the fearefull estate of francis spira: narrative, identity, and emotion in early modern england

The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early ModernEnglandAuthor(s): Michael MacDonaldSource: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 32-61Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on BritishStudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/175876 .

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The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early

Modern England

Michael MacDonald

This is the story of a story. It all began in May 1548, when an Italian Protestant named Francesco Spiera recanted.1 He had been denounced to the Inquisition the previous November, and, fearful that he would lose his wealth and beggar his family, he renounced Protes- tantism publicly both at St. Mark's in Venice and in his hometown of Citadella, near Padua. It was a painful decision. Even before his second recantation, he began to hear a voice warning him not to aposta- tize, and soon after it the voice returned, admonishing him for denying God and sentencing him to eternal damnation. Convinced that he had been forsaken by the Lord, Spiera fell into despair. He removed with

MICHAEL MACDONALD is professor of history at the University of Michigan. He is grateful to the many people who have helped him with this article: Carol Dickerman, Paul Seaver, Steven Mullaney, Sears McGee, Peter Parshall, and Linda Parshall read drafts of it; Cynthia Herrup, Bob Levy, Lawrence Stone, Gerald Strauss, and the other members of the National Humanities Center's 1990 seminar, Research Triangle Park, N.C., on early modern history participated in a stimulating discussion of it.

Authoritative modern treatments of Spiera's life and death include Anne Jacobson Schutte, Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer (Geneva, 1977), pp. 239-57, 266-68; Celesta Wine, "Nathaniel Wood's Conflict of Conscience," Publica- tions of the Modern Language Association of America 50 (1935): 661-78. Biographies of Spiera include brief lives by Emilio Comba, Episido della Riforma Religiosa in Italia (Rome and Florence, 1872), which is principally useful for the Church's view of him and includes a valuable appendix of original documents; and Karl Ronneke, Francesco Spiera: Eine Geschichte aus der Zeit der Reformation in Italien (Hamburg, 1874), which is based partly on archival materials, according to the author. For other Italian authorities (which I have been unable to locate in American and British libraries), see Schutte, p. 239n. For reasons that should become plain, in retelling the story I have relied on Nathaniel Bacon, A Relation of the Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira (London, 1638), from which the quotations are drawn. Spiera is usually described as a Lutheran, but, as Gerald Strauss pointed out to me, his precise theological views-like those of other early Italian Protestants-are hard to determine.

Journal of British Studies 31 (January 1992): 32-61 ? 1992 by The North American Conference on British Studies. All rights reserved. 0021-9371/92/3101-0002$01.00

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FEAREFULL ESTATE OF FRANCIS SPIRA

his family to Padua, where his woeful condition quickly came to the attention of prominent theologians, including Pier Paolo Vergerio, the bishop of Capodistra, and Matteo Gribaldi, like Spiera, a civil lawyer and a professor at the University of Padua.

As Spiera's despair deepened, he was consoled by these eminent scholars and by as many as thirty other men. He suffered terribly, refusing food and rejecting their attempts to persuade him that he was not damned. The days and weeks passed; he maintained his conviction that God had forsaken him. He argued brilliantly with his learned visi- tors, displaying a remarkable grasp of Scripture and theology, which he deployed to prove his own damnation. He declared that he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, the single fault that places one beyond the Lord's mercy. He was, he said, "a Reprobate like Cain or Judas, who casting away all hope of mercy, fell into despair."2 As his agony increased, Spiera became convinced that he was pos- sessed by the Devil. He threatened suicide, and when a priest offered to exorcise him, he drove him away, saying that the spirits that pos- sessed him would not be "cast out by spells."3 He tried to kill himself, but he was growing weak and emaciated: "he appeared," wrote one witness, "a perfect Anatomie."4 Finally, almost eight weeks after the deathbed drama began, he starved to death.

Spiera's despair and his conviction that God was punishing him had an enormous impact on those who observed him. Vergerio and Gribaldi converted to Protestantism; Vergerio fled to Basel, where he later told a friend that he would not have had the courage to renounce his religion and his office and abandon his family and his country had God not "shown him Spiera as an example of what happened to those who denied him.5 Vergerio, Gribaldi, and three other notable figures- Henry Scrymgeour, Sigismund Gelous, and Martin Borrhaus-wrote eyewitness accounts of Spiera's agony and death. These were gathered together and published in Latin in 1550, together with prefaces by John Calvin and Celio Secondo Curione, another Italian Protestant.6 Separate editions of the narratives in this book appeared within the year in Latin, Italian, and English. An anonymous Latin version and a German translation of it appeared at the same time. This was just

2 Bacon, Fearefull Estate (1638), p. 29. 3 Ibid., p. 60. 4 Ibid., pp. 77-78. 5 Schutte, p. 244. 6 Francisci Spierae, qui quod susceptam semel Evangelice ueritatis professionem

abnegasset, damnassetque, in horrendam incidit desperationem, historia (Basel, 1550); Wine, p. 665; Schutte, p. 241n.

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MACDONALD

the first wave of a tide of sixteenth-century publications about Spiera in all of the major European languages. His story was told in every imaginable kind of literature-theological tracts, sermons, plays, bal- lads, and popular "wonder books."7

Hardly anyone remembers Spiera anymore. And yet to readers all over sixteenth-century Europe, he was a familiar figure. His notoriety was not only broad; it was lasting. Versions of the Spiera tale continued to be published in England well into the nineteenth century. The first English version of the Spiera story was a translation of Gribaldi's narrative. It was probably issued in 1550.8 John Foxe included a brief version of the tale, probably based on Gribaldi, in his famous book of martyrs.9 A Ballad of Master FFrauncis [sic], based on Spiera's life, was printed in 1587; unfortunately, it has not survived.?0 Nathaniel Woodes, an otherwise obscure clergyman, wrote a late morality play based on the Spiera story. Two editions of The Conflict of Conscience appeared in 1581.11 Thomas Beard retold the story briefly in his hugely popular Theatre of Gods Judgements, the first edition of which appeared in 1597.12 Finally, Nathaniel Bacon produced an English recension of the original set of Latin narratives. This circulated clandestinely in Puritan circles; it was finally published in 1637 or 1638 as A Relation of the Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira. Prior to 1800, the book was reissued at least ten times; there were eight American printings as well. The last edition of Bacon's book listed in the British Library catalog was issued in 1845, almost three hundred years after Spiera's death. 13

This article discusses how the Spiera story was used and understood over the centuries it retained its popularity. It shall focus on its reception in England because it would be too daunting to try to study

7 Wine, pp. 665-67. 8 Matthew Gribaldi, A Notable and Marveilous Epistle (London, n.d.). 9 John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, 4th ed., 8 vols., ed. Josiah

Pratt (London, 1877), 7:219. 10 Wine, p. 670. 1 Nathaniel Woodes, The Conflict of Conscience, ed. F. P. Wilson and Herbert

Davis (Oxford, 1952). 12 Thomas Beard, The Theatre of Gods Judgements, 3d ed. (London, 1631), pp.

73-74. 13 The British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books to 1975 (London, 1979-),

sub nomen "Bacon, Nathaniel," and "Spira, Francis"; The American Bibliography of Charles Evans, 14 vols. (Gloucester, Mass., 1969). There were very likely more eighteenth-century editions than are now held by the British Library. This list of English Spieras omits translations, which included such hugely influential works as Peter Mar- tyr's Common Places (London, 1583) and Simon Goulart's Admirable and Memorable Histories (London, 1607): see Wine, p. 668.

34




its history in all the countries in which it was popular. This article shall try to identify to whom the story appealed and why. It will also explore the ways in which readers understood its meaning, how they appropriated Spiera's biography and used it to comprehend their own emotions and fashion their own identities.14 There were, broadly speaking, two main ways in which the tale was interpreted. One was sociological-or more properly, social psychological; the other was psychological. For generations of English Protestants, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spiera served as a terrible warning against the temptation to abandon the rigors of religious dissent and sectarianism and conform to an oppressive orthodoxy. His suffering and death epitomized the extreme agony that God's wrath brought down upon those who turned their backs on religious truth and so formed a sort of emotional antidote to the suffering that members of oppressed religious minorities experienced. But the story also took on a special significance in the psychology of evangelical Protestantism and came in time to denote a new and very particular emotion, religious despair. Some evangelicals identified with Spiera's desperation and used the narrative of his fate to indicate their own spiritual condition. In this context, the tale became a tool for constructing a new personality that transcended both worldly indifference and religious despair.

This article has a more ambitious aim as well. It will demonstrate a new approach to historical psychology that avoids some of the traditional methodological pitfalls of psychohistory. Most historians have rightly been wary of the broad, disputable claims of psychoanalysis and have been disturbed by the persistent tendency of psychohistori- ans to speculate from little or no surviving evidence. Many have wrongly concluded that psychology is not a possible or proper subject of historical scholarship. There is a middle way. Psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and a handful of historians have recently turned their attention to examining the social construction of the self and of

14 Several scholars have preceded me in this endeavor, and I have relied heavily on their work: see Brian Opie, "Beyond Ideology: Apostasy and the Horrors of Selfhood in Some Renaissance Texts," Mentalites/Mentalities 2 (1984): 21-33, "Nathaniel Bacon and Francis Spira: The Presbyterian and the Apostate," Turnbull Library Record 18 (1985): 33-50; Wine (n. 1 above); Lily B. Campbell, "Doctor Faustus: A Case of Con- science," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 67 (1952): 219-39; Leslie Mahin Oliver, "John Foxe and The Conflict of Conscience," Review of English Studies 35 (1949): 1-9; David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (New York, 1989), pp. 70, 132-35, 137, 142, 145, 173, 183, 205, 209; John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious De- spair (Oxford, 1991), pp. 37-39.

35



MACDONALD

the emotions. Thus, the anthropologist J. S. La Fontaine declares pith- ily that "concepts of the person are embedded in a social context," and the philosopher and psychologist Rom Harre observes, "Emotions do not just happen. They are part of the unfolding of quite standard dramatic scenarios.""5 The historians Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns have adopted a similar approach. They call for a history of "emotionality," by which they mean the conventions and standards governing the evaluation and expression of emotions in particular eras.16 This concern with the social determinants of psychological experience is closely analogous to the Annales tradition of the history of mentalites, and it calls for similar methods of discovering the beliefs and symbols that structured mental life in the past."7 Historians of early modern Europe have at their disposal a vast congeries of sources that illuminate emotional norms-prescriptive works such as conduct books and sermons, descriptive materials such as imaginative literature and works of art, and compendia of cultural cliches such as characters, dialect dictionaries, and collections of proverbs. These sources can enable one to reconstruct emotionality in the Stearnses' sense of the term.

But the problem remains of embedding these types and rules in

15 J. S. La Fontaine, "Person and Individual: Some Anthropological Reflections, in The Category of the Person, ed. Michael Carrithers et al. (Cambridge, 1985), p. 138; Rom Harr6, "The Social Constructionist Viewpoint," in The Social Construction of Emotions, ed. Rom Harre (Oxford, 1986), p. 13.

16 Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, "Emotionality: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 813-36; Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New Psychohistory (New York, 1988) (esp. Carol Z. Stearns, " 'Lord Help Me Walk Humbly': Anger and Sadness in England and America, 1570-1750"; and John R. Gillis, "From Ritual to Romance: Toward an Alternative History of Love"); Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History (Chicago, 1986).

17 The call over half a century ago by Lucien Febvre for a historical psychology that is integrated with social history has gone largely ignored in America and Britain. For Febvre's views, see Combats pour I'histoire (Paris, 1953), pp. 207-38. The original versions of these remarks were published in 1931 and 1941. Febvre's most important attempt to realize his own prescription was, of course, his famous Le probleme de l'incroyance au XVIe siecle: La religion de Rabelais (Paris, 1942). For examples of historians who have taken the call to heart, see Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France, 1500-1640, trans. R. E. Hallmark (New York, 1976), pp. 49-72; Jacques Delu- meau, La peur en Occident, XIVe-XVIIIe siecles (Paris, 1978); Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1986); Richard L. Kagan, Lucretia's Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Berke- ley, 1990). An important critical review of the Annales tradition of historical psychology is Stuart Clark, "French Historians and Early Modern Popular Culture," Past and Present, no. 100 (August 1983), pp. 62-99.

36




specific social and cultural contexts. Here, another recent development in social scientific theory points to a way forward. Jerome Brun- ner and other psychologists have emphasized the narrativity of mental life, stressing that in constructing their sense of themselves and evalu- ating their own and others' actions, people think in terms of narratives, rather than rules. "The typical form of framing experience (and our memory of it)" writes Brunner, "is in narrative form."18 He argues that what he calls "folk psychology," by which he means a culture's beliefs and working hypotheses about personal and social life, is best approached by analyzing personal narratives. Moreover, he asserts, cultures as well as persons form their identities at least partly by creat- ing and hoarding narratives. Brunner's emphasis on the narrativity of self-conceptions and emotional life resembles the contextualism of anthropologists of the self and of emotion, such as Michelle Rosaldo and Catherine Lutz.19 Both insist that the solution to understanding the link between meaning and action, language and society, lies in a close analysis of the ways that people describe their experiences: the keywords, tropes, and tales of the narratives about life and feeling that members of a culture tell about themselves. Fortunately, historians possess a large body of narratives-fictional, biographical, and autobiographical-that purport to describe the behavior and emotions of people living in particular cultures and subcultures. Moreover, in some instances at least, particular tales that were especially influential can be identified, and how they were read and used by the members of different social groups can be examined. The story of Francesco Spiera was one of those tales. (Because the English anglicized his name as Francis Spira, he shall be called that from now on.)

18 Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 56-57, 95, and passim. See also his Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), p. 66; Theodore G. Starbin, ed., Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct (New York, 1986).

19 Michelle Z. Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life (Cambridge, 1980); Catherine A. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll (Chicago, 1988). See also Robert Levy, Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands (Chicago, 1973); Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Man- aged Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley, 1983); Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, eds., Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emo- tion (Cambridge, 1984). Convenient reviews of the anthropology and sociology of emotions are Catherine Lutz and Geoffrey M. White, "The Anthropology of Emotions," Annual Review of Anthropology 15 (1986): 405-36; Peggy A. Thoits, "The Sociology of the Emotions," Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989): 317-42. A critical assessment of the social constructionist position is Thomas J. Scheff, "Toward Integration in the Social Psychology of Emotions," Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983): 333-54.

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God's Warning to Apostates

To judge from the pattern of publications and prominent references to Spira, there were five periods prior to 1800 in which the tale seems to have been especially in vogue in England-the 1550s, the 1580s and 1590s, the 1630s, the 1680s and 1690s, and the later eighteenth century. All of these decades were periods in which Protestant minorities were persecuted or imperiled, either by Catholics or by orthodox Anglicans. The story seems to have been particularly mean- ingful to English Protestants during the Marian persecutions and the 1580s and 1590s, when conflict with Catholic Spain finally erupted into war. It appealed to Puritans during the Laudian campaign to purge the church of Calvinists. There was a Baptist Spira in the 1680s, when the Dissenters were being harried by the authorities. And, finally, the tale was popular among the Methodists in the eighteenth century, as they struggled to sustain an evangelical movement that was anathema to the authorities and to a great many ordinary laymen. The reasons why a tale about the terrible consequences of apostasy would appeal to religious minorities during periods of persecution, or fear of persecution, should be fairly obvious. It served as an awful warning against backsliding: the earthly pains that persecuting officials might inflict were nothing to the suffering God visited on Spira. In the repertoire of tales that came to form the cultural tradition of English Protestant- ism, it gained a place as the dark mirror of martyrdom.

The fit between persecution and fascination with Spira was not, of course, exact, chronologically or thematically. In the 1690s, for instance, apparently orthodox authors discovered "Second Spiras," whose sin consisted in succumbing to atheism (in reality deism), which was certainly not the creed of a persecuting orthodoxy. There was also a continuous interest in the tale during periods of comparative tolera- tion on the part of men and women who were not sectarians. This was so because the story was more complex than a simple warning against actual apostasy, and, as we shall see, its applications became more generalized as it was retold and reinterpreted over the centuries.

Spira's story became familiar to English Protestants with aston- ishing speed. Leaders of the first generation of English reformers referred to him laconically in terms that show that they expected their audiences to know his history by heart. Precisely because most of their allusions to Spira are so brief, they will not bear very complex interpretations. John Bradford and Miles Coverdale, for instance, linked Spira with Lot's wife and with Judas. "Oh, let us not so run down into perdition, stumbling on those sins from which there is no

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FEAREFULL ESTATE OF FRANCIS SPIRA 39

recovery ... as it chanced to Lot's wife, Judas Iscariot, [and] Francis Spira," Bradford exhorted the English brethren in the darkest days of persecution.20 Lady Jane, then awaiting her own martyrdom, wrote to a chaplain who had recanted, urging him to remember Julian the Apos- tate and Spira, "whose case, methinks, should be yet so green in your remembrance, that, being a thing of our time, you should fear the like inconvenience, seeing you are fallen into the like offence."21 By the second half of the 1550s, within a decade of his death, Spira had become one of the archetypes of apostasy, joining figures from the Old Testament and the New, renewing the lesson that persecution is prefer- able to perdition.22

The accession of Elizabeth did not, of course, end English Protes- tants' sense that they were surrounded by vast numbers of indifferent or hostile people. In fact, Protestant evangelists fostered among the godly the self-image of an elect nation within the nation and within an international scene dominated by papist powers.23 The simple, literal message of Spira's story remained highly pertinent, and it was incorporated into the key texts of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English Protestantism. Foxe retold it in his book of martyrs, where it stood as an inversion of the tales of steadfastness and saintly suffering that filled the volumes of his book.24 The popularity of the story in the

20 The Writings of John Bradford, ed. Aubrey Townsend, 2 vols., Parker Society (Cambridge, 1843-48), 1:432-33. This passage was plagiarized by Coverdale; see Re- mains of Myles Coverdale, ed. George Pearson, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1846), p. 276. For similar allusions, see Bradford, Writings, 2:80; The Sermons of Edwin Sandys, ed. John Ayre, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1841), p. 362; Thomas Rogers, The Catholic Doctrine of the Church of England, ed. J. J. S. Perowne, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1844), p. 142.

21 Foxe (n. 9 above), 6:421. See also Bacon, Fearefull Estate (1638) (n. 1 above), preface, p. 4.

22 In Italy, discussion of Spira's case became subsumed in the debate over "Nicode- mism," the practice of conforming while secretly adhering to the new faith; see Delio Cantimori, "Submission and Conformity: 'Nicodemism' and the Expectations of a Con- ciliar Solution to the Religious Question," in The Late Italian Renaissance, 1525-1630, ed. Eric Cochrane (New York, 1970), pp. 244-65; Eretici italiani del cinquecento (Flor- ence, 1939), chap. 8; Carlo Ginzburg, II nicodemismo: Simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell'Europa del '500 (Turin, 1970), esp. pp. 172, 186, 188, 201. Calvin's preface to Gribaldi's narrative may be read as another of his blistering attacks on Nicodemism, but the language is unclear, particularly in the English translation; see Gribaldi (n. 8 above), esp. signature Aiii. In England, it should be emphasized, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers always referred to Spira's offense as apostasy. Nicode- mism, after all, was a strategy that English Protestants could have adopted only during the reign of Queen Mary, and, given the dangers they faced then, it is not surprising that their leaders did not waste their energies denouncing clandestine sympathizers.

23 The classic discussion of English Protestants' sense of themselves as a group is William Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London, 1963).

24 Foxe, 7:219.



MACDONALD

1580s and 1590s, when Woodes's morality, Beard's condensed version, and the Spira ballad all appeared, may well have been a response to the escalation in tensions between Protestants and Catholics and the lingering anxieties that they caused. Spira's fate continued to warn readers against apostasy in the narrow, sociological sense of denomi- national disloyalty, abandoning Protestantism and embracing Catholi- cism. Thus Beard, for instance, declared that "amongst all the examples of our age, of Gods severe Justice upon Apostates, the example of Francis Spira an Italian Lawyer . . . is most pittifull and lamentable."25 And he embedded Spira's story in a long series of vignettes describing the terrible fate of men who persecuted Protestants, members of the true church.

The triumph of Protestantism in the later decades of Elizabeth's reign was accompanied by a new contest between a conservative hier- archy and a reforming minority, determined to purify the church by eliminating the vestiges of popery. The antagonism between conformists and Puritans dominated church politics throughout the early seventeenth century.26 English Puritans' interest in the Spira story peaked in the 1630s, when the Arminian counterrevolution transformed pre- viously orthodox Calvinists into a harried minority within the church. Robert Bolton published an influential commentary on the Spira story as early as 1631, and Bacon produced his recension of the various eyewitness accounts of Spira's death.27 The manuscript of Bacon's Fearefull Estate was already widely known some years before it was published; the London turner Nehemiah Wallington copied out the whole book in 1635.28 Bacon's Spira story was longer than any other English version, and it accordingly introduced more issues and greater complexities into the story. It is possible to see in it some of the tensions and connections to which readers might have responded. The narrative establishes a series of oppositions, between which Spira- and the reader-has to choose: fidelity/apostasy, faith/renunciation, hope/despair, persecution/membership, salvation/damnation, even life

25 Beard (n. 12 above), pp. 73-74. 26 These apparently banal facts have been disputed by ecclesiastical historians re-

cently. The safest guides are probably Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982); Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of Arminianism, c. 1590- 1640 (Oxford, 1987); Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988).

27 Robert Bolton, Instructions for a Right Comforting [ofJ Afflicted Consciences, 2d ed. (London, 1635), pp. 12, 18-20, 81-83; Bacon, Fearefull Relation (1638).

28 Paul S. Seaver, Wallington's World (Stanford, Calif., 1985), p. 202. For other manuscript copies of Bacon's book, see British Library, London, Additional MS 22,591, fols. 280r-88v; Sloane MS 397; Harleian MS 6,626.

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and death. Having chosen to renounce Christ, Spira finds himself alienated socially, spiritually, and psychologically. He is displaced from the community of the faithful, exiled from his home and unable to accept consolation from the theologians who attend him, and plunged into suicidal gloom and anxiety, unable to repent and reestablish his relationship with God. Moreover, Bacon's portrait of Spira is extraordi- narily vivid. It relies heavily on eyewitness accounts, fashioning a dramatic dialogue between Spira and the men who try to console him. In fact, the book reads at times like a play, in which each of the principals has dialogue to speak, and Spira naturally gets the best lines. As a portrait of suffering, it is powerfully realistic, even though it depicts an extreme and uncommon situation.

The third-and in many ways the most remarkable-wave of Spira publications occurred in the 1680s and 1690s, in the aftermath of the government's campaign to suppress Protestant nonconformity. The tale during these tense years was once more employed as a warning to persecuted sectarians about the dangers of conforming. But it was also used by a Baptist printer to warn the government against persecuting Dissenters and by Anglican writers to caution Christians against succumbing to atheism. These three very different readings of the story were elaborated in reprints of Bacon's Fearefull Estate and in a series of books about latter-day "Spiras," Englishmen whose stories closely paralleled Spira's. The printing history of Bacon's book testifies to its ongoing popularity with nonconformist, particularly Bap- tist, readers. From 1683 to 1710 the Harris family published at least five editions of the Fearefull Estate. The most famous of this ink- stained clan was Benjamin Harris, a Baptist martyr, who was jailed for sedition in 1679 because of a work he wrote blasting the duke of York's papist proclivities. He was unrepentant, repeated his offense, and was tried again in 1681.29 For the 1683 and 1710 editions of Bacon's book, Harris wrote prefaces in which he reminded readers that recon- ciliation with Rome was treasonous. Spira's fate is especially apposite "in our present drowsie age," he inveighed in 1683, "wherein an Apos- tatizing Spirit seems to be let loose, and not a few are ready to shift their Religion (as Seamen do their Sails) with every Wind."30 By 1700, when Harris took up his pen to revise his preface, the wind had shifted

29 Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1688 to 1724 (Oxford, 1922), sub nomen "Harris, Benjamin"; Edward Caryl Starr, A Baptist Bibliography (Philadelphia and Rochester, 1947-), sub nomen "Harris, Benjamin."

30 Nathaniel Bacon, The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira (London, 1683), "To the Reader," unpaginated.

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MACDONALD

180 degrees. He took note of the change, claiming that God had driven James II from his throne to punish his own and Charles II's apostasy.31 Harris continued to update his prefaces in later editions, but as the Protestant succession seemed less threatened he turned his attention to the religious meaning of the story, adding recent examples of sectarians who had apostatized.

He plundered these complementary stories from other writers and publishers who had begun to unearth new, native Spiras in the 1680s. The earliest of these was John Child, a Baptist who renounced his sect to avoid persecution, fell into remorse, and hanged himself in 1684. The Baptists publicized his story in a pamphlet and at least one broadside. The broadside was entitled A Warning from God to all Apos- tates . . . Wherein the Fearful States of Francis Spira and John Child are Compared.32 Both the text and a wonderful series of six illustra- tions insist on the direct equivalence of the two men's experience. The pamphlet, published four years after Child's death, carries the parallel still further. It reports that the Baptists consoling Child asked him whether he was like Spira. He answered, "Spira's condition was nothing to mine, . . . because I have forsaken that which I knew to be true, to embrace that which I knew to be false."33 In these pieces their authors insist that both Spira and Child yielded to diabolical temptations. The frightening message was that apostasy involved succumbing to Satan, a kind of spiritual and social suicide that was realized by Child's actual death.

The persistent and ambivalent linkage of Spira's death with the diabolical sin of self-murder, which was routinely attributed to the instigation of Satan, gave the tale an interesting twist.34 It enabled

31 Nathaniel Bacon, The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira (London, 1700), "To the Reader," unpaginated.

32 A Warning from God to all Apostates ... Wherein the Fearful States of Francis Spira and John Child are Compared (London, 1684).

33 Thomas Plant and Benjamin Dennis, This Mischief of Persecution Exemplified; By a True Narrative of the Life and Deplorable End of Mr. John Child (London, 1688), p. 27. This pamphlet was reprinted, together with Bacon's A Relation of the Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira, in B. H., A Relation of the Fearful Estate of Francis Spira . . . As Also the Miserable Lives and Woful Deaths of Mr. John Child . and Mr. George Edwards (London, 1770). (There were several earlier editions of this collection.)

34 None of the works that depicts Spira's death (or those of his later counterparts) as the result of starvation calls him a suicide, and yet there was a persistent tendency to change the story to have him hang himself. The best example is Woodes's The Conflict of Conscience (n. 11 above), which is discussed below. Whether anyone who starved himself to death was regarded as a suicide is an intriguing question: there are no deaths by starvation among the almost 14,000 suicides recorded in the records of King's Bench and other central courts for the period 1485-1715; see Public Record Office, London, King's Bench 9, 10, 11, 140; PL 26; HCA 1. Ray Metzner suggested to me that starvation

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antagonists to depict the fate of Spira and his counterparts as an abomi- nable sin without seconding the notion that they had offended God by abandoning their religion. An orthodox broadsheet reporting Child's suicide, for instance, warns readers to avoid succumbing to Satan's temptations, but it makes no attempt to invoke Spira to characterize Child's sin or his suffering. Its title refers to Child as a "once Famous Anabaptist Teacher, who falling into Dispair [sic], Committed a Barba- rous and Unnatural Murther upon his own Person."35 The hostile author presents Child's story, not as a warning against apostasy, but as an indication of the dangers of dejection. Having fallen into a melancholy mood, Child was unable to resist the diabolical urgings to hang himself. From this point of view the miserable Baptist was a madman and a sinner, tout court.

Other orthodox writers went further. They appropriated the Spira story as a warning against atheism. Although this strained the analogy with the original story considerably, coupling tales of men who suc- cumbed to fashionable deistical beliefs with it proved hugely successful. The greatest success of them all was John Sault's The Second Spira, which allegedly sold some 30,000 copies in the year it was published, 1693.36 Sault's book recounts the torment and horrible death of one F. N., a gentleman who lost his Christian faith and embraced deism, the creed of Spinoza and of Hobbes. When he falls ill, he regrets his apostasy and falls into despair, which he attributes to the judgment of God. Curiously, Sault and the ministers who try to help F. N. drive him deeper into despair. Eagerly agreeing with his hopeless groans, they insist that he really is damned, and not simply the victim of diabolical trickery or mental illness. "We could wish it were Frenzy or Distraction," some of them say helpfully, "but we were afraid of a much sadder Cause, viz. the sense of Hell, and God's wrath upon him, which was so violent as to drive him into despair." Defeating the skepticism of Spinoza and Hobbes evidently required F. N.'s death, and he duly expires unconsoled. Following the success of The Second Spira, other authors advanced other candidates for the title, sometimes claiming that Sault had invented the story of F. N. Thomas Sewell, for instance, found in the pious Dissenter Haniel [sic] Halford A True

may have recalled traditions of holy fasting, even to the point of death, and so might have contradicted the prevalent notion that self-murder was an unholy, diabolical act. (This would not, of course, be consistent with Protestant doctrine, but a good many English popular beliefs were not.)

35 Sad and Lamentable News from Brick-lane (London, [1684]). 36 John Sault, The Second Spira, 6th ed. (London, 1693). The large number of 1693

editions lends some weight to the traditional claim.

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Second Spira, and Thomas James published accounts of several atheis- tical Spiras. He claimed Spira's sin, which he took to be suicidal despair induced by atheism, was commonplace. "Do any seek a proof of this?" he asked, "What mean those Self-Murders which are committed so frequently!"37

Both the sectarian and the orthodox readings of the Spira story survived in the eighteenth century. As Margaret Doody has pointed out, the tales of both Spira and F. N. had become so much a part of the worldview of pious men like Samuel Richardson that they influenced their understanding of how to live and die. Clarissa's death, she argues, follows the pattern of pious dying set out by Jeremy Taylor, and it implicitly rejects Spira's example, the model of bad death, which is Mrs. Sinclair's fate.38 But as familiar as the Spira story was in pious orthodox circles, it was far more important in Methodist religious culture. John Wesley encouraged those who had not read it to do so by publishing extracts from it in his Arminian Magazine; he also serialized The Second Spira.39 His followers hardly needed such encouragement; the autobiographies of early Methodists show intimate familiarity with the Spira story, and it played a crucial part in the religious development of some of the first generation of Methodist preachers, as shall be seen in a moment. On the simplest level, however, the tale once more taught the terrible and permanent peril of conformity to a religious orthodoxy against which sectarians had rebelled.

Religious Despair The attempts of conformists to wield the tale as a weapon against

atheism, while spectacularly successful in the 1690s, were an aberra-

37 Thomas Sewell, A True Second Spira (London, 1697); Thomas James, Spira's Despair Revived (London, 1697), sigs. A5v-A6r. See also, Treidantium Malleus: The Foxonian Quakers, Dunces, Lyars and Slanderers (London, 1697), p. 99; The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse, ed. A. W. Brink (Montreal, 1974), p. 18n., which lists several more examples. Some, such as The Second Spira: Or, the Blasphemers Reproved (Wigan, 1700), have nothing at all to do with the original story. Malcolm Gaskill kindly called my attention to a "Third Spira," similarly unrelated to the original tale: The Third Spira. Being Memoirs of the Life . . . of a Young English Gentleman at Paris in the Year 1717, 2d ed. (London, 1724).

38 Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion (Oxford, 1974), pp. 153-71. Spira's apostasy was recalled in Tillotson's Sermons, one of the most popular religious books among Anglican clergy and laymen of the eighteenth century: see John Tillotson, The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, ed. Thomas Birch, 3 vols. (London, 1752) 1:144; 2:430.

39 For Spira, see Arminian Magazine 10 (1787): 354-56, 412-15, 526-29, 582-85, 634-37; for Sault's The Second Spira, see Arminian Magazine 7 (1784): 24-28, 79-83, 132-33. A copy of Bacon's book is mentioned in the catalog of Wesleyana in the Method- ist Archives, John Rylands Library, Manchester.

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tion that quickly died out. The story's main appeal was to evangelical Protestants. For them, it became more than a simple, if terrible, warning against apostasy. Over the centuries, they began to place increasing emphasis on the tale's psychological rather than its sociological meaning. They became more attentive, in other words, to Spira's suffering and its significance and less concerned about apostasy in the narrow sense. Among evangelical Protestants, seventeenth-century Puritans, and eighteenth-century Methodists, the story came increasingly to be regarded as the most effective and terrifying depiction of a specific religious emotion, despair. This was easily the most important and interesting interpretation of the Spira story. This part of the article will argue that Spira's despair became a particularly vivid example both of how the emotions were interpreted and of their significance for the self-conception of pious believers.

At once an emotion and a sin, despair had been regarded in the Middle Ages as the opposite of Christian hope. In religious art, despair was depicted as a suicide, a self-murderer, and in picture programs like Giotto's series of sins and virtues in the Arena Chapel, it was represented as a hanging figure, accompanied by a hideous devil. The Protestant reformers preserved much of the traditional meaning of despair and placed it in a new context. Because salvation depended on faith-which was, after all, a state of mind as well as a spiritual condition-despair became still more important as a sign of God's displeasure. Emotionally and spiritually, it was the very opposite of grace.40 The dangers of despair were vividly incorporated into Protes- tant verbal iconography in The Faerie Queene and The Pilgrim's Prog- ress. Both of those famous epics taught that Christians on their journey to redemption might fall prey to despair, unless they were faithful and vigilant. Despair, in other words, was an integral feature of the patterns of Christian life described by both Edmund Spenser and John Bun- yan.41 The Spira story literalized allegory. The Italian was the Red-

40 Susan Snyder, "The Left Hand of God: Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Tradition," Studies in the Renaissance 7 (1965): 18-59; Arieh Sachs, "Religious Despair in Medieval Literature and Art," Mediaeval Studies 26 (1964): 231-56. For Giotto, see James Stubblebine, Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes (New York, 1969), plate 57. For a more detailed discussion, see Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), chap. 1.

41 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. I, canto ix, stanza 50, hereafter de- noted as I.ix.50, in The Works of Edmund Spenser, A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford, vol. 1 (Balti- more, 1932); John Bunyan, Grace Aboundingfor the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (London, 1966), p. 232. For commentaries, see Frederick Ives Carpenter, "Spenser's Cave of Despair: An Essay in Literary Comparison," Mod- ern Language Notes 12 (1897): 129-37; Harold Skulsky, "Spenser's Despair Episode and the Theology of Doubt," Modern Philology 78 (1980-81): 227-42; Kathleen Wil-

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crosse Knight; he was Christian. But unlike them, he had not been rescued; his agonizing death completed the scenes in which they are tempted to despair and proved that a real person could succumb to inescapable and unpardonable hopelessness.

From the moment of Spira's trial and death, Protestants debated whether his despair signalized his utter damnation or whether it represented a state of mind from which he might have escaped. Calvin had no doubt on this issue. Spira's fate, he wrote in his introduction to Gribaldi's narrative, exhibited "how earnest vengeance he will take upon those that scorne his majestie."42 This conclusion disturbed other theologians, who felt that God was more merciful. Hugh Latimer, for instance, preached that God might pardon even the worst sinners, including Spira. "I know that Judas had sinned against the Holy Ghost; also Nero, Pharao, and one Franciscus Spira. ... He, contrary to that admonition of the Holy Ghost, denied the word of God, and so finally died in desperation: him I may pronounce to have sinned against the Holy Ghost." And yet, despite the New Testament passages that de- clare plainly that the sin against the Holy Ghost is unpardonable, Lati- mer refused to accept that God would not or could not pardon a sinner who begged for His mercy. "For gratia exsuperat supra peccatum; The mercy of God far exceedeth our sins."43 This was an important issue. If Calvin were correct, then it was possible that a person who believed he had received the grace of God might subsequently be damned. Vergerio had grasped this immediately, and it frightened him badly. "Was it possible," he wondered in a letter, "that someone who understood and accepted the Gospel message could then reject it-that one of the elect could commit the sin against the Holy Spirit?"44

The debate over the significance of Spira's despair was not a matter solely for theological argument. It also influenced popular retellings of the story. The most interesting example is Woodes's The Conflict of Conscience. A rather free dramatization of the Spira story, it is in most respects a conventional morality.45 Woodes gives the historical

liams, Spenser's World of Glass (Berkeley, 1966), pp. 25-28; James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of the Faerie Queene (Princeton, N.J., 1976), pp. 152-55; Paul Alpers, The Poetry of the Faerie Queene (1967; reprint, Columbia, Mo., 1982), pp. 352-61; Harold Golder, "Bunyan's Giant Despair," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 30 (1931): 368-70.

42 Gribaldi (n. 8 above), sig. Aiii. 43 The Works of Hugh Latimer, ed. George Elwes Corrie, Parker Society (Cam-

bridge, 1844), p. 425. 44 Schutte (n. 1 above), p. 243. 45 Patrick Collinson has recently pointed out that Elizabethan Protestants were by

no means all hostile to religious drama, and the decline of the morality was more gradual

46




characters new names that suggest they are types and introduces purely allegorical figures. Spira thus becomes Philologus; his adversar- ies include Hipocrisie, Horror, and Satan himself. In the prologue to the play, Woodes explains that his decision to rename Spira was taken in order to broaden the application of the play's moral. For if the play were merely a recapitulation of what the historical Spira had done and said, "our selves we would not finde."46 As shall be seen, he was wrong about this: many readers found themselves in Spira's story.

Woodes prepared two versions of his play, each with drastically different endings and implications. The original version declared on its title page that the play was "The most lamentable Hystorie, of the Desperation of Frauncis Spera, who forsooke the trueth of Gods Gos- pell, for feare of the losse of life and worldly goodes." It depicts Philologus's dismal fate uncompromisingly. The drama ends with the announcement that "Philologus by deepe dispaire hath hanged himselfe with coard" (V.iv.2411), a death that recalls the legend of Judas's suicide and leaves no doubt that he died damned:

... in this man we may descrie, the judgements of the Lord: Who though he spare his rod awhile, in hope we will amende, If we persist in wickednesse, he plagues us in the ende. [V.iv.2416-18]

The second version of the play, also published in 1581, eliminates all reference to the historical Spira. The single change Woodes made in the text of the play itself was to supply a happy ending. Instead of hanging himself, Philologus repents, and although he still starves himself to death, there is no suggestion that he is a self-murderer:

Oh joyfull newes, which I report, and bring into your eares, Philologus, that would have hanged himselfe with coard, Is nowe converted unto God, with manie bitter teares, By godly councell he was woon, all prayse be to the Lorde, His errours all, he did renounce, his blasphemies he abhorde:

And now the Lord in mercy great hath ealde him of his payne. [V.iv.2410-24]

than many theater historians have realized. Woodes's play is a case in point. See Patrick Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation, the Stenton Lecture delivered at the University of Reading, 1985 (Reading, 1986), pp. 8-15, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (London, 1988), chap. 4.

46 Woodes (n. 11 above), prologue, lines 36-42.

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The two versions of The Conflict of Conscience embody antithetical interpretations of the story's significance. The original text, ending with the damnable sin of self-murder, leaves no doubt that Spira died condemned, the object of God's just wrath. The revised version presents his agony as the prelude to renewed and strengthened faith.

Surprisingly, perhaps, some of the leading Puritan divines preferred to think that the Spira story might have had a happy ending. Williams Perkins, for instance, responded directly to Calvin's reading of it: "And therefore the relation published of Francis Spira, his desperation, doth inconsiderately tax him for a castaway; considering that nothing befell him in the time of his desperation, but that which may befall the childe of God; yea, our own land can afford many examples which match Francis Spira, whether we regard the matter of his temptation, or the deepness of his desperation, who yet through the mercie of God have received comfort."47 Perkins saw Spira's fate, not so much as a warning against actual apostasy, but as an example of a spiritual state into which other believers could and did fall. This idea was developed by Bolton, who explained how Spira's experience related to the Puritan psychology of sin and salvation. The extreme suffering that Spira experienced, according to Bolton, was like the terror that seizes a "poor polluted wretch" when he suddenly realizes that his sinful behavior has angered God. The image of "God's frowning face" he sees in "the pure glasse of his most holy law" is utterly terrifying: "His heavie heart immediately melts away in his breast, and becomes as water. Hee faints and failes, both in the strengeth of his bodie, and stoutnesse of his minde. . . . His spirit the eye and excellencie of his soule, which should illighten, and make lightsome the whole man, is quite put out, and utterly overwhelm'd, with excesse of horrour, and flashes of despaire."48 This state of extreme agony is amplified, asserted Bolton, by "fained horrors, gastly apparitions, and imaginary hells, which notwithstanding, have reall stings." They flood in on his imagination and torture his heart.49 The state of the wakened, but not yet converted, sinner is so painful that it makes comprehensible

47 The Workes of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the University of Cambridge, Mr William Perkins, 3 vols. (London, 1626-31), 3:407; see also 1:290, 378. Gouge agreed, and even supplied a counterexample, Vincent Jenkes, who renounced Christianity after being captured by the Turks but resumed his religion on his escape: see William Gouge, A Recovery from Apostasy (London, 1639), p. 40. For a perceptive discussion of this story, see Opie, "Beyond Ideology" (n. 14 above), pp. 24-25.

48 Bolton (n. 27 above), p. 80 (see p. 83 and the marginalia on pp. 81, 82, 83 for the connection of this description with Spira). For an insightful commentary on these passages, see Opie, "Nathaniel Bacon and Francis Spira" (n. 14 above), p. 37.

49 Bolton, p. 82.

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the actions and sufferings of malefactors whose anguish might otherwise seem remote from the deeds and feelings of lesser offenders: "Hence it was that Judas preferred an Halter and Hell, before his present horror. That Spira said often (what heart quakes not to heare it?) that Hee envied Cain, Saul, and Judas: wishing rather any of their roomes, in the Dungeon of the damned, then to have his poore heart rent in pieces with such raging terrors, and fiery desperations upon his Bed of death."50 Perkins and Bolton were the great psychologists of Puritan piety, and they carefully marked out the stages of conversion and the significance of Spira's despair in that scheme.51 It was, however, Bunyan whose association of Spira with the sufferings of the converting soul had the largest impact on seventeenth- and eighteenth- century readers. Spira fascinated Bunyan. He regarded Spira's fate as exemplifying a state of mind into which any believer might fall, a horrid state of spiritual and emotional alienation. For Bunyan, the search for assurance of salvation was full of tribulation. His massively influential autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, recounts the extremes of suffering he experienced during his frequent periods of uncertainty. It was in one of his gravest crises that he first came on Bacon's book, and his description of how it affected him reveals vividly how strongly he identified with Spira's emotions. Bunyan tells his readers that he was being swallowed up by despair, and using one of his favorite metaphors, he explains that he was driven away from God by a tempest, frightening and uncontrollable thoughts that his sins were unpardonable: "About this time, I did light on that dreadful story of that miserable mortal, Francis Spira; a book that was to my troubled spirit as salt, when rubbed into a fresh wound; every sentence in that book, every groan of that man, with all the rest of his dolors, as his tears, his prayers, his gnashing of teeth, his wringing of hands, his twining and twisting, languishing and pining away under that mighty hand of God that was upon him, was as knives and daggers in my Soul. '52

50 Ibid., pp. 81-82. 51 For recent discussions of the Puritan psychology of conversion, see Charles Lloyd

Cohen, God's Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: 1986); Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative (Cambridge, 1983).

52 Bunyan (n. 41 above), p. 51. For a good brief discussion of Bunyan, Spira, and religious despair, see Christopher Hill, A Tinker and a Poor Man: John Bunyan and His Church, 1628-1688 (New York, 1989), pp. 184-87. A very similar response to the Spira story is described by John Crook in his autobiography. Crook later became a Quaker; at this point in his life, in the late 1630s or 1640s, he was a Puritan; see John Crook, The Design of Christianity ... To Which is Prefixed a Short Account of His Life Written by Himself (London, 1791), p. viii.

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Bunyan's reading of the Spira story was far more pessimistic and terrifying than those of Perkins and Bolton. Like Calvin, he regarded Spira's death as a terrifying example of God's vengeance. He had denied his faith, and in return he was condemned: "It is impossible for those Fall-a-waies to be renewed again unto Repentance.... Now to have the heart so hardened, so judicially hardened, this is a bar put in by the Lord God, against the Salvation of this Sinner. This was the burden of Spira's complaint, I cannot do it; 0 now I cannot do it."53 Bunyan's impassioned reading of the Spira story transformed it from a warning against rejecting God into a horrifying example of God rejecting man. He was especially disturbed by one sentence of Bacon: "Man knows the beginning of sin, but who bounds the issues thereof?" Recalling these words, Bunyan remembered others, which explained that a man would recognize the consequences of sin only when it was too late, when he asked God for forgiveness and discovered that "he was rejected."54 Bunyan's emphasis on God's inscrutability and the utter finality of His judgments was characteristically severe. And yet he plainly identified with Spira emotionally. It is precisely this identifi- cation with Spira's feelings that made his attitude to the story so striking. Later readers seem to have drawn some hope from the example of Bunyan's own conversion and from Christian's victory over Giant Despair in The Pilgrim's Progress and to have regarded Spira's state as a terrible trial and not a trap from which there could be no escape.

The despair that came from a sense of sinfulness was a distinct emotion, with a particular function. It gave the sinner a sense of the hell that awaited him if he slid back; and it also helped him to disengage from the false pleasures and illusory security offered by the secular world. The aim of Puritan commentary on Spira's tale was to place it firmly in the context of the pattern of conversion, and the references to it show that Puritans and Dissenters understood that its significance was greatest in that context. Conversely, the orthodox enemies of religious enthusiasm insisted that despair was not a genuine spiritual state, an emotion whose significance depended on its religious context, but rather a symptom of mental illness, which they usually called religious melancholy. Robert Burton coined the phrase, and he devoted much of a volume of his Anatomy of Melancholy to it. In his view, it was melancholy that made Spira impervious to the counsel and comfort of learned men. And the failure of his "excellent physicians" to

53 The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, ed. Graham Midgley (Oxford, 1986), 5:58; see also, 5:151, 173.

54 Bunyan, pp. 51-52; see also p. 57.

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get him to eat, drink, or sleep only proved how severe his affliction was: "He felt (as he said) the pains of hell in his soul; in all other things he discoursed aright, but in this most mad .... Never pleaded any man so well for himself as this man did against himself, and so he desperately died."55

Although Bacon's Fearefull Estate was based on sources almost a century old, it was a paradoxically timely book, and it embodies a defense against these conservative charges. He notes that some of those attending Spira "not looking so high as the Judgment of God, laid all the blame on his Melancholick constitution: that overshadowing his judgment, wrought in him a kind of madness."56 They called in physicians from the University of Padua, one of the foremost medical faculties of the age, but they were unable to relieve Spira's suffering. The divines present reasoned that a disease that could not be healed using natural means must have a supernatural cause, and this was the conclusion Bacon obviously endorsed. "Do you think that this disease is to be cured by potions?" he recounts Spira admonishing his physicians, "Believ[e] me there must be another manner of medicine, it is neither plaisters, nor drugs, that can help a fainting soul cast down with [the] sense of Sin, and the wrath of God; 'tis onely Christ that must bee the Physitian, and the Gospel of the Soul [the] Antidote."57 Bacon's Fearefull Estate appeared at a time when Laudian churchmen were assailing the gloomier tendencies in Puritan piety. In the religious context of Caroline England, Spira became important to Puritans as an example of spiritual affliction, of a state of mind whose origins lay, not in a disorder of the body, but in alienation from God. At the same time, the very attack by their clerical opponents tended to underline the fact that religious despair was an emotion peculiar to Puritan spiri- tuality.58

Eighteenth-century Methodists, many of whose theology was as antipredestinarian as Archbishop Laud's, nevertheless tended also to

55 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson, 3 vols. (Lon- don, 1972), 3:407.

56 Bacon, Fearefull Estate (1638) (n. 1 above), p. 22. 57 Ibid., p. 24. 58 This is a more optimistic account of the Puritan understanding of religious despair

than Stachniewski's Persecutory Imagination (n. 14 above), the most impressive study of the subject to date. Stachniewski's book, which appeared just as the final version of this article was going to press, is a sustained indictment of Calvinist predestinarianism, which he believes created anxiety and despair. There can be no doubt that it did, at least in some believers, but Stachniewski seems to me to de-emphasize the "prepara- tory" uses of despair, and he ignores the significance of the emotion outside of the context of Calvinist theology, among for instance the Methodists discussed below.

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regard Spira as an emblem of alienated agony. What seems to have united the various strands of Methodism-Calvinist and Wesleyan- was an intense emphasis on justification by faith alone and on personal conversion. Like its Puritan and dissenting predecessors, Methodism therefore encouraged its adherents to examine their hearts and to inter- pret their emotions in spiritual terms. They were the inheritors of Puri- tan emotionality, and they were attacked by their orthodox enemies in much the same terms as their Calvinist forebears had been.59 How they understood and employed the Spira story is perhaps best illus- trated in the autobiographies and diaries of two early lay preachers, John Haime (1710-84) and John Valton (1740-94). Haime was one of the earliest lay evangelists; in 1743, while he was still in the army, he formed a Methodist society in Flanders and converted three hundred of the soldiers stationed there. And yet his own conversion was any- thing but swift and easy. He suffered spells of extreme doubt and anguish, even after he resigned from the service and joined Wesley's band of preachers. His favorite book was Bunyan's Grace Abounding. Indeed, Haime strongly identified with Bunyan, and he found comfort in the edifying story of that tormented soul's life. He bought a copy of it while he was on duty at Banbury and pronounced it "the best book I ever saw; and again I felt some hopes of mercy."60 Not surprisingly, his autobiography, which he wrote in his old age, strongly resembles Grace Abounding. Valton, too, was an early follower of Wesley and a turbulent spirit. He also had read Bunyan and absorbed the language and pattern of Bunyan's life into his own self-conception. For instance, during an emotional crisis in 1767 he wrote, "This morning I was in Bunyan's Iron Cage," borrowing a metaphor from The Pil- grim's Progress.61 And like Bunyan, Valton for many years experienced doubt and despair, which he believed were satanic temptations.

59 For discussions of the similarities between Puritan divinity and Methodism, see Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Ox- ford, 1978), pp. 434-45; John Walsh, "The Origins of the Evangelical Revival," in Essays in Modern English Church History, ed. G. V. Bennett and John Walsh (London, 1966), pp. 138-60; Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (London, 1989), pp. 175-76, 307-8. For the Dissenters, see N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, Ga., 1987), chap. 6. For attacks on Methodist "enthusiasm," see George Lavington, The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compar'd, 3 vols. (London, 1757); A. Lytes, Methodism Mocked (London, 1960); Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688-1791 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 372-78.

60 Thomas Jackson, ed., The Lives of Early Methodist Preachers, 3d ed., 6 vols. (London, 1866) 1:273.

61 John Valton, MS autobiography and diaries, 1763-93, 6 vols., Methodist Ar- chives, John Rylands Library, Manchester, 4:24; Bunyan, p. 213.

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The Devil is as prominent in his diaries as he is in Grace Abounding, a real and terrifyingly insistent adversary.

Both Haime and Valton recalled the Spira story at key points in their turbulent conversions. When he was still a soldier abroad, in the mid-1740s, Haime began to be tormented by fears that he would not be saved and by temptations to renounce God. The Devil intruded into his thoughts, at last compelling him to remember Spira: "Now I thought God had forsaken me, and the devil had no need to trouble himself about me. He then set the case of Francis Spira before me, so that I sunk into black despair. Everything seemed to make against me."62 After this experience, Haime returned to England, joined Wes- ley's troops, and began in greater earnest his career as a Methodist preacher. Eventually, it brought him the assurance he craved. Valton's most important reference to Spira is very similar, and it, too, marked the lowest point in a slough of despond. Throughout much of the 1760s, Valton experienced almost daily attacks of anxiety and despair. In one of his gravest periods of distress, when he was in "an Agony of Prayer and Cries," he recalls Spira and is immediately tempted to commit suicide:

O I am damned, damned! I am fairly overcome. I yield, I yield . . 0 Spira, Spira. I remember thy Fate and Tremble. I envy the Damned! O what shall I do? "Hang yourself!" "No, Devil, I dare not do that."63

Valton, too, rescued himself from this nadir of suffering and went on to become a prominent Methodist preacher. He gained confidence in his role and in his relationship with God more slowly than Haime, but it is noticeable that, as the years pass in his diaries, he became less and less subject to doubt and despair. Haime and Valton were not the only Methodists to proclaim that they were "in Spira's state." William Black, for instance, told the older preacher John Newton, "I am in Francis Spira's condition," when Newton tried to console him during a spiritual crisis.6

What did it mean to be in "Spira's condition"? How did readers use the story to understand their own experiences? Naturally, the answer to this question depended partly on the religious orientation of

62 Jackson, ed., 1:300. 63 Valton, 4:11-12. Interestingly, Wesley cut the Devil from this passage when he

reprinted Valton's autobiography in the Arminian Magazine 7 (1784): 14. 64 Arminian Magazine 14 (1791): 69.

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the reader. When Samuel Sewell's fifteen-year-old daughter told him that she "was afraid [she] would go to Hell, was like Spira, not Elected," she was obviously expressing an anxiety common among New England Puritans and other Calvinists. For her, Spira was simply a literal symbol of reprobation, a man who, as Calvin himself had said, was surely damned.65 But other Calvinists and Methodist autobiographers as well depicted Spira's condition in more complex ways. Thus, for Wallington, according to Paul Seaver, the Spira story taught both terrible and edifying truths. It proved that recantation led to damnation, but, more important, it also showed that one should "take heed of relying on Faith that works not a holy, unblamable life, worthy of a believer."66 In other words, Wallington saw in Spira a pattern that was like a figure in a Gestalt drawing. It was at once a dire warning of how not to behave and an encouragement to maintain the faith "that works . . . a holy, unblamable life." Implicit in this interpretation of Spira's experience was the idea that faith (or its abandonment) had a transforming effect on the actions, thoughts, and feelings of men and women. Apostasy and grace were not passive spiritual states; they were ways of living and dying.

Bunyan, too, believed that Spira's example could be used to achieve a holier way of life. He stressed the story's psychological lessons. "Miseries as well as mercies, sharpen and make quick the soul," he observed. "Behold Spira in his book, Cain in his guilt, and Saul with the Witch of Endor, and you will see men ripened, men inlarged and greatned in their fancies, imaginations and apprehen- sions . . . about their Loss, their misery, and their woe, and their Hells."67 Recognition of sin "inlarged and greatned" the faculty of imagination, the power that enabled men to picture the future, vastly intensifying the emotional experience of reprobation, so that they were in a kind of Hell. As painful as it might be to fall into Spira's condition, or something very near to it, it could also lead to a sincere renunciation of sin and prepare the way for salvation. Wesley made this point, consoling Haime: "Think it not strange, concerning the fiery trials which God has seen good to try you with. Indeed, the chastisement for the present is not joyous, but grievous; nevertheless it will, by and by, bring forth the peaceable fruits of righteousness. It is good for you to be in the fiery furnace: though the flesh be weary of it, you shall be purified therein, but not consumed."68 Suffering, and even the ex-

65 Quoted in Hall (n. 14 above), p. 133. 66 Seaver (n. 28 above), p. 202. 67 The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, ed. Richard L. Greaves (Oxford,

1981), 9:167. 68 Jackson, ed., 1:302.

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tremes of despair that the Spira story epitomized, were for a great many people, as necessary a part of conversion as the experience of God's mercies and the joy that attended them.

But why did they have to reach that point at all? Why did God put some men and women through this fiery furnace, when others passed from sin to certainty with relatively little suffering? When the question is put like this, the answer seems obvious, although its implications are explosively controversial. As the enemies of religious zeal charged and modern psychologists have repeated, sects that emphasized dramatic conversion experiences attracted a disproportionate number of men and women with turbulent personalities. For every phlegmatic evangelical, there seem to have been several with a history of emotional distress, particularly in adolescence. For every Richard Baxter, there was a Wallington and a Bunyan; for every Wesley, a Haime, a Valton, and a Black. Part of the attraction of sectarian religion for such people was that its beliefs provided a language for understanding and managing troubling emotions, and its disciplined way of life, deliberately opposed to the customs of the wider society, provided structure and fellowship.69 But if we think of the question in terms of the challenges and opportunities that evangelical Protestantism afforded to potential converts, the question seems more interesting and less dismissive of the religious ideals of contemporaries. Puritanism, Restoration Dissent, and, later, Methodism all required a total trans- formation of the believer's personality and his or her relationship with the wider world. It was necessary to learn new patterns of thought and feeling that placed one at odds with the sources of sin and made the rigors of godliness a source of pleasure.70 Puritanism and Methodism, however great their differences were, both stressed that true Christian- ity was a "heart religion," a faith and way of acting that stemmed

69 One of the most conspicuous features of the autobiographies of many pious Prot- estants is the frequency with which they record unusually intense anxieties, even before their authors were awakened to their sins. A perhaps extreme example is Trosse (n. 37 above). See also, Watts (n. 59 above), p. 177; Stachniewski (n. 14 above), chap. 2, esp. pp. 39-41. It is notable that Richard Baxter worried that he had not experienced the sort of tribulation during conversion that Bolton, Thomas Hooker, and John Rogers had; see Reliquiae Baxterianae: or, Mr. Richard Baxter's Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of His Life and Times, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), pp. 6-9. For what they are worth, many modern psychological studies have tried to determine the extent to which people who convert to various religious denominations were "malad- justed" before their conversions. For a brief summary of the literature and wise remarks about the dangers of bias in such research, see Bernard Spilka, Ralph W. Hood, Jr., and Richard L. Borsuch, The Psychology of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1985), p. 213.

70 Cohen (n. 51 above), chaps. 3-4, is particularly good on this topic. For a contem- porary discussion of the changes in personality and emotionality that conversion required, see William Fenner, A Treatise of the Affections (London, 1642).

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from powerful emotions as well as the acceptance of valid doctrines. From this perspective, miseries were indeed as instructive as mercies, for they were guideposts that signaled one's location spiritually and impelled one on his or her way to a better life. The Spira story thus epitomized an emotional experience that was-for some people at least-essential to their salvation.71

Conversion was, for many Protestants, a protracted task that required hard, emotional work. A godly Christian, intending to be help- ful, told a troubled young Vavasor Powell "what a hard work the work of conversion was, it being no less than to make stone flesh, and darkness light."72 Spira's tale became one of the key narratives that helped Protestants to work their way through to becoming different people. For the task was nothing less than to create a wholly new self. The converted Christian was not the same person as the sinner left behind; he or she thought differently, felt differently, lived differently. New relationships defined the converted Christian's identity, a new relationship with God, new relationships with the congregation and with relatives and neighbors who had not converted. Much has been written recently by literary scholars and by social scientists about how people form and change their conceptions of themselves: "self- fashioning" is Stephen Greenblatt's handy phrase. According to Greenblatt, self-fashioning is a dialectical process in which people form an "achieved identity" in relation to an authority, such as God or the Bible, and an alien, such as a heretic or Antichrist.73 Anyone who has read Grace Abounding or myriad other of the similar spiritual autobiographies will immediately recognize that they depict the formation of a new sense of the self "at the point of encounter between an authority and an alien"-between God and Satan, whose struggle is experienced in the heart of the believer.74

The symbols and expressions that spiritual autobiographers used to describe the process of self-fashioning were old and highly conven-

71 A comment by William Kiffin demonstrates just how self-conscious this process of moral and emotional refashioning could be. Awakened to a sense of his sinfulness and unable to find in himself the tokens of grace, Kiffin sought the advice of godly ministers, who pressed on him "the necessity of deep humiliation by the law, as the only way God took to the conversion of the sinner. I was also the more convinced of it by reading Mr. Hooker's book, 'The Soul's Preparation for Christ' ": see William Kiffin, Remarkable Passages in the Life of William Kiffin, ed. William Orme (London, 1823), p. 10.

72 The Life and Death of Vavasor Powell (London, 1671), p. 3. 73 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

(Chicago, 1980), p. 9. 74 The outstanding work on spiritual autobiography, its symbolism, and psychology,

is Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience (Oxford, 1972).

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tional. The most striking of them were images of spiritual combat that can be found in medieval morality plays as well as in early modern popular religious thought. The history of the Spira story, however, points to some crucial developments in the methods of Protestant self- fashioning. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the alien and the authority were still often conceptualized in symbolic, allegorical terms. Relatively few biographical examples were used to represent complicity with Satan or triumph over him, and most of those were biblical references, such as Lot's wife or Judas. The obvious pattern of authority, the pattern of the godly life, was Christ. But as the period progressed, religious writers increasingly encouraged the production of histories and biographies that embodied the antithetical patterns of godliness and sinfulness. There were collections of biographies of Puri- tan saints and stories of the terrible afflictions and horrible deaths that befell notorious sinners. Samuel Clarke, for instance, churned out eight volumes recounting the lives of martyrs and divines and also compiled a popular collection of judgments.75 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, religious biography became increasingly realistic in the sense that it purported to be true reports of the lives of actual people. As conventionalized as the genre quickly became, spiritual autobiographies also provided realistic depictions of the emotional experiences of their authors and often of the trials they underwent as they embraced the sectarian or evangelical way of life. More and more laymen wrote their autobiographies, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these were frequently printed for the edification of their coreligionists. Their authors were often men and women of hum- ble social status, whose stories would therefore be more likely to en- gage the sympathy of ordinary readers. Wesley printed the life histories of at least forty early Methodists in the Arminian Magazine, and most of the authors were men and women of artisanal rank or below.76

75 These are conveniently listed in the Dictionary of National Biography, sub nomen "Clarke, Samuel." Clarke, like Foxe and Beard before him, included a reference to Spira in counterpoint to his songs of praise; see Samuel Clarke, A Mirrour or Looking- Glass, Both for Saints and Sinners, 4th ed. (London, 1671), p. 31.

76 Watts, pp. 407-8; Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore, 1989); chap. 4 is a challenging and illuminating discussion of early Methodist autobiographies that stresses the construction of identity. Incidentally, the versions of these autobiographies printed by Jack- son in Lives of Methodist Preachers are usually different from the Arminian Magazine versions, which in turn have been edited from the original manuscripts, many of which survive in the Methodist Archives, John Rylands Library, Manchester. It is notable that each successive edition or abridgment usually eliminated more and more passages that recounted intense emotional and spiritual experiences that might be regarded as instances of "enthusiasm." For a good set of seventeenth-century autobiographies by

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Thus, the tools for self-fashioning came increasingly to consist of a rich array of narratives, depicting the successful conversions of many and the miserable downfalls of a few. Readers seeking to form their own new Christian identity often turned to these works, and they sometimes found in them patterns for their own lives. We have seen that Wallington, Bunyan, Haime, Valton, and others saw in the Spira story a pattern of terrible failure, a symbol of life given over to the alien. They also found in other works contrasting figures that gave them the strength to escape from Spira's condition. Valton, for instance, found consoling examples in the lives of David Brainerd and Thomas Walsh. From the latter's autobiography, he learned to balance his exact record of the torments he experienced with a fuller account of the mercies he enjoyed: "I find that it has been exactly with me as with Mr. Walsh; but I have always called it a day of sore temptation and Trial without mentioning the frequent consultations I had in prayer, even on those days."77 When another new Methodist, Robert Roe, fell into tormented despair, Valton comforted him and lent him a volume of his own journal. "I find his Experience very much like my own," Roe wrote gratefully.78 For the Presbyterian Elizabeth West the dialectic of despair and hope, of Spira and a more hopeful narrative of despair overcome, was explicit. Happening on "the book called Francis Spira," she recoiled in terror: it was a book that "hurt me more than all the books I ever saw; O that I had never seen it! for I thought, I would make the same end he made." For consolation she, like many other eighteenth-century Dissenters and Methodists, turned to Grace Abounding.79

men and women of low social status, see Henry Walker, Spirituall Experiences, Of Sundry Beleevers (London, 1653). This book is sometimes attributed to Vavasor Powell.

77 Valton (n. 61 above), 1:39-40, 2:46, 3:52, 5:74. 78 Arminian Magazine 7 (1784): 133. See also Thomas Taylor's remark that "Allen's

[Alleine's] Alarm" described his state exactly in Arminian Magazine 3 (1780): 375. 79 Elizabeth West, Memoirs or Spiritual Exercises of Elizabeth West (Glasgow,

1766), pp. 15-16; Nussbaum, p. 172. (From her curious remarks about Spira's "atheism," it is not clear whether West was reading one of the editions of Fearefull Estate that combined Bacon's text with another or The Second Spira. She may also have simply regarded apostasy as "athesim.") The degree to which the Spira tale appealed to women is very unclear. Aside from West's remark, I have found only one reference to Spira in a woman's spiritual autobiography, a confusing passage in the preface to A Narrative of God's Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs Hannah Allen (Afterwards Married to Mr. Hatt) (London, 1683), "To the Reader," p. v. As these and many other texts demonstrate, women converts often passed through the same emotional transitions as men. The absence of references to Spira in their accounts of extreme anxiety and even despair cannot really be explained satisfactorily. Troubled women such as West did not hesitate to identify themselves with John Bunyan, as West's comment shows, and the number of autobiographies by distressed women is small enough so that Spira's absence from them may be entirely coincidental. For thoughts on this subject, I am grateful to Cynthia Herrup and Barbara Harris.

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Conclusion

The history of the Spira story and the way in which Puritan and Methodist autobiographers referred to it illustrate with particular clar- ity two broad lessons. The first is that conceptions of the self are socially constructed, and that narratives are one of the tools used in their construction; the second related point is that emotions can be fully understood only by reconstructing the cultural milieu in which people manifest them. Spira's story was important-in more than one way-in a particular social milieu, that of the Protestant minority or sect, and it called attention in a terrifying way to the consequences of transgressing the boundary between the sect and the world. In this sense it promoted group identity and urged Protestants to persist in the difficult task of sustaining themselves in opposition to hostile ma- jorities. The tale held an even more powerful meaning for evangelicals. They were in a very particular social situation. They had typically allied themselves with a religious minority but in the case of some of them-notably Bunyan and the Methodist autobiographers-had not fully achieved new identities as converts. Often, when they fell into "Spira's condition," they were at odds with their family and neighbors and yet were still painfully conscious that they were sinners and not "saints." It was this liminal stage in the transition from the world to the sect that many converts seem to have found most difficult. And it was in this stage that the terrible example of Spira and the recapitulation of his suffering was most crucial. It warned against backsliding; it helped to reorient one's emotions-making the comfort of conformity the source of extreme agony and the rigors of sectarianism the promise of transcendent joy.

This article claims that the despair that Puritans and Methodists associated with Spira's name was a distinct emotion. It was not the same as the medieval desperatio, and although it shared some of the features and functions of acedia, it was not that, either. For these were conditions into which one could fall at any stage in one's spiritual development, while Spira's despair was an experience only the wakened, but not yet saved, soul might have. In this context, religious despair was a normal, although not inevitable, experience. Its medieval analogues by contrast were abnormal and wholly negative in their content; they were certainly not recognized stages in one's spiritual growth. Nor was it merely melancholy or depression. To label it as such ignores the particular cognitive content of religious despair, which was an overwhelming sense of rejection, guilt, and helplessness with respect to God. Evangelical Protestants distinguished clearly between that emotion and the unhappiness that comes from bodily dis-

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orders or from social and psychological situations.80 The orthodox enemies of religious enthusiasm understood this: discrediting the genu- ineness of their emotional experience required equating it with a disease. To them, despair was a condition one "caught" rather than a spiritual state one attained and might transcend. Little is gained and much is lost in historical analysis if the polemical argument of the enemies of those who experienced religious despair is adopted uncriti- cally, however much it may be updated with psychoanalytic language.

This battle over the meaning of religious despair is notable. Early modern English culture was complex, and it afforded a rich array of psychologies more or less common to particular classes, religious groups, and genders. In the aftermath of the English Revolution, the enemies of religious radicalism sought to discredit enthusiasm by rein- terpreting the self-presentations and emotions of the radicals: they denounced inspired prophets as madmen and despair as melancholy. The weapon that they used against these religious conceptions of identity and feeling was the language of medical discourse, the classically based lexicon of mental illness.81 Thus, the cultural conflicts created by religious and political struggle affected the ways that the innermost feelings of men and women were understood by different social groups. It is the proper task of historians of the mind to try to reconstruct the language and tropes of the folk or lay psychology of different social groups over time and to show how they were transformed by wider social and cultural changes.

In pursuing this goal, this article has argued that the analysis of key narratives can be a powerful tool. Behavior is often thought of as being regulated by a set of cultural imperatives, "control mecha- nisms," as Clifford Geertz calls them.82 But the example of the autobiographers and diarists examined here suggests that, in fact, the formation of sectarian identities involved modeling and imitation as much as it did learning a set of rules. This was especially true of the ways in which people learned how to feel, for emotions are difficult, if not impossible, to understand outside of the context of specific social situations. Catherine Lutz insists that neither actors nor observers can un-

80 See, e.g., the careful distinctions drawn by Richard Gilpin, Daemonologica Sa- cra: or, a Treatise of Satan's Temptatons (London, 1677), pp. 378-82, 387-408.

81 Michael MacDonald, "Insanity and the Realities of History," Psychological Med- icine 11 (1981): 11-25; Roy Porter, "The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry," Medical History 29 (1983): 35-50. For the early seventeenth-century origins of this attack, see, most recently, Stachniewski (n. 14 above), pp. 227-31.

82 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), p. 44. Compare Greenblatt, p. 3.

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derstand the meaning of emotions without placing them in an imagined social context: "To understand the meaning of an emotion word is to be able to envisage . . . moral points of view, facial expressions, personal and social goals, and sequences of events."83 It is in the personal narratives of individuals that they can be seen constructing such imagined contexts, it is in the master tropes of their social groups that the patterns that guided their self-fashioning can be found.

This article does not mean to suggest that stories like Spira's are the skeleton key to historical psychology. The by now conventional methods of studying mentalites will remain the essential tools for reconstructing the mental world of the past. Nor does this article suggest that such stories-or personal narratives, generally-had a single, easily recoverable meaning. The variations in the interpretation of Spira's story lent to it by successive groups of English Protestants show how plastic readings of the same narrative could be. Narrative analysis is a more solid basis for historical psychology than psychoanalysis or other forms of depth psychology. It allows for the recovery of the ways in which people described themselves and others, built a sense of their own personhood, and made sense out of emotions. It does not require one to penetrate beneath the meanings that they constructed to make links with important historical themes. Moreover, the work of anthropologists and psychologists now emphasizes the role that folk psychology plays in social action and even social structure. Historians must attend to the ways that people told and lived the stories of their lives and how they understood the stories of others' lives. Stories are really all we have to reconstruct the inner lives of people in the past; stories are what they were made from in the first place.

83 Lutz (n. 19 above), p. 25.

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the fearefull estate of francis spira: narrative, identity, and emotion in early modern england

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