[In the following essay, Bicks detects references in Pericles to the tension surrounding the practice of traditional Catholic rituals as practiced in the reformed Church of England in the early 1600s. In particular, Bicks points out dramatic episodes that echo the controversy over church ceremonies involving women after childbirth.]

Our lodgings, standing bleak upon the sea,
Shook as the earth did quake;
The very principals did seem to rend,
And all to topple. Pure surprise and fear
Made me to quit the house.

(Pericles, 3.2.14-18)¹

Such an ordinarie service as yours is for every private
woman … hath, in my opinion, neither legges nor
foundation to stande on.

(Certaine Questions … concerning Churching of Women, 1601)

When Shakespeare's Thaisa awakens from her burial at sea to find herself on the shaken shores of Ephesus, her first words are to that city's goddess: “O dear Diana, / Where am I? Where's my Lord? What world is this?” (3.2.104-105). Except for her invocation of Diana, her words echo verbatim those of John Gower's heroine from the Confessio Amantis, the literary ancestor of the tempest-tossed Thaisa. This addition of Diana is a persistent feature of Pericles: Shakespeare refers to the goddess over a dozen times in the play, whereas Gower's work and Laurence Twine's Patterne of Painefull Adventures, his immediate sources, name her only twice.²

Critics generally read Pericles' oft-invoked Diana as a goddess of virginity and consider her Ephesian temple a site of maternal purification. From this perspective, Thaisa's enclosure in the goddess's temple and her reunion with husband and daughter fourteen years later are acts of compliance that reinforce male constructions of power based on the ideal of a chaste female body contained within a stable set of cultural rituals.³ This reading has its roots in certain early modern conceptions of Diana and Ephesus. Arthur Golding popularized her as an asexual deity in Shakespeare's time when he translated Ovid's Metamorphoses and instructed his readers to understand her as representative of “maydens chaste.”⁴ Another common story in the early modern period claimed that the Virgin Mary had accompanied Saint John to Ephesus and lived her last years there, for the city was also known as the site where Saint Paul established the new church—one of seven founded in Asia and central to the conversion mission.⁵

Ephesus and its goddess, however, were rich in mythical and pseudo-historical associations that went far beyond these chaste and often Christian-inflected parameters. The Temple of Diana, a vast marble monument built in the sixth century b.c., had been financed by the pilgrims and tourists seeking oracles from the goddess. Once built, the temple—revered as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world—also became central to the city's economic success and its consequent reputation as a nest of vice and luxury.⁶ The Greek travel writer Pausanias memorialized the city for future generations when he remarked on its fame—“the size of the temple, which is the largest building in the world, the prosperity of the city of Ephesus, and the distinction which the goddess there enjoys.”⁷

Although seventeenth-century Ephesus was a poor town whose famed Temple of Diana had sunk twenty feet into the silt, its reputation as an ancient thriving center of pagan worship and excess survived to be vividly narrated by early modern writers. Legends connecting the Amazons to the site compounded these illicit associations and competed with stories of the early Christian presence in Ephesus. In 1616, the Protestant minister Sampson Price dwelt more on the temple than the church:

Ephesus is fallen; one of the most famous Cities of the world, the Metropolis of little Asia, the glory of Ionia, built in the 28. yeare of David, either by the Amazons or one called Croesus. … Heere John and the Virgin lived. Ephesus was renowned for the great temple of Diana, one of the wonders of the World, 425. feet long, 220. broad, having 127. pillars the workes of so many Kings, 220. yeares in building.⁸

Ancient writers consistently named the Amazons as the founders of this famous goddess's temple and claimed that the women were the first devotees to dedicate an image of her at Ephesus.⁹ Thomas Heywood and Walter Ralegh were among the early modern writers to perpetuate the association.¹⁰ In many of these texts, the Amazons who worship at Diana's Ephesian temple are not subdued vestal virgins, but rather relentlessly maternal and aggressive bodies: Heywood explains that “they had mutuall congression with their neighbor nations: the men children they slew, the female they nourced.”¹¹

As Price's and Heywood's texts suggest, stories of pagan worship, excess, and the sexually free-ranging Amazons threatened to eclipse references to the early Christian church. Price was not alone in lamenting that Ephesus—a city that became synonymous with the Protestant Church of England and its post-Reformation conflicts—“is fallen.” To an early modern audience, the Church of England rested on shaky pagan foundations; Ephesus exemplified its struggle to resist backsliding into the idolatrous (i.e., Catholic) past on which it was built.

These troubling associations with idolatry and sexuality were aggravated by the fact that Diana was a scion of a pre-Hellenic fertility/mother goddess whose cult was centered in Ephesus and flourished throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. By the time she reached the early modern period, she was a constellation of contradictions. She had many names, each of which denoted a different function, but all of her incarnations found their way back, through centuries of tale-telling, to the Ephesian goddess's temple. As the Greek Artemis and the Roman Diana, she protected virginity; as Hecate, she embodied the mysteries of female power; her association with the procreative Amazons and the ancient fertility goddess led to her formulation as Luna, goddess of the moon, and Lucina, the Roman goddess of childbirth.¹²

The seventeenth-century midwife Elizabeth Cellier, confident that her readers would easily equate the Ephesian Diana with reproduction, made her the lynchpin of her argument for midwifery education: “here in London were Colledges of Women about the Temple of Diana, who was goddess of midwives here, as well as at Ephesus.”¹³ The mention of Diana in her Ephesian context evokes the goddess's function as midwife—Lucina and Diana are virtually indistinguishable. Shakespeare similarly conflates the figures in the climactic storm scene that ends with Thaisa's unhallowed descent into the ocean's ooze. Pericles makes Lucina central to his wife's survival, crying out to the goddess to help Thaisa in her “terrible child-bed” (3.1.56); in the next scene, Thaisa calls out to Diana on the shores of Ephesus. In Shakespeare's tale, then, Diana returns to her ancient reproductive function and foundation—invoked by a mother who will enter her temple and (paradoxically, it would seem) be her chaste votaress.

This conflation of the asexual Diana who protects the purity of women's bodies and the reproductive Lucina who attends to their procreative activities, however, far from being a textual inconsistency, is a central feature of the play itself. Shakespeare repeatedly summons Diana's incarnation as a fertility/midwife goddess in the midst of Thaisa's chaste devotion to her. Twine enacts a similar merger when he names his protagonist's wife Lucina and summarizes his first chapter at Ephesus with “How Lucina was restored to life” and placed “in the temple of Diana.”¹⁴

What I ultimately will argue here is that Diana's Ephesian temple and its connections to pagan mysteries and procreative women figured a heated religious debate of Shakespeare's time that centered on the maternal body and concerned the place of Catholic ritual in Protestant practice: the churching of women after childbirth. Originally a Jewish purification of the new mother, the ceremony continued as a Catholic ceremony in which the new mother returned to church with her birth attendants, after a prescribed time at home, to be cleansed by the priest and so readmitted to the congregation. In its English Protestant form, the ritual lost its purifying function when it was renamed the Thanksgiving, or churching of women after childbirth in 1552. With this change, reformers meant to erase the superstitious transformation of the new mother into an asexual, almost virginal figure reminiscent of the Holy Mother. The procreative female body, now distanced from any original polluted associations by this doctrinal shift, retained its physical maternal function while demanding the attention of a holy congregation. The result was the troubling entrance of a celebrated female sexuality into church doctrine and practice.

Like the Ephesian Diana and her votaresses, the churching community of mother, midwife, and friends affirmed both the miraculous and material process of birth. By retaining the ritual, but eliminating evocations of the Virgin, reformers had inadvertently set the pagan Mother goddess loose in their own church. Although misogynist satire focused on the financial burden that the ceremony placed on the beleaguered and displaced husband, it was in fact this public and hallowed acknowledgment of the material maternal experience that provoked the most anxious responses and brought the new church closer than ever to its pagan foundations.¹⁵

Religious opponents of the ritual felt it should not be present at all in the reformed Protestant Church precisely because of the ceremony's idolatrous associations: a Puritan Admonition to Parliament in 1572 complained that “Churching of women after childbirthe, smelleth of Jewishe purification: theyr other rytes and customes in their lying in, & comming to church, is foolishe and superstitious.”¹⁶ At the same time, they were troubled by the privileged position that the churching ceremony afforded mothers and that their own reformed church had promoted. Henry Barrow complained that “this particular and ordinarie (though miraculous) matter, more than all other strange actes … should be made a publique action of the church, an especial part of the publique worship.”¹⁷ His parenthetical acknowledgment of the “(miraculous) matter” of birth points to a paradox within the Protestant reworking of the ceremony: The maternal body contained both ordinary, earthly matter and a miracle deserving of reverence. To some reformers, this retention of the Jewish/Catholic ritual and elevation of everyday matter threatened a dangerous backsliding into pagan idolatry and exposed the new church's doctrinal instability—its ironic reliance on the very religious practices against which it was meant to define itself.

When Protestant ministers preached to their congregations against slipping back into Popish ways, they equated the Church of England's return to Catholicism with an early Christian Ephesus tottering on the brink of paganism. Ephesus, like Catholicism, was part and parcel of the foundational Judeo-Christian tradition from which the new church was toiling to emerge; at the same time, these foundations were tainted by superstitious associations. The shaking Ephesus that Thaisa first encounters, then, epitomizes the struggle of the reformed Church of England to negotiate its Popish/pagan past while constructing a new Protestant theology—one that was inescapably founded on idolatrous rituals and traditions. As one fictional debater in a 1601 work complains to the chancellor who pressures her to be churched: “such an ordinarie service as yours is, for every private woman such as my self, hath in mine opinion neither legges nor foundation to stande on.”¹⁸

This ambivalent and sometimes hostile reception of the churching ceremony by church and lay fathers alike suggests new ways of exploring early modern portrayals of Diana, her Ephesian temple, and the cults of women who operated within it. Jeanne Roberts, in her important analysis of abortive birth rituals in Shakespeare's plays, notes that “the necessary transition from sexual abstinence to fertility is fraught with dangers, attested to repeatedly in Shakespeare, of incorporating ‘whore,’ chaste wife, and mother into one female figure.”¹⁹ Both Diana at Ephesus and the Protestant churching ritual allowed this uneasy incorporation of sanctity and sexuality in the figure of the mother. She became, then, the embodiment of the Church of England's own uneasy relationship to its pagan (Catholic) past. Her sexuality represented these illicit beginnings, while her sanctity was figured as the promise of a new Christian (Protestant) redemption at Ephesus.

In Shakespeare's works, Diana and her votaresses sometimes do appear as holy virgins;²⁰ however, the women who worship in the temple are also portrayed as fertile Amazons, widows, unwed mothers, and defiant daughters. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for instance, Hermia would rather throw herself on “Diana's altar to protest / For aye austerity and single life” than obey her father and marry Demetrius (1.1.89-90). This aggressive pledge to the single life later is rendered far from austere by the sexual Titania (an alternative name for Diana), who revels in her Indian votaress's pregnancy.²¹

These conflicting visions of Diana and her Ephesian sanctuary clearly inform Pericles, where Shakespeare grapples with a maternal body that, thanks to Protestant revisions, was sacred and procreative—a reminder of the Great Mother and the magical rituals that surrounded her both in Catholic and pre-Hellenic practice. C. L. Barber has argued that Pericles is notable for the way its “symbolic action, centered on the recovery of lost bonds in a human family, is used to meet needs that, in different circumstances, are met in Christian worship of the Holy Family.”²² In post-Reformation England, however, the virginal Holy Mother was a troubling component of this family. Barber's claim that women's problematic position in Shakespeare's plays “reflects the fact that Protestantism did away with the Cult of the Virgin Mary” is particularly relevant to our exploration here of the maternal body's ritualistic movements in the reformed church and in Pericles.²³ When Shakespeare brings the new mother to Ephesus and scripts both her invocation of Diana and her movement to the goddess's temple, he aggravates all of the cultural and religious tensions that accompanied the Protestant Church's attempts to build a new doctrine of the maternal body on idolatrous foundations. Although it is tempting to interpret Thaisa's enclosure within the Temple of Diana as a patient withdrawal of the waiting wife before her smooth ritual return to husband and society, the complex associations of the temple with mysterious ritual and the sexual female body demand a more complicated reading of the Ephesian site in early Protestant theology and Shakespeare's late romance.

The Protestant Church of England, with its insistence on distancing doctrine from its idolatrous associations, did not quite know what to do with Ephesus. On the one hand, the city was a site of pagan mysteries and heathen Turks;²⁴ on the other hand, it epitomized the possibility of conversion to the “true” Christian church. William Caxton's Golden Legend narrates how Saint John “converted to Christ's faith 12,000 Gentiles” after his prayers toppled the temple, “so that the foundement turned up so down, and the image of Diana all-to dashed and destroyed.”²⁵ Most famously, Acts 19 depicts Saint Paul's confrontation with the Ephesian silversmith Demetrius, who incites a pagan crowd to cry out “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!” In both these texts, the image of Diana stands for the paganism that must be annihilated in order for Christianity to thrive; ironically, however, her city comes to represent the potential for a model Christian community. Once she has been destroyed, the city of Ephesus goes on to become the site of the most powerful Christian church in Asia Minor.

With roots in both pagan and Christian tradition, Ephesus exemplified England and its post-Reformation conflicts. John's address to the church at Ephesus in his Revelation (2:1-7) expresses his concern for her loss of Christian enthusiasm. As we have seen, the Ephesus of John's text was often used in Protestant sermons to figure the Church of England's backsliding away from the reformed church and toward idolatrous Catholic practice. John Prideaux, rector of Exeter College, delivered a sermon in 1614 entitled Ephesus Backsliding Considered and Applied to these Times in which he explicitly connects England's religious laxity to that of the early Christian Ephesus: “Hee that hath an eare to heare, let him harke what the spirit saith unto the Churches; to the Churches as well of Great Brittaine, as of those of little Asia.”²⁶ Prideaux expresses displeasure with the Church of England's loss of religious enthusiasm and employs John's reprimanding letter to Ephesus as an analogy:

For the best may grow remisse, and need dayly inciting. As Ephesus here, the Metropolis of little Asia and glory of Ionia, famous amonst the gentils for her situation, & temple, which (as Pliny reports) was 220 years in building, famous amongst Christians, for S. Johns residence, and S. Pauls epistle unto them; nay, which our Saviour here commends … for her forwardnesse in labour, for her constancie in patience, for her zeale in reforming manners, for her discretion in dismasking heretiques. … Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.²⁷

In his interpretation of John's Revelation, Prideaux conflates paganism and Catholicism. His goal is to encourage his congregation to “hate the abominations of Poperie (as the Ephesians did here the deedes of the Nicolaitans)” (37). He wants his church to have the same “zeale in reforming manners” as Ephesus had shown in its early days under Saint Paul's influence, and he praises King James for being “so able & resolved to withstand Popery” (36). At the same time, he warns his congregation not to backslide as Ephesus apparently had.

Prideaux emphasizes Ephesus's ties to both a pagan and a Christian past: in his text, the Temple of Diana is equal in fame to the residence of Saint John. The goddess and her house seem to eclipse the “Angel” (the church) of Ephesus. Prideaux chastises the latter for falling from grace and leaving her “first love” of Jesus.²⁸ It is here, as he turns the church into a feminized creature easily seduced away from Christ, that the line between the Angel and the goddess begins to vanish: “hast thou not began in the spirit, and now art sinking backe to end in the flesh?” (3). His words recall the multivalent Ephesian Diana, who was both a Greco-Roman goddess of virginal purity and an ancient goddess of the flesh. Prideaux does not name Diana, but he uses the image of the moon, her most noted symbol, to elaborate on her city's, and England's, ecclesiastical errancy:

It is usual with the Fathers to compare the church to the moone, in regard of her visible changing, like to the others waxing and waning. But the similitude holds as well, in respect of her borrowed light, and spotted face. … Her selfe acknowledgeth so much, Cantic. I. 5. I am blacke but comely.²⁹

Although here Diana is the cherished beloved of Canticles, in other texts she is a Popish whore. In 1644, John Vicars described her as the “Romish-Catholicks Sweet-Heart”—“Babylons Beautie.”³⁰ As Vicars's words and the destruction of Diana's statue by Saint John illustrate, the Ephesian goddess was often figured as either a Catholic or pagan enemy of the “true” church. Like her city's citizens, however, she also embodied the possibility of conversion. She and the struggling reformed church she came to epitomize could be all things to all men; both her temple and the Church of England wax and wane with the moon's vagaries—a fact that complicates any dyadic sacred/profane interpretation of the site and its goddess in early modern literature.

Before she was the Roman Diana of Reformation rhetoric, the Ephesian goddess was the Greek Artemis. The grove of Ortygia near Ephesus was the fabled place of Artemis's birth.³¹ Callimachus, in his Hymn to Artemis, tells how she assisted with her twin brother Apollo's birth. He describes the role she subsequently took on as celestial midwife: “the cities of men I will visit only when women vexed by the sharp pangs of childbirth call me to their aid—even in the hour when I was born the Fates ordained that I should be their helper.”³² Legend claimed that Artemis was performing her duties as a midwife at the birth of Alexander the Great in 356 b.c. when Herostratus burned the temple to the ground.³³ As the midwife goddess, Artemis was associated with Eileithyia, and later with the Roman goddess Lucina.

Long before these Greco-Roman incarnations, however, she was an Anatolian mother goddess. She often merged with other such figures: Gaia, Rhea, Isis, Kybele, Kore, and Demeter. This connection to Demeter, and then to Persephone, queen of the underworld, fueled her later associations with darkness and witchcraft—hence her incarnation as Hecate. The maternal goddess's multibreasted statue was preserved in the sanctuary of the great temple at Ephesus.³⁴ This form of the goddess was familiar enough to have inspired a polymaste statue of her made for the Villa d'Este at Tivoli in the sixteenth century.³⁵

These associations of Diana with female mysteries and sexuality, then, were familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries through both textual and visual representations. Centuries earlier, Chaucer had foregrounded these associations of the goddess with fertility when he created his Temple of Diana in The Knight's Tale. Far from being a site of corporeal purity, it is decorated with pictures of uncontainable metamorphoses and houses a laboring woman who cries wildly for “Lucyna.”³⁶ Like Chaucer's Diana, the pre-Hellenic goddess was known for the animalistic forms she took. In the numismatic tradition, for instance, her polymaste image often appeared with a stag or a bee until it was replaced by the head of the virgin huntress after Alexander the Great's conquest.³⁷

It is this ancient and untamed form of the Ephesian goddess who appears in one of the earliest known literary tales of Britain's foundation: Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae narrates Brutus's encounter with Diana, who comes to him in his dreams and tells him where to found the English nation. Brutus describes Diana as Diva potens nemorum terror silvestribus ac spes. Cui licet anfractus ire per ethereos infernasque domos (“Powerful goddess, terror of the groves and hope of the forest beasts. To whom it is permitted to traverse the airy paths and the hellish homes”).³⁸ Although Geoffrey situates the temple on an island called Leogetia, he is likely referring to Ortygia, the site in Ephesus of Artemis's mysteries.³⁹ In any case, the description of the goddess allies her with the ancient Ephesian goddess who had temples devoted to her throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.⁴⁰ Geoffrey's wild goddess who walks through heaven and hell is much closer in spirit to the deity who was rooted in the mysteries of birth and death than to the Hellenized and virginal Diana. Furthermore, as she guides Brutus toward England's future, she enacts one of the Ephesian goddess's most famous and enduring roles: As the Protestant minister Edward Chaloner described the city in 1618, it was “renowned for the Oracles of the Goddesse.”⁴¹

With these powerful pagan and Christian associations of the goddess with prophetic speech, national foundation, and female sexuality, it is significant that Shakespeare uses Ephesus, and its echoes of the cult of the Great Mother, to explore the gendered and religious conflicts inherent in the Protestant retention and revision of Catholic rituals, particularly those surrounding birth. The Temple of Diana and the Christian church already threatened to merge at times in Protestant texts; churching completed this process by opening the doors of the church to a sexual maternal body and allowing the pagan goddess, surrounded by her votaresses, to enter in.

As a ritual that brought mothers and their birth attendants together within a holy space, the churching of women after childbirth provides an analogue to the sexual activities of the pre-Hellenic Diana's worshippers.⁴² Like this pagan community, the maternal and midwiving bodies who were caught in the middle of the early modern churching debates occupied a multivalent space. Bringing to life the “spotted” goddess of Prideaux's sermon, Ephesus Backsliding, texts explaining the churching ritual portrayed the churched mother as tottering on the edge of institutional infidelity because of her time spent confined at home and away from an organized Christian community. As one such text by Thomas Comber averred: “She is now joyned again to the Assembly of the Faithful, and we pray she may ever remain among that number, never forsaking her Principles, nor her holy Faith by Apostasie and Backsliding” (emphasis mine).⁴³ The maternal body here represents the potential of all true Christians to fall. She is Ephesus backsliding and, in a certain light, Diana herself. The 121st Psalm that was part of the ritual exhorted that “the sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night”; with the churching ritual's new emphasis on the sacred and sexual body of the mother, the pagan, fickle moon goddess and her “borrowed light” (to recall Prideaux's phrase) threatened to spot the body of the Protestant mother and the reformed church that celebrated it, sending both backsliding into idolatrous superstition.

As we have seen, Prideaux reproached his congregation for backsliding like its Ephesian ancestor: “hast thou not began in the spirit, and now art sinking backe to end in the flesh?” (3). As Jacqueline de Weever notes in her study of Diana of Ephesus, such a division of spirit and body would not have been applied to the goddess before the early modern period: “The Great Mother and the chaste goddess seem to exist side by side in classical and medieval mythographers.”⁴⁴ In the nightmares of Shakespeare's religious contemporaries, however, the balance could tip: What “began in the spirit” of purity might sink back “to end in the flesh” of the great and pagan Mother.

Grounded in ancient Hebraic and Catholic tradition, the churching ritual, like those surrounding the Ephesian temple, provoked conflicted responses when placed in the context of the reformed Church of England. Both the ritual and the goddess had particularly pagan yet foundational associations: One could not simply topple them without destabilizing the foundation of England and its new church. A close look at Puritan objections to the churching ritual reveals a concern both with this lack of separation between the church and its past and with the transformation of a Protestant sanctuary into a privileged female space. Henry Barrow offers his critical commentary on the ritual:

The weoman's monethlie restraint and separation from your church, her comming after that just tyme wympeled, vealed [veiled], with her gosips and neighbors following her, her kneeling downe before and offring unto the priest, the prieste's churching, praying over her, blessing her from sonne and moone, delivering her in the end to her former vocation, shewe somewhat besides giving of thankes.⁴⁵

Barrow implies that the privileging of the maternal body's experience during churching was an intrusion into and appropriation of a sacred male space. His objection to the ritual is not, as some modern critics arguing for Puritan feminism put forward, a result of his respect for the processes of childbirth, but rather of his distaste for the special recognition accorded to the entire birthing community—the “gosips and neighbors” who accompanied the mother to church.⁴⁶ The fictional chancellor who debates churching with his kinswoman similarly objects to “the Ceremonie of it, as the Tyme, and th'Attyre, the companie of women … and the feasting of neighbours and friends.”⁴⁷

The time before the churching, consisting of the birth itself and the month of the mother's confinement—the lying-in, as it was called—at home, already provided a unique social space for the mother, her female friends, and her midwife. Churching, then, was the final and most public of these childbirth ceremonies. Far from being a ritual imposed upon women by a sexist culture, churching has been redefined by scholars in the past twenty-five years as a ceremony that women willingly upheld despite public religious conflicts.⁴⁸ Adrian Wilson, working from Natalie Zemon Davis's argument that the all-female ceremonies of childbirth placed women “on top” of their husbands, notes the popularity of the churching custom across religious and class divides “because it legitimated the wider ceremony of childbirth.”⁴⁹ In addition, it was a time for midwives to advertise themselves as successful birth attendants.⁵⁰

The need in Jewish/Catholic doctrine to cleanse the mother's body had been eliminated from the ceremony; this meant that she and her attendants could enter the church in celebration, not shame. The mother now knelt at the ritual center of the church and no longer had to wait “nygh unto the quier doore” until the priest sprinkled her with holy water and led her inside, as the purification ceremony had required.⁵¹ The churching ritual allowed that “the woman shall come into the churche, and there shall knele downe in some convenient place, nigh unto the place where the table standeth.”⁵² As David Cressy asserts, such “minor adjustments … were enormously significant. They transformed the woman from a penitent to a celebrant (or ‘gratulant’), from a petitioner at the margin to the focus of community attention.”⁵³ Gail McMurray Gibson has argued that the older purification ritual afforded women an equivalent sense of empowerment: “the symbolic and ritual center of this drama was a woman's body—and the privileged body of women who had served as childbed attendants in the exclusively female space of the childbirthing room.”⁵⁴ Even with Catholicism's desexualizing approach to the procreative female body, then, the ceremony brought women together as active agents within the church. Although the priest was officially responsible for the woman's reentry into society, the women who accompanied her created the impression of an empowered female society on public display.

When the ritual made its way into the reformed Church of England, it not only carried this strong idolatrous community forward into Protestant practice, but it officially recognized its identity as a group that supported female sexuality. The new church itself had conflated the sacred and the procreative by speaking out against the idea of a polluted maternal body. Reformed doctrine, eliminating the Catholic priest's purifying role, pointed instead toward the woman's material powers and her direct relationship with God. The language of the churching ceremony made God the midwife to the thankful new mother: The closing prayer addresses “almightie god, whiche hast delyvered this woman thy servant from the greate paine and peryl of child birth.”⁵⁵ Thomas Comber makes the analogy even more explicit in his explanation of the ritual: “our Creator … not only makes us in our Mother's Womb, but brings us also as wonderfully from thence. Thou art he (saith the Psalmist) that took me out of my Mothers Womb, Psal. xxii.9.”⁵⁶

Although this replacement of the midwife by God can be read as a textual removal of the mother's attendant within the church, it is more significant for its elision of the gap between maternal body and holy spirit that rendered the priest less significant in his own authorized realm. Bishop Bonner asked in 1554 whether there were any women who “by themselves or by sinister counsel have purified themselves after their own devices and fantasies, not coming to the church according to the laudable custom … where the parish priest would have been ready to do it, and some of the multitude to have been witnesses accordingly?”⁵⁷ This image of women anointing their own bodies graphically epitomizes the threat that the ceremony, steeped in an idolatrous past, posed to the Protestant Church's constructions of a new religious order. In an attempt to disempower the women who might interfere with this order, instructions were given to ministers that they should ensure “the midwife go not before the woman, that is to give her thanks, into the church and so up to the Communion table.”⁵⁸

These injunctions speak to some of the tensions that the female body and its community of attendants provoked when granted a place of honor within a traditionally male space. Robert Herrick brings this concern for maintaining a gendered order within the church to the level of the marital home when he describes Julia's churching:

Put on thy Holy Fillitings, and so
To th' Temple with the sober Midwife go.
Attended thus (in a most solemn wise)
By those who serve the Child-bed misteries.
.....All Rites well ended, with faire Auspice come
(As to the breaking of a Bride-Cake) home:
Where ceremonious Hymen shall for thee
Provide a second Epithalamie.(59)

(lines 1-4; 9-10)

The time of confinement before churching was a time of sexual abstinence as well as female gathering; churching was the last stage before the husband regained his rights over his wife and home. It was all well and good, therefore, for a woman to go to church and perform “Child-bed misteries” in the “Temple” with her midwife (words that recall the Ephesian cult of the Great Mother), as long as she came home to be bedded like “the breaking of a Bride-Cake” by her husband. Herrick's reference to these pagan details foregrounds the ritual's mysterious and female-centered past and reminds us of its troubled status within the reformed Church of England. Interestingly, his poem is entitled “Julia's Churching, or Purification” (emphasis mine)—an engagement, perhaps, with the unstable foundations of sexual female power and idolatrous backsliding upon which the Protestant ritual (and the church that created it) tottered.

Critics who have located traces of the churching ritual in Pericles and other Shakespearean plays tend to focus on how the maternal body is cleansed and returned to the husband so that family and nation—along with the religious and cultural structures that support them—can be restored. The victory of the husband (who has gone through a period of Christian-inflected redemption and salvation) over his once-procreative wife thematizes the patriarchal church's rescue from female sexual contamination. Janet Adelman, for example, suggests that “in the withdrawal and sanctified return of mothers after they give birth, Shakespeare found a dramatic equivalent for the customs surrounding churching.”⁶⁰ She discusses the ritual in terms of its desexualizing and controlling power, pointing to “the cost of sacredness to the women made to bear its burden.”⁶¹

Richard Wilson similarly reads both Thaisa's and Hermione's confinements and reunions with their husbands as an imitation of the churching ritual and reads that ritual as an ordering force. His analysis, however, leaves out the rich history of ambivalence and conflict that surrounded this movement of the Catholic/pagan past—with its cults of the Mother—into a Protestant present. He concludes that “science and religion had little to fear, it seems, from a rite de passage that reinstated the husband's claim to his wife's body; as Leontes ‘will kiss her’ when ‘the curtain’ is drawn from the face of Hermione.”⁶² Gail Kern Paster points to this ending of The Winter's Tale as well, but finds a critique rather than a celebration of patriarchy within it: “the ritualistic character of her unveiling symbolizes its function as a reminder of the churching ceremony that Leontes' trial prevented.”⁶³ But even this approach to the ritual delegates the maternal body too easily to a position of compliance to a larger male-defined order. Paster reads Hermione as “diminished,” no longer a sexual being, but a “living statue [who] is herself the subject of an evidently successful, self-imposed discipline of shame.”⁶⁴

Thaisa's physical renewal after death in childbirth and her chaste confinement in the Temple of Diana at times do echo aspects of the purification ritual's superstitious and magical cleansing of the female body. But when Shakespeare recalls this older Catholic/Jewish form of the ceremony and evokes the pagan Temple of Diana—not only in Pericles, but in The Comedy of Errors and The Winter's Tale as well—he troubles rather than calms the waters of contemporary theological debates surrounding churching.⁶⁵ Surely Hermione as “living statue,” for example, embodies some of the goddess's contradictions. An early tradition of the church claimed that the holy martyr Hermione, daughter of the Apostle Philip, was one of the three women who, with John the Evangelist, blessed Ephesus after the church was founded there by Paul's disciple Timothy.⁶⁶ This tradition must have affected Shakespeare's choice of names as he constructed the relationship between Paulina and Hermione. These Christian associations coexist with the Temple of Diana's pagan ones as Hermione and her apostle (who is called a “midwife” by Leontes in 2.3.160) perform an all-female ritual that reunites mother and daughter within Paulina's “chapel” (5.3.86). Aemilia, the displaced wife and mother of Errors, similarly presents a theological paradox: She is the abbess of the Temple of Diana. As Aemilia performs her healing mysteries, the Ephesian Diana is present in both her physical and sacred functions: She uses both earthly “drugs and holy prayers” (5.1.104). With all of these competing incarnations, it is important to be alert to the ambiguities surrounding Diana's temple—and Diana herself—when reading Shakespeare's Ephesus-inflected dramas. Clearly, more is happening inside Shakespeare's Temple of Diana than a nunlike cloistering in readiness for the wife's untroubled return to her Lord.

As Jeanne Roberts argues, “actual births are all conspicuously clouded, and the rituals … are truncated or aborted” in Shakespeare's plays.⁶⁷ These abortive moments are particularly apparent in Pericles, a play that separates mother and newborn at the moment of birth: Marina is separated untimely from her mother's body when Thaisa dies at sea. Previous to the family's journey, the female community surrounding birth had been intact. The first time Thaisa enters “with child” she is also “with Lychorida, a nurse,” and later her midwife (3.Cho.stage dir.). Beginning with her unhallowed burial at sea, however, the play truncates the rituals surrounding birth—fulfilling neither the Catholic nor Protestant ceremonial forms, but rather juggling both churches' treatments of the maternal body and ultimately leaving it in an unresolved and unincorporated state.

While Thaisa is in labor, Pericles calls out to Lychorida and Lucina, invoking and conflating both with his cry: “Lychorida!—Lucina, O / Divinest patroness and midwife gentle” (3.1.10-11). In his version of this scene, Twine makes no mention of the midwife, divine or otherwise, but simply states that Lucina “was weakened, that there was no hope of recoverie, but she must now die.”⁶⁸ Gower similarly names no goddess and does not bring Lychorida into the action. Shakespeare, however, highlights and conflates both figures as Pericles prays to Lucina: “make swift the pangs / Of my queen's travails!—Now, Lychorida!” (3.1.13-14). This connection of the earthly Lychorida with the celestial Lucina momentarily elevates the midwife to a quasi-divine status that mirrors her role in the Protestant churching ceremony.

The moment Thaisa dies giving birth, however, the mother's helper and the maternal body slide from the sacred to the suspect as Catholic-inflected beliefs begin to determine the action of the play. Lychorida, now distanced from Lucina, is no longer the revered attendant. She gives Pericles his daughter with the words: “Take in your arms this piece of your dead queen” (3.1.17-18). In this scene, the midwife can only deliver death. As for the maternal body, Thaisa must be buried at sea because of a superstitious custom that attributed storms to the presence of the unburied dead. As Pericles debates with the sailors, he resembles a Puritan minister addressing a Popish congregation.

1. Sail:
Sir, your queen must overboard. The sea works high, the wind is loud, and will not lie till the ship be clear'd of the dead.
PER:
That's your superstition.
1. Sail:
Pardon us, sir; with us at sea it hath been still observ'd, and we are strong in custom; therefore briefly yield ’er, for she must overboard straight.

(3.1.47-53)

Gower's Appolinus quickly sees the sailors' reasoning, and Twine's Apollonius resists because he cannot bear to throw his beloved overboard. Shakespeare's dialogue, however, is particularly steeped in the rhetoric of Popish/pagan “superstition” that informed the churching debates of his time.

The ritual of clearing the dead from the ship in order to calm the seas graphically enacts the backsliding that religious reformers feared. Pericles ultimately gives in to “custom,” and Thaisa is sent into the muck:

… Th'unfriendly elements
Forgot thee utterly, nor have I time
To give thee hallow'd to thy grave, but straight
Must cast thee, scarcely coffin'd, in the ooze.

(3.1.57-60)

Custom is upheld for the sake of cosmic order and monarchical safety: But that ritual here leaves the mother in an unsanctified state. Thaisa's descent into the ocean's ooze can be read as a return of the maternal body to the polluted associations that supported the need for the Jewish/Catholic purification ritual. Pericles, by saying “A priestly farewell to her” (3.1.69), participates in this religious tradition, but does not succeed in rendering the custom “hallow'd.”

If we are to read this scene as engaging with the superstition associated with churching's idolatrous foundations, then we must examine the simultaneous earthquake that shakes Ephesus. A gentleman of that city describes how “The very principals did seem to rend, / And all to topple” (3.2.16-17) as Thaisa's body is first thrown overboard and then borne by the stormy seas to Ephesus. This image of foundational instability—of “principals rend[ing]” and buildings “toppl[ing]”—recalls contemporary descriptions of the church's tottering state, of religious doctrine in disorder and decline. The custom of sacrificing the body is meant to calm the storm, but Ephesus—an original site of Christian conversion—shakes along with the unsettled and unhallowed Thaisa. Ephesus and the new mother appear to topple because they are backsliding into an idolatrous ritual that has no “legges or foundation” of its own in the new Protestant Church.

At the same time, the maternal body—the “spotted” goddess—must be recovered at Ephesus in order for familial reunion and salvation to occur. She is still a foundational figure for England and its church. When Thaisa washes up on the shores of Ephesus, she is given a second chance to properly rejoin the community. As Lord Cerimon brings her back to life, she resembles the churched woman exhorted by Comber to

stand upon the shore, … to cast your eyes back upon the raging and tempestuous Sea, on which you were lately tost, and in which you were likely to be swallowed up; for if you forget the evil past, you will not be so thankful for that good state which God hath now put you in.⁶⁹

As discussed earlier, Comber feared that the newly recovered mother might “forsake her principles … by Apostasie and backsliding.” By bringing this new mother to a shaking and backsliding Ephesus, Shakespeare aggravates these concerns and unsettles the shore of safety that Comber and other Protestant leaders envisioned for their theology's new foundation.

Consequently, there is no one consistent way to read Thaisa's ritual revival; it recalls many of the superstitious elements that reformers preached against, but the text presents it as both authorized and illicit. Cerimon's name implies sacred ritual, but his arts recall the more Popish, magical elements of purification: he uses “fire and cloths” and “rough and woeful music” to raise Thaisa from the dead (3.2.87-88). After watching Cerimon revive Thaisa, one gentleman reveres Cerimon's powers as god-sent: “The heavens, / Through you, increase our wonder, and sets up / Your fame forever” (3.2.95-97). At the same time, Cerimon's engagement with the “secret art” of physic (3.2.32) allies him with the pagan practitioners of “magic arts” whom Paul humbled at Ephesus. At times, he resembles Gower's Cerymon, a “leche” who is rooted in a tradition of earthly medicine;⁷⁰ at others, however, Shakespeare's Cerimon recalls the Christian deity Comber described as working His wonders upon the delivering woman “to bring Life out of Death.”

Thaisa's first words upon revival, her “O dear Diana,” evoke the pagan Mother goddess and temporarily disrupt whatever Christian powers Cerimon had embodied. Restored to health, however, Thaisa does not remember the moment of Marina's birth over which Diana Lucina had authority: “That I was shipp'd at sea I well remember / Even on my eaning time, but whether there / Delivered, by the holy gods / I cannot rightly say” (3.4.5-8). She vows to dedicate herself to chastity, and Cerimon recommends the Temple of Diana, now a sanctuary of asexuality, “Where you may abide till your date expire” (3.4.14). This turn of phrase suggests a prescribed time of confinement similar to the lying-in period before churching. The fourteen years during which she is solely in the company of other women do represent a version of this lying-in month; her attendants, however, are not the experienced women (often mothers themselves) who would have assisted the new mother through her physical recovery, but rather chaste women devoted entirely to the spirit. Soon after Thaisa's retreat to the temple, we learn that “Lychorida, our nurse, is dead” (4.Cho.42).

Although the earthly midwife and mother have been removed at this point in the text, Diana's figure continues to complicate any clear-cut categories of the sacred and the sensual, the Christian and the pagan, for she next appears in her most bodily incarnation—as a visible oracle to Pericles:

My temple stands in Ephesus, hie thee thither,
And do upon my altar sacrifice.
There when my maiden priests are met together
Before the people all,
Reveal how thou at sea didst lose thy wife.

(5.1.240-244)

Her bidding brings Pericles to his wife and Thaisa to her daughter. Gower gives this role to “The highe God which wolde him kepe,”⁷¹ and Twine casts “an Angell.”⁷² Shakespeare's decision to replace these Christian messengers with the pagan Diana, making her the agent of familial reunion, demands a reading that resists seeing the play's ending at Ephesus as a compliant maneuvering of the female body back into the structures of a Christian-inflected order.

This “Celestial Dian” (5.1.250), insisting upon the intactness of genealogy, recalls the prophetic and wild goddess of Geoffrey's Historia. Her appearance here reminds us of Diana's foundational status, not only for Ephesus, but for England. She returns us to the “powerful goddess,” the “terror of the glades and hope of the forest beasts” who appeared to Brutus long before the Greeks had incorporated and transformed her into the virgin goddess. This guidance by the ancient Mother toward female ritual, one that will occur within her temple, underscores churching as an inadvertant celebration of the procreative female body and of the ceremony's pagan past.

As the ritual reunion of husband and wife unfolds, the juggling of ceremonial traditions continues. Thaisa, “standing near the altar, as high priestess” (5.2.stage dir.), achieves a divine status that parallels the new mother's central role in the revised Protestant ceremony while recalling the pagan priestess who orchestrated the mysteries of Diana's temple.⁷³ Furthermore, her accompaniment by “a number of virgins on each side” illustrates a stripping of the sexual body from the ritual, a return to Jewish/Catholic purification. The direct relationship of the mother to God that the churching text allowed is compromised by Cerimon who acts as the priestlike intermediary. He reintroduces Thaisa to her husband: “This is your wife” (5.3.18). Similarly, when Pericles addresses Cerimon, he points to his powers of divine midwifery: “Reverent sir, / The gods can have no mortal officer / More like a god than you. Will you deliver / How this dead queen lives?” (5.3.61-63). In his next line, however, Pericles blesses “Pure Dian,” an actual deity who needs no simile to achieve divinity (5.3.68). Gendered and religious tensions continue as Cerimon insists upon his central role in Thaisa's ritual return: He tells Pericles that he “recovered her, and plac'd her / Here in Diana's temple” (5.3.24-25), like the purifying Catholic priest who determined the appropriate moment of her entrance into the sacred space; fourteen years later, however, it is the untamed goddess who initiates her ritual release at Ephesus.

Pericles will “offer / Night oblations” to Diana (5.3.69-70), an act that recalls her associations with the dark mysteries of nature and reminds us that she was far more than a virgin goddess who purified women's bodies for a greater patriarchal and—thematically speaking—Christian good. As Kenneth Muir suggests, such a tribute relegates him to the role of an idolatrous Ephesian facing off with Saint Paul: “He might well cry, in scriptural phrase, ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians!’”⁷⁴ Thaisa's words upon seeing her husband similarly confound any consistent reading of the reunion as a restoration of a new sacred order: “If he be none of mine, my sanctity / Will to my sense bend no licentious ear” (5.3.29-30). He is, of course, her husband and must be in order for the family to approach salvation; but this truth goes hand in hand with the unsettling fact that she will forever listen to her “sense” and indulge the “licentious” leanings of her “sanctity.” Her time in the Temple of Diana, then, has not stripped her of her sensuality.

It has, however, denied the husband—and the religious and cultural structures that upheld his rights over the female body—the promise of endurance.⁷⁵ As critics have noted, Shakespeare departs from his sources in failing to include Gower's and Twine's closing comments that the couple will have more children. There will be no “second Epithalamie” upon the churched mother's return from the “Temple” in this tale. Although one can read this final dramatic engagement with the Temple of Diana at Ephesus and the Protestant churching ritual as a successful ritualistic taming of the reproductive female and the paganism it represented, the play's inconsistent treatment of the maternal body suggests that we read the ending as a failure of the new church to find its own legs to stand on. Rather than playing her part in the drama of familial salvation, Thaisa will, as Pericles himself affirms, “be buried / A second time within these arms” (5.3.43-44). Their reunion evokes the superstitious muck of Thaisa's burial at sea—a final commentary, perhaps, on the reformed English church's unsuccessful attempts to build its new doctrine on idolatrous foundations. Burying herself in her husband's arms, Thaisa embodies more than ever the backsliding goddess and her temple that colored the rhetoric of Protestant ideology and figured its own toppling church. Neither Thaisa, the church, nor the temple that an early modern audience knew had sunk into the marshy ooze are ever fully recovered from the darkness of their Ephesian pasts: “the ruines of that wonder,” preached one of Shakespeare's Protestant contemporaries, “are intombed within the entrails of the Earth.”⁷⁶

Notes

1. All references to Shakespeare's plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. F. D. Hoeniger notes this pattern and comments that Shakespeare's departure from his sources on this point “may be significant.” See his commentary on the Dramatis Personae in his edition of Pericles, The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1963), 4. Kenneth Muir notes the repeated invocation of Diana as well and argues that Thaisa's enclosure is a form of atonement for taking her name in vain. See his Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), 255.

3. See, for example, C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 327; Richard Wilson, “Observations on English Bodies,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England, eds. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 142-144; and Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Play, Hamlet to the Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), 196-198.

4. Arthur Golding, preface to The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, Entituled Metamorphoses (London, 1565).

5. W. M. Ramsay traces the legend back to the fourth century a.d. in his detailed study, “The Worship of the Virgin Mary at Ephesus,” in The Expositor, vol. 12, 6th ser., ed. W. Robertson Nicoll (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905), 81-98.

6. For more on ancient Ephesus's attractions and visitors, see Bluma L. Trell's “The Temple of Artemis at Ephesos,” in The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, eds. Peter A. Clayton and Martin J. Price (London: Routledge, 1988), 84-86.

7. Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. J. G. Frazer (London: Macmillan and Co., 1913), 4.31.6. All citations of Pausanias are to this translation. Pliny also describes the grandeur of the Temple in his Natural History 36.21.

8. Sampson Price, Ephesus Warning before Her Woe (London, 1616), 19. The Lydian king Croesus is now acknowledged as the historical builder of the monumental temple.

9. See, for instance, Callimachus, Hymn to Artemis, line 237. Pliny describes how artists competed to make the best statues of the Amazons, which were then dedicated in the Temple (Natural History 34.19.54).

10. Heywood claims that the Amazons “built Ephesus” in his Gynaikeion (London, 1624), 221. In an unusual reversal of the legend—and an effort to cast the Amazons in a destructive light—Ralegh claims that the Amazons “sackt Ephesus, and burnt the Temple of Diana” in his History of the World (London, 1614), 196.

11. Heywood, 220-221. The scholarship on Amazons in the early modern period is extensive: see Celeste Turner Wright's foundational essay, “Amazons in Elizabethan Literature,” Studies in Philology 37.3 (1940): 433-456; for a discussion of positive and negative allusions to the Amazons, see Gabriele Bernhard Jackson, “Topical Ideology: Witches, Amazon's and Shakespeare's Joan of Arc,” English Literary Renaissance 18.1 (1988): 40-65.

12. For more on this complicated genesis of Diana's many forms, see Allen Jones, “Artemis,” Chap. 4 of Essenes (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985); also Jacqueline de Weever, “Chaucer's Moon: Cinthia, Diana, Latona, Lucina, Proserpina,” Names 34.2 (1986): 154-174.

13. Elizabeth Cellier, To Dr.—, An Answer to his Queries, concerning the Colledg of Midwives (London, 1688), 6.

14. Twine, introduction to Chap. 9 of The Patterne of Painfull Adventures (London, 1594). All citations of Twine are to this version.

15. For examples of such satire surrounding the birth community, and churching in particular, see “The Humor of a Woman Lying in Child-Bed,” Chap. 3 of The Bachelor's Banquet (London, 1615), and A Crew of Kind Gossips all Met to Be Merrie (London, 1613).

16. Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of the Puritan Revolt with a Reprint of the Admonition to Parliament, 1572, eds. W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas (1907; reprint, New York: Lenox Hill, 1972), 28.

17. The Writings of Henry Barrow, 1587-1590, Elizabethan Nonconformist Texts 3, ed. Leland Carlson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962), 463.

18. Certaine Questions by way of Conference betwixt a Chauncelor and a Kinswoman of his concerning Churching of Women (London, 1601), 60.

19. Jeanne Addison Roberts, “Shakespeare's Maimed Birth Rites,” in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, eds. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 131.

20. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, for example, Diana is a “sacred, shadowy, cold, and constant queen, / Abandoner of revels, mute, contemplative, / Sweet, solitary, white as chaste, and pure / As wind-fann'd snow,” and Emilia is her “virgin” (5.1.137-140, 145).

21. Ovid names Diana “Titania” in his Metamorphoses 3.173.

22. Barber and Wheeler, 325.

23. C. L. Barber, “The Family in Shakespeare's Development: Tragedy and Sacredness,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, eds. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppèlia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 196.

24. For a detailed account of both positive and negative early modern English attitudes toward the Turks, see Samuel Chew's “The Present Terror of the World” and “The Great Turk,” Chaps. 3 and 4 of The Crescent and the Rose (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937). For an analysis of these attitudes' contribution to Shakespeare's geographic choices in Pericles and of the “ambivalence toward the political and familial structures it asks us to accept,” see Constance C. Relihan, “Liminal Geography: Pericles and the Politics of Place,” Philological Quarterly 71 (1992): 281-299.

25. Jacobus de Voragine, vol. 2 of The Golden Legend: or Lives of the Saints as Englished by William Caxton, ed. F. S. Ellis (London: J. M. Dent, 1928), 169.

26. John Prideaux, Ephesus Backsliding Considered and Applyed to These Times (London, 1614), 5.

27. Ibid., 3.

28. Prideaux uses the term “Angell” to describe the church in his opening address. For a detailed study of John's Revelation text and a comparison of Ephesus's portrayal to that of the other six churches of Asia, see W. M. Ramsay, “The Letter to the Church in Ephesus,” Chap. 18 of The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1905).

29. Prideaux, 7.

30. Both phrases appear in the title of John Vicars's diatribe against Diana of the Ephesians, Babylons Beautie … (London, 1644).

31. See, for example, Strabo, Geography 14.1.20.

32. Callimachus, Hymns and Epigrams, trans. A. W. Mail (1921; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 63.

33. Ralegh repeats the tale in his History of the World, 168, as does Cellier in her letter To Dr—, 6.

34. There is no universal agreement as to what these shapes on the cult figure's chest are. Michael Camille, for instance, argues that it was a vest of fruits, “mistaken for breasts by early Christians” in his Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 108. Other theories claim that they are bull scrotum or pouches to hold amulets.

35. An ancient legend explains how this polymaste cult image of the goddess may have spread beyond the eastern Mediterranean via Marseilles when the Phocaceans sought her guidance on where to settle: The Greek geographer Strabo describes how the goddess commanded one of Ephesus's women “to sail away with the Phocacaeans, taking with her a certain reproduction which was among the sacred images; … in the colonial cities the people everywhere do the goddess honours of the first rank and they preserve the artistic design of the ‘xoanon’” (vol. 2 of The Geography of Strabo, trans. H. L. Jones [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960], 4.1.4). “Xoanon” is used in the text to mean “reproduction.” The cult image also may have reached Europe via tapestries and manuscript illuminations brought back by eleventh-century Spanish Crusaders. Trell makes this argument and adds that in the thirteenth century a Spanish group, the Catalan Grand Company, ruled in Ephesus and may have brought back images of the temple (97). A marginal note to Acts 19 in the Genova Bible of course deplores this tale of the image's perpetuity, claiming that “Antiquitie & the covetousness of the Priests broght in this superstition.”

36. Joseph Harrison connects Diana's changing and volatile associations to the pictures on the temple's walls in his “‘Tears for Passing Things’: The Temple of Diana in The Knight's Tale,” Philological Quarterly 63.1 (1984): 108-115.

37. See Ramsay, Letters to the Seven Churches, 219-222.

38. The Latin text is taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Historia Regum Britanniae, ed. Acton Griscom (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929), 238-239.

39. Mary Lefkowitz and Hugh Lloyd-Jones researched this point and conveyed it to me in conversation, 20 May 1999.

40. In his Description of Greece, for example, Pausanias mentions sanctuaries of the Ephesian Artemis in Alea (8.23.1), Scillus (5.6.4), and Corinth (2.2.5). He writes that “all cities recognize Ephesian Artemis, and some persons recognize her privately above all the gods” (4.11.6).

41. Edward Chaloner, Ephesus Common Pleas. Handled in a Sermon before the Judges in Saint Maries, at the Assises held at Oxford, An. 1618 (London, 1623), 116.

42. For detailed descriptions of these orgiastic rites, see Jones, Essenes, 86-87.

43. Thomas Comber, The Occasional Offices of Matrimony, Visitation of the Sick, Burial of the Dead, Churching of Women, and the Commination, Explained in the Method of the Companion to the Temple: Being the Fourth and Last Part (London, 1679), 536.

44. De Weever, 164.

45. The Writings of Henry Barrow, 1590-91, Elizabethan Nonconformist Texts 5, ed. Leland H. Carson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), 77.

46. William Coster, for instance, argues that these Puritan objections countered the “very low opinion of sex, childbirth, and women in early modern England” that the ceremony seemed to promote. See his “Purity, Profanity, and Puritanism: The Churching of Women, 1500-1700,” Studies in Church History 27, Women in the Church, eds. W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 384-386.

47. Certaine Questions, 19.

48. David Cressy argues, for instance, that “an alternative case can be made that women normally looked forward to churching as an occasion of female social activity, in which the notion of ‘purification’ was uncontentious, minimal or missing” (“Purification, Thanksgiving and the Churching of Women in Post-Reformation England,” Past and Present 141 [1993]: 110). Jeremy Boulton notes the popularity of the practice in his study of a seventeenth-century London suburb, showing that 92.3 percent of women who survived birth went to be churched. See his Neighborhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 276-279. Susan Wright's study of a late Elizabethan “chrisom-book” reveals a 75-93 percent churching-rate. See her “Family Life and Society in Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Salisbury” (University of Leicester Ph.D. thesis, 1982), 333-335.

49. Adrian Wilson, “The Ceremony of Childbirth and Its Interpretation,” Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England, ed. Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990), 92. He is working from Davis's essay “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975). Gail Kern Paster offers a different opinion, stating that the ceremony's enduring popularity among women “may argue just as forcefully for their internalization of shame and embarrassment as for their pride, relief, and self-congratulation.” See The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 195.

50. Cressy, 114.

51. The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI (London: Dent, 1964), 278. All references to the purification and churching ritual are from this edition, unless otherwise noted.

52. Ibid., 428.

53. Cressy, 119-120.

54. Gail McMurray Gibson, “Blessing from Sun and Moon: Churching as Women's Theater,” Medieval Cultures 9, Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, eds. Barbara Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 149.

55. First and Second Prayer Books, 429.

56. Comber, 512.

57. Qtd. in Cressy, 121.

58. W. P. M. Kennedy, Elizabethan Episcopal Administration, Alcuin Club Collections 27 (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1924), 3: 148-149. It is interesting to note that there were local clergy who refused to follow some of the injunctions for fear of community disruption. Peter Rushton points out that they “could easily be persuaded to church women (and baptise their children) without presenting them before the courts or exacting any prior penance” (“Purification or Social Control? Ideologies of Reproduction and the Churching of Women after Childbirth,” The Public and the Private, eds. Eva Gamarnikow et al. [London: Heinemann, 1983], 123).

59. “Julia's Churching, or Purification,” vol. 3 of The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick (London: The Cresset Press, 1928), 115.

60. Adelman, 347n. Although Roberts notes that “Shakespeare may have shared Protestant uneasiness at the idea of the need to purify women after childbirth,” she concludes that are “no clear traces of this rite in his work” (136).

61. Adelman, 198.

62. Richard Wilson, 142.

63. Paster, 278.

64. Ibid., 279.

65. For an extended discussion and analysis of Ephesus and the Temple in Comedy of Errors, see Laurie Maguire's “The Girls from Ephesus,” in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert S. Miola (New York: Garland, 1997), 355-391. I am grateful to her for drawing my attention to her research.

66. Clive Foss, Ephesos after Antiquity: A Late Antique, Byzantine and Turkish City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 33.

67. Roberts, 128.

68. Twine, Chap. 8.

69. Comber, 516.

70. Gower describes his healing as follows: “with the craftes which he couthe / He soghte and fond a signe of lif.” References to Confessio Amantis are from Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, Being the Confessio Amantis of John Gower, ed. Henry Morley (London: Routledge, 1889).

71. Gower, 428.

72. Twine, Chap. 19.

73. For a description of the priestess's role at Ephesus, see Guy M. Rogers, The Sacred Identity of Ephesos (London: Routledge, 1991), 53-55.

74. Muir, 255.

75. Adelman gives an illuminating reading of this ending as an unsatisfying loss of generativity in her Suffocating Mothers, 197.

76. Chaloner, 123.