SOURCE: “‘A whore at the first blush seemeth only a woman’: John Bale's Image of Both Churches and the Terms of Religious Difference in the Early English Reformation,” in Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1995, pp. 245-69.

[In the following essay, McEachern focuses on Bale's use of the image of the Whore of Babylon in The Image of Both Churches as a symbol of the corruption and duplicity of the Catholic Church.]

“When shall Goddes sonne be unto you no syne of contradiction?”(1)

John Bale is a precocious figure in the chronology of Tudor literature. Antiquary and playwright, he ushered in forms diverse as the chorography and the history play, which were to acquire full presence only with the arrival of Elizabethan conditions of textual production. Perhaps Bale's most trenchant contribution, however, to the textual practices of his century was a text that was itself concerned with periodization. Bale's 1545 commentary on the Book of Revelation, The Image of Both Churches, serves as a source not only for exegesis throughout his century, but for a semiotics of Protestant group identity. The Image is a thoroughly inaugural text, uniquely embedded in the moment of the early Reformation; yet in its exfoliation of the shared lability of religious and textual identities, it displays the persistent dilemma of a church defined against symbolic practice even as it insists on the primacy of the word.

As its title suggests, The Image of Both Churches negotiates religious controversy by first imagining the variety of religious identity within a binary system, and then by emphasizing the differences and distances between the resulting two types. Central to Bale's distinction is a typology of female identity. Female figures are of course crucial to the discovery narrative offered by the dense allegory of Revelation; chief among them is the notorious whore of Babylon. Buoyed throughout by the zeal of the newly converted, Bale's exegesis is for the most part confident, particularly on the subject of the whoredom of the Roman church. The term functions in several related fashions for Bale. Most generally, it is a trope of idolatry, or spiritual infidelity: “vain observations, … superstitious sects … errors in hypocrisy … fornication spiritual.” More specifically, however, “whoredom” links female decorativeness with the institutional gaudiness of the Roman church requisite to idolatry, “for what else” asks Bale, “[but a woman] beareth out this malignant muster in their copes, crosses, oils, mitres, robes, relics, ceremonies, vigils, holy days, blessings, censings, and foolings, … a wanton … vain-glorious pomp?”² As female decoration represents and solicits various liaisons, so idolatry (the adulterous divergence from the one true God) requires images, or a reliance upon outward signs. As the gloss to the 1560 Geneva Bible explains, “Antichrist is compared to an harlot because he seduceth the worlde with vaine wordes, doctrines of lies, and outward appearance.”³ Finally, it is a typology that explains, in its invocation of the universal susceptibility of “carnal understanding” to visible signs, the heretofore comprehensive cultural appeal of the Roman church. As Bale puts it, “Over a gorgeous glittering whore every fleshly man is inordinately wanton, fierce, and greedy.”⁴

Such universal appeal is certainly attested by the whore's subsequent literary popularity. The Faerie Queene is the most prominent invocation that comes to mind, but Duessa's ubiquity in that poem is perhaps underscored by her habit of appearing in Tudor literature generally. In 1607 Thomas Dekker titled his loosely veiled play about the Armada The Whore of Babylon, in which the latter battles the Faerie Queene, while the chief villainess of John Foxe's 1550 Latin verse drama Christus Triumphans is catchily termed “Pornapolis,” facing off against the virtuous “Ecclesia.” Bale's work also served as a primary source of subsequent biblical glosses and Revelation commentaries.⁵ If the difference between a bad woman and a good one is a persistent archetype of the western imagination, certainly its Tudor manifestations bespeak a particularly potent cultural expressiveness.

The proliferation of a typology he helped to enunciate might have gratified John Bale; he in fact hoped that the fate of his text would be its dissemination. For instance, he glosses the “little book” appearing in chapter 10 of Revelation as the “faithful, sincere, and godly interpretations of [singular learned men that God] willeth us to take, specially in books, forsomuch as in person they can in no wise be everywhere present, and for that it is a book here named.”⁶ Nor would such reappearances have surprised Bale, for at the very least, the longevity of the typology's resonance conforms to the reiterative narrative structure of apocalypse. The proliferation of Antichrist in Tudor literature is only testimony to its repeated currency in the world. However, I wish to argue that the charisma of the whore of Babylon has more to do with the relationship between textual dissemination and the accompanying hermeneutic contingency as it is shaped by the inaugural moment of the early Reformation.

Part of the whore's persistent appeal no doubt has to do with her decorativeness: she is ostentatiously outward in her appearance: “gorgeously appareled … flourishingly decked with gold, precious stones, and pearls.”⁷ Such costume is treacherous both in its appeal to the visual senses and in its suggestion in these symbols of outward glory of a corresponding inward worth: “So blinded are they with her fopperies and tangled with her toys, that they judge all that she doth holy, religious, and perfect.”⁸ This decoration is thus at once a symbol of the church's accessory paraphernalia of worship—“exterior ministration”—and a token of its merely outward, or superficial, presence; the gap, in other words, that the Roman church opens between inner truth and outer appearance: “not only in her manifold ornaments, … but also in mystery of counterfeit godliness. Many outward brags maketh this painted church.” Thus in addition to her possession of a fetching outward form, and hence visual appeal, the whore possesses the ability to dissemble godliness. Such a talent understandably poses a problem for the believer in search of the truth, as the phrase of my title reveals: “A whore at the first blush seemeth only a woman.”⁹

These words supply a comment upon the text of Revelation 17, in which John of Patmos is promised a vision of the harlot: “Come, I will shew ye the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters.” Bale's gloss, framed by a parenthesis, links the prospective whore of the first verse with her actual appearance in the third: “And I sawe a woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast.”¹⁰ The transition in the biblical text—from “great whore” to “a woman”—seems a relatively innocuous one, so much so that Bale's note linking the definitive whore and the mere woman seems overweening, positing an ambiguity in this text where, uncharacteristically, it doesn't exist. His choice of terms is further revealing. The phrase “only a woman” seems to suggest that a whore is in some way more than a woman—in excess of a woman. This nuance tallies with Bale's sense of the whore's superfluity, both sartorially and sexually. In a similar vein, the whore's ability to initially appear as a woman underscores her duplicity, her ability to impersonate, or to “seem” truth. However, the temporality of the locution “at first blush” invokes the reassuring teleological structure of Revelation: such confusion is merely temporary, or inaugural. If at first the whore appears as a mere woman, subsequent blushes, or glances, will see beyond the glittering surface to reveal the woman as a whore.

That the confusion of true and false churches is a function of the duplicity of the latter is a tenet of Bale's exegetical effort. He warns in his preface that “so glorious are the pretenses of Romish pope and Mahomet, that they seem unto them which regard not these warnings the very angels of light, and their churches most holy congregations.” The locusts with the faces of men in chapter 9 are similarly deceptive: “Outward pretense they had of wisdom, grace, and godliness, yet was there nothing less within them … yet were they but painted tombs, full of all sins and filthiness.”¹¹ Even more disturbing, however, than this impersonation of truth are the implications of such an impersonability for the stability of the category of the true itself. In other words, if a whore is something that can “seem” a woman, then a woman is something that can be impersonated, or falsely represented. More pressing, then, than the question When is a woman a whore becomes When is a woman not a whore, or, in Bale's terms, When is a woman only a woman? At its furthest extreme, such a logic points to the question whether a pure, or authentic, non-impersonated woman even exists. As such questions suggest, equal to the problem of discovering the false church—indeed, perhaps coincident with it—is the problem of discovering the true. For as Bale points out elsewhere, finding the true church is not merely a problem of recognizing a luridly false one, “for many false Christs are abroad in the world to seduce the people.” The problem of the truth's authenticity is perhaps best exemplified by another instance of a blush. Nowhere is the whore's duplicity more corroborated and figured, as it were, than by a fellow villain of chapter 13: the beast “with two horns like a lamb,” or as Bale rephrases it, “the Lamb at a blush.”¹²

It should be emphasized here that the dream narrative that Revelation presents is a dizzying challenge for an exegetical effort, both in its rambling succession of events and in the multiplicity and the inscrutability of its agents. (As William Tyndale remarked in his Obedience of a Christian Man, “the Apocalypse, or Revelation of John, are allegories whose literal sense is hard to find in many places.”)¹³ It came to focus, in fact, some key differences between Roman and Protestant attitudes to the vernacular availability of scripture. The 1584 preface to the Rheims Bible placed the Apocalypse among those parts of scripture “which have in them as many mysteries as words,” and to which public access should be restricted. Protestant voices, girded by the coincidental felicity of typological fulfillment, that virtually literal expiration of the thousand-year reign of Antichrist with the arrival of the Reformation, were less cautious: “Though it be hard to understand, there are many things in it that are plaine and easy to be understood of every artificer … there is nothing more cleere, then Rome be that Whore of Babylon.”¹⁴ Revelation provides a sequence of confusion, then disclosure or denouement, followed by the anticipation of a marriage; its sweep is complicated primarily by the need to decipher the identities of its succession of apparitions: among others, a series of angels, four horsemen, various miscegenated beasts, 144,000 virgins, a pregnant woman clothed by the sun, some dragons, and, of course, the whore.

There are, among this assortment, at least two lambs: one appears in chapter 5, another in chapter 13. Bale's approach to this multiplicity lies in a general schematic attempt to separate the characters into two types according to their relative relations to the text's initial God-like apparition. His identification of characters and their values necessarily relies on certain hermeneutic conventions: for instance, the typological identity of “the Lamb” as Christ, as well as the pejorative aspect of anything termed, or in the proximity of, Antichrist. Exegesis thus relies on a logic of filiation or resemblance, in which identity is determined by one of two principles, either (in the case of good characters) a version of “imitation is the best form of flattery,” or (for the bad ones) of guilt by association. Yet room for confusion remains, partly due to the resemblances between characters, partly due to the generic status of others;¹⁵ and partly to the doubling structure of the narrative itself: it is unclear at points whether additional episodes and agents are being introduced, or whether they are merely recapitulations of earlier moments. Most troubling, perhaps, for this text's articulation of difference is its reliance upon a logic of figural association, embodied in the fact that the chief security of all its correspondences rests in a tautological identity: Christ himself—“one like unto the son of man”—is best known by his resemblance to himself: “I saw one like unto Christ, which, when he was conversant here, among us, not only called himself the Son of Man, but also appeared in shape and apparel as the same.”¹⁶ As the sartorial security of Christ's own identity suggests, the figural province of identity is not that of the papists alone. And given that resemblance is itself a figurative operation—the comparison, for better or worse, of one identity with another—the very method by which Bale seeks to distinguish among significations is haunted by the precariousness of the contrasts it constructs. For as Bale must make all distinctions by means of figural conflations, differences among characters are less a function of absolute alternatives than of relative similarities, produced less via opposition than by means of a spectrum of gradient differences.

For instance, when confronted with the lamb—in John's text, “coming up out of the earth [with] two horns like a lamb, and he spake as did the dragon”—Bale admits this lamb's correspondence to the other lamb that immediately comes to mind, as his conversion of article—from a to the Lamb—reveals. The horns are the chief point of comparison, particularly as the initial lamb—established as Christ by its power to open the seven-sealed book—not only appears, in its possession of seven rather than two horns, as rather less (or more) a lamb than this lamb, but also, in its seven-horned glory, recalls rather uncomfortably sundry other seven-prowed creatures. Bale's commentary acknowledges this difficulty: “The horns of Christ are his high kingdom in the world … that word is the sceptre of Christ's power, and the rod of right order.”¹⁷ Hence, the more horns the better. But the problem posed by this abundance was recognized by other exegetes as well; crucially, Heinrich Bullinger confronts it by pointing out the scriptural use of simile: “And here we must observe, that he sayeth not, that those are the hornes of the lambe. For Christ here kepeth still both the presthood and the kingdom with the faithful in the church: neyther doth he resign the same to any other … he sayeth therfore, like a lambe. For the Pope will make all men beleeve that he hath received of Christe priesthood, and empire, that he is chrystes vicar, where he is nothing lesse.”¹⁸ In his association of a false figurality with Catholic practice, and a potential literal identity with the true lamb, Bullinger corroborates Barbara Kiefer Lewalski's account of the reformer's attribution of excessive allegorical habits to the papists.¹⁹ Bale's approach, however, relies on securing yet another figural identity. First, he counters with a causal formulation of the lamb's link to its companion: this lamb is “but all counterfeit and false in very deed; for he spake as did the dragon.” Though resembling a lamb in appearance, this creature resembles the dragon in speech; since the dragon has been earlier established as antichristian by its blasphemy, the second lamb appears more allied with the Antichrist. Bale continues, converting the disturbing plethora of horns into a sign of advantageous plenitude, and the apparent innocence of the two-horned beast into one of meager insufficiency: “Seven horns hath christ, for in him was the fulness of the verity whereas this beast hath but two, and yet they are but false and counterfeit; they seem to be Christ's and are not.” Bale cements the distinction by comparing the latter to “the corrupted letter of the two testaments, falsely interpreted, and for a carnal purpose alleged; … his is the verity and life, this is but a fable and fiction, fantastical and faint, sophistical and sleighty. Though the same be like Christ's, yet they are none of his.”²⁰

Bale's formulation of the difference between churches as a difference between readings recalls the divided tradition of Revelation exegesis itself. Katherine Firth classifies it as falling broadly into two genres. One method is historical, with medieval precursors in Otto of Freising and Joachim of Fiore, in which “the obscure prophecies of the Book of Revelation [are viewed] as a hidden history unfolding its pattern in world events.” The other, typified by Wycliffe, considers the text as “an allegory acted out on an eternal plane illustrating a completed and changeless revelation of truth.”²¹ The former is primarily a method that tends towards the literal in its typological translation of the events of Revelation poetic into the events of world history. Prompted by its acknowledgment of the incessantly teleological narrative structure of the text itself, among its features is the tempting potential identification of the exegete's own moment in the narrative, although such a location is undoubtedly complicated by the potential nonliterality of certain numbers, as well as the inevitable opaqueness of the future itself. The second, or allegorical method, is attractive for its responsiveness to the intractability of the many characters to a literal apprehension, and also to the inevitably deferred structure of closure that the text insists upon—evidence for most, of course, of the eternally backsliding nature of the struggle against evil. Even the otherwise literal-minded Tyndale admitted the latter to be the preferred approach to this text: “Antichryst is not an outward thinge, that is to say a man that should suddenly appear with wonders … no verely Antichryst is a spirituall thynge … his nature is when he is uttered and overcome with the word of God to go out of the Playe for a season and to disguise himselfe and then to come in again with a new raiment.”²² As Bale too concedes, “Since the worldes beginning, … hath iniquitie his frowarde course, and schall so have styll to the latter ende thereof.”²³ As such statements suggest, the move away from literal apprehension retreats from temporal structures altogether to construct a kind of essentialism with regard to the battle between good and evil: “For we must consider,” writes Bale, “that thus Revelation is in all points no story, … as many writers have thought it to be, in supposing an antichrist to be born at the latter end of the world. But it is a mystery, comprehending one general antichrist for all.”²⁴ Not story but mystery; not diachronic narrative, but synchronic symbol, and while not strictly free from a logic of correspondence, this method eschews a teleological goal. Yet such circumspection is in turn complicated by the fact that the text does promise an eventual resolution of the battle, however attenuated its arrival.

The division of exegetical tradition into the camps of literal-historical and symbolic-essential is inevitably schematic, and hardly absolute. Bale himself has been styled an exponent of both methods. Considered as influential for later efforts in his reanimation of the historical method, he placed his own age of the Reformation in the age of the sixth seal. Paul Christianson notes, however, that such satisfaction of his historian's bent was not determinative: “Holy history provided the framework for his exegesis, but the mystery of unlocking the sacred tropes preserved Bale from too direct an application of specific prophecies to individual historical events.”²⁵ Firth finds Bale similarly poised, in a “compromise position in which the Apocalypse might be interpreted as a revelation of the past but when it clearly referred to the future it remained a mystery incapable of certain interpretation.”²⁶ The threading of Revelation from the allegorical to the literal/historical through the needle's eye of the present was a position familiar to other interpreters. Heinrich Bullinger, in his Hundred Sermons on the Apocalypse (1557), argues against those who claim that “hardly shuld this book be understood before it was fulfilled” by promising that “doubtless if we read this same book of the Apocalypse, and confer those things which he speaketh under a shadow, with the same that stories testify to be done, We shall say also, that he telleth plaine stories.”²⁷Carion's Chronicle of 1532 similarly asserts that “God hath geven us all maner of prophecyes of exterior kingdomes, … that of the accomplishment of their chaunce, we might have wytnesse, that our worde is come of God, and that none other faith saviours is true.”²⁸ Yet as such a statement suggests, the literal method, in its desire for confirmatory proof or evidence through the coincidence of word and “exterior” world, will be problematic—even presumptuous—for a radically inward faith. The straddling of the threshold of the present, with one foot in allegory and another in literal history, bespeaks a comfort denied to a reformer as sensitive as Bale to the wedge driven between the two readings by the moment of the Reformation itself.

As the instance of the two-horned lamb suggests, Bale is wary of literal readings (however anatomically correct). Indeed, he warns throughout of the danger of literal apprehension: for instance, a “loud voice” in chapter 5 is “no corporal noise (for somuch as they are but spirits,) but a vehement zeal of most perfect love.”²⁹ In chapter 15 a song that is “but little and small, yet … therein containeth all verity … what though it be not so word by word expressed?”³⁰ The prejudice against literal interpretation of Revelation was a commonplace of exegetical practice; John Napier writes in his 1593 Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of Saint John that “first before every chapter, is premitted the argument, not of the literall sense of the chapter, but of the true meaning and interpretation of the same.”³¹ No doubt the bias against the literal in this case had to do with the real intractability of this particular scripture to any such apprehension; yet it also may be traced, for Bale, to a distrust of the outward, the surface, and the ready and familiar meanings that literal reading presupposes. As he writes in Yet a Course at the Romishe Foxe, “we loke not now for hys [Christ's] coming agayne with the iewes, nor yet thynke to receyve him in outwarde shaddowes with the hypocrites more upon one day than upon another. But we beleeve to have hym wythin us at all tymes.”³² Bale's chief argument against errant readings turns in fact on his attack of a literal reading, that by the papists of the appearance in chapter 14 of the 144,000 virgins as actual virgins: “From this place,” he puts its scornfully, “fetch the blind papists a great argument for their wiveless chastity, and that none followeth Christ but they in this muster, because they are unmarried. … O ignorant asses, and beastly idiots!” Bale's reading, on the other hand, identifies these virgins as those who “were not defiled with women”—in other words, “by no strange doctrines, nor yet profane worshippings, is their faith contaminated … not the spousage of their souls have they broken by no filthy traditions of men … therefore are they virgins, married unto Christ in faith. … Never is the maidenhood of the soul lost, till erroneous doctrine be received from the messengers of antichrist.”³³

Bale's invective against a practical priestly chastity is a refrain throughout all of his works. In the Epistle Exhortatory of an English Christian, he condemns the papists because “they have set up an ydoll among themselves, calling it holy virginitie and the vowed chastity of priests.”³⁴ Like most of his objections to idolatry, however, Bale's chief complaint concerns the authenticity of the representation. His Actes of English Votaryes, a saint-by-saint exposé of what Shakespeare would later call “behind-door work,” claims to disclose “one face of Antichryst … wherwith he hath of long time painted out his whore … that she might appear a glorious madame … that face is her vowed chastity, whereby she hath deceitfully boasted herself spiritual.”³⁵ Bale's catalogue rings changes on a single theme, that “they under the profession of chastity, leaving the naturall use of woman, have burnt in their own lust one to other that man with man, that is to say monke with monke, nonne with nonne, fryre with fryre, and priest with priest, wrought filthinesse.”³⁶

Bale's vehemence and explicitness about the alleged sexual perversions of the Roman church have earned him nickname of “bilious”; Paul Bauckham remarks upon his “wellnigh pornographic contempt for popish religious orders.”³⁷ The convergence of the texture of Bale's language with the promiscuity of his object is seconded by his adoption of the very method he deplores. While, on the one hand, he critiques his antagonists for a literal reading, the irony remains that he censors them for not being literal enough in their chastity: for, in effect, generating a false sign, what an earlier writer had called, after Luther, a “cloke of Godliness.”³⁸ (As Tyndale's comment implied, Antichrist was a thoroughly theatrical animal.) Ironically, for many reformers, it was the allegedly literal practices of sexual and carnal excess that provided the clearest mark of the beast. Not only false ceremonies, or the accessories of idolatry, but actual behaviors were the sign of “infidelitie, or ungodlinesse”:³⁹ “adulterous cardinals, … filthy bishops, … prostibulous prelates and priests … the stews of both kinds at Rome, … the good ghostly father that constuprated two hundred nuns in his time, … the burying of strange infants in their jakes.”⁴⁰ It is not merely that the truest route to spiritual adultery often lies via literal adultery⁴¹—for Bale, literal carnality is the surest sign of spiritual carnality: “no citizens are more preciously apparelled, more sumptuously fed, nor more deliciously dieted, than is the shorn nation, if ye mark well their favour and feeding, their fine disguising and lodging, their fat cheeks and great bellies … so undiscreet, carnal, and beastly are they.”⁴² For both Bale and Bullinger, a clear index of the Roman church's transgressiveness—indeed, the very type of the whore of Babylon—was the cross-dressed unwed mother Pope Joan: “What will you say that through the providence of God it came to passe, that a woman fayning herself a manne, dyd clymbe up to the see of Rome, was created Byshoppe … For thus would God declare, that the Bishoppe of Rome sitteth a whore upon the beaste.”⁴³ Carnal understanding goes hand in hand with actual corporeality: “In the fire of fleshly concupiscence … they [have] forsworn godly marriage, to make daily sacrifice to the devil in carnal beastliness.”⁴⁴ For Bullinger, this collapsing of the distance between sign and signified dispensed with the need for symbolic practice altogether: “For whilest the church of Rome hath prohibited lawful marriages … it hath opened the gates to fornications, adulteries, whoredoms, and luste abhominable. There nede no wordes, the thing itself speaketh.”⁴⁵ All prejudice against literality aside, the fact remains that the process of literal resemblance and correspondence provides the surest evidence of Antichrist's identity. As Bale notes, “if you spell Roma backwardes, ye shall find it love in this prodigious kynde, for it is preposterous amor, a love out of order and a love against kynde.”⁴⁶ Quite literally, the letters of the word will reveal the false church.

In their conviction that clerical chastity was a mere cover, or gorgeous cloak, for unseemly practices, reformers perhaps only reveal a defensiveness about clerical marriage, and about the interestedness of their own readings of scripture which sought to legitimize it.⁴⁷ But their conversion of the literal virgins of the papists into yet another suspicious sign suggests that there is no such thing as a literal reading, and furthermore, that any discrimination between good and bad readings is confounded by the necessary figurality of every lexical act.⁴⁸ This confidence about the absence of a literal virginity points to a skepticism of the possibility of an authentic semiotic purity altogether—a possibility linked less, I would argue, to an uncertainty about the signifying practices of Antichrist than about those of Christ himself. Appropriately enough, the chief figure of Christ's identity is “the word.”

Nominally, for Bale, in keeping with the antithetical logic of the text, Christ, unlike Antichrist, is not a false sign, but “always of one nature, to be the mark of contradiction and the rock of reproach.”⁴⁹ Whereas Antichrist propagates a corrupt language-“of false interpretations and glosses, with froward drifts and opinions”—Bale writes of [Christ's] perpetual clearness” and reads what might otherwise be considered an ambiguous token, the two-edged sword proceeding out of God's mouth, as a sign of clarity, not only of Christ but in those whom it touches: “his strong, mighty, and quick word, … so sharp that it pierceth through … effectual, quick, and strong in operation, that destroy[s] utterly all falsehood, filthiness, lies, lewdness, and wickedness.”⁵⁰ Unlike Antichrist, who “hath deceived all the world, in lying tokens and wonders,” Christ speaks the truth, “being the eternal verity itself … and in no wise could lie.”⁵¹ The Book of Revelation is itself considered a lucid token, whose understanding not only makes clear the meaning of history—“a full clearance to all the chronicles … opening their true nature of the ages, times, and seasons”—but which is coincident with, and necessary to, membership in the true church: “He that knoweth not this book, knoweth not what the church is whereof he is a member.” “Let us never look to have a more open mark,” writes Bale, “for herein is the estate [of the church] under pleasant figures and elegant tropes decided.”⁵²

However, as Bale's hundreds of pages of explication testify, the figures and tropes of Revelation, while they may be both pleasant and elegant, are far from lucid. Not only, as he admits elsewhere, does scripture come in a double form—“she” (the pronoun is significant) “hath her figure and history, her mystery and verity, her parable and plaine doctrine, her night and day”⁵³—but she is not, at first blush, as it were, self-evident. Bale admits as much in his preface, in suggesting that the way to decipher Revelation is to compare it with less oblique texts: “The more the figurate speech aboundeth here, the more let them confer it with the other scriptures without all honied colours of rhetoric or of crafted philosophy.”⁵⁴ Later he argues that the purpose of this opacity is to weed out the unfaithful, so that “in parables and figures shall that be hidden from [the wicked], that shall be evident enow to the faithful. For such speak the prophets in figures, Christ in parables, and the apostles in mysteries.” Such opacity results, however, in Bale's own doublespeak: “Such is the nature of God's wisdom, that though it be not in glorious words, fine painted terms, nor in persuasible reasons of man's wit, but in plain simple speaking, yet it cannot be known of the worldly wise.”⁵⁵ Divine terms, it seems, are equally complicit in the dubious complexities of signifying practice. As Napier comments on chapter 18, “Here doth the spirit of God describe and paint Rome no other wise, then shee in her old monuments and coynings doth paint and set out her selfe: to wit, after the forme of a lustye Ladye, clad in not mourning weede, nor widdowes apparel, but gloriouslie and richlie deckt, and decored with all delectable and costlie ornaments.”⁵⁶ The whore may paint herself. But God's word paints her. The precariousness of the boundary between the true and the false church is, it seems, no mere matter of the former's ability to impersonate the latter.

The opaqueness of the truth takes several forms. Interpretation is in part complicated by the fact that hermeneutic clarity is so often left to divine discretion: “At his only will and pleasure is the sincere understanding of the scriptures, and true interpretation of the same.”⁵⁷ Perhaps most confusing, however, is the sense in which God's favor often makes itself clear in a counterintuitive fashion. “So many as I love,” as Bale paraphrases, “I rebuke earnestly, lest they should perish with the wicked. And those that I favor I chasten in this life. … Who is that man that … is left without restraint, wallowing in the concupiscence and desires of the flesh? A great sign it is of the indignation of God; whereas the other is an evident token of God's love.”⁵⁸ The worldly ease of the wicked is no less a scriptural truism than physical persecution, for early reformers, was a political one.⁵⁹ Yet it must be admitted that such a sign system requires interpretation, and that such opacity entails risks: “Some men are tangled with doubts, some troubled with error, some tormented with fear, considering that for this new learning … some have been hanged, … some burned … and some beheaded.”⁶⁰ While the godly may be comforted that the ungodly, despite their outward ease, are inwardly discomfited, they themselves are neither more psychologically secure nor any more clear to the world's gaze. As Bale explains, the angel cloaked with a cloud in chapter 10

betoken[eth] these godly supporters of God's truth to be compassed with many hard showers and troublous crosses of opprobrious rebukes, scorns, slanders, lies, and open blasphemies, to the uttermost trial of their weak flesh. And this cloud hideth from the world all that is in them spiritual and godly, like as it did in Christ, that to many they seem not that they are in deed. Because they are despised of the crafty generation … the simple idiots and deceived multitude doth judge them ill doers; yea, they suppose them very heretics, and so do spitefully call them; whereas indeed, they are the Angels of God.⁶¹

The false church may put forth false signs, but the godly are no more decipherable in terms of the only commonly available lexicon, that of worldly value. While the whore of Babylon may obfuscate the truth “with a vile stinking smoke noyful to the eyes, choking to the throat, and evermore blemishing the light,”⁶² God himself is hardly visible: “under the shadow of figurate locution is his glory … the unfaithful reprobates behold the smoke, … and perceive the world troubled.”⁶³

In an effort to prevent such convergences, Bale distinguishes throughout between the outward nature of the false church and the inward nature of the true: “For God dwelleth in nothing that is made with hands. In the faithful heart is Christ only found.”⁶⁴ The pregnant woman clothed with the sun is the key exemplar of this inwardness: “The travelynge woman which is with childe … betokeneth christes people having [him] within them and not without them.”⁶⁵ Of her flight into the wilderness, Bale writes, “What else doth the just people of God but flee the contagiousness [and] … filthiness of this world, seeking God in the solitary heart, and not in outward fantasies?”⁶⁶ Of that other prominent woman of the text, the Bride of Christ, Bale notes that “every man shall not see … her apparel, for it will be rather a raiment of the heart than of the outward body.” In his concluding words upon chapter 22, he warns that “nothing mayest thou worship that thy outward sight offereth unto thee; for in them hath faith no place, which is a substance of thyngs unseen.”⁶⁷

Yet while attractive, and even logical, given the aggressively externalized nature of Roman ritual, the distinction between false and true churches in terms of their respective outer versus inner presences is dissolved by the exaggerated iconicity of Revelation itself. Of the four beasts in chapter 4, Bale writes that their “diverse exterior similitudes … are not else but the outward signs, tokens, testimonies, and signs of faith, or other fruitful works therof only proceeding; for faith is never without her wholesome fruits.” “By these four similitudes,” Bale continues, “is the true congregation of God known from the painted synagogue and counterfeit church of Satan.”⁶⁸ While Bale may point out that “such worldly similitudes and likelihoods, as we are best acquainted with” are a divine concession to our fallen understanding, the fact remains that God is not above similitudes, or exploiting their domestic appeal: “allur[ing] us to his kingdom by the examples and parables of such things as we have in daily custom.”⁶⁹ The false church is not alone, it seems, in its recourse to the outward and its familiar lexicon. The effort to distinguish the true church from the province of false signs stumbles on the oxymoron of a true sign.

The convergence of true and false signs in both the opacity of the divine word and the reliance on outward similitudes may perhaps be an essential feature of semiotic behavior, the way a process of distinction is always one of resemblance; as Bale acknowledges, “He that hath a desire to know the one church from the other, and the true from the false, may here do it well by conferring of them together.”⁷⁰ But such elisions have also quite temporal sources. No doubt one explanation for such convergence is that, for the inaugural reformer, the two churches are not as dissimilar as they might become for a religious identity more fully elucidated by the official institutional apparatus of the Elizabethan settlement. Even more pertinent are the material conditions of textual production. As I note above, Bale's chief goal in publishing The Image was a proselytizing one. He seeks to disseminate the word and to multiply its presence in the world: “The voice against the unbelieving antichrists was never more earnest than now in our time,” he writes, “as well in writings as in preachings. And farther hath it gone by books written, than by words spoken.”⁷¹ Such multiplication of textual presence is crucially dependent upon the material status of the printed book—as Foxe wrote to the papists in The Actes and Monuments, “if nothing else will deface you, yet printing only will subvert your doings, do what ye can, which the Lord only hath set up for your desolation.”⁷² Yet such proliferation repeatedly raises the vexed question that it is designed to answer, namely, that of how to control the correct interpretation of the Word at large in the world. For instance, in his preface to the second part, Bale claims that “two cruel enemies have my just labors had.” The first concerns the vagaries of the publication process, or more precisely printers, whose “heady haste, negligence, and covetousness, commonly corrupteth all books.”⁷³ The second, however, is the more pernicious creature “Momus,” or the wayward reader: “This cruel carper and malicious quarreler leaveth no man's work unrebuked. … But like as rust, moths, maggots, cankers, and caterpillars, with other vile vermin, corrupteth all that is to the use of man … His working tools are such unsavory syllogisms, sophisms, problems. … Satan upon the pinnacle of the temple never bestowed his alleged scripture more perversely, than this Momus interpreted certain of my allegations, nor yet farther from their right understanding.”⁷⁴ Like page-eating vermin, an unsympathetic reader corrupts the path of the Word, and Bale's anxiety about a misreading of his own words points out the potential failure of the interpretive limits governing scripture as well.

Perhaps the chief obstacle to the easy distribution of the word, however, is the pressure of political circumstance: “Some ungodly rulers there be … that will none of this angel with his open book.” Nowhere more ungodly are they than in the disorienting prohibition of the critical apparatuses designed to secure the word: “Already have they taken in England from the bibles the annotations, tables, and prefaces, straightly forbidden the reading thereof … to take scripture clean away, they have sought out great faults in the translation of it, and thereupon taken them away from the common people's understanding.”⁷⁵ Indeed, the printing history of The Image displays the encounter with such conditions. The first edition of 1545 was not printed in England but in Antwerp. The same is true of the second, of 1548, although it did acquire an English publisher and distributor in Robert Jugge. The date of the first edition both printed and published in England, by John Daye, is 1550.⁷⁶ Like Bale himself, whose intermittent presence in his native country was linked to the shifting official favor towards Protestantism, the availability of The Image of Both Churches was hardly free of ideological pressures, but determined by political circumstance—unwelcome under Henry VIII, but with full acceptance under his son Edward, and Somerset's pro-Protestant protectorship; presumably, like its author and fellow reformers, The Image once again became unwelcome under Mary.

However, while explanations of the precariousness of Bale's binary distinction between whores and women as either the result of the elusive figurality of all language or the pressures of ideological circumstance are appropriate, they do imagine a rather hapless, not to mention hermeneutically naive, John Bale. Indeed, the haplessness of the inevitably idolatrous iconoclast has been the governing tenor of much recent criticism addressed to the problem of a Reformation poetics, most of which concerns itself with later Tudor and Stuart writers. Stephen Greenblatt, for instance, writes of Spenser's “deep anxiety about the impure claims of art”; with similar plaintiveness, Ernest Gilman discusses the tendency of “the iconoclastic impulse [to] hold up … as the ideal of verbal purity, some impossibly chaste medium of unadulterous and unidolatrous signification.”⁷⁷ Such diagnosis of the iconoclast's dilemma seems, however, unable to encompass Bale's position both historically and hermeneutically. On the one hand, a designation of haplessness ignores the extent to which Bale was himself willing to brave the risks of right interpretation and to absolve his own textual practice of the errors he elsewhere imputes. For while he may cavil at the interference of bad readers, his hundreds of pages ignore the rather pointed injunction of Revelation itself that “if any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.”⁷⁸ Alternatively, we might assume that Bale's apparent insouciance about the contingency of his own hermeneutic position derives from a forthright confidence in the strict demarcation of true and false religion—hence the image of the “bilious” Bale, in which he appears a fanatic so innocent, in his zeal, of the polemical context of his own position as to be oblivious to its ironies. However, such a conclusion assumes a Bale unwittingly innocent (if willfully so) of the complexity of his own practice, an assumption which betrays a sentimentality that merely recapitulates in another form the pathos of the hapless iconoclast. In contrast and in conclusion, I would like to offer the suggestion that the convergent blush that Bale details between a whore and a mere woman is, for the newly Protestant, intentional as well as inevitable—a historically necessary as well as obnoxious lability of types.

Bale, like many other nascent reformers, was not born into the true church. A former Carmelite friar, he knew whereof he spoke when expounding the alleged practices of “the dwellers of the earth or worldly-minded multitude”: “Yea (I ask God mercy a thousand times), I have been one of them myself.”⁷⁹ And like such other converts in the process of inventing the traditions and vocabularies of their new religion, the communicability of and between types was essential to his own salvation. The shared iconicity of the false and true churches was not merely a function of the need to provide the latter with a tangible presence in the world—a way to recognize both the church and its members—but of the need to move between them. This requisite elision of the boundaries of belief helps explain why Bale's gloss of the antitype to the whore—the bride of Christ—is not (unlike the commonplace binarism) a virgin, but an ex-fallen woman: “the undefiled spouse … new in that she hath … done off the old man with his filthy works.”⁸⁰ Significantly, if for Bale “the maidenhead of the soul” is a metaphysical rather than physical condition, “never lost” until “erroneous doctrine is received,” so, unlike virginity, it is retrievable once lost: “became they now spiritual, by a true belief in the gospel, that afore were carnal … they of frailness offend many times (as the flesh can do none other) … but after they have fallen, they repent from the heart.”⁸¹

Thus for Bale, the fact that a whore at the first blush (figuratively speaking) seemeth only a woman is a necessary corollary of the fact that a woman seemeth a whore. As Gilman's comment about the “impossibly chaste medium of an unadulterous and unidolatrous signification” suggests, the sexualized (often feminized) tenor of figural instability is endemic to our languages of both political and semantic order.⁸² Yet while for Bale misogyny does indeed propel the conflation of all women with sexual commerce, the figure of the fallen woman simultaneously models his own position as spiritually lapsed and potentially redeemed. As an expression of the fragile boundaries of belief systems, the figural lability of female physiognomy is crucial both to his distinction and his redemption. Indeed, one of his more striking images of the ungodly is an image of physiological liminality, or intermittent sanguinity: they are “afore god but as the cloth stained with mensture.”⁸³ The intermittence of this form of female blood is shared by the enigmatic and transient form of the blush as well. Not only is the phrase of my title syntactically indeterminate (who is it who blushes, the whore, or her spectator?), its status as a sign is notoriously elusive and elisive.⁸⁴ Ostensibly a sign of innocence in its bearer, it also betrays complicity with that which provokes the blush: to blush is to acknowledge acquaintance with the need to do so. Erasmus writes in his De Civilitate Morum Puerilium that “a natural and wholesome modesty, not false or artificial coloring, should give the cheeks their glow. Although even that modesty should be so moderated that it is not construed as insolence, and does not connote … shame.”⁸⁵ But if a readiness to blush is semantically indeterminate, pointing the elusive boundary (not known until crossed) between modesty and shame, a failure to blush is even more troubling a sign.⁸⁶ Ascham writes that “blushing in youth, saith Aristotle, is nothing else but fear to do ill, which fear being once lustily frayed away from youth, then followeth to dare do any mischief, to contemn stoutly any goodness, to be busy in every matter, to be skillful in everything, to acknowledge no ignorance at all.”⁸⁷ So Stuart sermoner Charles Richardson can write of the wicked, “They have gotten an whore's forehead, they cannot blush.”⁸⁸ Blushing may be a suspect sign. But a failure to blush is even more so.

For Bale then, the figure of the first blush reveals the profoundly historical character of his semiotic practice. For the confusion that the first blush limns is an inaugural one, the result of a temporal problem of priority. The blush describes a necessary convergence, but not a permanent one: between types of churches, their symbolic effects, and the women that figure them. In other words, having once blushed, or misread, the outward sign, is a precondition of reading it rightly, in an interior manner. A chaste reading is possible only in the context of an earlier unchaste one, and the field of difference, confusing though it may be, that the latter enables. Thus the potential taint of the false haunts even Bale's final vision of a good woman:

She is cleansed with the fountain of water in the word of life, to seem a glorious congregation without blemish or wrinkle … “Upon thy right hand Lord (saith David), standeth a queene in a garment of most fine gold, compassed with diversity.” But every man shall not see this her apparel, for it will be rather a raiment of the heart than of the outward body … how marvelous this new Jerusalem will be in this regeneration, … it lieth not in us to declare in all points, considering that neither eye hath seen, nor ear heard, neither can the hart conjecture.⁸⁹

As I have tried to suggest, such ineffability expresses not merely the eternal inscrutability of the future, but the more pressing indeterminacies of the Reformation present. More subtly, the fragile difference between a woman and a whore denotes the necessary identity for a nascent faith with that it would reject; like the nation whose vocabulary it would come to provide, the difference between religions depends less on opposition than on resemblance, upon their joint membership in a common set, rather than exemption from the category altogether. For like Bottom the weaver, with whom he shares the Pauline phrase, for Bale the only temporal solution to the inexpressible lies in the dubious and paradoxical promise of those fallible worldly signs that confound pure expression.⁹⁰ Perhaps most elisive of the difference between churches is not how the true resembles the false in a shared figurality, but how, eventually, the two will converge in a shared literality: “For here do we see him in a similitude far off; there shall we behold him like as he is indeed.”⁹¹

Notes

1. John Bale, The Epistle Exhortatory of an English Christian, unto his dearly beloved country of Inglande, against the pompouse popyshe byshoppes therof, as yet the true members of thyr fylthy father the great Antichrist of Rome [Antwerp: Ruremond, 1544?], fol. 7^r.

2. The Image of Both Churches (London, 1545); reprint in Select Works of John Bale, ed. for the Parker Society by Rev. Henry Christmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), 36:494-96.

3. (Geneva: R. Hall, 1560), sig. GGgiiii^r.

4. Bale, The Image, 260.

5. For studies of Bale's reception, see Paul Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978); and Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). For consideration of the apocalypse in the period at large, see C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich, eds., The Apocalypse in Reformation Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).

6. Bale, The Image, 375; my italics.

7. Ibid., 497.

8. Ibid., 498.

9. Ibid., 496; my italics.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 262, 356. Cf. John Bale, Yet a course at the Romish Foxe (Zurich: Oliver Jacobson, 1543): “Moche better ys yt to the Christen beleever that Sathan apere Sathan, and the devill be knowne for the devill, than still to lurke under a faire similitude of the angell of light” (sig. M8^r).

12. Bale, The Image, 437; my italics.

13. William Tyndale, The Obedience of A Christian Man (1528), ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: The Parker Society, 1848), 305.

14. William Fulke, The New Testament (London: Christopher Barker, 1589), sig. A3^r, C4^v.

15. This generic quality, especially evident in the case of angels of an indeterminate moral valence, provoked one of the reticent Tyndale's rare marginal glosses in his 1534 translation of the Bible: “Angel is a greek word and signifieth a messenger. And all the angels are called messengers, … even so prophets, preachers, and the prelates of the church are called angels, that is to say messengers, … the good angels here in this book are the true angels, bishops and preachers, and the evil angels are the heretics and false preachers which ever falsify God's word”; Tyndale's New Testament, ed. David Daniell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 376.

16. Bale, The Image, 269.

17. Ibid., 437.

18. Heinrich Bullinger, A Hundred Sermons upon the Apocalypse of Jesu Christ (London: John Day, 1573; first publ. 1557); sig. Ddiii^r (my italics).

19. See Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), esp. 111-43.

20. Bale, The Image, 437-38. Elsewhere Bale is a bit more specific: in Yet a Course at the Romish Foxe, he advances the theory that the two-horned beast is Edmund Bonner: “I think verily that he is that two horned beast which Christ shewed unto johan Boanerges his dearly beloved apostle in mysterye … that shuld rise out of the earth. … For here he spekth perverse thynges and blasphemies as it is seyd that beast shulde do. He hath ii hornes like the lambe at blush, as that beast shulde have for they are also counterfette the two pricketes of his mitre (hys chaplayne sayth) betokeneth the ii testaments, which manifestly proveth him to be the same” (sig. B4^v).

21. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, 6.

22. William Tyndale, Parable of the Wicked Mammon (Marburg: Hans Luft, 1528), sig. Aiii^r. Foxe portrays a Tyndale confident in the lucidity of scripture: he “perceived that it was not possible to stablish the lay people in any truth, except the Scripture were so plainly layde before their eyes in theyr mother tongue, that they myght see the process, order, and meaning of the text”; The Second Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History, containing the Actes and Monuments … (London: John Day, 1583), sig. BBBiv^v.

23. Bale, Yet a Course at the Romishe Foxe, sig. Aii^r. The converse, optimistic position was also held to be true, in an equally essentialist manner: “We loke not now for [Christes] coming with the Jewes, nor yet thynke to receyve him in outwarde shaddowes with the hypocrites no more upon one day than upon another. But we beleeve to have hym wythin us at all tymes” (sig. B6^r).

24. Bale, The Image, 442.

25. Christianson, Reformers and Babylon, 16. Lewalski writes of Reformation exegesis in general that while “reformers loudly denounced the profusion of allegories [of medieval exegesis],” they also “accepted, and indeed exalted, tropological symbolism, endeavoring by more and more rigorous means to distinguish this divinely sanctioned symbolic method from arbitrary allegorizing”; Protestant Poetics, 117.

26. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, 43.

27. Bullinger, An Hundred Sermons, sig. B3^v.

28. Carion's Chronicle (London: John Day, 1550), sig. Avi^r.

29. Bale, The Image, 310.

30. Ibid., 473.

31. John Napier, A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of Saint John (Edinburgh: Robert Waldgrave, 1593), sig. A6^r.

32. Bale, Yet a Course at the Romishe Foxe, sig. B6^r.

33. Bale, The Image, 453-54.

34. Bale, Epistle Exhortatory of an English Christian, fol. 290^r.

35. The Actes of English Votaryes [London: John Day, 1546], sig. A2^v. A popular text: further editions appeared in 1548, 1551, and 1560.

36. Ibid., book 2; sig. A7^v-A8^r.

37. Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 21. To compound the irony, if we accept Lewalski's periodic distinctions among exegetical fashions, Bale here joins with his medieval predecessors in his distaste for the literal: “wherein the ‘meer letter,’ or carnal sense, is frequently equated with the ‘sense of the Jews’ now wholly abrogated by Christ” (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 116).

38. See Richard Brightwell, in his Epistle to the Christen Reader, The Revelation of Antichrist (Marburg: Hans Luft, 1529), thought to be a translation of Luther's De Antichristo: “The tenth face of antichriste is the excellent (although it be fained) keping of virginite and chastitie of the religious which trewely semeth in the face a godly and hevenly thinge. But it is a develish of the which it is spoken in the first pistell to Timothe forbidding to marye where as agaunst our most reverende father, / maketh that thynge necessary that Christe would have fre. / whereof Daniel meaneth that he shall refuse and abstaine from mariage for a cloke of Godliness and not for love of chastity” (fol. xxx^r).

39. Bullinger, An Hundred Sermons, sig. Llii^v.

40. Bale, The Image, 518.

41. The Balaamites are a case in point, who are lured to “support the execrable doctrine” by “the most fair damsels of the Midianites preciously apparelled; and they, once tangled with their wanton beauty, should not only defile the laws of their fathers by the eating of meats dedicate to unclean idols, but also … com[mit] with them most vile fornication”; Bale, The Image, 279.

42. Ibid., 533.

43. Bullinger, An Hundred Sermons, sig. IIii^v. See Bale, The Mysterie of Iniquitie (Geneva: Michael Wood, 1545): “Pope Joan the viii was a woman and was begotten with chylde by her owne dere chaplaine and chamberlayne a cardinall which God at that tyme woulde have knowne to the worlde as it was in dede all whoreishe fylthie and beastlye / lyk as the Apocalypse hath described her” (fol. 18^r).

44. Bale, The Image, 592.

45. Bullinger, An Hundred Sermons, sig. IIiv^v; my italics.

46. Bale, Actes of English Votaryes, sig. A7^v-A8^v.

47. On clerical marriage, see Eric Josef Carlson, “Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation,” Journal of British Studies 31 (1992): 1-31. Bale writes that susceptibility to false doctrine derives from the fallen nature of man: “So corrupt are the fleshly affects of men, that much more prone they are to lies and superstitions, than to the verity of the Lord, which is to be lamented”; The Image, 504.

48. In discussing the validity of Catholic marriage ceremony (considered to be false because of its insufficient attention to the inner state of the participants), Bale in fact insinuates that there is no such thing as a real Catholic virgin: “But where as ye wryte that ye marrye vyrgines, yt ys not true, speciallye in soche marryings as yow promote. I have harde of, and knowne dyverse of your generacyon that hath marred virgynes before they have married them, yea sumtime in the selfe mornynge afore, whyles the pyes were in bakynge, so spiritually have they used that godly ordinance. I thynke they be worse than dogge and bytche. Nether ys yt true in other marryages where as yow are no medlers, yf ye make a difference between wyves and vyrgyns. For wyves there are before they come theyre, els are thet made none by you. … Notwithstanding all thys, in marriage and out of marryage we wolde call them a chast virgyne, as Paul doth the corryntheanes, were they clere from the advoutrye of your Romyshe lawes and customes”; Yet a Course at the Romishe Foxe, sig. K8^r-v. The conviction moves him in The Image to discount the importance of the virginity of Mary herself: “What is virginity before God more than is marriage? No more than is circumcision in comparison to uncircumcision; and that is nothing. No more maketh the one than the other to a christian life. Only is it faith effectually working by love, that the Lord requireth of us. Only respected he the faith of Mary, and not her virginity. They which live in matrimony after the word of God are accepted afore him for virgins, and so are named of St. Paul”; The Image, 454.

49. Bale, The Image, 555.

50. Ibid., 271, 279.

51. Ibid., 413, 266.

52. Ibid., 252.

53. Ibid., 304.

54. Ibid., 261.

55. Ibid., 390. John N. King recuperates this opacity: “Although the richly poetic imagery of Revelation functions to conceal the truth from the reprobate, it makes a powerful appeal to the reader's imagination”; English Reformation Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 62-63.

56. Napier, A Plaine Discovery, sig. P8^v.

57. Bale, The Image, 304.

58. Ibid., 296.

59. See Bale, Yet a Course at the Romishe Foxe: “By non other token is the trewe church of Christ knowne from the false and cownterfett synagoge, but by persecution for rhytousnesse sake. For his church ys evermore as he was, hated, blasphemed, vexed, troubled, scorned, dysdayned, accused, lyed upon, and cruelly afflicted unto deathe, else it is not of hys marke”; sig. B8^r-v. Bauckham observes that “that aspect of the conflict … which carried most significance in the experience of early protestants was the contrast between persecuting and suffering persecution”; Tudor Apocalypse, 61. For discussion of the imaginative role of persecution in Reformation ideology, see Catharine Davies, “‘Poor Persecuted Little Flock’ or ‘Commonwealth of Christians’: Edwardian Protestant Concepts of the Church,” in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling, eds., Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 78-102.

60. Bale, The Image, 442.

61. Ibid., 368.

62. Ibid., 524.

63. Ibid., 476.

64. Ibid., 384.

65. Bale, The Mysterie of Iniquitie, 45.

66. Bale, The Image, 410.

67. Ibid., 583, 626. See also 304: “In faith shall men seek their living father, and not in dead images, nor other corruptible things. In spirit or verity shall they worship him, and not in dumb ceremonies nor outward shadows.”

68. Ibid., 301.

69. Ibid., 604.

70. Ibid., 588.

71. Ibid., 332.

72. From the 1563 edition of Foxe, Actes and Monuments, ed. George Townsend (London: Seeley, Burnside, and Seeley, 1843), vol. 1, xvi.

73. Bale, The Image, 341.

74. Ibid., 381. Foxe joins Bale in this fear of misconstrual; in “The utility of this story,” prefacing the 1583 edition of his Actes and Monuments, he worries that “no man should thinke that I unadvisedly or with rashness have attempted to this enterprise, as one not onely doubtful, but also both bashfull and feareful within my self for setting the same abroad. And why I first perceaved how learned this age is in reading in bookes, neither could I tell what the secret judgements of readers would conceave”; vol. 1, sig. ¶vi^r.

75. Bale, The Image, 371; 441-42.

76. All bibliographic information is taken from the revised Short Title Catalogue. Two further editions appeared in 1550 and 1570.

77. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 190; Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: “Down Went Dagon” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 44. Also see Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

78. Bale, The Image, 635. Bale's gloss ducks the obvious imputation by a process of distinction: “Nothing is this against them which by the other scriptures and histories doth expound this revelation, to make it to their understanding more plain: for then should St. Augustine, St. Jerome, Isidorus, Beda, Rabanus, and divers other great pillars of the church, be under plagues for doing that charitable office. So should also the doctrine of this book be against itself in the thirteenth chapter, where as liberty is given unto him that hath wit to count the number of the beast, and in other places else. But this is here spoken for them that corrupt the text to maintain their blasphemous lies for advantage, or that seek to blemish the right sense therof, lest men should behold them in their right colours, as the wicked papists have done ever since their beginning”; 637.

79. Ibid., 495. Perhaps the most concrete sign for Bale of his own conversion was his marriage to a woman named Dorothy. Interestingly, this marriage's result for the stability of Bale's own words—his vow of chastity—provoked the spirited but troubled defense of his right to break them. See his Apologie Against a Ranke Papist (London: John Day, 1550): “The heathen thought they were the … chosen people of God … yet were they very flexible and prone to idolatry, whych laye moche in that practiced kinde of vowynge, or promising somewhat … yet were they in themselves but ceremonial shadowes … of this I am sure, that vowes maye wele make pharysees, hypocrites, dissemblers, ydolatours, and beastly buggerers, as they have done without number. … Let no man then fear to forsake them, no more than he shall feare to forsake wiked sinne, for they are not only a miserable captivitie and servitude of Egypt, but also a clogge, a yoke, a snare of Satan, and the most sinful character of the great Beaste. … Here peradventure it wyl be reasoned, how can I be Gods, unlesse I do vowe my selfe into hym: Thus I answer thy unlearned and folyshe question … In the new law are we the first borne so many as beleeve in Christ, and are regenerate, that are we by faythe and baptisme and not by vowes … by vowes we are in no point his but our owne. Vowes being workes of our sinfull will, may adde unto his werkes greate imperfection and weakness. … A promise or vowe, is alwayes of this nature, it depossesseth the first owner, and maketh the thynge promised, to be his, whose it was not afore. See than what thou doest, when thou bryngest thyself under a vowe. Where as thou werte the Lordes before, thou becomest thyne owne by a newe creation, as the tree that is hewen downe and made an ymage, becometh of Gods, the carvers”; fol. viii^r-ix^v.

80. Bale, The Image, 583. Significantly, the only virgins in the text—the 144,000—are not women but men, “those undefiled with women.”

81. Ibid., 581.

82. E.g. of the locusts compared to horses with the hair of women in Revelation 9, Bale writes, “Hair they had on their heads, most like to the hair of women. All wavering were their minds, inconstant, fickle, and foolish”; The Image, 356.

83. Bale, The Image, 614.

84. Bale's Parker Society editor glosses the term as either “resemblance” or “look”; one proverb dictionary glosses the phrase as “at first sight; speaking without consideration; In allusion to the habit of blushing when taken by surprise”; A Dictionary of English Phrases, ed. Albert M. Hyamson (London, Routledge 1922). The figural complexity of blushing has been expounded for later periods by, among others, Christopher Ricks, in Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); and Ruth Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

85. Trans. Brian McGregor, in Erasmus, Collected Works, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1985), 25:275.

86. Ripa's Iconologia expounds the Roman emblem of Chastity as “a woman veiled, pointing with the forefinger with her right hand to her face, to signifie that she had no reason to blush” (Rome: Gigliotti, 1593), figure 265.

87. The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Charlottesville: published for the Folger Shakespeare Library by the University of Virginia, 1967), 42.

88. Charles Richardson, A Sermon Concerning the Punishing of Malefactors Preached at Paul's Cross the First of October (London: William Butler, 1616), sig. F4^r-v.

89. Bale, The Image, 584; italics mine.

90. Bottom's solution to the ineffable also lies in a poetic transcript: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man has not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a Ballad of this dream”; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 4.1.209-15, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman, 1973).

91. Bale, The Image, 584.