In this book, Stephen Hamrick has assembled an imaginative series of studies that attempt to explain the persistence and deployment of Catholic cultural imagery in the first three decades of Elizabeth's reign. There was, of course, nothing inevitable about a wholesale and successful conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism in what John Guy has termed Elizabeth's “first” reign, as recent Marian revisionism has emphasized. This thing that Hamrick calls the “Catholic Imaginary,” in fact, was much more real than the imagined designation suggests. Indeed, it carried considerable baggage into Elizabeth's reign, as the queen sought to formulate a lasting religious settlement and maintain her authority over a male-dominant culture. The idea of religious heterogeneity was anathema to the early modern European worldview, while the conventional wisdom was that religious uniformity was an integral ingredient for social and political stability. It is within this context that Hamrick unleashes his imaginative interpretations upon the works of Barnabe Googe, George Gascoigne, and Thomas Watson and their relationship to the deployment of an amorphous body of cultural artifacts identified by Hamrick as the Catholic Imaginary.
While the author never makes perfectly clear what the precise historical influence and legacy of the Catholic Imaginary might be, the book does a great job of explaining its existence and deployment by Catholics and Protestants alike, as “Catholic sensibilities” were simultaneously absorbed and resisted by the queen and her “cults” in “the broader theatre of power accessible by many artists” (189). While Hamrick wants to create the perception of a broad-based participation in the cultural practices discussed, the fact is that, in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, this was an elite, esoteric process, and it is not entirely and satisfactorily explained whether contemporaries would have discerned the layered meanings that Hamrick's erudite analysis mines from these texts.
But setting aside these qualifications, Hamrick's analysis is a solid work of historicized literary criticism. The use of Reformation Petrarchanism as a discursive tool was nicely compatible with the accession of a female monarch in 1558 and Elizabeth's own personality in particular; the absence of any discussion of the relationship between the Catholic Imaginary and Mary I's reign only highlights the lack of scholarly interest in the relationship between literature and Mary's own Counter-Reformation. But Elizabeth hardly lacks scholarly discussions of her own representational strategies; as the studies of Carole Levin, Anne Mclaren, and Natalie Mears have suggested, Elizabeth had a much firmer grasp of the potential for literature to contribute to the creation of royal images and bolster royal policies. Indeed, the entire corpus of Elizabethan courtly Petrarchan discourse, which beheld the queen as various manifestations of classical goddesses and biblical queens, was but one facet of an even larger body of cultural artifacts identified as the Catholic Imaginary. This adds up to one big conceptual category, but Hamrick may very well be right, and his book asks us to think about this category in a collective light, even if the cohesiveness of his studies at times displays some strain.
Despite the strain, chapter 1 offers a well-reasoned and contextualized reinterpretation for Elizabeth's famous walk out from her 1558 Christmas mass when Bishop Oglethorpe of Carlisle elevated the host after the queen had warned him not to do so. Fascinating, but the relationship here between the queen's action and the Catholic Imaginary is not quite clear, while Hamrick is on more solid ground in his description of the ritualized beheading of the statue of Thomas Becket on 9 January 1559. But if Elizabeth and William Cecil saw the efficacy of co-opting Catholic practice within an emergent Elizabethan court culture, other observers, such as Barnabe Goode, offered critiques of Catholic and classical forms in his attempt to fashion his art to play the role of a literary Cassandra to guide the queen down the aisle with a proper Protestant husband. In contrast, the chapter on the career of the multitalented George Gascoigne may very well represent how the Catholic Imaginary found a place in the Elizabethan “media via,” employing Petrarchan devises to both support the Elizabethan religious settlement as well as attack efforts to “limit the Queen's discursive agency” (114). Gascoigne never secured a level of patronage from the queen even remotely commensurate with his protean efforts, as this chapter offers a fascinating account of a man who, in Hamrick's words, “never fully or easily” inhabited “one social, economic, or cultural category” (145). Hamrick's final study presents the story of Thomas Watson, a Catholic poet, who employed his muse to rescue Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, from continued disgrace, which demonstrates the further evolution of the Catholic Imaginary into the 1580s, as other writers, from the Protestant George Whetstone to the recusant Nicholas Sanders, railed against the integration of traditional Catholic imagery into political Petrarchanism.
While the book as a whole is densely fascinating, it does tend toward the esoteric. While Hamrick's efforts to historicize these texts are commendable, such interdisciplinary literary criticism could benefit from a deeper discussion of historical cause and effect; how far did these manifestations reach into the culture, and what is the extent of the Catholic Imaginary's historical legacy, especially into the seventeenth century, in which religious passions, and the images they imagined, became even more polarized than during Elizabeth's reign?
