Using the rich concept of imitatio as an organizing theme, this study explores the tangibility of faith and a privileging of an affective, embodied religious subjectivity in post-Reformation England. Moving Imitation asserts that literary and devotional concepts of imitatio --as the Humanist activity of translation and as imitatio Christi --were intensely interested in semiotics. Indeed, if the Renaissance was a period in which literary imitatio flourished, advancements in translation theory were not unaccompanied by anxieties--in this case, anxieties about the stability of language itself. Likewise, as iconophilia turned into iconophobia, a similar anxiety about the reliability of signs also characterized the turmoil of the English Reformation. Moving Imitation examines the overlapping qualities of both types of imitatio in order to point out how an important devotional aesthetic in the period involves a type of embodied imitation. The human body's resonance with the humanity of Christ and the pre-Cartesian worldview that saw the human body as fully engaged with what we consider to be more cognitive functions contributed to a privileging of the body as an acceptable sign of true devotion.
Beginning with Sir Thomas Wyatt's paraphrase of the traditional penitential psalms, Moving Imitation explores the translation of penitence in Wyatt's work, and argues that a focus on David's outward gestures and body lends a firmness to a work that is otherwise anxious about the mutable nature of human words. Chapter two examines the suffering bodies in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments and their enactment of a visible imitatio Christi. Terms such as "members" function in its corporeal and communal senses in Acts and Monuments, for the marks of one's membership in the "true church" are born, literally, on one's members. Although much of Foxe's argumentation includes polemical disputes that seek to shut out a copia of meanings to the words, "This is my body," Foxe as an editor exploits the polysemous nature of the body in its corporeal and communal sensibilities. The performative aspects of martyrdom pave the way to a discussion of what I call transformative imitatio in William Shakespeare's Hamlet and The Winter's Tale. Although the theater's ability to "body forth" its fiction is a source of anxiety for antitheatricalists, proponents of the stage saw it as a way to defend the theater. Moving Imitation notes that the characterization of the stage's dangers--the ability to move people's affections--articulates an important Reformist desire: that the individual subject should not only be affected, but also be galvanized into devotional imitation. Such interest in action becomes important in Hamlet ; if the central dilemma of the play (Hamlet's inability to take action) is considered against a common religious dilemma (how one stirs oneself towards genuine worship) the solutions as well as the problems overlap. Through the statue scene of The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare defuses the danger attributed to the stage by animating a potentially idolatrous image with life; in ways that were only hinted at in Hamlet, The Winter's Tale makes use of the lively bodies onstage to suggest that the presumed connection between idolatry and the imitative stage is an unwarranted one, and "to see... life as lively mocked" can help to perform redemption.
