Typologies in England, 1650-1820

by Paul J. Korshin

Overview

Professor Korshin delineates the development of typology from the theological to the secular sphere through a study of abstracted typology, or types that writers transferred from their customary religious contexts and put into various genres of literature, from poetry and fables to novels and histories.

Originally published in 1983.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691613864
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #730
Pages:	490
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.80(h) x 1.00(d)

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Typologies in England, 1650-1820

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By Paul J. Korshin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1982 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06485-7

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Typological Propensity

A visitor from our century to early Enlightenment England — England in the mid and later seventeenth century — if he tarried long enough to taste the intellectual life of the period, would soon notice the large role that prediction of all kinds played in the life of the nation. The human impulse to predict the future, as anthropologists observe, is greatest in times of instability and uncertainty. Primitive tribes and civilized peoples alike, no matter how stable the body of received thought and tradition they possess, strive more energetically to know what the future may hold when the world around them appears unsettled and human affairs in doubt. Our visitor to England, then, sometime between 1650 and 1680, would soon observe a propensity for prediction, whether based on stories and events drawn from the past, on similarities between present events and previous history, or on the possibility that the present somehow suggested a fulfillment of an earlier prediction or prophecy. This modern visitor would soon recognize some common ground between twentieth-century thought and the intellectual attitudes of the last half of the seventeenth century. For one thing, he would recognize that some of the predictive skills of these early Enlightenment English were drawn from the Bible — a book still popular in the twentieth century — but that the figuralism his hosts employed was based on the notion that the Bible was historically true and that contemporary history was part of a seamless historical fabric continuous from biblical times. For another, our guest would soon see that many of his more articulate hosts readily believed there were predictive connections between biblical times and their own and that they searched constantly for signs to justify their beliefs. The modern visitor would also doubtless see that, despite their great, and to him, unusual preoccupation with signs, shadows, figures of something past or yet to come, the seventeenth-century English lived, loved, swore, fought, and so on, rather like people in most other historical periods. They might take prediction and prefiguring seriously — as indeed they did — but, however much matters of this kind might obsess a few men and women, most people lived most of the time unconcerned as to what predictions might or might not come true.

My imaginary visitor is an ideal guest, innocent of preconceptions or expectations, as well informed about his own situation as he is about the past, and with a certain sense of humor concerning both. Perhaps it would be a mistake to think that my character represents the scholar, the historian of ideas, or the literary critic, for these inquirers into the texts and stories of the past sometimes lack the traits I have sketched for my traveler through time. As an inquirer into the figural history, especially the prefigurative side of that history, of the English Enlightenment, I know that my vision may be clouded by a felicitous hypothesis, my objectivity weakened by a yearning to find what I have come to seek. But for the seeker after details of the story of typology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there is a good deal to find. That few if any have sought to understand this chapter in the history of typological thought makes a scholar's search harder — there are no reliable guides — and more hazardous; it is easy to be misled by evidence that may turn out to be something less than the best evidence. Of one thing we may be certain: the history of typology over the last two thousand years is highly varied and fragmentary. The scholar confronts a plethora of material in many sources and, to be effective, must weave the evidence into a coherent historical and literary account.

From the time that the ancient Jews first started to use prefigurative language in prophetical statements about the future of their nation, these figures (which would not be named "types" until the Hellenization of Palestinian culture) have had a double purpose. Typology, the collective noun for the reading and learning of these signs, refers not only to the creating of prefigurative entities, but also to their interpretation. Typology is a method of decoding as well as a code, a science of exegesis as well as one of mysterious foreshadowing. A typologist is a person who interprets — or claims to interpret — an existing or presumed literary code as well as someone who speaks or writes in typological language or style. For most of its history, typology has been largely if not exclusively a method of encoding and interpreting religious texts and theological history. But in the middle of the seventeenth century in England, typology slowly began to change, to become secular in its applications, and to involve genres of literature other than the strictly religious. These genres are numerous, ranging from myth to political writings, from the prose character to the fable, from various kinds of poetry to prose narrative. The reasons for these changes, for this gradual secularizing of what had been almost exclusively a religious figuralism and exegesis, are numerous, and I shall not attempt to outline them now. They are the subject of the following chapters, in which I undertake to find the intellectual bases of typology in the literature of the English Enlightenment, broadly construed to cover the period from 1650 to 1820.

Typology in its strict, conventional sense had expanded by the middle of the seventeenth century to embrace imagery from pagan mythology and pagan literature. Hercules, Pan, Orpheus, Ceres, Achilles, Aeneas, and dozens of other characters became pre-Christian types of Christ. Theologians in search of the origins of Christianity found them in the lore, languages, and literatures of gentile theology and, as they found these origins, they decided that they must be shadowy types of the true religion that was still to come. Thus during the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment, typology becomes a deciphering of the encrypted codes of ancient civilizations. If, contemporary writers and scholars thought, the types were figures in a code, then someone must have encoded them. Here the seventeenth-century typologists had a fine example of encryptment that served them as their paradigm for all such potential codes — the hieroglyphics of Egypt. There was universal agreement that the glyphs represented a code that the Egyptian priests had made to preserve the secrets of their faith from unbelievers. If one set of ancient priests had acted thus, was it not likely that others had done the same? Were not the mysteries of Grecian religion equally obscure? Did not Jesus himself speak in parables that required explanation for vulgar ears? It was; they were; and he did. Since the hieroglyphs were a visual code, seventeenth-century typologists looked for visual signs or types in other kinds of graphic representation. The typology of emblem books, engraved title pages and book illustrations, paintings and typographic devices, iconography and iconology emerged gradually as early Enlightenment thinkers looked around them for predictive signs that might date from some earlier culture.

It is worth mentioning that many seventeenth-century English writers were fascinated with codes of all kinds. Writing in cipher was an old device, but the forerunner of modern stenographic shorthand, tachygraphy, dates from the mid-seventeenth century. It was common to treat any text, including Scripture, that required explanation as a code for which a clavis or key had to be produced before contemporary readers could understand it. Hence the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are a period of "keys," "complete keys," guides to unlock the mysteries of dark or obscure authors, and efforts to decipher whatever some exegete deemed worthy of explanation. We may trace the unbroken skein of English fascination with dark authors from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, from Sir Thomas Browne, Henry More, and Samuel Butler to Blake, Coleridge, and Shelley. Typology, as an exegetical tool, could perform a valuable function for those who hoped to extract meaning — often a prejudged, preferred meaning — from the works of mystics, cabalists, and hermeticists and from other curious writings. Hence, during the late seventeenth century, religious exegetes and then secular writers as well began to treat typology as a code left undeciphered by earlier cultures. We will find that these writers habitually and easily confuse typology with emblems, parables, signs, symbols, and hieroglyphics in their terminology. So great is this confusion that types become, in the language of semiology, figural enclaves with prefigurative or postfigurative purposes. Sometimes types look backward and forward simultaneously. Even today, typology sometimes does not refer to prefigurative imagery or exegesis at all but rather describes the classification of phenomena in the manner of the sciences and the social sciences.

In dealing with such a complex and potentially confusing topic in intellectual history, there are, it seems to me, five possible approaches. The first is the strictly chronological treatment of typology, with a decade-by-decade survey of different authors, genres, and developments. The chief advantage that this approach offers is order; the reader finds materials about the 1660s in one place, about the 1720s in another, and so on. The second method of proceeding would involve individual authors and their works, in the order in which they appeared. Here, too, the advantage would be one of straightforward arrangement. A third possible method includes the examination of theories of typology over the period covered by this book. The fourth would be a study of typology according to the genres of literature in which it commonly appears. And the fifth approach that I considered is a strictly historical one, an attempt to write the history of typological thought in the English Enlightenment without regard for authors, genres, or decades. I rejected the first two methods as being limited and restrictive. Instead, I have chosen to follow a blend of the last three of these approaches — theories, genres, and the history of typology — with chapters devoted to each of these methods.

In the critical study of typological ideas and their applications to literature, this multivalent treatment of the subject is, so far as I know, still untried. Students of typology in the English Renaissance such as Barbara Lewalski (1966) and Mary Ann Radzinowicz (1978) have preferred to focus on a single author or a single work (in both cases the author is Milton and the works are Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes). Steven Zwicker's book on the typology of kingship in Dryden (1972) is devoted, except for introductory material, to one author. The various studies of typology in colonial American literature and thought follow either the single author approach or the history of ideas method. My choice of method is dictated in part by the fact that the typological study of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature is still a relative novelty. Except for specialized and partial views of a few authors and works, nobody has yet attempted a general survey of so broad a spectrum of typological texts and ideas as I shall take up in this book.

My second chapter, therefore, traces what may be, for readers conversant with Renaissance literature, familiar outlines of typological history from biblical times. I am interested in showing what the possibilities and limits of typological approaches to literature are, so I shall survey the different kinds of typology — conventional, applied, and abstracted — and suggest where, how, and under what influences types are likely to appear in literary and other artistic contexts. This is a work about literature rather than its sister arts, but I feel obliged to point out the numerous visual manifestations of typology from 1650 to 1820, impressions that I hope the illustrations to this volume will strengthen. Part of the appeal of typology during this period is that it is closely associated with ideas of the Millennium and with natural human propensities to predictiveness. Hence I want to prepare readers for later chapters dealing with millenarian subjects and with what I shall call natural typology.

Anyone who deals with the subtleties of typological figuralism in Enlightenment, especially in eighteenth-century, literature must face the traditional view that such figural intricacies are alien to the thought of this period. The title of the final chapter of Don Cameron Allen's Mysteriously Meant (1971) — "The Rationalization of Myth and the End of Allegory" — suggests that its author firmly closes the gates on mystical imagery and interpretation at the end of the seventeenth century. Allen, of course, simply expressed an attitude that descended to him from intellectual historians of the pre-World War II era, although it remains a pity that such a gifted student of the arcana of literature should have rested his lance when he had a chance to tilt with the eighteenth century. This view is now something of a straw man that my readers will have to forgive me for erecting in these pages again; indeed, literary studies of eighteenth-century literature during the decade of the 1970s did much to show the strong continuity of the period with the literature of the middle and late Renaissance. My third chapter, then, is another kind of introduction to the study of typology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for it argues that literary and figural changes were widespread but that, nevertheless, the attractions of typological thought and imagery did not disappear. Their survival and the changes that typology underwent as part of that survival are the subject of the bulk of this book.

Typology, as I noted earlier, is an exegetical technique or, as I describe it at the beginning of my fourth chapter, "Typology as System," "a system of exegesis." This system has its own language, syntax, terminology, and semiology. The purpose of this and the following chapter, "The Development of Abstracted Typology," is to show how and in what kinds of texts we may expect to find typological thought at work. I shall argue that abstracted typology is the principal modification or corruption of conventional theological typology during the English Enlightenment and that its occurrence is common in many genres of literature. Yet there are also limits to the possibilities of typology. Looking for applications of typology is a legitimate historical and critical enterprise, but too zealous a search, too great a willingness to find prefigurative techniques in literature, may lead to, as Erasmus said of the union of his parents, the sacrilegious. I have defined my subject optimistically, as any scholar must do, but I have tried throughout to identify types and typological thought only when these resemblances appear in such a way in my subject matter that I think I can defend them to a skeptical audience. There will be some authors in whose writings typological thinking is fairly prominent while, during the same or subsequent years, there will be others equally exposed to typological methods and literature in whose writings we will find little or no typology. Defoe, for example, in the words of a recent critic, "shared with the majority of his readers the typological habit of mind involved not only in the assumption that Old Testament events prefigure those of the New Testament but, more generally, that the past offers archetypes of the present and future." Not only does Defoe employ typology in his fictional narratives, but in A Journal of the Plague Year, which he represents as an accurate journal of a time in recent history, he includes events of 1665 as an historical type of a potential antitype in England of 1721. Yet a few decades after Defoe wrote, we will find that Samuel Johnson, who was also conversant with contemporary and past typological thought, seldom refers to typology per se. The principal influences on Johnson's theological thought include divines whose writings often include and discuss typology such as William Law, Samuel Clarke, Richard Baxter, Jeremy Taylor, and John Tillotson. But typology, however central a topic it is to eighteenth-century Christianity, is not central to Johnson's Sermons or other writings; it would be pointless to promote resemblances for which there is scanty evidence.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Typologies in England, 1650-1820 by Paul J. Korshin. Copyright © 1982 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• List of Illustrations, pg. ix
• Acknowledgments, pg. xiii
• Abbreviations and Short Titles, pg. xvii
• 1. Introduction: the Typological Propensity, pg. 1
• 2. The Possibilities and Limits of Typology, pg. 16
• 3. Figural Change and the Survival of Typological Tradition, pg. 39
• 4. Typology as System, pg. 75
• 5. The Development of Abstracted Typology, pg. 101
• 6. Typology and Myth, pg. 133
• 7. Typology and the Novel, pg. 186
• 8. Typology and Satire, pg. 269
• 9. Typology and Prophecy, pg. 328
• 10. The Typology of Everyday Life, pg. 369
• 11. Typology: A Bibliographical Essay, pg. 396
• Index, pg. 409