UC Berkeley

Abstract

The Hermeneutics of the Veil:

Reading Faith in Early Modern Poetry

by

Nicole M. A. Jones

Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature

and the

Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Timothy Hampton, Chair

“The Hermeneutics of the Veil: Reading Faith in Early Modern Poetry” examines the poetic works of Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547), Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), and John Milton (1608-1674) against the backdrop of the crises of Christianity of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in early modern Europe that gave Christian hermeneutics a central place in the practice and experience of Christian religion. This dissertation explores how these three poets engage with the complex yet crucial question of how to understand one’s relationship to God, by capitalizing on the form, language, and above all figuration provided by both lyric and narrative poetry. Writing in the 1530s and 1540s during the period of Italian Reform, Colonna’s lyric collection Sonetti for Michelangelo (c. early 1540s) wrestles with the theological debates that had been provoked by the Reformation and that called for reflections on the extent to which the Church, community, Scripture, and the Reformist doctrine of sola fide were central to salvation. In his post-Tridentine epic Gerusalemme liberata (1581), Tasso responds to the religious instability and censorship of the Counter-Reformation, while also exploring the related debates about poetry and the role of allegory in both Christian and literary hermeneutics. Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Samson Agonistes (1671) reflect on the hermeneutic crisis inherent in the mid-seventeenth-century devotional experience of English Protestantism.

As Colonna, Tasso, and Milton respond to their respective crises, as crises specifically of Christian hermeneutics, they use their poetic works to develop their own theories of hermeneutics in order to make sense of the theological paradoxes, whether Catholic or Protestant, that made faith so difficult; their development of these theories, I contend, is specifically through the image of the veil. In their poems, the veil is at once a textual image, an object and a metaphor, that, as it tends to recur at significant moments of interpretation within the poems, often provokes that interpretation as well. But as the authors respond in their poetry to the specific theological debates that surrounded them, the veil becomes more than just a poetic figure; it becomes a hermeneutic that points to the opposing hermeneutical approaches it symbolizes: suspicion or doubt, on the one hand, and faith or trust, on the other. As an emblem of this hermeneutical paradigm, the veil thus represents the irreducible tension between suspicion/doubt and faith. It is through this tension that each poet in his or her own way attempts to comprehend the paradox of the practice of early modern hermeneutics as one that seeks certain faith in salvation by inherently uncertain means.

By offering new perspectives into how early modern religious debates across these three texts and periods manifest at the level of form, language, and image, my dissertation also investigates the extent to which early modern poetry becomes a vehicle for theology. I argue that by responding to the religious crises of the early modern period with their own hermeneutic models of Christian interpretation, Colonna, Tasso, and Milton make hermeneutics as much a poetic question as a religious one. They show, even while their poetic works question the extent to which this very phenomenon is possible, that poetry has the capacity to lead to faith.