Sacred Space and Gender in Early Modern English Literature

Sacred Space and Gender in Early Modern English Literature examines the poetics of locality and spirituality in narrative poetry and drama (specifically comedy) by focusing on Books 1 and 2 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, William Shakespeare's As You Like It, and the anonymous city comedy The Family of Love. These disparate works are connected by their storytelling, an essential ingredient in the fashioning of spatial perceptions, according to Michel de Certeau. They respond, albeit in different registers, to English clergymen's theories of sacred space that emphasize men's kinetic energy (expended in the search of redemption) and women's emplacement in the godly home (where they provide comfort for peregrinating men). Narrative poetry, aimed at a primarily male audience, celebrates men's salvational mobility while depicting women as static support for peripatetic men. The genre thus cleaves closely to the model advanced by English ministers. By contrast, comedy, a capacious dramatic form capable of providing incongruent perspectives (not least of all because the commercial theatre depended on diverse, paying audiences), departs from the spatial ideals proscribed in theological treatises and offers tales of mobile women whose spiritual and domestic power moves outside the gendered paradigms promoted by England's notable clerics. Despite their conformity with theological premises, Spenser and Marlowe's poems exhibit some formal and ideological differences. The Faerie Queene, a vast epic romance, fully endorses the spatial binary advanced by England's clergy. The speaker of Marlowe's short erotic poem, however, offers sceptical commentary on reformed spatial ideals but ultimately does not challenge them. The plays under discussion work against narrative poetry's gendered duality of masculine movement and feminine stasis. Despite some significant formal differences between them, Shakespeare's As You Like It (a canonical romantic comedy that is aristocratic in focus) and the anonymous Family of Love (a rather obscure city comedy concerned with the 'middling sort') boldly contest theologians' perspectives on sacred space. Instead, they confirm a woman's right to mobility and authority in spatial consecration.

Helga L. Duncan is Professor of English, Emerita, at Stonehill College, where she won the Hegarty Award for Teaching Excellence in 2016. She earned a BA from the University of Colorado, and an MA and PhD from Brown University. Her essays have appeared in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Comparative Drama, Early Theatre, and elsewhere. Her recent work has focused on early modern English perceptions and constructions of sacred space, particularly in relation to gender.