Voicing the Commonplace: Emblem, Interpretation, and Civil Society in William Bullein’s Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence
Jane Griffiths (St Edmund Hall, Oxford, UK)
William Bullein’s Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence (1564) is a curious medley of genres, a series of loosely connected episodes that draw on the morality play, the medical tract, the ars moriendi, the beast fable, the Utopian travelogue, the complaint, and the estates satire, among others. Together these add up to an ‘anatomy’ of society, in which the plague becomes metaphorical retribution for the division between ‘civil’ society and God. Central to Bullein’s method is his engagement with the humanist tradition of moral reading. Like writers on education such as Vives and Erasmus, Bullein requires that the reader become actively involved in the interpretation of the text, augmenting its meaning by drawing the moral relevant to his own condition.
This paper will examine the ways in which Bullein urges the importance of interpretation in re-establishing a truly ‘civil’ community. It will focus in particular on two contrasting episodes: one in which the apothecary Crispinus describes but signally fails to interpret an elaborate sculpture of past English poets, another in which Bullein’s main protagonist, Civis, interprets a series of painted emblems and mottoes for benefit of his wife. Like the comments in the sidenotes to the text, both episodes contain obvious lacunae, which stimulate the reader to his or her own interpretation of the art works described. Bullein thus seems to urge the importance of responsible, independent reading, in a way that interestingly parallels the work’s Protestant message.
Yet at the same time the work manifests deep suspicion of intellectual resourcefulness. In the final episode, Civis is smitten by Mors and renounces all worldly vanities, including those of the intellect. This suggests that even the best human efforts at understanding are ultimately inadequate, and that ‘civility’ is to be defined as submission to the will of God. Shifting from a search for remedies for the plague and the ills of society to resignation in the face of death, the text surrenders the very strategies on which it depends. To consider Bullein’s Dialogue as part of a humanist tradition of reading thus illuminates not only the work itself but also a tension inherent in Protestant thought of the period.