Catholic Prophylactics and Islam's Sexual Threat: Preventing and Undoing Sexual Defilement in The Renegado

Abstract

Philip Massinger's The Renegado (1624) stages a confrontation between Christians and Muslims the cross-cultural North African port city of Tunis. The plot revolves around two potential interfaith unions and the recuperation of a renegade pirate who has previously denounced Christianity and now seeks repentance. Although the play attempts to establish a clear opposition between and Turk, its dramatic action arises from the ultimately porous boundary that divides them-a boundary mediated by sexual seduction and conversion. Two central Christian characters, a brother and sister, both risk sexual defilement and subsequent conversion as the result of potential unions with Muslim characters. The renegade pirate similarly calls attention to the permeable boundary between and Turk through his denunciation of the Christian faith and his adoption of a life of piracy. While conversion to Islam is mediated across a slippery threshold, both physical and spiritual, it implies a transgression from which there seems to be no return. And yet, despite the tragic repercussions linked with Islamic conversion-its association with permanent and irreversible consequences-The Renegado produces a comic ending for each of its Christian protagonists. These comic resolutions, however, turn out to be contingent upon the efficacy of a surprising model of Christian faith and resistance, and reveal a logic of redemption that differs for men and women.Although The Renegado overtly posits the triumph of Christian spirituality over Islamic carnality, it anchors Christian resistance Catholic objects, ceremonies, and bodily practices, and repeatedly marks spiritual redemption outward, visible, and material ways. For example, a relic purported to have magical qualities successfully protects the Christian heroine's virginity from her Turkish captor's carnal designs (1.1.147).1 Similarly, the renegade pirate assures his readmission to the church by making his confession to a Jesuit priest-a most unlikely hero on the English Renaissance stage-who is dressed in a cope, like a bishop (4.1.72).2 Enacting the ritual stages of confession and penance, the renegade reverses his former act of apostasy, which was carried out through his disruption of a Catholic mass and desecration of the Eucharistic host. And the play extends Christian conversion to the Muslim princess by requiring her participation an elaborate baptism ceremony that is performed by a layman, her husband-to-be.These details position the play explicitly against the practices and beliefs of English Protestantism, and yet the play was given official license for public performance and appears to have been popular and uncontroversial its time. I want to suggest that The Renegado's depiction of Christian triumph over Muslim conversion involves a complex negotiation of spiritual and material, inward and outward, and Protestant and Catholic models of faith. In turn, these tensions between spirituality and materiality reveal the ways which Islam's threat to early modern Christians was perceived to be not just religious nature, but bodily as well. More specifically, the play's recourse to material, Catholic practices to resist or undo Islamic conversion reveals how Islam was perceived to be a sexual threat, how it was understood to involve a bodily conversion, and how this conversion carried potential racial consequences. It is partly because of Islam's perceived sexual and bodily threat to Christians, I argue, that the stage resurrected older, Catholic models of Christian resistance, which, unlike the more spiritualized and disembodied notions of Protestant faith, were tangible and embodied.As part of the recent wave of interest early modern encounters with Ottoman Turks and the religion of Islam, The Renegado has attracted a burst of critical attention. Following the publication of Daniel Vitkus's modern edition (2000), critics including Bindu Malieckal, Barbara Fuchs, Jonathan Gil Harris, Jonathan Burton, Valerie Forman, and Vitkus himself have explored the play's dramatization of contemporary anxieties about Mediterranean commerce and English contact with the Ottoman Empire. …