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The Godly Woman in Elizabethan Iconography*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

John N. King
John N. King*
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Extract

Emblematic figures of godly and faithful women proliferate throughout the literature of the English Renaissance and Reformation. Characteristically they hold books in their hands symbolic of divine revelation, or they appear in books as representations of divine inspiration. While such representation of a pious feminine ideal was traditional in Christian art, Tudor reformers attempted to appropriate the devout emotionality linked to many female saints and to the Virgin Mary, both as the mother of Christ and as an allegorical figure for Holy Church, providing instead images of Protestant women as embodiments of pious intellectuality and divine wisdom. Long before the cult of the wise royal virgin grew up in celebration of Elizabeth I, Tudor Protestants began to praise learned women for applying knowledge of the scriptures to the cause of church reform.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , Spring 1985 , pp. 41 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1985

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Footnotes

*

This article was prepared with support from the Penrose Fund of the American Philosophical Society, a Huntington Library-NEH Fellowship, and a grant for photographic expenses from Bates College. It is indebted throughout to the generous counsel of Gordon Kipling of UCLA and to his forthcoming book-length study of the dramaturgy of late medieval royal entries and civic triumphs in England, France, and the Low Countries.

References

1 See Mâle, Émile, Religious Art from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century, anon, trans., 2nd ed. (New York, 1958), pp. 116-19Google Scholar; and Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York, 1976), pp. 206-23Google Scholar.

The modern use of i/j, u/v, and vv has been followed; contractions and abbreviations are expanded. London is the place of publication unless otherwise noted. The abbreviation sig. is omitted from signature references. Except in indirect quotations, scriptural texts are from The Geneva Bible, facsimile of the 1560 edition with intro. by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison, 1969).

2 Yates, Frances A., Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London and Boston, 1975), p. 79 Google Scholar; and Phillips, John, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535-1660 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973), p. 205 Google Scholar. See Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), p. 168.Google Scholar

3 Prior to the Tudor age, with the possible exception of the Saxon queen Seaxburh, the disastrous attempt by Empress Matilda to supplant King Stephen (c. 1130-48) provides the single precedent for government by a British queen. The powerful lords who controlled England at the death of Edward VI failed in their attempt to establish a Protestant succession under Lady Jane Grey (6-19 July 1553). Mary Tudor, whose marriage negotiations with Philip of Spain began soon after her accession, reigned as a virgin queen for barely more than one year (19 July 1553-24 July 1554). Neale, J. E. comments in Queen Elizabeth (London, 1934)Google Scholar that, prior to Mary's death, government by a virgin queen was “unthinkable” (p. 31). Although Mary does furnish a precedent for Elizabeth as a regnant queen, widespread discontent with that Catholic sovereign's Spanish consort and her executions of Protestants did not strengthen Elizabeth's claim to govern as an unmarried woman (see Neale, pp. 43-44, 63).

4 Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (1977), speaks for its age:

But vertuous women wisely understand,

That they were borne to base humilitie,

Unlesse the heavens them lift to lawfull soveraintie.

(V.V.25.7-9)

Hereafter cited as FQ. See also Humphrey, Lawrence, De Religionis Conservatione et Reformatione Vera (Basel, 1559)Google Scholar. In his Apology of the Church of England, ed. J. E. Booty (Charlottesville, Va., 1963), John Jewel places Elizabeth's settlement of religion in the tradition of iconoclastic and reforming kings and prophets of the Old Testament such as Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Hezekiah, andjosiah (pp. 113, 115). On the iconography of the Reformation court, see King, John N., English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, 1982), pp. 184-96Google Scholar. This study questions the traditional opinion that Tudor court patronage dried up in the midsixteenth century only to revive late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, which is assumed in works such as Roy Strong's The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (London and New Haven, 1969), p. 1. The rich tradition of Tudor royalist woodcuts contradicts Edward Hodnett's assertion in English Woodcuts 1480-IS3S (1935), p. vi, that English book illustration declines after 1535.

5 See Yates, , Astraea, pp. 29–87 Google Scholar, passim .

6 Erasmus, Desiderius, Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings, ed. John C. Olin (New York, 1965), p. 97 Google Scholar.

7 One example is the illumination depicting Jean de Wavrin presenting his Premier volume des anchiennes el nouvelles chroniques dangleterre to Edward IV (British Library, MS Royal 15 E. iv, fol. 14). The conventions of manuscript illumination are carried over into early printed books, as in the unique engraved frontispiece of the Huntington Library copy of William Caxton's first book, his translation of Raoul Le Févre's Recuyell of the Histories of Troy (Bruges, c. 1475). Here Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, is portrayed receiving the text from a kneeling author, possibly Caxton himself. Reproduced in Hind, Arthur M., Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1952-64), I, plate. IGoogle Scholar

8 See Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980), pp. 93–94 Google Scholar. On the manipulation of traditional dedication images by royal apologists, see Elizabeth Hageman, “John Foxe's Henry VIII as Justitia,” Sixteenth Centuryjournal, 10, i (1979). 35-44. Additional information concerning the iconography of Figures 1-6, 8-11 may be found in King, English Reformation Literature, pp. 52-54, 184-96, and 435-37.

9 Kantorowicz, Ernst, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957), pp. 61–65 Google Scholar, and Fig. 5. See also Grabar, André, Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins (Princeton, 1968), p. 41 Google Scholar.

10 See Martin, Joseph, “The Marian Regime's Failure to Understand the Importance of Printing,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 44 (1981), 231-47Google Scholar.

11 Missale ad usum Sarisburiensis (Rouen, 1554), G2V-3V, and passim. See Sermones super Cantica Canticorum (Rostock, 1481).

12 Protestants were hostile to the conception of Mary as “mediatrix nostra et interventrix ad Filium” (Peter of Blois, Semones, 12, in Patrologia cursus completes. Series latina, ed. J. P. Migne, 221 vols. [Paris, 1844-64], CCVII, 597). See Warner, , Myth and Cult, pp. 93 Google Scholar, 122-24, 129. and chap. 8, passim; and Gordon Kipling's forthcoming study of royal entries and civic triumphs.

13 “Concordia: Facta Inter Regem Riccardum II et Civitatem Londinie,” ed. with intro., trans., and notes by Charles R. Smith., Ph.D. Diss. Princeton 1972, 11. 433-52, 465-500, and pp. 104-105, 107. See also Wickham, Glynne, Early English Stages 1300 to 1660, 4 vols. (1959- ), I, 71 Google Scholar. Nicholas Udall's verses on the coronation of Anne Boleyn are reprinted in Nichols, John, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (1788-1805), I, ix–xi Google Scholar.

14 Kipling, Gordon, “The London Pageants for Margaret of Anjou: A Medieval Script Restored,” Medieval English Theatre, 4 (1982), 11. 9–16, 36-40, 85-98, 148-55Google Scholar.

15 Anglo, Sydney, Spectacle Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1969), p. 54.Google Scholar

16 One prayer in Horae ad usum Romanum (Paris, 1497) honors the Blessed Virgin as “Imperatrix regina,” “Excellentissima regina c[a]elorum,” and “Mediatrix dei et hominum” (L7V). See also Strong, Roy, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (1977), p. 125 Google Scholar; and Wells, Robin H., Spenser's “Faerie Queene” and the Cult of Elizabeth (1983), p. 18 Google Scholar.

17 In the Canticles or Balades of Salomon (1549), William Baldwin interprets the Song of Songs in line with the contemporary reading of Revelation as a prophecy of the Protestant Reformation by Martin Luther, Heinrich Bullinger, John Bale, and many others.

18 Examinations, 2 vols. (Marburg [i.e., Wesel, in the County of Cleves], 1546-47). For a contemporary woodcut showing Luther's quill reaching from Wittenberg to Rome, see Thulin, Oskar, ed., Illustrated History of the Reformation (St. Louis, 1967), p. 42 Google Scholar. See also Grabar, , Christian Iconography, p. 49 Google Scholar; and Kurt Weitzmann, Late Antique and Early Christian Book Illumination (1977), plates 33, 35, 37, and 42. On Bale's role in the design and transmission of wood blocks, see King, , English Reformation Literature, pp. 97–98.Google Scholar

19 Golden Legend (1483), B5V-6V. Iconographic variations of St. Margaret piercing the dragon or issuing from its back, and often carrying a cross, appear repeatedly in stained glass windows, rood screens, carved pews, and manuscript books of hours. Printed woodcuts of St. Margaret defeating the dragon illustrate the Golden Legend (B6V) and the following Roman rite books of hours: Horae ad usum Romanum (Paris, c. 1489), liv; and Hor[a]e intemerate virginis Marie secundum usum Romanum (Paris, 1497), niv. Those images adapt conventional illuminations from manuscript books of hours and the original Latin version of Voragine's Legenda Aurea (for example, Huntington Library MSS HM 1088, fol. 8v and 3027, fol. 76v.

20 A contemporary court portrait attributed to William Scrots (c. 1546) similarly depicts the princess holding her place in a book (possibly the New Testament) and standing beside a lectern holding what appears to be an open Bible. Reproduced in Strong, English Icon, No. 11.

21 “The Pearl of the Valois and Elizabeth I: Marguerite de Navarre's Miroir and Tudor England,” forthcoming in Silent but for the Word, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, Ohio, 1985).

22 An Harborowe [Harbor] for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes, agaynst the late blowne Blaste, concerninge the Government of Wemen (Strasbourg [or London?], 1559), D2V, G3V. John Knox was an exception in the ill-timed work that provoked Aylmer's counterattack: The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous [sic] Regiment of Women (Geneva, 1558).

23 The Queries Majesties Passage through the citie of London to Westminster the daye before her coronation (1558/9), D3v-4. Roy Strong observes of this entry, in Splendour at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and Illusion (1973), that in “spite of its reformist ethic, the aesthetic remained medieval” (p. 25). Pageantry for the 1578 royal entry into Norwich recapitulated the coronation tableau when five costumed women, including Deborah (whom God had appointed “for the judge of his elect“) and Judith, greeted Elizabeth. See Nichols, , Progresses, II, Anno 1578, pp. 13–16 Google Scholar.

24 King, , English Reformation Literature, pp. 427 Google Scholar, 435-36. Frances Yates offers no evidence in support of her conjecture that the three men in the historiated initial C represent the three estates (Astraea, p. 43). The man at the left does, however, closely resemble John Day's woodcut portrait on the last page of Actes and Monuments (4V4V); reproduced in Hind, Engraving, I, plate 13a.

25 Holbein and Henry VIII(1967). pp. 14-15.

26 See Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), p. 15 Google Scholar. On the tradition of the emblematic book symbolic of the Bible, see Curtius, Ernst R., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (New York, 1953), pp. 310-11Google Scholar. On the inclusion of imperial portraits in biblical manuscripts, see Kantorowicz, King's Two Bodies, Figs. 5 and l6a-b.

27 For explications of the political symbolism of this woodcut and its motto, “PLURA: LATENT: QUAM: PATENT” (“More things are concealed than are revealed“), see Yates, Astraea, pp. 48-50; and Corbett, Margery and Lightbown, Ronald, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England 1550-1660 (London and Boston, 1979), pp. 48–56 Google Scholar.

28 FQ, V.ix.30.

The “Sieve Portrait” (c. 1580) attributed to Cornelius Ketel is an interesting example of the redefinition of a traditional emblem for temperance (or intemperance) as a symbol for imperial majesty. This image of Queen Elizabeth as a Roman Vestal holding a sieve in her left hand alludes to the legend of Tuccia, the vestal virgin who disproved allegations of unchastity by carrying water in a sieve without spilling a drop (see Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, plate 3 and p. 153). Contrast “Nimis Nequid” (“Not Too Much“), with its image of a woman pouring water through a sieve as an emblem of immoderation, in George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Modeme (1635), Book 4, Illustration 34.

29 On the emblematic use of an embroidered and jeweled serpent as an emblem of wisdom on the left sleeve of Queen Elizabeth in the “Rainbow Portrait” (c. 1600) attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts, see Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, plate I, figure 28 (detail of the sleeve), and pp. 50-52. “Prudente Simplicitate” (“Simple-prudentharmelessenesse“) in Wither's Collection of Emblemes portrays this biblical commonplace with a caduceus made up of a dove at the top of a staff and two twining serpents (Book 3, Illustration 17). See Book 2, Illustration 12 (“Prudentia Maior Fato“) and Book 3, Illustration 8 (“Sapientia Custos Rerum“) for variant emblems portraying Divine Wisdom or Prudence as a serpent.

In The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936), p. 243, George Puttenham states of Queen Elizabeth: “So we commending her Majestie for wisedome… likened her to the Serpent… because by common usurpation, nothing is wiser then the Serpent.“

30 See Bergeron, David M., English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642 (Columbia, S. C, 1971), pp. 15 and 20Google Scholar.

31 Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 166. An intriguing connection between the figure of the Woman of Faith and the Elizabethan Settlement of Religion in 1559 is suggested by the inscription on Hans Eworth's portrait in the succeeding year of an unknown woman: “RATHER DEATHE / THEN FALSE OF FAYTHE.” Reproduced in Strong, English Icon. No. 33.

32 Quenes Majesties Passage, C2v-4. On the figure of Time the Revealer, see Panofsky, Erwin, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford, 1939), p. 83 Google Scholar.

33 A 1555 engraved portrait of Queen Mary bearing this motto is reproduced in Hind, Engraving, I, Plate 40b. On the polemical reinterpretations of this phrase during the reigns of Henry VIII and his daughters, see Saxl, Fritz, “Veritas Filia Temporis,” in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (Oxford, 1936), pp. 204–209 Google Scholar. See also Gordon, Donald, ‘“Veritas Filia Temporis': Hadrianus Junius and Geoffrey Whitney,“ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 3 (1930-40), 228-40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Anglo, , Spectacle, pp. 329 Google Scholar, 337-38.

35 Mill, Anna J., Mediaeval Plays in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1927), pp. 189-91Google Scholar, and p. 190, n 2. See also Gordon Kipling's forthcoming study of royal entries and civic triumphs.

36 Harvey, A. E., Companion to the New Testament (Oxford and Cambridge, 1970), pp. 791-92.Google Scholar

37 For example, see Dürer's engravings for Revelation (Nuremberg, 1498) and note 17, above. The Geneva Bible includes an illustration of a seven-branched candlestand at Exodus 25:31.

38 Aylmer states: “Was not Quene Anne the mother of this blessed woman, the chief, first, and only cause of banyshing the beast of Rome, with all his beggerly baggage?” (Harborowe for Faithfull Subjectes, B4V); see also Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), 2A2v.

39 Verses celebrating Marguerite as a Wise Virgin receiving Christ's kisses in the ecstasy of the heavenly bridal couch are contained in Annae, Margaritae, Janae, sororum virginum, heroidum Anglarum, in mortem divae Margaritae Valesiae, Navarromm reginae, Hecatodistichon (Paris, 1550), the collection of 104 Latin distichs memorializing her death prepared by the daughters of staunchly Protestant Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and one-time Protector of the Realm under Edward VI. See Prescott, “Pearl of the Valois.“

40 Bodleian Library, MS Cherry 36, dated 31 December 1544. See Mc Conica, James K., English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford, 1965), pp. 213-16Google Scholar.

41 “London Pageants for Margaret of Anjou,” ed. Kipling, ll. 148-63.

42 On the royalist iconography of David and Solomon at the Tudor court, see King, , English Reformation Literature, pp. 161 Google Scholar, 176-77. Hans Holbein's miniature of Henry VIII as Solomon (c. 1535) may symbolize the subjection of the church to the king during the Reformation Parliament, for he receives the homage of the Queen of Sheba, a conventional type for the church. See Queen's Gallery, Palace, Buckingham, Holbein and the Court of Henry VIII (London, 1978)Google Scholar, No. 88.

James I was also seen as the New Solomon, as in Francis Bacon's dedications to Certaine Considerations touching the better pacification and Edification of the Church of England (1604) and lnstauratio magna (1620), as well as the text of A Briefe Discourse, Touching the Happie Union of the Kingdomes of England, and Scotland (1603), C4. Florence Sandler sets forth the biblical bases for the Stuart cult of sacral kingship in “Icon and Iconoclast,” in Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton, ed. Michael Lieb and JohnT. Shawcross (Amherst, Mass., 1974), pp. 160-84.

43 On the redefinition of this famous constitutional topos during Elizabeth's reign, see Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (1977).

44 Wells, , Spenser's “Faerie Queene,” pp. 19–20 Google Scholar. See also Kantorowicz, King's Two Bodies, chap. 7, passim.

45 Staley Johnson, L., “Elizabeth, Bride and Queen: A Study of Spenser's April Eclogue and the Metaphors of English Protestantism,’ Spenser Studies, 2 (1981), 81–83 Google Scholar.

46 FQ, II.iii.22-28 and notes. A Dutch engraving of Elizabeth as bare-breasted Diana defeating the Pope is reproduced in Yates, Astraea, Plate IIa.

47 FQ, I.ii. 13 and I.viii. 14. See also glosses to Rev. 17 in the Geneva Bible, and compare Figure 7.

48 '“Queen Elizabeth, Spenser's Mercilla, and a Rusty Sword,” Renaissance News, 18 (1965), 113—17. Although Milton, a self-acknowledged disciple of Spenser, does away with royalist associations in a work like Comus (1634), the Lady incorporates the Woman Clothed with the Sun as a figure for the testing of Truth during exile into the wilderness. Her temptation by Comus carries into the seventeenth century the Reformation use of the ideal woman as a type for Christian wisdom and faith.

49 This image is contradictory, as Jonathan Goldberg conjectures in James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore, 1983). P. 4. only if one misunderstands the traditional decorum that divides the official public actions from the private feelings of the monarch. On this point see Kantorowicz, King's Two Bodies, passim.