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Jerusalem and Albion. Ralph Buckland’s ‘Seaven Sparkes of the Enkindled Soule’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Josephine Evetts-Secker
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Extract

Little is known of Ralph Buckland. Anstruther records that he was born in 1564, educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School and Magdalen College, Oxford, ordained in Rome in 1588 and sent as a ‘seminary priest’ to England where he was arrested and banished in 1606. He died in 1611 leaving behind him two works, both printed secretly in England, Seaven Sparkes of the Enkindled Soule (1604/5) and An Embassage to Heaven (1606–10). The earlier volume, a collection of original psalms, is a significant work from many points of view. It has literary value both as a poetic text and as a technical experiment, showing an early awareness of the mechanics of Hebrew prosody and current scholarly debate about its practice. It is also a poignant record of the predicament of the recusant Englishman around the time of the Gunpowder plot and an effective register of his state of mind.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , October 1990 , pp. 149 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1973

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References

Notes

1 Anstruther, G., The Seminary Priests. A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales, 1558–1850, St. Edmund’s College, Ware and Ushaw College, Durham, 1968, p. 57.

2 An Embassage from Heaven. Wherein our Saviour Christ Iesus giveth to understand, his iust indignation against all such as being catholikely minded, dare yeelde their presence to the rites… of the malignant church.

3 It precedes such works as Wither’s Preparation to the Psalter by more than a decade.

4 For a study of renaissance ideas about Hebrew poetry, see the work of Israel Barroway, particularly ‘The Bible as Poetry in the English Renaissance: An Introduction’. JEGP, 32, 1933 and ‘Accentual Theory of Hebrew Poetry.׳ ELH, 17, 1950.

5 The assumptions about the psalms in this paper (date, authorship, use etc) are those most likely to have been common in the sixteenth century. I am ignoring the insights provided by modern Biblical scholarship.

6 See Smith, Hallet, ‘English Metrical Psalms in the Sixteenth Century and their Literary Significance’. HLQ, 9, 1945–6Google Scholar.

7 Sternhold and Hopkins.

8 Introductory material.

9 London, 1597.

10 Title-page.

11 Catholics and Protestants alike were prolific on the subject of repentance. See the opening address of Reginald Pole to the Council of Trent, for example, and much later, such Protestant works as Daniel Price’s Sorrowe for the Sinnes of the Time, London, 1613.

12 See my article, “An Elizabethan Experiment in Psalmody: Ralph Buckland’s Seaven Sparkes of the Enkindled Soule.” The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. XV, No. 3. Fall, 1984.

13 This paper will consider the psalms in their given order. This is in many ways clumsy and leads to some repetition. But the order is important: the individual pieces are obviously intended to complement the others in sequence and some of the effects work by structured accumulation. In addition, this study is conceived of as a basic introduction to a little known text and serial quotation not only gives a sense of the essential content and progression of ideas, but also a feeling for the rhythms and rhetorical colouring. The structure of the parts and the whole I have tried to indicate briefly in passing.

14 It became very popular in renaissance literature and painting. Consider, for example, the inclusion of contemporary figures in paintings on historical or mythological subjects. See Pope-Hennessy, J., The Portrait in the Renaissance, Phaidon Press, London, 1966.Google Scholar

15 Titles such as ‘O thou fountayne of Grace/Mercy’, ‘Soverayne sweetnesse’ etc. obviously refer to Christ. Far more frequent are compounds such as ‘Monarch/Judge of all the World’, ‘Defendor of Israel’ etc. These are meant to indicate power that is both ‘tribal’ and cosmic.

16 The idea also appears in controversial form in Reginald Pole’s De Unitate… where he suggests that the Protestants are like the Turks, therefore the Emperor ought to declare war on them!

17 Tyndale had noticed this some time before. He claimed that ‘the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin…’ He thought that it could be translated into English almost ‘word for word’.