Stewart Mottram, Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 247 pp.

Ruins haunt the landscape of early modern England. The welter of destruction marked every aspect of religious life: monasteries were dissolved and sold, rood screens dismantled, pews and altars vandalised, heads and limbs of statues broken, murals whitewashed, stained-glass shattered, manuscripts scattered. Eamon Duffy’s classic Stripping of the Altars (1992) meticulously documented the systematic razing of the millennial tradition of medieval Catholicism. Margaret Aston’s England’s Iconoclasts (1988) demonstrated how iconoclasm must be viewed through the developments in theology and the alterations of ecclesiastical and civil laws; her posthumous Broken Idols of the English Reformation (2016) narrates how the destruction and partial rehabilitation of religious art transformed the fabric of life itself—not only ways of worship but also of seeing, hearing and remembering. Alexandra Walsham’s Reformation of the Landscape (2011) showed how the traces of the numinous remained in the trees, woods, springs, rocks, mountain peaks and prehistoric monuments of the British Isles.

English literature reflected all this iconoclastic violence. In Titus Andronicus, a Roman general anachronistically spies a ‘ruinous monastery’ (5.1.21). In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, the poet’s face is compared to the ‘Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang’. In The Duchess of Malfi, a character waxes, ‘I do love these ancient ruins’ (5.3.9). In Ruines of Time and Ruines of Rome, Spenser gave voice to the residual grandeur of ancient monuments. Many have read the allegory of The Faerie Queene as a magnificent, unfinished textual ruin. Philip Schwyzer’s Archaeologies of English Renaissance (2007) tells the story of how excavation, exhumation and ruin pervade The Faerie Queene, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, Donne and Thomas Browne. Rebeca Helfer’s Spenser’s Ruins and the Art of Recollection (2012) reads his fascination with destroyed monuments through the Ciceronian mnemonic techniques. Angus Vine’s In Defiance of Time (2010) explores the emergence of antiquarianism in early modern England in figures such as Leland, Stow, Spenser, Camden, Drayton and Selden. Jennifer Summit’s Memories Libraries (2008) argues that the library collections of Duke Humfrey, Matthew Parker, Robert Cotton and Thomas Bodley created our very understanding of medieval literature itself.

With Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell, Stewart Mottram enters this rich field by offering us a fine-grained account of the ambivalences of religious destruction in the wake of English Protestantism.[1] There are few literary critics today who have his deep reservoir of knowledge in the literary, political and religious history of the period. An empiricist at heart, his command of primary texts in manuscript and print is masterful and knowledge of secondary scholarship impressive. He interweaves history, politics and religion into a satisfying account of how the long reach of the dissolution of the monasteries persisted in the literary imagination from the founding of the national church in 1534 to its dissolution by Cromwell in 1653. That is to say, he argues that the ruins of the Henrician past were but a prologue to further ruination within the multiple recursive reformations that lasted well into the revolution in the time of Marvell. In five tightly argued and dense chapters, Mottram pairs familiar texts—The Shepheardes Calendar, A View of the Present State of Ireland, Cymbeline, Upon Appleton House—with lesser known ones—William Vallans’s A Tale of Two Swannes, John Denham’s Coopers Hill and Sophy, Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena—to show how attention to ‘Bare ruined choirs’ were not only marked by nostalgia for the pre-reformation church but also a sense of good riddance to the ‘papish’ past. Simply put, writers saw ruination ambivalently. Sometimes they approved, other times not.

Whereas the obsolescent grandeur of Roman antiquity haunted the imagination of continental writers such as Petrarch, Leonardo, Castiglione, the author of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Du Bellay and Montaigne, Mottram argues that English and Welsh writers were instead haunted less by pagan monuments than the broken Christian edifices that dotted the insular landscape: ‘If the monastic ruins of English literature celebrate the dissolution of medieval Catholicism, then they also gesture towards the fear of future dissolution for the church established on the ruins of England’s religious past’ (5).

Chapter 1 is on Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579). As the argument of the September poem announces, Diggon Davie discourses at large on ‘the abuses whereof, and loose liuing of Popish prelates’. In Mottram’s reading, Diggon Davie should be identified as Richard Davies, the Elizabethan bishop of St. David’s, whose Funeral Sermon complained that the new owner of former monastic lands not only did not allow farmers to plough the fields, but suppressed what was once vibrant religious life. The poem thus gives ‘voice to this complaint over landowners who hinder the work of preaching by pocketing ecclesiastical revenues for themselves’ (46). Spenser thereby reactivates the topos of the ruined parish as an index of rural and national decay. A View for Mottam holds a similar reading, the purpose of the colonisation of ‘savage’ Ireland is to rebuild Ireland’s ruinous churches, and not to further harm them.

In Chapter 2, Mottram notices a close kinship between William Vallans’ Two Swannes and Spenser’s Ruines of Time—for they both use a ‘chorographical focus on Hertfordshire as a frame for patriotic praise of Anglo-British heroism across history’ (55). Specifically, the ruins of Roman Verulamium are vaunted as a site for the propagation of English national identity. But whereas Vallans in his narrative lavishes a great deal of attention to the Benedictine abbey of St. Alban, the name ‘Alban’, interestingly, is conspicuously absent in Spenser’s Ruines of Time. Mottram sees, however, that a vestige of Alban remains in a whisper of allusion: the description of Thames,’his pure streames with guiltles blood oft stained’ (l.145), actually refers to the martyrdom of Alban. Spenser’s and Vallans’s purposes are thus to retrieve the British glorious past in order to allay the anxieties surrounding England’s war with Spain in the Low Countries.

In Chapter 3, Mottram uses Cymbeline as the aperture to view the contours of religious toleration. Mottram’s primary concern is with the rhetoric of British union of England, Wales and Scotland. He shows how Wales represented the danger of domestic insurrection among Catholics through a string of historically significant events from Inigo Jones’ sketch of ruins and its subsequently splendid restoration in Prince Henry’s Barriers (a masque performed in 1610), which was produced in anticipation of Henry Frederick’s installation as prince of Wales; to Robert Devereux, the second earl of Essex’s uprising; to Shakespeare contribution of ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ in the Love’s Martyr as evidence of his familiarity with the catholic sympathies and support of the Essex rebellion in Wales.

As Cymbeline dramatises the Roman invasion of Wales and its defence, Shakespeare, in Mottram’s view, wants to be both sympathetic and critical to the Catholics: he condemns the Catholic rebellion in Wales, but is also repulsed by Jacobean anti-Catholicism. Cymbeline, as Mottram admits, contains no explicit reference to ruined monastery (Cloton’s headless corpse is described as a “ruin … that sometime / … was a worthy building”); as such the subject of the book seem somehow to be lost in the background, as Mottram is more interested in detailed discussion Shakespeare’s alleged Catholicism and recusancy.

Chapter 4 continues with the problem of religious toleration. In June 1641 the Long Parliament decided to dissolve cathedral foundations. A year later, John Denham publishes ‘Coopers Hill’, a long chorographical poem that reflects nostalgically on the ruins of Chertsey Abbey, while at the same time praising the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, which had been in semi-ruin since its damage by lightning in 1561. Henrician dissolution and Caroline renovation are thus held in an interesting typological relationship: Mottram argues that although Denham laments the destruction of Chertsey Abbey, he was in fact quite committed to the royal cause, as his poetry reflects a ‘royalist-derived commitment to the “outward shew” of the Caroline church that is reflected his concern with the ruin and restoration of ecclesiastical buildings’ (137).

Finally, Chapter 5 examines how Andrew Marvell’s celebrated Upon Appleton House (c. 1651) uses the earlier ruination of medieval monasticism is reflected in the later ruination of the national Church during the Puritan Revolution. The family of Marvell’s patron, Thomas, the third lord of Fairfax, had transformed the Cistercian Nun Appleton Priory into their own country house estate. Marvell at once censures the hypocritical rapaciousness of such plunder, and also praises the family’s upright morality. Dated around the time of Scottish invasion of England, Mottram argues that the poem responds to anxieties over a possible royalist rising in the region. In his reading, Upon Appleton House becomes ‘a presbyterian reflection on the growth of sectarianism in the English commonwealth under Cromwell’ (170).

In sum, Mottram shows—in the most painstakingly detailed way—how literary imagination reflects the political and religious tensions of the time. Yet, one must note that the book is less concerned with the materiality or metaphysics of ruins as such and more with ruination (process) and ruins (aftermath) as both metaphor and metonym of inter-confessional conflict. The primal birth pangs of the reformation—the monastic dissolution under Henry VIII—is the principle lens to view all forms of ruins in Spenser, Shakespeare and Marvell; they are but an epiphenomenon of religious strife. The monastic ruin thus becomes the etiology, symbol and symptom of the continuing cycles of religious violence that convulsed early modern English history.

Through its meticulous attention to the dates, publication histories and thick political networks, the achievement of Ruin and Reformation is that it now provides scholars a firm foundation to build upon. Future works might consider: one, with greater theoretical sophistication the cultural memory, nostalgia, materiality, aesthetics or a different sort of religious impulse that surround such material destruction (Mottram’s religion is often more an byproduct of politics rather than manifestations of biblical and theological doctrines or liturgical or devotional practices); two, the interplay between classical ruins and Christian ruins in early modern England—there is almost no discussion of the Roman remains of Britain; and three, how Spenser harnesses the sublime imagery of monumental ruins into the architectonics of his encyclopedic allegory (after all, he composed his magnum opus in the shadow of Kilcolman Castle). How would Mottram interpret Walter Benjamin’s gnomic remark that ‘Allegory is in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things’? A fuller appreciation of Milton’s own ruinous imagination. In Of education, he writes, ‘the end of education is to repair the ruin of our first parents’. In Paradise Regained, Christ defies Satan as being ‘ejected, emptied, gaz’d, unpitied, shunn’d, / A spectacle of ruin, or of scorn’ (I.413-4). Paradise Lost is an epic teeming with the ruinous imagination. What then are the manifold ways in which Milton thought about material and spiritual ruination? How does it relate to his thoughts on iconoclasm, idolatry, the Reformation and the work of poetry?

Andrew Hui

Yale-NUS College, Singapore

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