Daily Life in Elizabethan England (46 page)

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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

The changing physical model of the universe was part of a broader

process of transformation that was beginning to redefine the relationship between people and the cosmos they inhabited. This process unfolded principally in the domain of religion, which provided the framework and vocabulary through which people understood their place in the world.

Religion ranked with profession and family as a core defining feature of an Elizabethan person’s life. It was seen as the key ingredient in the recipe for a successful society, and it was the primary criterion by which one judged a life successfully lived. God was invoked on waking in the morning and retiring at night, at the beginning and end of meals, in greetings and in partings. People interpreted the course of human history and the cycles of their own lives through religious stories, particularly the stories of personal and national salvation that pervade the New and Old Testaments. Birth, baptism, marriage, and death were waypoints on an individual’s road to heaven, following in the footsteps of Christ. The political history of Tudor England was seen as the story of a people chosen by God for tribulation and greatness, paralleling the experiences of the Jews in the Old Testament.

To the degree that religious skepticism, atheism, and irreligion were present, they operated within an essentially religious framework. When Lady Monson in 1597 consulted an astrologer “because she doubteth whether there is a God,” her doubts actually confirmed the importance of religion in her life.6 One contemporary complained that it was “a matter very common to dispute whether there be a God or not,” but in reality, few people voiced such questions, which could lead to the severest punishment. Christopher Marlowe is sometimes cited as an example of Elizabethan atheism, and he certainly ran considerable risk in claiming (as reported by a hostile informant) “that the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe,” and “that Christ deserved better to die than Barabbas and that the Jews made a good choice though Barabbas was both a thief and a murderer.”7 Marlowe’s words went unpunished, probably because of his shadowy connections to the government spy network, but in reality, they were in large part a posture of transgression by a self-made “bad boy”—a posture that had shock power precisely because he lived in a pervasively religious environment.

Marlowe’s provocative statements were ultimately sacrilegious rather than atheistic, and sacrilege is well documented in Elizabethan culture, whether in the form of swearing, blasphemy, or profanation of religious sacraments. On one occasion, a goose and gander were married; on another, a horse’s head was baptized; on yet another, an entire dead horse was brought to receive communion. Such impious actions were the ritual equivalent of Marlowe’s sacrilegious speech: their topsy-turvydom deliberately violated accepted cultural propriety but was not necessarily intended as a serious challenge to the established cultural order.

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Most people adhered to at least outward conformity with the religious status quo, in part because of the sanctions for failing to do so, but also because it was widely agreed that religious conformity was essential to the well-being of society. Hardly anyone advocated freedom of worship.

Catholic recusants and Protestant separatists alike believed that only a single religion should be permitted, disagreeing only in what that religion should be.

The nature of the dominant religious model changed significantly during Elizabeth’s lifetime. When she came to the throne, most adults had grown up in an environment shaped by medieval Catholicism. For such people, religion was a ritualized activity rooted in material things: doing pious works, honoring established religious institutions, observing the cycle of religious holy days that embodied the defining stories of the received faith. Respect for tradition encompassed not only specifically religious practices, but the host of secular observances that came with them, such as the festive rituals that attached to religious holidays.

The emerging Protestant generation of Elizabeth’s day were moving toward a mode of religion that was more cerebral and less reverent toward tradition. In its place, Protestants emphasized study of the Bible as the universal guide and reflection on its meaning in the life of the reader.

Lady Margaret Hoby’s diary records daily religious reading and reflection, searching her own soul before bedtime to judge her own conduct, and often meeting with others to read and discuss religious texts. Indeed the diary begins to emerge as a literary form in this period, particularly among reformist Protestants for whom it served as a means of cultivating religious self-awareness.

As literacy spread, more people were able to participate in this process of spiritual inquiry and reflection. Even those who could not read had ample opportunities to take part in contemporary religious culture.

Weekly church services included sermons and biblical readings, large towns offered public sermons outside of the regular services, and small-group reading was a common activity among reformists like Lady Hoby.

Public discussions on religious themes, known as
prophesyings,
were widely attended in the early part of Elizabeth’s reign; these provided a fertile ground for the development of increasingly reformist Protestantism, to the degree that the Queen had them suppressed in 1577.

All of these factors shifted the midpoint of English religious belief in a Protestant direction, but most people fell somewhere between Catholic and Protestant extremes. Practicing Catholics were few, but a majority of the population observed customs that would be regarded as superstitious by the reformists: one critic complained in 1584 that “three parts at least of the people [are] wedded to their old superstition still.”8 In 1590 in the conservative county of Lancashire, many observing members of the English church were still bringing prayer beads to services and habitually crossing

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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

Consulting an astrologer. [
Shakespeare’s England
]

themselves. At the other end of the spectrum, ardent reformists called for the abolition of bishops, yet most Protestants were willing to accept their continued existence. Some of the leading reformers were bishops themselves: Edmund Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, was suspended from his office for resisting the Queen’s order to suppress prophesyings.

Not every aspect of belief fell on a spectrum between Catholic and Protestant. At the margins of the Christian worlds of heaven, hell, and earth was another realm that did not fit comfortably into the geography of salvation: a world of angels, fairies, and witches, of astrology and divina-tion—some of them perhaps mentioned in scripture, but none having a clear place in Christian theology.

Such phenomena had roots in the more inclusive, less rationalistic spiritual environment of the Catholic Middle Ages. Yet belief in these forces was widespread across all sectors of society, regardless of religious leanings. Witchcraft was accepted as real by both church and state and carried the death penalty. Witchcraft accusations were most numerous in the highly Protestantized regions of southeastern England. They peaked in the 1580s and 1590s, although they were never as numerous as they tend to be
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in the modern popular imagination. Indictments for witchcraft in Essex, one of the counties most active in prosecuting witchcraft cases, amounted to 174 over the 40-year period 1563–1603; fewer than half of these led to executions. Reginald Scot, a justice of the peace in Kent at a time when witchcraft accusations were at their height, summed up the situation in terms that resonate with modern interpretations of the witchcraft craze: The fables of witchcraft have taken so fast hold and deep root in the heart of man, that few or none can nowadays with patience endure the hand and correction of God. For if any adversity, grief, loss of children, corn, cattle or, liberty happen unto them, by and by they exclaim upon witches—as if there were no God in Israel that ordereth all things according to his will, punishing both just and unjust with griefs, plagues, and afflictions in manner and form as he thinketh good; but that certain old women here on earth, called witches, must needs be the contrivers of all men’s calamities—and as though they themselves [the accusers] were innocents, and had deserved no such punishments.9

Belief in a non-Scriptural world of the supernatural permeated even the highest and most learned levels of society. John Dee, one of the most eru-dite men in England and a leading promoter of scientific, geographic, and mathematical discovery, was also a noted astrologer and spent much of his life and fortune trying to summon angels and discover the alchemist’s elusive Philosopher’s Stone. Elizabeth herself chose the date of her coronation based on a horoscope cast by Dee.

In fact, it is somewhat misleading in an Elizabethan context to distinguish between science and magic. Science was the body of human lore passed down over the centuries in the writings of learned men; it was the domain of numbers and logic, and much that today would be classed as magic was preeminently numeric and logical. Astrology and alchemy were as much a part of science as geometry and mathematics.

At the heart of both scientific and magical thinking was a system of correspondences that unified different aspects of the cosmos in a network of analogies. Physical matter was categorized by the ancient theory of the Four Elements, in which all matter consisted of one of the four elements, each defined by two properties: Fire (hot and dry), Air (hot and moist), Water (cold and moist), and Earth (cold and dry). This two-by-two division aligned with a grid of correspondences that connected the elements with directions on the compass, seasons of the year, signs of the zodiac, and parts of the human body. This system for classifying the physical world underlay much of Elizabethan science and medicine as well as supernatural disciplines like astrology and alchemy.

The study of magic actually played a role in the development of scientific thought. John Dee’s diary meticulously records personal events in his life—dreams, good and bad fortune, even instances of sex with his wife. Dee’s aim was to collate this data with his astrological calculations in order to place his astrological work on a more secure footing. It was cury cury

enus

enus

Planet

Mer

V

Saturn

Mars

Sun

Jupiter

V

Mer

Saturn

Moon

Mars

Jupiter

l of these sub—

Al

oat

blad—

than science. The

hips

belly

kidneys

ankles

face

back

ribs,

Part

thr

toes

east,

Body

Shoulders,

arms

Loins,

Shins,

Head,

Heart,

Thighs,

Neck,

Bowels,

Knees, back of

the thighs

Br

stomach

Genitals,

der

Feet,

Sign

us

o

aur

rg

Zodiacal

Gemini

Libra

Aquarius

Aries

Leo

Sagittarius

T

Vi

Capricorn

Cancer

Scorpio

Pisces

/

/

ime of Day / T Gender

Day

Male

Night

Female