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The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early Modern England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Michael MacDonald
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Extract

This is the story of a story. It all began in May 1548, when an Italian Protestant named Francesco Spiera recanted. He had been denounced to the Inquisition the previous November, and, fearful that he would lose his wealth and beggar his family, he renounced Protestantism publicly both at St. Mark's in Venice and in his hometown of Citadella, near Padua. It was a painful decision. Even before his second recantation, he began to hear a voice warning him not to apostatize, and soon after it the voice returned, admonishing him for denying God and sentencing him to eternal damnation. Convinced that he had been forsaken by the Lord, Spiera fell into despair. He removed with his family to Padua, where his woeful condition quickly came to the attention of prominent theologians, including Pier Paolo Vergerio, the bishop of Capodistra, and Matteo Gribaldi, like Spiera, a civil lawyer and a professor at the University of Padua.

As Spiera's despair deepened, he was consoled by these eminent scholars and by as many as thirty other men. He suffered terribly, refusing food and rejecting their attempts to persuade him that he was not damned. The days and weeks passed; he maintained his conviction that God had forsaken him. He argued brilliantly with his learned visitors, displaying a remarkable grasp of Scripture and theology, which he deployed to prove his own damnation. He declared that he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, the single fault that places one beyond the Lord's mercy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , January 1992 , pp. 32 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1992

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References

1 Authoritative modern treatments of Spiera's life and death include Schutte, Anne Jacobson, Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer (Geneva, 1977), pp. 239–57, 266–68Google Scholar; Wine, Celesta, “Nathaniel Wood's Conflict of Conscience,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 50 (1935): 661–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Biographies of Spiera include brief lives by Comba, Emilio, Episido della Riforma Religiosa in Italia (Rome and Florence, 1872)Google Scholar, which is principally useful for the Church's view of him and includes a valuable appendix of original documents; and Ronneke, Karl, Francesco Spiera: Eine Geschichte aus der Zeit der Reformation in Italien (Hamburg, 1874)Google Scholar, which is based partly on archival materials, according to the author. For other Italian authorities (which I have been unable to locate in American and British libraries), see Schutte, p. 239n. For reasons that should become plain, in retelling the story I have relied on Bacon, Nathaniel, A Relation of the Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira (London, 1638)Google Scholar, from which the quotations are drawn. Spiera is usually described as a Lutheran, but, as Gerald Strauss pointed out to me, his precise theological views—like those of other early Italian Protestants—are hard to determine.

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3 Ibid., p. 60.

4 Ibid., pp. 77–78.

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20 The Writings of John Bradford, ed. Townsend, Aubrey, 2 vols., Parker Society (Cambridge, 1843–1848), 1:432–33Google Scholar. This passage was plagiarized by Coverdale; see Remains of Myles Coverdale, ed. Pearson, George, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1846), p. 276Google Scholar. For similar allusions, see Bradford, , Writings, 2:80Google Scholar; The Sermons of Edwin Sandys, ed. Ayre, John, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1841), p. 362Google Scholar; Rogers, Thomas, The Catholic Doctrine of the Church of England, ed. Perowne, J. J. S., Parker Society (Cambridge, 1844), p. 142Google Scholar.

21 Foxe (n. 9 above), 6:421. See also Bacon, , Fearefull Estate (1638) (n. 1 above), preface, p. 4Google Scholar.

22 In Italy, discussion of Spira's case became subsumed in the debate over “Nicodemism,” the practice of conforming while secretly adhering to the new faith; see Cantimori, Delio, “Submission and Conformity: ‘Nicodemism’ and the Expectations of a Conciliar Solution to the Religious Question,” in The Late Italian Renaissance, 1525–1630, ed. Cochrane, Eric (New York, 1970), pp. 244–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eretici italiani del cinquecento (Florence, 1939)Google Scholar, chap. 8; Ginzburg, Carlo, Il nicodemismo: Simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell'Europa del '500 (Turin, 1970), esp. pp. 172, 186, 188, 201Google Scholar. Calvin's preface to Gribaldi's narrative may be read as another of his blistering attacks on Nicodemism, but the language is unclear, particularly in the English translation; see Gribaldi (n. 8 above), esp. signature Aiii. In England, it should be emphasized, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers always referred to Spira's offense as apostasy. Nicodemism, after all, was a strategy that English Protestants could have adopted only during the reign of Queen Mary, and, given the dangers they faced then, it is not surprising that their leaders did not waste their energies denouncing clandestine sympathizers.

23 The classic discussion of English Protestants' sense of themselves as a group is Haller, William, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London, 1963)Google Scholar.

24 Foxe, 7:219.

25 Beard (n. 12 above), pp. 73–74.

26 These apparently banal facts have been disputed by ecclesiastical historians recently. The safest guides are probably Collinson, Patrick, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar; Tyacke, Nicholas, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar; Lake, Peter, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988)Google Scholar.

27 Bolton, Robert, Instructions for a Right Comforting [of] Afflicted Consciences, 2d ed. (London, 1635), pp. 12, 18–20, 81–83Google Scholar; Bacon, , Fearefull Relation (1638)Google Scholar.

28 Seaver, Paul S., Wallington's World (Stanford, Calif., 1985), p. 202Google Scholar. For other manuscript copies of Bacon's book, see British Library, London, Additional MS 22,591, fols. 280r–88v; Sloane MS 397; Harleian MS 6,626.

29 Plomer, Henry R., A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1688 to 1724 (Oxford, 1922)Google Scholar, sub nomen “Harris, Benjamin”; Starr, Edward Caryl, A Baptist Bibliography (Philadelphia and Rochester, 1947–)Google Scholar, sub nomen “Harris, Benjamin.”

30 Bacon, Nathaniel, The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira (London, 1683)Google Scholar, “To the Reader,” unpaginated.

31 Bacon, Nathaniel, The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira (London, 1700)Google Scholar, “To the Reader,” unpaginated.

32 A Warning from God to all Apostates … Wherein the Fearful States of Francis Spira and John Child are Compared (London, 1684)Google Scholar.

33 Plant, Thomas and Dennis, Benjamin, This Mischief of Persecution Exemplified; By a True Narrative of the Life and Deplorable End of Mr. John Child (London, 1688), p. 27Google Scholar. This pamphlet was reprinted, together with Bacon's, A Relation of the Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira, in B. H., A Relation of the Fearful Estate of Francis Spira … As Also the Miserable Lives and Woful Deaths of Mr. John Child … and Mr. George Edwards (London, 1770)Google Scholar. (There were several earlier editions of this collection.)

34 None of the works that depicts Spira's death (or those of his later counterparts) as the result of starvation calls him a suicide, and yet there was a persistent tendency to change the story to have him hang himself. The best example is Woodes's The Conflict of Conscience (n. 11 above), which is discussed below. Whether anyone who starved himself to death was regarded as a suicide is an intriguing question: there are no deaths by starvation among the almost 14,000 suicides recorded in the records of King's Bench and other central courts for the period 1485–1715; see Public Record Office, London, King's Bench 9, 10, 11, 140; PL 26; HCA 1. Ray Metzner suggested to me that starvation may have recalled traditions of holy fasting, even to the point of death, and so might have contradicted the prevalent notion that self-murder was an unholy, diabolical act. (This would not, of course, be consistent with Protestant doctrine, but a good many English popular beliefs were not.)

35 Sad and Lamentable News from Brick-lane (London, [1684])Google Scholar.

36 Sault, John, The Second Spira, 6th ed. (London, 1693)Google Scholar. The large number of 1693 editions lends some weight to the traditional claim.

37 Sewell, Thomas, A True Second Spira (London, 1697)Google Scholar; James, Thomas, Spira's Despair Revived (London, 1697)Google Scholar, sigs. A5v–A6r. See also, Treidantium Malleus: The Foxonian Quakers, Dunces, Lyars and Slanderers (London, 1697), p. 99Google Scholar; The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse, ed. Brink, A. W. (Montreal, 1974), p. 18n.Google Scholar, which lists several more examples. Some, such as The Second Spira: Or, the Blasphemers Reproved (Wigan, 1700)Google Scholar, have nothing at all to do with the original story. Gaskill, Malcolm kindly called my attention to a “Third Spira,” similarly unrelated to the original tale: The Third Spira. Being Memoirs of the Life … of a Young English Gentleman at Paris in the Year 1717, 2d ed. (London, 1724)Google Scholar.

38 Doody, Margaret Anne, A Natural Passion (Oxford, 1974), pp. 153–71Google Scholar. Spira's apostasy was recalled in Tillotson's Sermons, one of the most popular religious books among Anglican clergy and laymen of the eighteenth century: see Tillotson, John, The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, ed. Birch, Thomas, 3 vols. (London, 1752) 1:144Google Scholar; 2:430.

39 For Spira, see Arminian Magazine 10 (1787): 354–56, 412–15, 526–29, 582–85, 634–37Google Scholar; for Sault's The Second Spira, see Arminian Magazine 7 (1784): 24–28, 79–83, 132–33Google Scholar. A copy of Bacon's book is mentioned in the catalog of Wesleyana in the Methodist Archives, John Rylands Library, Manchester.

40 Snyder, Susan, “The Left Hand of God: Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Tradition,” Studies in the Renaissance 7 (1965): 18–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sachs, Arieh, “Religious Despair in Medieval Literature and Art,” Mediaeval Studies 26 (1964): 231–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Giotto, see Stubblebine, James, Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes (New York, 1969)Google Scholar, plate 57. For a more detailed discussion, see MacDonald, Michael and Murphy, Terence R., Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

41 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. I, canto ix, stanza 50, hereafter denoted as I.ix.SO, in The Works of Edmund Spenser, A Variorum Edition, ed. Greenlaw, Edwin, Osgood, Charles Grosvenor, and Padelford, Frederick Morgan, vol. 1 (Baltimore, 1932)Google Scholar; Bunyan, John, Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. Sharrock, Roger (London, 1966), p. 232Google Scholar. For commentaries, see Carpenter, Frederick Ives, “Spenser's Cave of Despair: An Essay in Literary Comparison,” Modern Language Notes 12 (1897): 129–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skulsky, Harold, “Spenser's Despair Episode and the Theology of Doubt,” Modern Philology 78 (1980–1981): 227–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Kathleen, Spenser's World of Glass (Berkeley, 1966), pp. 25–28Google Scholar; Nohrnberg, James, The Analogy of the Faerie Queene (Princeton, N.J., 1976), pp. 152–55Google Scholar; Alpers, Paul, The Poetry of the Faerie Queene (1967; reprint, Columbia, Mo., 1982), pp. 352–61Google Scholar; Golder, Harold, “Bunyan's Giant Despair,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 30 (1931): 368–70Google Scholar.

42 Gribaldi (n. 8 above), sig. Aiii.

43 The Works of Hugh Latimer, ed. Corrie, George Elwes, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1844), p. 425Google Scholar.

44 Schutte (n. 1 above), p. 243.

45 Patrick Collinson has recently pointed out that Elizabethan Protestants were by no means all hostile to religious drama, and the decline of the morality was more gradual than many theater historians have realized. Woodes's play is a case in point. See Collinson, Patrick, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation, the Stenton Lecture delivered at the University of Reading, 1985 (Reading, 1986), pp. 8–15Google Scholar, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (London, 1988), chap. 4Google Scholar.

46 Woodes (n. 11 above), prologue, lines 36–42.

47 The Workes of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the University of Cambridge, Mr William Perkins, 3 vols. (London, 1626–1631), 3:407Google Scholar; see also 1:290, 378. Gouge agreed, and even supplied a counterexample, Vincent Jenkes, who renounced Christianity after being captured by the Turks but resumed his religion on his escape: see Gouge, William, A Recovery from Apostasy (London, 1639), p. 40Google Scholar. For a perceptive discussion of this story, see Opie, , “Beyond Ideology” (n. 14 above), pp. 24–25Google Scholar.

48 Bolton (n. 27 above), p. 80 (see p. 83 and the marginalia on pp. 81, 82, 83 for the connection of this description with Spira). For an insightful commentary on these passages, see Opie, , “Nathaniel Bacon and Francis Spira” (n. 14 above), p. 37Google Scholar.

49 Bolton, p. 82.

50 Ibid., pp. 81–82.

51 For recent discussions of the Puritan psychology of conversion, see Cohen, Charles Lloyd, God's Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: 1986)Google Scholar; Caldwell, Patricia, The Puritan Conversion Narrative (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar.

52 Bunyan (n. 41 above), p. 51. For a good brief discussion of Bunyan, Spira, and religious despair, see Hill, Christopher, A Tinker and a Poor Man: John Bunyan and His Church, 1628–1688 (New York, 1989), pp. 184–87Google Scholar. A very similar response to the Spira story is described by John Crook in his autobiography. Crook later became a Quaker; at this point in his life, in the late 1630s or 1640s, he was a Puritan; see Crook, John, The Design of Christianity … To Which is Prefixed a Short Account of His Life Written by Himself (London, 1791), p. viiiGoogle Scholar.

53 The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, ed. Midgley, Graham (Oxford, 1986), 5:58Google Scholar; see also, 5:151, 173.

54 Bunyan, pp. 51–52; see also p. 57.

55 Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Jackson, Holbrook, 3 vols. (London, 1972), 3:407Google Scholar.

56 Bacon, , Fearefull Estate (1638) (n. 1 above), p. 22Google Scholar.

57 Ibid., p. 24.

58 This is a more optimistic account of the Puritan understanding of religious despair than Stachniewski's Persecutory Imagination (n. 14 above), the most impressive study of the subject to date. Stachniewski's book, which appeared just as the final version of this article was going to press, is a sustained indictment of Calvinist predestinarianism, which he believes created anxiety and despair. There can be no doubt that it did, at least in some believers, but Stachniewski seems to me to de-emphasize the “preparatory” uses of despair, and he ignores the significance of the emotion outside of the context of Calvinist theology, among for instance the Methodists discussed below.

59 For discussions of the similarities between Puritan divinity and Methodism, see Watts, Michael, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978), pp. 434–45Google Scholar; Walsh, John, “The Origins of the Evangelical Revival,” in Essays in Modern English Church History, ed. Bennett, G. V. and Walsh, John (London, 1966), pp. 138–60Google Scholar; Rack, Henry D., Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (London, 1989), pp. 175–76, 307–8Google Scholar. For the Dissenters, see Keeble, N. H., The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, Ga., 1987)Google Scholar, chap. 6. For attacks on Methodist “enthusiasm,” see Lavington, George, The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compar'd, 3 vols. (London, 1757)Google Scholar; Lytes, A., Methodism Mocked (London, 1960)Google Scholar; Rupp, Gordon, Religion in England, 1688–1791 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 372–78Google Scholar.

60 Jackson, Thomas, ed., The Lives of Early Methodist Preachers, 3d ed., 6 vols. (London, 1866) 1:273Google Scholar.

61 John Valton, MS autobiography and diaries, 1763–93, 6 vols., Methodist Archives, John Rylands Library, Manchester, 4:24; Bunyan, p. 213.

62 Jackson, ed., 1:300.

63 Valton, 4:11–12. Interestingly, Wesley cut the Devil from this passage when he reprinted Valton's autobiography in the Arminian Magazine 7 (1784): 14Google Scholar.

64 Arminian Magazine 14 (1791): 69Google Scholar.

65 Quoted in Hall (n. 14 above), p. 133.

66 Seaver (n. 28 above), p. 202.

67 The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, ed. Greaves, Richard L. (Oxford, 1981), 9:167Google Scholar.

68 Jackson, ed., 1:302.

69 One of the most conspicuous features of the autobiographies of many pious Protestants is the frequency with which they record unusually intense anxieties, even before their authors were awakened to their sins. A perhaps extreme example is Trosse (n. 37 above). See also, Watts (n. 59 above), p. 177; Stachniewski (n. 14 above), chap. 2, esp. pp. 39–41. It is notable that Richard Baxter worried that he had not experienced the sort of tribulation during conversion that Bolton, Thomas Hooker, and John Rogers had; see Reliquiae Baxterianae: or, Mr. Richard Baxter's Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of His Life and Times, ed. Sylvester, Matthew (London, 1696), pp. 6–9Google Scholar. For what they are worth, many modern psychological studies have tried to determine the extent to which people who convert to various religious denominations were “maladjusted” before their conversions. For a brief summary of the literature and wise remarks about the dangers of bias in such research, see Spilka, Bernard, Hood, Ralph W. Jr., and Borsuch, Richard L., The Psychology of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1985), p. 213Google Scholar.

70 Cohen (n. 51 above), chaps. 3–4, is particularly good on this topic. For a contemporary discussion of the changes in personality and emotionality that conversion required, see Fenner, William, A Treatise of the Affections (London, 1642)Google Scholar.

71 A comment by William Kiffin demonstrates just how self-conscious this process of moral and emotional refashioning could be. Awakened to a sense of his sinfulness and unable to find in himself the tokens of grace, Kiffin sought the advice of godly ministers, who pressed on him “the necessity of deep humiliation by the law, as the only way God took to the conversion of the sinner. I was also the more convinced of it by reading Mr. Hooker's book, ‘The Soul's Preparation for Christ’”: see Kiffin, William, Remarkable Passages in the Life of William Kiffin, ed. Orme, William (London, 1823), p. 10Google Scholar.

72 The Life and Death of Vavasor Powell (London, 1671), p. 3Google Scholar.

73 Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), p. 9Google Scholar.

74 The outstanding work on spiritual autobiography, its symbolism, and psychology, is Watkins, Owen C., The Puritan Experience (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar.

75 These are conveniently listed in the Dictionary of National Biography, sub nomen “Clarke, Samuel.” Clarke, like Foxe and Beard before him, included a reference to Spira in counterpoint to his songs of praise; see Clarke, Samuel, A Mirrour or Looking-Glass, Both for Saints and Sinners, 4th ed. (London, 1671), p. 31Google Scholar.

76 Watts, pp. 407–8; Nussbaum, Felicity A., The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore, 1989)Google Scholar; chap. 4 is a challenging and illuminating discussion of early Methodist autobiographies that stresses the construction of identity. Incidentally, the versions of these autobiographies printed by Jackson in Lives of Methodist Preachers are usually different from the Arminian Magazine versions, which in turn have been edited from the original manuscripts, many of which survive in the Methodist Archives, John Rylands Library, Manchester. It is notable that each successive edition or abridgment usually eliminated more and more passages that recounted intense emotional and spiritual experiences that might be regarded as instances of “enthusiasm.” For a good set of seventeenth-century autobiographies by men and women of low social status, see Walker, Henry, Spirituall Experiences, Of Sundry Beleevers (London, 1653)Google Scholar. This book is sometimes attributed to Vavasor Powell.

77 Valton (n. 61 above), 1:39–40, 2:46, 3:52, 5:74.

78 Arminian Magazine 7 (1784): 133Google Scholar. See also Taylor's, Thomas remark that “Allen's [Alleine's] Alarm” described his state exactly in Arminian Magazine 3 (1780): 375Google Scholar.

79 West, Elizabeth, Memoirs or Spiritual Exercises of Elizabeth West (Glasgow, 1766), pp. 15–16Google Scholar; Nussbaum, p. 172. (From her curious remarks about Spira's “atheism,” it is not clear whether West was reading one of the editions of Fearefull Estate that combined Bacon's text with another or The Second Spira. She may also have simply regarded apostasy as “athesim.”) The degree to which the Spira tale appealed to women is very unclear. Aside from West' a woman's spiritual autobiography, a confusing passage in the preface to A Narrative of God's Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs Hannah Allen (Afterwards Married to Mr. Hatt) (London, 1683), “To the Reader,” p. vGoogle Scholar. As these and many other texts demonstrate, women converts often passed through the same emotional transitions as men. The absence of references to Spira in their accounts of extreme anxiety and even despair cannot really be explained satisfactorily. Troubled women such as West did not hesitate to identify themselves with John Bunyan, as West's comment shows, and the number of autobiographies by distressed women is small enough so that Spira's absence from them may be entirely coincidental. For thoughts on this subject, I am grateful to Cynthia Herrup and Barbara Harris.

80 See, e.g., the careful distinctions drawn by Gilpin, Richard, Daemonologica Sacra: or, a Treatise of Satan's Temptatons (London, 1677), pp. 378–82, 387–408Google Scholar.

81 MacDonald, Michael, “Insanity and the Realities of History,” Psychological Medicine 11 (1981): 11–25CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Porter, Roy, “The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry,” Medical History 29 (1983): 35–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the early seventeenth-century origins of this attack, see, most recently, Stachniewski (n. 14 above), pp. 227–31.

82 Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), p. 44Google Scholar. Compare Greenblatt, p. 3.

83 Lutz (n. 19 above), p. 25.