The text of casuistry in the Renaissance

This dissertation explores the impact of casuistry--the science of resolving cases of conscience--on the political and literary discourse and visual art of Elizabethan culture, using documents relating to the trial and execution of Mary Queen of Scots; contemporary accounts of the papist subculture and of the Tudor government's spy network; the "Siena Sieve" portrait of Queen Elizabeth I; and book 5 of The Faerie Queene. These documents, informed by the casuistical doctrines of equivocation and mental reservation, yield fresh insights into the politics of ambiguity and misreading in the Elizabethan period. The narrative procedures and interpretive cues in these texts enact the social and cultural practices that gave rise to the rhetoric of inviolability, which was associated with the voice of conscience and appropriated by monarch and dissident population alike. That rhetoric, I argue, depended on a practice, variously exploited in the documents, of politic self-censorship: the showing forth and suppressing of evidence of the contingent nature of the norms that the documents ostensibly invoke as immutable, inviolable structures.;Casuistry itself, I argue, promoted this ambiguous practice, in that it constituted a discourse through which the word "conscience"--a crucial word in each of the documents I examine--emerged as an equivocal cipher in the Celations of power between voices of ecclesiastical and political authority and voices of dissent. By analyzing late-medieval casuistical theory and its revisionist developments in post-Reformation moral theology in the context of their application in sixteenth-century England, I show the equivocal nature of conscience to be the effect of its inherent dialogic activity, through which it both embodied the culture's received norms and anatomized the social and political negotiations that produced and maintained the objective, inviolable aspect of those norms. Through this activity, the discourse of conscience, I argue, became the vehicle through which texts of various genres--ranging from Elizabeth's parliamentary speeches on the subject of Mary Queen of Scots to Spenser's epic treatment of justice and equity--exhibit a "novelistic" method, in Bakhtin's sense of the word, of analyzing crises and anomalous experiences. The narrative procedures I analyze in each document enact the signal characteristic of novelistic discourse: an "eternal rethinking and re-evaluating of a culture's organizing structures and privileged idioms." These documents point up the central role of casuistry, as a novelizing discursive structure, in the diffusion of a cultural hermeneutics that reflected the unstable relations in Elizabeth's commonwealth between competing authoritative discourses, their textual representations, and complicitous readers.