“To the Glory of God and Profit of the Commonwealth:”

Abstract

This article examines exile’s influence on the formation of an English national identity as it is expressed in the religious polemics of William Turner. Whether conscious of it or not, Turner and other exile polemicists define a nascent English nationalism by imagining the religious and political climate they desire to create, which might include a monarch but which emphasizes the commonwealth. In the first part of the article, I argue that Turner’s The Huntyng and Fyndyng Out of the Romishe Fox (1543) identifies and limits political and religious centers of power through the concentration of authority in written texts and through metaphors of texts as a means for disentangling sacred from secular authority. In this way they declare Turner’s own continued loyalty to the nation. The remainder of the article examines Turner’s use of an interior/exterior dichotomy that manifests in metaphors of contamination and infection in A New Booke of Spiritual Physik (1555). Placing Turner’s polemics alongside those of his contemporaries reveals a “rhetoric of exile” that defines and explores an English national identity formed extranationally by forcing readers and authors to takes sides, and by creating an unambiguous ideological platform, codified in the authority of print, a confessional both spiritual and national.