Knowing how to believe was a task of the utmost importance to early modern Protestants. Believing was, to their minds, an epistemic capacity that God had implanted in every human. As the Oxford cleric Barten Holyday (1593–1661) put it in his 1654 sermon on the ‘Nature of Faith’, ‘There is not any action in common life performed without a kinde of belief.’Footnote ¹ Nearly a century earlier, the influential Protestant theologian Wolfgang Musculus (1497–1563) would have concurred. ‘We haue the power to beleeue grafted in vs by God of nature’, he proclaimed in his Common Places (1560); ‘[t]here is no liuing man but dothe beleeue somewhat’.Footnote ² This ‘power and kind of beleuing’, so ‘naturally grafted in al folks’, was thought to be prompted by ‘sundrye causes’.Footnote ³ As Musculus suggests, it could arise from the ‘consente of multitude’, from following a particular ‘authoritie’, or by deferring to ‘long and continuall custome’.Footnote ⁴

In an overall sense, though, belief was recognised as something that could be made for you by someone else. It was a form of assent to be created by imparting credible information to someone, or by convincing them through skilful argument. Following the influential phrasing of Cicero, early modern practitioners of the rhetorical arts held that a key aim of persuasive arguments was to ‘make belief’ – fidem facere – in their listeners or readers.Footnote ⁵ This production of belief was essential to any kind of discussion that was designed to convince someone that something was credible.Footnote ⁶ It lay at the heart of early modernity’s deep cultural investment in the practices of rhetorical argument, themselves inherited from classical antiquity.Footnote ⁷ Creating belief in this way was particularly important, moreover, when it came to considering things that lay beyond one’s direct knowledge and that therefore had to be related by someone else – things that had taken place long ago, far away, or simply outside of one’s immediate contexts. When we find credible what a traveller reports about their overseas trip, what Tacitus tells us about Roman history or indeed what a witness in a courtroom relates about something they’ve seen, these accounts have – to early modern understandings – created ‘belief’ in us.Footnote ⁸ Belief, that is to say, was often produced by another person’s testimony – ‘any reporte’, as Musculus puts it elsewhere in his Common Places, ‘that is pronounced with purpose of affirmation, to make men beleeue [ad faciendam fidem] of any matter’.Footnote ⁹

Or, we might want to say, almost ‘any matter’. For, distinguished from these quotidian kinds of believing was the centrepiece of Protestant theology: religious belief. Most orthodox Protestants would have agreed that a Christian faith was, to use Holyday’s terms, a different ‘kinde of belief’. In the first place, its effects were infinitely more consequential to the life of the believer. The Protestant Reformation had from its very beginnings placed a strong premium on an individual’s faith.Footnote ¹⁰ As the faculty by which the Bible was understood to speak the truth, faith was a prerequisite for the right interpretation of scripture.Footnote ¹¹ It was also, famously, the essential criterion for salvation. In this respect, Protestants emphasised a mode of believing that had a very particular set of claims and purposes. It not only found the Bible truthful in its narration of events; it also believed that its salvific promises continued to apply to the individual believer.Footnote ¹²

Inseparable from these exegetical and soteriological functions was the understanding that religious belief was, in an ontological sense, profoundly different to what was sometimes termed ‘civil faith’ – the other kinds of belief that meant you could concede that (say) Constantinople was a city, though you’d never been there; that Walter Raleigh had indeed sailed to Guyana; or (again, for argument’s sake) that Sir Thomas Overbury had been poisoned in his cell in 1613.Footnote ¹³ Most critically – and unlike these other kinds of belief – it could not be made by someone else. Rather than being created by credible narrations or persuasive arguments, religious belief was a product of the Holy Spirit, infused into the hearts and minds of the faithful – a ‘victory of the holy Ghost upon the understanding’, in Holyday’s pithy formulation.Footnote ¹⁴

To Protestant ears, Paul the Apostle had put it well when he argued that ‘faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God’ (1 Corinthians 2.5). Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562), the Florentine Reformer and sometime Oxford professor, spoke for many fellow Protestants when he found in these remarks a canonical distinction between what a true faith ‘stand[s] in’ and the foundations of any other kind of belief. His commentary on this verse from Paul’s epistle notes that ‘those things which agree with human judgement, our senses, or our reason’ correspond with what we judge to be verisimilia – ‘plausible’ or ‘likely’.Footnote ¹⁵ (As Cicero would put it, a certain kind of belief would indeed be created by such probable arguments.)Footnote ¹⁶ But because it rested on such fallible, ‘human’ grounds, finding something ‘plausible’ was, for Vermigli, a process never free from ‘suspicion’. It brought about a kind of assent that lacked the ‘constancy and firmness [constantia & firmitas]’ that was the hallmark of a divinely created faith.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, no human agent had the ability to make this religious kind of belief: as Jean Calvin (1509–64) had glossed this moment in Paul’s letter, the ‘heauenly and secret wisdome’ of the gospel could not ‘be perswaded by humane reasons’.Footnote ¹⁸ Faith was, instead, a gift from God.

Articulating this difference between religious belief and its (so to speak) earthlier counterparts had been a concern of theological discussions long before the Reformation.Footnote ¹⁹ The priorities of the Protestant religion, however, gave it a new emphasis. By positioning faith as a gift bestowed by God’s grace in an individual, theologians argued that they were detaching the foundations of this belief from the authority of the Roman Catholic church.Footnote ²⁰ What the Edwardine homilies called a ‘true … faythe’ was now elevated to the pinnacle of religious virtues, and, in line with other Protestant teaching, it was made explicitly separate from a ‘dead faith’ or ‘common belefe’.Footnote ²¹ Yet, vital though it was, the maintenance of this distinction between kinds of believing – humanly made and divinely created – also created very serious problems for early modern Protestants. It generated a good deal of anxious scrutiny into what in practice it meant, in religious terms, to believe. If what was termed a ‘true’ faith could be cast as a kind of ‘persuasion’ – as it readily was – how could it be recognised as different from the belief generated by more human means of bringing about assent?Footnote ²² How could religious belief isolate itself from what Calvin called the ‘borrowed credit’ brought about by more human modes of argument?Footnote ²³ How did one – as Holyday’s sermon put it – ‘believe, that [one] does believe’ in this specifically religious way?Footnote ²⁴

I argue in this book that the Protestant literary culture of early modern England was often preoccupied with such questions. Across a number of different genres, and with a variety of discrete purposes, writers crafted literary works that could help their readers and listeners understand what it was that comprised a truly religious belief. They did so in ways that thought explicitly about faith’s similarities to, and its differences from, other kinds of belief. In making this case, this book focuses on a period when discussing what constituted a ‘true’ faith was a particularly pressing one: from the last decades of the sixteenth century until the decade before the Restoration in 1660. This stretch of time witnessed, as Ethan Shagan has shown, the beginnings a ‘revolution’ in approaches to religious belief.Footnote ²⁵ In the context of fast-shifting changes in understandings of human epistemology, as well as terrible religious conflict, a number of thinkers – Protestant and Roman Catholic alike – put significant pressure on the dividing line between religious belief per se and the altogether more secular ways of making belief that I discussed above. Some more radical writers went so far as to collapse this distinction. They attempted to show that the scriptures and the fundamental claims of Christianity were credible without the need for a supernaturally induced mode of assent.Footnote ²⁶

The writers that I study here did not participate in this revolutionary assimilation of faith with other kinds of belief: in fact, they consistently wanted to make the case for the special status of a spiritually infused, God-given faith in the individual believer. But they did find themselves in a historical moment when great pressures put intense scrutiny on what it meant, in a religious sense, to believe. If only to show how particular a truly religious faith was, they were likewise motivated to think about how it related to more quotidian kinds of belief. The texts that they produced could never hope to ‘make’ a religious belief in their audiences: that would be to claim for themselves the supernatural, revelatory powers of the Spirit. Nevertheless, Protestant writers were intensely preoccupied in producing textual forms that could represent what characterised a spiritual faith – how it operated, and how it was experienced. To articulate a mode of assent so apparently beyond a purely human acumen, they too turned to those other kinds of everyday, secular belief that were engrained in the social and intellectual life of early modern England.

It was, this book contends, the institutions and procedures of the law that provided a supremely helpful point of comparison when it came to writing about faith in an English context. In their discussions of religious belief, Protestant authors had frequent recourse to the means by which the prevailing legal culture tested and evaluated witness evidence – a specific kind of testimony – in court. Early modern England was by any measure an extremely litigious society, and there was a widespread legal fluency across many of its constituent members.Footnote ²⁷ With these contexts in mind, I argue throughout this book that legal forums and the processes that they adopted were a prime arena for producing (as Holyday would put it) a ‘kinde of belief’ and indeed for testing how such a belief could be created. Protestant writers turned to exactly this form of legal belief to articulate, by comparative means, that paragon of Reformed epistemology – a properly religious faith.

The secular, quotidian ways of believing I outlined above were readily associated with the assent that was afforded to credible testimony in a legal setting. From the mid sixteenth century, forming judgements according to forensic evidence became an increasingly important task for early modern English citizens. Jurors at criminal trials were asked to evaluate the ‘credit’ of the ‘Testimonie’ presented to them;Footnote ²⁸ they reached conclusions, as Lorna Hutson has shown, by assessing the probability of the evidence presented to them.Footnote ²⁹ In settings without juries – in those jurisdictions that followed the forms of European law inherited from classical Rome – a successful ‘proof’ of an allegation was again thought to ‘create belief’ (fidem facere) for the judge.Footnote ³⁰ As we shall see, the law developed across all of its forums ways of testing whether it was justified to believe what someone was presenting in their testimony. These evaluative methods were, clearly, integral to the jurisprudential practices of early modern England. But the belief produced through legal proofs also had a currency that went far beyond the doors of the courtroom. The scrutiny of witness evidence to establish credibility was, as Barbara Shapiro has demonstrated, a technique that became incorporated into natural philosophy, travel writing, historiography and (especially in the later seventeenth century) theological discussions.Footnote ³¹

In the period that I cover here, though, this forensic belief seldom mapped wholly onto spiritual definitions of faith. Protestant authorities were, as I indicated above, frequently motivated to show how these kinds of belief were different species of assent. Yet juristic methods of proof were still strongly involved with discussions of a specifically religious type of belief. Evidentiary procedures were appealed to as an instructive point of reference precisely because they exemplified a different way of bringing about assent – one that dealt in terms of evidence, probability and conjecture, rather than a supernaturally endowed form of spiritual assurance. Legal processes for handling evidence, and establishing or testing its credibility, thus presented to late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant culture a rich and familiar resource for thinking comparatively and contrastively about what it meant, in religious terms, to believe. Protestant writers subjected the fundamental claims of Christianity to an imaginary form of legal trial, testing its evidentiary basis. This could certainly help to suggest that a belief in strikingly implausible events (Christ’s Resurrection, for instance) or agonisingly ambiguous issues (one’s individual salvation) might be amenable to the methods of what, in my earlier quotation, Vermigli called ‘human judgement’. But it was also – and often more forcefully – the mismatch between an assent based on witness evidence and the spiritually induced belief produced by faith that attracted Protestant writers to this form of comparison. A mysterious, inward and divinely prompted faith could be analytically probed and its otherness powerfully articulated by comparing it to its more readily investigable, secular counterpart. And, moreover, it was manifestly possible for these apparently contrastive dynamics to co-exist in close quarters. Alec Ryrie has noted that early modern theological discourses could argue simultaneously that ‘beliefs’ were ‘reasonable, true and self-evident’ and that they were ‘mysteries’ which, ‘surpass[ing] reason’, remained ‘inaccessible except through faith’. This astute recognition holds true when we survey what kind of work the language of legal proof, and legal assent, could undertake when describing a properly religious faith.Footnote ³²

In this manner, the period covered by this book – around 1580 to the 1650s – found in the law a vital set of resources for talking about faith: testing its claims against a recognisably legal form of evidence, finding crucial support in this methodology, but also exposing the limits of a forensic approach so as to articulate a more obscurely positioned form of spiritual revelation. Before proceeding any further in my enquiries, though, I want too to justify the other terms that give shape to this study. Why England? Why Protestantism? And why literature?

The geographical focus of this book is relatively straightforward to address: it is informed by specific cultural phenomena within early modern England (and, in my study of Henry Vaughan’s writing, Wales).Footnote ³³ The high level of litigious participation and legal fluency of this period means that it generated a particularly fruitful interaction between juridical and religious discourses. All of the writers that I treat – Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), John Donne (1572–1631), Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Henry Vaughan (1621–95) – had, in fact, some degree of professional engagement with the law. But their legal language had an appeal that in any case ranged beyond these expert contexts. Speaking in the terms of the law provided a means to handle and scrutinise the most recondite of interior phenomena in terms, concepts and frameworks that would have achieved a widespread cultural recognition.

Protestantism’s centrality to my argument relies too on its clear cultural dominance in England at this time. Beyond recognising such a hegemonic status, though, I want to make the case that the legal frames of reference I analyse here also generated questions about belief that were especially germane to early modern Protestantism in England. In Chapter 1, for instance, we encounter Andrewes turning to the law to help his sermon-goers recognise the operation of faith in their reading of scripture – by any measure an integral aspect of Protestant devotion. Chapter 2, meanwhile, sees Donne drawing on evidentiary practices to engage both with Protestant responses to cross-confessional dispute and that knottiest piece of Reformed doctrine, salvation through faith. My study of Bacon’s works in Chapter 3 considers the relationship between law and epistemology in his natural philosophy, but it also applies these discussions to prominent questions about the relationship between faith, salvation and scripture. Here we find Bacon adopting evidentiary processes from legal contexts to press home a distinctly Protestant model of belief through evangelical revelation. Chapter 4 is something of a different case, in that its study of Vaughan’s devotional poetry draws on the momentous disputes between Protestant sects in the 1640s and 1650s. Nevertheless, it is in the service of maintaining his faith as a specifically Church of England Protestant that Vaughan turns to the processes of the law in his verse.

My focus on literature, on the other hand, is informed by a different set of prompts: principally, the revelatory scholarship that has over the past two decades read early modern drama in relation to English legal culture of the period. As I go on to discuss, this work has shown that the processes of evidentiary evaluation were tightly woven into the texture of early modern plays. Audiences were regularly invited to test the credibility of dramatic narratives in ways that mobilised the legal fluency of the early modern populace, and plays themselves problematised what counted as reliable evidence in a forensic context. This imbrication of legal evidence, literary form and interpretive response is something that I claim more broadly for literary writing of the period: in the sermons of Andrewes and Donne, the philosophical discourses and prose fiction of Bacon and the poetry of Vaughan. In different ways, these texts exemplify the early modern literary imagination’s ability to stage and evaluate processes of proof and to play with different kinds of evidence and different forms of assent. Such an imaginative engagement with legal methods played a crucial role in early modern discussions of belief.

To best understand the kinds of arguments and interventions the texts studied by this book made in their contexts, it is essential at the outset to grasp some elementary aspects of Protestant discussions of belief – both worldly and religious – and to survey some of defining features of English legal culture. Inevitably, this involves some relatively lengthy discussions of these key intellectual and historical circumstances, most of which are confined to the rest of this introduction. I start by situating my case within current scholarly treatments of early modern religious belief. Then I turn to a set of discourses that exemplify why the kinds of belief generated by legal and rhetorical arguments posed a significant problem for Protestant believers: law and rhetoric were thought to argue in ways that, as Vermigli put it, were verisimilia – probable or plausible but crucially lacking in the supernatural certainty that characterised faith. My aim here is not only to illustrate the differences between types of belief as they were conceived of at the time, but also to show that the probative force of testimony – the relation of some credible information between parties – was to a significant degree singled out as a form of probable argument that had the most to offer when it came to defining faith. Having taken stock of these contexts, I then think in more detail about the primary point of engagement between religion and early modern social culture that this book studies: legal testimony in particular. The Introduction draws to a conclusion by addressing in more detail questions of literariness as regards my argument and my sources. Readers familiar with these contexts should, of course, feel free to jump ahead to the author-focused chapters that make up the substantive argument of this book. But, because I am interested in bringing together in a new way relatively discrete areas of study – the histories of law, religion and literary culture – I want to give over the rest of this introduction to an exposition of some essential background contexts in a fair amount of detail.

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Revolutions in Believing

Making Belief positions itself within a growing scholarly interest in the category of religious belief. It is hardly the first to treat discussions of faith in the early modern period.Footnote ³⁴ Nor is it alone in seeing legal discourses as instrumental in generating and shaping contemporary understandings of a religious epistemology.Footnote ³⁵ As the notes to this introduction themselves reveal, moreover, it is particularly indebted to the work of Ethan Shagan, whose relatively recent history of belief from the Middle Ages onwards has made significant progress in presenting belief as a mental state that can be historicised and investigated by scholarly methods. Shagan’s work has above all helped us to recognise the important – if fragile – distinctions that early modern theology constructed between sacred and secular ways of believing.Footnote ³⁶

Yet Making Belief does, obviously, hope to shed new light on this area of investigation. One of the fresh perspectives it brings to our understanding of early modern religious belief is through its historical focus. I contend here that, between around 1580 and 1660, procedures for evaluating legal evidence provided not so much a foundation for the fundamentals of a Christian faith (as they later would) but rather an instructively contrasting, deliberately differentiated means of analysing and describing what was distinctive about religious belief. In order to demonstrate why this claim matters, and the intervention it makes, I need at this early stage to survey a body of scholarship that has made a different set of arguments. I provide here, then, a sketch of a narrative – set out most influentially by Shapiro and Shagan – of the revolutionary changes in religious belief that took place in the seventeenth century.Footnote ³⁷

This scholarship has shown that, in the face of a potential epistemological crisis, there was from the early 1600s an incipient rapprochement between mundane procedures for generating credibility – including, especially, the handling of forensic evidence – and the hitherto special status of religious belief. This new cooperation between different kinds of belief saw the principles of legal reasoning as supplying a vital evidentiary basis for the fundamental claims of Christianity: a newly rational notion of religious faith could help stave off the corrosive potential of scepticism and establish a basis for religious toleration. Such a handling of belief developed as the seventeenth century progressed: seeded in a variety of texts and contexts in the early seventeenth century, it matured and stabilised (in England at least) after the Restoration in 1660.

A key catalyst for this trend was a text written in the early seventeenth century by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) – the De veritate Christianae religionis.Footnote ³⁸ Amidst a context of terrible religious conflict, and in response to resurgent philosophical scepticism, Grotius’s discussion of religion saw an advantage in moving away from claims of spiritually infused certainty as the foundation of belief and instead tested the credal claims of Christianity by a different set of standards. As Shapiro has shown, De veritate in this respect relies heavily on the kinds of proof provided by witness evidence in legal forums: events such as Christ’s Resurrection are presented as credible because they were witnessed by a wide variety of people who subsequently left textual testimony of their knowledge.Footnote ³⁹ Christ’s rising from the dead is, for Grotius, a ‘foundation of … Faith’ because ‘those that first taught Christianity … did perswade their Auditors that the thing was so for certain’, and this persuasion is itself enduringly effective because the ‘ocular Testimony’ of these early preachers is so numerous.Footnote ⁴⁰

By imagining the gospels as conveying historical events that could be proven to a legal standard, Grotius was participating in a radical reconstruction of religious belief.Footnote ⁴¹ Calvin, for instance, had addressed the question of scriptural credibility in quite the opposite manner. Calvin’s expansive theological handbook, commonly known as the Institutes, made very clear the priority of divine revelation in bringing about a supremely certain assent to scriptural narratives: such a ‘faith … proceedeth from nothing els but … the holy spirit’.Footnote ⁴² He explicitly problematised those who ‘thinke that the Historie of the Gospel … [is] true’ if they come to this assent ‘as commonly wee are wonte to iudge of such things, as … are reported being done long ago’.Footnote ⁴³ Grotius, by contrast, moved the grounds of assent away from spiritual influence and towards a set of attested facts that, in theory, any rational agent could assent to. Spiritual certainty was thus replaced by a very high level of probability, founded in a plurality of eyewitness attestations.Footnote ⁴⁴ Grotius was, accordingly, much less concerned than Calvin about the loss of distinction between a specifically religious kind of belief and worldlier kinds of credit. In fact, it was for Grotius exactly the notion that religious belief could be moulded to fit the requirements of legal credibility that motivated his work. The international and eirenic goals of De veritate benefit from a presentation of Christianity as a persuasive narrative, eminently credible according to more secular standards, rather than the product of an inscrutable yet supremely certain revelation.Footnote ⁴⁵

Shapiro’s influential narrative affords Grotius a key position in germinating these legally constructed, probably argued conceptions of belief. Her argument has in turn led to more recent and more confessionally wide-ranging investigations into credibility, persuasion and faith in the early seventeenth century. Shagan has placed Grotius among a larger collection of writers who, prompted by emergent sceptical currents in early modern philosophy, adopted a similarly welcoming attitude towards various methods of proof in setting out the foundations of religious belief.Footnote ⁴⁶ One such example in Shagan’s account is the highly controversial Dominican friar Tomasso Campanella (1568–1639), whose Atheismus Triumphatus (written in 1605 and eventually published in 1631) sets out the reasonableness of Christianity by arguing for the credibility of the scriptures in legal terms.Footnote ⁴⁷ Campanella’s text establishes in general and widely recognisable terms the probity of eyewitness accounts.Footnote ⁴⁸ And, like Grotius (at least in this respect), he makes the claim that ‘Christ and his Apostles’ conform to these requirements for credible testimony.Footnote ⁴⁹ In Protestant contexts, meanwhile, such a methodology found a broader acceptance among the followers of Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) – the so-called Arminians – who placed a strong emphasis on the rational capacities of believers to test and assent to the fundamental claims of the Christian faith.Footnote ⁵⁰

The picture that emerges from these accounts is indeed of a ‘revolution’ in understandings of faith in the seventeenth century. Thinking back to some of the contexts that I touched upon in the opening to this introduction, we can see that religious belief became newly associated with those more ordinary kinds of assent that could indeed be ‘made’ by human agency. Grotius and Campanella – alongside other figures such as the Arminian English theologian Thomas Jackson (1579–1640) – were thinking like rhetoricians and lawyers when they treated questions about the scriptures’ credibility and the kind of belief that it might engender.Footnote ⁵¹ As Cicero would insist, they were finding out ‘plausible device[s]’ to ‘obtain belief’ that events such as the Resurrection did in fact occur.Footnote ⁵² Or, as a lawyer would put it, they were adducing valid forms of evidence (‘ocular Testimony’) to prove a ‘matter of fact’ (Christ’s Resurrection, for instance).Footnote ⁵³

An essential context for this narrative (and for my own case too) are the changes that were wrought on the meaning of probability in this period. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are well known as an era in which what counted as a probable claim underwent a significant reformulation. Ian Hacking’s work in the 1970s, for instance, showed that earlier ideas of the probable, which tested a claim on the basis of the authority of its source, gave way to a more statistically founded idea of likelihood.Footnote ⁵⁴ Shagan and Shapiro, along with the work of intellectual historians such as Steven Shapin, have brought a welcome nuance to this overall picture. Being appealed to in their studies is a notion of probability that cleaves closely to the criteria of plausibility and verisimilitude that were formulated in early modern rhetoric and law.Footnote ⁵⁵ Certainly, the social or moral status of whoever was making a particular assertion had a bearing on whether it was judged to be likely.Footnote ⁵⁶ But the techniques of the rhetorical arts – the finding out and arranging of probable arguments – were also taken into consideration. As Quentin Skinner has shown, the practices of rhetoric had long been associated with ways of arguing that generated probable or plausible cases.Footnote ⁵⁷ Rhetorical arguments didn’t aim for an absolutely certain demonstration of whatever they wanted to prove; instead, and paradigmatically, they treated topics that were necessarily conjectural: questions of praise and blame, of future action or, indeed, whether an alleged event in the past had taken place.Footnote ⁵⁸ And, although the kinds of argument that were admissible in court were differently regulated than the rhetorical arts, it is also clear that legal practitioners were similarly engaged in modes of discourse that produced likely conjectures about debatable assertions – in judging, that is, the probability of the evidence presented to the court. Though they sought for very high standards of proof in evaluating evidence and reaching judgements, they seldom thought that they were dealing with issues that could be addressed in terms of absolute certainty. Reckoning on the basis of evidence whether an alleged crime had been committed was, that is to say, always a probabilistic form of reasoning.Footnote ⁵⁹

The seventeenth-century ‘revolution’ in religious belief, then, turned on the ways in which these probable forms of argument – in rhetoric and in law – made an incursion into theological treatments of assent and epistemology. This did not mean that assenting to the factual status of the Resurrection (for instance) was viewed as a form of debatable conjecture. Its status as a testified matter of fact invested it with a very high degree of probability that was to all intents and purposes an assertion of the truth of the gospel accounts that related it. It could be believed, as Shapiro has shown, with a ‘moral certainty’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Nevertheless, such strategies of argument and exegesis signalled a clear move away from a model of religious belief that appealed to the certainty of spiritual revelation as the foundation of faith. As Shagan puts it, ‘the early seventeenth century’ was a time when, ‘on both sides of the Reformation, probable belief, based upon the judicious weighing of evidence, emerged as Christian belief indeed’.Footnote ⁶¹

Resisting Probability

Shagan’s and Shapiro’s descriptions of these revolutionary changes in how religious belief was understood to function are very persuasive. Grotius, Campanella and others serve as salient vanguards of a more widespread fusion between sacred and secular modes of believing in the later seventeenth century. With reference to English religious culture, moreover, it is true that Grotius’s De veritate had a direct influence on theological discourses soon after its publicationFootnote ⁶² and that after 1660 there was a much broader adoption of legal reasoning as a way of understanding how the scriptures were to be believed.Footnote ⁶³ The trend narrated by this scholarship thus does an excellent job of explaining a momentous set of extended historical changes. In the mid sixteenth century, Calvin had rejected an argument for the scriptures’ credibility on the basis of ‘probable opinion’ or the means by which we are ‘commonly … wonte … to iudge of things’.Footnote ⁶⁴ By the early eighteenth century, on the other hand, Thomas Sherlock (1678–1761) could confidently set out to prove the fact of Christ’s Resurrection by staging a mock trial in which imaginary witnesses were deposed to show the probability of this event.Footnote ⁶⁵

For all the force of this revolutionary narrative, it nevertheless leaves some important aspects of early modern culture obscure. What about those who didn’t embrace this new conception of belief? What other options were available to those who, recognising the manifest challenges to faith, wanted to explore its relationship to ‘probable’ modes of arguing, or indeed its relationship to other kinds of belief? Raising such questions does not overturn the general case made by Shagan’s and Shapiro’s books: both scholars are invested in describing important developments over the course of the seventeenth century, and the shape of their arguments means that agents of change are necessarily invested with a narrative prominence.Footnote ⁶⁶ But the teleological function performed in these accounts by early seventeenth-century forerunners of a later, more wholesale redefinition of belief does mean too that the immediate contexts in which these earlier works intervened tend to drift into the background quite swiftly. Grotius, for instance, is singled out in Shapiro’s narrative as an exceptional, early instigator of a trend that in practice only found a wider acceptance after 1660.Footnote ⁶⁷

Avoiding such a teleology in my own argument, I make the case that there existed, in pre-Restoration England, a different, varied and vibrant set of discussions about belief and about ways of believing. Such investigations into the nature of faith responded to the same intellectual and devotional challenges that prompted writers such as Grotius. How can the scriptures be believed? What role do techniques for producing forms of probable assent play in the phenomenon of religious belief? They turned too to the same methodologies that appealed to Grotius and his successors: processes of forensic reasoning – of gathering together and testing witness evidence – were coopted into analyses of faith. But the texts that I study here produced palpably different results in their adoption of these methods. They did not turn to legal methods to translate faith into an apologetic assertion of the likelihood of Christian doctrine. Instead, they continued to be informed by a context that (as Shagan’s account of the theology of the earlier post-Reformation period has shown) wanted to enforce a clearer division between religious belief and other, mundane modes of credit.Footnote ⁶⁸

The texts studied in this book, then, are inextricable from a context in which defining and investigating religious belief was a very important task, and they took from the methods of the law a set of tools to undertake this activity. They could do this without wanting to make faith any less certain or spiritually endowed – or, on the other hand, any more probable – in the process of doing so. In this respect, my examples bear a stronger affinity to the early modern Roman Catholic writers who have been studied by Stefania Tutino. Tutino has brought valuable attention to discussions of ‘credulity’ in Catholic Europe in the early seventeenth century, and she has likewise sought to revise the teleological implications of Shagan’s history of belief.Footnote ⁶⁹ Drawing on a wide-ranging set of encounters with ecclesiastical authorities, Tutino’s work shows that, rather than heralding a concession by the church that religious belief could be redefined as a species of merely probable assent, probabilistic constructions of belief sat within a more flexible understanding of the relationship between (in her helpful terms) ‘credibility’ and ‘truth’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The core material of belief – from scriptural narratives to saintly miracles – could certainly be tested for its probability, and this could involve a scrutiny of the evidence for such claims that drew on evidentiary procedures at law. Such a methodology invigorated polemical attempts to establish the credibility of the church’s teaching.Footnote ⁷¹ But, in many cases, the ecclesiastical response was not so much a grateful embrace of the helpfully plausible justification of belief that such attempts might produce than it was chastisement, suppression or a concerned ambivalence about what effect such intellectual endeavours might have.Footnote ⁷² Under perceived threat was a model of belief that rested ultimately on the authority of the Roman Catholic church and that didn’t expect or desire its doctrine to be subject to plausibility tests, legally derived or otherwise.

The Protestantism of early modern England was no less immune to queries about whether religious faith could be made to resemble the results of credible argumentation. English Protestants could even give voice to a desire to rest belief on the wishfully stable foundations of plausibility. But they also registered such foundations as, at best, an auxiliary kind of support for a ‘true’ faith, or a speciously plausible, but actually defective, ground on which to construct belief. It might very well have been possible to establish the credibility of the gospel narratives, rooting them in unimpeachable, first-hand testimonies. But it was rarely desirable to do so – or, at least, to do so without then qualifying the results of this task. Protestant authors thought that appealing to such a legal model of credit would leave scant room for the supernatural kinds of persuasion thought to be engendered by a kind of spiritual infusion.Footnote ⁷³ In this way, the authors that I examine here are as invested as those in Tutino’s case studies in negotiating the ground between ‘credibility’ (constructed along the lines of a legalistic marshalling of evidence) and a less schematically defined ‘truth’. And yet it is also clear that the Protestant contexts I treat reveal a different set of concerns. For Tutino’s case studies, the crucial interface sat between the epistemic resources of early modern subjects and the authority of the Roman church as an arbiter of both what and how to believe. For my sources, on the other hand, it is between a legalistic mindset, conditioned to test the likelihood of beliefs on account of their basis in rigorously evaluated evidence, and a form of spiritual communication and assurance that consistently transcended such probative methods.

Preliminary Examples

This tension between legal credibility and spiritual truth played a generative role in shaping discussions of faith. What did it look like in practice? To provide a provisional answer to this question, I want now to look at a couple of small-scale examples of early seventeenth-century engagements with forensic proofs. Minor though they are, these instances demonstrate the vital role of evidentiary discussions within Protestant understandings of belief. Thinking about legal evidence in relation to belief was by no means confined to the new, radical kinds of theology being formulated by figures such as Grotius. But such legal reasoning was also something to be resisted and circumscribed even as it was adopted. It could be used as much to outline the insufficiency of a forensic model of belief as it could to shore up – as it did for Grotius – the plausibility of the claims made by faith.

My first example is taken from a text by Thomas Taylor (1576–1632) – a moderate Puritan and disciple of the Calvinist luminary William Perkins (1558–1602). It shows that the categories of legal evidence could be deployed by religious writers who differed quite sharply from the early proponents of probable belief outlined by Shagan. Taylor was remembered posthumously as ‘a brazen wall against … Arminianism’.Footnote ⁷⁴ As such, he would be ill-disposed to see his methods compared with the controversial Arminian Thomas Jackson, one of Shagan’s principal agents in transforming a spiritually authored notion of belief into a probable assent based on the evidence of credible witnesses. Nonetheless, Taylor gives prominent place to legal methods of proof in his exposition of the foundations of a true Christian faith. In his 1612 exposition of Acts 10.34–43, a book-length exegesis of the verses in which Peter claims for the Apostles their role as ‘witnesses of things [that Jesus] did’ (Acts 10.39), Taylor insists at several points that the Apostles were ‘oculate witnesses’, ‘earewitnesses’ and ‘sensible witnesses’ to the ‘facts of Christ’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Though I reserve a detailed treatment of evidentiary rules for a later point in this introduction, it can be made clear at this stage that Taylor is appealing to unmistakably legal categories: forensic testimony was by and large required to be based in sensory information, and Taylor’s ‘facts of Christ’ itself echoes the legal category of ‘matters of fact’ – a term of art applied to alleged deeds that require proof by witness evidence. For Taylor, this forensic set of references plays an indispensable role in constructing a Protestant faith that is rooted in the texts of scripture, rather than participating in the apparent Roman Catholic tendency to rely on ‘tradition’: ‘How necessarie a thing it is in causes of faith’, Taylor tells us, ‘to leane vpon true and certaine things, and not vpon tottring traditions or vnwritten verities, which are the maine pillars of Popish doctrine.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Without any pre-emption of the kind of probable belief described by Grotius, Taylor shows how useful a turn to legal methods of proof might be – here, clearly, in a polemical assertion of Protestant scripturalism. At one level, then, the relationship between (in Tutino’s words) ‘credibility’ and ‘truth’ could be closely cohesive. The manifestly legal probity of the scripture’s accounts produces its status as something ‘true and certaine’.

On the other hand, two decades after Taylor’s text, we find a similar handling of the scriptural narratives that is much more cautious in its recourse to juristic techniques. William Austin (1587–1634), himself a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn, evidently drew on his professional experience in his Devotionis Augustinianae flamma (published posthumously in 1635). Discussing Christ’s Ascension after his post-Resurrection period on earth, Austin mirrors Taylor’s exegetical method, noting that no ‘Christian will make question’ of Christ’s ascent to the heavens, ‘For we have the testimony (in writing) of those, that saw it with their eyes.’Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet in discussing this moment, Austin also asks the reader to recognise the limitations of this legal model of proof. The moment where Christ is lost from view in his heaven-bound ascent becomes a point of linguistic and epistemological reorientation for Austin: it is now, paradoxically, the ‘Cloud’ that obscures the onlookers’ view of Christ that transforms itself into a metaphorical – and, functionally, profoundly different – ‘witnesse of his Ascension’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Clunky though it is, such a transition from precisely forensic kinds of testimony to an opaquely metaphorical witness serves an instructive purpose in Austin’s text. It outlines a limit to the kinds of enquiry, based on sense-based witness knowledge, that his exegesis has been engaged with: representing ‘a Barre’ to the ‘curiositie’ of the disciples and Austin’s own readers, it curtails a ‘further search’ along these lines.Footnote ⁷⁹ Austin’s forensic method, then, both supplements the credibility of the scriptures (wherein events such as the Resurrection and Ascension are verifiably attested)Footnote ⁸⁰ and also prompts a shift to a different kind of belief that transcends his legal methodology. In disclosing its own boundaries, the belief based on witness evidence directs us to a different, grace-given way of believing: it ‘confirmes and approves’ a ‘Faith, bred in us’ by the ‘Spirit’.Footnote ⁸¹

When we read these brief examples alongside the histories of belief written by Shagan and Shapiro, we can see the intriguing possibilities available to early modern Protestants on the cusp of the revolutionary changes in the understanding of faith that occurred in the seventeenth century. The application of legal proofs to questions of belief were plainly of some value to writers such as Taylor and Austin: they provided an attractively secure foundation on which to prove the claims that the Son of God rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. But these texts – and, especially, Austin’s – also participate in a model of faith that Shagan has found to be characteristic of an earlier set of Protestant concerns. This understanding of belief wanted to apply quite explicit limits to the reciprocity between a specifically religious kind of faith and the means of creating probable assent that were more properly the terrain of law and rhetoric.Footnote ⁸² The result of these contrary movements – an embrace of legal method, and a clear recognition of its limitations – embodies one of the key dynamics that I find across a wide range of early modern literature. It helped give an articulate form to the operation of a spiritual kind of faith. And it offered this help in a very culturally specific way: the juristic reach of this language of testimony was precisely targeted at a widespread legal fluency among early modern English readers.

Belief, Opinion and Persuasion

What stopped the widespread, culturally central processes of the law from lending an unreserved form of help to theological problems? Key to answering this question is the recognition that a sizeable brake was placed on legal reasoning as a basis for religious belief in Protestant theology. This limit took the form of a widespread suspicion of probable forms of argument when they were applied to matters of faith. Addressing the discourses that mapped these limitations helps us recognise why appeals to legal evidence in the construction of religious belief were consistently qualified. It shows too that the activity of defining what was properly religious about this kind of belief often involved thinking comparatively about other types of assent.

Early modern writers had centuries of theological discourses to draw on when comparing different ways of believing. Most influentially, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (c. 1266–73) had drawn categorical distinctions between knowledge (certain assent, derived from incontestable first principles and sensory stimulation), opinion (a weaker, more equivocal form of conviction) and faith, which, though lacking the irrefutable grounds of knowledge, was nevertheless similarly certain.Footnote ⁸³ Following Aquinas, Protestants themselves went about defining religious belief in relation not only to other epistemic states but to other kinds of belief too.Footnote ⁸⁴ For, while Aquinas had used only one term for religious belief (fides), early modern writers vocalised more explicitly their recognition of this word’s larger range of significances. As well as denoting a kind of spiritually infused assent, it was thought to encapsulate those more contingent, probable kinds of credit that I discussed above: the belief that was at work in rhetorical arguments and the ways in which persuasive legal cases were made. It was clear, following Cicero, that the rhetorician’s task was to ‘create belief’ – fidem facere – through skilful verbal artistry. It was no less clear that forensic arguments were also directed towards instantiating a ‘belief’ in those evaluating evidence for an allegation. But it was at the same time obvious that this kind of fides was categorically different to a specifically religious form of faith.Footnote ⁸⁵ Protestant writers could turn to the Thomistic category of ‘opinion’ to make distinctions between these different kinds of belief. As Musculus tells his readers, there is an abundance of assent that’s commonly called ‘faith’, but which is actually just ‘opinion’ by another name.Footnote ⁸⁶

From a modern-day perspective, we would be justified in asking some probing questions about the categorical distinctions being drawn here, especially in relation to their scriptural sources. Scholarship on the New Testament language of faith – and especially the Greek term pistis, equivalent to the Latin fides – has shown its involvement in an intricate negotiation between a variety of senses that it could carry in these antique contexts. This could involve, as Teresa Morgan and others have shown, an understanding of pistis as interpersonal trust;Footnote ⁸⁷ it could draw too on the sense of belief-through-persuasion that was the result of effective rhetoric.Footnote ⁸⁸ Protestant theologians, who often wanted to root their understanding of faith in the scriptures themselves, were certainly aware of these various significations: Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), a leading Lutheran divine, did indeed place a strong emphasis on the notion of fides as a kind of trust.Footnote ⁸⁹ But the results of Melanchthon’s philological enquiry drive home all the more firmly the importance for Reformers of separating belief-through-persuasion from religious faith. Essential to Melanchthon (and, as we shall see, other Reformers) in his research into the meaning of ‘faith’ in Latin and Greek was an insistence that it did not involve the kinds of belief engendered by persuasive rhetoric. Indeed, he explicitly denied that pistis or fides in the religious sense – and in the sense used by scriptural authors – could denote rhetorical ‘proofs [probationes]’.Footnote ⁹⁰

Nowhere is the distinction between these kinds of belief made clearer than in Protestant discussions of scriptural exegesis. As we have seen, new understandings of faith in the seventeenth century made scriptural credibility a topic of prime importance: they mobilised an array of persuasive resources to show that scriptures presented a historical account that was eminently credible according to secular, probable categories. Such a mode of reading – often termed a ‘historical faith’, or fides historica – had, however, been explicitly problematised by more mainstream currents of Protestant thought, and it was granted this problematic status precisely because it resembled a belief produced by probable argument – an ‘opinion’ – rather than spiritual influence.Footnote ⁹¹ A helpful, representative resource here is Vermigli’s Common Places (1576, revised 1580; English translation 1583), a text that achieved a widespread influence in Elizabethan England.Footnote ⁹² Vermigli describes this historical faith in precisely the terms that I have just outlined: it is belief that ‘consisteth of the opinion and persuasion of man’.Footnote ⁹³ Using such a model of belief to interpret the scriptures would fall drastically short of the requirements of a religious faith: it would only encapsulate an assent by which ‘those things that be written in the holie scriptures are beleeued to be no lesse true, than are the histories of Liuie, Suetonius, and those things which are now written of the new ilands’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Vermigli does not doubt that Livy, Suetonius and, say, an edition of Columbus’s log-books relate persuasive and credible accounts of the events that they describe (indeed he frequently relies on Livy and Suetonius as historical sources). But a true, justifying faith rests on essentially different foundations to the belief that these accounts may produce in their readers. It is only brought about when readers are ‘inspired from heauen’.Footnote ⁹⁵

Vermigli exemplifies a Protestant perspective that saw the kind of belief generated by ‘humane persuasion’ as radically insufficient, even if wholly credible – a species of opinio, rather than fides.Footnote ⁹⁶ Though most acutely demonstrated in discussions of scriptural interpretation, this distinction was applied to broader conceptions of religious belief. Vermigli discusses, for instance, the problem of an illusory faith, diagnosing it as something created ‘onelie by the persuasion of man’; he inveighs too against a ‘certeine cold assent, sproong of humane persuasion’.Footnote ⁹⁷ It is possible even for wholly ‘wicked’ people – those untouched by God’s grace – to ‘assent vnto the articles of faith, & beleeue that there is God’, but this ‘assent[ing]’ derives (again) from ‘a certeine humane persuasion, either by education, or by opinion’, rather than ‘the motion and impulsion of true faith’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Belief as a product of ‘persuasion’ was problematic because it was indebted to the categories of plausibility and probability that, as I mentioned above, were thought to be so characteristic of the rhetorical arts. Those who, in Vermigli’s examples, found their belief on the grounds of ‘humane persuasion’ act on account of a ‘probable credulitie’; they believe ‘bicause [one] thinketh it to be most likelie’.Footnote ⁹⁹

Specifically legal kinds of persuasion were included within this overall problematisation of probable belief. Exemplary here is Calvin’s treatment of a moment in the scriptural narratives that thinks in recognisably forensic terms about the credibility of the case it is making: the opening of Luke’s gospel, where the author claims to ‘set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word’ (Luke 1.1–2). Calvin’s handling of this opening moment of Luke’s gospel is plainly alive to the advantages that turning to ‘eyewitnesses’ might have in securing the credibility of the evangelist’s account. This probative strategy shows that ‘God doth euery where prouide, least wee[,] depending vpon the doubtfull words of men, our fayth shoulde fayle, or wauer.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ And yet, at the same time, Calvin is distinctly uneasy about the role that this testimony plays in establishing the truth of Luke’s narrative: its persuasive force risks founding belief on human opinions rather than divine disclosure. Rather worryingly for Calvin, Luke here ‘buildeth fayth, as it seemeth, very slenderly’ – resting it on ‘the report of men’ rather than a ‘full perswasion and assurance’ that is ‘wrought and sealed by the holy Ghost’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Calvin – a lawyer himself – recognised the legal implications of Luke’s discussion of testimony. The double definition of the early evangelists – ‘eyewitnesses and ministers of the word’ – gives them an apparently wholesome forensic probity: they are, explicitly, ‘witnesses’, ‘against [whom] … no exception can be taken (as the Lawyers say)’, and ‘which it is not lawfull to refuse’.Footnote ¹⁰² Yet Calvin’s recourse to the law shows up all the more clearly the problems that he has with its evidentiary procedures. First, he obviously re-invents its schemes for deciding who counts as a trustworthy witness: in no ordinary court is credible testimony reliant upon the witness’s divine elevation ‘aboue the degree of mans aucthority’.Footnote ¹⁰³ But, more generally, the whole force of his argument is to demote these eminently human means of establishing credibility. The ‘inward confirmation of the spirit’ is consistently positioned as the prime motivator for religious faith.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As much as rhetoric, then, law’s probable mode of argumentation placed it in clear distinction to an infused, spiritually prompted, assent.

The Role of Testimony

Within this overall picture, however, arguments that relied on or invoked the notion of testimony – in a general sense, when ‘any reporte … is pronounced with purpose of affirmation’ – were nevertheless granted an unusually prominent status in defining what constituted a properly religious kind of belief.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Testimony remained associated with limitations of merely probable forms of argument that I have outlined above. Finding a report credible was not the same interpretive transaction as assenting to what Vermigli called ‘the motion and impulsion of true faith’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Yet Protestant theologians also recognised an abiding set of structural similarities between believing what the Holy Spirit revealed to you through the scriptures and the investment of interpretive credit in the probable relations of a witness. On the one hand, this strategy had the advantage of echoing moments in the Bible where the Holy Spirit is itself described as a kind of witness. In Romans 8.16, for instance, the ‘Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God’, and Protestant commentators readily linked this supply of spiritual testimony to the experience of faithful assent within the individual believer.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ On the other hand, though, describing faith through the language of witnessing also helped writers home in on the differences between an everyday kind of belief created by reported information and the reception of a similarly extraneous, but specifically spiritual, kind of testimony. The modes of assent involved in these transactions were different, but this difference was all the more pronounced – and all the more useful – precisely because, in other respects, there were some underlying methodological similarities between them.

At a general level, it’s essential to recognise that, while probable belief was demoted to a position below faith, this dynamic is best characterised as more of a relegation than a complete dismissal. As we have seen, Calvin’s discussion of Luke’s opening verses thinks that legal evidence is a problematically slight way of founding faith, but this type of proof nevertheless plays for him a subsidiary, affirmatory role once the Spirit has done its revelatory work.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Such an attitude is mirrored more broadly in Calvin’s Institutes, where he sets out the auxiliary role that human methods of proof play in further driving home the spiritually revealed authority of the scriptures.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Indeed, for all their emphasis on the form of revelatory spiritual irradiation, Protestant definitions of faith did not entail an entirely passive role for the rational and investigatory capacities of believers. ‘[I]t is not enough,’ Calvin stresses, ‘if a man vnexpressedly beleeue that which he vnderstandeth not, nor seeketh to learne.’Footnote ¹¹⁰ Calvin thus sets out a pattern of intellectual enquiry into not only what should be believed but also – as his own extensive discussions about the nature of faith themselves reveal – how to believe. Protestant readers were encouraged to analyse the properties of their certain, spiritually endowed assent alongside other forms of more obviously probable arguments. They were exhorted to see how these weaker forms of arguing could help fortify a divine faith, but also how they could distinguish it.

It was in such enquiries that a special attention was paid to testimony – not only in its general sense of conveying credible information between people but also in its specifically legal sense of witness evidence in court. Some of the clearest examples of this line of thinking occurred in early modern universities. Early seventeenth-century lectures by William Pemble (c. 1591–1623), a moderately illustrious, ‘puritanically-inclined’ Oxford don,Footnote ¹¹¹ are notable for the ways in which they construct their discussion of ‘Fides, pistis, Beliefe’ around a reading of these terms as always involving ‘a knowledge grounded on testimony and authority of others’.Footnote ¹¹² His listeners are exhorted to ‘Take it … Vniuersally thus: All Objects of Beliefe are known only by the relation and telling of another.’Footnote ¹¹³ Testimony is considered an essential component in relating and believing information that lies outside of any individual’s capacities to know things by their own sensory or rational resources. ‘[W]hen wee reade any part of the Romane History, as the description of the battell at Cannae, in Liuie’, Pemble thinks that ‘we beleeve it’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ More day-to-day transactions also feature in Pemble’s account. ‘[W]hen a traveller reports unto us what he hath seene in forraine parts’, for instance, ‘we understand what he saith, and doe haply beleeve him.’Footnote ¹¹⁵ And, in ways that impinge upon the ways in which eyewitness evidence in legal settings functioned, when someone ‘relates unto mee an accident that himselfe hath seene’, Pemble contends that, while that witness ‘knowes it’, ‘I that heare him, doe beleeve it.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Aberdonian professor Robert Baron (1596–1639) was likewise indebted to the concept of testimony in his university disputations – subsequently distributed in England and the Netherlands – on how faith works as ‘assent of the mind [assensus mentis]’: any ‘act of believing [actus credendi]’ is said to occur when ‘we believe something to be true on account of the testimony of another [credimus illud esse verum propter alterius testimonium]’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In furnishing his listeners (and subsequent readers) with examples of this kind of belief-generation, Baron again turns to recognisably quotidian examples, including obviously legal situations. He considers the proposition that a notional ‘Peter’ has been killed. The person ‘who saw Peter killed [qui vidit Petrum interfectum]’ knows that this happened on the basis of sensory perception; if, however, one concedes that ‘Peter’ was killed on the basis of this eyewitness’s ‘narration and testimony [propter hujus narrationem, et testimonium]’, then one believes it.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Pemble and Baron never suggest that these ways of relating credible information between human interlocutors can simply be exported into a definition of religious belief. Baron makes an explicit distinction between ‘divine faith [fides divina]’ and ‘human faith [fides humana]’ – this latter category ‘relies on human testimony [nititur testimonio humano]’, something that can only ever produce (in Baron’s Thomistic terms) an ‘opinion’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Pemble, meanwhile, affords considerable room to the role of spiritual enlightenment in bringing about a specifically religious kind of belief – he replicates precisely the stress on the Spirit’s prompting that earlier Reformers had set out.Footnote ¹²⁰ But the point that I want to make here is that, even though ‘human testimony’ was recognised to fall into the kinds of proof that could only produce probable opinion, or everyday kinds of belief, it was nonetheless singled out as a vital explanatory tool for opening up divine faith to a sustained form of analysis. It presented a useful and abiding set of structural resemblances to a religious model of belief because it recognised the limitations of a human epistemology: it showed why religious belief turned to an outward source – the Holy Spirit – in search of the grounds for assent.

Such approaches to belief in its quotidian and religious forms found a currency that stretched beyond the confines of elite, university-level discussions. Musculus, whose writing I have cited at various points, provides an outstanding early example of this in his Common Places. In his discussion of the Ninth Commandment – ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’ (Exodus 20.16) – Musculus pays considerable attention to the ways in which testimony constructs different kinds of belief. Defining ‘Testimony or witnesse’ as ‘whatsoeuer is constantly reported and auouched of any thing, to enforce menne to beleeue it’, he demonstrates its vast array of social applications.Footnote ¹²¹ The ‘faith and beliefe’ that testimony generates ‘is (to be short) the very synowe of al coniunctions, affaires, and trades, wherevppon mans life standeth’.Footnote ¹²² This range of functions is so expansive because, as for Pemble and Baron, ‘we haue very small and thinne knowledge’ of ‘worldly matters’.Footnote ¹²³ ‘[V]erye necessitie compelleth vs’ to rely on what other people tell us, as it’s what allows us to understand the wider world while preserving a harmonious ‘felowship of life’.Footnote ¹²⁴

Musculus is as insistent as my examples above in showing how distinct a true, spiritually founded faith is. But he nevertheless sees the social network of credible testimony (and the ‘faith and beliefe’ it ‘enforce[s]’) as having an important resemblance to a specifically religious kind of assent. If we have minimal knowledge about ‘worldly matters’, he argues, when it comes to ‘godly’ affairs we have ‘none at all’.Footnote ¹²⁵ It is for this reason that the ‘vse of witnessing is greate, not onely in matters of the worlde, but in godlye matters also: because there bee an innumerable sorte of things which wee be ignoraunte of, to the knowledge of whiche we can not atteyne, but must be allowed for true by fayth’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Echoing the biblical language of supernatural testimony, he holds that the ‘scriptures’, the ‘holy spirite’ and indeed one’s inward ‘conscience’ all ‘witnesse’ God and Christ.Footnote ¹²⁷

Testimony thus inhabited an intriguingly ambivalent position in early modern religious discourses. As a credible relation by someone of something to someone else, it found a place among the kinds of probable arguments that Protestant theology wanted, expressly, to separate from the assent wrought by spiritual influence. (Conceding on the strength of eyewitness testimony that ‘Peter’ was killed in the street was for none of my sources the same assensus mentis as believing that Christ’s rising again had eternally salvific consequences.) Yet writers evidently saw the need to draw on such examples of everyday belief to furnish their audiences with a definition of religious faith: one’s epistemic dependence on revelation could be underlined by thinking with testimony, and spiritual illumination could be both familiarised – and subsequently reinforced in its otherness – by the quotidian scope of these thought exercises.

Importantly, though, these engagements with testimony also suggest that it was increasingly valuable to draw on and underscore a more particular set of interpretive activities associated with testimony in its social context – how it was analysed and tested in legal settings. We can observe between Musculus and Pemble a distinct change in the way that ‘reportes’ are conceived of as a kind of evidence – a relation to be tested and evaluated according to a set of criteria that judge how credible it is. Musculus’s discussions of everyday testimony do draw explicitly on the law: he discusses the necessity of testimony in a ‘courte’, and the conditions he frequently applies to credible forms of narration match (as I shall show very shortly) a forensic stress on sensory perception (what a witness has ‘seene and knowen’).Footnote ¹²⁸ Musculus, though, cannot apply these conditions to the ‘witnesse[s]’ he finds in spiritual sources (the scriptures and the Holy Spirit itself): these divine revelations are, explicitly, not to be subject to evaluation or ‘doubt’ in the way that usual kinds of testimony are.Footnote ¹²⁹

Things stand quite differently for Pemble. He too outlines a set of credibility tests that reflect the kinds of evaluative procedures that were applied in legal settings to witness testimony. These include evaluating ‘the Authority of the Speaker’, but they also involve a way of judging whether the testimony in itself is plausible.Footnote ¹³⁰ Pemble asks whether we have ‘[S]ome Experiment in part of the truth of that which is related’ – some partial ring of truth that allows us to conjecture that whatever is reported to us is, in its overall sense, credible.Footnote ¹³¹ A speaker’s ‘authoritie’ is, Pemble says, the most important criterion, for, ‘if one … hath neither wit nor honesty to tell us of a matter of greatest moment, wherof we also see the probability and truth in part, yet doth he not perswade us to beliefe, though he may move us to a strong suspicion’.Footnote ¹³² Even with this stress on the primacy of ‘authoritie’, Pemble’s description of testimony and its interpretation draws on a variety of interpretive resources that, as I am about to show, have a decidedly forensic hue. They consider both who is speaking and the ‘probability and truth’ of what they are saying, and these factors produce forms of assent ranging from ‘suspicion’ to a full ‘beliefe’.

What’s important to note here is that for Pemble – unlike for Musculus – these eminently probabilistic means of evaluating the credibility of testimony also form a key expressive resource for configuring the otherwise peculiar kind of relation offered by a set of divine agents: the scriptures and the Holy Spirit are themselves parsed through these evaluative schemes.Footnote ¹³³ Given Pemble’s abiding stress on the necessity of supernatural revelation, it’s understandable that the results of this intellectual exercise underline how far the scriptures and the Holy Spirit transcend any usual means of testing credible testimony: he points his readers instead towards a kind of interiorised spiritual revelation that lies beyond the power of human discourse, and that cannot, ultimately, be ‘demonstrate[d] … to another’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Where my emphasis falls here, though, is on the method that Pemble relies upon to elucidate this ineffable spiritual assurance. It is, in precise and schematic terms, the procedures by which all kinds of testimony are judged to be credible – the ‘authoritie’ of the relator; the testimony’s apparent ‘probability and truth’ – that furnish him with a set of tools both to argue for the probity of divine faith and also to adumbrate the mysterious, interior and profoundly distinct mode of religious assent that he is committed to describing.

Thinking with testimony was thus an important tool in Protestant discussions of faith, even though its familiar and widespread social role could only produce inferior, worldly, merely probable forms of belief. It underlined the limited epistemological profiles of individual humans, stressing their need to believe divine things they could neither see nor know at first hand. It also began to prompt considerations of the evaluative procedures associated with testing whether what was related to you was credible, and it used these modes of productively sceptical enquiry to underline how different and transcendent a properly religious faith should be. In the chapters that follow this introduction, we see a much more full-throated engagement with a much more explicitly legal set of credibility tests that were applied to testimony. There too, the essential difference of religious belief is given a powerful articulation by these comparative means.

Defining Testimony

So far this introduction has been happy to follow Musculus’s quite general definition of testimony: relating information to someone else in order to ‘enforce’ belief. I want now to define this term more precisely in its early modern context. My aim here is twofold. I hope to show more clearly that, in the early modern period, thinking about testimony involved turning to a specifically legal form of evidence. And, addressing English contexts in particular, I wish to argue that invoking testimony as a term activated a set of recognisable hermeneutic exercises that were formulated in legal settings. The credibility of witness evidence relied upon juristic ways of testing who was speaking and whether what they were saying was plausible.

Since classical antiquity, turning to someone’s testimony in the course of an argument had been formulated as a distinct kind of proof: it fitted into the scheme of ‘plausible device[s]’ designed to ‘create belief’ that Cicero had described.Footnote ¹³⁵ Testimony occupied a prominent position in those proofs that were thought to be drawn from ‘outside’ the matter under consideration: ‘rumour’, ‘oaths’ and ‘documents’, but primarily ‘the evidence of witnesses’.Footnote ¹³⁶ This arrangement reflects one of the most important generative contexts for classical rhetoric: the law courts of Greece and Rome.Footnote ¹³⁷ By the early modern period, however, this formative set of forensic contexts had been diluted by the expansion of rhetorical precepts into a much broader range of discursive practices. Sixteenth-century rhetoricians retained the category of ‘testimony’, but they now understood testimonia to signify not a particularly legal kind of proof but any type of argument that drew on and cited other authorities.Footnote ¹³⁸ The Lawiers Logicke (1588) of Abraham Fraunce (1558?– 92/3) sums up the issue well when it gives as the primary definition of testimony (an argument ‘borrowed elsewhere’) as a ‘famous sentence’.Footnote ¹³⁹

An influential way of reading this change has been to diagnose a weakening in the force of testimony as a method of proof. It was, as Richard Serjeantson has shown, its reliance on authority that began to mitigate testimony’s usefulness as a means of argument.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In Fraunce’s terms, testimony was ‘only fit for proofe or confirmation’ – capable of adding force to an argument but insufficient on its own terms.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The specific technique of arguing through testimony – that is, the quotation of some authoritative text or ‘famous sentence’ to amplify an argument – was losing some of its probative force. Such a diminution makes clear sense when we place it in the changing philosophical practices of early modernity. Where new methods of scholarship were asking troubling questions about the reliability of established sources, citing Pliny or Aristotle to strengthen an argument about natural history no longer carried the weight that it previously had.

Yet, as we have also seen, testimony was conceived of as something other than citing a renowned author to bolster one’s case. It could involve considering what other people had related to you, especially on the basis of what they had, in Musculus’s words, ‘seene and knowen’. This is because, even as the specific, rhetorical force of testimonia began to wane, there was a renewed and widespread investment in imagining testimony as a form of legal evidence – in a paradigmatic way, what an eyewitness relates in court. Early modern rhetoricians began, in a general sense, to register the legal resonances of the category of proofs that testimonia conventionally fell into: ‘witnesses, handwriting, confessions’ were recognised as things that ‘Jurists diligently teach about’.Footnote ¹⁴² (Legal texts by way of reciprocity had long incorporated Ciceronian terms to describe the kind of persuasion that takes place in court: defining a ‘full proof’ – provided by the testimony of two competent witnesses – as ‘that which creates enough belief to resolve a legal controversy’.Footnote ¹⁴³) And, at a more sustained level, a whole host of discursive activities began to import legal principles for discerning reliable witness evidence into their methodologies.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Andrea Frisch, for instance, has shown how integrated juridical models of eyewitness testimony and emergent cultures of travel writing were in early modern France in this period.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ François Baudouin’s On the Making of a Universal History (1561) – tellingly subtitled ‘and its conjunction with jurisprudence’ – likewise expresses a clear preference for sources whose writers ‘related those things that they saw, and at which they were present’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

In an English context, however, these newly legalistic modes of argument also resonated with an embedded set of cultural practices that had taken root in the sixteenth century: the examination and evaluation of witness evidence in a legal setting. In criminal trials, a cascade of information was examined by officials and citizen jurors.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Justices of the Peace gathered information from suspects and witnesses; this was then fed up the hierarchy to gaol delivery sessions (where imprisoned defendants were tried) or the Assizes.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Witnesses themselves had since 1563 been compelled to appear in court.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ And, perhaps most importantly, lay participants were called upon to judge evidence as jurors: in the coroner’s court; as members of a grand jury (which decided whether a case should proceed to a full trial); and in the so-called petty jury, which sat at the trial itself.

It is certainly true that, in these common law forums, juries and officials weren’t bound by a strict set of rules for deciding whether a witness could be believed or what counted as reliable evidence.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ But this didn’t mean that there were no guidelines for the ways in which testimony was examined. Justices of the Peace were charged with gathering evidence and examining it in ways that were informed by the stricter codification of evidence law in what is known as the ‘Romano-canon’ tradition.Footnote ¹⁵¹ They were also criticised for breaching presumed evidentiary standards – for being swayed more by ‘the number of voices than … the weight of reasons’ or for relying too much upon reported accusation rather than their own investigatory powers.Footnote ¹⁵² Grand jurors, meanwhile, were exhorted to a ‘diligent hearkening to that which [other men] will lawfully report touching offenses against [the] laws and statutes’,Footnote 153 and they seem to have put such advice into practice.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ At the trial itself, petty jurors also demonstrated their prowess in examining the ‘manner and content of testimony’, judging it for its coherence and probability.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ They could be instructed ‘not to look upon evidences only but to look into them, not to hear and read only, but to marke them well’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ James VI and I’s 1607 Proclamation to Jurors likewise frames the jury as practitioners of enquiry and discretion, leaving ‘the discerning and credit of Testimonie to the Juries consciences and understanding’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

This ‘credit’ was evaluated in a number of ways. Records of depositions from this period show a concern for noting the moral and social status of the witness, but also for the coherence of the account of events offered: ‘the place, time and people involved’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The epistemic basis of testimony was also given an important status. Justices of the Peace showed a preference for ‘immediate knowledge’ rather than ‘hearsay’ when taking down witness statements, matching the broader, centuries-old stipulation that ‘witnesses must testify “de visu et auditu”’ – on what they have seen or heard.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Witnesses shouldn’t testify unless they ‘soient de certein’ through their sensory perceptions.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ They must have, in the words of the jurist Ferdinando Pulton (1536–1618), a ‘certaine knowledge’ of what they are speaking about.Footnote ¹⁶¹

When writers like Musculus, Pemble, Taylor or Austin invoke testimony to describe how ‘reporte[s]’ generate belief, then, they not only reflected a broader awareness that forensic evidentiary procedures could (across a number of disciplines) offer ways of making a credible argument; they were also speaking in terms that sat at the heart of a widely participatory jurisprudential system in early modern England. To say (as Musculus did) that we should believe what people say that they have ‘seene and knowen’, or to say – if only later to qualify – that Christ’s Resurrection could be proved by eyewitness testimony, was to appeal to a core mechanism for producing and testing belief that would be instantly assimilable to the social lives of early modern English citizens.

But citing Musculus to exemplify an English form of evidentiary fluency raises a further question. How could this Strasbourgian Reformer speak so powerfully to an evidentiary mindset so rooted in a peculiarly English common law system? The ability of juristic principles to transcend locality in this respect points us to a further, equally crucial set of contexts for my discussion: the jurisprudential system inherited from Roman law, widely practised across Europe, and adopted by a variety of non-criminal jurisdictions in England. The expansive literature produced by this pan-European jurisprudential method (known as the ‘Romano-canon’ or ‘civilian’ tradition) had devised a much more explicit – and much more binding – set of guidelines about how witness evidence and other kinds of proof should be handled.Footnote ¹⁶² By definition, these rules informed how certain courts in England operated: the ecclesiastical courts,Footnote ¹⁶³ Chancery (which could revise judgements at common law), and the Admiralty courts. They also mirrored – and in some cases directly informed – many of the principles that I have just detailed for criminal investigations and trials.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Pulton’s stipulation of ‘certaine knowledge’, for instance, echoes exactly the calls for testimony ‘ex certa scientia visu et auditu [from certain knowledge by sight or hearing]’ in civilian forums.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

Guidebooks for these rules, often produced in Europe, were readily available and widely consulted in early modern England. Encyclopaedias of proofs and presumptions by Joseph Mascardus (d. 1588) and Jacobus Menochius (d. 1607) were the standard points of reference for lawyers working in civilian forums;Footnote ¹⁶⁶ these works drew heavily on the commentaries of medieval jurists (such as Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313–57) and Baldus de Ubaldis (1327–1400)), and were read alongside contemporary expositions of proof and procedure by (for instance) the Italian lawyer Prospero Farinacci (1554–1618).Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Specific handbooks de testibus were also produced: the anthology of tracts on witnesses edited by the sixteenth-century lawyer Giovanni Battista Ziletti (‘Ziletus’, in Latin), for example, provides a helpfully indexed compendium of rules for witness evidence, and one to which the present book makes frequent reference.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The evidentiary principles established by this rich textual corpus are especially worth summarising here because – as the following chapters of this book will show – they informed in considerable detail the discussions of testimony in relation to religious faith.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Justinian’s Digest, one of the foundational texts of the Romano-canon tradition, had set the terms for codifying who could count as a reliable witness: their ‘dignity, trustworthiness, character, and importance [dignitas, fides, mores, gravitas]’ are to be examined (Dig. 22.5.3).Footnote ¹⁷⁰ But the moral character of these witnesses formed only part of the equation.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Later commentators on civilian law had placed a high value on the probability of what it was that the witness said. They tested a testimony’s consistency;Footnote ¹⁷² they also laid great stress on the plausibility of a testimonyFootnote ¹⁷³ and the manner in which the information that it contained had been acquired – its dependence upon what the witness had seen and heard at first hand.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Even more explicitly than the common law contexts that I have just described, testimony in the Romano-canon tradition had to convey the sense-based knowledge of the witness, and the ‘grounds and detail of their knowledge’ could be made the subject of juristic enquiry.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Relatedly, an investigation into whether a testimony was plausible could prompt further questions about how the witness’s knowledge was acquired: they could be quizzed about ‘all the circumstances [de omnibus circumstantiis]’ of the event that they claimed to have perceived.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Such tests of plausibility and epistemic foundation were thus vital in establishing a witness’s credibility, and this category of the ‘credible’ received a new emphasis in early modern jurisprudence.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ And, while Romano-canon discussions of witness evidence were undeniably more codified than their common law equivalents, it’s important to observe too that there was a flexibility built into the way that these rules were applied.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ The moral status and the number of witnesses that could produce a sufficient proof were important, but they sat alongside a recognition that the judge could apply his discretion about whether notionally competent witnesses – ones who met the formalised criteria – were credible.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ The famous formal requirement for two witnesses to provide ‘full proof’ of a fact could itself be outweighed by more nuanced evaluations of credibility.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

The purpose of this overview of evidentiary methods in early modern England is to make a fundamental point about the function of testimony as a means of proof and argument in this period: within a broader shift towards seeing testimony as rooted in legal kinds of evidence (as it was for Baudouin, say), it could in an English context be readily attached to a set of specific interpretive criteria that were part and parcel of the contemporary legal administration. The principle that witness credibility should be tested (something that obtained for all legal forums) and the specific rules for evaluating credibility (codified in courts that used the Romano-canon system) had a perceptible influence on the ways in which the authors that I study in this book imagined testimony to work. The ‘reporte’ of a matter from one source to another was conceived of in legal terms. This involved assessing the moral status of the witness (their authority and social standing)Footnote ¹⁸¹ and, as Lorna Hutson’s study of forensic narration in early modern drama has shown, its ‘probability’ in terms that are as at home in law as they are in rhetoric: the consistency and plausibility of the matter narrated.Footnote ¹⁸² But it also involved an enquiry into what Andrea Frisch calls the ‘epistemic’ nature of testimony – the ways in which what a witness says should be rooted in some kind of sensory stimulation: what they have seen and heard.Footnote ¹⁸³

It was exactly these evaluative criteria that appealed to writers wishing to mobilise testimony as a concept and as a method of proof in their discussions of religious belief. In a general sense, imagining what kind of proof witnesses could provide could produce helpful grounds for supporting the credal claims of Christianity. As this book will go on to argue, in the sermons of Andrewes and Donne the truth of scriptural events (the Resurrection) and key aspects of Protestant doctrine (salvation through faith) could indeed be helpfully opened up to discursive investigation by imagining them as issues to be proved by witness testimony in a legal setting. A variety of notional witnesses – historical figures from the scriptures, ecclesiastical authorities, and indeed Christ and the Holy Spirit – are in these texts imagined to offer a testimony that meets precisely the requirements of credible evidence at law that I have just outlined. To return to the terms of my opening, the belief ‘made’ by these methods lends a beneficent support to a ‘true’ faith.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

And yet, as I have already indicated, these legal methods become all the more expressive of a properly religious belief by disclosing their limitations as merely probable, human methods of proof – perfectly admissible in court but fundamentally lacking in divine assurance. Donne and Andrewes find ingenious ways of differentiating the workings of a ‘true’ faith by showing how the usual categories of credible testimony cannot contain the supernatural modes of proof offered through the scriptures, the Spirit and the sacraments. Bacon’s New Atlantis, studied in Chapter 3 of this book, is likewise committed to setting out in subtle but telling detail how a spiritually established faith must transcend the belief that can be created by reliable witness evidence. Vaughan’s poetry presents at times an agonised wish that legal evidence could provide some kind of secure foundation on which to build his (sorely tested) faith. But this desire is consistently checked: it can provide at best a mitigated security that awaits a stronger kind of spiritual warrant.

Critical Contexts

It is these evidentiary, legal practicalities of testimony that provide the foundation of the literary aspects of this study. In making the claim that legally oriented discussions of belief spring especially from early modern literature, I want to advert in the first instance to some outstanding studies of the period’s literary culture that have focused on its relationship to contemporary cultures of law and evidence. Some of the most fruitful developments in literary studies since the turn of the century have been the groundbreaking connections drawn between legal and literary cultures in early modernity,Footnote ¹⁸⁵ and a particular strand of this scholarship has shown how influential the cultural procedures of analysing and testing legal evidence were on the period’s dramatic genres.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Lorna Hutson’s work has placed a particular stress on the relationship between ‘the epistemology of the jury trial’, which ‘provided a legal context in which concepts of narrative probability and the circumstantial coherence for alleged “facts”’ gained a fresh emphasis, and the new kinds of plot and character that emerge in early modern drama.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Plays from the late 1580s and early 1590s such as Titus Andronicus, 2 Henry VI and Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (to name just a few) not only stage processes of evidentiary enquiry; they also appeal directly to a culture in which those exact forms of investigation, and the kinds of inferential reconstruction of unseen events that they involve, were rooted in the civic lives of early modern citizens.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ In complement to Hutson’s work (though slightly preceding it), Subha Mukherji’s readings of the legal resonances of early modern drama have shown that late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century plays could also exercise more sceptical critiques of the ways in which evidence was read in judicial forums. Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (c. 1603), for example, exposes the ‘murkiness of evidence collection’;Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Webster’s The White Devil (1612), on the other hand, is more forthright in its ability to render the notions of stable, legible evidence a ‘fantasy of the law’ that is ripe for problematisation in practice.Footnote ¹⁹⁰

The texts that I examine here do not, for the most part, have plots or characters in the ways in which plays do; nor do they stage the process of intrigue-driven enquiry in the way that a Renaissance revenge tragedy might. Yet I want to make the case that they are as informed as these dramatic works by a culture of evidentiary enquiry that could, in Hutson’s words, ‘help an audience infer and so imagine what they cannot see’.Footnote ¹⁹¹ When they imagine a scriptural event – or, indeed, a form of more inward spiritual revelation – as being mediated through a recognisably legal form of testimony, the texts I examine are asking their audiences or readers to think about how a belief in some occurrence that they cannot otherwise know or perceive might be generated by forensic evidence. This is one way in which historical events (the Resurrection) or inward, intangible occurrences (spiritual revelation and conversion) can be represented and inferred to be plausible or probable. But, as with Mukherji’s readings, the authors I examine here also demonstrate the limitations of such legal reasoning: it is, we might say, itself a ‘fantasy of the law’ in these texts that a true faith could be established through the techniques of forensic credibility.Footnote ¹⁹²

In the course of my argument, though, some further differences emerge between the cultures of evidentiary investigation handled by this scholarship and the legal contexts drawn on by Andrewes, Donne, Bacon and Vaughan. At the heart of Hutson’s model lies the participatory nature of the common law system in early modern England: one in which lay jurors participated in analysing evidence. Though this is a set of contexts that is likewise appealed to in much of the discussion in this book, my work (on Donne and Bacon especially) shows that that other system of law in early modern England – the civilian, Romano-canon tradition – also constituted a key resource for thinking about how belief might be constructed and justified according to evidence. Certain of the plays that Hutson reads undertake a politicised celebration of the participatory nature of common law at the (implicit or explicit) expense of a secretive, un-interrogable Romano-canon set of procedures.Footnote ¹⁹³ Hutson’s readings of these dramatic works are wholly persuasive; the point I want to make here, rather, is that, in other discursive fields, a more flexible approach to civilian practices could be adopted. For Donne, the pan-European applicability of civilian law helped it address questions about belief that transcended the particularities of an English jurisprudential system. For Bacon, on the other hand, the abundantly codified evidentiary rules of civilian law could be handily appropriated for the practicalities of a natural philosophy while also exemplifying that the categories of credibility those legal rules entailed remained insufficient in accounting for religious belief. In any case, the texts that I read here show a clear and often detailed awareness of civilian procedure. This may itself reflect a more widespread familiarity with this system in early modern England, if only from the growing amount of litigation in courts that relied on civilian law.Footnote ¹⁹⁴

The texts that I examine here, then, are themselves engaged in a literary culture that frequently imagined a set of legal contexts in order to complicate and comment upon the practices and limitations of forensic arguments. It is, as I have been suggesting throughout this introduction, precisely at the points where legal evidence is revealed to create an insufficient form of belief that the spiritual foundations of a true faith can be articulated. And it is in recognising the juristic frames of reference that I hope too to contribute something new to the varied discussions of how notions of religious belief inform the literature of early modern England that have emerged in the past decade or so.

We are, as scholars, in an excellent position to recognise the interaction between religion and literature in early modern EnglandFootnote ¹⁹⁵ and, within this field, to think about how the epistemological aspects of religion were engaged with by literary writing. Work by Mukherji (and her colleagues) has drawn welcome attention to the vibrant, plural ways in which repertoires of knowledge and belief – including sensory perception, rhetoric and the law – addressed questions about faith in the period’s writing.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Likewise, though in quite diverse ways, Claire McEachern, Brooke Conti and Victoria Kahn have (with insightful results) investigated how discussions of faith inform the content and form of literary works from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For McEachern, the narrative possibilities of Protestant understandings of salvation have a shaping force over the structure of dramatic works and an audience’s response to on-stage representations.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Conti has likewise seen the period’s literary writing as responding to the pressures of faith: moments of autobiography in religious prose demonstrate in their digressive complexities the difficult transition from a collective set of credal claims to the narration of individual experience.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Kahn’s illuminating study of modern engagements with early modern political theory, meanwhile, sees the belief-claims of Christianity as already available for ironisation and reinvention in (for instance) Shakespeare and Hobbes: appeals to a theologically founded, transcendentally justified political authority reveal their unstable potential as fabricated artefacts.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Belief, we might extrapolate, could in these more sceptical writings be shown to be strategically created through a literary ‘poesis’: its transcendent origins could be gestured towards, while also being exposed as artificial in their origin.Footnote ²⁰⁰

In the course of their investigations, though, these accounts of early modern religion share an inclination to stabilise faith as a cultural phenomenon in order to show that literary writing problematises, transmutes or appropriates the way it works. Mukherji’s reading of The Winter’s Tale, for instance, sees its final scenes as subverting both legal concepts of evidence and Protestant discussions of religious belief.Footnote ²⁰¹ Conti’s excellent close readings show that an orthodox belief, structured as a set of credal propositions, is complicated within textual expressions of a more mercurial subjectivity.Footnote ²⁰² For McEachern, the widespread methods of investigating belief in salvation in early modern England become a powerful set of conditions for producing something quite different: the formal and mimetic properties of Shakespeare’s drama, and the audience’s investment in the people represented on stage.Footnote ²⁰³ And, in a broader sense, Kahn’s suggestion that the transcendental claims of a political theology might be a ‘subset of metaphor’ similarly positions the language of belief as available for appropriative, ironic deployment in a variety of literary contexts.Footnote ²⁰⁴

By contrast, my investigation of belief, literature and legal evidence helps us to see that the workings of a properly divine faith were something to be worked out from the inside of these texts, as it were: its spiritual origins could be figured forth by tracing a set of discursive and conceptual limitations when thinking in legal terms. Another way of putting this is that there is an abundant set of appropriative and ironising dynamics at work here, but they operate with respect to a prevailing legal culture and the ways in which it thought about producing forms of probable assent in its participants. It is the terms of the law that are twisted and redeployed in the search of a form to represent a kind of divine disclosure and assurance that could never be contained by human discourse or proved by human methods.

Chapter Summaries

The two chapters after the Introduction focus primarily on early seventeenth-century preaching: the sermons of Andrewes and Donne. As Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough have argued, the sermon is best understood as a finely wrought literary artefact in this period: preaching was a ‘literary art inextricably engaged in the public sphere’.Footnote ²⁰⁵ As we shall see, the sermon’s public form of delivery and intervention gives it as a literary genre the opportunity to ape and then creatively reinvent the lexis and form of legal discourse for spiritual ends, and particularly for discussions of religious belief.

Chapter 1 turns to Andrewes’s preaching, and specifically his sermons preached on several Easter Sundays at the Court. By reading these sermons alongside some of Andrewes’s earlier lectures at the University of Cambridge, this chapter attends to some of the key epistemological grounding that legal evidence could supply for one of the central faith-claims of Christianity: Christ’s rising from the dead. For Andrewes, the credibility of this event is established by its being rooted in eminently probative witnesses: its status as a legal fact is a key way in which it is known, and known assuredly, by Andrewes’s own audience. And yet, as the chapter shows, this way of knowing is consistently qualified in Andrewes’s preaching: other forms of experience – spiritual illumination, liturgical participation, and indeed the reception of the sacrament – are essential components in his definition of a true religious faith. Crucially, it is through his engagement with the law that this broad experiential repertoire can be gathered under the rubric of belief. Religious faith is defined by legal process even as it transcends it.

For Donne, the subject of Chapter 2, forensic method is no less crucial in outlining how a spiritually derived belief might be defined and articulated, and indeed how its presence might be discerned by Donne’s audience. Yet the purposes to which this co-option of legal process is put are markedly different from those touched on by Andrewes. Donne is interested, primarily, in making an assurance of salvation available to his listeners. This chapter turns by way of a preliminary case study to Donne’s polemical prose tract, Pseudo-Martyr, in order to show that rules for evaluating witness testimony play a key role in adjudicating between legitimate and unwarranted belief. The chapter then shows how, in different settings, Donne uses this legal framework to address the forms of inward and outward evidence that his sermon audiences can parse to establish a belief in their personal soteriological states. One of the outcomes of this chapter, I suggest, is that the legal frameworks that Donne draws on are shown to have bespoke polemical and pastoral objectives. While Romano-canon law helps, by virtue of its pan-European extent, to address an international, post-Reformation controversy, the homelier aspects of common law can help reframe the question of salvation to a set of pastoral ends.

Having focused mainly on the sermon as a genre, this book in its subsequent two chapters considers how evolving intellectual and political contexts generate an interest in the engagement with legal evidence in other genres and contexts. Chapter 3 turns to the philosophical and literary writings of Francis Bacon. Bacon responds to emergent questions about the validity of natural philosophical practices by turning to forensic practices for parsing witness testimony: they help sift through and navigate a hugely diverse array of sources of information, from ancient philosophers to contemporary accounts of different geographical and cultural phenomena. Yet, as this chapter argues, Bacon finds a significant mismatch between probable claims about the natural world, organised and evaluated through a legal method, and ways in which religious belief is manifested. I show this in my reading of his prose fiction, the New Atlantis. On the one hand, Bacon’s text represents a stylistic implementation of the categories that underwrite credible witness testimony in a courtroom: the narrator’s rhetoric is, in its sensory detail, invested in providing a plausible eyewitness account. But the evangelical conversion of the Atlantan community to a saving faith cannot be represented through this style of plausible narration. The mysterious workings of a true faith are given articulate shape by virtue of their refusal to be corralled into the framework of legal evidence.

If contemporary revisions in epistemological practices underpin Bacon’s deliberate obscuring of the operation of faith, it is the wholesale upheaval of spiritual, societal and indeed legal order that sets the scene for the book’s final substantive chapter. Here, in Chapter 4, I turn to the devotional lyrics of Henry Vaughan, written from a Church of England, Royalist perspective in the 1640s and 1650s. Vaughan’s lyrics attempt to adduce and preserve some kind of guidance for dispossessed Church of England adherents during these tumultuous contexts. They represent a search for divine presence and providential protection at a time of ecclesiological suppression and intense conflicts over scriptural interpretation. One of the ways they invoke a form of stable order is, I suggest, by turning to the processes of evaluating legal evidence (processes that had themselves been subject to radical revision and reinvention). Vaughan imaginatively recreates legal inquests in order to prove to his readers God’s historical interventions in the world: like Andrewes, he turns to witnesses of divine manifestations on earth in order to establish these moments in scriptural history as reassuring facts. But, again realising the limitations of this approach, his poems find a new value in the role of the legal frameworks, concepts and metaphors that Making Belief addresses throughout. It is the structure and process of an ordered, equitable trial that becomes a means of instilling a faith in God’s presence and salvific promise.