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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2020
The Christian Cabala, a Christianised version of Jewish mysticism originating in Renaissance Italy, reached England in the early sixteenth century and was met with a variety of responses from English Catholics in the Reformation period. While ‘cabala’ was used as a slur by both Protestant and Catholic polemicists, Robert Persons drew positively from the work of the Italian cabalist Pietro Galatino, and in 1597 Sir Thomas Tresham, then a prisoner at Ely, described in detail a complex cabalistic design to decorate a window. While the Christian Cabala was only one source of inspiration for Tresham, he was sufficiently confident in his cabalistic knowledge to attempt manipulations of names of God in his designs for the window at Ely and to insert measurements of cabalistic significance in the gardens on his Lyveden estate. Persons’s and Tresham’s willingness to draw on Christian cabalism even after its papal condemnation suggests the intellectual independence of English Catholics, who were prepared to make use of esoteric traditions to bolster their faith. The evidence for experiments with cabalism by a few English Catholics highlights the need for further re-evaluation of the significance of esoteric traditions within the English Counter-Reformation and the eclectic nature of post-Reformation English Catholic mysticism.
This article is based on a paper entitled ‘Esoteric Recusancy in the Elizabethan Age: The Occult Architecture of Sir Thomas Tresham’, which I delivered at the ‘Visions of Enchantment’ conference at the University of Cambridge on 18 March 2014.
1 In this article I use the Latinised spelling ‘Cabala’ to refer to the Christian tradition of interpreting the Hebrew Kabbalah (which was often only tenuously related to the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah), and ‘Kabbalah’ to refer to the tradition as practised within Judaism.
2 Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 62–63, 170.
3 Alexandra Walsham, ‘Miracles and the Counter Reformation Mission to England’, The Historical Journal 46 (2003): 779–815; Francis Young, English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 38–40, 157–62; Francis Young, Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 87–118; Liam P. Temple, Mysticism in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2019), 19–44.
4 The British Library, London (hereafter BL) MS Add. 39831, fols 5r–13r.
5 David S. Katz, ‘Christian and Jew in Early Modern English Perspective’, Jewish History 8 (1994): 55–72, at 59.
6 Godfrey Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden: A Recusant Family (Newport: R. H. Johns, 1953), 277.
7 Paula Henderson, ‘Clinging to the Past: Medievalism in the English “Renaissance” Garden’ in Alexander Samson, ed. Locus Amoenus: Gardens and Horticulture in the Renaissance (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 42–69 at 64.
8 Temple, Mysticism in Early Modern England, 25–32.
9 On the Christian Cabala see Joseph Leon Blau, The Christian Interpretation of Cabala in the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944); Werner L. Gundersheimer, ‘Erasmus, Humanism, and the Christian Cabala’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1963): 38–52; François Secret, Les kabbalistes chrétiens de la Renaissance (Paris: Dunod, 1964); Moshe Idel, ‘The Magical and Neoplatonic Interpretation of the Kabbalah in the Renaissance,’ in B. D. Cooperman, ed. Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 186–242; W. K. Percival, ‘The Reception of Hebrew in Sixteenth-Century Europe: the impact of the Cabala’, Historiographia Linguistica 11 (1984): 21–38; J. Dan, ed. The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books and their Christian Interpreters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, 1997); Philip Beitchmann, Alchemy of the Word: Cabala of the Renaissance (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998); Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Geshichte der christlichen Kabbala (Stuttgart: Fromann Holzboog, 2012–15), 4 vols; Peter J. Forshaw, ‘Christian Kabbalah’ in Glenn A. Magee, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 143–55.
10 For an early instance of the political use of the word see BL MS Cotton Caligula E. vii, fol. 174v, William Herle to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 18 May 1580: ‘… he had his secret cabala … to undermyne your estate’.
11 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1995), 100.
12 Brian Copenhaver and Daniel Stein Kokin, ‘Egidio da Viterbo’s Book on Hebrew Letters: Christian Kabbalah in Papal Rome’, Renaissance Quarterly 67 (2014): 1–42.
13 Katz, ‘Christian and Jew’, 58.
14 Gareth Lloyd Jones, The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 168.
15 Ibid., 168–74.
16 ‘apud Britannos longe aliud occultissimum quoddam tunc agebam negotium’; quoted in M. Van der Poel, Cornelius Agrippa: The Humanist Theologian and his Declamations (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 20.
17 On Agrippa’s dispute with Catilinet see Van der Poel, Cornelius Agrippa, 18–21.
18 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Henrici Cornelii Agrippae Expostulatio super expositione sua in librum de verbo mirifico cum Ioanne Catilineti fratrum Franciscanorum in Opera (Lyon, 1530), 2:508–12.
19 Gundesheimer, ‘Erasmus, Humanism and the Christian Cabala’, 44.
20 Lloyd Jones, Discovery of Hebrew, 97.
21 John Fisher, The sermon of Ioh[a]n the bysshop of Rochester made agayn the p[er]nicious doctryn of Martin luther (London, 1521), unpaginated.
22 Ibid.
23 On English Protestant interest in the Cabala see Lloyd Jones, Discovery of Hebrew, 168–74; Deborah Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 157–94.
24 Katz, ‘Christian and Jew’, 58.
25 Vaughan Hart, Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts (London: Routledge, 1994), 48.
26 Ibid., 148.
27 Ibid., 55.
28 Jonathan Willis, The Reformation of the Decalogue: Religious Identity and the Ten Commandments in England, c. 1495–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 53–5.
29 P. J. Klemp, ‘Numerology and English Renaissance Literature: Twentieth Century Studies’, Bulletin of Bibliography 40 (1983): 231–41; Colin B. Anderson and Jo B. Atkinson, ‘Anne Wheathill’s A Handfull of Holesome (though Homelie) Hearbs (1584): The First English Gentlewoman’s Prayer Book’, The Sixteenth Century Journal (hereafter SCJ) 27:3 (1996): 659–72 at 669–72; Colin B. Anderson and Jo B. Atkinson, ‘Numerical Patterning in Anne Wheathill’s A Handfull of Holesome (though Homelie) Hearbs (1584)’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40:1 (1998): 1–25.
30 Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 48–50.
31 Lloyd Jones, Discovery of Hebrew, 151.
32 Gregory Martin, trans., The Nevv Testament of Iesus Christ, translated faithfully into English, out of the authentical Latin (Rheims, 1582), 565–6.
33 Robert Persons, A Christian directorie guiding men to their saluation (Rouen, 1585), 208.
34 Willem F. Smelik, Rabbis, Language and Translation in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 454–63.
35 Johann Reuchlin, De arte Cabalistica (Hagenau, 1517), sig. Oiiir: … ubi ad quaestione[m] Antonini Romani de sacrosanctis no[min]ibus r[espo]ndit Rab Hakados q[uo]d ex tetragra[m]mato fluit nome[n] xii literar[um] … pater filius & sp[irit]us sanct[us]. Ex q[u]o derivate[ur] nomen quadragi[n]ta duaru[m] literaru[m] q[u]od ita p[ro]nu[n]ciat[ur] … Pater deus, filius deus, spirit[us] sanctus deus, tres in uno & unus in tribus. The same passage is also found in Pietro Galatino, Opus de arcanis catholicae veritatis (Basel, 1550), 89.
36 Galatino, Opus, 542: Rabbenu Hakados … in tertia eius libri petitione, qui … Gale razeya, id est, Reuelator arcanorum inscribitur, ab Antonino urbis Romae consule interrogatus. Quae sit prophetissa illa de qua Isaias meminit, cum dixit octauo capite, Et accessi ad prophetissam, & concepit & peperit filium. Ita respondit, Saepe numero in hac quaestione suspensus fui & anxius … Haec prophetissa est mater Regis Messię … Ipsa est omnium prophetarum domina & magistra.
37 M. Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 442–7; Robert J. Wilkinson, Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: the first printing of the Syriac New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 58–61.
38 Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 199–200.
39 Wilkinson, Orientalism, 73, 115.
40 Mayer, Reginald Pole, 285.
41 Estote ergo prudentes sicut serpentes, et simplices sicut columbae (Matthew 10:16).
42 John Edwards, Archbishop Pole (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 241.
43 Marsha K. Schuchard, Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Jewish Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 245.
44 Mark Girouard, Rushton Triangular Lodge (London: English Heritage, 2004), 13–14.
45 Noah’s flood.
46 BL MS Add. 39831, fol. 10v.
47 BL MSS Add. 39828–39838.
48 Bodleian MS Eng. Th. b. 1–2. The case that the Brudenell Manuscript forms part of Tresham’s corpus is made by Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005), 13–14.
49 Sandeep Kaushik, ‘Resistance, Loyalty and Recusant Politics’, Midland History 21:1 (1996): 37–72, at 48.
50 Mary E. Hazard, Elizabethan Silent Language (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 139.
51 Mark Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall, 1540–1640 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 218–39; Girouard, Rushton Triangular Lodge; Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription, 138–40.
52 Kristen Fairey, ‘Tres testimonium dant: Resurrecting the Hawkfield Lodge at Rushton as Part of Sir Thomas Tresham’s Architectural Testament’, Architectural History 58 (2015), 55–82 at 76–8.
53 Lucy Gent, ‘Elizabethan Architecture: A View from Rhetoric’, Elizabethan Architecture 57 (2014): 73–108, at 73–80; Susan M. Cogan, ‘Building the Badge of God: Architectural Representations of Persecution and Coexistence in Post-Reformation England’, Archiv für Reformationgeschichte 107 (2016): 165–92.
54 Katie McKeogh, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham (1543–1605) and Early Modern Catholic Culture and Identity, 1580–1610’ (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2017), 189–91.
55 Alastair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).
56 See John Summerson, ‘Three Elizabethan Architects’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 40 (1957), 202–28 at 218–19; Gyles Isham, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham and his Buildings’, Reports and Papers of the Northamptonshire Antiquarian Society 65:2 (1966): 1–37; Malcolm Airs, The Making of the English Country House, 1500–1640 (London: Architectural Press, 1975), 5–6, 14.
57 Kilroy, Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life, 381 n.189.
58 Andrew Eburne, ‘The Passion of Sir Thomas Tresham: New Light on the Gardens and Lodge at Lyveden’, Garden History 36 (2008): 114–34.
59 Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription, 136–8; Gerard Kilroy, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham: his emblem’, Emblematica 17 (2009): 149–79.
60 Schuchard, Restoring the Temple of Vision, 244–46.
61 Nicholas Barker and David Quentin, The Library of Thomas Tresham and Thomas Brudenell (London: Roxburghe Club, 2006), 384, no. 1509.
62 Schuchard, Restoring the Temple of Vision, 244–46.
63 P. Renold, ed. The Wisbech Stirs, 1595–1598 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1958), 255.
64 For a discussion of concerns about ‘atheism’ and its meaning in early modern England see Kenneth Sheppard, Anti-Atheism in Early Modern England 1580–1720: The Atheist Answered and His Error Confuted (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 14–40.
65 Barker and Quentin, Library of Thomas Tresham, 113–5.
66 J. Peter Zetterburg, ‘The Mistaking of “the Mathematicks” for Magic in Tudor and Stuart England’, SCJ 11 (1980): 83–97.
67 BL MS Add. 39828, fols 143r–v.
68 Mordechai Feingold, ‘The Occult Tradition in the English Universities of the Renaissance: A Reassessment’ in Brian Vickers, ed. Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 73–94 at 81–2.
69 Francis Young, ‘The Bishop’s Palace at Ely as a Prison for Recusants’, Recusant History (hereafter RH) 32 (2014): 195–216, at 206–10.
70 Lisa McClain, ‘Without Church, Cathedral, or Shrine: the search for religious space among Catholics in England, 1559–1625’, SCJ 33 (2002): 381–99, at 391.
71 BL MS Add. 39831, fol. 5r.
72 Roberta Albrecht, The Virgin Mary as Alchemical and Lullian Reference in Donne (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2005), 41.
73 Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription, 124–5.
74 The edge of the manuscript is damaged and the reading ‘sence’ is here conjectured from ‘senc-’.
75 BL MS Add. 39831, fol. 5v.
76 Barker and Quentin, Library of Thomas Tresham, 237 nos 345–6.
77 Ibid., 340 no. 1149, 283 no. 707.
78 Ibid., 379, nos 1453–6.
79 Ibid., 194, nos 15–16.
80 Ibid., 292, no. 775.
81 Wilkinson, Orientalism, 42–3.
82 Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription, 126–32.
83 Young, ‘The Bishop’s Palace at Ely’, 204–8.
84 The book was Robert Persons, A Booke of Christian Exercise, appertaining to resolution (London, 1584). Tresham’s copy still survives in the library at Deene Park. Barker and Quentin, Library of Thomas Tresham, 366, no. 1355.
85 BL MS Add. 39831, fol. 13v.
86 David Stocker and Margarita Stocker, ‘Sacred Profanity: The Theology of Rabbit Breeding and the Symbolic Landscape of the Warren’, World Archaeology 28 (1996): 265–72.
87 Ibid., 270.
88 Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription, 140.
89 Lloyd Jones, Discovery of Hebrew, 180.
90 BL MS Add. 39831, fol. 7r.
91 Vidit ecce candelabrum aureum totum et lampas ejus super caput ipsius et septem lucernæ ejus super illud et septem in fusoria lucernis quæ erant super caput ejus. McKeogh, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham’, 189–90.
92 Joe Jarrett, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham’s Elements of Geometrie’, Notes and Queries 61 (2014): 214–16.
93 BL MS Add. 39828, fols 143r–v, discussed in McKeogh, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham’, 78–9.
94 Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels, 162–5.
95 Barker and Quentin, Library of Thomas Tresham, 50: T[homae] Tresami et amicorum. Credo. sobrie, iuste, pie. Verbum crucis pereuntibus stultitia est. mihi absit gloriari nisi in cruce. T[homas] T[resham] eli[ensi] 1597.
96 Verbum autem crucis pereuntibus stultitia est. Mihi autem absit gloriari nisi in cruce.
97 Eburne, ‘Passion of Sir Thomas Tresham’, 129.
98 Christopher I. Lehrich, The Language of Angels and Demons: Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 158. On the pentagrammaton, see also Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘History and Prehistory of the Cabala of JHSUH’, in Giovanni Busi, ed. Hebrew to Latin, Latin to Hebrew: The Mirroring of Two Cultures in the Age of Humanism (Berlin/Turin: Nino Aragno, 2006), 223–41.
99 David H. Price, ‘Christian Humanism and the Representation of Judaism: Johannes Reuchlin and the Discovery of Hebrew’, Arthuriana 19 (2009): 80–96, at 83.
100 BL MS Add. 39831, fol. 24r: iod, he, van, he. Nomen quadrilator[e]m [sic. for quadrilitterarum?], id est Tetragrammaton (illud magnum nomen dei) attributum filio … ut filius procedit a patre, sic et nomen eius a patre producatur.
101 BL MS Add. 39831, fol. 9r.
102 Galatino, Opus, 169: Hinc dixit R. Iohanan. Scriptum est Iob 25. Fecit pacem in sublimibus suis. Firmamentum enim est de aqua, & stellae de igne, non tamen dirumpunt se alterutrum.
103 Yates, Occult Philosophy, 27. On the other hand, Tresham continued to use distinctively Scholastic terminology in his notes, for example BL MS Add. 39831, fol. 5v: ‘SUM being the most appropriate name to God, implying necessitas essendi, eternitas et immutabilitas.’
104 Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 10.
105 BL MS Add. 39831, fol. 6v.
106 Galatino, Opus, 136.
107 Galatino, Opus, 70–4; BL MS Add. 39831, fol. 31r.
108 For Tresham’s notes on gematria from Galatino see BL MS Add. 39831, fol. 31v.
109 BL Add. MS 39831, fol. 9r.
110 Galatino, Opus, 483.
111 Kilroy, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham’, 154.
112 Young, ‘The Bishop’s Palace at Ely’, 210.
113 Richard L. Williams, ‘Forbidden Sacred Spaces in Reformation England’, in A. Spicer and S. Hamilton, eds. Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005), 95–114, at 108.
114 See BL MS Add. 39828, fol. 291r on Lyveden’s Doric frieze and BL MS Add. 39829, fols 47v and 48v on the construction of the Triangular Lodge.
115 Geoffrey Holt, ‘Two Seventeenth Century Hebrew Scholars: Thomas Fairfax and Edward Slaughter’, RH 22 (1995): 482–500.
116 William Alabaster, Apparatus in revelationem Jesu Christi (Antwerp: Arnold Conincx, 1607); Robert V. Caro, ‘William Alabaster: Rhetor, Mediator, Devotional Poet’, RH 19 (1988): 62–79, 155–70.
117 Temple, Mysticism in Early Modern England, 78–9.
118 Michael Hunter, The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment (New Haven, NY: Yale University Press, 2020), 8.
