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Words Like Daggers
Violent Female Speech in Early Modern England
By Kirilka Stavreva UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8657-3
CHAPTER 1
Feminine Contentious Speech and the Religious Imagination
In the third chapter of James's New Testament epistle to Christian believers, the apostle sounds a grave warning about the capacity of the human tongue to wreak havoc: "The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity.... It defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell." To make matters worse, "the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison." This devastating condemnation of the tongue follows a begrudging acknowledgment of the mighty power packed in this small organ. James's turn of phrase associates the tongue with the principal means of transportation in an age when domestic, foreign, and intercontinental travel expanded dramatically: "Behold, we put bits in the horses' mouths, that they may obey us; and we turn about their whole body. Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm, withersoever the governor listeth." Even as James compares the tongue to a horse's bit or a ship's rudder that steers them in the desired direction, he also charges it with the capacity to lead speaker and addressees—the entire social and natural world—into chaos and destruction. Unruly tongues, he goes on to explain, bring out into the world the "bitter envying and strife" hidden in the heart.
The early moderns drew on a rich and strong discursive tradition of the "sins of the tongue" authorized by James's epistle. Edwin D. Craun traces the ecclesiastical beginnings of this discourse in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century pastoral manuals for confession. Starting in the late fourteenth century the ecclesiastical condemnation of deviant speech permeated the poetry of writers such as Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Patience poet. By the end of the century, Sandy Bardsley contends, the ecclesiastical and poetic tradition of "the sins of the tongue" had gone viral. In the fifteenth century it permeated secular and church law courts; manor, borough, and guild administrations; and popular ballads and plays. Malicious slander, barratry, scolding, cursing, and prophesy continued as causes for legal action from the Elizabethan era through the Interregnum. In no small part the prominence of this discourse after the Reformation can be credited to the widely popular genre of sermons on the tongue, which gave an English habitation to James's admonitory epistle. In this chapter I expand the historical scope of Craun's and Bardsley's analyses by studying representations of contentious speech in Elizabethan and Jacobean religious commentators on James's epistle. Ultimately I argue that the cultural category the sermonists portrayed as rendered most chaotically unreliable by the fiery tongue was that of gender.
The "sins of the tongue" are defined with an insistence approaching exasperation in a host of sermons and other popular religious texts from the era. The issue was considered significant enough to be propagated throughout the realm by means of readings during Sunday services of the "Homelie agaynst Contencion and Braulynge." Included in a collection of homilies first published in 1547, shortly after King Edward VI came to the throne, and reissued several times during the reigns of Elizabeth and James, "Against Contencion and Braulynge" was among the twelve crown-endorsed texts that remained at the heart of Sunday and holiday services well into the seventeenth century. (One more, "The Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion," was added to the set after the 1570 Northern Rebellion.) The value placed by the governments of both Elizabeth and James on these texts' capacity to quell religious and hence political unrest made them the default liturgical choice over topical sermons by preaching ministers. The 1559 preface to the collection specifies that the homilies were to be read to parishioners "in suche order as they stande in the booke—except there be a sermon, according as it is injoyned in the booke of her Hyghnesse Injunctions, and then for that cause onely, and for none other, the readyng of the sayde homelye to be dyffered unto the next Sonday or holy day folowyng. And when the foresayde boke of homelyes is read over, her Majesties pleasure is that the same bee repeated and read agayne." A good Christian subject, then, was likely to have heardparts or all of the "Homelie agaynst Contencion and Braulynge" at least four times a year.
The homily's message was reinforced in other topical sermons and religious readings during church services. Among them is a sermon on "The Taming of the Tongue" by the charismatic and talented preacher Thomas Adams, whose patrons included Thomas Egerton, Baron of Ellesmere, Henry Montagu, first earl of Manchester and chief justice of the king's bench, and William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke. Although we cannot be certain that "The Taming of the Tongue" received endorsement by the court or by any influential aristocrats, its 1616 publication in a volume boasting that its title sermon, "The Sacrifice of Thankefulnesse," was preached at Paul's Cross suggests authority. Paul's Cross, after all, was what Ronald Bond has called "the principal pulpit in the land. Another text in this genre is the sermon "The poysonous Tongue" by John Abernethy, Bishop of Caithness, organized like a medical handbook and included in his 1622 collection, A Christian and Heavenly Treatise. Clerical writers detailing the nature and danger of the fiery tongue feature the outstanding preacher William Perkins, leading Cambridge Calvinist and rector of St. Andrews, who coupled his call against the tongue's sins with specific strategies for its "wel ordering" in a widely reprinted treatise, A Direction for the Government of the Tongue: According to Gods Word. In 1619 George Webbe, Bishop of Limerick and later chaplain of Charles I, likewise attacked contentious speech in a pamphlet, this one modeled after common law court procedure and entitled The Araignement of an Unruly Tongue.
None of these texts by high-powered men of the cloth visits the sins of the tongue upon the heads of female parishioners. Yet all appear to attribute feminine qualities to contentious speech, although, as I argue below, closer analysis renders such gendering more complicated. Such propensity to gender fiery words as feminine is apparent when early modern authors interrelate the violent speech acts of scolding and what I have termed witch-speak—malevolent speech that was typically impossible to reconstitute but was credited with effecting physical harm or death. This connection was drawn time and again in the popular literature of the seventeenth century. Among the authors who highlighted it was Henry Goodcole, chaplain of Newgate jail and crime pamphleteer. Three times in his documentary pamphlet on the indictment, conviction, and jail confession of the witch Elizabeth Sawyer (1612), Goodcole singles out her "cursing, blaspheming, and imprecating" tongue as the "occasioning cause" for the devil's active interest in her. It was Elizabeth's fiery tongue, the minister-pamphleteer insists, that made her fall victim to the devil and caused the death of Agnes Ratcleife, whom Elizabeth bewitched. Furthermore her violent speech proved "the meanes of her owne destruction," as she uttered "most fearefull imprecations for destruction against her selfe" in the courtroom—imprecations that were promptly heeded by God.
Even those of Goodcole's contemporaries who rejected his understanding of witchcraft concurred with him regarding the connection between witch-speak and contentious speech. The witchcraft skeptic Reginald Scot, for instance, asserts that the "chief fault" of witches "is that they are scolds." In Wales litigation for scolding and witchcraft often overlapped. In 1670 one Welsh plaintiff, Sarah Poole, described the verbal onslaught of her longtime foe Elizabeth Parry to the Denbighshire justices of the peace in these terms: "Elizabeth Parry came not long ago to my house ... and scandalized me with most filthy and uncivil language and likewise kneeled down upon her knees and cursed me, whereupon I fell suddenly sick and so continued for seven days." Parry was said to have used a similar combination of scolding and cursing twelve years before, and reputedly Poole's child had died that very night, while Poole herself lapsed into a three-year-long sickness. Welsh villagers and members of the English learned elite alike conjoined feminine scolding—the publicly provocative use of "filthy and uncivil language"—and feminine witch-speak. Goodcole, as we saw, was explicit about the lack of qualitative distinction between these types of injurious speech. Anxious about the possibility that scolds could easily turn into witches, he issued a stern warning in his pamphlet "to many whose tongues are too frequent in these abhominable sinnes."
In chapter 4 I discuss the representations of witch-speak in pamphlets borrowing from early modern legalese as a high-profile crime defying patriarchal, Christian, and class hierarchies—what psychoanalytic critics refer to as the Law of the Father. Here and in the next chapter I analyze the portrayal, in religious and legal discourse, respectively, of the threat that contentious speech, usually labeled scolding, presented to the Law of the Father. For the early moderns, scolding was not mere outspokenness, forwardness, or incivility. A term more vehemently negative than in contemporary usage, it entailed habitual contentiousness and an assault on the peace of the neighborhood. In scolding, rhetorical aggressiveness was often hard to distinguish from physical aggressiveness. As Martin Ingram reminds us, the verb and especially the noun scold had "strong legal connotations." The "common scold" (referenced in court documents as communis scolde, communis rixatrix, perturbatrix pacis, garrulatrix, obiurgatrix, calumniatrix) was a technical legal term whose first record in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated 1467. Incidentally this first written record concerns a defendant named, like Shakespeare's "shrew," Katherine.
Although, to use today's legal concepts, scolding could be a tort (an interpersonal offense) or a crime (an offense against the public), clerical as well as legal authorities of the era tended to view it as a crime, emphasizing its capacity to escalate to significant public proportions. In the opening part of the "Homelie agaynst Contencion and Braulynge," endorsed by the Tudor government, scolding and brawling are said to be more harmful than theft, for "a thief hurteth but him from whom he stealeth, but he that hath an evill tongue troubleth al the towne where he dwelleth, and sometime the whole countrey. And a raylinge tongue is a pestilence so full of contagion that Sainct Paule willeth Christian men to forbear the company of suche and neyther to eate nor drynke with theim." By the closing part of the homily "contencious wordes" transcend local contexts and become "muche hurtefull to the societie of a common wealthe" as a whole—a volatility that the emblem literature of the era also pointed out (fig. 2). The homily's language of contagion and the emphasis on the threat to the polity at large indicate that clerical authorities (and likely the royal court) saw contentious speech in general and scolding in particular as a matter of dire public significance.
Semantics
Somewhat surprisingly the verbal phenomenon in such desperate need of chastisement and ordering lacks descriptive precision in these texts. More interested in the broad-stroke picture of the "evilfavoredness and deformitie" of unruly speech, authors of sermons and religious treatises pay scant attention to the specific "woordes of contencion" favored by parishioners; nor do they comment on the significance of these words or their figurative patterns. The sermon writers in particular may have been wary of explicitly unraveling fiery speech in texts that were themselves meant for impassioned oral delivery. Instead they describe contentious speech in terms of absence. Contrasting it to fervent preaching, Perkins calls it "rotten speach," "talke as is voyd of grace, which is the heart & pith of our speach." He goes on to emphasize its lack in the divine graces "which are to shewe forth in our communication, ... Wisdome, Truth, Reverence, Modestie, Meeknesse, Sobrietie in judgement, Urbanitie, Fidelitie, care of others good name." Such portrayal of the semantic content of contentious speech renders it impossible or at least unworthy to discuss, while clearly distinguishing it from the rhetorical aggressiveness of the ministers themselves. But it may also point to an important quality of contentious speech: its association with voice rather than sign, action rather than meaning.
"Hot" and "Sharp" Voices
The divines readily elaborate on the aural matter of contentious speech. Hugh Latimer's terms of choice in describing it in the "Homelie against Contencion and Braulynge" are "hot" and "sharp." Early modern audiences of the homily would have surmised that hot words were made up of hot breath. Hot words thus both indicated a thermal imbalance in the speaker's body and contributed to this imbalance. This in turn signaled the speaker's inability to regulate the body humors, a point relevant to the discussion of the gendering capacity of contentious speech discussed below. "Stirred but with one litle woorde," Latimer exclaims, "how we fume, rage, stampe and stare like mad men." In addition to noting the brawlers' uncontrollable impulsivity, he points out the sharpness, or the malicious intent, of their speech. Contentious words, "more sharpe then any two edged swoorde," are clearly capable of wielding destruction. Yet in considering these descriptors, we should entertain the likelihood that in an age much more attentive to sound than ours, hot and sharp also denoted the manner of enunciation: explosive, shrill, projective. Such manner is the opposite of the "meeknes and gentleness" desired in civil communication, of the "soft" answers said to smother the fire of angry repartees in Perkins's treatise. In contrast, words abruptly propelled by heated breath travel far, do not dissipate in a noisy environment, and reliably penetrate their addressee's ear. To an early modern mind, then, describing the sounds of contentious speech as hot and sharp could have gone hand in hand with viewing them as material vehicles for destruction, set into motion by an abrupt and uncontrollable discharge of choler through the speaker's breath.
The physical force of this discharge is suggested when words are said to have been spewed or sputtered out like venom, the breath mingled with saliva heavy with the words' malice. We get a sense of the velocity of such liquefied speech from Latimer's description of an imagined response to it: "Shall I be such ydiot and diserde to suffer every man to ... spewe out al their venyme against me at their pleasure?" Adams, in his sermon, is at once more metaphoric and more literal when he describes the trajectories of poisonous words. They are said to poison their speakers first, for "they have speckled souls. Secondly, They sputter their venime abroad, and besputtle others: no beast can cast his poyson so farre. Thirdly, Yea, they would ... poison Gods most sacred and feared name." Not limited to one direction, explosive words are imagined here as scattering far and wide like shrapnel, their destructive potential widely dispersed. It is worth noting too that while these words are presumably propelled by the choleric heat of their speaker's breath—the light element associated with masculinity in the humoral physiology of the era—they are heavy with moisture, the heavy humor of female bodies. Acoustically, then, these descriptions render contentious words not so much feminine but rather as dually gendered.
They are also described as rash and rapid words, "multiplied" by their speakers. Enunciation-wise such multiplication entails short, machine-gun-like breath spurts, to use another metaphor from modern warfare. Considering the "most proper places" for evil tongue action—"Alehouses, Tavernes, Play-houses, Bake-Houses, Wooll lofts, and Gossip meetings," all of them noisy environments with reflective walls—rapid and forceful enunciation likely produced a dinging echo effect, adding to the overwhelming aural effect of contentious speech.
The loudness of this speech is another quality noted with disapproval by the divines. Adams calls the actions of unruly tongues "roarings," and Abernethy compares it to the barking of city dogs, a truly clamorous sound in an age before the pervasive machine noises ushered in by the Industrial Revolution. Sounds of such volume have the capacity for carrying far. Indeed Adams envisions the "roarings" as reaching "the battlements of heaven" and shaking them, only to "waken an incensed God to judgement." Echoing the prophesies of Zechariah and Jeremiah, he renders the punitive divine counterpart of contentious human "roarings" as proportionate in volume: "There is a curse that goeth foorth, and it shall enter into the house of the swearer, and not onely cut him off, but consume his house with the timber, and the stones of it." God's curse is of a magnitude that shatters timber and stone, and its main material difference from human roarings appears to be the precision of its destructive force.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Words Like Daggers by Kirilka Stavreva. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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