Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England by Nandra Perry (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England by Nandra Perry Rebecca Huffman Nandra Perry, Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2014) 288 pp. Nandra Perry’s holistic approach to literary and religious imitatio from Sidney to Milton persuasively explores questions and categories of embodiment, kingship, private/public spheres, and the instability of language while also, in a most worthwhile step, seeking “to move more freely across the period, gender, generic, and confessional boundaries that often delimit treatments of early modern English piety” (11). This wide methodological lens enables Perry to draw together an ideologically diverse group of texts for case studies, all connected back to Sidney, to determine what good imitatio means in varying contexts and how it adapts over the course of this period. Perry engages questions of imitatio’s literariness alongside its religious purposes and tensions to work through its role in a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century orthodoxies and heterodoxies. In the introduction, she uses Erasmus’s writings on the subject to set out a debate that will remain prominent throughout the book: what differentiates imitatio from mimicry, or worse, idolatry? In the range of ideologies in the chapters that follow, this hazard is a shared motivator in developing models of good imitatio. Beginning with Sidney’s 1580 Defense of Poesy and Thomas Roger’s translation of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, Perry suggests that Rogers develops a Protestant form of imitatio Christi that is especially connected to Sidney’s vision of imitatio’s literary qualities. Both Rogers and Sidney imagine Protestantism on a transnational scale, where Rogers in his translation of Kempis foregrounds the experience and presence of the Word. In place of Kempis’s culminating depiction of the Eucharist, Rogers offers the Word as the Protestant community’s sustenance. Rogers must also deal with the inherent fallibility of human words and human imitatio in relation to the sacred Word as well as “language’s seemingly irredeemable fleshliness” (56). In this reading, Rogers grounds good imitatio in the text and in reading, where despite its fallibilities language could connect to the sacred. While Roger’s long career and the chapter’s subsequent exploration of his later writings show how his work on imitatio played out in an increasingly factionalized English Protestantism rather than his hoped-for transnational Protestant community, Sidney’s short career is succeeded by his own Protestant martyrology; here, Sidney’s martyred body and “personal imitatio Christi is the best measure of the distance and difference separating his innovating model of poetic imitation from” modern models of Shuger or Habermas. Perry contends that Sidney’s body marks both an end and a beginning in the period studied in this volume, where the instability of words and physical bodies would eventually close down “the dream of an organic connection between language and the sacred body visible” (63). The second chapter moves into more heterodox territory as it delves into notions of Christian eloquence and tensions surrounding the instability of language with the writings and Life of Elizabeth Tanfield Cary. Here and in the [End Page 280] following chapter, Perry’s movement across conventional boundaries is especially rewarding. Perry examines the ways in which The Tragedy of Mariam and The Lady Falkland: Her Life by One of Her Daughters offer other kinds of bodies (beyond Sidney’s male, aristocratic body) for discussions of incarnational poetics. Reading Mariam’s confrontation with Herod as a Reformation confrontation between believer and magistrate shows models of female piety that align with the meekness and stoicism advocated for and by Catholic martyrs. Intervening in scholarship that draws clear parallels between Cary herself and Mariam, Perry suggests that instead Graphina, whose privatized “silent speech” offers the kind of exemplum that sustained Catholicism in England more effectively than martyrdom, is a more fitting model. From Graphina to Cary herself and subsequently to the daughter who authored her biography, “the Life explores the epistemological and expressive outer limits of this cross-confessional, post-Reformation vision of imitatio Christi” (96). The final two chapters turn to kingship and one body’s imitatio in particular: Charles I in...