Romance is a notoriously errant genre, and its consumption by early modern English readers caused alarm in some circles. This book focuses on the religious errors that shadowed the transmission of Catholicized chivalric romance into Protestant England. Building on “post-Revisionist” scholarship that “has taught us to see England’s Reformation as long and complicated” (3), Werth proposes that the “formal continuity” of romance across confessional lines and historical generations represents what she terms an “unfinished Reformation” (3). Emphasizing the “hybridity” (24) or “in-between” structure of romance narratives, Werth explores the “partial transformation” (6) of Catholic and chivalric tropes into Protestant narratives that value interpretive acuity and suspect overt supernaturalism. The “fabulous dark cloister” of her title comes from Jonson’s The New Inn (1631), where romances from the Catholic cloister are happily absent from Lord Beaufort’s ideal library. For Werth, however, these dark stories never vanish; in the romances of Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Wroth she finds “a perfect register of the hybridity that spans Catholicism and Protestantism in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England” (2). Against Fredric Jameson’s influential argument that genres emerge in response to historical change, Werth explores a “parallel process in which formal modes of representation coalesce with historical particulars” (8).
Werth’s first section, “Fabulous Texts,” begins with one of many excellent visual illustrations of an early modern book, an embroidered binding of a 1610 Bible, from which the crucifix has been “carefully excised” (30). Reading this erasure through early seventeenth-century anti-Catholicism, Werth explores Spenser’s and Sidney’s efforts to purge their romances of overt Catholic magic. Emphasizing “Sidney’s wariness of the supernatural” (43), she shows how the Arcadia turns romance into a Protestant interpretative contest. Spenser has more sympathy with Arthurian materials, but he models them after Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Both Foxe and Spenser, Werth asserts, “reclaim a popular mode of storytelling by sanitizing it of miracles, abbeys” (54), and other Catholic features. Likewise Sidney’s princesses become in Werth’s reading Protestant saints directly comparable to Anne Askew (74). Shakespeare’s Pericles also separates Marina’s human miracles from the implicitly Catholic marvels of Cerimon and Ephesus.
After these chapters, the study turns to “Superstitious Readers,” and the analysis shifts from authorial disciplining of errant romance to models of right reading and interpretive practices. The key figure here, and arguably the hinge figure in the book, is Sir Guyon, the horseless knight who models careful reading. Through illustrations from Harrington’s glossing of Ariosto, Werth shows how difficult and essential careful reading practices are to the Knight of Temperance. Guyon’s dependence on the Palmer, particularly in the second half of his adventure, however, leads Werth to conclude that book 2 marks Spenser’s “growing uneasiness” (131). Even active reading practices may be insufficient to navigate the treacherous waters of romance. For Werth, destroying the Bower of Bliss represents interpretive catastrophe.
The book culminates by reading multiple heroines across Wroth’s Urania. The contrast between Antissa, a naïve and emotional consumer of romance, and Urania, a reasoned interpreter who “succeeds where Guyon failed” (142), combines Spenser’s anxiety about the allure of textual pleasures and Sidney’s narrative of heroic resistance. But the most compelling heroine, in Werth’s view, is Pamphilia, who models an in-between space, both affected by and interpreting the romance narratives in which she finds herself. This heroine helps create “a different model of Protestant virtue, which gives the community a central role in determining proper behavior and reading” (159).
Werth notes throughout that these elite Protestant texts were not the only, or even the most popular, sources of romance narrative in early modern England. Reading these texts through the prism of Catholic chivalry and Protestant Reformation sometimes excludes other strains of narrative that were grist for the romance mill, from Greek romance to pastoral poetry to the novella. The payoff in this smart and convincing study is a rich sense of how deeply these four authors wrestled with their genre’s Catholic past. The “ongoing, incomplete reformation” (6) that this study finds in literary and religious culture will influence future scholarship on these and other literary romances.
