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Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tradition 1st Edition
Elizabeth Vander Lei Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Elizabeth Vander Lei; Thomas Amorose; Beth Daniell; Anne
Ruggles Gere
ISBN(s): 9780822979593, 0822979594
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 1.13 MB
Year: 2014
Language: english
Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tr adition
Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Liter acy, and Culture
—

David Bartholomae and Jean Ferguson Carr, Editors

Renovating
Rhetoric in
Christian
Tr adition

Edited by
Elizabeth Vander Lei,
Thom as Amorose,
Beth Daniell,
and Anne Ruggles Gere

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2014, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available at the Library of Congress.

 Contents
—

ack nowledgments
vii

introduction
Elizabeth Vander Lei
ix

The Rise of Christian Sects

1. constructing devout feminists : a mor mon case

Anne Ruggles Gere
3

2. a rhetoric of opposition :
the seventh-day adventist church and the sabbath tr adition
Lizabeth A. Rand
17

The Rise of Fem ale Rhetors

3. preaching from the pulpit steps :

m ary bosanquet fletcher and women’s preaching in early methodism
Vicki Tolar Burton
31

4. “ with the tongue of [wo ] men and angels”:

apostolic rhetorical pr actices a mong religious women
Aesha Adams-Roberts, Rosalyn Collings Eves, and Liz Rohan
45

5. rhetorical str ategies in protestant women’s missions :

appropriating and subverting gender ideals
Karen K. Seat
59
 The Rise of Academic Concern about
American Christian Fundamentalism

6. “attentive, intelligent, reasonable , and responsible”:

teaching composition with ber nard lonergan
Priscilla Perkins
73

7. “ain’t we got fun?”: teaching writing in a violent world

Elizabeth Vander Lei
89

8. a question of truth :
reading the bible , rhetoric , and christian tr adition
Beth Daniell
105

Rhetoric in Christian Tr adition

9. the jewish context of paul’s rhetoric

Bruce Herzberg
119

10. resistance to rhetoric in christian tr adition

Thomas Amorose
135

notes
151

bibliogr aphy
181

contributors
199

index
203

vi ■ Contents
 Acknowledgments
—

This book finds its genesis in the scholarly curiosity of five people who, in
2001, applied for a modest Initiative Grant from the Council of Christian Col-
leges and Universities: Tom Amorose, Beth Daniell, Anne Gere, David Jolliffe,
and Elizabeth Vander Lei. When we were selecting readings to discuss and
traveling to our first gathering, none of us could have imagined how rich our
conversations would be and how deep our friendships would grow. At that first
meeting, we talked at length about the scope and, more important, the attitude
of our work. To reflect that scope and attitude, we chose the name Symposium
for Rhetoric and Christian Tradition—a name that designates the focus of
our curiosity and our intent to honor the many historical strands of Christian
thought and practice. After the initial three-year grant period, David Jolliffe
left the Symposium so that he could focus his attention on his work as Brown
Chair for Literacy at the University of Arkansas. Nonetheless, with indefat-
igable good cheer, David continues to encourage the work of the Symposium.
His influence on the scope and attitude of our work cannot be overstated. We
are glad for his friendship and support.
After that initial meeting, the Symposium invited other curious scholars to
join the conversation. In 2003, Shirley Wilson Logan granted the Symposium
status as a Special Interest Group at the Conference on College Composition
and Communication; this SIG has been meeting annually ever since, provid-
ing CCCC’s attendees the opportunity to meet others with a similar scholarly
interest and to broaden their awareness of published scholarship and emerg-
ing research questions. In 2006, for example, members of the SIG—chaired
by Kristine Johnson, Priscilla Perkins, Suzanne Rumsey, Shari Stenberg, and
Joonna Trapp—compiled bibliographies of scholarship related to rhetoric and
Christian tradition. Over the years others scholars (like Lillian Bridwell Bowles,
Keith Miller, Vicki Tolar Burton, and Rebecca Nowacek) have presented sum-
maries of their work at SIG meetings. In 2005 the Symposium hosted a con-
ference at DePaul University that attracted more than one hundred attendees
from across the nation for two days of conversation in which we considered

vii
further the intersections of rhetoric and Christian tradition. Reverend Dr. John
Buchannan, editor of Christian Century, and Anne Gere provided plenary lec-
tures. We are grateful to David Jolliffe, again, for his dedicated attention to
the local arrangements. We thank Father Dennis Holtschneider, president of
DePaul University, for welcoming the Symposium to his campus, and Bonnie
Perry, then rector at All Saints Episcopal Church, for her contributions to the
conference. And we thank, particularly, all the conference attendees for their
willingness to risk time and travel funds on an untested venture, for their open-
ness to varied understandings of both “rhetoric” and “Christian tradition,” and
for all that they have contributed to the ongoing conversation about rhetoric
and Christian tradition.
We are grateful, too, to the authors of chapters in this collection, for the
important questions about rhetoric and Christian tradition that they take up
and for their perseverance in seeking answers for those questions. We appreci-
ate the work of Josh Shanholtzer at the University of Pittsburgh Press and the
anonymous reviewers at the University of Pittsburgh Press for their encour-
agement and their helpful recommendations for the book as a whole and for
individual chapters.
This project was supported by an initial grant from the Council of Chris-
tian Colleges and Universities. Elizabeth Vander Lei received sabbatical sup-
port from Calvin College to chair the Inquiries into Rhetoric and Christian
Tradition conference and additional sabbatical support to prepare the book
manuscript for publication. Dean Ward, Jim Vanden Bosch, Bill Vande Kopple,
and Becky Moon at Calvin College provided support during the development
of the manuscript. Beth Daniell received a semester free from teaching from
her chair, Bill Rice, and her dean, Robin Dorff, in order to work with chapter
authors.
Our continuing explorations of rhetoric and Christian tradition are enriched
daily by the people in our lives. Our students teach us to wonder anew; our
families support us as we pursue those wonderments. Tom Amorose is grateful
for Victoria’s patience with his absences, both mental and physical, related to
the development of this book. Beth Daniell thanks Bonnie and Lee, sisters in
fact and in spirit, who share the Adventure. Anne Gere’s gratitude for an on-
going discussion of homiletics with Budge is matched only by her appreciation
for the ways that her three children continue to challenge her rhetorically. And
Elizabeth Vander Lei thanks Andrew, Bryant, Maria, and Josie for bringing the
circus every day; she thanks Paul for running the show.

viii ■ Ack nowledgments

 Introduction
—

Elizabeth Vander Lei

This book grows out of and contributes to a persistent scholarly curiosity

about the relationship of rhetoric and religion, a curiosity that dapples the his-
tory of rhetoric from Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine to the work of con-
temporary scholars, a curiosity that persists in part, I believe, because scholars
have found that examining this relationship produces useful insights about
complex rhetorical acts like argumentation. Renovating Rhetoric in Christian
Tradition focuses attention on rhetors who press into service an array of rhetor-
ical strategies—some drawn from Christian tradition and some contributing
to Christian tradition—to achieve their rhetorical ends. And it gives us more
to be curious about: this collection brings together a range of arguments made
during times and places of significant social rupture associated with Christian
tradition—from the formation of Christianity (Bruce Herzberg) to contem-
porary questions about religious ways of being (Priscilla Perkins), from colo-
nial Africa (Aesha Adams-Roberts, Rosalyn Collings Eves, and Liz Rohan) to
present-day American classrooms (Beth Daniell).
These chapters demonstrate that as rhetors argue, they press into service a
variety of strategies, including beliefs and practices that are cultural as well as
religious, subtle, multiple, interdependent, and historically situated. Chapters
in the first three parts of this collection attend to three particular areas of social
rupture: the rise of Christian sects, the rise of female rhetors, and the rise of
academic concern about American Christian fundamentalism. In each of these
parts, readers meet rhetors who have taken the opportunity to renovate rhe-
torical resources associated with Christian tradition and, through their use of
those resources, reshaped their discourse communities. Chapters in the fourth
part, which centers upon rhetoric in Christian tradition, line out the complexi-
ties encountered by such rhetors (and those who study them) as they create and
resolve moments of social upheaval in Christian tradition.
In the first part, “The Rise of Christian Sects,” contributors Anne Ruggles
Gere and Lizabeth A. Rand consider how rhetors from “outsider” groups have
created arguments with and against Christian tradition to assert the identity of

ix
their sect. In this piece, Gere and Rand, like other chapter authors, contribute
to a body of scholarship that explores how rhetors have made use of the rhe-
torical resources available in Christian tradition and how these rhetors some-
times mix those resources with other resources to create hybrid discourses.
The rhetorician Patricia Bizzell provides an example of this kind of blending
in her analysis of the 1263 Barcelona Disputation, a staged theological debate
between the Jewish scholar known as Nahmanides and the Dominican friar
Paul Christian.1
As a Jew living under the rule of a Christian king, Nahmanides represented
religious believers who troubled a culturally promulgated argument for the ra-
tionality of the Christian faith because “the Bible was the central holy text for
[Jews] but they did not find the same meanings in it that the Christians did.”2
In this contest Nahmanides found himself in a difficult situation: if he won, he
risked “offending the high secular and religious authorities in attendance and
bringing down more persecution of his fellow Jews.”3 And if he lost, “he risked
seriously demoralizing a population who was already under severe psycholog-
ical and physical assault from the majority culture.”4 Bizzell emphasizes that in
this disputation, both Nahmanides and Friar Christian (also a Jew but one who
had converted) made extensive use of their knowledge of Jewish and Chris-
tian warrants, evidence, and argumentative strategies.5 Bizzell argues that in
rhetorical moments like this, many features of a rhetorical situation—religion
and culture, language and argumentation, belief and rationality—intertwine to
create a Gordian knot of meaning. Such mingling of features is possible, Bizzell
concludes, because “as is often the case when we analyze mixed discourses, we
discover that the discourses being mixed were not so separate to begin with.”6
As a result of its long history and global distribution, Christian tradition has
been shaped by innumerable mixed discourses like these.
In her chapter “Constructing Devout Feminists: A Mormon Case,” Gere
studies the rhetorical influence of Mormon women on the arguments for Utah
statehood and for the acceptance of Mormonism as an expression of Chris-
tianity. She rehearses the terrible social stigma that Mormons, particularly
women, endured as a result of the Mormon religious practice of polygamy. She
describes how, in the face of this prejudice, Mormon women countered prev-
alent attitudes toward Mormons by arguing in support of women’s suffrage
and by getting involved in the women’s club movement, even as these women
maintained a distinctive Mormon religious identity. In this way they were able
to demonstrate their affinity with other American women and their loyalty to
American values. More than that, they renovated the concept of feminism to
include women like them—deeply religious and passionately concerned about
the status of women.
In “A Rhetoric of Opposition: The Seventh-day Adventist Church and the

x ■ Elizabeth Vander Lei

Sabbath Tradition,” Rand considers the oppositional rhetoric of Seventh-day
Adventism, a strand of Christianity that defines itself largely through its op-
position to the Sunday-worship practices of mainstream Christianity and its
critique of the collusion of government and religion, particularly legislation
that designates Sunday as a special day for rest, leisure, and worship. Rand
notes that as a consequence of their strident opposition to the cooperation of
government and religion, Seventh-day Adventists have also critiqued populist
ideas of American exceptionalism and the American dream, further isolating
themselves from mainstream American culture. This oppositional stance,
Rand argues, fulfills an important rhetorical function, what the scholar John
Shilb has called a “rhetoric of refusal,” and actually demonstrates deep concern
for the well-being of their fellow citizens.
The second part, “The Rise of Female Rhetors,” offers three chapters that
challenge the assumption that religious communities protect orthodox belief
and practices at all costs—an assumption rooted in an erroneous idea that for
religions (though Christianity and American Christian fundamentalism are
pointed to in particular) “‘Truth’ is static, constant, and universal.”7 Schol-
ars have portrayed orthodoxy as a restricting force on rhetors in religious
discourse communities who may be fearful that they will be shut out of the
community.8 For example, in her description of the limits of rhetoric to per-
suade “apocalyptist” Christian fundamentalists, Sharon Crowley posits that
“people who are invested in densely articulated belief systems” are unlikely
to respond to rhetorical argumentation—to change their minds—because the
cost of changing their belief system is too great, “because it is all they know,
or because their friends, family, and important authority figures are similarly
invested, or because their identity is in some respects constructed by the beliefs
inherent in the system. Rejection of such a belief system ordinarily requires
rejection of community and reconstruction of one’s identity as well.”9 But are
religious discourse communities so rigidly bounded? Are they as static as some
have imagined them to be?
While not denying the pressures exerted by all “densely articulated belief
systems,” be they religious, cultural, or ideological, chapters in Renovating
Rhetoric in Christian Tradition draw attention to rhetors in Christian discourse
communities arguing more freely than some might expect, given their assump-
tions about the pressures of orthodoxy on religious rhetors. The rhetors show-
cased in this collection sometimes respect and sometimes challenge orthodox
practices and beliefs of their discourse communities. In so doing, they alter
those practices and beliefs to serve their arguments and, in the process, they
renovate their religious community. Chapters in this edited volume contribute
to a body of scholarship that showcases a historical line of rhetors who experi-
ence religious belief as a dynamic process of meaning-making—a process that

Introduction ■ xi
they experience, in part, by making arguments. An example of this kind of
scholarship is Lisa Shaver’s Beyond the Pulpit: Women’s Rhetorical Roles in the
Antebellum Religious Press. Shaver documents “women’s rich, expansive rhe-
torical legacy”—in particular, the writing that antebellum Methodist women
who published “brief everyday descriptions of women’s activities” in widely
distributed periodicals of the Methodist Church.10 By studying these publica-
tions, Shaver argues, scholars come to understand “how the church provided
sites for women’s rhetorical development.”11 Shaver documents, for example,
women drawing “rhetorical proofs from their own scriptural interpretations,”
asserting logical conclusions based on Methodist theology, and relying on
traditional interpretations to “endorse their public activism.”12 In this process,
women reshaped both their religious faith and their religious community.13
Shaver notes that despite the rhetorical resourcefulness displayed by these
humble religious women, they have been overlooked by scholars who “often
steer clear of religious institutions.”14
Like Shaver’s research, chapters in Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tradi-
tion complicate the idea that to argue successfully in a given discourse com-
munity, a rhetor—even one with relatively limited social or political power—is
not obligated to adopt unconditionally a community’s ways of thinking, be-
lieving, and doing in order to gain rhetorical agency within that community.
Rather, rhetors can gain rhetorical agency by refurbishing a community’s ways
of thinking, believing, and doing to suit their rhetorical goals. Three chapters
focus on women rhetors in the Protestant tradition of Christianity who altered
community-imposed limitations on their rights and opportunities by using
the very words, ideas, and rhetorical strategies that had been used to suppress
them. These chapters focus particularly on how women rhetors used widely
held assumptions about the value of Christian devotion to overcome opposi-
tion to their religious, social, and political activism.
In “Preaching from the Pulpit Steps: Mary Bosanquet Fletcher and Women’s
Preaching in Early Methodism,” Vicki Tolar Burton directs readers’ attention
to a historical and cultural moment during the rise of Protestant sects when a
woman’s right to speak was under debate. In particular, Burton details Mary
Bosanquet Fletcher’s argument for Methodist women’s right to preach, argu-
ments that rely on an ethos that blends female modesty and sharp (masculine)
intellect. Throughout her adult life, Bosanquet put her arguments into action
by creating hybrid sacred spaces through her judicious choice of where and
when to preach. Furthermore, while Bosanquet willingly preached to those
who sought her out, she also pursued approval for her preaching from church
authorities, notably John Wesley, who responded favorably to her reasoning.
In “‘With the Tongues of [Wo]men and Angels’: Apostolic Rhetorical Prac-
tices among Religious Women,” Aesha Adams-Roberts, Rosalyn Collings Eves,

xii ■ Elizabeth Vander Lei

and Liz Rohan describe how four women from different times and places fash-
ioned an apostolic ethos as an alternative to the prophetic ethos available only
to men in their culture. Drawing authority from the rhetor’s humility and her
conversion story, an apostolic ethos enables disenfranchised rhetors like these
women to be effective preachers and teachers within their communities. Trac-
ing the various experiences of four women in three diverse historical, cultural,
and religious settings, these authors demonstrate that this ethos has been a reg-
ular feature of arguments made by Protestant women. This distinctive ethos is
underrepresented in scholarship on rhetoric and religion, scholarship that em-
phasizes instead a prophetic ethos used by socially prominent male speakers.
Karen K. Seat focuses on the rhetoric of American women of the same time
period who argued to establish the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the
Methodist Episcopal Church in her chapter entitled “Rhetorical Strategies in
Protestant Women’s Missions: Appropriating and Subverting Gender Ideals.”
Methodist women established this society by altering conservative ideologies
of gender—in particular, sexist assumptions about the intellectual capacity
of women and the kind of work that was appropriate for them. Because these
revised ideologies retained enough of the original thinking to seem familiar,
they appeared rational and nonthreatening to initially reluctant male religious
leaders. Able to demonstrate success as both social organizers and foreign
missionaries, these women shifted Protestant ideas about proper social order
and contributed to the liberalizing of mainline American Protestant theology.
The women represented in these chapters, as well as other rhetors represented
throughout this volume, demonstrate that while discourse communities may
provide rhetors with rhetorical identities, strategies, and theoretical frame-
works, they are not necessarily constrained by those resources; rather, rhetors
can renovate those resources, sometimes in radical ways, refining and adapting
the resources to match their rhetorical needs.
As rhetors renovate Christian tradition, they seem to act in some ways that
seem similar to those of the student “agents of integration” described by the
scholar Rebecca Nowacek in her book of that title. Regarding how people make
use of their knowledge and skill to accomplish rhetorical purposes, Nowacek
proposes that “as individuals move from one context to the next, they receive
cues, both explicit and implicit, that suggest knowledge associated with a prior
context may prove useful in the new context.”15 As rhetors in Christian tradi-
tion take up rhetorical resources and fit them to argumentative need, rhetors
inevitably alter both the resources and themselves.16 For example, when Mar-
tin Luther King Jr. concludes “I Have a Dream” speech with the words of “My
Country Tis of Thee,” he takes up the song that Marian Anderson sang on the
same steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 and fits those lyrics and their rich
history to the occasion of the March on Washington.17 When King follows

Introduction ■ xiii
those words with the “Let Freedom Ring” anaphora, he takes up words that the
African American preacher and civil rights activist Archibald Carey spoke to
the 1952 Republican Convention, and he refurbishes them by heightening their
musicality and matching them to his own speech cadences.18 When King con-
cludes the anaphora by adding “Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill
of Mississippi,” he connects Carey’s words to contemporary civil rights battles.
Immediately following this anaphora, King concludes by imagining heaven as
a multiracial choir holding hands and singing a Negro spiritual. This image
invokes a Christian theology that was shaped by King’s arguments for an ex-
perience with nonviolent civic protest. What is true of King and his argument
for racial justice is also true of the rhetors and the arguments showcased in this
edited volume: as they remake rhetorical resources, they remake themselves.
The experiences of rhetors remaking themselves through argumentation
supports Nowacek’s more fully embodied model of transfer that “puts the in-
dividual as meaning maker at the center of conceptions of transfer and inte-
gration” and draws us into the topic of the third part of this book, “The Rise
of Concern about American Christian Fundamentalism,” a part that features
three chapters exploring how teachers of rhetoric and composition might cre-
ate an environment that would encourage students to become “agents of inte-
gration.”19 Assumptions about transfer permeate the composition scholarship
about religious students—a body of scholarship that has focused particularly
on students who have allegiances to Christian fundamentalism. Early stud-
ies presumed negative transfer, specifically that students were inappropriately
transferring genre knowledge from their religious experiences, such as wit-
nessing talk, to their academic writing.20 Later studies suggest the possibility of
positive transfer, arguing that students can and should draw on their prior rhe-
torical experiences in religious communities to solve the rhetorical problems
that they encounter in the composition classroom. In this model of transfer,
students’ religious faith serves as rhetorical resource that they can draw upon
when writing.21 Some research on transfer, however, raises questions about the
ease of transferring genres, rhetorical strategies, or even knowledge from a re-
ligious community to a composition classroom.22 Indeed, Rebecca Nowacek’s
study highlights the varied and subtle factors—religious identity being one—
that influence a student’s ability to “see” and “sell” connections between even
seemingly similar academic contexts to their professor readers.23 Nowacek
describes a student “Betty” as caught in a double-bind, a situation in which
“individuals experience contradictions within or between activity systems but
cannot articulate any meta-awareness of those contractions.”24 Unwilling to
compromise her identity as a Quaker, Betty altered the assignment, writing in
a genre other than one the professor describes on the assignment—a decision
that carried no small amount of risk. While Betty’s instructor rewarded her

xiv ■ Elizabeth Vander Lei

innovation with an acceptable grade, we are left to consider how easily it might
have been otherwise.
Three chapters in this collection explore resources that instructors of rhet-
oric and composition might draw on when helping students make sense of the
relationship of their religious identity and their academic work. In “‘Attentive,
Intelligent, Reasonable, and Responsible’: Teaching Composition with Bernard
Lonergan,” Priscilla Perkins looks to the work of Lonergan, a Canadian Jesuit
philosopher, for an approach to ethos that encourages students to take the time
to internalize their argument before they attempt to persuade others. Further-
more, Perkins argues, when students attend to what they are learning and how
it affects them, they also learn to attend to the ways their arguments might af-
fect their readers. Perkins describes the difficulties that Tina, a Christian evan-
gelical student, encountered as she struggled against the idea that she might
have something to learn from course readings or her classmates.
In my chapter, “‘Ain’t We Got Fun?’: Teaching Writing in a Violent World,”
I rely on the work of two contemporary Protestant theologians, Stanley
Hauerwas and Miraslov Volf, to suggest strategies that teachers and students
might use when they encounter ideas that they find odd or offensive. I look to
Hauerwas’s narrative theology for the idea that when we recognize that our
stories are nested in the stories of our communities and when we think of
our voice as speaking for, through, and against that community, we find the
courage to challenge the power of seemingly univocal stories. I look to Volf’s
argument against the idea of religion as a private matter to find reasons to enact
intellectual hospitality that invites the other in so that we can find a way to talk
together and to learn to trust one another. In “A Question of Truth: Reading
the Bible, Rhetoric, and Christian Tradition,” Beth Daniell considers student
questions that might indicate that students are transferring ideas and experi-
ences from fundamentalist Christian communities into the college classroom.
Noting that a wide range of students ask the kinds of questions commonly
associated with Christian fundamentalist students, Daniell suggests that the
study of rhetorical theory draws all students into an exploration of the relation-
ship between language and truth. Daniell lines out strategies that teachers can
use when addressing questions that arise during that exploration, strategies
that respect the theological and theoretical allegiances of both students and
instructors. Drawing on the work of rhetoricians, Christian theologians, and
biblical scholars, Daniell considers the rhetorical nature of not only the act of
reading but also of Christian tradition itself.
In the final part, “Rhetoric in Christian Tradition,” authors Bruce Herzberg
and Tom Amorose contemplate the troubled relationship of rhetoric and Chris-
tian tradition, tracing the complexities of interpretation and the interplay of
religious and rhetorical traditions. In “The Jewish Context of Paul’s rhetoric,”

Introduction ■ xv
Herzberg demonstrates the Apostle Paul’s use of Jewish forms of argumenta-
tion, uses that are consonant with the rabbinic tradition that Paul had been
trained in. Herzberg lines out scholarship on Paul’s rhetoric, scholarship that
signals clear allegiance to Christian tradition, that ignores or dismisses the idea
that Jewish argumentative traditions could inform our understanding of Paul’s
argumentative practices. Herzberg clears the way not only for fresh scholarly
interpretation of Paul’s arguments but also for new consideration of the ways
that rhetors who may no longer feel strong allegiance to a particular religious
tradition refurbish elements of that tradition to make effective arguments.
Amorose concludes the collection with his chapter “Resistance to Rhetoric
in Christian Tradition,” in which he provides a clear-eyed review of the chal-
lenges faced by scholars who accept Stanley Fish’s coronation of religion as the
successor of “high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the
center of intellectual energy in the academy.”25 Amorose develops a convincing
case for the argument that Christian tradition has resisted renovating rhetor-
ical practices and consequently missed opportunities to make arguments that
can renovate the human heart. Throughout his chapter, Amorose provides an
invaluable roadmap for future scholars, pointing out difficulties inherent in
any approach that proposes broad and easy intersections of rhetoric and Chris-
tianity (and rhetoric and religion generally) and directing scholars toward
more productive questions that account for the social, historical, and cultural
landscape of arguments.
So although the chapters in Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tradition pro-
voke as many questions (or more) than they can provide answers for, we hope
that they fire the curiosity of our readers, compelling them to ask and seek
answers for their own questions about rhetoric and Christian tradition.

xvi ■ Elizabeth Vander Lei

Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tr adition
The Rise of Christian Sects
—
 1
—

Constructing Devout Feminists

a mor mon case

Anne Ruggles Gere

The followers who accompanied Brigham Young when he arrived in the

Great Salt Lake valley on July 24, 1847, and declared “this is the place,” were the
first Mormon pioneers to envision Utah as a location where they could practice
their religion with minimal interference. Adherents to this religion, which took
shape as Joseph Smith published The Book of Mormon in 1830, had moved from
Palmyra, New York, to Kirtland, Ohio, to Nauvoo, Illinois, to avoid violence
and discrimination, but the 1844 murder of Joseph Smith in Carthage, Illinois,
and the subsequent harassment of his followers convinced them to leave Illinois
for a better land. Young and his followers moved west to avoid further persecu-
tion for the religious differences that raised a mixture of anxiety and hostility
in the dominant American culture.
Brigham Young’s party included 143 men, 3 women, and 2 children. This
gender ratio shifted as subsequent groups arrived, but because of constraints
in Mormon doctrine, women remained relatively absent in church governance
and leadership. Although women did not take leadership roles in the Church
of the Latter Day Saints, as the Mormon church is formally called, women did
occupy visible positions in secular society, positions aimed at ameliorating the

3
negative responses generated by religious differences. This chapter uses the
term “feminist” to describe the devout Mormon women who helped to trans-
form the State of Deseret, as Utah was originally called, from a territory, subject
to frequent federal incursions, into a state that could govern itself and enjoy
the increased autonomy that came with statehood, including greater freedom
from religious persecution. These Mormon women represent an unusual type
of feminism because they both resisted and accepted gendered roles. In the
secular context they took up positions and activities that led them to demand
rights for women and to take up roles in public life. At the same time, however,
these women did not challenge the church’s patriarchal power structure and,
in fact, they remained deeply committed to its traditions and beliefs. This mix-
ture of enacting and eschewing feminist principles positions Mormon women
between 1870 and 1896 as pioneers of a special kind because they entered new
gendered territory just as Mormons of both genders entered the territory be-
yond the Wasatch Mountains.
Mormon women occupied a stigmatized position during the latter part of
the nineteenth century because of their religious beliefs. For non-Mormons and
particularly for white Protestant women, the bodies and sexuality of Mormon
women constituted a site of contest because the Mormon doctrine of plural
marriage or polygamy—a signifier of religious devotion among Mormons—
took on political significance for non-Mormons. White Protestant women, in
particular, saw polygamy as a threat to themselves and the gendered family
structure they constituted and were constituted by. Increasingly uneasy about
the legal status of women within marriage, these women played out their own
anxieties with vicious attacks on Mormon women. As Susa Gates, an active
Mormon feminist put it, Mormon women were “even more unpopular in the
outside world than the Mormon man. . . . They were actually thought of as de-
based slaves, ignorant beyond description, and utterly immoral and unchaste.”1
Given such views of Mormon women, it is remarkable that they made con-
certed efforts to interact with non-Mormon women.
Although women were most concerned about women’s legal status in mar-
riage, many Gentiles, or non-Mormons, showed an interest in maintaining
the integrity of the gendered family. American national identity narratives de-
pended upon the carefully delineated gender roles of the traditional American
family, with the domestic female figure nurturing and influencing male family
members so that these males could effect changes in the larger social world.
As the Americanist Priscilla Wald has observed, reinforcement of these narra-
tives “used the traditional American family as both metaphor and medium.”2
Fears of “race suicide”—the concern that the combination of immigration and
a lower birth rate among resident European Americans would cause the “pure
English American” to disappear or at least cease to control the means of cul-

4 ■ A nne R uggles Gere

tural production—added significance to the woman’s role in maintaining the
traditional gendered family. These fears increased hostility toward the aber-
ration of polygamy. The revulsion for polygamy provided a convenient foil for
deflecting, as the historian Sarah Barringer Gordon has observed, problems
within monogamous marriages because antipolygamists did “not have to ex-
amine their own behavior in the course of enacting legislation.”3 The polyga-
mous family, with its reconfigured gender roles and complex questions about
sexuality, provided a convenient site onto which anxieties about monogamous
marriage could be projected.
Like Mormon polygamy, slavery represented another source of anxiety for
many nineteenth-century Americans, and for white women the figure of the
female slave raised special concern. Slavery reverberated with Mormon polyg-
amy in the minds of many. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was
published in the same year (1852) that Mormons first made their practice of
polygamy public. As literary scholar Nancy Bentley has explained, both slavery
and Mormonism posed problems for the democratic principle of consent—
proponents assumed that women in polygamous marriages could not have
consented (any more than African Americans) to their status.4 As the dark
double of monogamy, polygamy aroused considerable anxiety about the role
of consent in marriage. Before and during the Civil War, anti-Mormon and
antislavery movements frequently merged; indeed, the Republican platform of
1856 included a pledge to rid the country of both slavery and polygamy. One
manifestation of the anxiety about Mormons appeared in the unwillingness of
the U.S. government to accept Utah as a state. The first petition for Utah state-
hood was made in 1849, and its rejection was followed by unsuccessful petitions
in 1856, 1862, 1867, 1872, and 1887. Even though government work, mining, and
the railroad brought some Gentiles to Utah, over 90 percent of the population
remained Mormon, and concerns about this religious group led to the succes-
sive rejections of Utah’s petitions for statehood.
Another expression of anxiety appeared in the spate of antipolygamy novels
published between 1855 and 1898. With titles such as In the Grip of the Mor-
mons: By an Escaped Wife of a Mormon Elder; Mormon Wives: A Narrative of
Facts Stranger than Fiction; and Saved from the Mormons, these narratives were
written by non-Mormons who had never been to Utah and detailed horrors
including white slave procurers, secret doctrines of organized vengeance, and
physical torture of women in polygamous marriages.5 Although few of these
accounts had any basis in fact, they captured the public’s imagination, much as
Indian captivity narratives had done at an earlier point in American life. Like
Indian captivity narratives, antipolygamy novels accomplished purposes that
extended beyond their sentimental and sensational accounts of female victims.
As the scholar Jane Tompkins has reminded us, the sentimental text achieves

Constructing Devout Feminists ■ 5

its goal by “altering the reader’s world view, an alteration that necessarily trig-
gers action in the reader’s life.”6
Such novels also allowed both authors and readers to consider political is-
sues that would have been difficult for them to discuss in other contexts. Anti-
polygamy novels addressed concerns about the political and moral dimensions
of marriage at a time when concerns about the vulnerability of women—bound
legally to men whose desires (for sex, gambling, alcohol, or violence) could be-
tray them—ran high. Similarly, anxieties about slavery and, later, the incorpo-
ration of African Americans as free citizens found expression in the blurring of
concerns about polygamy and slavery, both in the captivity narratives (which
portrayed women as unwilling or nonconsenting participants in plural mar-
riages) and in the rendering of the progeny of polygamy as nonwhite. Written
mostly by women and addressed to a largely female audience, antipolygamy
fiction addressed anxieties while simultaneously arousing popular sentiment
against Mormons.7
For most Americans, and especially for white Protestant women, the figure
of the independent-minded, devout Mormon woman could not be imagined.
Gentiles could accept the idea of women entering plural marriages under force
or duress, but they could not countenance the idea that Mormon women would
willingly enter such unions. It was possible for Gentiles to imagine women ac-
cepting the “patriarchal principle,” but women who willingly and knowingly
embraced Mormon doctrine could not exist in the national imagination be-
cause they incited such anxiety among women—and men—from other reli-
gious traditions.8 Greater acceptance of Mormons by Gentiles depended upon
repositioning Mormon women in the Gentile mind.
One response of Mormon women was to ally themselves with the cause of
woman suffrage, which was granted to Utah’s women—for the first time—in
1870. Accounts of how this occurred vary, with some commentators portray-
ing Mormon women as relatively passive and emphasizing the role of non-
Mormon women supporting suffrage because they believed that women who
could vote would quickly make polygamy illegal.9 Other accounts describe
Mormon women as politically active well before 1870, pointing to their petition
to the Illinois state government in 1842, their activism on behalf of the poor,
and their continuing defense of their religion.10
Both sides agree, however, that Mormon women took public stands on be-
half of their religion, including the doctrine of plural marriage. When the
legislature voted suffrage for Utah’s women, Mormon women called upon
rhetorical strategies to argue for statehood in the face of powerful opposition
to their religion. In 1870 the poet and LDS leader Eliza Snow addressed an
audience of more than five thousand of her Mormon sisters in the Salt Lake
Tabernacle, declaring: “Year after year we have petitioned Congress for that

6 ■ A nne R uggles Gere

which is our inalienable right to claim—a state government; and year after year,
our petitions have been treated with contempt.”11 Actually, of course, the peti-
tions had been submitted by Mormon men, but Snow’s “our petitions” made a
rhetorical claim for the ownership she and her sisters assumed for Utah’s politi-
cal fate. Statehood would give Mormons an autonomy they lacked as a territory,
thereby enabling them to practice their religion more freely. In response to this
call, Mormon women undertook further rhetorical action by signing and cir-
culating petitions in support of their religious beliefs. In 1871, twenty-five hun-
dred women petitioned for repeal of the Morrill Act, which outlawed bigamy
and, after the Supreme Court ruled the act legal in 1879, Mormon women took
an even more public rhetorical position by issuing and personally delivering to
the White House a series of petitions on behalf of women and children whose
legitimacy and inheritance rights were affected by the decision. In their peti-
tion drive Mormon women replicated the actions of Gentile feminists, but their
goal of protecting the legal rights of polygamous women did not fit comfortably
within traditional feminist causes.
With Utah’s passage of woman suffrage in 1870, Protestant women con-
fronted the specter of enfranchised women who would not use the ballot to
eliminate polygamy. This led them to action. Within Utah, Gentile women
organized the Anti-Polygamy Society in 1878 and, with the aid of Protestant
women from elsewhere, issued an 1884 petition that Congress disenfranchise
Utah women. They succeeded in 1887, when the Edmunds-Tucker law abolished
suffrage for women of Utah. Indeed, historical commentators argue that the
Edmunds-Tucker law would not have passed without the support of Protestant
advocates, a majority of them women.12 It was a remarkable instance of one
group of women undercutting the rights of another. As suffragist Lucy Stone
put it: “It is hardly possible that so bold an attempt to disenfranchise citizens
who have exercised the right to vote for ten years can be accomplished. It would
certainly never have been attempted if these citizens had not been Mormons.”13
In addition to achieving suffrage, Mormon women used print to ally them-
selves rhetorically with progressive women, especially on the issue of educa-
tion. The Woman’s Exponent, one of three newspapers west of the Mississippi
“edited and published entirely by women,” including female typesetters, was
established by Mormon women in 1872.14 With a masthead that read: “The
Rights of the Women of Zion and the Rights of the Women of all Nations,”
this paper regularly published articles advocating woman suffrage, reported on
the accomplishments of women throughout the world, and self-consciously af-
firmed the historic importance of women’s activities. For example, a significant
number of Mormon women became medical doctors, following the example of
Romania Pratt, who returned to Utah from the Philadelphia Women’s Medical
College in 1877. These accomplishments were carefully displayed to an audience

Constructing Devout Feminists ■ 7

beyond Utah.15 One commentator claimed that “no concentration of women
in medicine ever occurred proportionately to the number of women doctors
among the pioneers of Utah.”
Despite repeated petitions for statehood and despite the woman suffrage,
educational and publishing efforts of Mormon women, Utah still remained a
territory. The practice of polygamy, which aroused tremendous hostility, still
remained an obstacle. Accordingly, on September 24, 1890, the LDS Church
president Wilford Woodruff issued a manifesto forbidding plural marriage,
and the General Conference of the Church accepted it unanimously on Oc-
tober 6 of the same year. Despite this move, Gentiles remained unconvinced,
suspecting that the manifesto might be temporary, “a political maneuver de-
signed to relieve external pressure long enough for Utah to gain entrance to the
Union, after which the practice would be gradually reinstated.”16 Whatever the
status of its origins or the motivations of those who supported it, the manifesto
was a necessary but not sufficient step in Utah’s campaign to render a Mormon-
dominated territory recognizable as an appropriate candidate for statehood.17
Since the manifesto by itself was not entirely convincing to Gentile popula-
tions, further efforts were necessary.
The next step for Mormon women was women’s clubs. The term “clubwomen”
may conjure an image of relatively privileged white Protestant women who
shared gossip over tea cups or it may call up a turn-of-the-century movement
that included working-class, African American, Catholic, and Jewish women
in projects of Americanization, philanthropy, and self-improvement, as well as
the creation of such institutions as libraries, kindergartens, and schools of so-
cial work. Mormons are not typically associated with the women’s club move-
ment. In part, this results from the fact that white Protestant clubwomen have
been represented as normative in most studies of the women’s club movement,
much as whiteness has been, until very recently, taken as normative rather than
one racial category among several.18 The unfamiliarity of the phrase “Mormon
clubwoman” also results from the stigmatized position of this most American
of religions.19 Despite this unfamiliarity, Mormon women in Salt Lake City or-
ganized at least a half-dozen clubs.
Mormon clubwomen were not, of course, the only ones to occupy a stigma-
tized position. Their African American and Jewish peers faced similar chal-
lenges, and these two groups offered compelling examples of how clubwomen
could help transform members of their population into fit Americans. Club-
women affiliated with the National Association of Colored Women not only
monitored their own manners and morals to emulate those of the white middle
class but also frequently intervened in the lives of their sisters “by whom . . . the
world will always judge the womanhood of our race,” in attempts to bring them
closer to middle-class American norms.20 In keeping with the National Asso-

8 ■ A nne R uggles Gere

ciation of Colored Women’s motto, “Lifting as We Climb,” these clubwomen
helped to constitute members of their race as legitimate Americans.
Jewish clubwomen played a particularly active role in Americanizing mem-
bers of their community. The rapidly growing number of Jewish immigrants
in the 1890s included a significant proportion of women (unlike other immi-
grant groups, which typically included fewer women) and, as one woman put
it in a speech at the 1902 Triennial of the National Council of Jewish Women
(NCJW): “We who are the cultured and refined, constitute the minority, but
we shall be judged by the majority, the Russian Jews, by the children of the
Ghetto.”21 Accordingly, Jewish clubwomen worked to transform these “Russian
Jews” into “Americans.” Convinced that the “strange ways” of their immigrant
sisters might reflect badly on them—particularly if the recent arrivals appeared
to present an economic burden—Jewish clubwomen developed a highly efficient
and wide-ranging system for acculturating their immigrant sisters. The process
designed to transform immigrant Jews included meeting each ship that went
through Ellis Island, ascertaining the legitimacy of U.S. family connections
claimed, maintaining contact with recent arrivals, and providing educational
opportunities such as night schools and summer schools for working women.
Unlike their Jewish peers, Mormon clubwomen lacked an established and
assimilated wing that could ease them into public acceptability and, unlike
African Americans, they didn’t have opportunities for domestic and/or work-
place contacts with dominant populations. Their geographic isolation fostered
the worst imaginings of misinformation, which in turn were fueled by anti-
polygamy novels and negative public discourses. Still, however, club work of-
fered what I, following historian Mary Louise Pratt, call a contact zone—a so-
cial space where this relatively powerless population and their more influential
peers could use literacy to “meet, clash, and grapple with each other.”22
Mormon women came to clubs later than their peers in other parts of the
country and later than Gentile women in Utah, but they entered the movement
at a propitious time. Although the larger male culture still remained somewhat
hostile toward and suspicious of women’s clubs, they had by 1890 become a
relatively common social formation.23 Not only had clubs begun to spring up in
cities and towns across the nation but groups of clubs had banded together in
national associations. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs was founded
in 1890, the National Council of Jewish Women in 1893, and the National As-
sociation of Colored Women in 1896. Mormon leader Emmeline Wells founded
the Utah Women’s Press Club (UWPC) in 1891, and both the Reapers Club
and Cleofan were established in 1892. Between their founding and Utah’s 1896
successful petition for statehood, these clubs carried out rhetorical projects
that did much to transform the way Mormon women were perceived. Through
clubs, Mormon women engaged in rhetorical exchanges with women who saw

Constructing Devout Feminists ■ 9

them as ignorant and immoral, and such exchanges helped Gentile women to
reconsider the identities they had assigned to their Mormon peers.
Like their peers elsewhere, Mormon clubwomen produced and consumed
official documents such as constitutions, by-laws, and minutes of meetings; pa-
pers written and read at club meetings; as well as letters, articles, and literary
texts, thereby signaling their seriousness of purpose. Through publication in
The Woman’s Exponent (which was exchanged for the publications of many
other clubs), correspondence with other clubs, state and national meetings
where club papers were read, and visits with members of Gentile clubs, Mor-
mon clubwomen circulated their texts to their peers throughout the country,
thus countering biased misrepresentations of themselves and their beliefs.
Mormon clubwomen called upon rhetoric to make and circulate overt
claims about their relationship to the nation. In a speech given at a reception for
members of several clubs and published in the Exponent, a Reapers Club mem-
ber declared: “Politics has been from girlhood an interesting subject to me.
. . . I read Daniel Webster’s Speeches, the ‘Union Text Book’ of our American
Statesmen including the Constitution and Declaration of Independence . . . the
more I read the more I felt the positive necessity of woman being not only a wife
and mother in name but in very deed. Intellectually strong, brave, wise, pru-
dent, efficient and capable.”24 With such statements as “our American States-
men” and references to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, this
clubwoman appropriates an American heritage for herself and her Mormon
audience, using the reading of common texts as a way to show shared values
and loyalties. By combining this claim to being American with an affirmation
of educated and capable womanhood, the speaker gestures toward a common
citizenship that extends both within and beyond the Mormon community.
Another of the “American” virtues displayed by Mormon clubwomen ap-
peared in the causes they supported. For clubwomen in many social locations,
moral or social uplift numbered among the most popular causes. In some
cases this took the form of attempting to ameliorate poverty or improve the
lot of those in less advantaged positions. Although class lines were less well
defined in Utah than in the East, Mormon clubwomen took on the burden
of “improving” those less advantaged than themselves. A paper given at the
Utah Federation of Woman’s Clubs by a member of Cleofan, a Mormon club,
articulates principles common to clubwomen who supported social uplift proj-
ects. Cleofan’s membership in the state federation was particularly important
since so much anti-Mormon sentiment was generated by Gentiles living in
Utah. State meetings provided opportunities for Mormon clubwomen to show
members of groups such as Salt Lake’s Ladies’ Literary and the Woman’s Club
that religious differences did not weaken patriotism or prevent the flowering of
common interests. In her history of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs,

10 ■ A nne R uggles Gere

the founding leader Jennie June Croly affirmed a commonality that extended
across religious difference: “No line is drawn in the Utah Federation. Mormons
and Gentiles enter on an equal footing, and the work is doing much to break
down the walls of ancient prejudice.”25
In an 1896 paper titled “Social Purity,” a Mormon clubwoman argued for
the social value of promoting the welfare of all members of society, points to
poverty as a cause of social impurity, and urges the assembled clubwomen to
help improve “the conditions of those who form the lower classes in society.”26
Moyle, the speaker, goes on to urge that parents provide moral surroundings
for children and that men adhere to the same standards of (sexual) purity that
they expect of women. In addition to demonstrating how Mormon clubwomen
shared the same values as other clubwomen, rhetorical maneuvers like Moyle’s
offered Mormon women opportunities to redefine themselves as intelligent and
moral beings rather than the immoral and ignorant figures anti-Mormon texts
made of them.
Another rhetorical alliance created by Mormon clubwomen took aesthetic
form. Minutes of Mormon club meetings indicate that members studied literary
texts by such American authors as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Green-
leaf Whittier, Benjamin Franklin, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Like their sisters
in the East, Mormon clubwomen accorded even more importance to British lit-
erature, lavishing attention on texts by such writers as Chaucer, Milton, Shake-
speare, Scott, Byron, Arnold, and Ruskin. Like clubwomen elsewhere, Mormon
clubwomen participated in literature-related activities that included writing
papers about authors, reading texts aloud or performing them, discussing and
interpreting literature, and participating in authors’ parties where members
dressed like and impersonated literary figures. In choosing to study the same
literature and employ approaches similar to those of clubwomen from other
parts of the country and in displaying their work in published articles in the
Woman’s Exponent that circulated to their non-Mormon counterparts, Mor-
mon clubwomen constructed another rhetorical connection with American
women who occupied less stigmatized social positions.
The circulations of print culture enabled Mormon clubwomen to display
rhetorical evidence of their increasing acceptance by non-Mormons. The
published minutes of a UWPC meeting included this: “The president stated
that she had received a letter from the Countess Annie d’Montaign, asking
for information concerning the club, to publish in an Eastern magazine. This
shows that the club is becoming well known.”27 In an editorial published by the
Woman’s Exponent in July 1893, UWPC founder Emmeline Wells wrote: “Many
times while in Chicago, women whom we had never seen before, said, ‘O yes, I
know the Woman’s Exponent, and it has enlightened me greatly on your ques-
tion, especially concerning the women of your faith.’”28 Wells published this

Constructing Devout Feminists ■ 11

editorial shortly after her return from the 1893 Chicago Exposition, where she
and a delegation of Mormon clubwomen had joined with their peers from all
areas of the United States to participate in the Congress of Women as well as
other woman-centered activities included in the exposition.29
Given their earlier (but later revoked) access to the ballot box, Mormon
clubwomen took a clear stance in favor of suffrage. Minutes of the UWPC for
April 5, 1895—a time when politicians were debating whether woman suffrage
should be included in the forthcoming state constitution—indicate that the
club abandoned its planned program to discuss the debate and plan a peti-
tion drive in support of including woman suffrage in the Utah state consti-
tution.30 In reporting on the World’s Congress of Women held at the Chicago
Exposition in 1893 and attended by more than a dozen Mormon clubwomen,
Emmeline Wells asserted that “the woman suffrage question was one of the
most popular themes of discussion presented” and described suffragist Susan
B. Anthony as the most popular woman of the Congress.31 When Ellis Shipp,
a physician and member of the UWPC, reported on the 1895 meeting of the
National Council of Women, a group that favored giving women the vote, she
glowed with accounts of having “met some of the brightest women of America”
and having seen women “so busily engaged in elevating humanity.”32 Suffrage
thus gave Mormon clubwomen a rhetorical platform upon which they could
build exchanges with their Gentile sisters.
Records show that Mormon clubwomen measured their own progress in
creating linkages with non-Mormon women. In 1894, after attending a meeting
of the exclusionary Ladies’ Literary Club of Salt Lake, a Gentile group, Emme-
line Wells wrote in her diary: “Some years ago, no Mormon could be admitted
as visitors even, but now things are different—we [Mormon women] are sought
after. . . . We are getting more recognition and stand more on an equality with
other women than formerly.”33 Associations with women in the General Fed-
eration yielded similar results. Writing from Washington, D.C., where her
husband served as representative from Utah, Isabel Cameron Brown described
a meeting of the Woman’s Press Club in that city. After outlining the papers
given by members, she commented: “Nearly every one of the ladies that I met
knew Mrs. Wells personally and all said such nice things about her.”34 Emme-
line Wells worked with Jennie June Croly, founder of the General Federation
of Women’s Clubs, and was a guest in her home in New York, an experience
she later described in the Woman’s Exponent after Croly’s death. May Wright
Sewall, a leader in both the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and in the
National Council of Women, visited Salt Lake City after statehood had been
granted, but her visit was prompted by club friendships that extended back
more than a decade. As Emmeline Wells put it in her full-page article about

12 ■ A nne R uggles Gere

Sewall’s visit, it was “a time we had both looked forward to for many years,” and
her enthusiastic account of every event in Sewall’s four-day stay demonstrates
its importance to Wells as well as to the Mormon clubwomen of Salt Lake.
Even as they emulated, exchanged texts with, and became friends of Gentile
women, Mormon clubwomen renovated the term “clubwoman.” Their identity
as Mormon clubwomen remained ever-present even though they distinguished
themselves from the more overtly religious Female Relief Society. Minutes
mention prayers at the beginning and end of some meetings, and members
frequently refer to one another with religiously inflected terms like “sister” or
“saint.” Their reading of British and American literature was interspersed with
literature written by Mormon authors like Eliza Snow, Hannah King, Emily
Woodmansee, and Sarah Carmichael, whose names appear in club minutes
alongside the more familiar American and British ones. A Women’s Exponent
article on current literature listed as “books that can never . . . be surpassed.
. . . The Bible, The Book of Mormon, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Shakespeare and
Milton,” asserting: “In the literary world alone were born many most glorious
spirits, Hugo, Eliot, Dickens, Bancroft. But the brightest star in all this won-
drous constellation, the brightest since the sorrowful Nazarene, was the spirit
of Joseph Smith the Prophet.”35 Such readings, claims, and tributes show how
Mormon clubwomen reconceptualized literature to include the unique literary
contributions of Mormons. In so doing, these women simultaneously affirmed
their religious difference and identified themselves with Gentile clubwomen.
In addition, Mormon clubwomen also took advantage of every rhetorical
opportunity to represent their religious traditions to non-Mormon clubwomen.
The Women’s Exponent regularly published articles about Mormon theology,
paid tribute to church leaders, and affirmed Mormon values. At the World’s
Congress of Representative Women held at Chicago’s 1893 exposition, Mormon
clubwomen gave papers outlining the early history of Utah, describing women’s
achievements, and explaining the differences between first- and second-
generation Mormon women of Utah. Whenever clubwomen from other reli-
gions expressed interest in the Mormon tradition, clubwomen responded fully.
A paper titled “Why a Woman Should Desire to Be a Mormon” was “written
by special request and read at Women’s Clubs in New York,” and club minutes
include enthusiastic accounts of opportunities for sharing Mormon theology
with other women. One woman, recently returned from a meeting in Wash-
ington, D.C., reported meeting with “liberal” women who “found they were
dissatisfied with their religion, desiring something that touches the soul. She
hoped many would be brought to acknowledge of the truth of the gospel.”36 For
this woman, “liberal” means both a supporter of suffrage and someone willing
to listen to the Mormon perspective. The networks of associations created by

Constructing Devout Feminists ■ 13

clubs, then, provided Mormon women with opportunities for evangelism as
well as interactions with Gentiles.
At the same time that they deployed rhetoric to underscore their similarities
with other clubwomen, Mormon clubwomen acknowledged that their religion
would always mark them as unlike other Americans. They expressed resent-
ment at the way others represented them. As an editorial in the Woman’s Ex-
ponent put it: “There are still, however, many among the people of the outside
world who think Mormon women have no method by which they express their
true feelings and are ignorant of all the great questions of the day upon which
other women are so well informed. It would be amusing if it were not such a
serious matter, to hear how women of the world speak of Mormon women.”37
In describing a character in Sarah Grand’s Heavenly Twins, a member of the
Reapers Club observed: “She holds up a perfect moral, ideal standard to guide
humanity, shows that man must and can bring to the marriage altar as unspot-
ted a record as he demands from the bride. It is the doctrine of our own church
as well all know, though the world will not receive it from a ‘Mormon.’”38
Although Mormon women were willing to emulate many of the practices of
Gentile clubwomen, they remained intensely loyal to their religion and resisted
any and all attempts to undermine it.
Mormon women deployed rhetoric effectively to negotiate a complex set
of religious and political desires. In entering public life and seeking educa-
tional opportunities, they created linkages with their Gentile peers. Although
it cannot be definitively proved that Mormon clubwomen facilitated Utah’s
successful petition for statehood in 1896, they certainly helped to ameliorate
the negative perceptions of Mormon women. By becoming active in public life
and participating in women’s clubs, Mormon women were able to help Gentiles
redefine Mormonism. Despite their embrace of liberal causes like suffrage and
their willingness to adopt many practices common among Gentile women’s
clubs, Mormon women were not willing to separate their religious goals from
their political aims. Mormon women saw, as Jill Mulvey Derr puts it, “obedi-
ence and faithfulness” as inextricably bound to women’s cause.39 Women’s clubs
consciously distinguished themselves from church-affiliated ladies’ societies,
but at the same time their rhetoric retained a number of religious markers.
Even though they remained strongly committed to their religion, Mormon
women undertook rhetorical practices that allied them with feminists of other
religions. Making public speeches, circulating petitions, voting, attending uni-
versities, and writing for publication—all these activities distanced Mormon
women from the gendered roles assigned them by their religion. Complicat-
ing the one-dimensional roles of being Mormon wives and mothers, Mormon
women moved outside the domestic boundaries of their lives to take on public
positions. In one way these women were collaborating with Mormon patriarchs

14 ■ A nne R uggles Gere

who supported their participation in public life. No doubt these patriarchs rec-
ognized the value of having women promote the Mormon cause. At the same
time, however, Mormon women were collaborating with non-Mormon fem-
inists who affirmed woman suffrage and encouraged women to become edu-
cated and participate in public life. These alliances probably helped to decrease
Gentile anxieties and hostilities, but they also created opportunities for Mor-
mon women to expand their horizons in several directions, including becom-
ing ambassadors for their religion.
To ignore the religious beliefs of women who participate in public life, be-
come educated, or join women’s clubs is to miss an important part of their
motivations, behavior, and impact. Sadly, the theoretical tools most readily
available to scholars do little to help us “see” religion in a secular context, much
less to consider the role of religious discourses in nation formation. Among the
obstacles to considering the cultural effect of religious discourses are institu-
tional ones. As the historian George Marsden has observed, higher education
conflated the disestablishment of Protestant domination—which opened the
way for educating Jews, Catholics, and agnostics—with a cultural secularism
that banished religion altogether, leading to the “near exclusion of religious
perspectives from dominant academic life.”40 A more powerful set of obstacles
are the intellectual ones that emerged as the humanities became secularized.
Aesthetics were increasingly detached from any traditional religious meaning,
creating what the historian T. J. Jackson Lears has called “a surrogate religion
of taste well suited to a secular culture of consumption.”41
This conflation of institutional with intellectual secularization has rendered
the discourses surrounding religion stunted, and religion provides, as historian
Stephen Carter has put it, a source of embarrassment to American intellectu-
als.42 Accordingly, discussions of evangelical Protestant religions are frequently
one-dimensional and fail to articulate the internal complexities of specific
groups, focusing instead on triviality or extremism.43 Similarly, representations
of contemporary Mormons frequently employ extreme examples and empha-
size exoticism without attention to actual doctrines and practices.44 The paucity
of academic language about religion and the normative stance often accorded
to mainline Protestant denominations frequently leads to the default view that
religion is synonymous with a limited range of denominations. The limited
secular academic language for religion means that the agency of rhetors within
specific religious populations is often slighted, and that religion is rarely used
as a category of analysis. In particular, the impoverished terms of academic
discourses about religion make it difficult to perceive and explore the complex-
ities that enable adherents of a given faith to remain completely devout while
simultaneously embracing progressive secular causes.
As the case of Mormon women in the nineteenth century shows, although

Constructing Devout Feminists ■ 15

religion is typically conceptualized as personal and private, it can play complex
and vital roles in public institutions and issues. Religion’s shaping effect on
the bodies and sexualities of Mormon women inflected their behavior just as
it did the distorting mirror of antipolygamy novels and other anti-Mormon
discourses. It inspired the rhetorical stances adopted by these women, and it
fueled their emergence into public life. It generated a renovation of a new and
more inclusive national identity, and it renovated the concept of “feminism” to
include women who simultaneously held deep commitments to religious doc-
trines and practices and determination to take up positions in secular society,
both to enhance their own independence and to protect their religion.
In his “Divinity School Address,” Ralph Waldo Emerson offers an Ameri-
can perspective on Jesus Christ: “The idioms of his language and the figures of
his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on
his principles but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic
teaching of Greece or Egypt, before.”45 Although he focuses on Christianity,
Emerson’s point can be extended to religion more generally. Religion is always
imagined, or socially constructed, and—as is true for constructs like gender,
race, and class—it must be continually renovated. This renovation will allow
for greater complexity in considering the relationship between the secular and
the religious.

16 ■ A nne R uggles Gere

 2
—

A Rhetoric of Opposition

the seventh-day adventist church and the sabbath tr adition

Lizabeth A. Rand

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do
all your work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you
shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant,
or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates;
for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them,
and rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and
hallowed it.
—Exodus 20:8–11

The fourth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy,” has
been a central principle of the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) church, a Christian
denomination with over sixteen million members worldwide, since its begin-
ning. According to Adventist theologian Raymond F. Cottrell, “the Sabbath
was . . . in a very real sense, the unifying factor around which the Seventh-day
Adventist Church came into being, and it is still a potent force that binds to-
gether the Adventist people around the world, transcending all barriers of na-
tionality, race, language, political ideology, and economic status.”1 Adventists
worship on Saturday—the seventh day of the week—because this is the day that
they believe God set aside for that purpose, the day that God sanctified and
blessed. Across the nation, and across the world, Seventh-day Adventists spend
the twenty-four-hour period from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown with
their families and friends. Many participate in special religious events on Fri-
day evenings, followed by Sabbath school and Sabbath worship on Saturdays.
They share Sabbath meals and Sabbath rest. Secular talk, secular reading, and
secular activities are also generally put aside.
The Seventh-day Adventist church, a denomination that developed out of a

17
premillennial movement led by Baptist preacher William Miller in the 1840s,
was cofounded by Ellen White and her husband James, along with Joseph Bates,
a former sea captain, and shortly thereafter it made Battle Creek, Michigan, its
home. The founders built much of the framework of the Adventist movement,
with Mrs. White, as she’s commonly referred to in Adventist literature, serving
as the prophetic voice of the worldwide church. Adventism, both past and pres-
ent, has contributed most significantly to the American landscape through its
message of health and wellness. The Adventist church promotes vegetarianism,
funds smoking cessation and addiction recovery programs, and operates a vast
network of clinics and hospitals.
It is the Sabbath, however, that shapes the Adventist church’s relationship to
America more than anything else. For non–Seventh-day Christians (the vast
majority of Christians in America), worship on Sunday is such an established
custom, so outside of interpretation, that it holds little tension. Seventh-day
Adventists, however, define themselves more by their opposition to worship
on the first day, and their loyalty to the Saturday Sabbath as sacred time, than
by any other moral or religious principle. Founding members believed them-
selves to be engaged in a cosmic battle against Sunday keepers. Modern-day
Adventism in America remains powerfully shaped by a rhetoric of resistance
to worship on the first day of the week. For Seventh-day Adventists, the day on
which Christians worship (and what, specifically, should occur on that day) is a
contested site of both spiritual and political meaning.

The Sabbath Comm andment in Western History:

Sunday Becomes Sacred

In his book Please Don’t Wish Me a Merry Christmas: A Critical History of

the Separation of Church and State, scholar Stephen M. Feldman argues con-
vincingly that while America makes strong claims for the separation of church
and state, the boundaries between the two are often blurred. The source of
these less-than-strict boundaries can be traced back to the early history of the
Christian church, as Christianity separated from Judaism and formed a com-
plex relationship with Rome.2 Christianity and the state “struck a deal for their
mutual benefit” for the first of many times in the centuries to come—a deal that
clearly privileged Christian identity over all others.3 At this time, it was Jewish
citizens who suffered the most, persecuted for their non-Christian beliefs and
practices, including their day of worship.
Making use of the discourse of the New Testament, early Christians “[rede-
fined] Jews as a subcultural Other.”4 Jews were assigned to the realm of the “car-
nal,” the worldly, the flesh, whereas Christians were deemed to be otherworldly,
spiritual, and blessed. In this manner, the Jewish faith became a scapegoat,
carrying the sins of humanity, so that Christians were free to put their own

18 ■ Lizabeth A. R and
transgressions aside to pursue a new path toward salvation. Feldman points
out that the binary of spirituality versus carnality would become crucial to the
development of the doctrine of church-state separation, as religion and laws
governing the conduct of citizens were pulled apart from one another: “The
Christian rejection of the Jewish Torah, which included laws for all aspects
of social and civil life, facilitated this recognition [of two realms of differing
authority] and approval of the Roman civil authority. In effect, the Christian
repudiation of Jewish law opened a gap where the Roman civil law could legit-
imately function.”5 It is from within this gap that Sunday worship originated.
Contrary to an often-held assumption that Jesus or his disciples changed
the day of worship for Christians from the Jewish Sabbath to Sunday, Kenneth
Strand, a professor of Adventist church history, notes that “Sunday was not
substituted for Saturday as the Christian weekly day of worship or rest during
New Testament times.”6 This change occurred gradually, and from the second
to the fifth centuries many Christians still observed the Jewish Sabbath, even as
worship on the first day gained influence. In most regions Sunday overtook Sat-
urday as the principal day of Christian fellowship through a two-stage process.
Sunday was first treated as a day to hold worship services but also a day to work:
“In [this] role, there would be no reason for conflict with the Saturday rest day.”7
Only later did Christians more strongly repudiate Jewish law, collaborating,
at times, in unexpected ways with the Roman state to institutionalize Sunday
more convincingly as a full day’s experience of religion.
It might be surprising to modern-day Christians that Sunday emerged, in
part, out of pagan traditions and customs, as a means for the church to es-
tablish itself as the dominant religious group. As pagan rhetoric was folded
into Christianity, Sunday was transformed into an increasingly sacred and holy
day. Samuele Bacchiocchi, an Adventist theologian and author of “The Rise of
Sunday Observance in Early Christianity,” describes how the early Christian
church embraced various features of sun-cult symbolism, and that “Sun wor-
ship with its ‘Sun-day’ was influential in determining the choice of Sunday [as
the new day of worship.] . . . [Sunday] provided a fitting symbology that could
efficaciously commemorate and explain to the pagan world two fundamental
events of the history of salvation—creation and resurrection.”8 It is no coinci-
dence, Bacchiocchi argues, that Sunday was viewed by the early church as the
day that God created light in addition to the day that God’s son or “sun” was
risen. Bacchiocchi describes church leaders’ logic as follows: “‘If it is called day
of the Sun by the pagans, we most willingly acknowledge it as such, since it is
on this day that the light of the world has appeared and on this day the Sun of
Justice has risen.’”9
Early Christian church leaders defined Sunday using increasingly devout
language, heightening the contrast between Sunday and the Jewish day of wor-

A R hetoric of Opposition ■ 19
ship. Strand identifies the Council of Laodicea, a Roman Catholic council, as
issuing in 364 AD the first ecclesiastical Sunday law, decreeing that Christians
should treat Sunday as a day of rest, and they should work instead on Saturday:
“‘Christians shall not Judaize and be idle on Saturday but shall work on that
day; [and] the Lord’s day they shall especially honour, and, as being Christian,
shall, if possible, do no work on that day.’”10 Fourth-century Christian leaders
did not completely prohibit work on Sunday because, they claimed, the Jewish
practice of Sabbath rest led people to “wicked idleness.”11 In obvious contradic-
tion, Christians also characterized the Sabbath as too exhaustive and strict:
by the end of the sixth century, Pope Gregory worried that Jewishness was
negatively impacting the church by shaping Christians’ attitudes about what
could or could not be done on Sundays. “This paradoxical caricature by Chris-
tians of the Jewish Sabbath as both too rigorous and too idle,” writes Craig
Harline, professor of history at Brigham Young University, “would persist for
centuries.”12
Although the term “blue law”—“the colloquial term for state statutes that
regulate or prohibit entertainment and commercial activities on Sundays or re-
ligious holidays”—was not used until much later, the actions of the early church
clearly set the stage for such restrictions.13 British colonists brought blue laws
with them to America: “Blue laws in colonial America were both widespread
and frequently enforced, most commonly through the levying of substantial
fines.”14 Even our first president was reprimanded for ignoring a Sunday re-
striction: as George Washington traveled to New York from Connecticut in
1789, he was stopped by an official for unnecessary travel on the Lord’s day; he
was allowed to continue after vowing to go only as far as his immediate des-
tination (which was, after all, to attend a worship service).15 The lawyer Lesley
Lawrence-Hammer has observed that “colonial blue laws survived the
American Revolution and the enactment of the First Amendment relatively
unscathed.”16 In the nineteenth century, blue law enforcement was intensified,
including a successful campaign to end Sunday mail delivery. Seventh-day
Adventism was founded at the height of moral sentiment over proper behavior
on the first day of the week. It would respond by constructing its own distinct
culture, running parallel to but separate from the American way of life.

The Sabbath Comm andment as

Resistance to American Time

In coauthors Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart’s groundbreaking study of

Seventh-day Adventism, Seeking a Sanctuary, they point out that the American
dream, if it were to be described, would include the following components: “(1)
the belief that the American Revolution created a state uniquely blessed by God
in which human beings have unprecedented opportunities for self-realization

20 ■ Lizabeth A. R and
and material gain; (2) the conviction that the American nation, through both
example and leadership, offers hope for the rest of the world; and (3) the as-
sumption that it is through individual, rather than collective, effort that the
progress of humanity will be achieved.”17 According to Bull and Lockhart, the
early Adventist church boldly rejected the American dream as popularly de-
fined and offered a different narrative for its followers, one that depended on
the rejection of Sunday and all that it symbolized as the most sacred day of the
week: “[SDAs] did not accept that the republican experiment would lead to the
betterment of humanity or that it would be a lasting success. They consigned
America to eventual destruction, and in place of the nation, they daringly sub-
stituted themselves as the true vehicle for the redemption of the world.”18
Most American Seventh-day Adventists still believe that the Sabbath will be
the defining issue in the last days before Christ’s return, and that the state (this
time in the form of America) will once again join hands with powerful religious
forces in what will ultimately be a futile (though deadly) attempt to disparage
the seventh day. They believe that Seventh-day Adventists will combat these
forces, emerge victorious, and bring forth God’s salvation. In Seventh-day Ad-
ventist founder Ellen White’s The Great Controversy, a widely known and fre-
quently quoted text within both historical and modern Adventism, she traces
the battles between Christ and Satan throughout history, describing in great
detail the final war to be waged over good and evil.19 In the last days, Mrs.
White admonishes, Satan will try to persuade as many human beings as he
can to worship on Sunday, even going so far as to institute Sunday laws that
only the most faithful of God’s people will refuse to obey. America, along with
Sunday-keeping Protestant and Catholic churches, will attempt to enforce
these laws. “In this scenario,” Bull and Lockhart point out, “the division be-
tween the saved and the damned hinges on which day of the weekly cycle is
considered more important. The essential criterion of salvation is a correct
apprehension of temporal sequence. Time, the least visible of divisions, is the
basis for an irreversible separation of good and evil.”20 In other words, only
those who accept the seventh-day Sabbath and remain loyal to it will be a part
of God’s remnant group.
Persecution is a recurring theme in Adventist literature; clearly, it served as
a means for the church to shape its own identity and to differentiate itself from
the mainstream Christian world. In the early days of the Adventist movement,
SDAs were taunted by rock-throwing mobs, their property was destroyed, and
of course they were jailed for working on Sunday (fines, jail, and job termina-
tion emerged as the primary means of penalizing modern SDAs for Sabbath
observance). In The Great Controversy, Mrs. White warns her fellow Adventists
that those who uphold the “measure of light” granted to them will necessarily
face trial and tribulation: “Opposition is the lot of all whom God employs to

A R hetoric of Opposition ■ 21
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 Her hart did leape, and all her hart-strings tremble,
For sudden ioy, and secret feare withall,
And all her vitall powres with motion nimble,
To succour it, themselues gan there assemble,
That by the swift recourse of flushing blood
Right plaine appeard, though she it would dissemble,
And fayned still her former angry mood,
Thinking to hide the depth by troubling of the flood.

When Glauce thus gan wisely all vpknit; xxx

Ye gentle Knights, whom fortune here hath brought,
To be spectators of this vncouth fit,
Which secret fate hath in this Ladie wrought,
Against the course of kind, ne meruaile nought,
Ne thenceforth feare the thing that hethertoo
Hath troubled both your mindes with idle thought,
Fearing least she your loues away should woo,
Feared in vaine, sith meanes ye see there wants theretoo.

And you Sir Artegall, the saluage knight, xxxi

Henceforth may not disdaine, that womans hand
Hath conquered you anew in second fight:
For whylome they haue conquerd sea and land,
And heauen it selfe, that nought may them withstand.[108]
Ne henceforth be rebellious vnto loue,
That is the crowne of knighthood, and the band
Of noble minds deriued from aboue,
Which being knit with vertue, neuer will remoue.

And you faire Ladie knight, my dearest Dame, xxxii

Relent the rigour of your wrathfull will,
Whose fire were better turn’d to other flame;
And wiping out remembrance of all ill,
Graunt him your grace, but so that he fulfill
The penance, which ye shall to him empart:
For louers heauen must passe by sorrowes hell.
Thereat full inly blushed Britomart;
But Artegall close smyling ioy’d in secret hart.

Yet durst he not make loue so suddenly, xxxiii

Ne thinke th’affection of her hart to draw
From one to other so quite contrary:
Besides her modest countenance he saw
So goodly graue, and full of princely aw,
That it his ranging fancie did refraine,
And looser thoughts to lawfull bounds withdraw;
Whereby the passion grew more fierce and faine,
Like to a stubborne steede whom strong hand would restraine.

But Scudamour whose hart twixt doubtfull feare xxxiv

And feeble hope hung all this while suspence,
Desiring of his Amoret to heare
Some gladfull newes and sure intelligence,
Her thus bespake; But Sir without offence
Mote I request you tydings of my loue,
My Amoret, sith you her freed fro thence,
Where she captiued long, great woes did proue;
That where ye left, I may her seeke, as doth behoue.

To whom thus Britomart, Certes[109] Sir knight, xxxv

What is of her become, or whether reft,
I can not vnto you aread a right.
For from that time I from enchaunters theft
Her freed, in which ye her all hopelesse left,
I her preseru’d from perill and from feare,
And euermore from villenie her kept:
Ne euer was there wight to me more deare
Then she, ne vnto whom I more true loue did beare.

Till on a day as through a desert wyld xxxvi

We trauelled, both wearie of the way
We did alight, and sate in shadow myld;
Where fearelesse I to sleepe me downe did lay.
But when as I did out of sleepe abray,
 I found her not, where I her left whyleare,
But thought she wandred was, or gone astray.
I cal’d her loud, I sought her farre and neare;
But no where could her find, nor tydings of her heare.

When Scudamour those heauie tydings heard, xxxvii

His hart was thrild with point of deadly feare;
Ne in his face or bloud or life appeard,
But senselesse stood, like to a mazed steare,
That yet of mortall stroke the stound doth beare.
Till Glauce thus; Faire Sir, be nought dismayd
With needelesse dread, till certaintie ye heare:
For yet she may be safe though somewhat strayd;
Its best to hope the best, though of the worst affrayd.

Nathlesse he hardly of her chearefull speech xxxviii

Did comfort take, or in his troubled sight
Shew’d change of better cheare: so sore a breach
That sudden newes had made into his spright;
Till Britomart him fairely thus behight;
Great cause of sorrow certes Sir ye haue:
But comfort take: for by this heauens light
I vow, you dead or liuing not to leaue,
Till I her find, and wreake on him that her did reaue.

Therewith he rested, and well pleased was, xxxix

So peace being confirm’d amongst them all,
They tooke their steeds, and forward thence did pas
Vnto some resting place, which mote befall,
All being guided by Sir Artegall.
Where goodly solace was vnto them made,
And dayly feasting both in bowre and hall,
Vntill that they their wounds well healed had,
And wearie limmes recur’d after late vsage bad.

In all which time, Sir Artegall made way xl

Vnto the loue of noble Britomart,
And with meeke seruice and much suit did lay
 Continuall siege vnto her gentle hart,
Which being whylome launcht[110] with louely dart,
More eath was new impression to receiue,
How euer she her paynd with womanish art
To hide her wound, that none might it perceiue:
Vaine is the art that seekes it selfe for to deceiue.

So well he woo’d her, and so well he wrought her, xli

With faire entreatie and sweet blandishment,
That at the length vnto a bay he brought her,
So as she to his speeches was content
To lend an eare, and softly to relent.
At last through many vowes which forth he pour’d,
And many othes, she yeelded her consent
To be his loue, and take him for her Lord,
Till they with mariage meet might finish that accord.

Tho when they had long time there taken rest, xlii
Sir Artegall, who all this while was bound
Vpon an hard aduenture yet in quest,
Fit time for him thence to depart it found,
To follow that, which he did long propound;
And vnto her his congee came to take.
But her therewith full sore displeasd he found,
And loth to leaue her late betrothed make,
Her dearest loue full loth so shortly to forsake.

Yet he with strong perswasions her asswaged, xliii

And wonne her will to suffer him depart;
For which his faith with her he fast engaged,
And thousand vowes from bottome of his hart,
That all so soone as he by wit or art
Could that atchieue, whereto he did aspire,
He vnto her would speedily reuert:
No longer space thereto he did desire,
But till the horned moone three courses did expire.
With which she for the present was appeased, xliv
And yeelded leaue, how euer malcontent
She inly were, and in her mind displeased.
So early in[111] the morrow next he went
Forth on his way, to which he was ybent.
Ne wight him to attend, or way to guide,
As whylome was the custome ancient
Mongst Knights, when on aduentures they did ride,
Saue that she algates him a while accompanide.

And by the way she sundry purpose found xlv

Of this or that, the time for to delay,
And of the perils whereto he was bound,
The feare whereof seem’d much her to affray:
But all she did was but to weare out day.
Full oftentimes she leaue of him did take;
And eft againe deuiz’d some what to say,
Which she forgot, whereby excuse to make:
So loth she was his companie for to forsake.

At last when all her speeches she had spent, xlvi

And new occasion fayld her more to find,
She left him to his fortunes gouernment,
And backe returned with right heauie mind,
To Scudamour, who she had left behind,
With whom she went to seeke faire Amoret,
Her second care, though in another kind;
For vertues onely sake, which doth beget
True loue and faithfull friendship, she by her did set.

Backe to that desert forrest they retyred, xlvii

Where sorie Britomart had lost her late;
There they her sought, and euery where inquired,
Where they might tydings get of her estate;
Yet found they none. But by what haplesse fate,
Or hard misfortune she was thence conuayd,
And stolne away from her beloued mate,
 Were long to tell; therefore I here will stay
Vntill another tyde, that I it finish may.

FOOTNOTES:
[102] xvii 8 bathe 1609
[103] friend 1609
[104] xviii 8 strooke 1609
[105] xxiv 8 his om. 1609
[106] xxviii 6 He] Her 1596: Him conj. Upton
[107] certes 1596
[108] xxxi 5 withstand 1596
[109] xxxv 1 certes 1596
[110] xl 5 launc’t 1609
[111] xliv 4 in] on 1609
 Cant. VII.

Amoret rapt by greedie lust

Belphebe saues from dread,
The Squire her loues, and being blam’d
his dayes in dole[112] doth lead.

Great God of loue, that with thy cruell dart[113] i

Doest conquer greatest conquerors on ground,
And setst thy kingdome in the captiue harts
Of Kings and Keasars, to thy seruice bound,
What glorie, or what guerdon hast thou found
In feeble Ladies tyranning so sore;
And adding anguish to the bitter wound,
With which their liues thou lanchedst[114] long afore,
By heaping stormes of trouble on them daily more?

So whylome didst thou to faire Florimell; ii

And so and so to noble Britomart:
So doest thou now to her, of whom I tell,
The louely Amoret, whose gentle hart
Thou martyrest with sorow and with smart,
In saluage forrests, and in deserts wide,
With Beares and Tygers taking heauie part,
 Withouten comfort, and withouten guide,
That pittie is to heare the perils, which she tride.

So soone as she with that braue Britonesse iii

Had left that Turneyment for beauties prise,
They trauel’d long, that now for wearinesse,
Both of the way, and warlike exercise,
Both through a forest ryding did deuise
T’alight, and rest their wearie limbs awhile.
There heauie sleepe the eye-lids did surprise
Of Britomart after long tedious toyle,
That did her passed paines in quiet rest assoyle.

The whiles faire Amoret, of nought affeard, iv

Walkt through the wood, for pleasure, or for need;
When suddenly behind her backe she heard
One rushing forth out of the thickest weed,
That ere she backe could turne to taken heed,
Had vnawares her snatched vp from ground[115].
Feebly she shriekt, but so feebly indeed,
That Britomart heard not the shrilling sound,
There where through weary trauel she lay sleeping sound.

It was to weet a wilde and saluage man, v

Yet was no man, but onely like in shape,
And eke in stature higher by a span,
All ouergrowne with haire, that could awhape
An hardy hart, and his wide mouth did gape
With huge great teeth, like to a tusked Bore:
For he liu’d all on rauin and on rape
Of men and beasts; and fed on fleshly gore,
The signe whereof yet stain’d his bloudy lips afore.

His neather lip was not like man nor beast, vi

But like a wide deepe poke, downe hanging low,
In which he wont the relickes[116] of his feast,
And cruell spoyle, which he had spard, to stow:
 And ouer it his huge great nose did grow,
Full dreadfully empurpled all with bloud;
And downe both sides two wide long eares did glow,
And raught downe to his waste, when vp he stood,
More great then th’eares of Elephants by Indus flood.

His wast was with a wreath of yuie greene vii

Engirt about, ne other garment wore:
For all his haire was like a garment seene;
And in his hand a tall young oake he bore,
Whose knottie snags were sharpned all afore,
And beath’d in fire for steele to be in sted.
But whence he was, or of what wombe ybore,
Of beasts, or of the earth, I haue not red:
But certes was with milke of Wolues and Tygres fed.

This vgly creature in his armes her snatcht, viii

And through the forrest bore her quite away,
With briers and bushes all to rent and scratcht;
Ne care he had, ne pittie of the pray,
Which many a knight had sought so many a day.
He stayed not, but in his armes her bearing
Ran, till he came to th’end of all his way,
Vnto his caue farre from all peoples hearing,
And there he threw her in, nought feeling, ne nought fearing.

For she deare Ladie all the way was dead, ix

Whilest he in armes her bore; but when she felt
Her selfe downe soust, she waked out of dread
Streight into griefe, that her deare hart nigh swelt,
And eft gan into tender teares to melt.
Then when she lookt about, and nothing found
But darknesse and dread horrour, where she dwelt,
She almost fell againe into a swound,
Ne wist whether aboue she were, or vnder ground.

With that she heard some one close by her side x

Sighing and sobbing sore, as if the paine
 Her tender hart in peeces would diuide:
Which she long listning, softly askt againe
What mister wight it was that so did plaine?
To whom thus aunswer’d was: Ah wretched wight
That seekes to know anothers griefe in vaine,
Vnweeting of thine owne like haplesse plight:
Selfe to forget to mind another, is ouersight[117].

Aye me (said she) where am I, or with whom? xi

Emong the liuing, or emong the dead?
What shall of me vnhappy maid become?
Shall death be th’end, or ought else worse, aread.
Vnhappy mayd (then answerd she) whose dread
Vntride, is lesse then when thou shalt it try:
Death is to him, that wretched life doth lead,
Both grace and gaine; but he in hell doth lie,
That liues a loathed life, and wishing cannot die.

This dismall day hath thee a caytiue[118] made, xii

And vassall to the vilest wretch aliue,
Whose cursed vsage and vngodly trade
The heauens abhorre, and into darkenesse driue.
For on the spoile of women he doth liue,
Whose bodies chast, when euer in his powre
He may them catch, vnable to gainestriue,
He with his shamefull lust doth first deflowre,
And afterwards themselues doth cruelly deuoure.

Now twenty daies, by which the sonnes of men xiii

Diuide their works, haue past through heuen sheene,
Since I was brought into this dolefull[119] den;
During which space these sory eies haue seen
Seauen women by him slaine, and eaten clene.
And now no more for him but I alone,
And this old woman here remaining beene;
Till thou cam’st hither to augment our mone,
And of vs three to morrow he will sure eate one.
Ah dreadfull tidings which thou doest declare, xiv
(Quoth she) of all that euer hath bene knowen:
Full many great calamities and rare
This feeble brest endured hath, but none
Equall to this, where euer I haue gone.
But what are you, whom like vnlucky lot
Hath linckt with me in the same chaine attone?
To tell (quoth she) that which ye see, needs not;
A wofull wretched maid, of God and man forgot.

But what I was, it irkes me to reherse; xv

Daughter vnto a Lord of high degree;
That ioyd in happy peace, till fates peruerse
With guilefull loue did secretly agree,
To ouerthrow my state and dignitie.
It was my lot to loue a gentle swaine,
Yet was he but a Squire of low degree;
Yet was he meet, vnlesse mine eye did faine,
By any Ladies side for Leman to haue laine.

But for his meannesse and disparagement, xvi

My Sire, who me too dearely well did loue,
Vnto my choise by no meanes would assent,
But often did my folly fowle reproue.
Yet nothing could my fixed mind remoue,
But whether willed or nilled friend or foe,
I me resolu’d the vtmost end to proue,
And rather then my loue abandon so,
Both sire, and friends, and all for euer to forgo.

Thenceforth I sought by secret meanes to worke xvii

Time to my will, and from his wrathfull sight
To hide th’intent, which in my heart did lurke,
Till I thereto had all things ready dight.
So on a day vnweeting vnto wight,
I with that Squire agreede away to flit,
And in a priuy place, betwixt vs hight,
 Within a groue appointed him to meete;
To which I boldly came vpon my feeble feete.

But ah vnhappy houre me thither brought: xviii

For in that place where I him thought to find,
There was I found, contrary to my thought,
Of this accursed Carle of hellish kind,
The shame of men, and plague of womankind,
Who trussing me, as Eagle doth his pray,
Me hether[120] brought with him, as swift as wind,
Where yet vntouched till this present day,
I rest his wretched thrall, the sad Æmylia.

Ah sad Æmylia (then sayd Amoret,) xix

Thy ruefull plight I pitty as mine owne.
But read to me, by what deuise or wit,
Hast thou in all this time, from him vnknowne
Thine honor sau’d, though into thraldome throwne.
Through helpe (quoth she) of this old woman here
I haue so done, as she to me hath showne.
For euer when he burnt in lustfull fire,
She in my stead supplide his bestiall desire.

Thus of their euils as they did discourse, xx

And each did other much bewaile and mone;
Loe where the villaine selfe, their sorrowes sourse,
Came to the caue, and rolling thence the stone,
Which wont to stop the mouth thereof, that none
Might issue forth, came rudely rushing in,
And spredding ouer all the flore alone,
Gan dight him selfe vnto his wonted sinne;
Which ended, then his bloudy banket should beginne.

Which when as fearefull Amoret perceiued, xxi

She staid not the[121] vtmost end thereof to try,
But like a ghastly Gelt, whose wits are reaued,
Ran forth in hast with hideous outcry,
 For horrour of his shamefull villany.
But after her full lightly he vprose,
And her pursu’d as fast as she did flie:
Full fast she flies, and farre afore him goes,
Ne feeles the thorns and thickets pricke her tender toes.

Nor[122] hedge, nor ditch, nor hill, nor dale she staies, xxii
But ouerleapes them all, like Robucke light,
And through the thickest makes her nighest waies;
And euermore when with regardfull sight
She looking backe, espies that griesly wight
Approching nigh, she gins to mend her pace,
And makes her feare a spur to hast her flight:
More swift then Myrrh’ or Daphne in her race,
Or any of the Thracian Nimphes in saluage chase.

Long so she fled, and so he follow’d long; xxiii

Ne liuing aide for her on earth appeares,
But if the heauens helpe to redresse her wrong,
Moued with pity of her plenteous teares.
It fortuned Belphebe with her peares
The woody Nimphs, and with that louely boy,
Was hunting then the Libbards and the Beares,
In these wild woods, as was her wonted ioy,
To banish sloth, that oft doth noble mindes annoy.

It so befell, as oft it fals in chace, xxiv

That each of them from other sundred were,
And that same gentle Squire arriu’d in place,
Where this same cursed caytiue did appeare,
Pursuing that faire Lady full of feare,
And now he her quite ouertaken had;
And now he her away with him did beare
Vnder his arme, as seeming wondrous glad,
That by his grenning laughter mote farre off be rad.

Which[123] drery sight the gentle Squire espying, xxv

 Doth hast to crosse him by the nearest way,
Led with that wofull Ladies piteous crying,
And him assailes with all the might he may,
Yet will not he the louely spoile downe lay,
But with his craggy club in his right hand,
Defends him selfe, and saues his gotten pray.
Yet had it bene right hard him to withstand,
But that he was full light and nimble on the land.

Thereto the villaine vsed craft in fight; xxvi

For euer when the Squire his iauelin shooke,
He held the Lady forth before him right,
And with her body, as a buckler, broke
The puissance of his intended stroke.
And if it chaunst, (as needs it must in fight)
Whilest he on him was greedy to be wroke,
That any little blow on her did light,
Then would he laugh aloud, and gather great delight.

Which subtill sleight did him encumber much, xxvii

And made him oft, when he would strike, forbeare;
For hardly could he come the carle to touch,
But that he her must hurt, or hazard neare:
Yet he his hand so carefully did beare,
That at the last he did himselfe attaine,
And therein left the pike head of his speare.
A streame of coleblacke bloud thence gusht amaine,
That all her silken garments did with bloud bestaine.

With that he threw her rudely on the flore, xxviii

And laying both his hands vpon his glaue,
With dreadfull strokes let driue at him so sore,
That forst him flie abacke, himselfe to saue:
Yet he therewith so felly still did raue,
That scarse the Squire his hand could once vpreare,
But for aduantage ground vnto him gaue,
Tracing and trauersing, now here, now there;
For bootlesse thing it was to think such blowes to beare.

Whilest thus in battell they embusied were, xxix

Belphebe raunging in that forrest wide,
The hideous noise of their huge strokes did heare,
And drew thereto, making her eare her guide.
Whom when that theefe approching nigh espide,
With bow in hand, and arrowes ready bent,
He by his former combate would not bide,
But fled away with ghastly dreriment,
Well knowing her to be his deaths sole instrument.

Whom seeing flie, she speedily poursewed xxx

With winged feete, as nimble as the winde,
And euer in her bow she ready shewed[124]
The arrow, to his deadly marke desynde.
As when Latonaes daughter cruell kynde,
In vengement of her mothers great disgrace,
With fell despight her cruell arrowes tynde
Gainst wofull Niobes vnhappy race,
That all the gods did mone her miserable case.

So well she sped her and so far she ventred, xxxi

That ere vnto his hellish den he raught,
Euen as he ready was there to haue entred,
She sent an arrow forth with mighty draught,
That in the very dore him ouercaught,
And in his nape arriuing, through it thrild
His greedy throte, therewith in two distraught,
That all his vitall spirites thereby spild,
And all his hairy brest with gory bloud was fild.

Whom when on ground she groueling saw to rowle, xxxii

She ran in hast his life to haue bereft:
But ere she could him reach, the sinfull sowle
Hauing his carrion corse quite sencelesse left,
Was fled to hell, surcharg’d with spoile and theft.
 Yet ouer him she there long gazing stood,
And oft admir’d his monstrous shape, and oft
His mighty limbs, whilest all with filthy bloud
The place there ouerflowne, seemd like a sodaine flood.

Thence forth[125] she past into his dreadfull den, xxxiii

Where nought but darkesome drerinesse she found,
Ne creature saw, but hearkned now and then
Some litle whispering, and soft groning sound.
With that she askt, what ghosts there vnder ground
Lay hid in horrour of eternall night?
And bad them, if so be they were not bound,
To come and shew themselues before the light,
Now freed from feare and danger of that dismall wight.

Then forth the sad[126] Æmylia issewed, xxxiv

Yet trembling euery ioynt through former feare;
And after her the Hag, there with her mewed,
A foule and lothsome creature did appeare;
A leman fit for such a louer deare.
That mou’d Belphebe her no lesse to hate,
Then for to rue the others heauy cheare;
Of whom she gan enquire of her estate.
Who all to her at large, as hapned, did relate.

Thence she them brought toward the place, where late xxxv
She left the gentle Squire with Amoret:
There she him found by that new louely mate,
Who lay the whiles in swoune, full sadly set,
From her faire eyes wiping the deawy wet,
Which softly stild, and kissing them atweene,
And handling soft the hurts, which she did get.
For of that Carle she sorely bruz’d had beene,
Als of his owne rash hand one wound was to be seene.

Which when she saw, with sodaine glauncing eye, xxxvi

Her noble heart with sight thereof was fild
 With deepe disdaine, and great indignity,
That in her wrath she thought them both haue thrild,
With that selfe arrow, which the Carle had kild:
Yet held her wrathfull hand from vengeance sore,
But drawing nigh, ere he her well beheld;
Is this the faith,[127] she said, and said no more,
But turnd her face, and fled away for euermore.

He seeing her depart, arose vp light, xxxvii

Right sore agrieued at her sharpe reproofe,
And follow’d fast: but when he came in sight,
He durst not nigh approch, but kept aloofe,
For dread of her displeasures vtmost proofe.
And euermore, when he did grace entreat,
And framed speaches fit for his behoofe,
Her mortall arrowes[128] she at him did threat,
And forst him backe with fowle dishonor to retreat.

At last when long he follow’d had in vaine, xxxviii

Yet found no ease of griefe, nor hope of grace,
Vnto those woods he turned backe againe,
Full of sad anguish, and in heauy case:
And finding there fit solitary place
For wofull wight, chose out a gloomy glade,
Where hardly eye mote see bright heauens face,
For mossy trees, which couered all with shade
And sad melancholy:[129] there he his cabin made.

His wonted warlike weapons all he broke, xxxix

And threw away, with vow to vse no more,
Ne thenceforth euer strike in battell stroke,
Ne euer word to speake to woman more;
But in that wildernesse, of men forlore,
And of the wicked world forgotten quight,
His hard mishap in dolor to deplore,
And wast his wretched daies in wofull plight;
So on him selfe to wreake his follies owne despight.
And eke his garment, to be thereto meet, xl
He wilfully did cut and shape anew;
And his faire lockes, that wont with ointment sweet
To be embaulm’d, and sweat out dainty dew,
He let to grow and griesly to concrew,
Vncomb’d, vncurl’d, and carelesly vnshed;
That in short time his face they ouergrew,
And ouer all his shoulders did dispred,
That who he whilome was, vneath was to be red.

There he continued in this carefull plight, xli

Wretchedly wearing out his youthly yeares,
Through wilfull penury consumed quight,
That like a pined ghost he soone appeares.
For other food then that wilde forrest beares,
Ne other drinke there did he euer[130] tast,
Then running water, tempred with his teares,
The more his weakened body so to wast:
That out of all mens knowledge he was worne at last.

For on a day, by fortune as it fell, xlii

His owne deare Lord Prince Arthure came that way,
Seeking aduentures, where he mote heare tell;
And as he through the wandring wood did stray,
Hauing espide this Cabin far away,
He to it drew, to weet who there did wonne;
Weening therein some holy Hermit lay,
That did resort of sinfull people shonne;
Or else some woodman shrowded there from scorching sunne.

Arriuing there, he found this wretched man, xliii

Spending his daies in dolour and despaire,
And through long fasting woxen pale and wan,
All ouergrowen with rude and rugged haire;
That albeit his owne deare Squire he were,
Yet he him knew not, ne auiz’d at all,
But like strange wight, whom he had seene no where,
 Saluting him, gan into speach to fall,
And pitty much his plight, that liu’d like outcast thrall.

But to his speach he aunswered no whit, xliv

But stood still mute, as if he had beene dum,
Ne signe of sence did shew, ne common wit,
As one with griefe and anguishe ouercum,
And vnto euery thing did aunswere mum:
And euer when the Prince vnto him spake,
He louted lowly, as did him becum,
And humble homage did vnto him make,
Midst sorrow shewing ioyous semblance for his sake.

At which his vncouth guise and vsage quaint xlv

The Prince did wonder much, yet could not ghesse
The cause of that his sorrowfull constraint;
Yet weend by secret signes of manlinesse,
Which close appeard in that rude brutishnesse,
That he whilome some gentle swaine had beene,
Traind vp in feats of armes and knightlinesse;
Which he obseru’d, by that he him had seene
To weld[131] his naked sword, and try the edges keene.

And eke by that he saw on euery tree, xlvi

How he the name of one engrauen had,
Which likly[132] was his liefest loue to be,
For whom he now so sorely was bestad;
Which was by him BELPHEBE rightly rad.
Yet who was that Belphebe, he ne wist;
Yet saw he often how he wexed glad,
When he it heard, and how the ground he kist,
Wherein it written was, and how himselfe he blist:

Tho when he long had marked his demeanor, xlvii

And saw that all he said and did, was vaine,
Ne ought mote make him change his wonted tenor,
Ne ought mote ease or mitigate his paine,
 He left him there in languor to remaine,
Till time for him should remedy prouide,
And him restore to former grace againe.
Which for it is too long here to abide,
I will deferre the end vntill another tide.

FOOTNOTES:
[112] Arg. 4 doole 1609
[113] i 1 darts 1609
[114] 8 launcedst 1609
[115] iv 6 snatcht vp from the ground 1609
[116] vi 3 reliques 1609
[117] x 9 ore-sight 1609
[118] xii 1 captiue Collier &c.
[119] xiii 3 doolefull 1609
[120] xviii 7 hither 1609
[121] xxi 2 th’ 1609
[122] xxii 1 Nor] For Collier
[123] xxv 1 Which] With 1596
[124] xxx 3 shewed, 1596
[125] xxxiii 1 Thenceforth 1596
[126] xxxiv 1 sad] said 1596
[127] xxxvi 8 faith 1596
[128] xxxvii 8 arrowes, 1596
[129] xxxviii 9 melancholy, 1596
[130] xli 6 neuer 1609
[131] xlv 9 wield 1609
[132] xlvi 3 likely 1609
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