Moving Words: Enargeia in Early Modern Devotions: Sophie Read

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Moving Words: Enargeia in Early Modern
Devotions
Sophie Read
IT IS MID-MORNING IN A FRENCH SEASIDE HOTEL in the 1950s, and a waiter

brings a small glass of beer to a smart customer, pomaded and moustachi-
oed, who is reading some papers at a table. As he approaches, two things
happen simultaneously: the waiter notices a tall man entering the room, of
whom he obviously has cause to be wary, and starts to watch him cautious-
ly; the hotel clock begins to strike the hour. The tall man, bending forward
from the toes, tilts his wrist to check his watch: a gesture at once large and
precise. The vigilant waiter automatically mirrors this action. In a curious
sense, the waiter is at this moment both attentive and distracted; this ech-
oed movement causes him to pour the drink he is carrying neatly into the
lap of the startled customer. The tall man who is the oblivious cause of this
commotion is of course Monsieur Hulot, on his celebrated Vacances, one of
the greatest comic films ever made.1 This short scene – it lasts less than
twenty seconds – demonstrates the exaggerated logic of physical action
and reaction on which much of the film’s effect depends; as an example of
echopraxis (the clinical term for involuntary imitation of movement) it also
visibly encapsulates an intimate phenomenon of muscular sympathy that is
at the heart of this essay’s concerns. Jacques Tati exerts his disruptive influ-
ence through silent physical magnetism, in contrast to the expansive rhet-
oric characteristic of the writers to whom I will shortly turn; the gentle,
For their invaluable comments on a previous draft of this essay, I would like to offer
my warm thanks to Terence Cave, David Hillman, Joe Moshenska, and Michael
Schoenfeldt.
1
Les Vacances de Monseiur Hulot, dir. Jacques Tati (1953). Guillemette Bolens offers
a masterful account of Hulot’s disruptive physical presence in the context of kinaes-
thetic theory; see The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative
(Baltimore 2012) pp. 167–79. This moment is mentioned in passing on p. 178. I am
grateful to Ned Allen for redirecting my attention towards it.
doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfz034
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34 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
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frictionless world he inhabits, whose frequent disasters are attended, sur-
prisingly, by no lasting consequences, could not be much further from the
studies and pulpits of post-Reformation Europe. But the response Hulot’s
simple gesture elicits, exaggerated into our sight by the susceptible waiter,
helps us to understand something of the subtler play of physical and emo-
tional coercion often at work in early modern theological discourse.
It is my aim here to attempt to unite old and new descriptions of cognitive
technologies in order to suggest a way of understanding the lived experience
of devotional practice as it is expressed in early modern literary writings –
those in the private, meditative tradition, and the more obviously rhetorical
public address of the sermon, both of which aim at an immersive experience
for their readers or listeners. The crucial terms will be the ancient rhetorical
technique of enargeia (a vivid picturing) and the relative newcomer ‘kinesis’, or
motor resonance, which describes how actions seen or read about may be
echoed or mirrored in involuntary muscular response. Kinesis is linked to the
phenomenon of kinaesthesia, first conceptualised around the last part of the
nineteenth century (the term ‘kinaesthesis’, meaning the sense or perception
of bodily movement, was coined by the neurologist Henry Charlton Bastian
in 1880).2 Effective enargeia, I want to suggest, frequently expects or invokes a
form of kinesis, distinct from M. Hulot’s echopraxis by being imperceptible
to all but the sensing subject, and sometimes even to her. I will start by inves-
tigating the well-documented early modern suspicion of rhetoric and its rela-
tion to these powerful physical or sensorimotor effects. The following two
sections will then explore the importance of kinesis for a stock-in-trade of
early modern devotional writing: enargeic descriptions of the body of Christ.
This subject in particular prompts the kind of vivid physical description that
leaves the kinesic elements of enargeia most readily apparent (though this is
not to suggest that does not appear in other contexts too). I will look at prose
tracts by Cranmer, Loyola, and Puente, and sermons by Donne and
Andrewes, in order to demonstrate some of the complexities of gesture and
somatic response involved in the fraught enterprise of moving towards God.
Bastardising and Corrupting the Essence of Things: Early Modern

Rhetoric in Disrepute
The formal discipline of rhetoric is a particularly complex and ambivalent
presence in the religious discourse of the early modern period, which
includes lyric poetry and polemical writings as well as devotional aids and
sermons, my focus here. Briefly put, the notion that God’s word should
need no sophistical elaboration comes up against rhetoric’s evident utility
2
Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London
2011) p. 7.
MOVING WORDS 35
in this pastoral context: the preacher must use all means of persuasion to
bring people to God. Despite early Puritan objections, as Peter
McCullough points out, ‘[e]ven among the more godly preachers who
came to court, the flowers of rhetoric appear’.3 This is unsurprising in the
light of contemporary advice. Ludham’s 1577 translation of Hyperius’s in-
fluential treatise The Practice of Preaching is absolutely clear that the resources
of rhetoric belong to the business of effective pulpit oratory:
Whatsoever thinge is profitable either to teache perspicuousely, or

also to move & perswade withall, all that shall the Preacher purchase
to himselfe as most requisite and necessary furniture. Therefore, let
him knowe, that argumentations tripartite, quinquepartite, Enthymemata: also
Schemes and Tropes: further, the crafte of amplifying and moving of
affections, and finally whatsoever else of this order is taught of the
Rhetoritians, masters of well speakinge, doe appertayne and belonge
unto him.4
All of rhetoric’s modes and means – its cunning byways, its specialist ter-
minology, its persuasive force, its power to move – are the ‘requisite and
necessary furniture’ of the preacher: more properly his, in fact, than the
rhetorician’s, who may be ‘compelled nowe and then fowly to flatter and
fawne uppon the Judges’ rather than standing in awful judgement himself.
For this reason, ‘[t]o the Preacher oughte a greater liberty to bee gyven by
all meanes then to the Orator’.5
Despite the bullish confidence of this wholesale appropriation of the art
of rhetoric, some preachers – even, or perhaps especially, those who most
evidently master its precepts – feel qualms. In one sermon Donne, for ex-
ample, appears to speak approvingly of its capacity to ‘make absent and re-
mote things present to your understanding’: ‘he came to save by calling
us’.6 In another sermon, however, he uses the same notion to denigrate ra-
ther than elevate the arts of speech by contrasting the simplicity of Christ’s
command (‘follow me’) with the subtle blandishments of the rhetoricians:
3
Peter E. McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and
Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge 1998) p. 79.
4
Andreas Hyperius, The Practice of Preaching, Otherwise Called the Pathway to the Pulpet,
trans. John Ludham (1577) p. 37.
5
Ibid., p. 43.
6
Donne, ‘Preached upon Easter Day’, in LXXX Sermons, pp. 254–66 (p. 266); ‘A
Second Sermon Preached at Whitehall, April 2, 1621’, in XXVI Sermons (London
1661), pp. 190–204 (p. 200).
The way of Rhetorique in working upon weake men, is first to trouble
the understanding, to displace, and to discompose, and disorder the
judgement . . . and then when it is thus melted, to powre it into new
molds, when it is thus mollified, to stamp and imprint new formes,
new images, new opinions in it.7
Coining is a favourite image of Donne’s, and here the aspect he emphasises

is the violence of its reconstructive process; the discourse of sweetness and
subtlety swiftly gives way to that of open brutality: rhetoric is ‘fire’, ‘prac-
tise’, ‘battery of eloquence’, ‘verball violence’.8 Though its terms are more
military than domestic, this is not in fact so far from Hyperius: Ludham’s
choice of the word ‘furniture’ to describe the arts of rhetoric is poised nice-
ly between its senses of ‘embellishment’ and ‘munitions’.9 In considering
the question of the potentially dangerous arts of rhetoric turned to devo-
tional purposes, however, these writers come to the view, implicitly or ex-
plicitly, that the end – salvation – justifies the means.
Montaigne (writing in the 1580s, and translated into English by John
Florio in 1603) approaches it solely from a secular perspective. He calls
rhetoric ‘the imposture and amphibologie of words, captiously enterlaced
together’, ‘an high-raised, proudly-pufft, mind-moving, and heart-danting
maner of speech’.10 In his essay on the ‘vanitie of Wordes’, Montaigne
accuses rhetoricians of aiming to ‘deceive and beguile . . . our judgement;
and to bastardize and corrupt the essence of things’. He goes on to describe
rhetoric as a fraudulent art designed to impose on the ‘sicke mindes’ of an
unruly multitude; rhetorical sophistication is the mark of a broken and de-
generate civilisation, both an empty puff of sound and a sinister instrument
of manipulation and control. In attempting the coup de grâce, however,
Montaigne delivers his argument firmly up to the paradox that all writing,
and indeed all speaking, might be regarded as fundamentally, inescapably
rhetorical:
Doe but heare one pronounce Metonymia Metaphore, Allegory, Etimologie,

and other such trash-names of Grammer, would you not thinke, they
7
Donne, ‘Preached at The Hague, December 19 1619’, in LXXX Sermons, pp.
717–25 (pp. 723–24).
8
On Donne’s fondness for coining metaphors, see John Carey, ‘Donne and
Coins’, in English Renaissance Studies: Essays Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in Honour of
Her Seventieth Birthday (Oxford 1980) pp. 151–63.
9
See OED, ‘furniture’, n, senses 1b and 4b.
10
Essays written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne . . . done into English, according to
the last French edition, by Iohn Florio (London 1613) p. 66.
MOVING WORDS 37
meant some forme of a rare and strange language; They are titles and
words that concerne your chamber-maides tittle-tattle.11
This complicated response covers most of the points ordinarily made in

such arguments, arranged in the customary contradiction: rhetoric is, vari-
ously and at once, unnecessary and effeminate ostentation;12 the ordinary
language of the uneducated; and a means of altering the very fabric of per-
ceived reality, of corrupting ‘the essence of things’.
Clearly, if rhetoric did not possess this potentially dangerous power of
influence it would not be necessary to disparage it as academic bombast or
servants’ chat; nor would it be imperative to annex it to religious ends. It is
its moving or persuasive function, the ability to make someone think, or
feel, or act differently, that the preachers seek to exploit to godly ends (and
that Montaigne most distrusts). We might, if we felt it necessary, argue
against Montaigne that rhetorical utterance is capable of being differenti-
ated from natural or ‘everyday’ speech, if only by the element of deliber-
ation or artistry implied by its being composed; in either case, the question
arises of where its particular power inheres. I want to suggest that it is at
least in part stylistic: some figures, in their recognised structures, shapes, or
strategies, are repositories of meaning and affect, records of cognitive path-
ways – complex and inherited – that have the power intrusively to retrace
those pathways in the minds of their hearers or readers. Rhetorical figures
and tropes can preserve thought, in other words, not as flies in amber, or
as jack-in-the-boxes, but as genies in lamps. Raphael Lyne has convincing-
ly argued that Renaissance rhetoricians gave intimations of this insight in
the textbooks and manuals of their trade. Things, ideas, feelings are not be-
fore or behind rhetoric; they are constituted by it: ‘Rhetoric comes to look
like a map of thought, and a map of thought extracted from, and applied
to, language in a very complex form.’13 Terence Cave also argues for the
interdependence of rhetoric and cognition: ‘Catachresis and metaphor are
not rhetorical flourishes but cognitive instruments for the construction and
extension of language’, he writes; ‘figurative acrobatics’ stretch ‘the cogni-
tive boundaries of language itself’.14 In fact Montaigne himself, in another
essay, recognises this close relationship; half-rescuing rhetoric by a pretty
sleight, he writes: ‘When I behold these gallant formes of expressing, so
lively, so nimble, so deepe: I say not this is to speake wel, but to thinke
11
Ibid., pp. 165–7.
12
Effeminacy is by strong implication, and connects the over-embellished with
the unrefined (‘chamber-maides’); see the essay on Virgil: ‘The whole composition or text
is manly, they are not bebusied about Rhetorike flowers’ (ibid., p. 490).
13
Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition (Cambridge 2011) p. 93.
14
Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature (Oxford 2016) p. 105.
15
well.’ Acknowledging rhetoric’s pervasiveness, its familiarity, in no way
implies a lessening of its power. Quite the reverse: its roots in natural, habi-
tuated speech are the very source of its capacity to structure thought and
influence behaviour, and Montaigne’s paradox turns out to be no paradox
at all.
Enargeia As It Were: Feeling Visions in Private Devotion

Not all of the tropes and figures of classical rhetoric are born equal, how-
ever, and some proved more useful than others for the preachers whose ur-
gent concern was to bring their congregations to a living and present
understanding of events both distant in time and, seen dispassionately, fair-
ly improbable. Relating biblical narrative to the ‘present state of things’
(the phrase recurs frequently) is a major concern for Hyperius; he advises
preachers to describe a moment of Scripture
with such comelines and decencye of speache, and so to apply it to the

present state of thinges, and even present it (as ye would saye) to the
eyes and senses, that the hearers are compelled to judge, and not un-
willingly to confesse, that the same thing was longe agoe spoken or
writen, for their sakes, and especially of their times.16
Though he does not give it its name, Hyperius is here describing the rhet-
orical figure of enargeia (also called evidentia, illustratio, hypotyposis), or vivid de-
scription – a figure explicitly of cognitive alignment, which entails the
relation of a place or event with sufficient force and detail to call it to a
mind that has not in fact seen or experienced it.17 Quintilian’s influential
account (in which the figure is called evidentia) underlines both its affective
force and its forensic significance: it has ‘a quality which makes us seem
not so much to be talking about something as exhibiting it’, he suggests;
‘Emotions will ensue just as if we were present at the event itself’. This is
15
Montaigne, Essays, p. 490.
16
Hyperius, The Practice of Preaching, p. 140. For other references to the need to re-
late the matter of the sermon to the ‘present state of things’, see pp. 31, 74, 108, 143,
144.
17
The current account is instrumental rather than exhaustive; for useful descrip-
tions and discussions of the term, see Terence Cave, ‘“Enargeia”: Erasmus and the
Rhetoric of Presence in the Sixteenth Century’, L’Esprit Créateur, 16 (1976) pp. 5–19;
Linda Galyon, ‘Puttenham’s “Enargeia” and “Energeia”: New Twists for Old
Terms’, Philological Quarterly, 60 (1981) pp. 29–40; Jane Grogan, ‘“So liuely and so
like, that liuing sence it fayld”: Enargeia and Ekphrasis in The Faerie Queene’, Word &
Image, 25/2 (2011) pp. 166–77; Lorna Hutson, ‘Law, Probability and Character in
Shakespeare’, in Yota Batsaki, Subha Mukherji, and Jan-Melissa Schramm (eds.),
Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt (Basingstoke 2012) pp. 61–83.
MOVING WORDS 39
particularly useful for the effective advocate, whose vivid descriptions of
the crime and its aftermath will carry his case:
A speech does not adequately fulfil its purpose or attain the total dom-
ination it should have if it goes no further than the ears, and the judge
feels that he is merely being told the story of the matters he has to de-
cide, without their being brought out and displayed to his mind’s
eye.18
Enargeia thus goes beyond mere storytelling: it aims to make its auditors feel
truly present at the narrated events. The term has a complex and confused
history in the early modern period, due partly to issues of mistranslation
and misunderstanding, and partly to a common flexibility of approach:
terms of classical rhetoric are often turned to contemporary practice rather
than being held restrictively to their original definitions. Richard Sherry’s
Schemes and Tropes (1555) introduces the concept to English poetics with a
suggestive phrase (‘as it were’) that foreshadows Hyperius’s ‘(as ye would
saye)’ and will resurface in this discussion. ‘Enargia’, he writes, ‘evidence or
perspicuitie called also descripcion rethoricall, is when a thynge is so
described that it semeth to the reader or hearer that he beholdeth it as it
were in doyng.’19 It is related conceptually to ekphrasis and energeia, a term
with which is has often – for obvious reasons – been confused; for the pur-
poses of the current discussion, it is helpful to think of enargeia as a sort of a
hybrid of these two cognate figures. The first, ekphrasis, differs in that it is
the detailed description of a work of art – a painting, a tapestry, a sculpture
– or other tableau; the second, energeia, carries a sense of vigour or energy
(for Aristotle it is ‘making the lifeless living through the metaphor’20),
though it is not necessarily visually descriptive. So enargeia is rather the
forceful depiction of an animate scene, a moment of narrative imposed on
an auditor or reader: something at least notionally real (a scriptural story,
for instance), rather than imagined or artificial. Its crucial attributes are vis-
ual description – the ekphratic element – and the animation, energy, move-
ment that characterise energeia. It is not one of those neat, self-contained,
and easily recognisable figures: it makes use of all of the other resources of
rhetoric, from metaphor down, to achieve its ends.
18
Quintilian, The Orator’s Education [Institutio Oratoria], vol. i, trans. Donald A.
Russell (Cambridge, Mass. 2001) pp. 61, 375–7.
19
Richard Sherry, A treatise of schemes and tropes very profytable for the better understanding
of good authors (London 1550) sig. E1v.
20
Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, 2nd edn., trans. George A.
Kennedy (New York 2007) bk. 3, ch. 11 (1411b); p. 222.
In the context of preaching, the element of movement or kinesis is more
significant even than its pictorial vividness. Many of the recognised literary
techniques of the greatest preachers and devotional poets involve forms of
enargeia: frequently a scriptural scene will be described using this figure,
often one from the life of Christ; sometimes it will be the experiences and
inner life of the writer, in a state of confusion, despair, enacted sin. The
purpose of this enargeic display is to mirror and magnetise the experiences
of others, so that the shock of recognition – re-cognition, to crumble the
word in an obvious but still useful way – reforms the hearer’s mental land-
scape and lays out the patterns of thought necessary for penitence and sal-
vation. Much of this will seem familiar. In his seminal work The Poetry of
Meditation (1954), Louis Martz points out that the Jesuit tradition of ‘in-
tense, imaginative meditation that brings together the senses, the emotions,
and the intellectual faculties’ relies on methods that ‘are in themselves
adaptations of ancient principles of logic and rhetoric’.21 The directions for
private worship whose literary impact Martz traces, the ‘spiritual exercises’
prescribed by St Ignatius of Loyola, St François de Sales, Vincentius
Bruno, and Luis de la Puente, among others, derive their inspiration in
part from the same rhetorical techniques that inspire public preachers –
and also, of course, exert their own influence on the practice and habits of
those preachers. (This is not meant to gloss over or efface confessional dis-
tinctions, which are of course crucial; but even in their midst, there are dis-
tinct continuities of rhetorical technique.) Thus mental self-discipline can
be seen as a kind of auto-oratory or self-persuasion, and both devotional
modes – the public and the private – are heavily reliant on the affective
tropes of which enargeia is among the most powerful.
Enargeia is, indeed, enshrined in the meditative system as an important
part of the prelude to each meditation, the ‘composition of place’: a careful
mental reconstruction of the location in which the event to be contem-
plated occurred. Bruno emphasises the importance of ‘imagining our selves
to be really present at those places; which we must endeauvour to represent
so lively, as though we saw them indeed, with our corporall eyes’.22
Ignatius of Loyola, however, recommends not so much this historical pro-
jection as an attempt to bring a scriptural event into living time: he shares
Hyperius’s concern with making the past present, in both its corporal and
temporal senses. ‘But one thing is specially to be noted’, he writes:
21
Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature (New
Haven 1954) pp. 1, 38.
22
Vincentius Bruno, An abridgment of the Meditations of the life, passion, death, & resur-
rection of our Lord and Sauiour Iesus Christ, trans. R[ichard] G[ibbon] (1614) sig. C1r.
MOVING WORDS 41
that when thou art to make the Composition of place in some passage
or Mistery of Christ, either newly borne, or bound to the pillar, or
nayled to the crosse, thou must not imagine as though it happened a
far off, in Bethelem, or in Jerusalem, a thousand, and so many yeares
since, for this doth weary the imagination, and is not of so much force
to move: But rather imagine those thinges, as if they were present, and
even now did passe before thyne eyes: seeing and beholding with the
eyes of thy soule the infant Jesus weeping and crying in the cradle or
manger. And as it were heare the strokes of whips, and knocking of
the nailes, whereby thou shalt both pray with more facility, swetnes,
attention, and devotion, and be moved more & reap more aboundant
fruite and profit thereof.23
This is quite clear: imagining something long ago and far away is difficult,
and has less ‘force to move’ than transposing the event into the present. The
devout meditator must see ‘with the eyes of thy soule’, and ‘as it were heare’
the accompanying sounds: the events should be accommodated and the
senses engaged. All of this is consistent with Quintilian’s advice on the use of
enargeia, which suggests that making things seem nearer or more familiar gives
them, perhaps counter-intuitively, greater rhetorical impact: ‘All eloquence is
about the activities of life, every man applies whatever he hears to his own ex-
perience, and the mind finds it easiest to accept what it can recognize.’24
In the literary realm, the practice of presenting episodes in Christ’s life
with enargeic precision has traditionally been associated with writers with
Catholic, if not Jesuit, connections (Robert Southwell, John Donne,
Richard Crashaw); George Herbert is a significant exception. It is not hard
to see why this might be the case: a reliance on image, even verbal image,
could be felt by Protestant writers to shade too close to forbidden icono-
graphic modes of worship, and in particular the detailed enumeration of
the lacerations and indignities of Christ’s dying body might, in its recall of
the crucifix, seem transgressively ekphratic rather than usefully enargeic.
The situation is, as ever, more complicated than a division along confes-
sional boundaries would suggest, however, as a consideration of early
Protestant rhetoric makes clear. Even for his trying times, Thomas
Cranmer was a theologian of extraordinary boldness and tact, and his po-
lemical defences of reformed theology are studies in rhetorical virtuosity.
The enargeic sensory engagement is evident in his assertion, for example,
that ‘the eatyng and drinkyng of this sacramentall breade and wyne, is as it
23
Ignatius of Loyola, A manuall of devout meditations and exercises instructing how to pray
mentally, trans. H.M. (1624) pp. 128–9.
24
Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, p. 381.
were a shewyng of Christ before our eies, a smellyng of hym with our
noses, a feelyng and gropyng of hym with our hands, and an eatyng, chaw-
ing, digestyng and feedyng vpon hym to our spirituall strength and perfec-
tion’. Later in the same treatise he writes of how ‘we be taught that we
spiritually feed upon Christ, eating him and drincking him, and as it were
sucking out of his side the bloud of our redemption & foode of eternall sal-
vation, although he be in heaven at his fathers right hand’.25 Cranmer’s
characteristic ‘as it were’, a phrase that has already appeared in several
forms in this discussion of enargeia – Sherry and Loyola use it verbatim,
Hyperius has ‘as ye would saye’, Bruno ‘as though we saw them indeed’ –
seems but flimsily braced between rhetoric and reality, intellect and affect.
Joe Moshenska has brilliantly described how useful this phrase is for
Cranmer, and how slippery; it ‘allows him both to describe intense sensory
contact with Christ’, he points out, ‘and to deny, when challenged, that
any such contact literally occurs’.26 This is not so much a negotiation be-
tween literal and figurative planes as, itself, a rather sophistical refusal to
acknowledge the importance of the distinction. When pressed on his carnal
rhetoric, Cranmer simply scoffs at those unable to appreciate the subtlety
of his get-out-of-jail card: ‘For what speach were this of a thing that is in
dede, to say, as it were?’27
This attitude is so thoroughgoing that it persists even when its useful sig-
nalling phrase is absent. Comparing Cranmer’s image of Christ crucified,
offered in explanation of the mechanics of a reformed Eucharist, with a
passage from the Jesuit Luis de la Puente’s Meditations (1610), reveals how
problematic this stance is. First, Puente:
Then I am to set before mine eyes Christe IESVS crucified, beholding

his Heade crownde with thornes; his Face spit upon; his Eyes
obscured; his Armes disjoincted; his Tongue distasted with gall, and
vineger; his Handes, and Feete pierced with nailes: his Backe, and
Shoulders torne with whippes; and his Side opened with a Launce:
and then pondering that hee suffereth all this for my Sinnes, I shall
drawe sundrye Affections from the inwardest parte of my Hearte,
sometimes trembling at the rigour of Gods Iustice.28
25
Thomas Cranmer, An Aunswere . . . Unto a Craftie and Sophisticall Cavillation
(London 1551) pp. 38, 401.
26
Joe Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (Oxford
2014) pp. 36–45: 41.
27
Cranmer, An Aunswere, p. 160.
28
Luis de la Puente, Meditations vppon the mysteries of our holy faith with the practise of
mental praier touching the same, trans. Richard Gibbons (London 1610) pp. 98–9; quoted
in Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, pp. 49–50.
MOVING WORDS 43
Now Cranmer:
with our fayth wee see Christ crucified with our spirituall eyes, and eat
his flesh, thrust thorow with a speare, and drinke his bloud springing
out of his side with our spirituall mouthes of our faith.29
Puente offers a thorough anatomisation, moving round the body and

noticing the separate injuries of each part: head, face, eyes, arms, and so
forth. Though he claims to be ‘beholding’ this spectacle, greater intimacy
of imagination is implied by mention of the tongue ‘distasted with gall,
and vineger’; this cannot be seen from the outside, but requires a level of
sensory projection – identification, rather than simple contemplation.
The passage is vivid and detailed, designed both to move Puente (‘I shall
drawe sundrye Affections from the inwardest parte of my Hearte’) and to
model for his readers how they might be moved. Compared with
Puente’s, Cranmer’s is a very curious form of enargeia, of ‘shewyng . . . be-
fore our eies’: one that at once invites and censures devotional visualisa-
tion and sensory immersion. ‘Spirituall’ tries to qualify these images
(another way of saying ‘as it were’), but the rhetorical distancing actually
has very little effect, here; a rhetorician of Cranmer’s gifts must know
that the words find their mark before their careful caveats are registered,
and that the effect is somatic as much as it is visual. In crucial addition to
the immediacy of we see, we eat, we drink, that is (enargeic representation is
typically in the present tense), the narrative markers encode tiny throbs
of dramatic action, shocking and cataclysmic, but infinitely iterated:
‘thrust thorow’, ‘springing out’.
This is important because, contra Quintilian’s notion that a thing might,
through verbal description, be ‘displayed to [the] mind’s eye’, the success
of such mental visualisation is in fact in question. In his recent quasi-
philosophical treatment of the subject, What We See When We Read, the
graphic artist and book designer Peter Mendelsund has this to say:
‘Specificity and context add to the meaning and perhaps to the expressive-
ness of an image, but do not seem to add to the vividness of my experience
of an image – that is, all this authorial care, the author’s observation and
transcription of the world, does not help me to see.’30 Terence Cave comes
to a similar conclusion: ‘imaginary representations lack the force and clar-
ity of actual perception’; ‘[t]he imagination isn’t a brightly-lit theatre of col-
ourful perceptions: it’s a dim, ill-focused back room’. How, then, he asks,
29
Cranmer, An Aunswere, p. 340.
30
Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read: A Phenomenology with Illustrations
(New York 2014) p. 135.
‘do imagined scenes deliver that sense of immediacy, intensity?’31 His an-
swer is kinesis, or motor resonance, the phenomenon whereby the descrip-
tion of action or physical movement evokes in a reader or listener an
embryonic mirroring response, a ‘faint but distinct echo in the reader’s
own motor response system of what it takes in sensorimotor terms to per-
form a highly specific gesture’.32 Motor resonance, which might also be fa-
miliar as the theory of mirror neurons, ‘is the process by which action
observation activates the same neural substrates as those recruited when a
perceiver performs an action by themselves’.33 Crucially, as Guillemette
Bolens notes, is is not just seeing an action that prompts this response:
hearing or reading about that action can do it too: ‘the brain also simulates
perceptual and motor actions when they are signified verbally’.34 We think,
as we read Cranmer’s sacrificial vignette, that it is the picture held and
withheld in the mind’s eye that impresses us: the spear’s grey glint, the pale
skin, the red blood. In fact, we are fooled by the primacy of visual meta-
phors for understanding (‘I see’) into missing the infinitesimal electrical
pulse which registers the scene’s true impact in the body. The motive qual-
ity of enargeia is in fact a kind of kinesic encoding. As we read, as we hear,
we suffer tiny muscular rehearsals of recoil and embrace, a synaptic stiffen-
ing that quickens us, imperceptibly, momentarily, to another life; this odd
mode of incarnation, both unimaginably sophisticated and entirely invol-
untary, feels like thinking almost as a plant thinks, towards the sun.
This physical sympathy, the contiguity between the imagined and imag-
ining bodies, is evidently related to the principle which underpins a signifi-
cant element of the meditative tradition – the devotional contemplation of
the body of Christ. The ‘slight but distinct sensation that allows you to feel
something like what it is to be that person’ identified by Cave as a promin-
ent feature of kinesis is deliberately cultivated in Jesuit meditations, even
though the body here is not so much active as passive and suffering.35
Puente’s visualisation of Christ’s physical torments provokes an explicitly
physical response; he describes himself ‘sometimes trembling at the rigour
of Gods Iustice’, where the trembling is at least in part a sympathetic
shrinking from the injuries enumerated: the distinction between bodies is
collapsed, ‘looking’ turned to ‘feeling’. But, perhaps surprisingly, there is
very little difference in the quality of kinesic response evoked by what are
31
Cave, Thinking with Literature, pp. 78, 82.
32
Ibid., p. 29.
33
Sian L. Beilock and Ian M. Lyons, ‘Expertise and the Mental Stimulation of
Action’, in Keith D. Markman et al. (eds.), Handbook of Imagination and Mental
Stimulation (New York 2009) pp. 21–34: 21.
34
Bolens, The Style of Gestures, p. 11.
35
Cave, Thinking with Literature, pp. 29, 30.
MOVING WORDS 45
in ontological (as well as confessional) terms the rather different accounts
of Puente and Cranmer; involuntary sensorimotor mirroring does not dis-
tinguish between literal and figurative prompts, so Cranmer’s caveats and
qualifications, philosophically necessary though he finds them, do nothing
to diminish the impact of his enargeia.36 Instead, the enargeia acts without
needing its author’s explicit licence, though the somatic effect is undoubt-
edly complicated by the intellectual dissonance of Cranmer’s careful
hedging.
‘Classical rhetoric’, writes Ellen Spolsky, ‘back before it was reduced to
a list of writerly possibilities or tropes, was indeed about producing motor
resonance’: as she understands it, the way oratory originally worked was to
compel consensus through ‘language instead of physical force’, but with
that language able to retain and convey some imprint of the physical force
for which it did service.37 She goes on: ‘the terms traditionally used to de-
scribe the varieties of verbal persuasion, thus, have always been indirectly
linked to the lived reality of readers’ or audience’s bodies’: to recognise the
kinesic element in enargeia, in other words, is simply to uncover the deep
structural mechanism on which the trope is founded.38 This quite radical
insight has implications for the starting premise of this essay – rhetoric as a
source of suspicion and fear, the art of subtle persuasion, against reason
and against right. The insistent sense of well-directed words as capable of
having injurious physical effects in the world (Donne’s ‘battery of elo-
quence’) takes on a new dimension if the workings of enargeia and related
figures of vivid description are understood to be physiological, however
vanishingly, as well as intellectual: here is a concrete, somatic basis for the
resentment of rhetoric’s intrusive force. Montaigne, who presents himself
as physically suggestible to an inordinate degree (‘[i]f one cough continual-
ly, he provokes my lungs and throate’39) might well be on his guard against
a heightened susceptibility to the persuasive powers of rhetorical tropes in
his diatribes against them. The idea of physical impulsion in emotional re-
sponse has been with us since the earliest times, wholly petrified at the
deepest level of our metaphorical understanding. This is what it means to
be moved, and why motion is so closely cognate with emotion.
36
See Bolens: ‘action simulations occur in the semantic retrieval of both figural
and literal meanings’ (Style of Gestures, p. 17).
37
Ellen Spolsky, ‘How Do Audiences Act?’, in Kathryn Banks and Tim Chesters
(eds.), Movement in Renaissance Literature: Exploring Kinesic Intelligence (Cham, Switzerland
2017) pp. 225–40: 225.
38
Ibid., pp. 225–6.
39
Montaigne, ‘Of the Force of Imagination’, Essays, p. 40.
Moving Hands and Touching Eyes: Kinaesthetic Rhetoric
in Donne and Andrewes
If private devotions and polemical arguments are dependent on motive
rhetoric, then so too is the period’s pre-eminent genre of public influence
and instruction, the sermon. Along with their various interpretative and di-
dactic purposes, sermons taught – as Jennifer Clement has shown us –
‘how to feel’. This lesson was learned, she argues, ‘through the emotional
rhetoric of the sermon. In effect, the audiences and readers of early mod-
ern sermons were taught a mimetic theory of emotion.’40 The task of the
preacher, then, was to use rhetoric and performance, verbal and bodily in-
telligence, to model appropriate affective response. Hyperius gives the full-
est account of how to achieve this effect, relying on Quintilian’s courtroom
insight that ‘the heart of the matter as regards arousing emotions, so far as
I can see, lies in being moved by them oneself’.41
Before all thinges it is very necessary that hee which speaketh, doe
conceyve such lyke affections in his mynde, and rayse them upp in
himselfe, yea, and (after a sorte) shews them forth to be seene unto
others, as hee coveteth to bee translated into the myndes of his audi-
tors. . . . Hee that burneth wholly in himselfe, and is altogither
inflamed to attempt some notable thinge, hee by his oration and (as it
were) by his owne example may incense others to enterprise the
lyke.42
What is described here is effectively the next stage of a private meditation:

genuine affect pictured and projected outwards, finding its mark through
the alchemy of somatic sympathy. The preacher must ‘conceyve such lyke
affections in his mynde . . . as hee coveteth to bee translated into the
myndes of his auditors’; he ‘(after a sorte) shews them forth to be seene’ –
again, a belief that enargeia (as it were) has the capacity to influence emo-
tional states in a profound and transformative way. Lancelot Andrewes,
one of the greatest preachers of his generation, explicitly recognised the
place of enargeic rhetoric in sermons; in an early Good Friday sermon
(1597) his text is an Old Testament prophecy thought to foreshadow
Christ’s torments on the cross: ‘And they shall looke upon Me, whom they have
pierced’ (Zechariah 12: 10). He identifies this time in the liturgical calendar
in particular as one appropriate for visual devotions: ‘though on other
40
Jennifer Clement, ‘The Art of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century English
Sermons’, English Studies, 98 (2017) pp. 675–88: 676.
41
Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, p. 59.
42
Hyperius, The Practice of Preaching, p. 43.
MOVING WORDS 47
dayes, we employ our eyes otherwise, this day at least, we fixe them on this
object’, that is, on Christ’s wounded side.43 Andrewes means this figura-
tively, as he goes on to explain: ‘by the office of preaching, IESVS
CHRIST is lively described in our sight, and (as the Apostle speaketh) is vis-
ibly crucified among us’.44 Such looking leads to an affective response: this
steady regard ‘ought to pierce us with love too’; ‘when fixing both the eyes of
our meditation upon Him that was pierced’, he concludes, we find ‘some mo-
tion of grace arise in our hearts’.45
To move his auditors to repentance, Andrewes places himself along-
side them. He translates scriptural narrative into familiar locations, mak-
ing events urgently present (‘this very day’ is a phrase he uses here, and it
recurs dozens of times across the XCVI Sermons);46 he continually uses
‘we’ and ‘our’ to underline the sense of companionship, of shared looking
and shared feeling. Donne does this too, but he also recognises the rhet-
orical power of ‘I’. His focus as a preacher was often on the body,
whether the body of Christ or his own (or his congregation’s) fragile flesh:
not just, as Andrewes, in the Good Friday and Easter Day sermons, but
throughout his oeuvre.47 Contemporary accounts suggest that there were
occasions when he self-consciously, theatrically, sought to convey the ser-
mon’s message through an even more intensely embodied version of
Hyperius’s affective modelling: to use his own body both as an instru-
ment of performance and as a cipher in the text. His first public sermon
after the death in 1617 of his wife Ann was reportedly one such; though
the sermon itself does not survive, Izaak Walton’s description of its deliv-
ery does:48
His first motion from his house was to preach, where his beloved wife
lay buryed (in St. Clements Church neer Temple-Barre London,) and his
text was a part of the Prophet Ieremy’s Lamentations: Lo, I am the man
that have seen affliction. And indeed his very words and looks testified
him to be truly such a man; and they with the addition of his sighs
43
Cf. Donne’s ‘Goodfriday, riding westward’.
44
XCVI. Sermons by the Right Honourable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes,
Late Lord Bishop of Winchester (London 1629) p. 334.
45
Ibid., pp. 344, 347–8.
46
Ibid., p. 334.
47
See e.g. Ramie Targoff, John Donne: Body and Soul (Chicago 2008).
48
There is an extant sermon preached by Donne on the text from Lamentations,
but it is commonly dated to 1624. See Raymond-Jean Frontain, ‘“the man which
have affliction seen”: Donne, Jeremiah and the Fashioning of Lamentation’, in
Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins (eds.), Centred on the Word: Literature,
Scripture and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way (Newark, Del. 2004) pp. 127–47: 138.
and teares did so work upon the affections of his hearers, as melted
and moulded them into a companionable sadnesse.49
What is remarkable about this, aside from its moving picture of grief, is
how very close Walton comes in describing the impact of Donne’s exem-
plary rhetoric to the terms in which the poet expresses his own doubts
about it. ‘The way of Rhetorique in working upon weake men’, we might
remember, is to ‘disorder the judgement’, ‘and then when it is thus melted,
to powre it into new molds’. Walton describes Donne here as the coiner,
melting and moulding his auditors into replicas of the grieving preacher,
and filtering the lamentations of Scripture through his own sad circum-
stance: a tangible demonstration of something rather like the psychosomat-
ic transference that motor resonance represents.
The intersections of rhetoric and embodiment in this reported event, as
well as in others of Donne’s extant sermons, are complex; the preacher, as
he performs his text, occupies a mediating role in the economy of salvation
between the body of Christ and the bodies of the congregation. In saying
‘I know nothing, if I know not Christ crucified, And I know not that, if
I know not how to apply him to my selfe’, Donne both asserts what he evi-
dently believes to be true – the urgent relevance of scriptural narrative –
and exhorts those listening to believe it too.50 ‘I’ is ‘you’; ‘my selfe’ is ‘your-
selves’. In this detail, it is a markedly different approach from Andrewes’s.
Elsewhere the importance of this layered identification is made explicit, as
Donne tells his congregation: ‘I impute nothing to another, that I confesse
not of my selfe, I call none of you to confession to me, I doe but confesse
my self to God, and you.’51 Simply exhorting his listeners is not enough,
however, and this implied equality quickly comes under pressure; as Brent
Nelson points out, the Christian preacher ‘begins with the premise of his
audience’s depravity’, and is therefore faced with the task of persuading a
weak and wayward congregation to prefer the harder path – something
that necessitates both an acknowledged superiority and a degree of power-
ful rhetoric.52 Donne’s rhetoric in his sermons is, as Andrewes’s is, fre-
quently enargeic: he builds vivid mental images around scriptural events,
often projecting himself into narratives of immersive intensity. A passage
49
Izaak Walton, The Life of Doctor John Donne (London 1658) p. 55. Elsewhere,
Walton praises Donne for ‘preaching the Word so, as shewed his own heart was poss-
est with those very thoughts, and joyes that he labored to distill into others’ (p. 38).
50
Donne, ‘Preached at S. Paul’s’, in LXXX Sermons, pp. 803–16 (p. 807).
51
Donne, ‘Preached at Lincoln’s Inn’, in Fifty Sermons, preached by that learned and rev-
erend divine, John Donne (London 1649), pp. 151–163 (p. 153).
52
Brent Nelson, Holy Ambition: Rhetoric, Courtship and Devotion in the Sermons of John
Donne (Tempe, Ariz. 2005) p. 59.
MOVING WORDS 49
on the second Hague sermon is one of the most striking examples of this
technique. Donne’s text is Matthew 4: 18–20 (‘follow me, and I will make
you fishers of men’), and it provides the occasion for reflections on the
apostolic calling and, by extension, his own function as a preacher. Donne
is comforted in his ‘Lucubrations and night-studies’ by the thought that he,
too, is a fisher of men, using the knotty net of the Gospel (‘It hath leads and
corks’) to snare a congregation for the marriage feast of heaven. Before he
reaches this conclusion, however, he meditates on other ways in which one
might follow or imitate Christ: he uses the story of Elisha’s resurrection of
the Shunammite’s child (2 Kings 4: 8–37) to imagine a confrontation with
Christ on the cross, in what is effectively a knotting together of Old and
New Testament narratives:
And as Elisha in raysing the Shunamits dead child, put his mouth upon
the childs mouth, his eyes, and his hands, upon the hands, and eyes
of the child; so when my crosses have carried mee up to my Saviours
Crosse, I put my hands into his hands, and hang upon his nailes, I
put mine eyes upon his, and wash off all my former unchast looks,
and receive a soveraigne tincture, and a lively verdure, and a new
life into my dead teares, from his teares. I put my mouth upon his
mouth, and it is I that say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
and it is I that recover againe, and say, Into thy hands, O Lord, I com-
mend my spirit.53
Cranmer was at the foot of the cross, or rather he wasn’t (‘as it were’).
Donne’s imaginative ascent brings him precisely level with the crucified
Christ, and what seems at first, for its emphasis on eyes, like a visual de-
scription – an ekphratic enargeia – becomes instead a bodily echo. Eyeball
to eyeball as he is, Donne can’t in fact see anything, but he can feel: the
nailed hands he holds, the wet of alien tears, the mouth that moves as it
moves his mouth in speech. Donne stands to Christ here as Elisha does to
the dead child (‘and he stretched himself upon the child; and the flesh of
the child waxed warm’), the preacher’s breath quickening and animating
this vision of the crucifix, and, in imaginative symbiosis, being quickened
in return. Because Donne is also here to facilitate the imaginative projec-
tions of the congregation, however – to extend an invitation to penitence
and a promise of mercy – he stands in the narrative as the auditor’s
embedded embodiment. Donne, and his attentive listener, collapse
53
John Donne, ‘Second Sermon Preached at The Hague, December 19 1619’, in
LXXX sermons preached by that learned and reverend divine, John Donne
(London 1640), pp. 726–37 (pp. 737, 736, 732).
successively into the foreshadowing Elisha and the figure of Christ; they
experience not just a proleptic tremor of described gesture but also (like
Puente) a shrinking from the affronts on the body; hands and eyes are,
after all, particularly squeamish sites, and hands, with their dense web-
bing of nerves, particularly sensitive to the echoic twitches of sensori-
motor suggestion.54
Hands are also, as John Bulwer argues in his Chirologia (1644), an im-
portant expressive tool for the preacher, used to emphasise, interpret,
and sometimes to anticipate his discourse: ‘when the fancy hath once
wrought upon the Hand’, Bulwer writes, characterising an involuntary
kinesic response, ‘our conceptions are display’d and utter’d in the very
moment of a thought’.55 Later, he describes the interdependency of voice
and gesture as ‘this solemne bond and Rhetoricall obligation between the
Hand and the mouth’.56 As it happens, the preacher Bulwer singles out as
pre-eminent in this ‘artifice of the Hand’ ‘that much lamented Dr Donne’;
he quotes Jasper Mayne’s elegy as testimony to Donne’s rhetorical
dexterity:
Yet have I seen thee in the Pulpit stand,

Where one might take notes from thy look & hand.
And from thy speaking action beare away
More sermon then some Teachers use to say.
Such was thy cariage, and thy gesture such,
As could devide the heart, and conscience touch:
Thy motion did confute, and one might see
An error vanquish’d by deliverie.57
Donne’s moving enargeic rhetoric is matched by affective gesture, as we

might imagine ‘I put my hands into his hands, and hang upon his nailes’ to
have been; the body and hands of the preacher have a literal function in the
performance of the sermon as well as an imaginative life in its text. If Donne
did indeed match his gestures to his words, then he would have performed
both the image of the cross and an attitude of prayer: Bulwer describes this
posture as one favoured by the early Christians, who ‘did extend them out
54
This is a recurrent insight in Bolens’s Style of Gestures; see particularly pp. 3–4,
27, 66–7; Evelyn Tribble also remarks on ‘the tight link between the brain and the
hand’: see ‘Kinesic Intelligence on the Early Modern Stage’, in Banks and Chesters
(eds.), Movement in Renaissance Literature, pp. 213–24: 214.
55
J[ohn] B[ulwer], Chirologia: or, The natural language of the hand, and Chironomia: or,
The art of manual rhetoric (London 1644) p. 4.
56
Bulwer, Chironomia, p. 7.
57
Ibid., p. 20. The elegy originally appears in the 1633 Songs and Sonets.
MOVING WORDS 51
here and here’ – he means their hands – ‘into the figure of Christs suffering’.
Bulwer goes on, providing by chance what might be interpreted as corrob-
orative evidence for this speculation: ‘Doctor Donne in reference to the
Symbolicall signification of the Gesture calls it Constantines Catechisticall
Coyne’.58 An evanescent moment, impossible to recover minutes, let alone
centuries, later; but something of the appeal Donne’s gestures may have
made to his congregation yet resides in the preserved words of his sermon.
This is the very essence of enargeic rhetoric: text, amplified by the muscular
contraction of symbolic gesture, registers its effect in the sensorimotor sys-
tems of its auditors, compelling them with the smallest perceptible answering
tremor to imitate – fleetingly – Christ themselves; an instant of resurrection
described and performed. This invitation comes from Donne, but it recog-
nises, too, the gestural invitation encoded in the shape of Christ’s death:
‘how would he have called us to him, had he not been crucified? for it is
only on the cross that a man dies with his arms wide open.’59
The record Bulwer leaves us of Andrewes’s life of gesture is in a different
key; he describes not the pulpit but the deathbed of ‘that learned and rev-
erend Doctor of our Church’, whose hands, remembering their preaching
habit, continued to form the shape of prayer in the last weakness of his
body, ‘when he could pray no longer voce, with his voice’.60 This more pri-
vate kind of performance reflects Andrewes’s interest in the communicative
power of gesture that is not so much theatrical as social, interpersonal.
Moshenska has demonstrated the importance to Andrewes of ideas of de-
corum in touch, and this combines memorably with his knack for evoking
the immediacy of scriptural events in the Easter Day sermon of 1621.61
Andrewes’s immediacy is different from the immediacy of the surreal,
decontextualised, altar-piece Christ with which Donne presents us, even
allowing for the fact that here is it Christ’s risen body, and not his body
crucified, that is ‘lively described in our sight’. Andrewes is as idiomatic, as
quotidian, as his subject matter will allow, planting the garden of
Gethsemene in the king’s chapel at Whitehall in an attempt to resolve one
of the most enduring emotional puzzles of the Passion narrative – why
58
Bulwer, Chirologia, p. 25 (original capitals removed).
59
Athanasius, quoted and translated by Eric Griffiths in ‘Godforsakenness’, in If
Not Critical, ed. Freya Johnston (Oxford 2018) p. 226.
60
Bulwer, Chirologia, pp. 27–8. For an interesting discussion of Andrewes’s preach-
ing gestures, and their possible relation to performing in plays at school, see John
Wesley, ‘Acting and Actio in the Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes’, Renaissance Studies,
23 (2009) pp. 678–93.
61
Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures, pp. 47–80. See pp. 73–80 for a much fuller discus-
sion of this sermon.
Christ forbids Mary’s touch after the resurrection, though he will allow
Thomas’s doubting fingers:
Now, heer, after all this love, after all these favours, even in the necke
of them (as it were) comes an unkind word or two, a Noli me tangere,
and marres all; turnes all out and in. Make the best of it, a repulse it is:
but a cold salutation for an Easter-day morning.62
The moment of this repulse is rendered with great care.
No sooner had CHRIST’S voice sounded in her eares, but she knew
streight Rabboni, it was He; and withall (as it may be gathered by this
Noli me, &c.) she did that which amounted to a Nolo te tangere: that is,
she made toward Him, stretched forth her hand, and offered, would
have touched Him, but for this Touch me not. Touch not? why not? What
harme had there been, if he had suffered her to touch Him?63
Andrewes’s characteristic proliferations lengthen the instant of unmet

reaching to make sure its strain, its shock, register on his congregation.
The series of movements he describes – a body in motion towards a
loved object, a hand, outstretched, suspended – is utterly familiar; in
contrast with Donne’s grandly symbolic cruciform arms, it is likely to
have been performed habitually and unselfconsciously by all who listen,
making possible a different kind of ‘kinaesthetic empathy’.64 It is hard
to imagine this being said without an illustrative gesture (Andrewes’s
‘Hands in the time of health’, as Bulwer reminds us, ‘having beene used
to accompany and exhibit [his] requests to heaven’), but with or without
it has a clear devotional resonance – the soul in faithful flight to an un-
known God.
The mortification of Christ’s recoil is, then, powerfully felt. But how to
account for it? Andrewes chooses again to appeal to a somatic logic for his
answer, to make his listeners understand with their bodies what their minds
may be unable to grasp:
The truth is, in the Naturall body, the eye is a most excellent part; but
withall, so tender, so delicate, it may not indure to be touched; no,
though it aile nothing, be not sore at all. In the Civill body the like is:
62
Andrewes, XCVI Sermons, p. 543.
63
Ibid., p. 544.
64
The phrase is Bolens’s. As she explains: ‘In an act of kinaesthetic empathy, I
may internally simulate what these inferred sensations possibly feel like via my own
kinaesthetic memory and knowledge’ (The Style of Gestures, p. 3).
MOVING WORDS 53
There are in it, both Persons and Matters, whose excellencie is such,
they are not familiarly to be dealt with by hand, tongue, or penne, or
any other way.
One might object that the argument is over-ingenious and over-

extended: the figurative sense of ‘touch’, meaning to discuss, seems to be
invoked here solely as a kind of safety-net, to be used in the event that
Andrewes’s other explanations malfunction (if his auditors still do not
understand Christ’s noli me tangere at the end of the sermon, that is pre-
sumably because it is itself a matter ‘not familiarly to be dealt with’).
Even so, the bodily simile at its heart is powerfully effective: whose eye
does not instinctively blink or twitch away when a touch is offered?
Donne plays on the same circumstance to rather different effect in his
sermon, imagining instead the eye that will not shrink from such contact
(‘I put mine eyes upon his’); in both cases, the effectiveness of the rhetoric
depends on the picturing of a gesture that is understood in the body, as
well as by the mind.
This argument began with the thought that the particular problem of
rhetoric for religious discourse may be related to its evident utility: the
preacher must use all means of persuasion to bring people to God, even, at
times, forceful misrepresentation. Faith can shade over into bad faith, des-
pite good intentions, and rhetorical success – as Montaigne and others rec-
ognised – depends to an extent on the auditor’s comparative lack of
interpretative sophistication; to persuade is also to outwit, to deceive.
Enargeia, central to the meditative tradition, is among the chief weapons in
the affective rhetorical armoury; devotional writers like Donne might have
intuitive recourse to its capacity for vivid evocation while remaining wary
of its ability to move in various subterranean (in fact subcutaneous) ways.
Recognising the kinesic aspect of this cognitively intrusive figure – vivid,
visual, sensory, embodied, presencing – explains in part enargeia’s powerful
sensorimotor prompt to action, the internal straining felt as a motion to-
wards God. This, in turn, suggests why such a strong resistance to vivid
words that could be felt as physically coercive developed over the period;
understanding the processes of sensorimotor response, and that it can be
prompted by action seen, described, and even figuratively evoked, explains
the vanity of the rhetoricians’ as-it-weres. For us, however, such thinking
might also restore a kind of life to devotional works that are too often read
historically, bloodlessly; the utter impossibility of reconstituting an authen-
tic experience of early modern sermon-going, or of rapt private meditation,
need not prevent an understanding of the words that survive as physically
powerful or somatically instantiated. Both private, prayerful devotions and
the public calls to action of the sermon demand and expect an unusual
level of identification and assent from their readers and listeners: in the
writings of Cranmer, of the Jesuits, even of Donne and Andrewes, the
body of Christ is offered as an exemplary, transhistorical site of compli-
cated kinaesthetic empathy. The private life of gesture that is implied by
their words is not recoverable in any simple sense, but nor is it quite lost:
the attentive reader of an early modern sermon registers its trace in the
text, and that reading becomes, in more ways, perhaps, than it was
intended to be, an infinitesimal act of rhetorical resurrection.

Moving Words: Enargeia in Early Modern Devotions: Sophie Read

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Moving Words: Enargeia in Early Modern Devotions: Sophie Read

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IT IS MID-MORNING IN A FRENCH SEASIDE HOTEL in the 1950s, and a waiter

Bastardising and Corrupting the Essence of Things: Early Modern

Whatsoever thinge is profitable either to teache perspicuousely, or

Coining is a favourite image of Donne’s, and here the aspect he emphasises

Doe but heare one pronounce Metonymia Metaphore, Allegory, Etimologie,

This complicated response covers most of the points ordinarily made in

Enargeia As It Were: Feeling Visions in Private Devotion

with such comelines and decencye of speache, and so to apply it to the

Then I am to set before mine eyes Christe IESVS crucified, beholding

Puente offers a thorough anatomisation, moving round the body and

What is described here is effectively the next stage of a private meditation:

Yet have I seen thee in the Pulpit stand,

Donne’s moving enargeic rhetoric is matched by affective gesture, as we

The moment of this repulse is rendered with great care.

Andrewes’s characteristic proliferations lengthen the instant of unmet

One might object that the argument is over-ingenious and over-

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