Abstract
This chapter argues that Protestants aggressively rejected Christian celibacy and instead saw religious ‘conversion’ in accordance with the divine commandment to “go forth and multiply”; conversion involved moving into a sexually active life through marriage. This chapter argues further that this development inaugurated new discourses of Protestant marriage. One was a language of ‘companionate marriage’, but another encouraged greater tolerance of sexual, erotic impulses than in previous Christian thinking. For Luther, erotic passion for one’s married partner could itself be seen as a sign of election, with marriage becoming the template for an ideal Christian lifestyle—including suffering the many pains Luther amusingly associated with marriage. This praise of lust is the approach that will be followed up on by Spenser and Shakespeare.
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Notes
- 1.
Praise of marriage is a constant theme in Christian theology. In “The Excellence of Marriage ,” Augustine had famously praised this lifestyle for three reasons (the triplex bonum): proles or procreation, fides or mutual fidelity (which encompassed both physical avoidance of fornication and the spiritual sins involved in betraying the trust of one’s spouse), and sacramentum, as a sign of Christ’s marriage with the church. Augustine, “The Excellence of Marriage ,” in Marriage and Virginity, trans. Ray Kearney , in The Works of Saint Augustine , eds. John E. Rotelle and Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 1999), I/9:27–62, esp. 56–7.
- 2.
Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; rpt. 2008), 277.
- 3.
Augustine, “Holy Virginity,” in Marriage and Virginity, trans. Ray Kearney, in The Works of Saint Augustine , eds. John E. Rotelle and Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 1999), I/9:74.
- 4.
Jerome, “Against Jovinianus – Book One,” in Letters and Select Works , trans. W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis, and W. G. Martley, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series. Eds. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. 14 vols. (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1893), 6:355.
- 5.
Helen Parish, Clerical Celibacy in the West: c. 1100–1700 (Farnham, Surrey, GBR: Ashgate, 2010), 109–10. In addition to Parish’s extended study, see William E. Phipps, Clerical Celibacy: The Heritage (New York and London: Continuum, 2004) and John E. Lynch, “Marriage and Celibacy of the Clergy: The Discipline of the Western Church: An Historico-Canonical Synopsis, Parts One and Two” The Jurist 32.1 and 32.2 (1972): 14–38 and esp. 189–212. See also Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 107, for an explanation of the influence of the monastic tradition on this development.
- 6.
Parish , Clerical Celibacy, 122.
- 7.
Parish , Clerical Celibacy, 132–41.
- 8.
John Wycliffe (?), “Of Weddid Men and Wifis and of Here Children Also,” in Select English Works by John Wyclif, ed. Thomas Arnold. 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871), 3:190. This text is often attributed to Wycliff, although as the editor notes, he may not be the author, 3:188.
- 9.
See the “Petition of Eleven Priests to be Allowed to Marry,” trans. Henry Preble, in Huldreich Zwingli, Selected Works, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1901), 33.
- 10.
“Petition of Eleven Priests to be Allowed to Marry,” 34.
- 11.
Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (2012) (Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 14.
- 12.
“Council of Trent -1545–1563: Session 24,” trans. John Coventry, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London: Sheed and Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 2:755.
- 13.
Desiderius Erasmus, “In Praise of Marriage,” trans. Charles Fantazzi, in Erasmus on Women , ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 67, 73.
- 14.
Desiderius Erasmus, “The Defense of the Declamation on Marriage,” trans. Charles Fantazzi, in Collected Works of Erasmus (Controversies) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), 71:92. Margo Todd’s otherwise excellent essay on the influence of early sixteenth-century humanism on Protestant thought in relation to marriage overstates the case when it comes to Erasmus . Todd suggests Erasmus’s views on “the superiority of the married state over virginity” were acceptable to a “substantial number of Catholics” in the sixteenth century, but Erasmus apologized for those views, which were not standard Catholic theology. Margo Todd, “Humanists, Puritans and the Spiritualized Household.” Church History 49.1 (1980), 18. Todd points out, rightly, the Council of Trent undermined the humanist and Protestant praise of marriage not only by stressing the superiority of celibacy but also by insisting that the family was not the most appropriate place to teach theology, 32.
- 15.
Ellen Muehlberger writes that “the equation of the ascetic life with ‘the angelic life’ permeates ancient writing about the renunciatory efforts of Christians,” “Ambivalence about the Angelic Life: The Promise and Perils of an Early Christian Discourse of Asceticism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16.4 (2008), 447. Richard Sowerby , in Angels in Early Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), credits the monk Bede (c. 673–735) for revitalizing this emphasis on chastity as the most significant angelic quality, 61.
- 16.
Martin Luther, “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate 1520,” trans. Charles M. Jacobs, rev. James Atkinson, in Luther’s Works, American Edition, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann, Christopher Boyd Brown, et al. 79 vols. to date (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Press; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–), 44:177. Philip Melanchthon, “Apology of the Augsburg Confession (September 1531),” trans. Charles Arand, in The Book of Concord, eds. Kolb and Wengert, 253.
- 17.
Hooker’s remark is cited in Richard Mallette , Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 100.
- 18.
Heather Dubrow , A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 16.
- 19.
Melissa E. Sanchez, “‘Modesty or Comeliness’: The Predicament of Reform Theology in Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion.” Renascence 65.1 (2012), 5.
- 20.
Richard Mallette , Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England, 87 (emphasis in original). See also Laurie Shannon who makes a similar argument about the superiority of friendship (an often-celibate state) to marriage in the time of Shakespeare. Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Shannon implies that Parolles’s comment in All’s Well That Ends Well, “A young man married is a man that’s marr’d” (2.3.297) reflects an approved value system in Shakespeare’s plays, 55. To Shannon, “masculine friendship and female chastity” are both preferred to marriage by Shakespeare and other writers of the time: “both proffer self-sufficiency, autonomy, and constancy, as well as a freedom from servility, mutability, or contingency,” 68.
- 21.
Ellen Muehlberger argues that even in the early Christian period, “being thought of as living ‘the angelic life’ was a prospect received in ascetic literature with ambivalence, and at times disdain,” “Ambivalence about the Angelic Life,” 450.
- 22.
Andreas Carlstadt, “Regarding Vows,” in The Essential Carlstadt: Fifteen Tracts by Andreas Bodenstein (Carlstadt) from Karlstadt (Waterloo, Ontario and Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1995), 67.
- 23.
Luther, “The Estate of Marriage, 1522,” trans. Walther I. Brandt, in Luther’s Works , American Edition, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann, Christopher Boyd Brown, et al. 79 vols. to date (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Press; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–), 45:21. Bucer’s view is cited in H. J. Selderhuis , Marriage and Divorce in the Thought of Martin Bucer, trans. John Vriend and Lyle D. Bierma (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999), 329. Wolfgang Bruel argues that this viewpoint marked “a fundamental anthropological shift and a new understanding of the physical needs of human beings: the ability to live in abstinence as a grace given only to very few people.” “Celibacy-Marriage-Unmarriage: The Controversy Over Celibacy and Clerical Marriage in the Early Reformation,” in Mixed matches: Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment , eds. David M. Luebke and Mary Lindemann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 33.
- 24.
Martin Luther, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 7 (1523),” in Luther’s Works, 28:28.
- 25.
William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, (London, 1627), 122.
- 26.
In Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Joel F. Harrington argues that the early Reformation rejection of celibacy is not to be equated with the movement’s later praise of marriage: “Protestant demolition of the celibate religious ideal … apparently required little elaboration for popular acceptance. The same cannot be said of its proposed successor as the ideal Christian estate,” 61. However, Harrington , like other scholars, cites comments from Luther and other early Reformers that praise marriage using the same arguments used by later Reformers , 66. That marriage continued to increase in prestige over the course of the sixteenth century among Protestants is undeniable, but even from the start its stature was greatly ennobled, if only as a result of the aggressive condemnation of celibacy.
- 27.
Heinrich Bullinger, The Golde[n] Boke of Christen Matrimonye (Der Christlich Eestand [1540]), trans. Miles Coverdale and Thomas Becon [Theodore Basille] (London: 1543), fo. 19v.
- 28.
Luther, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 7 (1523),” in Luther’s Works, 28:56. In “The Estate of Marriage,” Luther wrote that the command to multiply is as essential to human nature as “sleeping and waking, eating and drinking, and emptying the bowels and bladder,” in Luther’s Works, 45:18.
- 29.
See Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002); she writes that some of these Lollards “were not taking a Pauline stance and claiming that it was better to marry than to burn. Rather, they were celebrating conjugal sexuality and procreation as superior to celibacy and doing so on the basis of conjugal sex’s spiritual benefits,” 120–1 (emphasis in original).
- 30.
Luther, “The Estate of Marriage” in Luther’s Works, 45:18.
- 31.
Martin Luther, “Vom Ehelichen Leben,” in D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. 121 vols. Weimar Edition (WA). (Weimar: Hermann Böhlhaus Nachfolger, 1888–2009), 10/2:277. Luther translated the term this way in his New Testament Bible translation also.
- 32.
Luther, “The Estate of Marriage,” in Luther’s Works, 45:18.
- 33.
Luther, “The Estate of Marriage,” in Luther’s Works, 45:19.
- 34.
Luther, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 7,” in Luther’s Works, 28:11, 28:48.
- 35.
Carlstadt, “On Vows,” 99.
- 36.
For examples, see Kathleen M. Crowther, Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 109. The idea that marriage was instituted in paradise was held by Augustine, although he believed that before the fall, physical intercourse was not erotic. See, for instance, Augustine, The City of God, 4:397 (Book 14, Chapter 26).
- 37.
“The Book of Common Prayer, 1549” in The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–64. William Perkins, “[Christian] Oeconomie: Or, Houshold-Government,” in The Workes of … William Perkins. 3 vols. (London, 1626–1631), 3:671.
- 38.
Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife, 52, 133, 92.
- 39.
For Thomas More’s response, see Parish, Clerical Celibacy, 185; Erasmus’s response to the marriage was that “all the ups and downs of comedy usually end in marriage. It looks as though the Lutheran tragedy will end in the same way,” “Letter 1655 to Frans Van Cranevelt” (24 December 1525), trans. Alexander Dalzell, in Collected Works of Erasmus (Correspondence of Erasmus; Letters 1535–1657 [January–December 1525]), (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), 11:396.
- 40.
Luther, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 7,” in Luther’s Works, 28:17. See also Scott Hendrix, “Luther on Marriage,” in Harvesting Martin Luther’s Reflections on Theology, Ethics, and the Church (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004) 169–84, esp. 173.
- 41.
As Kathleen M. Crowther writes, “Lutheran writers who took up the topics of marriage and celibacy routinely equated vows of celibacy with illicit sexual activity.” Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation , 125.
- 42.
Susan Wabuda, “Sanctified by the believing spouse: women, men and the marital yoke in the early Reformation,” in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 116.
- 43.
Luther, “The Estate of Marriage,” in Luther’s Works, 45:39.
- 44.
Luther, “The Estate of Marriage,” in Luther’s Works, 45:39.
- 45.
Luther, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 7,” 28:12. In this sense, I would disagree with Heather Dubrow’s citation of Luther’s reference to “the evil days of marriage” in this particular passage as evidence that Luther was not an “enthusiastic” supporter of marriage. Dubrow, A Happier Eden, 17.
- 46.
Luther, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 7,” in Luther’s Works, 28:11.
- 47.
In “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 7,” Luther calls those who require celibacy in the young “reprehensible murderers of souls,” in Luther’s Works, 28:10.
- 48.
Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Feeling, 68.
- 49.
Helen Parish writes that, in the pre-Reformation church, celibacy was “a defining characteristic of the priesthood, which distinguished the priest from his congregation, and testified to his particular status as intercessor and minister at the altar,” Clerical Celibacy, 128.
- 50.
The usual phrase attributed to Luther and other Protesants in this context is the ‘priesthood of all believers.’ For a rich analysis of what this concept actually meant to Luther, see Timonthy J. Wengert, “The Priesthood of All Believers and Other Pious Myths,” in Saying and Doing the Gospel Today, ed. Rhoda Schuler (Valparaiso, Indiana: Institute of Liturgical Studies, 2007), 92–115. Also at https://scholar.valpo.edu/ils_papers/117.1
- 51.
Calvin, Institutes, 3.25.11, 1006.
- 52.
Henry VIII, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum or Defence of the Seven Sacraments, trans. Thomas Webster (1687), ed. Louis O’Donovan (New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Brothers, 1908), 396–7.
- 53.
Henry VIII, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum , 396.
- 54.
Henry VIII, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum , 396.
- 55.
Henry VIII, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum , 396. Queen Elizabeth I apparently felt the same way. See Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 35. In Tullibody, Scotland, in 1539, five people were burned for attending “the wedding of their colleague the vicar, breaking the Lenten fast in order to do so.” Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 214.
- 56.
Jerome, “Against Jovinianus – Book One,” 6:386. Luther explicitly repudiates this belief in his “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 7.” He writes, “it was spoken by a heathen, therefore I ignore it and say it is not true,” in Luther’s Works, 28:13.
- 57.
Thomas Aquinas, “On the Parts of Lust” in Summa Theologica. 3 vols. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947 [1911–1925]), 2:1823 (Second Part of the Second Part; Q 154. A8. R2.).
- 58.
Augustine, “Marriage and Desire,” trans. Roland J. Teske, in The Works of Saint Augustine, eds. John E. Rotelle and Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 1999), I/24:30. Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Past Masters Series, Electronic Edition, 1st release, 2001.
- 59.
“Petition of Eleven Priests to be Allowed to Marry,” 37.
- 60.
Luther, “The Estate of Marriage,” in Luther’s Works, 45:36.
- 61.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Library of Christian Classics, vols. 20 and 21 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 2.8.44, 407–8.
- 62.
Catherine Belsey, “Love in Venice,” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1992), 43.
- 63.
William Perkins, “[Christian] Oeconomie,” in Workes, 3:689; Robert Cleaver and John Dod, A Godlie Forme of Household Government (London: 1600), 184.
- 64.
Augustine, “The Excellence of Marriage,” in Works, I/9:38. Similarly, “when the desires of the flesh lead to the degree of marital union needed for the purpose of having children being exceeded to some extent, this evil is not part of marriage, but it is pardonable because of the good there is in marriage.” Augustine, “The Excellence of Widowhood,” trans. Ray Kearney, in The Works of Saint Augustine, eds. John E. Rotelle and Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 1999), I/9:115. Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Past Masters Series, Electronic Edition, 1st release, 2001. Augustine also wrote, “So too the fathers of the Old Testament had intercourse because it was their duty, and their natural enjoyment of it was never let go to the point of becoming irrational or sinful passion, and there is no comparison between this and the depravity of adultery or married persons’ excesses,” “The Excellence of Marriage,” in Works, 47.
- 65.
Erasmus, “In Praise of Marriage,” 69.
- 66.
Daniel Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour (London, 1642), 150. This passage is frequently cited in discussions of early modern English marriages.
- 67.
Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 81.
- 68.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning; From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 249; italics in original.
- 69.
Rebecca Ann Bach, Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature Before Heterosexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 15, 1.
- 70.
See especially Edmund Leites, “The Duty to Desire: Love, Friendship, and Sexuality in some Puritan Theories of Marriage,” Journal of Social History 15.3 (1982), 383–408; Leites concludes that:
sensuous love is not simply permitted, given the existence of a higher, holier, ‘spiritual’ relation between man and wife, nor it is allowed only to forward the other purpose of marriage. It is required as a constituent and intrinsic element of a good marriage. (388–9)
See also William Haller and Malleville Haller, “The Puritan Art of Love,” Huntington Library Quarterly 5.2 (1942), 235–272; Roland Mushat Frye, “The Teachings of Classical Puritanism on Conjugal Love,” Studies in the Renaissance 2 (1955), 148–59, esp. 153–5; James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 73–6; Daniel Doriani, “The Puritans, Sex, and Pleasure,” Westminster Theological Journal 53.1 (1991), 125–143, esp. 130–3; Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, 80–3. For a brief general overview, see Anthony Fletcher, “The Protestant Idea of Marriage in Early Modern England,” Religion, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 161–81. It should be noted that the precise nature of English Protestant marital conjugal passion in the early modern period is a still contested topic. Gregory Chaplin and Catherine Gimelli Martin have argued, for instance, that John Milton introduced into Protestant ‘companionate marriage’ a sense of intellectual ‘passion’ between husbands and wives that was lacking in earlier Protestant/Puritan thinking. See Gregory Chaplin, “‘One Flesh, One Heart, One Soul’: Renaissance Friendship and Miltonic Marriage.” Modern Philology 99.2 (2001), 266–92, esp. 280; Catherine Gimelli Martin, Milton Among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism (Ashgate 2010) (Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 238. Yet Shakespeare clearly established a model for intellectual parity between husbands and wives throughout his work; the extent to which this reflects his optimism rather than social ‘reality,’ and the extent to which Shakespeare and other writers influenced Milton on this topic, remain open questions.
- 71.
Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 82.
- 72.
For the pervasiveness of this idea throughout the Renaissance, See Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism , 93–6, and also Lee Ritscher, The Semiotics of Rape in Renaissance English Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 17.
- 73.
As Sarah McNamer notes, in the Middle Ages, while not all brides of Christ were virgins (or necessarily nuns), “lost virginity is typically cast as a serious disadvantage for one who strives to be recognized as Christ’s true bride.” Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 77. Carolyn Diskant Muir points out that even some male mystics saw themselves as brides of Christ “Bride or Bridegroom? Masculine Identity in Mystic Marriages,” in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, eds. P.H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), 73.
- 74.
Qtd. in Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 178; Elliott says that “all of the Beguine mystics describe their union with Christ in frankly erotic terms” (179) and cites additional examples, 177–88.
- 75.
Qtd. in Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 153. For additional discussion of Hadewijch’s sensually passionate religious language, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Los Angles, London: University of California Press, 1987), 153–60.
- 76.
As James Grantham Turner notes, Proverbs 5:18–19 also provided a potent Biblical citation for those Protestants who wished to encourage passion within marriage; Turner cites an example from William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties. See One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 76.
- 77.
Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I , trans. Kilian Walsh (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1971), 7.
- 78.
Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 84.
- 79.
Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 85–6.
- 80.
Hendrix , Luther and Marriage, 184. This wedding sermon (“Eine Hochzeitpredigt über den Spruch Hebrews 13.4”) has not yet appeared in the American Edition of Luther’s Works. It is in the Weimar edition. D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. 121 vols. Weimar Edition (WA). (Weimar: Hermann Böhlhaus Nachfolger, 1888–2009), 34:52.
- 81.
Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 273.
- 82.
Plato, “Symposium,” trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper & D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company 1997), 475; 192c.
- 83.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978). All citations to this edition. As the remainder of this section will further demonstrate, such passages cast doubt on claims that, in the words of Mario DiGangi, The Faerie Queene displays a “negative valuation of heteroerotic desire.” The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 33.
- 84.
For the idea that Spenser’s lovers form these specifically hermaphroditic pairs, see James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of the Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 606–7.
- 85.
Calvin seemed to have noticed the possibility of hermaphroditism in marriage as well, but he rejected its intensity. He wrote that when Christ said “the twain shall become one flesh” (Matthew 19:5), “it was not Christ’s intension to introduce Plato’s impure and obscene speculation, but to speak reverently of the order divinely appointed.” John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries: A Harmony of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, trans. T. H. L. Parker. 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1972), 2:244–5.
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Gleckman, J. (2019). The Protestant Conversion into Marriage. In: Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9599-5_8
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