Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T22:16:15.729Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Metaphor, Cure, and Conversion in Early Modern England*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Helen Smith
Helen Smith*
Affiliation:
University of York
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

One of the most prevalent metaphors for conversion in early modern England was the cure of a diseased soul. This article draws together religious controversy, medical manuals, and individual accounts of conversion to chart the variety of sources that inform this metaphor, from the practical experience of the sickbed to the typological traditions of biblical interpretation. It explores the varied language of spiritual sickness in order to reevaluate both the operations of religious feeling and recent accounts of metaphor as embodied, and suggests instead that conversionary cures open up the category of imagined sensation and the complex connections between bodily and spiritual feeling in this period.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , Summer 2014 , pp. 473 - 502
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This article was born out of the Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe. I owe a debt of thanks to the project members Simon Ditchfield, Peter Mazur, and Abigail Shinn, who have discussed these ideas on numerous occasions and commented on an early draft. Lieke Stelling, an honorary member of the team, also offered suggestions and has been generous in sharing her ongoing work. Audiences in Leeds, York, and Lausanne provided stimulating feedback on these ideas as they developed. Warm thanks are due to the anonymous readers for Renaissance Quarterly, whose comments were crucial in the final stages, and especially to Brian Cummings, Mark Jenner, and Richard Rowland, who read drafts and offered characteristically perceptive and helpful suggestions. All italics within quotations are found in the originals.

References

Adams, Thomas. The happines of the church. London, 1619.Google Scholar
Baxter, Richard. The reasons of the Christian religion. London, 1667.Google Scholar
Baxter, Richard. Directions for weak distempered Christians, to grow up to a confirmed state of grace. London, 1669.Google Scholar
Beier, Lucinda McCray. Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England. London, 1987.Google Scholar
The Boke of common prayer, and admission of the Sacramentes. London, 1552.Google Scholar
Bristow, Richard. A reply to Fulke, In defense of M. D. Allens scroll of articles, and booke of purgatorie. Louvain, 1580.Google Scholar
Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Oxford, 1621.10.1093/oseo/instance.00006619CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cambers, Andrew. “Demonic Possession, Literacy, and ‘Superstition’ in Early Modern England.” Past and Present 202 (2009): 3–35.10.1093/pastj/gtn021CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cambers, Andrew. Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720. Cambridge, 2011.Google Scholar
Carier, Benjamin. A treatise, vvritten by M. doctor Carier, vvherein hee layeth downe sundry learned and pithy considerations. [English Secret Press], 1614.Google Scholar
Cave, William. Antiquitates apoitolicae. London, 1676.Google Scholar
Coltheart, Max. “What Has Functional Neuroimaging Told Us About the Mind (So Far)?” Cortex 42 (2006): 323–31.10.1016/S0010-9452(08)70358-7CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Conway, Anne. The principles of the most ancient and modern philosophy concerning God, Christ and the creatures. London, 1692.Google Scholar
Cressy, Serenus. The church-history of Brittany. Rouen, 1668.Google Scholar
Donne, John. Devotions vpon emergent occasions and seuerall steps in my sicknes. London, 1624.Google Scholar
Donne, John. “The Litanie.” In Poems, by J.D. With elegies on the authors death, Z2v–Bb1v. London, 1633.Google Scholar
Donne, John. The Sermons of John Donne. Ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson. 10 vols. Berkeley, 1959.Google Scholar
Dursteler, Eric. Renegade Women: Gender, Identity and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore, 2011.Google Scholar
Fissell, Mary. “Popular Medical Writing.” In The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture. Vol. 1, Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed. Joad Raymond, 417–30. Oxford, 2011.10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199287048.003.0030CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Floyd-Wilson, Mary, and Sullivan, Garrett A. Jr., eds. Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England. New York, 2007.10.1057/9780230593022CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York, 1984.Google Scholar
Gee, John. The foot out of the snare. London, 1624.Google Scholar
Gerard, John. The Autobiography of an Elizabethan. Trans. Philip Caraman. London, 1951.Google Scholar
Goodcole, Henry. A True Declaration of the happy Conuersion, contrition, and Christian preparation of Francis Robinson, Gentleman. London, 1618.Google Scholar
Gott, Samuel. The divine history of the genesis of the world. London, 1670.Google Scholar
Göttler, Christine. “Vapours and Veils: The Edge of the Unseen.” In Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Christine Göttler and Wolfgang Neuber, i–xxviii. Leiden, 2008.Google Scholar
Grafton, Anthony, and Mills, Kenneth, eds. Conversion: Old Worlds and New. Suffolk, 2003.Google Scholar
Hakewill, George. An ansvvere to a treatise vvritten by Dr. Carier. London, 1616.Google Scholar
Harley, David. “Medical Metaphors in English Moral Theology, 1560–1660.” Journal of the History of Medicine 48 (1993): 396–435.Google ScholarPubMed
Harris, Jonathan Gil. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia, 2003.Google Scholar
Healy, Margaret. Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics. Basingstoke, 2001.10.1057/9780230510647CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heller-Roazen, Daniel. The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation. New York, 2007.Google Scholar
Henry, John. “The Matter of Souls: Medical Theory and Theology in Seventeenth-Century England.” In The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roger French and Andrew Wear, 87–113. Cambridge, 1989.10.1017/CBO9780511897078.004CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hindmarsh, D. Bruce. The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford, 2008.Google Scholar
Hunt, Arnold. The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640. Cambridge, 2010.Google Scholar
Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London, 2000.Google Scholar
Jackson, Ken, and Marotti, Arthur. “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies.” Criticism 46 (2004): 167–90.10.1353/crt.2004.0031CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, Michael. “Thinking through the Body: An Essay on Understanding Metaphor.” Social Analysis 14 (1983): 127–48.Google Scholar
Juneja, Monica, and Kim Siebenhüner, eds. The Medieval History Journal 12 (2009). Special issue on “Religious Conversion in Medieval and Early Modern Societies.”10.1177/097194580901200201CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, K., , G. The Roman martyrologe according to the reformed calendar faithfully translated out of Latin into English. Saint-Omer, 1627.Google Scholar
King, John. A sermon preached at the funeral of Sir Willoughby Chamberlain, Kt. London, 1697.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York, 1999.Google Scholar
Lemnius, Levinus. The Touchstone of Complexions … Englished by Thomas Newton. London, 1576.Google Scholar
Lund, Mary Ann. “Experiencing Pain in John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624).” In The Sense of Suffering (2008), 323–45.Google Scholar
Luria, Keith. Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble. Berkeley, 1991.Google Scholar
Lynch, Kathleen. Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World. Oxford, 2012.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199643936.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mack, Phyllis. Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism. Cambridge, 2008.Google Scholar
Matar, Nabil. Islam in Britain, 1558–1685. Cambridge, 1998.10.1017/CBO9780511582738CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayhew, Jenny. “Godly Beds of Pain: Pain in English Protestant Manuals (ca. 1550–1650).” In The Sense of Suffering (2008), 299–322.Google Scholar
Mazzio, Carla. The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence. Philadelphia, 2009.10.9783/9780812293401CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClain, Lisa. Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642. London, 2004.10.4324/9780203504994CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milner, Matthew. The Senses and the English Reformation. Aldershot, 2011.Google Scholar
Montagu, Richard. Appello Caesarem. London, 1625.Google Scholar
More, Henry. The immortality of the soul. London, 1659.Google Scholar
Morgan, David, ed. Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief. London, 2010.Google Scholar
Murray, Molly. The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden. Cambridge, 2009.10.1017/CBO9780511770562CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicholls, John. A declaration of the recantation of Iohn Nichols. London, 1581.Google Scholar
Paré, Ambroise. The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey. Trans. Thomas Johnson. London, 1634.Google Scholar
Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago, 2004.10.7208/chicago/9780226648484.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paster, Gail Kern, Rowe, Katherine, and Floyd-Wilson, Mary, eds. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia, 2004.Google Scholar
Petti, Anthony G. “Unknown Sonnets by Sir Toby Matthew.” Recusant History 9 (1967): 123–58.10.1017/S003419320000443XCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Potter, Barnaby. The baronets burial. Oxford, 1613.Google Scholar
Puttenham, George. The arte of English poesie. London, 1589.Google Scholar
Questier, Michael. Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625. Cambridge, 1996.Google Scholar
Randall, John. Tvventy-nine lectures of the Church. London, 1631.Google Scholar
Reading, John. A faire vvarning Declaring the comfortable vse both of sicknesse and health. London, 1621.Google Scholar
Rous, Francis. Diseases of the time, attended by their remedies. London, 1622.Google Scholar
Rous, Francis. Oile of scorpions, the miserie of these times turned into medicines and curing themselues. London, 1623.Google Scholar
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford, 1985.Google Scholar
Schoenfeldt, Michael. Embodiment and Interiority in Early Modern England. Cambridge, 1999.Google Scholar
Schoenfeldt, Michael. “Aesthetics and Anesthetics: The Art of Pain Management in Early Modern England.” In The Sense of Suffering (2008), 19–38.Google Scholar
Schoenfeldt, Michael. “Eloquent Blood and Deliberative Bodies: The Physiology of Metaphysical Poetry.” In The Making of English Writing 1500–1650, ed. Healy, Margaret and Healy, Thomas, 145–60. Edinburgh, 2009.10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638734.003.0010CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture. Ed. Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl A. E. Enenkel. Leiden, 2009.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. The Merry Wives of Windsor. Ed. Giorgio Melchiori. Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. Walton-on-Thames, 2000.Google Scholar
Sheils, W. J., ed. The Church and Healing. Oxford, 1982.Google Scholar
Shell, Alison. Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England. Cambridge, 2007.10.1017/CBO9780511483998CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shuger, Debora. “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors and the Reflexive Mind.” In Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, 21–41. Philadelphia, 1999.Google Scholar
Smith, Bruce. “Reading Lists of Plays, Early Modern, Modernist, Postmodern.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 127–44.10.2307/2870544CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Bruce. The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture. Chicago, 2009.Google Scholar
Smith, Helen. “‘more swete vnto the eare / than holsome for ye mynde’: Embodying Early Modern Women’s Reading.” Huntington Library Quarterly 73 (2010): 413–32.10.1525/hlq.2010.73.3.413CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York, 1989.Google Scholar
Spiller, Elizabeth. Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance. Cambridge, 2011.10.1017/CBO9780511842337CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stelling, Lieke, Hendrix, Harald, and Richardson, Todd M., eds. The Turn of the Soul: Representations of Religious Conversion in Early Modern Art and Literature. Leiden, 2012.10.1163/9789004226371CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stock, Richard. The doctrine and vse of repentance. London, 1610.Google Scholar
Strathern, Alan. Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land. Cambridge, 2007.Google Scholar
The Task of Healing: Medicine, Religion and Gender in England and the Netherlands, 1450–1800. Ed. Hilary Marland and Margaret Pelling. Rotterdam, 1996.Google Scholar
Taylor, Jeremy. Antiquitates christianae. London, 1675.Google Scholar
Taylor, Thomas. A commentarie vpon the Epistle of S. Paul written to Titus. Cambridge, 1612.Google Scholar
Taylor, Thomas. Dauids learning, or The vvay to true happinesse. London, 1617.Google Scholar
Tuke, Thomas. The true trial and turning of a sinner. London, 1607.Google Scholar
Tyndale, William. The obedience of a Christen man. Antwerp, 1528.Google Scholar
Vaught, Jennifer, ed. Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England. Aldershot, 2010.Google Scholar
Vidal, Fernando. The Sciences of the Soul. Trans. Saskia Brown. Chicago, 2011.10.7208/chicago/9780226855882.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vitkus, Daniel J. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean. New York, 2003.10.1007/978-1-137-05292-6CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waardt, Hans de. “Chasing Demons and Curing Mortals: The Medical Practice of Clerics in the Netherlands.” In The Task of Healing (1996), 171–203.Google Scholar
Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford, 1999.Google Scholar
Wear, Andrew. “Religious Beliefs and Medicine in Early Modern England.” In The Task of Healing (1996), 145–69.Google Scholar
Weisberg, Deena Skolnick, Keil, Frank C., Goodstein, Joshua, Rawson, Elizabeth, and Gray, Jeremy R.. “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20 (2008): 470–77.10.1162/jocn.2008.20040CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wilson, Thomas. The rule of reason, conteinyng the arte of logique. London, 1551.Google Scholar
Wilson, Thomas. The arte of rhetorique for the vse of all suche as are studious of eloquence. London, 1553.Google Scholar
Zouche, Richard [attrib.]. The Sophister. London, 1639.Google Scholar