Lucian tells us that when Momus, the god of fault-finding, considered Hephaestus’ creation of a human being, he remarked that the craftsman should have made a window into the human chest, so that all could see the hidden thoughts and feelings within. At the center of this tale, with which Arnold Hunt’s excellent book opens, is the core theme of the book itself: how did outward appearance relate to inner truth for the people of early modern England? Gesture and comportment, Hunt argues, and the debates around them, were not of merely antiquarian interest, but concerned truth and dissimulation, conformity and community membership, and the experience of moving through the early modern world. Just as Alex Walsham and Tara Hamling have shown us that debates over church decoration concerned far more than aesthetics, far from being “[i]ndifferent, accidental, incidental, circumstantial,” debates about gesture were central to the English Reformation (8).
Gestures had the potential to reveal truths that might be hidden by lying words; “it was widely assumed that gesture was an authentic expression of the self” (24). Yet, as Hunt skillfully unfolds in the first chapter on gesture in the pulpit, this created a paradox. To demonstrate virtue, one had to consciously develop virtuous-seeming gestures. However, if these gestures were cultivated, did they serve their true function as windows into the heart? The stage and the pulpit were often contrasted in literature of the period, yet preachers were also encouraged actively to learn from their counterparts on the stage how to manipulate their features, voice, and gestures to move, literally to touch the emotions of their congregations (38). The tension between the actor, who merely feigned emotions, and the true orator, who felt them sincerely, was in Hunt’s depiction constructive; gesture “made it possible for the preacher to embody emotion and convey it to his audience […] yet it also made it possible for the preacher to feign an emotion he did not truly feel, in order to manipulate the emotions of his audience” (81).
Truth and dissimulation were likewise central to the physical movements penitents adopted, from baring their heads to wearing a white sheet, before being readmitted to the church community, treated in Chapter Two. These were not bizarre ceremonies, but public uses of gesture to confirm sincerity; they were not chiefly a means by which the clergy exercised power over their flocks, but rather “a ritual addressed by the laity to the laity” (112). Repentance sought, ultimately, to achieve not “so much the humiliation of the offender as their reconciliation and reintegration into the community,” mirroring the social function played by more formal disciplinary structures in mainland European reformed churches (112).
Penitent sinners bowed before the community, but Paul says in Philippians 2:10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, which by the late Middle Ages had come to mean bowing at the name of Jesus. As Hunt shows in Chapter Three, however, in England this practice spent the Elizabethan period in “a sort of religious limbo – simultaneously prescribed and proscribed” (130), required by the 1559 Injunctions yet barely enforced and defended by John Whitgift only as a thing indifferent. In the 1630s, however, an argument running “in a direct line from Vorstius to Pareus to Willet to Andrewes,” that Philippians 2:10 must be read literally, thrust the practice back into contestation (138). The ensuing controversy turned less on church government, as Charles Prior has argued, than on the nature of worship itself. Whereas many Puritans (notably William Prynne) held that bowing “confounds one duty with another, “advocates of bowing insisted that it was not a distraction from the business of worship; it was the business of worship (141).
Contestation over the sign of the cross (Chapter Four) likewise turned on the nature of things indifferent, and “[h]owever hard the reformers tried to force it into the category of adiaphora, the cross refused to stay there” (164). Its apotropaic power continued in charms, healing rituals, and everyday blessings, while skeptical Protestant controversialists conceded its efficacy but reattributed its source to the devil. The ritual of touching for the king’s evil here serves as a striking case study of the tensions at play; the sign of the cross was central to the ritual, so if its power came from the devil, “was Elizabeth I a witch?” (185).
Chapter Five, on hat-honor, may prove the most instructive chapter to readers unfamiliar with early modern social customs, and among the most fascinating. The removal, or not, of a hat was among the most visible and quotidian demonstrations of hierarchy. The 1604 canons’ insistence that, rather than wearing caps or hats to church and removing them at key moments, men should be always bare-headed in church, was therefore truly radical, making all men humble themselves before God alike, eliminating the difference of ranks marked out by varying headgear, and demarcating sacred space in a new way.
Seventeenth-century reemphasis on physical reverence for church spaces can also be seen in the practice of bowing to the altar (Chapter Six), which emerged as a crucial point of contestation during the Laudian reforms of the 1630s. Though many rejected the practice, interestingly Hunt shows that some Puritans embraced it as an aid to inward devotion (278–280). More centrally, across religious divides, in “the early seventeenth century angels the angels returned to English churches,” as the physical space once again came, through the uncovering of heads and bowing to the altar, to be demarcated as a place of special holy presence (283).
Wide-ranging and persuasive, Protestant Bodies shows that far from occasioning a “death of gestures,” the English Reformation made gestures all the more significant since they became contested markers of identity (287). This book is a valuable contribution to the ongoing effort to demonstrate, contra an earlier myth that set a medieval religion of the heart against a modern religion of the head, that “English Protestantism was a thoroughly embodied religion,” an embodiment in which gesture played a central role (289).
