The beauties of the land: Bale's books, Aske's abbeys, and the aesthetics of nationhood.

   "That's an ill phrase, a vile phrase, 'beautified' is a vile phrase."
   --Hamlet, 2.2.111-12

What is the place of beauty in the life of the nation, and of nationalist thought? What makes a nation aesthetically pleasing, and does it matter whether it happens to be so or not? These questions have been under debate for several centuries. Lamenting the iconoclasm of the French Revolution, and in particular the insults heaped on France's queen, Edmund Burke insisted in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) that "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely." Thomas Paine's riposte in The Rights of Man (1791) is memorable for its bitter wit: "he pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird." (1) As in so many matters, Burke and Paine define the terms of a controversy that has persisted into the present day.

Nationalists the world over have come down firmly on Burke's side of the question. A host of patriotic songs, from "America the Beautiful" to "O Lovely Zimbabwe," testify to the central place of the aesthetic in nationalist thought and feeling. (2) Scholars of nationalism, on the other hand, have tended to follow Paine in minimizing or dismissing the question of beauty. Lists of the features fundamental to nations (myths of origin, common laws, a public culture) rarely if ever make mention of aesthetic appeal. (3) The grounds for this indifference are implicit in Paine's chosen metaphor. Like "plumage," beauty is seen as something merely external, as opposed to the "meat" of the matter. Like the feathers on a fashionable hat, it is regarded as too frivolous (and perhaps too feminine) to merit serious consideration. And, like a handful of down, it is hard to grasp--resistant to analysis, impervious to refutation. (One might with effort convince a nationalist that he was misinformed about Bannockburn or the Treaty of Trieste, but one could hardly hope to prove him wrong in his idea of the beautiful.) Yet, whatever our larger sympathies with Paine, it must be apparent that in this case Burke's insight is too important to belittle or ignore. Given the many and notorious failings of nationalism on a practical level, it is questionable whether it would have survived so long as an ideology, were it not for the fact that nations--all of them--are enduringly, achingly beautiful.

The loveliness of nations had been noticed long before the advent of Edmund Burke. A debate crucial to the English Reformation centered on what constituted the beauties of the land. Robert Aske (ca. 1500-37), leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace, applied the phrase "the beauties of this realm" to the abbeys and monasteries he fought heroically and unsuccessfully to save. On the opposing side, the Protestant polemicist John Bale (1495-1563) argued that the ancient manuscripts previously hidden in monastic libraries were the true "beauty of our nation." These differing aesthetic judgments spring from fundamentally opposed imaginings of the land. As perhaps the first Englishman to mourn the passing of the Middle Ages, Aske's concept of beauty is embedded in a vision of timeless feudal harmony. Bale, by contrast, reveals how a national community can be born out of shared experiences of disruption, loss, and nostalgia. While responding in complex ways to Petrarchan aesthetics, Bale's vision is also in some respects arrestingly modern. Discovering what beauty meant to "Bilious Bale" may also shed light on the role of the aesthetic in later forms of nationalism.

1. ASKE'S ABBEYS: "THE BEAUTIES OF THIS REALM"

The spark that would ignite the greatest rebellion of the Tudor era was lit by a few men who wanted to hold on to their beautiful things. Since the late fifteenth century, the prosperous artisans of Louth had spared no effort or expense to add luster to their parish church. In the 1530s, the church's beauties included a magnificent spire raised in the previous generation, of almost 300 feet, no fewer than four silver crosses behind which the townsfolk marched proudly in procession, and--the most recent acquisition--a costly new organ. (4) In the early autumn of 1536, the people of Louth were agitated by alarming rumors that the king was planning to confiscate church ornaments, and even to pull down many parish churches. On Sunday, 1 October, they rose in arms to defend their church from despoilment. The rising spread quickly through much of Lincolnshire. By 7 October, Lincoln had been taken by the rebels, whose forces had swelled to 20,000 men. Although the Lincolnshire movement dissipated a few days later, word of the revolt had by then spread north to Yorkshire, where other insurgents launched what would become the Pilgrimage of Grace.

In Yorkshire, the movement quickly fell under the military and ideological leadership of the lawyer Robert Aske; it was he who gave the Pilgrimage its name and devised the oath all Pilgrims were to swear. The city of York surrendered to Aske's forces without resistance on 16 October. By the end of the month, with allied or parallel insurgencies erupting in Richmondshire, Durham, Cumberland, and Northumberland, most of the north of England was in the hands of the rebels. Unable in the short term to respond militarily, Henry VIII agreed to a truce, which held for several months. In December, Aske and his fellow leaders issued their manifesto, the "Pontefract Articles," in which they demanded, among other things, the stamping out of Luther's heresies, the recognition of the pope as head of the church, punishment of Thomas Cromwell and other corrupt royal councillors, and "to have the abbeys suppressed to be restored unto their houses, lands, and goods." (5) Still biding his time, the king offered the rebels some minor concessions, and a universal free pardon.

Historians remain divided over both the nature and causes of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Was it a spontaneous and genuinely popular rebellion, or the fruit of a conspiracy hatched by members of the northern nobility whose faction was out of favor at court? Were the motives of the rebels primarily religious or economic? The Pilgrimage undoubtedly presents a complex picture. (6) But while we can only guess at the motives and feelings of the majority of Pilgrims, we can describe with some clarity those of their captain, Robert Aske. For Aske, no issue took precedence over that of the defense of the monasteries threatened with dissolution. The principles that impelled Aske to lead a desperate fight to save the monasteries were, on a deep level, aesthetic.

In the spring of 1537, Henry VIII capitalized on a few isolated outbreaks of fresh rebellion to cancel the truce and arrest the ringleaders. But, having broken his word and the Pilgrimage of Grace at one blow, he did not rush to execute the movement's leaders. First he wanted their opinions. Under the direction of Henry's chief minister Thomas Cromwell (ca. 1485-1540), Aske and his associates were subjected to long days of meticulously recorded interrogation. Who was responsible for spreading rumors that the churches would be stripped of their goods, and but one parish church within seven miles left standing? Where, when, and upon what occasion was Aske made captain of the commons in Yorkshire? Was he chosen because he was the initiator of the rebellion, or merely the most enthusiastic once it had begun? Which of the king's acts had Aske and the rebels resented ("grudged against"), and why? (7)

With little hope of preserving his own life, Aske was determined to put the best case possible for the Pilgrimage in written answers which, he must have hoped, might yet have some influence on the king. (8) In response to the twenty-third article, regarding the king's acts, Aske asserted that he and "the holl contrey" grudged against the dissolution of the abbeys of the north by the Act for the Suppression of the Smaller Monasteries of 1536 (561). Aske's ensuing defense of the abbeys is impassioned and occasionally incoherent, but the arguments are well-rehearsed, and they are deployed for maximum effect. Aske was a lawyer before he became a rebel, and he was careful in constructing his last case.

Aske's strategy in responding to Cromwell's query is to emphasize first the spiritual and then the economic importance of the abbeys, without losing sight of the ways in which these are intertwined:

  [F]urst, to the statut of subpressions, he dyd gruge ayenst the same
  and so did al the holl contrey, because the abbeys in the north
  partes gaf great almons to pour men and laudable servyd God; in wich
  partes of lait dais they had but smal comforth by gostly teching. And
  by occasion of the said suppression the devyn seruice of the almightie
  God is much minished, great nombre of messes unsaid ... the temple of
  God russed and pulled down, the ornamentes and releques of the church
  of God unreverent used, the townes [tombs] and sepulcres of honorable
  and noble men pulled down and sold, non hospitalite now in thos places
  kept, but the fermers for the most parte lettes and taverns out the
  fermes of the same houses to other fermers, for lucre and advauntage
  to them selfes. And the profites of thies abbeys yerley goith out of
  the contrey to the Kinges highnes.... Also diverse and many of the
  said abbeys wer in the montaignes and desert places wher the peple be
  rud of condyccions and not well taught the law of God, and when the
  said abbeys stud, the said peple not only had worldly refresshing in
  ther bodies but also sperituall refuge ... and many ther tenauntes wer
  ther feed servaundes to them, and servyng men, well socored by abbeys:
  and now not only theis tenants and servauntes wantes refresshing ther,
  both of meat, cloth and wages, and knowith not now wher to have any
  liffing, but also strangers and baggers of corne as betwix Yorkshir,
  Lancashir, Kendall, Westmoreland and the bischopreke.... [W]herefore
  the said statut of subpression was greatly to the decay of the comyn
  welth of that contrei, and al those partes of al degreys greatly
  groged ayenst the same, and yet doth, ther dewtie of allegieance
  alwais savyd. (561-62)

Aske depicts the consequences of the dissolution in terms of spiritual and material deprivation. Souls and stomachs have suffered in equal measure. Only once these points have been thoroughly established does Aske introduce a new and different argument: "Also the abbeys was on of the bewties of this realme to al men and strangers passing threw the same" (562).

Up to this point Aske has been speaking to his interrogators, to Cromwell, and, through Cromwell, to the king. Now, suddenly, he speaks in terms that seem to resonate down the ages, demanding our sympathy and agreement. Almost five centuries after their dissolution, the shells of the great English and Welsh abbeys still rank very high among the beauties of the realm; they attract the gaze not only of natives but of millions of strangers--or tourists--passing through the land. There is, of course, a painful irony in this, for the beauty discerned today at a Fountains or a Rievaulx depends in large part on the very conditions Aske gave his life to forestall. Today, these sites offer the stranger the melancholy "pleasure of ruins"--to quote the title of Rose Macaulay's 1953 book--a pleasure bound up with the isolation and contemplative silence which are increasingly rare commodities. For Aske, on the other hand, the abbeys were hubs of life and hospitality, a refuge from isolation in "the montaignes and desert places." The beauty he took up arms to defend did not consist in architecture only, but in divine service and sacred song, in the brightness and fascination of "ornamentes and releques," in simple bustle and prosperity. Aske's abbeys would have stimulated all of the five senses, not only, as today, the eyes alone.

Yet in spite of this strange and ironic reversal, there remains at least one feeling or perception common to the sixteenth-century Pilgrim of Grace and the modern tourist. Today, as then, the beauty of the religious houses seems peculiarly national: they are still "beauties of this realm." The phrase is particularly striking as used by Aske, for up to this point his concern has been wholly with the "country" (Yorkshire) or more generally with "the north parts." His only reference to a wider realm has been to complain that the rents on monastic lands now "goith out of the contrey to the Kinges highnes" (561). Suddenly, with the invocation of beauty, Aske's horizons enlarge.

Aske's vision of the abbeys was, to some extent, a highly personal one. Other participants in the Pilgrimage would probably not have ranked the suppression of the smaller monasteries so highly among its causes. (9) As for Aske's aesthetic sentiments, they appear to find no echo in the recorded testimony of other Pilgrims. (10) But while Aske may have had a special enthusiasm for the abbeys, he never saw their plight in isolation from the other traumatic events of the 1530s; and though he laid stress on their beauty, the terms of his answer make it clear that his vision was not narrowly aesthetic. His difference from his fellows was perhaps more a matter of emphasis and expression than of ideology. When Aske spoke of "beauties," he had in mind a whole pattern of social and national life, which he together with thousands of others had risked everything to defend.

In his response to the twenty-third article, Aske carefully positions the abbeys within an intricately patterned world, structured by cycles in space and time. Interspersed in the "mountaignes and desert places," the abbeys bring a human design to an otherwise hostile and formless landscape. They are attuned to the reliable rhythms of the year, both liturgical and agricultural (offering succor to itinerant "baggers of corne"), and are also bound up with the longer cycles of generations, housing the "sepulcres of honorable and noble men," ensuring that the sons and daughters of the gentry are "brought up in vertuee" (562), and guarding "mony left to the usses of infantes" (562). Aske concludes his defense by pointing out how the beauties of the realm help maintain its very shape, preserving sea walls, bridges, highways, and "such other thinges for the comyn welth" (562). Aske's recourse to the aesthetic occurs at the pivotal moment in which he shifts from the regional to the national, and from the yearly cycles of masses and migrating labor to the greater historical patterns of human generations and the shape of the land itself. The beauty of the abbeys is intimately bound up with their role in preserving these cycles, and providing the links between one and another. They are keys to the land's unchanging pattern, and it is for this reason that they must be recognized as not only beautiful in themselves, but as beauties of the realm.

Aske's intensely ideological answer to Cromwell's question amounts to an ideal vision of late-feudal agrarian society with all its traditions and customary rights. One fundamental feature of this vision is uniformity across historical time; society in Yorkshire is structured as it always has been and as, were it not for the suppression of the abbeys, it would always be. Equally fundamental to this vision, however, is an understanding of time as highly variegated with respect to the calendrical year. Inside the abbeys, the religious follow the pattern of the liturgical calendar; outside, agricultural laborers migrate with the changing seasons "betwix Yorkshir, Lancashir, Kendall, Westmoreland and the bischopreke" (561). As this varied group of place names indicates, this late-feudal world was also highly variegated with respect to space. The physical topography of the north, with its "montaignes and desert places," was overlaid with a complex tapestry of overlapping and incommensurate jurisdictions: crown lands, monastic estates, and lordships; manors, parishes, and wapentakes; commons, wastes, and forests; boroughs, honors, and liberties. (11) Yorkshire itself was for some purposes a single county, for others three autonomous Ridings; to the north, the "bischopreke" of Durham had long possessed the unique status of a county palatine ruled by a prince bishop.

Aske saw himself as defending not only the smaller religious houses, but the whole world he describes in his answer. In the mid-1530s that world had come under an unprecedented attack coordinated by the man who was now his chief interrogator, Thomas Cromwell. The traditional religious calendar had been subjected to rationalization with the elimination of many holidays, especially in the harvest season; one particularly offensive order required all churches to celebrate their patronal festivals on the same day, 1 October. (12) On a grander scale, Cromwell had embarked on the rationalization of national space, with the aim of ensuring that the king's writ ran evenly throughout his dominions. In 1536, the same year that saw the suppression of the smaller religious houses, the first act of union between England and Wales was passed; closer to the scene of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the archbishop of York's liberties of Beverley, Ripon, and York were eliminated, and the county palatine of Durham was stripped of its special status, with judicial supremacy passing from the bishop to the king. The ultimate tendency of Cromwell's reforms was the transformation of his master's dominions into a realm where the state's sovereignty would be, in the words of Benedict Anderson, "fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimeter of a legally demarcated territory"--in Wales as it was in Durham, in Dublin as it was in Calais. (13) A consequence of these transformations would be the abolition of a host of local customary rights upon which English people of all classes had been able to rely for as long as local memory could recall. It is little wonder that, as Aske had sought to warn Henry VIII months before, "ther is non erthly man so evill belevyd as the said Lord Cromwell is with the comyns." (14)

Most of Cromwell's reforms were undertaken piecemeal, in opportunistic response to contingent pressures and events, and perhaps with no grander ends in view than to fill the royal coffers and secure his master's political and religious supremacy. Yet they did not lack for ideological underpinnings. As its titular wording suggests, Cromwell's 1536 Act for Recontinuing of Certain Liberties and Franchises Heretofore Taken From the Crown rested on a radical claim about the structure and meaning of British history. It is a claim we find reiterated throughout the radical legislation of the mid-1530s invoked to justify everything from the rejection of Rome's authority to the annexation of Wales. The work of the titles and preambles to these parliamentary acts is to present apparent innovation as pious restoration. What was supposedly being restored was the political and religious order of an imperial Britain in the early Christian era, before the arrival of pagan invaders and papal emissaries. Since then, the claim went, the realm had languished in a state of ever-deepening corruption, awaiting its rescue by a Tudor king. (15) If the people had in the meantime come to regard certain forms of corruption as "customary," it was time they were taught to see with better eyes.

By 1537, Aske's feudal vision of the realm as variegated over space and the calendrical year but uniform across historical time was thus open to challenge from a vision which held the realm to be opposite in each respect. The Cromwellian reforms hold the seeds of a worldview that is familiarly modern: one in which there is no fundamental (in the sense of being institutionally recognized) difference between one part of the nation and another, or between February and October, but in which change is the constant condition of the present, and the past is a foreign country. (16) It would, of course, be absurd to trace the origins of modernity to the machinations of a Thomas Cromwell. In terms of causes, the changes which gathered pace in England from this point onward probably had less to do with the rationalization of Tudor governance than with that new breed of agricultural entrepreneur noticed by Aske, who "lettes and taverns out the fermes of the same [monastic] houses to other fermers, for lucre and advauntage to them selfes." What Aske was bearing dismayed witness to was, in Robert Brenner's terms, the "newly emerging tripartite capitalist hierarchy of commercial landlord, capitalist tenant and hired wage labourer." (17) The triumph of this new hierarchy would transform far more than the workings of the rural economy: "As the individualist farmer was metamorphosed from a covetous canker on the body politic into a godly man of thrift and industry, the meaning of agrarian England shifted accordingly from a site of manorial community toward a modern landscape of capitalist enterprise." (18)

And yet, having said all this, it remains strangely difficult to let the much-maligned Thomas Cromwell entirely off the hook. It was he, after all, who insisted that the assets of dissolved monasteries should pass directly to the crown, a policy that led inevitably to the flooding of the Tudor land market, greatly accelerating the transformation of the English agrarian economy. (19) Although he can hardly have foreseen all the consequences, we may well agree with A. G. Dickens that "Cromwell was a Pygmalion" whose innovations somehow took on a life of their own. (20) As I shall argue in the next section, the new conception of the nation that emerged in the wake of the Cromwellian reforms required a new relationship to national beauty, a relationship oddly reminiscent of that between Pygmalion and his statue.

2. BALE'S BOOKS: "THE BEAUTY OF OUR NATION"

As Dom David Knowles concluded in his history of the monasteries, "the loss to what may be called the aesthetic capital of the nation was very great." (21) In the long run, as I have suggested, that loss seems to have been redeemed, and the abbeys are once again the beauties of the realm. Yet this transformation did not occur overnight. For at least a century after the dissolution, almost no one saw anything beautiful or sublime in the shattered husks of the religious houses. To succeeding generations they must have appeared "like the gashes in an urban landscape continuing long after the Second World War." (22) For the royalist poet Sir John Denham (1615-69), in the middle of the seventeenth century, the ruins of Chertsey Abbey seen from Cooper's Hill remained "dismal heaps," hideous witnesses to a deed of wanton destruction. (23) The immediate effect of the dissolution, then, was to make England appear a much uglier place. The image of the broken monasteries must have flashed before the minds of many who heard Shakespeare's John of Gaunt lament, "That England that was wont to conquer others / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself." (24)

We need not imagine that those involved in the destruction of the abbeys were somehow blind to their beauty. In an 8 June 1537 letter to Cromwell, Sir Arthur Darcy (ca. 1505-61), a participant in the suppression of Jervaulx, cast an admiring and frankly covetous eye over "one of the fairest churches that I have ever seen, fair meadows, and a river running by it"; what especially attracted Darcy's admiration was the lead-covered roof which, needless to say, was swiftly stripped. (25) Whether his role in the dismantling of this fair place caused Darcy any disquiet we do not know; but there is no doubt that the loss in national beauty weighed heavy on the minds of some of the chief supporters of the dissolution. The humanist Thomas Starkey (ca. 1495-1538) favored the suppression of the smaller houses for the good of the commonwealth, but some months before the outbreak of the Pilgrimage he issued a strikingly prescient warning to the king: "pity it were that so much fair housing and goodly building ... should be let fall to ruin and decay, whereby our country might appear so to be defaced as [if] it had been lately overrun with enemies in time of war." (26) But neither a Starkey nor an Aske could stand in the way of the political juggernaut that--almost accidentally--reduced the ancient beauties of the realm to ruins in a remarkably short space of time. As the antiquarian William Lambarde (ca. 1536-1601) wrote of Canterbury, the monasteries "came soudenly from great wealth, multitude of inhabitaunts, and beautiful buildings, to extreme povertie, nakednes, and decay." (27) It was an aesthetic loss from which there appeared to be no hope of recovery--unless, that is, "the beauties of the realm" could somehow be rediscovered elsewhere, safe from the catastrophe that had blighted the realm's physical landscape.

In the years before the suppression began, one of the "strangers passing through" the religious houses of north and south was the great antiquarian and topographer John Leland (ca. 1506-52). He had received his warrant from the king in 1533 "to peruse and dylygentlye to searche all the lybraryes of monasteryes and collegies of thys ... noble realme, to the entent that the monumentes of auncyent wryters ... myghte be brought out of deadly darkenesse to lyvelye lyght." (28) Leland visited more than 100 libraries, cataloguing their contents and often bringing ancient writers "to light" by appropriating them for the royal library, or his own. He seems to have been genuinely seduced by the vision of Henry VIII as an enlightened monarch bent on restoring the nation to its ancient and imperial glory. He promised his king "I trust so to open this wyndow, that the lyght shall be seane ... by the space of a whole thousand yeares stopped up, and the old glory of your renoumed Britaine to reflorish through the worlde." (29)

But while Leland was trying to open the window, others were tearing down the walls. With the dissolution underway, his task became a hopeless race against time. No official provision was made to safeguard the contents of the monastic libraries. Manuscripts were robbed or bought up for use as rags, wrapping, or toilet paper. Some were simply cast to the winds; as Dr. Richard Layton (ca. 1500-44), one of those appointed by Cromwell to conduct "visitations" of the religious houses in 1535-36, exultingly reported to his master, "the second time we came to New College after we had declared your injunctions, we found all the great quadrant court full of the leaves of Dun [Duns Scotus, the thirteenth-century scholastic], the wind blowing them into every corner." (30)

In the midst of this continuing catastrophe, Leland preserved what he could, and devoted himself to his commentaries on British writers, compiling nearly six hundred entries. And, in the late 1540s, he went insane--perhaps, as Anthony a Wood thought, because of the impossibility of the task he had set himself, and because "at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, he saw with very great pity what havoc was made of ancient monuments of learning." (31) The task of carrying forward Leland's many unfinished projects was left largely to John Bale, the dramatist, antiquary, and famously vituperative enemy of monks and monasteries. Bale was no stranger to the insides of monastic libraries. In his twenty years as a Carmelite friar he had compiled a history of the order, consulting libraries across England and France. Now, as Leland's literary executor, Bale set about expanding the catalogue of British writers, incorporating numerous legendary figures. (32) He also put into print Leland's progress report of 1546, the "New Year's Gift" to Henry VIII. Published in 1549 as The Laboryouse Journey and Serche of Johan Leylande, for Englandes Antiquitees, the book includes an introduction, conclusion, and frequent interpolations by Bale, all devoted to stressing the vital necessity of saving England's bibliographical heritage.

Convincing his readers to place a value on the books once housed in monastic libraries presented Bale with a tricky task. He was genuinely horrified by the fate suffered by so many volumes in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution:

  A greate nombre of them whych purchased those superstycyouse mansyons,
  reserved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr jakes, some to
  scoure theyr candelstyckes, and some to rubbe their bootes. Some they
  solde to the grossers and sope sellers, and some they sent over see to
  the bokebynders, not in small nombre, but at tymes whole shyppes full,
  to the wonderynge of the foren nacyons. (33)

The market economy which took over in the wake of the desacralization of monastic property had left nothing exempt from commodification and recognized no form of value beyond immediate practical utility. Yet, appalled as he was by this spectacle, Bale himself had played a leading role in demystifying monastic life and denouncing the superstitious veneration of objects. He now found himself caught, as it were, between the monks and the soapsellers, between two opposing and equally intolerable ways of valuing manuscripts. To save his beloved books, Bale had to reinvest them with a form of value distinct from both the idols of the monastery and those of the marketplace. This value turns out to be aesthetic value.

Not once, but several times in The Laboryouse Journey, Bale employs a phrase that hauntingly echoes Robert Aske's description of the abbeys as "one of the beauties of this realm." But he refers not to the buildings themselves, but to the books once housed within their walls. For Bale, in other words, the destruction of the supposed beauties of the realm has brought to light the true beauties of the realm. These manuscripts are variously described as "precyouse antiquytees, whych are the great bewtie of our lande" (sign. E7v), and "the landes antiquitees whyche are a most syngulare bewtye in every nacyon" (sign. B8v). The pillaging of the libraries "is hyghly to be lamented of all them that hath a naturall love to their contrey, eyther yet to lerned antiquyte, whyche is a moste syngular bewty to the same" (sign. A7v). What has survived must be preserved and published; Bale calls on every nobleman to finance the printing of an ancient manuscript, for "a more notable poynt of nobylyte can ye not shewe, than in suche sort to bewtifie your contrey" (sign. B2v). Likewise, "lete one ryche merchaunt brynge one worthye worke of an auncyent wryter to lyght, and another put forth another, to the bewtie of our nacyon." (34)

It is striking to find so-called "bilious" Bale, among the coarsest and most brutal of Protestant controversialists, writing so insistently of beauty. This is not to say that he writes of it in a beautiful manner. As Polonius says, "that's an ill phrase, a vile phrase, 'beautified' is a vile phrase." (35) Vile or not, the phrase was in 1549 a relatively newfangled one--the first recorded instance of "beautify" in the Oxford English Dictionary dates only from 1526--and this too is something of a surprise in a work by Bale, known for his "old and rude English." (36) His incessant repetition of this wooden, if not vile, phrase suggests that, however alien to his own style, the beautiful is central to his understanding of antiquity, and of the nation. But what does he mean by "beauty" and "to beautify"?

There is no difficulty in specifying what he does not mean. Bale is not celebrating the beauty of illuminated manuscripts as art objects; he repeatedly insists on the necessity of having these works printed, and he seems to have the widest and cheapest dissemination in mind. Nor is he thinking of the beauty and grace of literary language. While normally careful to harmonize his project with Leland's, he rejects Leland's call for the chronicles to be revised and embellished with humanist eloquence, preferring that they "apere fyrst of all in their owne simplycyte or native colours without bewtie of speche" (sign. C3v). (37) Whatever the beauty of ancient manuscripts may be, it has nothing to do with either the physical pages themselves or the prose style of the words written upon them.

Bale's preferred method of defining and praising the beautiful is to contrast it with its opposite, which is not sheer ugliness so much as it is false and transient beauty. He is in his element--and at his most bilious--when he denounces the sins and vanities, the "belly bankettes and table tryumphes" (sign. B2r) which distract the English from contemplation of their own past. He begs his countrymen to belie their reputation abroad: "I have hearde it amonge straungers reported, that Englysh men are fryndely in thinges which lasteth not, as in bankettes and late suppers" (sign. F8v). To this spiritual distaste for worldly luxuries, Bale adds the economic patriotism of an Edwardian commonwealth-man:

  We sende to other nacyons to have their commodytees, and all is to
  lyttle to feade our filthye fleshe. But the syngular commodytees
  within our owne realme, we abhorre and throwe fourth as most vyle
  noysome matter. Avydyously we drynke the wines of other landes, we bye
  up their frutes and spyces, yea we consume in apparell their silkes
  and their velvettes. But alas our owne noble monumentes and precyous
  Antiquytees, which are the great bewtie of our lande, we as little
  regard as the parynges of our nayles. (38)

Here the beauties of the land are defined equally against all that is fleeting and all that is foreign.

Yet to qualify as a "bewtie of our lande" requires more than a record of durability and a domestic origin. Bale's notion of national beauty also stands opposed to that part of the nation that is visibly manifest in landscape and in buildings. (39) Where Robert Aske had seen "the beauties of this realm," Bale recognizes only "thinges which lasteth not." No doubt with the architectural devastation of the dissolution in mind, he cautions his readers against placing faith in built structures, however ancient: "neyther the labyrinth of Dedalus, nor yet the great pyllers of Hercules, neyther yet here in England the Stoneheng of Salysbury playne" (sign. F7v) can preserve fame as reliably as a book. Bale's impatient dismissal of the physical nation is all the more striking in that he is required to print and comment upon Leland's plans to produce a topographical description of England. Bale's tone is brisk and businesslike on the subject of Leland's Itinerary: such a tome would be "profytable" to men in "their necessary affayres" (sign. D5r). There is no suggestion that either the work or the land it describes could qualify as beautiful. But the very moment the subject turns from contemporary to antiquarian geography, Bale returns eagerly to the aesthetic: "for the syngular bewtye of Englande, he calleth agayne to lyvely memory, the auncyent names of cyties, townes, castelles, hylles, havens, ryvers, and suche lyke, which have bene longe buryed in oblivion" (signs. E7v-D8r).

If we take Bale at his word, it appears that nothing that is to be seen in England, no building, hill, or haven, ranks as a thing of beauty. Beauty resides instead only in their long-disused names. The beauty of London, for instance, is not to be found in its streets, bridges, and towers, but rather in its ancient name of Troynovant. This radical approach reveals the extent to which Bale's vision of the nation is diametrically opposed to Robert Aske's. For Bale, the nation is an entity uniform across physical space. Recognizing the tendency of Cromwell's reforms (perhaps even more clearly than did Cromwell himself), Bale writes as if the national territory were not only jurisdictionally homogenous, but effectively (and ideally) featureless and flat. To depart from this stance and recognize the possibility of topographical beauty would be to locate beauty in a part rather than in the whole, and thus to invite the confusion of national and regional loyalties. (40) (The danger of this would have been particularly apparent in 1549, when the Western Rising in Devon and Cornwall, sparked by an explosive mixture of religious and regional grievances, reinforced the lessons of the Pilgrimage of Grace.) Even Leland's Itinerary would seem to be useful primarily in that it allows travelers and merchants to anticipate and circumvent the obstacles posed by inconveniently variegated topography, and so to traverse the nation as if it were indeed a uniformly flat space.

In contrast to his effective leveling of topography, and in further opposition to the ideological vision of Robert Aske, Bale presents the nation as highly differentiated across historical time. Of all Tudor reformers, Bale was the most devoted to the exhaustive periodization of British history, subdividing the standard Reformation narrative (purity-corruption-regeneration) into a sequence of distinct ages. Already in the first part of The Actes of English Votaryes (1546), Bale had divided the history of the English clergy into four periods whose names are suggestive of both landscape and architecture--"rising, building, holdynge, and falling." (41) In his celebration of Leland's "journey," Bale seems determined to substitute chronological for topographical terrain, timescape for landscape.

In his rapturous response to the revival of moribund topographical nomenclature, Bale deploys a phrase which offers a further key to his aesthetic ideology. Beauty, he makes clear, is not a property inherent in the disused names themselves, but rather a consequence of their being summoned to "lively memory." Variations on this phrase recur throughout the text, as when Bale terms antiquities "lyvelye memoryalles of our nacyon" (sign. A7v). The peculiar "liveliness" of these memorials is a crucial feature. For when Bale describes an ancient text as "lively" he does not mean that it has a vigorous style or an action-packed plot. He is using the word in its most literal sense: "lifelike."

That the beauty of representations consists in their truth to nature, their lifelikeness, is an ancient notion. (42) It is epitomized in Pliny's famous story of the painter Zeuxis, who depicted grapes so realistically that birds came to feed on them, and who then lamented that the boy he had painted was not lifelike enough to scare the birds away. (43) The long-lost art of lively representation was restored at the dawn of the Renaissance by Giotto (ca. 1266-1337)--that, at least, was the story the Renaissance liked to tell about itself. As the fourteenth-century Florentine Filippo Villani (fl. 1364-1404) wrote of Giotto in De origine civitatis Florentiae et eiusdem famosis civibus (1381-82), "images formed by his brush agree so well with the lineaments of nature as to seem to the beholder to live and breathe; and his pictures appear to perform actions and movements so exactly as to seem from a little way off actually speaking, weeping, rejoicing, and doing other things, not without pleasure for him who beholds." (44) The language employed to describe the pleasure derived from Giotto is the same as that applied in this period to the art of antiquity. Thus the Byzantine humanist Manuel Chrysoloras (1350-1415), in a letter to Emperor John VIII Paleologue (ca. 1411), marveled at the figures depicted in relief "as if really alive" on Roman triumphal arches: "one seems to see a real man, horse, city or army ... and real people captured or fleeing, laughing, weeping, excited or angry." (45)

Francesco Petrarch (1304-74) also saw ancient Romans moving and speaking "as if really alive." He saw them not on triumphal arches, however, but in his mind's eye, stirred by the sad spectacle of Rome's crumbling ruins, as in his letter to Giovanni Colonna: "here was the palace of Evander ... here the cave of Cacus, there the famous she-wolf." (46) The vestiges of ancient greatness fill Petrarch with an almost intolerable longing to recapture the past, to make the Rome that is lost forever live again. Similarly, in Mantua he searches for signs of the poet Virgil: "I wonder by what path in your wanderings you sought the unfrequented glades, through what meadows you were wont to stroll, what river shore you pursued.... Such sights bring you vividly to my eyes." (47) It is not the landscape itself which succeeds in conjuring the image of Virgil, but rather the poet's own impossible desire, expressed in fruitless questioning of field and stream. Petrarch is blessed--or cursed--with what Bale would later term a "lively memory." Desire works upon Petrarch's mind so powerfully that its eternally lost object, be it his beloved Laura, Evander, or Virgil, seems almost to live again.

Longing for the lost object of desire, longing so intense that it seems almost capable of making what is absent present or of conjuring the dead, is the thread that unites Petrarch's humanist writings with his poetry of love. In sonnet 78, he experiences the familiar surge of yearning when faced with Simone Martini's wonderfully lifelike portrait of Laura:

  [I]f he had given to his noble work voice and intellect along with
  form // he would have lightened my breast of many sighs/that make what
  others prize most vile to me. / For in appearance she seems humble, /
  and her expression promises peace; // then, when I come to speak to
  her, / she seems to listen most kindly: / if she could only reply to
  my words! // Pygmalion, how glad you should be / of your statue, since
  you received a thousand times / what I yearn to have just once!" (48)

The artwork remains as silent and uncompliant as the Mantuan landscape. But this is by no means a criticism of Martini's painting, which Petrarch praises in sonnet 77 for its unearthly beauty. The painting's success--its beauty--lies precisely in its power to excite longing in the beholder's breast; fulfilling that desire is not part of its business. This was the most important lesson that Renaissance artists and aesthetes derived from Petrarch. As Elizabeth Cropper has argued of the High Renaissance, "Petrarchan aesthetics and ideals ... were integrally bound up with the production of beautiful images.... At the turn of the century, the expression of desire for the impossible object ... became both the means and ends of painting, as it was for poetry." (49) The traditional compliment paid to the lifelike figure, that it lacks nothing but the power of speech, was more and more often expressed as a longing that the image would, in fact, speak. (50) Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) reports of Donatello (ca. 1386-1466) that while working on his extraordinary statue of Habbakuk he kept muttering, "Speak, damn you, speak!" (51) But what Donatello sought was not the actual fulfillment of Pygmalion's desire so much as to bring to the marble the imprint of that impossible yearning. For Donatello and his audience, frustrated longing for the irrecoverable was another name for beauty. By the second half of the sixteenth century, such a response would come naturally to an English humanist such as Daniel Rogers, who wrote of Veronese's (1528-88) portrait of Philip Sidney, "When I look at that image, so like your own nature, it looks back at me with eloquent eyes. But oh, why is it muter than a silent fish, why does it not speak?" (52)

Such sophisticated, if not masochistic, Petrarchan pleasures may seem a long way from the world of Bale--and even further, surely, from the world of Robert Aske. Yet there are unmistakable resonances between High Renaissance aesthetic theory and late medieval popular piety. The longing gaze that worshippers fixed on images of the Virgin and of various saints provoked the rage of Protestant reformers, culminating in the burning of a number of famous and venerated images as "idols" at Smithfield in 1538. (53) There was undoubtedly a significant aesthetic element in popular devotion to such images, as evidenced by the Elizabethan recusant Roger Martin's (ca. 1527-1615) nostalgic recollections of the pre-Reformation furnishings of the church at Long Melford, which included a representation of Christ's passion, "lively and beautifully set forth," and an image of Our Lady, "the tears as it were running down pitifully upon her beautiful cheeks." (54) Nor was Martin alone in imagining, as he clearly did, that those tears might really flow. Late-medieval Christianity abounds with pious versions of the Pygmalion story, in which holy statues come wonderfully to life. (55) The Protestant response was to trace such tales to monkish trickery. On 7 February 1538 Geoffrey Chamber wrote to Thomas Cromwell that, at the suppression of Boxley Abbey, its venerated Rood of Grace was found to contain "certain engines and old wire, with old rotten sticks ... that did cause the eyes ... to move and stare in the head thereof like unto a living thing; and also the nether lip in likewise to move as though it should speak." (56) Such mechanical effects were clearly designed to facilitate and intensify the same longing gaze which worshippers elsewhere fixed on less animated images, a gaze which could surely have expressed itself in the words of Daniel Rogers quoted above.

Bale was anything but unaware of the power of this gaze. As recently as 1536, he had been prior of the Carmelite house at Doncaster, whose Image of Our Lady, among the most venerated in the country, was one of those burned at Smithfield just two years later. Now a confirmed and violently anti-monastic Protestant, Bale recognized the need to find a new and worthier object for a gaze that could no longer fix on images and abbeys. He found this object in the literary records of British antiquity. In classic Protestant manner, Bale sought to replace the false shows and spectacles of Catholicism with the truth of texts--texts viewed, in this case, through the lens of Petrarchan desire.

At the time of writing The Laboryouse Journey, Bale was immersed in Petrarchan ideas, perhaps more than he realized. He was John Leland's literary executor during his madness, and Leland, more than anyone then alive in England, could respond to Petrarch's legacy in all its complexity. As a close friend of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-40) and a mediocre versifier himself, Leland knew Petrarch as a poet. In a sequence of funeral songs on his friend's death, he names Wyatt as England's Petrarch, and one poem in particular seems to echo Petrarch's praise of Simone Martini:

  Holbein, the chiefest of that curious Art,
  Drew Wiat's lively image in each part
  With matchlesse skill; but no Apelles can
  Pourtray the witt and spiritt of that man. (57)

Leland was also an admirer of Petrarch the antiquarian and preserver of manuscripts. De viris illustribus, the title Leland gives to his catalogue of English authors in his New Year's Gift, is borrowed from Petrarch, as is the ubiquitous metaphor of antiquarian study as illumination (in Leland's phrase, "out of deadly darkness to lively light"). (58)

It is unlikely that Bale's spirit could ever have warmed to Petrarch as a poet. Indeed, he regarded poor Leland's "poetycall wytt" (sign. B4r) as a principal cause of his madness. He may, in spite of a deep anti-Italian bias, have had more time for Petrarch as an antiquarian, sharing his love of manuscripts and his conviction that one should honor the ancients "by making their obscure names well known." (59) But Bale's principal debt to Petrarch lies in a simple realization. The gaze that fixes on a beautiful and lifelike work of art and the gaze that bores into the ancient past are one and the same. Both produce aesthetic gratification out of a longing for the irrecoverable; both fix on those who must be for ever silent, and yearn for them to speak. The Petrarch who wished for the painting of Laura to reply to his words is the same man who clasped to his bosom a manuscript of Homer in Greek (a language he never mastered), and sighed "Oh great man, how willingly would I listen to you!" (60) The force of this impossible longing still resonates down the centuries: "I began with the desire to speak with the dead." (61) "Speak, damn you, speak!"

Bale recognized that the "lively memorials" of antiquity could serve as objects of beauty under the desiring gaze, in the manner of the lifelike painting of Laura or an Image of Our Lady. Of course, he must also have recognized that these textual beauties differed from paintings, images, and physical ruins in one crucial way. They could speak. For thinkers of the Reformation era, what set language apart from all other modes of representation was its power to render the objects of its representation present. (62) Possibly, then, in his program for the beautification of the nation through the publication of these beauties, Bale hoped to combine the pleasures of Petrarch with the joys of Pygmalion. If only these books were in print! Then, at last, the image would speak, the statue would move, the irrecoverable object of desire could be, and would be, recovered. (63)

This would be a relatively straightforward way of understanding what Bale means by "beautify," but there are reasons for skepticism. For one thing, if Bale believed that the nation could be transformed through the printing of ancient texts, he would presumably have done something about it. Bale was extraordinarily prolific, and his historical and bibliographical writings, including the massive Catalogus, run to thousands of pages. Not one printed page of Gildas, Nennius, Asser, Bede, or any other early British or English author can be set in the scales against this weight. Bale did nothing, in other words, to gratify the desire which so much of his writing was calculated to heighten. (64) The implication is that Bale's project of beautifying the nation has less to do with the production of printed texts than with the production of nostalgia.

"Nostalgia," the name we now give to the yearning for the irrecoverable past, was not yet a word in 1549, but, as many scholars have emphasized, it had a constant place in Renaissance thought--more particularly after the traumatic break with the customary past entailed by the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries. (65) The term aptly describes what Petrarch feels when he thinks of Laura or Evander, as well as what Bale feels when he muses on learning in the age of Alcuin and sighs, "Muche altered are we from that golden worlde, now adayes" (sign. F2v). But Petrarch and Bale were both well aware that it is in the nature of nostalgia to misidentify the object of its desire. As David Lowenthal argues, nostalgia always conjures "a past that was unified and comprehensible, unlike the incoherent, divided present ... what we are nostalgic for is the condition of having been, with a concomitant integration and completeness lacking in any present." (66) The nostalgic image of the past incites longing precisely because it is not like life, but is, rather, lifelike, or, as Bale would put it, "lively."

Even were they to be published and disseminated across the land, the ancient manuscripts Bale calls beautiful could never fulfill the desire they provoke. This is because that desire is neither for the words on the page (which can be reproduced), nor for the long-vanished world they describe (which cannot), but rather for the perceived integration of those words and that world. As Janet Sorensen argues, "the nationalist nostalgic" conjures "a mythic past where experience mystically mirrored--even joined--linguistic description." (67) In the nostalgized past, unlike the fragmented present, words are things. And this applies above all to that word which Bale is determined to present as a thing: the nation. Bale never speaks simply of the beauty of antiquity, but always of antiquity as the beauty of the land, or the country, or the nation. The ancient chronicles are beauties of the nation because in them the nation is realized as a thing and presented to the desiring, nostalgic gaze as integrated, unified, graspable, lifelike.

Throughout The Laboryouse Journey Bale insists that antiquity will be honored by "all them that hath a naturall love to their contrey (sign. A7v). (68) The implication is that these people constitute the vast majority. Bale's confidence seems remarkable, considering that twelve years before Robert Aske had used "the country" to mean his county (a usage that survived long after), and that for many people in 1549 the nation would still have seemed a less natural repository for affections than either Kent, on the one hand, or Christendom, on the other. In fact, Bale is quite knowingly reversing cause and effect. Love of country emerges from a desire for antiquity, not the other way around. Antiquity for Bale holds out the promise of making love of country natural, by presenting the nation as an object of desire in the nostalgic gaze.

As Edmund Burke had it, "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely." He need only have added, "to make our country lovely, it must be forever lost." An approach to nationalism founded in the unfulfillable longing for an irrecoverable object may seem needlessly convoluted and, indeed, perverse. In fact, however, it is this very aspect of Bale's nationalism that is most prescient of modern forms. As Eric Hobsbawm remarks, "nationalism comes before nations." (69) From the historian's point of view, this means that nations are invented and brought into being by nationalists. From the nationalist's own point of view, it means that the nation which anciently existed but which has more recently been dead or sleeping must be revived (through the restoration of ancient liberties, dignity, customs, borders, etc.). Nationalism is the project of bringing a nation into being, and one of its prerequisites is thus the absence of a fully-realized nation. (A nationalism that accomplished its project would presumably wither away, but this has never happened.) To be a nationalist, then, is to experience forever the longing of Petrarch, and to be forever denied--perhaps fortunately, after all--the joys of Pygmalion.

(1) Burke, 75; Paine, 24.

(2) The assertion of peculiar national beauty also occurs in the anthems of Australia ("Our land abounds in Nature's gifts / Of beauty rich and rare"), Brazil ("More flowers put forth in thy fair, smiling fields / Than in the most gorgeously reputed lands"), Denmark ("A lovely land is ours / With beeches green about her"), Mauritius ("Sweet is thy beauty, Sweet is thy fragrance"), and the Philippines ("Beautiful land of love, oh land of light"), to name but a few.

(3) Two of the most influential definitions of the nation today are those of Anthony D. Smith, as "a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members" (14), and of Benedict Anderson, as "an imagined political community ... imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (6). Differing in so much else, these definitions are equally blind to the aesthetic.

(4) For further detail on the ongoing "work of beautification" at Louth, see Hoyle, 101-02.

(5) Ibid., 461.

(6) The debate among historians is reviewed in ibid., 13-17. In recent years, Hoyle and Davies have presented compelling evidence that the Pilgrimage was a genuinely popular revolt, at least at the outset, and vitally, though not exclusively, concerned with religion.

(7) Bateson, 1890a, 552. All further quotations of Aske are from this text, unless noted otherwise.

(8) That Aske hoped his responses might yet succeed where the Pilgrimage had failed is suggested by Dodds and Dodds, 2:207.

(9) Hoyle goes so far as to brand Aske with "monastophilia" (48), suggesting that "the opposition to the dissolution that forms one strand of the Pilgrimage was largely the result of Aske's own preoccupations" (50).

(10) Almost a century later, however, William Lithgow in his Comments upon Scotland (1628) lamented that "Mr. Knoxe did with our glorious Churches of Abbacies and Monasteries (which were the greatest beauty of the Kingdome) knocking all downe to desolation" (Macaulay, 355). The coincidence of phrase and context seems too close to be accidental. Since Lithgow can hardly have consulted the record of Aske's interrogation, this may indicate that this way of describing the suppressed houses had become something of a commonplace, and not in England alone.

(11) On the complex pattern of lordship, jurisdiction, and political power in Yorkshire in this period, see R. B. Smith. The landscape described by Aske exemplifies the traditional "landscape of custom," which in the sixteenth century would be increasingly challenged by the new "landscape of absolute property" (Sullivan, 12).

(12) Davies, 71; Hoyle, 85. Some churches with important patrons were exempt. Davies notes that one unintended effect of the new system was to bring together large and potentially disgruntled crowds at the beginning of October, a factor which may have contributed to the outbreak of the Lincolnshire rising.

(13) Anderson, 19. See also Voekel.

(14) Bateson, 1890b, 343. On Cromwell's drive for a "uniform legal order," see Beckingsale, 79-91; for parallels between the crown's actions in the far north of England and in Ireland, see Ellis; on the transfer of power in the County Palatine of Durham, see Lapsley, 196-98; and on the Archbishop of York, see R. B. Smith, 176.

(15) The 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals proclaimed that by "by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed, that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world" (Koebner, 29). Similarly, the 1536 act uniting Wales with England insisted that Wales "ever hath been incorporated, annexed, united, and subject to and under the Imperial Crown of this Realm" (Thomas, 29). On the Tudor vision of historical redemption, see Jones, 33-40; on the significance of the early British church to Protestant reformers, see Williams.

(16) Here Anderson, following Walter Benjamin, would speak of the rise of "homogenous empty time" (24), and Debord, perhaps more pertinently, of the transition from "cyclical time" to "irreversible historical time"--apprehended first in millenarian terms and later in bourgeois terms as "progress" (103-06). The transition in conceptions of space has been theorized by Lefebvre as one from medieval "historical space" to modern "abstract space," which "erases distinctions" (49).

(17) Brenner, 298: "The affirmation of absolute private property by the landlords over and against peasant possession went hand in hand ... with the gradual rise of a different sort of state, one which attained a monopoly of force over and against the privatized powers of feudal potentates. The state which emerged during the Tudor period was, however, no absolutism. Able to profit from rising land rents, through presiding over a newly emerging tripartite capitalist hierarchy of commercial landlord, capitalist tenant and hired wage labourer, the English landed classes had no need to recur to direct, extra-economic compulsion to extract a surplus."

(18) McRae, 7.

(19) A number of the king's reform-minded advisors, including Thomas Starkey and, apparently, Anne Boleyn, argued that monastic assets should be used carefully to further education and preaching. Hoyle sees the dispute over the fate of monastic lands as a proximate cause of Boleyn's sudden fall, engineered by Cromwell. "Cromwell (and perhaps the king too) could see all their painfully secured gains being tied up in annuities for preachers and endowments for undergraduates, a noble aim and one which it was difficult to resist" (82).

(20) Dickens, 176.

(21) Knowles, 387.

(22) Aston, 325.

(23) Denham, 73: "Cooper's Hill," line 149.

(24) Shakespeare, 1997, Richard II, 2.1.65-66. Recent discussions of John of Gaunt's speech in relation to the question of nationhood include McEachern and Maley.

(25) Cook, 131.

(26) Youings, 169.

(27) Lambarde, 236.

(28) Bale and Leland, sign. B8r. References are to signature numbers.

(29) Ibid., sign. E7r. The reference, in a text belonging to the 1540s, to "a whole thousand yeares" is by no means merely rhetorical. King Arthur, for Leland the preeminent prototype of Henry VIII in his role as Christian Emperor, had departed for Avalon in 542.

(30) Letter from Layton to Cromwell, 13 September 1535, in Cook, 48. On the dispersal of monastic libraries, see Wright.

(31) Cited by Simpson, 222, who further suggests that Leland must have suffered a "divided consciousness," being "himself an agent of the destruction of the very past he [sought] to recuperate."

(32) On Bale's catalogues, see Ross, Simpson, and Hudson.

(33) Bale and Leland, sign. B1r. As Bale would later recall in a letter to Matthew Parker (20 July 1560), "in those uncircumspect and carelesse dayes, there was no quyckar merchaundyce than lybrary bokes" (Graham and Watson, 17).

(34) Bale and Leland, sign. F6v. See also signs. A[2.sup.r] and B[6.sup.v].

(35) Shakespeare, 1997, Hamlet, 2.2. 111-12.

(36) Anthony a Wood, cited in King, 59. King offers a sympathetic account of Bale as an English stylist. Bale's Latin catalogues are far less concerned with aesthetics, though he occasionally praises a writer for having beautified (ornavit) the English language; see Hudson, 327-28.

(37) On Bale's attempts to create an appearance of harmony between his own and Leland's rather different agendas, see Simpson, 232-33.

(38) Sign. E7v. Bale's remarks on commodities find a clear echo in Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England, attributed to Sir Thomas Smith, also 1549: "What number first of trifles comes hither from beyond the seas that we might either clean spare or else make them within our realm, for the which we either pay inestimable treasure every year or else exchange substantial wares and necessary for them.... What grossness of with be we of ... that will suffer our own commodities to go and set strangers awork and then to buy them again at their hand" (Sir Thomas Smith, 63-65). The example is that of wool being exported and then bought back dearly as cloth, but Bale's example of precious manuscripts going abroad only to return in the binding of foreign books would have served just as well.

(39) "As far as landscape and architecture were concerned, Bale would never demonstrate much sensitivity" (Fairfield, 6). This is an understatement.

(40) Referring to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Helgerson, 131-39, discusses the ways in which county chorographies, with their proud emphasis on local prerogatives and particularity, could be seen as subversive of a centralizing royal authority.

(41) Fairfield, 95. On Bale's periodization of church and national history, see ibid., 50-120, and Hadfield, 51-80.

(42) And a very modern one; see Scarry, 68-70, 80, 89-90.

(43) The story is first told in Pliny's Natural History and retold in the sixteenth century by (among others) Thomas Nashe (in Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem), 2.96. On the Zeuxis story as a parable linking the power of art to the frustration of the viewer see Halpern.

(44) Baxandall, 70.

(45) Ibid., 81. It is important to note that the aesthetic delight expressed by Villani and Chrysoloras bears no necessary relation to what is being represented, but derives solely from the lifelikeness of the depiction. Chrysoloras himself wondered on another occasion how we find beauty in the representation of things which are not beautiful themselves. The original may be mundane, even actively disagreeable, yet "the representations are praised in proportion to the degree to which they seem to resemble the originals" (ibid., 82).

(46) Petrarch, 1975, 291. See also Greene, 88; Mazzotta, 53-55. Panofsky's assertion that "Even the ruins of Rome failed to evoke in [Petrarch] what we would call an 'aesthetic' response" (11) is true only in the literal sense that Petrarch did not find the ruins themselves aesthetically appealing--but the visions they prompted in his mind undoubtedly were so.

(47) Petrarch, 1985, 341. See also Greene, 90.

(48) Petrarch, 1976, 178, lines 3-14. The portrait of Laura by Sienese painter Simone Martini (ca. 1280-1344) apparently no longer exists.

(49) Cropper, 192.

(50) In the Lives, Vasari pays this compliment to Masaccio, 128, Donatello, 189, Bramantino, 193, and Fra Filippo Lippi, 222.

(51) Ibid., 178.

(52) Quoted in van Dorsten, 56. For the English translation of Rogers' "In effigiem illustrissimi iuvenis D. Philippi Sydnaei," see ibid., 1577?, 55-56, and for the Latin original, 174-75.

(53) Phillips, 75.

(54) Martin, 1-2. See also Duffy, 38.

(55) Camille, 220-41, and 317-37.

(56) Cook, 145.

(57) Muir, 261, lines 1-4 (my emphasis). Leland's several funeral songs for Wyatt are included as append. A of Muir's edition.

(58) Bale and Leland, sign. B8r. See also Ross, 64.

(59) Greene, 312, n. 29.

(60) Petrarch, 1985, 46.

(61) As these, the opening words of Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations (1) imply, Petrarchan preoccupations continue to inform the project of literary studies.

(62) As Erasmus wrote in his Paraclesis, the treatise that inspired William Tyndale, "If anyone shows us the footprints of Christ ... how we adore them! But why do we not venerate instead the living and breathing likeness of Him in these books? ... [A]ny paltry image ... represents only the form of the body--if indeed it represents anything of Him--but these writings bring you the living image of His holy mind, and the speaking, healing, dying, rising Christ Himself, and thus they render Him so fully present that you would see less if you gazed upon Him with your very eyes" (108). To substitute "England" for "Christ" is to come (almost sacrilegiously) close to Bale's tone in The Laboryouse Journey.

(63) Such visions of radical recovery are characteristic of "supernostalgia" (Eggert, 537).

(64) In his last years, Bale was associated with the circle of Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504-75), which finally succeeded in publishing a small handful of ancient books, more than a decade after Bale's death. Between The Laboryouse Journey and the Parker association came Bale's stint as bishop of Ossory in Ireland (1552-53), which ended in the catastrophic loss of Bale's personal library when he fled the country at the accession of Mary Tudor. In his letter to Parker (20 July 1560; in Graham and Watson, 17-53, Bale recounts this personal loss alongside the more general catastrophe of the dissolution of the libraries. This succession of crises does not, however, account for Bale's failure to carry through with the publication project envisioned in The Laboryouse Journey. That Bale continued to work on his catalogues while in exile in the mid-1550s demonstrates both that he had not lost his antiquarian interests and that he had access to old books. He simply declined to have any of them printed.

(65) Nostalgia as a response to the dissolution can be witnessed as early as Aske's own defense of the abbeys in 1537. Though the suppression had as yet touched only the smaller monasteries, Aske evinces at times a kind of proleptic nostalgia, speaking as if monastic life in general belonged to an irrecoverable--and therefore more easily idealizable--past. On nostalgia in later Tudor England, see Rackin, Eggert, and Hillman. For Panofsky, a "nostalgic vision born of a sense of estrangement as well as a sense of affinity ... is the very essence of the Renaissance" (210). For the history of the term, see Starobinski.

(66) Lowenthal, 29. Once again there is a significant parallel with contemporary discourses of painting and lifelikeness. As Halpern remarks of Zeuxis and his painted grapes, "the unsatisfied hunger of the birds indicates their own emptiness in relation to the image, which is complete unto itself. In the paradoxical ontology of the artwork, it is the real birds who are hollow and the painted grapes that are full" (383) (Halpern's emphasis).

(67) Sorensen, 37. Similarly, Susan Stewart argues that "in order to entertain an antiquarian sensibility, a rupture in historical consciousness must have occurred, creating a sense that one can make one's own culture other--distant and discontinuous. Time must be seen as concomitant with a loss of understanding, a loss which can be relieved through the reawakening of objects and, thereby, of narrative" (142). Both Sorenson and Stewart associate this "nationalist nostalgic" or "antiquarian sensibility" with the era of Romanticism. Yet a markedly similar sensibility developed in Renaissance as a result of advances in biblical scholarship (a subject naturally close to Bale's heart). "Humanist scholarship ... designed to retrieve the exemplary past from the ravages of time, unearthed alien cultures fixed in time. Yet although unfamiliar, the rediscovered visage remained the face (and law) of the father, remained the matrix of early modern identity. The estrangement of the past did not destroy the longing for it" (Shuger, 53).

(68) For variations of this phrase, see also signs. A2v, B6r-v, B7r, D8r, E3v, and E7r.

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