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1954), p. 25; Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian
Rhetorike (London, 1588), ch. 6, in facsimile at Early English Books Online; and George
Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker
(Cambridge: The University Press, 1936), 3.18. In quoting from Puttenham,
I modernize the long s and the ligatures common in the original type.
42 The Faerie Queene, Letter to Raleigh, line 4. 43 The Faerie Queene 1.12.42.
which the form of a statue struggles free from its formless stone), and they
therefore force and sustain the failures that the Platonic dialogues persist-
ently try to escape.44 In the context of the Christian incarnation, as I will
argue, these failures become central and inescapable.45 A diverse array of
ancient and medieval Christian discourses find the creator established at
the very heart of creation, embedded deep in the temporal being of matter
and of the human. To look to Prudentius as a seminal moment for
allegorical narrative is to look necessarily to a moment when the theology
of incarnation is working to remake the ancient contest between time and
eternity. Prudentius himself takes care, near the beginning of his allegor-
ical narrative, to have Chastity announce a new model of bodily life,
participatory and paradoxical: “since a virgin bore a child,” she says,
“. . . . all flesh is divine [omnis iam diva caro]. . . . neither has God lessened
what is his by taking on what is ours, but by giving his nature to ours He
has lifted us to the height of his heavenly gifts.”46
Some commentators have distinguished these two models of allegory—
meaning contra narrative and meaning as narrative—as the “this for that”
and the “this and that” models of signification.47 These terms are useful
44 The allusion to Plotinus, too, is Anderson’s, by way of Erwin Panofsky and Miche-
langelo’s Boboli Captives. Reading the Allegorical Intertext, p. 8.

45 On the implications of incarnation theology for figurative language, Christina
Maria Cervone’s Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) is particularly helpful. Of special
interest to my discussion of these two models of allegory is her distinction between two
models of metaphor, metaphor as “ornamental” and metaphor as “fundamental.” Accord-
ing to the latter model, which Cervone finds operative in the Middle English writers she
reads, metaphor is “fundamental to thought,” an apprehension of “language, embodiment,
and cognition as mutually interrelated.” This model of embodied cognition and language
interacts in complex ways, she argues, with theologies of incarnation. See esp. pp. 31–9;
qtd. at pp. 31, 21.
46 Psychomachia 71, 76, 85–6.
47 These terms have been developed most extensively by Paul Suttie, who borrows them
from Charles Singleton’s famous discussion of “the allegory of poets” and then makes them
central to his own account of allegory as self-interpreting discourse. Suttie, Self-
Interpretation in “The Faerie Queene,” pp. 19–38. See also Singleton, “Dante’s Allegory,”
Speculum 25:1 (1950), pp. 80–1. David Aers draws a similar line of demarcation between
what he calls the “shell-kernel” model of signification, in which the shell of narrative is just a
disposable container for the kernel of meaning, and what he calls the “disclosure” model, by
which the material sign does not enclose or conceal the truth but rather initiates a process of
apprehending truth, a process to which the sign remains important. Piers Plowman and
Christian Allegory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), pp. 13–14, 52–63. On this
reflexive process of self-interpretation, see also Gordon Teskey’s account of allegory’s
aesthetic of “interpretive play” and Angus Fletcher’s comment that, “because allegory is a
mix of making and reading combined in one mode, its nature is to produce a ruminative
self-reflexivity.” Teskey, “Allegory,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 16; and Fletcher, “Allegory without
Ideas,” in Thinking Allegory Otherwise, ed. Brenda Machosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2010), p. 10.
because they imitate, in the structures of their syntax, relationships at
the heart of allegoria itself. “This for that” gives priority to the “that,” the
other that grounds the other-speaking, the form that imposes itself upon
matter.48 “This and that,” on the other hand, gives priority to “and,” to
the processes of negotiation by which narrative and meaning reach across
the rift at the heart of allegory, penetrating and refashioning each other.
This latter formulation has the paradoxical structure of allegory written
into it. It is impossible, after all, to be both this and that, and a reading of
allegory as “this and that” lays bare the agonistic (and, as I will argue, the
participatory) structure of allegory, the struggle of opposing terms to enter
into the same space. The coherence of “this and that” is therefore fragile, a
kind of transitory enchantment by which two opposing terms cease to be
themselves and become pregnant with each other. If figuring the material
of narrative as “this and that” involves a kind of submission to enchant-
ment, reading that material as “this for that” involves an attempt to escape
from the enchantment, a dissolution of the intolerable paradox in order
that the “that” might remain undisturbed in its purity.
My readings here will suggest that allegory makes necessary both these
formulations, that they represent a tension within allegory’s self-
understanding. Already in Prudentius, the practice of “this and that”
allegory comes into the gravitational field of its “this for that” other,
inclining toward the simple “that” which negates and explains away the
“this.”49 And allegorical narratives from Alan of Lille and Guillaume de
Lorris through to Spenser and Bunyan tend to bring these two models of
signification into a generative, sometimes violent, negotiation. These
narratives make promises of simultaneity, creating the illusion that a
signifying body might be both this and that, and at the same time they
find in the allegorical sign what Paul de Man calls a “temporal difference,”
48 By “priority” here I mean something like ontological priority, the priority of a
meaning that precedes the veil of narrative contrived to enclose it. This sense of “priority”
belongs to a poetics of creation. On the aesthetics of reception in its “this for that” forms, see
again Cervone’s discussion of metaphor and of what she calls the “literal-first” model of
Aristotle, which characterizes the auditor’s reception of metaphor as “immediate recogni-
tion of the literal sense, then quick recognition of the figurative sense.” Cervone’s comments
help to clarify the temporal break at the heart of “this for that” models of allegorical
language, the attention of the interpreter first to the provisional “this,” then to the ultimate
“that.” Poetics of the Incarnation, pp. 35–6.
49 See Andrew Escobedo’s discussion of the “this and that” formulation, where he insists
on the inescapable secondariness of allegory’s narrative elements. These elements exist “for
the sake of” meaning, he says: the term “for” being the key point. The allegorical exegetes, as
he says, never encourage readers to study the baptism of Christ in order to learn more about
Moses: “it’s not ‘this and that’ so much as ‘this and, even more importantly, that.’ ”
“Daemon Lovers: Will, Personification, and Character,” Spenser Studies 22 (2007),
pp. 209–10.
a deferral of the signifying body’s meaning to a “that” which has not yet
been fully disclosed.50 For just this reason, allegory in its “this for that”
hypostasis tends to cultivate a particular sort of eschatological allure, the
allure of disenchantment. If disenchantment participates in the revolu-
tionary temporality of modernity, so too does allegory. Just as early
modern writers believe modernity’s revolutionary breakages—from mat-
ter, from history, from society—to be inescapable or inevitable, allegorical
writers believe their own renunciations to be allegory’s proper end. It
might well be the case that the eschatological temporalities and self-
regarding hermeneutics of allegory gain a particular resonance, and a
particular generative power, at moments of modern emergence.
*
The disenchanting poetics of allegorical narrative are especially clear in the
context of allegory’s most important trope: personification. Personifica-
tions are central to allegory in its narrative forms: they often carry out the
action of allegorical narrative. And like the term “allegory” itself, they
invite two extreme and incompatible critical accounts. Much commentary
on personification since the eighteenth century has inclined heavily
toward one of these extreme accounts, the one that supposes an idea
(such as “nature”) to be abstracted by the mind from sensory stimulation
and that therefore regards a personification (such as the goddess Nature) as
a translation of this abstract idea into human form. A certain version of
this account is at work already when the Rhetorica ad Herennium says that
personification “consists in representing an absent person as present, or in
making a mute thing or one lacking form articulate, and attributing to it a
definite form or a language or a certain behaviour,” or when Quintilian
says that, in practicing prosopopoeia, “we are even allowed . . . to bring
down the gods from heaven or raise the dead: cities and nations even
acquire a voice.”51 These rhetorical analyses emphasize the unreality of
50 My language of simultaneity and temporal difference is indebted to de Man’s account of
allegory as a “rhetoric of temporality.” De Man argues that, while the romantic symbol depends
on relationships of simultaneity in which “it would be possible for the image to coincide with
the substance,” allegory acknowledges difference: “in the world of allegory, time is the original
constitutive category.” For de Man, allegory’s temporality has to do in particular with its
dynamics of textual inheritance, the tendency of allegorical signs to refer to other signs that
have preceded them in other texts. More than my account here, which emphasizes allegory’s
structures of eschatology or anagogy, de Man emphasizes, allegory’s structures of anteriority.
I will explore the points at which these two emphases converge in my Chapter 5. See de Man,
“The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight, esp. pp. 200–8; qtd. at 207.
51 In accordance with long tradition, the Loeb Classical Library prints the Rhetorica
among the works of Cicero: Ad C. Herennium, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge,
MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1954), 4.53. Quintilian, Institutio
Oratoria 9.2.31. On the history of personification theory, including its roots in classical
personification, and Puttenham follows their example when he explains
that, “if ye wil [sic] attribute any humane quality, as reason or speech to
dombe creatures or other insensible things,” then “it is not Prosopographia,
but Prosopopeia, because it is by way of fiction.”52 Coleridge adopts a version
of this ancient account, and assimilates it to a broadly Lockean psychology,
when he dismisses personification as a “translation of abstract notions into a
picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from the object
of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom
proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot.”53
This one extreme view can explain many of the peculiarities of personi-
fication. When the goddess Nature appears to (for instance) the poet of
Alan of Lille’s twelfth-century Complaint of Nature, the translation of an
ideal order into her temporal, acting, speaking body generates powerful
destabilizing energies. The descent of Nature into the mutable world is a
kind of fall—delapsa, as Alan’s poem says—“from an inner palace of the
impassable world.”54 Her bodily movements unfold both in linear time
and in a static cyclicality, as if she cannot decide whether fully to enter into
the temporal order.55 She presides over a group of personified agents who
rhetoric, see James Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), pp. 8–34.
52 Prosopographia, he here explains, involves attributing actions and speech to an actual
but absent person, The Arte of English Poesie, 3.19. See also Quintilian’s comment that
“some confine the term Prosopopoeia to cases where we invent both the person and the
words,” Institutio Oratoria 9.2.31.
53 “The Statesman’s Manual,” in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 6,
ed. R. J. White (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 30. Coleridge
elsewhere notes that, as abstractions made personal, the personifications must always be
arbitrary and artificial—“cannot be other than spoken consciously”—the expression of a
“disjunction of Faculty” by which one thing (the image of a body) “is every where presented
to the eye or imagination” while another (an abstract concept) “is suggested to the mind.”
Lectures on Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Spenser, Ariosto, and Cervantes (1819), and Lectures
on the Principles of Judgement, Culture, and European Literature (1818), both in Lectures
1808–1819: On Literature, 2 vols, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol.
5.2, ed. R. A. Foakes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), qtd. at pp. 418, 99.
54 For Nature’s descent, see De planctu Naturae 2.2. All citations of Alan’s Latin text are
from Nikolaus M. Häring’s edition (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo,
1978). English quotations come from The Plaint of Nature, trans. James Sheridan (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), here at p. 73. Jon Whitman is perceptive
on this fall, and on the complications that arise from Nature’s status as a “character.” “The
Problem of Assertion and the Complaint of Nature,” Hebrew University Studies in Literature
and the Arts 15 (1987), pp. 5–26.
55 See, for instance, Alan’s description of Nature’s dress: “Changing circumstances,
which substituted one hue for another, altered the garment with a varied display of colour.
At first whitened to the brightness of the lily, it dazzled the eyes. Secondly, as though moved
to repentance and struggling to amend, it shone forth in blood-red colour. Thirdly, at the
peak of perfection, it gladdened the eyes with an emerald green.” This passage does not
mean to describe a linear progression. The movement from white to red to green is present
are supposed to enact her presence in nature but who are, as agents, at
cross purposes with one another. And she is herself, as an agent, strangely
aloof from, and strangely conscious of, the natural world of which she is
the form and image. Her enfleshment seems foreign to her primarily
conceptual being, an absurd and arbitrary reduction into material life.
Her trajectory is downward, from the world of form into the world of
recalcitrant matter.
But Nature follows another trajectory as well. Her body is the image of
a cosmos which is itself embodied, a site of negotiation between that
embodied cosmos and the manifold forms of human life. She figures to the
poet the sea, the land, and the sky, the planets and stars, the powers of
creation and sexual generation, the orders of grammar and rhetoric and
music, the faculties of the human person, and, ultimately, the operations
of the creator himself, the Logos made flesh. In her body all the orders of
material and immaterial being join in a total unity, and she discloses
those orders to the poet as the mirror image of his own bodily form. She
is therefore the ground of a convergence between the poet’s material,
temporal life and the total cosmos toward which the poet strives. She rises
toward allegory from the base of an irreducible materiality, a body that
reaches out to embrace all material and immaterial things.
Alan’s goddess admits the possibility, in other words, of another
extreme account of personification. Coleridge himself gestures toward
this other extreme when he speculates about the ontological status of
ancient personifications:
Of a People, who raised Altars to Fever, to Sport, to Fright, &c it is
impossible to determine, how far they meant a personal power, or personi-
fication of a Power. This only is certain, that the introduction of these agents
could not have the same unmixed effect, as the same agents used allegorically
produce on our minds—but something more nearly resembling the effect
produced by the introduction of characteristic Saints in the roman catholic
poets, or of Moloch, Belial, and Mammon in the second Book of Paradise
Lost compared with his Sin and Death.56
What is the difference between a “personal power” and the “personifica-
tion of a Power”? Coleridge acknowledges that, in the context of a culture
to this garment in every moment of its narrative existence, and its static recurrence is like the
recursive movement on that same garment of the eagle, who, “assuming first the form of a
youth, secondly that of an old man, thirdly returning to his former state, makes his way
back from Nestor to Adonis.” De planctu Naturae 2.138–43, 148–9; trans. Sheridan, The
Plaint of Nature, pp. 85–6.
56 Lectures on the Principles of Judgement, Culture, and European Literature (1818),
p. 102. I have incorporated Coleridge’s emendations into his text.

that reveres powers as themselves daemons and deities—as themselves
persons—it can be hard to say. And many medieval poets and visionaries
accord to the powers just this sort of reverence. Cosmological poets such as
Alan and Boethius find Nature, Philosophy, and Fortune presiding over
the cosmos of time and matter with a kind of angelic authority. Dante calls
these figures the “primal creatures.”57 They are embodied, personal,
numinous beings. Barbara Newman has this understanding of personifi-
cation in mind when she chooses to call figures such as Nature not
personifications but “goddesses.” Her nomenclature acknowledges that
these primal creatures belong, at some level, to a pre-Christian universe of
presences.58 If Concordia, Caritas, Pietas, Spes, and Sapientia are familiar
to medieval readers as the inventions of Christian poets, they came forth
first from the ecstasies and encounters of the cult, goddesses in the old
pagan orders. In Roman antiquity these goddesses had temples, oracles,
and adherents; were counted daughters of major deities; commanded their
own feast days. And even in their afterlives as personifications—when Jean
de Meun sees Nature weeping at her forge, or when Alan’s dreamer falls
wonderstruck at her feet—the old goddesses resonate with the shock of
visionary encounter. They bear in much medieval poetry the memory of a
genealogy that begins not in the transcendent operations of the human
mind but rather in a temple, at an altar, in the utterances of a sibyl or the
offices of a priest.59
According to this second way of accounting for personification, the
personifications are born into the sort of universe that I have described as
“enchanted,” a universe densely populated by many intelligences at many
levels. As Coleridge acknowledges, the world of the personifications is
likewise the world of the Roman di minuti and of the Catholic saints,
agents who channel divine power into domestic life. If these daemonic
agents oversee certain fields of human activity, such as copulation, child-
birth, harvesting, and healing, so too do Nature, Genius, Contemplation,
and Desire belong to the animated cosmos that enfolds and energizes the
57 Of Fortuna his Virgil says, “con l’altre prime creature lieta / volve sua spera e beata si
gode.” Dante also includes Fortuna among li altri dèi, “the other gods.” Inferno 7.95–6, 87.
58 God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), esp. pp. 1–35.

59 On the gods and Christian allegory, see Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh:
Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1986); Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth
of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986); Robert Grant,
Gods and the One God (Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1986); Whitman,
Allegory, pp. 14–57; and Teskey, Allegory and Violence, pp. 32–55. These latter two
accounts, especially, rewrite C. S. Lewis’s seminal account in The Allegory of Love:
A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. 48–59.
human cosmos. They are signs of enchantment, of an economy in which
every experience of impersonal force verges on personal encounter.60 They
may be abstract nouns, but they nevertheless mate with, dispute with, give
birth to, and blend into a host of gods, genii, angels, and saints. Some of
these personifications, such as the Venuses and Minervas who show up all
over later medieval poetry, still bear the names of the deities from whom
they derive. Some, as in the fairy romances of Spenser, seem to come up
from the green world of wood spirits and river nymphs. In the presence of
such tutelary spirits the dreamers of allegorical poetry tend to adopt the
stance of supplicants or pupils, souls initiated into a larger cosmos by
principalities who themselves represent that cosmos. Such is Boethius’
stance before the goddess Philosophy and Alan’s before the goddess
Nature. In the fourteenth century, when the goddesses give way to the
complicated figure of Genius and the mortal woman Beatrice, the poet-
protagonists of Gower and Dante adopt the same supplicant pose.
What makes the personifications different from the gods is that they are
subject to a certain gravitational pull. In a poet such as Prudentius,
Concord is concord, but she also presides over, practices, and exemplifies
concord. She is all at once an acting body and an idea, and she is therefore
marked by a certain referential, and self-referential, structure. To say that
Concord indicates concord is, after all, to say that she indicates herself. But
she must also strive away from her personal self toward meaning, for
concord, as idea, does not comprehend personhood at all. The allegorical
structure of Concord lies in just this paradox of striving. She is her own
other, the prophecy of her own exhaustion in pure meaning. Like so many
of the medieval goddesses, she issues both from the temporal matter of
poetic narrative and from the static forms of meaning: from both sides, in
other words, of allegory’s divided operations.61
Inasmuch as personification is a channel by which bodies pass from the
world of narrative to the world of significance, personification is a harbin-
ger of death, not just a citizen of the enchanted universe but a sign that the
presences of that universe are retreating, like Weber’s “sublime and
ultimate values,” into the homeland of meaning.62 Not by accident does
60 Charles Taylor describes human life under enchantment as playing out in a “field
of spirits,” in a condition of porous vulnerability to a variety of powers and influences,

A Secular Age, p. 27. In his own brief account of disenchantment, C. S. Lewis calls
the animated order of enchantment the “genial universe.” See his preface to
D. E. Harding, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth (Gainesville, FL: The University
Presses of Florida, 1972), p. 9.
61 For this interplay between vision and making, see Newman, God and the Goddesses,
pp. 24–35.
62 “The twilight of the gods,” as C. S. Lewis says, “is the midmorning of the personifi-
cations.” The Allegory of Love, p. 52.

Spenser’s Legend of Justice begin with the retreat of a goddess. Just at the
moment when Astrea retreats from the world of human action (she goes
off to what Spenser calls “an euerlasting place”) and appoints two agents,
Artegall and Talus, to represent and mediate her power, the allegorical
narrative commences.63 This myth of the goddess receding could almost
stand in for the first emergence of allegory in the latter centuries of
antiquity, as Christianity ushers in a terminal disenchantment of the old
pagan pantheon. Prudentius opens the narrative of the Psychomachia with
Faith’s slaying of Worship-of-the-Old-Gods [Veterum Cultura Deorum], a
compression of the whole universe of ancient deity into a single dying
vice.64 In his theological poem Apotheosis he figures Christ himself as a
warrior against the old gods, exulting that “Apollo writhes when the name
of Christ smites him” and interpreting the god as one of the demons cast
out by the Jesus of the gospels. “Thou art beaten, vain spirit,” he imagines
the priest of god crying to Apollo: “Christ commands: go out of him.”65
The god, in Prudentius’ little narrative, retreats into the territory of the
infernal demonic, just as the old gods in the Psychomachia retreat into the
territory of the personified vice.
Something like the image of this vanishing deity haunts the many
medieval poets who take up Prudentius’ disenchanting idiom. In the
allegorical narratives of these poets, the dying goddess hangs suspended
in a negotiation between body and meaning, her compound life as a
signifying agent ever threatening to come apart. She is entangled with
allegory because she is caught up in a striving out from matter, like the
statue from the stone, toward a significance that can contain or cancel her
material existence. The rifts and contradictions that disrupt the existence
of a goddess such as Alan’s Nature are at work likewise in the Silva who
gives birth to all things in the Cosmographia of Bernard Silvestris, in the
Fronesis who goes questing through the cosmos in Alan’s later Antic-
laudianus, and in the emblematic goddesses who preside over the king-
doms, temples, houses, and hells of The Faerie Queene.66 All these
daemons and goddesses must, by virtue of their power to fold into
themselves many orders of being, be ever unstable and uncontainable.
They are like enchantment itself: fragile, transitory, teleologically directed
63 Faerie Queene 5.1.11–12. 64 Psychomachia 21–39.

65 Apotheosis 402–3, 411. As with the Psychomachia, I cite from the Loeb Prudentius,
vol. 1, ed. H. J. Thomson.
66 On the paradoxes and contradictions of the Anticlaudianus, and the ambiguous status
of Fronesis as a psychological faculty, see James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval
Poetry: Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio amantis (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 32–56, 110–16. In printing the Latin of Gower’s
title with the minuscule a, I follow Simpson.
toward their own end. Their allegorical operations depend on their power
to represent and participate in an eschaton of pure meaning without ever
entering fully into that eschaton.
*
Allegory’s poetics of disenchantment will, then, be an important backdrop
against which my readings of early modern allegorical texts will unfold.
Against this backdrop, it is possible to discern a dense network of con-
tinuities between the medieval and the modern, breaches in the wall of
separation that early modernity works so hard to construct. But the story
I have to tell about medieval disenchantment leaves plenty of questions
about early modern disenchantment unanswered. If disenchantment
really is as important to the poetics of allegory as I have suggested, it is
strange that so many modern writers would be flatly inhospitable to
allegory as a literary form. Critics and poets from the eighteenth century
forward have been particularly troubled by allegory’s signifying dynamics.
Just at the moment when European critics begin to cultivate an awareness
of allegory as a distinct genre of writing, in fact, they begin to regard that
genre as intolerably limited in its possibilities, unforgivable in its contra-
dictions and absurdities. The development of this critical attitude has
roots in early modern allegorical texts. It can do much to explain the
intuition of those earlier texts that they are engaged in something new, and
it can help to illuminate the ways in which the early modern hostility to
allegory really is new. As another large backdrop of my investigations here,
this modern renunciation of allegory deserves careful attention.
Accounts of allegory before the eighteenth century seem to have little
notion of the allegorical as a particular category of writing or a particular
sort of agent. Even Spenser, whose poetry has done much to undergird
generic accounts of allegorical narrative, tends in his critical comments to
treat allegory as a rhetorical figure defined by deliberate obscurity, and his
theoretically minded contemporaries tend much the same way, as my
comments on extended metaphor will have already begun to suggest. As
late as the first part of the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon regards
allegory as a pervasive esoteric device by which “a veil, as it were, of fables”
is drawn over the secret learning of forgotten times, and seventeenth-
century critics such as Henry Reynolds and Martin Opitz regard the whole
of ancient poetry as a kind of high natural philosophy delivered dissim-
ulanter, as Reynolds says, “by riddles and enigmaticall knotts.”67 Not until
67 Bacon, Of the Wisdom of the Ancients, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James
Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, vol. 13 (Boston, MA: Taggard
and Thompson, 1864), p. 75. Reynolds, Mythomystes (London, 1632), p. 29; in facsimile at
the end of the seventeenth century does the shift to a new notion of
allegory, a notion of allegory as a literary genre, begin to occur.
Why does this shift occur? The first clue to this question lies in the
eighteenth-century anxiety about allegory’s incoherence. Many eighteenth-
century readers simply do not know what to do with allegorical narrative,
for reasons Samuel Johnson makes plain in his grumblings about “alle-
gorical persons.” The agents Dr. Johnson finds in the allegorical passages
of Milton “have no real existence,” he complains, which is to say that
they belong not to the world of material action but rather to the mind
alone. They are simply abstractions, operations of the human cognitive
machine, rendered artificially into bodily form. Dr. Johnson will tolerate
the admission of these embodied abstractions into poetry, for it is
the poet’s privilege, as he says, “to exalt causes into agents, to invest
abstract ideas with form”:
But such airy beings are, for the most part, suffered only to do their natural
office, and retire. Thus Fame tells a tale, and Victory hovers over a general, or
perches on a standard; but Fame and Victory can do no more. To give them
any real employment, or ascribe to them any material agency, is to make
them allegorical no longer, but to shock the mind by ascribing effects to non-
entity. In the Prometheus of Æschylus, we see Violence and Strength, and in
the Alcestis of Euripides, we see Death, brought upon the stage, all as active
persons of the drama; but no precedents can justify absurdity.68
At the heart of Dr. Johnson’s anxieties are problems of action and agency,
effects and their causes. The question, for him, is what allegorical agents
are suffered to “do.” So long as Fame and Victory are merely inert, like the
statuesque rhetorical ornaments of William Collins and Thomas Gray,
they will not threaten to draw the language of narrative toward the
unstable language of allegory. But the moment these ornaments come
into “any real employment,” the moment they themselves assume agency,
the internal coherence of narrative begins to come apart. A narrative agent
belongs, after all, to a world of material causes and temporalities, and the
operations of that agent must be explicable in the terms of that material
world. For something to irrupt into the homogenous causal system from
Early English Books Online. For perceptive discussion of Bacon’s treatise, see Gordon
Teskey, Allegory and Violence, pp. 89–93. On the long tradition of finding esoteric mystery
in ancient poetry, see Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes toward a Theory of
Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969),
pp. 21–53. See also Opitz, Buch von der deutschen Poeterei, ed. Wilhelm Braune (Halle: Max
Niemeyer, 1913), chs. 2–3.
68 “Milton,” in Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with
Critical Observations on their Works, vol. 1, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2006), paragraph 256.
some other system—from, say, the immaterial order of mind—can, in
Dr. Johnson’s account, only produce absurdity. The only way to save narrative
from this fate is to banish allegorical persons out to narrative’s margins.
The critics of the English eighteenth century develop and justify this
banishment by making frequent recourse to the notion of probability.
Joseph Addison, whose essays on Paradise Lost exerted a powerful influ-
ence on Dr. Johnson and many others, returns to this term again and
again. He allows in his essays that marvelous things can, and in fact must,
happen in an epic. Odysseus’ ship can be turned into stone; the action
need not be “only probable” in a sense that would, he says, make it
indistinguishable from “a true History.” The key requirement, though,
is that the marvelous event must be explicable within the terms of the
fictional world. The gods, native inhabitants of that world, must be there
to make it happen.69 The event might not be only probable, but it must be
probable, which is to say that the fictional world must be a closed system,
inclusive of the causes of its narrative events. This internal coherence is
just what the complex agents of allegory disrupt. Addison is particularly
displeased with the “Chymerical Existence” of the abstractions Sin and
Death, who come forth as full-fledged agents to confront Milton’s Satan at
the gates of hell. Such chimerical agents do not rightly belong to the world
of Milton’s epic, Addison says, “because there is not that measure of
Probability annexed to them, which is requisite in Writings of this
kind.”70 How indeed could there be, when sin and death are “the
Description of Dreams and Shadows, not of Things or Persons”?71 Such
dreams and shadows are incapable of probable action—it is not probable
that they would act at all—and eighteenth-century critics tend therefore to
agree with Addison that, as Spenser’s editor John Hughes says in his 1715
edition, “Persons of this imaginary Life are to be excluded from any share
of the Action in Epick Poems.”72 They can be admissible within the causal
system of the narrative world only if they appear as incidental figures
69 Spectator 315. All my quotations of Addison’s Spectator essays come from Joseph
Addison, Criticism on Milton’s Paradise Lost, from “The Spectator,” 31 December, 1711–3
May, 1712, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1869; reprinted in English Reprints, New York:
A.M.C. Press, 1966). I have modernized the long s and the ligatures common in the
original type. In these comments on Addison I am much indebted to Paul Suttie’s
perceptive account, Self-Interpretation in “The Faerie Queene,” pp. 43–5. See also Theresa
Kelley, Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 70–9;
and Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 53–65.
70 Spectator 273. 71 Spectator 315.
72 Hughes’s “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry” appears in the front matter of his The
Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser, vol. 1 (London, 1715), which includes in its prominently
presented list of subscribers one “Joseph Addison, Esq.” and also a “Mr. Pope.” I quote
from p. xliii, where he approves of Addison’s comments on Milton.
who are “only shown,” as Hughes says approvingly of the shadowy beings
who guard Virgil’s entrance to underworld, “and have no share in the
Action of the Poem.”73 These non-agents are properly marginal, orna-
ments who, as Dr. Johnson would require, have nothing to do.
Some recent historians have associated these critical attitudes with a
shift within literary criticism from canons of form to canons of character.
The great seventeenth-century treatises on dramatic poetry illustrate the
shift in their turn away from Aristotle’s emphasis on unity of plot to a new
emphasis on drama as what Dryden calls the “just and lively Image of
Humane Nature, representing its Passions and Humours, and the Changes of
Fortune to which it is subject.”74 Critical treatments of Shakespeare follow
suit, so that when Dr. Johnson calls Shakespeare “the poet of nature,” he
means, as he goes on to explain, that Shakespeare’s characters “act and
speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all
minds are agitated” and that the plays therefore hold up “a faithful mirrour
of manners and of life.”75 Shakespeare’s experiments in dramatic
characterization—what one recent commentator describes as his “psycho-
logical mimesis”—indeed forms part of the background of this critical
shift. His drama is an intermediate stage on the way to the modern interest
in representing the motives, moods, self-apprehensions, and interior dis-
eases of an introspective human self.76 His authority in the English literary
canon depends partly on the ascent of interiorized subjectivity into the
central interests of modern fiction.
But that new interest in character, and the hostility to personification
that it provokes among Dr. Johnson and his colleagues, also puts in
jeopardy the authority of a fiction such as Spenser’s, where the hope of
banishing personifications to the margins of the narrative is out of the
question. If Milton’s episode of Sin and Death can come up on charges of
absurdity in eighteenth-century criticism, the rampant allegorical persons
of Spenser’s fiction, if judged by the same canons, will appear to be
73 “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry,” p. xli.

74 Dryden’s Lisideius advances this definition of a play, and Neander, Dryden’s mouth-
piece in his dialogue on dramatic poetry, assumes something like this definition when he
complains that the beauties of the decorous French drama “are indeed the Beauties of a
Statue, but not of a Man, because not animated with the Soul of Poesie, which is imitation
of humour and passions.” John Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay, ed. James Boulton
(London: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 43, 75. On the broader neoclassical turn
toward character, see Jane K. Brown, The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism
from Shakespeare to Wagner (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007),
pp. 1–10.
75 “Preface to Shakespeare, 1765,” in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson,
vol. 7, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 62.
76 Again see Brown, The Persistence of Allegory, pp. 3, 7.
desperately and intolerably absurd. A whole new canon, a new critical
category, becomes necessary, and Spenser’s critics begin to develop a
notion of allegory as a distinct literary genre with its own rules and its
own ways of meaning.77 When Hughes prefaces his edition of The Faerie
Queene by prescribing that personified abstractions be “excluded from any
share of the Action” of a narrative, he means to govern every sort of
narrative except one. “What I have said of Epick and Dramatick Poems,”
he clarifies, “does not extend to such Writings, the very Frame and Model
of which is design’d to be Allegorical; in which therefore, as I said before,
such unsubstantial and symbolical Actors may be very properly admit-
ted.”78 In this one special sort of fiction, the poet has a liberty to roam
“without the Bounds of Probability,” into such licenses “as wou’d be
shocking and monstrous, if the Mind did not attend to the mystick
sense contain’d under them.”79 Where does this liberty come from?
Hughes’s recourse here to the mystic sense under the monstrous surface
suggests well what he everywhere assumes and often articulates: that this
strange fiction called allegory has liberty to roam beyond the bounds of
probability because its internal coherence is not a coherence of action or
causation. Its agents are not really agents, and its principles of action are
not narrative principles. The coherence of allegory rather inheres, for
Hughes, in the coherence of something wholly separate from the narra-
tive, a mystic sense. “It is for this reason,” Hughes explains, “that is to say,
in regard to the moral Sense, that Allegory has a liberty indulg’d to it
beyond any other sort of Writing whatsoever; that it often assembles
things of the most contrary kinds in Nature, and supposes even Impossi-
bilities.”80 Because the narrative surface of allegory is merely secondary, in
other words, it is free to indulge even in impossibility without running any
danger of incoherence. The guarantee of coherence belongs to the mystic
sense, and the persons who act in the narrative world are therefore loosed
to violate narrative’s causal and temporal laws.
Hughes reinvents allegory, then, by draining all meaning out of its
narrative matter and into its moral sense. No surprise that allegory
throughout the eighteenth century tends increasingly to be moralizing
and topical in its aims, more and more often intended for the instruc-
tion of children or the inflammation of political factions (even
77 Andrew Escobedo observes that before the eighteenth century there is no idea of
nonallegorical fiction: all narrative could signify an order of ideas. See “Daemon Lovers,”
p. 213. On Hughes’s conception of allegory as a distinct genre, Suttie is helpful, Self-
Interpretation in “The Faerie Queene,” pp. 43–7.
78 “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry,” p. xliii.
79 “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry,” pp. xxxvi, xxxiv.
80 “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry,” p. xxxiii.
The Pilgrim’s Progress, central and powerful as it is, tends in these direc-
tions). Partly as a result of Hughes’s innovations, allegory becomes the
game that Coleridge has in mind in the passage I have quoted above,81
when he dismisses it as “a translation of abstract notions into a picture-
language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from the objects of the
senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy,
both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot.”82 When poets
in the later eighteenth century want to turn back to a visionary practice,
away from the notions of law and subjectivity that determine the bent of
Johnson and his cohort, they therefore find this newly constituted genre of
“allegory” to be unsuitable for their purposes. Coleridge, in line with a
host of continental critics at the turn of the nineteenth century—Goethe,
Schiller, Schelling, in his own way Hegel—rejects allegory in favor of
“symbol” as a paradigm of communion between the mind and the
cosmos.83 Blake turns from allegory to “vision,” as when he insists that
“Allegory is Formd by the Daughters of Memory,” whereas vision
is formed by the “daughters of Inspiration,” and that, therefore, “the
Hebrew Bible & the Gospel of Jesus are not Allegory but Eternal Vision
or Imagination of All that Exists.”84 Robert Lowth, in his 1753 lectures on
Hebrew poetry, distinguishes between “allegory”—in which “the writer is
at liberty to make use of whatever imagery is most agreeable to his fancy or
inclination” and in which “the truth lies altogether in the interior or
remote sense”—from what he calls “mystical allegory,” in which “the
exterior or ostensible is not a shadowy colouring of the interior sense,
but is in itself a reality; and although it sustain another character, does not
81 See p. 22.
82 As above, “The Statesman’s Manual,” p. 30. Coleridge’s pronouncements about
allegory have been a lightning rod for critique of the eighteenth-century attitudes toward
allegory. Influential attempts to reconsider Coleridge’s claims appear in Edwin Honig, Dark
Conceit: The Making of Allegory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1959),
pp. 44–51; Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1962), pp. 15–19; de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” pp. 191–200;
Kelley, Reinventing Allegory, pp. 118–29; Knapp, Personification and the Sublime, pp. 7–50;
and Teskey, Allegory and Violence, pp. 98–107.
83 Coleridge’s famous passage on the Allegorical and the Symbolical appears in the
Lectures on Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Spenser, Ariosto, and Cervantes (1819), pp. 417–18.
On the Continental cult of the symbol, and its theoretical underpinnings, see Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s critique, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1989), pp. 70–81. De
Man is particularly perceptive on what is at stake in the theory of the symbol and on the
conceptual problems that tend to trouble articulations of that theory, “The Rhetoric of
Temporality,” pp. 187–208. On Hegel’s ambivalences about allegory, see Kelley, Reinvent-
ing Allegory, pp. 135–43.
84 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1982), p. 554. The typographical eccentricities are Blake’s.
wholly lay aside its own.”85 Even the narrator of Bleak House indulges this
notion of allegory when he observes that Mr. Tulkinghorn’s allegorical
ceiling “makes the head ache—as would seem to be Allegory’s object
always, more or less.”86 When C. S. Lewis writes the book that so richly
informs the twentieth-century effort to rehabilitate allegory, he begins,
still, by insisting on the priority and accessibility of the sense that underlies
allegory’s fiction-surface. To say, as he does, that “symbolism is a mode of
thought, but allegory is a mode of expression” is to assume the separation
between narrative exterior and interior sense that informs the critical
anxieties of Coleridge, Addison, and Hughes.87
*
These eighteenth-century discourses are sensitively attuned to the dynamics
of allegorical signification. They are alive, certainly, to the violence
that form, within a Platonic metaphysics, exerts against matter, and they
understand well the intractable difference between the atemporal order of
mind and the temporal order of bodies. They reckon seriously with the
“other” of allegory’s other-speaking. If these discourses enshrine allegorical
narrative as a distinct poetic genre, they do so only as a way of rescuing
narrative from its ancient contest with meaning. To circumscribe allegory
as a narrative genre—almost a pseudo-narrative genre—is, after all, to
contain its volatile energies, to keep it from disrupting the mainline
canons of narrative probability and causation. This attempt at contain-
ment is hardly new to the discourses of eighteenth-century criticism.
Many allegorical narratives, including the ones at the heart of this book,
work to stabilize their own narrative forms, to protect themselves from the
irruptive force of their own other-meanings.
But the critical anxieties of the eighteenth century participate also in
new developments, developments that belong specifically to the cultural
history of modernity. These developments have begun to remake narrative
already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they put tremen-
dous pressure on the structural supports that sustain allegory’s paradoxical
being. The principle that grounds and enables these developments is a
transcendent model of law, an account of physical and historical action
85 Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, trans. George Gregory (Boston, MA:
Crocker & Brewster; and New York: J. Leavitt, 1829), Lecture 11, p. 89.
86 Bleak House: an Authoritative and Annotated Text, ed. George Ford and Sylvère
Monod (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 119.

87 The Allegory of Love, p. 48. In saying that allegory is a mode of expression, Lewis
makes the sense necessarily prior. “You can start,” he says, “with an immaterial fact, such as
the passions you actually experience, and can then invent visibilia to express them. . . . This
is allegory,” p. 44. For a pointed critique of Lewis’s account, see A. D. Nuttall, Two
Concepts of Allegory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 15–25.
that depends on chains of predictable causation within a closed system.
This is law as necessity, one emblematic formation of which is Newton’s
world-system governed by universal gravitation. By subjecting all celestial
and terrestrial motion to mathematical analysis, Newton formulates the
physis of creation as not a cosmos (a heterogeneous, hierarchical order) but
a universe, a homogenous system of matter and force.88 The theorists
who follow Newton in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will
emphasize more and more the bounded quality of this universe, adding to
Newton’s laws of motion the great laws of conservation: the conservation
of energy, of mass, of momentum. Every action within such a universe will
determine the “opposite and equal reaction” described in Newton’s second
law. The bodies that inhabit this bounded universe will move in exact
accordance with the forces internal to it, which is why Laplace, the theorist
of probability, suggests that a being who could perceive the current state of
all bodies and all forces could predict the whole course of universal history.89
If Addison and his contemporaries insist that the actions of a narrative
agent must be “probable” within the world of the fiction that agent
inhabits, they do so because they imagine fictional worlds as broadly
Newtonian systems. Like the Newtonian universe, with its laws of inertia,
reaction, and conservation, the channels of power within a given narrative,
along with their loci of causes and effects, must constitute a self-contained
and seamless material order. In a marvelous narrative such as epic, the
system may contain marvelous agencies in the personages of the gods, but
that same system had better not admit low domestic clowns, just as a
narrative of low domestic life had better not admit heroes or gods (and
Shakespearean tragedies had better not admit indecorous elements of
buffoonery, as, to Dr. Johnson’s annoyance, they so often do). The bent
of much eighteenth-century criticism resists the possibility of hybridity or
88 See especially the third book of Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathema-
tica, The Third Edition (1726), ed. Alexandre Koyré and I. Bernard Cohen (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), available in English as The Principia: Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1999). On the “revolutionary” quality of the Principia, see
I. Bernard Cohen, The Newtonian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1980), esp. pp. 3–96. But see also Andrew Janiak on Newton’s opposition to the mech-
anical philosophy, on the complicated importance of God to Newton’s system, and on what
Janiak calls Newton’s “divine metaphysics,” Newton as Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008). Newton’s famous discussion of God appears in the General
Scholium with which the Principia concludes.
89 Laplace appended his Essai philosophique sur les probabilités as an introduction to the
second edition of his massive Théorie analytique des probabilités (Paris: V. Courcier, 1814).
For his bold determinist claim, see pp. 2–4, or see Andrew Dale’s English translation, A
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, Translated from the Fifth French Edition of 1825 (New
York and Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1995), pp. 2–4.
heterogeneity within a narrative system. The jumble that results from such
heterogeneity—the mingling of different powers and levels of being on a
single narrative plane—offends the eighteenth-century taste for decorum
and absolute law. The literary-critical prejudice against agents “without
the Bounds of Probability” participates in the same commitment to law
that informs, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, political
theories of natural rights, theological accounts of general revelation, and
attempts across the scientific disciplines to deduce the laws of nature from
universal principles. The agent within such a homogenous and lawful
universe must be materially coherent and materially determined, free from
the intrusions of powers not continuous with the agent’s own being.90
Because the person in a universe of law must be determined, coherent,
and grounded in the operations of matter and force, the transcendence of
law therefore develops in uneasy harmony with—and in ways makes
necessary—a transcendence for the self. The conscious human self is,
after all, radically unlike the universe of homogenous matter and imper-
sonal law. Ideas, in such a universe, can exist only within the transcendent
sphere of mind, and the mind that apprehends ideas will therefore
apprehend nothing more than its own creative activity. It will be solitary,
self-regarding, bounded in by its difference from everything outside it. If
the theoretical ideal of the bounded universe achieves advanced form in
the mathematical principia of Newton and Laplace, the theoretical ideal of
this bounded mind finds expression in Locke’s image of a “dark Room,” or
“Presence-room,” into which the senses admit vibrations derived from
their contact with external things.91 This dark room of the mind (and the
reasoning faculty that operates within its confines) has no supply of ideas
beyond what the senses provide and no means of apprehending directly
the objects to which the senses respond. “For, methinks,” says Locke in An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “the Understanding is not much
unlike a Closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left,
to let in external visible Resemblances, or Ideas of things without.”92 This
chamber of cognition is wholly dependent for ideas on the organs and
nerves “which are the Conduits, to convey them from without to their
90 See also Catherine Gimelli Martin’s observation that allegory in the seventeenth
century is vitiated not by a loss of faith in the wholeness of the world but rather by a new
sort of faith in a new sort of wholeness, not hieratic and heterogeneous but naturalistic and
homogenous. The Ruins of Allegory: “Paradise Lost” and the Metamorphosis of Epic Conven-
tion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 1–5.
91 Locke uses these images in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter
Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2.11.17 and 2.3.1. In this and all quotations
from the Essay, I reproduce Locke’s italics.
92 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.11.17.
Audience in the Brain.” Should the biological machinery fail to perform
rightly, the ideas that form the basis of all knowledge would have “no
Postern to be admitted by; no other way to bring themselves into view,
and be perceived by the Understanding.”93
Locke therefore figures the rational self as a prisoner within a body,
dependent on whatever scraps of data its sensory organs slide under the
door. The meager capacity of these scraps to produce real knowledge of
the world is particularly evident in Locke’s discussion of “secondary
qualities,” which the senses cannot directly perceive but which provoke
the mind’s experiences of things like color or smell. Ideas such as green,
sweet, cold, and fragrant are not inherent qualities in the objects of the
senses, Locke insists, but simply the response of the human sensory
apparatus to qualities it cannot fully grasp. Why, after all, should “hot”
be more an inherent quality of fire than “pain”?94 If the human organism
had four senses, or twelve senses, rather than five, Locke provocatively
suggests, the mind’s construction of the world would be wholly different,
the nature of knowledge wholly altered.
Such a materialist psychology leads to intricate problems, because it
cannot really account for the translation of sensory vibrations into ideas, or
of physical phenomena into the phenomenon of consciousness. It there-
fore shuts the mind up as a prisoner in a world of matter and motion to
which it does not naturally belong. How can this bounded mind be
certain of the immaterial ideas that the material sense organs have derived
from their contact with the material world? How, if the mind’s knowledge
can be only of its own ideas, can certain knowledge be possible? Locke
acknowledges the difficulty, even the suffocation, of these problems, in a
passage that is also suggestive of his response to these problems:
Though our Knowledge be limited to our Ideas, and cannot exceed them
either in extent, or perfection; and though these be very narrow bounds, in
respect of the extent of Allbeing, and far short of what we may justly imagine
to be in some even created understandings, not tied down to the dull and
narrow Information, is [sic] to be received from some few, and not very acute
ways of Perception, such as are our Senses; yet it would be well with us, if our
Knowledge were but as large as our Ideas, and there were not many Doubts
and Inquiries concerning the Ideas we have, whereof we are not, nor I believe
ever shall be in this World, resolved.”95

94 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.8.10–16.
Locke suggests here that each mind should address the problem of
knowledge by turning inward, into the bounded order of its own ideas.
Knowledge is, after all, just that, “the perception of the connexion and
agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas,” and Locke’s
long discourse on knowledge occupies itself with a careful taxonomy of
ideas, their relationships, and the mind’s methods of apprehending and
organizing those relationships.96 Locke concerns himself, in other words,
with knowledge as a closed system of ideas internal to the mind. Method,
given this conception of knowledge, must become central, because the
best (more or less the only) tool the mind has in its quest for knowledge is
a careful attention to the methods it has used in reaching its best conclu-
sions and deducing its most certain general principles. In one of his later
defenses of the Essay, Locke suggestively says that “all therefore I can say of
my book is, that it is a copy of my own mind, in its several ways of
operation.” He goes on to note that the only justification for publishing a
copy of his own mind is that “I think the intellectual faculties are made,
and operate alike in most men,” which is to say that an epistemology
founded on the operations of reason must likewise be founded on resem-
blance: the resemblance of one rational mind to another, and a more
profound resemblance between rational minds and the “eternal Mind” of
God.97 The only hope of certainty is the rigorous pursuit of coherence
within the operations of the isolated subject.
These new forms of transcendent law and transcendent subjectivity
have powerful consequences for the way texts mean. Spenser’s apologist,
Hughes, exemplifies these consequences when he tries to remove the
moral sense of The Faerie Queene to a transcendent locus outside the
contingencies of the poem’s narrative world. A homogenous Newtonian
universe of matter-under-law will tend, after all, to isolate as transcendent
the principles and powers that the mind abstracts from the things it
perceives. A Lockean universe of bounded subjects will likewise remove
meaning from the world of matter to the transcendent world of cognition.
If Spenser’s narrative allows “Virtues and Vices, Passions and Diseases” to
jostle around on the narrative plane and so “represents them acting as
96 This discussion, which builds on everything he has done in An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding, occupies the fourth and final part of the essay. I quote from 4.1.2.
97 I quote “eternal Mind ” from Locke’s proofs (deduced from the mind’s knowledge of
its own existence) for the knowledge that God exists, Essay 4.10.12. His defense of his book
I quote from Peter A. Schouls, Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlightenment (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 34. Schouls, who gives particular attention to
Locke’s method for the education of the mind, is useful on the roots of this method in
Descartes and on the implications of the method for Locke’s ideals of autonomy.
divine, human, or infernal Persons,” Hughes tidies things up by relocating
those chimerical beings to the padded room of the poet’s mind, where
they dwell securely and inertly as the “moral sense” of the unstable
narrative.98 He imagines, in other words, that allegorical meaning—
indeed all meaning—is prior to, and separate from, the narrative in
which it issues. Like the form that precedes matter in Plato’s metaphysics,
the moral sense of the allegory precedes the matter of narrative in the
poet’s mind. Spenser’s meaning generates his narrative, and not the other
way around.99 The more completely a reader can dispense with the
narrative of The Faerie Queene in favor of its transcendent meaning
(Coleridge’s “abstract notions”), the more thoroughly the poem will
have done its work. The meaning is a fully formed thing, transmitted by
means of narrative matter from one solitary mind to another, where it
once again abides as an object to be contemplated in isolation.
The importance of likeness to Lockean epistemology—the demand for
a “formal correspondence,” as Gordon Teskey calls it, among isolated
minds and among isolated systems of ideas—leads to similar demands of
formal correspondence in allegorical language.100 Just as the order of ideas
within the Lockean mind must be subjected to rigorous methodological
examination, so must the translation of those ideas into allegorical images
and narratives be rigorously exact, internally coherent, and intelligibly
clear. “A Moral which is not clear,” says John Hughes as he lays down his
rules for allegory, “is in my apprehension next to no Moral at all.”101 How
can the ideas in the maker’s mind be conveyed rightly to the reader’s
mind, after all, if the image or narrative that conveys those ideas is not
perfect in its correspondence to their transcendent formal order? In
allegory too, then, a Lockean epistemology demands both rigorous like-
ness and rigorous distinction. Hughes objects to the moment in Spenser’s
Prothalamion when the two swans appear in their human form as brides-
to-be, on the grounds that this moment violates the consistent parallel
between the swans and the brides they represent.102 It is rather like the
moment, in Locke, when the mind confuses its experience of physical
qualities such as color with the qualities themselves, for it involves a
98 “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry,” p. xli.

99 I paraphrase Teskey, who observes that, when the agents of allegory become robustly
active, “the narrative becomes the generative source of the meaning, rather than the other
way around.” Allegory and Violence, pp. 99.
100 Allegory and Violence, p. 104. Teskey evocatively discusses the implications for
allegory of Locke’s dark room of the mind, pp. 98–107.

101 “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry,” p. liii.
102 “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry,” pp. xlviii–xlix.
confusion about which phenomenon belongs to which closed order. Color
belongs to mind, the particles that stimulate the idea of color to the
material world; swans belong to the order of material imagery, brides to
the order of meaning.103
*
If allegory involves a contest between “this and that” and “this for that”
forms of signification—between affirmations of identity and affirmations
of difference—then it seems that eighteenth-century critics want to
renounce allegory just to the extent that they want to renounce this
contest. Allegory in its “this for that” mode of self-understanding itself
strives away from the contest, in favor of a simple “that,” which is why
allegorical narrative often includes or anticipates its own negation. But in
sustained allegorical narratives from Prudentius to Dante, the conjunctive
force of “this and that” draws allegory back, against its own eschatological
orientation, into the paradoxes of its temporal, mutable, embodied agents.
What is missing in the eighteenth-century accounts is this counter-
movement, the will to enter into a state of enchantment in which
paradoxes bend and defy the laws of material existence. When enlightened
critics such as Addison and Hughes object to “improbability” in allegorical
narratives, or when they call for the exorcism of “unsubstantial and
symbolical Actors” and chimerical “Dreams and Shadows” from narrative
forms such as the epic, they mean to break a spell, to return from the
agonistic dream state of allegorical representation to something sustainable
and coherent, something graspable by the waking mind.
In what ways is this modern resistance to allegory genuinely new? What
does this resistance share with the forms of resistance—the forms of
disenchantment—that this book will find at work within allegorical
texts themselves? And where do the genealogies of this modern resistance
lie? These large questions will undergird much of my discussion in this
book, and the answers I consider will often take dialectical and contrary
forms. Especially in my readings of early modern poetry, I will claim that
allegory both participates in and suffers under the weight of modernity’s
eschatological orientation. Allegorical narrative has a peculiarly modern
dynamics, a set of self-interpreting practices that aim at an escape from the
103 Spenser in fact mixes these two orders so pervasively that they both seem to occupy
the surface levels of his poem, in a more intricate dance of mutual participation than
Hughes acknowledges. The swans are brides not just in one offending passage but through-
out the poem (see, e.g., lines 49–53, 76–82), and the dance of mutual signification between
the swans and the women further suggests itself in the punning echoes of “Birdes” and
“Brides” that resonate across the poem’s surfaces. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of
Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas Cain, Alex-
ander Dunlop, and Richard Schell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).
material, historical world into an eschaton of meaning. This orientation
toward escape is particularly strong in the work of early modern poets such
as Langland, Skelton, Spenser, and Bunyan. But my readings will suggest
that these poets, like the medieval poets from whom they depart, choose
also to remain in the material world, to embed the eschaton in that world’s
bodies, objects, and actions. Early modern allegorical writers do their work
not in the aftermath but in the throes of disenchantment, and they tend in
their fictions not to erase the presences of the enchanted cosmos but to
sustain those presences into tense, transitory forms. Because the tensions
at the core of allegory do so much to inform their projects of disenchant-
ment, allegory is for these writers not an alternative to being modern but
rather an alternative way of being modern. In their hands, the agonistic
reflexivity of allegory—its restlessness of movement and form—helps to
reveal disenchantment as itself an agonistic negotiation, volatile and
dynamic. In writing allegorically, early modern poets hold disenchant-
ment in tension with an insistent pull toward re-enchantment that might
well be a part of disenchantment’s core structure.
Allegory therefore helps my poets to test the imaginative possibilities of
modern disenchantment. As a way of investigating those possibilities
myself, I have chosen for my readings here poets who engage in this sort
of testing explicitly and self-consciously, in the course of allegorical
compositions on a large scale. And I have chosen two poets, in Langland
and Bunyan, who exist at the margins of early modernity, at the bound-
aries beyond which our periodic definitions of “early” and “modern” run
up against their limits. My readings of these poets will find that allegory’s
early modern development is not simple or linear, not merely the exten-
sion of a medieval essence or a decline into modern obsolescence. I find
allegory from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries suspended,
instead, in a middle place, not so much between the medieval and the
modern as between the competing orientations to matter and meaning
with which both those cultural formations, in their own ways, struggle to
come to terms. I do find early modern allegorical poets looking intently
(and increasingly) both to a medieval past and to a modern future. But
both these histories, the past and the future, yield up ambivalent mean-
ings, and both tend to recede from the poet’s gaze out to the margins of
history: back toward an Edenic past that the present cannot recover, and
forward into an eschatological future to which the present cannot attain.
My readings of allegory make hints, then, at forms of cultural modern-
ity more fluid and subtle than our language of “medieval” and “early
modern” tends to invite. Though I use and gain traction from that critical
language, the story I have to tell about allegory will suggest a story of
modernity that begins long before the sixteenth century and that does not
lead, in any century, to any sort of static or settled cultural state.104
Inasmuch as this book does have a developmental story to tell, it is the
story of a fragile solution to an ancient anxiety, and of the increasing
difficulty of sustaining that fragile solution from the fourteenth to the
seventeenth centuries. In my Chapter 1, I will make a first account of
allegory’s genealogies and poetics by looking for the primal moments of
allegorical signification in the dialogues of Plato and, then, in the writings
of early Christian exegetes and poets, from Paul and Origen to Augustine
and Prudentius. My genealogical account in this chapter follows two
trajectories. I track, first, a resistance to allegory that exerts powerful
force in Plato’s discourse and that will become, eventually, a key compo-
nent of allegory’s self-cancelling poetics. In the metaphysical experiments
of the Phaedo, the Republic, and the Parmenides, Plato finds his critical
language falling into inescapable paradoxes, paradoxes that push him
persistently to the verge of allegorical language. He strives to resist alle-
gorical language exactly because he wants to resist these paradoxes, and in
his work of resistance he maps out many of the dynamics and structures
that will characterize allegory in its more fully elaborated forms.
These dynamics and structures come to fully elaborated expression only
in the second genealogy I explore in Chapter 1. The Christian theology of
the Word made flesh gives new life to Plato’s paradoxes, not because it
resolves those paradoxes but rather because it equips writers such as
Origen and Prudentius with new motives, and new tools, for sustaining
them. The god-man Christ redefines the rules of negotiation between the
transcendent God and the orders of creation, and his incarnation makes
possible new ontologies of body and spirit, new theories of history and the
eschaton, new ideals of king and commune, new economies of sacrament
104 Recent accounts have done much to show how difficult it is to locate modernity in a
single discrete period, and some scholars have given particular attention to the reversals and
contradictions of the period we call “early modern.” William Bouwsma, for instance,
observes that the transcendent forms historians associate with the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries—Newtonian law, natural law, Lockean mind, Protestant scholasticism—
are in fact a departure from many forms of modernity in the fifteenth and the sixteenth
centuries. Bouwsma muses that the seventeenth-century political theorist Grotius, with his
system of general moral laws, would be of more interest to Aquinas, theorist of first
principles, than to Machiavelli, tactician of the will to power. A Usable Past: Essays in
European Cultural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 120–4.
Other accounts have looked for the roots of modernity elsewhere. See, for instance, Michael
Allen Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008) and Louis Dupré’s Passage to Modernity, on the significance of fourteenth-
century theological crises; or Asad’s Formations of the Secular, e.g., pp. 23–5, on the
significance of nineteenth-century liberal reform. See also Weber and Gauchet on the
roots of modern disenchantment in ancient monotheism: The Protestant Ethic, p. 105;
The Disenchantment of the World, pp. 107–15.
and salvation. He makes possible, too, patterns of poetic other-speaking
that mimic his own hypostatic union of humanity and divinity. Inasmuch
as allegorical language patterns itself on the doubleness of the Christ, it can
be oriented both toward and away from matter and time, instinct with the
power of all bodies to signify the one perfect body. An other-speaking
poem such as the Psychomachia is not innocent of the claims of disen-
chantment, but its allegory entails a choice to suspend disenchantment,
along with a conviction that the “this and that” of the incarnate Word can
undergird the hazardous choice.
My Chapter 2 begins to explore the implications of this hazardous
choice by testing the extent to which the incarnation is, for Langland,
powerfully generative of allegorical language. Langland figures many of his
allegorical agents as manifestations of the Christ who plays, as he says, “in
alle places,” and he gives that metamorphic Christ many bodies and many
names.105 But he also persistently pushes his allegorical agents to the point
of narrative failure, both by exposing them as mere tricks of language and
by figuring many of them as impostors, manifestations not of Christ but of
an Antichrist who presides over a God-emptied world. I here consider
Piers Plowman both as an exemplary articulation of allegory’s ancient
dynamics and as a phase in the early modern story my book has set out
to tell. To what extent can Langland’s self-conscious, self-cancelling, self-
interpreting poem be both these things? To what extent are his postures of
bewilderment and skepticism, of wary diffidence, signs of an emergent
modernity?
Even in the doubts that drive Langland on his visionary pilgrimage
there is an incipient paranoia, a tendency to suspect that every institution,
person, faculty, term, and text he meets on his way must somehow be
either deluded or lying about the nature of truth. As it converges with the
political machinery of the Tudor court, this sort of suspicion comes to
inform the deliberate disguises of Skelton’s allegorical speakers: of, for
instance, the Parrot who says that “metaphora, alegoria withall / Shall be
his protectyon, his pavys and his wall.”106 Skelton writes at the threshold
of a culture that prizes both surveillance and dissent, a culture in which
centralized control and private freedom assert themselves against one
another with escalating force.107 In his early poem The Bowge of Court,
he maps out the contours of an emerging information age, an age of
105 Piers Plowman 15.161.

106 Speke Parott 203; in Skelton, The Complete English Poems.
107 On the tendency of literary texts in the early modern period to reject “complicated
accretion” and “consensus” in favor of “the intelligence of central command,” see especially
James Simpson’s critique of early modern revolution in Reform and Cultural Revolution; qtd.
at p. 2.
intelligence and of counterintelligence, of insurgents, disguises, ciphers,
and spies. And he makes a first experiment in fashioning allegory as the
idiom of paranoia Parrot imagines in the passage I have just quoted, a
language of suspicion, secrecy, and occult interpretation. My Chapter 3
considers the cost of that experiment by reading the traumatic experience
of loss that Skelton articulates in this poem. Skelton finds, in the Bowge,
that the tutelary deities who educate medieval allegorical dreamers are no
longer available to him. The speaker of his poem is desperately alone, and
the poem intimates that his solitude is the consequence of a historical and
cosmic breakage. Skelton figures his solitude, in other words, as a peculiarly
modern habitation, haunted by the ghosts of a vanishing moral order.
My Chapters 4 and 5 cross over to the other side of a more visible and
violent historical breakage. In the post-Reformation fictions of Spenser
and Bunyan, the interpretive dynamics of paranoia and the interpretive
dynamics of allegory converge more fully. Both these writers must con-
tend with experiences of historical solitude and loss, and both work hard
to cultivate a kind of skepticism, a suspicion of the institutions and
infiltrators of the present age. Both know how to regard allegory, and its
conventional materials, as the residue of an enchanted history. I argue in
Chapter 4 that Spenser, in the first book of The Faerie Queene, translates
the experience of historical loss into various forms of eschatological desire.
Many of this poem’s personifications strive toward dissolution from the
order of narrative into an eschaton of pure significance, and the poem’s
hero, the Redcrosse Knight, embarks on a campaign of cleansing from
which he cannot rest until all the infiltrators of his body and the world
body have been purged away. His efforts in extermination express the
hunger of the modern dissenter for solitude, for an apocalyptic moment
liberated from history. He persistently returns to the narrative temporality
of his progress in self-cleansing—he persistently, and crucially, returns to
history—but he just as persistently comes under the gravitational pull of a
longing to escape.
Bunyan’s narrative of authenticity in The Pilgrim’s Progress shares with
Spenser’s narrative of purification a conviction that the world is full of
demonic conspiracies and demonic conspirators, the many followers, as
Spenser says, of “Errours endlesse traine.”108 To be faithful, in the context
of such conspiracies—of Jesuit infiltrators, inauthentic conformists, allur-
ing heresies, and false assurances—requires elaborate tactics of inquisition.
In Chapter 5, I will explore the ways in which Bunyan’s book is acutely
concerned with authentic selfhood, a primer in the rigorous disciplines of
108 The Faerie Queene 1.1.19.

self-interrogation and convicted belief. And I will consider the extent to
which Bunyan’s book is also a secular book, an experiment in removing
the sacred from the material realm of history into the private realm of the
self. In Bunyan’s narrative world, the Christian pilgrim is radically alone, a
refugee from a present evil age. The solitary journey of this pilgrim, the
careful attention he himself pays to his own interior motives and progress,
has seemed to many readers of Bunyan to signal the emergence of a new
and novelistic kind of fiction, a literary modernity built on the ruins of
allegory. But Bunyan’s fiction, with its retreat from history, also finds a
special use for allegory as a hiding place for the fugitive sacred, a way of
shielding both the transcendent divine and the authentic conscience from
history’s corruptions. He renders the solitary pilgrim as himself an other-
speaking, a sign of the divine presence in this world, and he therefore
fashions allegory into a fresh articulation of what it has been all along: a
way of sustaining and elaborating the paradoxes of incarnation. In his
hands, too, allegory is an instrument both of revolutionary disenchant-
ment and of willful enchantment. Its strange dynamics furnish Bunyan, at
the threshold of a flight from history, with a means of bringing the
materials of history—the productions of time—into the eccentric embrace
of time’s eternal other.
1
Genealogies of Allegory
Where, in the cultural history of the West, are allegory’s primal scenes?
This question can be difficult to answer. It is hard, after all, to construct a
linear history of “allegory” when practices of allegorical reading and
practices of allegorical making do not neatly correspond with each other.
Certain mainline practices of allegorical reading are in fact hostile, as I will
observe in this chapter, to the narrative forms that tend to ground
allegorical writing. And it is even harder to write a linear history of allegory
when allegorical poems show signs of hostility toward their own forms and
signifying structures. Allegorical narratives are, as I have said, double in
their orientation. They strive out toward a fulfillment in which narrative
dissolves into interpretation or pure idea. At the same time, they charge
the materials of narrative with the presence and power of the eternal order
into which narrative is, in the end, supposed to disappear. The self-
cancelling forms of allegory therefore invite two different kinds of genea-
logical account. Allegorical making has roots, on the one hand, in an
ancient resistance to the paradoxes that arise when eternal forms come
into commerce with mutable bodies. A genealogical account of allegory
might begin with allegory’s ancient impossibility, with the resistance to
allegory evident in certain pre-Christian philosophical and exegetical
discourses. But allegorical making also has roots in a later crisis that
redefines the ancient paradoxes and that motivates poets to embrace and
sustain allegory’s impossible forms. A genealogical account might like-
wise begin, then, by telling the story of allegory as a self-conscious
experiment in enchantment, an attempt to work out the terms on
which eternity and time conduct their troubled negotiations. The first
scenes in both these genealogies—a negative genealogy and a positive
genealogy—will have much to teach about allegory’s fragile poetics.
They will also have much to teach about just why it is that allegory
seems to its practitioners from the beginning to be an enchantment, an
unnatural state, a raising of matter into communion with the divine.
Why is it that allegorical writers seem, long before early modernity, to
regard freedom from this enchanted state as the material world’s natural,
neutral, inevitable condition?
As a way of making an approach to this question, I want to propose a
narrative of allegory’s ancient emergence that begins with projects of
disenchantment and then goes looking, against that background, for the
origins of a precarious and self-conscious project of enchantment. The
dynamics of disenchantment are already central to allegorical narrative in
Prudentius’ Psychomachia (c.405), a poem that many literary historians
have regarded as the first sustained experiment in literary allegory.1 One of
the most prominent features of this poem, as I have begun to say, is its
tendency to bend the agents and temporalities of its narrative idiom into
recursive forms. The poem is haunted by impossibility, and the contours
of its paradoxes and self-cancellations will cast long shadows over the
literary history that this book means to explore. But Prudentius himself,
like his contemporary Augustine, knows well that his endeavors in disen-
chantment already have a long genealogy. He also knows that his
endeavors in enchantment have a history of their own, and he meditates
in the Psychomachia on the legacies of that history. His poem is, for my
purposes in this chapter, not a point from which to look forward but a
point from which to look back, back through the many doors he opens
onto allegory’s negative and positive genealogies.
Prudentius sets out in the Psychomachia to write a little epic narrative of
the human soul and of the virtues and vices that fight for possession of that
soul. The language of the poem is in many ways Virgilian, and the results
of the poem’s epic action can be ponderous: Chastity plunges her sword
through the throat of Lust; Soberness smashes the face of Indulgence with
a rock; Faith stomps out the eyes of Worship-of-the-Old-Gods; Heresy is
torn into pieces and fed to animals. Spears are brandished. Spoils are
taken. Heroic declamations are made. But for all that, Prudentius’ narra-
tive has a static quality. The battles that occupy his central section are
isolated from each other, repetitive didactic episodes in which the com-
batants stride into the theater, the narrator describes their symbolic
furniture and physical qualities, they speak about (and in accordance
with) their own significance, and then the virtue kills the vice. Some of
the poem’s commentators have observed that this episodic form partici-
pates in the tendencies of much early Christian exegesis. A reader such as
Origen, in many passages of his exegetical work (though not all of them, as
1
Coleridge, who calls the Psychomachia “the first Allegory compleatly modern in its
form,” is one of the authors of the notion that the history of literary allegory begins with
Prudentius. Lectures on the Principles of Judgement, Culture, and European Literature (1818),
in Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, 2 vols, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, vol. 5.2, ed. R. A. Foakes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987),
p. 102. See also C. S. Lewis’s influential comments in The Allegory of Love: A Study in
Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 66.
Genealogies of Allegory 47
I will observe in this chapter) discovers the possibility of deep, polyvalent,
layered significance in the narrative action of scripture. But in delving
for those deep meanings, he tends to isolate particular episodes, even
particular words and phrases, of the narrative text into isolated signs, cut
off from the possibility of historical continuity or consequence. The
demands of meaning, for him as for Prudentius, have the power to arrest
the movements of history.2
Even the climactic moments of Prudentius’ episodic narratives, the
killings of the vices, tend to resist the demands of epic narrative. Patience
does not in fact kill Wrath: she just “abides undisturbed” [quieta manet]
(128) while Wrath rages and attacks her with various weapons, until
Wrath finally becomes so wrathful that she slays herself. The battles
between Lowliness and Pride, too, and between Soberness and Indul-
gence, fail to happen. Soberness simply holds up a cross, and the steeds
that pull Indulgence’s chariot are thrown into confusion, wrecking the
chariot and running their mistress over. After a great deal of prideful
posturing, Pride spurs her horse toward Lowliness and abruptly falls into
a pit dug by her own lieutenant, Deceit. The virtuous warrior is left
standing placid and unarmed, arrested before the battle has begun. In
both these cases she, the virtue, strides forward and finishes the job, but
the poet is careful to separate her from the actions in which she engages.
Here is Lowliness:
But the quiet, self-controlled Virtue [Virtus placidi moderaminis], seeing the
vain monster crushed and lying at the point of death, bends her steps calmly
towards her, raising her face a little and tempering her joy with a look of
kindliness. As she hesitates, her faithful comrade Hope comes to her side,
holds out to her the sword of vengeance, and breathes into her the love of
glory. (274–9)
2
See Jon Whitman’s suggestion that allegorical interpretation “suspended the move-
ment of history into moments of episodic exegesis,” Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient
and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 84. David
Aers makes useful account of these exegetical tendencies in Piers Plowman and Christian
Allegory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), pp. 1–32. Prudentius’ own interpretation of
the story of Abraham, in the first movement of the Psychomachia, exemplifies this suspen-
sion. He reads Abraham’s battle with Chedorlaomer as a “figure” [figura] of the Christian
believer in her struggle against wanton desires, and he finds in the accidents of the scene
figurations of the Christ who helps every Christian warrior: the 318 warriors who fight
alongside Abraham represent, numerologically, the name of Christ and the sign of the cross.
The scene’s orientation is not out toward other historical places and moments but rather
upward, toward the static, ideal image of the warrior in Christ’s army. See Psychomachia
50–68. I cite Prudentius from the Loeb edition of the poems, vol. 1, with translation by
H. J. Thomson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949). Line citations refer to
the Latin text.
There is every sign in this passage of an ambivalence about action.3 The
weapon here is not Lowliness’ own; neither is the love of glory, nor the
determination to kill. How could any of these things be her own, when all
that belongs to her is to be Lowliness itself? The poet must separate the
agent Lowliness from any possibility of real action, because any engage-
ment in the epic action will diminish the virtue’s conceptual clarity.4 If
Lowliness is to mean, she cannot do: cannot, especially, do deeds of a
lusty, haughty, heroic sort. Neither can Soberness, or Patience. To be
Soberness and Patience they must be merely themselves, merely sober and
merely patient. So it is with the vices. “Fury is its own enemy,” Patience
declares in response to her enemy’s self-destruction; “fiery Wrath in her
frenzy slays herself and dies by her own weapons” (160–1). Sin destroys
itself, and the destruction of each of these vices is not so much a dynamic
action, not so much an exchange between agents, as a fulfillment of what
each agent simply is. After Heresy is violently dismembered by the
company of virtues, the poet concludes, “so perishes frightful Heresy,
rent limb from limb” [ruptis Heresis perit horrida membris] (725). Violent
division is who heresy is. She has only the possibility of her own identity.
So it is for every agent in this poem, which is why Soberness urges the
faltering virtues by crying, “remember who you are” [state . . . vestri mem-
ores] (381).
And so the poet of the Psychomachia finds himself forced into a
renunciation of epic action, committed to a poetic strategy according to
which narrative must fail. His failure raises the question of why he would
choose to write his poem in this way. He could not choose, after all, to
write an allegorical poem, as Brenda Machosky has observed.5 There were
no models for him to follow, no generic conventions to mask for him the
acuteness of his poem’s contradictions. And the methods of the allegorical
exegetes, with their dismissals of narrative contingency in favor of static
meaning, would seem not to encourage but to resist a way of writing that
articulates meaning into the bodies and actions of narrative agents.
3
Whitman notices that Prudentius uses the phrase at regina humilis—“but the lowly
queen” (267)—at the moment when Lowliness refrains from entering the field of battle.
The phrase echoes Virgil’s at regina, a phrase he uses of Dido at three key points in Aeneid
IV, and so sets in relief this poem’s refusal of the Virgilian queen’s epic fury. Allegory,
pp. 90–1.
4
On the poem’s many ambiguities, and the uncertain significations of its narrative, see
Brenda Machosky, Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of Literature (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. 81–91; and Martha Malamud, A Poetics of Trans-
formation: Prudentius and Classical Mythology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989),
pp. 54–72. See esp. Malamud’s observation that for a virtue to defeat a vice, in the
Psychomachia, she must adopt some of the vice’s characteristics, pp. 66–7.
5
Structures of Appearing, p. 71.
Prudentius’ poem registers the force of that resistance, as his inactive
virtues suggest. His poem wants, in its pursuit of encyclopedic moral
and redemptive significance, to negate its own epic aspirations and narra-
tive forms.
Where, then, do the roots of Prudentius’ strange idiom lie? I want to
look for the origins of his narrative temporalities and self-cancelling
bodies in the dialogues of Plato. The Platonic discourses furnish many
early Christian writers with a model of disenchanting, idol-shattering
skepticism. Plato’s metaphors of awakening and ascent frequently verge
on narratives of disenchantment, and in his philosophy of causes and
forms he cultivates disciplines of escape, ways of renouncing a world of
mutable bodies and narrative contingencies. Augustine, as I will show
here, invokes Plato explicitly as a paradigmatic spell-breaker, a debunker
of the superstitions of the old pagan cults. The critical movements of
Plato’s dialogues set down the patterns Augustine will follow when he
mocks the supposed bodily operations of the Roman deities, and Prudentius
conforms loosely to those patterns when in his Apotheosis he sounds the
trumpet of the “supreme God” [deum summum] against the embodied
deities of Greece and Rome, or when he opens his Psychomachia with
Faith’s slaying of “Worship-of-the-Old-Gods” [Veterum Cultura Deorum]
and then proceeds to cancel the bodily being of one divinity after the next.6
Much more important for Prudentius, though, is the way Plato’s
disenchanting project generates an array of metaphors and narrative
forms that come down to Christian writers through a variety of Middle
Platonic and Neoplatonic sources and that resonate in remarkable ways
with the forms and dynamics of allegory.7 In the course of his various
experiments in disenchantment, Plato runs persistently into self-
contradiction, fashioning wondrous paradoxes and absurdities of narrative
discourse. It is just at the moments when these paradoxes become visible
that Plato begins to map out the complex reflexivities, the self-fulfilling
self-repudiations, of allegory. He is a maker of other-speaking images, and
at the same time he strives to suppress those images, to expose as impos-
sibilities the paradoxes his experiments unleash. If he caresses and culti-
vates the language of allegory, he also engages again and again in stringent
renunciations of that language. A careful account of his fragile, intricate,
finally unsustainable creations will do much to explain the dynamics of
6
See Apotheosis, e.g., 186–214, 402–48; qtd. at 188; Psychomachia qtd. at 29. Apotheosis,
like Psychomachia, I cite from the Loeb edition of the poems, ed. H. J. Thomson.
7
Mark Mastrangelo makes a succinct survey of the channels by which Platonic phil-
osophy reaches fourth-century Latin intellectuals, including Prudentius. The Roman Self in
Late Antiquity: Prudentius and the Poetics of the Soul (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008), pp. 121–59.
allegorical disenchantment. And his inability to dissolve these creations
will do something to explain the problems and possibilities that confront
Christian poets when, motivated anew by the incarnation of the Word,
they turn to new experiments in a language of enchantment.
*
When the Homeric epics look for causes, they find agents. The temporal
field of human action is governed, in Homeric narrative, by causative
forces such as eris (strife), atē (reckless impulse), phobos (terror), and
kydoimos (tumult), and these forces are themselves acting and temporal
beings. They are defined not logically, as ideas prior to human action or
abstractions derived from human action, but rather genealogically, as
corporeal, contingent, procreative entities in relationship with one
another.8 Atē is the daughter of Zeus (19.91), Phobos a subordinate of
Athena (4.440), Kydoimos a warrior-comrade of Fate (18.535).9 Eris, the
sister of Ares (4.440), is herself numbered among the gods (11.74–5), a
presiding spirit who towers over the field when the armies at Troy join in
battle. At those moments when her operations on the plane of human
action are particularly complex or consequential, the relations of Eris come
crowding in around her, as when terror, tumult, and fate enter the strife,
or when the gods come swarming to the field of battle upon the return of
Achilles: “But when the Olympians were come into the midst of the
throng of men, then up leapt mighty Eris, the rouser of hosts, and Athene
cried aloud” (20.47–8). Agamemnon looks to these agents as the causes of
his action when he urges the aggrieved Achilles to blame Atē, glossy-haired
daughter of Zeus—along with Zeus himself, Moira (Fate), and dark-
walking Erinys (the Fury)—for the atē that provoked Agamemnon to
steal the war prize Briseis (19.86–91). It is difficult to tell, in this
accounting, just where Agamemnon’s madness ends and the goddess
begins, and it is likewise difficult to tell where the goddess herself ends
and where begin Zeus, Fate, and the Fury, the agents who cast the agrion
atēn upon Agamemnon’s spirit (19.88). “Father Zeus,” Achilles responds
accordingly, ē megalas atas andressi didoistha: “great are the delusions [atas]
8
The “genealogical” tendency of ancient epic is likewise exemplified by Hesiod, whose
Theogony, as Emma Stafford says, “is based upon more or less significant genealogical
relationships, from Memory as mother of the Muses to Strife, mother of Toil, Famine,
Sorrows, Slaughter, Lawlessness and the rest.” Worshipping Virtues: Personification and the
Divine in Ancient Greece (London: Duckworth; Swansea: the Classical Press of Wales,
2000), p. 10. On logical and genealogical definition in Hesiod and Homer, see also Teskey,
Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 39–50.
9
All Homeric citations and quotations are from the Loeb text of the Iliad, with
translation by A. T. Murray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). I follow
Murray’s practice of capitalizing Greek nouns that indicate, or seem to indicate, personifi-
cations, though this practice creates the illusion of a neat distinction between Eris the
goddess and eris the abstraction.
you send upon men” (19.270). The rashness of Agamemnon, as he
himself sees it, has a divine genealogy. And the implication of that
genealogy is that the cause of an action played out on the plane of narrative
temporality—the rage of a material agent—is itself grounded in the plane
of narrative temporality, is itself (or rather herself) irreducibly material and
irreducibly an agent.10
Exactly because divine agents are operative in every quarter of the
Homeric cosmos, it is impossible to identify the final cause of anything
in that cosmos. Mutable agents are, after all, always moved and always
moving, part of the system of contingency and consequence that an
account of causes wants to explain. So long as the gods retain integrity
as embodied and temporal presences, any invocation of a god to explain
action will only introduce new actions that themselves need explaining. As
agent-causes, the gods therefore tend to raise again and again the very
question of causes they have come out to answer. They produce endless
contingency, and they inhabit a dynamically unstable cosmos in which
inquiries about ultimate causes will have no final destination. It is partly
against the backdrop of this cosmos that Plato sets out to fashion his
idealist metaphysics. Plato addresses the problem of endless contingency
by making experiments in the evacuation of real causation, real power,
from all these mutable agents. He is a philosopher in search of final
causes, and for just this reason he must be a philosopher of disenchant-
ment, a philosopher against the gods. His idealist project explores,
fitfully and variously, the desire to suppress temporal, acting, contingent
bodies in the service of something static, inactive, and absolute. He looks
for a path from the Homeric account of causes, with its untamable
bodies and its genealogical narratives, to a new sort of account that
will not depend on narrative at all. And he finds that path in the theory
of forms.
It is not hard, in light of the plurality and diversity of material bodies, to
understand why. If I say that the goddess Aphrodite is beautiful and that
10
On the divine status of abstractions such as Eris and Atē in Greek religion, see Walter
Burkert, “Hesiod in Context: Abstractions and Divinities in an Aegean-Eastern Koinē,” in
Personification in the Greek World: From Antiquity to Byzantium, ed. Emma Stafford and Judith
Herrin (London: Ashgate, 2005); and Stafford, Worshipping Virtues, pp. 1–35. Many modern
critical accounts look for the origins of the gods themselves in the human search for aitiai—-
causes—and in the volatile linguistic power of abstract nouns. See, for instance, Max Müller’s
vast work in comparative mythography, with its influential claim that the gods begin as a
disease of language; and Jane Ellen Harrison’s arguments against Müller, on the origins of the
gods in animistic ritual and primitive demonology, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). For more recent critical attempts to identify
the origins of the gods, see Robert Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), pp. 387–451; and Richard Caldwell, The Origin of the Gods:
A Psychoanalytic Study of Greek Theogonic Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
the Temple of Apollo is beautiful, I have predicated a common quality of
these dissimilar bodies. Where is the ground of that common quality? If
I say that the rites of Dionysos, or the songs of Ion, are beautiful, the
question becomes more complicated still. On what basis can these dispar-
ate subjects bear a single and common predicate? Where has this idea of
“beautiful” come from? How can anyone talk about “beauty” who has
experienced only the complex and various objects of the material world?
Plato in the Phaedo has Socrates answer that the soul’s notion of beautiful
derives from its experience of an immutable form, the Beautiful itself:
Then I no longer understand nor can I recognize those other wise reasons [tas
allas aitias tas sophas]; but if anyone gives me as the reason why a beautiful
thing is beautiful either its having a blooming colour, or its shape, or
something else like that, I dismiss those other things—because all those
others confuse me—but in a plain, artless, and possibly simple-minded way,
I hold this close to myself: nothing else makes it beautiful except that
beautiful itself, whether by its presence or communion or whatever the
manner and nature of the relation may be; as I don’t go so far as to affirm
that, but only that it is by the beautiful that all beautiful things are beautiful
[tō kalō panta ta kala gignetai kala].11
Socrates’ aim in this dialogue is partly to make a claim about the immor-
tality of the soul. The soul knows when a beautiful thing is beautiful, he
says, because every soul comes into this world of shadows from another
place. In that other place the soul has beheld pure and absolute Beauty,
and it now understands the variable material of this world by the light of
that absolute principle. To say, then, that Aphrodite is beautiful because
she is of this stature or that complexion is to reveal nothing, Socrates
insists, about the real grounds of beauty.12 Every predication must put its
complex, mutable, and plural subject—Aphrodite, for instance—into
commerce with a simple, immutable, and singular form. “Aphrodite is
beautiful” must really mean “Aphrodite participates in the Beautiful.” It is
by the beautiful, Socrates tells Cebes, that beautiful things are beautiful.
The language of this account is fraught with contradictions. In the
particular passage I have quoted, and throughout the Phaedo, Socrates
speaks as if the relationship between a beautiful body and the Beautiful is
something like the relationship between an effect and its cause, its aitia.
Readers of English, especially, are prone to translate kalon as “Beauty” and
to imagine that beauty causes a body to be beautiful more or less as heat
11
Phaedo 100d, trans. David Gallop (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). The Greek text
I quote from Harold North Fowler’s Loeb edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1953).
12
See Phaedo 100d.
causes a body to be hot.13 Socrates invites this reading when he here
repudiates the hope of identifying “other causes” [allas aitias] of beauty,
and again when he suggests that the form is an immaterial quality that
infuses or covers a material body and thereby “makes it beautiful” [poiei auto
kalon]. He works, as he introduces the forms, in metaphors of causation.
There is, however, another sort of metaphor at work in the discourse of
the Phaedo. Socrates intimates this alternative metaphor when he asks how
Simmias can be both large (with respect to a boy) and small (with respect
to Heracles). The answer? Simmias can be both large and small only
because he enjoys commerce with contrary forms that cause him to exhibit
contrary qualities:
Then you too wouldn’t accept anyone’s saying that one man was larger than
another by a head, and that the smaller was smaller by that same thing; but
you’d protest that you for your part will say only that everything larger than
something else is larger by nothing but largeness, and largeness is the reason
for its being larger; and that the smaller is smaller by nothing but smallness,
and smallness is the reason for its being smaller. You’d be afraid, I imagine, of
meeting the following contradiction: if you say that someone is larger and
smaller by a head, then, first, the larger will be larger and the smaller smaller
by the same thing; and secondly, the head, by which the larger man is larger,
is itself a small thing; and it’s surely monstrous that anyone should be large
by something small; or wouldn’t you be afraid of that?14
Here again Socrates verges on metaphors of cause and effect, of quality
determining substance: “largeness is the reason for its being larger” [dia
touto meizon, dia to megethos]. He also suggests, however, that the rela-
tionship between Simmias and largeness is one not of causation but
rather one of resemblance. “It’s surely monstrous that anyone should be
large by something small,” he says, as if the form were itself an object of
which largeness might be predicated, a paradigmatic large thing. Socrates
elsewhere uses this language of likeness more explicitly, when he claims
that an object such as a bed relates to the form of Bed as the eikōn
(image) or phantasma (appearance) of a paradeigma (model) or an eidos
(form).15 When a bedmaker makes a bed, Socrates says to Glaucon, he
13
For discussion of the forms as causes in this passage, see R. M. Dancy, Plato’s
Introduction of Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 303–4; and
Ronna Burger, The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1984), pp. 147–50.
14
Phaedo 100e.
15
See, for instance, Republic 596e–598b and 509d, Timaeus 29b. On all these terms, see
E. E. Pender, “Plato on Metaphors and Models,” in Metaphor, Allegory, and the Classical
Tradition: Ancient Thought and Modern Revisions, ed. G. R. Boys-Stones (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
“doesn’t make the form—which is our term for the being of a bed” [ou to
eidos poiei, ho dē phamen einai ho esti klinē] but rather makes the “appear-
ance” [phantasma] of that form.16 Many of Plato’s commentators have
proposed that the forms of what English speakers might call qualities or
attributes—forms such as beauty and holiness—are more like the form of
Bed than we know: not beauty but the Beautiful, not holiness but the
Holy. A holy woman is holy because she resembles the Holy, just as a bed
is a bed because it resembles Bed, and Simmias is large because he
resembles the Large.17
The discourse on Simmias hints, in other words, at the double nature of
forms such as the Beautiful and the Large. They seem, on the one hand, to
be paradigm cases (the standard yard on which all yardsticks are modeled,
the perfect and defining expression of yardness) and, on the other, to be
immaterial ideas (yardness itself, which stands above even the paradigm
case).18 And they tend therefore to obscure the difference between having
a quality and being a quality, between patterns of mimēsis (imitation of a
form that has largeness) and patterns of methexis (participation in a form
that is largeness).19 Inasmuch as that distinction remains blurry, the
forms must be structurally self-referential. If the Beautiful both has beauty
and is beauty, then the Beautiful has itself. Socrates indeed claims at
various junctures that a form must be predicable of itself, a quality that
16
Republic 597a, 598b. Unless otherwise indicated, I quote Plato from the Complete
Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997). Greek
quotations of Republic come from the Loeb text, ed. Paul Shorey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
17
On the difficulty of using abstract English nouns to designate Platonic forms see
P. T. Geach, “The Third Man Again,” in Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics, ed. R. E. Allen
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965). Geach notes that Plato’s Greek nouns do not
distinguish so neatly as English nouns do between “giraffeness” and “the Giraffe,” or
between “holiness” and “the Holy.” The construction “F-ness,” in English, assumes a
relationship between F and the things that are F, and this assumption can mask the
paradigmatic qualities of Plato’s universals. As Geach says, “Plato speaks of (the) Man
and the Bed, not of Manhood and Bedness. . . . Surely his way of speaking about these Forms
suggests that for him a Form was nothing like what people have since called an ‘attribute’ or
a ‘characteristic.’ The bed in my bedroom is to the Bed, not as a thing to an attribute or
characteristic, but rather as a pound weight or yard measure in a shop to the standard pound
or yard,” p. 267.
18
I borrow the term “paradigm case” from John Malcolm, who discusses at length what
he calls Plato’s “failure to distinguish the universal from the paradigm case.” Plato on the
Self-Predication of Forms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), esp. pp. 159–66. David Bostock
argues that we find in the Phaedo “traces of two quite different views of what the forms are:
on one view they are unambiguous examples of properties, and on the other view they are
the properties themselves.” Plato’s “Phaedo” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 200.
Bostock enumerates the different sorts of forms, pp. 196–201.
19
Methexis, with the verb (metechō) from which it is derived, is one of Socrates’ favorite
words for describing the relationship of instance with form. For instance, Phaedo 100c: “it is
beautiful for no reason at all other than that it participates [metechei] in that beautiful.”
modern philosophers have named “self-predication.”20 This claim lurks
in Socrates’ insistence that Simmias cannot be made large by a head
because a head is not a large thing. The Large, he here assumes, must be
large; and likewise must the Beautiful be beautiful, the White white, the
Pious pious (“How could anything else be pious,” he elsewhere asks, “if
piety itself is not?”21).
The consequence of self-predication, and of the double nature it
implies, is that a rift opens up within each form. Each form both is and
is not a body, is and is not itself. Each signifies both itself, as the exemplar
of a quality, and its other, the quality of which it is the exemplar. Exactly
because it issues in these paradoxes, the Socratic requirement for self-
predication opens up fatal fault lines in the theory of forms. By rendering
the forms as themselves exemplars of qualities, self-predication eviscerates the
forms as the grounds or causes of those qualities. Plato himself elaborates
this problem in the Parmenides, a magic show of a dialogue that demol-
ishes the theory of forms even as it maps out, at the heart of that theory, a
dazzling labyrinth of fissures, feedback loops, reduplications, and dead
ends. Parmenides does his destructive work by insisting that, if every
predication must gesture away from its subject to an ultimate form, and
if every form must be self-predicating, then every form must gesture away
from itself, as subject, toward another form more ultimate than itself. The
ultimate cause will, then, keep receding from the very forms in which
ultimacy is supposed to be grounded. To say that the Large is large because
it participates in largeness is, as Parmenides forces Socrates to admit, to
open up an infinite series of large things:
“What about the large itself [to mega] and other large things? If you look at
them all in the same way with the mind’s eye, again won’t some one thing
appear large, by which all these appear large?”
“It seems so.”
“So another form of largeness will make its appearance, which has
emerged alongside largeness itself and the things that partake of it, and in
20
Gregory Vlastos coins this term to describe one of the assumptions of the Third Man
argument in Plato’s Parmenides, but his essay on that argument has provoked a contentious
scholarly literature on the problem of self-predication across the dialogues. See Vlastos,
“The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides,” Philosophical Review 3:63 (1954), pp. 324,
336–9. Perhaps the most extensive treatment of the problem is to be found in Malcolm’s
Plato on the Self-Predication of Forms, which argues (among much else) that not all the forms
are subject to self-predication.
21
He advises Protagoras to ask this question, Protagoras 330e. In Laches; Protagoras;
Meno; Euthydemus, ed. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
turn another over all these, by which all of them will be large. Each of your
forms will no longer be one, but unlimited in multitude.”22
Here is the conundrum of the Third Man, so named by modern philosophers
because, if a particular man, an instance, resembles the form Man, then
there must be some larger category to which both form and instance belong.23
There must be a third man, more ultimate than both the instance and the form
the instance resembles. And inasmuch as the form, Man, and the instance,
man, resemble that third man, there must be yet a further category of
manness—a fourth man—that comprehends them all, and a further beyond
that, and so on. To admit the need of a third man will be to admit the need of
an infinite regression of man-forms and to undermine the possibility of talking
comprehensibly about forms at all. Therefore, says Parmenides,
nothing can be like the form, nor can the form be like anything else.
Otherwise, alongside the form another form will always make its appearance,
and if that form is like anything, yet another; and if the form proves to be like
what partakes of it, a fresh form will never cease emerging.24
Here the language of the forms goes more or less out of control. The
temporal and spatial metaphors of this passage are impossible, without
limit or bound. Parmenides directs Socrates’ search for the forms down the
line of an endless series of regressions, a ceaseless emerging of likeness-
alongside-likeness that leads out toward a vanishing point at which all talk
of emerging and likeness must lapse into silence. To step out toward the
form of the Large is, as Parmenides has it, to step back into the world of
instances, for every new emergence of the Large simply adds one more
instance to the plurality of large things. The effect is of stepping toward a
mirror and finding that the objects at one’s back advance and recede all at
once.25 In such a forward–backward movement there is a fall into, but also
22
Parmenides 132a. In Cratylus; Parmenides Greater Hippias; Lesser Hippias, ed. Harold
North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).
23
A foundational account of the third man can be found in the essay I have cited by
Vlastos, “The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides.” For a revaluation of the interpret-
ive tradition that descends from Vlastos, see Malcolm, Plato on the Self-Predication of Forms,
pp. 47–53; and Kenneth Sayre, Parmenides’ Lesson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1996), pp. 78–88. A particularly intricate (and likewise revisionist) analysis of
the third man argument appears in Samuel Rickless, Plato’s Forms in Transition: A Reading
of the Parmenides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 64–75. On self-
predication and the third man in relation to allegory, see Teskey, Allegory and Violence,
pp. 14–19; and A. D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2007), pp. 40–8.
24
Parmenides 132e.
25
Socrates indeed uses the metaphor of a mirror to describe the material world as an
eikōn of the immaterial, like the sun reflected in water. See Phaedo 99e and Republic 402b,
509e–510e.
a frustration of, linear temporality. The language Socrates cultivates for
talking about the forms indeed makes necessary a certain fall into tem-
porality. Metaphors of cause and metaphors of resemblance are inescap-
ably bound up with the language of narrative. The cause is prior to the
effect, the object to its image, and that priority cannot be merely logical.
Inasmuch as the cause precedes and begets its effect, the priority of the
cause must necessarily be not only logical but also genealogical, a priority
not only in being but also in time.
This necessity is an embarrassment to the Socratic theory of forms. The
whole orientation of that theory, after all—the turn from a genealogical
cosmos of agents to a logical cosmos of forms—is directed by a renunci-
ation of the instabilities and contingencies of narrative. Parmenides reveals
that narrative is inescapable even as Socrates’ idealist account of causes
renders it impossible. “A fresh form will never cease emerging,” he says;
“another form will always make its appearance.” His inquiry into the forms,
then, forces them to betray their own entanglement in temporal and teleo-
logical narratives, or, more precisely, in the frustration or suspension of such
narratives. The forms as Parmenides imagines them seek, but do not find,
progress toward resolution, and he rejects them because he finds them stuck
in repetition, in a moment that threatens to become an endless recurrence of
moments. It is here, at the point where the language of being begins to
register its own disappointed need for narrative structures, and where moving
bodies and mutable agents jostle into the economy of the forms, that
Socrates’ project of disenchantment rediscovers the rifts it had hoped to
close. And it is in these rifts—between body and idea, and between agent and
action—that the first conditions for allegorical narrative will develop.
*
Because Plato wants to escape the instability of narrative—because he
wants to disenchant the Homeric gods—he tends to dismiss the possibility
of allegory. As the Socrates of the Republic makes prescriptions for the
education of children, he says to Adeimantus that the supposed hyponoia,
the undermeaning, of the epic stories cannot atone for falsehood and
blasphemy in the narrative matter of those stories. “We won’t,” he says,
“admit stories into our city—whether allegorical or not [out’ en hyponoiais
pepoiēmenas oute aneu hyponoiōn]—about Hera being chained by her son,
nor about Hephaestus being hurled from heaven by his father when he
tried to help his mother, who was being beaten, nor about the battle of
the gods in Homer.”26 Such stories are inadmissible, he insists, because
“a god must be always represented as he is,” and if the gods are purely
26
Republic 378d.
good, then they cannot be represented as the agents or causes of evil.
Socrates therefore sets down two principles for any representation of the
gods: first, “that a god isn’t the cause [aition] of all things but only of good
ones”; and, second, that, “since the gods are the most beautiful and the
best possible, it seems that each always and unconditionally retains his
own shape.”27 The instinct behind these two principles is the same, and it
is closely related to what Socrates has said in the Phaedo about causes and
forms. As the Large must be wholly and only itself—wholly and only
large—so must the good gods be wholly and only good, wholly and only
godlike. To admit mutability into the nature of the gods, as the poets do
when they speak of Zeus wandering the earth disguised as a man or when
they imagine the gods to be the causes of both good and bad fortune, is to
open moral discourse to the instability of narrative. Even in his attempt to
preserve the integrity of the gods, then, Socrates strives to depart from a
genealogical cosmos of agents to a logical cosmos of forms. Preserving
integrity, for him, means suppressing the destabilizing energies of agency,
and he renders his gods not as bodies in motion but as causes in stasis. He
has little use for allegory, with its grounding in narrative, exactly because
he resists the narrative existence of the gods in favor of a theology that
supposes each god to be simple, transparent, unchanging, and complete.
Narrative, however, is not easy to eradicate, and when Socrates turns
later in the Republic to an analysis of human action, he finds the dynamics
of allegorical narrative operating in his language even more plainly and
ineradicably than they do in his discourses on the forms. He begins his
account of the soul with the same renunciation of contingency that
grounds his account of the gods. Each faculty or aitia of the human
soul, he says, must do always, and only, what is proper to itself.
A thirsty person who chooses not to drink must have two wholly distinct
faculties in simultaneous operation: the faculty of appetite, which bids the
person to drink, and the faculty of reason, which forbids the thing the
appetite desires. These two faculties are, each of them, static and self-
consistent. Reason only reasons and appetite only desires, and the acting
human soul is therefore like the Simmias of the Phaedo, who is both small
and large because he participates in two distinct forms, the Small and the
Large. In these insistences Socrates aspires to free the soul’s faculties from
movement and change. Like the gods, and like the forms, the faculties of
the soul are causes, and every final cause must be simple, limited to the
necessary terms of its own definition. If the total acting soul is mutable,
unpredictable, and plural, that soul must nevertheless be grounded in a
27
Republic 379a, 380c, 381c.
stable cosmos of self-predicating aitiai, in a faculty of reason which is only
reasonable and a faculty of appetite which is only appetitive.
Socrates tests this articulation of the self-predication principle by con-
sidering the story of Leontius, who comes across the corpses of some
executed men and finds himself torn between a desire to look at the
spectacle and the knowledge that he should turn away. He covers his
eyes, wavers, grows angry, gives in, and finally throws his hands from
his eyes, crying, “Look for yourselves, you evil wretches, take your fill
of the beautiful sight.” What troubles Socrates about such a story is
that its agent-protagonist contradicts himself. How can Leontius both
want and not want to look? How can he be angry at himself without
ceasing to be wholly himself? Could he likewise be both large and
not large, or both beautiful and not beautiful, or both Leontius
and not Leontius? The answer to these conundrums depends on the
same insight that rescues large-small Simmias from absurdity. It is,
Socrates says, not exactly Leontius who opposes Leontius. It is rather
the reason of Leontius that opposes the appetite of Leontius with help
from the willful high spirit, the thymos, of Leontius. The self-
contradicting agent before the corpses is in fact a plurality of self-
consistent faculties:
Besides, don’t we often notice in other cases that when appetite forces
someone contrary to rational calculation, he reproaches himself and gets
angry [thymoumenon] with that in him that’s doing the forcing, so that of the
two factions that are fighting a civil war, so to speak, spirit [ton thymon] allies
itself with reason? But I don’t think you can say that you’ve ever seen spirit,
either in yourself or anyone else, ally itself with appetite to do what reason
has decided must not be done.28
Leontius seems complex, in other words, only because his simple parts are
in competition with one another. Reason reasons and appetite desires, and
the human agent finds himself caught in the middle of their eternal
opposition.
The difficulty with such a disposal of the soul’s faculties is that it
accounts for the agent by diffusing his agency among a plurality of interior
agents. If reason reasons, appetite desires, and willful spirit spiritedly wills,
what remains for Leontius himself to do? And who finally tips the balance
so that Leontius obeys reason or succumbs to desire? To imagine that
Leontius has a choosing power independent of reason, appetite, and
thymos only calls for further dissection, the further isolation of further
faculties within his soul. To imagine a special intimacy between Leontius
28
Republic 440b. Jon Whitman discusses this passage perceptively, Allegory, pp. 26–8.
and the thymos (as active, deciding will) has just the same result. Because
Socrates wants simple causes and not complex agents, any account that
identifies the agent as a cause of his own action will simply require the
further multiplication of interior agents and will raise the question of
causes all over again.
Socrates’ search for the causes of action therefore threatens to open an
infinite regression rather like the regression that produces the third man.
So long as the cause is causal also of itself—so long as forms such as Reason
and Large are self-predicating—they must proliferate endlessly. In the case
of the third man and the metaphysics of being, this infinite regression
issues in renunciation and in the devastating critique of Parmenides. Here,
however, in his analysis of action, Socrates hints at other possibilities. His
account of Leontius moves agency to a new home, a new point of
mediation between mutable bodies and immutable causes. As Leontius
participates in the civil war playing out before his eyes, some measure of
his agency is refracted into the faculties that fight that war, and Socrates
lapses from analysis into narrative. Consider his metaphors. Appetite plays
the bully; reason resists; thymos takes sides; war breaks out. The faculties of
Leontius themselves play the role of agents, and what Socrates had tried to
conceive as static aitiai seem instead marauding homunculi with their own
wills, their own narratives, and their own faculties. The footsteps of
personification become audible.
This brush with personification happens without Plato’s acknowledg-
ment and more or less without his consent. The aim of Socrates, in the
passage I have quoted, is not to multiply agents but rather to disclose the
operations within a single complex agent of ordering reason and disorder-
ing desire. That agent, Leontius, stays in the fray throughout Socrates’
account: he himself is taken captive by appetite; he himself becomes angry.
But as the powers of his private cosmos occupy the center of Socrates’
attention, Leontius tends also to recede out to the margins. Socrates ends
the passage at hand with an image of someone looking into himself as
spectator: “I don’t think you can say that you’ve ever seen spirit, either in
yourself or anyone else, ally itself with appetite to do what reason has
decided must not be done.” The human agent here is in relationship with
himself, looking in on the theater of his own action almost as if from the
outside, and the total effect of the passage is to render the agent double,
ever in recession from himself and ever himself nonetheless. It is this
doubleness that drives the tentative emergence of the personifications,
who come out both to enact in miniature the agent’s operations of
reasoning and desiring, and to fill the space left vacant as he is differen-
tiated from the theater of action. These strange, static agents are an index
to Leontius’ simultaneous commerce with and alienation from himself, his
experience of his own faculties as beings who usurp him. In their other-
speaking signification of both the agent and of his interior cosmos, they
are intimations of reflexivity, the harbingers of a shift from an ethics
grounded in moving bodies—the Homeric ethics of action and glory—
toward an ethics newly grounded in the closed system of the soul—an
ethics of reflection and self-knowing.29
*
Because Plato subjugates mutable bodies beneath an immutable and unified
soul, his discourses retain always a kind of resistance to the encroachments of
allegory. Certainly they do not, by themselves, produce the conditions
necessary for the development of allegorical narrative. But because he puts
acting bodies into negotiation with a conceptual order beyond action and
body, Plato sets down the blueprints for the methectic cosmos in which
allegory will unfold. The Republic is abundant with the suggestion that the
configuration of the soul participates in a series of analogous configurations
at every level of the total cosmic order. The tripartite soul of the human
person (reason, thymos, and appetite) resonates with the tripartite form of the
state (rulers, warriors, and laborers), with the tripartite structure of music
(words, rhythm, and melody), with the tripartite order of human activity
(using, creating, and imitating), with the tripartite order of human motives
(wisdom, ambition, and desire), and, ultimately, with the tripartite order of
being itself (forms, instances, and imitations). Each of these triads partici-
pates in the others—each is a microcosm of the cosmos at large—and every
component in this microcosmic order is therefore significant of other com-
ponents at other levels. The soul, in this model, is always in commerce with
the cosmos, implicated in the whole by secret patterns and harmonic
correspondences. The soul ordered according to reason participates in the
right order of all things, and the sources of its agency and its actions lie well
beyond its own outer limits.
When Plato dismisses the practice of allegorical exegesis, he does so in
part because he wants to preserve a participatory relationship between the
agents who inhabit the mutable world and the immutable order that
expresses itself in those agents. He wants the gods to be properly godlike,
the exemplars of good to be properly good. But in his efforts to preserve
that relationship, he hints at another kind of allegory, a form of narrative
making that the ancient schools of allegoresis do not imagine. The ancient
29
My language here is partly indebted to Charles Taylor’s account of the “long-
developing process whereby an ethic of reason and reflection gains dominance over one
of action and glory,” Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 117. Taylor grounds his account of Platonic self-
mastery in Republic IV; see his pp. 115–26.
schools turn to allegorical interpretation, after all, as a way of dissolving
the relationship between temporal agents and a total order. Even when the
Stoics read the pantheon of Homer and Hesiod as the expression of a
cosmic physis—so that Zeus represents the articulation of that physis in life
[zōē] and Hera its articulation in air [aēr]—their allegoresis resolves the
gods into a fluid material continuity that undermines each god’s integrity
as an acting, vital, individual presence.30 The gods of the Stoic cosmos are
physical extensions of a single divine force, points along a material
continuum that has little room for agents or action. All action, in the
Stoic cosmos, simply extends the vibrations of the one divine power into a
universal cyclical movement. To read the gods rightly is to absorb the
actions of individual gods into that universal stasis. The allegoresis of
the Stoic exegetes translates divine action from mythos to physis, from the
temporal realm of narrative to the static realm of cosmography.31
In its earlier phases, the Stoic tradition regards this sort of reading as a
liberation from the delusions of myth. The early Stoics loosely agree with
Aristotle in regarding myth as the corrupted memory of an earlier philo-
sophical wisdom. As the high civilizations of deep antiquity fell into ruin,
the Stoics suppose, the deepest secrets of those civilizations declined into
incoherent fables. Any return to the ancient wisdom must begin with the
stripping away of those fables in search of the deeper secrets they dimly
recall. The Stoics therefore regard the wisdom of Homer as a thing not
artfully concealed but rather blindly obscured by the narrative surface.
The power of allegory is grounded not in any economy of philosophical
ascent, nor in the nature of the cosmos, but rather in the need of
30
In naming the Stoics I pass over the shadowy record of the very earliest interpreters of
Greek epic: the Pythagoreans, the Sophists, and the bards themselves. On these traditions,
see Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the
Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986),
pp. 10–43; Andrew Ford, The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in
Classical Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 67–89; and Luc
Brisson, How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology,
trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 32–8.
31
My comments on Stoic exegesis, and on the transition from mythos to physis, are
indebted to Whitman’s discussion of Diogenes Laertius, Allegory, pp. 32–8. Whitman finds
the same tendencies at work in the psychology of Chrysippus and, later, of Seneca’s de Ira,
where the Anger of the angry man rampages about as a bloodthirsty monster but then
disappears when the man returns to a reasonable state. She disappears because she is merely
a manifestation of the man’s corporeal soul in a particular state, not an independent agent,
not a power of the soul with whom other powers (such as reason or thymos) must contend.
The only source of action, in Seneca’s account of the soul, is the material soul itself—much
as the only source of action in the Stoic cosmos is the one pervasive material god—and the
presence of the personification therefore indicates disarray within that soul. See Allegory,
pp. 45–7.
correcting a mistake, of rescuing wisdom from the shackles of narrative.32
Only with the interventions of the philosopher Cornutus at the threshold
of the Christian era, and with the development of Middle Platonism in the
first two centuries of that era, will it begin to be possible to read the
material forms of narrative as the expression of a layered, reflexive, and
other-speaking temporal cosmos. And only with this notion of allegory as
the very language of creation will a robust practice of compositional
allegory begin to emerge.33 So long as Greek allegoresis reduces the gods
to points along a seamless material continuum, it eradicates the rifts—
between body and idea, between Form and form, between effects and causes,
between actions and agents—that so persistently plague Plato’s economy
of participation, and it shuts down the possibility that Plato reluctantly
opens up, the possibility of a language that occupies and explores those rifts.
Allegoresis, in other words, sometimes resists, or tries to resist, the
conditions that enable allegorical making. To the extent that the disen-
chanting project of allegorical interpretation dispels narrative altogether, as
in the case of the Stoics, a devotion to allegory’s interpretive operations
tends in fact to foreclose the possibility of its poetic operations. The gods
of the Stoa threaten to multiply infinitely, until they occupy as many
degrees of extension as exist in the material physis of the cosmos. The
solvent power of allegoresis only accelerates their dissolution as temporal
agents, and in doing so it severs any necessary or natural connection
between narrative and hyponoia.34 Allegoresis as the ancient schools prac-
tice it therefore erodes its own explanatory and generative power, dismiss-
ing narrative as error and so leaving itself unable to account for, or to direct,
narrative’s temporal forms. Plato, in his way, understands this problem.
His own efforts to disenchant narrative have, after all, only generated new
forms of narrative and raised again his questions about just how narrative
means. For all his commitment to the simplicity, immutability, and unity
of each god, he knows that the reductions of the exegetes will only divorce
32
For a detailed account of the early Stoic traditions and the difference (beginning with
Posidonius and Cornutus) of the early Christian centuries, see G. R. Boys-Stones, “The
Stoics’ Two Types of Allegory,” in Metaphor, Allegory, and the Classical Tradition, ed. Boys-
Stones.
33
I borrow “the very language of creation” from Boys-Stones, “The Stoics’ Two Types
of Allegory,” p. 216. On the Middle Platonic development of allegorical exegesis, from
Numenius and Cronius to Clement and Origen, see Lamberton, Homer the Theologian,
pp. 44–82. On the departure from Stoic reading practices in late antiquity, from Cicero
to Macrobius, see Philip Rollinson, Classical Theories of Allegory and Christian Culture
(Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1981), pp. 1–10.
34
Cicero’s Cotta confounds the Stoic Balbus with just this claim about infinite prolif-
eration, De Natura Deorum, ed. with English trans. by H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 3.16–25. On which, see Teskey,
Allegory and Violence, pp. 47–50; and Stafford, Worshipping Virtues, pp. 20–1.
the gods from their own actions and effects, severing the temporal world
from any involvement in the eternal. His attempts to articulate an account
of the forms run up against much the same problem. Can a timeless,
bodiless, self-consistent form of beauty even be beautiful? Can temporal,
variable bodies possibly disclose such a form? Likewise, what sorts of
narratives can disclose the forms of gods who are by nature good? Plato
cannot escape these questions, because he wants to assert a resemblance, a
methectic commerce, between the ontological goodness of each god and
the operations of that god in the material cosmos. However insistently he
turns to critical analysis as a way of solving the problems of narrative, Plato
just as insistently maps out the limits of that analysis. His experiments in
the disenchantment of the world of matter, action, and time are ever
sensitive to the need of a dialectic negotiation between that material
world and the immaterial forms it embodies and conceals.
*
Plato’s search for the commerce between agents and forms commits him,
in other words, to something like a search for a coherent allegorical
language. His methectic cosmos intimates a grammar of likeness that
the perverse substitutions of Homer’s philosophical interpreters do not
know, a grammar with the power to force agents and forms into dynamic
play. I have said that Prudentius participates in Plato’s resistance to the
absurdities of this grammar of likeness, that he too finds bodies collapsing
under the demands of signification. This is so, in part, because Prudentius
writes from the center of a new campaign of disenchantment. For Chris-
tian believers in the early centuries of the church, the idea of the incarna-
tion awakens an acute sense of historical rupture, an experience of pre-
Christian history as something remote and obsolete. The opening scenes
of the Psychomachia, in which Faith slays Worship-of-the-Old-Gods and
Chastity speaks triumphantly of “our times” [tempora nostra] as a new
age in the history of redemption, correspond with the temporal breakages
that direct Christian polemicists throughout late antiquity in their
campaigns against the ancient gods (29, 67). In the couple of decades
after Prudentius writes the Psychomachia, Augustine argues in his City of
God that the gods of Rome are not divinities but infernal demons,
“phantoms [phantasmata] come from him who, hoping to ensnare
unhappy souls by delusive rites of many false gods [multorum falsorumque
deorum fallacibus sacris] and to turn them away from the true worship of
the true God . . . ‘transforms himself,’ as was said of Proteus, ‘into every
shape.’”35 The mythological histories that chronicle the doings of these
35
De civitate Dei 10.10. Both English and Latin I quote from the Loeb edition, ed. and
trans. by R. W. Dyson as City of God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).
gods are inventions of “utterly deceitful spirits” [fallacissimi spiritus] who
“gladly welcome such inventions about divinities,” Augustine says, “to the
end that sufficient authority may seem to have been transferred to earth
from heaven itself for the perpetration of such crimes and villainies.”36
Augustine aims to refute these false histories and to unmask these impos-
tors. He persistently calls his readers to be incredulous, to make a break
from the dark enchantments of the discredited past. “Awake,” he urges all
true believers, “it is now day. . . . Do not follow false and fallacious gods.
Abandon them, rather, and despise them, break away into true liberty.”37
In these exhortations to incredulity, and in his elaborately developed
accounts of ancient conspiracy and illusion, Augustine fashions his treatise
as a countercharm, an exercise in critical disbelief. He shares Prudentius’
sense of living just this side of a historical rupture, and he sets out to
repudiate an enchanted past by exposing and destroying the old idols who
presided over that past.
Augustine’s critical project therefore makes an experiment in a revo-
lutionary temporality, a kind of modernity. His attack against the gods
belongs to an originative moment of disenchantment, a moment of
temporal breakage and hermeneutic suspicion. In making this attack,
he looks specifically back to Plato as his own originative moment, a first
breaking away from the old error of seeking divinity in the material
world. Plato’s metaphysics of immaterial causes dispels a whole world of
superstition, Augustine claims, and the Platonic schools that adhere to
this metaphysics triumph “not only over the mythical theology, which
delights the minds of the irreligious by showing them the crimes of the
gods, nor only over political theology, in which foul demons under the
name of gods lead astray communities that are devoted to earthly
delights,” but also over the more sophisticated attempts of other philo-
sophical schools to understand the gods as part of, or as representations
of, a natural order.38 Augustine wants to follow Plato in reinterpreting
the gods. His project of disenchantment is to some degree a strategy of
36
De civitate Dei 2.10. For Augustine’s attack on the mythological histories of the gods,
see especially his invectives against the poets and players (2.6–14, 25–7), his discussion of
what he calls the “fabulous” [fabulosa] or “mythical” [mythica] theology (6.5–7), and his
revisionist history of the pagan world (Book 18).
37
De civitate Dei 2.29; and see also 10.10.
38
Augustine’s account of Plato’s philosophy occupies much of his eighth book, De
civitate Dei 8.3–13; qtd. at 8.5. On the theology of Varro, to which he particularly refers in
this passage, see Augustine’s Book 6. On the importance to Platonic metaphysics of the
question of causes and origins, see, for instance, 8.10: “Other philosophers have worn out
their talents and zeal in seeking out the causes of things [rerum causis] and the right way to
learn and to live; but they [the Platonists], because they knew God, have discovered where
to find the cause by which the universe was established, the light whereby truth may be
apprehended, and the spring where happiness may be imbibed.”
reading, and many accounts of allegory have noted that the need to
explain away the pagan gods does much to inform the development of
Christian allegorical reading practices.
What then motivates a poet such as Prudentius to write a narrative
that gives divine and spiritual beings material bodies? Such a practice
of narrative making needs the impelling energies not just of a new
project of disenchantment but also of a new project of enchantment, a
project strong enough to support the unstable forms of a difficult,
diffident narrative idiom. The whispers of that need are audible already
in the language of the Pauline epistles, which in the immediate after-
shock of the Christian rupture bear tidings not just of a new age but
also of a new humanity. In their language of moral exhortation, these
epistles frequently evoke the person of the god-man as a canceling and
constituting force, the center of a new identity for every human person
who participates in his being. Paul encourages the Colossians to remem-
ber that “you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God”
[apethanete gar kai hē zōē hymōn kekryptai syn tō Christō en tō theō]; he
explains his freedom from the ritual demands of the Jewish law by
claiming, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me [zō
de ouketi egō, zē de en emoi Christos]; and the life I now live in the flesh
[en sarki] I live by faith in the Son of God”; and he explains that he
rejoices in suffering because “in my flesh [en tē sarki mou],” in the
actions and afflictions of his own body, “I complete what is lacking in
Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body [tou sōmatos autou], that is,
the church.”39 The Pauline epistles often suggest, in other words, that
the Christian’s spiritual and bodily existence are grounded in, and
somehow inseparable from, the spirit and the body of the Word made
flesh. The language of these epistles, therefore, hints at a selfhood that
begins with the divine person hid in the human person, the human
body hid in the divine body. The incarnation of the Christ, as Paul
interprets it, makes possible a paradoxical negotiation by which human
agent loses herself, and finds herself, in the actions, words, and identities
of the divine agent:
When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with
our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of
God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that
we may also be glorified with him [klēronomoi men theou, synklēronomoi de
39
Col. 3:3; Gal. 2:20; Col. 1:24. I quote English text from the Revised Standard Version,
ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973),
and Greek text from the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece (Stuttgart: Deutsche
Bibelstiftung, 1979).
Christou, eiper sympaschomen hina kai syndoxasthōmen]. . . . For those whom
he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son
[symmorphous tēs eikonos tou huiou autou], in order that he might be the first-
born [prōtotokon] among many brethren.40
This new negotiation amounts not, as in both Plato and the Stoics, to a
negotiation between personal agents and impersonal final causes, but
rather to a disclosure within personal agents of a final agent-cause, what
Paul calls “Christ in you [Christon en hymin], the hope of glory.”41 The
dynamics of this new sort of selfhood will, in the discourses of many
Christian theologians from the second to the fourth centuries, take the
form of a dialectic movement, out from the human to the divine and
likewise back, with the divine, into the core of the human. Even in
second-century Alexandria, where the streams of Platonism run deep,
Clement expounds on Paul’s rhetorical question, “Do you not know
that you are God's temple?” by explaining that the Christian believer “is
consequently divine, and already holy, God-bearing, and God-borne
[theophorōn kai theophoroumenos].”42 The paradoxical quality of his
language—his God-bearing and God-borne believer—allows for neither
an escape from nor a final appeal to the material existence and temporal
activity of the human person. Though Clement does not articulate the
robust incarnational theology that has begun to take shape with Irenaeus
in the West, he tends nevertheless to affirm, against the philosophical
schools that denigrate the body, that the believer’s body is “perfected with
the perfection of the Saviour.”43 And though his account of happiness as
“the image and likeness” [eikona kai homoiōsin] of God in the believer
appeals to Plato as its authority, he hints also at a new basis for likeness, the
Savior who says to the Christian martyr, “‘dear brother,’ by reason of the
similarity of his life” [tēn tou biou homoiotēta].44 Especially in his praises of
martyrdom, he tends to echo the exhortation he quotes from the apostle
Peter—“you share Christ’s sufferings”—and to indicate that for just
this reason, for the sake of this shared suffering, the incarnate Lord “is
called brother”: “for he being life, in what he suffered,” Clement says,
“wished to suffer that we might live by his suffering.”45 In such passages,
Clement follows Paul in hinting at a Christological grounding for human
40 41
Rom. 8:15–17, 29. Col. 1:27.
42
Stromata 7.13.82. Greek quotations come from Clementis Alexandrini Opera, ed.
Wilhelm Dindorf, vols 2 and 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869). English quotations come
from “The Miscellanies,” in The Writings of Clement of Alexandria, trans. William Wilson,
vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1869). I quote Paul, as usual, from the Revised Standard
Version; 1 Cor. 3:16.
43 44
Stromata 4.26.163. Stromata 2.19.97, 4.4.14.
45
Stromata 4.7.43. Clement quotes 1 Pet. 4:13–14.
subjectivity, a model of personhood in which the human achieves fullness
of identity, and fullness of agency, in communion with the firstborn to
personhood, the god-man Christ.
*
In what remains of this chapter, I want to argue that this new model of
personhood is crucial to the emergence of allegorical narrative. For Pru-
dentius, who does much to establish the paradigmatic forms of Christian
allegorical making, and for Origen, who does much to establish the
paradigmatic forms of Christian allegorical reading, the incarnation of
the Word provokes not just new campaigns of disenchantment but also
new campaigns of enchantment. Origen and Prudentius both find that
their critical projects activate the paradoxes that haunted the projects of
Plato and the ancient schools. They also find, though, that the incarnation
opens up new possibilities for negotiating with those paradoxes, not
resolving them but rather sustaining them into fragile and generative
narrative forms. These new forms will become the primal stuff, the genetic
material, from which poets down to Spenser and Bunyan will build their
other-speaking fictions.
In his exegetical practice, Clement’s pupil Origen draws heavily on
ancient schools of interpretation, and his readings of the scripture often
resemble the reductive readings of the Stoics. He explains in his third-
century De Principiis that the biblical narratives are full of manifest
absurdities, of things “which could not have happened at all,” things
which “could neither be true nor useful” and which can only be taken as
“stumbling-blocks and interruptions of the historical sense” [offendicula
quaedam vel intercapedines intellegentiae fieri historialis].46 How, after all,
could the first three days of creation have an evening and a morning when
the sun and moon were not created until the fourth day? How could a
fruit tree convey knowledge of good and evil? How could Cain depart
from the presence of God when God is everywhere? Origen finds the
biblical history to be riddled with such absurdities, and as he proceeds
through the scriptures, his list of narrative failures gets longer and longer.
Jesus tells his disciples that, if someone strikes your one cheek, you should
turn the left cheek also: but of course everyone knows, Origen objects,
that a right-handed blow will strike the left cheek in the first place. The
devil takes Jesus to the top of a mountain and shows him all the kingdoms
of the earth: but everyone knows, Origen objects, that there is not a
46
Origen, De Principiis 4.2.9. I quote throughout from Paul Koetschau’s edition of
Rufinus’ Latin version, in Origenes Werke, vol. 5 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1913), and from
G. W. Butterworth’s English translation of Koetschau’s text, On First Principles (Gloucester,
MA: Peter Smith, 1973).
mountain in existence to which all the kingdoms of the earth are adjacent.
And how could Jesus imagine that your right eye might offend you, when
the left eye and the right eye always work together? What is the meaning of
these incoherent texts?47
Origen’s answer is that biblical narratives fail for a purpose, the purpose
of directing the reader’s attention away from narrative altogether and
toward something more important. The incoherence of these texts sends
the reader, he says, “to a higher and loftier road,” into secret and spiritual
meaning, “a meaning worthy of God.” While this spiritual meaning can
sometimes find expression in history, Origen most often imagines that it
must entail a cancelation of history: “the historical narrative is interrupted
and broken,” he says, “with the object of turning and calling the attention
of the reader, by the impossibility of the literal sense, to an examination of
the inner meaning” [quibus historialis narrandi ordo interpolatus vel inter-
cisus per inpossibilitatem sui reflecteret ac revocaret intentionem legentis ad
intellegentiae interioris examen].48 In his homily on the creation account,
for instance, Origen explains that when God creates heaven and earth, the
heaven he makes “is our mind, which is also itself spirit”; and he then
proceeds to disclose the meaning of the puzzling passage in which God,
several days later, creates heavenly bodies: “it can happen to us,” Origen
says, “if only we also are zealous to be called and made heaven. We shall
have lights in us which illuminate us, namely Christ and his Church. For
he himself is ‘the light of the world’ who also illuminates the Church by
his light.”49 His reading does not clarify so much as it dispels the difficult
details of the narrative. Again in his homily on the impossible mountain-
top temptation of Christ, Origen explains that when the devil shows
Christ the kingdoms of the world in a “moment of time” (as Luke’s
account says), the kingdoms are not the actual, historical kingdoms of
this world—not “the kingdoms of the Persians, and of the Indians”—and
the moment of time is not an actual moment of narrative time. The
kingdoms are rather the operations of wickedness in the world, “both sin
reigning and those who are ruled by vices,” and the moment is “the
present course of the ages, which in comparison with eternity lasts the
equivalent of a moment.”50 In both these homilies history vanishes, and
the allegorical meaning discloses itself just as the chaff of narrative is
winnowed away. Allegorical reading seems to work along the lines of the
47 48
De Principiis 4.3.1, 3. De Principiis 4.2.9.
49
In Genesim Homiliae 1.2, 5, trans. Ronald Heine in Homilies on Genesis and Exodus
(Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1981).
50
In Lucam Homiliae 30.2, trans. Joseph T. Lienhard in Homilies on Luke (Washington
DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996).
“this for that” models of signification I described in my Introduction. It is
an instrument of disenchantment, not a means of belonging to history so
much as a vehicle for escaping from history, out to a static order of
meaning removed from history’s contingencies.
The incarnation is one of the motive forces behind this effort in
disenchantment, as Origin intimates when he reads the creation of the
heavenly bodies as the figure of Christ in the human soul. His reinter-
pretation of the Genesis text is a way of capturing for Christian believers a
narrative history from which these modern believers must feel distant, a
history that seems not to acknowledge the Christ on whom their faith is
founded. In reading this text as a passage about the soul, Origen cancels
the awkward details of that history in favor of a spiritual principle that
needs no history. But does the incarnation do anything for Origen’s
reading practice beyond providing a rupture in history, a motive for
disenchantment? Does the theology of the Word made flesh furnish new
patterns of reading? My comments thus far would hardly seem to suggest
so. Origen has, after all, learned many of the techniques of his allegorical
exegesis from Stoic, Philonic, and Middle-Platonic sources. His debts to
ancient Greek schools are especially clear when he disposes scripture into
three senses, literal, moral, and spiritual-mystical, on the microcosmic
analogy of the body, soul, and spirit of the human. He suggests such a
disposition in, for instance, the theoretical passages of the De Principiis,
where he explains that “as man, therefore, is said to consist of body, soul,
and spirit, so also does the holy scripture,” and where he tends to associate
the second sense with moral precept and the third with the “heavenly
things” of which the literal things are “a copy and a shadow” [exemplaribus
et umbrae].51 His language of “copy and shadow” here has Platonic
resonances, and much of his scheme would be comprehensible within
the parameters of Stoic exegesis. Many Stoic interpreters recognize a
progression from literal to ethical to metaphysical meaning and likewise
dispose philosophy into the related triad of logic, ethics, and physics. This
tripartite progression shapes the practice of Philo’s first-century exegetical
method, in the steps of which Origen often follows.52 When Origen
illustrates the progress from the literal to the moral sense by quoting
Paul’s injunction “You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the
grain,” and then explaining that Paul really has in mind not oxen but
human laborers in religious service, he engages in a mode of tropological
51
De Principiis 4.2.4, 6.
52
On this tripartite scheme and its influence, see John Dillon, The Middle Platonists: 80
B.C. to A.D. 220 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977, rev. ed. 1996), pp. 141–5.
reading that would be perfectly comprehensible to Philo and to any
number of ancient exegetical schools.53
But Origen is also a theoretician of the Word made flesh, and his
meditations on the incarnate Christ open up for him, also, a very different
set of possibilities for allegorical reading. In many passages of the De
Principiis, Origen thinks carefully about how the conscious life of the
human person might be rooted in the life of the incarnate Christ. After a
disquisition on the humanity of Christ and on the image of humanity
“returning from the dead with spoils after vanquishing the kingdom of
death,” he begins his summation of the nature of Christ as follows:
The only-begotten Son of God, therefore . . . both made all things and “loves
what He made.” For since he is the invisible “image” of the “invisible God”
[nam cum invisibilis dei ipse sit imago invisibilis], he granted invisibly to all
rational creatures whatsoever a participation [participationem] in himself, in
such a way that each obtained a degree of participation proportionate to the
loving affection with which he had clung to him.54
This account suggests a nascent grammar of likeness between human
agents and final causes, and it grounds this grammar of likeness in two
facts: the fact of creation, and the fact of love. These two facts, likewise,
Origen grounds in the one creator and lover of the human, the Christ who
is all at once the perfect eikōn of God and the perfect eidos of the human
person. “For the things that were made, how could they live,” he asks
elsewhere, “except by the gift of life? Or the things that exist, how could
they really and truly exist, unless they were derived from the truth
[ex veritate descenderent]? Or how could rational beings exist, unless the
Word or reason had existed before them? Or how could they be wise, unless
wisdom existed?”55 All of which is to suggest not only that the life, wisdom,
and rationality of the human person are inconceivable apart from the
creative presence of the divine person, but also that the human, in a
mystery, embodies and signifies Christ just as Christ in a mystery embodies
and signifies the invisible God.
These Christological passages are dense with the language of participa-
tion, and Origen gestures often toward the possibility of a human identity
that participates in the divine identity. In his comments on Paul’s declar-
ation to the Colossians—“for you have died, and your life is hid with
Christ in God”—Origen urges that, just as Christ kept himself from all
53
De Principiis 4.1.12.
54
De Principiis 2.6.2–3. I have here omitted the editorial brackets found in Koetschau’s
Latin text.
55
evil and so became the vessel of the wisdom, truth, and life of God, “so,
too, should each one of us, after a fall or a transgression, cleanse himself
from stains by the example set before him [exemplo proposito], and taking a
leader for the journey proceed along the steep path of virtue, that so
perchance by this means we may as far as is possible become, through our
imitation of him [per imitationem eius], partakers [participes] of the divine
nature.”56 His language of commerce develops out of the suggestion of
fraternal union with Christ that lurks everywhere in Paul and that draws
Clement’s Gnostic and Platonic discourses into territory that neither of
those older systems ever quite enters.
It is in this language of participation that Origen finds new models for
the practice of allegorical reading. Henri de Lubac has argued that Ori-
gen’s most important method of ordering the senses of scripture is in fact
different from the tripartite scheme Origen inherits from ancient exegesis.
In most of his sermons and expositions, de Lubac observes, Origen renders
the levels of meaning not as literal, moral, and heavenly, but rather as
literal, heavenly, and moral, in that order.57 This difference in the order-
ing of the three senses might seem superficial, except that the former
manner of ordering the three senses, from literal to moral and then to
heavenly or spiritual, evokes cosmic schemes that lead away from the
human agent, first into a rational soul not neatly identifiable with that
agent, and then out to the larger cosmos that grounds the existence of the
rational soul. When, on the other hand, Origen in his homilies reads the
literal facts of the Exodus as signs of the mystery of Christ and then
unfolds the ethical implications of this mystery for “souls who follow
Christ along the same path on which Christ preceded them,” he has
grounded the text’s levels of meaning in a mystical participation that
leads out to the person of the divine and then, via that divine person,
back to the historical human agents with whom he has commerce.58
Allegorical reading, in the light of this Christocentric structure, has
human agents in history as its terminal points, and for this reason it
cannot quite regard itself as the correction of a mistake, or as the stripping
away of a historical-mythological surface to reveal a primary ethical and
metaphysical truth. In Origen’s rendering, the historical agents of the
biblical narrative participate in the mystery of the Christ, and that mystery
56
57
Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, trans. Marc Sebanc, vol. 1, The Four Senses of
Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI, and Edinburgh: Eerdmans Publishing Company and T&T
Clark, 1998), pp. 142–50.
58
Homiliae in Librum Judicum 7.2, trans. Elizabeth Ann Dively Lauro in Homilies on
Judges (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010). On which passage,
see de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, p. 146.
in turn enfolds every soul who reads the text with spiritual eyes. The
mystery of incarnation is the ground—and the biblical text the medium—
of a real communion among the persons, past and present, whose lives are
hid with Christ in God.
The potential significance of Origen’s Christology for his exegetical
practice becomes fully apparent in the sections of De Principiis that follow
his critique of narrative incoherence in the scriptures. In these sections of
his treatise, Origen uses the theology of the Word made flesh to solve a
conundrum. He wants to argue here that the story of Israel is in fact the
story of the incarnate Word. He appropriates the words of Psalm 45 to
describe the Hebrew text—“all the king’s glory is within”—and he implies
throughout that the god-man is the root of the text’s allegorical structure,
the secret behind all the Hebrew histories, patriarchs, prophecies, and
laws.59 But he likewise insists that the depths of this secret are, as Paul
says, “past finding out,” and he warns off the curious reader who might be
tempted to pry into the details of the mystical sense. Glossing Paul’s
language of wonder, Origen is emphatic: “he did not say that God’s
judgments were hard to search out, but that they could not be searched
out at all; not that his ways were hard to find out, but that they were
impossible to find out.”60 How, then, can Origen claim to know the
mystery that neither Moses nor Solomon could name or apprehend? How
can his readings of scripture find out what by its nature cannot be found?
Though he takes care not to dilute the force of these questions, Origen
indicates the first part of an answer to them when he says these mysteries
“could not be comprehended by any except our Lord Jesus Christ and the
Holy Spirit.” Can this claim furnish the grounds of an incarnational
exegesis? Just perhaps, Origen suggests. He defers all exegetical authority
to a single ideal reader, a divine-human exegete who alone understands the
mystery of “the beginnings of all things and the ends of the universe.”61
The most powerful implications of this deferral he articulates in one of his
sermons, when he raises the possibility for the human reader of exegesis by
participation:
we can understand the Law correctly, if Jesus reads it to us, so that, as he
reads, we may receive his “mind” and understanding. Or is it not to be
thought that he understood “mind” from this, who said, “But we have the
mind of Christ, that we may know the things which have been given to us by
God, which things also we speak”? And [did not] those [have the same
understanding] who said, “Was not our heart burning within us when he
59
De Principiis 4.2.4–3.14; qtd. at 4.3.14.
60
De Principiis 4.3.14. Origen quotes Paul from Rom. 11:33.
61
opened the Scriptures to us in this way?” when he read everything to them,
beginning from the Law of Moses up to the prophets, and revealed the things
which had been written about himself.62
The Christ who grounds this hermeneutic is all at once the giver, the
reader, and the object of the scriptures, as if that sacred text were written
all at once by, for, and about him. The Christian interpreter therefore
reads by methexis, by participating in this divine person’s activity of
giving, interpreting, and being the Word. Human readers have the
power to speak the mystery of the Word for the same reason they have
the power themselves to signify that mystery: because, as Paul says and
Origen believes, “We have the mind of Christ.”63
This participation does not enable an escape from the problems of
ancient metaphysics. It does not close up the conceptual rifts that Plato
discovers between agents and ideas, or between the mutable and the
immutable, and it does not dissolve the impossible paradoxes of predica-
tion. Nor does it enable an escape from the narrative difficulties to which
Origen responds in his allegorical readings of the creation of the heavenly
bodies or the mountaintop temptation of Christ. The incarnation of the
Word in fact has just the opposite effect. Within the resources of Platonic
philosophy, the best way of escape from the embarrassment of embodied
personhood is into the Good, with its purity beyond action and its
resistance to all predication. Within the resources of much ancient exe-
gesis, the best way of escape from the embarrassment of narrative is into
meaning, with its purity from the corruptions of history and of action.
The incarnation does not diminish the allure of these mechanisms of
escape, and that allure will in fact inform a host of medieval Christian
discourses: the negative theologies of the mystics, the revisionist kernel-
and-husk models that guide much medieval exegesis, the longing of some
millenarian discourses for an apocalypse that cancels history. What the
incarnation does, rather, is motivate a dialectical or backwards movement,
a turn back into the material orders of history and action. It troubles any
attempt to dissolve time’s contradictions and instead asserts those contra-
dictions with new vigor.
This is so because the incarnate Word orchestrates a collision, world-
shattering and world-affirming, between the order of history and the order
62
Homiliae in Jesu Nave 9.8, qtd. from Daniel Boyarin, “Origen as a Theorist of
Allegory: Alexandrian Contexts,” in The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, ed. Rita
Copeland and Peter Struck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
pp. 48–9. Boyarin evokes vividly both the problems of ancient allegorical interpretation
and the surprise of Origen’s solutions.
63
I Cor. 2:16.
of eternity. The god-man who undergirds Origen’s exegetical method
reconstitutes the creation as grounded in a person and likewise reconstitutes
the divine person as himself, in a mystery, clothed in creation. He therefore
initiates a downward movement of the immutable creator into the mutable
creation, and he grounds later medieval formulations such as that of John
Scotus Eriugena, who says in the ninth century that “the surface of the
Scriptures” and the “sensible forms of the world” are the two garments of
Christ, what Aelred of Rievaulx in the twelfth century will call a “double
tunic.”64 This assumption of the mutable creation by the immutable creator
entrenches paradox at the heart of all things and so renders inescapable the
impossibilities from which the ancient schools instinctively recoil. And
because Christ in his person discloses the forms of history and the forms
of eternity as other-speaking signs of one another, his incarnation makes
possible a range of allegorical idioms. He charges the materials of history
with presence of God, and he therefore opens the possibility of a narrative
that discloses in its own contours, in its very failures and contingencies, a
divine agent who could be disclosed in no other way.
*
In a number of texts from around the turn of the fifth century, the
theology of incarnation begins to bring into view the dynamics of allegor-
ical fiction. Augustine, in his articulation of the human agent as an
inward-looking subject, suggests with particular clarity the consequences
of the incarnation both for narrative and for the sort of reflexive self-
analysis alongside which narrative’s allegorical possibilities so often
emerge. If Plato’s search for the Good in the soul involves a turning of
his gaze toward the forms (in the economy of which the Good makes itself
known) and away from the plane of contingent action, Augustine begins
his search for the Good in the temporal experience of the human person.65
He directs his search into the self as self, and into the experience of
experiencing the self as self. “You know where he is,” Augustine admon-
ishes the seeker after God; “he is most intimately present to the human
heart [the intimus cordi], but the heart has strayed from him. Return to
your heart, then, you wrongdoers, and hold fast to him that made you.”66
64
Both qtd. from de Lubac, who argues that both text and creation, for these medieval
exegetes, participate in “the sacramental mystery of the flesh of Christ.” “The two garments
of Christ” is also his: Medieval Exegesis, pp. 77–8.
65
On this contrast between Plato and Augustine, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self,
pp. 127–42.
66
I quote in English from Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New
City Press, 1997), 4.12.18, and in Latin from Confessions, ed. James J. O’Donnell, vol. 1
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
Such a turn into the heart is, as this passage from Confessions makes
explicit, grounded in the peculiar presence and image of God there.
Exactly because “your God,” as he says to his soul, “is to you the life of
your life itself ” [deus autem tuus etiam tibi vitae vita est], the life of the soul
matters, and the capacity of the soul to contemplate itself matters. In
descending into itself in contemplation, it ascends to a contemplation of
God.67 Augustine therefore cultivates a reflexive language of self-
encounter—“then toward myself I turned, and asked myself, ‘Who are
you?’ And I answered my own question: ‘A man’” [et direxi me ad me et
dixi mihi, “tu quis es?,” et respondi, “homo” ]—and he meditates at length,
in his great treatise on the Trinity, on what happens “when the mind sets
itself in its own view by thinking about itself ” [quando se mens in suo
conspectu sui cogitatione constituit].68 His search for the Trinity leads him
to just that question, “for although the human mind [mens] is not of the
same nature as God, still the image [imago] of that nature than which no
nature is better is to be sought and found in that part of us than which our
nature has nothing better.”69 One of the most important means of
apprehending the Trinity is, for Augustine, the soul’s experience of
remembering, understanding, and loving itself, in which operations “we
see a trinity, not yet God of course, but already the image of God”
[cernimus trinitatem, nondum quidem deum sed iam imaginem dei].70 In
the hands of later mystics this interior economy will furnish a path of
graduated ascent into God. And these economies of ascent will be import-
ant for allegory because they render the active, reflexive human soul as all
at once a reader of itself and, as text, a signifier of the divine and cosmic
orders of which it bears the image. Augustine’s inward turn fashions the
soul as the theater of dialectic negotiation between interior and exterior
(or, after the manner of the Christ, between human and divine) agencies.
In so fashioning the soul, Augustine elaborates on the language of
captivity and conflict that lurks in Plato and that develops through later
antiquity, and he therefore discovers himself as a contested piece of
territory, entangled in participation with competing, contradictory para-
digmatic agents. When he meditates on the story of Victorinus, who was
constrained to give up teaching rhetoric and thereby freed to pursue God,
he articulates his interior conflict as follows:
67
Confessions 10.6.10.
68
Confessions 10.6.9; De Trinitate 14.6, which I quote in English from The Trinity,
trans. Edmund Hill (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991) and in Latin from Aurelii
Augustini Opera, vol. 16.2, ed. William John Mountain, in Corpus Christianorum: Series
Latina, vol. 50a (Turnhout: Typographia Brepols, 1968).
69 70
De Trinitate 14.8. De Trinitate 14.8.
I ached for a like chance myself, for it was no iron chain imposed by anyone
else that fettered me, but the iron of my own will [mea ferrea voluntate]. The
enemy had my power of willing [velle meum] in his clutches, and from it had
forged a chain to bind me. . . .
A new will had begun to emerge in me, the will to worship you disinter-
estedly and enjoy you, O God, our only sure felicity; but it was not yet
capable of surmounting that earlier will strengthened by inveterate custom.
And so the two wills [duae voluntates meae] fought it out—the old and the
new, the one carnal, the other spiritual—and in their struggle tore my soul
apart [atque discordando dissipabant animam meam].
I thus came to understand from my own experience what I had read, how
the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit strives against the flesh. I was
aligned with both [ego quidem in utroque], but more with the desires
I approved in myself than with those I frowned upon, for in those latter
I was not really the agent, since for the most part I was enduring against my
will rather than acting freely [ibi enim magis iam non ego, quia ex magna parte
id patiebar invitus quam faciebam volens].71
The language here is the language of the psychomachia, the fiction of the
soul in conflict—machē, “battle”—with itself. Augustine figures himself as
aligned with both the agencies that battle for his will (the Latin simply
reads, ego quidem in utroque, “I indeed was in both”) and so develops a
suggestion that is often present in the Christian language of interior
captivity: the suggestion that the plight of the contested agent is not so
much a captivity as a methexis, a participation. To look for the influence
of other agents, in Augustine’s account, is not to turn away from the
human agent but to turn squarely toward the human agent, and this
principle is the more true when the other agent is the Christ, the ground
and sum of human agency. Augustine achieves such subtle penetration
into his own soul exactly because, by a dialectic movement, he finds his
soul opening up onto greater vistas and so finds himself moving both
inward and outward, through the self to the cosmos. The language of
reflexive isolation that reverberates already in Paul—the “I am not I”—has
here developed to a point that Augustine finds in himself two I’s, each
vying to become “myself,” each in participation with spiritual powers that
lie beyond the self. The metaphors of battle that haunt both Plato and
Paul are deepening into the expression of a more radically participatory
and personal cosmos.72
71
Confessions 8.5.10–11.
72
Marco Nievergelt discusses the ways in which Augustine figures his journey inward as
ultimately a journey to God, and he is perceptive on the “higher self” at which Augustine
aims as a “vanishing point,” ever pursued and never achieved. Nievergelt usefully looks to
If Augustine’s trajectory takes him deep into his own interior and, by
that track, out to a vast exterior, Prudentius moves according to something
like the inversion of that dialectic pattern. He, too, takes the incarnation as
the basis of a participatory model of human selfhood. Human persons are
“the figure and image [forma et imago] of Christ,” he says in his theological
poem Apotheosis, “made after the likeness of the Lord by the goodness of
the Father,” and at the same time Christ was appointed to come “into our
likeness after ages of time” [in nostram faciem post saecula Christo], a
“sharer” [consortem] in the qualities of human flesh and a “partaker
[participem] of its nature” (309–11; 161–2). Prudentius in this poem
imagines a double movement, of the Son into human flesh and of
human flesh, with the Son, to the throne of the Father: “the Son,” as he
says, “passed both ways” [Natus per utrumque cucurrit] (177). And he
particularly emphasizes the Son’s act of putting on, and ascending with,
the nature of the human. The language of his account anticipates the
image of the garment that later appears in John Scotus Eriugena and
Aelred of Rievaulx—“He himself wears the work He made,” as Prudentius
says (776)—and the passionate final movements of the Apotheosis insist
that the power of Christ’s redemptive work begins with his assumption of
the garment of human flesh: “What does Christ achieve,” the poet asks, “if
He does not take up my nature? [quid agit Christus si me non suscipit?] Or
whom does He set free from his infirmity if He does not stoop to assume
the burden of the flesh? [si dedignatur adire carnis onus]” (1019–21).
This divine assumption of human flesh changes the laws of narrative
because it effects radical changes in the nature of the human. Prudentius
says in Apotheosis that “man was once as the animals, but now the Spirit
has transformed him into the nature of a child of heaven by the inpouring
of God himself, who quickens what is mortal” (164–6). Human flesh is
not now what human flesh was, for now that “Christ is our flesh” [Christus
nostra caro est] (1046), the very substance and significance of “flesh” has
shifted to new ground. Partly for this reason, Prudentius is strong in his
emphasis on the temporal ruptures that attend the incarnation of the
Word. When Chastity speaks at the outset of the Psychomachia of “our
times” as the age of a new humanity, she locates the paradigm of this new
humanity in the flesh of Mary, who ushers humanity into new territory by
conceiving and bearing God: “since a virgin bore a child,” she says, “since
the day when man’s body lost its primeval nature [humani naturam
pristina origo deseruit], and power from on high created a new flesh
[carnem . . . novam]. . . . From that day all flesh is divine [omnis iam diva
Augustine’s figure of pilgrimage as a way of elucidating that transitory state. Allegorical

Quests from Deguileville to Spenser (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), p. 12.
caro], since it conceives Him and takes on the nature of God by a covenant
of partnership” (71–7). And what are the consequences of saying that all
flesh is divine? One of the consequences, for Prudentius, is that his
narrative of interior human conflict will likewise be a narrative of the
divine agent at work. Because God has both taken on the nature of human
persons and given his nature to human persons, the conflicts that rend the
interior life of the human person participate in the conflicts and the
redemptive processes that rend the creation at large. The verses with
which Prudentius introduces the action of his allegorical fiction promise
just this sort of Christocentric methexis:
since Thou, O Christ, art God born of the Father—say, our King, with what
fighting force the soul [mens] is furnished and enabled to expel the sins from
our breast; when there is disorder in our thoughts and rebellion arises within
us, when the strife of our evil passions vexes the spirit [exoritur quotiens
turbatis sensibus intus / seditio atque animam morborum rixa fatigat], say what
help there is then to guard her liberty, what array with superior force
withstands the fiendish raging in our heart. For, O kind leader, Thou hast
not expelled the followers of Christ to the ravages of the Sins without the
help of great Virtues or devoid of strength. Thou thyself dost command
relieving squadrons to fight the battle in the body close beset [ipse salutiferas
obsesso in corpore turmas / depugnare iubes]. (4–15)
Prudentius here suggests that the existence of his personifications is rooted
in the participatory negotiation between the human person and the
incarnate Christ. It is Christ who furnishes the soul with virtues and
then directs and inhabits the operations of those virtues. Chastity acknow-
ledges her grounding in Christ’s being when she declares, to Lust, “it is his
gift that thou liest conquered, filthy Lust, and canst not, since Mary,
violate my authority” (87–8). According to these opening passages of the
Psychomachia, the Christian warrior can command the army of the virtues
because Christ the warrior, in that Christian warrior, himself commands
those armies. In this language of participation, this discovery of the divine
agent in the interior of the embattled subject, Prudentius comes close to
the language of Augustine’s meditations on Victorinus and on the Trinity.
But Prudentius’ work of allegorical making also has a contrary
trajectory, an orientation that will haunt allegorical narratives down to
early modernity. The soul of his psychomachia is embattled, but it is
not really a subject. His narrative presents no human agent beset by
other agents, no competing proliferation of interior I’s, no mutable
person in the midst of an immutable cosmos of forms. Prudentius writes
rather as if the human soul simply is the cosmos. His poem concerns
itself with Christ and his army of Virtues; with their enemies, the
armies of evil; and with their theater of action, an entity he variously
calls the mens, the anima, the corpus: the soul of the warrior. What he does
not write about at all, except in a displaced way, is that soul’s experience of
itself. If there is a human person in his poem, that person performs no
actions, has no experiences or identity, has not even any parts. The
complex subjectivities of Augustine are nowhere to be found, and they
will not exert their full force on allegorical narrative until the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, in the elaborately self-regarding allegorical agents of
Alan of Lille, Guillaume de Lorris, and Jean de Meun.73
Even so, Prudentius sets down a pattern that will be crucial to those
later allegorical narratives—that will, indeed, do much to direct the efforts
of those narratives to represent human action in time. In his Psychomachia,
on the one hand, he comes close to removing the human subject from
history. The soul in which the action of the poem plays out has no
experiences, engages in no actions, traverses no time. This soul has no
gender or identity, no body, no contingencies of character or nature. Its
limitless interior spaces expand to encompass all of the cosmos and all of
time, as if the burden of meaning has urged the human person toward a
universality so complete that it amounts, almost, to a disappearance. On
the other hand, this dissolution of the subject into the absolute is not quite
a dissolution into a Stoic physis or into the stillness of the Platonic forms.
His absolute is, in the end, a person, a paradigmatic warrior and first
embattled subject who sets down the pattern for Prudentius’ warrior
virtues. The intimations of his being are vague, in Prudentius, but they
are just enough to keep narrative from dissolving altogether. Christ
undergirds, and is just apparent in, the person of Concord, who marshals
the virtues together as they prepare to build the kingdom of God. More
remarkably, Christ’s mother undergirds, and shows herself in, Chastity,
who both declares and represents the Blessed Virgin in the theater of the
soul. Just because these agents are agents, indissolubly bodily and per-
sonal, they represent the human person of the poem to herself and so
establish the contours, however faint, of her shadowy narrative being.
However persistently Prudentius tends to arrest narrative and eradicate the
human in favor of a static cosmography, the presence of the divine agent
stops the Psychomachia just short of total dissolution, turning the poem
back to the realm of the human and suspending its narrative in the fragile,
paradoxical middle state of allegorical enchantment.
When Concord makes her speech to the victorious virtues, she promises
a new reign of peace, “the fulfillment of a virtue’s work, peace the sum and
73
For this reason Charles Muscatine can observe, as he famously has, that Prudentius,
unlike the later French poets, is not a biographer but a “cosmographer.” “The Emergence of
Psychological Allegory in Old French Romance,” PMLA 68 (1953), pp. 1160–3.
substance of her toils” [pax plenum Virtutis opus, pax summa laborum]
(769). She dreams of inaction, of cessation from the burdens of temporal
being, and at the conclusion of Concord’s speech, Faith steps forward and
sets the virtues to the building of a city. That city is the New Jerusalem,
built within the vast interior of the human soul:
On the tops of the gateways gleam the twelve names of the apostolic senate
inscribed in gold. With these inscriptions the Spirit encircles the unseen
privacy of Soul [arcana recondita Mentis], calling elect sentiments into the
heart. (838–41)
This is hardly the last allegorical narrative that will conclude with the
coming of the eschaton and the escape of the poem’s agents from the
afflictions of time. Allegory, after all, is in some part a dream of escape, of
the dissolution into purity that informs the metaphysics of the forms and
the hermeneutics of the hyponoia. Prudentius figures the human person as
an eschatological being because doing so fashions the person into a final
revelation of the new creation and the City of God.74 His poem frees the
human from the rust of human life, and it figures the interior of the person
as likewise its own exterior, a microcosm that can gather into itself all the
orders of the real. These figurations of personhood will in the hands of
medieval poets give form both to a host of allegorical protagonists, who
strive toward union both with the cosmos and with themselves, and to the
deities who guide these protagonists. These deities—Genius, Reason,
Anima, Wisdom—reside in the soul and ground the identity of the
human person who possesses or projects them, but their terminal point
is in eternity, in the eschaton, even in the divine person himself. In the
play of that title, Wisdom is Christ, and so, in their own oblique ways, are
Langland’s Conscience and Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight. Like Concord in
the Psychomachia, they figure the promise of a participation in the cosmos
that dissolves into something more like identification with the cosmos.
But because they live in the shadow of the Word made flesh, these heroes
and deities pull back hard from the point of dissolution, back into the
contingencies of bodily, temporal, conscious human life. They will be the
impossible subjects of allegory, at once alien from, and the animate image
of, all material and immaterial things.
74
On the ancient notion of the Christian struggle as not just an individual enterprise
but also a collective eschatological enterprise, the striving of fallen humanity toward the
New Jerusalem, see Nievergelt’s discussion of the figures of pilgrimage and psychomachia,
Allegorical Quests from Deguileville to Spenser, pp. 22–6.
2
Incarnations of the Word
Piers Plowman
Medieval writers have no one name for the narrative forms Prudentius
invents in the Psychomachia, or for that poem’s negotiations between the
mutable order of narrative and the eternal order of meaning. But in the
many narrative poems that appear in European languages from the twelfth
to the fourteenth centuries, Christian poets experiment with translating
the theology of incarnation into a practice of other-speaking, a suspension
of narrative materials into something like an enchanted state. They call
the components and structures of their other-speaking idioms by a variety
of names—allegoria, integumentum, figura, intentio, materia, vestigium,
mysterium, senefiance, dissimulation, conceit—and they use these idioms
to map out intricate channels of commerce between the immaterial
divine and the material creation.1 Even when the matter of a poem such
as The Complaint of Nature is not apparently Christian, the dynamics of
1 On integumentum, see Alastair Minnis, Magister amoris: The “Roman de la Rose” and
Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 15–20. In printing
his Latin title with the minuscule a, I follow Minnis. On figura, see Auerbach’s classic essay
“Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984); on intentio and materia, see Minnis, Medieval Theories of Author-
ship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984),
pp. 40–72, 170–4; on the vestigia of God, see Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum,
trans. by Zachary Hayes, with Latin text from the Quaracchi Edition (Saint Bonaventure,
NY: The Franciscan Institute, Saint Bonaventure University, 2002), 1 and 2; on the
mysteria hidden in ancient poems, see Boccaccio, Genealogia Deorum Gentilium 14.8; on
the senefiance of his poem, see Guillaume de Lorris, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Daniel Poirion
(Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1974), 2065; on allegory as “the figure of false semblant or
dissimulation,” see Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and
Alice Walker (Cambridge: The University Press, 1936), 3.18; and on the “darke conceit”
see Spenser, The Letter to Raleigh, in The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi
Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki (Harlow: Longman, 2001), line 4. For Boccaccio’s Latin
text I have consulted an early printed edition, Peri Genealogiae Deorum (Basel, 1532), in
facsimile at the University of Mannheim’s online archive CAMENA: Corpus Automatum
Multiplex Electorum Neolatinitatis Auctorum (for the durable URLs associated with digital
texts, see my Bibliography); at the time of this writing, Jon Solomon’s edition of the
Genealogia for the I Tatti Renaissance Library has appeared only through Book 5.
Incarnations of the Word 83
incarnation direct the poem’s forms of signification. Alan’s poem enacts
incarnation, as I will observe at more length in Chapter 3, in its notion of a
human subject who participates in the identity of a divine subject, and in
its notion of a body that gathers all things into itself. The poem’s quasi-
pagan goddess, in whose body the orders of vegetable life, sexual generation,
the spherical heavens, and the rational soul appear to the poet-dreamer in
speaking form, would not seem foreign to a Christian worshiper who has
contemplated images of Mary as Queen of Heaven or of the Christ in
Majesty. Nor would the whispers of identification between Alan’s
deified Nature and his dreaming poet seem strange to the many mystics
who, following Augustine, find trinitarian patterns binding the human
soul to the world of nature and binding both to the person of God. “The
universe itself,” as Bonaventure says, is “a ladder [scala] by which we can
ascend to God,” for all material things imitate the divine so that “in them
as in mirrors [tanquam in speculis] we can see the eternal generation of the
Word, the Image, and the Son eternally emanating from God the
Father.”2 The disciplines of worship and contemplation are themselves
acts of other-speaking, apprehensions of the divine person in bodily
gestures and material forms. The mystic, the pilgrim, and the communi-
cant all know well the fragility of enchantment, the resistance of the
material world to the immanent divine. And they all participate, at the
same time, in the motive energies of Alan’s poem, his search for the scales
and the specula by which the eternal Word makes itself present to the
world of flesh.
In the context of Christ’s body, the body of the human person enters
into participation with a whole cosmos of bodies, ecclesiastical, social, and
individual, living and dead. In this participation, she enters into a play of
identity and difference, into the dynamics of referentiality and reflexivity
that direct the narrative forms of the Psychomachia and of the many
medieval poems that take up its idiom. The claim I will develop here is
not that the theology of incarnation issues in a stable genre of writing
which can be called “allegory.” My claim is rather that this theology
provokes and authorizes the paradoxes from which allegorical forms of
signification derive their energy. Inasmuch as she participates in the
personhood of Christ, the human person both is and is not herself. She
is both “this and that,” a compound identity who expresses in her other-
speaking the impossible dynamics of incarnation. Because her body strives
toward unity with the body of Christ, and because his body remains
distinct from all who wait for consummation, his incarnation becomes
2 Itinerarium mentis in Deum 1.2 and 2.7.

the ground, in many medieval poems, for allegorical fictions of contest and
convergence. These fictions find the various orders of creation caught up
in the strife of penetrating, articulating, and enfolding each other. In the
symphonic narratives of contest and copulation to which some of these
fictions rise—in, for instance, the mystical itineraria of Bonaventure and
the Victorines, or the poetic cosmogonies of Bernard Sylvestris and Alan
of Lille—the converging orders of the creation participate fitfully in what
Alan’s Nature calls the copula maritalis of soul and body, what the biblical
apocalypse describes as the marriage of Christ to his appointed bride.3 At
the culminating moment of Dante’s erotic journey, the promise of this
convergence discloses itself in the form of a human body at the heart of all
things, the body of the Word made flesh.4
Dante’s journey into this body does not exactly attain its promised
end. But the bodily presence of the “Love which moves the sun and other
stars” [amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle] sustains the Commedia’s willed
enchantment.5 The poem pursues paradox programmatically, drawing
toward a narrative climax that its narrative form cannot accommodate,
rendering the perfection of its agents as a cessation from agency in the
stillness of fulfilled (but still desirous) desire. Though Dante is perfectly
alive to his poem’s many impossibilities, he chooses to dwell in those
impossibilities. He allows his absurdities and temporal suspensions to
remain. In the end, he allows the material world itself to remain, conclud-
ing not with the apophatic silence toward which he so earnestly gestures
but rather with the sole e l’altre stelle under which much of his journey has
taken place. His allegory depends, more self-consciously and elaborately,
on the choice I have also found Prudentius to be making: a choice to
suspend disenchantment, in the hopes that the “this and that” of the
incarnate Word will sustain his impossible vision.
I want in this chapter to consider an English text, Piers Plowman, in the
light of this relationship between incarnation and allegory. And I want to
raise questions about what it would mean to read this densely allegorical
poem as an experiment in early modern forms of disenchantment. It
might seem idiosyncratic or inexact to approach Piers Plowman as an
early modern text. William Langland wrote the successive versions of his
vast poem in the late fourteenth century, after all, at a moment no
mainline account of English literary history would label as properly
3 De planctu Naturae, ed. Nikolaus M. Häring (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto
medioevo, 1978), 6.42.

4 Paradiso, ed. Charles Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975),
33.124–41.
5 Paradiso 33.145.
“modern.”6 And while commentators have sometimes remarked on vari-
ous “non-medieval” qualities of Piers Plowman, the conventions and
idioms in which Langland’s poem participates have long and recognizable
medieval histories. The poem’s richly complex allegorical language draws
on an array of visionary, exegetical, apocalyptic, encyclopedic, theological,
scientific, satirical, and devotional forms of medieval discourse. Its play of
narrative and meaning depends on the same theological vocabularies and
exegetical practices, the same patterns of incarnational narrative, that
inform the allegorical fictions of many medieval poets. Much of my
purpose in this chapter will be to consider the extent to which Langland,
too, is a poet of incarnation, a poet who brings both his dreaming subject
and his many allegorical agents to participate in Christ’s negotiations
between human personhood and divine being.
At the same time, Langland seems indeed to be engaged in some of the
disenchanting projects and ideals that will be central to English early
modernity. He persistently orchestrates lapses from allegorical enchant-
ment into critical disenchantment, and his poem intimates that the
failures of its narratives and vocabularies are consequences not just of
theological but of historical crises. Throughout the various versions of
Piers Plowman—I will here be concerned mainly with the B-text—
Langland orchestrates a vigorous contest between radical and conservative
idioms. He channels and caresses the powers of Lollard dissent, of eccle-
siastical inquisition, of populist revolt, and of nominalist critique, and
from all these new energies he fitfully recoils, a manic prophet in a
disintegrating social and theological order. His pilgrim-poet reconstitutes
himself and his search for salvation again and again, and each new start
promises a new language of truth, a new kind of self or society, a new way
of dealing with the discourses and institutions that history has deposited
around him. His self-consciousness, like his consciousness of historical
solitude, is acute. Where Langland’s allegorical language collapses, espe-
cially, many critics have found evidence of an emergent skepticism, of a
linguistic and theological critique that belongs in particular to the streams
of fourteenth-century nominalism. His allegorical agents are complexly
torn between their material existence as bodies and their linguistic exist-
ence as concepts, and they therefore exist persistently at the verge of
dissolution. In his attention to the instability of these agents, Langland
6 My innocuous-sounding claim about Langland’s authorship belies the hot dispute that
has raged for more than a century over the composition of the various versions of Piers
Plowman. For an account of the controversies, see Charlotte Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman:
The Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and C. David
Benson, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), esp. pp. 3–42.
seems bent on carrying out a disenchanting analysis of the bonds between
language and bodies, between the order of history and the order of
eternity. Any account of his allegorical poetics, and any account of his
place in a larger literary or cultural history, must take these currents of
skepticism and critique into account.
Piers Plowman is, then, a good place to test my claim that disenchantment—
with its ideals of solitude and renunciation and its grounding in a skeptical
human subject—tends in early modern poetry to arise at the same time,
and in the same locations, as allegory. Do Langland’s critical discourses
issue from his language of incarnation, or do they run against the grain of
that language? Are there signs of a disenchanted modernity in the forms of
subjectivity that Langland’s theology of incarnation makes possible? As a
limit case, a text at the margins both of what we call the “early modern”
and of what we call the “medieval,” Piers Plowman can suggest with
peculiar power the extent to which projects of enchantment and projects
of disenchantment invent and need one another. The poem’s dreamer
experiences the immanence of the incarnate divine as an enchantment,
powerful in its ability to capture the material world into a divine embrace,
and, at the same time, perilously vulnerable to counterfeiting and disin-
tegration. And he finds his own will to sustain the enchantment breaking
down, troubled by a self-regarding skepticism that separates him from
history and from history’s institutions.
*
Langland’s poem is greatly occupied with both the social and the interior
contours of the human subject, and its explorations of subjectivity begin
with the life of a single paradigmatic person, the person of the incarnate
Christ. At key moments in Piers Plowman, Langland figures the Christ as a
questing romance hero, and he hints that his own quest follows the pattern
of this divine protagonist. He toys, too, with the possibility that the quest
of the Christ is, like all romance journeys, a quest for subjectivity. Christ is
driven to become man, in Langland’s sometimes surprising accounts, not
just by a redemptive mission but by a desire to suffer. The Abraham of
Passus 16 suggests to the dreamer that “creatour weex creature to knowe
what was bothe,” that the Son of God became man in order to gain the
experience of human personhood (16.215).7 This account of incarnation
7 All quotations of Piers Plowman come from Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the
B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London: J. M. Dent, Everyman, 1995). On this daring

notion of “divine need,” as he calls it, and on Langland’s elaboration of the possibility that
God desires “to attain ‘kynde knowing’ of his creation,” see Nicholas Watson, “Concep-
tions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God,” in New Medieval
Literatures 2, ed. Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland, and David Lawton (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998), pp. 113–17. Watson sets these ideas against the more cautious claims of, for
supposes that there is a knowledge which can be had only in narrative, a
knowledge not transcendent and static but rather disposed into the
contingencies of history. Because they suffer the travails of historical
being, human persons are the unique possessors of that knowledge, and
when Christ sets out to redeem these human persons, he does so by
coming right into the heart of their suffering. Peace, in the course of her
arguments for the goodness of human suffering, adds that God himself
“bicam man of a mayde mankynde to save, / And suffrede to be sold, to
se the sorwe of deying” (18.212–13). The creator comes because he wants
“to se,” to know. He allowed Adam to suffer in the first place, as Peace
goes on to explain, so that Adam might learn blessedness through sorrow,
and then he “auntrede hymself and took Adames kynde / To wite what he
hath suffred” (18.221–2).8
The possibility that a participation with humanity is part of the fash-
ioning of the Christ—part of his preparation for the redemption of the
created world—has various bases in scripture, and it gains currency in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as an affective devotion to the human
Christ undergirds new models of sympathy between the suffering pil-
grim-Lord and his suffering pilgrim-followers.9 Langland has such models
in view when he turns in the latter parts of his poem to the image of
Christ as a romance knight, “Jesus the justere” (19.10), come to joust with
the devil clad in the guise of Piers Plowman. He imagines the Son of God
as participatory, sympathetic, inclusive of a whole range of identities and
narratives, dispersed into many bodies and known by many names. In
this office as the paradigm of suffering personhood, the participatory
Christ undergirds not only the being of Langland’s dreaming pilgrim
but also the being of many of his personifications. When Holichirche
instance, Nicholas Love, pp. 93–8. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, who notes in her
account of maternal images of Jesus that one medieval writer, Isaac of Stella, “goes beyond
images of souls drawn into the womb or bowels or side of Christ to develop a theory of the
mystical body that claims that Christ himself is not complete until we are all incorporated
into him,” Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1982), p. 150.
8 Christina Maria Cervone finds similar accounts of incarnation in Repentance’s prayer
for the penitent (5.478–500), and in Need’s claim in C.22.41 that Christ “bicam nedy” as
the poor are needy. Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 66–72. For a broader
account of suffering and desire as components of subjectivity in Piers Plowman, see
Nicolette Zeeman, Piers Plowman and the Medieval Discourse of Desire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), e.g., pp. 157–200.
9 Sarah Beckwith discusses the Franciscan articulations of this affective devotion in
Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge,
1996), pp. 52–5. On the influence of the English abbot Aelred of Rievaulx, who helps to
popularize the practice of imaginatively participating in the events of Christ’s life, see
Watson, “Conceptions of the Word,” pp. 91–3.
gives her account of a figure who “hadde of this fold flessh and blood
taken” because “hevene myghte nat holden it, so it was hevy of hymselve”
(1.155, 153), the figure in question is clearly the incarnate God, but
Holichirche gives him a different name. He is Love, who by this incarna-
tion becomes “ledere of the Lordes folk of hevene” (1.159). When she tells
the dreamer in this same discourse of Love’s close associate, who “is in
Trinitee” and “is fader of feith, formed yow alle / Bothe with fel and with
face and yaf yow fyve wittes / For to worshipe hym therwith” (1.133,
14–16), her subject is again named not Christ but Truth, who will
reappear before long as the betrothed husband of Mede. These
subjects—Love, Truth—are not the Christ, but then of course they are
the Christ, for he has dispersed himself as subject into a series of identi-
ties that together gather up the many layers of his being. He is Love and
Truth both.
This dispersal of the divine person into many bodies is an important
key to understanding Langland’s allegorical practice. Just after he has seen
Christ clad in the bloody armor of Piers, Langland has his dreamer raise
the question of the incarnation by asking Conscience why Christ has so
many names. Conscience’s reply exemplifies the pattern that governs
much of Langland’s fiction:
“Thow knowest wel,” quod Conscience, “and thow konne reson,

That knyght, kyng, conquerour may be o persone.
To be called a knyght is fair, for men shul knele to hym;
To be called a kyng is fairer, for he may knyghtes make;
Ac to be conquerour called, that cometh of special grace,
And of hardynesse of herte and of hendenesse—
To make lordes of laddes, of lond that he wynneth,
And fre men foule thralles, that folwen noght hise lawes.” (19.26–33)
This passage figures Christ as the possessor of many human identities. It is

the preface to a lengthy narrative in which Conscience recounts scenes
from the life of Jesus and explains how he got each of his names: Dowel,
Dobet, Dobest, fili David, Jesus, Christ, Conqueror, King. Conscience’s
discourse serves to address the frustrations of the long middle portion of
Piers Plowman, in which the dreamer hunts high and low for the elusive
figure of Dowel and cannot find him in any institution, practice, or moral
precept. What Conscience suggests is that the dreamer has been looking
all along for a Christ who, as Gerard Manley Hopkins would say, “plays in
ten thousand places” (or, as the dreamer himself says, “clerkes kenne me
that Crist is in alle places,” 15.161): in Langland’s Dowel, Love, and
Truth as in his jousters, kings, and knights. Like the corpus mysticum, the
Eucharistic body that is present in every consecrated morsel of bread at
all places and times, “Dowel” has been concealed everywhere, in all the
persons who have tempted and eluded the dreamer in his search.10
Langland’s subjects are all rooted, in other words, in the person of a
single metamorphic subject. His personifications tend to cluster and
circulate as hypostases of one shape-shifting identity, bound together by
elaborate patterns of participation. Anima’s disquisition on his own names
is reminiscent of Conscience’s disquisition on Christ:
“The whiles I quykke the cors,” quod he, “called am I Anima;
And whan I wilne and wolde, Animus ich hatte;
And for that I kan and knowe, called am I Mens, ‘Thoughte’;
And whan I make mone to God, Memoria is my name;
And whan I deme domes and do as truthe techeth,
Thanne is Racio my righte name, ‘Reson’ on Englissh;
And whan I feele that folk telleth, my firste name is Sensus—
And that is wit and wisdom, the welle of alle craftes;
And whan I chalange or chalange noght, chepe or refuse,
Thanne am I Conscience ycalled, Goddes clerk and his notarie;
And whan I love leelly Oure Lord and alle othere,
Thanne is ‘Lele Love’ my name, and in Latyn Amor;
And whan I flee fro the flessh and forsake the careyne,
Thanne am I spirit spechelees—and Spiritus thanne ich hatte.
“Austyn and Ysodorus, either of hem bothe
Nempnede me thus to name—now thow myght chese
How thow coveitest to calle me, now thow knowest alle my names.”
(15.23–39)
This is Langland’s picture of the soul, or rather his suggestion that the soul
is not a picturable thing but instead an array of permutations on a volatile
base substance. Here, as in the discourses on Christ, the identities of
Anima reach out in all directions. He is not only Mens, Memoria, and
Racio, identities that recall the parade of psychic faculties with whom
the dreamer has just interacted, but also Conscience, Spiritus, Love, names
for the personae Christ assumes throughout the poem. Anima’s self-
identification suggests that the flaring forth of God into historical being
and the flaring forth of soul into historical being participate in one
another. Who is Love? He is Anima and Christ, both of whom Langland
will find at play in all his speaking and other-speaking persons.
*
10 The Fourth Lateran Council consolidated and ratified the idea of the corpus mysticum,
and the closely related idea of the corpus ecclesiae mysticum, the body of the church, in 1215.
The Council of Constance, in 1415, would ratify the further doctrine that both the body
and blood of Christ are present in both the bread and the wine, a unified and ever-present
corpus. See Beckwith, Christ’s Body, pp. 31, 3.
It is in his attempt to sustain these structures of incarnation that Langland
cultivates his language of allegory. His personifications are allegorical
because they speak forth, in their flickering, metamorphic personhood,
the deeper being of other persons with other identities and names. In
doing so, they represent to the poet-dreamer his own desire for participa-
tion in the paradigmatic personhood of Christ, and they make possible to
him particular forms of subjectivity. Langland’s dreamer looks for the
ground of his subjective experience in his own capacity for other-speaking,
his dispersal into the identities that crowd into his visions and beckon him
into themselves. If Christ gains the truth of historical experience by
participating in human personhood, he likewise inflames Langland’s
pilgrim with a desire for that sort of experiential life. The bloody Jesus
appears during Mass, Conscience says to the dreamer, in order that the
communicants might “se bi his sorwe that whoso loveth joye, / To
penaunce and to poverte he moste puten hymselven, / And muche wo
in this world wilnen and suffren” (19.66–8). To suffer is to be like Christ.
To go questing, to go plowing, to go jousting, to go doing well are, in the
same way, to be like Christ. Langland suggestively relates his own poetic
“makynge” to the work of the “Fader and formour of al that evere was
maked” (12.16, 9.27), and he situates himself at various times in com-
munities of laborers, and communities of feasters, who collectively strive
to operate as the body of Christ. The human subjects of his collective
bodies enact the claim of Guerric, the twelfth-century abbot of Igny, who
says that God draws wretched men “into his very bowels and makes
them his members,” for he “could not bind us to himself more closely,
could not make us more intimate to himself than by incorporating us
into himself.”11
The dispersed subjectivity of the Christ therefore opens up possibilities
for the poet-dreamer to disperse his own subjectivity across the great
expanse of his text, into its many identities and contingencies. This
dreamer is not a subject confined within a self but a subject extended
across many selves, a subject who sees himself in all the imperfect images
of personhood who confront him in his quest. That quest, like allegory
itself, is an expression of desire, an orientation toward the point at which
all identities resolve themselves, and become themselves, in Christ. The
poet William Langland evokes this desire when he capitalizes on the
potential of his own name and calls his dreamer “Will,” a person who
means both the poet and the poet’s ideal of desiring subjectivity. If, as
various scholars have said, poets in the fourteenth century assert more and
11 Qtd. from Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 121.

more forcefully the relationship between actor and auctor, Langland
explores particularly complicated connections between his authority as
poetic maker, his dreamer’s visionary work as poetic maker, and his
dreamer’s interpretive work as bewildered, desiring pilgrim-reader.12 His
“I” is the vessel of a layered array of subjects, who dispose themselves along
a continuum from the primal creative subjectivity of the Christ to the
creative subjectivity of the poet and into the many subjectivities that
represent to the poet his own possible selves.
The rampant confusion that has characterized commentary on Piers
Plowman himself, and the attempts of some critics to identify Piers with
one or other of the many identities he assumes in the course of the
poem—as “St. Peter,” as “an eschatological figure,” as “Grace,” as “God
the Father,” as “a simple honest laborer,” as “the human nature of Christ,”
as “Adam,” as “the Pope”—stem from a failure to grasp this basic fact.13
What interest could a Piers who represents one recognizable ideal, or who
simply signifies Jesus at the expense of the poem’s many other incarnate
identities, have for the poet who says that “Crist is in alle places; / Ac
I seigh hym nevere soothly but as myself in a mirour: / Hic in enigmate,
tunc facie ad faciem” (15.161–3)? Such a singular signification might suit
Langland perfectly well if he accepted a clean separation between the body
of the creator and the body of the creation, or if he brought to his work of
making a static kernel of truth, ready to be allegorically concealed under
the matter of history. But Langland is engaged in something different, a
work of visionary pursuit. Piers represents to the poet the phases of his
own subjectivity along the course of that pursuit. He is a reflection of the
selves the poem has fashioned and a reflection of the incarnate Word to
those selves.14 He therefore grounds allegory in a successive disclosure, a
12 On which, see, for instance, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic
Ego,” in Written Work, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Stephen Justice (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). Like many of the essays in this volume, Kerby-
Fulton’s essay works to understand the functions of Langland’s poetic persona in the world
to which the poet addresses himself and his book. On Langland’s work of making in the
context of his own historical being, see also Ralph Hanna, “Will’s Work,” and Anne
Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version ‘Autobiography’ and the Statute of 1388,”
both in Written Work, ed. Kerby-Fulton. Laurence de Looze observes the increasing
convergence of auctor and actor in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Pseudo-
Autobiography in the Fourteenth Century (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997),
pp. 5–6.
13 Most of the quoted identifications are recorded by David Aers in Piers Plowman and
Christian Allegory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), p. 77. The penultimate pair are
Lavinia Griffiths, Personification in Piers Plowman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), p. 90;
and the last is J. J. Jusserand, recorded by Nevill Coghill in “The Character of Piers
Plowman Considered from the B-Text,” in Interpretations of Piers Plowman, ed. Edward
Vasta (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), p. 55.
14 Here I am indebted to Aers, Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory, pp. 77–9.
history ever in the process of discovering its own meaning. If he expresses
Langland’s version of the wish of John of Grimstone, “I wolde ben clad in
Cristes skin,” he registers too Langland’s acknowledgement that this
garment is a living one, and metamorphic of form.15 Langland’s allegorical
subject would be clothed not just in Christ’s skin but in his personhood,
in the whole historical being of his living and dying self.
*
Throughout Piers Plowman, Langland finds this language of incarnation
falling into crisis. He pays lavish attention to the errors and absurdities
that frustrate his longing for incorporation into Christ, and he orchestrates
intricately the failures of his allegorical idiom, magnifying those failures
under the glass of his self-regarding skepticism. I want to look for the roots
of these failures by attending to two crises that cause particular trouble in
Langland’s allegorical poetics. Both these crises tend to crop up in and
around Langland’s articulations of incarnation, and both link Piers
Plowman with fourteenth-century trends that some historians have
regarded as key to the emergence of modernity. The first of these crises
begins with the simple fact that, if personifications such as Love, Truth,
and Dowel distill the person of the Christ into richly participatory
allegorical agents, there is in Langland’s poem a variegated gallery of
corrupt allegorical agents who seem to obscure more than they reveal
the divine person. Most of Langland’s personifications and tutelary spirits
indeed have the effect of provoking a kind of paranoiac anxiety, a sense
that the power of allegorical persons to reveal the incarnate Christ is in
crisis. His dreamer finds signs of bad faith, inauthenticity, and incom-
pleteness not just in worldly wayfarers such as Haukyn and Mede but also
in guiding spirits such as Thought, Wit, Clergie, and Dame Studie. And
in his companies of bickering abstractions, such as the ones who bustle
into the court at Westminster in the episode of Mede, he seems far from
the language of incarnation, or from any sort of participatory or theo-
logical project. These figures have, after all, a density of social being that
situates them squarely in English domestic life. In this episode, Reason has
a horse that makes “wehee” and a knave called Caton. Wrong steals
Reignalde’s sweetheart Rose, signs a legal document with “Bette the
Bedel of Bokynghamshire,” borrows Peace’s horse without bringing it
back, and goes on a barnyard crime spree that culminates in the bloodying
of Peace’s head (2.110, 4.47–60). Peace is dissuaded from putting up a bill
of complaint in Parliament only when Mede bribes him off with gold.
These virtues and vices are citizens, farmers, scoundrels, and clerics,
15 Qtd. in Beckwith, Christ’s Body, p. 61.

endowed with unruly spouses and chronic gout. Some critics have argued
that they are predominantly male for just this reason, because they are
not divinities but social types.16 A figure such as Liar is not so much
an incarnation of the word as a caricature of a corrupt class of humans: the liars.
But I want to suggest that these marauding vices can be a key both to
Langland’s poetics of incarnation and to the crisis into which he finds his
poetics collapsing. Social being is, after all, only part of Liar’s story. He is a
stalwart in the party of False when the King, persuaded by Conscience,
orders the whole rout captured or killed. All are scattered, and Liar finds
himself a persecuted outcast:
Til pardoners hadde pite, and pulled hym into house.
They wesshen hym and wiped hym and wounden hym in cloutes,
And senten hym [on Sondayes with seles] to chirches,
And gaf pardoun for pens poundemele aboute.
Thanne lourede leches, and lettres thei sente
That he sholde wonye with hem watres to loke.
Spycers speken to hym to spien hire ware,
For he kouthe on hir craft and knew manye gommes.
Ac mynstrales and messagers mette with hym ones,
And [with]helden hym half a yeer and ellevene dayes.
Freres with fair speche fetten hym thennes,
And for knowynge of comeres coped hym as a frere;
Ac he hath leve to lepen out as ofte as hym liketh,
And is welcome whan he wile, and woneth with hem ofte. (2.220–33)
Here is social being on parade, yes. This walking abstraction would seem
to have not one bodily form but many—he is a doctor, a friar, a pardoner,
a minstrel—and his changing occupational hats associate him with a
familiar social type, the wandering rogue or confidence man with his
pocketful of tricks.17 It is just here, though, that his adventures partake
of a stranger aura. This doctor-friar-pardoner-minstrel is omnicompetent,
a man who contains multitudes. He dwells with the minstrels half a year
and eleven days, but the account of his flights seems on the whole to
compress or defy narrative time and ends, strangely, in the present
16 Helen Cooper makes this claim in “Gender and Personification in Piers Plowman,”
Yearbook of Langland Studies 5 (1991), 31–48; see esp. p. 36. See also Masha Raskolnikov,
“Promising the Female, Delivering the Male: Transformations of Gender in Piers
Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 19 (2005), 81–105; and, on the shift to person-
ifications as social types in late medieval poetry, Griffiths, Personification in Piers Plowman,
pp. 48–58.
17 Jill Mann notes that, if Liar is a vice, he is also a recognizable domestic character, a
vagrant. Langland and Allegory (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992),
pp. 4–5, 8.
tense: “and woneth with hem ofte.” The employers who seek him are
not individuals but professions—the spicers, the pardoners—and he
seems, as he sojourns among them, not so much a man as a motive
force or a patron spirit, the one who dwells with friars. His metamorphic
flight through the human professions is the work not of a social type but
of a demon. Liar is the power who sets churchmen and tradesmen to the
telling of lies.
All the scoundrels who fill this episode are confidence men of more or
less this stamp. Wrong, False, Civil, and Guile are operators, agents
behind the scenes, greasing wheels and making bribes, manipulating
legal action according to their lust. They are disguised, secretive, and
dangerous, and in these qualities they constitute a satire on the corrup-
tions of English social life. Like Liar, though, these figures take on also
another aura, and the poem suggests persistently that they are something
other than social entities. The moment when False, Favel, Simony, and
Civil saddle up a host of human types and ride them to Westminster is
funny, but not in the same way that Chaucer’s satirical passages are funny.
Langland is engaged in a darker sort of joke. There is no mistaking the
distinction between the social types in this scene—they are sheriffs,
flatterers, summoners, deacons—and the hungry, cunning, shape-shifting
beings who possess them. Civil pronounces, as he rounds up this lot of
mortals, that they “shul serven myself that Cyvyle is nempned” (2.179).
False has power to summon “alle the segges in shires aboute” (2.158). He
is not one of them, and his flavor is less like the caricatures of vice that
populate much late medieval satire and more like the devils who figure in a
wide variety of late medieval demonological, hagiographical, dramatic,
and visionary texts.18
Holichirche introduces False by saying that he “nevere sooth seide
sithen he com to erthe” (2.26). Come to earth? This is not the description
18 The prancing demon tricksters of the morality drama are close counterparts to
Langland’s caricatures, as are the demonic mischief-makers who persistently afflict the
saints of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea and of influential hagiographical texts such
as Bonaventure’s life of St Francis. For English versions of these texts, see The Golden
Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993), and The Soul’s Journey into God; The Tree of Life; The Life of St.
Francis, trans. Ewert Cousins (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978); and for Latin texts, see
Legenda Aurea, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni (Florence: Società Internazionale per lo
Studio del Medioevo Latino, 1999), and Legendae S. Francisci Assisiensis: Saeculis XIII et
XIV Conscriptae (Florence: Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1926–41). See also, for
instance, the angler-devil of Mum and the Sothsegger, who is, like Christ, a fisher of men,
Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger, ed. James Dean (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval
Institute Publications, 2000), 1157–65. And see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s comments on
Brigit of Sweden, with her visions of the devil infiltrating the Franciscan orders, Reformist
Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 110.
of a domestic being, as Holichirche and Theology confirm when they
name False as “a fendes biyete” (2.41) and “a bastarde ybore of Belsa-
bubbes kynne” (2.131). The deed of False’s marriage to Mede grants him
“a dwellynge with the devel, and dampned be for evere” (2.103), and the
whole episode of False and his compatriots suggests that these agents have
an eternal destiny, a place with Satan in hell: “for he leveth be lost—this is
his laste ende” (2.101). Even the most pungently topical passages of the
episode are tinged with the language of devils and damnation. The deed of
marriage, a fantasia of legal verbiage granting lordship over the seven
deadly sins along with a place in hell, is sealed “in the date of the devel”
(2.113). The hearing at London, which Theology urges after declaring
False a bastard of Beelzebub, has the damnation of Civil and Simony in
view: “And if he fynde yow in defaute and with the False holde, / It shal
bisitte yowr soules ful soure at the laste” (2.140–1). The civil action against
Wrong, in the denunciation of Reason, is a crusade against wrong itself and
will not end, Reason proclaims, until all the filth of society is drained away,
“and Love shal lede thi lond as the leef liketh” (4.148). All these legal
proceedings are actions against evil itself, with an eye to the eschaton and the
renewal of creation.
What do these demonic beings have to do with Langland’s Christo-
logical personifications: with Dowel, Love, and Truth? To describe False
as “com to erthe” is to describe him in terms that would seem to be
broadly Christological. That Holichirche’s terms are Christological indeed
becomes clear in her account of Lucifer, the firstborn of the angels who
“fellen out in fendes liknesse” from the heavenly places (1.121). Holi-
chirche describes the fall of the angels—“noon hevene myghte hem
holde”—and the descent of divine Love—“for hevene myghte nat holden
it”—in a single narration, in terms that resonate unmistakably with each
other (1.120, 153). And this resonance might seem strange, except that
Antichrist is everywhere the negative image of Christ, a metamorphic
subject dispersing himself into the many subjects and histories of the created
order. When the “fals fend Antecrist” comes to plow and rule the earth in
the poem’s final passus, he, too, comes “in mannes forme” (20.64, 52), and
he, too, plays in ten thousand places and has ten thousand names, as when
Holichirche describes him in his guise as Wrong:
Fader of falshede, founded it hymselve.
Adam and Eve he egged to ille,
Counseilled Kaym to killen his brother,
Judas he japed with Jewen silver,
And sithen on an eller hanged hym after.
He is lettere of love and lieth hem alle:
That trusten on his tresour bitrayed arn sonnest. (1.64–70)
This principality is here, there, and everywhere, and Holichirche’s account of
him, near the beginning of Piers Plowman, anticipates the patterns that will
characterize the presence of Christ himself in Langland’s poem. Like the
Christ of Conscience’s account, the person of Wrong grounds the synchronic
patterns of history and gives those patterns a name. If he has little bodily
presence in the scene at hand, it is because that presence is dispersed, itself a
corpus mysticum, into the material of biblical history and the many bodies—
human, serpentine, and angelic—of which that history is constituted.
*
Langland’s vision of Mede reveals that the dynamics of incarnation make
not just Christ but Antichrist immanent in history, and his language of
incarnation in this passage gives rise to a paranoiac insight—an apprehen-
sion of Antichrist infiltrating a domestic world—that will grow only more
bitterly forceful in the culminating visions of Piers Plowman. I will return to
this paranoia, and to Langland’s demonic presences as the signs of a crisis in
allegorical language, after I have sketched the contours of the second crisis
that troubles his allegorical idiom. This second crisis is apparent in Lang-
land’s resistance to the conventions of allegorical vision he inherits from
Latin poets such as Martianus Capella, Boethius, Alan of Lille, and Bernard
Silvestris. In the dynamics of his allegorical agents and his allegorical visions,
Langland’s difference from these poets is striking enough to suggest that
he is engaged in a significant departure, in crossing to the other side of a
rupture.
Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (c.524) sets down an especially
influential model for the introduction of an allegorical personification.
As his poet speaks the words of complaint that open the Consolation, he
finds himself interrupted by a sudden apparition:
there seemed to stand above my head a woman. Her look filled me with awe;
her burning eyes penetrated more deeply than those of ordinary men; her
complexion was fresh with an ever-lively bloom, yet she seemed so ancient
that none would think her of our time.19
Here is Philosophia, something like a goddess. The manner of her entrance
follows the pattern of Martianus Capella’s quasi-divine personifications of
the liberal arts (c.480). Martianus’ Rhetorica makes her entrance as follows:
in strode a woman of the tallest stature and astounding self-confidence,
a woman of outstanding beauty; she wore a helmet, and her head was
19 The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. and trans. S. J. Tester (Cambridge, MA: Loeb
Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1978), 1.1.1–7. Citations are by book, section
number, and line and refer to the Latin text.
wreathed with royal grandeur; in her hands the arms which she used to
defend herself or to wound her enemies, shone with the brightness of
lightning.20
Both Lady Philosophy and Lady Rhetoric enter the narrative world as
robust presences, and they provoke the poet to a profusion of visual detail.
Their names and natures will be revealed in time, but in the long moment
of first encounter they are simply the goddess descending, a splendid
being before the poet’s eyes. Such a manner of introduction will be
typical of later personifications from Alan’s Nature, who, before she ever
speaks, provokes a festival of description that spans three metrical and
two prose sections of Alan’s text, to Spenser’s pantheon of goddesses
and anti-goddesses, who tend to enter The Faerie Queene in more or less
this manner:
High aboue all a cloth of State was spred,
And a rich throne, as bright as sunny day,
On which there sate most braue embellished
With royall robes and gorgeous array,
A mayden Queene, that shone as Titans ray . . . 21
This is Lucifera (light-bearer), but the poet will disclose her name only
after he has dwelt on her “glistring gold” and “pereless pretious stone,” her
“glorious throne” and “bright blazing beautie,” her mirror, her haughty
visage, the dragon beneath her feet. She comes into the poem as an
apparition, a numinous presence whose significance will unfold in time
but whose first impression is one of iconographical density and royal
splendor. So it is with many of Spenser’s goddesses: his Mercilla, his
Philotime, his Isis. And even the earthiest creatures of Spenser’s fiction
tend to enjoy a drama of arrival. They burst onto the stage of the The
Faerie Queene as unfamiliar beings, costumed, emblematic, often fantas-
tically theatrical, strangers to be unriddled or unmasked.
The personifications of Piers Plowman, though they may trace their
lineage to this long tradition, tend to make grand entrances of a different
20 De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, 426. For similar entrances, see Martianus’ intro-
ductions of Arithmetica (728), Astronomia (810), and Harmonia (905). References are to
section numbers. I quote from the translation by William Harris Stahl and Richard
Johnson, published as Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, vol. 2 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1977). The Latin text can be found in Le nozze di Filologia e
Mercurio, ed. with Italian trans. by Ilaria Ramelli (Milan: Bompiani, 2001). On the
difficulty of dating Martianus’ poem, see Danuta Shanzer, A Philosophical and Literary
Commentary on Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, Book 1 (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 5–17.
21 The Faerie Queene 1.4.8.
sort. They tend, for instance, to come in as Holichirche does when she
descends from the Tower of Truth:
A lovely lady of leere in lynnen yclothed
Cam doun from [the] castel and called me faire,
And seide . . . (1.2–5)
Or as Anima does, when the dreamer falls asleep and sees,
a sotil thyng withalle—
Oon withouten tonge and teeth, tolde me whider I sholde . . . (15.12–13)
Both these moments of apprehension begin in something like the
Boethian manner. A being presents itself to the dreamer’s sight, and
the drama of revealing its identity and name begins. But in both passages
the poet hastens from description to spoken discourse. The dreamer has
hardly registered the new presence before it opens its mouth and dissolves
the vision in speech. Even Lady Mede, who, practically alone among
Langland’s creations, provokes an ecphrastic description upon her appear-
ing, has nothing like the effect of a goddess such as Alan’s Nature. Alan’s
vision of Nature’s crown occupies, in the uncommonly small type of
Nikolaus Häring’s edition, nearly 100 lines of Latin prose, and it disposes
her animated jewels into the elaborately graceful moving forms of the
heavenly constellations.22 Here, on the other hand, is the description in
full of Lady Mede’s crown:
Ycorouned with a coroune, the Kyng hath noon bettre. (2.10)
Alan’s description of Nature’s garments is an ecstasy of color, cloth, and
magic that occupies 150 lines of prose, and one metrical section, in
Häring’s text.23 Here is Mede’s robe:
Hire robe was ful riche, of reed scarlet engreyned,
With ribanes of reed gold and of riche stones. (2.15–16)
Such is the entrance of Mede. Her countenance is not described at all, nor
her hair, nor her beauty or bearing, for Langland has drained her figure of
emblematic power, of the grandeur of vision that announces the personi-
fication in Boethius, Martianus, and Alan. What splendor remains is, like
the splendor of Spenser’s Lucifera, a parody of the visionary tradition, but
without the Spenserian intuition that Lucifera’s dazzling light is the most
22 De planctu Naturae, ed. Nikolaus M. Häring (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi
sull’alto medioevo, 1978), 2.40–137.

23 De planctu Naturae 2.138–292.
dangerous of her weapons. Langland will locate the dangerous power of
Mede elsewhere.
This peculiarity has seemed to many of Langland’s readers a sign of his
turn from presences, and from universals, to a conviction that words are
mere signs, just as likely to conceal as to disclose being. The scholarly
literature on Piers Plowman is full of distinguished commentators
who claim that the poem’s personified abstractions “are not really persons
or things, and we are not to take them as real,” or who call his personifi-
cations “ambulatory words” and claim that “a personification is, at all
times, a word.”24 It is hard not to notice that a philosopher such as
William of Ockham, earlier in Langland’s century, had already begun to
argue much the same thing about universals. For Ockham, and for the
nominalist schools of critique of which he is a chief architect, universal
terms such as “justice,” “human,” “nature,” “person,” and “fire” are simply
signs invented by the human mind for the purpose of gathering individual
instances into categories. Those signs do not amount to the revelation of a
total order of being. Indeed there is no rational order of being to be
revealed, for God’s creative sovereignty over individuals is such that no
accommodation of the totality of individuals to the order of human reason
is possible. The abstractions dreamed up by the mind, and fashioned by
the mind into universals and deities, are just that: mere abstractions.25
If Langland develops a version of this disenchanting nominalist analysis,
he does so most of all in the self-conscious artificiality with which he
clothes abstract nouns in the garb of living flesh.26 He is acutely aware of
24 I quote, respectively, from R. W. Frank, “Piers Plowman” and the Scheme of Salvation
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 2, and Mary Carruthers, The Search for
St. Truth: A Study of Meaning in “Piers Plowman” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1973), pp. 36, 38. Carruthers here resists readings of Langland that take his
personifications to be people. See her note 3, p. 38. See also Frank’s “The Art of Reading
Medieval Personification-Allegory,” ELH 20 (1953): 237–50.
25 My comments on nominalism are indebted to Michael Allen Gillespie’s account, The
Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), esp.

pp. 22–4. See also Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of
Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 38–41, 80–90.
26 Claims about Langland’s nominalist allegory are common enough that Lawrence
Clopper has urged Langlandian scholars to take philosophical realism more seriously,
“Langland and Allegory: a Proposition,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 15 (2001): 35–42.
See also Lavinia Griffiths, Personification in Piers Plowman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer,
1985), pp. 41–2, 52–3, and 59–61. Pamela Raabe argues, controversially, for a realist
Langland, Imitating God: The Allegory of Faith in Piers Plowman B (Athens, GA: University
of Georgia Press, 1994). Jill Mann’s work thinks deftly about how, in Langland, these two
ways of thinking in fact collapse into each other. See “Eating and Drinking in Piers
Plowman,” Essays and Studies 32 (London: John Murray, 1979); and, especially, Langland
and Allegory, The Morton W. Bloomfield Lectures on Medieval English Literature, vol. 2
(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), pp. 8, 14, 20–4.
his personifications as not presences but bits of language, irreducibly
linguistic and inescapably abstract, and he puts this awareness on flam-
boyant display not just in the advent of Mede but in the allegorical
language of her whole episode. Upon hearing the accusations of Con-
science, who has just refused to marry her, Mede offers a discourse on the
power of mede—material reward—to maintain good government and
good deeds in this world. “Ther that meschief is gret, Mede may helpe”
(3.177), she urges, and she explains herself in a disquisition in which the
word “mede” proliferates to rank abundance:
“It bicometh to a kyng that kepeth a reaume
To yeve [men mede] that mekely hym serveth—
To aliens and to alle men, to honouren hem with yiftes;
Mede maketh hym biloved and for a man holden.
Emperours and erles and alle manere lordes
Thorugh yiftes han yomen to yerne and to ryde.
The Pope and alle prelates presents underfongen
And medeth men hemselven to mayntene hir lawes,
Servaunts for hire servyce, we seeth wel the sothe,
Taken mede of hir maistres, as thei mowe acorde.
Beggeres for hir biddynge bidden men mede.
Mynstrales for hir myrthe mede thei aske.
The Kyng hath mede of his men to make pees in londe.
Men that [kenne clerkes] craven of hem mede.
Preestes that prechen the peple to goode
Asken mede and massepens and hire mete [alse].
Alle kynne crafty men craven mede for hir prentis.
Marchaundise and mede mote nede go togideres:
No wight, as I wene, withouten Mede may libbe!”
Quod the Kyng to Conscience, “By Crist, as me thynketh,
Mede is worthi the maistrie to have!”
“Nay,” quod Conscience to the Kyng and kneled to the erthe,
“Ther are two manere of medes, my lord, by youre leve.” (3.209–31)
A. V. C. Schmidt, the editor of this text, capitalizes the first instance of the
word—“Mede may helpe”—as if the woman Mede were referring to
herself, and Mede seems to confirm the choice by moving then into the
first person and offering various protestations of her innocence and
usefulness. But with the beginning of the long passage I quote here,
“Mede” gives way to “mede,” and it becomes hard to tell whether the
word indicates the name of a woman or merely the name of a particular
sort of behavior or commodity. Is it really possible to assert that Mede is a
proper name in this instance—“No wight, as I wene, withouten Mede
may libbe!”—but not in this one—“Marchaundise and mede mote nede
go togideres”—when the one line follows hard on the other? Schmidt’s
shifting capitalization seems to suggest as much, but the referential orien-
tation of “mede” is so ambiguous that it brings the distinction between the
embodied woman and the abstract principle she represents to the verge of
collapse.
Much of the game of the passage involves the dynamics of this collapse.
“Mede” mainly drifts here toward use as a common abstract noun, but
at any moment it could fall back into proper reference to Lady Mede, as
in its various editors’ judgments it sometimes does.27 There is constant
ambiguity—is this speech about a person or an abstraction?—and the text
bristles with the possibility that mede could at any moment come to life as
Mede. More to the point, Langland’s poetry intimates that the woman
derives her life from the word, that her genesis might lie not in a vision of a
goddess but in the terms and metaphors of the poem’s discourse. Take
even a rather unassuming metaphor: “Marchaundise and mede mote nede
go togideres.” Read it in a spirit of misprision, and a wedding scene is only
a breath away. Take a hotter metaphor, one that gives its abstract subject a
transitive verb: “Swich a mischief Mede made”; or, “Mede may helpe.”
Read these clauses in the right spirit, and the embodied personification is
at hand, not exactly a goddess and not a mere abstract universal, but rather
the vaporous and shape-shifting form of a body just emerging from, and
still entangled in, its linguistic roots.
This sort of radioactivity—the possibility that a verb, noun, or pronoun
might emit a living person at any moment—explains the genesis of many
of Langland’s personifications. The life of Dowel begins here:
“Peter!” quod the preest thoo, “I kan no pardon fynde
But ‘Do wel and have wel, and God shal have thi soule,’
And ‘Do yvel and have yvel, and hope thow noon oother
That after thi deeth day the devel shal have thi soule!’ ” (7.111–14)
27 Langland’s editors have in fact varied wildly in their approaches to the capitalization
in this passage. Owen Rogers (1561) and Walter Skeat (1886) both hold to minuscule type
throughout the passage except in the single instance, Mede may help. Langland’s first
printer, Robert Crowley (1550), swings from upper to lower case in what seems to me an
entirely haphazard fashion. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (1975), who use the
same base MS as Schmidt but who adhere more closely to its capitalization practices,
capitalize almost every instance of Mede in the passage (including, strangely, Conscience’s
claim that “Ther are two manere of Medes”), though they too veer into inexplicable
variations and produce odd couplets such as, “Mynstrales for hir myrthe Mede thei
aske; / The kyng hath mede of his men to make pees in londe.” In quoting from this
edition I have modernized thorns into Roman type. See The Vision of Pierce Plowman
(London, 1550); The Vision of Pierce Plowman (London, 1561); The Vision of William
Concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, ed. Skeat, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1886); and Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. Kane and Donaldson (London:
Athlone Press, 1975).
Not in a vision, but in a verb phrase. And Mede’s comrade False is born
when the dreamer asks Holichirche,
Kenne me by som craft to knowe the false. (2.4)
“The false” turns out to be standing just to his left, more knowable than
the dreamer ever imagined. His substantiality confounds the sense of the
dreamer’s question and opens up the ambiguities of that question as if they
were windows onto some strange other world, a world in which the turns
and oddities of language come to sudden birth as people and places. The
poet need only shift the rules of reading the discourse at hand, and
every pronoun, every abstraction, every modifier or phrase can come
forward as an actor on the stage of the poem, a realization of the poet’s
tropes and metaphors as bodily agents.28 A passage such as the following,
in Langland’s hands, bristles with potential life:
“And that deeth in hem fordide, my deeth shal releve,
And bothe quyke and quyte that queynt was thorugh synne;
And that grace gile destruye, good feith it asketh.
So leve it noght, Lucifer, ayein the lawe I fecche hem,
But by right and by reson raunsone here my liges:
Non veni solvere legem set adimplere.
“Thow fettest myne in my place ayeins alle reson—
Falsliche and felonliche; good feith me it taughte,
To recovere hem thorugh raunsoun, and by no reson ellis,
So that with gile thow gete, thorugh grace it is ywonne.” (18.346–54)
Who are the personifications here? Grace? Death? Guile? Right? Reason?
Good Faith? They come close, in varying degrees, but none of these terms
28 This sort of writing will enjoy a heyday in the popular stage moralities of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, which often enact what Carolynn van Dyke calls an “ontological
metamorphosis” by which personifications emerge from whatever captured bits of verbiage
the poet sets under his yoke. Everyman, for instance, begins with God’s declaration that
“euery man lyueth so after his owne pleasure,” and with Death’s response, “Euery man wyll
I beset that lyueth beastly.” In Mankind ambiguities about text and presence become the
stuff of punning self-awareness, as when Mercy tells the spectators, “I prey Gode, at yowr
most nede, that mercy be yowr defendawnte,” or when New Guise says farcically of
Mankind’s altered coat, “this ys thi new gyse.” Everyman, ed. A. C. Cawley (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1961), lines 40, 74; Mankind, ed. Kathleen M. Ashley and
Gerard NeCastro (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010), lines 24, 804.
In quoting from this edition I have modernized thorns into roman type and have omitted
editorial italics. See Carolynn van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth: Structures of Meaning in
Narrative and Dramatic Allegory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 108. See
also Martha Bayless on the Nemo satires that circulated among monastic communities in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and that depend on flamboyant misreadings of the word
nemo in the scriptures, Parody in the Middle Ages (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 1996).
ever quite solidifies into bodily presence or active participation. The
ransom happens through grace; but grace destroys guile. He flickers back
and forth, now slouching toward personhood, now a mere power or
condition under which the action of Langland’s narrative takes place.
And if terms such as “reason” and “guile” are mostly, in this passage,
insubstantial and abstract, elsewhere Reason rides his horse to London and
Guile travels around bribing notaries. Their fluttering in and out of being
is incessant, and it is easy to see why Jill Mann says that it would be
possible to draw up a list of Spenser’s or of Bunyan’s allegorical agents, but
not of Langland’s.29 His personifications invite the dreamer not so much
into a vision of incarnate principalities as into a critical analysis of
language. The chief concern of his allegorical idiom seems to be the
power of words both to reveal and to pervert the truth of God in the
world, and he therefore refashions allegory as a counterpart of Ockham’s
critique of universal terms.30 For such a nominalist Langland, personifi-
cation reveals the structure of truth not because it reveals a larger order to
the mind but because it reveals the mind to itself. His personifications
open up the problems of where abstractions come from, of why they
crowd so insistently into the center of moral and theological discourse, and
of why they so often seem incommensurable with embodied human life.31
*
These nominalist analyses might, on the surface, seem remote from the
demonic principalities Langland finds rampant in the episode of Mede.
But as twin expressions of disenchantment, Langland’s linguistic maps
and his demonological visions are more intimate with one another than
they seem. If Mede’s discourse on mede functions as a kind of critical
exegesis, an abstraction of one term from many historical narratives, so too
do the narratives of Liar and Wrong, which disperse the bodily being of
their protagonists into many bodies and histories. It is possible to read all
these experiments in metamorphic identity as experiments in nominalist
29 Langland and Allegory, p. 14.

30 “It is language itself,” as Mann says, “that becomes the stuff of Langland’s imagined
world, the reality out of which it is made,” Langland and Allegory, p. 17. See also Mary
Carruthers’ comments about Langland’s concern with “this analysis of words as ambiguous
tools of thought, capable not only of revealing a true cognition but also of generating a
corruption of understanding,” The Search for St. Truth, p. 3.
31 For an elaborately developed theory of personification as a “confusion of narratorial
discourse with narrated story,” see James Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 35, 41. See also Morton Bloomfield’s influential
work in “A Grammatical Approach to Personification Allegory,” Modern Philology 60
(1963): 161–71; “Allegory as Interpretation,” New Literary History 3 (1972): 301–17;
and “Personification-Metaphors,” Chaucer Review 14 (1980): 287–97.
analysis. These discourses test the power of universals in the order of
history, and they find terms such as “mede” and “wrong” to be volatile
and hazardous, suspended between mere abstraction and demonic life. For
all her collapses back into mere linguistic matter, and for all her difference
from the bodily splendor of many medieval personifications, Mede is
herself, in these metamorphic visions, possessed of an indissoluble demonic
presence. According to her own discourse, she is everywhere: manipulated
by “alle prelates,” sought by beggars and minstrels, handed out by “Em-
perours and erles and alle manere lordes” (3.209–29). In the accusations of
Conscience she is like Job’s Satan, who wanders to and fro on the face of the
earth, or like the great whore of the apocalypse, drunk with the blood of
saints and martyrs. She has poisoned popes, taught wives to be wanton,
killed the king’s father, destroyed the armies of Saul, made herself the lover
of monks, minstrels, and lepers (3.120–69). Her scope is universal, and the
vision of her demise, with which her episode ends, is a vision of all things
made new, a prophecy of the day when Reason will displace Mede as the
ruler of this world. He is Christ to her Antichrist, the one who prophesies of
a day when “Love shal lede thi lond as the leef liketh” and who promises to
the king that he will “reste with yow evere” (4.148, 192).
The relationship between these incarnations of Antichrist and the
abstract terms of Langland’s poem will help to make visible the relation-
ship between Langland’s passages of nominalist analysis and his passages of
incarnation theology. In the critical discourses of Conscience and Holi-
chirche, the proliferating names of the metamorphic Christ are not unlike
the proliferating names of Liar, Mede, and Wrong. These Christological
discourses are concerned with naming exactly because they mean to
analyze the contours of a conceptual map, to open up commerce between
a single universal principle and the many individual manifestations of that
principle. They resemble Anima’s self-dissection in just this way.32 And
they resemble, too, the games of naming and renaming, of embodi-
ment and disembodiment, that generate so many of Langland’s flickering,
iridescent personifications. His allegorical agents are all words made flesh,
32 Carruthers argues, for instance, that Anima is himself an exercise in the trope pictura,
a “cognitive” and “organizing” device by which one creates a map “to show the relationships
of subject matters in rational fashion.” Anima is best understood, she argues, as “the
imagined form of a scholastic distinctio,” a way of summarizing and organizing information.
“Allegory without the Teeth: Some Reflections on Figural Language in Piers Plowman,”
Yearbook of Langland Studies 19 (2005), pp. 29, 34, 41–2. James Simpson says that, in
passages such as the adventures of Liar, “concepts act out a narrative whose real force is
argumentative; the very existence of such concepts implies an act of completed intellection
before the action of the ‘allegory’ even begins, and such an act of completed abstraction
allows very little room for continued action.” “From Reason to Affective Knowledge:
Modes of Thought and Poetic Form in Piers Plowman,” Medium Aevum 55 (1986), p. 11.
and they all render the negotiations between word and flesh, between the
eternal life of God and the many bodies and institutions that participate in
that life, as both powerfully enchanting and hazardously unstable.
The dynamics of incarnation thus provoke Langland both to visionary
hope and to paranoiac anxiety. He concerns himself and his poetry with
the delicate lines between authenticity and imposture, and he keeps
discovering the powers of Antichrist, impostors of the incarnate Word,
lurking in the domestic world of his English church and society. His poem
might not quite begin with a sense of God’s absence from the world, but it
at least begins with a sense that God’s presence in the world is comprom-
ised, often counterfeited, made difficult to discern by corrupt histories and
institutions. If his poetry of incarnation wills to enchant the world of
history with the presence of the Christ, that enchanting poetry also plays
out against the backdrop of a society for which incarnation makes possible
diverse, even contradictory, ideals. In many fourteenth-century contexts
Christ’s body is a ground of utopian unity, an image of all persons
gathered into one harmonious social collective; but it also serves some
ecclesiastical and state regimes as an image of the body subjected, a
submissive human form well suited to the justification of centralized
disciplinary controls.33 In some contexts Christ’s body serves as a point
of contact between subjectivity and social life, a call into ritual, social,
Eucharistic community; but it also confronts many late medieval seekers
as a call out of community, into a reflexive self-knowledge that Langland
himself experiences, by turns, as liberation, sanctification, suffocation,
solitude, and bewilderment.34 It is for this reason that Piers is himself so
very unstable. The bodies and ideals he exemplifies are ever contradicting
themselves, ever falling into the corruptions of history, ever confronting
history with the elusive promise of the eschaton. The dreamer can only
wander through the remains of history, searching for the residues of Piers’
metamorphic existence and picking up fragments as he goes.
33 See Beckwith, who describes a painting of the suffering Christ that Bishop Henry
Despenser commissioned for Norwich Cathedral Priory in 1381, after he had helped to
suppress the Peasants’ Revolt. If Christ can be the grounds of resistance, Beckwith observes,
the Christ of this painting is also “emblematic of acceptance, of humility, of being a body
not acting, but acted upon.” If, in other words, the doctrine of incarnation can be the
grounds of human identity, it can also be appropriated as an instrument of control, an
instrument by which individual identities are policed from above. Christ’s Body, pp. 23,
40–2; qtd. at p. 23. On the uses of incarnation theology for both conservative and radical
projects, see Watson, “Conceptions of the Word,” pp. 86–112.
34 See Bynum’s comments on Cistercian piety, with its tendency to see love “as an
opportunity for personal emotional expansion, as ‘affective’ more than ‘effective’ charity,”
Jesus as Mother, pp. 77–81; and Beckwith’s discussion of Bernard’s affective devotion,
Christ’s Body, pp. 49–52.
If there are signs in Langland of the disenchanting projects and ideals of
renunciation that will characterize the culture of English early modernity,
those signs lie here, in the experience of historical and spiritual solitude
that Piers Plowman takes as one of its central problems. His poem’s
allegorical narrative yields up its own most crucial meanings at moments
of renunciation: the tearing up of the pardon, the institutional critiques of
Anima, the final departure of Conscience from the church. At these key
junctures, Langland’s dreamer despairs of a redeemed history or a
redeemed social life. He catches glimpses, instead, of a church run up
against the dead ends of history, of a transcendent God who annuls
history, and of a paranoiac subject who finds himself at a terrible distance
both from God and from history. In his disenchanted glimpses of these
modern experiences, with their structures of revolution and renunciation,
Langland feels the pull of a temptation that will be more strongly apparent
in Skelton, Spenser, and Bunyan, a temptation to remove the operations
of grace to a sphere beyond the corruptions of the secular order. At the
same time, he experiences this temptation within, and as a corollary of, a
theology of incarnation that seems almost to include the temptation
within itself. By choosing to belong to history, the incarnate Christ
of Langland’s search embraces the very crisis of authenticity that, for
Langland, calls the power of his incarnation into question. He clothes
himself in the rags of history, and he enchants those same ragged materials
with his indwelling life, opening paradoxes of convergence and divergence
that the anxious dreamer of Piers Plowman finds nearly impossible to bear.
That dreamer verges on modernity, not because he has discovered new
impossibilities but because he finds his will to sustain an old impossibility
growing more and more troubled. The paradoxes of God’s presence are,
for him, signs not of grace but of crisis, harbingers of a violent reckoning
between the order of redemption and the order of history.35
Langland finds demons everywhere for just this reason. His proliferat-
ing images of Antichrist suggest an emergent modernity because they
belong to the idioms of a culture that associates spiritual presence with
35 On Langland’s renunciations and reaffirmations of history, see James Simpson,
Reform and Cultural Reformation: 1350–1547, Oxford English Literary History, vol. 2
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 346–65. Simpson sets the revolutionary
theology of Protestantism, in which “the historical accretions of the material church are
dissolved by the direct and powerful solvent of divine grace,” against a reformist view
according to which Christ’s “gracious irruption into history” all at once redeems the church
from the dead ends of history and inaugurates the church into a new, redemptive history.
Simpson finds Langland wrestling with the former and clinging to the latter, pp. 360, 362.
See also Zeeman, who reads Langland’s “distinctive dynamic of failure, rebuke, and
renewal” as a path to real spiritual progress, as negation in the service of creation, Piers
Plowman and the Medieval Discourse of Desire, pp. 21–2.
Satanic presence. Though the high period of European witch-hunting will
not begin until the end of the fifteenth century, church authorities
throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries wrestle earnestly
with the question of how to distinguish divine from demonic possession.
Visionaries such as Brigit of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, who claim to
speak with the voice of God, arouse anxieties that the voice in question
might in fact be the voice of Antichrist. Both Brigit and Catherine are
subjected to examination for demonic possession, and Brigit herself per-
sistently worries that she is ensnared by illusions of the devil. In the
decades following their deaths at the end of the fourteenth century,
the cases of Brigit and Catherine will provoke a number of treatises on
the power of Antichrist to ape the operations of Christ. In diagnosing
visionary women as vessels of the enemy, these treatises advance the
supposition that all possession is demonic possession, and they begin to
articulate the disciplines of examination and authentication necessary
to root out the invisible enemy.36
By the end of the fifteenth century, when Henry Kramer produces his
great Malleus maleficarum, this supposition will be dominant, and the
witch-hunts will begin. All the demonological manuals of the early mod-
ern period assume that the divine has little operation in the realm of
bodies, outside the tightly circumscribed sphere of the ecclesiastical sacred.
A possessed body is a sign of Antichrist, and the church’s inquisitors
become masters of discernment, readers of the demonic in nuances of
speech and behavior, in physiological ailments, in male and (especially) in
female bodies.37 They are practitioners in paranoia, their manuals of
36 On the cases of Brigit and Catherine and the writings of their detractors, see Nancy
Caciola, to whom I am indebted here, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in
the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 278–315. Caciola reads
the resistance to divine possession as an attempt to undercut visionary women who speak
from outside the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
37 The history of Christian anxiety about demonic activity begins, of course, in the
earliest periods of the church. On the intensification of this anxiety in the late medieval and
early modern periods, see Alain Boreau, Satan the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the
Medieval West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Armando Maggi, Satan’s
Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
On the relegation of magic to the realm of the Satanic, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the
Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971); Richard Kieckefer, Magic in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 183–201; and Robert Muchembled,
“Satanic Myths and Cultural Reality,” Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and
Peripheries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1990), pp. 139–60. On the convergence of superstition with the more heinous crime of
heresy in ecclesiastical law, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer
of Children since the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
pp. 14–36; and also Boreau, Satan the Heretic, pp. 43–67.
witchcraft blueprints for a hermeneutics of suspicion. They analyze evi-
dence, conduct trials, root out conspiracies and communes. And as the
culture of Protestant reform removes the operations of God further and
further out to a transcendent realm, all signs of spiritual agency, from
magic speech acts and prophetic revelations to Eucharistic rites and
communion with the dead, will come to be understood as illusions of
Satan. Religion itself, in its bodily, public, ecstatic, efficacious forms, will
seem to many a clue that the insurgent enemy is at work.38
Langland’s search for the residues of God is haunted by these very
doubts. Every voice he encounters is the voice of Christ, the voice that
speaks in ten thousand places. But the voices in his poem are also corrupt
and inconsistent, and in their claims to speak Christ they conjure the
specter of Antichrist. Langland’s book of allegory is a book of anxious
discernment for just this reason. His pilgrim, like the early modern
inquisitors, must be paranoid, a discerner of spiritual presences. However
deeply his unstable personifications may resonate with the grammar of
nominalist analysis or of satirical caricature, they are always, to a certain
degree, presences. In his riotous vision of Lady Mede they crowd into
court and countryside as a noisy domestic rabble; in his quest for Dowel
they hover around him with the strange familiarity of tutelary spirits; in
the apocalyptic visions with which the poem ends they roam the earth as
giant forms, death and pestilence in their grasp. In their manifestations as
Conscience, Holichirche, Dowel, Kynde, Scripture, Clergie, Anima, and
Piers Plowman, they are images of incarnation. They figure the possibility
of Christ in the dreaming subject and Christ in the world. But in their
failures, fault lines, and acts of abandonment, they also set their prophet,
the Langlandian dreamer, to his work of discernment, and they leave him
in doubt about the real identity of the principality of whom they are
hypostases or signs.
Because he dwells among these uncertain presences, Langland’s mod-
ernity is both an incarnate modernity and a disenchanted modernity. If his
allegorical agents signify divine absence, they do so by discovering the
residual enchantments of God in a world of bodies, institutions, and
38 See, e.g., James VI of Scotland’s Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597), in facsimile at
Early English Books Online (for the durable URLs associated with individual titles at Early
English Books Online, see my Bibliography). Epistemon, the voice of authority in James’s
dialogue, classifies the different sorts of ghosts, faeries, genii, and incubi, according to the
principle that “they are in effect, but all one kinde of spirites,” spirits of the devil, “who for
abusing the more of mankinde, takes on these sundrie shapes, and vses diuerse formes of
out-ward actiones, as if some were of nature better then [sic] other,” p. 57. Magic, too, he
says, is an illusion of the devil, who teaches human practitioners materials and rites, “not
that anie of these meanes which hee teacheth them . . . can of them selues helpe any thing to
these turnes, that they are employed in,” p. 44.
human agents. If they signify divine presence, they render that presence as
a ghostly and flickering thing, ill at ease in the world of history that
Langland wants so badly to redeem. They initiate Langland’s dreamer
into a dialectic of renunciation and affirmation, and they direct his
provisional experiments in a series of radical and rehabilitative projects.
In the dynamics of these experiments, Langland inhabits the postures of
disenchantment that I will find at play in the major allegorical narratives of
the English sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is the first great
practitioner of allegory’s self-renouncing, early modern phase, a writer
who loses history at every turn but who persists in his quest to reclaim it,
ever in pursuit of the incarnate presences that beckon him on in his search.
3
Suspicion and Solitude
The Bowge of Courte
When George Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie (1589) calls allegoria
a “guilefull & abusing” trope, he understands the uses of allegory to be far
removed from the ideals of incarnation that direct the language of Piers
Plowman. If allegory for Langland strives to enact and reveal the embodi-
ment of the eternal Word, allegoria for Puttenham is a weapon of rhet-
orical combat, a tool for confounding hostile interlocutors “by a duplicitie
of meaning or dissimulation vnder couert and darke intendments.” Put-
tenham’s account of allegory as what he calls “false semblant” gives special
weight to the concealing functions of allegorical language.1 His user’s
guide to these concealing functions concerns itself with the power of
allegory to generate solitude, and he figures the allegorical maker as wary
and embattled, hazardously at odds with a powerful opponent or a larger
society. He hints, then, at a relationship that will be particularly important
for sixteenth-century poets such as John Skelton and Edmund Spenser, a
relationship between the poetics of allegory and the self-protecting, world-
renouncing energies of dissent.
I have claimed throughout this book that allegory is disenchanting in its
eschatological tendency toward self-interpretation and self-cancellation.
But Puttenham’s fantasia of militaristic language—he calls allegoria “the
chief ringleader and captain of all other figures”—also suggests another
kind of resonance between allegory’s dynamics of concealment and
England’s early modern culture of disenchantment.2 The trope of false
semblant belongs to the resistant subject who occupies the center of many
early modern narratives of historical breakage and private authenticity.
This resistant subject is both a practitioner and an object of canny
suspicion, and Puttenham’s comments on this subject’s duplicitous
1
The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge:
The University Press, 1936); qtd. at 3.7, 3.18, and again 3.18.
2
The Arte of English Poesie, 3.18.
Suspicion and Solitude 111
charms themselves express a kind of hermeneutic anxiety. His exposition
of allegory as falsehood can do much to explain the currents of suspicion
that Spenser channels when, in The Faerie Queene, he sets out to expose
what he might as well have called the “couert and darke intendments” of
his own arch-charmers, Duessa and Archimago. The operations of allegory
in this guileful mode tend to arouse not so much the interpretive zeal of
the eschatological visionary as the tremulous paranoia of the disenchanted
subject, the subject who both fears and defensively cultivates the power of
dissimulation.
John Skelton’s one explicit acknowledgment of “allegoria” as a poetic
strategy seems to conceive of allegory in just these paranoiac terms. The
acknowledgment comes in a relatively late poem, the first of Skelton’s
three trumpet blasts (1521–2) against Cardinal Wolsey and the “remark-
able concentration of power” that characterizes the Tudor court under his
chancellorship.3 “My name ys Parott,” that poem begins, “a byrde of
Paradyse,” and the speaker of Speke Parott is a strange bird indeed.4 His
poem is a profusely multivocal self-declaration that anticipates an act of
prophetic speaking but never gets there, and he presents himself in an
array of bewildering masks. He is, by turns, a courtly preener, an antic
jester, a wanton hedonist, a weeping moralist, a disgruntled academician,
an incendiary preacher, an enigmatic riddler, and—most of all—a reluc-
tant prophet. The many fragments of his discourse are interpenetrated by
a proliferation of voices that threaten, question, encourage, bully, and
bless him, and Parrot’s refrain in response to these voices is this: “I pray
you, let Parot have lyberte to speke.” But he has no liberty to speak. The
voices that urge him to speak blend with other voices that rebuke him to
silence—“Tycez-vous, Parrott, tenes-vous coye” (56); “Peace, Parrot, ye
prate as ye were ebrius!” (68); “what is this to purpose?” (71); “what
meneth this besynes?” (58)—and with still other voices that warn him
about the persecution that will greet his prophetic message. “Supply to
them, I pray,” the voice of one of his envoys enjoins him, “ . . . that they
wolde / Vouchesafe to defend yow agayne the brawlynge scolde / Callyd
Detraxion, encankryd with envye” (359–62).
These cautionary voices know that Parrot lives in a saeculum of wrong,
presided over by tyrants against whom “there dar no man sey nay, / For
Frantiknes and Wylfulnes and Braynles ensembyll / The nebbish of a lyon
3
I quote from Stanley Fish, who describes succinctly the “centralizing process” in which
Wolsey played such a visible role. John Skelton’s Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1965), pp. 126–35, qtd. at pp. 128, 126.
4
Quotations from Skelton’s poetry come from The Complete English Poems, ed. John
Scattergood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), and are cited by line number.
they make to trete and trembyll” (421–2). How then is the trembling
prophet to speak? It is in the implicit context of this question that Parrot
avows his use of allegoria. In the shadow of a centralizing, marginalizing,
tyrannizing regime, there is liberty only behind the cloak of obfuscation,
what Parrot calls his “confuse distrybutyve” (198). His whirligig of voices,
languages, registers, and identities is part of a deliberate strategy of
speaking in enigmate (191), so that “metaphora, alegoria withall / Shall
be his protectyon, his pavys and his wall” (202–3). This is allegory in the
office Puttenham gives it: a figure of “false semblant or dissimulation,” the
tactical weapon, as Parrot says, “of confuse tantum avoydynge the chek-
mate” (196). For this tyrannized speaker, allegory means deliberate
obscurity as a tactic of evasion. His allegoria is not just a technique of
other-speaking but a form of self-defense, and the beneficent voice that
speaks his envoys has to remind him that, though the public surfaces of his
discourse are deceptive and obfuscating, “yet undyr that dothe reste /
Maters more precious than the ryche jacounce” (366). In this interior
alone, the envoy suggests, Parrot finds the liberty to adhere to the truth.
His allegorical idiom is a device of political and psychic protection that
allows him both to venture into the fray and to escape into an inscrutable
privacy. It is this antic disposition, this manic drama of aggression and
diffidence, that he learns from the ancient prophets whose words and
identities he tries on like so many disguises.5
Skelton’s poems of attack all affect this deployment of allegory as a
defensive weapon. His later assaults on Wolsey, Collyn Clout and Why
Come Ye Nat to Courte? (written successively in 1522), articulate their
criticisms in progressively more explicit terms, but these poems, too, have
their ways of registering the paranoiac evasions of the threatened dissenter.
5
In his reading of the anti-Wolsey satires, Greg Walker argues that Skelton wrote Speke
Parott partly in an attempt to win the favor of the king and others at court while Wolsey was
away at Calais. The speaker of the poem, then, walks a thin and dangerous line: he bets that
Wolsey’s stock is falling and so attempts an aggressive attack that will exploit the king’s
displeasure with the cardinal. But he also proceeds with the caution of an outsider, himself
ill-favored, who knows the power of his foe and who needs to be able to deny everything.
Walker reads the more explicit approach of the later anti-Wolsey poems as a response to the
indifferent reception of Speke Parott and an attempt to reach a different audience among the
minor nobility and London citizenry. John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 53–100. Other commentators have seen Parrot’s
strategies of obfuscation as a positive program of meaning-making: as, for instance, what
Arthur Kinney describes as a fit medium for articulating the typological contours of God’s
work in history; or as what Jane Griffiths describes as a “process of cumulative signification”
that demands of its readers a certain sort of learning and that therefore defies the pedagogical
strategies of English humanism. See, respectively, Kinney, John Skelton, Priest as Poet
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 15–30; and Griffiths,
John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2006), pp. 79–100.
These evasions are indeed a crucial part of each poem’s rhetoric. The “style
rude and playne” of Collyn Clout is a mask, or rather the performance of a
mask, and the poem culminates in Collyn’s ventriloquized rendition of the
response of corrupt prelates to his attack. What the prelates promise is
violent suppression—
Wherefore we make you sure,
Ye prechers shall be yawde:
Some shal be sawde,
As noble Isaias,
The holy prophet, was;
And some of you shall dye
Lyke holy Jeremy;
Some hanged, some slayne,
Some beaten to the brayne;
And we wyll rule and rayne (1203–12)—
and Collyn leaves off with his certainty that there is no way the ecclesiastical
powers “wyll suffre this boke / By hoke ne by croke / Prynted for to be”
(1237–9). He therefore chooses to withdraw and lapses into silence, taking
his ship, as he says, out of the storm and into shelter, “and sayle nat farre
abrode, / Tyll the coost be clere” (1256–7). It is a retreat into silence, if a
rather loud one. In Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?, where Skelton is blatant
and dangerous in his campaign against the man he calls “the red hat,” he
fashions his gestures of cautious diffidence into instruments of vicious
aggression: “I coulde say some what, / But speke ye no more of that, /
For drede of the red hat / Take peper in the nose / For then thyne heed of
gose. / . . . Thus wyll I conclude my style / And fall to rest a whyle” (397).
The speakers of these poems need a place to hide—or they adopt the
posture of needing a place to hide—and the other-speaking of allegory, as
Parrot suggests, offers them something to hide behind without forfeiting
their liberty to speak. In these poems Skelton understands the doubleness
of allegoria as a response to danger, a way of wooing the reader into secret
knowledge without bringing the secret things out into the open.6 The
numeric ciphers of Ware the Hauke (between 1503 and 1512) and of the
Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell (1494–1523) all at once declare and refuse
6
See Kenneth Burke’s observation that the pressures that drive satire tend to be more
powerful under centralized control than they are under liberalism, “for the most inventive
satire arises when the artist is seeking simultaneously to take risks and escape punishment
for his boldness, and is never quite certain himself whether he will be acclaimed or
punished.” The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (n. p.: Louisiana
State University Press, 1941), pp. 231–2. On this claim in relation to allegory, which he
calls “the chief weapon of satire,” see Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic
Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), pp. 324–8.
to declare the poet against his enemies, and the imperative headers that
organize the former poem announce with strange clarity the poet’s double
office of concealing and revealing: OBSERVATE, CONSIDERATE, DELIBERATE,
VIGILATE, DEPLORATE, DIVINITATE, REFORMATE, PENSITATE.7 Most of these
headers enjoin the reader to a state of mind, a hermeneutic watchfulness.
Listen, they say, for the other-speaking of this poem. After challenging any
comers to unriddle his cipher—the solution to which is Skeltonida vatem,
the avis unica tantum—the speaker of Ware the Hauke challenges his
learned, clerical target to unriddle his poem. “Whereto shuld I rehers /
The sentens of my vers?” he rhetorically asks, and he dares his reader,
construas hoc: “construe this” (246–50). There is an effrontery in his
riddles and dares—see if you can figure it out, “ye develysh dogmatista”
(255)—and in his doggerel Latin verses there is an undercurrent of
mockery, a parody of the clerical Latin used by his target. His refrain
“ware the hauke” condenses the effrontery and mockery into a polyvalent
image that communicates menace. The hawk is no longer simply the bird
that came into the church but a complex and other-speaking thing: a
symbol of offense, a minister of judgment, in some ways a sign of the
predator-poet, Britain’s bird like no other.
The concealing offices of allegory are, of course, familiar to premodern
rhetoricians and theorists. Quintilian advises that allegorical tropes can be
used “to disguise unpleasant facts in better words” or “to blame with a
pretence of praise,” and early modern writers learn from a variety of
ancient sources to regard poetry as itself a disguise, a veil to protect esoteric
truths “that they might not,” as John Harington says, “be rashly abused by
prophane wits.”8 Ancient poetry in many medieval and early modern
7
The dating of the Garlande is particularly complicated and matters somewhat to my
reading of Skelton here. Many scholars have dated the poem to 1523, the year of its first
printing. Certainly its mention of Collyn Clout cannot have been written before 1522. But
there is evidence that substantial portions of the poem date from 1495 (some of the lyrics
from even earlier) and from intervening years (the defense of Phyllyp Sparowe, for instance,
responds to attacks that were made against the poem in 1509). On that evidence, see
Scattergood, Complete Poems, p. 496, and Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the
1520s, pp. 17–22.
8
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, ed. Donald A. Russell as The Orator’s Education
(Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 2001), 8.6.57, 55.
For the Renaissance notion of poetry as the veil of esoteric mysteria, see Book 14 of
Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium and the two proems to Pico della Mirandola’s
Heptaplus. “It was the well-known practice of the sages of old,” Pico says in the first of those
proems, “either simply not to write on religious subjects or to write of them under some
other guise,” so that even Plato himself “concealed his doctrines beneath coverings of
allegory, veils of myth, mathematical images, and unintelligible signs of fugitive meaning.”
On the Dignity of Man, On Being and the One, and Heptaplus, trans. Charles Glen Wallis,
Paul J. W. Miller, and Douglas Carmichael (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1965), pp. 68–9.
And see Michael Murrin’s useful critical account in The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes toward a
accounts is allegorical because its “riddles and enigmaticall knotts” conceal
what Thomas Nashe describes as “a more hidden and diuine kind of
Philosophy, enwrapped in blinde Fables and darke stories.”9 But there is
also something in Skelton’s speakers that savors more particularly of early
modern disenchantment, with its ideals of skeptical resistance and of
withdrawal from history. These speakers situate themselves out beyond
the margins of the society they address, as prophets in exile. In their
cultivation of suspicious anxiety, they seem to anticipate the broad ten-
dencies that John Farrell associates with the paranoiac temperament in
modern culture: most of all, a “psychological tendency toward suspicion,
grandiosity, persecutory delusions, and systems of interpretation,” and a
susceptibility to accounts of the human situation that “undermine our
ability to distinguish our thought from coherent delusion or manipulative
contrivance.”10 They write self-consciously, as dissenting subjects under
tyranny, in a condition of cultural and historical solitude, and they make
quiet experiments in the assertion of this solitude as an ethical stance, as an
exercise of the “essential freedom and responsibility” that theorists of
modernity have associated with the development of the “buffered” or
the “sovereign” self.11
Skeltonic allegory seems, in this way, to participate in a project of
disenchantment that enforces historical solitude with aggressive violence.
But Skelton knows another sort of allegory, too, one that this account of
guileful and abusing tropes does not comprehend. It is worth noticing that
none of the poems I have mentioned are narrative in their form. In their
mania for retreat into concealed messages, they decline to reckon with the
relationship between the structure of allegorical signification and the
demands of narrative representation. Nor do they register the allure of
enchantment—the capturing of narrative and history by an eternal order
of meaning—that so troubles the poems I have read so far: Psychomachia,
The Complaint of Nature, Piers Plowman. Does Skelton feel that allure?
Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1969), esp. pp. 3–20. Harington I quote from Murrin, p. 10.
9
As in my Introduction, I quote “riddles and enigmaticall knots” from Henry Rey-
nolds, Mythomystes (London, 1632), p. 29; in facsimile at Early English Books Online. For
the durable URLs associated with individual titles at Early English Books Online, see my
Bibliography. Nashe I quote from Murrin, The Veil of Allegory, p. 10.
10
Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2006), p. 5.
11
See, again, Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), which I quote here from p. 16; and
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2007), pp. 29–41. I discuss these formations briefly in my Introduction and at more
length in Chapter 5.
The answer to this question might lie in the first of his narrative poems.
Skelton attempts to write sustained narrative with notable infrequency.
When he does take up robustly fictional forms, he tends to take up the
conventions of the dream vision and the stage morality. These fourteenth-
and fifteenth-century forms mediate to Skelton many of the conventions
of late medieval allegorical writing. And they force Skelton to contend
with questions about the extent to which the literary culture he inherits is
a culture in decay, a culture available to him only as a history from which
he finds himself isolated. In poems such as the Garlande or Chapelet of
Laurell (a Chaucerian dream vision) and Magnyfycence (a morality play,
c.1516), Skelton cultivates an ambivalent array of approaches and
responses to these questions.12 He positions himself as both a laureate
master and an ironic dismantler, a citizen all at once of the disintegrating
literary culture of the fifteenth century and of the rising Tudor regime
whose patronage he so ardently covets and despises. He seems to be
engaged, especially in the latter poem, in exploring the possibility of
disenchanted narrative forms, in ironizing and parodying the old conven-
tions of allegory, and in testing the capacity of allegorical language to
discover eternity in the materials of history.
But it is in his first major English poem, The Bowge of Courte (c.1498),
that Skelton registers with full force the shock of what presents itself to
him as a new crisis for allegorical language.13 It is here that he really
12
The date of Magnyfycence is, in fact, uncertain, but Skelton probably finished the play
sometime between 1515, when Louis XII of France died, and 1523, when the Garlande
appeared in print. Most scholars have accepted the conclusions of R. L. Ramsay, who argues
that Skelton must have written Magnyfycence when tensions with France were still high,
certainly before the betrothal of Mary Tudor to the Dauphin in 1518, and probably before
the treaty of Noyon, in 1516. See Magnyfycence: A Moral Play, ed. R. L. Ramsay (London:
Kegan Paul for the Early English Text Society, 1906), pp. xxi–xxv; along with, e.g., William
Nelson, John Skelton: Laureate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 188;
A. R. Heiserman, Skelton and Satire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 67;
and Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority, p. 56, n. 1. Paula Neuss, in her Revels
edition of Magnyfycence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980),
pp. 15–17, challenges this consensus and proposes a date as late as 1520–2, though she
maintains that no precise date can be established. Greg Walker suggests that the play
dramatizes Wolsey’s ousting, in 1519, of the king’s minions, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and
Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
pp. 60–76.
13
Wynkyn de Worde printed his edition of the Bowge in 1499. Many critics date the
poem to 1498: e.g., H. L. R. Edwards, Skelton: The Life and Times of an Early Tudor Poet
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1949), p. 68; Pollet, John Skelton: Poet of Tudor England
(Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1971), p. 32; and Scattergood, The Complete
English Poems, pp. 16, 395. Melvyn J. Tucker and F. W. Brownlow both argue for a dating
in the early 1480s, and some recent scholars, such as Meredith Anne Skura, have accepted
that early dating. See Tucker, “Setting in Skelton’s Bowge of Courte: A Speculation,” English
Language Notes 7 (1970): 168–75; Brownlow, “The Date of the Bowge of Courte and
contends with the power and allure of allegorical enchantment, and I want
to revisit Skelton’s projects of disenchantment by attending closely to this
poem’s remarkable allegorical dynamics. The Bowge is a fifteenth-century
dream vision built (rather strangely) on the model of the morality play. Some
scholars have regarded the poem as a “preliminary study” for Magnyfycence,
and some have claimed that it was itself written for theatrical performance.14
Like Magnyfycence, the Bowge features a motley band of conspiratorial
personifications, cloaked and shifty, who lead a mainly inert protagonist
into temptation while whispering behind his back. Like that later play, it
occupies a secular institutional setting—the court—and it invests its person-
ifications with a vividly realized social particularity as dubious gentlemen and
pocket-picking pretenders. Commentators have therefore tended to read
both the Bowge and Magnyfycence as exercises in domestic realism (in fash-
ioning “living, speaking characters,” as one critic says, “in place of the
medieval straw personalities”) and in the dissolution of allegory’s old incar-
nate divinities and daemonic presences into the terms of abstract discourse.15
This reading does reasonably good service to Magnyfycence, where the
allegorical agents are so mischievously and ironically aware of themselves,
and so gymnastically variable in their identities and disguises, that they
seem to be not personifications but actors, each with at least a couple of
Christian names and more aliases than anyone can count. The playful
games of self-interpretation and exposition in which these agents engage
tend to distance them from their significance, and their bodily presence
on what is manifestly a stage means that they tend both to precede and
to survive the fleeting claims of whatever meanings they are supposed
to embody. They are almost the contrary of Langland’s unstable
Skelton’s Authorship of ‘A Lamentable of Kyng Edward the III,’ ” English Language Notes
22 (1984): 12–20; and Skura, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 24, 244–5. Greg Walker challenges their claims and
reaffirms the evidence that Skelton wrote the poem in 1598–9, John Skelton and the Politics
of the 1520s, pp. 9–14.
14
On the Bowge as “preliminary study,” see Anna Torti, The Glass of Form: Mirroring
Structures from Chaucer to Skelton (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 1991), p. 108. On the
evidence that the Bowge is conceived as a stage play, see Leigh Winser, “The Bowge of Courte:
Drama Doubling as Dream,” English Literary Renaissance 6 (1976): 3–39.
15
I quote Judith Larson, from John Scattergood, “Insecurity in Skelton’s Bowge of
Courte,” in Genres, Themes, and Images in English Literature: From the Fourteenth to the
Fifteenth Century, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1986),
p. 186. Helen Cooney argues well for Skelton’s debts to philological humanism, with its
hostility to allegory and to the trope’s idealist tendencies, “Skelton’s Bowge of Courte and the
Crisis of Allegory in Late-Medieval England,” in Nation, Court, and Culture: New Essays on
Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Helen Cooney (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001),
pp. 159–61. Other critics have argued for Skelton’s poem as an exercise in “nominalism,”
e.g., J. S. Russell, “Skelton’s Bouge of Court: A Nominalist Allegory,” Renaissance Papers 2
(1980): 1–9.
personifications: not, like Liar, a demon with one name and many bodies,
but rather, each of them, an all-too-human rascal with one body and many
names. In their hands, Magnyfycence is a festival of self-parody and
knowing skepticism, a burlesque of signification that seems to announce
something like an ironic phase for allegory. The play abounds with
passages such as this one:
FANSY: Nay, nay. He hath chaunged his, and I have chaunged myne.
COUNTERFET COUNTENANCE: Nowe what is his name? And what is
thyne?
FANSY: In faythe, Largesse I hyght;
And I am made a knyght.
COUNTERFET COUNTENANCE: A rebellyon agaynst nature –
So large a man, and so lytell of stature!
But, syr, howe counterfetyd ye?
CRAFTY CONVEYANCE: Sure Surveyaunce I named me.
COUNTERFET COUNTENANCE: Surveyaunce! Where ye survey,
Thryfte hathe lost her cofer kay. (518–27)16
The effect of this linguistic mayhem is to register a shift from the
Langlandian anxiety about demonic insurgence to a Tudor anxiety
about conspiracy at court. Skelton himself, in the Garlande, sums up
Magnyfycence with the promise, “who pryntith it wele in mynde / Moche
dowblenes of the worlde therin he may fynde” (1196–7). The play is a
guide to the machinery of political power and duplicity, and its other-
speaking is informed not by the occult patterns of an animate cosmos but
rather by the secretive patterns of a corrupt state. No surprise that some
critics have described the play as an exercise in the “secularization” of the
morality drama.17 Its punning tricksters are flamboyant in their postures
of critical self-awareness, and its model for tracking the volatile meanings
of allegorical agents has shifted from demonic metamorphosis to theatrical
disguise.18
16
For the sake of clarity, I have spelled out the names of the speakers here, where in
Scattergood’s text they are abbreviated.
17
The “secularized” quality of Magnyfycence has been variously disputed and is a useful
minor test case of Skelton’s complicated relationship with his literary models. See, for instance,
Jane Griffiths: “its most obvious affinity is with the morality play, yet it is one of the first such
plays to focus not on theological but on secular issues,” John Skelton and Poetic Authority,
pp. 65–6; and likewise Anna Torti, The Glass of Form, p. 108. A. R. Heiserman half a century
ago questioned the usefulness, to commentary on Magnyfycence, of oppositions such as
“religious” and “secular,” “theological” and “philosophical,” Skelton and Satire, esp. pp. 117–25.
18
The prominence of disguise and ironic self-consciousness owes a particular debt to the
dramatic medium itself, and to the living actor who lends the personification substance of
the most tangible sort. If Wealth emerges from a noun phrase (“a fole he is with welth that
Preliminary study or no, The Bowge of Courte bears extensive resem-
blance to Magnyfycence, and plenty of commentators have read it through
the lens of that later, more readily decipherable play. But there is some-
thing different about the Bowge. It is more sensitive than Magnyfycence,
more introverted and involved, and it both earnestly tries and abjectly fails
to be an allegorical narrative poem. In this early piece, his first (and practically
his only) sustained attempt at narrative, Skelton confronts more intently than
anywhere else the enchanted forms of the dream vision and the psychoma-
chia. The result of the experiment is a fatal collapse, and in the midst of that
collapse the poet examines with particular acuity the powers and presences he
discovers allegory to have lost. This experience of loss becomes the central
matter of the poem, for which reason the Bowge approaches at times the
quality of a prophetic lament. In this poem, Skelton fashions allegory as a
series of broken promises, and he channels currents of mourning and terror of
which Magnyfycence has no knowledge. At the same time, he translates the
experience of loss into a new allegorical idiom, in which the agents of allegory
linger as ghostly presences and in which the occult structures of allegorical
vision suffer metamorphosis into a frighteningly reflexive nightmare of
interior consciousness. What the Bowge conjures up from the visionary
structures of allegory is, then, something strange, not so much a poetry of
dissenting renunciation as a poetry of haunted solitude, phantasmic, intes-
tine, and whispering, the stuff that dreams are made on.
*
The Bowge of Courte belongs in many respects to the Chaucerian dream
visions of the fifteenth century. Those English poems tend to begin with a
mythologized evocation of the season: “In May when Flora, the fressh lusty
queen”; “Quhen pale Aurora with face lamentable”; “This lusty Maii, the
quhich all tender flouris”; “Whan that Lucina with hir pale light.”19
fallyth at debate,” 5), he also emerges from backstage, and he anchors the personification in
a body that makes inevitable the sort of corporeal clarity that all his puns and identities
would seem to deny. Plays such as Magnyfycence and Mankynde, alive as they are to the
linguistic origins of their heroes and villains, are also colorfully alive to the effect of the
actor, whose presence monopolizes the range of reference for the first person pronoun (as in
“Dyspare is my name,” Magnyfycence 2284) and diminishes the power of Dyspare’s abstract
name to fix or contain his meaning. To see Fansy assuming different roles is to apprehend
the endeavors of his own theatrical genius rather than the revelation of a numinous order.
This effect must surely be responsible for the frequent occasions, in these plays, when a
character must be reminded of who he is. “Thynke well in yowr hert; yowr name ys
Mankynde,” urges the Mercy of Mankynde, and his exhortation suggests how easy it is to see
the actor on the stage and forget his role or his meaning, his origin in the utterance
“mankynde was dere bought.” See Mankind, ed. Kathleen M. Ashley and Gerard NeCastro
(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010), qtd. at 279, 9.
19
This little anthology samples the opening movements of the anonymous Scottish
poem The Quare of Jelusy and John Lydgate’s Complaynte of a Lovers Lyfe, both in
Especially when their matter is erotic, they are poems of spring, season of
appetite and desire. As the earth stirs with new life, so stirs the dreamer with
restless longing. In another strain of this dream tradition—in poems such
as The House of Fame, The Kingis Quair, The Temple of Glas, and Skelton’s
own early fragments of The Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell—the poetry of
spring gives way to a poetry of winter. These winter poems have for their
matter not the sickness of love but the cruelty of fortune. Their genealogy is
Boethian, and their winter setting might indeed derive from the Consola-
tion of Philosophy, which begins with its poet-dreamer in the gloom of old
age: “For age has come unlooked for. . . . My head is white before its time,
my skin hangs loose / About my tremulous frame.”20 In their complaints
against fortune, their satirical critiques of desire, and their sadder and
wiser protagonists, they together constitute an important backdrop to the
Bowge of Courte.
There is another, more obscure expression of this fifteenth-century
tradition. In it are the poems of autumn. They include the fourteenth-
century Pearl (“In Augoste in a hygh seysoun, / Quen corne is coruen
wyth crokez kene”) and Hoccleve’s Complaint (“Aftir þat heruest inned
had his sheeues, / And þat the broun sesoun of Mighelmesse / Was
come”), poems of mourning, retrospection, and what Hoccleve calls the
“thoghtful maladie.”21 Hoccleve’s poem, especially, is paradigmatic for a
poetry of autumnal melancholy. The Hoccleve of the Complaint is a man
past his time: middle-aged, failing in limbs and eyes, and excluded from
society by the memory of his former madness. His themes are mutability,
regret, the place of the suffering mortal before an inscrutable God, and,
perhaps most vividly, the experience of cowering under the gaze of a
gossiping, disapproving world: “and moist ynow was / of my swoot, /
Which was now frosty cold / now fyry hoot” (153–4). In the context of
this poem, the opening of Skelton’s Bowge is already faintly familiar:
Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints, ed. Dana M. Symons (Kalamazoo, MI: Medi-
eval Institute Publications, 2004); Gavin Douglas’s The Palis of Honoure, ed. David
Parkinson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007); and Lydgate’s The
Temple of Glas, ed. J. Allan Mitchell (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications,
2007).
20
Consolation of Philosophy, 1.m1.9, 11–12. English and Latin quotations of Boethius
are from the Loeb edition, with translation by S. J. Tester (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1978). Citations are by book, section number, and line; metrical sections
are designated with “m.”
21
Pearl 39–40, from The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Malcolm Andrew and
Ronald Waldron (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996); and Complaint 1–3, 21, from
Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. J. A. Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University
Press for the Early English Text Society, 1999). I have modernized yogh characters to
Roman type.
In autumpne, whan the sonne in Vyrgyne
By radyante hete enryped hath our corne;
Whan Luna, full of mutabylyte,
As emperes the dyademe hath worne
Of our pole artyke, smylynge halfe in scorne
At our foly and our unstedfastnesse;
The tyme whan Mars to werre hym dyd dres;
I, callynge to mynde the great auctoryte
Of poetes olde . . . (1–9)
This poet, too, situates his poem in the brown season of ripeness and
decay. If the Bowge has a presiding deity, that deity is not the rising and
regenerative god of spring but rather a scornful, mutable empress-moon.
The poet’s first awareness is an awareness of himself as the object of that
goddess’s gaze, and he therefore hints already at a sort of uneasy self-
regard. The intensity of that self-regard becomes evident as the poet muses
fitfully about the renown of “poetes olde,”
whyche, full craftely,
Under as coverte termes as coude be,
Can touche a troughte and cloke it subtylly
Wyth fresshe utteraunce full sentencyously;
Dyverse in style, some spared not vyce to wrythe,
Some of moralyte nobly dyde endyte. (9–14)
Skelton’s poet longs to join these poets, but he is a man born out of due
time, and his desire to join the ancient company runs up against the wall
of his historical and social solitude. He is, like Hoccleve’s protagonist,
an exile from the society he wishes to join, and the moment he takes up
his pen, his anxiety rises up in the guise of a figure called Ignorance, who
warns him against attempting to exceed his feeble “connynge” and enjoins
him not to write, lest he become as one “that clymmeth hyer than he may
fotynge have” (23, 27). He thus finds himself paralyzed by his self-regard.
In this regard he bears a certain kinship to the wakeful dreamers of The
Book of the Duchess and The Kingis Quair, and his opening verses seem to
promise another incarnation of Hoccleve’s autumnal narrator, alone with
himself before the mirror.22
Before this solitary poet has the chance to write a word, Skelton puts
him to sleep and has him board a dream vessel that has just sailed into
Harwich Port. That ship will be the setting for his nightmare, and as he
climbs aboard he encounters straightaway the lineaments of his waking
life. There is a scornful empress presiding over all, a forbidding voice (her
22
See Hoccleve, Complaint 155–8.
name is now not Ignorance but Danger) who warns the poet to turn back,
a company whose number the dreamer longs to join. Most of all there is
the ship’s merchandise, a commodity called “Favore-to-stonde-in-her-
good-grace” (55), potent drug for the ambitious, cowering, self-regarding
subject. The name of the ship itself—it is called The Bowge of Courte—
signifies royal favor or reward, and it perhaps reveals something about the
sort of poem the poet in his waking life had hoped to write. His dream will
begin, it seems, as a satire of the court, written, like the Boethian satires
of the fifteenth century, by an exile from the court.23 In it the poet
conceives a ship of fools, a coveted jewel called bone aventure, and, at the
climax of his prologue, a vision of the ship’s lady revealed as the goddess
Fortune, all the stuff of the Boethian strain. The damned rout that
crowds Fortune’s throne and begs her favor belongs to that strain as
well: Skelton learns it from the allegorical visions of Chaucer, Gavin
Douglas, and James I, and he himself has experimented with it before in
the frame narrative for the Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell. But now, at
the start of this new vision, Skelton’s satirist-dreamer does something
surprising. He casts off his role as observer and plunges into the throng,
unmediated and unrebuked:
And I with them prayed her to have in mynde.
She promysed to us all she wolde be kynde;
Of Bowge of Court she asketh what we wold have,
And we asked favoure, and favour she us gave. (123–6)
Here the poem makes its move into a new idiom. From this point the
lady, the throng, the jewel, the ship, and the tutelary presences of Danger
and Desire—indeed all the furniture of the allegorical vision—disappear.
In their place, the dreamer finds a compound apparition: “For, as me
thoughte, in our shyppe I dyde see / Full subtyll persones in nombre foure
and thre” (132–3). These seven phantoms will dominate the rest of the
dream. With their advent, the visionary world of allegory gives way to a
world of inescapable claustrophobia. They come pressing in: Favel, full of
flattery, “that well coude fayne a tale,” and misdeeming Suspicion, “with
face deedly and pale,” and their comrades, “Dysdayne, Ryotte, Dissymu-
ler,” a proud and forbidding company (134–42). Dread—for this, as the
dreamer reveals, is his name—awkwardly advances himself and assays to
join these figures in their dance, but he finds himself all at once the object
of their hatred and the object of their intense interest and desire. The rest
of the dream is composed solely of the assaults they make on Dread’s
23
On this posture, and the Bowge’s departures from it, see Fish, John Skelton’s Poetry,
pp. 54–81.
attention. They draw in very close, breathing on his neck, whispering in
his ear, touching his arm in counterfeit intimacy, fingering his purse. He
will see nothing beyond their faces and will hear nothing over their
increasingly meaningless chatter, which comes wholly now to displace
the visionary world in which his dream was supposed to take place.
An account of the first of these figures will illustrate the effects of the
poem as a whole. He is Favel, and he has a conventional medieval past. His
name, which indicates duplicitous flattery, probably derives from the
fourteenth-century Roman de Fauvel, and his idiom belongs to the lan-
guage of the court. He comes cooing that he “can not flater,” tickling
Dread’s ear with rumors about his standing at the Lady’s court (“I herde
her speke of you”; “ye be to her, yea, worth a thousande pounde”; “here be
dyverse to you that be unkynde”), bashfully confessing his own priceless
loyalty (“though I say it, I was myselfe your frende”; “and, yf nede be, a
bolde worde I dare cracke”), and entreating Dread to keep confidence with
him (“shewe to me your mynde”; “no word that I sayde!”).24 His diction
has a comic flavor. The smoothness, the false modesty, the plangent
protestations of sincerity, the “nay, nay, be sure” and “though I say it,”
all mark him out as a satirical type. He is the sort of imposter with whom
Chaucer’s Host would have a field day, the prancing trickster whom the
protagonists of the morality drama must ever learn to resist.
But see the difference. Favel does not give way to mockery or morality.
There is no real question of resisting his enticements. Already in the first
clause of his flattering discourse, in which he wonders at the dreamer’s
excellent “connynge,” he returns to the vocabulary of an earlier discourse:
that of Ignorance, who puts a stop to the dreamer-poet’s efforts on
grounds that he lacks “connynge.” In rehearsing this term, Favel speaks
to Dread with the voice of Dread’s own secret anxieties. Indeed he knows
the dreamer’s secrets all too well, as if he were the uncanny ventriloquist of
Dread’s fantasies and fears. It is telling that Dread himself says not a word
during Favel’s monologue. All his delusions, doubts, objections, and
hopes are drained from his own disabled voice into the voice of his
flatterer, which is why Favel asks him to bare his mind and then does
not stay for an answer, and why Favel responds as if to an objection when
no objection has been spoken (“Nay, naye, be sure, whyles I am on your
syde / Ye maye not fall; truste me, ye maye not fayle,” 169–70). Dread’s
acts of submission and disclosure are all wrapped up in the words of Favel
himself. The flatterer seems to have insinuated himself into Dread’s
24
These quotations come from lines 157–75.
consciousness, a more subtle and hypnotic operator than any of the
tricksters of the medieval moralities.
As Suspicion arrives and begins whispering with Favel (quite loudly
enough to be overheard), it becomes clear that these figures are playing a
game. Favel flatters Suspicion; Suspicion suspects Dread; Favel lies about
Dread; Suspicion suspects Favel; Suspicion flatters Dread; Suspicion lies
about Favel; and Dread suspects them both. What is the purpose of this
bewildering charade? There is no clue, for the poetry itself reveals nothing
more, overhears nothing more, than what Dread himself sees and over-
hears. And as the procession of fiends advances, the game becomes only
more complex. They come one by one, contradicting and repeating one
another, drawing in close with flatteries and threats, trading enigmatic
whispers in coming and going. Their speeches are a careful orchestration
of reduplications and reversals, a symphony of nonsense that grows more
garish and indecipherable as each new fiend appears. In the middle of it all
sits the dreamer, silent, terrified, strangely credulous, and strangely
unmoving. His consciousness seems to extend no further than the stream
of consciousness generated by the discourses of the villains. They know his
history, articulate his thoughts, empathize with his desires, echo back to
him the phrases and falsehoods he has already heard from their colleagues.
The whole cacophony reaches a climax with the coming of Deceit, who
brings the curtain down with this masterpiece of nonsense:
But by that Lorde that is one, two and thre,
I have an errande to rounde in your ere.
He told me so, by God, ye maye truste me.
Parde, remembre whan ye were there,
There I wynked on you—wote ye not where?
In A loco, I mene juxta B:
Woo is hym that is blynde and maye not see!
But to here the subtylte and the crafte,
As I shall tell you, yf ye wyll harke agayne:
And whan I sawe the horsons wolde you hafte,
To holde myne honde, by God, I had grete payne;
For forthwyth there I had hym slayne,
But that I drede mordre wolde come oute.
Who deleth with shrewes hath nede to loke aboute! (512–25)
Here is The Bowge of Courte in miniature. The twitchy syntax, the mock
confessions, the code-speak, the winking, the invocations of sacred things,
the ambiguous and vaguely menacing proverbs, the play on words such as
“dread” and “subtlety,” the insistent refrains of didn’t you know? and listen
closely now, the intimations that Dread would understand if only he could
remember the one crucial secret, all play into the poem’s peculiar idiom of
anxiety. And the power of these bizarre utterances to strangle the mental
faculties of the dreamer, to bewilder and terrify, is so prominent as to
seem, at least at times, the poem’s central concern.
In this idiom of mental strangulation and terrorized interiority the
Bowge will find its way toward a new kind of allegorical making. And
this new kind of allegory has little to do with the language of satire,
however powerfully that language continues to operate in the Bowge and
in much of Skelton’s poetry. If most writers of court satire adopt the stance
of sadder and wiser men who have escaped court life to some exile, Skelton
abandons that place of retrospective exile and thrusts his dreamer back
into the moment of a first, traumatic encounter. His interest, in the
Bowge, is not so much in satire as it is in a particular sort of consciousness,
an attention to the processes by which a mind loses its moral bearings and
falls apart.25 If Langland’s dreamer often watches vices at work from a
distance, Skelton’s Dread enjoys no distance from them at all. He has lost
himself in their magic show of error, and he is left utterly without a
conscience (personified or otherwise) to lead him back to wholeness. His
dream comes to an end when, after he has heard Deceit worrying that
“mordre wolde come oute,” he sees murderers materializing all around
him and casts himself overboard (524–31).
In what ways does this pageant of terror issue from, and in what ways
does it rewrite, the narrative forms of allegorical poems such as The
Complaint of Nature and Piers Plowman? And what does Skelton’s poem
suggest, at the threshold of English early modernity, about the disen-
chanting poetics and projects of early modern allegorical narratives? Cer-
tainly Skelton does not fashion himself in this poem as a militant spell-
breaker or dissenter. The disenchantments of the Bowge are far from the
inquisitorial disciplines and the ideals of authenticity that will do so much
to shape allegorical fictions such as The Faerie Queene and The Pilgrim’s
Progress. As a way of understanding Skelton’s particular modernity, I want
to give attention now to the medieval forms of allegorical narrative from
which Skelton specifically departs. However acutely the poet-dreamer of
the Bowge experiences his distance from “poetes olde,” the allegorical
forms of those old poets furnish both the patterns of this poet’s solitude
25
Fish, who is insightful on this point, notes that satire in the Bowge “ceases to be a way
of thinking and becomes a way of experiencing,” John Skelton’s Poetry, p. 78. James Simpson
elucidates the way Dread’s tormentors invade his voice and identity, “The Death of the
Author?: Skelton’s Bouge of Courte,” in The Timeless and the Temporal: Writings in Honour of
John Chalker by Friends and Colleagues, ed. Elizabeth Maslen (London: Queen Mary and
Westfield College, University of London, Department of English, 1993), pp. 68–70.
and the enchanting promise—destined, for Skelton, to be broken—of
escape from that solitude.
*
When Skelton begins the Bowge by bringing the poem’s dreamer into
confrontation with Ignorance, Danger, and Desire, he announces the
kind of fiction he has set out to write. Here is a man beholding his own
psyche in fragmented and embodied form. The poem marks itself from
the outset as a psychomachia, an expression of the incarnation theologies
and participatory identities I have found at play in narrative texts from the
Psychomachia to Piers Plowman. Even in Plato’s analysis of the soul in the
Republic, the analysis of the psyche in conflict—machē, “battle”—with
itself tends to generate daemonic agents and to open up negotiations
between the order of those interior agents and the order of a larger
cosmos. When in the allegorical poems of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries these daemonic principalities come to populate whole narrative
worlds, they raise the specter of possession and, with that specter, the
problem of human agency. If these agents initiate the human subject into
a form of subjectivity that reaches out to participate in, and to absorb, a
total moral order, they also threaten to undermine the integrity of the
human subject, and they raise problems of identity and action that are
already visible in the work of Prudentius. The human agent in his
Psychomachia is already an inert being, surrounded by the rampant
forms of her own fractured self. The unstable personhood of this allegor-
ical subject resonates powerfully with the personhood of the Bowge’s
paralytic dreamer, and an account of that latter subject’s solitude might
well begin with the forms of allegorical participation and allegorical
solitude that fictions of psychomachia make possible.
In making an account of those allegorical subjectivities, I want to begin,
here, not with Prudentius but with a text that has particular importance
for the aspirations and conventions of The Bowge of Courte. In Boethius’
sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy, the subject’s exile from himself is a
sign of ethical decay, and that exile from self corresponds with an experi-
ence of exile from the social order and from the total moral order of the
cosmos. The Consolation opens with the prisoner-poet in bed, languishing
and alone, bitterly resentful of the cruelty of fortune and the wickedness of
human society. His opening complaint culminates in a metrical move-
ment in which he declares that the goodness of God orders everything
except the world of human activity, where evil prevails and the virtuous
suffer (1.m5.25–48). Into this grief irrupts the goddess Philosophy, both
humanly corporeal and divinely expansive, clothed in garments of
emblematic splendor and bearing in her two hands a book and a scepter.
She diagnoses the poet as a sick man who has “for a little forgotten his real
self ” [sui paulisper oblitus est] (1.2.13), and she embarks on the long
process of restoring him to himself by restoring him likewise to harmony
with the total order of things. Her first diagnostic interrogation of the sick
poet begins with the question, “Do you think . . . that this world is run by
random and chance events, or do you think it is rationally directed?”
(1.6.5–7). When he answers well, the goddess encourages him that “out of
this tiny spark your vital warmth will glow again,” and she proceeds to lead
him through a series of educative conversations that fashion him in the image
of the highest good, which is both human happiness and God himself:
“therefore every happy man,” as she instructs the poet, “is a god [omnis igitur
beatus deus], though by nature God is one only: but nothing prevents there
being as many as you like by participation [participatione]” (3.10.88–90).
What Philosophy orchestrates for her patient is a return to right order,
to a wholeness that she both represents and mediates to him. Her wisdom
becomes his wisdom, her happiness his happiness, her pleas for divine
vision his own pleas for that vision (see, e.g., 3.9.22–4). She is the pattern
of his own being, and she rescues him from the disorder of history by
offering him an alternative order that can overcome history. As the poet
comes to participate in that order, his being reaches out to embrace not
only Philosophy herself, the voice of his interior wisdom, but also the total
cosmos of which she is the emblem.
The Consolation of Philosophy does not attempt a sustained narrative,
but the narrative contours it does suggest—the plaintive poet, the tutelary
goddess, the catechetic exchanges, the converging images of the poet and
his tutor, the encyclopedic reckonings with nature, time, fortune, and
suffering—will inform a host of medieval allegorical poems, including the
dream visions that guide Skelton in his framing of The Bowge of Courte.
One of the most important of these poems, Alan of Lille’s twelfth-century
Complaint of Nature, has at its center a similar embodied goddess and a
similar ideal of that goddess as a point of convergence between the poet
and a total cosmic order. Alan’s poem articulates in more fully elaborated
form than The Consolation of Philosophy the participatory dynamics
of the allegorical subject. This poem, too, begins with the poet-
protagonist’s laments, not on the cruelty of fortune but rather on the
terrible disarray of sexual and grammatical order in the mortal world.
In the midst of his complaints the goddess comes, again clothed in
emblematic garments, again an embodiment of a total order, now not
Philosophy but Nature. The long opening movements of Alan’s poem
are given, as I said in Chapter 2, to describing this goddess, who reveals,
in her female body, the shape of the world-body. Nature’s diadem
comprehends every constellation and planet and revolves with their
unceasing movement. Her airy mantle figures forth a vast congregation
of birds. On her watery mantle are the fish, on her variegated tunic the
beasts of the earth, on her boots the flowers of the field.26 She is all of
creation compressed into a microcosmic image, and her human form
suggests a dialectical rendering of the cosmos as a vast person and the
person as a little cosmos.
More explicitly than Boethius’ goddess Philosophy, Alan’s goddess
Nature reveals herself as the pattern both of the cosmos and of the
dreamer-poet’s own body and soul. He hears in her voice all the reson-
ances by which his existence echoes the larger order in which he is nested.
If Nature is the voice of creation speaking to the soul, she is also the voice
of the soul speaking to itself of itself:
For I am the one who formed the nature of man according to the exemplar
and likeness of the structure of the universe [ad exemplarem mundane
machine similitudinem hominis exemplaui naturam] so that in him, as in a mirror
of the universe itself, Nature’s lineaments might be there to see. . . . Moreover,
the same qualities that come between the elements as intermediaries establish a
lasting peace between the four humours. Just as any army of planets fight
against the accepted revolution of the heavens by going in a different
direction, so in man there is found to be continual hostility between
sensuousness and reason. For the movement of reason, springing from a
heavenly origin, escaping the destruction of things on earth, in its process
of thought turns back again to the heavens.27
The human subject addressed by this Nature encompasses the entire
cosmos, so that reason, for instance, is not simply the exercise of a
transcendent and bounded human mind. Reason here is rooted rather in
the movement of the heavens, implicated by its ruling activity in the
activity of the divine ruler. The mind that exercises reason is therefore a
channel for powers that lie beyond the boundaries of the mind itself. The
reasoning person is never really alone. And because she is constituted by
her participation in a cosmos to which she is alien, the human person must
necessarily be an allegory of that cosmos (ad exemplarem mundane
machine, as Nature says), and vice versa. A visionary poet such as Alan
goes in search of the occult patterns that constitute this allegory, the
hidden correspondences by which the subject and the cosmos are bound.
For this reason the individual being of an allegorical hero will strive
outward to the far boundaries of the world in which he finds himself.
26
Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae, ed. Nikolaus M. Häring (Spoleto: Centro italiano
di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1978), 2.1–292. A corresponding English translation of this
passage can be found in The Plaint of Nature, trans. James Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), pp. 73–105.
27
De planctu Naturae 6.42–56. As throughout, I quote English text from The Plaint of
Nature, here pp. 118–19.
Everything he meets in that world will seem an operation of his own
psyche, and everything in his psyche will seem an operation of that world,
because the whole orientation of the allegorical narrative is toward the
point at which the hero and his world become one. Allegorical narrative
tends thus to be encyclopedic and educative, directed toward a conver-
gence of all the hierarchical orders of nature in the individual nature of the
human subject. If a narrative such as Alan’s begins with an awareness of
the soul’s difference from the world and the world’s difference from the
divine, it inclines nevertheless toward a point of universal convergence.
The intricate resonances and correspondences of Alan’s cosmos register
this inclination. They express the libidinal drive of the soul toward
copulation with its material other, a remembrance of the ancient meta-
physics of male form and female matter (Nature, as I have noted, tells the
dreamer that the copula maritalis of soul and matter was solemnized at her
consent).28 At the heart of Alan’s poem, after all, is desire: the desire, as
Bonaventure says, to enter the world “as a mirror through which we may
pass to God,” and likewise to enter “into ourselves, that is, into the mind
itself in which the divine image shines forth.”29
In the Complaint, the channels of commerce among the poet, the
cosmos, and the creator are most fully open when the goddess discloses
herself as the basis of the poet’s own creative work. Alan’s Nature is not
just an image of the poet as a component in the total cosmos—not just an
image of the poet as creation—but also an image of the poet as himself a
creator. She represents herself as an artisanal maker, not only a coiner
(responsible for stamping matter with form) and a weaver (responsible for
the cosmographical garments she wears) but also a writer, who has
bestowed on Venus her “unusually powerful writing pen” and has taught
her the arts of orthography, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic.30 More than
this, she is the poetic maker of Alan’s own poem, artist of the words she
herself speaks. She herself composes and declaims four of the poem’s eight
28
De planctu Naturae 6.42.
29
Itinerarium mentis in Deum, trans. by Zachary Hayes, with Latin text from the
Quaracchi Edition (Saint Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, Saint Bonaventure
University, 2002), 1.9, 3.1. See also Gordon Teskey’s characterization of allegory as the
desire “to think of the self as the world and the world as the self,” Allegory and Violence
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 7.
30
De planctu Naturae 8.229–32, 2.196–8, 10.30–4; The Plaint of Nature, pp. 146, 94,
156. The bestowal of the pen on Venus seems in its immediate context to be for the purpose
of drawing blueprints, but Nature turns promptly from her mention of drawing to her long
discourses on the art of language. On other medieval representations of Nature as an artisan,
see Katharine Park, “Nature in Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and
Emblems,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 55, 69.
metrical movements, occasionally prefacing them with critical comments
such as “now let us tune our harp for a plaintful discourse in elegiac verse”
and “let it, however, be refined by the sublimity of the writer’s pen.”31 At
the outset of her disquisition on vice she explains to the dreamer, “it is my
intention to contribute a mantle of fair-sounding words to the above-
mentioned monsters of vice to prevent a poor quality of diction from
offending the ears of readers,” and after she reluctantly performs Meter 5
at the dreamer’s request, she explains that its flamboyant proliferation of
allusions and rhetorical flourishes “is offered as a dish fit for your naïvete,”
resolving, “now let the mode of narration, that has digressed a little into
the trivial, crude pieces suited to your undeveloped literary ability, return
to the prearranged sequence of the prescribed discourse.”32 She is a harsh
critic and a fellow poet—to some degree a rival poet—and she is an angelic
enabler of Alan’s poetic work. He takes the pattern of his literary
endeavors from the more perfect pattern of hers. If Nature’s ornamented
clothing is a figure for the poet’s own work of making, so too are all
Nature’s works, even the creation of the world itself, in which primal act
the creative work of the poet participates.33
Nature intimates something like this participation when she explains
that “God creates man by his command,” that “man by obedience
recreates himself,” and that she herself mediates the complicated negoti-
ation between divine and human creative action.34 She is the point of
convergence at which these different and incommensurable agencies
blend. “He is the creator of my work,” she says of God; and she is, herself,
not just the “deputy of God, the creator” but also the form of the universe
(which “finds its own qualities in man”) and the form of the human body
(which “takes over the image of the universe”).35 It is difficult to tell, given
these nested, interlocking, mutually generating orders of being, just where
one body ends and another begins, or where one creator ends and another
begins. To say, as Nature does, that God’s power is superlative, hers
comparative, and man’s positive, is to acknowledge that the power of
creation issues from multiple centers.36 In which case, where is authorship
to be located? How many agents are involved in, say, the composition of
31
De planctu Naturae 10.170–2, 8.276; The Plaint of Nature, pp. 165–6, 148.
32
De planctu Naturae 8.193–5, 10.17–20; The Plaint of Nature, pp. 144, 155.
33
Park observes that Nature’s garments represent the poet’s own work of fabrication,
“Nature in Person,” p. 54. On the implications of Nature’s language for the poet’s own
language, see Whitman, “The Problem of Assertion and the Complaint of Nature,” Hebrew
University Studies in Literature and the Arts 15 (1987), pp. 12–26.
34
De planctu Naturae 6.86–8; The Plaint of Nature, pp. 120–1.
35
De planctu Naturae 6.134, 6.21, 6.73–4, 6.103; The Plaint of Nature, pp. 124, 117,
120, 122.
36
De planctu Naturae 6.162–5; The Plaint of Nature, p. 126.
the Complaint of Nature? Alan’s allegorical discourse will give up no
quantifiable answer to these questions. Nature’s grammatical metaphor
disperses a single power, eternal and divine, into a series of exchanges
among discrete, temporal agents who together participate in that divine
power’s creative activity. “My work,” she says, like a good allegorical
commentator, “is but a sign of the work of God” [est nota diuine].37
Alan’s complicated dynamics of vision and participation might seem
hardly relevant to The Bowge of Courte, except that the dream poems that
make up Skelton’s more immediate background are deeply entangled in
just these dynamics. It can be difficult, in many allegorical narratives of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to tell to what extent a power such as
Conscience or Wisdom belongs to the experiencing subject, and to what
extent this principality speaks to the subject with the voice of a larger
cosmos or an incarnate deity. The poet of Gower’s Confessio Amantis
(c.1390) apprehends Genius as his own spirit, the spirit of his genesis or
birth. But this Genius is also the priest of Nature, and he tutors the poet
on the seven deadly sins and the order of the created world. Langland’s
poet apprehends Conscience as his own faculty of judgment, the voice of
his consciousness in purified form. But Conscience, in Langland’s vast
psychomachia, also leads armies, protects the Church, challenges kings,
and signifies the presence of God’s Spirit on the earth. So it is with the Venus
and Minerva who educate the prisoner-poet of the Boethian The Kingis
Quair (c.1423), and with the many angelic beings who restore the fallen
protagonists of the morality plays. If these tutelary figures signify the faculties
of the subject who possesses or projects them, they also represent to that
subject the demands and structures of an eternal order. To attend to the voice
of one’s own conscience, in these poems, is to enter a channel in which many
voices are audible and in which the operations of the human mind savor of
the operations of a divine mind. Inasmuch as they are allegorical—inasmuch
as the image of the speaking subject is also the image of other persons and
orders—these poems generate tension between the experience of commu-
nion and the experience of alienation, between the capacity of the conscious
person to comprehend the cosmos and the difference of the conscious person
from the cosmos. Their other-speaking articulates both the reflexive solitude
and the participatory desire of the self-regarding subject.
*
The Bowge of Courte, like these earlier visions, is a poem of communion
and counsel, but with a difference. The crux of its difference lies in the
quality of that subtle company who come creeping into Dread’s
37
De planctu Naturae 6.136–7; The Plaint of Nature, p. 124.
confidence and make themselves his counselors. Who are these enigmatic
creatures, if not participants in the Christ (or the Antichrist) who under-
girds so many medieval personifications? Some commentators on the
Bowge have observed that its allegorical agents are little more than dis-
torted images of each other, permutations on a single identity.38 Favel,
Dissimulation, and Deceit, especially, are lexical cousins, and it is hard to
tell them apart. All three are cloaked or hooded (178, 428, 528); Favel and
Dissimulation both have “pokes” (stomachs) full of crafty words (179,
477); and all three stroke Dread with eerie smoothness, whispering
promises, rumors, and wickedly clever demands. Their voices echo the
same empty protestations of confidence: “truste me,” “nay, nay, be sure,”
“so have I blys.” If the poem first names Deceit as “Subtylte” (140), it
strikes a suggestive note in naming the whole company (just seven lines
before) as “full subtyll persones.” These ghostly beings are, or seem to be,
iterations of that one basic identity, seven ways of looking at Deceit. They
are like genetic mutations, or variations on a theme.
Against the background of the psychomachia, it is not hard to appre-
ciate that this primal identity might be that of Dread himself. The
boundaries between Dread’s consciousness and the voices of his tor-
mentors are porous. Those tormentors absorb his anxieties and desires
into their discourse, and in a certain sense they operate as his organ of
thinking, as if his processes of cognition had leapt out into bodily form
and gone to work before his eyes. They are therefore a mirror in which the
dreamer beholds his own image. Is not Suspicion, after all, another version
of Dread? His very name suggests a family likeness, and he comes
encouraging Dread to be Suspicious as he is. He represents a way for
Dread to go, a monster he himself might become. All these seven fiends
indeed come to Dread as his own desires on two feet, images of the social
personae he both longs and fears to put on. They are his fellows, Suspicion
his fellow doubter, Hervey Hafter his fellow versifier, Favel his fellow
climber-courtier. No accident that this dreadful crew is not the first subtle
company our dreamer has hoped to join. His ordeal began with his waking
meditations on the “poetes olde, whyche, full craftely, / Under as coverte
termes as coude be, / Can touche a troughte and cloke it subtylly” (9–11).
The terms in which he first describes his own poetic project—craftiness,
covertness, subtlety, the cloak—have become the lexicon of deceit from
which the tempters of his nightmare emerge. If these fiends are distorted
38
See, e.g., Cooney, “The Crisis of Allegory,” p. 162. Leigh Winser’s detailed recon-
struction of how these figures might recycle each other’s props and clothing (it appears in
the midst of her argument that the Bowge is designed for the stage) evokes the complex web
of resemblances that link vice to vice, “Drama Doubling as Dream,” pp. 7–20.
images of each other, they are likewise images of Dread himself in various
states of corruption, his possible selves splayed out before his eyes.
Here is where the difference of the Bowge from the conventional forms
of allegory really begins. If the protagonists of the morality plays tend to
have tempters on the one hand and counselors on the other, Dread’s
tempters and his counselors are one and the same. If the vices of medieval
poems such as Li Tournoiemenz Anticrit, the Commedia, and Piers
Plowman issue from an infernal order, Dread’s vices have origins only in
Dread himself. The other minds of his cosmos are emanations of his own
mind’s decay, and they reflect not the total order of reality but rather the
bounded order of one consciousness. They may bear the referential
structure of personification—the person Courtesy who is courtesy—but
the direction of their referentiality is not outward but backward, back to
the person by whom they are regarded. They are reflexive images of the
same thing and of each other, like a hall of mirrors in which Dread beholds
his own face in endless reproduction.
A poem such as Piers Plowman revises the old structures of allegory by
finding allegory’s daemonic agents invading the world of history (see the
difference: Dante’s Commedia concerns itself with Florence but takes place
elsewhere, in a visionary world of moral realization; but Piers Plowman, or
parts of it, takes place squarely in a possessed and infected England).
A poem such as Magnyfycence revises those structures further by deriving
its allegorical agents from the secular order itself (see the difference again:
Langland’s Lady Mede, global and metamorphic, bears little resemblance
to Skelton’s domestic caricatures Crafty Conveyance and Sir John
Double-Cope). The Bowge revises those structures in its own way, by
situating its protagonist not in the thick of a corrupted secular order but
rather as an exile from that order. Its tempters may have roots in the same
courtly world that produces the tempters of Magnyfycence, but in the
Bowge those tempters are holed up within the dreamer himself, haunting
his dreams and possessing his psyche. If Langland deploys allegory as an
apocalyptic vision of the social order infected, and if the Skelton of
Magnyfycence deploys allegory as a satiric vision of the royal court infected,
the Skelton of the Bowge deploys the trope as a spasm or nightmare of the
consciousness infected. His idiom turns vision to hallucination.
Skelton’s allegorical idiom is, then, an articulation of solitude. The
cosmos of his poem is to be found not in the saeculum of an early modern
state, after the manner of Magnyfycence, but rather in the anxious interior
discourses of a subject who has been cast out from that secular order. This
retreat into the subject is itself the consequence of institutional secular-
ization. The very possibility of being cast out, the possibility of being
utterly alone, is after all the result of a new concentration of power and
significance in the institutions of the English court, a new separation of
that particular machine from everything it chooses to exclude. Much as
they might wish to, Dante’s and Langland’s pilgrims cannot escape the
societies to which they belong. Those societies are too integrative and
comprehensive, too basic to the world as the allegorical poet envisions it.
But Skelton’s dreamer has discovered, in the world of the court and of
royal “bowge,” a society that almost programmatically tempts and pro-
hibits escape, a society that forces the moral poet underground simply
because it is the tendency of that society to examine and control. By choosing
in the midst of this solitude to hold on to allegorical form—with its multi-
plicity of agents, its porous model of consciousness, its promise of revelation,
and its structures of analogy and commerce—Skelton is able to remake
solitude as a medium of paranoia, strangely crowded with agents who have
no discernible names or origins. His poem engages in fitful experiments with
the compromises of agency, and with the mute, passive, inscrutable ordeals of
pain, that figure so prominently both in Farrell’s account of modern paranoia
and in many accounts of the modern, disciplined subject.39
*
Gone from this interior order is Conscience or Nature or Philosophy, the
voice of the cosmos mediated through the voice of the self. The Skeltonic
consciousness meets its other, but that other is no longer truly other. The
dreamer is a mirror not of the cosmos but of himself, and one half of
allegory’s double voice is silenced. What emerges from this silence is the
suggestion of an allegorical (or anti-allegorical) idiom in which the other-
speaking materials of the narrative order signify nothing other than the
visionary protagonist’s own private anxieties and desires. In this disen-
chanted allegorical idiom, the old structures of reference and commerce
persist, but the goddesses are gone, as if Alan’s Lady Nature has begun to
give way to the “brute nature” that Akeel Bilgrami associates with scientific
and colonialist discourses of the seventeenth century.40 Katharine Park has
observed that the image of Nature suffers transformation already, in many
fifteenth-century discourses, from a goddess, clothed and speaking, to a
lactating, many-breasted woman, naked, passive, and silent. Though this
new image has sources in medieval iconography and analogues in changing
practices of representation, it also, Park argues, has much to do with a
39
These terms for describing secular accounts and experiences of pain are Talal Asad’s,
who uses them in the course of revising them and developing an “agentive” model of pain
that resists their reductions. Formations of the Secular, pp. 67–99.
40
“What is Enchantment?” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael
Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2010), p. 150.
developing notion of nature as a “benign and bountiful natural world,” not
creator but creation. Nature is, in early modernity, not an arbiter of moral,
cosmic, or reproductive order but rather a fertile body (a ravishable body, as
the New World will prove) to be colonized and cultivated.41
The changing status of Nature might hardly seem the ground for an
account of early modern paranoia, but the anxieties of the Bowge suggest
that the suspicious poet’s retreat from historical and cosmic orders—his
subjection of those orders to a project of disenchantment by which he
marks himself as modern—opens up the possibility of a radical solitude
that figures all spiritual presence as illusory enchantment. If Skelton takes
up in his poem the referential agents of allegorical narrative, he establishes no
ground outside the human subject for their referential work, and they become
the basis for a poetry of the solitary self, of a self that has closed its borders and
redirected all reference into a buffered interior. One of the oddities of the
Bowge’s fictional grammar is that the mere mention of a thing makes it so.42
Deceit need only whisper of a murder plot, and lewd fellows spring up “here
and there” before the dreamer’s eyes (528). Name the thing, get it into the
dreamer’s consciousness, and it will spring to life in the order of the narrative,
from which that central consciousness cannot distinguish itself. Language in
this world is severed from commerce with anything beyond the one mind of
the poem. There is no Philosophy to break into that mind’s broodings and
restore him to harmony with the order of things. Here all counsel turns to
Deceit, all wisdom to Suspicion, all speech to Favel.
It is for this reason that the climactic and perhaps the defining image of
the poem is an image of the self haunting itself, an image that seems
almost to anticipate the Freudian analysis of the Dopplegänger as an
emblem of narcissistic paranoia.43 That image occurs when, in the midst
41
“Nature in Person,” p. 60.
42
On which, see Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority, p. 62.
43
In his analysis of the uncanny, Freud describes a “special agency” that forms within
the ego, “which is able to stand over against the rest of the ego, which has the function of
observing and criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship within the mind, and which
we become aware of as our ‘conscience.’ In the pathological case of delusions of being
watched, this mental agency becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego, and discernible to
the physician’s eye. The fact that an agency of this kind exists, which is able to treat the rest
of the ego like an object—the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation—renders
it possible to ascribe the old idea of a ‘double’ with a new meaning and to ascribe a number
of things to it—above all, those things which seem to self-criticism to belong to the old
surmounted narcissism of earliest times.” This account of the interior double participates
not just in the streams of early modern paranoia Farrell describes but also, as Freud’s
invocation of “conscience” can help clarify, in the allegorical conventions from which
Skelton fashions the Bowge. “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 17 (London: The Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1955), p. 235.
of his nonsense talk about Dread’s fortunes and enemies, Dissimulation
suddenly exclaims as follows:
Naye, see where yonder stondeth the teder man!
A flaterynge knave and false he is, God wote.
The drevyll stondeth to herken, and he can.
It were more thryft he boughte him a newe cote;
It wyll not be, his purse is not on-flote.
All that he wereth, it is borowed ware;
His wytte is thynne, his hode is threde-bare. (484–90)
No one has ever quite known what to make of this weird apparition. Leigh
Winser, who calls the “teder man” the “central mystery of the entertain-
ment,” argues that the teder man is a straw man, a scarecrow.44 Teder can
indeed mean not just “other” (in contraction, that is: “th’other”) or (just
maybe) “tatter,” but also “tether,” a rope. Straw men appeared as props in
several stage plays of Skelton’s period, as Winser shows, and there are
passages in the Bowge that prompt one to wonder whether the teder man is
not a headpiece filled with straw, bound up with rope and tied to a stick.
One of these passages appears in the midst of Disdain’s threats:
Well, ones thou shalte be chermed, iwus:
Naye, strawe for tales, thou shalte not rule us;
We be thy betters, and so thou shalte us take,
Or we shall the oute of thy clothes shake! (340–3)
Another is whispered by Dissimulation:
Ryghte now I spake with one, I trowe, I see—
But, what, a strawe! I maye not tell all thynge.
By God, I saye, there is a grete herte-brennynge
Betwene the persone ye wote of, you— (458–61)
More interesting here than Skelton’s play with the word straw are
Disdain’s promise that Dread will be “charmed” and shaken out of his
clothes, and the syntactic jumble involving “ye,” “you,” and an unnamed
“person” whom Dissimulation thinks he sees and whom, he suggests,
Dread knows all too well. These oddities hint at an identification of Dread
with the man of straw. No surprise that, just after Dissimulation calls
attention to the teder man’s empty purse, Disdain comes picking the
nobles out of Dread’s pouch, or that Disdain calls Dread a “drevyll” and a
“knave,” the same names Dissimulation will call the teder man. This
scarecrow, silent, empty, and inert, is the image of Dread presented to
44
My account here is indebted to Winser’s “Drama Doubling as Dream,” pp. 19–23;
qtd. at p. 19.
Dread, his identity as a hollow man made vivid before his eyes. The
passage makes explicit what the entire poem implies: the dreamer gazing,
in horror, at decomposed images of himself.
The Bowge of Courte is haunted by the ghosts of allegory’s signifying
agents. Skelton’s dreamer might be alone, a man in conversation with
himself in a brute material order; but he is also set upon by morbid
presences who speak for this poem’s cosmos of interior dread and who
arrogate to themselves the authority that once belonged to the tutelary
figures of Conscience, Genius, and Nature. The poem records an experi-
ence of historical and cosmic solitude as an experience of historical and
cosmic loss. Though Skelton never quite returns to the tremulous inward-
ness he achieves in the Bowge, the speaker of this early poem discovers the
solitude, the place of moral and social exile, from which so many of
Skelton’s speakers will issue their trumpet blasts against the world.
Regardless of what the laureate Skelton tries to promise in the Garlande
or Chapelet of Laurell, there is no Pallas or Fame or company of poets to
visit most of his lonely poet-prophets: just a welter of disembodied voices,
a hostile institutional order, and the insistent prospect of detraction and
persecution. The dreamer of this early poem establishes in some respects
the pattern for all Skelton’s disenchanted allegorical practitioners. He is
not those later speakers: he cannot rise to the dissenting renunciations of
Collyn Clout or the speaker of Why Come Ye Nat to Courte, and he does
not know, like Parrot, how to arrogate the privileges of obfuscation to
himself. He does not know, as Skelton’s later speakers do, that allegorical
concealment can be its own form of power.
What he does know is that allegory must be, for him, a complicated and
recursive language of loss. Because allegory invites different voices to speak
in harmony through the medium of the poet’s subjectivity, it opens the
possibility of paradox, the fact of the poet’s difference from the voices he
wants to subsume. If the theologies of incarnation and participation that
undergird allegorical narratives from Boethius to Langland sustain the
volatile life of those paradoxes, Skelton finds the paradoxes dissolving: in
Magnyfycence, into the deliberate disguises of the self-fashioning vices,
and, in the Bowge, into a solitude so complete that the poet can find no
voices to contend with other than his own. His experiments in solitude
push allegorical narrative to the point at which the contradictions of other-
speaking disappear along with the “other” that allegory speaks. But he also
finds the shade of allegory’s lost other returning in phantasmic forms,
occupying the solitude of the disenchanted subject and reasserting, within
that subject, the enchantments from which solitude was supposed to offer
an escape.
4
Violence and Apocalypse
The Faerie Queene
To cross from the poetry of John Skelton to the poetry of Edmund

Spenser is to cross what Spenser himself regards as a line of demarcation,
a rift separating the present age from a repudiated past. That rift opens up
when, in the 1530s, Henry VIII declares himself supreme head of the
English church. Spenser follows many English writers and preachers in
understanding Henry’s break from Rome as the beginning of a new age, a
deliverance from the long tyranny of the papal Antichrist. Henry himself
appears in The Shepheardes Calendar as “Pan the shepheards God,” a figure
of the over-shepherd who will call false shepherds to account and whom
E. K. glosses as “Christ, the only and very Pan, then suffering for his
flock.”1 In the first book of The Faerie Queene, Henry appears more subtly
in the episode of Abessa and Kirkrapine, where the polyvalent “Lyon Lord
of euerie beast in field” (1.3.7) watches over Una and tears Kirkrapine to
pieces and where this kingly beast’s identities as temple cleanser and divine
champion figure the first champion of Christ’s church, the Lion of Judah
and Good Shepherd himself.2 Some recent commentators have suggested
that the rescue of the English church from Antichrist is in fact analogous,
in Spenser’s imagination, to the incarnation of Christ, who comes both to
establish his church and to demolish the idols of a corrupt past.3 This
1 The association of Henry with Pan appears in “Aprill,” line 51, where Pan and Syrinx
are the parents of “fayre Elisa” (46) and where E. K. glosses Pan as signifying both
“K. Henry the eyght” and “in some place Christ himselfe, who is the verye Pan and god
of Shepheardes.” The reference to Pan as over-shepherd (with the gloss I quote above)
appears in “Maye,” line 54. All quotations of Spenser’s poetry apart from The Faerie Queene
are from The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram, Einar
Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).
2 The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki
(Harlow: Longman, 2001).

3 I am indebted here to Kathryn Walls’s argument that Spenser sees Henry’s break with
Rome as an originative moment parallel to, and founded on, “the absolute and definitive
beginning represented by the Incarnation.” “Spenser and the ‘Medieval’ Past,” in Spenser in
Violence and Apocalypse 139
decisive breakage from the past establishes a separation between an old
covenant and a new covenant, and Spenser figures the Roman enemies of
the true church not just as errant but as antiquated or superseded. It is no
accident that Abessa, who receives the spoils of Kirkrapine’s thievery and
whose house the Messianic lion will soon invade, appears first under the
shadow of a steep mountain, attended by an iconography that suggests in
subtle ways the old covenant and the law of Sinai. If Christ is a second Moses,
reissuing the law on a new mountain and delivering a covenant people from
bondage, the lion of Spenser’s English history is here both a new Moses and a
new Messiah, bringing the people of God out of Egypt once again.
Some scholars have recently explored the extent to which this historical
breakage provokes, for Spenser, not just a triumphant narrative of deliv-
erance but a more ambivalent set of negotiations with the vanishing
medieval past. Spenser often conducts these negotiations in the context
either of a melancholic experience of loss or of a prophetic conviction that
the present, too, is soon to be negated by an eschatological future.4 He
lives in what Andrew Escobedo calls an “elderly present”—a present from
which the past is precipitously receding and for which the future is
perilously short—and he participates in a variety of sixteenth-century
cultural projects that aim either at recuperating a lost history or at
demolishing that history’s material and cultural remains.5 He certainly
the Moment, ed. Paul J. Hecht and J. B. Lethbridge (Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 2015), qtd. at p. 37. Walls discusses both the identification of
Henry with Pan in The Shepheardes Calendar (p. 43) and the Messianic and Henrician
significations of the lion in the episode of Kirkrapine and Abessa (pp. 38–40). Many of her
readings are avowedly provocative and tentative. Even the familiar association of Kirkrapine
and Abessa with Roman monasticism has been called into question by, for instance, Mary
Robert Falls, who argues for the episode as a condemnation of Elizabethan practices of
clerical non-residency and impropriation. “Spenser’s Kirkrapine and the Elizabethans,”
Studies in Philology 50 (1953): 457–75. On this densely textured episode as signifying
not just one moment of breakage but “a continuity of corruption going back to the Old
Testament,” and, more locally, “abuses which originated in the Roman Church but have
been continued into the English Church,” see Douglas Brooks-Davies, Spenser’s “Faerie
Queene”: A Critical Commentary on Books I and II (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1977), pp. 37–9; qtd. at pp. 39, 38.
4 See, for instance, Thomas Pendergast’s argument that Spenser engages, in The Ruines
of Time and the Briton Moniments episode of The Faerie Queene, Book Two, in fashioning
“a melancholic history, born of the loss of material medieval monuments and based on the
phantasmatic recreation of that which was lost.” Pendergast sees Spenser’s “phantastic”
histories not as a fabulous alternative to the “true” historiography of the humanists, but
rather as a way of reckoning seriously with the “tragic loss,” and the difficult task of
recuperating, a lost medieval national history. “Spenser’s Phantastic History, The Ruines
of Time, and the Invention of Medievalism,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
38.2 (Spring 2008): 175–96; qtd. at pp. 176 and 178.
5 I quote Escobedo from Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe,
Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 13.
understands the experience, articulated by many sixteenth-century writers,
of living in a “perishing world now hasting to his end.”6 And he under-
stands the posture of skeptical weariness that a polemicist such as Reginald
Scot adopts when, in his Discouerie of Witchcraft (1584), he wonders how
it is in this disabused age that “witches charms, and coniurors cousenages
are yet thought effectuall” and then exhorts his readers to be incredulous,
to defy the “abhominable and divelish inuentions” of the Roman enchant-
ers.7 The metaphors of disenchantment and “discoverie” that direct Scot’s
polemic are likewise operative in Spenser’s poetry, especially when his own
themes are spiritual error and rehabilitation. In the poem with which I will
be concerned in this chapter, Book One of The Faerie Queene, Spenser
brings his protagonist under the spell of a “guilefull great Enchaunter” and
a host of other impostors, and he fashions the hero’s education as, in part,
an education in disenchantment, in the breaking of spells and the ferreting
out of falsehood. This narrative of spell-breaking is, I will find, particularly
responsive to the needs of a culture that regards itself as inhabiting a
modern present, alienated from an inauthentic past.
The peculiarities of Spenser’s disenchanting project have much to do
with his commitment to another large cultural project: the project of
apocalyptic interpretation and proclamation. As I said at the outset of
this book, John Bale’s seminal project of disenchantment develops in the
shadow of the great Babylon, whom the biblical apocalypse describes as a
purveyor of enchantments: “for thy marchaunts were the grett men of
the erth. And with thyne inchantment were deceaved all nacions” (Rev.
18:23).8 To oppose this impostor is to engage in campaigns of spell-
breaking and unmasking, and Bale is hardly alone among English reformers
in finding that this vocation—the vocation of disenchantment—is an
apocalyptic one. The very word “apocalypse” (apokalypsis) indicates, in
the Greek, a disclosure or uncovering, a revelation. Though apocalyptic
expectation rolled in waves across the cultural landscape of medieval
Europe, it gained a new urgency and topicality in the writings of the
6 This is from Arthur Golding’s 1574 translation of Augustine Marlorat, qtd. in
Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss, p. 13. Escobedo, who notes that many Tudor
writers comment on what Thomas Rogers in 1577 calls “signs of the oldness of the world,
and of his overthrow,” is perceptive on the close relationship between apocalyptic expect-
ation and historical loss.
7 I quote, as in my Introduction, from Scot’s The Discouerie of Witchcraft (London,
1584), “To the Readers,” fol. B2v; and from book 1, chapter 9, p. 18; in facsimile at Early
English Books Online. For the durable URLs associated with individual titles at Early English
Books Online, see my Bibliography. In my citation of early modern English titles,
I regularize capitalization and type.
8 As before, I quote from William Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament, reproduced as The
New Testament: A Facsimile of the 1526 Edition (London: The British Library, 2008).
Protestant dissenters who went into exile under Henry VIII and Mary I.9
Especially in that first generation of Tudor exiles, apocalyptic prophecy tends
to do its revelatory work by unmasking the Roman church as the biblical
Antichrist and by removing the true church into the hearts and the eschato-
logical futures of the martyrs, who prove their faith in exile and overcome the
world. George Joye in his Exposicion of Daniel the Prophete (1545) learns
from the prophecies of Daniel how the church will fare “under this last
monarchie of the Romans to ye worldis ende,” and he encourages the citizens
of “these laste perellous dayes & blody ende of this worlde” to remember that
the true church is often appointed to be “but a litle miserable sorte afflict with
pouerty, presons and persecucion with many other calamities / and the
wyked enimies of god for the more parte to bere rule / to be emprours and
kinges, popes, cardinals, bisshops, &c. And to have the wealthy vayn glorye
of this worlde.”10 Bale articulates a widespread conviction when, in the 1548
edition of his Image of Bothe Churches, he identifies the powerful Roman
church as “the old supersticious Babilon with antichrist the vicar of Sathan”
and the church in exile as “the meke spouse of the lambe without spot,” soon
to be crowned with glory at the end of all things.11 John Foxe proposes
various possible dates for that end (they include 1564, 1570, 1586, 1594)
and encourages believers in exile to set their eyes on something beyond the
present age: “new heaven, new earth, a new world, new lyfe, new bodyes,
new myndes, new possessions, new treasures, and all things new, brand new:
such as neither eye hath seen, nor ear hath ever heard of before.”12
9 On apocalyptic expectation in Lollardy and in medieval England more broadly, see
Curtis Bostick, The Antichrist and the Lollards: Apocalypticism in Late Medieval and Refor-
mation England (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 19–75. On other, Continental, strains, including
the vastly influential Joachimist tradition, see the extensive work of Bernard McGinn and
Marjorie Reeves: e.g., McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), which includes extensive selections from
primary sources; and Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in
Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) and The Prophetic Sense of History in Medieval
and Renaissance Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1993).
10 The Exposicion of Daniel the Prophete (“Geneve” [Antwerp]: 1545), fols 11v, 5v, 7v–8r.
For clarification of the book’s place of publication, I rely on the British Library’s catalogue. See
also the modernized excerpts of these passages in Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse:
Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism, and the English Reformation (Oxford: Sutton
Courtenay Press, 1978), pp. 278–84. The latter two passages Joye adapts from Melanchthon.
11 The Image of Bothe Churches (London, 1548), fols A3v, A2v. Bale’s ambitious
interpretation of the biblical apocalypse is a pivotal moment in the formation of an English

Protestant apocalyptic tradition. For useful discussions of Bale’s importance and of his
book’s composition, see Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic
Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1978), pp. 13–22; and Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation
Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 32–68.
12 The quotation is from Foxe’s Good Friday sermon of 1570, qtd. in Bauckham, Tudor
Apocalypse, p. 157. Bauckham discusses Foxe’s predictions at p. 164.

These apprehensions of the end are most stark in the period of the
Henrician and Marian persecutions, which help provoke persecuted dis-
senters to suspect more and more that the sacred has disappeared from its
old dwelling places. The order of grace has severed its ties with history and
is now to be found not in a sacred, ritual present but rather in a sacred past
(Eden, or the primitive church of Christ and the apostles) or in a sacred
future (the eschaton). The true church that England’s disabused exiles
seek is like the classical culture that eludes the Renaissance humanists,
buried under ruins and lost to memory. The only hope of recovering that
church is a cataclysm that breaks the enchantments of an idolatrous past
and establishes in the place of that repudiated past a new age of disen-
chantment, cleansed of the rust of history. Even Bale, who pointedly
refrains from speculating about the dates or details of the promised end,
proclaims at the outset of the Image that “the Jeopardous tyme is at hande,
that the wrath of God shall be declared from heauen upon all ungodly-
nesse of those seducers that witholde hys trueth in unryghtousnesse, and
set hys commaundementes at nought for their owne vyle tradicions.”
Throughout his treatise, he looks ahead to the time when, “of their
bewtyfull cytyes, shall not one stone be left upon an other” and “their
proude paynted Synagoges, as duste in the winde shal be scattred awaye
from the earth.”13
This expectation of an imminent end, and the ethic of negation that
attends it, begins to soften as Elizabeth’s England becomes the champion
of the Protestant faith against its enemies. By the time the Long Parlia-
ment begins to meet in the early 1640s, a more millenarian eschatology
will teach English believers to look for the coming kingdom not in a
negation of history but in the course of history, in the victory of Christ’s
armies over the armies of the beast.14 Bale and Foxe themselves, in their
later works, become increasingly hospitable to the possibility of a future in
history for the English church and the English nation. In an edition of
King Johan revised sometime shortly after Elizabeth’s accession in 1558,
Bale wishes the new queen a long reign for herself and also for her
offspring after her, and Foxe in his 1563 and 1570 prefaces to the Actes
and Monuments wishes Elizabeth “long prosperity” (1563) and “long
health” (1570).15 Expressions of expectation such as these allow for a
13 The Image of Both Churches, commentary on Rev. 1:1–3, paragraph 7; and on Rev.
20:11–15, paragraph 4.
14 See Christianson’s account of the English transition “from expectation to militance,”
Reformers in Babylon, pp. 179–243.

15 Both Bale and Foxe I quote here from Escobedo, who examines the tensions, in both
these writers, between nationalist expectation and apocalyptic expectation. Nationalism and
Historical Loss in Renaissance England, pp. 29–44, 93–112; qtd. at pp. 99–100.
deferral of the end that had once seemed urgently at hand. And the
miraculous fall of the Armada in 1588 inspires in many English subjects
a hope that England might occupy a special place in God’s redemptive
plan, as a nation not of martyrs but of warriors. George Gifford exempli-
fies the new spirit when he looks explicitly to the Armada, in his Sermons
upon the Whole Booke of the Revelation (1596), and exclaims in response:
looke how long that great fierie dragon, Sathan, that prince of darknes doth
burne in hatred against God & his truth, so long Antichrist and his adherents
moued by his instigation, wil be restles in seeking the subuersion of our
religion, Queen, and countrie. Then doe we especially and aboue many
others, stand in neede of noble warriors & mighty men.
The book of Revelation, Gifford goes on to say, has given us special, specific
instructions for these wars; the Lord himself “doth as it were sound the
trumpet vnto this battaile against Babel, saying, Reward her euen as she
hath rewarded you.” In the wake of such a call, the believer’s stance toward
history must be one not so much of isolation as of militant contestation.16
Spenser publishes the first installment of The Faerie Queene in 1590,
when the memory of the Armada is fresh, and many critics have read the
poem’s first book, the Legend of Holiness, as the expression of a particu-
larly militant and optimistic orientation to history.17 The Redcrosse
Knight’s victory over the beast, and the restoration of Una’s kingdom,
enact the victories not only of Christ over Antichrist but also of Elizabeth’s
armies over the Catholic armies of sixteenth-century Europe. The villains
and vices of the poem—Archimago, Duessa, Abessa, Lucifera, Orgoglio—
include in their layers of signification various events and actors from the
recent national past, and they function as a kind of ground on which
English history comes together with biblical history. Spenser turns to
allegory in this poem partly because he is committed to finding such a
16 Sermons upon the Whole Booke of the Revelation (London, 1596), fol. A3v; in facsimile
at Early English Books Online. See also the excerpts of Gifford’s sermons in Bauckham,
Tudor Apocalypse, pp. 353–8. On the development of this post-Armada apocalyptic, see
Bauckham’s discussion, pp. 162–83, and also Christianson’s account, Reformers in Babylon,
pp. 93–107. Escobedo usefully proposes that apocalyptic expectation in Reformation
England can be divided into four stages: (1) Marian apocalyptic; (2) early Elizabethan
apocalyptic; (3) post-Armada apocalyptic; and (4) Civil War apocalyptic. Nationalism and
Historical Loss, p. 83. See also Richard Mallette, who discusses the differences of apocalyptic
discourse after the Armada and who furnishes to Escobedo the term “post-Armada apoca-
lyptic.” Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 143–50.
17 For instance, Florence Sandler, “The Faerie Queene: An Elizabethan Apocalypse,” in
The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph
Wittreich (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Escobedo, Nationalism and
Historical Loss, pp. 112–40.
meeting ground, a point of contact between time and eternity, between
national and spiritual warfare. By reading England’s history allegorically as
redemptive history, he entertains the possibility that allegory can be an
expression of optimism, a sign of the eternal significance of human action
in history. Allegory converges with apocalypse, for Spenser, at just this
point, the point at which he is able to unmask the contingencies of the
present age and discern that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. In the
other-speaking patterns of his narrative in Book One, the army of Christ
and the army of Elizabeth signify and complete one another. The Red-
crosse Knight’s body signifies other bodies, individual, ecclesiastical,
national, messianic. And the Virgin Queen herself comes to signify the
expectant bride, the figure of Christ’s chosen people on earth. The signs of
the divine in history undergird and sustain Spenser’s narrative just as they
embolden Foxe, in his late prefaces to the Actes and Monuments, to
imagine a dynastic narrative sustained down long passages of time.
But Spenser’s poetry has a persistent tendency to worry about historical
action and historical loss, an apprehension that history is itself a theater of
loss in which towers fall, bodies die, names vanish, rivers dry up, empires
end, gardens become deserts, and all, as he says in The Ruines of Time, “to
nought through spoyle of time is wasted.”18 Spenser finds himself haunted
already by time the devourer in his juvenile translations of Petrarch and du
Bellay, with their visions of “grevous chaunge” and their persistent
reminder that “loe all is nought but flying vanitie”; and the speakers of
the poems gathered in his Complaints, especially, often speak from what
seems to be the end of history, in the aftermath of a violent temporal
rupture, looking over the ruins of their own or someone else’s glory.19
One of those speakers hears the ghost of the ruined city Verulamium
lamenting that she has not even a name now, “nor anie being,” and asking,
“what bootes it that I was / Sith now I am but weedes and wastfull gras?”20
Another hears the muses dismissing Venus, Cupid, and the Graces from
their company and complaining that all their patrons and votaries have
fallen into decay, “all corrupted,” as the muse Calliope says, “through the
rust of time.”21 The posture Spenser cultivates in these poems is one of
disappointment with history, almost of disbelief at history’s betrayals. The
18 The Ruines of Time 119.

19 Those first poems appeared, when Spenser was 17 years old, in the English edition of
Jan van der Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings, for which Spenser translated Petrarch’s Rime 323,
eleven sonnets from the Songe of Joachim du Bellay, and four apocalyptic sonnets by van der
Noot himself. I quote from the sonnets of du Bellay, 9.12 and 1.11. The image of time as
predator I take from Spenser’s The Ruines of Rome 36: “the pray of time, which all things
doth devowre.”
20 The Ruines of Time 34, 41–2. 21 The Teares of the Muses 433.
personae he fashions in these poems are like the poet-speaker of du Bellay’s
Les Antiquitez de Rome: wanderers among the rubble, examining the
remains of the past (“as they which gleane, the reliques use to gather, /
Which th’husbandman behind him chanst to scatter”), and wondering
why the frame of the world had to outlast the civilization these ruins
represent.22
Spenser often expresses this awareness of loss as an eschatological
restlessness, a fantasy of negation that looks for the moment when time
shall eradicate “the last reliques” of human effort: “for if that time make
end of things so sure,” he exhorts himself, “it als will end the paine, which
I endure.”23 At its most extreme, as in this passage from his (probably
early) translation of du Bellay’s Antiquitez, he longs for the same rust that
has devoured all else to eradicate his own conscious existence, and his only
hope is that “all this whole shall one day come to naught” and that, in the
great undoing of that last day, “the seedes, of which all things at first were
bred, / Shall in great Chaos wombe againe be hid.”24 But Spenser in this
poem also brings this longing for eschatological negation into tension with
a longing for eschatological fulfillment. His eschatology is less an orienta-
tion away from than an orientation toward, and he comforts himself not
only with the bleak promise of oblivion but also with the hope that, while
Rome’s sins were buried in the rubble, its virtues were “caried to heaven,
from sinfull bondage losed.”25 Spenser’s later poetry gives a great deal of
attention to this second sort of eschatological desire, with its apprehen-
sions of an end that does not eradicate but rather fulfills and redeems the
broken promises of history. This sort of desire induces, for instance, the
visions that conclude The Ruines of Time, where the poet hears a voice
confirming that “all is vanitie and griefe of minde, / No other comfort in
this world can be” but then enters promptly into a second set of visions.26
22 Qtd. from Spenser’s translation, The Ruines of Rome 419–20; for the latter meditation
see 113–20.
23 The Ruines of Rome 95, 97–8. 24 The Ruines of Rome 126, 307–8.
25 The Ruines of Rome, qtd. at 264. Spenser also entertains a hope here that poetry might
itself outlive material ruin. On the power of poetry to confer immortality, see, e.g.,
Spenser’s envoy to the The Ruines of Rome, at 449–62, and The Ruines of Time 400–41.
Andrew Hadfield has observed that Spenser’s dedications of these poems cultivate what he
calls a “deliberate paradox”: introducing poems that proclaim the world’s ruin, these
dedicatory epistles look forward, as Spenser says in his dedication of The Ruines of Time
to the Countess of Pembroke, “to the renowming of that noble race . . . and to the eternizing
of some of the chiefe of them late deceased.” Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 273. On Spenser’s apprehensions of “wicked time,” and
the various ways in which those apprehensions trouble his notions of lasting fame, see
Richard McCabe, The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in The Faerie Queene
(Blackrock, County Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), pp. 55–9, 72–9.
26 The Ruines of Time 583–4.
In these visions, a swan sings its death song and then mounts up to
heaven, where it joins the constellations; a knight bleeds to death on the
battlefield and is then swept off to heaven on his steed; a golden ark holds
the ashes of a great prince and is then carried by Mercury to heaven, there
to give the ashes up to a “second life.”27 Each vision begins, as so many of
Spenser’s emblematic visions do, with an image of human life in bondage
to corruption, and each then sees that image spring forth into a new,
purified, eschatological existence. Each ends with the melancholy of the
weary poet, who is left behind to sing about the loss: “there now the joy is
his, here sorrow mine”; “and left me here his losse for to deplore”; “and
I for dole was almost like to die.”28
There are both local meanings and ancient conventions in play here:
the poet mourns the death of Philip Sidney and takes consolation in the
promise of his friend’s enduring life; and the poem’s apotheosis of the
departed soul participates in elegiac conventions that reach back to Virgil’s
fifth Eclogue and that remain live in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and his
Doleful Lay of Clorinda.29 His complaints against the world’s fickleness
likewise participate in old conventions, which Spenser learns not only
from humanist texts such as du Bellay’s and from the elegiac strains of the
pastoral tradition, but also from various medieval forms of complaint
against fortune and love. But Spenser finds in these occasions and con-
ventions a paradoxical grammar of historical breakage—an orientation
toward an eschaton that both cancels and fulfills history—that will do
much to shape his experiments, at the outset of The Faerie Queene, in
allegorical narrative. I will suggest, in this chapter, that Spenser’s Legend
of Holiness brings his interest in the narrative dynamics of history, and
his commitment to the church’s life in history, into the gravitational field
of a powerful negation. Spenser in this poem persistently chooses to
believe in the power of narrative to mediate truth, but he persistently
knows, at the same time, the strong allure of escape. The tensions between
these contrary orientations do much to shape the narrative forms, and the
allegorical forms, of Book One. It is in the dynamics of allegory that
Spenser finds many of his resources for dealing with the uneasy relation-
ship between history and eternity. Allegory as a narrative form tends
itself, after all, to be troubled by the allure of negation, to register the
27 The Ruines of Time 589–602, 645–58, 659–72; qtd. at 669.

28 The Ruines of Time 602, 658, 672.
29 For the turn of Spenser’s elegiac complaints to apotheosis and consolation, see the
November eclogue of the Shepheardes Calender, 163–202, and also The Doleful Lay of
Clorinda 67–96. On the long history of this convention, see Ellen Zetzel Lambert, Placing
Sorrow: A Study of the Pastoral Elegy Convention from Theocritus to Milton (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1976), e.g., pp. 44–5, 51–88.
gravitational pull that meaning exerts on narrative. This negative pull is
hardly new in the sixteenth century, as I have shown at length in my earlier
chapters. What is new, for Spenser, is the imagery of violence in which the
allure of negation comes to expression. The violence he explores in the
Legend of Holiness resonates powerfully with certain forms of early
modern cultural violence, and in the context of this violence Spenser
makes experiments in a number of strategies for sustaining and renewing
his allegorical narrative. In the course of reading a few key moments in
his large, complex poem, I want to ask here how Spenser’s orientation
toward the eschaton produces heavy strain in the dynamics of his allegory.
And I want to ask how Spenser fashions forms of allegorical narrative
especially suited to bear, and to gain fresh energy from, that heavy strain.
*
Much of my discussion here will consider the possibility of action in The
Legend of Holiness. The agency of allegorical agents has long perplexed
literary critics; the eighteenth-century anxiety about allegorical narrative
itself has much to do with allegory’s tendency to undermine the possibility
of action. If Fame’s office is simply to spread fame, as Dr. Johnson says,
then opening any other course of action before her—ascribing to her any
“real employment” or “material agency” beyond a static posture—will
produce absurdity.30 The only proper vessel of material agency is, for a
critic such as Dr. Johnson, a material agent who belongs to a temporal
system of causes and effects. The prime literary expression of this material
agent might be the emerging protagonist of the novel, with her fixed and
detailed history and her efforts to deliberate and act in light of that history.
Milton’s eighteenth-century commentators are in search of something like
this agent when they insist that Milton’s epic action be “probable.” In no
causal system can narrative action include the “Dreams and Shadows”
Addison finds in Milton’s episode of Sin and Death. In no system, that is,
except for the transgressive world of allegory, where the causes of action
belong not to history but to the wholly other realm of what John Hughes,
Spenser’s eighteenth-century editor, calls the narrative’s “mystick Sense.”
In this special sort of fiction, as Hughes understands it, the persons who
act are not persons at all but “so many Apparitions,” and the movements
of these apparitions are free from the usual laws of “probable or possible
Actions.”31 They are free from the laws of agency and narrative, because a
30 Here I allude to arguments I made at some length in my Introduction. I quote from
Johnson, “Milton,” The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations
on their Works, vol. 1, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), paragraph 256.
31 Hughes, “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry,” The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser, vol. 1
(London, 1715), pp. xxxiv–xxxv.

fiction such as The Faerie Queene chooses to abandon all questions of
probability, choice, cause, and consequence in order to represent some-
thing other than the theater of human activity.32
This notion of Spenserian allegory as a distinct sort of fiction, set apart
by its indifference to the laws of probable action, enabled some of the most
generative twentieth-century criticism of Spenser’s poetry. Angus Fletcher
writes in the spirit of Johnson when he observes that the heroes of
Spenser’s allegory “do not choose, they do not ‘deliberate’ but act on
compulsion, continually demonstrating a lack of inner control.”33 Paul
Alpers is reminiscent of Hughes when he suggests that Spenser “seems not
to have imaginatively grasped that the potentialities of human nature . . .
could show themselves in dramatic actions whose consequences . . . could
not be undone.”34 These critics understand well Dr. Johnson’s claim that
allegorical narrative abides by its own rules, rules different from the ones
that govern narratives of deliberation and dramatic action. Recent com-
mentators on The Faerie Queene have usefully extended that claim into a
linked set of insights about the narrative laws that govern Spenser’s poem.
These commentators clarify that Spenser does not conceive of moral
action in terms of choices and consequences; that his agents have no
histories and no real possibilities; that the boundaries between the selves
of The Faerie Queene and the landscapes they inhabit are porous and
unfixed. J. B. Lethbridge claims that Spenser’s characters should not be
read “dramatistically” because their words and actions “are not motiv-
ated.” Like the dramatic situation itself, Lethbridge says, the acts and
utterances of Spenser’s agents “do not spring from internal pressures in the
figure, but are given from the outside; in consequence they do not reveal
developed psyches.”35 Andrew Escobedo distances Spenser from the
Enlightenment notion of “character”—which is, in Spenser’s Renaissance,
“a category of narrative resource, not an individualized interior”—and
instead explores the possibility that the teleological fates of Spenser’s agents
32 See also Thomas Warton, who perceptively hypothesizes that Spenser’s allegorical
agents derive from his experience of pageants and masques. Spenser’s allegory is best,
Warton says, “where his IMAGINATION BODIES forth unsubstantial things, TURNS THEM TO
SHAPE, and marks out the nature, powers, and effects, of that which is ideal and abstracted,
by visible and external symbols; as in his delineations of FEAR, ENVY, FANCY, DESPAIR, and the
like.” Observations on the Fairie Queene of Spenser (London, 1754), pp. 217–39; qtd. at p. 91.
33 Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964),
p. 64. Fletcher makes his debt to Johnson explicit on p. 32.

34 Qtd. from Andrew Escobedo, “Daemon Lovers: Will, Personification, and Charac-
ter,” Spenser Studies 22 (2007), pp. 203–4.

35 “The Poetry of The Faerie Queene,” in Hecht and Lethbridge, eds, Spenser in the
Moment, p. 199. The poem, Lethbridge says, “is not dramatistically conceived, and . . . the
characters are precisely not characters but allegorical figures,” p. 198. He develops and
nuances this basic insight in a sustained reading of Phedon, pp. 201–8.
might enhance and define, rather than diminish, their operations of will.36
Jeff Dolven observes that even Spenser’s spectacles of punishment tend not
to be haunted by “the contraction of history or subjectivity,” the dehu-
manization, that forms a constituent part of Dante’s poetry of damnation.
Spenser’s emblematic figures, Dolven says, were not particularly human in
the first place and therefore do not experience inhumanity as a loss.37 In
these readings, the Spenserian constriction of agency operates outside any
sort of ethics of personal freedom, in a symbolic economy that precludes
anxieties about consequences, choice, and human suffering.
But modern criticism is ever troubled by allegory’s undercurrent of
violence, by the paralysis or possession of its agents. Like Dr. Johnson’s
claim that Fame and Victory “can do no more,” Fletcher’s notion of the
allegorical agent as daemonic and obsessed, however generously it maps
out an imaginative territory for allegorical narrative, raises also the specter
of bondage. Some critical readings of Spenser’s poem—for instance,
Gordon Teskey’s reading of Spenser’s personifications as walking corpses
and Susanne Wofford’s association of “allegorical compulsion” with
“human loss” in Spenser’s narrative—have found signs that Spenser
himself acknowledges the losses his agents suffer.38 To what extent does
Book One of The Faerie Queene register these anxieties about allegory and
the human agent? Does the violence that some modern critics find at work
in allegory have anything to do with the revolutionary violence that issues
from early modern projects of apocalyptic unmasking and religious dis-
sent? The answers to these questions are written, in Spenser’s poem, in the
bodies of the allegorical agents themselves. To an extraordinary degree,
The Legend of Holiness is indeed about bodies: beautiful, shape-shifting,
imprisoned, infected, disguised, and dissected bodies. And the movements
of these bodies in time do often hint at a condition of enslavement, a
36 “Daemon Lovers,” p. 205.

37 “Spenser’s Sense of Poetic Justice,” Raritan 21 (2001), pp. 134–6; qtd. at p. 136.
These figures, as Dolven says, operate “outside an ethic of care,” p. 134. But see also
Dolven’s richly nuanced discussion of whether and what the Redcrosse Knight can learn,
and of the possibility “not only that characters cannot read the allegory, but that we must
read it at their expense,” Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 138–47; qtd. at p. 147, italics his.
38 Teskey, “Death in an Allegory,” in Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, ed.
Elizabeth Bellamy, Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003); Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 298–310. See also Dolven’s account
of the violent excesses of Arthegal’s brand of justice, “Spenser’s Sense of Poetic Justice,”
pp. 136–9. And see also, on this relationship of cross purposes between poet and protag-
onist, James Nohrnberg’s comment that “while Guyon is trying to integrate his psyche, the
poet is analyzing it into its component elements,” The Analogy of The Faerie Queene
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 759.
bondage to something outside the order of narrative. They therefore
furnish Spenser with a way of making experiments in allegory’s potential
for violence.
Spenser himself, in Book One, furnishes an exemplary figure for the
allure of violent negation. After the Redcrosse Knight has been rescued
from Orgoglio’s dungeon, and before he arrives at the House of Holiness
to begin his program of purgation and rehabilitation, he ventures into the
den of the “man of hell,” Despair. Spenser imagines Despair as a cave-
dwelling whisperer of “inchaunted rimes” (1.9.48), no less persuasive for
his filthy and emaciated body and his charnel house of carrion flesh
(1.9.28, 33, 35). This enchanter’s promises are crafted for souls weary of
the demands of action and of time. He defends himself against Redcrosse’s
accusations by describing his typical patient as one “who trauails by the
wearie wandring way, / To come vnto his wished home in haste,” and he
offers to such weary travelers the gifts of “eternall rest,” “happy ease,” a
long and quiet sleep. The maxim with which he concludes his self-defense
is a celebration of escape, of cessation, as an ideal: “Sleepe after toyle, port
after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please”
(1.9.39–40).
Despair links this desire for escape to the futility of life in the world.
The Redcrosse Knight’s pursuit of good action is futile, Despair assures
him, not because goodness does not exist but rather because the saeculum
of corrupt history is far removed from the eschatological realm of God’s
goodness. The achievements and battles of the knight’s heroic career,
“now praysed,” will in the “hereafter” be turned to the knight’s damnation
(1.9.43). The best solution? To renounce that career, along with the
sphere of temporal action in which it plays out. Why linger, Despair
asks, in this saeculum of wrong? “Is it not better to doe willinglie, / Then
linger, till the glas be all out ronne?” (1.9.47). In his attempts to hasten the
Redcrosse Knight’s escape from the present age, to reveal the conse-
quences of a life lived in bondage to sin, Despair speaks as a kind of
apocalyptic prophet. He concludes, tellingly, by showing the knight an
image of the hereafter he has described, a painting of the damned souls
who suffer in a fiery punishment “which for euer shall remaine” (1.9.49).
Redcrosse cannot resist the promise of rest from his wearying and
ethically complicated quest. That he ends up in a state of paralytic
“amazement,” and that Una bursts in crying “Come, come away, fraile,
feeble, fleshly wight, / Ne let vaine words bewitch thy manly hart,”
confirms Despair’s power as another “guilefull great Enchaunter” under
whose spell the knight of holiness is all too ready to fall. Una’s intervention
breaks the spell, and Redcrosse sets out to resume his quest, to return from
the dark enticements of eternal rest to the demands of life in the world.
But Spenser concludes the episode with a stanza that reveals much about
the allure of eternal rest, and about the tensions between this allure and
the temporal lives of the allegorical agents who experience its power:
So vp he rose, and thence amounted streight.
Which when the carle beheld, and saw his guest
Would safe depart, for all his subtile sleight,
He chose an halter from among the rest,
And with it hong him selfe, vnbid vnblest.
But death he could not worke himselfe thereby;
For thousand times he so himselfe had drest,
Yet nathelesse it could not doe him die,
Till he should die his last, that is eternally. (1.9.54)
I say Spenser concludes the episode thus, but the effect of this stanza is in
fact to resist conclusion. Despair, dying, does not die. He abides rather in a
recurrence of dying, as if it were his lot to despair even of the desperate act
of which he is the particular demon. In this recurrence, Despair articulates
a particular sort of temporality. His hanging amounts to a teleological
labyrinth, a crumpling inward of narrative form, and the action of his self-
destruction is, in a certain sense, too purely reflexive to constitute action at
all. There is in the stanza I have quoted not one Despair but a thousand, as
if the poet had set mirrors opposite one another and so produced an
infinite repetition of a single image. And there is not one moment of
hanging but a thousand, as if time itself had taken a turn into the mirror,
along the unending line of Despair’s regressive and reduplicating image.
Every step forward into the mirror is likewise a step backward, back into
the gesture in which Despair has been suspended. His frustrated effort
bends the temporal rules that govern narrative and action. It is as if a
cosmic record player has gotten stuck.
This fall from temporality is, to a degree, a sign of Despair’s damnation.
Interminable reflexivity is, after all, a persistent tendency of Spenserian
vice. It is the tendency, for instance, of Error devoured by her own
children, “making her death their life, and eke her hurt their good”
(1.1.25). In Book Two, it is the tendency of fiery Pyrocles in the Idle
Lake, “burning in flames, yet no flames can I see, / And dying dayly, dayly
yet reuiue” (2.6.45), and of Tantalus, with his repetitive reaching for the
fruit just above his head: “The whiles he steru’d with hunger, and with
drouth / He daily dyde, yet neuer throughly dyen couth” (2.7.58). Each of
these figures is suspended in a moment of self-consumption. They undo
themselves, and in that undoing they embody a certain type of desire, a
desire so perversely and paradoxically directed that it can neither abide nor
escape itself. Something like this sterile repetition marks the blind idolater
Corceca, with the “nine hundred Pater nosters euery day, / And thrise nine
hundred Aues” she obsessively repeats (1.3.13). In a different way, this
suspension out of time constitutes the hell of the souls who languish by
the road leading to Lucifera’s palace, “euer after in most wretched case”
(1.4.3), and likewise of the souls in Despair’s illustrative painting, “which
for euer shall remaine” in the fire and brimstone that consume them
(1.9.49). The Redcrosse Knight escapes just this sort of damnation, and
resists the temptations of Despair, by entering back into temporality
and resuming the quest, a choice he has had to make (or accept) again
and again: after his digression into Error’s den (“so forward on his way . . . /
He passed forth, and new adventure sought,” “Ne euer would to any
byway bend,” 1.1.28); after his lingering in Lucifera’s palace (“he no
lenger would / There dwell in perill of like painefull plight, / But early
rose, and . . . / by a priuy Posterne tooke his flight,” 1.5.52); after his
sojourn in Archimago’s hermitage (1.2.6).39
But this lapse into stillness must signify more than just damnation. It
also, after all, characterizes many of Spenser’s virtues. Speranza, the daugh-
ter of Caelia, leans on her anchor, gazes “euer vp to heuen,” and waits, like
Despair, for consummation (1.10.14). Her sister Charissa increases
“euermore” with children, yet without overpopulating the House of
Holiness or the world, and her other sister, Fidelia, stands fixed with her
gold cup and her sealed book, inalterable in “her constant mood” (1.10.16,
13). These sisters preside statically over the House of Holiness just as
Despair presides over his cave and Lucifera over her house. They are, like
many of the blessed and damned daemonic fixtures of Spenser’s poem,
unmovable and unchanging, the genii of the ideal landscapes they oversee
and emblematize. The men and women who populate the provinces of
these various tutelary spirits participate in a similar sort of fixity. They tend
to move in hordes, souls without options, unswerving in their mass pursuit
of pride or Mammon or (as under the altar in Orgoglio’s dungeon) apoca-
lyptic justice. Even when these figures sharpen into individuality and enter
the romance narrative as characters, they incline toward a single meaning
that circumscribes tightly the scope of their possibilities. Characters with
names like Sansfoy, Kirkrapine, and Una can, in the end, do only one thing.
In the midst of these static figures ride Spenser’s errant knights, the
only really mobile agents in The Faerie Queene. Unlike the daemonic
machinery that surrounds them, the heroes of the legends wander, learn,
fall, rise, deliberate, and change. They make choices, endure and escape
39 See here Richard McCabe’s observation that “for the poem’s evil characters existence
is a matter of perpetual recurrence,” where “by contrast the questing characters develop
perceptibly.” The Pillars of Eternity, p. 223.
consequences. They have selfhood, and their selfhood is persistently under
threat from the forces of moral bondage, as Una suggests when she finds
Redcrosse languishing in Orgoglio’s prison and tells him, “of your selfe ye
thus berobbed arre, / And this misseeming hew your manly looks doth
marre” (1.8.42). If Spenser’s poem aims to fashion a “perfect gentleman”
of its reader, a knight such as Redcrosse seems to be the image of that
gentleman’s developing self, an errant pupil on tour through Spenser’s
museum of virtue.
It is striking, then, that this protagonist likewise persistently lapses into
a suspension of temporal movement, in a rhythm of progress and arrest.
Consider the first appearance of the Redcrosse Knight, in the very first
moments of Spenser’s narrative:
A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
Ycladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine,
The cruell markes of many’ a bloody fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield:
His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,
As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.
.....................................................................
A louely Ladie rode him faire beside,
Vpon a lowly Asse more white then snow,
Yet she much whiter, but the same did hide
Vnder a vele, that wimpled was full low,
And ouer all a blacke stole shee did throw,
As one that inly mournd: so was she sad,
And heauie sate vpon her palfrey slow:
Seemed in heart some hidden care she had,
And by her in a line a milkewhite lambe she lad.
.....................................................................
Behind her farre away a Dwarfe did lag,
That lasie seemd in being euer last. (1.1.1, 4, 6)
These verses reveal, piece by piece, a knight riding, and now a horse, now
his furniture, now a lady, now an ass, now a lamb on a leash, and now a
dwarf lagging behind. Each rider appears in turn, unnamed, and the poem
beholds them from this side of their masks and veils, as if its narrator were
looking at a woodcut or a wall hanging. The lady here is “as” one who
mourns; she “seems” inly sad, and likewise the knight “seems” full jolly
and dwarf “seems” lazy. The narration grants access to none of the
inwardness, and to none of the history, that these verses so abundantly
imply. Instead it presents a mere image, disposed into anatomical array.
The effect of this anatomized image is paratactic: there was a knight, and
beside him there was a woman, and by her there was a lamb, and so forth.
And the effect of this parataxis, at the outset of Spenser’s narrative, is to
resist the temporal motion upon which narrative depends. No time passes
as the poem proceeds from stanza to stanza. The only movement is
through the symbolic furniture, and the progress of the poetry corres-
ponds not with the passage of time but with the movement of a gazing eye
over the furniture of an emblematic scene.
Even in their activities, then, the figures disposed into Spenser’s open-
ing scene are static. All their pricking, riding, and lagging are not so much
actions as states, modes of being in which they simply are. A. D. Nuttall
has pointed out that the arrangement of this group is, from the perspective
of what he calls “the actual,” absurd. How could a lagging dwarf, or a
milk-white lamb, keep pace with a knight’s angry steed? They would, if
Spenser’s scene allowed for moments, in a matter of moments be left far
behind, and the current arrangement of the figures would dissolve. But the
point, of course, is that the scene does not allow for moments at all. Its
temporality is the temporality of recurrence. Its dwarf is “ever last,” neither
in motion nor at rest, caught in an endless lagging much as Despair is
caught in an endless repetition of hanging.40
The figures in this scene do not, of course, remain in these static poses.
Once the tableau has served its purpose, they ride on to Error’s den and
the next scene of temporal arrest (there Redcrosse will be “so wrapt in
Errours endlesse traine” that he will be caught in “sore constraint,” “that
hand or foot to stirr he stroue in vaine,” 1.1.18). Nor does the suspension
into masque-like stillness in the poem’s opening stanzas entail the sort of
violence that prevails in the hanging of Despair, or in Error’s capture of
Redcrosse in her endless train. But it will be important to my conclusions
here that Spenser’s scenes of damnation and despair resemble so closely
the movements of his knight of holiness. The structures of Spenserian
damnation are in play throughout Redcrosse’s visit to the House of
Holiness, where Amendment “euer” waits “still at hand” to pluck out
his corrupted flesh and where Mercy agrees to lead the knight, “that he
should neuer fall / In all his waies through this wide worldes waue, / That
40 Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007),
p. 78. Richard McCabe, who notes that this passage “recalls the tableaux of medieval
pageantry in which the figures were enshrined in characteristic pose for all time,” also reads
sensitively the passage’s temporal complications and contradictions, The Pillars of Eternity,
pp. 15–19; qtd. at p. 19. See also Harry Berger’s comments on the “visual stasis” of this
scene as exemplary of Spenser’s devotion to “artifice” and “play,” Revisionary Play: Studies in
the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 52–61.
Mercy in the end his righteous soule might saue” (1.10.26, 34). And they
are evident at the end of Redcrosse’s journey, when the king hides the
knight’s nuptial “sacred lamp” in a secret chamber, “where it should not be
quenched day nor night, / For feare of euill fates, but burnen euer bright”
(1.12.37). The cardinal words in these passages, as in Spenser’s spectacles of
self-consuming sin, are “ever” and “never,” for Spenser, at his key moments
of iconographic density, tends to write a poetry of temporal absolutes.
His lexicon of time is on display already in those first stanzas of Book
One—“and dead as liuing euer him ador’d”; “yet nothing did he dread, but
euer was ydrad”; “and euer as he rode his heart did earne”; “that lasie seemd
in being euer last”—and his rhetoric of action persistently lapses, through-
out The Legend of Holiness, into a rhetoric of inaction. Movement, for his
knights, often means movement within a feedback loop of repetition.
*
I have said at length, in my Introduction and Chapter 1, that allegorical
agents tend to be suspended between incompatible temporal orders, the
immutable order of idea and the mutable order of bodies. Many accounts
of personification, in particular, situate the trope in a middle region
between material, embodied presence and immaterial, incorporeal mean-
ing. Spenser’s Despair lives in something like this middle region, between
two poles. At one of these poles is despair in its plain or literal sense: a
condition of the human intellect or soul, perhaps a force governing the
soul’s relationship with the world; in any case, an idea, bodiless and
universal, despair itself. Spenser seems to intend “despair” in this sense
when he says, of Redcrosse, “And hellish anguish did his soule assaile, / To
driue him to despaire, and quite to quaile” (1.9.49). Vivid as the meta-
phors of this passage are, the despair toward which Redcrosse descends is
the thing itself, unencumbered by anything beyond its own definition. At
the other pole is a person, the desperate man, not a universal but an
individual. This individual is encumbered by all the contingencies of
bodily and temporal existence. He may participate in despair, but he
cannot be reduced to despair. He is organic, mutable, complex.
The important thing to note about these two poles is that language and
temporality at both of them can retain a certain semblance of integrity.
Despair itself belongs to the order of moral exposition, and the desperate
man to the order of narrative, and the poet can (in aspiration if not in
actuality) work at either of these poles without getting tangled up in the
rules of the other. But personification happens between these extreme
points. If a human person is the exemplar of desperation, that person
moves toward the universal, into the middle of the spectrum. If despair
itself, the universal, is a force or an agent, it moves toward the personal—
again, into the middle region of personification. The trope of personification
therefore pulls away from itself, in contrary directions. A personification
such as Despair strives away from pure and absolute definition toward
bodily existence: if he began life as an abstract noun, he now has greasy
locks, raw-bone cheeks, a neck to hang himself, an expectation of death.
And he likewise strives away from the contingencies of bodily existence
toward pure signification: if he inhabits the world of narrative progress and
change that Redcrosse inhabits, his narrative existence runs aground on
the purity of his desperation. He is a paradox, oriented all at once toward
and away from temporal embodiment.
This paradoxical dynamics helps to explain how a personification such
as Despair tends toward the reflexive forms of allegory. The body of a
personification makes reference both to itself and away from itself. Despair
is Despair because he signifies despair. And as soon as that formulation—
despair is despair—ceases to be pure tautology and begins to describe a
referential structure, a rift opens up within the personification much like
the rift I have explored at the heart of the term “allegory.” There is despair,
and then there is Despair. The man in the cave means, or is, something
other than himself. He is an other-speaking, an allegoria, and he cannot
die because his allegorical existence depends on Benjamin’s “destruction of
the organic,” the dismantling of a mortal, mutable, contingent body in
order that the disjecta membra of that body might pass into an eschaton of
pure meaning. Benjamin calls this eschaton “the homeland of allegory,”
and Spenser’s “man of hell” has a double citizenship in the present age
and in that distant homeland.41 His body refuses death because he is
caught up already in a different sort of passage, away from mortal existence
altogether.42
If Spenser’s allegorical vices suffer this passage into the homeland of
allegory as a loss of agency and possibility, what does the middle state of
allegorical embodiment mean for Spenser’s romance protagonists? In
Book Three of The Faerie Queene, Spenser has Malbecco, the jealous
husband, move from the pole of embodied narrative life toward the pole
of pure idea, so that he suffers his own metamorphic progress away from
the intermediate state and toward a death to contingency: he “is woxen so
deform’d that he has quight / Forgot he was a man, and Gelosy is hight”
(3.10.60). It is in keeping with Spenser’s idiom of temporal reflexivity that
in his drift away from humanity Malbecco comes “euer” to dwell in a state
41 As in my Introduction, I quote here from The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans.
John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 216–17. Disjecta membra is also Benjamin’s
phrase, p. 198.
42 See Gordon Teskey’s comments on the deaths of Cymocles and Pyrocles, and on “the
expulsion of everything in them that is vital,” “Death in an Allegory,” p. 76.

in which “can he neuer dye, but dying liues,” sustained by a self-made
jealousy “that death and life attonce vnto him giues” (3.10.60). And it is in
keeping with Spenser’s intimations of loss that that this newly minted vice
loses his old name (which is not without signification but which is a
proper name even so) and gains as his new name an abstract noun. In
forgetting he is a man, Gelosy makes explicit the fall from humanity
implicit in many of Spenser’s dying–undying vices. These figures live by
desire—for death, for consummation, for possession—and they suffer that
desire as the sort of arrest or suspension that Tantalus enters into when he
strives toward the unattainable fruit. They are drawn, as if by gravitational
force, toward a homeland or an eschaton that remains ever out of reach.
The Redcrosse Knight gets an inkling of this eschatological longing
when Contemplation urges him to renounce “earthly conquest” in favor
of the paths that bend toward the New Jerusalem, “where is for thee
ordained a blessed end” (1.10.60–1). At that blessed end, he will, like
Malbecco, gain a new name, a revelation of the significance that his body
conceals (“Saint George shalt called bee, / Saint George of mery England,
the signe of victoree,” 1.10.61), and his conference with Contemplation
so inflames his longing that he begs, in the end, “but let me heare for aie in
peace remaine, / Or streight way on that last long voiage fare, / That
nothing mey my present hope empare” (1.10.63). Contemplation’s
refusal to grant his request suggests just how emblematic the figure of
hope—Speranza—is of the Redcrosse Knight’s position. Speranza’s
unalterable posture of expectation and her unswerving gaze are for the
knight, in moments such as this one, the forms of his own desire. The
deferral of that desire occurs again and again, in the knight’s unending
byways and false starts, and the Legend of Holiness concludes with his
own choice to defer that desire once more, when Una’s father offers him
“ease and euerlasting rest” and Redcrosse replies, “of ease or rest, I may not
yet deuize” (1.12.17–18). That the knight himself decides, in the end, to
defer his satisfaction is a sign of how far he has come in holiness. When he
took up Despair’s dagger, or when he cried out in Orgoglio’s dungeon for
“happy choyce / Of death” (1.8.38), he could not make that decision.
These moments of deferral suggest, too, how central and intimate
Despair is to the Redcrosse Knight and his quest. In this book of doubles
and counterfeits, Despair is Speranza’s negative image, a prophet of the
same promised end toward which she turns her gaze. His apocalyptic
presentation of hell is a negative version of Contemplation’s apocalyptic
presentation of the New Jerusalem, and the “darkesome caue” in which he
peddles his regimen of “penurie and pine” (1.9.35) is a counterpart of the
“darksome lowly place far in” to which Patience, in the House of Holiness,
carries Redcrosse for a similar regimen of fasting, sackcloth, and whipping
(1.10.25). What Despair represents is, in other words, not so much a
cancellation of the quest as a perverse fulfillment of it, which is why, when
Una’s father offers Redcrosse “ease and euerlasting rest,” his words eerily
recall the “happy ease” and “eternall rest” that Despair himself offers.
Redcrosse faces in the cave of Despair an alternative way of leaving behind
the world of sin and error, a misdirected eschatological hope. Many of the
vices the hero has encountered have represented perverted forms of his
own image, monsters he himself might become, but Despair, most of all,
is the Redcrosse Knight’s dark other. It is Despair who still haunts the
knight when, under the tutelage of Fidelia in the House of Holiness, he is
so “prickt with anguish of his sinnes so sore” that he desires “to end his
wretched dayes” (1.10.21). And it is a redeemed and purified version of
Despair’s death longing that inflames Redcrosse to beg Contemplation, on
the mountain of vision, to hasten the promised eschatological end. The
gravitational field into which the knight is persistently drawn is governed
by providence and divine ordination, and by the successive revelation of
his identity as “Saint George of mery England, the signe of victoree.” But
even in his most hopeful moments Redcrosse enters into structures of
desire and arrest not wholly unlike those that govern Despair’s world-
renouncing pursuit. His bodily movements reveal a pattern beyond all
movement, the pattern of the ideal body of which Saint George, the
champion against Satan and the bridegroom of the Woman, is a shadow.
As Una says to the yet untested Redcrosse: “shew what ye bee” (1.1.19).
The burden of his quest is to discover a selfhood not yet visible in this
world of narrative error. If one of the key climaxes of his narrative comes at
the moment when he catches a mountaintop glimpse of his eschatological
significance, that significance has exerted a strong pull on his mortal
contingency from the moment he first rode into view, his young body
hidden beneath ancient arms, his angry steed chiding at the bit, and Truth,
with her veil and her white lamb, riding silently and statically beside.
*
If there is violence in this exertion of gravitational force—if Spenser
regards the body of his protagonist as subject to violence or loss—one of
the key places to look for this violence is the poem’s language of bodily
sickness. A Spenserian protagonist such as the Redcrosse Knight is sick,
and his quest is in part an effort in pathology, in the exercise of diagnostic
and rehabilitative force against his diseased body. The dynamics of sick-
ness and therapy often generate allegorical reflexivity in The Faerie Queene
for just this reason: because sickness provokes the afflicted agent into
practices of self-interpretation and self-discipline. Sickness is itself a fragile
middle state, teleologically directed toward its own end in either the cure
or the death of the body under affliction. Spenserian sickness has a special
relationship with disenchantment, then, because disenchantment too is a
kind of antidote or cure, a return from the enchanted other-state of
sickness to the homeland of ordinary bodily life.
There are two ways to be sick in The Faerie Queene. The peculiar form
of disenchantment in Book One, Spenser’s book of apocalyptic dissent,
depends on one of them. Its peculiar contours will come more clearly into
view, though, if I describe first the other kind of sickness, which is the
form of sickness more familiar in the context of early modern medical
discourses. This latter form of sickness regards disease as a matter of
imbalance in the body. According to the long Galenic tradition of
humoral medicine, the health of the body depends on order, both in the
balance of the four humors and in the proper ordering of diet, evacuation,
sleep, air, exercise, and the passions.43 Bodies under the regime of humoral
medicine in the sixteenth century are ever in peril of poisoning themselves
by the excess of one humor or another.44 The treatment of the diseased
body depends, in this regime, on exercise, diet, purgation, and control,
and the remedies for disease are not catastrophic but disciplinary, oriented
toward the assertion and maintenance of order.
Ancient though it is, this Galenic regime of self-maintenance intersects
with and helps to undergird the early modern tendency toward disciplines
of self-control. Early modern strains of Neostoicism, especially, prize the
exercise of force within the self and tend, like Galenic medicine, to
enshrine temperance as a central virtue. Both these schools, in their
early modern forms, tend to concern themselves with the intensity of
the passions rather than the objects of the passions, and both charge the
temperate subject with a moral responsibility for taking control of
her interior desires.45 Both amount, broadly speaking, to a kind of
43 Michael Schoenfeldt explains that illness in the sixteenth century “is not the product
of an infection from without but rather is the result of an internal imbalance of humoral
fluid,” Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser,
Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 2.
Schoenfeldt’s first chapter usefully introduces sixteenth-century Galenic medicine, as does
Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and
Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). These six other factors I name here
are the “non-naturals” of Galenic theory, on which, see Gail Kerns Paster, Humoring the Body:
Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 4.
44 Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, p. 3.
45 See, for instance, Justus Lipsius’ De Constantia (1584), where Langius advises the
Lipsius character, “You will discover the enemy beside you and here within (he tapped me
on the chest) [hostem reperies apud te, & in isto (pectus mihi concutiebat) penetrali]. What
difference does it make how pacified the place to which you have come? You drag war along
with you. Or how quiet it is? There is commotion around you, or rather within you [turbae
circum te, imo in te sunt]. For a discordant mind fights with itself, and will always do so
[pugnat enim pugnabitque secum semper discors hic animus] by wanting, fleeing, hoping, and
despairing. And just as those who turn their backs out of fear expose themselves to more
self-fashioning, and it is no accident that, when Stephen Greenblatt in his
classic study of that theme turns to Spenser, he turns to the Legend of
Temperance and to its protagonist Guyon. This second book of The
Faerie Queene is all at once a book of humors and a book of Neostoic
discipline, and Greenblatt, following Freud’s claim that civility entails the
suppression of powerful human instincts, suggests that Guyon’s quest for
civility can be achieved only through acts of disciplinary violence.46
At the same time, humoral medicine suggests to many of Spenser’s
contemporaries a way of opening the human subject up to a cosmos of
forces beyond the subject. The economy of humors begins, after all, with
an assumption, as one sixteenth-century physician puts it, of “the famil-
iaritie . . . betwixt mind and bodie.”47 The self-discipline of the humoral
body aims not to master the passions from without but rather to regulate
them from within; and the practices of humoral physiology therefore open
the possibility of a regimen that would be rather foreign to the inveterate
dualism and the ideals of autonomy prevalent in some Stoic discourses.
Inasmuch as the humoral system of medicine investigates the channels of
commerce between the body and an array of elemental, astrological,
psychological, and spiritual powers—inasmuch as it investigates the secret
meeting places of body and spirit—it suggests the possibility of an
allegorical rendering of the human person, an understanding of the person
as participating in larger material and immaterial orders.48 This rendering
danger uncovered and turned away, so it is with those vagabonds and raw recruits, in whom
there was never any fight against the passions [quibus cum adfectibus numquam pugna fuit],
but only flight.” Both English and Latin I quote from Justus Lipsius’ Concerning Constancy,
ed. and trans. R. V. Young (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance
Studies, 2011), 1.3. And see Charles Taylor’s discussion of Lipsius’ importance for early
modern “programmes of military and social reconstruction,” which ultimately issue in “a
far-reaching remaking of institutional and social life, through the discipline and training of
the subordinate population” and the “internalization of the values of industriousness and
self-control among these subjects,” A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 117–18.
46 Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 172–3.
Schoenfeldt makes a further distinction between continence (the resistance of desire) and
temperance (the achievement of such a balance that no resistance is necessary) and
elucidates the ambivalent oscillation of Spenser’s Legend of Temperance between the
violence of the one state and the placid stillness of the other, Bodies and Selves, pp. 40–4.
47 Qtd. from Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and
Early Modern Texts (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 15.
Marshall’s is among the recent studies that have read humoral medicine as an early modern
alternative to rational, self-disciplined subjectivity, pp. 13–21.
48 Schoenfeldt discusses the possibility that, “whereas our post-Cartesian ontology
imagines psychological inwardness and physiological materialism as necessarily separate

realms of existence, and thus renders corporeal language for emotion highly metaphorical,
the Galenic regime of the humoral self . . . demanded the invasion of social and psycho-
logical realms by biological and environmental processes” and so “gave poets a language of
of the human person governs a number of Spenser’s narrative experiments
in The Faerie Queene.
The implications for allegory of this Galenic notion of sickness are
especially clear in Spenser’s Book Two, the narrative dynamics of which
are worth describing briefly as a way of setting into relief the very different
contours of Book One. Spenser gives the allegorical idiom of Book Two
central articulation in passages like this one:
Then gan the Palmer thus, Most wretched man,
That to affections does the bridle lend;
In their beginning they are weake and wan,
But soone through suff'rance growe to fearefull end;
Whiles they are weake betimes with them contend:
For when they once to perfect strength do grow,
Strong warres they make, and cruell battry bend
Gainst fort of Reason, it to ouerthrow:
Wrath, gelosy, griefe, loue this Squyre haue laide thus low.
Wrath, gealosie, griefe, loue do thus expell:
Wrath is a fire, and gealosie a weede,
Griefe is a flood, and loue a monster fell;
The fire of sparkes, the weede of little seede,
The flood of drops, the Monster filth did breede:
But sparks, seed, drops, and filth do thus delay;
The sparks soone quench, the springing seed outweed,
The drops dry vp, and filth wipe cleane away:
So shall wrath, gealosy, griefe, loue die and decay. (2.4.34–5)
There are hints in this passage—I will return to them—of an image of
sickness quite foreign to the Galenic theory of humors, an image of filth or
parasites invading the sick person from without. But the dominant
metaphor here is of conflict within the order of the self. This patient’s
problem is that he has put the bridle to interior forces—“affections”—that
should have been subdued, and the result is rebellion, an attack by a
domestic rabble upon the soul’s interior social order. The agents of
Phedon’s pathological narrative are forces within the body exceeding
their proper limits. Even the fire and flood, started though they are by
invading sparks and drops, introduce into this narrative metaphors of
control, narratives of the loss and restoration of balance within the soul’s
economy.
Imbalance is indeed a controlling metaphor in the Legend of Temper-
ance, which has at its core the poet’s vision of the body “now seeming
inner emotion whose vehicles were also tenors, whose language of desire was composed of
the very stuff of being.” Bodies and Selves, p. 8.
flaming whott, now stony cold” (2.9.39). Here, in Spenser’s book of
physiology, moral disease is a question of humoral predominance, of the
“implacable fyre” of Pyrocles (2.6.44) on the one hand and the dreary dry
coldness of Maleger (2.11.22) on the other. To be ill, in Book Two, is to
lack “gouernaunce” over one’s humors, just as to be whole is to show
“goodly maysteries” over them (2.4.7, 2.6.1). Good medicine is built on a
model of restraint or suppression, and the cure for the diseased body is
typically to quench the fire (2.6.44), to dam up the flood (2.4.11), to lock
up the tongue and bind the hands (2.4.12–13), to “menage and subdew”
pride as a valorous man manages his horse (2.4.1–2). Health is achieved
through tempering force; it depends not on the cleansing of the body but
on the economy of the body, the right ordering of its fluids, powers, and parts.
The passage I have quoted here exemplifies on a small scale the narrative
material of Book Two, which engages its virtuous knight not in Book
One’s scenes of monomachia but in scenes of siege and insurgency. This
book of temperance is constituted of many local metaphors of governance
and restraint, and these metaphors in their most fully sustained and
elaborated forms suggest narratives of statecraft. Spenser figures the well-
ordered human soul as a little kingdom, a kingdom in correspondence
both with a material body and with the larger material orders of state and
military power. Alma’s castle of selfhood is both a physiological machine
and a miniature kingdom exactly because Spenser means for it to represent
a human subjectivity that participates in both these material orders.49
However much he might compare the “bitter tyranny” of desire to the
“happy peace and goodly gouernment” of reason, he frames these celebra-
tions of rational control by setting the scene of good government “in a
body which doth freely yeeld / His partes to reasons rule obedient”
(2.11.1–2). To be a self, disciplined or not, is to be in negotiation with
a material, historical, bodily saeculum. In his will to sustain the corres-
pondences between the self and that larger saeculum, the Spenser who
writes the Legend of Temperance opens his discourse to the allegorical
tropes of the psychomachia. His interlocking languages of selfhood and
statecraft attempt to fashion an other-speaking human subject who is
49 There is a long tradition of allegorically figuring the human person as a castle. This
figuration does much to inform thirteenth-century poems such as the Chasteau d’amour and
the Roman de la rose, and it is still in play in Thomas Elyot’s sixteenth-century medical
treatise The Castel of Helthe and Bunyan’s seventeenth-century fiction The Holy War. For an
account of the metaphor, see Christopher Burlinson, Allegory, Space, and the Material World
in the Writings of Edmund Spenser (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 97–127. On the
Vitruvian idea that architecture itself imitates the human form, see, e.g., Rudolf Wittkower,
Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 14–16, and
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance
Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 69–72.
neither robbed of agency by her participation in a larger cosmos nor
removed from agency by a longing to escape into an eschatological
homeland. His metaphors of good government in the soul are farther
from the longings of the Henrician and Marian apocalyptic prophets, who
promise an immanent end, and closer to George Gifford’s call in 1596 for
“noble warriors & mighty men,” or to the hopes of John Foxe and John
Bale that Queen Elizabeth might enjoy “long prosperity” and “long
health.” They allow for a continuation of history’s long narrative, in the
hopes that eternity can make itself present in the materials and agents—
the monarchs, armies, parliaments, and preachers—of that narrative.
*
But this is only one way of being sick in The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s
ambivalence about these diagnoses of disorder, and about the models of
temperate government he fashions to cure the disease, are evident in
Guyon’s violence at the Bower of Bliss, which brings to culmination
both the knight’s training in the exercise of power and the poet’s anxieties
about that power. Partly because he is nourished on Augustinian (and not
just Stoic) streams of Renaissance humanism, his search for temperance is
persistently caught in the undertow of his skepticism about the ethics of
control, and his prescriptions for good government come into tension
with competing prescriptions of a very different sort.50
There is, after all, another way of being sick in The Faerie Queene. This
second sort of sickness depends on a metaphor that haunts Spenser’s
poetry throughout his career. The poems he translates for Jan van der
Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings, his first publication, concern themselves
already with bodies that fail and with the reasons for that failure. In the
Petrarchan visions that open the Theatre, the poet sees a great ship break
itself “on a rocke, that under water lay” (2.9), a flourishing laurel tree
stricken to the root by “sodaine flash of heavens fire outbrast” (3.10), a
lovely lady stung fatally in the heel by a serpent, to which the poet responds,
50 Greenblatt argues that, exactly because temperance demands of the subject an exercise
of power against her own desires—and exactly because this exercise of power itself
constitutes a form of desire—Spenser’s journey in temperance culminates inevitably in
the “supreme act of destructive excess” that paradoxically establishes and undermines
temperance at the Bower of Bliss. Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 172–3. See also Sean
Kane’s discussion of what he calls Guyon’s “quest for the illusory centre of the independent
moral self.” Kane observes that, throughout Book Two, “we encounter complete subjective
worlds offered by incomplete people” such as Mammon, Phaedria, and Acrasia, and the
effect of these worlds is to undermine the authority of Guyon’s own subjective world and of
the disciplines by which he orders that world. Spenser’s Moral Allegory (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1989), pp. 53–4. On Augustinian, as opposed to Stoic, strains of
Renaissance humanism, see William Bouwsma, A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural
History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 19–73.
“alas in earth so nothing doth endure” (6.11). The sonnets from du Bellay
begin with a vision of a mighty temple, a ghost who cries to the poet,
“beholde, / What under this great Temple is containde” (1.10), and then an
earthquake that shatters the temple “from the bottome deepe” (2.13). And
the poems of van der Noot himself turn the theme of catastrophic ruin to
visions of apocalypse, in which the Whore of Babylon and the seven-headed
“Dragon” begin in splendor and might and are then cast down.
Spenser’s own Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, which are of uncertain date
and which he compiles alongside the translations of Petrarch and du Bellay
in his Complaints, develop further what was merely an undercurrent in
those earlier visions. Here again the poet assembles a catalogue of mighty
things—a cedar of Lebanon, a hideous Dragon, a goodly ship—which
suffer a sudden fall. But in Spenser’s visions the fall comes not by
lightning, boulders, or earthquakes, as it often does in the poems of the
Theatre. The destructive agents in his visions are more like Petrarch’s
serpent in the grass and du Bellay’s subterranean fault line. The culprit in
his vision of the ship is “a little fish, that men call Remora” (9.120). The
emphasis shifts from the greatness of the fall to the smallness and insinu-
ation of the lurking evil, as if Spenser has discovered that the most
frightening thing in those Continental poems is not the heap of ruins or
the thunder from heaven but rather “the bottome deepe” from which the
earthquake rises up, the weeds in which the serpent lies unseen. Spenser’s
great dragon is undone by a tiny spider—“the subtill vermin creeping closely
neare, / Did in his drinke shed poyson privilie” (6.77–8)—and his cedar by
an even more subtle foe, “a litle wicked worme, perceiv’d of none” that
breeds unseen “within her inmost pith” (7.90–1).51 The prevailing imagery
has changed from the imagery of shaking, striking, and crashing to the
imagery of creeping, breeding, and infiltrating: the language of infection.
These metaphors will become, in the Legend of Holiness, the meta-
phors of sickness that undergird that book’s particular forms of violence.
One of the key articulations of Spenser’s language of holiness is the
following diagnostic passage, which describes the Redcrosse Knight’s
sickness as he convalesces at the House of Holiness just before he has
his vision of the New Jerusalem:
But yet the cause and root of all his ill,
Inward corruption, and infected sin,
Not purg'd nor heald, behind remained still,
And festring sore did ranckle yett within,
Close creeping twixt the marow and the skin. (1.10.25)
51 I cite both by sonnet number and by the continuous lineation of the Yale editors.
Here is sickness as infection, an abscess or a creeping thing festering in the
tissues of the afflicted body. The surgeons of holiness discover the knight’s
disease as a rancid boil or a sunken object, a “corrupted iott” that the nurse
Amendment stands by to pluck out with his fiery hot pincers (1.9.26). Sir
Trevisan had warned Redcrosse that Despair’s “subtile tong, like dropping
honny, mealt’th / Into the heart, and searcheth euery vaine” (1.9.31), and
here the physicians apprehend how deeply Despair has insinuated himself
into the knight’s flesh. No wonder that Trevisan describes Despair as
“creeping close, as Snake in hidden weedes” (1.9.28). The parasites that
occupy Redcrosse’s body represent a sickness both deeply interior and
frighteningly alien, a disease that comes creeping into the body from the
outside. They root Spenser’s metaphors of bondage and captivity in
deeper metaphors of infestation and interior usurpation, metaphors that
figure the human agent as not just constrained but contaminated.
These metaphors of infection direct the language of sickness all over
The Faerie Queene. In the passage I have quoted from Book Two, already,
the “sparks, seed, drops, and filth” described by the Palmer are viral agents
that need to be expelled and washed away. Elsewhere in Book Two,
Phedon cries that he has been eaten up with a “gealous worme”
(2.4.28). Grief gnaws at the sisters of Medina “as doth an hidden moth
/ The inner garment frett” (2.2.34). The arrows of Atin and Maleger are
dipped “in poyson and in blood, of malice and despight” (2.4.38; also
2.11.21). And Mordant and Amavia are poisoned with a “charme and
veneme” that “their blood with secret filth infected hath, / Being diffused
through the sencelesse tronck, / That through the great contagion direful
deadly stonck” (2.2.4). Even the common tropes that root action in
impulse—“rage enforst my flight” (2.4.32); “prickt with guiltie shame”
(2.8.44); “auarice gan through his veines inspire” (2.7.17)—suggest the
presence of an invader who lays hold on the reins of its host’s body and
usurps the powers of agency. Such a catalogue could go on, and it could
extend well beyond the end of Book Two, into the later books of both the
1590 and the 1596 Faerie Queene. Throughout the poem, Spenser con-
tinues to develop the metaphorics of infection into new forms.52
52 In the third book of The Faerie Queene, for instance, Spenser turns from Book Two’s
pervasive imagery of poison to images of the body’s interior penetrated and wounded, often
by arrows. In the episode of Busirane, Wanton Mars is pictured “full of burning dartes, /
And many wide woundes launched through his inner partes” (3.11.44). The victims of
Busirane’s Grief abide “in wilfull languor and consuming smart, / Dying each day with
inward wounds of dolours dart” (3.12.16). The wounded dragon beneath the idol of Love is
shot through either eye with a shaft “that no man forth might draw, ne no man remedye”
(3.11.48), and Amoret’s exposed and bloody heart is “quite through transfixed with a
deadly dart” (3.12.21). The theater of desire is, in this episode, a theater of dissection,
a diagnosis of lovesickness as an arrow embedded deep in the patient’s interior tissues.
In Book One, though, narratives and metaphors of infection govern the
shape of the quest, and of the poem’s ethics, in a special way. To be
concerned with “inward corruption, and infected sin,” as the passage
I have quoted suggests, is to be concerned with lurking evil, with infil-
trating agents who “ranckle yett within, / Close creeping twixt the marow
and the skin.” Infection is terrifying, in Book One, because it insinuates
itself invisibly into the tissues of the body, like a serpent, parasite, or
poison. The episode of Orgoglio begins with this hymn to Duessa, who is
along with Archimago the poem’s great practitioner of creeping deceit:
What man so wise, what earthly witt so ware,

As to discry the crafty cunning traine,
By which deceipt doth maske in visour faire,
And cast her coulours died deepe in graine,
To seeme like truth, whose shape she well can faine,
And fitting gestures to her purpose frame,
The guiltlesse man with guile to entertaine?
Great maistresse of her art was that false Dame,
The false Duessa, cloaked with Fidessaes name. (1.7.1)
Here deceit is a “she” in disguise, and her “crafty cunning traine” recalls
both “Errours endlesse traine,” in which Redcrosse has already been
ensnared, and the “hideous trayne” of the dragon he has seen under
Lucifera’s feet (1.4.10). Though the manifest sense of “traine” is here
the train of a garment, it also evokes the imagery of serpents, insinuating
agents of deceit. Before the episode is over, Duessa, who is deceit herself,
will be mounted upon a serpent whose “tayle was stretched out in
wondrous length” (1.7.18), and the Redcrosse Knight will later stand his
ground against a dragon whose “huge long tayle wownd vp in hundred
foldes” (1.12.11). If the knight’s physicians know that his infection is like
a serpent “close creeping” between the marrow and the skin, Book One
often implies that deceit is herself a serpent, lying in wait like Error in her
den, “creeping close” like the “Snake in hidden weedes” Despair (1.9.28),
emerging like Orgoglio’s serpent from its “long time in darksome den”
(1.7.16). Even in the celebrations over the slain dragon at the poem’s end,
a paranoid citizen of Eden warns his fellow revelers not to touch the beast,
“for yet perhaps remaynd / Some lingring life within his hollow brest, / Or
in his wombe might lurke some hidden nest / Of many Dragonettes, his
fruitfull seede” (1.12.10).
It is this sort of lurking evil against which the knight directs his crusade,
from his encounter with Error and her offspring through to his descent
into the den of Despair. The plucking out of the knight’s corrupted flesh,
and the slaying of the poem’s greatest serpent, are just moments of climax
in a sustained narrative of hunting and eliminating infectious agents.
What makes the Legend of Holiness apocalyptic is, in part, its concern
with unmasking these infectious agents, and its persistent, often subtle
intimation that these agents are the many faces of a single Satanic agent
whose power will, finally, be destroyed. In this concern with apocalyptic
diagnosis, Spenser finds the pathological grammar of this poem. The
burden of the Redcrosse Knight is to hunt the great usurper in every
corner of the narrative world. The creeping worm beneath the knight’s
own skin is another version of the serpent toward whom he rides, and the
object of his exterminatory quest is infection not just in his own body but
in the world itself. Where the surgeons of holiness discover worms close-
creeping twixt the marrow and the skin, the rest of the poem discovers
them lurking in Error’s Den, ramping and menacing outside Orgoglio’s
palace, wreaking havoc in Una’s kingdom. Where the nurses in Patience’s
team dig out the rotting flesh and filthy jots in Redcrosse’s infected body,
Redcrosse himself goes digging in a world-body full of corpses, lepers, filthy
scald, and “great lumps of flesh and gobbets raw” (1.1.20). Where the “root
of all his ill” in the diagnostic passage is Redcrosse’s “inward corruption,”
elsewhere in the poem it is Duessa who is, as Arthur tells Redcrosse, “The
roote of all your care, and wretched plight” (1.8.45). Nowhere in Spenser’s
corpus does he assemble such a collection of misshapen, monstrous, rotten
bodies, often dead and stinking, lurking in dungeons and dens. These
cadavers create the impression that Book One, as James Norhnberg has
said, is “an adventure inside a monster.”53 All the dens, caves, dungeons,
and wombs constitute an anatomical hell, as if the Redcrosse Knight were
in the pregnant belly of the beast herself, striving to fight his way out.
What the diagnostic passage from the House of Holiness reveals is that
Redcrosse’s passage through this great body is likewise a passage through
his own body, a confrontation with the serpents and sores that infect him.
*
What do these metaphors of infection have to do with Despair, and
with Despair’s power to articulate what the Redcrosse Knight himself
wants and seeks? The answer to these questions begins with the fact that
Book One’s metaphors of infection correspond with a program of neg-
ation. Holiness in Spenser means wholeness, as its etymology implies and
as many readers of The Faerie Queene have observed. But holiness, in
many sixteenth-century discourses, also means purity. Thomas Morton,
in the multifaceted account of his The Threefold State of Man (1596),
defines holiness not only as “the spirituall coniunction of the reasonable
53 The Analogy of The Faerie Queene, p. 183.

creature with God” but also as a state of cleanness, in which “the whole
nature be pure in the sight of God without any spot or blemish of
sinne.”54 The “Christian” who sings the verses of a 1593 broadside called
The Heartie Confession of a Christian professes that “Christ is my perfect
holiness, and grace: / Him, as that holy of holies, if I frequent, / My blottes,
and blemishes shall soone be spent.”55 These renderings of holiness as the
washing away of blots and blemishes have a close counterpart in Spenser’s
House of Holiness, where the Redcrosse Knight is subjected to the
immersion of “his blamefull body in salt water sore, / The filthy blottes
of sin to wash away” (1.10.27), and again in the “well of life” into which
Redcrosse falls, with its power to “wash away” the guilt of sin and to cure
“those that with sicknesse were infected sore” (1.11.30). And if the
Christian of the broadside asks Christ to forgive the “foule and vgly
vice” with which he is “soiled in this filthie life,” Spenser’s Book One
likewise figures the contrary of holiness as filth. When Duessa is stripped by
Arthur, it is her “secret filth” that is exposed, in a passage of four stanzas that
uses the word “filth” four times (to say nothing of “loathly,” “scurfe,” “scald,”
“rotten,” “sowre,” and “scabby,” 1.8.46–9). Error, too, is four times called
“filthy,” and the poet’s first introduction of her as “most lothsom, filthie,
foule, and full of vile disdaine” begins to establish the lexicon he will use to
describe the enemies of holiness throughout the poem (1.1.16).
It is partly from these early modern discourses on holiness that Spenser
learns his vocabulary of expurgation and negation. The surgical attack
Patience makes against the Redcrosse Knight’s creeping infection comes
close to the language of, for instance, Thomas Palfreyman’s 1572 para-
phrase of the book of Romans, where Palfreyman expounds on Paul’s
exhortation to “giue vp your bodies a liuing sacrifice, holie, acceptable
vnto God” (Rom. 12:1) by explaining that Paul here enjoins “slaying and
putting to death, all your evill lustes and moste filthy affections that reigne
in your members.”56 Palfreyman, like Spenser, figures this pursuit of
holiness as a campaign of extermination and disinfection:
in the steede of killing a Calfe, we must kill and slea within us the raging
heate of pride . . . In steede of killing a Goate, we muste suppresse and choke
54 A Treatise of the Threefolde State of Man (London, 1596), p. 39; in facsimile at Early English
Books Online.
55 The Heartie Confession of a Christian (London, 1593); in facsimile at Early English
Books Online.
56 A Paraphrase upon the Epistle of the Holie S. Paul to the Romanes (London, 1572?),
p. 47; in facsimile at Early English Books Online. Here, where the publication information is
unclear, I rely on the British Library’s catalogue. Paul I quote from the Geneva Bible: The
Bible and Holy Scriptvres Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament (Geneva, 1560); in
facsimile at Early English Books Online.
up our sensuall lustes: And in steede of Pigeons and Turtles, we muste
sacrifice unto God all the wanton motions and infected thoughtes of our
myndes.57
Because it is oriented to this particular sort of violence, the mission of the
Redcrosse Knight is quite different from the mission of Guyon: not to
govern but to eliminate, to strip bare and scrub clean. The only way for
him to achieve the eschaton is to finish the job of cleansing the world of its
infectious agents, to achieve a condition of health that takes the form not
of balance but of sterilization. He must, for this reason, be God’s zealous
exterminator, so extreme in his mission of cleansing that he threatens, in
the cave of Despair, to turn his violence against even himself. His zeal for
the discovery of every impurity has something in common with the
standard of moral perfection that Despair himself adheres to, and that
tempter appeals with strange power to the knight’s quest for holiness when
he tempts him toward suicide as the final solution to the problem of sin.
The same misguided zeal inflames Redcrosse throughout the poem, and
he oscillates between postures of outrageous skepticism and outrageous
credulity, ready to devote his energies not just to the cause of purity and
truth but likewise to the counterfeit forms of purity and truth embodied in
Archimago and Duessa. There is, perhaps, just a touch of the Quixote
about the Redcrosse Knight as he persecutes Una and sallies forth to
vindicate Duessa. He is the star of his own cautionary romance of error,
misapprehension, and deluded grandiosity.
It is, of course, true that this errant zealotry, like his death-longing, is a
temptation that the Redcrosse Knight must overcome; he ultimately must,
and does, reject Despair’s final solution, and he is receptive to Despair’s
remedies partly because he comes to Despair at his lowest point, as Una
conveys him from Orgoglio’s dungeon to be treated at the House of
Holiness. But like the death-longing to which Despair appeals, the right-
eous zeal in which he encourages Redcrosse is an image of the very virtue
the knight is out to discover. Violent dissent is one of the most important
virtues in his education, and the heart of his chivalric mission is to deny
and debunk, to ferret out, to kill. When he fails, he does so either because
he has directed his violence in the wrong direction (as when he denies
Una) or because he has not taken it far enough (as when he succumbs to
Error, to Duessa, or to Orgoglio). When the object of denial or destruc-
tion is rightly identified, his calling is to pursue purity to the uttermost.
He finds the House of Holiness to be a place of “pure vnspotted life”
(1.10.3), not contrary to, but in a strange way commensurate with, the
57 A Paraphrase upon the Epistle of the Holie S. Paul to the Romanes, p. 47.
purity that he demands of Una and that Despair demands of him. His
rampant zeal for extirpation can hardly exceed that of Charissa’s surgeons,
who imprison, starve, strip, whip, pluck, corrode, puncture, prick, and
“embay” the knight in an agonizing ritual of discipline that so purges him
of filth and rot “that soone in him was lefte not one corrupted iott”
(1.10.25–7). The demands of holiness are stringently absolute, as the
“ruefull shriekes and gronings” (1.10.28) of the knight-in-treatment
unambiguously attest, and the misdirected violence he has practiced
against himself and his friends can hardly be separated from the rehabili-
tative violence he must suffer now in consequence. His sins and his ideals
are dangerously alike.58
This perilous resemblance will partly explain why Error is the first
enemy the Redcrosse Knight must face, and why some of his most
formidable enemies come to him in disguise. Spenser’s book of infection
must necessarily also be a book of paranoia, of hermeneutic anxiety,
because the infectious agents that corrupt the bodies of this poem come
creeping secretly, unannounced and unsuspected. Redcrosse’s moral crises
turn on apprehension and misapprehension, blindness and insight, and
one of the central sins of the book is the sin I noted in my Introduction as
central also to sixteenth-century projects of disenchantment and dissent:
the sin of hypocrisy, embodied here in Duessa. As Una says, on the
occasion of that sorceress’s climactic exposure, “Such is the face of fals-
hood, such the sight / Of fowle Duessa, when her borrowed light / Is laid
away, and counterfesaunce knowne” (1.8.49). As long as Duessa holds
sway over Redcrosse’s world, that world is rife with conspirators, and all
the women, men, monsters, and phantasms who accost the bewildered
knight conceal identities and keep secrets that he cannot find out. His only
recourse is to doubt everything: to “know them, and be the more ware of
them,” as John Bale says of the Roman enemy at the outset of his Image of
Bothe Churches, and to learn well, as John Bate warns in his 1589 manual
against hypocrisy, that “carelesse” souls, “when they thinke them selues to
stande fastest, do slippe most sodenlie into dreadfull daunger.”59
The first book of the Faerie Queene seems to belong, in other words, to
the culture of paranoia and solitude that I found at work in Skelton’s 1498
58 See Joseph Campana’s discussion of the shifting status of pain in sixteenth-century
piety, The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2012), pp. 47–74. Campana reads the Legend of Holiness
in light of the medieval devotion to the suffering Christ and the Protestant turn to a new
regime of flagellation and discipline, in which “the virtues associated with the suffering body
recede before the power associated with righteous, royal militancy,” p. 52.
59 Bale, The Image of Bothe Churches, fol. A2v; and John Bate, The Portraiture of
Hypocrisie (London, 1589), “To the Christian Reader,” fols A8r, A7v; in facsimile at
Early English Books Online.
poem The Bowge of Courte. What separates the Redcrosse Knight from
Skelton’s Dread is that the knight, unlike the passive and ambivalent
dreamer, enforces his solitude with uncompromising zeal. If Dread
responds to the presences of Error, Faithlessness, and Duplicity by cower-
ing among them, Redcrosse responds by unmasking or exterminating
them. He is the policeman of his own infested self, on a mission of ethical
cleansing that anticipates the sterilization he himself will suffer at the
House of Holiness. Where there are infectious agents lurking in the body
of the knight, the nation, the church, or the world, they must be elimin-
ated, and the desire to be pure, in Spenser’s allegory of holiness, therefore
coincides with a desire to be untouched and alone. The vices in Book One
are all serpents in the garden of creation, and the knight who has done his
work will find his world—which is to say, himself—emptied out. To
accomplish his work, he must cultivate a bodily and spiritual regime that
Spenser never quite ventures to imagine fully but which Book One
everywhere whispers of, a regime of total purity and total integrity,
exclusive of all foreign agents and comprehensive in itself.
*
Maurice Evans has observed that “holiness is the head of the virtues” and
that Book One of The Faerie Queene is, therefore, the foundation on
which the other books of the poem are built. “If Red Cross were not
rescued from Orgoglio by Arthur,” he says, “there would be no point in
any subsequent quest, for Guyon and the rest start in the strength of Red
Cross’s Justification and explore those virtues which his achieved faith
alone has made possible.”60 Some critics have gone even further in
suggesting that the first book of Spenser’s poem is the high mark from
which the other books decline, that Books Two through Six represent a
“fall into history,” from Book One’s optimism about the value of moral
action to the much more pessimistic sensibilities of, especially, Book Five
and Mutabilitie.61 There is truth in these claims: Redcrosse’s spiritual
victories and discoveries are considerable, and the sheer artistic achieve-
ment of the poem, its success in crafting an allegorical idiom of such
flexibility and power, undergirds much of what Spenser goes on to
achieve, and to call into question, in the latter books of The Faerie Queene.
But Despair is right there at the low point of Book One, not just the poem’s
most dangerous villain but, in some sense, its darker presiding spirit. If his
persuasive whisperings represent the worst perversion of the Redcrosse
60 Spenser’s Anatomy of Heroism: A Commentary on “The Faerie Queene” (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 89.

61 See, e.g., Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss, pp. 112–19. The quoted phrase
is David Quint’s, qtd. by Escobedo at p. 118.

Knight’s quest for holiness, those whisperings nevertheless exert a strong
undertow throughout the poem, and it is often genuinely difficult to tell the
difference between the death-longing that Spenser’s knight learns from Despair
and the death-longing he carries with him up the mountain of Contemplation
and into Eden. This longing is strongest in moments when the knight is
frozen into a pose, whether of hopefulness or of despair, and it indeed does
much to regulate the rhythms of Spenser’s narrative, which persistently sus-
pends the knight’s progress for the sake of an emblematic, allegorical scene and
then releases him back into the world of the romance narrative.62 It might well
be the case that this tendency to freeze the action for the sake of elaborate
allegorical images anticipates the eighteenth-century distinction between
narratives, which are governed by the laws of probable action, and allegorical
images, which are static, populated by agents who have nothing to do.
Despair, of course, also resists such distinctions, and his remarkable
dynamism depends on the dynamism of Spenser’s narrative, which always
does go on, straining against the constraints of eschatological arrest as
Redcrosse’s steed strains against the bit. In Despair’s allure and in his
deadliness the complex dynamics of Spenser’s allegory are visible. Spenser
registers, as Langland and Skelton do not, the violence that allegorical
signification can unleash within a narrative system. And he weds that
violence to the energies of cultural disenchantment, to the hazardous
projects of paranoia and militant dissent, so that the drive of his narrative
gains only more power, in Book One, from the eschatological militance of
his protagonist. Unlike Langland’s Scripture, Clergie, or Anima, and
unlike Skelton’s Suspicion, Favel, or Deceit, Spenser’s personifications
orient themselves with special insistence toward their temporal end.
Unlike most of the allegorical agents in Langland and Skelton, Spenser’s
personifications can die. Many of them do die—many, as in Lucifera’s
dungeon, already have—and even those who do not strive, in their bodies,
against a meaning or a destiny that binds them. If this poetry of destiny
looks for a future moment at which both allegory and action will be no
more, the Redcrosse Knight hastens that moment in his search-and-
destroy operation, for his burden is to cleanse the world of the allegorical
agents who are the root of all evil, to dispatch them into the eschatological
moment of their significance. His longing to enter into the same moment
himself suggests how paradoxically torn he is between the two poles of his
62 See Dolven’s evocative comments about the “cardinal opposition in Spenser’s poly-
modal poem between romance narrative and personification allegory” and about Spenser’s
orchestration throughout The Faerie Queene of “a perpetual contest between the two,
unfolding, reforming, and corroding one another, the allegory tending toward an abstract,
axiomatic order, the erring course of the narrative toward unstructured experience.” Scenes
of Instruction in Renaissance Romance, p. 137.
existence, between the imperative of safeguarding his powers of action and
the imperative of escaping into a purity beyond action.
In its eschatological longings, Spenser’s poem registers the same histor-
ical breakage that energizes the apocalyptic projects of John Foxe and John
Bale. The travails of reformation and renunciation help to consolidate,
and to bequeath to Spenser, a subjectivity that defines itself by the need of
resisting a great enchanter. Spenser explores in the Legend of Holiness a
dissenting subjectivity, self-protective, agonistic, and alone. The dissent-
ing subject, as Spenser imagines him, resists enchantment, first by assert-
ing his integrity against external demands and then by bringing the fight
home, experiencing his own desires and faculties as alien threats.63 In his
guise as the Redcrosse Knight, this subject searches for Benjamin’s
“destruction of the organic,” the road by which the citizens of an age of
ruins must seek the homeland of allegorical meaning. If the search leads
him often to speak with the voice of Despair, as he does when in the
House of Holiness he longs “to end his wretched dayes” (1.10.21),
Spenser has Hope standing by to sustain the knight’s posture of expect-
ation for a while longer: “But wise Speranza gaue him comfort sweet, /
And taught him how to take assured hold / Vpon her siluer anchor, as was
meet” (1.10.22). He goes forward from this moment ready, or readier
than before, to carry on in his work of living in the world of mutability,
suspended—or anchored—as ever, in expectation of the promised end.
Spenser has nursed his eschatological restlessness, his fitful desire to
escape and negate, in many of his visions of the world’s vanity, and here in
the first book of his allegorical epic he tests the ways in which allegorical
narrative can give powerful expression to that desire. His knight’s suspen-
sion in an in-between place, between history and eternity, between hope
and despair, participates both in the fragile paradoxes of allegory and in the
complex dynamics, world-negating and world-renewing, of apocalypse.
The modernity of his poem lies, in large part, in the hermeneutics of
suspicion it shares with many early modern dissenters, in a paranoiac
interpretive zeal that exposes Archimago and Duessa on the one hand and
the papal Antichrist on the other, that roots out worms and hidden boils
on the one hand and Jesuit infiltrators on the other. The final target of his
disenchanting project is not just the power of a nation (such as Catholic
Spain) or an institution (such as the church in Rome), but rather
the pervasive power to which these regimes are bound, the prince of the
darkness of the present age. In the shadow of this Satanic corruptor, the
iconoclasts, dissenters, intelligencers, and apocalyptic prophets among
63 On which, see Kane, Spenser’s Moral Allegory, pp. 11–18 and 53–5.
whom Spenser lives are all Redcrosse Knights, enacting their secret citi-
zenship in the New Jerusalem. These skeptic-believers all know them-
selves to be citizens of a secular institutional order, an order troubled by
mutability and wrong. They go out into that order as antiviral agents,
vigorous in their work of examining, authenticating, suppressing, and
resisting, warriors in the thick of history. But they carry out their missions,
at the same time, in a posture of expectation: reading the signs that the
eschaton is at hand, demolishing the last relics of history’s accretions and
corruptions, and waiting for the hard rain of eternity to come down.
5
Selfhood and Secularity
The Pilgrim’s Progress
Among the allegorical makers who occupy this book, John Bunyan is the
most self-conscious in his postures and projects of disenchantment. He
fashions himself as a dissenter, persecuted and defiant, and he addresses his
writings to the concerns of an embattled minority at a post-revolutionary
moment. His militant energy often begins from his apprehensions of
inauthenticity, his conviction that the religious institutions of contempor-
ary life are empty of the presence of God. In Bunyan’s disenchanted
imagination, most religion is false religion, and authentic belief begins
necessarily in disciplines of resistance, in acts of renunciation. Partly for
this reason, some commentators have taken Bunyan’s writings to be
experiments in newly “secular” forms of discourse. His fictions take
place in a world from which the sacred has been evacuated, a world in
which the experience of the divine must be tightly circumscribed, con-
cealed, and protected. He orients his search for religious truth not so much
toward questions of orthodox adherence as toward the exercise of authen-
tic belief. His devotional program exemplifies an evacuation of religion
from public ritual into private conscience, and in his narrative writings
especially, he seems to map out the paradigmatic forms of the novel, with
its fictions of secular domestic life and sacred interior experience.
To what extent is it useful to describe Bunyan as a secular writer? How
is the “secular,” as a category, structurally distinct from “modernity,” with
its narratives of temporal breakage, and from “disenchantment,” with its
narratives of repudiation? If Bunyan really is engaged in mapping out the
contours of the secular, or the contours of the novel, then why would he
commit himself at the same time to the unruly and enchanting dynamics
of allegorical narrative? I want to explore these questions by attending
closely to Bunyan’s most apparently novelistic fiction, The Pilgrim’s Pro-
gress. And I want to begin my meditation on Bunyan’s secularity with
the simple fact that his book of pilgrim devotion is, to a remarkable degree,
a book of inquisition. Everywhere he goes, Bunyan’s Christian finds
himself answering questions: from Help (“But why did you not look for the
steps?” (15)), from Evangelist (“How is it then that thou art so quickly turned
aside?” (20)), from Good Will (“But how is it that you came alone?” (26)),
from Piety (“What moved you at first to betake yourself to a Pilgrim’s life? ”
(47)), from Prudence (“And what is it that makes you so desirous to go to
Mount Zion?” (50)), from Charity (“Have you a family? are you a married
man?” (51)), from Worldly Wiseman (“How camest thou by thy burden at
first?” (18)), from Apollyon (“How is it then that thou hast ran [sic] away from
thy King?” (56–7)), and from a host of other friendly and hostile examiners.1
These questions tend to issue, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, from an ideal of
authenticity. One of the central principles of Bunyan’s book is that there
is, as Faithful tells Talkative, “knowledge and knowledge,” which is to say
that there is inauthentic knowledge—graceless knowledge that leads “the
Talker” to destruction—and authentic knowledge—graceful knowledge
that leads “the true Christian” to God (82). These two sorts of knowledge
can look very much alike, and Bunyan’s inquisitors are, therefore, persist-
ently anxious about the business of investigating counterfeit belief and
counterfeit believers. When the Shepherds “put questions” to Christian
and Hopeful, “as, Whence came you? and, How got you into the way?
and, By what means have you so persevered therein?” (120), they mean to
screen, to probe, to verify the motives and identities of the claimant
pilgrims. When Faithful asks Talkative, “Doth your life and conversation
testify the same, or standeth your Religion in Word, or in Tongue, and not
in Deed and Truth?” (83), he means not to verify but to convict, to bring
proof of Talkative’s inauthenticity before the court of his conscience.
Because they address so persistently the question of authenticity, the
disputations of Bunyan’s pilgrims are strong with the language of legal and
forensic examination. Faithful speaks to Talkative of testimony, judg-
ment, profession, lying, discovery, proof, and conviction. Christian asks
Formalist and Hypocrisy, “will your Practice stand a Trial at Law?” (40),
and he proves that Demas has “been already condemned for thine own
turning aside, by one of His Majesties Judges” (107). In the culminating
inquisitions of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian and Hopeful examine their
fellow pilgrim, Ignorance, asking him, “but why, or by what, art thou
perswaded that thou hast left all for God and Heaven?” (145). Unsatisfied
with his answers, they ask him for his documentary proof, the “roll” that
certifies the authenticity of all true pilgrims: “But what have you to shew at
1 The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That which is to Come, ed. James Blanton
Wharey, rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960). The italic type in my
quotations of Bunyan is to be found in this edition, which follows largely the practice of the
first edition of 1678.
Selfhood and Secularity 177
that Gate, that may cause that the Gate should be opened unto you?” (123).
When Ignorance finally arrives at the Celestial Gate, this authenticating
document turns out to be his undoing. After he replies to the interroga-
tions of the gatekeepers with his usual effusions of scripture-speak, they
ask him to produce his “Certificate” of true assurance. “Then said they,
Have you none?” (163). For all his earnestness and cleverness, he has
none. He is an undocumented pilgrim, an inauthentic believer after all.
If there is a secular language in The Pilgrim’s Progress, this convergence
between the language of legal probation and the language of private
authenticity might be the first place to look for it.2 Recent critical accounts
have suggested, after all, that the category of “the secular,” along with
the processes of secularization that accompany the development of that
category, depends both on an ideal of resistant subjectivity and on a
collective interest in examining, policing, and reforming individual sub-
jects.3 Bunyan’s seventeenth-century England sees the entrenchment of
these twin ideals. The dissenters and nonconformists among whom his
piety is formed commit themselves to a religious voluntarism that prizes
sincerity as a mark of true belief and that asserts the freedom of the true
believer from the demands of society and of history. In their experiences of
nonconformity, these dissenters are directed by, and contribute to the
development of, a notion of the conscience as a sacred and inviolable
private realm. One nonconformist minister, in a pamphlet published in
1641, shares glad tidings of “many converted, many confirmed, and many
convinced,” and the voluntary religion into which Bunyan enters is indeed
the religion of the convinced.4 This religion begins in, and authenticates
2 Beth Lynch has noticed that this convergence happens in much of Bunyan’s work,
including the pamphlets he wrote before his own legal troubles began, John Bunyan and the
Language of Conviction (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 14–22. The legal language in
the early pamphlets is worth noting, because it might otherwise be tempting to read
Bunyan’s legal vocabulary as a consequence of his experience as a nonconformist on trial.
Certainly in some passages, as when Christian and Faithful are “brought to examination” at
Vanity Fair (90), the concerns of the dissenters resonate, and there are resemblances, as
Christopher Hill has noted, between Bunyan’s pilgrims and the prosecuted vagabonds and
itinerants of seventeenth-century England, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John
Bunyan and His Church, 1628–1688 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 212–15.
3 The relationships among “the secular” (a category), “secularization” (the process by
which certain cultural projects or spheres of activity are subsumed into that category), and
“secular” (a particularly troubled adjective, applicable to cultures or institutions that tend to
assert the distinctness of the secular as a category) are intimate and complicated. I will use
the term “secular” in all these senses and will, in the account that follows, attempt to
indicate further some of its contours. For a useful introductory account of the term, see
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003), e.g., pp. 21–65.
4 On “voluntary religion,” see Patrick Collinson’s influential account, The Religion of
Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982),
itself by, the subject’s experience of a convicted conscience. John Winthrop
reports in the 1630s that after his conversion as a young man he could not
miss a sermon “such as did search deep the conscience.” His conversion
makes him a connoisseur of interior experience, and dissenting believers like
him look to the power of their interior experiences to strengthen them for a
rigorous, solitary, and often costly commitment to individual purity.5
In their commitment to the claims of conscience, these believers
participate in the “buffered” or “sovereign” subjectivity I have found at
the core of modern disenchantment.6 They disengage the operations of
the conscience from the activities of the body, from religious institutions,
from dead and repudiated traditions. The extent to which these believers
rely on a buffered model of the self is evident in, for instance, their turn
from liturgical prayer to free prayer. This turn involves a relocation of true
prayer from the bodily, collective, ritual work of liturgical worship to the
rational, individual, spontaneous work of the private self. Bunyan himself,
in his I Will Pray with the Spirit, compares the efforts of a man who
“prayes out of bare, naked knowledge” with another who “hath his words
forced from him by the anguish of his soul.” “Surely that”—the man
anguished of conscience—“is the man that God will look at,” Bunyan
says, for true prayer inheres neither in the orthodoxy of the spoken words
nor in the posture of the speaking body but, rather, in the affectionate
sincerity of the praying soul.7 Bunyan’s treatise on prayer therefore sets
pp. 242–83, from which I quote this passage of William Hinde, p. 243. My account here
conflates many varieties of early modern English piety. Collinson carefully distinguishes the
dissenters of the seventeenth century and the latter-day Lollard conventicles of the sixteenth
century from the main streams of English Puritanism. Sharon Achinstein explores the often
contradictory political, social, and theological commitments of the English dissenters of the
1660s and 1670s, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge
5 Qtd. from Collinson, The Religion of Protestants, p. 242.
6 As I have said, “buffered self” comes from Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge,
MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), e.g., pp. 29–41, and “sovereign
self” from Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and
Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 93–144. See also Asad’s
comments on what he too calls the “sovereign self” and, similarly, the “secular self whose
sovereignty had to be demonstrated through acts of sincerity,” Formations of the Secular,
pp. 16, 52. Taylor elsewhere makes a more particular account of the “disengaged reason” he
associates with the Cartesian self, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 143–58.
7 My comments on free prayer are indebted to Lori Branch, from whom I quote this
passage, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth
(Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), p. 45. See also C. John Sommerville’s survey of
early modern English secularization, which he imagines as, in part, the transformation of
religion “from a matter of practice to a matter of thought,” The Secularization of Early
Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992), esp. pp. 44–54, 129–43, and 165–77; qtd. at p. 48.
out to guide the believer in the introspective work of self-examination and
self-verification. In the versified apology with which he introduces The
Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan suggests that his dream-romance will serve
much the same purpose. He beckons his reader, “Would’st read thy self,
and read thou know’st not what / And yet know whether thou art blest or
not?” (7).8 If so, he beseeches, then read my pilgrim fiction, itself a primer
on the toils of authentic selfhood.
These ideals of authentic piety serve the ideological needs not just of an
autonomous subjectivity but also of the other formation that recent
accounts of secularity have found emergent in the seventeenth century:
the disciplinary society.9 The “ideology of spontaneity,” Lori Branch
observes, is in fact inseparable from an “ideology of objectivity,” because
the sincere self is a self examining and examined, the object of its own (and
not only its own) probative scrutiny.10 Christian’s question to Ignorance
says it all: “what have you to show?” Ignorance and Talkative have plenty
of religious words at their disposal, but Branch might suggest that their
words, like the prayers of the English writers she discusses, “are either true
or counterfeit currency.”11 Exactly because this currency is so easily
counterfeited, Bunyan’s book of authentic conviction is likewise a book
of anxious scrutiny. “Conviction” can indeed mean both private fixity and
legal judgment, and in Bunyan’s hands these two senses of the word
negotiate and intertwine. Christian’s question to Ignorance is not just
“what have you to shew?” but also, “why, or by what, art thou perswaded?”
Which is to ask, “are you sure you are persuaded?” By rendering Christian
assurance as a question of being persuaded, or of being persuaded of being
persuaded, he binds salvation up with the hard work of self-knowledge
and self-fashioning.12
Bunyan’s language of Christian conviction participates, then, in the
“obsession with self-observation and self-control” that John Farrell has
identified as a key component of early modern paranoia, the same para-
noia that informs the first book of The Faerie Queene.13 Both Spenser’s
holy warrior and Bunyan’s convicted believer depend on the exercise
of disciplinary force against the self by the self. If the protagonists of
8 Even in my citations of Bunyan’s verse (for which Wharey and Sharrock do not
provide continuous lineation), references are to page numbers.

9 This term, too, is Taylor’s. See A Secular Age, pp. 97–112.
10 Rituals of Spontaneity, p. 42. 11 Rituals of Spontaneity, p. 51.
12 On the two senses of “conviction” and Bunyan’s way of intertwining them, see
Lynch, John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction, pp. 11–14, 34–63.
13 Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2006), p. 87. Farrell comments on Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and
especially on the book’s paradox of moral agency and its explorations of morbid anxiety, at
pp. 85–8.
Spenser’s Legend of Holiness participate, as I have argued, in apocalyptic
visions of violent medical cleansing, Bunyan’s pilgrims participate in a
meticulous differentiation between true and false belief. In this regard they
are like the human subjects imagined by the pamphlets against hypocrisy
I named in my Introduction. The ideal reader of pamphlets such as The
Hypocrite Discovered and Cvred and The Christians Looking-Glasse knows
well that she is vulnerable to her own powers of deceit and that, as the
latter pamphlet says, her own heart is a “Sea of subtilty, and a Mine of
deceipt, giuen to deceiue and beguile it selfe.”14 This vulnerable self-
deceiver’s best recourse against herself is to become her own inquisitor,
to exert against herself the same kind of force to which she is subject under
the church and state regimes of early modern Europe. In her attempt to
bring her errant, appetitive self under control, she participates in the
inquisitorial and disciplinary tendencies of these regimes. For her, as for
them, the rational, sovereign, transcendent will is a locus of power, an
instrument of repudiation and reformation.15
It is in these exercises of disciplinary control that the projects of
modernity and of disenchantment tend toward the condition that we
call “secular.” The ideal of an authentic, rational will as the locus of
power corresponds, in various early modern discourses, with a conceptu-
alization of the material world as what Akeel Bilgrami calls a “brute” thing,
available without limits to be mastered and colonized by that will. This
brute saeculum, with the bodies that inhabit it, is mute, empty of divine
presence and of moral authority, unable to make demands of the tran-
scendent selves who strive to exercise control over it. Early modern
discourses, therefore, tend often to conceive of this brute order of bodies
and material forces as a secular order, distinct from and defined against the
spheres of instrumental reason and of the sacred divine. The ideal of “elites
ruling over a brute populace” is, as Bilgrami says, “just a mundane version
14 Thomas Tuke, The Christians Looking-Glasse (London, 1615), p. 69; in facsimile at
Early English Books Online. For the durable URLs associated with individual titles at Early
English Books Online, see my Bibliography. In my citation of early modern English titles,
I regularize capitalization and type.
15 On the centralization of ecclesiastical controls during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and on the new emphasis among both Catholic and Protestant reformers on the
authentication of belief and the “bodily control and propriety” of the individual believer, see
Meredith McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), pp. 22–44; qtd. at p. 40. On the attempts of the church-state
establishment to discipline (or “reform,” as they both say) the morals, manners, celebra-
tions, and superstitions of the common classes, see also Ronald Hutton’s history of the
ritual year in early modern England, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year,
1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 69–152, and Peter Burke’s
survey of early modern festive culture, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 289–334.
of the ideal of the external God ruling over a brute universe.”16 Foucault’s
account of the human body in modernity as subject to “a machinery of
power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it” and that “estab-
lishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude
and an increased domination” issues from, and perceptively names, these
secular ideals of brute matter and transcendent reason.17 So too do the
many early modern attempts to circumscribe and protect the sacred, to
isolate the sacred in its essential purity from the corruptions of Christian
history and Christian institutions. The very idea of the sacred as a distinct
category, an essence wholly other from the material world, is itself a
consequence of cultural and institutional secularization, as many recent
accounts have suggested.18 The machineries of authentication and control
matter to the formation of a secular culture because they correspond
with the absence of the sacred from the saeculum in which human bodies
and institutions operate. For disenchanted pilgrims like John Bunyan,
this absence seems to demand that grace be located in a transcendent
conscience, to which the material world is wholly alien, and that power
be located in an inquisitorial rationality, to which the material world is
wholly subject.19
To what extent does The Pilgrim’s Progress, as a sacred fiction, belong
to a secular age? Bunyan’s terror of the law, however well it expresses an
16 Bilgrami, “What is Enchantment?” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed.
Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010), p. 150.
17 Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995),
p. 138.
18 Here Talal Asad’s account of what he calls “the essentialization of ‘the sacred’ as an
external, transcendent power” is useful. Asad argues that, in the “enlightened space and
time” of a colonialist Europe, magic objects and practices must be contained in categories
such as “idolatry,” “fetish,” taboo,” and “superstition”—“constituted as categories of
illusion and oppression,” as he says—so that reason can eliminate or explain them. At the
same time, this all-seeing reason delineates new practices, such as the “sanctity of con-
science” and the private exercise of religion, as transcendent endeavors contained and
protected by a larger secular order. Though Asad here, as elsewhere, looks to the nineteenth
century as the key moment for his account of secularization, he associates the development
of “the sacred” as a category with the similar development of “religion” and “nature” as
universal categories, a process that he locates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Formations of the Secular, pp. 30–7.
19 As a counterpoint to the way I have here described the importance of “transcendent”
subjects and claims to secular culture, see also William Bouwsma’s argument that secular-
ization arises from a suspicion of transcendent universals, a commitment to the local and the
contingent. The seventeenth-century turn to disembodied and disenchanted reason—and
the attendant turn from, for instance, Renaissance historiography to Enlightenment genres
such as political theory and philosophical ethics—amounts in fact, he suggests, to a turn
away from secularity, back toward a speculative reason more akin to Thomistic theology
than to the forms of the high Renaissance. A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 117–22.
ancient Christian narrative of bondage by law and redemption by grace,
seems also to express the peculiar anxieties of a disciplinary, secularizing
society. The prisoner-preacher behind The Pilgrim’s Progress writes under
conviction in more than one sense, and it is possible to read his book as an
experiment in disenchanted modernity, an exploration both of peculiarly
modern freedoms and of peculiarly modern controls. I want, in the
present chapter, to consider that possibility and so to join a number of
recent commentators who have read Bunyan in light of modernity’s
secular tendencies. But I also want, more specifically and more provoca-
tively, to consider the complications that Bunyan the secular subject must
suffer whenever he meets up with Bunyan the allegorist. The Pilgrim’s
Progress is, unmistakably, allegorical. It is so unmistakably allegorical that
many critical accounts have taken it as a paradigmatic allegorical narra-
tive.20 And it is, as I will argue here, engaged in fresh, urgent, often
surprising experiments with allegorical form. Many of Bunyan’s best
recent readers tend, nevertheless, to refrain from serious engagement
with his book’s allegorical dynamics. They do so because they suppose
that Bunyan must depart from allegory just to the extent that he is modern
and secular. Some literary-historical accounts have called Bunyan a “post-
allegorical” writer, the late child or the swansong of an exhausted Christian
rhetorical and exegetical tradition.21 Recent revisionist accounts have
20 This traditional account of The Pilgrim’s Progress begins with Bunyan’s own explan-
ation that he “fell suddenly into an Allegory” (1), and it is already well entrenched when
Blake comments, in his notes (c.1809–10) on A Vision of the Last Judgment, “Note here that
Fable or Allegory is Seldom without some Vision Pilgrims Progress is full of it,” The
Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1982), p. 553. The missing punctuation is Blake’s doing. Among recent
commentators, even Gordon Teskey, whose Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1996) gives no attention to Bunyan, begins his study by wondering
whether Keats, when he says that a worthy man’s life is a continual allegory, has in mind
“a traditional allegory such as Pilgrim’s Progress,” p. 1. “A traditional allegory”: there is an
undercurrent of boredom in that phrase, a supposition that The Pilgrim’s Progress is so
obviously allegorical, so simply and schematically allegorical, as to be almost reducible to
mere convention.
21 I quote “post-allegorical” from Brian Nellist, who associates this anti-allegorical
modernity with a change in subjectivity: “Bunyan is writing a secondary form of allegory

whose value is both to disguise and then to show forth the radical individualism of his
position,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress and Allegory,” in The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and
Historical Views, ed. Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1980),
p. 137. For a different version of this claim, see Thomas Maresca, who argues that the
rhetorical trope allegoria, before modernity, is defined by multivocation and connotative
complexity. Maresca claims that Bunyan turns from allegory’s complexity to the simple
structures of personification, and he suggests that the modern tendency to confuse
allegory with personification might indeed be traceable to The Pilgrim’s Progress, “Saying
and Meaning: Allegory and the Indefinable,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 83
(1980), p. 257.
more subtly played down the allegory of The Pilgrim’s Progress by turning
from the book’s narrative and symbolic forms and instead giving their
attention to its more discursive, catechetical, and satirical passages. Lori
Branch, Beth Lynch, and Thomas Luxon, perceptive as they often are
about Bunyan’s “fall into allegory,” return to the same few episodes—the
discourses of Ignorance and Talkative, the trial at Vanity Fair, the author’s
Apology—as the basis of their arguments about Bunyan’s modern idiom.
They have less to say about the episodes and images that many of Bunyan’s
readers have most loved: the Shepherds, the Interpreter’s house, the Palace
Beautiful, the burden, the robes, the pilgrim’s armor, the valleys and
mountains, the enchanted ground, the river of death, the giant Despair,
the “shining ones,” or the Celestial City itself. These episodes are, arguably,
the most robustly allegorical passages in Bunyan’s narrative, and they are
often neglected by his most lucid recent commentators.
A survey of the criticism suggests, in other words, that it is difficult to
explicate Bunyan’s language of secular subjectivity without dismissing his
language of allegory. I will try, in this chapter, to explain why that is. And
I will ask what a criticism might look like that seeks Bunyan’s secularity at
the very heart of his allegorical language, and vice versa. Bunyan’s allegor-
ical idiom, no less than the idioms of Prudentius or of Dante, is rooted in a
certain theology of incarnation and in a particular set of religious practices
and commitments. At the same time, Bunyan is most urgently and
creatively engaged in the fashioning of his allegorical idiom when he is
most vigorously engaged with the discourses and anxieties of the secular
subject. More even than the other disenchanted poets who have occupied
my readings here, Bunyan fashions an idiom in which allegory and a
secularizing modernity contend and converge with one another in gen-
erative ways. He inhabits fully the dynamics of anxiety, paranoia, solitude,
and renunciation that I have found in early modern poetry from Langland
to Spenser, and he tests in genuinely new ways the power of allegory to
isolate sacred language from the corrupt discourses of history and its
institutions. In his testing of that power, he finds that allegory’s most radical
projects of renunciation open surprising possibilities for affirmation. He
intimates that secularity entails not an escape from, but rather a form of
engagement with, the claims of theological meaning and religious practice,
and he articulates his own negotiation with those claims into a new kind of
allegory, an allegory for modern subjects in a secular age.
*
The difference of Bunyan’s idiom from the integrative “this and that”
structures that undergird allegorical making is apparent already in the title
of his book. “This” world, in The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That
which is to Come, is an inauthentic order to be left behind, not a cosmos to
be subsumed into the self, not an other with which the pilgrim seeks
consummation. In this regard The Pilgrim’s Progress seems to incline more
toward the fictional forms of a secular age—the picaresque, the Bildungs-
roman, the dystopian satire—than toward the visionary structures of Alan
of Lille, of Dante, or even of Langland and Spenser, who find the person of
the divine creator and the person of the human subject converging in their
allegorical agents. If an allegorical hero such as Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight
figures in his body a nested array of other bodies—an ecclesiastical body, a
national body, an Edenic world-body, and, finally, a Messianic body—
Bunyan’s hero is defined by his isolation, by his commitment to a kingdom
with which the world around him has no correspondence. His posture must
be defensive, for he must keep the world at hand from encroaching on his
vision of the world to come. Small wonder that, in Bunyan’s vision, the
pilgrim begins his journey running, with his hands over his ears and the
city at his back. To be a citizen of this world is, for him, to be a citizen of
Destruction or of Vanity Fair. “Salvation” is a wall along the pilgrim’s
path, and every incursion of the world beyond that wall brings with it the
threat of contamination or of martyrdom.
From the beginning, then, The Pilgrim’s Progress makes a turn inward,
to a mode of fiction that finds its unity not in the coherence of an
intricately patterned cosmos but in the coherence of a single conscious-
ness. Critical accounts of Bunyan’s narrative have tended to read the
buffered subjectivity of his fiction as a post-religious and post-allegorical
phenomenon. In a particularly suggestive (and particularly extreme) ver-
sion of this reading, Vincent Newey has argued that The Pilgrim’s Progress
is a therapeutic and psycho-novelistic text, a chronicle of authentic sub-
jectivity in which dogma and deity are consistently diminished in favor of
“an image of an unexceptional man saving himself through a personal act
of will and self-counselling.”22 Consider, Newey says, the episode of the
Giant Despair. Christian escapes the giant’s clutches when he finds the key
called Promise in his bosom, but the promise that the key represents is,
oddly enough, left unspecified. The point, as Newey sees it, is that the
promise itself matters less than the act of will by which Christian breaks
his cycle of indecision and despair: “the key to open the prison is situated
just as entirely within the individual (‘in my bosom’) as the despair that
shuts him in and the stabilizing thoughts that allow him to hold on.”23
Such omissions are indeed hard to ignore. Why does Bunyan introduce
the key of promise into his narrative without bothering to specify what the
22 “Bunyan and the Confines of the Mind,” in The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and
Historical Views, ed. Newey, p. 25.

23 “Bunyan and the Confines of the Mind,” p. 24.
promise is or who has made it? Or, to put the question more pointedly,
why does Christian reach the cross and find no one on it? Christ is
strangely absent from the vision of Calvary, and the main significance of
the episode seems to be that Christian’s burden, almost of its own accord,
falls off. The cross for Bunyan seems to represent not kenosis, incarnation,
atonement, justice, the marriage of mortal creation to immortal God, or
the cosmic and redemptive centrality of the city Jerusalem; but, rather, a
particular sort of experience, a liberation. And so it is with the roll, the
garments, the weapons, the shelters, and so much of the furniture of
Christian’s pilgrimage. These objects represent, or provoke, varieties
of religious experience. Their purpose is to be worn, wielded, inhabited,
lost, and found, and Bunyan keeps a strange silence about the theological
or cosmic reality toward which these objects make gestures. Newey fills
that silence with affirmations of Christian’s own agency and supremacy.
“Bunyan would seem to be the celebrant more of man and experience,” he
says, “than of God and absolute truth.” He claims Bunyan for a brave new
world of self-disciplined subjects and interior narratives, a world that
“reduces the status of God in favor of Man and the centrality of ‘belief ’
in favor of ‘being.’”24
It is perhaps no longer possible, thirty years after Newey’s essay first
appeared, to write in just this way. Recent work on secularity has called
into question the equation of secularization with a decline of religion, and
many alternative genealogies of modernity have challenged the “inno-
cently thin” triumphalist account of secular reason that Newey’s reading
of Bunyan sometimes assumes.25 But the image of Bunyan’s secular
self overcoming his allegorical and religious self has lurked everywhere in
the criticism of the last two centuries, and not only in criticism of a
24 “Bunyan and the Confines of the Mind,” pp. 24, 26. In this supposition that (as
Newey says) Bunyan “was restricted by his creed but was not its victim,” p. 44, Newey more
or less rehearses Coleridge’s influential dictum that Bunyan’s “piety was baffled by his
Genius, and the Bunyan of Parnassus had the better of Bunyan of the Conventicle,” Lectures
on the Principles of Judgement, Culture, and European Literature (1818), Lecture 3, in
Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, 2 vols, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, vol. 5.2, ed. R. A. Foakes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987),
p. 103.
25 I quote from Akeel Bilgrami, who means by “innocently thin” that certain triumph-
alist accounts of secularization fail to appreciate the “thick accretions” and political com-
mitments that gather around, and decisively shape, the humanist rationality of early modern
science. “What is Enchantment,” p. 151. See also William Bouwsma’s observation that
early modern secularization in fact coincides with enhancements of piety, A Usable Past,
pp. 115–19; Charles Taylor’s resistance to what he calls “subtraction accounts” of secular-
ization, A Secular Age, e.g., pp. 25–9, 569–79; and Talal Asad’s claim that the secular is
“neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, not the latest
phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, not the opposite, an essence that
excludes the sacred),” Formations of the Secular, p. 25.
triumphalist bent. It is there, for instance, in G. K. Chesterton’s indict-
ment of Bunyan’s Protestant piety, which “is certainly mere individualism,
when it is not mere terrorism,” and in Max Weber’s identification of
The Pilgrim’s Progress as exemplary of the “deep spiritual isolation” that lies
at the heart of the Protestant Ethic.26 It is there, too, in the recent
revisionist accounts I have mentioned, accounts that find Bunyan’s pil-
grims crossing “from the Protestant upheavals of the early modern period
into a fully modern religious subjectivity” and that find Bunyan’s narrative
so “unutterably subjective” that “it seems increasingly inappropriate, and
certainly simplistic, to describe Bunyan’s narrative as an allegory per se.”27
This reading of Bunyan has real power, and Bunyan himself might indeed be
one of its architects. His interest throughout The Pilgrim’s Progress in the
breaking of enchantments and errors, along with his own account of his sudden
“fall” into allegory, suggests the contours of a contest between enchanted
fictions and the disenchanted consciousness that makes and interprets those
fictions. But I want to begin again, with the core dynamics of Bunyan’s
allegorical language, and I want to test the extent to which this language is in
fact rooted in Bunyan’s particular religious commitments and in the
enchanting potential of those religious commitments. How possible is
it, really, to argue that Bunyan’s allegory issues from his concern with
the secular? How is it that the allegorical and the secular concerns of
The Pilgrim’s Progress belong to common theologies of incarnation and,
at the same time, to common projects of revolutionary dissent?
*
Consider an episode that exemplifies the eccentricities of Bunyan’s alle-
gorical style. Christian and Hopeful are on their way after having left
Ignorance behind them. They come to a fork in the road and stop to
deliberate about their path:
And as they were thinking about the way, behold, a man black of flesh, but
covered with a very light Robe, came to them, and asked them, why they
stood there? They answered, They were going to the Cœlestial City, but
knew not which of these ways to take. Follow me, said the man, it is thither
that I am going. So they followed him in the way that but now came into the
road, which by degrees turned, and turned them so from the City that they
desired to go to, that in little time their faces were turned away from it; yet
26 Chesterton, “On Two Allegories,” in vol. 3 of The Complete Works of G. K. Chesterton,
ed. James J. Thompson, Jr. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), p. 250; Weber, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1930), pp. 104–7.
27 I quote from Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity, p. 85, and from Lynch, John Bunyan and
the Language of Conviction, pp. 86–7.

they followed him. But by and by, before they were aware, he led them both
within the compass of a Net, in which they both were so entangled, that they
knew not what to do; and with that, the white robe fell off the black mans back:
then they saw where they were. Wherefore there they lay crying sometime,
for they could not get themselves out. (133)
This narrative is marked by the silences and obscurities that prevail in many of
Bunyan’s major episodes. The black man is the Flatterer, but from Bunyan’s
narration no reader would know it. Have the pilgrims just been flattered?
Have they sinned in following the stranger? Bunyan reveals little, and he
does not seem much interested in exploring either the psychological or the
theological implications of flattery. Rather he tells a tale—on the surface, an
oddly skeletal tale—of two pilgrims who follow a dark man in a white robe.
The tale includes some suggestions of symbolism (the following of a master,
the turn of the path away from the Celestial City, the darkness of skin), but
these suggestions give up no hint of the episode’s real meaning, with
which they have little to do. In a book punctuated all over by explicit moral
discourse, the silence that circumscribes this episode is curious. What can
anyone learn about flattery from a passage that includes no temptation, no
motive, no struggle, no apparent offense, and no real clues about the identity
of its mysterious antagonist? The only thing here is a bare symbolic action,
a boiling down of flattery to the treading of a path and the casting of a net.
If this gesture of casting a net is, as Newey would insist, mainly void of
theological detail, the gesture is likewise void of psychological and experi-
ential detail. So it is throughout the great emblematic episodes of The
Pilgrim’s Progress. There is not a hint of experienced guilt or despair as
Christian falls into the Slough of Despond, not a word about doubt as he
loses his roll, and just a brief formulaic utterance about forgiveness and
relief as he sheds his burden. Bunyan seems largely uninterested in placing
the slough, the burden, or the roll in the narrative context of the experi-
ences they represent, and any attempt to read his book by the rules of the
novel or of a psychological realism will find his pilgrim oddly void of
experience. Christian does not endure guilt, hope, or flattery but rather
loses and finds objects, gets mired in bogs and caught in nets. His life is a
bric-a-brac of obstacles and acquisitions, one quite innocent, often
enough, of the sort of novelistic narrative for which modern commenta-
tors sometimes claim Bunyan as a pioneer.
This encoding of narrative into props and places draws Bunyan’s
episodes toward a form much older than the novel or even than allegory:
the riddle. And the structure of the riddle will help to explain the peculiar
qualities of the tale of the Flatterer. Why did a man with no apparent
name just throw a net, for no apparent reason, on two unsuspecting
pilgrims? The passage sends the inquisitive reader looking for an answer,
and Christian himself provides it as he and Hopeful languish in the net.
“Now I do see my self in an errour,” he suddenly exclaims; “did not the
Shepherds bid us beware of the flatterers? As is the saying of the Wise man,
so we have found it this day: A man that flattereth his Neighbor, spreadeth a
net for his feet” (116; Prov. 29:5). A right understanding of his situation
turns out to rest on Christian’s remembrance of two texts, each of which
points the way to the other and finally to the meaning of the dark man
and his net. The more important of these texts is a biblical proverb,
which Christian quotes verbatim from the Authorized Version, and the
whole scene turns out to be something like a joke, with a proverb for its
punch line. The revelation of the proverb has a just-so quality. This is
where the story of the net comes from. The dark man was a riddle waiting
to be solved, an allusion to a buried text that Bunyan beckons his readers
to discover.
This sort of riddling allusion is the machine that produces much of the
narrative incident in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Behind each new piece of
scenery or action there lurks a familiar phrase, and reading Bunyan’s
fiction rightly means penetrating to his substratum of proverbial, and
almost always biblical, language. “Know you not,” says Christian as he
sees Formalist and Hypocrisy come tumbling over the wall, “that it is
written, That he that cometh not in by the door, but climbeth up some other
way, the same is a thief and a robber” (39; John 10:1). The shepherds
explain that those who wander among Despair’s tombs do so “that the
saying of the wise Man might be fulfilled, He that wandereth out of the
way of understanding, shall remain in the Congregation of the dead ” (121;
Prov. 21:16). Christian tells Apollyon he has left his service because
“your service was hard, and your wages such as a man could not live on,
for the wages of Sin is death” (57; Rom. 6:23), and Good Will tells
Christian, as he opens the wicket gate, “an open Door is set before thee,
and no man can shut it” (26; Rev. 3:8).28 In every case Bunyan maps his
narration onto the etiological structure of the riddle. The image or
narrative at hand always conceals a key, a primary text to which it
owes its existence and its meaning.
What Bunyan’s fiction often amounts to, in other words, is not just an
act of telling but also an act of reading. His imagination is intensely
28 The Bible most familiar to Bunyan was the Authorized Version, but he also knew the
Geneva Bible, as Hannibal Hamlin shows, “Bunyan’s Biblical Progresses,” in The King
James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, ed. Hannibal
Hamlin and Norman W. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
pp. 211–14.
exegetical, and his narration looks rather like a biblical commentary gone
wildly awry. Practically every detail, every episode of the narrative arises
out of some biblical passage or another, and if we read carefully enough,
we understand that The Pilgrim’s Progress is a book about a book.29 The
dream indeed begins with a man obsessing over a book. In this domestic
beginning the book is recognizably the Bible, and it is from the Bible that
the man takes his very first cries: What shall I do? What shall I do to be
saved? (8, 9; Acts 2:37, 16:30). When his traveling companion Pliable asks
“what the things are: and how to be enjoyed, whither we are going,” Christian
responds, “since you are desirous to know, I will read of them in my Book”
(13), and as he flies from the city his speech is hot with the words of that
book. He tells Obstinate that he seeks “an Inheritance, incorruptible,
undefiled, and that fadeth not away,” that the Celestial City “is not worthy
to be compared” with the glory to come, and that he cannot turn back
“because I have laid my hand to the Plow” (11; 1 Pet. 1:4; Rom. 8:18;
Luke 9:62). In the course of his short answer to Pliable’s question about
the company in heaven, he quotes from Isaiah, Revelation, the gospel of
John, and two epistles of Paul (13–14). His burden and the slough both
come from the Psalms, and his flight from Destruction from the prophets
and the Gospels (Psa. 38:4, 40:2; Matt. 3:7; Hab. 2:2). Obstinate’s “wiser
in their own eyes than seven men that can render a reason” (11) comes
from Proverbs 26, the words of the parchment roll (Fly from the wrath to
come, 10) from Matthew 3. Even Evangelist’s nondescript “and it shall be
told thee what thou shalt do” (10) comes verbatim from Acts 9. It is as if
the whole world in which Christian moves had sprung direct from the
book in his hand.30
29 Bunyan’s book represents the moment, Roger Sharrock says, when “Puritan biblio-
latry found its poet,” John Bunyan (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1954),
p. 101. Though the snide undertones of “Puritan bibliolatry” fail to do justice to the fact
that the English seventeenth century, and not just Puritanism, was very thoroughly a
“Biblical culture,” as Christopher Hill vividly shows, The English Bible and the
Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 1993), pp. 3–44.
30 Hannibal Hamlin, in “Bunyan’s Biblical Progresses,” discusses this effect in terms
that resonate well with my own. Brainerd Stranahan enumerates in great detail Bunyan’s
allusions to the Song of Solomon, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and a range of satirical
passages from all over the English Bible. See Stranahan, “Bunyan’s Special Talent: Biblical
Texts as ‘events’ in Grace Abounding and Pilgrim’s Progress,” English Literary Renaissance 11
(1981): 329–43; Stranahan, “‘With Great Delight’: The Song of Solomon in the Pilgrim’s
Progress,” English Studies 68 (1997): 220–7; Stranahan, “Bunyan and the Epistle to the
Hebrews: His Source for the Idea of Pilgrimage in The Pilgrim’s Progress,” Studies in
Philology 79 (1982): 279–96; and Stranahan, “Bunyan’s Satire and its Biblical Sources,”
in Bunyan in Our Time, ed. Robert Collmer (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press:
1989). Dayton Haskin does much the same for Luke and Acts, “Bunyan’s Scriptural Acts,”
also in Bunyan in Our Time.
Once Christian has passed through the wicket gate and embarked on
the Way, the book is not mentioned again. This would seem an extraor-
dinary act of forgetfulness on Bunyan’s part, except for the possibility that
Christian ceases to carry the book because he has entered it. The very
world in which Christian now moves is a world of texts, familiar, biblical,
dislocated, redeployed texts. Take Bunyan’s personifications, for instance.
Some critics have noticed that these figures do not belong among the
virtues, angels, or divinities we know from the medieval allegorical trad-
ition. They seem secularized, exercises either in the language of caricature
or the language of subjectivity.31 The shepherds Christian meets in the
Delectable Mountains are Watchful, Sincere, Experience, and Knowledge,
just the figures who might spring up around Vincent Newey’s therapeutic
Bunyan; and the jury in Vanity Fair is populated by the likes of Mr
Malice, Mr Enmity, Mr Hate-light, and Mr High-mind, antagonists
worthy of the Restoration stage and its comedies of manners. These
domestic presences are a long way, no doubt, from the goddesses and
demons who preside over many medieval allegorical narratives. But if we
know the English Bible as well as Bunyan expects us to, his personifica-
tions will assume a different garb from the ones commentators most often
find them clothed in. We will know, for instance, that Experience belongs
not just to the language of the modern self but also to the vocabulary of
Paul (“tribulation worketh patience: And patience, experience: and experi-
ence, hope,” Rom 5:3–4).32 His companions Sincere, Knowledge, and
Watchful also have Pauline pedigrees (Phil. 1:10, Eph. 4:13, 1 Tim. 2:4, 1
Thess. 5:6). The juror Mr Hate-light comes from Jesus’ discourse with
Nicodemus (John 3:20), Mr High-mind from Paul’s exhortations to
Timothy (1 Tim. 6:17, 2 Tim. 3:4). So it is again and again with Bunyan’s
31 Coleridge calls Bunyan’s personifications “real persons, who had been nicknamed by
their neighbors,” Lectures on the Principles of Judgement, Culture, and European Literature,
p. 103. I have silently incorporated Coleridge’s emendations to his text. Modern versions of
Coleridge’s suggestion can be found in Brean Hammond, “The Pilgrim’s Progress: Satire and
Social Comment,” in The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views, ed. Newey,
p. 122; and in Maureen Quilligan, whose influential study observes that many of Bunyan’s
personifications have not nouns but adjectives for their names, as if they are simply persons
defined by one quality, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1979), pp. 127–31. Thomas Luxon argues that Talkative is the projection
of Christian’s own anxieties and sins, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation
Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 171–8. Also
useful on Bunyan’s personifications are Lynch, John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction,
pp. 85–96; and, especially, Kathleen Swaim, Pilgrim’s Progress, Puritan Progress: Discourses
and Contexts (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 26–32.
32 I quote from The Holy Bible. Quatercentenary Edition. Being an Exact Reprint in
Roman Type, Page for Page, Line for Line, and Letter for Letter of the King James Version,
Otherwise Known as the Authorized Version, Published in the Year 1611 (Oxford: Oxford
personifications, from Good Will and Worldly Wiseman to the sisters
Prudence, Piety, Charity, and Discretion. They all belong to the vocabu-
lary of scripture, as if Christian had passed through the looking glass and
found himself in a biblical wonderland, jostling with a rabble of words and
metaphors who have come clamoring to bodily life.
At times, Bunyan’s absorption of the language of scripture is so total
that his narrative seems not so much to allude to as to generate the biblical
text. Consider another exemplary passage. In the dungeon of Despair, the
giant has encouraged the pilgrims “to make an end of themselves, either
with Knife, Halter, or Poison: For why, said he, should you chuse life,
seeing it is attended with so much bitterness” (115). Christian cries,
what shall we do? the life that we now live is miserable: for my part, I know
not whether is best, to live thus, or to die out of hand? My soul chuseth
strangling rather than life; and the Grave is more easie for me than this
Dungeon: Shall we be ruled by the Giant? (115)
The reader well versed in Bunyan’s method will guess that there is a
biblical quotation embedded here. My soul chuseth strangling rather than
life comes, indeed, from Job 7:15. But notice that Bunyan has inverted the
etiological structure that tends to characterize his riddles. The conceit of
this passage is not that the episode at hand conceals a biblical text but
rather that the biblical text belongs to a narrative context which the
episode at hand provides. Bunyan has shaped his narrative in order to
produce, strictly from the conditions of the narrative, the Joban utterance.
The giant asks Christian either to take up the halter or to “chuse life,” and
Christian makes his choice. One needs to look no further for the origins or
significance of his cry, because Bunyan’s intentions have been not riddling
but appropriative. He has set out not so much to gesture at a biblical text
that lies beneath his narrative surface as to absorb the biblical text into his
surface material. He does much the same thing when, in the Valley of the
Shadow of Death, he has Christian hear a voice up ahead saying, Though
I walk through the valley of the shaddow [sic] of death, I will fear none ill, for
thou art with me (64; Psa. 23:4), and again when Christian, in the midst of
the river, cries out to Hopeful, “I sink in deep Waters; the Billows go over
my head, all his Waves go over me, Selah” (157; Psa. 69:2).33 These
utterances are not identified as quotations but seem to originate in the
narrative situation of the protagonist, who finds himself in a valley or a
river and responds not by quoting scripture but by crying out from his
33 Sharrock and Wharey note that “none ill,” a departure from the Authorized Version’s
“no evil,” quotes the metrical Psalter of Sternhold and Hopkins, The Pilgrim’s Progress,
p. 324. But see also Hamlin’s alternative proposal, “Bunyan’s Biblical Progresses,” p. 212.
soul’s depths. The biblical passages are, in Bunyan’s hands, topical and
particular in reference; the halter for the soul that “chuseth strangling”
dangles before Christian’s eyes.
The Pilgrim’s Progress is, to a remarkable degree, a rewriting of the Bible,
as if Bunyan had decided to reconstruct the biography of, say, the psalmist
by gathering up his utterances and extrapolating from them to a life of
narrative incident. No accident that Bunyan tends so often to draw his
biblical material from the Psalms and the books of wisdom: it is in those
scriptures, especially, that narrative context is missing. By providing that
context, by gathering up the many movements of scripture as the stuff of a
single life, Bunyan produces an exegetical and critical sort of fiction, a
fiction of interpretive play. He stuffs such a vast variety of biblical
material into his narrative that his frame threatens at every turn to
crack to pieces, and the brilliance of his wit arises exactly from the
absurdities that ensue when many different temporal, spatial, and meta-
physical planes converge. In the same armory from which Christian
fetches the shield of faith and his weapon all-prayer, he sees the rod of
Moses, the jawbone with which Samson slew the Philistines, the sword
with which Christ will one day kill the Man of Sin, and spiritual weaponry
enough for an army that outnumbers the stars of heaven (54). What
physical continuity can possibly exist among these items? How many
temporalities and levels of existence have had to collapse together for
these curiosities to end up in a single room? The passage is a wonder,
and it slips by with deceptive ease, a quick and unassuming interlude
during Christian’s visit to the Palace Beautiful. The complexities of such
an interlude illustrate just how much energy and ambiguity—just how
much narrative mischief—Bunyan’s appropriative method can generate.
*
One implication of this appropriative method is that Bunyan situates The
Pilgrim’s Progress as secondary: secondary to another text. At every turn his
book announces loudly its subservience to The Book, the very book
Christian carries as his pilgrimage begins. Bunyan’s language is, for this
reason, always an other-speaking, an attempt to speak again the words of a
book that remains prior to and separate from his own. In this regard The
Pilgrim’s Progress seems to approach the sort of modern allegory Paul de
Man finds in certain passages of Rousseau’s eighteenth-century fiction.
For Rousseau, as de Man reads him, allegory consists exactly in an
awareness of textual secondariness. A novel such as his La Nouvelle Héloïse
might at times flirt with the cult of the romantic symbol, and with its
dream of an intimate correspondence between the order of the self and the
order of nature, but in the novel’s key image of Julie’s garden, Rousseau creates
an allegorical sign, a sign that “can consist only in the repetition . . . of a
previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of
the previous sign to be pure anteriority.”34 The repetition of this previous
sign occurs, de Man says, in the “traditional and inherited” imagery
Rousseau uses to describe the garden. Because he derives this imagery
from anterior texts such as Robinson Crusoe and the Roman de la rose,
Rousseau situates the garden as allegorical, temporally secondary, the
remembrance of a cluster of texts that, in being remembered, become
part of the garden’s meaning and its form. The garden is not a place at
which the world discloses itself to a sympathetic human subject. The rift
between language and matter is too deep for such a disclosure to be
possible, and the allegorical garden must necessarily be a work of mem-
ory.35 To experience the garden is to be made aware of the verbal idioms
by way of which others have figured it.
If I have described allegory as an articulation of commerce between the
self and the world, de Man’s reading of Rousseau defines allegory in what
seem almost the opposite terms: as a renunciation of that commerce, a way
of signaling the difference between the world and the linguistic apparatus
by which the self apprehends the world. For de Man, the allegorizing
subject is the buffered subject of modernity, able to place herself in the
cosmos only by means of linguistic formations which do not themselves
belong to the cosmos. This subject apprehends nature as an alien
thing—neither the animated and analogical cosmos of many medieval
discourses nor the sympathetic cosmos of the romantic symbol—and her
meaning-making activity must consist not in her commerce with the
material world but rather in a manipulation of her own remembered
stock of vocabularies and images. Her “secularized allegory” is modern
exactly because, in its secondariness, it acknowledges time as what de
Man calls “the originary constitutive category,” temporal difference and
temporal relationships being the crucial sign of the subject’s separation
from the order of nature.36 And it is secularized exactly because it tends
toward separation: it conceives as transcendent, and therefore removes to
an inaccessible point, the sacred meanings and presences that many
medieval allegorical texts find immanent in the temporal world. Allegory
in de Man’s account is much more a trope of disenchantment than
34 “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 207.

35 As de Man says: “renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it [allegory]
establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference. In so doing, it prevents the
self from an illusory identification with the non-self, which is now fully, if painfully,
recognized as a non-self.” See “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” pp. 204–6; qtd. at p. 207.
36 “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” p. 207.
of enchantment. It renounces the illusion of a continuity between the
self and the world.37
The structure of this disenchanted allegory—its conscious appropri-
ation of remembered texts into the text of the self—bears resemblance to
Bunyan’s own art of textual appropriation. If Chesterton has said that the
mind of Dante “really begins as well as ends in the City of Creation,” it
might likewise be said that the mind of Bunyan begins and ends in the
City of Scripture, a city of texts.38 Any account of Bunyan’s pilgrims
must acknowledge that they are made of texts. The souls wandering
among Despair’s tombs (121; Prov. 21:16), Hypocrisy the wall-tumbler
(39; John 10:1), Sloth muttering, “yet a little more sleep” (39; Prov.
6:10)—even the most incidental and earthy characters in Bunyan’s
narrative—come right out of anterior and remembered texts. They are, in
this respect, very much like Rousseau’s allegorical garden, not the appre-
hension of a total cosmos or even of a local place, but rather signs of the
operation of an isolated, remembering consciousness. The cosmos itself,
different as it is from that consciousness, seems to have little to offer
Bunyan’s symbolic or theological economy, and The Pilgrim’s Progress,
too, seems a secularized allegory, an exercise in the renunciations and
disjunctive temporalities of modern disenchantment.
But there is something different about Bunyan’s allegorical grammar.
However much his narrative technique might resemble Paul de Man’s
allegory of textual anteriority and modernity, he also participates in other,
older forms of allegorical signification. His collisions of temporal and
spatial planes are not wholly unlike the sort of collision that happens
when, in Alan of Lille, the human soul, the body of a goddess, and the
shape of the cosmos converge in a single image. The doomed and blinded
pilgrims wandering in Despair’s back yard illustrate the extent to which
this is so. In this brief episode, the “way of understanding” of the Hebrew
proverb converges with the “highway” of Jeremiah’s prophecy (113, Jer.
31:21) and with the Christological Way (John 14:6) that Christian has
followed all along, and the pilgrims who wander from that way into
Despair’s clutches converge with the Israelites who grumbled in the land
of Canaan (111, Num. 21:4), with the psalmist who finds himself in the
grave and cut off from all acquaintance (114, Psa. 88:11–18), with the Job
who chooses strangling over life (115), and even with the Jesus who walks
for three days among the lowest of the dead (114, 117). The effect of these
37 As de Man says: “The secularized allegory of the early romantics thus necessarily
contains the negative moment which in Rousseau is that of renunciation.” “The Rhetoric of
Temporality,” p. 207.
38 Chesterton, “On Two Allegories,” p. 253.
convergences is a high level of refraction, as if Bunyan had looked at the
matter of scripture through a cubist lens. And these many converging
planes invest an image such as the blind wanderers with a kind of
universality. In them, different narratives, localities, metaphors, voices,
histories, and moments come together, in often wildly complex config-
urations, on a single spatial and temporal plane. Like Alan’s image of
the goddess Nature, Bunyan’s image attempts to bear the weight of all
moments and all instances.
This encompassing tendency is most clearly evident in the subject who
grounds the whole of Bunyan’s narrative. Christian’s consciousness is no
more coherent, no more contained, than the refracted and allusive world
through which he moves. Any account of Christian as an emergent
buffered self—as, in Newey’s words, “an image of an unexceptional man
saving himself through a personal act of will and self-counselling”—must
also reckon with his synthetic character. In a certain respect Christian
is indeed a solitary English Puritan, at war with a society of Worldly
Wisemen who fear and loathe his creed. But in the passages I have
discussed, Christian is also something rich and strange. He is the valley-
walker of Psalm 23, the sinking swimmer of Psalm 69, the despondent
man of Job 7, the flattered neighbor of Proverbs 29. His identity is an
agglomeration of a thousand other identities. Did we think the words “I
sink in deep waters” belonged to the tribulations of King David, or that
“what must I do to be saved?” belonged to Paul’s Philippian jailor? In
Bunyan’s cosmos these words belong to Christian, as he sinks into the
river of death and looks to escape the City of Destruction. He has
absorbed the voices of the afflicted king and the smitten jailor into his
own voice and has assimilated their experiences into his own narrative.
This sort of promiscuous appropriation amounts, in one sense, to just
the sort of buffering that characterizes the subjects of a secular age.
Bunyan, after all, absorbs every scripture text he comes across into the
interior of his hero’s consciousness. The voices of scripture suffer transla-
tion into Christian’s voice exactly because nothing remains audible, in
Bunyan’s narrative, beyond the noise of Christian’s own troubled psyche.
The Pilgrim’s Progress might well be the solipsistic dream of an avid reader
of scripture. I, a solitary reader, ingest the psalms, the parables, the stories
of the Bible, and they all assume the shape of my private anxiety and my
private history. They are, indeed, the materials out of which I build that
private history. Bunyan’s shift from the City of Creation to the City of
Scripture necessarily has such a move built into it: the consciousness seeks
not absorption into but absorption of. But to build my private history out
of these materials is, nevertheless, to take the pattern of my invented self
from a source outside myself. If scripture is the occult pattern of my life,
my life is also a re-speaking—an other-speaking—of scripture. Inasmuch as
this analogy between text and self holds, then my life becomes an allegory of
all Christian lives. Here is where Bunyan furnishes the materials for an
account of modern allegory more responsive than Paul de Man’s is to
metaphors of enchantment. Like de Man’s Rousseau, Bunyan resists the
tendency of the romantic subject to dream of convergence or correspondence
with nature, but he does so by looking for an alternative path into an
alternative sort of convergence. Selves figure other selves, in Bunyan’s
allegory, because they have all become porous to the same base text, have
all appropriated the same voices as their own.39 And that base text is itself, for
Bunyan, the expression of an ideal self, the Christ who discloses his pattern in
Adam, Isaac, Joseph, and Moses, in the suffering King David, in the prophets
and priests, and in all the resurrected dead of whom he is the firstborn.
Bunyan’s technique of appropriating the biblical text into a buffered con-
sciousness therefore activates, in his narrative, allegory’s ancient dynamics.
He absorbs the solitary reader into the divine person who beckons all persons
into his story, and in doing so he initiates the dialectical patterns of narrative
signification that Prudentius derives from his fifth-century experiments in
the theology of incarnation. Like the Psychomachia, The Pilgrim’s Progress
directs the disenchantment of a repudiated religious order toward the new
possibilities that open up in the paradoxes of the Word made flesh.
*
Bunyan writes, unquestionably, in the language of disenchantment. Inas-
much as his nonconformist project of authentic belief depends on a
modern tendency toward temporal renunciation and a secular tendency
toward structural separation, Bunyan finds such a language to be inescap-
able. He is a believer among nonbelievers and, in the context of institu-
tional and social life, a nonbeliever among believers. At the fairs, in the
courtroom, among the religious conformists, and alone with himself, he
speaks with the voice of a powerful and uncompromising skepticism. His
aim is to debunk and to expose. Even his riddles reverberate with the
energies of revolutionary dissent, the resistance of a Samson who can boast
39 It is no wonder that Bunyan’s Christian has proven so eminently replaceable to the
writers of parodies and sequels. Even before Bunyan published his Part II (1684) of The
Pilgrim’s Progress, in which Christiana and some hangers-on follow Christian’s path,
Thomas Sherman had published his unauthorized The Second Part of the Pilgrim’s Progress
(1682), and a host of imitators and parodists have since set other characters on the road to
see how they fare. This string of pilgrim-successors would be hard to imagine in the context
of any modern novel, or, for that matter, in the allegorical worlds of Dante and Spenser. My
arguments should suggest already that the proliferation of these sequels to Christian has
something to do with the temporal priority of the scriptural text to Bunyan’s text. Christian
is already a sequel: he encounters everywhere signs of those who have preceded him.
that “the Philistines understand me not.”40 If the consequence of a
reductive and secularized science is an experience of nature as a brute
thing that does not hear, speak, or respond, Bunyan likewise lives in a
natural and social order that is deaf, mute, and uncomprehending in the
face of his passionate belief. It is exactly because he is a secular writer that
there is, in his allegory, no cleansing of the world, as in Spenser, no
gathering up of the world, as in Dante, no city built in the midst of the
world, as in Prudentius. For Bunyan, religious meaning has migrated out
of the world. No sacrament, no object, no institution, no king or queen,
no place, and no cosmic order can serve, in his fiction, as a channel or
container of God’s order. True that something like what modernity
essentializes as “the sacred” is encoded in the symbolic economy that
constitutes the Way, but that economy is walled against the world, a
bounded sphere of scriptural metaphors vividly realized in the dream of a
solitary pilgrim. The world beyond those walls, the world of the institu-
tional church and the domestic town, is empty of God. If there is any
material residue of God in the world at large, that residue lies hidden in a
book, and Bunyan searches for God by dreaming of that book, by
absorbing that book deep into his own identity and narrative. He is secular
not because he renounces sacred essences but because he locks up sacred
essences as the secrets of a believer who overcomes the world.
It is this secularity that enables many of the distinctive qualities of
Bunyan’s allegorical language: his alienation from the world, his medi-
ation of the sacred and its signs through an interior order, his playful
knowledge of his allegory’s artificiality. But Bunyan’s allegorical idioms
direct him also toward enchantment, and they suggest here and there that
his signifying technique has its own undergirding theologies of incarna-
tion. The Pilgrim’s Progress intimates in various ways that Bunyan is
conscious of the incarnate Christ as a constitutive part of his narrative
system. His disenchanted protagonist may live among the all-too-human
pilgrims of the present age, all very English, very bourgeois, and very
fallen, but presiding over the key passages of Bunyan’s narrative are other
figures, figures such as Interpreter, the Shepherds, Moses, Adam, and the
Shining Ones who flicker now and again into visibility. These enigmatic
presences are not pilgrims with destinies, are not citizens of the secular
order. And they hint, in their oracular utterances, at the presence of still
other, unnamed figures: “the owner of the place” (13), “the Governour of
40 I take this claim, and this quotation, from Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent
in Milton’s England, p. 71. On this passage from Grace Abounding, Achinstein notes that the
purpose of riddles, in a revolutionary context, is not only to conceal but also to test and
exclude, to divide “the chosen nation Israel from the outsider Philistine nation,” p. 108.
that Countrey” (14), the maker of the book (13), “the King” (15), “the
Law-giver” (16), “the Lord of the Hill” (44), “the Prince under whose
Banner now I stand” (57). If we know Bunyan, we know that these
moments of coy indirection are riddles, and that this invisible governor
belongs to some order beyond the domestic countryside over which he
presides. Solving the riddle of his identity is rather like solving the riddle of
Piers Plowman’s identity—“Petrus, id est, Christus,” as Langland’s Anima
summarizes it—and Bunyan, like Langland, teases his reader into seeking
this elusive principality “in alle places.”
Bunyan, like Langland, articulates this pervasive presence not into a
stable theology of incarnation or a sustained narrative vision of the divine
in the cosmos, but rather into a set of experiments, often failing and
unstable, in what could be called an enchanted or allegorical secularity.
However much Bunyan might incline toward a transcendent solitude
that commits the bodies and narratives of history to destruction, he
nevertheless works out his salvation in negotiation with the bodies and
narratives—and with the central incarnate body, and the central incarnate
narrative—he finds jostling around in the language of scripture. The piety
he cultivates in The Pilgrim’s Progress is distinctly a bodily piety, almost a
sacramental piety. The hero of his nonconformist book makes a pilgrim-
age to kneel before a cross, wears symbolic garments, carries talismanic
objects, eats at the table of Charity, gazes at wall paintings, offers prayers in
ancient formulations. In these activities he participates in forms of piety
that Bunyan would himself identify as errant and enchanted, forms that
savor more of the Roman than of the English religion.
It is no accident that these gestures toward willful enchantment corres-
pond with key images in Bunyan’s allegorical idiom. The garments,
objects, icons, and actions that draw Bunyan so close to the embodied
forms of medieval piety all participate in his fiction’s riddling secondari-
ness, its intimations of a scriptural base. As material bodies, they enter into
the signifying doubleness of allegory, and in doing so they seem to mount
a kind of resistance to Bunyan’s ideals of solitary transcendence. They
suggest, at the very least, the gross inadequacy of Coleridge’s pronounce-
ment that Bunyan’s “piety was baffled by his Genius, and the Bunyan
of Parnassus had the better of Bunyan of the Conventicle.”41 In the
light of these enchanted objects, it can be hard to read The Pilgrim’s
Progress as a disenchanted secular fiction, or as an expression of the ideals
of transcendent, disciplined, rational subjectivity that direct many projects
of secular modernity. Bunyan’s allegorical narrative, with its appropriative,
41 Coleridge I quote, as in my note 24 above, from the Lectures on the Principles of
Judgement, Culture, and European Literature, p. 103.

integrative, material pilgrim, might instead be something more like an
experimental alternative to these ideals, a foray into the forms and possi-
bilities of a secular enchantment.
Such a reading of Bunyan’s allegory might throw into new light the
grim, almost lurid tones in which much recent criticism has described his
fiction. Recent accounts of The Pilgrim’s Progress have much to say about
“signs of intense strain” and “sheer violence,” about “misery, anxiety, and
passivity” and a “despair over one’s worthlessness, felt with such pain and
intensity that it bubbles forth like blood from a wound,” and about crisis
and ambivalence in Bunyan, “boiling away just below the surface of his
text and erupting more and more frequently as the narrative proceeds in
startling images of violence.”42 These critical accounts are genuinely
evocative of Bunyan’s ruptures and renunciations. No reading of his allegory
can do without such accounts, and my own reading here means not to
diminish but rather to harness their force. At the same time, the terms of
these accounts fail to comprehend some of the most important energies that
impel Bunyan in his pilgrim fiction. They fail, for one thing, to acknow-
ledge the centrality of play to Bunyan’s allegorical technique. One would
never guess from much of the literature on The Pilgrim’s Progress that the
book is a funny book, a book of riddles, japes, parodies, puns, and winking
absurdities. In it, the dynamics of allegorical signification often take the
form of playful teases, coy insinuations, surprise endings, punch lines.
This allegorical playfulness, with its tantalizing dynamics of presence
and deferral—its hinting that the answer to the riddle plays in the ten
thousand places of Bunyan’s narrative world—draws The Pilgrim’s Progress
toward just the sort of incarnational poetics that Langland, in the four-
teenth century, finds to be so critically unstable. Exactly because Bunyan
makes experiments in identifying the incarnate Christ as the primal self of
his fiction, he can also figure this divine person as the primal subject,
examining and examined, who undergirds the book’s exercises in self-
inquisition. This figuration raises the possibility, for Bunyan’s pilgrims, of
what some critics have called a “graceful” fiction, a release from the endless
reflexivity of that self-inquisition.43 Hopeful alludes to this possibility of
42 I quote, respectively, from Lynch, John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction,
pp. 95, 166; Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity, pp. 81, 83; and Luxon, Literal Figures, p. 181.
43 Michael Davies uses this term in his attempt to find an alternative to “anxiety-
centered” readings of Bunyan’s predestinarian theology. He compares the “shifting, irides-

cent allegorical world” of The Pilgrim’s Progress to the self-referential and anti-narrative
qualities of postmodern fiction, and he associates both sorts of fiction with a resistance to
novelistic canons of causality and probability. See Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative
in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 1–15, 239–66;
qtd. at pp. viii and 261.
release when, in the course of his conversion narrative, he recalls his own
attempts to achieve authentic conversion and the collapse of those
attempts into interminable repetition and despair. In Hopeful’s narration,
the incarnate Christ breaks the cycle of the self regarding itself by shifting
the grounds of authenticity from the pilgrim’s person to his own. Hopeful
explains his escape from despair by describing his discovery that he must
“look for righteousness in his person,” because the inquisitorial reckoning
Christ himself endured “was not for himself, but for him that will accept it
for his Salvation” (143). His language here suggests a “this and that”
structure of correspondence: it figures Hopeful’s subjectivity as participat-
ing in the subjectivity of another, and it defers the proof of Hopeful’s
authenticity from his own interior activities to the activities of the incar-
nate divine. If this deferral of agency has a counterpart in the narrative
dynamics of The Pilgrim’s Progress, that counterpart lies in the swamps,
rolls, nets, keys, and weapons that embody and displace Christian’s
experiences of despair, assurance, flattery, hope, and prayer. The disappear-
ance of the pilgrim’s agency into these objects resembles the disappearance
of Hopeful’s efforts into the divine subject in whose incarnate being he finds
his own being hidden. This disappearance is not absolute: the allegorical
structure in which these pilgrims participate sustains them in a bodily,
narrative existence even as it draws them away from that existence into
the eschatological narrative of Christ’s own journey to the heavenly city.
The willful enchantment into which both Hopeful and Christian enter is
paradoxical and unstable, ever engaged in allegory’s negotiations between
the “this” and the “that” of its fragile signifying dynamics. But in the elusive
beckoning of the primal subject who enacts and undergirds their own
subjectivities, these pilgrims discover a passage, provisional and recursive,
out of the absolute demands of a disciplined autonomy and into the
dialectical movements of an enchanting, other-speaking embodiment.
The Pilgrim’s Progress enters, then, into a dynamic negotiation between
the stabilizing disciplines of the modern subject and the destabilizing
convergences of allegory. Bunyan’s narrative forms are a guide to the
imaginative possibilities of secularization, and his book suggests just how
crucial, in the midst of secularity, the paradoxical structures of allegory can
remain. Secular modernity has, after all, its own paradoxes and dialectic
negotiations. Genealogical accounts such as de Man’s have helped to
clarify that modernity’s project of “absolute forgetting” is itself a form of
remembering, a way of inhabiting the history from which the transcend-
ent ideals of the modern self promise escape.44 The revolutionary present
44 De Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight,
p. 147.
is always enchanted, always in negotiation with the anterior moments
against which it defines itself. In his allegorical appropriations of ancient
narratives and ancient identities, Bunyan writes from the center of this
negotiation. He, more than any of the allegorical writers this book has
considered, explores and exemplifies a program of revolutionary dissent, a
program according to which allegory, to say nothing of consciousness
itself, defines itself as an exertion of violence against an inauthentic social
order and a brute material cosmos. But he also, in his playful other-
speaking idiom, renders the language of dissent into fragile, self-canceling
forms. His pilgrim fiction finds, in the course of its work of renunciation,
that the disciplines of authenticity can open the self to forces beyond itself;
that the interior spaces of the solitary subject can be a theater for the
surprises of incarnation; and that the project of modern disenchantment
can derive energy from, and create new avenues for, the abiding presence
of the things it has tried to leave behind.
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Index
Addison, Joseph 29, 33, 34, 39, 147 exegesis of, see exegesis
Aelred of Rievaulx 75, 78, 87n see also Bible, quotations and allusions;
agents, allegorical: Bunyan, John
and character 30, 148 Bible, quotations and allusions:
and death 15–17, 156, 172 Acts 189, 195
eighteenth-century criticism of 27–31, Col. 66, 67, 71–2
34–5, 37–8, 39, 147–9 1 Cor. 70, 74
and narrative 12, 15–17, 2 Cor. 5
80–1, 84, 184 Dan. 141
see also demons; gods and goddesses; Eph. 190
Langland, William; Nature Exod. 72
(personification); personification; Gal. 66
Plato; Prudentius; Skelton, John; Gen. 68–70, 74
Spenser, Edmund Hab. 189
Alan of Lille: Heb. 189n
allegorical idiom of The Complaint Jer. 194
of Nature 10, 20, 80, 82–4, Job 191, 195
127–31, 184 John 188, 189, 190, 194
Anticlaudianus 26 1 John 5
personification in The Complaint of Luke 189
Nature 22–3, 24, 25, 26, 96–8, 195 Matt. 68–9, 74, 189
see also Nature (personification) Num. 194
allegoresis, see exegesis 1 Pet. 67, 189
Antichrist 132 Phil. 190
Roman church as 3, 138, 141, Prov. 188, 189, 194, 195
143, 173 Psa. 73, 189, 191, 194, 195
see also Langland, William Rev. 3–4, 84, 140–1, 188
apocalypse: Rom. 66–7, 73, 168, 188, 189, 190
biblical book of, see also Bible, quotations Song of Sol. 189n
and allusions 1 Thess. 11, 190
early modern 3–4, 140–4, 149, 1 Tim. 190
150, 163 2 Tim. 190
medieval 74, 140–1 Blake, William 32, 182n
in Piers Plowman 85, 108, 133 Boccaccio 82n, 114n
see also Antichrist; eschatology; whore of Boethius 24, 25, 96–8, 120, 126–8, 134,
Babylon 135, 137
Augustine: Boethian tradition 13, 120, 122, 130
and disenchantment 46, 49, 64–6 Bonaventure 82, 83, 84, 94n, 129
and selfhood 75–8, 79, 80, 83 Bowge of Courte, The, see Skelton, John
Brigit of Sweden 94n, 107
Babylon, see whore of Babylon buffered self 8, 115, 135, 178, 184, 193,
Bacon, Francis 27 195–6
Bale, John 3–4, 8, 140–2, 163, Bunyan, John 11–13, 20, 40, 43–4,
170, 173 175–201
Bate, John 9n, 170 allegorical or anti-allegorical 182–6
Benjamin, Walter 15–16, 156, 173 allegory of, grounded in incarnation 44,
Bernard Silvestris 10, 26, 84, 96 68, 183, 186, 196, 197–200
Bible, as book 32, 75, 87, 102 allegory, formal qualities of 32, 192,
biblical history 96, 143 194–6
222 Index
Bunyan, John (cont.) and human person 71, 79, 91,
Bible, use of 188–92, 194–8 129–30, 184
and disenchantment 40, 175, 178, human powers of 23, 61, 91, 129–31
180–3, 186, 194, 196–8, 201 and incarnation 71, 75, 86–7
and dissent 11, 13, 175, 177–8, 186, negotiation with creator 19, 41, 75, 82,
196–7, 201 86–7, 91, 129–31, 184–5
and enchantment 175, 186, 196–201 renewal of 81, 95
history, resistance to 11, 44, 177, 181, six days of 68–70, 74
183, 197–8, 200–1 see also nature (concept); Nature
Holy War, The 162n (personification)
incarnation and the human self in 44,
196, 199–200, 201 daemonic agents, see demons
and inquisition, as a practice 43, Dante Alighieri:
175–81, 199–200 allegorical agents in 15–16, 24, 25, 149
I Will Pray with the Spirit 178–9 allegorical cosmos of 84, 133–4,
modernity of 12, 40, 44, 175, 178–9, 196n, 197
182–6, 192–201 allegorical idiom of 13–14, 39, 183,
narrative methods of 186–92, 194–6 184, 194
riddles in 187–8, 191, 196–8, 199 de Man, Paul 6, 7, 20–1, 32n, 192–4,
and secularity 44, 106, 175, 177–86, 196, 200
190, 194–200 demons 3, 64–5, 106–8, 190
and violence 175, 186, 196–201 daemonic agents 2, 24, 26, 117, 126,
see also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; satire; 149, 152
Weber, Max see also Langland, William
devil, see Satan
Catherine of Siena 107 Dickens, Charles 33
Catholic church, see Roman church discipline, see violence
causes and causation 15, 28–35, 50–1, 71, disenchantment, see Augustine; Bunyan,
147, 199; see also Plato; probability, John; gods and goddesses;
critical notion of incarnation; Langland, William;
character, concept of, see also agents, modernity; Plato; Prudentius;
allegorical Skelton, John; Spenser, Edmund;
Charles I of England 8 Weber, Max
Chaucer, Geoffrey 14, 94, 122, 123 Douglas, Gavin 14, 119–20, 122
Chaucerian dream visions 116, 119–20 drama 30–1, 94, 116, 117–18, 123, 131,
Chesterton, G. K. 186, 194 132n, 133
Christology, see incarnation dream vision, as form 116, 119, 127, 131
Cicero 17, 63n; see also Rhetorica ad Dryden, John 30
Herennium
Clement of Alexandria 63n, 67–8, 72 Elizabeth I of England 138n, 142–4, 163
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: enchantment:
on Bunyan 185n, 190n defined 1–11
on personification 22, 23–4, 38 and poetics of allegory 13–14, 24–7,
on Prudentius 46n 39–40, 45–6, 50, 82–4, 115
on symbol 32–3 see also Bunyan, John; incarnation;
conscience, concept of 44, 135n, 175, Prudentius; “this and that” and “this
176, 177–8, 181; see also inquisition, for that”
as practice epic 29–31, 34, 39, 147
Cornutus 63 Greek epic 51, 57, 62
cosmos, see creation; Dante; nature see also Prudentius
(concept); Nature (personification) eschatology:
creation: and allegorical agents 16, 27, 156, 200
allegorically ordered 63, 84, 128 and allegorical poetics 18, 21, 39–40,
as cosmos, opposed to universe 34 81, 110, 111
Dante as poet of 194–5 and early modern reformers 141–2
Index 223
and historical solitude 7, 11, 40, 105–6 incarnation and the divine in 72–3,
in Piers Plowman 91, 105 87–92, 95–6, 105, 106, 109
see also apocalypse; history; Prudentius; invaded by the demonic 95–6,
Spenser, Edmund 103–4, 133
eternity, see history, concept of millenarian engagement with 142–4,
exegesis: 163, 174
early Christian and medieval practice and narrative in poetry 10, 15, 29, 80,
of 10, 20, 47n, 74–5 103–4, 115, 147–9, 163
Origen’s practice of 46–8, 63n, 68–75 and narrative in scripture 47, 68–70,
Plato’s critique of 57–8, 61 72–4
Stoic practice of 45, 62–3, 70–2, 74 opposed to divine order 106, 109,
see also Jesus Christ; self-interpretation 127, 150
opposed to eternity 10–11, 15, 72–5,
Faerie Queene, The, see Spenser, Edmund 86, 115, 116, 144, 163, 173–4
Foxe, John 141–2, 144, 163, 173 opposed to modernity 6–7, 21, 200
Fraunce, Abraham 18 opposed to sacred 44, 142, 177,
181, 183
genre, allegory as 27–33, 83 opposed to self 44, 86, 106, 162, 177
Gifford, George 143, 163 opposed to significance 91–2, 115
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 32 see also apocalypse; Bible; eschatology;
gods and goddesses: historical solitude; modernity;
ancient allegoresis of 61–4 revolution
Christian disenchantment of 25–6, 49, Hoccleve, Thomas 120–1
64–6, 99 Homer 50–1, 57, 61–2, 64; see also epic;
in epic 29, 34, 50–1, 57, 62 exegesis; gods and goddesses
personification, early modern difference Hughes, John 29–33, 37–9, 147–8
from 43, 93, 117, 190 Hull, John 8
personification, relationship with 21–7, hypocrisy:
81, 96–9, 131 and authenticity, ideals of 175–80
see also agents, allegorical; Boethius; campaigns against, early modern 9, 170
Nature (personification); Roman church accused of 3–4
personification; Plato; Prudentius
Gower, John 25, 131 idols:
Guillaume de Deguileville, see Pèlerinage de early Christian shattering of 49, 65, 138
la vie humaine early modern shattering of 4–5, 7–8,
Guillaume de Lorris 10, 14, 20, 80 138, 142, 151–2
Guillaume de Machaut 14 and modern self-conception 1, 181
incarnation:
Harington, John 114 and allegory 42, 78–81, 82–4, 117,
Harsnett, Samuel 5, 6, 8 126, 131, 137
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 32 and biblical exegesis 70–5
Henry VIII of England 138–9, 141, 142 and disenchantment 4n, 64–6, 70, 138–9
hermeneutics, see exegesis; inquisition, as and enchantment 42, 50, 66, 68, 80,
practice; paranoia 83–4, 197–8
Hesiod 50n, 62; see also epic; exegesis; gods and human persons 66–8, 71–81, 83–4
and goddesses and metaphor 19
historical solitude, see eschatology; history; and paradox 19, 41, 44, 68, 74–5,
Langland, William; Skelton, John; 137, 196
Spenser, Edmund see also Bunyan, John; creation; history;
history, concept of: Jesus Christ; Langland, William;
and causation 15, 33–4 Nature (personification);
early modern breakage from 6–7, 12, personification; Prudentius;
110, 115, 138–40, 173–4 sacraments; Spenser, Edmund
incarnation and rupture of 10, 64–5, inquisition, as practice 3–9, 11, 43, 85,
70, 78–9, 106n, 138–9 107; see also Bunyan, John
224 Index
Inquisition, Catholic 5–6, 13, 106–7, 108 Lipsius, Justus 159n, 160n
Irenaeus 67 liturgy 6, 10, 178
Locke, John 22, 35–9, 41n
James I of Scotland, see Kingis Quair, The Lollards 13, 85, 141, 178n
James VI of Scotland 108n Lorris, Guillaume de, see Guillaume de
Jean de Meun 24, 80 Lorris
Jesuits 4, 5, 43, 173 Lowth, Robert 32
Jesus Christ: Lydgate, John 14, 119, 120
body of 83–4, 88–9, 105
double nature of 41–2, 75, 76 magic 1–3, 107–8, 181n
figured as warrior or commander 26, Man, Paul de, see de Man, Paul
79–80, 142–4 Martianus Capella 96–8
figured in Henry VIII 138–9 Mary (mother of Jesus) 19, 78–80, 83
figured in scripture 47, 69–70, 72–4, Mary I of England 116n, 141, 142
75, 139 medieval, as concept 2–3, 10–11, 27, 40,
and human persons 66–8, 71–81, 83–4, 85–6, 139
90, 92 metaphor, critical concept of 17–18,
image of God 71 19n, 20n
and suffering 66, 67, 86–7, 138, 170n metaphysics:
temptation of 69–70, 74 Greek, broadly 16, 129
see also incarnation; Langland, William; metaphysical sense of texts 70, 72
personification Newtonian 34n
John Scotus Eriugena 75, 78 Platonist 18–19, 33, 38, 41, 51–7, 60,
Johnson, Samuel 28–30, 32, 34, 147–9 65, 74, 81
Joye, George 141 methexis 54, 61, 64, 74, 77, 79
Milton, John 23, 28–30, 147
Kingis Quair, The 13, 14, 120, 121, 122, 131 modernity, as concept:
early modern awareness of 5–8
Langland, William 11–13, 40, 42, 82–109 and metaphors of disenchantment 1–3,
Antichrist in Piers Plowman 42, 95, 96, 7, 10, 11–12, 21, 27
104–8 opposed to allegory 10–11, 13
demons in Piers Plowman 93–6, 103–8, and periodization 1–3, 6, 14, 27,
117–18, 133 40–1
and disenchantment 12, 40, 85–6, 99, temporal structure of 1–3, 6–7, 21, 39,
103, 105–6, 108–9, 172 65, 106
dreamer, Christological identity see also Bunyan, John; history; Langland,
of 85–6, 87, 90–2, 108, 131 William
dreamer, solitude of 85–6, 105–6, 125, morality drama, see drama
134, 183
and humanity of Christ 86–7, 90, narrative:
105–6 allegorical, ancient emergence of 10,
and incarnation, as basis for poetics 42, 48–50, 66, 68, 75, 78–84
85–6, 110, 115, 137, 184, 199 allegorical, eighteenth-century criticism
modernity of 12, 42, 84–6, 92, 106, of 28–35, 37–9, 147–8, 172
108–9 allegorical, self-negating tendency of 12,
and paranoia 13, 42, 92, 96, 105–6, 14–21, 39–40, 45–9, 145–6
108, 183 allegorical, temporality of 12, 15–21,
Piers Plowman, person of 12, 87, 88, 22–3, 25, 45, 129
91–2, 105, 108, 198 hostility of ancient exegetes toward 45,
see also apocalypse; eschatology; 46–7, 61–4, 68–70, 73–4
nominalism; personification; see also Bunyan, John; epic; history;
romance; satire; Satan Plato; Spenser, Edmund
Laplace, Pierre-Simon 34–5 Nashe, Thomas 115
Lewis, C. S. 24n, 25n, 33, 46n nature (concept):
Lille, Alan of, see Alan of Lille as conceptual category 21, 99, 127, 181
Index 225
and the gods 62–4, 65 poetics of 21–7, 96–103, 149, 155–7,
as material cosmos 10–11, 16, 23 172, 182n
medieval notions of 2, 134–5 and social types 92–3, 108,
modern notions of 33–5, 41, 134–5, 117, 190
197, 201 and theatrical roles 117–19
and romantic symbol 192–3, 196 see also agents, allegorical; Alan of Lille;
Shakespeare the poet of 30 demons; gods and goddesses;
Trinitarian patterns in 83 Langland, William; Nature
see also Nature (personification) (personification); Prudentius
Nature (personification): Petrarch 7n, 144, 163–4
and allegorical cosmos, the 23–5, Pico della Mirandola 114n
127–31, 134–5, 137 Piers Plowman, see Langland, William
and allegorical poetics 21–5, 26, Pilgrim’s Progress, The, see Bunyan, John
97–8, 195 Plato 41, 51–64
images of, medieval and modern 134–5 allegory, affinities with 41, 49, 60–1,
and incarnation 23, 83, 84, 129–31 63–4, 76, 77
see also nature (concept) allegory, resistance to 18–19, 41,
Neoplatonism 18, 49 57–8, 65
Neostoicism 159–60, 163 on causes and causation 51–3, 55, 57,
Newton, Isaac 34–5, 37, 41n 58–60, 63, 65, 67
nominalism 13, 85, 99, 103–4, 108, 117n on the disenchantment of
novel, as form 44, 147, 175, 184, 187, narrative 49–50, 51, 57–8, 61–5
196n, 199n on forms 16, 51–7, 58, 60, 61, 63–4,
75, 80
Opitz, Martin 27–8 on the human agent 57–61, 74, 76,
Origen 41, 46–7, 63n, 68–75 77, 126
Owen, Lewis 4, 5, 6 as model for Christian writers 49, 64–6,
67, 114
paradox, see incarnation; Plato and paradox 16, 41, 49, 55, 68, 74
paranoia: Parmenides 41, 55–7, 60
and allegory, poetics of 13, 43, Phaedo 41, 52–4, 56, 58
110–11 Protagoras 55
attributed to witch hunters 6 Republic 41, 53–4, 56, 57–61, 126
as early modern project 6, 13, 42–3, see also methexis; Platonism
107–8, 135, 173–4, 179–80, 183 Platonism:
as hermeneutic 5, 13, 65, 108, 111, and the history of Christian thought 49,
170, 173 63, 65, 67, 70, 72
as modern project 115, 134, 135 and metaphysics 18, 33, 38, 65, 67
see also hypocrisy; inquisition, as practice; see also Neoplatonism; Plato
Langland, William; Skelton, John; possession, see demons
Spenser, Edmund Plotinus 18–19
Paul (apostle) 41, 66–8, 72, 77; see also prayer 9, 178–9, 198, 200
Bible, quotations and allusions probability, critical notion of 29–31,
Peacham, Henry 18 33–5, 39, 147–8, 172, 199n
Pearl 120 Prudentius 41–2, 46–50, 78–81
Pèlerinage de la vie humaine 10 and allegorical enchantment 39, 46,
periodization, see modernity 48–50, 66, 68, 78–81, 84, 196
personification: Apotheosis 26, 49, 78
and abstract nouns 21–2, 25, 28–32, and disenchantment 20, 26, 41–2,
50–1, 99–104, 117, 155–7, 190–1 49–50, 64–5, 68
eighteenth-century criticism of 27–31, and epic 10, 46–8
147–8 and eschatology 80–1, 196
and human self 60, 62n, 132–3, 190 and human persons 78–81, 126
and incarnation 79–81, 87–90, 92, and incarnation 19, 26, 41–2, 68,
104–5, 108–9, 132 78–81, 84, 183, 196
226 Index
Prudentius (cont.) Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 32
and narrative temporality 10, 15–16, Schiller, Friedrich 32
25, 46–49 Scot, Reginald 5–6, 8, 140
and personification 15–16, 25, 79–81 scripture, see Bible, as book; Bible,
Psychomachia as originative allegorical quotations and allusions
narrative 10, 15, 19, 41–2, 46–9, 82 secularity:
psychomachia (literary form) 77, 81n, 119, early modern projects of 106, 175,
126, 131, 132, 162; see also Prudentius 177–81, 185
Psychomachia (poem), see Prudentius nature of 134n, 174, 175, 177–81, 185,
Puttenham, George 18, 22, 82, 110–12 200–1
Rousseau and “secularized allegory” 193
Quintilian 17, 21, 22n, 114 see also Bunyan, John; religion, as
concept; Skelton, John
rationality, see reason, faculty of secularization, see secularity
reason, faculty of: self, see agents, allegorical; buffered self;
modern notions of 1, 35–7, 160–2, Bunyan, John; conscience, concept of;
178, 180–1, 185, 198 history; hypocrisy; incarnation;
premodern notions of 58–61, 62n, inquisition, as practice; Jesus Christ;
71–2, 99, 128 Locke, John; Plato; Prudentius;
religion, as concept 1–2, 108, 118, 175, psychomachia
178n, 181n, 185; see also secular self-interpretation 14, 19n, 21, 39–40,
revolution, see modernity; violence 110, 117, 158; see also inquisition, as
Reynolds, Henry 27, 115 practice
Rhetorica ad Herennium 21 Seneca 62n
rhetorical analysis of allegory 17–18, 21–2, Shakespeare, William 6, 30, 34
27, 110–11, 114–15, 182 Silvestris, Bernard, see Bernard Silvestris
riddles 27; see also Bunyan, John; Skelton, Skelton, John 11–13, 40, 42–3, 110–37
John Collyn Clout 112–13, 137
Roman church 3–4, 8, 138–41, 170, 173, and dissent 110–15, 119, 125, 137
180n, 198; see also Antichrist; Jesuits and disenchantment 40, 110–11,
romance, as genre 11–12 115–17, 125, 134–5, 137, 172
in The Faerie Queene 25, 152, 156, dreamer of The Bowge of Courte,
169, 172 reflexivity of 121, 123, 132–4, 135–7
in Piers Plowman 86–7 dreamer of The Bowge of Courte, solitude
romantics, see symbol, romantic concept of of 119, 121, 125–6, 133, 135, 137,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 192–4, 196 170–1
Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell,
sacraments 41 The 113, 116, 118, 120, 122, 137
Eucharist 88–9, 96, 105, 108 and historical solitude 7, 11, 13, 43,
incarnation, relationship with 41, 115–16, 121, 137
75n, 198 Magnyfycence 116–19, 133, 137
modern repudiations of 1–2, 4, 6, 10, and paranoia 42–3, 111–14, 115,
108, 197 134–5, 170–2
saints 10, 23, 24, 25, 94, 104 riddles in 111, 114, 115
Satan: and secularity 106, 117–18, 133–4
in The Faerie Queene 158, 167, 173 Speke Parott 42, 111–13, 137
in Piers Plowman 87, 94, 95, 104 vices in The Bowge of Courte 122–5,
Roman church associated with 3–6 131–3, 135–7
and witchcraft 106–8 Ware the Hauke 113–14
satire, as genre 113n Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? 112–13,
medieval tradition of 94, 102n, 120, 137
122–3, 125 see also Boethius; Chaucer; drama; dream
in Piers Plowman 85, 94, 108 vision; narrative; personification;
in Pilgrim’s Progress, The 183, 184, 189n psychomachia; satire
in Skelton’s poetry 122–3, 125, 133 Socrates, see Plato
Index 227
Spenser, Edmund 11–13, 20, 40, 43, goddesses; personification; romance;
138–74 Roman church; Satan
and agency, the possibility of 147–9, Stoics 18, 62–3, 67, 68, 70, 80; see also
152–7, 163, 172–3 Neostoicism
allegory, critical comments on 18, 27 symbol, romantic concept of 21, 32–3,
and disenchantment 26, 106, 110, 140, 192–4, 196
150, 158–9
Doleful Lay of Clorinda, The 146 “this and that” and “this for that”
eighteenth-century criticism of 29–31, 19–21, 39, 42, 69–70, 83–4, 183,
37–9, 147–8 200
eschatological longing (in The Faerie topical allegory 31–2, 95, 146, 192
Queene) 11, 43, 150, 156–8, 163, Trinity, the 76, 79, 83, 88
169, 172–4 Tuke, Thomas 180
eschatological longing (in work at
large) 139, 145–7 violence:
and historical optimism 143–4, 163, and allegorical poetics 16–17, 18, 33,
171, 197 149–50, 172–3
and historical solitude 11, 43, 138–40, colonial 1, 134–5, 180–1
144–6, 171 disciplinary 9, 43–4, 105, 113, 125,
and holiness, nature of 167–70, 171–2 142, 159–60, 170n, 179–81
and humoral medicine 159–63 revolutionary 6–7, 13, 42n, 115,
and incarnation 68, 81, 138, 184 173–4, 197n, 200–1
and infection, metaphors of 164–71 see also Bunyan, John; inquisition, as
and narrative temporality 146–7, practice; Inquisition, Catholic;
148–58, 163, 172 modernity; Spenser, Edmund
and paranoia 111, 166–7, 170–4, Virgil 30, 46, 48n, 146
179–80, 183
Prothalamion 38–9 Weber, Max:
Ruines of Rome, The 144–5 on the disenchantment of the
Ruines of Time, The 144–6 world 1–3, 9, 25, 41n
Shepheardes Calender, The 138–9, 146 on The Pilgrim’s Progress 186
Teares of the Muses, The 144 whore of Babylon 3–4, 104, 140,
Theatre for Worldlings 144, 163–4 141, 164
and violence (exercised by fictional William of Ockham 99, 103
agents) 160n, 163, 164–5, 166–71, Winthrop, John 178
172–4, 179–80 witchcraft:
and violence (inherent in allegory) 147, debunked as illusion 5–6, 140
149–50, 154, 158, 172–3 witch-hunters 5–6, 8, 13, 107–8
Visions of the Worlds Vanitie 164 see also magic; Satan
see also agents, allegorical; gods and Wolsey, Thomas (Cardinal) 111–13, 116n

Allegory and Enchantment

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A L L E G O R Y A N D EN C H A N T M E N T

What is enchantment? For the past century, historians and theorists of

5 Bilgrami, “What is Enchantment,” p. 148; and Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 32.

Catholiques of England,” fol. A2v.

at Early English Books Online.

14 The Discouerie of Witchcraft, “To the Readers,” fol. B5r.

18 To speak of “historical solitude” is to invoke Thomas Greene’s account of the

fol. A4v; in facsimile at Early English Books Online.

Sea (London, 1600); in facsimile at Early English Books Online.

J. M. Dent, Everyman, 1995), 20.379.

sustained experiment in allegorical narrative, in Chapter 1. I quote Prudentius, in both

Verso, 1977), p. 217.

Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 5.

41 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593): A Facsimile Reproduction (Gaines-

langelo’s Boboli Captives. Reading the Allegorical Intertext, p. 8.

48 By “priority” here I mean something like ontological priority, the priority of a

50 My language of simultaneity and temporal difference is indebted to de Man’s account of

p. 102. I have incorporated Coleridge’s emendations into his text.

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), esp. pp. 1–35.

of spirits,” in a condition of porous vulnerability to a variety of powers and inﬂuences,

cations.” The Allegory of Love, p. 52.

63 Faerie Queene 5.1.11–12. 64 Psychomachia 21–39.

73 “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry,” p. xli.

Monod (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 119.

93 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.3.1.

96 This discussion, which builds on everything he has done in An Essay Concerning

98 “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry,” p. xli.

allegory of Locke’s dark room of the mind, pp. 98–107.

105 Piers Plowman 15.161.

108 The Faerie Queene 1.1.19.

Augustine’s ﬁgure of pilgrimage as a way of elucidating that transitory state. Allegorical

2 Itinerarium mentis in Deum 1.2 and 2.7.

medioevo, 1978), 6.42.

B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London: J. M. Dent, Everyman, 1995). On this daring

“Thow knowest wel,” quod Conscience, “and thow konne reson,

This passage ﬁgures Christ as the possessor of many human identities. It is

11 Qtd. from Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 121.

15 Qtd. in Beckwith, Christ’s Body, p. 61.

22 De planctu Naturae, ed. Nikolaus M. Häring (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi

sull’alto medioevo, 1978), 2.40–137.

Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), esp.

29 Langland and Allegory, p. 14.

35 On Langland’s renunciations and reafﬁrmations of history, see James Simpson,

38 See, e.g., James VI of Scotland’s Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597), in facsimile at

Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago

To cross from the poetry of John Skelton to the poetry of Edmund

(Harlow: Longman, 2001).

6 This is from Arthur Golding’s 1574 translation of Augustine Marlorat, qtd. in

9 On apocalyptic expectation in Lollardy and in medieval England more broadly, see

interpretation of the biblical apocalypse is a pivotal moment in the formation of an English

Apocalypse, p. 157. Bauckham discusses Foxe’s predictions at p. 164.

Reformers in Babylon, pp. 179–243.

18 The Ruines of Time 119.

27 The Ruines of Time 589–602, 645–58, 659–72; qtd. at 669.

30 Here I allude to arguments I made at some length in my Introduction. I quote from

(London, 1715), pp. xxxiv–xxxv.

p. 64. Fletcher makes his debt to Johnson explicit on p. 32.

ter,” Spenser Studies 22 (2007), pp. 203–4.

36 “Daemon Lovers,” p. 205.

expulsion of everything in them that is vital,” “Death in an Allegory,” p. 76.

imagines psychological inwardness and physiological materialism as necessarily separate

What man so wise, what earthly witt so ware,

53 The Analogy of The Faerie Queene, p. 183.

58 See Joseph Campana’s discussion of the shifting status of pain in sixteenth-century