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The Poetics of Prayer and Devotion to Literature

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The Poetics of Prayer and Devotion to Literature: Introduction to the Special Issue Practices of Devotion

Available free of charge for a limited time

by Eleanor Craig, Amy Hollywood, and Kris Trujillo

 

In the introduction to this special issue, three of the co-editors explain that their goal “is to desegregate religious studies and theology from the humanities more broadly by reasserting religion’s significance to the histories of critique, theory, and literature … [and to] pursue connections between devotional practices, literary production, and contemplative or intellectual labor so as to move the intellectual project called Religion and Literature away from an emphasis on thematics and toward an investigation of practices.” 

The introduction begins:

Is there a place for devotion in criticism? What about love and desire? Recent attempts to historicize and parochialize critique as one method of interpretation among others lead to these questions. Deidre Lynch’s Loving Literature: A Cultural History (2015) identifies love as a requirement for critique and turns “to histories of criticism, canonicity, literary history, and ‘heritage,’ and, above all, to the emergence . . . of new etiquettes of literary appreciation . . . so as to examine how it has come to be that those of us for whom English is a line of work are also called upon to love literature and to ensure that others do so too.” Rita Felski offers a different analysis of the field in The Limits of Critique (2015), positing and resisting as central to literary study a version of critique to which love is antithetical—that is, a critique that “highlights the sphere of the agon (conflict and domination) at the expense of eros (love and connection) [and assumes] that the former is more fundamental than the latter.” Despite their distinct formulations of the relationship between love and critique and the role each plays within literary studies past and present, Lynch and Felski both argue that love ought to be central to the discipline.

This newfound interest in love, desire, and affect echoes, in many ways, to the call voiced a decade and a half ago in the edited volume Polemic: Critical or Uncritical (2004). There Jane Gallop, Michael Warner, and others ask that literary scholars think with and about practices of “uncritical” reading and author love in order to understand the modes of subject formation to which these reading practices are bound. The “uncritical” reader, in particular the one who identifies too closely with characters, who invests too deeply in a plot, or who becomes a card-carrying member of an author’s fan club, remains a serious object of study, especially in light of theoretical developments in affect theory, digital humanities, and fan studies. Yet a slightly different argument also appears in the volume. This is the claim that religious readers, like Lynch’s literature loving readers, can be and in fact often are also critical readers. Michael Warner’s pious readers and Amy Hollywood’s mystical subjects have been joined in recent years by Mark Jordan’s convulsing bodies, Aisha Beliso-De Jesús’s electric “copresences,” and Ashon Crawley’s stomping spirits. Yet despite the foundational role that religion plays in twenty-first century conversations about the history and value of critique, these religious figures seem largely to have disappeared from literary critical discussions of the issue.[v] Why are religious readers, particularly markedly embodied religious readers, absent from recent histories of literary criticism? Have they been forced to remain uncritical, scapegoats whose erasure enables other modes of putatively “uncritical” reading to be reclaimed as less excessive, credulous, or nonrational? Does postcriticism require a disavowal of the critical religious subject? These questions carry particular political relevance today, as the need for critical reading is ever more pressing and, simultaneously, the dangers of paranoia as the presumptive critical stance have become all too clear.

The essays collected here return to the questions raised in earlier scholarship about the interplay of love and the literary-critical enterprise by attending to the practices of devotion. Following Richard Rambuss’s claim that devotional texts “afford us a plethora of affectively charged sites for tracing the complex overlappings and relays between religious devotion and erotic desire, as well as between the interiorized operations of the spirit and the material conditions of the body,” the essays gathered here demonstrate the close relationship between literary reading, critical reading, and devotion. Attending to the intersections of devotional practices (among them, prayer, recitation, scriptural exegesis, meditation, and contemplation) and the rhetorical and literary arts (invention, poetry, and fiction), contributors explore the ways in which the reading, writing, and contemplative practices of Christianity contribute—both historically and in the present—to the training, cultivation, and disciplining of affective attachments to, investments in, and analyses of literature. Contributors also examine the relationship between religious devotion and the devotion to literature through analyses of the ways in which materiality and embodiment condition the connections between devotional practices and the textual arts.

The goal of this special issue, then, is to desegregate religious studies and theology from the humanities more broadly by reasserting religion’s significance to the histories of critique, theory, and literature. Most of the authors are scholars of religion, and we all work with the assumption that the putative secularity of literary study in English is largely a ruse. Rather, religious frameworks, sensibilities, and practices have been present in the study of English literature from the beginning, even at the moments when the literary was most strenuously attempting to differentiate itself from the religious. This is not only a more accurate account of contemporary critical frameworks and their evolution, but a signal of their limitations. Practices identified as the sole domain of a largely secular form of literary expertise may be more parochially Christian than their practitioners realize. Generalized understandings of literary devotion developed within these frameworks might inadvertently limit what is considered critical or rigorous, even literary.

We use the term “devotion” in its broadest sense in order to question and undo the epistemological restrictions generated by sharp distinctions between the secular and the religious. These essays pursue connections between devotional practices, literary production, and contemplative or intellectual labor so as to turn the intellectual project called Religion and Literature away from an emphasis on thematics and toward an investigation of practices. We follow Niklaus Largier’s proposal that those writing the history of Christian mysticism and secular modernity move away from identifying persistent motifs and intellectual paradigms shared by medieval mystics and modern intellectuals and, instead, toward an interrogation of the ways that practices of reading shape sensation, perception, and what he calls “a poetics or poiesis of experience.” We ask not only how religious practices are organized around literature but also how these practices are transmuted into putatively secular forms of devotion. How might one be “religiously devoted,” for example, in a political (devotion to candidate, cause, state), epistemological (devotion to methods and objects of disciplinary formation), or aesthetic (devotion to artistic pursuits, modes of experimentation, or artifacts of popular culture) sense? To what extent can we demarcate religious and nonreligious devotion, and what is at stake in attempts to do so?

Most importantly, perhaps, these essays demonstrate that the work of devotion is as much about the transformation wrought through it as it is about the specificity of its object. Moreover, as these essays show, this emphasis on transformation was already in place in the Christian Middle Ages. We collectively are interested in devotion not as a stance of subservience before a divine or human other, but as transformative practice. Devotion does not merely—or uncritically—receive, follow, and reinscribe predetermined patterns of thought or courses of action. The ends or outcomes of its critical performances are not fully known in advance, even when they are animated by identifiable desires. The essays in this issue thus read for textual accounts of devotional practices as well as the ways in which the text itself delivers or demands particular forms of practice. Read the full introduction free of charge …

ELEANOR CRAIG is Program Director and Lecturer for the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights at Harvard University.

AMY HOLLYWOOD is the Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School and a member of the Committee for the Study of Religion at Harvard University.

KRIS TRUJILLO is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago.

New Special Issue, Representations 153

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NOW AVAILABLE!

Number 153, Winter 2021 (available free for a limited time from UC Press)

Special Issue
Practices of Devotion

“The goal of this special issue … is to desegregate religious studies and theology from the humanities more broadly by reasserting religion’s significance to the histories of critique, theory, and literature … [and to] pursue connections between devotional practices, literary production, and contemplative or intellectual labor so as to move the intellectual project called Religion and Literature away from an emphasis on thematics and toward an investigation of practices.” –from the editors’ introduction 

Edited by Eleanor Craig, Amy Hollywood, Niklaus Largier, and Kris Trujillo, this volume demonstrates that the work of devotion is as much about the transformation wrought through it as it is about the specificity of its object.

Introduction: The Poetics of Prayer and Devotion to Literature 
Eleanor Craig, Amy Hollywood, and Kris Trujillo
Impersonating Devotion 
Constance M. Furey
Literary Persons and Medieval Fiction in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs 
Julie Orlemanski
“As Often as His Heart Beat, the Name Moved”: Devotion and the “As if” in The Life of the Servant 
Rachel Smith
Prayer and the Art of Literature in Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion 
Robert Glenn Davis
The Ambiguity of Devotion: Complicity and Resistance in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE 
Eleanor Craig
Queer Melancholia 
Kris Trujillo
Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, and Seraphic Devotions 
Amy Hollywood

Down on the Farm with Dylan

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Bob Dylan in the Country: Rock Domesticity and Pastoral Song

by Timothy Hampton

At the close of the 1960s two developments changed the shape of mainstream rock and roll music. The first was a new focus, on the part of a number of influential artists, on music about domestic life—kids, spouses, home. The second was a new interest in blending rock rhythms with instrumentation and themes taken from country music. This essay explores the ways in which these two concerns overlap in the work of Bob Dylan. I argue that Dylan’s work at the turn of the decade offers insights into our own current moment, when the relationship between the public world and the private world is being renegotiated. I show how Dylan’s “country” songs are, in fact, models of self-conscious experimentation that push against the conventions of popular song and highlight the conditions of their own production.

The essay begins:

One day, around 1970, John Lennon took a bath. Then he wrote a song about it. “In the middle of a bath I call your name,” sang the composer of “Revolution.” Next, he shared his call with his wife: “Oh, Yoko! Your love will turn me on.” About the same time, Lennon’s erstwhile writing partner, Paul McCartney, went to his second home in rural Scotland to get away from the press. There, the composer of “Eleanor Rigby” got down to work: “Fly flies in, fly flies out,” he sang on his second solo album, Ram. While McCartney was in Scotland, the American writer Paul Simon went to his doctor for a checkup. His song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” had recently stood with McCartney’s “Let It Be” as an anthem of consolation for a generation exhausted by war and political violence. Both tunes had achieved broad success with both white and black audiences—in the latter case, through covers by the soul singer Aretha Franklin. Simon’s GP read him the riot act about his fast living. Simon passed the news on to his spouse: “Peg, you better look around! How long you think you can run that body down?”

What is this stuff? By the end of the 1960s, rock and roll music had generated a canon of powerful songs built around a set of frequently reworked themes: sexual desire, regret, more sexual desire, rebellion, drugs, despair, escape, sexual desire. Now, all of a sudden, major composers in the field were writing about trivia.

The turn to domestic themes on the part of major white rock stars reflects the changing relationship between public art and personal expression at the end of the 1960s. Rock music’s extraordinarily rapid rise to dominance in the field of entertainment was built on images of rebellion and fictions of expanded consciousness. Now it seemed to have run out of steam. In part, it had been overwhelmed by the explosion of spectacle and drama that had taken over much political and social life. In the United States, the violence and confusion that followed the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King and the Democratic Convention in Chicago dwarfed expressions of youthful rebellion on the part of rich rock musicians. So these artists increasingly showcased themselves, not as rebels or teen-magazine “stars,” but as personalities. Songs about family life, bathing experiences, and dietary regimens began to creep into the canon, and listeners were turned into paparazzi in spite of themselves. The music seemed to be at a crossroads.

The moment has resonance. We now enter our own new “decade” (that conventional unit of pop culture history), and face a set of challenges that have rearranged our relationship to the public world, to private space, and to our understanding of community. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a new experience of domestic space, as millions of people are compelled to shelter in place and wait for signs of improvement. Daily rituals of bathing (Lennon), home life (McCartney), and self-medication (Simon) replace the public experiences of political gathering (say, “Revolution”), face-to-face conversation (“Hey, Jude”), and street life (“The Sound of Silence”). In our own moment of nesting, not communing is both the prudent and the ethically correct thing to do. And yet, as the massive protests against racial injustice that erupted in May 2020 have also shown, the domestic idyll of self-quarantine is shaped by race and class. Sheltering in place is largely the prerogative of a professional class that remains overwhelmingly white, even as the protests against a segregated society have been strikingly multiracial. All of these factors raise the question of what we can learn from an earlier moment of political upheaval, and from the escapist art that was produced in response to it. Continue reading …

TIMOTHY HAMPTON is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California at Berkeley. His book, Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work, appeared in paperback in fall 2020. A new study,  The Secret History of Cheerfulness:  Shakespeare to Facebook, is forthcoming from Zone Books in 2021.  He writes about literature, music, and education at www.timothyhampton.org.

 

Attention!

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Attention

Thursday, Feb 4, 2021 4:00 pm PST
An online conversation 

From the series: (Re)making Sense: The Humanities and Pandemic Culture sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley

Click to watch the livestream. No registration required.

Every previous major disaster in human history, from the Black Plague to the Great Depression, has elicited a reimagination of the world, a reinvention of collective life through culture. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. The arts and humanities—two areas of inquiry that focus on value and meaning—provide crucial resources for reconceptualizing our lives together during, and after, our current crisis.

In this online discussion, three UC Berkeley professors consider an aspect of university culture and daily life that has changed significantly in the COVID era: our sense of attention. We pay attention differently than we used to. This shift is due both to the technologies with which we must work, and the noise of anxiety and suffering that rumbles in the background as we read, write, teach, and learn. They discuss the forms of our attention, both now and in the past. How do the humanities and arts shape and cultivate attention?  How can they help us reshape our attentive selves going forward?

Hannah Ginsborg is the Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy at UCB. Her scholarship encompasses the work of Immanuel Kant, the history of philosophy, and contemporary philosophy, with a focus on the theory of meaning and the philosophy of mind.

Ken Goldberg is the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UCB. He is an inventor working at the intersection of art, robotics, and new media, whose inventions have been awarded nine US patents. He is cofounder of the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Berkeley Associate Professor of English and Representations editorial board member David Marno studies the relationship between literature and religion, with a focus on the act of prayer. His book Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention reads John Donne’s Holy Sonnets as a site where devotional, literary, and philosophical investments in attentiveness become visible.

 

Kent Puckett on J. M. Keynes

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J. M. KEYNES AND THE VISIBLE HANDS by Kent Puckett

at Public Books

“…For Keynes, hands are not only something to see or to look at. Hands are also something for which the seeing is, in and of itself, significant.”

Kent Puckett is a long-time member of the Representations editorial board and the author of War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945 and other books. His “Rand Narratology” appeared in our Winter 2020 issue.

Image: Members of the Commission of the League of Nations created by the Plenary Session of the Preliminary Peace Conference, Paris, France, 1919. Wikimedia Commons.

Political Theology or Theological Politics? 

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Political Theology or Theological Politics? Hugo Ball, Early Christian Hagiography, and a New Vision for Society

by Sebastian P. Klinger

A contribution to modernist studies and the history of political ideas, this article examines the unlikely intellectual dialogue between Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) and the former Dadaist Hugo Ball (1886–1927), a dialogue that frames the formative scene of politico-theological discourse in the twentieth century. Based on close readings of Ball’s aesthetic, intellectual, and philosophical exchanges with Schmitt, the essay offers insights into the peculiar case of a Catholic intervention into political theology.

The essay begins:

For more than a century, political philosophers and cultural critics have grappled with the problem of political theology, whose resurgence seems to align with the crises of liberal democracy. Defined in general terms as the reassertion of religion’s place within the putatively secularized public sphere, political theology has sparked extensive scholarly debates in the past two decades, driven by the work of social, legal, and political theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Claude Lefort, Chantal Mouffe, Paul Kahn, and Eric Santner. At the center of these debates is the conceptual legacy of the right-wing jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt (1888–1985). In his influential book Political Theology (1922), Schmitt postulates that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” and links this claim to a theory of sovereignty that invests power with transcendent authority. To finesse and further the understanding of the founding scene of political theology, the present essay rereads Schmitt’s dialogue with the artist Hugo Ball (1886–1927), which paralleled the publication of Political Theology in 1922. Bonding over Catholic values, Ball and Schmitt studied each other’s writings, exchanged letters, met in person, and discussed their book projects. But the elective affinity between the Dadaist-turned-oblate and the prospective “Crown Jurist” of the Third Reich ground to a halt after Ball published the first-ever examination of Schmitt’s thought. The study at hand analyzes how Schmitt and Ball begin from Catholic principles but then move apart as they seek to define political theology.

Ball’s contribution to political theology has been mostly overlooked in the wider scholarly debate for three reasons: the historic encounter of Ball and Schmitt seems unlikely; the texts in which Ball’s critique unfolds are hermetic and difficult to access; and the thrust of his argument points in a direction different from more recent studies on economic-political theology. Today, Ball remains best known for his flamboyant involvement with the Zurich art movement Dada, in particular, for his legendary performance as a “magical bishop”; for his friendships with Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch; and for an antiwar activism that expanded into a thorough intellectual critique of German militarism. But in the aftermath of the Great War, the former Dadaist broke with his left-wing past and returned to the Catholicism of his childhood, searching for a form of life that negated the violent turn of Western culture. It was then that he entered into dialogue with Schmitt, whom Ball initially perceived as a new Catholic philosopher, “great and expansive like a scholastic.” Between 1919 and 1925, they discussed what political theology could mean—an urgent question in the face of the historically unprecedented opportunity to rethink Germany’s social order from scratch after the November Revolution of 1918–19 had unseated the emperor and launched the country on its ill-fated and crisis-ridden experiment with parliamentary democracy.

Ball and Schmitt shared many concerns, but their dialogue revealed fundamental divergences on political theology. Near the end of their exchange, Ball noted: “In my experience, reaching an understanding with someone else is a thorny and delicate matter. For this reason one has to write books.” In direct response to the appearance of Schmitt’s seminal Political Theology, Ball published two texts of his own that are entwined with his turbulent exchange with Schmitt. One of these texts bears in an obvious way on the dialogue: Ball’s essay “Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology” (1924) combines a magisterial command of Schmitt’s thought with a subtle but scathing intellectual critique of his interlocutor. It points out the shortcomings of political theology with regard to the nature of the zoon politikon, the concept of politics, and the notion of sovereignty. Concurrently, Ball laid out his own political vision in a strange book entitled Byzantine Christianity: The Lives of Three Saints (1923). This book focuses on the form of life developed by John Climacus, a monk and hermit of the seventh century; Dionysius the Areopagite, a late fifth- to early sixth-century Christian theologian and philosopher; and Saint Simeon Stylites, a fourth-century anchorite. Although Ball’s startling turn to hagiography seems to stand out as a departure from pressing questions of politics, Byzantine Christianity contains, paradoxically, a new vision for German society. Why, though, did Ball choose the genre of hagiography to convey his ideas? In what follows I will argue that these two texts work together as an intervention into political theology.

Approaches to the later work of Ball tend to fall into two camps: that of his “Catholic quietude” and that of a “sacralization of power.” Yet Ball’s association and interaction with Schmitt complicates both of these arguments. My argument differs from the quietude thesis, as it shows that Ball strives to deactivate the distinction between friend and enemy as the “specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced.” And it differs from the “sacralization-of-power thesis,” as Ball’s theological politics seeks to establish the transcendent law as an “institution” that “can never come into direct relation with the state.” For Ball, the church becomes an institution only in its suspension; what legitimizes it is resistance to a government gone rogue. Basing my argument on close readings of Ball’s Byzantine Christianity and “Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology,” I contend that such theological politics must be conceived as a critique of Schmitt’s thought. If Schmitt legitimizes political authority with a transcendent source, Ball delegitimizes it; if Schmitt glorifies the sovereign, Ball champions the saint; if Schmitt does away with human rights, Ball declares “opposition” to the violation of human rights as “the highest duty.” I develop my argument in two steps: I begin with a discussion of Ball’s political vision in Byzantine Christianity, paying close attention to the aesthetic form of the book and its place in history. I then examine Ball’s “Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology” and bring out his critique of Schmitt. Continue reading …

SEBASTIAN P. KLINGER is a PhD candidate in the Department of German at Princeton University. His research investigates sleep experiments in literature, science, and society, 1899–1929.

 

Weird Scholarship Meets Weird Studies

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Literally. We just found out that Phil Ford, one of the authors in our just-released Weird Scholarship virtual issue, is also the co-host of the podcast Weird Studies, whose most recent show is “On Ishmael Reed’s ‘Mumbo Jumbo,’ or, Why We Need More Magical Thinking.”

For more on our virtual issue (available free for a limited time), visit Representations at UC Press. And check out the the full roster of episodes from Phil Ford and co-host, J. F. Martel, at Weird Studies.

Weird Scholarship

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Read Representations’ new special virtual issue, “Weird Scholarship: From Curious to Rare,” free for a limited time.

Of the many cross-disciplinary and topical strands that have emerged from nearly forty years of Representations in print, one stands out: a kind of research that perhaps originated in the journal’s pages and remains difficult to find elsewhere–what might fondly be called “weird scholarship.” We invite you to dip into a virtual issue featuring some of the most representative examples in this vein, available free of charge for a limited time.

The essays selected for this virtual issue highlight examples from the early years of Representations, by which the contours of New Historicism became known, and many examples from more recent issues, which show how the conversation among disparate discourses has born strange and wonderful fruit.

Weird Scholarship: From Curious to Rare

Table of Contents

Introduction

Terry Castle. The Female Thermometer, no. 17, 1987

István Rév. In Mendacio Veritas (In Lies There Lies the Truth), no. 35, 1991

Nathaniel Mackey. Other: From Noun to Verb, no. 39, 1992

Elaine Scarry. On Vivacity: The Difference Between Daydreaming and Imagining Under-Authorial-Instruction, no. 52, 1995

Michel Zink. Nerval in the Library, or The Archives of the Soul, no. 56, 1996

Jessica Riskin. Eighteenth-Century Wetware, no. 83, 2003

Sue Waterman. Collecting the Nineteenth Century, no. 90, 2005

Phil Ford. Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica, no. 103, 2008

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby. Negative-Positive Truths, no. 113, 2011

Carolyn Steedman. Cries Unheard, Sights Unseen: Writing the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis, no. 118, 2012

D. Vance Smith. Fallacy: Close Reading and the Beginning of Philosophy, no. 140, 2017

A Spectacle in New Spain

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The Sultan Hernán Cortés: The Double Staging of The Conquest of Jerusalem

by Nicole T. Hughes

In 1541, the Franciscan friar Motolinía sent to Spain an account of the Tlaxcalan people performing the religious drama The Conquest of Jerusalem in Tlaxcala, New Spain. Previous scholars have read his festival account to reflect only local political interests. In this essay Nicole Hughes argues that the account is a palimpsest, describing both the Tlaxcalans’ ambitious diplomatic strategy, expressed in their performance, and Motolinía’s own efforts to steer Castile’s policies in the Americas and the greater Mediterranean.

The essay begins:

The very idea of a “New World” conveys a sense of rupture. Yet the culture of sixteenth-century New Spain is rich in interwoven historical imaginaries. Hall-of-mirrors effects were particularly complex in theatrical spectacles based on Mediterranean battles that featured as characters Turks, Moors, and Catholic knights. It is often assumed that European actors always depicted Catholic forces destined for victory while all indigenous participants played Muslims doomed to defeat. This conforms to the false expectation that, after the conquest, there were only triumphant Europeans and defeated “Indians” in Mesoamerica.

Yet when the Tlaxcalans, the conquistadors’ most famous indigenous allies, performed the drama The Conquest of Jerusalem for the feast of Corpus Christi in 1539, they played many roles. These included Moors and Turks as well as soldiers from Italy and Germany, “Indians” from Peru and Santo Domingo, and the pope. More strikingly still, one of the play’s central characters was neither exclusively Muslim nor Christian, neither wholly defeated nor resoundingly victorious. This is because he is a double character. The Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente, also known as Motolinía, introduces him as follows in his account of the feast: “[The Spanish army] marched in good order straight upon Jerusalem, and as the Sultan, the Marquis of the Valley, Don Hernando Cortés saw them come, he ordered his people to go out into battle.” Motolinía describes a figure that condenses Hernán Cortés, the Catholic conquistador who led the Siege of Tenochtitlan in 1521, and an Islamic sultan who defends and ultimately surrenders Jerusalem in the drama. The sultan’s paradoxical identity challenges the scholarly expectation of clean-cut opposition, not only between European and indigenous figures in the Americas, but also between figures of Muslims and Christians in the “Old World.”

This article reveals the full complexity of the “Sultan Hernán Cortés” by first focusing on the doubled audience of The Conquest of Jerusalem: the one in Tlaxcala, where this auto, or short religious drama, was performed, and the other in Spain, where Motolinía’s account of it would be delivered to his patron, who was tied to the Spanish court. The sultan himself, and the textual and historical complexities of his character, will reveal the stakes of Motolinía’s text within contemporary debates concerning royal policy in New Spain. Continue reading …

NICOLE T. HUGHES is Assistant Professor of Brazilian and Mexican Literature and Culture in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. She is completing a book manuscript entitled Stages of History: New Spain, Brazil, and the Theater of the World in the Sixteenth Century.

England and Scotland: A Metaphorology

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On the Knees of the Body Politic

by Lorna Hutson

In this essay, Oxford’s Lorna Hutson analyzes the fullest theoretical elaboration of the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies in the Elizabethan period, Edmund Plowden’s Treatise on the Succession (1567). It argues that Plowden here deploys the King’s Two Bodies not, as has been thought, as a legal proof against the foreign birth of Mary Queen of Scots, but as a way of embodying and sacralizing the disputed historical relations of England and Scotland. Plowden’s sacralizing metaphors of embodiment transform the highly contentious English claim of Scotland’s historic vassalage into the indisputable and timeless truth of political theology.

The essay begins:

Ten years ago, Representations ran a special forum on fifty years of The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz’s vastly influential study of medieval political theology. The influence of Kantorowicz’s concept shows no signs of ebbing. It has become routine to cite titles that echo his—The Poem’s Two Bodies; The Law’s Two Bodies; The People’s Two Bodies—as well as to instance Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben as both influenced by and transformative of Kantorowicz’s conception. In this journal and in a subsequent book, Victoria Kahn has shown how Kantorowicz’s genealogy of sovereignty was identified by critics of liberal democracy as a key, if ambivalent, text of twentieth-century political theology, responding as it does both to Carl Schmitt’s theological modeling of the sovereign exception and to Ernst Cassirer’s critique of political myth. Readings of Kantorowicz have run the gamut of political-theological possibility among literary critics, political theorists, and constitutional historians. For some, the two-bodies theory proves an early modern belief in “rule by a sacral king,” while others look to the secular, constitutionalist way in which the doctrine renders the monarch “a creature of the law”; others still have shown how the regal corporation sole is just one among many incorporating forms, and may not even be the most important, if we look at the unparalleled political influence of corporations in modern Western capitalism.

In view of this conceptual range, it might seem reductive to propose that one of the doctrine’s fullest early modern articulations was aimed at Scotland. To propose, that is (as I wish to do) that it was designed to render Scotland’s territorial sovereignty unimaginable, by separating the “body natural” of Scotland’s ruling dynasty from its power to signify Scotland’s body politic or autonomy as a state. The habit of imagining an English insular exceptionalism in which Scotland is implied while simultaneously being excluded is common in analyses of the current crisis of the United Kingdom’s relation to Europe. Without positing a direct line of descent, I contend that such a habit was consciously fostered by the metaphors of English constitutional thought as it developed in the sixteenth century.

To give a current example: in 2016, the result of the British referendum on the question of whether or not to leave the European Union was manifestly split between a majority for “Leave” in England and an even more decisive majority for “Remain” within Scotland. In December 2019, this split was repeated, with a majority in England voting for Boris Johnson’s “Get Brexit Done” Conservative manifesto, while in Scotland the Scottish National Party, the party of Remain, won a resounding majority. Yet in analyzing Boris Johnson’s appeal “to the millions of Brits . . . for whom many of the Conservative party’s prejudices and presumptions are simply common sense,” Professor of Politics Tim Bale, at Queen Mary University of London, articulates the issue in a way that signals the legacy of centuries of what I wish to analyze in this paper. The “most fundamental” presumption that “Brits” share with Boris Johnson, Bale wrote,

is the idea that Britain is, can be, and should be, Great. . . . To call that belief a sense of manifest destiny would be an exaggeration. But it is a patriotic attachment to the idea (however illusory) of an island nation, albeit one with global interests and reach, that is fundamentally unique and, yes, better than many of its closest neighbours, especially those unfortunate enough not to speak English—or else to speak it with a Scottish or southern Irish accent. 

Bale’s is a skeptical diagnosis, but he nevertheless makes Scotland unthinkable. Scotland’s implicit (and essentially defining) inclusion in the terms “Brexit,” “millions of Brits,” and their attachment to an “island nation,” turns out to be illusory. Within a sentence, Scotland morphs from being part of “an island nation” into being the “closest neighbour” whose inferiority to and exclusion from insular exceptionalism is required to prove the British propriety of the latter. Bale by no means believes in the myth of British insularity, yet he fails to see how integral to it is a doublethink that has always rendered Scotland a nonplace: essential to the “Br” in “Brexit,” but in no real sense part of the English exceptionalism that demands to be “Great” or to be free of Europe.

It is the argument of this paper that Bale’s conceptual elision, part of the currency of everyday English thought, is the imaginative legacy of a conscious set of strategies shared by a number of genres of Elizabethan writing that were variously engaged in transforming the discourse of England’s claims to sovereignty over Scotland (till then grounded in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s legends of Brutus, Arthur, Leir, Kymbeline, and so on) into a pervasive metaphorics of English insular indigeneity. Some texts that contribute to this transformation are more obviously poetic or chorographic. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for example, or William Harrison’s Description of the Iland of Britain, as well as William Camden’s Britannia and a range of tragedies that model their handling of “British” Galfridian material on Senecan tragedies of Thebes. Early modern legal fictions, though not to be conflated with epic poetry, drama, or chorography, also involve, as Victoria Kahn has shown, an element of poeisis or poetic making. Following Hans Blumenberg, Kahn calls Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies a “metaphorology.” In this paper, I want to engage in a metaphorology of the most elaborate theoretical account of the King’s Two Bodies in the Elizabethan period. It occurs in Edmund Plowden’s Treatise on the Succession, written in 1567 to support the Scottish Queen, Mary Stewart, in her claim to the English throne. In this treatise, the King’s Two Bodies is deployed not merely as a legal refutation of arguments against Mary’s right, as has been thought. Rather, its primary energies are what we would call literary or poetic. Subtly exploiting the somatic and sacred resonances of an established legal language of royal incorporation, the text works to transform a legendary and partisan English history of Scottish vassalage into an allegorical drama in which a Scottish body politic is bound to perpetual genuflection, its consequent lack of sovereign autonomy thereby rendered an immutable theological truth. The Treatise thus translates a historiographical dispute between nations into an English political theology of insular sovereignty that persists today in the “metaphors we live by,” the common currency of Brexit talk. Continue reading …

LORNA HUTSON is Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford. Her books include Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford, 1989), The Usurer’s Daughter (Routledge, 1994), The Invention of Suspicion (Oxford, 2007), and Circumstantial Shakespeare (Oxford, 2015). She edited the Oxford Handbook of Law and Literature, 1500–1700 (2017) and is now working on a book entitled England’s Insular Imagining.