The Reception of Petrarch and Protestant Self-Abnegation in William Fowler’s

Tarantula of Love

William Fowler’s Tarantula of Love (c. 1584-1587) gives expression to

an antagonism inherent within erotic poetry that acquires new urgency in the
context of Renaissance Scotland. In composing his sonnet sequence, Fowler
engages with love’s capacity to function as a mode of social distinction, and
questions the related conception of memory as the foundation of ethical
character.
Conceived as the articulation of private emotion, of an unsatisfied
libidinous desire, love poetry is a practice that indicates the refined
sensibility of the writer: its composition demonstrates an ability to sublimate
desire, redirecting it to cultural ends. The conception of love as itself marking
a cultivated response to the impulse of desire finds expression in the
aristocratic culture of love and friendship within medieval and early modern
Europe that C. Stephen Jaeger terms ‘ennobling love’. Privileging erotic
discourse as the idiom of political and social interactions, the practice of
‘ennobling love’ enables aristocratic subjects to present themselves as being
at once capable of an exceptional depth of feeling, yet also fully able to
control its expression. Within this model, the erotic serves as an index of the
aristocratic subject’s ability to reconcile will and reason, a capacity that
distinguishes human from animal, and creates social distinctions. As Andreas
Capellanus argues in his treatise on the art of love, ‘We say that it rarely
happens that we find farmers serving in Love’s court, but naturally, like a
horse or a mule, they give themselves up to the work of Venus, as nature’s
urging teaches them to do’ (1.11). Nobility is defined by the ability to repress
the urges of the appetitive will, natural impulses, contributing to social
harmony.
Within pre-modern culture, self-discipline is customarily linked with the
cultivation of memory. Memory-training provided a means to assimilate the
ethical teachings amassed by a society, and authorized by tradition,
fashioning a self that conforms to the values of the time. Memory might also
play a more immediate part in sublimating the urgent impulse of desire, as
the advice offered within Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano suggests:
To avoide therfore the tourment of this absence, and to
enjoy beawtie without passion, the Courtier by the helpe
of reason muste full and wholy call backe again the
coveting of the body to beawtye alone and (in what he
can) beehoulde it in it self simple and pure, and frame it
within in his imagination sundred from all matter (Hoby
1900: 357).

In theory, then, the pain of desire for an inaccessible object can be assuaged
by a process of transference, redirecting desire towards an image framed in
imagination, where it is sundered from the corrupting influence of matter,
and can be preserved inviolate. Memory-training cultivated this form of
mental visualization, and the conception of memory as the fundamental tool
of literary composition links the subjective production of such imaginative
images with the creation of love poetry.
Within Fowler’s Tarantula, however, the techniques traditionally
employed to master longing do not have the anticipated effect. Memory does
not translate desire to a mental realm where beauty can be enjoyed without
passion; instead, it increases the urgency of a bodily hunger: ‘quhils that hee
quhome thrist dois sore assayle, / remembring drink, recressis mair his
drouthe, / so I remembring the rebreids my bayle’ (Meikle, I. 197, ll. 9-11).
For Fowler, recollective thought increases subjection, as it ‘presents your
absent schape more me to thrall’ (Meikle, I. 162, l. 7). Fowler’s attitude to
memory is especially interesting, as his familiarity with methods of memory-
training is attested by his authorship of a lost treatise on the ‘art of
memorye’. The treatment of memory within the Tarantula marks a self-
conscious reflection on the value of memory-training as a means to subject
the impulses of the appetitive will to the rule of reason.
In its traditional role as an instrument of self-discipline, a curb for the
unruly will, memory-training was conceived as a tactic that might temper the
effects of the Fall, restoring a measure of concord to the order of the soul.
Fowler’s sequence seriously undermines this aspirational model, not only
through the identification of memory as a spur to appetite, but also through
a conclusion that identifies his own former pursuits as forms of idolatry:
I have blaikned beutyes lovd and servd,
and hethe adord bot outward bark and skin,
and earthlie things to heunlye hes preferd:
yet let thy mercie the to mercie move,
and off my mortal mak immortal love.
(Meikle, I. 206, ll. 10-14)
Whereas the traditional conception of ethical character associated with
memory-training allowed individual subjects to make a positive contribution
to their own moral development, Fowler’s speaker lacks agency. Highlighting
the failure of repeated efforts to alleviate his own bondage to bodily desire,
the Tarantula emphasises the extent of his dependence upon divine grace.
Fowler’s use of the sonnet cycle form to question the beneficial
associations of mnemonic practice is especially apposite in light of Petrarch’s
contemporary reputation as an authority on memory, and of the particular
connotations the Canzoniere had acquired through its appropriation by
scholars such as Giordano Bruno, whose De gli eroici furiori (c. 1585)
reinscribes Petrarchan tropes as emblematic images of the type employed in
memory work. Fowler’s treatment of memory is itself anticipated within the
Canzoniere, in Petrarch’s sensitivity to the ambiguities of desire and poetic
language, blurring the boundaries between conversion, idolatry, and
narcissism. Yet Fowler’s scepticism about the role of memory reflects a
heightened awareness of the affective character of images characteristic of
his time, issuing from the tensions surrounding devotional practices
employing images during the Reformation. The Tarantula, as Sarah Dunnigan
has argued, writes back to the Canzoniere, with its concluding invocation to
the Virgin Mary, as Fowler’s erotic poetry identifies the feminine as ‘the locus
of sin and an idolatrous object of abject adoration’ (Dunnigan 2002: 150).
Within the Tarantula, contemporary anxieties centring on the devotional use
of images, like those of the Virgin, give rise to a keen appreciation of the
extent to which precisely those activities intended to suppress desire serve
to increase it.
Fowler’s observation that remembering his beloved Bellisa renews his
disease finds a parallel in the Puritan divine William Perkins’ denunciation of
the art of memory: ‘The animation of the image, which is the key of memory,
is impious; because it requireth absurd, insolent and prodigious cogitations,
and those especially, which set an edge vpon and kindle the most corrupt
affections of the flesh’ (1607: 130). Rather than facilitating the sublimation
of desire that is the mark of the civilised, aristocratic subject, memory
kindles the affections of the flesh, and the arousal associated with
meditation on Bellisa’s physical beauty gestures towards the sensory
response elicited by other aspects of memory work. Contemporary advice
emphasises the particular value of images that carry an emotional charge,
since the affective stimulus ensures that an image will be more readily and
deeply ingrained in memory. Conceived as an essential tool for the
composition of poetry, memory is associated with writing as an activity that
apparently marks the redirection of desire towards culturally sanctioned
ends, yet which can also become a source of pleasure in itself. In the
Tarantula, the composition of poetry, like the adoration of Bellisa, can be
understood as a form of idolatry in its failure to serve an instrumental
purpose, furthering the moral development of the writer. A narcissistic
pleasure in artistic production, and a desire for poetic immortality, insidiously
displace the aspiration towards spiritual immortality. In terms of the
distinction developed by Augustine in On Christian Doctrine, the sin Fowler
regrets at the close of his sequence is an abuse of material and verbal signs:
rather than using them to achieve a knowledge of the divine, he has enjoyed
them as ends in themselves.
The final sonnet of Fowler’s sequence, however, casts doubt on the
idea that any such use of material signs is possible, as it appeals to God for
words:
Lord quha redemes the deid and doth reviue,
 and stumbling things preservs fra farder fall,
quha mercyeis maks the sinfull saul to liue,
and dothe to mynde na mair there guylt re[call],
aboliss, lord, my faults baith great and smal,
and my contempt and my offence efface;
by thy sweit meiknes and thy mercy thral
my stubborne thoughts, proud rebels to thy grace;
In thy sones bloode my sins, great god, displace,
and giue me words to cal vpon thy name.
Lord in thy wonted kyndnes me embrace,
that to this age I may these words procla[m]e:
‘as I IN ONE GOD EUER ay haith trust,
so ar his promeis steadfast, trewe, and Iust.’
(Meikle I. 207)

Fowler’s desire is not for the worldly self to be replaced by a religious self,
capable of living virtuously and performing devotion; such a renunciation
would undermine itself, carrying its own hidden narcissistic gain in the
satisfaction of self-denial. Instead, Fowler aspires to be emptied of self and
filled with God, as ‘stubborn thoughts’ are effaced, yielding to divine words.
The sonnet envisages a form of negative mysticism, which seeks active
forgetfulness, resisting the tendency to think in images as all attempts to
imagine likenesses for the divine can only be misleading. Self-dissolution is
necessarily an unattainable goal for an embodied subject, yet Fowler’s vision
of a self-abnegating selfhood reflects a powerful longing, anticipating the
models of self-construction that would later find expression in forms such as
the Puritan diary.
Fowler’s sequence appropriates and reimagines Petrarch’s Canzoniere,
as a locus where tensions surrounding the use of images in devotional
practice, and the underlying question of the nature of the relationship
between God and humanity, might be negotiated. The Tarantula enacts a
profound meditation on these issues that reflects the cultural and ethical
values of the Scottish Reformation, ultimately envisioning a hope for
salvation that lies in faith, rather than works.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dunnigan, Sarah M. 2002. Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of
Scots and James VI (Basingstoke: Palgrave)
 Elliott, Elizabeth. 2010. ‘‘‘A Memorie Nouriched by Images’: Reforming the Art
of Memory in William Fowler’s Tarantula of Love.’ Journal of the Northern
Renaissance 2 http://www.northernrenaissance.org/articles/A-memorie-nouriched-
by-images-Reforming-the-Art-of-Memory-in-William-Fowlers-iTarantula-of-
LoveibrElizabeth-Elliott/21
Hoby, Thomas (trans.) 1900. The Book of the Courtier from the Italian of
Count Baldassare Castiglione: done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. by Sir
Walter Raleigh (London: Nutt)
Meikle, Henry W., James Craigie, and John Purves (eds.). 1914-1940. The
Works of William Fowler, 3 vols (Edinburgh: STS)
Perkins, William. 1607. The Arte of Prophecying. Or a Treatise concerning the
Sacred and Onely True Manner and Method of Preaching. Trans. Thomas Tuke (STC
19735.4)