Mixed motions: Protestant struggles and the proper place of feeling, 1550--1660.

Abstract

Early modern people did not imagine their emotional worlds to be clearly distinguishable from the physiological checks and balances of their bodily interiors. Pre-modern and early modern views of human inwardness were as sophisticated as any analytical scheme devised in the post-Cartesian era. In the interest of further exploring the historical phenomenology of emotion, this dissertation frames questions about the nature of early modern feeling in terms of the proprieties and improprieties of passion in Protestant devotional discourse. It is my sense that insufficient attention has been paid to the complications Protestant interest in religious emotion introduces to an already vexing passions discourse. In the Reformation, the tensions between different moral taxonomies regarding the passions were not merely dreamt of in philosophy and theology. They were deeply felt. In Tudor and Stuart England, humoral and spiritual being-in-the-body was being-in-between---not just between shifting confessions but between comfort and chaos. This study examines the perplexing pressures many felt to get comfortable amid a discourse that makes comfort itself extremely difficult. In its first half, this dissertation examines the place of passion in Thomas Cranmer's temporary abjuration and in Francis Spira's permanent apostasy. In the second half, the study moves from hagiographic polemic to more traditionally literary texts, arguing for related ambiguities in devotional subjectivity as treated by Marlowe's <italic>Doctor Faustus</italic> and Herbert's <italic> The Temple</italic>. My approach has been to scrutinize the way each of these texts wrestles with emotional volatility, especially volatility that seems to stray beyond the threshold of propriety. For the many early modern English Protestants concerned about moral physiology, the passions of the soul could also be the Passion of witness to Christ's loving sacrifice for humanity. This openness to religious feeling often brought the temptation to submit to the improper passions. The Christian call produced extreme, often damaging, perturbations. Insofar as this literature shows living sacrifice to be acceptable to God, it must come dangerously close to---and perhaps even go through---an experience of abjuration.