Tottel's Miscellany and the English Reformation

Tottel's Miscellany and the English Reformation.

by Stephen Hamrick

HYDER ROLLINS BEGINS the introduction to his indispensable critical edition of Songs and Sonnets (1557), now known as Tottel's Miscellany, by ostensibly situating that text within early modern religious history. In startling terms, Rollins writes "in the spring and summer of 1557 martyrs' fires were sending a lurid glare throughout England," and adds, "to the accompaniment of fire and martyrs' shrieks the epoch-making book correctly known as Songs and Sonnets ... made its appearance on June 5." In contrast to the martyrs' fires that died down, "the poetic fire started by the Songs burned more bright than ever in Elizabeth's reign." (1) Rollins's prose recaptures some of the "lurid glare" of those fires some 450 years ago, but his introduction merely serves as an arresting rhetorical device, and this tantalizing glimpse into early modern religious history and Tottel's Miscellany's relationship to it is left unexamined.

Tottel's Miscellany remains the most important poetic collection published in the mid-sixteenth century and provides a representative sampling of the period's verse. This first surviving collection of Petrarchan poetry proved enormously popular and went through nine editions by 1587, dramatically influencing generations of poets, courtiers, and other readers. (2) Although many of the poems were first written in the 1530s, the collection was not published until 1557. This long period of writing, circulation and publication corresponds to the long period of the English Reformation, which initially took shape in the late 1530s but only came to "settlement" in the second decade of Elizabeth's reign. The writing and reading life of the poetry in Tottel's Miscellany, then, was congruent with the English Reformation, yet scholars have not recognized this correspondence. (3) Nor have scholars recognized that the Reformation and Petrarchanism came to England at the same time. As the premier conduit of Petrarchan poetry, Tottel's Miscellany provides a key site at which to read the cultural impact of the Reformation.

Scholars have placed Tottel's poetic collection within both continental and domestic literary discourses and have provided detailed stylistic, bibliographical, and editorial analysis of the work. They have also defined how the collection provides readers with didactic models of courtly performance, self-advertisement, and place seeking. (4) Critics have not, however, set the anthology within contemporary religious history. For most critics, in fact, the "shorter poetry" of the English Reformation "is largely untouched by the religious controversies fissuring sixteenth-century culture." (5) Making a similar claim, Rollins asserts that the early modern editors of the text worked as conservative censors of religion "removing objectionable references and phrases," yet resituating Tottel's Miscellany within early modern religious history suggests that we reconsider Rollins's further assertion that "all comments on Roman Catholicism were ruthlessly struck out." (6) Reading this poetry through the lens of early modern ritual practice and Reformation polemic, we find that Tottel's Miscellany incorporated poetry that did "comment" upon Catholicism, Protestantism, and the English Reformation.

The following argument supplements traditional scholarship on Reformation literature, which stems from Barbara Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and John King's English Reformation Literature. (7) Lewalski and scholars influenced by her work have consistently read Reformation poetry as developing a poetics that favors iconoclastic, Protestant biblical forms and the biblical simplicity praised by the Reformers. Following King, most scholars have also seen a distinct separation between Petrarchan and religious verse, arguing that poets wrote Petrarchan evocations of love at the same time that they rejected amorous pursuits in their religious verse. (8) We have learned a great deal from this scholarship, yet in exploring Protestant poetics, scholars have almost entirely ignored the survival of what I shall call a "Catholic poetics" in Petrarchan poetry.

When we examine Tottel's representative collection through the contemporary lens of religious practice, the critical dichotomy between Petrarchan poetry and poetry inflected by religious concerns comes undone. It is not the case that sixteenth-century poets simply wrote Petrarchan verse in addition to religious poetry; rather, they combined Petrarchan verse with religious concerns. Instead of removing Catholicism from Tottel's Miscellany, some writers encoded a Catholic poetics within that text, which both preceded English Jesuit discourse and existed independently of the highly popular Catholic hagiographic tradition. Yet, many modern readers have interpreted such signs of Catholicism in Petrarchan poetry as simply the poetic representations of idolatrous love or, more often, the playful iterations of early modern wit. Some poets in Tottel's text did employ religious vocabulary as rhetorical window dressing. The following, however, argues that other poets inscribed conflicting Catholic and Protestant pieties in their poems to renegotiate the Reformation conflict over "true religion" on a battlefield of Petrarchan lyric. Poets engaged contemporary changes in ritual practice by assimilating religious language to Petrarchan ideals of service. The discourse of Petrarchan adoration shaped by Catholic poetics combined the secular and the devotional. In so doing, it translated Catholic ritual practices to the poetic construction of the deified and adored Petrarchan beloved. The discourse of Petrarchan adoration shaped by Protestant poetics rejected the Catholic worship of the beloved without rejecting Petrarchan poetics.

In the following argument, I initially reconstruct the Catholic poetics adapted by poems included in Tottel's ostensibly expurgated collection. I then recover how poets inflected Catholic theology and practice to transform Petrarchan neoplatonism. Such a reconstruction responds directly to the representations of Catholicism within a broad range of sixteenth-century poetry and also to the early modern poets who interpreted Petrarchan love poetry as Catholicism in hiding. Lastly, I turn to the Protestant discourse operating within Tottel's Miscellany. Early modern iconoclasm, by definition, mandated the violent destruction of Catholic idols, but the Protestant poetry in Tottel's Miscellany incorporated complex images of Catholic practice to fashion a new form of iconoclasm, which creates rather than destroys. It is true that the early modern editors of Tottel's Miscellany removed many traces of the English Reformation from that text, yet by piecing together the few remaining poems that record the signs of Catholic and Protestant pieties, we can develop a greater appreciation of how important and useful such religious concerns were to Petrarchan poets. As we shall see, Tottel's collection represents only a few of the many contemporary poetic texts that incorporate Catholic poetics.

Despite a sweeping program of cultural iconoclasm, many individuals in early modern England still observed the traditional practices of Catholicism, which were increasingly curtailed from the late 1530s and outlawed in 1559, but never entirely eradicated. The Puritan preacher and writer William Perkins, in his highly popular A Golden Chain ... Containing the Order of the Causes of Salvation and Damnation (1558), describes such practices as the "Popish superstitions in sacrifices, meates, holydayes, apparell, temporarie and beadridden prayers, indulgences, auster[e] life, whippings, ceremonies, gestures, gate, conversation, pilgrimage, building of Altars, pictures, Churches, and all other of that rabble." (9) Perkins writes about these traditional practices from an oppositional (Protestant) position; nevertheless, his comments convey the continued appeal of many of the most popular, everyday forms of Catholic ritual worship, including the nonintuitive practices of "conversation," "austere life," and "gate" or walking. Not consisting simply of ritual "ceremonies" like the Mass or "pilgrimage," Catholicism is constructed as a comprehensive and discernible mode of being in the world that incorporates speaking, thinking, moving, and outward appearance, i.e., all of "life." As we shall see, both negative and positive representations of such Catholic practices and identities abound in early modern visual images, sermons, and, for our purposes, Petrarchan poems.

Religious practice, in fact, filled the lives of men and women throughout England far into the Reformation period and after. John Foxe's Actes and Monumentes (1563), popularly known as the Book of Martyrs, provides an instructive visual testament of the central place of piety in early modern England. Foxe's incredibly popular text was written to provide the English Protestant Church with a confessional genealogy that would connect it directly to the apostles, proto-Protestant martyrs, and Marian martyrs who are pictured in the text being persecuted, tortured, and killed by "despotic" popes and the Catholic Church as "antichrist." On his magnificent title page, Foxe also depicts Protestants attending a sermon in an iconoclastically stripped church, yet many of the congregants simply do not look at the preacher but look instead at God's Word; significantly, the Word takes the form of open bibles and Hebrew characters for God inscribed on the wall (fig. 1). (10) Foxe's title page also depicts Catholic ritual practice and its abundant ritual paraphernalia: rogation processions, kneeling devotees, images of saints and crosses, prominent Rood crucifixes, prayer beads, bells, holy water receptacles, ornate clerical vestments, and a priest saying Mass as he raises the Host above his head for all to see and adore; the crucified Christ is also clearly inscribed on the Host.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

In his Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum (1587), Englishman Richard Verstegen presents readers with a small, beautifully illustrated text that depicts the ravages of Protestant iconoclasm in Catholic Europe, but also details the central Catholic practices that Foxe had denigrated (See fig. 2). (11) Accompanied by explanatory Latin texts, each of the images in the Catholic Theatrum depicts Protestants as vile monsters killing Catholic martyrs in bizarre ways. In comparing Verstegen to Foxe, Christopher Highly has shown that Verstegen constructs Catholics as passive victims. Within the Theatrum itself, Catholics are also constructed in the midst of ritual practice, kneeling before candle-lit shrines and altars. (12)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

From different sides of a confessional and political divide, each of these texts fashions practice as the defining characteristic of religious identity. Whether depicting the traditional rituals of Catholic saint veneration and the Mass or the iconoclastic rituals of "cleansing" idolatrous "temples" and killing unrepentant "enemies of God," both texts see practice as the foremost indicator of religious self-fashioning. (13) As these visual texts suggest and as historians have demonstrated, a culture steeped for centuries in a beloved, ritual-centered religion did not quickly or completely divest itself of its material practices or, as we shall continue to see, the representation of such Catholic practices in popular texts.

Tottel's Miscellany not only popularized the themes and terms of unrequited Petrarchan love for early modern English poets, but also, in spite of the radical editing discussed by Rollins, conveyed the religious vocabulary and the representations of ritual practice that contemporary poets regularly deployed in their construction of the beloved. Throughout its some 300 poems, readers of Tottel's Miscellany are repeatedly told of the Petrarchan beloved's divinity. She is alternately figured as a "worldly Paradise," a "godesse," "this worldes bliss," "divine" in "your doings," "my god in earth," "my perfect earthly bliss," "that excellence, divine," "a paradice," as having "a sacred head," and as harboring "gifts divine" in "her heavenly shape." (14) Such language helps to shape the religious sensibilities recorded by the collection.

The contributions of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, to Tottel's Miscellany, moreover, contradict the critical assertion that sixteenth-century religion was inimical to love poetry and also demonstrate that the editorial erasure of Catholicism from the text was incomplete. As William Sessions has shown, Surrey adapted the Catholic sacrament of marriage to his "Set me wheras the sunne doth parche the grene," which Tottel included in his anthology as "Vow to love faithfully howsoever he be rewarded." (15) In adopting a playful attitude toward religion, Surrey translates an even broader range of Catholic practices to fashion an affirmative religion of love. Surrey's lover in "Descripcion of the restlesse state of a lover" rues the fact that

 But all to late love learneth me, 
 To painte all kinde of colours new, 
 To blinde their eyes that els shoulde see, 
 My specled chekes with Cupides hewe. 
 And nowe the covert brest I claime, 
 That worshipt Cuppide secretely: 
 And norished his sacred flame. (5)

With the "specled" color of embarrassment and/or suffering tears, Surrey's lover stresses a desire to hide the physical effects of his love and in this follows the Rime sparse 71 where Petrarch complained of the "many colors Love often paints in my face." Within the religious context evoked by the poem, the lover's "worship" has also remade him in the god's image, for he has taken on "Cupides hewe." The deployment, moreover, of the terms "covert brest," "worshipt Cuppide," "norished" and "sacred flame" connects this poem to specific Catholic practices. Catholic polemicists provide a different view of the kind of traditional practices inscribed in Tottel's Miscellany from the one Perkins offered. In A Treatise of the Images of Christ (1567), Catholic exile Nicholas Sander defends the Catholic adoration of sacred images against Protestant accusations of idolatry. (16) Sander writes,

 It is the mind which geveth honour principally. If I fal down before 
 an Image, and kisse the same, and light a candel before it ... 
 either of Christ, or of his Mother, or of his Disciples, towards 
 whome I desier to shew mie affection, God it knoweth mie honour is
 farre of from that honour, which is due to God alone. In so much, 
 that if I lay prostrate before Christes feete, and kissed them, and 
 knocked mie brest and held up my hands to him, and crept upon my 
 knees after him, and called him the Sonne of God, and yet al this 
 while thought him not to be the natural son of God ... mine honour
 should be accompted no honour at al. (f. 10v; my emphasis)

Not unlike the proverbial Petrarchan lover seeking the physical embrace of his beloved, Catholic devotees wished to "shew" their "affection" and "kiss" their beloved saints with heartfelt physical adoration and with the "honour" of lighting candles before them. The behavior of devotees giving honor, lying "prostrate" before saints, and creeping on "knees" aptly represents the ritual practices and the specific language circulated in Catholic discourse. Sander, furthermore, connects Catholic material practices to "the mind." As Perkins had also, early modern writers across faiths and discourses repeatedly assert that religious practice inculcates religious thinking. After the iconoclastic destruction enacted during the reign of Edward VI, Marian England was on its way to a more or less comprehensive return to Catholic practice with its special regard for the use of images in devotion. (17) Published during the reign of Queen Mary, Tottel's Miscellany incorporates contemporary Catholic practice and its theology of images. Outlining the Catholic theology of image use, Marian Archbishop Edmund Bonner further details the lexicon of sixteenth-century ritual practice. In his widely used A profitable and neccessarye doctrine, with certayne homelyes adjoyned therunto (1555), Bonnet writes that "when we doo worshyppe the Images of Saynctes we doo not worshyppe those outewarde shapes or fygures, but we doo worshyppe the gyftes, graces, and vertues whych god hath wrought in those Sayntes ... and styrre uppe oure selves there by to imitate and folowe theyr foote steppes" (Ii 3r; my emphasis). (18) The images of saints inspired religionists to "folowe theyr foote steppes," for Catholics believed that the adoration or "worshyppe" of images was morally and spiritually productive. The images of the beloved saints, moreover, served as conduits of salvific grace. As Bonner writes, "when I doo honoure and openly adore the images of saints and erect or set up theyr Images these same saints do make interscession to God for me, that throughe their mediation, our mooste beninge god maye be mercifull, and frely graunt unto me remission of synnes" (Ii 40. (19) Early modern Catholics believed that they would receive God's saving mercy when they "worshyppe[d]," "adored," and "set up" the images of intercessory saints.

Applying this Catholic poetic discourse, Surrey's lover "erects or sets up" an image of Cupid and maintains a dedicated passion that bums in the "covert brest" or sacred shrine of his heart. Such a claim initially communicates the lover's serious commitment to the beloved but also echoes religious discourse. Philip Sidney's Petrarchan lover Astrophil will "adore" images in the "temple" of his "hart," and John Milton will reject all false "Temples" to find the muse of the Holy Spirit in a regenerate "upright heart and pure." Surrey's text also translates Paul's sense of the individual Christian as the Temple of God from 1 Corinthians, chapter three. (20) In the Geneva version, Paul asks, "Knowe ye not that ye are the Temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man destroy the Temple of God, him shall God destroy: for the Temple of God is holy, which ye are." Biblical discourse asserted that the "Spirit of God" should inhabit his "covert brest," yet Surrey's lover enshrines Cupid through the synecdoche of his sacred flame. Writing Cupid in his heart, Surrey's lover evokes Paul's sense of the individual body as being a temple "in you." Where Paul wished to replace Roman temples and the Jewish Temple with individual Christian temples, Surrey's ritualistic lover practices his religion in the temple of his own heart. In unison with the construction of his heart as a temple and the term "sacred flame," the contemporary term "worship" recalls the ubiquitous image of Catholic devotees worshipping before sacred lights. By worshipping Cupid through his "sacred flame," the lover becomes a serious devotee standing before the candle-lit shrine of a saint.

In conventional Petrarchan fashion, Surrey's gustatory metaphor, that he has "norished his sacred flame," indicates that his own desire and pining love feeds or nourishes the hot desire or "flame" inside of him. The term "nourish" also suggests that the lover provides material sustenance to keep the flame burning in his temple/breast. Since it is a "sacred" flame that will burn such "nourishment," this image may also evoke the biblical practice of making burnt offerings to God in the Jewish Temple. For distinctly different purposes, early modern Catholics and Protestants both connected those biblical sacrifices to Catholicism and especially to the Mass. (21) In pre-Reformation England, "sacred" flames or candles and torches were located in churches illuminating the carved, painted, and stained-glass images of saints. In both Foxe's Actes and Verstegen's Theatrum, Catholics kneel before candle-lit altars, worship under suspended candles, and carry lights in Catholic processions.

In an early modern religious context recalled by these popular prints, Surrey's poetic image of maintaining or nourishing a sacred light before a god also potentially evokes the popular practice of "decking" altars and saints or providing money for candles and the other material elements of saint construction and adoration. One of the most popular forms of early modern piety was providing wax, candles, and/or money to light the shrine or altar of one's favorite saint. (22) To "nourish" a sacred flame in Catholic England, then, also suggests that one provides the material support for the cultic worship so immensely popular in early modern England. In using such imagery, poets in Tottel's Miscellany and in other texts were able to define love in a language that a highly religious culture could readily understand. At the same time, such poetic imagery allowed a range of writers to voice a kind of Catholic religiosity that the Reformation had called into question.

Some early modern polemicists, however, suggested that love poetry could turn English men and women back to such Catholic pieties. A number of iconophobic polemicists, that is, feared that love poetry, among other cultural practices, might lead English people to return to Catholicism or Catholic ways of thinking. (23) When English Protestants threw down the body- and image-centered rituals of Catholicism, they replaced them with an English eucharist and the central practices of hearing and discussing sermons. With relatively few Protestant ministers qualified to preach the new dispensation, the Edwardian administration published a book of homilies or sermons to be read in churches. When Elizabeth came to the throne following the Marian hiatus from Protestantism, this book of homilies was returned to English churches and new sermons were added.

Echoing a broader cultural connection between erotic discourse and Catholicism, the widely heard Elizabethan homily "Against peril of Idolatrie" (1571) asserts, "every Artificer and profession hath his special Saint, as a peculiar god. As for example, Schollers have Saint Nicholas ... neither lacke souldiers their Mars, nor lovers their Venus, amongst Christians" (47). (24) Strikingly, the homilist asserts that even "amongst" ostensibly reformed Christians, "lovers" worship Venus as a "special" or patron "Saint." Paired with the homiletic assertion that in "pilgrimage going, Lady Venus and her sonne Cupide, were rather worshipped wantonly in the fieshe, then God the Father and our Saviour Christ his Sonne truely worshipped in the spirit" (49), these evocative homiletic claims reject the cult of Catholic saints and pilgrimage. Here, the Protestant homilist uses Venus and Cupid as allegorical figures to say that Catholic pilgrimage was "really" just an opportunity for men and women to have illicit sex. However, the text also makes a distinct connection between the figures of Venus and Cupid and Catholic religious practice: the "worship" and "pilgrimage going" reviled and rejected here in the homily. Such a connection speaks to the wider cultural assertion that the discourse and practices of love--Petrarchan, carnal or otherwise--had become an alternative religion.

The sermon makes the homology between Christianity and Petrarchan discourse explicit. Where the comparison usually remains implicit in love poetry, the preacher's prose contrasts Lady Venus and "her sonne Cupide" directly with God the Father and the "Saviour Christ his Sonne." The formal parallelism in this description and the repetition of "Sonne" constructs these amorous and allegorical figures as alternative or competing religious figures. The homology further decries the apparent fact that as God's son is a savior, Venus's son also functions as a salvific figure. When we remember that the homily "Against Idolatrie" was read repeatedly in churches throughout England and that the book of homilies was printed ten times in Elizabeth's reign, we recognize that a wide range of parishioners would have been repeatedly told that, in addition to representing sexual misconduct, Cupid and Venus are emblems of idolatrous practice and an alternative religion. If the anti-Catholic homily "Against Idolatrie" makes such a claim secondary to its assertion that pilgrimage was really an excuse for sex, Surrey and other contemporary writers take the wider cultural claim that Venus is a special saint and translate it to the specific needs of Petrarchan discourse. While the homilist does not overtly refer to writers, Petrarchan poets are "artificers" or linguistic craftsman who do create the art of Petrarchan poetry and, as the homilist writes, make Cupid and/or Venus Petrarchan saints. Translating Catholic theology and practice, Surrey and other English poets fashion Venus and Cupid as special or patron saints for lovers.

Sir John Cheke, a member of Surrey's coterie, extends the use of Catholic poetics and its fictive reenactment of Catholic religious adoration in Tottel's Miscellany 283, "The Lover Having Enjoyed His Love, Humbly Thanketh The God of Love." (25) "The Lover" did not appear in the first 1557 edition of Tottel's Miscellany, but was included in the second 1557 edition and in each of the eight early modern editions published thereafter. Casting Cupid as a special saint, this poem conveys a nuanced sense of Catholic poetics. (26) Instead of addressing a Catholic saint, the lover prays:

 Thou Cupide God of love, whom Venus thralles do serve, 
 I yeld thankes upon my knees, as thou dost well deserve. 
 By thee my wished joyes have shaken of despaire, 
 And all my storming dayes be past, and weather waxeth faire. 
 By thee I have received a thousand times more joy, 
 Then ever Paris did possesse, when Helen was in Troy. 
 (231; my emphasis)

Together, Surrey and Cheke's Catholic poet-lovers have "worshipt" at a "sacred flame," giving "thankes" upon their knees to "serve" the "gods" Cupid and Venus. Although kneeling remained a legal practice when Tottel first published his collection in 1557, already by 1549 kneeling to the name of Christ had become a controversial Catholic practice that some Protestants rejected. The poetic image of a lover kneeling before a divine being, however, evokes multiple early modern contexts that inflect the contemporary understanding of this ubiquitous Petrarchan image. Considered a pictorial medium, poetry was defined by Tudor theorists as a written discourse that produced visual images. (27) Within this context, the visual image of lovers kneeling or "worshipping" before the candle-lit shrine of Cupid initially evokes the poetic tradition of Cupid as a military lord who requires kneeling deference and the lover's martial "service" in a never-ending amorous battle. (28) Such an image may also evoke political or courtly service and the attendant rituals of deference, which required individual suitors and servants to kneel before their monarch or other superior. It is intriguing to note here that Surrey and Cheke's coterie used poems as scripts for highly ritualized social performances of courtly behavior, entertainment, and oral reading, which would quickly become the accepted allegorical language of political place seeking. (29) Perhaps Cheke and/or Surrey "playfully" kneeled before an imagined or real "beloved" if not before a male stand-in for Cupid. If so, they thereby literally embodied the images that were only mentally envisioned in their poems. In any case, Tudor aesthetic theory also expected English men and women to read such poetic images from multiple perspectives. Whereas the poetic tradition of Cupid's military service was known primarily to educated writers, the religious tradition of kneeling before a saint was familiar to everyone regardless of class or education. The image of kneeling before one's social or political superior might simply evoke social, military, and/or courtly conceptions of order and etiquette. The poetic/visual image of a man kneeling and "serving" before a divine being who brings aid, however, also invites contemporary readers to see Cupid as a saint. (30) Foxe's and Verstegen's images of kneeling devotees provide pictorial versions of Cheke's kneeling devotee-lover.

Cheke's use of the term "serve" corroborates this analysis of the multiple readings offered by the image of the kneeling lover. From the moment that Petrarchan discourse came to England and incorporated such ostensibly Catholic practices as kneeling to and "serving" the saint-beloved, Protestant polemicists had identified Petrarchan poetry as a religious discourse. (31) At the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign in 1561, broadside writer Thomas Brice complained about the kind of religiously inflected poetry published in Tottel's Miscellany, which had been circulating more widely in England. In contemptuous terms, Brice exclaims,

 Tel me is Christ, or Cupide Lord? doth God or Venus reigne? 
 And whose are wee? whom ought wee serve? I aske it, answere plaine
 If wanton Venus then go forth, if Cupide, keep your trade 
 If God, or Christ, come bak [to?] the best, or sure you will be made 
 Doth God? is he the Lord in deed? and should we him obey? (46) (32)

As the Elizabethan homilist would argue for somewhat different reasons ten years later, here "wanton" Venus and Cupid figure Petrarchan discourse as a serious religious threat to Christian life and practice, which Brice embodies in the ritually charged term "serve." (33) The 1578 translation of Peter Canisius's Catholic catechism, Certayne Necessarie Principles of Religion, uses the same term for religious worship to define the second commandment against idolatry. For Canisius, the second commandment "forbiddeth and disanulleth Idolatry, or honouring of false Gods, Magique, Divination, superstitious observaunces, and in breefe, all suche service of the Goddes, which is erronious and nought." (34) "Serve" and "service," then, communicated a sense of the religious worship of God that should not be given to Venus, Cupid, or idols. In Petrarchan poetry inflected by these ritual concerns, the metaphor of "service" incorporates military, courtly, and religious meanings. Such multiple meanings of "serve" correspond to the overlapping visual and verbal senses of courtly, military, and/or religious service to Cupid employed in many love poems in early modern England, including Surrey's, and Cheke's. Participating in the same coterie, Surrey and Cheke adapted representations of religious service to construct the depth and import of the lover's attachment to the unresponsive but inspirational beloved, yet we cannot simply assert that Surrey or Cheke wrote to evoke contemporary religious debate. We should not, however, ignore the possibility that some Petrarchan poets did engage in a poetic debate over the practice of religion in early modern England. While Surrey and/or Cheke's confessional allegiances might or might not suggest that their poetry figured support for Catholicism, some readers interpreted such poetry as evidence of a continued (and, from the Protestant perspective, idolatrous) interest in Catholic religious practice. In any case, as we come to recognize the degree to which a broad range of Petrarchan poets incorporated images of Catholic ritual practice into their poems, we can more easily understand why Protestants like Spenser, Sidney, and Milton sometimes so intensely denounced Petrarchan desire as idolatry.

Cheke participated in the transmission of traditional religion to English Petrarchan poetry by deploying the Catholic rituals of kneeling to, serving, and worshiping his saint Cupid. "The Lover Having Enjoyed" also reconstructs the Catholic theology of grace as a central component of his Catholic poetics. The poet-lover says that he will "performe" his ritual kneeling for, he exclaims of Venus and Cupid, "by thee I have received a thousand times more joy."

 By thee have I that hope, for which I longde so sore, 
 And when I thinke upon the same, my hart doth leap therefore. 
 By thee my heapy doubtes and trembling feares are fled, 
 And now my wits that troubled wer, with plesant thoughts are fed. 
 (231; my emphasis)

Here, Cheke's lover prays to Venus and Cupid and also evokes Paul's famous credo from I Corinthians 13, "now abideth faith, hope and love, even these three: but the chiefest of these is love." Echoing Paul, Cheke substitutes a Petrarchan triumvirate of "faith" (the result of his "heapy doubtes" fleeing), "Hope" and "joy." All this beneficence descends from "the seale and signe of love, the key of trouth and trust ... Such grace sins [sic] I have found." The poet-lover also swears he will be damned "If I do false my faith" for, he states, "I aske no better grace" (231-32). Traditionally, Petrarchan lover-poets constructed their mistresses as full of all the "graces" or virtues that define contemporary feminine beauty. Poets also used the term "grace" as a synonym for sexual favors and/or political aspirations. "No better grace," however, recognizes competing forms of grace including God's grace. In identifying himself as receiving a kind of grace that requires his own material action of "thankes upon my knees," the lover's use of the term "grace" also evokes Catholic piety. For Catholics the "works" of the sacraments necessarily involved the physical rituals prescribed by the Church. Cheke's lover correspondingly states the "I yeld thankes upon my knees" because Cupid and Venus "well deserve" such service. His description of these actions as necessary performance underscores the Catholic works-centered function of his love service. In this complex relation, he represents Cupid as a saint bringing him "grace" from the beloved who becomes a god. Furthermore, in naming both Cupid and Venus as the source of "such grace," Cheke emphasizes that the lover gives multiple saint figures all the life-sustaining powers of "Hope" and grace normally ascribed by Protestants only to God. Within the highly religious culture of Reformation England, the lover's "faith," his prayer to Venus and Cupid, his kneeling, and his reception of "no better grace" from multiple saints all re-create the ritual performances understood as Catholic piety.

Cheke's embodiment of the lover's ritual actions in Tottel's Miscellany contradicts a Protestant understanding of grace as delivered solely by God and adapts the Catholic theology of grace, which Catholics saw as accessible through the adoration of intermediary saints. Cheke's refrain of "by thee" also mimics the Catholic Mass, which thanked God by reiterating the formula "of thee." (35) Imitating the rhythms of the Catholic Mass and ancient Christian liturgy in this fashion, the refrain of "by thee" in Cheke's "The Lover Having Enjoyed" engenders a kind of ritual formalism not unfamiliar to early modern Catholics. The ritual decorum produced by these Mass rhythms dramatically underscores the source of his grace, which does not descend from God as a means to salvation but from the god and goddess of Love. The parallel between the theology of amorous love constructed here and the theology of Christian grace established by the Catholic Church is unmistakable. In both systems, "grace" descends from divine beings and produces "faith" and the necessary material "service" of kneeling and giving thanks.

In his self-positioning as the recipient of grace-for-services-rendered, the speaker reconstructs a theology of grace that turns not on the sacrifice of Christ, but on the propitiatory sacrifice offered by ritual lovers before their Petrarchan saints Cupid and Venus. The use of the Catholic liturgy of saints was apparently a commonplace in early modern love poetry. Thomas Proctor, in a later miscellany titled A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), for example, records that the lover Pyramus goes before an "idol" in "Venus Temple" and "prostrate downe doth fal." In his text, "Poore Pyramus in Venus Church" "performed his vowes and prayers eke," which directly recalls the lover's Catholic "performance" in Cheke's poem. (36) Four years later in his own Petrarchan sequence The Passionate Century of Love (1582), Thomas Watson reiterated Catholic poetics and wrote about a lover who "adores" his "saint" in "Cupid's Church," hoping "the Saint I serve" with "sacrifice" would "geve [me] helpe in time;" the term "sacrifice" may evoke eucharistic controversy because Catholics defined the sacrament as a sacrifice and many Protestants defined it as a memorial. In any case, Watson's Catholic lover commands other suffering lovers to "Hang up your votive tables in the quire / Of Cupids Church, in witness of the paine" they have experienced. (37) Unlike the Elizabethan homily "Against Idolatrie" and other ostensibly Protestant poems like Proctor's, however, Watson does not make Venus or Cupid's Church an idolatrous temple where devotees perform, as Perkins wrote, "the popish superstitions in sacrifices" to an "idol." Along with the remaining Catholic poetics in Tottel's Miscellany, Proctor and Watson's poetic use of Catholic theology and practice suggests that the Catholic poetics was more widely used in the period.

Cheke's text casts this amorous system of grace within the clothing of Petrarchan service to Cupid and Venus, yet it remains a thinly veiled Catholic system, which may attest to the continuing popularity of such ritual practices in the period. Such use may also attest to the utility of Catholic poetics as a Petrarchan language understood by many readers and used by a wide range of sixteenth-century poets. During 1557, when Queen Mary reigned and Catholic theologians stressed reform-influenced ideas far more than traditional Catholic practices and beliefs (such as purgatory and the concomitant adoration of saints), Tottel's inclusion of this ostensibly proritual text in his second edition of 1557 could have also been read as support of a relatively conservative ritual mentality. (38) The continued inclusion of such poems in subsequent editions of Tottel's Miscellany published during the Protestant reign of Elizabeth, furthermore, could alternately be read as a rejection of the ostensible Protestant "settlement" of religion eventually achieved under the new Queen. I would argue, moreover, that not unlike the popular stage, love poetry could serve as a venue from which to celebrate amorous and religious ritual as an essential part of life and, thereby, also as a safe venue in which to criticize the Reformation. With the relatively uncontrollable circulation and subsequent collection and editing of manuscript poetry in early modern England, the strategic placement of Catholic poetics by editors and printers makes Surrey's or Cheke's own religious beliefs largely irrelevant. (39) The plasticity of such religious and poetic imagery is supported by the fact that Surrey's poetry and life could be used by both Roman Catholic Queen Mary and Protestant martyr Anne Askew to justify their own diametrically opposed confessional, rhetorical, and political goals. (40)

The early modern editor of Tottel's Miscellany removed much in the way of Catholic imagery or, as Rollins writes, "comments" on Catholicism. Contrary to Rollins's assertions, however, Tottel's 221 deploys Catholic poetics to marked purpose. In Tottel's 221, "The lover sheweth what he would have if it were graunted him to have what he would wishe" converts traditional neoplatonic Petrarchanism to a decidedly Catholic sense and thereby transforms a popular spiritualizing Petrarchan figure into a trope that makes the body a central element in amorous and religious discourse.

Rejecting all manner of worldly pleasures including "princely hye estate," victory in war, and "worldly rule," the lover claims to desire only the "joy and perfect blisse" of his beloved. Following Petrarch's Christian and/or Dantean neoplatonism, the lover evokes the standard claim that the contemplation of his beloved will take him to a higher realm of existence. He rejects all worldly desires as

 Grose and gredie wittes which grope but on the ground. 
 To gather muck of worldly goodes which oft do them confounde. 
 Can not attaine to know the misteries devine 
 Of perfit love wherto hie wittes of knowledge do incline. (172)

Contrasting the "muck" of "worldly goodes" that others find on the "ground" to the "misteries devine" of "hie wittes" who seek "knowledge," the lover rejects the world because it cannot bring him the "perfit love" his lady provides. Thus far, the lover provides a very Petrarchan sense of love as a path to neoplatonic spiritual advancement, but he does not stop there. Much as John Donne will later embrace a poetic that confirms a Catholic sense of amorous and ritual worship as requiring the body, this lover also embraces a decidedly body-centered sense of his sacramental divine mystery. Where the "mystery of God" was said by Catholics to be revealed in the Mass and the other sacraments as a result of specific, material rituals, "The lover sheweth" casts the speaker's beatific vision of his beloved as the same type of "misterie devine," which also results from specific material actions. (41) As an amorous kind of sacrament, this Petrarchan "misterie" is constructed as producing grace. At the end of a poem in which the controlling metaphor consistently valorizes the spiritual, internal world over the physical and external one, the author of "The lover sheweth" writes that

 And as the Angels all which sit in heaven rye 
 With presence and the sight of god have theyr felicitie. 
 So lykewyse I in earth, should have all earthly blis, 
 With presence of that paragon, my god in earth that is. 
 (172) (42)

What had been described in contrast to all the impermanent "worldly goodes," comes to be defined as equivalent to the beatific vision of God granted to angels in "heaven rye." In a figurative strategy that turns on simile, the author of "The lover sheweth" equates the beloved with God. Initially serving as either hubris or hyperbole, this trope likens the lover's earthly vision of the beloved to the angels' beatific, heavenly vision of God and the divine joy produced by that mysterious vision. Like "sacrifice" in other poems, the repetition of the term "presence" in this poem may also evoke contemporary eucharistic controversy, which turned precisely on the "real presence" of God in the sacrament. In any case, the term "as" in line eighteen and the term "lykewyse" in line twenty make the comparison between these two ostensibly distinct experiences explicit, but the poet further marks the similarity between these two experiences by providing a precise parallel in syntax and meter between the two separate lines. Through parallelism, "the sight of god" and "that paragon" are equated as the same kind of blissful experience. In this, the lover places himself in the position of "the Angels" in heaven hye" who bask in the glow of God on his throne. While both Dante and Petrarch, following the Wisdom of Solomon 7:26-27, envisioned Beatrice and Laura, respectively, as emanations of the beatific vision of God's female, heavenly wisdom, neither of them made amorous beatification the result of the material actions of the lover. (43)

More than an element in the "sublime love tradition" or an expression of the so-called "yearning other-worldliness of the Petrarchan mode," this complex image of the mysterious "presence" of the beloved relies directly upon contemporary Catholic religious sensibilities that stand in opposition to Protestantism. (46) Despite rejecting all physical and material rewards, the beatification of the beloved is produced by the physical actions of the lover and the beloved. In contrast to the physical world he rejected, this beatific vision comes to him with the material

 Touching of her corall lippes [which] would straighteways 
 make me gladde, 
 And when that in my heart I fele that dyd me greve 
 With one imbracing of her armes she might me sone releve: 
 And as the Angels all which sit in heaven hye. (172)

The "mystery" of this sacramental vision and bodily experience of God does not strictly reside in his heart, his mind, or in the poem, but significantly takes place when (and if) he kisses his beloved's "corall lippes" and she holds him in her "arms." Medieval mystics, mystery playwrights, and painters had envisioned the devotees of Christ kissing his life-giving mouth. Here, the anonymous author of Tottel's 221 uses that evocative religious image to fashion his own passionate and grace-full experience. The mystery plays continued to be performed into the reign of Elizabeth. Those plays and many other devotional texts reiterated the centrality of the body in Christ's Passion as well as in the human experience of the divine. (45) Figuring this contemporary sense of the necessity of the body in worship, "The lover sheweth" represents this sacramental moment as occurring precisely when the lover kisses his beloved--not unlike apologist Sander fashioned Catholic devotees kissing their saints to receive grace and felicity. If the beloved becomes a kissed saint here, the poet fantasizes that the saint comes to life and embraces him in a way that Sander did not envision. In any case, in a poem that had rejected physical rewards and worldly pursuit, such an emphasis on the physical actions of the lovers and the poem's corresponding formal, i.e., material precision strongly emphasize the physicality and thus the Catholic sensibility of this moment. Through its precise material form the poem embodies a religious message: the physical use of poetic and physical bodies is appropriate in love and religion.

In Tottel's 221, the poet's revision of Petrarchan neoplatonism relies upon contemporary Catholic religious sensibilities that centralize the body in worship. (46) The normally spiritual and disembodied experiences of felicity and bliss promised to neoplatonic lovers--described as divine mysteries or the source of sacramental grace--are here paired with the very material presence of lips and arms. Such a combination asserts the interconnectedness of body and spirit, which was the hallmark of early modern Catholic piety. As the beloved also embraces the lover, the poem may imply that such religious felicity and grace requires the physical intervention of someone other than the worshipper. In a sense, the beloved may become not only a saintly intermediary helping the lover-devotee to higher grace, but also a kind of priest-like figure who performs material actions along with the devotee to produce such grace. Reformation Protestants, on the other hand, removed priestly and saintly intermediaries from their theology of grace. Protestants also increasingly removed the body as a conduit of grace from worship and made "the Spirit" the only religious vessel in human life. Cheke balances his definition of love between the ratified experience of divine "felicitie" and the physical touch of lips and arms by pointedly bringing the Catholic valuation of the body to his poem. In this manner, religion also becomes an essential tool for refashioning sexual love as essential to human life. Contrary to modern criticism, early modern religion does not focus solely upon the conflict between human and divine love or even on the suppression of physical love by Protestant morality (cupiditas vs. caritas) but, rather, brings the physical and the spiritual together to stress the great importance of bodies in human love. (47) Read as confessional apologetics, the poem can also be said to celebrate the importance of ritual in life and to stress that religion necessitates the union of body and soul in worship.

Such a reconstruction cannot be attributed to a modern strategy of reading against the grain. Nor can the use of Catholic poetics be limited to Tottel's Miscellany, for other early modern responses to English Petrarchan poetry again corroborate this reconstruction of Catholic poetics operating widely in Reformation literature. In his popular and didactic collection Rocke of Regard (1576), for example, Protestant writer George Whetstone deplores the representation of Catholic practice in the early modern religion of love. The ritual language of Catholic poetics permeates Whetstone's moralistic text where he depicts lovers who "serve.... saints" and "goddesses" by "stooping" and "honouring" them in order to achieve "grace." Instead of God's grace, Whetstone's lover Plasmos pointedly "attained her grace" by serving his mistress in traditional fashion with both "penance" and "sacrifice."

As these ritual terms attest, the wider cultural association of traditional Petrarchan service with Catholic ritual practice recorded in Tottel's Miscellany was familiar enough to readers and writers that Plasmos could compare the two by simply writing "as good men God, so I my Goddesse serv'd." If such a description does not obviously enough fashion Petrarchanism as a religious piety or "service," Whetstone provides a staggering marginal gloss upon Plasmos's ritualized practice: "the religion of wanton lovers [is] like the papistes." (48) In this portrait, Whetstone expands upon the more general claims of Brice and the Elizabethan homilist to assert that the Petrarchan lover is a kind of Catholic in hiding. Rather than simply repeating such Protestant iconoclastic prejudice, however, we recognize the existence of a Catholic poetics, which many early modern poets deployed without adding the type of Protestant rejection Whetstone had.

Because it celebrated or at least reiterated a residual (and increasingly oppressed) ritual ideology, "The lover sheweth" could have been read as embodying conservative support for Catholic or "papist" practice in the face of the nascent Protestantism circulating in England and at the court of Henry VIII. In 1557, when Tottel's Miscellany was initially published under Mary, such a poetic recasting of traditional religion within that text would have been a familiar and welcome group of images for those Catholic devotees attempting to rebuild the "true Catholic Church" and the venerable "traditions of their fathers." If the poetic representation of these Catholic sentiments during a Catholic regime are not considered especially interesting, the continued inclusion of this poem in later editions of the Miscellany during the reign of Protestant Queen Elizabeth might have been seen as perpetuating a transgressive ritual ideology as both Brice and Whetstone's Elizabethan comments suggest. If we recall, moreover, that Catholicism remained a viable religious option for many in the first decade of Elizabeth's reign, when it was still uncertain what religion would prevail in the kingdom and before Catholicism had become a traitorous practice and discourse, we might better understand how the Catholic poetics in Tottel's 1557 text and in other circulating poems could have stood out to readers concerned with (advancing or retarding) religious change. (49)

Where scholars have found poetic evidence of Protestant pieties represented in the period's poetry, they have recovered an aptly named Protestant poetics. It should follow that when we recover Catholic concerns and practices in sixteenth-century love poetry, we must also reconstruct a Catholic poetic discourse. As we have seen, Surrey, Cheke, and other poets reconstruct the efficacy of ritual practice and Catholic theology in amatory devotion. In the context of Reformation debate and the other contemporary religious practices represented in other poems, such body- and image-centered practices registered a Catholic note in the highly iconoclastic moment of the English Reformation when Protestantism was becoming the dominant religious and poetic ideology.

Not all poets inscribing religious ritual in Tottel's Miscellany re-created traditional Catholic practices as Cheke, Surrey, and others had. The anonymous author of Tottel's 172, "The tale of Pigmalion with conclusion upon the beautye of his love," initially incorporates creative Catholic "works" in his poem only to reject them as disabling idolatry. In this, he provides readers with a subtle portrait of ritual love, which appropriates Catholic poetics as a weapon in a program of Protestant cultural iconoclasm.

Rewriting the story of Ovid's artist-lover Pygmalion, the poem presents both the traditional Petrarchan trope of the artist's inability to represent the true beauty of his beloved and an anxious meditation on the creative nature of the Petrarchan artist. The poet of "The tale" (whom we shall call the Pygmalion poet) writes that Pygmalion "made so faire a woman.... of Yvorie white" that no one could tell the difference between it and an actual woman.

 Twixt nature, & Pygmalion, there might appeare great stryfe. 
 So semely was this ymage wrought, it lackt nothying but life. 
 His curious eye beheld his own devised work: 
 And, gasying oft thereon, he found much venome there to lurke. 
 For all the featurde shape so dyd his fansie move: 
 That, with his idoll, whom he made, Pygmalion fell in love. 
 To whom he honour gave, and deckt with garlandes swete, 
 And did adourn with jewels fiche, as is for lovers mete. 
 Somtimes on it he fawned: some time in rage would crye: 
 It was a wonder to beholde, how fansy bleard his eye. (126)

Like Petrarch's proverbially unrequited lover, in Tottel's poem Pygmalion pursues the love of a cold and unresponsive beloved "as is for lovers mete." Like the conventional lover-poet, Pygmalion also "writes" his beloved in order to win "immortal name." While the parallels between the traditional lover-poet and this artist identify Pygmalion as the consummate Petrarchan, the Pygmalion text also exhibits an anxiety over producing idolatrous art. (50) Surrey and Cheke had presented images of lovers worshipping before saints, but the Pygmalion poet and other ostensibly Protestant poets reconstruct the Catholic practice of making saints itself. Representing the artist as a skilled carver and worshipper of saints' statues and other images, the Pygmalion poet asserts that Pygmalion's "fame" came from "his connyng" skill. In Protestant polemic, moreover, the images of saints were made of a specific set of material elements: they were "trimly deckt in Golde, Silver ... Stone," "Ivorie," and "pearle." (51) In line with the physical descriptions of those ritual artifacts, Pygmalion chooses both "jewels rich" and ivory to construct his beloved as a Catholic devotional artifact and himself as a carver of saints' images. Even as it figures the traditional practice of "decking" saints through Catholic poetics, such a focus also participates in a type of Reformed iconoclasm.

Protestants rejected as idolatrous saints' images on walls, in stained glass windows, and in painted statues, which were so very popular in Catholic England. Warning those who enacted such physical practices instead of embracing the logocentric spirituality of "Gods worde," the Elizabethan homily "Against Idolatrie" promises

 a just reward for those that have left the mighty living GOD, the 
 Lord of hosts, and have stooped and given the honour due to him, to 
 deade blockes and stockes, who have eyes and see not, feet and 
 cannot goe, and so foorth, and are cursed of GOD, and all they that 
 make them, and that put their trust in them. 
 (37; my emphasis)

Here and throughout his text, the Elizabethan homilist stresses that idols are powerless because they are the finite and imperfect "works of man's hands." He also warns of the punishment given to those devotees who "make them" and "stoop" or kneel before them in traditional Catholic fashion. The Pygmalion poet inherited such concerns from medieval writers who had figured Pygmalion as an idolatrous lover. The "Tale of Pygmalion" also inherited Chaucer's concern for the "idol of the text" or the potential idolatrousness of creative poetic images. (52) English Reformation architects William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer, moreover, used Paul's biblical sense of the idolatrous imagination to recast medieval Catholicism as the inheritor of an idolatrous, enslaving, and feminizing pagan and Hebrew imagination. These complex anxieties over the potential idolatry of imaginative literature would remain prevalent themes throughout the early modern period and would haunt poets such as Spenser, Sidney, Herbert, and Milton. (53) In worrying over the physical practices of this Petrarchan lover-artist, Tottel's Pygmalion poet provides an early Reformation model for such iconoclastic, poetic anxiety; later early modern poets and polemicists would also construct Pygmalion as an idolatrous Catholic lover. Here, the poet attributes Pygmalion's great "fame" to "his connyng" skill and turns readers' attention to the fact that he created this object. The Pygmalion poet first refers to Pygmalion's beloved statue as "this ymage wrought." The term "wrought" emphasizes both the palpability of the statue and the great skill needed to carve such an artifact. This Protestant, iconophobic focus on the crafted nature of the statue repeats itself in the assertion that the statue is "his own devised" work. Finally, when the poet goes beyond describing Pygmalion's beloved statue as an "ymage," he writes that Pygmalion has "made" it but that it is also an "idoll." If the poem's repeated focus on the material construction of the "image" does not evoke the Protestant distrust of "dead," deceptively crafted images, then the concurrent use of the term "idoll," which "lackt nothying but life," would have done so.

"The tale of Pygmalion" is not, however, the only poem in the collection that incorporates the term "idol" to define Petrarchan love as idolatry. Poem 226, "Of a lover that made his onelye God of his love," also decries Petrarchan love as idolatry, even though it fails to provide the elaboration that makes "The tale" a distinctly Protestant text. Having sought long for a woman "worthy to receive such trust" (1. 11) of "A faithful frende" (1. 9), the lover of Tottel's 226 admits,

 I carde for her so much alone, 
 That other God I carde for none. 
 But as it dothe to them befall, 
 That to them selves respect have none: 
 So sweete graffe is growen to gall 
 Where I sowed mirthe I reaped mone 
 this ydoll that I honorde so, 
 Is now transformed to my fo. (177)

Here the lover follows Petrarch's Rime sparse 60 in admitting that his love and his poetry have taken him away from God and have become his "ydoll." Petrarch's figuration of poetic love and poetic pursuit as idolatry influenced Tottel's Miscellany, but Petrarch did not represent Catholic ritual in his poetry as English poets did. (54) Echoing iconoclastic polemics, Tottel's 226 suggests that the lover's worship of his idol resulted in a "just scourge" of "pla[u]ges" and that his "soule shall suffer for the same" (177-78). The poem, however, does not contain the repetitive stress on the lover's creative powers or evoke contemporary saint-decking terminology. "Of a lover that made his onelye God" also does not use both "image" and "ydoll," which was a key part of the Protestant iconoclastic vocabulary. Instead of turning to contemporary Protestantism, the text relies upon traditional humanist and biblical rejections of lust to structure this poem. (55) These moralizing sentiments were relatively popular in the period as evidenced by the fact that John Harington, the elder, also copied "Of a lover" into his family's poetic miscellany. (56) Rather than follow this popular tradition of Christian morality inherited from Petrarch, the Pygmalion poet incorporates a wider range of Protestant sensibilities that situate this poem firmly within sixteenth-century iconoclastic discourse. Paired with the descriptive Catholic ritual terms "honour" and "adoum," the Pygmalion poet's use of the prerogative "fawned" and "idoll" and the repeated anxiety concerning Pygmalion's generative powers identifies Pygmalion in early modern Protestant discourse as an idolatrous artist guilty of literally making his own creation his god. The Pygmalion poet denigrates the image-centered worldview of Catholicism by focusing on the artist's own "eye." Pygmalion's moral eye is "bleard" and he is observed "gaysing oft" on what has been interpreted as a saint's statue. The Pygmalion poet thus echoes the negative judgment evoked in Perkins's denigration of devotional "pictures." That rejection necessarily invokes the Catholic sense of the centrality of images in worship, which also enables Watson to communicate the lover's visible suffering by hanging "votive tables" in Cupid's church for other Petrarchan devotees to see and adore. Using the terms "poison" and "bleard," however, the Pygmalion poet reconstructs a distinctly Protestant rejection of the Catholic understanding of images in worship. (57) The Pygmalion poet also uses the terms "image" and "idol" to describe it.

Contemporary usage of the terms "idol" and "image" is instructive for understanding the Pygmalion poet's use of these terms in Tottel's Miscellany. In 1555 just before Tottel's Miscellany was published, Catholic Archbishop Bonner advances a representative Catholic theological and linguistic distinction between images and idols. Rejecting Protestant iconoclasm, Bonner asserts in A profitable and necessarye doctryne that "betwene an Image (whyche is a name of reverence) and an Idol (whyche alwayes with the good is abhominable) there is a very notable and greate difference" ([f.Iil.sup.r]). For Catholics like Bonner, "images" of Christ and the saints were acceptable conduits of grace and patterns for a good Catholic life. (58) "Idols," on the other hand, were defined as only those "false" images and pursuits that took the place of God. Catholics expressly rejected the Protestant assertion that all images used in worship are idols. Contemporary Protestant polemicists, however, considered the terms "image" and "idol" to be synonymous; that is, as the Elizabethan homilist and other Protestants repeatedly wrote, the terms "idol" and "image" signifie one thing." Any and all images used in worship were idolatrous. By the end of the sixteenth century, moreover, the term "image" was identified in lexicons as "idol." (59) From this, the Pygmalion poet's synonymous use of "idol" for "image" follows Protestant lexical practice instead of maintaining the linguistic, conceptual, and religious distinction maintained by Catholic writers. The "Tale of Pygmalion" thus becomes a tale of the Petrarchan idolator.

Published under Catholic Queen Mary, Tottel's Miscellany--contrary to Rollins's claim--did include "comments" on Catholicism. As we have seen, however, Tottel's was only one cultural text among many that incorporated and rejected a Catholic poetics. Read in the Catholic moment in which they were written, circulated, and published, moreover, such ostensibly Protestant poems as the "Tale" could have been read as a rejection of the Catholic cult of the saints, which was being assiduously repaired and reinstated by the Marian government. If Rollins's sense of religious history and Petrarchan literature did not allow him to recognize the religious representations within the text of Tottel's Miscellany or in other contemporary texts, our more complete understanding of early modern pieties does allow us to do so.

As even this initial analysis of the religious discourse invoked in Tottel's Miscellany demonstrates, early modern writers conceived of ritual worship in ever-expanding terms. Saints or "idols" were not only carved, painted, and adored in churches, chantries, and in private homes, but also were actively written into the texts of Petrarchan poetry. Surrey, Cheke, and the Pygmalion poet's texts establish the existence of a Catholic discourse circulating within Tottel's Miscellany and the wider literary culture. Literary historians, however, continue to overlook such sixteenth-century evocations of religious culture for at least two reasons. First, they do so because of a largely unexamined adherence to C. S. Lewis's claim that early and mid-sixteenth century poetry is "drab." This critical tradition has kept scholars from carefully examining this poetry in the light of the most recent Reformation historiography. Second, when scholars have read Petrarchan poetry in the context of religion, they have limited those readings to the evocation of Protestant theology and have thereby missed the representation of Catholic practice.

Nevertheless, the foregoing argument hopes to suggest some of the ways we can begin to supplement modern criticism and bring a revised understanding of the Reformation to our readings of Petrarchan literature. Far from suggesting that all love poetry is "really" about religion, the argument suggests that such love poetry is often about love, politics, and religion simultaneously, which reflects Tudor aesthetic theory. Scholars have examined the "religion of love" in medieval poetry, yet there a distinctly Catholic poetics could not have had the same potentially transgressive meaning as in the post-Reformation period when Catholicism came under attack as a residual and, later, traitorous discourse. (60) Petrarchan poetry did continue during the Reformation, and it did incorporate Protestant and Catholic sensibilities, pieties, and poetics. Although it was heavily bowdlerized to remove Catholic sensibilities, Tottel's Miscellany retained clear comments on Catholic practice, but--as we have seen--it was not the only published or circulating manuscript text in the period to identify Petrarchanism as a kind of Catholic religion. The survival of Catholicism in Tottel's anthology and the many negative reactions to Petrarchan discourse, then, suggest that a Petrarchan Catholic poetics circulated relatively widely in early modern England. Critics, however, have not reconstructed the Reformation tradition of such a Catholic "religion of love" that preceded and prepared the way for later poets. (61) In this Reformation moment, the poetic figuration of Catholic ideas and practices in Petrarchan discourse was often read as a conservative or reactionary reiteration of Catholicism and/ or idolatrous "papistry." We cannot read such figurations of Catholicism as a simple index of confessional allegiances, but neither can we reject the possibility that such poems could express Catholic sympathies or a lingering attachment to the "old" religion.

As the ritual practices of the "old religion" were increasingly removed from early modern life, Petrarchan discourse offered a discursive space in which to engage Catholicism on its own terms for both artistic and ideological purposes. Responding to the slow growth of Protestantism among a tenaciously Catholic populace, the ostensible embrace of Catholic religion in Petrarchan poetry seems a logical response to the radical removal of ritual practice from early modern life. English Protestants recognized this poetic recreation of outlawed piety and found ways to offer ritual in representations of human love without ceding ground to Catholicism or Cupid's Church. As the Reformation progressed, moreover, Petrarchan poetry grew in popularity, and love poets writing after the publication of Tottel's Miscellany continued to incorporate both Catholic and Protestant poetics regularly in their work. In this, early modern poetry inscribes the running Reformation battle between Catholic and Protestant writers for cultural and religious hegemony.

Does this mean that people felt a growing need for ritual in their lives, which they found in love poetry? In other words, was Petrarchan poetry so popular, in part, because it expressed a popular Catholic piety that was outlawed in English churches? (62) By way of initially answering this question, we should note that when Petrarchanism was at its most popular from the 1570s to the 1590s, England was also experiencing one of its most anti-Catholic moments. While a direct correlation between religious persecution or ritual deprivation and the figuration of religion in Petrarchan poetry is not possible, we can suggest that Petrarchan poetry and its Reformation religion of love reflects the ongoing impact of cultural reform and offers critics and historians a site at which religion and literature intersect in suggestive ways.

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Notes

(1.) Hyder Rollins, ed., Tottel's, 2, p. 3. All citations to Tottel's Miscellany are taken from the Hyder Rollins edition, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).

(2.) While The Courte of Venus, ed. Russell Fraser (Durham: Duke University Press, 1955), was published in the 1530s, that collection of Petrarchan poems does not seem to have had the same immense impact as Tottel's Miscellany or survived in a complete form.

(3.) Beyond noting that William Gray's epitaph (Tottel's no. 255) had been edited to remove its "vigorous antipapal satire and advocacy of the English Bible as the guide to life" (245), John King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), does not situate Tottel's Miscellany within the context of Reformation history.

(4.) In addition to the extensive introduction provided by Rollins, the critical literature on the Miscellany that explores its place in continental and domestic literary traditions includes Douglas Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of the Plain and Eloquent Styles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 39-86. See also, Richard Osberg, "Alliterative Lyrics in Tottel's Miscellany: The Persistence of Medieval Style," Studies in Philology 76.4 (1979): 334-52 and William Sessions, "Tottel's Miscellany and the Metaphysical Poets" in Approaches to Teaching the Metaphysical Poets, ed. Sidney Gottlieb (New York: MLA, 1990), 48-53. For a stylistic analysis, see F. Corbett, "Some Contributors to 'Tottel's Miscellany'" in Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, second series, vol. 26 (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 145-63, C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 236-40, and Elizabeth Pomeroy, The Elizabethan Miscellanies: Their Development and Conventions (Berkeley: California University Press, 1973), 1-16 and 31-52. See also Jane Hedley, Power in Verse: Metaphor and Metonymy in the Renaissance Lyric (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988). On the place of Tottel's Miscellany in early modern social, bibliographical, and print discourses, see J. W. Saunders, "The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry," Essays in Criticism 1.2 (1951): 139-64; for a readjustment of Saunders's claim, see Nita Krevans, "Print and the Tudor Poets" in Reconsidering the Renaissance, ed. Mario Di Cesare (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 301-14. See aso G. K. Hunter, "Drab and Golden Lyrics of the Renaissance" in Forms of Lyric, ed. Reuben Brower (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 5-18, and Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 212-27. See also Elizabeth Heale, 'Songs, Sonnets and Autobiography: Self-Representation in Sixteenth-Century Verse Miscellanies" in Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, eds. Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox (London: Macmillan, 2000), 59-75.

(5.) This statement is from Debora Shuger, "Religious Backgrounds of Elizabethan Shorter Poetry" in Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry, eds. Patrick Cheney and Anne Lake Prescott (New York: MLA, 2000), 89. Although he does not address Petrarchan poetry, Brian Cummings, in "Reformed Literature and Literature Reformed" in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 821-22, has written "the history of the sonnet or of English metrics serenely bypasses the strange, savage world of heresy and treason trials in which the forms of English religion were ripped apart not once but five times in the course of thirty years."

(6.) Rollins, Tottel's, 2, 97. See also King, Reformation, 245.

(7.) Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

(8.) King, Reformation, 224-31, maintains a binary separation between secular and religious discourses in the period's poetry. Thomas Roche, Jr., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS Press, 1989) and Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986) are two important exceptions who place Petrarchan poetry within the context of religious discourse.

(9.) Perkins, A golden chaine, or the description of theologie (1558), STC (2nd ed.) 19657, f. G[1.sup.v]. On the importance, popularity, and theology of "experimental predestinarianism" in his work, see Lori Anne Ferrell, "Transfiguring Theology: William Perkins and Calvinist Aesthetics" in John Foxe and His World, eds. Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2002).

(10.) I examined the second edition, The first volume of the ecclesiasticall history contayngyng the acres and monumentes of thynges passed in euery kynges tyme in this realme (London, 1570) STC (2nd ed.) 11223. Image by permission of the Rare Book & Special Collections Library, The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. For a wide-ranging exploration of Foxe, see Highley and King, Foxe.

(11.) Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum (Antwerp, 1587). I examined the 1604 edition. Image by permission of the Rare Book & Special Collections Library, The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

(12.) See Highley, "Richard Verstegen's Book of Martyrs," in Highley and King, Foxe, 183-97.

(13.) On Protestant iconoclasm as a ritual practice, see Margaret Aston, England's Iconoclasts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). See also Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

(14.) Rollins, Tottel's, 1, 51; 129, 130, 139, 141,265,309; 18; 139; 221; 273; 300; 306; 309.

(15.) Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 201, discusses Surrey's use of Catholic marriage and writes, "Surrey enacts an objective and historically liturgical performance" to structure his "Set me whereas the sun doth parch the green." Sessions, however, does not discuss the deployment of Catholicism or the Reformation. Rollins, Tottel's, 1, 11.

(16.) Nicholas Sander, A Treatise of the Images of Christ ([1567], Ilkley: Scolar Press, 1976). On Sander's prose, see A. C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 1559-1582 (London: Sands, 1950), 94-100, and Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1977), 11-15.

(17.) On the resurgence of Catholic religion and ritual under Mary, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 524-64 and Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 95-106. For a dissenting view of this process, see A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 2nd ed. (London: Batsford, 1989). Muir, Ritual, 197, takes the middle ground stating that Duffy's "defense of Catholicism misses the degree to which English communities were deeply divided on religious issues and had already begun to express themselves in diverging ritual languages before Henry VIII ever thought of divorcing Catherine of Aragon." More recently, in her incisive reconsideration of Reformation Catholicism, Lucy Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 114-51, argues that the Marian church cannot be equated either with an underground Recusant Catholicism or a late medieval Catholicism, but rather a humanist-informed Catholicism, which had more in common with Henrician Catholicism than scholars have noted.

(18.) Edmund Bonner, A profitable and necessarye doctrine, with certayne homelyes adjoyned thereunto (London, 1555), STC (2nd ed.) 3283.3 (Doctrine) 3285.5 (Homilies). On Bonner's work, see Wooding, Rethinking, 132, 153-58.

(19.) On "adoration" of saints in late medieval and early modern Catholic theology, see also Jaroslav Pelikan, Reformation of Church and Dogma 1300-1700 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 260-61. Compare also Perkins, Golden, describing the use of "saints" in his extensive discussion of idolatrous ritual and belief, saying that "nevertheless, such as are Saints indeede, are to be honoured by an approbation of Gods gifts in them and by an honourable mention of them, and also by imitation of their manners and lives, being as paterns for us to walke after," f., G[3.sup.v].

(20.) Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 5, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William Ringlet, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Paradise Lost, Bk. 1 1.18, The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

(21.) Marian Catholic polemicist George Marshall, "A compendious treatise in metre declaring the firste originall of sacrifice, and of the building of aultares and churches" (1554), Fugitive Tracts written in verse which illustrate the condition of religions and political feeling in England and the state of society there during two centuries, First Series 1493-1600 (London: Privately ptd., 1875), no pagination, but 7-8; also STC (2nd ed.) 17469, provides a Catholic example of this identification. In defending altars and "sacrifice," he identifies King Solomon as the biblical precedent for Catholic sacrifice. Marshall writes that

 Salamon the kyng most wise of fame 
 Builded a temple to Gods honour and name 
 With ryches aboundant he dyd it beautyfye ... 
 An aultare of Golde unto the lorde he made 
 A tabell of the same, where the swete bread was layde 
 And Candlesticks ten on the aultare standing ... 
 Here may you see that the good fathers of olde 
 Destroyed no Aultares, but made some of golde.

(22.) On the biblical sense of idolatry, see Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). (23.) "An Homilie Against peril of Idolatrie, and superfluous decking of Churches" in Certaine Sermons or Homilies: Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1547-1571), eds. Mary Rickey and Thomas Stroup (Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1968).

(24.) Rollins, Tottel's, 2, 323.

(25.) See Gilman, Dagon, 1-31.

(26.) "Service" stems from the Provencal poets' construction of love as a feudal relationship; see Donald Guss, John Donne, Petrarchan: Italianate Conceits and Love Theory in The Songs and Sonets (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), 126-27.

(27.) On Surrey and his coterie's performance of poetry and the central importance of Surrey in creating the Petrarchan language of political service and aspiration, see Sessions, Henry, 176-77. He writes that, after the publication of Tottel's Miscellany, Surrey's "poetic language would quickly become the basis for public expression and social sensibilities." See also Marotti, Manuscript.

(28.) As Arthur Kinney, ed., The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5, reminds us, "painters and writers of the Renaissance ... placed a premium on the potential multiplicity of perspective. Painters did not expect viewers to remain fixed in looking at a work of art, but to move around to various positions to view it, just as the writers at Henry's court expect to be read.... Shifting stances allow various readings."

(29.) On the dating of The Court of Venus, which includes such religious concerns, see Fraser, Court, 20. It is significant to note that The Court was published with the pro-Reformist, anti-papal The Pilgrim's Tale. Poem number 7 in The Court of Venus includes contemporary religious terminology, including "grace," "service," and "faith," 124. On the counterdiscourse of sacred poetry and psalms combating Petrarchan poetry, see Lily Campbell, Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). King, English, 215, however, argues that sacred poetry did not come into existence to battle Petrarchan poetry.

(30.) As excerpted in Campbell, Divine. Fraser, Court, 62-63, suggests that these comments may be in direct response to Tottel's Miscellany; he also excerpts the ballad and discusses Brice's publishing career as a moralist rejecting both the Court and Tottel's as "filthy writing and such like delighting."

(31.) The homily "Against Idolatrie," for example, asserts that early modern idolaters wished to "pricke Satan to us and are ready without reward to follow his desire. Yea, rather than fayle, we will offer him gifts and oblations" so that he will "receive our service" (my emphases). Catholics, however, use the term "serve" and "service" simply to represent traditional ritual worship.

(32.) English Recusant Literature, ed., D. M. Rogers (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969), f. C[3.sup.r-v].

(33.) On Surrey and Chekes coterie, see Sessions, Henry, 175.

(34.) Significantly, Cheke's biography is largely still based on John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir John Cheke, knight, ed. Thomas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1821), who casts Cheke as an apostle-like coward who turned away from Christ and a life of humanist devotion to the Protestant cause. The Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 10, ed. Leslie Stephen (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1887), 178-83, largely follows Strype's, in effect, Protestant apologetic hagiography of Cheke. A modern, religiously unbiased biography has not been published. Scholars disagree on Surrey's religious allegiances. Sessions, Henry, 88, 102, 233-37, 379, notes that Surrey went to Mass, was familiar with saints' statutes and roods, but was also considered a Protestant by some. Without argument, he asserts that "the earl's general sympathies were in the religious position of Wyatt and Blage," i.e., Protestant. Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (London: Longman, 1998), 143-46, 175-76, reviews the modern critical debate, which contests whether Surrey was a Reformer or simply used Reformist language as a political tool. Heale leans toward but cannot confirm a Protestant Surrey.

(35.) The ritual and/or liturgical prayers of thanksgiving using the refrain "to thee" begins in apostolic times. See Francis Brunner, trans., The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, 2 vols. (New York: Benziger, 1950), vol. 1, 11-12.

(36.) A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), ed. Hyder Rollins (Cambridge: Scolar Press, 1926), 105-07.

(37.) The Complete Works of Thomas Watson (1556-1592), ed. Dana Sutton (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), sonnets 51, 76, 91, but passim.

(38.) Wooding, Rethinking, 116-17, 177, discusses the lack of traditional concerns for Catholic writers in the Marian return to Catholicism.

(39.) On the circulation and social appropriation of poems, see Marotti, Manuscript, 135-37, but passim.

(40.) On the use of Surrey's life and translations as support for Roman Catholicism during the reign of Mary (and by Mary herself), see Sessions, Henry, 270-71. On Anne Askew's Protestant use of Surrey's paraphrase of Ecclesiastes, see 354-57.

(41.) In writing about Wyatt's dead body, Surrey also uses the term "mystery" as a sacrament; see Sessions, Henry, 255.

(42.) Compare William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure [c. 1566], ed. Joseph Jacobs, 3 vols. (London: D. Nutt, 1890), 2: 400, who translates M. Niccolo Amanio. Amanio celebrates

 Lookes that upliftes [sic] my soule above the Skies, 
 And in each coast all cloudes expelling cleane, 
 Do teach ten thousand paths to Paradise. 
 My Goddesse brave, Angelicall Sirene, 
 Fayrnesse it selfe, Dame Beautie's sacred heire.

(43.) On the beatific vision in Dante and Petrarch, see Robert M. Durling, trans, and ed., Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 23-25. (44.) The terms come from Murray Roston, Sixteenth-Century English Literature (New York: Schocken, 1982), pp. 43, 45.

(45.) On kissing Christ in medieval homiletic discourse and in medieval mystery plays, see Michael O'Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6, 76-77.

(46.) Marian apologist Marshall, A compendious, 7-8, constructs the body-centered nature of Catholicism, writing:

 God was contente the people should adore 
 With Body and goodes, he gave it therefore ... 
 In all tymes past, such was the Conclusion 
 When scysmes hathe bene, then true Religion 
 Was falsely perverted as the booke sayes.

(47.) Regarding Protestant poets and polemicists writing in the period, Sessions, in Henry, 187-88, correctly recognizes "the bad taste of spiritual transcendence other than through the Tudor God or the idealized monarch." He also writes that "in the Tudor world, even trascendence through a female had its problems, as revealed in the representations and responses to Surrey's cousin Elizabeth I and the Petrarchan sequences of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare (a transcendence finally impossible for Elizabeth Drury in John Donne's 1612 Anniversary poems)." Poets incorporating both Catholic and Protestant poetics prior to Spenser, however, complicate this apt and apparently overlooked observation. (48.) The rocke of regard, (London, 1576) STC (2nd ed.) 25348. For all these references see "The Orchard of Repentance," 99-100, but passim.

(49.) For a discussion of the survival of Catholicism in Elizabethan England, see Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and "The Church of England, the Catholics and the People" in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Christopher Haigh (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1985), 195-200, but esp. 197. See also Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination 1558-1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 11-12. Note her comment that "because Elizabeth's reign was so long and policies toward Catholics grew stricter towards the middle and end of it, one recognizes the presence of pre-Reformation texts and ideas throughout it, but sees emerging a change in attitude." On the uncertain state of religious affairs both in popular opinion and also in Queen Elizabeth's own opinion, see Norman Jones, The Birth of the Elizabethan Age: England in the 1560s (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 4-86. On Catholic loyalty to Elizabeth in the first decade of the reign, see Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of Elizabethan Catholics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 11-22. See also Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1979), 3-10.

(50.) On the development of Pygmalion as a lover and artist in the early modern period and before, see Essaka Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 20-31. Although Joshua recognizes the religious use of Pygmalion in the early modern period, she does not note the Reformation polemics encoded in Tottel's version. See also, Classical Mythology in English Literature: A Critical Anthology, ed. Geoffrey Miles (New York: Routledge, 1999), 334-37, 353-78.

(51.) Rickey and Stroup, Certaine, 27, 67, 69, 71. For other contemporary references to the material elements of idol making, see Gregory Scot, A briefe Treatise agaynst certayne errors of the Romish church (London, 1574), STC 21855, ff. A[6.sup.r], A[8.sup.r] and B[1.sup.r]. See also Jan van der Noot, A Thetatre for Voluptuous Worldlings ([London, 1569] New York: Scolars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1936), ff. [16.sup.r], [35.sup.r], and [37.sup.r-v]. William Fulwood, The Enimie of Idleness (London, 1568), STC (2nd ed.) 11476, deploys the same material components of saint decoration: namely "thy christall neck, thy corall lips, thy golden haire" f. [132.sup.r]. The Enimie has been reprinted in Studies in Philology 87.1 (1990), 1-74. See also Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 5 for another influential example of the use of these material elements. Although one might argue that Petrarchan poets inherit the terms "pearl" and "jewels" from extra-religious discourse, when such terms are used in combination with "idol" and "saint" or with other ritual terminology, we recognize their participation in religious discourse.

(52.) On late medieval concepts of idolatry and iconoclasm, see the important Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, eds. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicollette Zeeman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), passim. On Pygmalion and Chaucer's sense of idolatry, see Zeeman's "The Idol of the Text," 43-62 in that volume.

(53.) On the Protestant poet's distrust of images and his own image-making, see Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), and Peter Herman, Squitter-Wits and Muse Haters: Sidney, Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Antipoetic Sentiment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996). See also Gilman, Dagon. On Tyndale and Cranmer's refashioning of the medieval period and medieval Catholicism as enslaved to the idolatrous imagination, see James Simpson, "The Rule of Medieval Imagination" in Dimmick, Images. Sander, A Treatise, f. [72.sup.r], also writes about creative ability, saying that the image "is not to be worshipped in respect of the art, which is in it (for the artificer might make the image of an ape as wel as of a man) but it is adored, if it represents an honorable person as Christ, S. Paul, or any like blessed man." See his comments on "manufactures" as being only the worke of mens hands," f. [76.sup.r].

(54.) Petrarch's Rime sparse was not published in England in the early modern period. Wyatt, Surrey, and the other Petrarchan's in Tottel's Miscellany were the first to popularize Petrarchan conventions in the English language. On Petrarch's sense of idolatry, see, for example, Durling, Rime sparse, 30 and 360. On Petrarch's idolatry, see Durling, "Petrarch's 'Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro,'" MLN 86 (1971) and John Freccero, "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics" in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, eds. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 21. On Petrarch and Edmund Spenser's poems as embodying a sacred process of fall and redemption, see William Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 233 ff.

(55.) For an excellent review of the traditions of the Ovidian satire of lust, the Petrarchan models for overcoming lust, and the Platonic model for using human love to ascend to spiritual love, see N. J. C. Andreasen, John Donne: Conservative Revolutionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 21-77. On Wyatt as the first English poet to honestly and caustically examine and reject Petrarchan tradition in generalized Christian terms, see Petersen, English Lyric, 87-99.

(56.) The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, ed. Ruth Hughey, 2 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1960), 1: 91-93.

(57.) For a recent study on the function of idols in early modern culture, see O'Connell, Eye, 3-62.

(58.) Sander, A Treatise, ff. [12.sup.v], writes vehemently against the accusation "that Catholikes abused the Images of Christ and of his Saints, worshipping them, like as the Gentils heretofore did worship the Idols of their false Gods; I wil first shew, that our Images, although thei had bene falselie worshipped, yet thei ought not to have ben so broken and destroyed, as they were." See also [17.sup.r]-[18.sup.v] but passim.

(59.) Rickey and Stroup, Certaine, 13; see also 75. Stephen Buick, "'Little children, beware of images': 'An Homily Against Peril of Idolatry' and the quest for 'Pure religion' in the early Elizabethan Church" in Reformation 2, (1997): 321, writes that "by the late Elizabethan period we see the same assumption informing the semantics of lexicographers." Scot, A Briefe, also a f. B[1.sup.v], argues that the terms image and idol each mean "one thing to signifie."

(60.) Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century secular English lyrics do employ the language of religion but, as a matter of course, do not cast these terms within the context of religious ritual. See Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. Rossel Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). Peterson, English Lyric, 28, argues that this medieval poetry demonstrated "no concern for the 'heretical' implications of courtly love."

(61.) Richard Waswo, "The Petrarchan Tradition as a Dialectic of Limits," Studies in the Literary Imagination. 11.1 (1978): 12, asserts that Petrarchan poetry took a "hiatus" between the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. He writes that "this curious hiatus cannot be explained merely by the vagaries of literary fashion, since to petrarchize was very much in fashion on the continent throughout this period. It can be explained by the social prerequisites of the tradition itself: an aristocratic milieu with the leisure and taste to seek elegance it did not have. Such a milieu could simply not exist in the midst of the social and political upheavals of the Reformation: the Edwardian protectorates, the Marian persecutions, and the struggles that led to the Elizabethan Settlement."

(62.) Leonard Tennenhouse, "Representing Power: Measure for Measure in Its Time" in Shakespeare and History, ed. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 148-49, argues that the popularity of Petrarchan discourse is due to the fact that such fictions embodied the compensatory fantasies of a gentry class unable to marry into the aristocracy.

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Publication Information:
Article Title: Tottel's Miscellany and the English Reformation.
Contributors: Stephen Hamrick - author.
Journal Title: Criticism. Volume: 44. Issue: 4. Publication Year: 2002. Page Number: 329+.
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