Against Metaphor: Stephen Bateman's A Christall Class as Spiritual Politics

Abstract

<p>I am interested in how A <em>christall glasse</em> takes up the notion of Reform - how Bateman both deploys and writes against the notion of reform: multiply political, epistemological, spiritual, linguistic. Writ small in this one text are signs of the tectonic cultural shifts that resulted from England's separation with Rome. In content Bateman's book is concerned with ridding the English spiritual imagination of any vestigial faith in the popish church; and through the form of A <em>christall glasse</em>, Stephen Bateman works to instruct his audience in a new kind of reading as a means of rhetorical persuasion. In this thesis, I hope to successfully demonstrate how A<em> christall glasse</em> deploys medieval modes of expression to articulate a position on late 16th-century Reformist ideas, a position that seeks to move away from the practice and traditions of Roman Catholicism towards a Protestant and monarchical envisioning of Christianity in England. In its expression, however, one can detect, within A <em>christall glasse</em>, a degree of anxiety surrounding the instability of meaning and truth generated by such reform, by the shaking of the foundations of how faith is understood and politically organized in England which this book, in its small way, performs. I will be reading A <em>christall glasse</em> as a text which is at once dependent upon devices of the emblem genre while at the same time uneasy about the visuality of the form.</p>