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A L L E G O R Y A N D EN C H A N T M E N T
Allegory and
Enchantment
An Early Modern Poetics

JASON CRAWFORD

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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First Edition published in 2017
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for Chelsy
 Acknowledgments

My first encounter with the texts that occupy this book took place in my
childhood, when my mother read The Pilgrim’s Progress aloud to me and
my sister. I remember well how thrilling, how charged with danger and
wonder and dark truth, Christian’s quest seemed to us then, unfolding in
my mother’s voice. The byways of writing the critical story I have to tell
here have, at times, taken me far from those early, enchanted moments.
But the abiding power of those moments in my imagination has reminded
me often that the most significant debts of this book are deeper than any
footnote can tell, and that my parents are, as they ever have been, the first
and best of my teachers.
I owe special debts of thanks to Nicholas Watson, James Simpson, and
Gordon Teskey. These three were wise and generous guides as I wrote my
doctoral dissertation in Harvard’s Department of English, and they each
taught me much then about what scholarship can mean and be. But they
have surprised me even so, in the years since, with the steadfastness of their
encouragement and support. As I have toiled at this book, each of them
has read, commented, contributed, questioned, warned, conversed, and
cheered, with untiring patience. Each has shared with me many gifts from
his own learning and writing. In plenty of ways each of them will take
issue with the pages that follow. Even at these points, each has helped to
make the book stronger, and each has done a great deal to sustain my joy
in writing it.
Along the way I have enjoyed the companionship of many colleagues
at Harvard University, at Union University, and in the Lilly Fellows
Program in Humanities and the Arts. I have been grateful in particular
for Scott Huelin and John Netland, who made themselves my friends on
my arrival at Union and who encouraged me to keep writing in the midst
of much else; for Mike Owens, who convinced me to give this book a try
and who helped me through some key phases of its making; for Joshua
King, who was there in the beginning, a fellow pilgrim in many endeavors;
for Steve Halla, who has been so very free with the gifts of his woodcut
artistry and of his good company; for Ryan Wilkinson and David
Hoogerheide, who have enriched this work with years of conversation
about matters great and strange; and for Kathy Sutherland, Joe Creech,
Sandra Visser, Gwen Urdang-Brown, Melinda Posey, Chad Schrock, and,
not least, my colleagues in the Department of English and the Honors
viii Acknowledgments
Community here at Union. Brenda Machosky has, at various conferences
on various coasts and continents, been a perceptive and hospitable inter-
locutor, and Vladimir Brljak offered me a warm welcome, in my last weeks
of writing, at a colloquium on allegory hosted by the Warburg Institute. In
the final stages of my work, I have been heartened and helped by my
commissioning editors at Oxford University Press, Jacqueline Norton and
Eleanor Collins; by the attentiveness of the press’s editorial and production
staff; and by the reports of the press’s anonymous readers, who took the
time to know my work well and whose astute readings have prompted me to
revise at a number of points.
I wrote portions of the book with the help of a Lilly Postdoctoral
Fellowship, a Pew Research Grant from Union University, and a Lindsay
Young Visiting Faculty Fellowship at the University of Tennessee’s Marco
Institute. I have been much helped by the skill and graciousness of the
librarians at Harvard’s Widener and Houghton Libraries, at Oxford’s
Bodleian Library, in the Special Collections of the University of Tennessee’s
Hodges Library, and at Union University’s Logos Library, where the ever-
forbearing Stephen Mount must be glad my work is done. Portions of
the book have appeared in journals: part of Chapter 2 as “Langland’s
Allegorical Modernity,” English Studies 95:6 (fall 2014); part of
Chapter 3 as “The Bowge of Courte and the Afterlives of Allegory,” Journal
of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 41:2 (spring 2011); and part
of Chapter 5 as “Bunyan’s Secular Allegory,” Religion & Literature 44:1
(fall 2012). I am grateful to those journals for permission to publish my
work here.
There is no way of acknowledging adequately my greatest debts of
gratitude. In Boston, Jackson, Knoxville, and Atlanta, and especially in
Charlotte (where the cup of good cheer is never dry) and in Baton Rouge
(where kindness never knows limits), my friends and family have loved me
to all excess and beyond all deserving. I cannot do justice to the depth or
breadth of what they have contributed to this book: certainly not in the
case of my two smallest helpers, who daily renew my capacity to tell stories
and love words; and least of all in the case of the one to whom this book is
dedicated. She has endured more, hoped more, believed more, and been
more than the small offering of this book can possibly answer or attest.
Caritas numquam excidit.
 Contents
Introduction: A Poetics of Enchantment 1
1. Genealogies of Allegory 45
2. Incarnations of the Word: Piers Plowman 82
3. Suspicion and Solitude: The Bowge of Courte 110
4. Violence and Apocalypse: The Faerie Queene 138
5. Selfhood and Secularity: The Pilgrim’s Progress 175

Bibliography 203
Index 221
 Introduction
A Poetics of Enchantment

What is enchantment? For the past century, historians and theorists of

many persuasions have used the term to say something about modernity.
Especially in the long shadow of Max Weber’s critical accounts, we have
come to conceive of modern culture as a set of interlinked projects:
empirical science, capitalist industry, constitutional government, colonial
violence, interiorized religion, instrumental rationality. And we have come
to understand these projects as exercises in what Weber calls the “disen-
chantment of the world.” “The fate of our times,” as Weber says in a 1918
lecture,
is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by
the “disenchantment of the world” [Entzauberung der Welt]. Precisely the
ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into
the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and
personal human relations.1
The projects of modernity, as Weber understands them, commit them-
selves to the enforcement of an absence, to an abandonment of the
sacramental rites, magical practices, and immanent spiritual presences of
an idolatrous past.2 Weber here imagines the old values and presences
in retreat, but “disenchantment” is also a transitive act, and many more
recent commentators have described modernity as a campaign of

1 I quote from the English version of Weber’s lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” in Max

Weber, Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1946), p. 155; and from the German text, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in
Max Weber, Schriften: 1894–1922 (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 2002), p. 510. The
German phrase appears also on p. 488. My description here of modernity’s “projects” is
indebted to Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 13.
2 In naming sacrament and magic as the linked practices modernity has repudiated,

I reiterate the terms of Weber’s analysis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), pp. 104–5, 117.
2 Allegory and Enchantment
renunciation, as what we have variously called “the elimination of magic
from the world,” “the impoverishment of the reign of the invisible,” “the
departure from religion,” “the destruction of the old enchanted cosmos,”
the “general rejection of magic,” “the abandonment of that theoretical
ideal [of ‘ontotheological synthesis’], defined more than two millennia
ago,” “the surrender of our previous meaningful, humanly suffused,
humanly responsive, if often also menacing or capricious world.”3 To
understand modernity as disenchantment is to conceive of modernity in
just these negative terms: elimination, impoverishment, departure,
destruction, rejection, abandonment, surrender. Modernity, in our narra-
tives, is the end of something, a withering of the obsolescent past in the
light of a utopian or dystopian future. Its identity depends upon the old
magic from which it is, for better or worse, persistently trying to awaken.
And enchantment is that old magic, the spell modernity has broken. In
a kind of back-formation on Weber’s language of disenchantment, some
recent narratives of modernity use “enchantment” to name a set of
premodern, and usually medieval, cultural forms.4 When we talk about
enchantment, we often talk about the medieval church, with its vast
sacramental economies and its theology of bodily presence; about medi-
eval political life, with its magical conceptions of authority and social
bond; or about the medieval natural order, with its occult affinities and its
daemonic agents. If disenchantment entails “the impoverishment of the
reign of the invisible,” enchantment, as many of our narratives imagine it,
indicates the immanent operations of the invisible, whether the invisible
agent takes the form of the God whom Akeel Bilgrami has described as
“present in nature itself and therefore providing an inner source of

3 I quote, respectively, from Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 105; Marcel Gauchet, The

Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 3; The Disenchantment of the World, p. 5 (and this
metaphor of departure permeates his book); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge,
MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 63; Keith Thomas, Religion
and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century
England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 787; Louis Dupré, Passage to
Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1993), p. 3; and Ernest Gellner, who here summarizes the Weberian thesis
in a parodic spirit, “The Rubber Cage: Disenchantment with Disenchantment,” in Culture,
Identity, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 153.
4 See, for instance, Charles Taylor’s synopsis of premodern enchantment in A Secular

Age, e.g., pp. 25–43; Akeel Bilgrami’s account of early modern alternatives to disenchant-
ment, “What is Enchantment?” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael
Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2010), pp. 145–65; and David Morgan’s comments on the uneasy persistence
of enchantment in modernity, “Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment,” in
Re-Enchantment, ed. David Morgan and James Elkins (New York and London: Routledge,
2009), pp. 9–18.
 A Poetics of Enchantment 3
dynamism” or of the “host of demons, threatening from all sides” that
Charles Taylor takes as the defining mark of an enchanted cosmos.5 The
language of enchantment therefore tends to indicate forms of commerce
or of approach, channels by which the material world and the immaterial
divine come into contact with one another.
But as a term of critical discourse, “enchantment” also indicates some-
thing else. A critical account of enchantment can be possible, after all, only
to the subject who has come out from under the spell and who therefore
stands at the distance necessary to give enchantment a name. “Enchant-
ment,” as the name of an unnatural suspension out of ordinary life, has a
kind of retrospection built into it. Just as the terms “medieval” and
“premodern” define the thing they name as inherently previous, a period
that precedes and strangely presupposes the real birth or rebirth of
civilization, “enchantment,” too, precedes and presupposes the disen-
chantment that makes its spells apparent. The term signifies a condition
of otherness, a secondary state. In our narratives of modernity, it suggests
the fragility and anteriority of the dream from which the premodern world
eventually will awaken. Even when our critical accounts mean to eulogize
or rehabilitate enchantment, they tend to find enchantment already, and
perhaps necessarily, dissipated: at odds, certainly, with modernity, and
with modernity’s core projects of repudiation and departure. Enchant-
ment is premodern, and the premodern is enchanted. It seems hard,
within the terms of the Weberian narrative, to imagine a modern enchant-
ment, or an enchanted modernity.
Early modern writers would in many ways recognize this narrative of
medieval enchantment and modern disenchantment. These writers are
themselves, after all, engaged in the repudiation of an old magic. In
England, writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have their
own narratives and metaphors of disenchantment, and they invent a
variety of renunciatory postures, imagining themselves as debunkers,
skeptics, bearers of news, inquisitors and counter-inquisitors, plain-
speaking prophets against every sort of conspiracy and error. For the
main body of these English writers, the metaphor of disenchantment
undergirds a violent renunciation of the Roman church, which John
Bale in the 1540s calls the “proud church of hypocrites, the rose coloured
whore, the paramoure of Antichrist, and the sinfull sinagoge of Sathan.”6
In their efforts to expose this rose-colored whore, English writers take their

5 Bilgrami, “What is Enchantment,” p. 148; and Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 32.

6 I quote from the 1548 edition of The Image of Bothe Churches (London, 1548),
“A Preface unto the Christen Reader,” fol. A2v. Here, as in all my quotations from early
modern editions, I modernize type but retain spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.
4 Allegory and Enchantment
marching orders from the biblical apocalypse, with its declaration about
Babylon the Great: “for thy marchaunts were the grett men of the erth.
And with thyne inchantment were deceaved all nacions” (Rev. 18:23).7
Bale in his commentary on this biblical passage lays bare the “preuye
legardimain,” the “iuglinge castes,” the “lyes in hipocrisye,” the “errours in
supersticion,” the “craftes, & inchauntmentes,” and the “subtyle charm-
ers” of the great Satanic impostor.8 His mission is to break the charms of
this impostor, and the terms of his commentary could serve as a kind of
lexicon for many of the anti-Roman titles that come off English presses
over the next century: A Countercharme against the Romish Enchantments,
that Labour to Bewitch the People (1630); The Spreading Evills, and
Pernicious Inchantments of Papisme, and Other Errors (1641); The Iesuites
Banner. Displaying their Original and Successe: their Vow and Othe: their
Hypocrisie and Superstition (1581); A Discouerie of the Most Secret and
Subtile Practises of the Iesuites (1610); The Vnmasking of all Popish Monks,
Friers, and Iesuits . . . Together with Some Briefe Obseruations of their Trea-
sons, Murders, Fornications, Impostures, Blasphemies, and Sundry Other
Abominable Impieties (1628); The Hatefull Hypocrisie, and Rebellion of
the Romishe Prelacie (1570); Roman Forgeries or A True Account of False
Records Discovering the Impostures and Counterfeit Antiquities of the Church
of Rome (1673).9
The skeptical zeal of these titles serves a vigorous campaign of discovery
and disbelief. Protestant prophets in England direct their efforts against an
ecclesiastical history that seems increasingly alien and against forms of
sacramental practice and word-magic that seem nothing more than idol-
atrous superstition.10 These prophets perceive the times to be perilous and
evil, and they labor to cultivate in their dissenting communities a finely

7 I quote from William Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament, reproduced as The New

Testament: A Facsimile of the 1526 Edition (London: The British Library, 2008).
8 The Image of Bothe Churches, commentary on Rev. 18:20–4, paragraph 17.
9 I quote from the title pages of, respectively, Anthony Cade, A Iustification of the

Chvrch of England (London, 1630); Anon., A Discouerie of the Most Secret and Subtile
Practises of the Iesuites (London, 1610); Lewis Evans, The Hatefull Hypocrisie, and Rebellion
of the Romishe Prelacie (London, 1570); Alexander Grosse, A Fiery Pillar of Heavenly Truth
(London, 1641); Meredith Hanmer, The Iesuites Banner (London, 1581); Lewis Owen,
The Vnmasking of all Popish Monks, Friers, and Iesuits (London, 1628); and Thomas
Traherne, Roman Forgeries (London, 1673); all in facsimile at Early English Books Online.
For the durable URLs associated with individual titles at Early English Books Online, see
my Bibliography. In my citation of early modern English titles, I regularize capitalization
and type.
10 The term “word-magic” I take from James Baumlin, whose Theologies of Language in

English Renaissance Literature: Reading Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2012) is useful on the early modern disenchantment of sacramental and
incarnational language. See, e.g., pp. xxxii–xl.
 A Poetics of Enchantment 5
tuned apparatus of doubt. Lewis Owen, author of The Vnmasking of all
Popish Monks, Friers, and Iesuits and various other attacks against the
Jesuits, begins his treatise with Paul’s reminder that Satan can appear as
an angel of light and John’s exhortation “not to beleeue euery spirit.” He
teaches his readers that these apostles “labour to stirre up the godly to a
more continuall and earnest watchfullnesse and warinesse, when they
tell of the state of the latter dayes wherein wee liue,” and he insists that,
in these perilous days, faithful individuals and communities can survive
only by practicing a hermeneutics of suspicion, a resistance to the heresies
of Jesuitical impostors.11 Samuel Harsnett begins his A Declaration
of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) by addressing “the Seduced
Catholiques” themselves, warning these spiritual prisoners of their captivity
to a “forraine Idol Gull, composed of palpable fiction, and diabolicall
fascination, whose enchaunted chalice of heathenish drugs, & Lamian
superstition, hath the power of Circes, and Medeas cup, to metamorphose
men into asses, bayards, & swine.” Harsnett sets out to expose the
tricky methods of the Jesuit exorcist Father Edmunds, and he too exhorts
his readers to be wary and watchful, quick to inquire and disbelieve. If, he
says to them, my Declaration can unmask the Jesuit swindlers, then “what
can you, or any ingenious spirits do lesse, then bewaile your seduced
misaffection unto us, and to account them as the grand Impostors, and
enchaunters of your soules?” If Owen’s burden is to inoculate, Harsnett’s
is to rescue, but their missions in the end are more or less the same: to train
their readers in the disciplines of a disenchanted skepticism, to leave them
disabused and wide awake.12
At the outset of his The Discouerie of Witchcraft (1584), Reginald Scot,
the great enemy of the witch-hunting Inquisition, suggests that this
posture of skepticism is a mark of his generation’s modernity. “Robin
goodfellowe ceaseth now to be much feared, and poperie is sufficientlie
discouered,” he says, as if he need only remind English subjects that they
have, at this late date of 1584, become well inured to the enchantments of
older times. How is it then, he asks, that “witches charms, and coniurors
cousenages are yet thought effectuall,” so that “our cold prophets and
inchanters make vs fooles still”?13 He urges his disenchanted readers to
“defie the diuell, renounce all his works, and not so much as once thinke
or dreame vpon this supernaturall power of witches; neither let vs

11 In his “To the Gentle Reader,” The Vnmasking of all Popish Monks, Friers, and Iesuits,

fol. A2v.
12 A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London, 1603), “To the Seduced

Catholiques of England,” fol. A2v.

13 The Discouerie of Witchcraft (London, 1584), “To the Readers,” fol. B2v; in facsimile

at Early English Books Online.

6 Allegory and Enchantment
prosecute them with such despight, whome our fancie condemneth, and
our reason acquiteth.”14 In doing so, he suggests, like Owen and Harsnett,
that to pursue disenchantment is to resist both unreasoning “fancie” and
the great enchanter, the devil. His inquiry into the investigative methods
and paranoiac superstitions of the witch-hunters exposes these self-
appointed enemies of Satanic enchantment as themselves agents of that
enchantment, charmers whose spells must be broken. The clarion call of
his long treatise is persistently against the “credulitie” of those who fall
prey to the “abhominable and divelish inuentions” of the witchmongers,
and he sets out to cultivate a stance of incredulity, a critique that inquires
into the inquisitors and examines the examiners.15
A writer like Scot offers, in other words, a counter-paranoia, an Inqui-
sition of his own. The contest he orchestrates between doubt and doubt,
accusation and accusation, is in many ways exemplary of an inquisitorial
age. Many writers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England are, like
Shakespeare’s Iago, “nothing if not critical,” complexly anxious about
deception, probation, and proof. Inasmuch as they make themselves the
debunkers of a corrupt tradition—crusaders against superstitions, sacra-
ments, rituals, festivals, liturgies, abbeys, icons, and relics—these early
modern dissenters are what James Simpson has described as “revolution-
ary,” engaged in a militant breaking away from history, oriented in their
efforts toward the “aggressive physical and ideological demolition of the
‘old’ order.”16 It is in this revolutionary orientation, this commitment to
radical violence, that the English reformers are modern. Some recent
observers have argued that the term “modernity,” at its base, indicates
not a stable condition or a discrete historical period but rather a revolu-
tionary temporal relationship, an assertion of difference from—or, as Paul
de Man calls it, a “ruthless forgetting” of—an inaccessible or undesirable
past.17 This militant orientation toward the past takes the form, in the

14 The Discouerie of Witchcraft, “To the Readers,” fol. B5r.

15 The Discouerie of Witchcraft, book 1, chapter 9, p. 18.
16 Reform and Cultural Revolution: 1350–1547, Oxford English Literary History, vol. 2
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 1.
17 Talal Asad observes that, though modernity is not what he calls a “verifiable object,”

the idea of modernity as a verifiable object, as a discrete ideal or enemy, directs the way
individuals and states behave and is therefore itself “part of practical and political reality.” It
is possible, then, to think of modernity as a shared fiction or goal, as “a project—or rather, a
series of interlinked projects—that certain people in power seek to achieve.” Formations of
the Secular, pp. 12–13. Italics are his. De Man is perceptive on the temporal structures of
this project when he reads “modernity” as an antonym of “history” and so exposes “the
radical impulse that stands behind all genuine modernity when it is not merely a descriptive
synonym for the contemporaneous or for a passing fashion.” “Literary History and Literary
Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 142–65; qtd. at p. 147.
 A Poetics of Enchantment 7
English revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of what
some scholars have described as an experience of “historical solitude” and
“historical loss.”18 History in this period becomes prominently visible—
becomes history—exactly because English subjects perceive themselves to
be the citizens of a new age, an eschatological age after history. These
modern citizens regard the past with new intentness, and they articulate
their distance from the past with a complex mingling of nostalgic longing
and revolutionary dissent.19 John Skelton, who will figure centrally in my
account here, is at the turn of the sixteenth century already caught
between longing and renunciation in his hopeful invocation of the “poetes
olde” whose example he aspires to follow, and in his melancholy know-
ledge that he is cut off from these poets, a man born into evil days. The
poets of the past are lost to Skelton’s narrator because the history to which
he belongs has left them behind. He suffers the double exile that charac-
terizes many early modern writers: an exile both from a receding past and
from an inauthentic present.20
The “modernity” of these English writers is intimately bound with
metaphors of disenchantment for just this reason: disenchantment, too,
has a revolutionary temporality at its core. Narratives of disenchantment
are narratives of repudiation, of the process by which authentic know-
ledge, rational or empirical or spiritual, strips the old idols of their

18 To speak of “historical solitude” is to invoke Thomas Greene’s account of the

Renaissance humanists, with their discovery of the past as past, The Light in Troy: Imitation
and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), e. g.,
pp. 8–11. The experience of early modern “historical loss” has been explored by Andrew
Escobedo, who sensitively reads the contradictory stances of English reformers toward what
they experience as a painfully ambiguous national history, Nationalism and Historical Loss in
Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2004).
19 Some historians have observed that early modern antiquarian scholars and early

modern cultural revolutionaries are often the same people. James Simpson, to whose
account I am indebted here, notes that the “project of historical recuperation” drives the
sixteenth-century antiquarian John Leland to a mental breakdown exactly because, as Simp-
son claims, such an early modern project necessarily produces a “divided consciousness”: “the
entire past becomes visible as ‘history’ precisely because Leland is committed to the construc-
tion of a wholly new age.” Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 7–17; qtd. at p. 17.
20 The Bowge of Courte 9. Quotations from Skelton’s poetry come from The Complete

English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), and
are cited by line number. “Double exile” I take from Thomas Greene, who writes about
Petrarch’s “double exile” from both an irrecoverable past and an inadequate present.
Petrarch was, as Greene says, “neither Roman nor modern, so that he became in his own
eyes a living anachronism.” The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry,
p. 8. See also de Man, who observes in a different way that modernity’s radical impulse leads
to paradox, because modernity must discover itself as “a generative power that is itself
historical.” Modernity, says de Man, “invests its trust in the power of the present moment as
an origin, but discovers that, in severing itself from the past, it has at the same time severed
itself from the present.” “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” pp. 150, 149.
8 Allegory and Enchantment
deceptive power. When reformers such as Bale, Scot, and Harsnett frame
their attacks as campaigns of disenchantment, they ask their readers to
adopt the stance of modern subjects, practitioners of suspicion in the
present wicked age. These modern subjects must be self-protective, com-
mitted to authenticity, wary examiners of themselves and others. And they
bear, in the narratives of Bale and many others, the features of what some
accounts of modernity have called the “sovereign” or “buffered” self, the
aggressively autonomous subject whose distance from both the inauthen-
tic past and the inauthentic present gives her power to resist the encroach-
ments of idolatry and error.21 She is buffered, this subject, because her
commitment to an ethics of repudiation demands elaborate mechanisms
of defense. In early modern England, the writers from whom I have
quoted are hardly alone in offering their books as necessary medicine for
an assailed and vulnerable people. Countless title pages and prefatory
epistles echo the promise of these writers to protect against enchantment:
“it forewarnes and so forearmes thee,” as John Hull promises of his anti-
Roman treatise The Vnmasking of the Politique Athiest (1602), “against
these popish charmes that now flye about the land, least unwittingly thou
be inchanted with them.”22
In the context of these projects of renunciation and self-protection, the
metaphor of disenchantment becomes central to a wide variety of early
modern discourses. Especially in the chaotic decades following the acces-
sion of Charles I, entrants into the crowded fray of English spell-breaking
direct their efforts not just against the Roman church and its corrupt
history but against Quakers (Quakers are Inchanters and Dangerous
Seducers, 1655), against Anabaptists (Anabaptismes Mysterie of Iniquity
Vnmasked, 1623), against Anglican ministers (The City-Ministers
Unmasked, or The Hypocrisie and Iniquity of Fifty Nine of the most Eminent
of the Clergy, in and about the City of London, 1649), against lawyers (The
Lawyers Bane, 1647), against witches (A Confirmation and Discovery of
Witch-Craft, 1648), against archbishops (The Grand Impostor Vnmasked,
or, A Detection of the Notorious Hypocrisie, and Desperate Impiety of the Late
Archbishop, so styled, of Canterbury, 1644), and against a whole cornucopia
of Jews, Socinians, Arminians, skeptics, schismatics, impostors, and sedu-
cers.23 And because the possibility of enchantment everywhere threatens

21 On the “sovereign self,” see Dupré, Passage to Modernity, pp. 93–144, and Asad,

Formations of the Secular, e.g., pp. 16, 52, 67–99. Charles Taylor’s extended meditation on
what he calls the “buffered self” snakes through his A Secular Age, e.g., pp. 29–41.
22 This in his “To the Reader,” The Vnmasking of the Politique Athiest (London, 1602),

fol. A4v; in facsimile at Early English Books Online.

23 I quote here from the title pages of the following volumes: Anon., Quakers are

Inchanters and Dangerous Seducers (London, 1655); I. P., Anabaptismes Mysterie of Iniquity
 A Poetics of Enchantment 9
the purity and authenticity of the self-protective subject, this subject turns
her inquisitorial zeal, most of all, against herself. Early modern England
abounds in treatises on discerning true prayer from counterfeit prayer,
true religious emotions and experiences from counterfeit ones. Many of
these treatises direct themselves against hypocrisy, with its potential to seduce
the subject into inauthenticity. They bear titles like The Portraiture of
Hypocrisie (1589), The Hypocrite Discovered and Cvred (1643), The Chris-
tians Looking-Glasse (1615), and The Estates of the Hypocrite and Syncere
Christian (1613), and in their warnings against inauthenticity they cultivate
an anxious awareness that hypocrisy destroys not only social bonds but also
the bonds by which the self knows itself.24 They understand well that
the grand impostor can come home—“the heart of man being a Sea of
subtilty, and a Mine of deceipt, giuen to deceiue and beguile it selfe,” as The
Christians Looking-Glasse says—and they regard the vulnerable subject as her
own first potential victim.25 The manuals against hypocrisy work, therefore,
as manuals against self-enchantment, critical guides to self-examination and
self-regard. In their schemes of reflexive attention, these texts help to make
explicit the degree to which disenchantment is an orientation of the self
toward itself. For the writers who will ground my discussions here, as for so
many early modern writers, disenchantment entails an apprehension of
the self as in danger of enchantment and therefore as in need of careful
disciplines and controls. The cultivation of inquisitorial discipline serves to
keep the subject free and to keep her under control, to safeguard and police
her authentic, autonomous being. In this regard, the early modern human
subject is like the broader early modern realms of church and society, and like
the cultural projects of Max Weber’s critical narrative: she defines herself
as modern by learning the arts of critical suspicion and renunciatory dissent.
*
Our vocabulary for talking about modern disenchantment seems, then,
to issue in certain ways from the very fiction it has set out to anatomize
and explain. Weber’s accounts have an early modern genealogy, a kinship
with the narratives of disenchantment that direct so many cultural

Vnmasked (London, 1623); Anon., The City-Ministers Unmasked (London, 1649); Benjamin
Nicholson, The Lawyers Bane (London, 1647); John Sterne, A Confirmation and Discovery of
Witch-Craft (London,1648); and Henry Burton, The Grand Impostor Vnmasked (London,
1644); all in facsimile at Early English Books Online.
24 See John Bate, The Portraiture of Hypocrisie (London, 1589); Samuel Torshell, The

Hypocrite Discovered and Cvred (London, 1643); Thomas Tuke, The Christians Looking-
Glasse (London, 1615); and Thomas Cooper, The Estates of the Hypocrite and Syncere
Christian . . . Very Necessarie, for the Tryall of our Estates in Grace (London, 1613); all in
facsimile at Early English Books Online.
25 The Christians Looking-Glasse, p. 69.
10 Allegory and Enchantment
enterprises in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Part of my purpose
in this book will be to explore the deep structures of these narratives as
they emerge in their seminal forms. In what ways are fictions of disen-
chantment entangled with modernity’s self-conception as a new age of, or
after, history? What other self-conceptions does early modernity entertain?
My meditations on these broad questions will suggest that our metaphors
of enchantment and disenchantment have genealogies older than early
modernity. And my account of these metaphors and their genealogies will
look for its crucial clues in one of the cultural forms that early modern
writers set out to renounce: allegory.
In the centuries before early modernity, allegory informs a diverse range
of ideals and institutions. Its medieval history begins in the work of early
Christian exegetes, who translate the techniques of ancient exegesis into
new practices of allegorical reading, partly as a way of reckoning with a
receding Hebraic and Classical past, and partly as a way of articulating the
incarnation theology that separates them from that past. These new
exegetical practices make possible a vastly intricate culture of reading in
medieval Europe, and they are constitutive, too, of a new way of making
narrative poetry. Already in the fifth century, Prudentius in his Psycho-
machia fashions a narrative that anticipates and directs its own interpret-
ation. The conceit of this poem is that its action belongs, ultimately, not
to history—not to the logic of narrative temporality—but to a moral and
cosmic order, an order not temporal but static, not historical but eternal.
In concealing and revealing this other order, the Psychomachia works
allegorically, inviting the discerning reader to strip away its veils of epic
narrative in order to discover the kernel of truth hidden (in this case, not
very subtly) beneath. This basic economy of signification comes in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries to produce the dynamics I will explore in
this book, the poetics of allegorical making. In the narrative poems of Alan
of Lille, Bernard Silvestris, and Guillaume de Lorris, narrative serves not so
much as a form of exegesis-in-reverse, a way of predetermining an act of
allegorical reading, but rather as a much more complicated negotiation
between the immaterial forms of eternity and the material orders of
history, nature, and the human subject. These negotiations are at the
heart of medieval encyclopedic poems such as the Commedia and the
Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, and it is hard to make an account of medieval
allegory without saying what many accounts of allegory have more or less
said: that allegorical thinking undergirds the things we talk about when we
talk about medieval enchantment. The dynamics of allegory are manifestly
at work in the economy of the sacraments, in the structure of liturgical
time, in the cult of saints, in the bestiaries and medical treatises, in the
disciplines of astrology and mineralogy, in the political ordering of medieval
 A Poetics of Enchantment 11
social and ecclesiastical bodies. All these fields of discourse and practice
suppose that history is pregnant with eternity, that God is pervasively
immanent in the material cosmos. No surprise, then, if a culture bent on
repudiating its medieval past regards allegory as part of an old spell,
dissolved under the rising sun of disenchantment. The early modern
poets I will read here tend to repudiate allegorical narrative as a thing
not compatible with their modern projects. Allegory is, for them, a
dangerous enchantment, a residue of the medieval past from which they
have determined to escape.
But the efforts of these poets also raise questions that a linear narrative
of medieval allegory and modern disenchantment cannot address. If
allegory in early modernity is a dissolving enchantment, then why do
many early modern poets spend their best creative energies in the making
of allegorical fictions? And why do these poets often engage in allegorical
projects at moments when they are self-consciously engaged in projects of
disenchantment? Throughout this chapters that follow, I will claim that
the dynamics of disenchantment are in fact closely related to the dynamics
of allegory, and I will test this claim by reading, at length, some of the
most sustained, complex, and thoughtfully critical allegorical fictions of
English early modernity: Langland’s Piers Plowman, Skelton’s The Bowge
of Courte, the first book of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Bunyan’s The
Pilgrim’s Progress. One of my first observations about these texts will be
that each of them is infected by a kind of historical weariness or solitude.
That weariness might take the form of an eschatological longing to escape
the ruins of history, as in Spenser; or of a studied posture of exile from a
corrupt and dangerous age, as in Skelton; or of an intensely self-protective
religious dissent, as in Bunyan. Whatever form it takes, this posture of
weariness tends to issue, for each of these poets, in narratives of disen-
chantment. Spenser’s knight of Holiness directs his efforts against the
charms of a “guilefull great Enchaunter” who presides over a saeculum of
illusion and error.26 Bunyan’s Christian passes from inquisition to inqui-
sition in the course of his quest to escape the corrupt domestic world in
which he lives, and he resists the sleep-inducing charms of the “Inchanted
ground ” with the words of Paul’s exhortation: “wherefore let us not sleep as
do others, but let us watch and be sober.”27 If these fictions of disenchant-
ment have something to do with the conventions of romance, where the

26 The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki

(Harlow: Longman, 2001), qtd. from the argument to 1.2. The italics here are Spenser’s.
27 The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That which is to Come, ed. James Blanton

Wharey, rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 136. Italics are in the
original.
12 Allegory and Enchantment
breaking of enchantments is a standard part of the heroic task—“glorious
conquestes ouer Knights, Gyants, Monsters, Enchauntments, Realmes,
and Dominions,” as one romance at the turn of the seventeenth century
summarizes itself—they also have much to do with Spenser’s and Bunyan’s
modernity, their commitment to unmasking the corrupt institutions and
traditions of an obsolescent history.28 Even Langland’s fourteenth-century
Piers Plowman, which I will argue for as a tentative, transitional experi-
ment in these early modern tendencies, ends with Peace’s melancholy
apprehension that the church in history has lost its authority—“the frere
with his phisyk this folk hath enchaunted”—and with Conscience’s
resolve to roam the earth looking for Piers and his disenchanting
remedies.29
This weary skepticism about history corresponds with an uneasy
ambivalence about narrative. Each of these poems is composed of narra-
tive matter, and each does its signifying work in the course of a narrative
progress. But each also orchestrates various contests in which meaning
pushes narrative to the point of failure. The dreaming narrator of Skelton’s
Bowge of Courte, overcome with the Dread that is his name and identity,
aborts his allegorical voyage by throwing himself overboard and bringing
the poem to a premature end; Spenser’s Despair hangs himself in endless
iterations but discovers every time that he cannot die; Langland’s dreamer
runs into his own spatial and temporal dead end when he sets out on his
pilgrimage and discovers that there is nowhere to go, except into endless
disputations about what the pilgrimage means. These allegorical agents
fail, each in his own way, to carry out a coherent narrative action. They
suspend themselves in moments that undermine their temporal, narrative
being, and they all turn strangely against themselves, figures of self-
cancellation. In their suspensions and negations, as I will argue at length
here, these self-cancelling agents intimate that the collapse of allegorical
narrative is a sign of bondage, a consequence of the spell by which
meaning bewitches and arrests the world of narrative action. Their failures
to act reveal the various ways in which allegory makes action unsustain-
able, subject to recursive short circuits and temporal paradoxes.
The readings that occupy this book will suggest that early modern
poets regard the failures of allegorical narrative as the consequence of a
specifically modern predicament. Already for Langland in the fourteenth
century, allegory’s crises are linked to the same cultural crises, the same

28 I quote from the loquacious title page of The Heroicall Aduentures of the Knight of the

Sea (London, 1600); in facsimile at Early English Books Online.

29 Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London:

J. M. Dent, Everyman, 1995), 20.379.

 A Poetics of Enchantment 13
currents of skepticism, that come to expression in the linguistic experi-
ments of the theological nominalists, in the liturgical experiments of the
Lollard reformers, and in the inquisitorial experiments of the first witch-
hunters. All these reformers give expression to emergent forms of paranoia
and hermeneutic anxiety, and Langland’s poem responds to their new
anxieties with its own attitudes of loss, with a sense that the underpinnings
of allegorical meaning have fallen into terminal decay. That experience of
loss remains in play for Skelton, whose Bowge of Courte derives its sadness,
its melancholy articulations of solitude, from its persistent failure to attain
the harmony that its form and its literary models seem to promise.
Skelton’s poem does not just stage, but also mourns, the disintegration
of allegorical language. When he begins by meditating on “poetes old” and
on the historical solitude that separates him from them, he signals that his
vision of Fortune will try, and fail, to belong to a tradition of Boethian
allegorical poems—from the sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy to the
fifteenth-century Kingis Quair—in which a goddess tutors the poet-
dreamer in the cosmic, institutional, social, and interior harmonies of
which she is the image. His dreamer locates allegorical language in a
literary past that he cannot recover, and he shares Langland’s vague
apprehension of a historical rupture that has rendered his allegorical
project impossible. In the poets of the later sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, this awareness of revolutionary breakage becomes clearer and
more militant. Langland, Skelton, Spenser, and Bunyan all fashion them-
selves as both victims and orchestrators of allegory’s failures, but the latter
two poets, especially, turn progressively from postures of paralyzed bewil-
derment to postures of renunciatory violence. The paranoiac tendencies
nascent in Langland are on marching display in Bunyan. The troubled
allegorical idiom of The Pilgrim’s Progress is tangled up with its author’s
ardent, dangerous, world-defying participation in seventeenth-century
forms of revolutionary dissent. Bunyan seems to stand at the end of a
line of development, an escalating tendency toward violence that suggests
a deepening crisis for the poetics of allegory under the emerging pressures
of modernity.
But the poems at the center of my inquiries also have another story to
tell. Early modern poets find themselves persistently drawn to allegory as a
field for their campaigns of disenchantment, and they seem to discover
again and again that allegory has disenchantment embedded in its most
fundamental dynamics. Many of my arguments here will begin from the
possibility that allegory has in fact always tended to orchestrate its own
repudiation. A medieval poet such as Dante draws on a long tradition
when he beckons his readers to find the dottrina che s’asconde / sotto ’l
velame de li versi strani (“the doctrine that is hidden under the veil of the
14 Allegory and Enchantment
strange verses”), and so likewise does Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest when he
exhorts his fellow pilgrims to “taketh the fruyt” of his beast fable, “and lat
the chaf be stille.”30 The orientation of these comments is toward the
stripping of a veil, the breaking of poetry’s spell in order that the dottrina
che s’asconde might be revealed. No accident that allegorical poems so often
begin as dreams, enchanted flights out of wakefulness from which the poet
will inevitably return. In figuring their symbolic narratives as dreams,
allegorical poets from Guillaume de Lorris and Guillaume de Machaut
through to Chaucer, Lydgate, James I, and Gavin Douglas open up
complex possibilities for self-examination and self-renunciation. The
dreaming self is after all not quite the self, and the fictions of these poets
are reflexively oriented toward a recovery of the wakeful consciousness and
a disenchantment of the dream narrative in which that consciousness has
been submerged. The convergence of allegorical making with practices of
allegorical reading, in major allegorical poems from the twelfth to the
fourteenth centuries, has something to do with this reflexive tendency.
Allegorical narrative is self-interpreting narrative, oriented toward its own
dissolution or clarification in commentary. It regards its own narrative
material as a veil, or as chaff, and so inclines oddly away from itself in a
paradox of unmaking.
It is, then, impossible to imagine that early modern poets renounce
allegory simply because they are modern rather than medieval. The
disenchantment of allegory in early modernity cannot suggest simply a
story of cultural revolution, or of ruptures so severe that they create lines of
demarcation between a medieval past and a modern future. The tendency
of modernity might be to explain itself according to the temporal linearity
of such a narrative, but the paradoxes of allegory have a remarkable way of
resisting linear narratives and of indicating the contours along which a
much more complex, and much longer, account of modern disenchant-
ment might develop. This book therefore meditates on the question of
where allegory’s early modern crises begin. Do allegorical narratives turn
against themselves, in early modernity, because they come under pressure
from modern projects and cultural forms? Or do the failures of early
modern allegory begin in much older crises, in fault lines that run deep
in the structures of allegory’s medieval poetics? What sort of genealogical
account would make it possible to respond to both these questions with a
dialectical “yes”?

30 Dante, Inferno, ed. Charles Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1970), 9.62–3; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales 7.3443, in Larry Benson, ed., The Riverside
Chaucer (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
 A Poetics of Enchantment 15
*
There are good reasons for reading allegory’s early modern crises against
the backdrop of its ancient crises. Allegorical narratives tend, after all, to
fall persistently into self-contradiction and self-renunciation. Allegory
turns narrative away from itself, out toward its own fulfillment in a
perfection of static meaning, and it turns agents away from themselves,
out toward a state of pure signification that threatens to cancel agency
altogether. If narrative is the language of history—of chronological time,
of material causation, of contingent action—allegorical narrative attempts
an escape from time, matter, and action, into the static forms of signifi-
cance, the language of eternity. The consequences of this attempt are
evident already in the originaive experiments of Prudentius’ Psychoma-
chia, where Patience sets out to make battle against Wrath but then
freezes into inaction and “abides undisturbed” [quieta manet] while her
enemy consummates her identity as Wrath in an act of wrathful self-
destruction.31 In Patience’s patient abiding, narrative dissolves. So it is
again and again with Prudentius’ goddess-virtues. Lowliness and Soberness,
too, stand suspended in paralytic poses of lowly and sober inactivity while
their enemies, Pride and Indulgence, boast and indulge themselves to death.
Prudentius’ poem may be the primal scene of allegorical narrative, but in it
narrative in fact refuses to happen. His virtues and vices can do only what is
proper to their own definition—“remember who you are” [state . . . vestri
memores], Soberness exhorts the virtues—and their victories and deaths are
therefore not so much actions as states or identities.32 In their repetitive
gestures of patience and lowliness and wrath, these goddesses exemplify the
inertness, the interminable movements, of the allegorical agent. Their
temporality folds itself into reflexive forms and ceases from linear progress.
The inactivity of the allegorical agent can look like bondage, as it does in
endlessly circling figures such as the lustful and avaricious shades of Dante’s
hell, and it can look like a consummated unity of desire and action, as it
does in the souls who abide in Dante’s heaven d’un giro e d’un girare e d’una
sete: “with one circle, with one circling, and with one thirst.”33 Either way,
the allegorical agent savors of death, of a departure from mutable existence
into what Walter Benjamin calls “the homeland of allegory.”34 Prudentius’

31 See my more detailed discussion of the Psychomachia, and of its reputation as the first

sustained experiment in allegorical narrative, in Chapter 1. I quote Prudentius, in both

English and Latin, from the Loeb edition of the poems, ed. H. J. Thomson, vol. 1
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), Psychomachia 128.
32 Psychomachia 381. I have here slightly emended the Loeb translation.
33 Paradiso, ed. Charles Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 8.35.
34 The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York:

Verso, 1977), p. 217.

16 Allegory and Enchantment
vices and Dante’s shades are quite literally dead, and one reason for their
deadness is that the gravitational field of signification pulls bodies away
from organic life. The significance of these bodies seems to lie on the
other side of a divide, across the rifts that separate the material order of
nature from the immaterial order of idea. Those deeper rifts belong to an
ancient Greek metaphysics of form and matter, and their contours do
much to determine the failures and complications of allegory. The
ancient separation of eternal form and temporal matter dictates, after
all, that a body cannot both mean and live. Allegory must do its work by
force, enslaving bodies, as Benjamin says, in the “eccentric embrace of
meaning,” and drawing them out toward an eschaton of fulfillment.35 In
this eccentric embrace, the bodies of narrative agents experience the
beckoning of an order that narrative cannot accommodate. They become
double, oriented all at once toward the material world in which they are
grounded and toward the homeland of meaning in which their perfec-
tion lies. Their operations as narrative agents are necessarily restricted, as
if meaning had subjected them to violent arrest and refashioned them,
the natives of time, in the likeness of eternity.36
The failing narratives of early modern allegory participate in these
ancient problems. The pattern of Spenser’s self-cancelling Despair is
apparent already in Prudentius’ self-murdering Wrath, and Despair’s
temporal paradoxes operate already, in ways this book will explore, in
the paradoxes of Plato’s self-predicating forms. And if this claim seems to
contradict my claim that the crises of early modern allegory are related to
crises in early modern culture, it does so because allegory itself invites two
accounts—also contradictory—of its forms and dynamics. Allegory’s

35 The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 202. Benjamin therefore reads allegory as a

destructive force directed against the body, which “could be no exception to the command-
ment which ordered the destruction of the organic so that the true meaning, as it was written
and ordained, might be picked up from its fragments. . . . For this much is self-evident: the
allegorization of the physis can only be carried through in all its vigour in respect of the corpse.
And the characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that they can enter
the homeland of allegory,” pp. 216–17. On death and allegory, see also Gordon Teskey,
“Death in an Allegory,” in Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, ed. Elizabeth Bellamy,
Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
36 In my metaphors of violence I recall Gordon Teskey’s arguments about allegory as a

“negation of the integrity of the other” which is “the first moment of allegory’s exertion of
its power to seize and to tear,” Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1996), p. 18. Teskey’s discussion of “capture,” pp. 25–31, is particularly pertinent to my
discussion here, as are Paul Suttie’s comments on the “colossal, systematic violence” that
Dante’s allegory inflicts on the bodies of its human characters, Self-Interpretation in “The
Faerie Queene” (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2006), p. 17. My Heideggerian
language of “rifts” is indebted to Teskey’s account, e.g., pp. 2–12; but see also Benjamin’s
image of the “jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance,” The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 166.
 A Poetics of Enchantment 17
failures, absurdities, and scenes of violence are, on the one hand, signs of a
contest between narrative form and allegorical signification. “Allegorical
narrative” seems almost an oxymoron: a term, at the very least, with a
deep rift at its center. The agents of allegory strive away from narrative
because their capacity to signify puts tremendous pressure on their
capacity to act. But there is another, very different, way of accounting
for the peculiarities of allegorical narrative. Even if narrative tends
to collapse under the pressure of idea, it remains, nevertheless, crucial
to allegory’s operations. The very term “allegory”—allos agoreuein, “to
speak other”—yokes together the opposed orders of narrative and
of significance. The “other” which is spoken might seem to cancel or
transcend the material stuff of time and narrative, but allegory as other-
speaking embeds that transcendent other in the “speaking,” in a discourse
that must unfold in time.37 Allegory allows neither of its opposed
halves to escape from the other but rather forces them into a dialectic
negotiation that opens narrative to meaning and meaning to narrative.
“Allegorical narrative,” on this reading, might be less an oxymoron than
a redundancy.
The classical analysis of allegorical rhetoric comes close to saying just
this. In reading allegory as extended metaphor, Cicero and Quintilian
assign to allegory what Judith Anderson calls the “contiguous relation-
ship” of words and figures that characterizes sustained narrative.38 The
Crassus of Cicero’s De Oratore describes allegory as metaphor sustained
through a sequence of words “connected in continuity” [continuatis con-
nectitur].39 Quintilian follows Cicero in his explanation that “a continued
series of Metaphors produces Allegory” [allēgorian facit continua meta-
phora].40 And the early modern rhetorical theorists tend likewise to define

37 For a useful synopsis of the ancient term allegoria, see Jon Whitman, Allegory: The

Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1987), pp. 263–8. On the rift at the heart of “allegory,” see Teskey, who reads the two halves of
the term as “negative and positive others”: as privileging, in other words, the “meaning that is
other to its speaking” over the “speaking that is other to its meaning.” He qualifies this
suggestion of privileged meaning in his description of allegory’s “oscillating movement”
between meaning and speaking and in his reminders that any reading of the term must attend,
first of all, to the rift at its center, and not to either of its halves. Allegory and Violence, pp. 6,
10–12; qtd. at p. 6. Brenda Machosky takes Teskey’s comments as a jumping-off point for her
own discussion of allegory’s “concrete substance of words” and of the necessity of that
substance to “the language of the logos.” Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of
Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. 18–19.
38 Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (New York:

Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 5.

39 Cicero I cite from Anderson, Reading the Allegorical Intertext, p. 5.
40 Institutio Oratoria, ed. Donald A. Russell as The Orator’s Education (Cambridge, MA:

Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 2001), 9.2.46. I have transliterated
Quintilian’s Greek characters in allēgorian and metaphora.
18 Allegory and Enchantment
allegory using this language of continuity. Henry Peacham calls allegory a
“continued Metaphore,” Abraham Fraunce says that irony “continued
maketh a most sweet allegorie,” and George Puttenham describes allegory
in even more explicitly temporal terms, as a “long and perpetuall Meta-
phore.”41 Spenser, too, is close to the language of temporality when in the
Letter to Raleigh he calls The Faerie Queene a “continued Allegory, or
darke conceit.”42 His allegorical practice whispers in some ways of an
escape from time into an eschatological order of meaning, but Spenser’s
comment here suggests that his poem will discover the signs of that
timeless order only in the course of an irreducibly temporal progress,
what he elsewhere calls his “long voiage.”43 Skeletal though they are, the
rhetorical analyses of allegorical figures hint at a first basis for this
voyage, because they suggest an intimate and necessary relationship
between allegory and narrative. Allegorical significance operates, in
these analyses, not as a force that exerts itself against narrative from a
base somewhere else but rather as a force generated within the material
of narrative itself.
According to this reading, then, allegory is not just an orientation
toward meaning—certainly is not simply meaning, the allos that allegory
conjoins with agoreuein—but is rather a way of negotiating passage across
the rift that separates these two terms. Anderson has observed that some
modern theories of allegory are informed by a broadly Platonic metaphys-
ics of form imposing itself on matter, of the tyrant meaning subduing
time in its eccentric embrace. Where this metaphysics holds sway, alle-
gorical narrative tends to be a scene of absurdity and violence, and for this
reason allegory does not develop in any sustained form in the contexts of
ancient Stoicism and Platonism. Plato himself resists in complex ways the
incursions of allegorical language into his discourse, the possibility of
putting time into negotiation with eternity. Anderson has suggested that
theorists of allegory might profitably look instead to a variety of Neopla-
tonic discourses in which form strives with matter not from without but
from within, straining toward an impossible escape from its material
prison, involved, as Anderson says, in “a proximity too massive and
powerful to be broken.” These discourses embed form in the very sub-
stance out from which it strives (Plotinus writes about the process by

41 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593): A Facsimile Reproduction (Gaines-

ville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1954), p. 25; Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian
Rhetorike (London, 1588), ch. 6, in facsimile at Early English Books Online; and George
Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker
(Cambridge: The University Press, 1936), 3.18. In quoting from Puttenham,
I modernize the long s and the ligatures common in the original type.
42 The Faerie Queene, Letter to Raleigh, line 4. 43 The Faerie Queene 1.12.42.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
"Go?" Johnson shrugged, then stretched and yawned widely. "I
guess it went all right. I haven't seen Danny or Flip for forty years.
Wonder what ever happened to them?"
"Ended up in jail, most likely. But what about the crisis? Did you
succeed in avoiding it?"
"Crisis?" Johnson peered at him through narrowed lids. "Are you
daft, man? What crisis could there possible be in a bunch of kids
getting together in a corner sweet shop?"
"But...." Cavendish shook his head. "Things did change!"
"What changed? Name me one concrete thing that's different than it
used to be."
"I...." He shook his head. "I can't."
"Of course you can't. And for the very simple reason that nothing did
change. I'm still the same man I always was. And you'd better start
coming up with some concrete benefits from this gadget of yours.
You know I put myself into hock to raise the money you needed—I
told my wife I was adding another franchise to my line. If she finds
out her jewels were hocked for me to play around with a time
machine, instead of a new line of cars, she'll flip. So how about it,
Cavendish? Some concrete results next time."
Cavendish went to the bar and returned with a generous slug of
whisky.
"What's this?" said Johnson.
"Why, your drink."
"Drink?" He snorted. "You know I don't drink, man. Have you gone
completely daft? I haven't touched alcohol since I was a youngster."
Cavendish seemed near tears. He drank the whisky himself, then
turned back to the machine.
"What are you up to now?"
"I'm looking for a suitable crisis point." The screen wavered, then
filled with a group of men in uniform—heavy winter garb. They were
clustered around a small fire in a cave; one seemed to be heating
coffee in a tin can. Johnson sucked in his breath.
"You know what is going to happen?"
"Yes, dammit! You're a devil!"
"Perhaps." He sighed. "I sometimes wonder.... But no matter." He
adjusted the picture, and events flowed forward a few hours. The
soldiers were now at the base of a snow-covered hill. Above them,
gaunt and bare, the timber-line beckoned with obscenely stretching
limbs.
Suddenly a flare shot up from someplace to the right of the little
band. Its eerie glare picked out unexpected shadows among the
trees above. One of the soldiers, facing the prospect of near and
immediate personal death for the first time in his life, panicked and
began spraying the tree-line with his grease gun. Branches and
splinters of wood kicked out, until the Sergeant reached out and
slapped the gun from the boy's arms.

The men waited until an unheard signal sounded; then the Sergeant
waved them on up the hill. Slowly, cautiously at first, they made
progress through the protecting trees. But then they reached the
timber-line and froze. Cursing, the Sergeant moved from man to
man, shoving them out of the false protection. At last he came to the
boy who had fired earlier. Just as the older man placed his hand on
the boy's shoulder, the boy twisted and broke away, running madly
down the hill....
"That's enough, damn you!"
Cavendish turned off the picture and came back to Johnson's side.
"They court-martialed you, didn't they?"
"You know they did," he said, dully.
"You were unlucky, that's all. Many a soldier spooks his first time
under fire. A lot of them run away."
"How many of them run right into the arms of their Commanding
General?"
"Unlucky," said Cavendish.
"They kicked me out," said Johnson, bitterly. "A dishonorable
discharge—'cowardice in the face of enemy action'. Said I was lucky
I didn't face the firing squad."
"Officers are human, too," said Cavendish. "In times of stress, they
tend to panic."
"They were 'making an example of me'," said Johnson. He laughed,
a humorless sound that grated on the ears. "Some example. It took
me twenty years to live it down."
"But people do forget, eventually."
"Not all of them."
"Shall we get on with it?"
"Of course, man. This is what I have been waiting for!" His words
were sharp and impatient.

"Hey, Art! Got a butt?"

"Yeah, sure." Art Johnson scrabbled around inside his jacket and
came out with a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He passed them over.
"Thanks, buddy. God, but it's cold here!" He stripped off one glove
and warmed the palm of his hand over the glowing coal of the
cigarette. "Now I know what they mean when they call a place
Godforsaken."
"Ease off there, you two!" Sergeant Stebbins glowered their way.
"You want every chink in Korea to hear you?"
"Sorry, Sarge," muttered the cigarette-bummer. He dropped his voice
to a whisper. "Hey, Artie! I hear some of the guys in Fox company
are making book on how many of us live through the day."
"Yeah?" Johnson shook his head. "Some characters'll bet on their
own mother's funeral."
"Or their own." The boy giggled. "Wouldn't it be funny if the winners
couldn't collect because they were all dead?"
"A real scream," said Johnson, sourly. "Look, let's change the
subject, huh?"
The boy shrugged. "Sure, Art. Anything you say."
They lapsed into silence, and Art Johnson considered the
improbable amount of circumstances that had brought him to the
base of this numbered but nameless hill half across the world from
home. There was nothing of home here, and he felt the lack mightily.
There was a very good chance that before another few hours had
passed, he would be dead. And then he would never see home
again.
He shivered. The thought frightened him. He didn't want to die. Not
that he supposed any of the other men wanted to die either. But they
were remote, other beings, alien in Art Johnson's world. What they
felt he could not guess; what he felt he knew.
And he did not want to die!
"Hey, Art!"
"Uh, what is it, Tooey?"
"Chinks, I think. Up there in the trees. God, they're sneaking down!"
"Where? Dammit, where?" He thumbed the safety of his grease gun,
and brought it up to bear on the trees. His fingers tightened around
the stock; the trigger started to depress—
Then—
Something clicked.
"Jesus, Artie, they're coming!"
Art Johnson's eyes took on a faraway look. His fingers loosened
their death grip on the gun. He shook his head.
"Artie!"
"Shut up, Tooey!" Reaching out, he slapped the boy's face. "You're
imagining things."
"But they're up there, Artie!" whimpered the boy.
"Sure they're up there. But not where you think they are. They're dug
in, in the caves. And it's going to be up to us to dig them out. Now
snap out of it!"

Suddenly a flare shot up from somewhere to their right. It whistled,

then popped, the white light hurting their night-adjusted eyes. A
moment later, Stebbins whistled and the men started moving up the
hill.
They paused at the timber-line, and Stebbins cursed, moving from
man to man and urging him out of the false protection of the trees
and onto the broad expanse of boulder-pocked snow. Above them,
another two hundred yards, black dots against the snow showed
where the caves were waiting for them. Johnson could visualize the
little slant-eyed men within. He flopped to his belly and wriggled
forward. Suddenly he stood up and dashed twenty yards, then
flopped again as bullets whined through the space occupied by his
body bare instants earlier.
He lay there, face pressed into the snow, until the muscles of his
legs started tensing of their own accord. Then he was up again, and
running for dear life.
Gun fire was bursting all around now, a seemingly solid screen of
lead pouring down from the caves. But the men were getting through
the barrier; one slammed into the rock wall beside a cave mouth and
started unlimbering grenades, tossing them in as quickly as he could
pull the pins. Seconds later a vast tongue of fire roared out, melting
the snow and scorching the barren earth beneath.
The fire probed down the hill as the side around the cave shook and
roared. The fire reached and passed over Art Johnson, lying in the
snow, fingers digging at the rock beneath.
By its orange light, the spreading circle of red around the soldier
blended into the artificial coloring of the snow.

"Just think of it!" Cavendish pounded his hand on the desk. "The
chance to go back and correct our mistakes, live our lives over
again. The opportunities missed, the chances passed up, the
decisions made wrong—all can be changed."
The man in the chair swirled the dregs of the whisky in the bottom of
the glass. "Go on, Cavendish," he said. "You're keeping my interest."
Cavendish flushed. "Thank you, Mr. Blackwell. I knew a man of your
position would not pass up an opportunity like this. Why, this is
another chance to make the world! A second chance!"
THE END
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SECOND
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