Strong stomachs: Arthur Golding, Ovid, andcultural assimilation

Joseph Wallace

Arthur Golding’s prefaces to his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses exemplifythe early modern discourse of cultural assimilation, envisioning porous, per-meable boundaries separating Christian culture from the pagan culture ofOvid’s poem. These prefatory poems were Golding’s only foray into originalpoetry, with the exception of his liminary verses for John Baret’s Alvearie of1574. He composed a preface ‘to the reader’ for the 1565 edition, and a verseepistle to the Earl of Leicester for the 1567 edition, though he included bothin the later edition. The two poems share a common purpose, however, whichis to argue for points of contact between Ovid’s pagan culture and Golding’scontemporary Christian culture. Golding accomplishes this by suffusing hisprefaces at key moments with the language of digestion, linking the operationof the stomach to the interpretive methodology employed by the Christianreader of pagan texts. In doing so, Golding accesses a tradition of commentarythat looked to the commonality of physical nature as a standard to judgediverging cultural and religious beliefs and practices. Similarly, the religioustranslation projects that Golding undertook around the same time of theMetamorphoses often correlate encounters with gentiles in the early church withinterpretive strategies of incorporation and assimilation, or separation andisolation. This article argues that Golding’s prefaces bring together severalinterrelated strands of the discourse of assimilation, blending poetic, physical,cultural, and religious tropes of assimilation into a coherent interpretivestrategy.

That Golding’s prefaces participate in this discourse has long been over-looked in scholarship on his translation. The scholarly conversation aboutGolding’s prefaces has focused on the nature of their moralizing and allego-rizing, and on the relationship between his religious sympathies and histranslation of Ovid’s poem. Until recently, it was generally assumed that thetranslation itself was largely unaffected by any moralizing tendencies on Gold-ing’s part,1 though that view has been largely overturned in the work of Gary

1 See Gordon Braden, The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven: Yale Univer-sity Press, 1978), 12; and Caroline Jameson, ‘Ovid in the Sixteenth Century’, in J. W. Binns (ed.), Ovid (London:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 215–16.

Renaissance Studies Vol. •• No. •• DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2011.00768.x

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G. Gibbs and Florinda Ruiz, among others.2 Along the same lines, the prefa-tory materials are often dismissed without much discussion as recommendinga traditionally medieval, moralistic reading of the poem.3 However, RaphaelLyne, in the most complete reading yet of the prefaces, points out the pref-aces’ idiosyncrasy and novelty. According to Lyne, Golding’s moralizing in theprefaces is uneven and inconsistent, not least because at times they actuallysuggest that the reader may approach the poem ‘without moralizing media-tion’.4 And while medieval commentary continued to be very influential in thesixteenth century, translators and critics increasingly attempted to approachpagan works on their own terms, or at least with the copious historical detailsprovided by humanistic editions.5 In fact, much of the idiosyncrasy of Gold-ing’s prefaces comes from their selective appropriation of earlier commentar-ies, combined with the urgency Golding lends to the comprehension andassimilation of pagan culture. Just as recent scholarship has read Golding’stranslation in terms of his religious sympathies, we also need to read hisprefaces in terms of his intellectual and historical milieu and to furthercontextualize his interpretive strategies within the religious culture in whichthey were produced.

One of the great contemporary problems underpinning Golding’s prefaceswas the relationship between Christians and gentiles in the early church.6 Thiswas the case because the interaction of the two groups formed a basis forargument for those debating ecclesiological controversy, especially that involv-ing what one was allowed to borrow from non-Christian, or non-Protestant,societies. This discourse often coalesced around the concept of ‘offence’, theperception of stumbling blocks (what Paul called a skandalon) standing in the

2 Gary G. Gibbs and Florinda Ruiz, ‘Arthur Golding’s Metamorphoses: Myth in an Elizabethan PoliticalContext’, Renaissance Studies 22 (2008), 557–75; see also Liz Oakley-Brown, ‘Translating the Subject: Ovid’sMetamporphoses in England, 1560–7’, in Roger Ellis and Oakley-Brown (eds.), Translation and Nation: Towards aCultural Politics of Englishness (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2001), 79–80; and Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare andOvid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 47.

3 See Eleanor Rosenberg, Leicester: Patron of Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 157;Madeleine Forey, ‘“Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou Art Translated!”: Ovid, Golding, and A MidsummerNight’s Dream’, The Modern Language Review 93 (1998), 325; Madeleine Forey (ed.), Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’,Translated by Arthur Golding (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), xix–xx; MassimilianoMorini, Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 22–23; and Jameson, ‘Ovid in theSixteenth Century’, 216.

4 Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English ‘Metamorphoses’, 1567–1632 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),45.

5 Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1986), 172. For Golding’s reliance on the 1493 Raphael Regius edition of Ovid, see Grundy Steiner,‘Golding’s Use of the Regius-Micyllus Commentary Upon Ovid’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 49(1950), 317–23.

6 For discussions of the intercultural conflicts in the early church that inform this article, see Luke TimothyJohnson, Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), esp.130–41; Francis Watson, Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective (Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B.Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007), 100–117; and Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 13–38. I use the term ‘gentile’ throughout in its sixteenth-century meaning of ‘heathen’ or ‘pagan’ (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Gentile’, n. 2a).

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way of the expansion of the church. In 1566 Golding produced a translationof John Calvin’s treatise Concerning Offences, wherein Calvin discusses theproblem of stumbling blocks at length.7 The circumstances surrounding thistranslation are important, as is the dedicatee.

By this point in his early career, Golding was already well connected in theupper echelons of English society. His half-sister Margery married John deVere, sixteenth Earl of Oxford. Henry, his brother, became the steward of theearl’s household in 1553 and was elected to Parliament in 1558. Edward deVere, the seventeenth earl, was Arthur Golding’s nephew; the young earl wasalso the ward of William Cecil, to whom Golding also had strong ties, trans-lating for him and often residing at his house. In 1566 and 1567, Golding wastranslating in ‘Barwicke’, an estate owned by the de Vere family in WhiteColne, Essex, about fourteen miles from his native town of Belchamp St Paul.He dedicated Calvin’s treatise on ‘offences’ to Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford,member of the Privy Council, and ‘Governour of Barwicke’ (that is, Berwick-upon-Tweed). Russell was charged with the governorship of the northerntown of Berwick-upon-Tweed to act as a liaison between Elizabeth and MaryQueen of Scots during the former’s attempts to marry the latter to someonein the English court (possibly Robert Dudley).8 In 1566 Berwick-upon-Tweedwas a dangerous border town. In that same year, Anthony Gilby wrote adialogue portraying a soldier of ‘Barwicke, whose enemies are ever about it’,meaning the Catholic threat represented by Mary’s supporters.9 The relation-ship between Golding’s place of residence and the residence of his dedicateewas probably Golding’s way of underscoring his support for the distant earl’smission of spreading Protestantism beyond England’s borders.10

The occasion for Golding’s translation seems to have been primarily Bed-ford’s mission in the north and the interreligious conflicts there. Calvin’s workwould have appealed to Bedford because of Calvin’s ideas of how the gospelshould be spread. Paul’s mission among non-Christians and far-flungchurches provides the background for Calvin’s exposition of the problem that‘offence’ represents. He writes,

7 Calvin, A Little Booke of Iohn Caluines Concernynge Offences, trans. Arthur Golding, (London, 1566).8 Records of Russell’s activities in the north, including his negotiations with Mary, may be found in J. H.

Wiffen, Historical Memoirs of the House of Russell from the Time of the Norman Conquest, 2 vols. (London, 1833),1:442–77.

9 Anthony Gilby, A Pleasant Dialogue, Betweene a Souldior of Barwicke, and an English Chaplaine (London, 1588),sig. L3r. Gilby wrote the dialogue in 1566 at the height of the vestiarian controversy as an intervention on theside of the ministers.

10 The fact that Golding dedicates his translation to the governor of ‘Barwicke’ and lists his residence as‘Barwicke’ has caused some confusion. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that Golding’s ‘Bar-wicke’ refers to the castle in Essex, following Louis Thorn Golding, An Elizabethan Puritan: Arthur Golding theTranslator of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ and also of John Calvin’s ‘Sermons’ (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1937), 59.However, the original Dictionary of National Biography conjectured that Golding had visited Berwick in the northin 1566–67, and some scholars agree, such as H. S. Bennett, English Books & Readers, 1558 to 1603: Being a Studyin the History of the Book Trade in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 107. Ifollow the ODNB, but there remains a possibility that Golding was in the north with Russell in 1566–67.

Arthur Golding, Ovid, and cultural assimilation 3

when Paule was goynge of his harde souldierfare in countries farre of: whenthrough a thousande daungers he endeuored to enlarge the kingdome ofChriste: hauinge continuall conflictes with sundry enemies, runnynge hither andthither of purpose & desire to gather nations farre distant asunder, into thevnitie of the faith: cowardly and currish whisperers burdened him behinde hisbacke with vndeserued slaunders. (fol. 83r)

In other words, petty slander impeded his progress in unifying Christendom.In the New Testament, Paul often intends the word skandalon to represent theinflexibility of opinions hardened by institutional tradition.11 Calvin similarlysees the virtue of patience when dealing with opposing beliefs and cultures:

we muste possesse our soules in patience, vntill suche time as he may makeperfect his strength in our weakenesse. Surely the Apostles were in no happiercace, when they cried out boldlie, why doo the Heathen so furiously rage, andwhy doo the people imagine vaine thinges?’ (fol. 44r).

Here, too, Calvin uses the context of the interaction between Christians andnon-Christians as one of the most important cases of scandals arising toimpede the progress of the church.

Calvin conceives ‘offence’ as arising from the perception of something asalien, out of place. Golding also worried about offence in his translation ofOvid, asking that his readers not ‘offend/ At vices in this present woork inlyvely colours pend’ (420–21).12 Golding acknowledges that Ovid’s work con-tains vices repugnant to his readers’ morality, but he asks that this not dis-courage them from approaching the work. The goal of the prefaces is tomitigate offence by identifying areas of similarity between competing groups.Accordingly, Golding sets up two ways of approaching the pagan elements ofOvid’s poem. One is through an allegory of morality. Jove represents rulers,Mars represents soldiers, and so on. The other, however, is through an alle-gory of materiality and corporeality, part of a complex inheritance fromChristian allegorists of the early church who portrayed the confrontation withevil in terms of bodily infection and purity.13

In delineating the similarities between pagan and Christian beliefs, Goldingrelied on the extensive body of medieval commentary that had provided atleast four ways to read Ovid’s poem allegorically, as a source of both secular

11 See, for example, Galatians 5:11: ‘And I, brethren, if I yet preach circumcision, why do I yet sufferpersecution? then is the offence of the cross ceased’ (cited from the Geneva Bible). For the early modernreception in England of Paul’s project of ecclesiastical expansion and accommodation, see Gregory Kneidel,Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature: the Poetics of All Believers (New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2008), Chap. 1.

12 I cite Golding’s translation by page number from John Frederick Nims (ed.), Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses,’ theArthur Golding Translation 1567 (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000).

13 See Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 199–205.

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and sacred wisdom.14 But instead of providing Ovid’s stories with neatlydivided natural, historical, spiritual, and moral explanations, Golding picksand chooses. He is mainly interested in moral and natural allegories in theepistle to Leicester; and while the moral explanations present abstract ethicalprinciples as one possible similitude between pagan and Christian, Goldingseems much more concerned with the idea of material similitude as a point ofcontact between the two religions. In order to emphasize the universality ofthe very matter that Ovid’s poem is about, Golding argues that Ovid’s creationaccount is fundamentally the same as the Christian account.15 Golding inti-mates that Ovid may even have read Moses’ works; for confirmation, he citesPhilo Judaeus’ literal interpretation of the creation story (De Opificio Mundi).Ovid recounts the origins of the world as a confused heap gradually attainingform; according to Golding, the Christian God worked similarly to informmatter with the pattern, according to Philo, He had ‘Conceyved everlastinglyin mynd’ (415). In a passage after the one that Golding quotes, Philo portraysthe origins of the world in terms of the same confused mass that Ovid does.Water poured over the earth ‘had produced swamps and deep mud, earth andwater being mingled together and kneaded, like a mass of dough, into a singleelement without shape or distinction of its parts’.16 The point of quoting Philoin his preface is to associate the basic matter that Ovid’s poem describes withthe same basic matter in the Christian creation story. The fundamental iden-tity of the two accounts of the material world becomes the prime way to bridgethe gap between Ovid’s paganism and Golding’s Christianity.17

This concern with material similarity also appears in Golding’s more prac-tical pronouncements on reading strategies. He often represents Ovid’s poemas something to be eaten, digested, and assimilated. The poem itself evenoriginates in our stomach; according to Golding, ‘The Authors purpose is topaint and set before our eyes/ The lyvely Image of the thoughts that in ourstomackes ryse’ (427). He describes Ovid’s poem as

14 See Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in RenaissanceHumanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (1953; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 91–95;Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in theRenaissance (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 163–200; Ann Moss, Poetry and Fable: Studiesin Mythological Narrative in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 6–16; andFrank T. Coulson, ‘Ovid’s Transformations in Medieval France (ca. 1100–ca. 1350)’, in Alison Keith andStephen Rupp (eds.), Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto:Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007), 42–60.

15 This recognition of similarity was common among theologians looking for points of contact between paganand Christian beliefs. See Arnold Williams, ‘The Two Matters: Classical and Christian in the Renaissance’,Studies in Philology 38 (1941), 160–61; and, for a more general account, Daniel Pickering Walker, The AncientTheology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1972), 132–63.

16 Philo, trans. F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker, Loeb Classical Library, 10 vols. (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1962), Vol. 1, 29.

17 In making this argument Golding shares his terms with the Neoplatonic thinkers recently popularized byItalian philosophers in the fifteenth century. See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 2nd ed,.(London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 241–55; and Moss, Poetry and Fable, 13–14.

Arthur Golding, Ovid, and cultural assimilation 5

This worthy worke in which of good examples are so many,This Ortyard of Alcinous in which there wants not anyHerb, tree, or frute that may mans use for health or pleasure serve,This plenteous horne of Acheloy which justly dooth deserveTo beare the name of treasorie of knowledge.

(421)

Again, he hopes that ‘every wyght that shall have pleasure for to sport/ Himin this gardeine, may as well beare wholesome frute away/ As only on thepleasant flowres his rechlesse senses stay’ (421–22). Golding actively encour-ages the experience of cultural transformation and assimilation, illustratingthe principle with a familiar metaphor. In his preface to the reader he writes,

Then take theis woorkes as fragrant flowers most full of pleasant juce,The which the Bee conveying home may put to wholesome use:And which the spyder sucking on to poison may convert,Through venym spred in all her limbes and native in her hart.

(427)

The bee goes out into the garden and chooses from among the variety there,while the spider would convert that same material into poison. Goldingmimics Seneca’s Epistle 84, where Seneca argues that ‘We ought, as they say,to imitate Bees, which wander up and downe, and picke fit flowers to makehonie’.18 Seneca goes on to compare physical digestion to intellectual assimi-lation, writing,

Nourishment which we have taken, so long as it abideth in quality, and swim-meth solid in the stomacke is a burthen; but when it is changed from that whichit was, then at length it passeth into strength and into blood. The same let us doein these things wherewith wits are nourished.

(348–49)

There are some, Golding implies, who will simply never be fit for Ovid’s‘pleasant juce’. Yet, Golding’s ideal reader has no such native flaw, but rathercan be trained to convert the poem to ‘wholesome use’. Golding writes, ‘If anystomacke be so weake as that it cannot brooke,/ The lively setting forth ofthings described in this booke,/ I give him counsell to absteine untill he beemore strong’ (428–29). Golding’s metaphors of eating are meant to suggest aprocess; the reader may train himself to become more strong, and is evenurged to wander around the imagined garden of the poem, exercising anactive, selective principle of interpretation.

18 Seneca, The Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, both Morall and Naturall, trans. Thomas Lodge (London, 1614),348; see also Silvia Montiglio, ‘Should the Aspiring Man Travel? A Conflict in Seneca’s Thought’, AmericanJournal of Philology 127 (2006), 568.

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But to introduce this way of consuming Ovid’s poem is also to acknowledgethe danger of being consumed. The pagan poetry is like a beautiful, danger-ous animal:

Behold, by sent of reason and by perfect syght I fyndA Panther heere, whose peinted cote with yellow spots like goldAnd pleasant smell allure myne eyes and senses to behold.But well I know his face is grim and fearce, which he dooth hydeTo this intent, that while I thus stand gazing on his hyde,He may devour mee unbewares.

(420)

The pagan mysteries are beautiful and enticing, like the golden panther,which represents the pleasures of idolatry and the senses.19 Just as Goldingcounsels his reader to eat Ovid’s poem, he warns against being eaten in turn.This warning is the necessary corollary to the emphasis on the materialsimilarity of the pagan world to the Christian one; such similarity mightprivilege the dangerous idea that material nature, and the commonality ofnatural beneficence, can serve as a basis for religious community.

Thus, even as Golding insists on the fundamental similarity of materialorigins in his prefaces, he also makes sure to counter the idea that suchsimilarity provides an uncomplicated way to approach pagan poetry. In hisepistle to Leicester, he rehearses the Pythagorean philosophy of metempsy-chosis, also introducing the idea of a tripartite soul. ‘Three sorts of lyfe orsoule (for so they termed bee)/ Are found in things’ (406). This is the familiardivision of the soul into lower, middle, and upper portions. The lower is thegenerative faculty, the middle is faculty of movement, and the upper grantsreason. Golding acknowledges that men share with other creatures the firstand second souls: ‘I graunt that when our breath dooth from our bodies goaway, / It dooth eftsoones return to ayre: and of that ayre there may / Bothbird and beast participate, and we of theirs likewyse’ (ibid.). The stomach wasoften associated with this middle soul as the seat of bodily change, representedby both respiration and digestion. Golding could have found an explication ofthis tripartite scheme in St Augustine’s City of God, where Augustine associatesthe middle faculty with ‘the worlds sence, the heauens, or Aether’.20 Themiddle spirit was like the air, the pneuma, which was neither wholly physical

19 Aristotle explained that the panther uses its enticing smell to lure its prey; see History of Animals, trans. d’A.W. Thompson, in Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle, Bollingen Series 71, 2 vols. (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1984), Vol. 1, 954 (612a3–16).

20 Augustine, Of the Citie of God, with the Learned Comments of Io. Lod. Vives, trans. I. H. (London, 1610), 283(7.23); for other sources of the anima media, see David Marsh, ‘Erasmus on the Antithesis of Body and Soul’,Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976), 673–74. The ‘middle spirit’ later became common in treatises on magicas a way to explain the link between man’s generative and spiritual faculties: e.g., Thomas Vaughan, Anthro-posophia Theomagica (London, 1650), 39; and Robert Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy Grounded upon the Essential Truth,or Eternal Sapience (London, 1659), 191.

Arthur Golding, Ovid, and cultural assimilation 7

nor completely spiritual; it was the site of discrimination, where the materialworld was transmuted into the higher orders of the spirit.

The middle spirit entered into religious writing as Protestants sought toreinterpret the mechanism of the Eucharist. Thomas Cranmer advises theChristian to digest Christ’s sacrifice ‘with the stomake of his hart’, and JosephHall advises that a ‘man must first know the power of his stomach, ere heeknowe how with safetie and profit to frequent Gods Ordinary’.21 As Goldingargues in his epistle, the brazen age witnessed ‘mens stomackes wexing hardas steele ageinst their God’ (418); here, too, the stomach is a figure for theprocess of digestive discrimination that must accompany obedience to God. AsJanel L. Mueller has argued, such metaphors of digestion were crucial formid-century understandings of the relationship between human identity anddivine will. The rejection of the ‘corporeal real presence’ was accompanied,she argues, by the ‘rival ontology in which analogical relations bind with theforce of physical connections’. The Marian persecutions only served to asso-ciate death with the ‘cosmic process of digestion and assimilation by whichGod works to ready the faithful for incorporation within his heavenly body’.22

The crucial distinction made in the Protestant community was that eventhough the physical material of worship was fundamental, more important wasthe process of transmutation that accompanied salvific refinement.

Golding makes it clear that Christians need a way to guard against beingoverwhelmed by material change. He cites the famous example from Plato’sPhaedrus of the charioteer guiding his two horses (cf. 246a–248b). The chari-oteer must

directHis mynd by reason in the way of virtue, and correctHis feerce affections with the bit of temprance, least perchaunceThey taking bridle in the teath lyke wilfull jades doo praunceAway.

(421)

To control the ‘affections’ it is necessary to use a ‘bit’, preventing the ‘teath’of the horses from taking the reins. The battle of the soul was thus similar tothe process of temperance, whose agent is the middle soul between affectionand reason. This tradition invoked by Golding was all the more appropriatefor his project of mitigating pagan belief because arguments for self-controland obedience had been used effectively in the early church as counters to

21 Thomas Cranmer, An Aunswere by the Reuerend Father in God Thomas Archbyshop of Canterbury . . . Unto a Craftieand Sophisticall Cauillation (London, 1580), 217; and Hall, Holy Observations (London, 1607), 93–94.

22 Janel L. Mueller, ‘Pain, Persecution, and the Construction of Selfhood in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments’, inClaire McEachern and Debora Shuger (eds.), Religion and Culture in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1997), 178 and 172.

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arguments by heretics and pagans for an equality based on the commonalityof natural dispensation, especially as it pertained to air and food.23

This tradition became increasingly relevant in the sixteenth century. Calvinhimself agrees that material nature could function as a basis of commonalitybecause at first, all peoples were created out of the same matter. In hiscommentary on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, translated by Golding, Calvinwrites,

as in respect of our first creation, there is no difference betwene the Iewes, theTurks, the Heathen men, & vs. Wee are al of vs taken out of one Lump, wee areal the children of Adam, yea wee are all heyres of Gods wrath, and cursed bynature’.24

Indeed, for Golding in his prefaces, the body is also a ‘lumpe of flesh andbones’ (425). Golding follows Calvin in valuing the primordial ‘lump’ as evilrather than simply unshaped; the consequence of such a theological positionwas that the management of physical processes seemed actually to be anindicator of elect or non-elect status.25 Just as God distinguishes matter intoform, so too does the soul somewhat determine the operations of our materialbeing. And thus our bodily processes can come to indicate our relative per-meability with the outside world and with similarly distinguished and differentkinds of matter.

Towards the end of his preface to the reader, Golding makes his mostcomplex statement of the relationship between bodily processes and theability to confront and assimilate Ovid’s poem:

For to the pure and Godly mynd, are all things pure and cleene,And unto such as are corrupt the best corrupted beene:Lyke as the finest meates and drinkes that can bee made by artIn sickly folks to nourishment of sicknesse doo convert.And therefore not regarding such whose dyet is so fyneThat nothing can digest with them onlesse it bee devine,Nor such as to theyr proper harme doo wrest and wring awrye

23 See especially Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, Books One to Three, trans. John Ferguson (Washington DC:The Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 259–60; and Prudentius, Contra Symmachum, trans. H. J.Thomson, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), Vol. 2,68–71. Theworks of Clement and Prudentius were commonly found in sixteenth-century English book inventories. See R.J. Fehrenbach (gen. ed.), Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and EarlyStuart Book-Lists (Binghamton NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992), Nos. 67.33, 67.114, 127.114,and 127.180 (for Prudentius); 1.27, 2.21, and 4.139 (for Clement); and E. S. Leedham-Green (ed.), Books inCambridge Inventories: Book-Lists from Vice-Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, 2 vols.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Vol. 2,225 and 645.

24 Calvin, The Sermons of M. Iohn Caluin, upon the Epistle of S. Paule too the Ephesians, trans. Arthur Golding(London, 1577), fol. 77r.

25 This position should be contrasted with that of Theodore Beza, for whom the original lump was not evil,merely neutral until God separated the elect from the non-elect. On this point see R. T. Kendall, Calvin andEnglish Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 30.

Arthur Golding, Ovid, and cultural assimilation 9

The thinges that to a good intent are written pleasantly,Through Ovids woorke of turned shapes I have peinfull pacePast on untill I had atteyned the end of all my race.

(427)

This passage draws on several interconnected discourses that relate digestionto cultural exchange. Perhaps the most important of these is the Galenicdiscourse surrounding the function of the stomach. And in fact, the traditionof associating the stomach with changing the matter that it takes in continuedto have relevance in the sixteenth century, as Golding demonstrates by chan-nelling it into his prefaces.

Galen’s works had recently become extremely popular in England, thanksin large part to the efforts of Thomas Linacre and his circle of medicalhumanists.26 Among other works, Linacre translated Galen’s On the NaturalFaculties, which appeared in 1523. In that work, Galen devotes significantdiscussion to the stomach and its functioning as he attempted to prove,against Erasistratos, that the stomach does fundamentally change what it takesin. This conflict involved differing interpretations of the role of the body increating nutrition.27 Erasistratos imagined that the body was simply a poroussolid through which matter flowed freely. The stomach is merely a mechanicalgrinder; the necessary cooking of the food (or concoction) is supplied by heatfrom the food itself and from external pneuma. The stomach does function todeliver (anadosis) nutritive matter to the parts of the body, where the matterundergoes assimilation (diadosis). Yet, for Galen the stomach does fundamen-tally change what it takes in, because there is a digestive power (dynamis) in thestomach. And whereas for Erasistratos any contagion or sickness had to comefrom outside of the body, for Galen sickness was attributable to the malfunc-tion of the organs themselves.28

This ancient debate has clear ramifications for Golding’s method of inter-pretation, because, crucially, the pagan matter of the poem is not the agent of

26 See Richard J. Durling, ‘Linacre and Medical Humanism’, in Francis Maddison, Margaret Pelling, andCharles Webster (eds.), Essays on the Life and Work of Thomas Linacre, c. 1460–1524 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1977), 77; Vivian Nutton, ‘John Caius and the Linacre Tradition’, Medical History 23 (1979), 375–76; Nutton, ‘ “Adiet for barbarians”: Introducing Renaissance Medicine to Tudor England’, in Anthony Grafton and NancySiraisi (eds.), Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge MA: MIT Press,1999), 279; and Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010),299–300.

27 In the following account I rely on Harris L. Coulter, Divided Legacy: A History of the Schism in Medical Thought,Vol. 1 (Washington DC: Wehawken Book Co., 1975), 176–77 and 309–10.

28 Jonathan Gil Harris argues that the view of pathology as stemming from ‘foreign bodies’ became influen-tial in the 1570s and ’80s, alongside functionalist models of the state that blamed social ills on external agents(Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998), 1–16). Galen and Golding advocate, alternatively, a model of pathology originatingwithin the subject, removing the threat of infection from any external force.

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infection; rather, the danger and fault lies with the individual stomachs of hisreaders. Galen, discussing those with weak stomachs, writes (in the words ofLinacre’s Latin translation):

Cum imbecillus est, quacumque parte complecti exacte, assumpta non valet: hiclaxum quoddam spacium efficiens, permittit ea quae in se continent humida,pro figurarum varietate ex alio loco in alium transire, ac fluctuationum sonitusedere. Rationabile itaque est, qui hoc symptomate laborat, ne concoctionemquidem sufficientem sperare. Neque enim potest qui imbecillus venter est,probe concoquere.29

[When it is weak, however, being unable to lay hold of its contents accurately, itproduces a certain amount of vacant space, and allows the liquid contents to flowabout in different directions in accordance with its changes of shape, and so toproduce gurglings. Thus those who are troubled with this symptom expect, withgood reason, that they will also be unable to digest adequately; proper digestioncannot take place in a weak stomach.]30

Those with weak (imbecillus) stomachs cannot properly concoct what they takein. And the cause of this problem is the ‘variety of shapes’ (figurarum varietate)which it cannot process, recalling Golding’s navigation of Ovid’s ‘dark Phi-losophie of turned shapes’ (403). On the other hand, according to Galen, thestrong stomach is a good interpreter of nutrients. It takes what is good andjettisons what is bad. Something that provides nutrients to the body is thatwhich is conquered by the body, whereas a poison conquers the body in turn.And as Galen triumphantly concludes, this conquering in the stomach leads toalteration of matter. The stomach alters what it takes in, just like Golding’sinterpreter of pagan culture. Galen, like Golding, portrays the stomach’saction in terms of a contest, striving to conquer what is foreign and toassimilate it.

For Calvinists such as Golding, this active management of aberrant materi-als formed a necessary part of religious belief. In his Institutes, Calvin explainsthe function of the Lord’s supper in terms of weak and strong stomachs:

For as bodily meate, when it fyndeth a stomach possessed wt euill humors, beingit selfe also therby made euil and corrupted doth rather hurt than nourish: sothys spiritual meate, if it lighte vpon a soule defiled with malice and noughti-nesse, throweth it down hedlong wyth greater fal: verily not by ye fault ye meateit selfe, but because to defyled and vnbeleuing men nothing is cleane, thoughotherwise it be neuer so muche sanctified by the blessing of the Lorde.31

29 Galen, Galeni Pergameni de Naturalibus Facultatibus Libri Tres, trans. Thomas Linacre (London, 1523), fols.64v–65r. Golding, like many others, probably relied on Linacre’s version.

30 Galen, On the Natural Faculties, trans. Arthur John Brock, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2000), 237.

31 Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, trans. John Dawes (London, 1561), fol. 137v (4.17.40).

Arthur Golding, Ovid, and cultural assimilation 11

For Calvin, the fault lies with the individual stomach: those whose stomachsare strong and pure can process any kind of meat, while corrupt stomachscannot. His argument is premised on the idea that a healthy stomach convertsphysical and spiritual ‘meats’ into good use; and though Calvin was making atheological point, his terms draw on contemporary changes in thinking aboutthe stomach. Michael Schoenfeldt has found that regimens of dietary controloften governed not only physical but also ethical and moral conceptions of theearly modern self. The stomach was crucial for Protestant, and especiallyCalvinist, writers concerned with the relationship between Christians andnon-Christians because it supervised the assimilation of foreign matter, bothphysically and spiritually.32 It is not a coincidence that this period also saw achange in dietary recommendations. After 1550, physicians increasinglybegan to recommend corrective diets, which would work against the naturaltemperament of an individual’s body.33 Such regimes accompanied the rise ofa Galenic conception of a powerful, discriminating stomach.

So, when Golding quotes Titus 1:15, ‘to the pure and Godly mynd, are allthings pure and cleene’ (427), he gestures towards the spiritual, ethical, andmaterial conjunction between Galenic medicine and Pauline evangelism. Incomparing the purity of the ‘Godly mynd’ with the strength of the stomachthat processes ‘the finest meates and drinkes that can bee made by art’,Golding positions the stomach as the organ that effects the interpretation anddiscrimination of Ovid’s foreign culture. It is likely that he also had beeninfluenced by John Calvin’s commentary on the passage from Titus, whichrelates his version of Christian liberty to the dictates of the individual con-science. Calvin writes, ‘All things are, therefore, pronounced by the Apostle tobe pure, with no other meaning than that the use of all things is free, asregards the conscience.’34 For Calvin, this version of Christian liberty allowedthe believer to take in whatever seems right to his conscience, permitting aconsiderable degree of freedom of engagement with foreign cultures. In Titus1:12 Paul quotes Epimenides to the effect that the Cretans, to whom Titus wassent as an emissary, are always liars and evil beasts, and that they have ‘slowbellies’ (gast�reς argai).35 Calvin translates the line in Latin as ‘venter iners’,with ‘iners’ connoting a range of meanings, from ‘slow’ and ‘weak’ to ‘incom-petent’ and ‘useless’. The point is that the Cretans are fickle regarding whatthey want to take into their bodies and minds and convert to good use. Theyare among those taking offence to everything new and unfamiliar that must beincorporated into their society via Christianity. Similarly, Golding is notwriting for those who are too particular about their food, but rather for those

32 Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakes-peare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 31.

33 Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 174–78.34 Calvin, ‘Commentaries on the Epistle to Titus’, in Calvin’s Commentaries, trans. Rev. William Pringle, 22 vols.

(Grand Rapids MI: Baker Book House, 1993), Vol. 21, 305.35 Ibid., Vol. 21, 300.

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who can convert many different foods to good use. For Golding, as for Calvin,the ‘weak’ are most often those not learned enough to recognize the value ofconfronting and examining a wide range of foreign matter, both culturallyand intellectually.36

In accessing this discourse, Golding also gestures at a larger one surround-ing conflicts not only about eating but also about the relationship and prox-imity between believers and unbelievers. Protestant writers were often vexedby what they saw as the problem of mingling with unbelievers, fearing bothphysical and spiritual pollution, contamination, and infection. This concernfor cleanliness was often worked out through the various ceremonies by whichother religious groups expressed their beliefs and created their identities.Peter Vermigli’s work on the issue of ‘cohabitation’, published in 1555, is arather extreme example of Protestant insularity, but nevertheless shows thelogical conclusion of many arguments for purification of body and mind.37

The treatise is an English translation of part of Vermigli’s lectures on the bookof Judges, and the aggressively separatist tone of that book comes through inthe treatise. In his commentary on Judges, Vermigli exercises himself onquestions such as ‘Whither it be lawful for Christians to seeke for helpe ofinfidels’.38 Vermigli spends several folio pages answering in the negative. It istrue that Christians can live in peace with unbelievers, he says, ‘especially if[the peace] be concluded for the peaceable defending and keping of thebondes or borders on ether syde’ (fol. 99v). Christians can only deal withinfidels if the result is that the borders between the two are reinforced. ButVermigli is adamant that the ungodly cannot help the godly at all:

For if Paule will have us rather to suffer wronge and hurt, than that we shouldego to the judgement seats of the infidels when we are in controversy with ourbrethren, how much lesse is it lawfull to use the helpe of the ungodly, to deliverus from other Christianes, which unjustlye oppresse us. (fols. 99v–100r)

The very same year Golding published his partial translation of the Metamor-phoses and confronted the problem of using the classical philosophers toaccess Christian truth. But Vermigli is quite clear that even the classicalphilosophers were not free from stain.

In the 1555 treatise, Vermigli’s language, mirroring his scriptural sources, isfull of the ‘filth’, ‘pollution’, and ‘plagues’ that the faithful might receive fromthe unfaithful. He worries that some, prompted by the scriptural scenes in

36 See William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988),99.

37 For a discussion of this treatise as an example of ‘mental habits of binary opposition, antithesis, andinversion’, see Patrick Collinson, ‘The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful’, in Ole Peter Grell,Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (eds.), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religionin England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 54.

38 Vermigli, Most Fruitfull and Learned Commentaries of Doctor Peter Martir Vermil Florentine (London, 1564), fol.99v.

Arthur Golding, Ovid, and cultural assimilation 13

which the faithful mix with the unfaithful, might think it allowable for Prot-estants to mix with non-Christians. Not completely true, he says. Jesus dinedwith pagans, Paul allowed marriages between believers and unbelievers, andsome heretics even now may dwell among the faithful because the civil laws donot require that they all be put to death.39 Vermigli argues that the faithful canhave some contact with the unfaithful, but only in order to convert them.Strikingly, the faithful cannot have ‘familiar conversacion with the unbelieversfor their own cause as for their recreacion or for their gayn and profite’ (fol.4v). Of course, Vermigli restricts access to the unfaithful to those who arelearned, and those learned men of course must never participate in rituals andceremonies of the unbelievers, because it is an immutable rule that ‘Euellthings ar not to be doone that goode maye comme therof’ (ibid.). But whatabout the ‘weake and unlearned man’ (fol. 6v)? Vermigli asks if it is allowablefor someone to learn from an ‘unfaithful master’. He answers in the negative,because ‘Yt is a very dangerus thinge to use them which ar unbeleavers asMasters and teachers.’ Vermigli concludes, ‘that such a weakling shuld use anunfaithfull Master I thincke that he shuld abstayn alltogether from suche’ (fol.7v). Vermigli finds the language of infection useful to drive home his adviceto abstain. Doctors advise their patients not to go near the sick, and the lessonapplies equally to those not sure in faith (fol. 9v).

One finds a mixed reception of these ideas in Golding’s later translations.He translated David Chytraeus’ postil on the Pauline epistles and holidayliturgies in 1570, in which Chytraeus expresses his view, similar to Vermigli’s,that the faithful and the unfaithful make a poor match. Chytraeus was aLutheran centrist, though he remained unmoved by the attempts of thefollowers of Philip Melancthon to compromise on the issue of adiaphora, ormatters indifferent, which could include the importation of non-Christianrituals.40 Like Calvin in his treatise on offences, Chytraeus worried over thepossibility for offence offered by the intermixing of pagan and Christiancultures. For him, Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians urges the faithful awayfrom the ‘infection of worshipping Idols, and specially from eating meatesoffred unto idols’.41 Paul means that ‘the godly ought in no wise to be presentat such feasts where flesh sacrifised to idols is set uppon the table, bycause thatby their example the worshipping of Idols myght bee confirmed, and theconsciences of the weak might be offended and wounded’ (292). In theoryChytraeus does accept the commonplace of the New Testament that all thegentiles are called to salvation despite their religious practices. In his expla-nation of verses usually read on Epiphany, he writes,

39 Vermigli, A Treatise of the Cohabitacyon of the Faithfull with the Unfaithfull (London, 1555), fols. 2v–3r.40 See Robert E. Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (Burlington VT: Ashgate,

2008), 11n15.41 Chytraeus, A Postil or Orderly Disposing of Certeine Epistles Usually Red in the Church of God, uppon the Sundayes

and Holydayes Throughout the Whole Yeere, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1570), 292.

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in the doctrine of the calling of the Gentyles these three articles are alwayes toobee considered. First, that the promise of the Gospell is vniuersall, and that Godis not an accepter of persones, but is indifferent too all men according too thatone rule expressed in the Gospell. (50)

But in general, Chytraeus was less assured by the capacity of the faithful toremain uninfected by pagan customs. Even though doctrine held that all arecalled to salvation, Chytraeus, like Vermigli, advises separation between Prot-estants, Jews, and pagans on the basis of the potential for physical and spiritualcontamination.

Yet, one suspects that Golding’s sympathies did not lie wholly withChytraeus. The prolific printers Lucas Harrison and George Bishop essentiallycommissioned Golding’s translation of Chytraeus after they had success withGolding’s translation of the Philippist Niels Hemmingsen’s postil in 1569.42

The fact that Golding could move so easily between authors of differingProtestant allegiances shows the ambiguous religious sympathies of manyEnglishmen, especially those in Golding’s circle. But in these years the officialposition of the English government increasingly drifted towards a moderateCalvinism, and Golding’s translations followed suit. He translated Calvin’scommentary on Galatians in 1574 and dedicated it to William Cecil. He frameshis translation as a rebuttal to contemporary ceremonialist arguments, thoughCalvin’s commentary emphasizes that Paul himself often compromised on theissue of mixing different ceremonial practices in the early church. At onepoint, Calvin takes up the question of why Paul circumcised Timothy but notTitus. It was, Calvin argues, completely a case of accommodating religiouscustoms for a greater good:

Saint Paule therfore had circumcised Timothie: and the reason why, was for thathee sawe manye weaklings, whiche woulde haue bene offended bycause theywere not yet throughly confirmed in the knowledge of the Gospell, but thoughtthat it behoued them to keepe still the ceremonies of the Lawe. And it is sayd,that wee must yeeld one to an other, for charitie byndeth vs thervnto. Euery manmust not do what he him self thinks good, to the trubbling of his neybours: butwe must so fashyon our selues one too an other, as none maye bee offendedthrough our faulte.43

Again, Calvin mentions the weak and advocates concessions for them, in thespirit of Paul’s commensality. But more importantly, Calvin argues that weshould accommodate our actions to those around us, and ‘fashyon our seluesone too an other’ in order to minimize offence. Calvin’s is a time-bound ethic,though. Christian liberty lasts forever, and it is only for a short time that

42 Bennett, English Books & Readers, 1558 to 1603, 107–8.43 John Calvin, Sermons of M. Iohn Caluine upon the Epistle of Saincte Paule to the Galathians, trans. Arthur Golding

(London, 1574), fol. 63r.

Arthur Golding, Ovid, and cultural assimilation 15

believers have to participate in unclean rituals. Vermigli and Chytraeus neversaid that the believer had to sometimes partake in rituals not his own. Thiswould be, for Vermigli, to do evil to accomplish good. Yet Calvin thinks thatthe believer may participate in rituals of different religions, as long as thoserituals are illustrative of non-essential cultural differences. But Calvin con-structs this participation as done for the benefit of the weak, or those whocannot understand why Christian habits must trump those of other beliefs.

Golding thus found himself in the middle of contemporary debates aboutcultural assimilation and separation, both in the realm of imaginative litera-ture and ecclesiastical controversy. His place in this discourse was, in 1567 atleast, thoroughly on the side of assimilation. His prefaces demonstrate asustained intellectual engagement with contemporary religious debatesplaying out against the background of the early church and its interculturalconflicts. By portraying Ovid’s poem as something to be eaten and digested hewas also tapping into a long-standing discourse that took food as a focus forconcepts of cultural distinction and incorporation. One consequence of Gold-ing’s Christian syncretism in his prefaces was that the pagan world came toexist on the same material continuum as the Christian world, a situation thatrecalled the context of the early church, when Christians and pagans actuallydid exist side by side. The problem of cultural assimilation was thus verysimilar to the problem of transformative material assimilation represented inOvid’s poem, wherein the transformed subject always retains characteristics ofa former self.44 Similarly, critics of assimilation worried that engaging withpagan culture at all risked a kind of spiritual infection. Golding argues,however, that strong stomachs are like good interpreters of food, culture, andreligious doctrine, because they act as mediators of the dangerous material offoreign culture. Thus, Golding could portray the act of reading as a materialencounter with a culture whose values and practices still had contemporaryrelevance, and the assimilation of which formed a pressing concern.45

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

44 Maggie Kilgour, ‘Changing Ovid’, in Keith and Rupp (eds.), The Changing Face of Ovid, 268.45 A version of this article was presented at the annual conference of the Sixteenth Century Society &

Conference, in October 2010. I thank Gary G. Gibbs and Florinda Ruiz for allowing me to share my work withthem and participate in their panel. This article has also greatly benefited from the detailed, thoughtful, andengaging suggestions of my anonymous readers at Renaissance Studies.

16 Joseph Wallace

Abstract

joseph wallace, Strong stomachs: Arthur Golding, Ovid, and culturalassimilation

This article argues for a new interpretation of the prefatory poems Golding wrote forhis published translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These prefaces are thoroughlyenmeshed both in Golding’s own intellectual project of mitigating Ovid’s paganculture and in the wider cultural debates about contact with non-Christians. Thisdebate often had recourse to the circumstances of early Christians and their proximityto the gentiles and their religious practices. Specifically, the language of eating anddigestion was frequently deployed in the early Christian world to suggest the necessityof confronting and processing foreign cultures. Golding’s prefaces approach thisintellectual legacy through sustained language of food, digestion, and stomachs. ForGolding’s ideal reader, culture clashes were analogous to eating a variety of foods,requiring strong stomachs. Galenic conceptions of an active, powerful stomach alsohelped Golding formulate his ideas about cross-cultural exchange. And as I argue inthe last part of the article, Golding’s interpretive strategy was not unique, but ratherwas commonplace in Protestant polemic in the 1560s and ’70s.

Keywords: Arthur Golding; cultural assimilation; religious culture