SOURCE: Mueller, Janel. “Complications of Intertextuality: John Fisher, Katherine Parr, and ‘The Book of the Crucifix.’” In Representing Women in Renaissance England, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted Larry Pebworth. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997, pp. 24-41.

[In the following essay, Mueller investigates the source of Parr's metaphor of “the book of the crucifix,” which had its source in a sermon by John Fisher, and compares the two writers' use of the metaphor.]

The level of current interest in interpreting texts as registers of cultural change in early modern England bespeaks an increasingly shared perspective in literary studies that again seeks to take history seriously. As we literary-historical types now go about our usual business of intertextuality—analyzing texts and putting them into relation with other texts—we avoid dealing solely in textual formulations of our concerns. Unless they are tethered to extralinguistic referents of context, relations among texts seemingly cannot be freed from the specter of an indefinite regress of signifiers in play. Many of us have accordingly turned to an almost hallowed triad—the factors of race (or ethnicity), class, and gender—as anchors for our work on historical texts in historical contexts. Taken over from our social-science colleagues in the current vogue of interdisciplinary method swapping, these factors look so promising because race, class, and gender are both powerfully material in their bases and even more potently ideological in their social encodings and decodings.

Thus, we routinely suppose that if we analyze texts for what we call their race, class, or gender “inscriptions” and interpret them accordingly, we will be able to surmount disjunctions between world and word, between material facts and ideas in literature, and manage to make our criticism and historical work be about something that can count as real. We further assume that race, class, and gender, as fundamental constituents of human lives in social relations, will unfailingly leave significant markings in a text—or, what amounts to nearly the same thing in practice, we assume that the markings of race, class, and gender will yield significance more basic, more primary, than that conveyed by way, say, of the verbal and cognitive effects of rhetoric or poetics. To this triad of race, class, and gender I want to join the additionally powerful factor of a writer's generation, his or her biological and social moment, for we now know from historical linguistics that generationally diffused variation is the chief motor of language change.¹ Why should the situation not be analogous with literary change, a problem that we have much current trouble accounting for?

The “we” locutions that I have been using are not disingenuous. These reflections do indicate lines that my own critical thinking has taken, and I am aware of a number of colleagues who have been moving in this same direction. Nevertheless, I have come to regard the material that I present in this essay as something of a test case or a limit instance of the capacity of gender—particularly as now theorized—to anchor the literary-historical work that I have been doing on women in English Protestantism. I begin by explaining my concrete difficulties in a specific case and the available interpretive options as I saw them. I will end with some reflections on what for me remains a conjoint dilemma of methodology and interpretation: how to decide which factor to treat as determinative when more than one option seems available, and what interpretive difference it makes to decide one way or the other.

The heart of my material is an odd metaphor, “the book of the crucifix,” which is arguably even a catachresis (an outright violation of figurative language) by traditional rhetorical criteria. The oddity of this metaphor consists in its conflation of long-divergent, even long-opposed domains in Christian symbolics: on one hand, the book as the Bible, Holy Writ, the acme of verbal truth; on the other, the crucifix as the simulacrum of Christ's bloody, suffering body, the most sacred object, the acme of nonverbal truth. I first encountered the metaphor of “the book of the crucifix” in the sustained use that Katherine Parr makes of it in her religious prose work The Lamentation of a Sinner, published in November 1547.

Parr was Henry VIII's last queen and his widow—also, in earliest years, an intimate of Henry's daughter, Princess Mary. Thanks to arrangements made with Catherine of Aragon by Parr's mother, one of the queen's ladies, to enroll her daughter along with Princess Mary under the tutelage of Juan Luis Vives, Katherine Parr received the most advanced Christian humanist education then thought suitable for a Tudor royal female and the other children admitted to her nursery.² But, however well lettered and Latined, such a female education did not constitute a sufficient incentive to authorship (as opposed to translation or patronage) for any woman of the earlier Tudor—that is, the pre-Elizabethan—period. In that period the catalysts for female authorship were education to a point of secure literacy—not necessarily including Latin, as in Parr's case—and the sine qua non, a conversion to Protestantism, with its emphasis on the equality of all souls before God and its urgent imperative to share the soul-saving news of the Gospel in order to make other Christians aware of their own accountability to God for their spiritual state.³

If the categories of the compilation and the familiar letter are excluded, Katherine Parr is the first certain instance in English of a woman writer.⁴ Her first work, Prayers or Meditations, minutely reworks excerpts from Book 3 of Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ in Richard Whitford's English translation, which was published about 1530. The end result moves Parr beyond adaptative translation into original composition while still holding to enough common ground in Christian orthodoxy to satisfy her religiously conservative husband, Henry VIII.⁵ The publication of Parr's Prayers or Meditations in June 1545 with the king's authorization thus predates by more than a year the clandestine publication of Anne Askew's First Examination and Latter Examination, published in 1546 and 1547, respectively. Askew, a member of Parr's circle of ladies, records her investigation and condemnation for Protestant heresies that brought her to death at the stake.⁶ Understandably, Parr would withhold her account of her own conversion to an objectionably Lutheran strain of Protestantism from the notice of a violent husband who was sure to disapprove, publishing The Lamentation of a Sinner at the safe interval of nine months after Henry VIII's death.⁷

The intense self-reckoning into which Parr plunges in her Lamentation makes clear that her own book owes its existence to another book, which she calls “the booke of the crucifixe.” She declares: “This crucifix is the boke, wherin God hath included all thinges, and hath most compendiously written therein, all truth, profitable and necessary for our salvacion. Therfore let us indevour our selfes to studye thys booke, that we (beyng lightened with the spirite of god) may geve hym thankes for so great a benefite” (L, sig. Ciir-v). Parr elaborates the metaphoric relation between “book” and, as she proceeds, not so much “the crucifix” as “the crucifixion”—the significance of the action of Christ's love for human souls rather than the material image or icon of it. “Inwardlye to behold Christ crucified upon the crosse,” says Parr, “is the best and godliest meditacion that can be” (L, sig. Bviiiv). “To learne to knowe truly our owne sinnes, is to study in the booke of the crucifixe, by continuall conversacion in fayth. … If we looke further in thys booke, we shall see Christes greate victory upon the crosse” (L, sigs. Ciir-v). “We may see also in Christe crucified, the bewtie of the soule, better then in all the bookes of the worlde. For who that with lively fayth, seeth and feleth in spirite, that Christe the sonne of god, is dead for the satisfiying and the purifiyng of the soule, shall se that his soule, is appoynted for the very tabernacle, and mansion of the … majestie and honour of god” (L, sigs. Bviiiv-Cir).

This odd metaphor of the book of the crucifix (or Crucifixion) becomes the vehicle for Parr's figuration of a true apprehension of Christian faith as a process of intently reading the one message that really matters for the relation between Christ and the soul. When I began to consider how to interpret this metaphor, I certainly recognized that I was working with a crucial stretch of text. As a first move, I took the feminist scholar's turn toward autobiography as the likeliest form that gender marking would assume in a woman author's text. I hypothesized a scenario in which the “book of the crucifixe” was a metaphor coalescing those definitive developments in Katherine Parr's experience that brought her to the authorship of her Lamentation. These developments would include her superb education, the authority that she as queen of England learned to exercise through writing (in particular, the letters and proclamations that she issued when Henry appointed her regent while he undertook the reconquest of lost English territories in France in the summer and autumn of 1544), and, finally, her conversion as a mature woman from the Catholicism of her girlhood to a Protestantism rendered unmistakable by her embrace of justification by faith (this last apparently a consequence of the daily consultations that Henry required her to have with Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury and ranking member of the Privy Council, while she acted as regent).⁸

On further reflection I imagined that, while a gender factor might account for the bookish character of the metaphor, a generational factor might account for its oddity. The mixed modalities of Parr's “book of the crucifixe” might be read as a mark of the transitional mentality of a person born (as she was) about 1513, before the printing press had gathered much momentum as a cultural medium, but so placed as to witness firsthand its steadily expanding force and impact. Moreover, the components of the metaphor—half text, half image—might be interpreted as trace elements in the experience of an adult convert to Protestantism, that religion of the Book par excellence, who in growing up had been habituated to older modes of visuality and to the use of images in Catholic worship. However, for all of these imagined autobiographical resonances to hold, confirming the factors of gender and generation—Parr's historical specificity—as determinants of my proposed interpretation, there was a condition that the metaphor of “the book of the crucifixe” really had to fulfill. It had to be Parr's own creation. I wanted to believe that it was, of course, yet I suspected that it might not be.

While working on my 1988 article about The Lamentation of a Sinner, I hoped to resolve my uncertainty about the originality of Parr's metaphor. At that time my hopes were deceived because my best findings were merely negative. I found some weak support for my hunch that the book of the crucifix was a metaphorical oddity of early modern date because none of the indexes to writers of the Church in either the Latin or the Greek series of the Migne Patrologia included “book” among the profuse imagistic equivalences that they listed for Christ's cross.⁹ Moreover, since The Lamentation begins with Parr's account of coming to awareness of her justification by faith in Christ, and thus offers the first conversion narrative in English, I looked in Luther, in Tyndale, and in other early Tudor Protestants for adumbrations of her metaphor of the book of the crucifix. But there too I turned up nothing significantly similar.¹⁰ The closest I came overall in that research was a passage in Erasmus's Enchiridion Militis Christiani (which was written in 1501 and published in 1503; the first enlarged edition appeared in 1518), a book that Parr is known to have owned. Erasmian piety, moreover, is the best publicized of Parr's prominent interests as queen.¹¹ In his seventeenth rule Erasmus advises

that thou mayest with … profyte, in thy mynde recorde the mistery of the cross: It shalbe hovefull that every man prepare unto hym selfe a certayne way and godly crafte. … Suche may the crafte be, that in crucifyeng of every one of thyne affectyons, thou mayste applye that parte of the crosse whiche most specially therto agreeth. For there is not at all any maner eyther temptacion eyther adversyte, whiche hath not his proper remedy in the crosse.¹²

This passage focuses the extremities of inward spirituality and struggle on the figure of Christ crucified, as Parr does in the first-person soul-searching that opens her Lamentation, but Erasmus offers no intimation of a book of the crucifix. Could I conclude that the metaphor was Parr's own? Clearly not. I could conclude only that gender and generation had not been ruled out as its possible autobiographical determinants.

In due course I discovered the exact formulation—“the book of the crucifix”—in a sermon by John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, who together with Thomas More was beheaded as a traitor in 1535 for refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy. The sermon containing this metaphor was preached on an unspecified Good Friday, for which no Fisher scholar has been able to fix a year. However, a passing reference to “the B. of R. Innocent” (if this phrasing can be trusted to be Fisher's own, and not a printer's interpolation) seems to me to provide reasonable grounds for dating the sermon to the period 1531-1534, a time when the nomenclature “bishop of Rome” would have been de rigueur for any public reference in England to a pope and when Fisher himself was shifting from acquiescence to resistance regarding Henry VIII's claimed headship of the English church.¹³ When and how Parr became acquainted with Fisher's Good Friday sermon is unknown; its transmission and eventual printing are as uncertain as the year that he preached it. If, conjecturally, she heard it between 1531 and 1534 as the wife of John Neville, Lord Latimer, a ranking peer in Parliament, she, a Catholic at that time, would just have turned twenty years of age. It is easy to see why this Good Friday sermon attracted her attention and stayed in her memory, for it is a conceptually ingenious and spiritually stirring composition.¹⁴

At no juncture in Fisher's long preaching career (from about 1501 until its abrupt suspension when he was arraigned for treason in 1534) was it permissible to own or read an English Bible without authorization from one's bishop; such was the perceived strength of the menace that Lollardy still posed to Catholic orthodoxy.¹⁵ In keeping with these historically specific constraints, Fisher maintains that the crucifix will serve to arouse a right response as well as the Scripture for Good Friday will. He will infuse the physical object with signification drawn from two verses of the Old Testament reading assigned for that day in the liturgy. The words will literally be read onto the object of devotion, thus merging the biblical text into the ceremonial action of the rite for Good Friday—the veneration of the crucifix standardly mounted on the grille or screen separating the church nave from the choir and its altar. So Fisher opens by signaling his interpretive intervention that will make a book of a crucifix: “The Prophet Ezechyell telleth that hee sawe a booke spread before him, the which was written both within and without. … This booke to our purpose may bee taken unto us, the Crucifixe, the which doubtlesse is a merveylouse booke, as wee shall shewe heereafter.”¹⁶ Fisher offers an object of devotion—“the image of the Crucifixe”—as a substitute equivalent to Scripture in evoking Christ's consummate love for humankind. “Who that will exercise this lesson, he shall … come to a great knowledge both of Christ & of him selfe. A man may easily say & thinke with him selfe (beholding in his hart the Image of the Crucifixe), who arte thou, and who am I” (S, 388).

This question, says Fisher, was posed by Saint Francis of Assisi, in whose exemplary spirituality “meditation and imagination” were “so earnest, and so continuall, that the token of the five woundes of Christ, were imprinted and ingraved in thys holy Sancytes bodye” (S, 391). Thus promoting the Franciscan spirituality that figures prominently in English religion during Henry's reign, Fisher admits that the devotions of ordinary Christians cannot “attayne” such “hygh fruite” as the stigmata. Yet ordinary Christians can take the crucifix, as a book for their instruction, to their hearts: “Thus who that list with a meeke harte, and a true fayth, to muse and to marvayle of this most wonderfull booke (I say of the Crucifixe) hee shall come to more fruitefull knowledge, then many other which dayly studie upon their common bookes. This booke may suffice for the studie of a true christian man, all the dayes of his life. In this boke he may finde all things that be necessarie to the health of his soule” (S, 390). At length, when closing his sermon, Fisher steers away from any possible construal of his book of the crucifix as a call for popular Scripture reading, instead renewing his exhortation to imitate Saint Francis's devotion to the crucifix as physical object: “Thus … it is an easie thyng for any man or woman to make these two questions wyth them selfe. O my Lorde that wouldest dye for me upon a Cross, how noble and excelent art thou? & agayne, how wretched and myserable am I?” (S, 391-92).

After I found the book of the crucifix metaphor in Fisher, my feminist scholar's hypothesis about its uniquely autobiographical expressiveness for Katherine Parr lay pretty much in ruins. She had not created her key metaphor. Fisher ostensibly had; he seems to imply this when he introduces it: “This booke to our purpose may bee taken unto us, the Crucifixe, the which doubtlesse is a merveylouse booke, as wee shall shewe heereafter” (emphasis added). But I had another problem, and that was the utter paucity of other autoreferential markings in Parr's text. Even if I shifted my interpretive focus away from the book of the crucifix metaphor—the site, for me, of paramount intensity and expressiveness—there was only one certain self-identification of the first-person speaker in the entire Lamentation. This was Parr's passing reference to “king Henry the eight, my most sovraigne favourable lord and husband” in the course of hailing him as a Moses who had brought God's English people out of bondage to the papal “Pharao,” “Bishop of Rome” (L, sig. Dvir).¹⁷ Confronting the hard textual facts, I considered whether I could salvage autobiographical significance for Parr's Lamentation by pursuing a generational difference even if I had to give up a gendered one. Could the oddity of the metaphor in question be usefully tracked to an origin in an early, transitional phase of modern print culture?

Fisher was born about 1469, six years before William Caxton set up the first English printing press in Westminster, making him Parr's senior by two generations (forty-four years). Perhaps Fisher could be situated as an exponent of the late medieval manuscript culture in which he came to adulthood and in which the Lollards' fervor for judging all things by God's book continued to be rigorously suppressed. Would a corresponding generational placement of Katherine Parr throw significant light on what she did with Fisher's metaphor? Certainly, the circumstances prompting Fisher's coinage had radically altered by the time Parr used it to figure her justification by faith. Fisher himself had been discredited as a spokesman for Catholic orthodoxy to the extent of suffering a traitor's death. What is more, vernacular Scripture reading was so far from being illegal by 1538-1540 that Henry VIII was mandating that the so-called Great Bible, whose publication he had authorized, be made available for public reading in the parish churches of the realm.

To work toward an interpretation in terms of a generational divide, I realized, would make the differences between Fisher's text and Parr's the most salient features of both. She did not significantly follow his precedent in elaborating the metaphor. There is conspicuous evidence that Fisher envisaged his book of the crucifix as an artifact dating from before the era of print. He exhibits a truly metaphysical ingenuity as he details why he calls the crucifix a book. A book has “boardes” (still a current term for “hard covers” among bibliographers), leaves, lines, writings, and “letters both small and great.” The two planks of Christ's cross are the “boardes” of the book of the crucifix, on which its leaves, “the armes, the handes, legges, and feete, with the other members of his most precious and blessed body,” are spread. No “Parchement skynne” was ever so stretched and hung up to dry in order to make a writing surface as Christ's body was stretched and laid out upon the cross. And on its spread skin the lines to be read are the marks of the whiplashes, the red letters his blood, the blue letters his bruises, the five capital letters the great wounds in his two hands, his two feet, and his side, “for bycause no parte of thys booke shoulde bee unwritten” (S, 393, 394, 395, 396). Fisher develops his extended conceit of the crucifix as an illuminated manuscript. He then proceeds to read this manneristically drawn image, so evocative of figure groupings in early sixteenth-century Netherlandish and Rhineland paintings of Christ's Crucifixion and deposition from the cross, as a “wryting” of “lamentation” (S, 397).

Parr inflects their shared theme of lamentation and their shared metaphor of the book of the crucifix in a systematically different fashion. While The Lamentation of a Sinner engages a lavishly as the Good Friday sermon does in a rhetoric of emotion—apostrophe, rhetorical questions, serial parallelisms, stark antitheses—her treatment of the Crucifixion never becomes graphic and pictorial like his; instead, it remains consistently theological and phenomenological. Parr opens with lamentation, the key word of her title, and unfolds her concomitant shame, her confusion, her misery, perversity, and presumption as she develops her self-accusation of being altogether insensible of Christ as her crucified savior—being, that is, without the faith that justifies. “I did as much as was in me, to obfuscate and darken the great benefite of Christes passion: … And therfore I count my selfe one of the moste wicked and myserable sinners, bycause I have ben so much contrary to Christ my saviour. … What cause nowe have I to lament, mourne, sigh and wepe for my life, and time so evil spent?” (L, sigs. Avr-v, Aviiv).

Parr's turn from phenomenology to theology proceeds through reiterations of Tyndale's key term for Scripture, the promises, to explain “what maketh me so bolde, and hardy, to presume to come to the lord … who is only the Advocat, and mediatour betwene god and man to helpe and relyve me, … beyng so greate a Sinner”—“trulye nothinge, but hys owne woorde,” “the promise of Christ.” “He promiseth, and bindeth him selfe by hys worde, … to all them that aske hym with true fayth: … For fayth is the foundacion, and grounde … : and therfore I wil saye, Lord encreace my fayth” (L, sigs. Biir-v, Biiiv).¹⁸ She shifts to merge theology with phenomenology in giving this account of the advent of her justifying faith: “I never had this unspeakeable and most high charitie, and abundant love of god, printed and fixed in my heart dulye, tyll it pleased god of hys mere grace, mercy, and pitie, to open myne eyes, makyng me to see, and beholde with the eye of lively fayth, Christ crucified to be myne only saviour and redemer. For then I beganne (and not before) to perceyve and … knowe Christ my Saviour and redemer” (L, sig. Bvv). “Therefore inwardlye to behold Christ crucified upon the crosse, is the best and godliest meditacion that can be,” Parr affirms, and precisely at this point she introduces her metaphor. “Therefore to learne to knowe truly … is to study in the booke of the crucifixe, by continuall conversacion in fayth: … this crucifix is the boke, wherin God hath … most compendiously written … all truth profitable and necessary for our salvacion” (L, sigs. Bviiiv, Ciir).

Viewed along a generational divide, it is Fisher who returns the book of the crucifix to earlier roots in Franciscan devotion, there seeking to renew the mystical rapture of the saint with his divinely conferred stigmata as a talisman against the continuing danger of Bible-reading by the laity.¹⁹ It is Parr who brings the book of the crucifix into Protestant print culture, promoting Bible-reading by the laity through her equation of this metaphor with the promises of the Gospel, apprehended in Tyndalian fashion as the felt truth of one's personal salvation. With these findings, however, I found myself confronting another question. Could I sustain the premium on difference that resulted from emphasizing the generational factor yet claim to have fairly interpreted what, intertextually considered, is a relation of verbal identity—the same words, “book of the crucifix”? I had yet taken no critical notice of the measure of likeness between Fisher's and Parr's texts, so I began to examine how far this extended. Beyond the verbal identity of the key metaphor, I found that other likenesses were generated by a further intertextual relation: their shared recourse to Erasmian motifs and themes. This material promotes perceptions of continuity in Fisher's and Parr's religious experience by documenting, for each, a pair of connections with the two best-known works of Erasmus in England, the Enchiridion Militis Christiani and the Paraclesis.

In the Enchiridion—a book that Fisher as well as Parr is recorded as owning—Erasmus variously calls the saving act of divine love that is Christ's death upon the cross “philosophia Christi” and “a Christian man's book.”²⁰ Fisher's Good Friday sermon echoes the one formulation, referring to the Crucifixion as “another higher Philosophie which is above nature,” “the very Philosophie of Christian people” (S, 389). Parr echoes the alternative Erasmian formulation because she refuses to refer to Christian faith as philosophy, in keeping with its Protestant categorization as “carnall and humane reasons” (L, sig. Aviv). After invoking Saint Paul, who called Christ “the wisedome of god,” she can join with Erasmus in identifying personal, experiential knowledge of “Christ crucified” with what is learned from study in “a christian mans boke”—the titular metaphor of the Enchiridion Militis Christiani—and then turn directly to identify this with “the booke of the crucifixe” (L, sig. Civ-Ciir).

The second instance where Erasmus serves as intertext is the notable passage in Paraclesis that exhorts vernacular reading of Scripture upon all ranks of society, high and low, men and women, not even excluding the plowboy in the field. Fisher, steering clear of Bible-reading, urges devotion to the crucifix as the truest employment of all Christians: “every person both ryche and poore,” “the poor laborer … when he is at plough earyng his grounde, and when hee goeth to hys pastures to see hys Cattayle,” “the rich man … in his business. … And the poore women also … when they be spinning. … The ryche weomen also in everie lawfull occupation that they have to doe” (S, 391-92).²¹ For her part, when Parr climaxes her Lamentation with a comprehensive vision of “all sortes of people” who “loke to theyr owne vocacion, and ordeyne the same according to Christes doctrine” (L, sig. Giir-v)—citing preachers, laymen, fathers, mothers, children, servants, matrons, and young women—she echoes the same passage in Paraclesis. And since “Christes doctrine,” the Bible, is the book supremely emphasized by Erasmus and Parr, it is they who draw closest in this second intertextual tie. Thus, despite marked local differences in their respective appropriations, an intertextual approach to interpretation leaves Fisher and Parr looking significantly alike in aspiring toward a Christian universalism that Erasmus had conceptualized for them both.²²

So much for what might be done respectively to interpret Fisher's and Parr's books of the crucifix by emphasizing a generational factor on the one hand and intertextual relations—a key metaphor compounded with Erasmian affinities—on the other. Clearly there is a complex weave of differences and similarities here. Is the one to count as more significant than the other? And, if so, on what grounds should the judgment be staked—on intrinsic grounds of content or on extrinsic evaluation of the methodology employed? For example, since intertextual relations are classed with the history of ideas, now much discredited for failure to reckon with concrete social realities, we are likely to prefer a generational factor that deals more frontally with them.²³ But this very mention of dealing with one's objects of interpretation raises yet a further question for me. Can I really claim that a two-generation gap in age and experience in Henrician England accounts accurately and adequately for the characterization I have just given of Fisher's and Parr's metaphors? This is what I need to claim if I am to assign this factor the role of a primary determinant in my interpretation. As I began by saying, it is reassuring to think that our current approaches to texts by way of race, class, or gender (I added generation) are anchored by the combined weight of materiality and ideology and are thereby well grounded. But what if our interpretations by way of any or all of these factors come up short, as I think this one of mine manifestly does?

I would want to claim that a more primary determinant of the difference between Fisher's and Parr's metaphors is the emergent (and here clearly detectable) difference between a Catholic and a Protestant. The cutting edge is provided by Parr's central insistence on justification by faith—a tenet that the Council of Trent, which began meeting in 1548 to codify Roman Catholic orthodoxy, found unassimilable from first to last.²⁴ Then add that the two are historical contemporaries who deal in older and newer ways with the book of the crucifix and the authority of Erasmus—this gives us the generational factor, but not as primary. Then add that the two are a man and a woman—this gives us the factor of gender compounded with the further difference between Fisher's celibate state and Parr's married one, but still without a discernible effect on their divergent handlings of the book of the crucifix metaphor. Then add that the two are a bishop and a queen, a cleric and a layperson respectively—this gives us two more rank or status factors that crisscross gender by assigning different values to Parr and Fisher, but still without discernible impact on the textual difference, the metaphor in question. Yet what of the difference that seems to me so determinative here, the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant? It is obvious that religion presently has no theoretical standing comparable to that of race, class, or gender as a primary determinant of interpretation. If religion goes anywhere in current categories, it (like intertextuality) is lumped with the history of ideas.²⁵ So where does my interpretation leave me if I aspire to make it in newer methodological terms? At the close of this essay I will return to the question of constituting religion as a fourth primary determinant.

Here, however, I want to reflect on how troubling the recognized primary determinant of gender, in particular, has become for me in the interpretation of religious texts by women authors, particularly. In my earlier article I took the line that Parr's Lamentation challenges and baffles the prediction of feminist methodology that the fact of a woman author will eventuate in significant, gender-specific textual markings. In fact, apart from an arguably feminine-sounding disclaimer that “I have certeynly no curious learning to defende … but a simple zele, and earnest love to the truth, inspired of god, who promiseth to powre his spirite upon al flesshe: which I have by the grace of god (whom I moste humblie honour) felt in my selfe to be true” and the aforementioned brief reference to Henry VIII as “my most sovraigne favourable lord and husband” (L, sigs. Bviir-v, Dvir), Parr's “I” renders her gender all but undetectable. At best, gender in the two texts in question is a matter of inference from authorial positioning: Fisher's enactment of the male-only office of preacher as he publicly instructs the people with the words of the prophet Ezekiel, Parr's private self-accounting with no overtones of a public context or a judgment on others. It is the unsparing honesty and lack of individuation in that self-accounting, moreover, for which William Cecil's prefatory letter to The Lamentation most highly praises Parr as author, noting that she asks and makes no allowances for her gender or her royal rank.²⁶

Instead, Parr deploys her I's and me's to construct what I have termed a generic and genderless Christian responding to the message of salvation through faith in Christ crucified. “Truly I have taken no lytle small thing upon me, firste to set furth my whole stubbernes, and contempt in wordes, the which is incomprehensible in thought (as it is in the Psalme) who understandeth hys faultes?” she exclaims, assimilating the pronoun “his” to her case (L, sig. Aiv). Again, she laments in a similar gender elision, “And I most presumptuously thinking nothing of Christ crucified, went about to set furth mine owne righteousnes, saying with the proude Pharisey. Good lord I thanke the, I am not like other men” (L, sig. Avir). Thus, as I formerly read Parr's conversion narrative, its first-person author compiles the traits of an Everyman-Everywoman, a generic Christian soul: blind ignorance, cold and dead knowledge, a stone-hard heart softening into penitential lament, a dejected conscience suddenly overcome and joyed by the gift of divine love and forgiveness.²⁷ I tied these generic traits in with the other considerable evidence in The Lamentation of the universalism—the attempt to reclaim the etymology and the lowercase c for “catholicism”—and the personalism that energized early Protestants in their convictions that all souls are equal before God and that every soul is individually accountable to God. Parr conceives and casts herself as a subject for discourse on the shared grounds of humanity confronting divinity. Such (as mine is), she implies, are all souls. Such (as mine is) is the human soul.

Since recent theoretical developments have split social positionality (masculine and feminine roles) off from biology (sexed bodies) in defining gender as a determinant for interpretation, I am compelled to question from a number of angles my earlier claim that the “I” characterized and voiced in Parr's Lamentation is a genderless, generic Christian soul. In the first place, on the theoretical front where I began, if gender positionality is split off from sexed bodies, does gender as a primary determinant retain any measure of its theoretically desirable materiality or only its ideological charge?²⁸ And if only the latter, what are the implications for gender as an alleged primary determinant of experience and the language used to talk about experience? Does splitting gender from anatomy plunge us back into the regresses of verbal indeterminacy from which we have sought and thought to free ourselves?

If gender is to figure now as a relational position, moreover, who can dispute the old dictum that all souls are feminine—or shall we say feminized?—when they register a personal relation to God? (I will specify: the Judeo-Christian God.) Some of the superabundant evidence for this dictum is familiar and scriptural: the erotic love between Christ and his bride, the soul, in the traditional allegorization of the Song of Solomon; the prophet Hosea's figuration of the idolatry of his fellow Jews in the lineaments of his own adulterous wife. Where, I want to know, does the splitting of gender from biological sex leave us in interpreting devotional and mystical texts written in the first person—texts in which religious affect predominates—no matter who their authors? Are such texts to be treated as gendered feminine? As generically feminine? As confounding gender difference because this determinant operates meaningfully only in human social relations, not in relations between humans and the divine? Caroline Bynum, who has done more than anyone to advance thinking on these questions, shows their extreme intractability by gesturing in opposite directions on the same page. On the one hand she signals “the feminist insight that all human beings are ‘gendered’—that is, that there is no such thing as generic homo religious”; on the other she proclaims: “Gender-related symbols, in their full complexity, may refer to gender in ways that affirm or reverse it, support or question it; or they may, in their basic meaning, have little at all to do with male or female roles. Thus our analysis admits that gender-related symbols are sometimes ‘about’ values other than gender.”²⁹

In my view, the trouble that I have faced in seeking to analyze and interpret such sites of primary significance as the book of the crucifix metaphor is likely to be alleviated only by making a case for religion—understood, in the present case of Fisher and Parr, in terms of Catholicism and Protestantism—as exercising a potentially determinative force in human life and its linguistic and social forms, just as race or ethnicity, class, and gender (and generation?) are already taken to do. If religion is accorded such equal status, it will emerge as a primary determinant in certain contexts, just as the others do. At present these primaries appear an ill-sorted lot, showing how rough and unready the state of theorizing about them is. Nonetheless, it seems clearly desirable to me that materiality be predicated as a feature of all of them and be explicitly specified for all of them—religion too, if it is to be accorded the status of a primary determinant.³⁰ It seems equally clear to me that much more explicit allowance for historical and situational variation must be made regarding the material component of each recognized primary determinant in interpretation. If this is done, then it may prove possible, for any given determinant, to correlate a decline in its material manifestation and perceptibility with a reduction in its capacity for determination. In the late twentieth century, blue-jeaned “everybodies” apparently bear witness to the waning power of class distinctions, while developing surgical and endocrinological procedures for transsexuality may weaken the power of gender as a primary sociobiological determinant. As for religion in our own Western culture and era, two among many indications of its potential to figure as a primary determinant include the strongly materialized practices that mark conflicting stands on the issue of legalized abortion and the distinctive clothing worn by such diverse groups as orthodox Jews, the Amish, and members of the Nation of Islam and other Muslims.

If allowance for historical and situational variation is extended to Tudor England, we find class as a factor of primary difference being read as materially encoded in sumptuary laws and a network of protocols of deference and precedence, not in bodily features as such. This is why pretenders such as Perkin Warbeck could be genuinely dangerous, if the pretenses materialized in their dress and bearing were convincing. Similarly, gender as a factor of primary difference in Tudor England was read as materially encoded in female bodies viewed as male ones fallen short of fulfillment.³¹ This is why the accession of Elizabeth I to the throne of England, for example, required interpretation as a special providence of God, with divine right as merely a secondary consideration.³² Religion might be argued to read as a factor of primary difference in sixteenth-century England on analogous material grounds: its sharply rival sets of objectifications of the holy.

Positing religion as such a materialized factor would immediately pick out as significant the contrasting object referents for Fisher's and Parr's books of the crucifix—both as exemplifications of the phenomenon and as sites where the determinative strength of the factor of religion thus materialized can be weighed interpretively. More broadly, positing religion as a materialized factor might help to make legible and intelligible certain currently underattended-to aspects of massively deployed social energies in sixteenth- and earlier seventeenth-century England. Although iconoclasm has drawn appreciable scholarly attention, the long-sustained contestations over sacramental dogma and its attendant modalities of worship (themselves encoded in and as bodily practices) have not yet done so.³³ I am thinking not only of the centrality of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments to Reformation English culture but also of the voluminous book wars fought over transubstantiation by generation after generation: Thomas More vs. John Frith; Stephen Gardiner vs. Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer; and Thomas Harding vs. John Jewel, for example.

By the same token turned to its obverse face, can we then proceed, as I suggested above, to theorize that race or class or gender or generation or religion lose force as primary determinants in specific historical and situational contexts when and if they diminish (or lose) their material component? Clearly, there is more hard work to be done at a fundamental level before we can feel sanguine about making our criticism and historical work be about something that counts as real. Toward what I am inclined to regard as not just the desideratum but the necessity of theoretically constituting religion on a par with the triad of race, class, and gender as a material determinant of human experience and expression, however, the way at present looks long and hard—given the sweeping negativism of Freudian and post-Freudian, Marxian, and modern secular predispositions regarding religion for starters. But I am prepared to make such a start nevertheless.

Notes

1. Too little notice, in my view, has been given to Richard Helgerson's Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1983), with its cogent definition of “the literary system” in terms of generational patterns. Robert O. Evans has my thanks for calling my attention to the pioneering work of Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1966).

2. For these biographical particulars, see Anthony Martienssen, Queen Katherine Parr (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), 18-28.

3. See the treatment of the (uneven) gradation from translation to original authorship in Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), chaps. 1-3, and the essays on Margaret More Roper, Elizabeth Tudor, and Anne Askew in Margaret P. Hannay, ed., Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985).

4. Julian of Norwich's scholarly editors take the view that she dictated her Showings of Divine Love (ca. 1393), while the Book of Margery Kempe (ca. 1436-1438) was unquestionably dictated by its illiterate author. See Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, eds., A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), vol. 1: Introduction; and The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford B. Meech, with annotation by Hope Emily Allen, EETS orig. ser. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 153, for an extended passage in which Margery's scribe asserts his presence and describes his misgivings about some of what she dictates to him. The Book of St. Albans (1486), attributed in its earliest printings to Dame Juliana Berners, traditionally identified as the prioress of the nunnery of Sopwell in Hertfordshire, contains treatises on hawking, hunting, and heraldry that have been analyzed as compilations by different hands. See The Boke of Saint Albans by Dame Juliana Berners, ed. William Blades (London: Elliot Stock, 1905), 6-14.

5. See my “Devotion as Difference: Intertextuality in Queen Katherine Parr's Prayers or Meditations (1545),” Huntington Library Quarterly 53 (1990): 171-97.

6. On the relation between Askew and Parr, see Martienseen, Queen Katherine Parr, 189-223, building on John Foxe, “The Trouble of Queene Katherine Parre,” Actes and Monuments (London, 1570), 2:1422-25. On the historical significance of this case, see Paula McQuade, “‘Except that they had offended the Lawe’: Gender and Jurisprudence in The Examinations of Anne Askew,” Literature and History, 3rd ser., 3.2 (1994): 1-14, and Elaine Beilin's edition of Askew's Examinations, forthcoming in the Oxford University Press series, Women Writers in English, 1350-1850.

7. Henry VIII died in January 1547. Parr's reference to him as an English Moses who has led God's people out of captivity to Pharaoh, the bishop of Rome, clearly indicates that the king is still alive (Katherine Parr, The lamentacion of a sinner, made by the most vertuous Ladie, Quene Caterin, bewayling the ignoraunce of her blind life [London, 1547], sigs. Dvv-Dvir). Further citations will be abbreviated L and incorporated parenthetically in my text. For discussion, see Janel Mueller, “A Tudor Queen Finds Voice: Katherine Parr's Lamentation of a Sinner,” in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, ed., The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988): 15-47.

8. Martienssen, Queen Katherine Parr, 180, 205-6; for discussion, see Mueller, “A Tudor Queen Finds Voice,” 28-33.

9. To illustrate the relative remoteness of any analogues: Christ is called a “book” (liber) by Rabanus Maurus (PL, vol. 112, col. 987) and by St. Bruno the Carthusian (PL, vol. 152, cols. 545, 805); he is called “a book written within and without” (liber scriptus intus et foris) by Adam Scotus, echoing Ezekiel 2:10 (PL, vol. 198, col. 774). Of the cross, Alcuin pronounces that it “is a sign, the sign of the living God” (signum Dei vivi, crucis est signum) (PL, vol. 100, col. 1129).

10. Luther comes closest, yet not very close, in articles 20 and 21 of his Heidelberg Disputation (May 1518): “He deserves to be called a theologian … who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross. A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is” (Luther's Works, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann and Harold J. Grimm [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1957], 31:52-53).

11. F. Rose-Troup, “Two Book Bills of Catherine Parr,” The Library, 3rd ser., 2 (1911): 40-48; James K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), chap. 7; John N. King, “Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr,” in Hannay, ed., Silent but for the Word, 48.

12. Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani: An English Version, ed. Anne M. O'Donnell, S.N.D., Early English Text Society. o. s., no. 282 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 178-79. In quoting I have modernized s and u/v and expanded printers' contractions.

13. Convocation first acceded to the royal supremacy in February 1531 after Fisher managed to lodge his famous qualification “as far as Christ's law allows” and the formal submission of the clergy to the king's headship took place in May 1532, presumably with Fisher's mounting discomfiture. When the Act of Supremacy began to be enforced by oath in the spring of 1534, Fisher explicitly refused to take the oath and was confined to the Tower of London in April. He was executed on June 22, 1535, with More following him to the block on July 6. See John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 128, 131, and 135, and Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9.

14. The Short-Title Catalogue lists one edition only (STC 10899) of A spirituall consolation, written by John Fyssher to hys sister Elizabeth, to which A Sermon verie fruitfull, godly, and learned, … Preached upon a good Friday, by the same John Fisher is appended in continuous pagination. The hypothetical ascription of printer and date [W. Carter, 1578?] is derived from A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640: An Annotated Catalogue, vol. 2, Literature in English (Aldershot, Hants., Eng.: Scolar Press, 1994), no. 273. This Good Friday sermon has attracted much less critical attention than others by Fisher—his defiance of Luther, his memorial sermon on Henry VII, and his series on the Penitential Psalms, for example. Rex, Theology of John Fisher, 217, notes the cursory discussions by J. W. Blench and Edward Surtz, S.J., but offers only a brief synopsis of his own (46-49). Arthur Kinney's admiration for Fisher's sermon is such that he supposes (personal communication) that it was delivered more than once. If so, the occasions on which it might have been heard multiply accordingly.

15. For an authoritative account of Lollardy, see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

16. John Fisher, A Sermon verie fruitfull, godly, and learned, upon thys sentence of the Prophet Ezechiell, Lamentationes, Carmen, et vae, very aptely applyed unto the passion of Christ: Preached upon a good Friday, in The English Works of John Fisher, part 1, ed. John E. B. Mayor, Early English Text Society, e. s. no. 27 (London: N. Trübner, 1876), 388. Subsequent references will be abbreviated S and incorporated parenthetically in my text. In quoting I have modernized s and u/v and expanded printers' contractions.

17. See, further, my remarks on how Parr “screens topicality, polemic, and personality from her text” and the mutedness of her gender identification (explicit only in her name on the title page until her late reference to her royal husband) in Mueller, “A Tudor Queen Finds Voice,” 41-42.

18. Compare William Tyndale in The Parable of the Wicked Mammon (1529): “See therefore thou have God's promises in thine heart. … The promises, when they are believed, are they that justify; for they bring the Spirit, which looseth the heart, … and certifieth us of the good-will of God unto usward. … Christ is our Redeemer, Saviour, peace, atonement, and satisfaction; and hath made amends or satisfaction to Godward for all the sin which they that repent (consenting to the law and believing the promises) do, have done, or shall do. … For in the faith which we have in Christ and in God's promises find we mercy, life, favour, and peace” (Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Various Portions of the Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter, Parker Society vol. 25 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848], 48, 52, 47).

19. Both Fisher's reference to beholding the image of the crucifix in one's heart and Erasmus's notion of recording the mystery of the cross “in thy mind” (cited above) have affinities with the important devotional trope of “the book of the heart,” the subject of a book-in-progress by Eric Jager.

20. On the importance of the Enchiridion as the best single source for Erasmus's conception of the Christian life, see Preserved Smith, Erasmus: A Study of His Life, Ideals, and Place in History (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923), 55, 58; John Joseph Mangan, Life, Character, and Influence of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 1:174; and Johan Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation, trans. F. Hopman (New York: Scribners, 1924; Reprint, New York: Harper, 1957), 54. Rex, Theology of John Fisher, 47, records that Fisher owned a copy of the Enchiridion. For Parr, see n. 11.

21. I am not implying that Fisher was disingenuous here, for current political circumstances sufficed to deter him from any overt endorsement of Erasmus's scripturalist brief in Paraclesis. As Rex pertinently remarks, “Fisher seems to have accorded a higher place to scripture and the vernacular in the Christian religion than we have been accustomed to expect of the late medieval English hierarchy” (Theology of John Fisher, 48; cf. 158-60).

22. Any adequate assessment of the Erasmian likenesses-within-difference that link Fisher's and Parr's texts would, however, also need to reckon with appropriations of Paraclesis by Tyndale in his English translation of the work and by Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer in citing it to defend their vernacular scripturalist program. Parr is not likely to have been ignorant of any of these at the time she wrote her Lamentation.

23. For a probing discussion of problems of methodology and subject matter, see Dominick La Capra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), chap. 1.

24. On the importance of justification by faith as a confessional difference as early as the 1540s, see William P. Haugaard, “Katherine Parr: The Religious Convictions of a Renaissance Queen,” Renaissance Quarterly 22 (1969): 346-59.

25. For a sharply reasoned, historically acute argument that religion was the principal category in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors “thought through” a whole range of vital concerns, see Debora K. Shuger's Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).

26. In Cecil's words, “This good lady thought no shame to detect her sinne, to obteyne remission: no vilenes, to become nothing, to be a membre of him, which is al thinges i[n] all: no folye to forget the wisdome of the worlde, to lerne the Simplicitie of the gospel: at the last, no displeasauntnes to submyt her selfe to the scole of the Crosse, the learning of the crucifixe, the booke of our redempcion, the very obsolute library of goddes mercye and wisdome” (L, 8-9). As a further example of the difficulty of locating gender in Parr's Lamentation, it might seem that not merely inference but a full-blown argument from silence was required to explain the lack of circumstantial specificity in Parr's conversion narrative as a feminine tactic employed to minimize the presumptive scandal of a queen of England in overt self-abasement in print. But, in turn, how would such an argument comport with Cecil's praise of Parr's outspokenness about her spiritual state?

27. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), provides a pathbreaking account of the composite features of this Protestant subjectivity, substantially revising that of Louis L. Martz in The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962).

28. See, especially, Judith P. Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

29. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Introduction: The Complexity of Symbols,” in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 2.

30. Admittedly, Louis Althusser has provided for the determining force of ideas in the cultural-materialist process by offering a fundamental revision of the Marxian binary of “base” and “superstructure.” His influential work on “ideological state apparatuses,” a category that easily accommodates the political mandates of Reformation and Counter Reformation Christianity, permits cultural potency to be claimed for religion without invoking considerations of materiality. However, it seems obvious to me that race or ethnicity, class, gender, and generation have attained the status of primary determinants because, in large measure, they register perceptually as physical facts about human beings. I want to pursue the possibility that religion can be put on the same footing.

31. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), chap. 2.

32. See Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 131, 202.

33. This literature notably includes Margaret Aston, England's Iconoclasts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), John R. Phillips, The Reformation of Images (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, ca. 1400-ca. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), as well as work on literary implications, especially in Milton studies: see Lana Cable, Carnal Rhetoric: Milton's Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), Ernest B. Gilman, Down Went Dagon: Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).