A CRITICAL EDITION OF JEREMY TAYLOR'S HOLY LIVING (1650) by AALI AREEFUR REHMAN B.A. , The University of Rajshahi, 1972 M.A., The University of Rajshahi, 1973 M.A., The University of Birmingham, 1979 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA FEBRUARY 1984 (7)Aali Areefur Rehman, 1984 In presenting t h i s thesis i n p a r t i a l fu l f i l m e n t of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of B r i t i s h Columbia, I agree that the Library s h a l l make i t f r e e l y a v a i l a b l e for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of t h i s thes i s fo r scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It i s understood that copying or publi c a t i o n of t h i s th e s i s for f i n a n c i a l gain s h a l l not be allowed without my written permission. Department of English The University of B r i t i s h Columbia 1956 Main Mall Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Y3 Date 12 May, 1984 i i ABSTRACT This dissertation presents a c r i t i c a l , old spelling edition of Jeremy Taylor's The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650). As no manuscript is extant, the text has been prepared from a collation of the f i r s t eight editions of the book that had appeared by 1668, a year after Taylor's death. The collation has shown that only the f i r s t edition of the book was set from manuscript and that Taylor made some revisions and corrections in four of the later editions. The second, fourth, sixth, and seventh editions contain alterations that range from the addition of paragraph-length passages to the correction of a few words. The text presented here has been prepared according to the principles formulated by Sir Walter Greg and Fredson Bowers. The f i r s t edition has been chosen as the copy-text and al l authorial alterations in later editions have been incorporated into the text. Autograph revisions and annotations that appear in presentation copies of the f i r s t and f i f th editions (now in the Libraries of the University of Northern I l l ino i s and King's College, Cambridge) have also been included. The text is accompanied by an introduction and a commentary. The introduction includes a short l i f e of the author and a discussion of the tradition of devotional literature and of Holy Living. The commentary provides glosses, identifies sources, and gives translations of Taylor's Latin, Greek and Italian marginal notes. The textual apparatus consists of an introduction and two schedules. The introduction deals with the printing histoVy and the transmission of the text. Textual notes appear in the f i r s t schedule and emendations of accidentals in the second. i i i CONTENTS I. CRITICAL INTRODUCTION Taylor's Life and Major Works v The Tradition of Devotional Literature xvi Holy Living xiv Taylor's Use of Religious and Clasical Literature xliv Style 1 vi The Reception of Taylor's Works, with Special Reference to Holy Living . 1 xi Notes lxi II. TEXTUAL INTRODUCTION The First Edition lxi The Transmision of the Text lxvi i The Present Edition xcv Notes xcvi Sigla and Abreviations c Bibliographical Description of Editions Colated ci I. THE TEXT 1 IV. TAYLOR'S NOTES 46 V. TEXTUAL NOTES 51 VI. EMENDATION OF ACIDENTALS 524 VI. COMENTARY 529 VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY 613 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I am grateful to Dr. Gemot Wieland of the Department of English, Dr. Elizabeth Bongie of the Department of Classics, and Dr. Sylvana Carr of the Department of Italian and Hispanic Studies for their help in translating Taylor's Latin, Greek and Italian notes. To Dr. Harry Edinger of the Department of Classics, who typed the Greek passages in the text and notes, I am especially grateful. My thanks are also due to Dr. Tirthankar Bose for h/is many acts of assistance. To my supervisor, Dr. Paul G. Stanwood, I am deeply indebted for advice and help at every stage in the preparation of this dissertation. I am grateful, most of a l l , to my wife Anu, for her help and her never-failing patience and constant encouragement. My daughter, Sameen, helped by lightening my dissertation-dark days. V TAYLOR'S LIFE AND MAJOR WORKS Of Jeremy Taylor's early l i f e , as indeed of large parts of his later l i f e , very l i t t l e is known. He was born in Cambridge, the fourth child of a barber named Nathaniel Taylor and his wife, Mary. The exact date of Taylor's birth is not known but he was baptized on 15 August, 1613 and this has tradit ional ly been supposed to be the year of his bir th . Nathaniel Taylor, though poor, belonged to a respectable lower middle class family. Both he and his father, Edmund Taylor, had been churchwardens in Cambridge. Nathaniel Taylor was also a man of some education. His son was later to say, according to a tradit ion, though not a very trustworthy one, that he had been "solely grounded . . . in grammar and the mathematics" by his father. 1 In 1619, at the age of six, Taylor was sent to a free grammar school in Cambridge that had been founded a year earl ier under the wil l of Dr. Stephen Perse, Fellow of Caius College, who had died in 1615. After spending seven years at the Perse School, Taylor was admitted, in 1626, as a sizar or "poor scholar" to Gonville and Caius College. At Caius, too, the Perse foundation provided him with the means to continue his education. He became a Perse Scholar in 1628 and, after taking his B.A. three years later, was elected a Perse Fellow in 1633. In the same year, when he was twenty, he is said to have been ordained, though the exact date is unknown. In 1634 he was made a Reader in Rhetoric at his College and was awarded the M.A. Beyond the dates and a few details such as these, very l i t t l e information has been unearthed about Taylor's nine years in Caius College. He was in Cambridge when some of the seventeenth century's most famous literary figures were there. Milton, Fuller , Crashaw and George Herbert vi were al l at Cambridge during these years, but nothing remains, either as oral tradition or written allusion, to show that Taylor knew any of these men at this time or later. But another contemporary, Henry More, was Taylor's friend in later l i f e and i t is possible that they became acquainted while at Cambridge. He also may have known George Rust, who became Dean of Connor when Taylor was Bishop and, upon Taylor's death, Bishop of Dromore. It was Rust who delivered the sermon at Taylor's funeral, a sermon to which we are indebted for some interesting details of Taylor's early career. In 1634 there occurred the event that was to change Taylor's l i f e . After his appointment as Reader, he had been sharing rooms at College with a Reverend Thomas Risden who was engaged as a preacher at St. Paul's . On one occasion Risden, unable to go up to London for some reason, asked Taylor to take his place. Taylor did, and preached a number of sermons at St. Paul's . He preached, according to Rust, "to the admiration and astonishment of his auditory; and by his f lor id and youthful beauty, and sweet and pleasant a i r , and sublime and raised discourses, he made his hearers take 3 him for some young angel newly descended from the visions of glory." Rust may be pardoned this extravagant eulogy on his friend, but we may take i t that Taylor charmed and exceedingly impressed the worshippers at Paul's . His name was mentioned to William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury and, at this time, the most powerful man in the realm next to the King. Laud was interested enough in the twenty-two year old Taylor to arrange to have him preach before him. Laud heard Taylor, again according to Rust, "not less to his wonder than satisfaction" but thought the preacher too young. Taylor asked to be pardoned "that fault" and promised that " i f he lived he would 4 mend i t . " This interview was suff icient, i t appears, for Laud to become his patron. v i i Taylor did not return to Cambridge after this event, but spent the next two years under the protection and guidance of Laud. Almost nothing is known for certain about how he spent this time, or of his movements, until he was incorporated an M.A. at University College, Oxford in 1635. Soon after, he was recommended by Laud for a Fellowship at Al l Souls College, but his election was opposed by Gilbert Sheldon, Warden of the College. Laud was Visitor of Al l Souls, so in January 1636, exercising his Vis i tor ' s right , he appointed Taylor to the Fellowship. At this point in his l i f e Taylor seemed to be well settled with al l the advantages that a man of letters and a promising young clergyman might wish. In 1638 he was presented, possibly upon Laud's recommendation, to the rectory of Uppingham in Rutland by Bishop Juxon of London. He was also, at some time during this period, made a chaplain to Laud. These additional duties made frequent and lengthy absences from Al l Souls a necessity, and in al l probability Taylor did not spend much time at Oxford. Uppingham may have been his principal place of residence, but i t is more probable that he was frequently in London, at Lambeth with his patron. The care of his living was for the most part left to his curate. As l i t t l e is known about his Oxford days as about his l i f e at Cambridge. According to Anthony a Wood, i t was here that Taylor turned his 5 attention to casuistry and sharpened his s k i l l s in that art. He also became acquainted, i t would appear, with William Chillingworth, Laud's Godson, who had published The Religion of Protestants in 1637. One acquaintance caused him much trouble at this time and later. This was a Franciscan fr ia r who was known as Francis a Sancta Clara but whose real name was Christopher Davenport. He was a Catholic convert from Protestantism, had been to Douay where he had taken the degree of doctor of divinity and, vi i i after wandering in Spain and the Netherlands, had returned to England as a missionary. Soon after his return he was appointed one of Queen Henrietta Maria's chaplains. Sancta Clara, according to Wood, was extremely learned and a man of moderation. One of his books, entitled Deus, Natura, Gratia, had been put on the Index Expurgationis in Spain and Italy for being too conciliatory in tone towards Protestantism. With this man Taylor was, while he was at Oxford, on terms of close friendship. His intimacy with a "Romish priest" was enough to create, and sustain, a suspicion of Catholic leanings in him, a suspicion that he later took great pains to seek to dispel . In the f i r s t of his writings to survive, the "Sermon Preached upon the Anniversary of the Gunpowder Treason" delivered at Oxford on November 5, 1638, Taylor went out of his way to show his anti-Romanist views and prove himself an Anglican. In doing so he gave much offence to Catholics, but succeeded in showing the world clearly where his true loyalties lay. Soon after obtaining his living of Uppingham, he had been appointed a chaplain to Charles I. In the following year, on May 27, 1639, he was married at Uppingham to Phoebe Landisdale or Langsdale, probably the sister of Edward Langsdale, one of Taylor's former pupils at Cambridge. Beyond the name of Taylor's wife, l i t t l e of his domestic l i f e at Uppingham is known except that, according to the parish register, they buried a son William in May 1642. Taylor spent a few months more than three years at Uppingham. When we next see him he is at Oxford with the King in November, 1642 at the beginning of the most d i f f i cu l t period of his l i f e . For by this time the "great storm" of seventeenth-century England had f ina l ly broken, Laud was in the Tower, and King and Parliament were at war. When he joined the King, probably at Nottingham where Charles had raised his standard, Taylor had ix with him the manuscript of his f i r s t book, Of the Sacred Order and Offices of Episcopacy, which he had been working on at Uppingham. Read by Charles even before its publication, i t pleased the King so much that, by royal command, Taylor was made doctor of d iv ini ty at Oxford. He had wanted to dedicate the book to the King, but Charles, though pleased with i t , would not let Taylor dedicate i t to him. So i t was that when the book was published in the same year i t was dedicated to Christopher Hatton, who subsequently became Taylor's patron as wel as his friend. Episcopacy Asserted, as the book is known, was Taylor's contribution to the Anglican-Puritan religious quarrels that had been raging in England and feeding the printing presses of the time. Defending episcopacy, the book was part of the Anglican rejoinder to such works as Milton's tracts against the bishops, "Of Reformation in England" and "Of Prelatical Episcopacy" (1641) among others. Modern commentators see l i t t l e to praise in the book; most find the style colourless and the overuse of quotation tedious. While Taylor was with the King in 1642-3, the Parliamentarians - sequestered his l iving of Uppingham and gave i t to a Presbyterian. In compensation for this loss, the King gave him, in early 1643, the l iv ing of Overstone in Northamptonshire, though Taylor may never have resided there. How long Taylor stayed at Oxford is not known, but at some time in the next two years, during which the Civ i l War took its course, he went to Wales. His name next crops up in connection with the struggle between the Royalist and Parliamentary forces for the possession of Cardigan Castle. Anthony Wood mentions that Taylor had been made chaplain in the King's army at Oxford,^ and i t may have been while acting as chaplain that he was ' captured in February 1645 when Cardigan Castle was taken by Parliamentary forces under Rowland Laugharne. He was probably held prisoner there until