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Article Excerpt
In the preface to her 1960 edition of Henry Constable's poetry, Joan Grundy contextualizes Constable's Spirituall Sonnettes in relation to post-Tridentine aesthetics by observing that he uses "the sonnet form to express religious experience"; that he addresses "a series of sonnets to God and His saints"; that he gives "prominence to a saint dear devotionally and artistically to the Counter-Reformation, namely Mary Magdalen, and in doing so" emphasizes those aspects of her cult popular at the time; and that he uses the "language of earthly love to express the aspiration of the soul, thus indicating the relationship of this form to the Petrarchan love-sonnet." (1) In a more recent account of Constable's religious poetry, A. D. Cousins qualifies Grundy's view by asserting how "it is remarkable ... that although the Spirituall Sonnettes clearly bear the doctrinal impress of the Council of Trent, they are otherwise virtually independent of the Counter-Reformation." (2) While the generality of Cousins's formulation renders it more provocative than explicative, his basic insight that Constable's devotional poems are divorced from the English Counter-Reformation in ways which Grundy and other earlier critics ignore is accurate and important. Given the complexity and significance of the claim, the thesis deserves more careful attention than Cousins provides in his brief account of the Spirituall Sonnettes. (3)
Constable's religious poems operate in ways that are devotionally and rhetorically distinct from other Elizabethan Catholic poetry for a number of reasons. First of all, his poems are consistent with John Bossy's thesis that many English Catholics, especially members of the Gentry such as Constable, resisted the reforms and styles of the Counter-Reformation, particularly as promulgated by Jesuits who wrote many of the poems now thought to be representative of Counter-Reformation aesthetics. (4) Secondly, and perhaps partly as a result of his expressed antipathy towards the Jesuits, (5) Constable draws less on the plaintive language of spiritual exile so popular amongst other recusant poets, and more on traditions of affective piety, especially later medieval traditions. In order to see how Constable's adaptation of affective piety makes his poems appear more "pre-" than "post--" Tridentine in orientation, I propose juxtaposing the Spirituall Sonnettes with the most representative exemplar of the Elizabethan Counter-Reformation, namely Robert Southwell. While the Ignatian traditions informing Southwell's verse are also examples of affective piety, particularly through their indebtedness to Franciscan practices, Constable's eroticized devotional poetry differs from Southwell's in revealing ways. By comparing these two poets, we can better grasp Constable's unique synthesis of medieval devotional traditions and Counter-Reformation poetic forms, thereby clarifying how his poems operate as devotional and rhetorical artifacts.
Such a perspective will also allow us to begin considering how Constable writes not only at the edges of the English Counter-Reformation but also within the transitional space that Michel de Certeau identifies as sixteenth and seventeenth-century mystics, the re-interpretation of contemplative traditions originating in the work of Meister Eckhart and other late medieval mystics. (6) The term mystics, which is a translation of de Certeau's historically precise and non-essentialist designation, la mystique, is chronologically broader but thematically more narrow than the rather unruly term "Counter-Reformation." Sometimes referred to in his study as "the new science," mystics extends back to the early fourteenth and goes up to the late seventeenth century. Moreover, it identifies a specific set of discourses arising at the threshold of modernity which re-envision longstanding devotional traditions. In particular, de Certeau is concerned with how such figures as John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila recreate the ways of speaking or modus loquendi that are characteristic of mystics. The transformation de Certeau identifies is fundamentally a transformation of language, a shift in the speech acts that constitute mystics as a discipline concerned with expressing the relations between God and the felt experience of the soul amidst the varying pressures of increased modernity. Of particular relevance to Constable's work is de Certeau's analysis of the "poetics of the body," which is central to mystics as an identifiable discourse. By positioning Constable's religious sonnets within the context of de Certeau's account of mystics, particularly his study of the "mystic" pursuit of the body, we can gain greater purchase on the original blend of modern and medieval elements at work in his devotional poems.
To begin with, Constable's biography as a well-to-do courtier whose conversion resulted in political and professional exile parallels the biographies of those belonging to de Certeau's account of the rise of mystics. In a brief summary of Constable's life, John Bossy cites a letter written by Pierre du Moulin, who was "in the closest of contact with [Constable], and who obviously liked him as a person," that encapsulates the poet's fortunes: "He has killed his father from sorrow, and lost both his reputation and the advancement which the Lord Treasurer would have procured him. He has wrecked his career, and nothing remained but that he should wreck his conscience also." (7) According to de Certeau, such marginalization is typical of those who participated in the discourse of mystics:
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the mystics most often belonged to the regions and social categories that were going into a socioeconomic recession, were disfavored by change, pushed aside by progress, or financially ruined by the wars. That impoverishment developed the memory of a lost past; it clung to models deprived of efficacy and available for an "other world." It redirected toward the spaces of utopia, of dreamy imaginings or writings, aspirations before which the doors of social responsibilities were closed. (21-22)
In Constable's case, the "spaces of utopia" de Certeau speaks of take at least two basic forms, one in his prose and one in his poetry. In his prose, Constable pursued an ecumenical vision that appeared too radical for most English protestants and would likely have been too moderate for most Counter-Reformation authorities. (8) The utopian quality of Constable's ecumenical hopes might be seen as the political side of a desire for anagogic union with God expressed throughout his devotional verse. In his Spirituall Sonnettes, Constable hyperbolizes forms of cross-gender identification and eroticized union with Christ that are characteristic of late medieval traditions. While such traditions inform Counter-Reformation works such as Southwell's Marie Magdalenes Funeral Tears, the modes of identification at work in Constable's eroticized spirituality differ from Southwell's in ways that produce different devotional and interpretive responses. Thus while Constable faced the same experience of loss and exile that recusant writers such as Southwell suffered, he responded to his experience somewhat differently, developing an eroticized spiritual poetics that calls for modes of devotion one does not generally see in the verse of his English-Catholic contemporaries.
EROTIC IDENTIFICATION: "TO ST MARY MAGDALEN"
While Grundy adduces Constable's Magdalen sonnets as proof of his Counter-Reformation aesthetic, a closer examination of these sonnets suggests that they owe as much, if not more, to a re-interpretation of late medieval devotional practices as to the penitential ethos characteristic of Southwell's exemplarily Tridentine Magdalen poems. Southwell's Magdalen is the ideally penitent figure of the Counter-Reformation--a plaintive saint who reinforces the Council of Trent's sacralizing of penance. (9) And although Southwell's homiletic prose treatise, Marie Magdalens Funeral Tears, draws on the medieval tradition of figuring Magdalen as a beata dilectrix Christi, it mediates this tradition through the Ovidian-inspired practice of representing abandoned female lovers. In this way, the eroticism of Southwell's Funeral Tears centers more on the experience of Christ's absence than on an anagogic union with Christ as expressed through the amorous language of Canticles. (10) The differences between Southwell's and Constable's depictions of Magdalen become most clear when we consider the distinct modalities of devotional identification called for in each. While Southwell maintains a certain critical distance from Magdalen, often depicting her as embodying an ideal love of Christ but an incompletely realized knowledge of faith, Constable encourages a full identification with her. The result is that Constable's poems envision an anagogic union of the (Magdalenian) soul with Christ, whereas Southwell's poems sketch out a far less mystical account of this female saint, one that functions...
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