Beyond the Bosphorus: The Holy Land in English Reformation Literature, 1516-1596
[Thesis]
Rosenbaum, Jerrod Nathan
Wolfe, Jessica L.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2019
183 p.
Ph.D.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2019
This dissertation examines the concept of the Holy Land, for purposes of Reformation polemics and apologetics, in sixteenth-century English Literature. The dissertation focuses on two central texts that are indicative of two distinct historical moments of the Protestant Reformation in England. Thomas More's Utopia was first published in Latin at Louvain in 1516, roughly one year before the publication of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses signaled the commencement of the Reformation on the Continent and roughly a decade before the Henrician Reformation in England. As a humanist text, Utopia contains themes pertinent to internal Church reform, while simultaneously warning polemicists and ecclesiastics to leave off their paltry squabbles over non-essential religious matters, lest the unity of the Church catholic be imperiled. More's engagement with the Holy Land is influenced by contemporary researches into the languages of that region, most notably the search for the original and perfect language spoken before the episode at Babel. As the confusion of tongues at Babel functions etiologically to account for the origin of all ideological conflict, it was thought that the rediscovery of the prima lingua might resolve all conflict. The language of More's ideal society is informed by such contemporary inquiry. Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene was published in English in 1590 and 1596, a time when Protestantism had become a fact of the English national establishment and any interest in reconciliation with Rome had largely disappeared. Thus The Faerie Queene looks to the history of the Holy Land not for examples of utopian unity, but as a site of religious conflict. Spenser recognized the significance that the Crusades bore upon the religious conflicts of his own time and place. But as crusading was a decidedly Roman Catholic institution, Spenser was obliged to reimagine the crusading past to square with his doctrinal and nationalist goals, most notably demonstrating the teleological legitimacy of the Church of England and the veracity of Protestant doctrines. Thus this dissertation traces the evolving utility of the Holy Land in pre- to post-Reformation England, as reflected in the literary texts of those moments.