“Plunged in the like peril”: The Power of Remembered and Dismembered Bodies in Robert Southwell’s Epistle unto His Father

Abstract

The text of Epistle of Robert Southwell unto His Father is populated by bodies: the body politic that is the omnipresent Elizabethan state, the body of the Southwell family on behalf of whom Southwell claims to make his appeal, the body of the Catholic Church from which Richard Southwell is presently separated, and most significantly the body of Christ to which the young priest would have his father reunited. The detachment of father and son from these various bodies, and consequently from one another, is the reason for the letter’s existence as well as the foundation of its arguments and the source of its considerable drama. This essay argues that the artful persuasiveness of the Epistle lies in the simultaneity of its rhetorical appeals to both a private and public audience, appeals which are strengthened by the author’s awareness of the divided bodies he addresses, and his subsequent decision to deploy a provocative interplay between the actions of remembering and dismembering throughout his text.