Some newer name than Christian': Confessionalization in Early Modern English Literature, Spenser to Donne

This dissertation examines the confessionalization of early modern English literature in the 1580s and 90s, focusing on the works of Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and John Donne. It argues that the division of creeds and churches in the late Reformation precipitated a crisis in Elizabethan poetics, and that the creation of a poetry able to articulate to the pressures of doctrinal profession marked an important pre-condition for the emergence of a professional authorship in early modern England. Studies of religion and literature in the period have typically emphasized poetry's freedom from the constraints of codified confession, privileging either the moderating vision of an English via media or the inherently unifying nature of literary representation. The present study demonstrates the fragility of those ideals in the 1580s and 90s by providing a detailed analysis of the politics and ecclesiology of the divided Church in late Tudor poetics, and the impact of confessions of faith on English conceptions of literary form. The attempt by writers like Philip Sidney to confer on poetic imagination the freedom of the 'golden' world reflects, I argue, a larger anxiety about the languishing hopes of Christian universality at the end of the sixteenth century, shared both by the repressive designs of the Elizabethan Church and the irenic designs of literary humanism. Spenser, Marlowe, and Donne explore, instead, an emerging poetics of profession in their works. Informed by their ties to the Dutch Low Countries Ì¢‰âÂ' an emblem of confessional chaos in Elizabethan writing Ì¢‰âÂ' these authors directly portray the divided Body of Christ, and through it, a novel view of the late Reformation poet: a poet defined, not by the ideological motives of one 'true' church, nor the liberating potential of poetic mimesis, but by the need to profess a particular creed or church among many. In individual chapters, the dissertation charts the development of this poetics through four religious discourses Ì¢‰âÂ' Familism, Anabaptism, atheism, and 'schism' Ì¢‰âÂ' that evoked the nature and necessity of confession for these writers and their contemporaries. Chapters One and Two examine Spenser's depiction of the Family of Love and Anabaptism in The Shepheardes Calender and 1596 Faerie Queene, respectively, arguing that Dutch religious radicalism unsettled the pastoral and apocalyptic ideals underwriting English perceptions of the confessionalized Church and Spenser's authority as allegorical poet in relation to it. Chapters Three and Four examine the tension between doctrinal and poetic 'profession' in Marlowe's plays and Donne's Satyres. The charges of Marlowe's atheism mirror, I suggest, what were in fact early Elizabethan biases toward the inherent prodigality of a poet who professes at all Ì¢‰âÂ' either a creed or career Ì¢‰âÂ' while Donne's exploration of the divided Christian city in his satires provides an alternate poetic model. 'Satyre III' envisions a potentially voluntaristic distinction between poetic and doctrinal profession necessary for imagining an English poet able to speak to, while increasingly defined by, confessions of faith.