Jane Austen & the Reformation

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Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samurais. relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

It was a large, handsome stone building, standing well on rising ground and backed by a ridge of high, woody hills. And in front, a stream of some natural importance has swirled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She'd never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.

They were all of them warm in their admiration, and at that moment she felt that to be the mistress of Pemberley might be something. These are the words of Jane Austen, published in 1813. Words of languid pastoral beauty. that speak of centuries of change and division that she was reluctant to embrace. 250 years after the dissolution of the monasteries had seen the largest redistribution of land and wealth since the Norman conquest.

Austin would come to treasure visits to Stonely Abbey in Warwickshire and the ruins of Netley Abbey in Hampshire, insistent reminders of Britain's fractured identity. As stately homes came to be fashioned out of monastic foundations, and commercial and secular pursuits grew into further class divisions, So too came a nostalgia for the recent past and these institutions which had seemingly stood for community and stability. In this anniversary year...

250 years after Jane Austen's birth. We're following the recommendation of listener Theodosia Austen to stretch well up into the 18th and 19th centuries, very much not just the Tudors, to explore the impact of the Tudors and the ways in which we have continued to think of them. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Roger E. Moore, Principal Senior Lecturer in English at Vanderbilt University.

A specialist in early modern English literature and religion, including work on Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sidney and Geoffrey Chaucer, Moore has written extensively on the subject of today's episode, Jane Austen, his landmark work. Jane Austen and the Reformation, Remembering the Sacred Landscape, examines the ways in which the changing society of the 18th and 19th centuries contended with the after effects of the dissolution. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb.

And this is Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Dr. Moore, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much. It's good to be with you today. How did you first come to look at Jane Austen's work in the context of the Reformation? actually offered the opportunity. I came to this subject, actually, in the best possible way, and that is working with a student. And I was asked to direct.

student's honors thesis on Jane Austen. And she was looking at the different sorts of women in Jane Austen's novels. And so in rereading those novels and preparing to guide her in that project. I kept noticing references to the medieval past, to abbeys, churches, and chapels. And I started to notice patterns.

in those references. And so from there, the subject just took off. What personal experience did Austen have of what you call the sacred landscape? So she had... quite a full connection to the sacred landscape. She spent much of her life visiting or staying at remnants of the former abbeys and churches. She attended school briefly in Reading, and this school was Mrs. Lautrenel's school in Reading Abbey Gatehouse, and the inner gatehouse there. And she visited her family at Stonely Abbey.

She knew the God's House, which became the Royal Garrison Chapel in Portsmouth. Her knight's relatives owned a house in Canterbury called Whitefriars, which was built on part of it. former friary. She visited, as you mentioned, Netley Abbey on at least one occasion, we think a couple, and maybe Bewley also. So she was surrounded by these remnants and I think fascinated by them.

She looked at them as more than just picturesque scenery. I think that she looked at them and saw political and social consequences and lamented the changes that had.

made those ruins possible. What do you think was prompting that sympathy in her? Well, I think that Austen, growing up in a clerical family, she would have heard a great deal about ecclesiastical history doctrinal issues and she would have from a very early age i think heard a good deal about of the changes and she starts her earliest writings, one of her earliest writings is a history of England, a comic history of England, where she addresses a number of historical

And, of course, mentions the dissolution when she discusses Henry VIII. So I think that we may talk about this later, but I think that she tended to be... conservative in looking back at the past and in seeing the values of the past. And that comes out in her novels in so many interesting ways. And I think that helps account for some of her interest in

the Reformation, and in particular, the dissolution. And I would like to talk about that history of England, but before we do, do you think that her beliefs... were representative of common thought at the time, or was she more exceptional? Is it dangerous to think of her as a mouthpiece? I think that her thoughts on the dissolution were in line with a particular...

strand of thinking about the dissolution. There were really two ways in the 18th century and early 19th centuries that the British regarded the dissolution. One was, of course, that it was a part of a great deliverance from superstition and that the destruction of these houses was a good thing. It ushered England into a more rational and...

powerful kind of faith. And so for them, looking at these ruined monasteries, they exulted in the loss. Then on the other hand, though, there is a strand of thinking about the dissolution. that starts very early after the closure of the monasteries and continues on through the 18th century. And Jane Austen is heir to this tradition. And in this way of thinking, the dissolution was a great loss.

And so I think that Jane Austen is aware of this tradition. She knew many of the writings, antiquarian works, historical works where some of these nostalgic sentiments were articulated. And so I think that she's very aware of that tradition when she represents remnants of the Abbeys in her work. When we look at her history of England, which is 1791, how possible...

Is it to draw out the evidence of her beliefs? Yes. Well, I think that the tendency often with authors with regarding the juvenilia, their early works. is to discount that, to see, well, this is the apprentice work. This is something that the author has developed past. And these are childlike works. And I think that we're... We would be wrong to think that about Jane Austen. I think that her juvenile works are quite mature and quite sophisticated, and they bring up many...

themes that she's going to develop or literary techniques that she's going to develop in the mature novels. So I think that we can feel pretty safe in saying that What she might have to say about the Reformation and the history of England is something that she continued to entertain as she moves through. And some of the...

points of view, some of the comments that she makes on historical figures in the history of England are connected to other comments that she made. For instance, the history of England is... very much pro-Stewart, very much pro-Mary Queen of Scots. And for Austin in that work... Elizabeth I is the great pest of society whose greatest crime is her perfidious behavior to her sister queen. And so in Austen's copy...

of Oliver Goldsmith's History of England. She includes numerous marginal comments that disagree with Goldsmith, and she makes a number of pro-Stewart comments there as well. And we know that other members of her family were aware of how their ancestors had in the past expressed loyalty to the stewards. So I think all that kind of information tells us that. even when she's being tongue-in-cheek or

comic in history of England, there's a great deal of truth behind it as well. She describes Henry VIII in hardly more favorable terms when she calls him a man of no religion himself.

Do you think this is a common perception of his actions by the time we get to the late 18th century? Yes, I think so. And I think even those historians of the 18th century like Goldsmith or Hume or Robertson... who seemed to think that Henry overall, some of his actions, particularly in relation to religion, were justified.

Even they find it hard to defend his spirituality. And so I think for her to say that, she's articulating something that was pretty deeply felt in the culture. I think people were aware. of the mercenary reasons behind much of Henry VIII's religious reform. So what motive does she ascribe then to the dissolution itself?

So in the history of England, she says that Henry VIII has done a great service to the landscape by providing all of these ruins and these picturesque ruins, and that this must be the reason. that he did it, because why else would a man, as you mentioned, of no religion, be so intent on destroying one that had been in place for ages?

So for her, it has to be an aesthetic motivation for what's going on. And clearly, that's amusing and anachronistic. I mean, he was not aware of picturesque scenery, and we don't seem to have any evidence. You would think about that, of course. But there's something to her statement that it attributes still a selfish motivation to Henry VIII. So, yes, he destroys these places for...

his own personal aesthetic pleasure. Do you think she was being ironic? I mean, think about some of the tones of her novels later. Yes, I think there's definitely irony there. And she's also responding to a very... famous theorist of the picturesque, William Gilpin, who was famous for writing a number of travelogues throughout about various places in England. And he, on a couple of occasions,

comes close to saying, well, Henry VIII's actions were really beneficial to us also. So she's both rehearsing and kind of also mocking that theorist of the picturesque. It's almost a bit like a sort of Instagram influencer today being like, well, I'm so glad he dissolved the monasteries because I get to take this great picture. Yeah, that's a good way of thinking of it.

So there are references to the ruins of former monasteries in... Many of her novels from Eleanor and Marianne, reminiscing of walks in the ruins of the Abbeyland and Sense and Sensibility, Mr Knightley's residence, Donwell Abbey and Emma. Fanny Price's reverence of monastic churches in Mansfield Park. But can we talk about Northanger Abbey, first of all, 1817? How explicitly does Northanger Abbey examine...

the political and social changes that came out of the Reformation? Well, I think it examines them pretty clearly and forcefully and in some detail. And so this novel is one in which Jane Austen... confronts the craze and fashion for reading gothic novels and her protagonist catherine moreland is a wonderful reader of novels. She's read all of the horrid novels, and there's a list of these Gothic novels in the work. And so this is what she's investigating, is how...

Patterns of reading can lead to particular kinds of behavior. But when she chooses, when Austen chooses to write about an abbey or set the novel in an abbey. She does not choose the typical location for an abbey in a Gothic novel, say by Anne Radcliffe or any other number of other Gothic novelists. Those novels set their abbeys in France or Italy or Spain. And she chooses to set her novel in an English abbey. And she foregrounds. the history of the Abbey, because we learn, Catherine learns,

that the abbey fell, that's the word, it's used into the hands of the Tilney family. The Tilneys are the family that Catherine is going to visit at Northanger, and fell into their hands at the dissolution. It was a richly endowed monastery, we are told, and they have lived there ever since. So that piece of information... While Brief, though, establishes, gives us some political context to this that she didn't have to have. So by choosing to place her story in an English abbey.

she is choosing to foreground the event that was the dissolution and set the stage for thinking about the transformation of these properties from houses of spirituality to stately homes. Thinking of the Tilneys and these gentry sort of families that benefited from the redistribution of wealth.

How do her novels typically characterize such people? Well, they do not characterize them positively. Certainly in Northanger Abbey, the Tilney family. comes in for a good deal of criticism, particularly the patriarch, General Tilney, who is a rather forceful and, we later find, tyrannical man. who kind of rides roughshod over other people, who is intent on getting his own way, who is vain, who is proud of his possessions.

He's particularly proud of the newness of his possessions and how expensive they are. So Austin gives us a lot of unflattering detail, I think, about... the Tilneys and makes the connection between their acquisitiveness in the novel and the acquisitiveness that led to their

acquisition of the property back in the 16th century. And it's interesting, isn't it? There's a kind of tension here because one of the first images that comes to mind when people think of Jane Austen's novels is the stately home. How important do you think it is to acknowledge that Austin's landscape is also one of significant degradation? I think that's very important and that's something that...

readers of Austin have not necessarily paid a lot of attention to in the past. I think that when we have looked at the references to the past, to what these properties used to be, we do kind of... We've always assumed that this was picturesque scenery, that Jane Austen was engaging in the vogue for this kind of scenery. And we know that she liked William Gilpin and she read his works and she was quite aware of this.

But I think that it makes a big difference to learn that some of these properties were ill-gotten gains that were the result of an immense 16th century land grab. And certainly that's the case. Northanger Abbey. And though Austin is associated with a stately home and often associated with upholding the values of the gentry, she is also very critical.

of the gentry throughout the novels for not living up to their standards, for not living up to their expectations for them in society. And so I see this. awareness on her part of perhaps the taint associated with some of the property as another way of criticizing the gentry. I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures.

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Yes, because there's something much more trenchant once you realise that Northanger is not simply ravaged by time, it's something that's been deliberately dismantled. Then it figures really differently in the work, doesn't it? That's right. Yes, it's not something that, yes, happened naturally. This is something that was a result of sometimes, not often, violent process. I mean, some of these, Abbott did not want to surrender their properties.

and suffered the ultimate punishment for that execution. And so knowing that the house that she's visiting, that Catherine Moreland is visiting in the novel, has this sort of past. certainly makes us look a little bit differently at that. And it allows Austen to pick up on the trope of the tyrannical father that shows up in Gothic novels all the time and give it some added heft. Okay, here's somebody.

whose entire family line has been built on ill-gotten acquisition. Dr. Moore, how much do you think this fascination with the dissolution... speaks to the political and social upheaval of her own century. I mean, is the novel engaging with recent events like the French Revolution, the dismantling of structures of power at the time? Yes, it definitely is. I think that one of the reasons that critiques or reconsiderations of the English dissolution were becoming common...

in the 1790s was because of what the English were seeing across the channel in France. So the French Revolution, the French revolutionaries were hostile to these organizations also, these institutions. And so the English watched with horror as the revolution which began, which seemed to begin with so much hope and so much promise. And there were so many prominent English intellectuals who were...

cheering on the revolutionaries. But as time went by and property was confiscated and people were ejected from their homes, then the English could reassess their own past and see its consequences represented right before them. So I think that's very important. I think that it's important that many French nuns and monks

Escaped came as emigres to England. There were a number who lived in Winchester, so near where Jane Austen lived in Chalenton and Steventon, and she, of course, knew Winchester very well. So it would have been really the first time in England since the 1540s, late 1530s, that English people had seen people in... monks and nuns of their habits on English soil in the open. So I think what was going on there certainly affected the way that people like Jane Austen were thinking about this.

Her sister novelist, Frances Burney, wrote a pamphlet about the immigrate clergy in which she was trying to raise money for them. And she says something in one of her letters about how there wasn't a rectory in England where the subject of what was happening across the channel to these clerics was not being discussed.

And so this made this very powerful for them. Now, you could see it both ways. So on the one, there'd be a great deal of sympathy. We're seeing reenacted what happened in England 250 years before. And it does not look good. On the other hand, though, you could look at what was happening in France and see this as once again a triumph of reason over superstition. So kind of both.

camps of or ways of looking at the dissolution found something in the French confiscation of religious property that they could turn to or that made it real for them.

If North Andrew Abbey seems to be engaging with contemporary concerns, Mansfield Park, in contrast, seems to situate itself in a tradition of nostalgia common. to the 18th and 19th centuries will be picked up by people like Walter Scott later. What prompted this trend for romanticizing the past? Well, I think Walter Scott. since you mentioned him, has a lot to do with it. I mean, he was certainly trying to resurrect a noble medieval past, a noble Scottish past. And so I think that had...

enormous implications. He was so popular. But I think that there's also a tendency developing in 18th century thinking and 18th century poetry. A melancholy that shows up in the graveyard poetry of Thomas Gray in the Abbey meditation tradition, poems about Abbey meditations. This kind of strain of melancholy. that becomes more pronounced as the century turns. And perhaps that has a lot to do with just the really important nature of...

The changes in society that were taking place as a result, not only of the French Revolution, but of Napoleon's conquests. So much was being swept away. And classes and laws and countries and... Once Napoleon had been defeated, there was a great desire to return things back to what they had been, or at least to appreciate something about what had been lost. So I think that there are a number of things that play into it.

How does Austin connect the dissolution of these spiritual institutions with the increased isolation of vulnerable communities? How is Austin drawing on ideas of... The dissolution of the monasteries constituting the dissolving of the institutions of charity and what that meant for local communities. So I think that one of the... most significant critiques that gets articulated about the dissolution is that it destroyed charity and hospitality.

that the dissolution of these 800 or so houses in England made it a darker, less friendly place. One of Austin's contemporaries, William Cobbett, wrote a history of the Protestant Reformation. And in it, he is very vocal about what had been lost, about the... community support. He says that we never would have heard the sound of the poor rate had it not been for the dissolution. He challenges his readers.

to go to any Earl's house that has been built on the site of one of these abbeys and see what sort of... hospitality you'll receive at the door. Very different, of course, from what would have been offered in the past. So I think that Austin sees this also as perhaps the most important consequence of the closure of the monasteries. And it becomes important to her in Mansfield Park because that's a novel about hospitality or the lack of it.

in many ways it begins with fanny price this young girl who is being taken in by her aunt and uncle And they think they're going to do a nice thing for their poorer sister living in Portsmouth by taking one of her children. But they... continually remind Fanny that she should be grateful for everything that she gets. And in many ways, Mansfield Park is not a hospitable place at all. It's not been built on top of an abbey, but certainly that loss.

I think, comes into play. So in a novel that's about charity and hospitality and about the challenges to those things, there's some resonance and poignance when... former abbeys are mentioned or places are visited where the discussion comes up, as it does in Mansfield Park. I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack or Julius Caesar?

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It's this same loss of charity or sense of charity that we see in Sanditon. How is the commercial resort and its people described in that novel? I love Sanditon, and I think it has so much interest in just the part that we have. And of course, there have been so many attempts to try and continue the novel and take it other places, and certainly recently on TV.

But that novel, in my reading, is a severe critique of the lack of religion and lack of spirituality that is becoming apparent in England. in the 1815 era, and it is represented as an ephemeral place. The very name suggests that it is ephemeral. There's an oblique reference to the biblical parable of the house built. on rock and the house built on sand that underlies the work. And the Parkers, the family who are involved in the development of the resort.

Mr. Parker is a projector. He's someone who's always seeing the possibilities of making money and improving things and yet ignores the kind of roots. And there's a very poignant passage in the work where the Parker family passes by, they're driving past their former home to the new resort of Sandington, which is built. Up on a hill, the families literally rocked in their beds at night because it's an inhospitable place. But they recall how snug and cozy everything was back.

at their old house where they had been. So Austin, I think, is looking at the kind of craze for wellness. She's looking at general acquisitiveness when she imagines this place. And she, in that novel, also makes, just that short fragment of a novel, refers to the medieval sacred landscape. The town is not far from Battle Abbey, one of the most significant Abbeys. And the proprietress of the local emporium is Mrs. Whitby, and Whitby also another very significant abbey in English history.

I think that even in her last days when she's working on this, she's thinking about drawing a contrast between the England of the past and its traditions. and this kind of rootless world that has mushroomed up out of nowhere in Sanditon. And what do you see reflected in the imagined illnesses that the people of Sanditon are attempting to cure? Well, I mean, they're all hypochondriacs and there's a great deal of humor.

And the representation of the family huddled around the stove, cooking their food, talking about their ailments, completely ignoring the views, looking away from the windows. not being really aware of that. So I think that she is commenting on the vanity that comes along with these kinds of health resorts and the kinds of people it attracts. are also rootless and live in their imaginations. And there's a reference in the novel, Mr. Parker is referred to as an enthusiast.

And in one sense, Austen means that as he's someone who goes after projects with gusto. But in the 18th century, enthusiasm also meant... religious enthusiasm that is being filled, thinking that you're being filled with divine inspiration. And often, enthusiasm was represented in theological tracts as an illness. as a distemper of one's humors, fumes in the brain that caused this. And so I think there's some power there when she connects this town.

It's the product of an enthusiast. It's something that is a bubble. It's not substantial and not real. And the people who come there are not suffering from real ailments either.

So do you see her conservatism here then, this sort of suspicion of seeking spiritual well-being outside established institutions? Yes, I think so. I think that Sandington is a good example, I think, of that kind of conservative impulse, that this is what has taken the place. of solid spirituality or former English spiritual traditions. And it's a poor substitute for what went before.

And Sanditon is the only one of the pieces she produced as an adult that does not have a clergyman playing a significant role. And the church itself and the old villages, there's barely a reference to it. So this is a distinctly unspiritual place. And though she can laugh at these characters. I think she sees something more troubling about what this town and the people it attracts believe and what they think.

Why do you think she might have been so nostalgic for the structures of this pre-Reformation world? I think she's someone who believed in... tradition and who was very much like her contemporary Edmund Burke, who was an enemy of precipitate change, who felt that gradual change over time. respecting the wisdom of the past, the wisdom of one's ancestors, that this was the right way to go about structuring society.

And I see Austin in much the same way. And I think that the tendency today is to think of Austin as someone very much like us. She's so witty and wise that she must share many of our modern preoccupations. She couldn't really have believed in... status and hierarchy and the chain of being. And so she's really somebody that was more modern than conservative or of the past. And I think some of that has to do with the fact that we

tend to forget, we as readers generally, that Austen was a committed Christian, that she came from a clerical family, that she took her religion seriously. She wrote her own prayers. And so a woman of devotion who thinks positively about the traditions that have been handed down to us is often not the way that we want to see Austin. So I think that her family was aware of tradition. They upheld tradition. They were proud of their...

the role their ancestors had played in the 17th century religious upheavals. And Austen connects to that in her world. I mean, she's not afraid of change, and she's not afraid to point out when... People are acting poorly, particularly the gentry. But it doesn't mean that she is a revolutionary or a rebel, as it might seem. Finally, then, there has been...

I think a bit of an image of Jane Austen, as you've alluded to there, as sort of progressively modern. And your work seems to be challenging that, questioning. our alignment of Austen with her age's confidence in progress. And I wonder, looking at her... in this anniversary year and thinking about her continuing relevance and all those sort of questions that will come up this year. What do you think this analysis of Jane Austen in the context of the Reformation?

can add to our understanding? Well, I think it deepens our sense of Austen's engagement with the big issues of her time. I think that... She's certainly someone who is interested in the plight of women, and she is interested in the limitations, the vulnerabilities that women have of her time. certainly speaks to us today and is forward-looking. But I think that knowing that she was aware of the dissolution and other religious changes and that she might have regretted those.

makes us see her as a more sophisticated commentator on history and religion than we thought and returns her to her context. And I think that... Often, and partially, this is due to Jane Austen herself, who's famously quoted as saying, giving advice to one of her nieces about writing, that three or four families in a village is just the thing for a novel. And so thinking about her that way, we don't think about her with history and politics.

We don't think about her as someone who is aware of the slave trade. We don't think about her as someone who was responding to the French Revolution in the novels. But she is. So I think that looking at... Acknowledging her connection to such an important event in English history as the dissolution of the monasteries helps us see her as an even more significant figure.

and cultural to hear. Dr. Roger Ball, this has been a really fascinating conversation that will enrich both our sense of the abbeys and monasteries and those ruins when we see them, but also, of course, of our reading of Jane Austen. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. It's been a pleasure talking with you about this.

Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher, Alice Smith, and my producer, Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susanna Lipscomb, next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. With Asana, you can manage any kind of work. Say your team handles project intake. Maybe they're in charge of campaign management. Or they work on strategic planning. Or literally anything else. Asana works for you. Try for free today at asana.com. That's asana.com.

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