Part II
4
Joe Moshenska
I
In 1630, Sir Kenelm Digby took Protestant Communion, publically renouncing his Roman Catholicism. Five years later, it became widely known that he had rejoined the faith into which he had been born. It was far from uncommon for individuals to convert more than once in the early modern period, whether this involved stages of progressive radicalisation, or, as in Digby’s case, the return to a religious position previously occupied.1 While double conversions of this sort may have been relatively frequent, they nonetheless present a challenge to certain central precepts of the conversion narratives integral to Christian tradition. In its most famous manifestations – St Paul on the road to Damascus, or St Augustine in the garden in Milan – conversion takes place in an instant of blinding clarity, and involves a change that is absolute and irreversible. A convert who later recants has two options: to dismiss the first conversion as merely superficial, and risk seeming flighty or insincere; or, alternately, to develop forms of narrative and self-understanding that construe the return to a position that one has previously occupied as the most decisive of transformations, and present the journey back to where one began as the journey that takes one furthest of all.
Double conversion, then, creates both specific challenges and certain opportunities for a coherent narrative of selfhood. It demands an account that can find room for transformation and discontinuity, while subsuming these moments of apparent rupture within a seamlessly integrated whole. In this essay, I argue that Digby responded to these challenges with particular acuity, and that he did so in part through a repeated invocation and exploration of sensory experience. Digby placed enormous weight upon the senses in both theological and epistemological contexts, and he rewrote his life experiences obsessively. These two aspects of his writings are, I argue, deeply interconnected: the exercise of the senses was integral to the way that he understood not only the workings of the world, but the internal consistency of his own life. Attending to the rewriting of sensory experience in Digby’s oeuvre has significant implications for the way in which we understand the functioning of the senses in the early modern period, and the place of the senses in the enterprise of recounting a life. My argument has two parts. In the first, after explaining the context of Digby’s religious transformations, I discuss the letters and devotional works that he wrote around the time of his reconversion, following the death of his wife. In these writings, I claim, his repeated and conventional avowal that piety can only be achieved by the utter renunciation of sensory experience and enjoyment is persistently undercut by a tacit acknowledgement that such sensuous pleasures are covertly perpetuated by being transposed onto a higher plane, even as they are seemingly renounced. In this way, Digby seeks to ensure the persistence and cohesion of his plurally converted self, which, like sensory experience, can both change utterly and remain the same. In the second part, I consider moments from Digby’s philosophical magnum opus, the 1644 Two Treatises on the nature of body and soul, in which he vividly recreates sensory experiences that predated his original conversion. By evoking these earlier moments in the course of developing his philosophy of the senses, Digby thereby implies unbroken continuity between his past and present sensing selves, creating a seamless and cohesive sensory autobiography unperturbed by the ruptures attendant upon his double conversion.
II
On 22 October 1635, James Howell wrote a letter to the Earl of Strafford, which he ended by updating the Earl on the latest spate of conversions to Roman Catholicism that had controversially taken place in courtly circles. ‘Sir Kenelm Digby is gone over’, Howell wrote, ‘and Mr Wat Montague hath taken the portion his father intended him, and gone over an hot Roman to return no more’.2 The conversion of Walter Montague was a sensation: as the son of the Earl of Manchester, his was a particularly high-profile and controversial apostasy, which provoked a public reply from his father, to which Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, appended a further reply in print.3 At this fraught point in the mid-1630s, when it seemed to alarmed observers among the godly that the whole court was drifting back towards Rome and the King himself was rumoured to be leaning towards conversion, Montague’s actions were particularly loaded.4 By contrast, the ‘going over’ of Kenelm Digby seems to have provoked far less controversy or surprise. While Howell lumped them together, in fact the conversions of the two men would have seemed very different to contemporaries. Montague was abandoning the faith into which he had been born, and in which he had been raised by his illustrious father. Howell’s prediction that he would ‘return no more’ proved prescient, and Montague ended his long and colourful life in 1677 as a committed Roman Catholic, in his position as Abbot of St Martin in Pontoise, twenty miles north of Paris. Digby, however, was not making a new and decisive change, but returning to a path that he had already trodden. His father, Everard, had been executed for his role in the Gunpowder Plot when Digby was a young boy, and he had been raised a Roman Catholic by his mother.5 For Digby, unlike Montague, this was a reconversion, a return to a religious identity that had once been his.
While there has been abundant discussion of religious conversion in the early modern period in recent scholarship, Digby’s has received only the briefest of mentions.6 This is perhaps because reconversion itself prompts a degree of scepticism: if a person chooses to return to his or her original religion after a period of a few years, must this not suggest that the original conversion was superficial and insincere? This doubt was expressed in Digby’s time, and is also evident in recent discussions. On 27 December 1630, the Venetian ambassador to England reported to the Doge and Senate that there had been talk of sending an ordinary ambassador to Spain: ‘and many mention the name of Sir Kenelm Digby, who was at one time a pirate in the Mediterranean, and who let your Serenity’s subjects feel the unlawful effects of his robberies. Moved by ambition he has recently abandoned the Catholic Faith and become a Protestant’.7 Digby had spent 1628 in the Mediterranean as a privateer, culminating in a sea-battle with the Venetian vessels guarding the Turkish port of Scanderoon, and it was after his return that his conversion became public: no wonder the ambassador chalked it up to mere ambition.8 The assumption has proven durable: more recently, we find the art historian Francis Haskell describing Digby as ‘A Catholic convert (but had he ever not been a Catholic?)…’9 This tendency to describe Digby’s original conversion as superficial is part of a long-standing inclination to dismiss him and his fellow court Catholics as generally frivolous and insubstantial: the great Victorian historian S.R. Gardiner insisted that ‘The danger from Rome was less serious than it seemed. The bait held out by the papal clergy appealed to the low and more selfish side of human nature. Fantastic speculators like Sir Kenelm Digby, witty intriguers like Walter Montagu, brought no real strength to the cause that they espoused’.10
In the course of my work on Digby’s correspondence, I have uncovered significant new evidence which demonstrates the sincerity and serious theological engagement that was involved both in his original conversion and in his reconversion, including his close relationship with Montague. Digby’s double conversion was not an expression of base ambition or evidence of his insubstantiality: his original decision to abandon Roman Catholicism, and his subsequent return, were both the product of serious and highly deliberate thought. Nonetheless, it is necessary to recognise that both the fact and the occasion of Digby’s reconversion rendered them ambiguous, both to his contemporaries and to later historians. If Digby’s original conversion has been taken as a symptom of his insincerity, this is in part because his recantation seems on the surface to have been precipitated by personal trauma rather than religious principle. The event that apparently instigated Digby’s reconversion was the death of his wife, Venetia, on 1 May 1633.11 His immense grief was channelled into a concerted attempt to secure and shape her memory: he commissioned Anthony van Dyck to paint her on her deathbed, as well to produce a striking portrait of Digby himself in mourning garb; Ben Jonson and several of the prominent Sons of Ben, including Thomas May and Aurelian Townshend, wrote elegies in her memory; and Digby had a funeral monument erected in Christ Church, Newgate, that was later destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666.12 He also penned a series of impassioned letters – to his sons, his brother John, his patron, the Secretary of State Sir John Coke, and various friends and relatives – in which he stressed Venetia’s unimpeachable virtue and his own transformed, grieving self, and which were carefully copied for wide circulation. He also changed his demeanour and dress, with John Aubrey reporting that Digby wore ‘a long mourning cloake, a high-crowned hat, look’t like a Hermite, his beard unshorne, as signes of sorrowe for his beloved Wife’.13 This outpouring of grief was subjected to a certain degree of scepticism at the time, and this has continued to be the case. Rumours began to circulate that Digby had poisoned his wife with wine made from a distillation of vipers – either deliberately, or as part of an unfortunate treatment for her complexion. Aubrey reported that Digby had ‘retired in to Gresham College…to avoyd envy and scandall’ following Venetia’s death. Equally damaging rumours had earlier swirled around Venetia herself – Aubrey claimed that one nobleman, Richard, Earl of Dorset, ‘kept [her] as his concubine’ and even stated, implausibly, that she had borne him a child.14 These facts and rumours made Digby’s public and performative grief seem less an attempt to secure her reputation for piety and purity than a rearguard action against the gossip that threatened his wife’s posthumous reputation and his own standing. Digby’s way of mourning seems somewhat repellent to modern sensibilities: it is insistently public and histrionic rather than dignified and private; it is highly artificial and constructed rather than spontaneous and sincere; it emphasises the woe and the rampant subjectivity of the mourner rather than the personality of the mourned. It would be easy, but wrong, to dismiss Digby’s actions in this way as a public-relations campaign, and to assume a division between authentic feeling and its inauthentic public performance that certainly did not exist in the seventeenth century.15 They are better understood as a response to Digby’s felt need to make public to others, and coherent to himself, the implications of his ongoing changes in his personal and religious conviction.
Even if we reject the complacent assumption that because Digby’s mourning and his eventual reconversion were public they must necessarily be inauthentic, the structural vulnerability of his double conversion must still be recognised. This vulnerability is made clear by a letter written to Digby by Archbishop William Laud in 1636. It was never sent, apparently because Laud wrote it to dissuade Digby from re-converting, but then heard that the decision had already been made.16 The letter was ultimately printed as the final item appended to the 1695 history of Laud’s trial, and it allows us to reconstruct the reasons that Digby gave his friend the Archbishop for returning to Catholicism, which included serious doubts about the historical validity of the reformed church. Laud responds by stressing the inconsistency of reconversion as an act, and the objections to which it is structurally open. Digby, he observes, claims ‘that you may preserve yourself in that Church [of Rome], without having your belief bound up in several particulars’. Laud, though, doubts that Roman Catholicism will really leave Digby’s conscience as free as he claims, and asks ‘doth that Church leave you free to believe, or not to believe, any thing determined by it? And did not your former Dislike arise from some things determined in and by that Church? And if so, what Freedom see you now, that you saw not then?’17 Laud’s final question is telling: because Digby had, at the point of his original conversion, acknowledged that the Roman Catholic Church determines certain points of belief and rejected it partly for that reason, it is difficult for him to distance himself from the reformed Church and justify his return on that same basis.
Digby answers the difficulties raised by Laud, and which are endemic to any reconversion, in part through the way in which he treats sensory experience. In some of Digby’s writings from the mid-1630s, namely the letters written following Venetia’s death and his Conference with a Lady about Choice of Religion (1638), his account of the senses vacillates. Sensory pleasure is described, on the one hand, as a transitory and debased aspect of human existence which must be overcome in the pursuit of spiritual purity and will finally be left behind by the immortal soul at the point of death. On the other hand, Digby repeatedly suggests that sensory pleasures are valuable in their own right, and that they can and will be retained and transformed, not abandoned, when higher states of piety and eventual immortality are achieved. This significant vacillation is one way in which Digby treats the problems of biographical disruption and continuity raised by his double conversion: it allows him to trace a trajectory for the pious self that incorporates apparently total transformation, while simultaneously suggesting that this change is less than total, and finally enables an assertion of continuity unaffected by contingent change.
Digby’s Conference with a Lady, probably written in 1636, was almost certainly addressed to Francis Howard, Lady Purbeck, who had fled to France and resolved to change her religion to Roman Catholicism after being found guilty of adultery with Sir Robert Howard. The Conference is replete with fairly conventional denouncements of the body and the value of its material experiences. The soul, Digby insists, once ‘released out of the body (which is like a darke prison to wall it in)’ will attain to distinct and perfect knowledge: ‘her conjunction here with resistent matter was a burden and a clogge unto her’.18 ‘To avoid misery in the next life’, he claims, ‘we must deny our senses the content and satisfaction that they naturally desire in corporall things’, and this involves ‘withdrawing our affections from sensible goods’.19 Digby offers a lamenting description of ‘a soule so disposed and wrought upon by the sensuall passions tyrannising over it’.20 These are standard sentiments, and they are not confessionally specific: they would seem no more controversial to a reformed than to a Catholic reader.
As the Conference develops, however, and Digby begins to justify the specific and exclusive legitimacy of the Catholic Church, it becomes less easy to dismiss the workings of the senses out of hand. He insists, against what he describes as the Protestant scepticism towards the outward dimensions of worship, that the effectual imprinting of Christ’s doctrine on the hearts of believers cannot be achieved through the pure inwardness of the soul. ‘Now to have this compleately performed’, he claims, ‘it was to be done both by exteriour and interiour meanes; proportionable to the senses without, and to the soule within’.21 Digby’s account of the historically assured validity of the Catholic Church relies upon the ‘exteriour…meanes; proportionable to the senses without’ having an authority of their own. Or, more precisely, faith relies upon a specific form of disjunction between spiritual and sensory experience: sensory experience remains necessary precisely so that it can be confounded. The evidence of miracles must be a scandal to the senses, and this in turn becomes evidence that ‘some inward and supernatural light be given her [the soul] to disperse all the mistes that the senses rayse against the truth of the doctrine’.22 In order to make this point, Digby invokes the example of Doubting Thomas, who ‘would not believe his [Christ’s] resurrection unless he saw him and put his fingers into his wounds’.23 In referring here to the sceptical disciple, Digby endorses the bulk of Roman Catholic commentators who insisted that Thomas did indeed probe the wounds inflicted at the Crucifixion, and that this was a necessary step towards the acceptance of Christ’s claim that ‘because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’.24 Whereas, as Glenn Most points out, many Protestant commentators worked hard to deny that Christ’s body had actually been subjected to touch in this moment, Digby asserts that direct sensory experience must be undergone if it is to be overcome.25 Digby makes a similar point when describing ‘the reall presence of Christs body in the blessed Sacrament’ as the point ‘of the Romane doctrine which [is] most repugnant to sense’.26 Digby was much invested in these questions at this point, having made extensive notes on the question of communion under one species from February 1637 onwards.27 Where many Protestants ridiculed the standard Roman Catholic claim that Christ’s body and blood could be present beneath the apparently unchanged sensory species of bread and wine, for Digby this scepticism should not be answered by explaining its plausibility in philosophical terms: rather its scandalous implausibility, its repugnance, should be accepted as the basis of the faith it demands. He argues for a specifically sensory corollary of the famous dictum attributed to Tertullian: credo, quia impossibile est. The initial and seemingly uncontroversial rejection of sensory experience in the Conference, then, gives way to something more complex: the mere fact that sensory experience can be rejected against its overwhelming persuasiveness is evidence for the guiding light of the Spirit. The fact that the believer should finally be led to accept a doctrine so repugnant to sense testifies not simply to the baseness and disposability of the senses, but to the constitutive necessity of the experience of their overcoming as the basis of Roman Catholic piety.
In this work, then, Digby does not dismiss sensory experience out of hand, as might first appear. He insists upon lingering with the senses precisely so that they might be overcome. This unstable dual impulse towards the dismissing and retaining of the senses as the basis of piety is of fundamental importance to the role of the senses in the early modern period. This unstable dynamic emerged as writers sought to avail themselves of the affective force and intimacy of the senses as a way of maintaining a relationship with God, but they could not do so without drifting into a dangerous position: a stress on the tempting dangers of the senses was a point of commonality between the differing ethical accounts provided by Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic ethics, while Christians who brought the senses too emphatically into the divine realm risked the excessive reification and concomitant diminution of the godhead. The tension between these impulses was acutely felt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Digby was only one of many writers who developed subtle linguistic strategies through which a sensory piety might be disavowed and covertly perpetuated at once.28 Digby develops similar techniques in a still more unstable and complex way in the letters that he wrote and had circulated amongst his friends following Venetia’s death. Here too it is easy to find denunciations of sensory pleasure and a repeated insistence that the body must be entirely forgotten in order to assure the purity of the soul. In these letters, though, the status of sensory experience is particularly complicated by Digby’s intensely affective emphasis on his encounter with the body of his freshly dead wife. Addressing his sons, he writes that:
Her hair was tending to brown, yet shining wth a strange natural lustre and brightnesse; it was by many degrees softer than the softest that euer I saw, wch hath often brought into my consideration that the rules of Physiognomy many times fall out to be true for they direct to iudge of the mildnesse and gentlenesse of one’s disposition by the softnesse and finenesse of their haire. Nothing can be imagined subtiler then hers was; I haue often had a handful of it in my hand, and haue scare perceiued I touched anything.29
Maximum softness, an extreme of sensory lustrousness, tends towards that which cannot be sensed: that which most merits or solicits touch is that which cannot finally be felt, which eludes feeling. This paradoxical dynamic is present elsewhere in the same letter: Venetia’s flesh, he claims, ‘was the tenderest, the softest and the finest graine of any that I ever looked upon; it was firm, and yet so gentle and smooth as it seemed to escape ones touch’.30 Venetia’s own body seems to be the quintessential object of sense, and by that very same token to exist beyond sense. A version of this paradox, moreover, migrates into Digby’s description of his own spiritual state. ‘My minde is now even with my body’, he writes to his brother, ‘for all the rebellions and faults it ever committed; these two tyrannize over one another by turnes…nothing but true vertue can keepe the beame even betweene these unsteady balances’.31 This state is understood not, as we might expect, simply as the body capturing and weighing down the soul, but as a dual tyranny, in which acquiescing to solely spiritual concerns would be a suppression rather than a perfection of the self. He concludes that if God will allow him ‘to take comforte and delight in spiritual objects…I may be happy even here; nay more happy than ye happiest sensuall man living’. This is not, though, simply because spiritual objects trump their sensory equivalents. He aspires to the condition of those who ‘have enjoyed a kind of heaven here upon earth…And though ye worde voluptie be usually taken in ye worse sense, yet their condition may be fitly expressed by saying they lived in a most entire and full voluptuousnesse of spirit’.32 While Digby’s current turbulent state involves the painful and mutual tyrannising of the body and soul, he strives towards a condition in which sensory voluptuousness would be not forgotten or abandoned, but retained and redeemed by being elevated to a higher form.
Digby’s refusal to leave behind the pleasures of the senses entirely is stated most emphatically in a reflection written on 23 June 1634, and which was circulated along with his letters. There, he claims that:
when the end of time and motion shall setle all thinges in a state of rest and deliuer back unto each soule her own bodie, the senses shall also enjoy their delights; not by the use of their operations, which must cease when motion ceaseth, but by a redundance of the soul into them: the order of working in man being now inverted, when as att the first production the soul was belonging to the senses for all the impressions made in her, but then att the second the senses shall receive no impressions but from the soule, unto which they shall be perfectly subject. And all those good and naturall delights which in this life a man enjoyeth by meanes of his senses, he shall there enjoy infinitely more refined and perfectly by his soule.33
Here, most clearly, the anticipated transformation of sensory experience becomes a figure for Digby’s own incipient reconversion – a total change that is at the same time a reversion, and no change at all. The transformations that he has undergone by virtue of his double conversion will be replayed on an apocalyptic scale. At the end of all things, the senses will operate through the ‘redundance’ of the soul – that is, the soul’s overflowing and excess. This will represent the inversion of the human compound of body and soul: where once the soul relied on the senses for its impressions and experiences, now the soul will perfectly temper sensory experience. Yet this later account of a ‘full voluptuousnesse of spirit’ is all the more remarkable because it is so distant from the disavowals of sensory experience and pleasure that Digby professes elsewhere. The delights of the senses – or at least those that are good and natural – will be retained in this higher state even as their basis is transformed, and spiritual sensation will refine rather than simply transcend sensory experience. This is a total sensory change in which the thoroughly mixed status of the human, both sensate and ensouled, is not abandoned or purified but merely reconfigured: a form of continuity that is achieved, paradoxically, through thorough and absolute transformation, much like the reconversion that Digby was soon to announce.
III
By the beginning of the 1640s, Digby had moved from theological discussion into the realms of physics and metaphysics, and was writing his Treatise on the Nature of Body. In his Observations on Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, written while imprisoned in 1642, Digby claimed that he had produced a ‘first draught’ of his ‘totall Survey of the whole Science of Bodyes’, covering ‘neere two hundred sheets of paper’.34 This apparent shift in the focus of Digby’s writings was, however, much less absolute than it might seem: it is precisely his emphasis on the senses, and the careful interweaving of sensory experiences that stress the unbroken continuity of his own life, that form the connection between these stages in Digby’s authorial career. If the Treatise…of Body has received less attention than it deserves then Digby himself is partly to blame, since he described it in the preface to the Two Treatises as merely the ‘proaemiall part’ of the work, and worries that it has grown ‘so ample in respect of the other’ – that is, the Treatise on the Soul – ‘which was the end of it, and for whose sake I meddled in it’.35 John Henry claims on this basis that it is ‘quite evident’ that the entire work ‘was written to provide a philosophical basis on which to erect a new eschatology’, and Digby’s account of the nature of body has been generally overlooked by those who have explored his religious commitments.36 In the Treatise…of Body Digby develops an unusual and original account of the senses, and rather than drawing a strict line between his theological and epistemological concerns, we might instead see the senses as the bridge between them. Digby’s account is unusual in two ways: the first, which I cannot explore in detail here, concerns the intellectual traditions on which he draws and seeks to amalgamate. Digby engages closely with the differing atomist and mechanist accounts of the senses developed by Hobbes, Gassendi, and Descartes – all of whom he knew personally – but, unlike many exponents of the New Philosophies who contrasted their accounts vociferously with Aristotle and his followers, Digby sought to reconcile Aristotelianism and mechanised materialism in idiosyncratic fashion.37 The second, and scarcely less striking difference, concerns the range of examples upon which Digby draws when developing this philosophically hybrid account of sensation. In deploying an array of outlandish examples, he departs from writers such as Descartes, who emphasised everyday, quotidian forms of sensory experience and sought to reconfigure them.38 When Descartes described himself sitting before the fire and watching a ball of wax metamorphose in the second of his Meditations on First Philosophy, the rhetorical force of this most famous of philosophical fables arises precisely from the everydayness of the scene: Descartes need not even leave his hearth to shatter the secure basis of sensory reality, and any reader can easily envisage and imaginatively inhabit the scene that he describes.39 In drawing upon examples from his own idiosyncratic and exotic experiences, Digby proceeds very differently, and his procedure, I would argue, is closely connected with the techniques developed in his theological writings in the 1630s, where discussions of the senses were deployed to manage the combination of rupture and underlying continuity occasioned by his double conversion.
The Treatise…of Body is studded with striking and vivid anecdotes, drawn from tales that Digby has heard but especially from his own past experiences, which are used to reinforce his philosophical points. Nowhere is this more ostentatious than in his account of the senses. This is not so unusual in itself, but the episodes from his earlier life upon which Digby chooses to focus, and the particular experiences that he selects, are remarkable. As a young man, in the early 1620s, Digby made a Grand Tour through France and into Italy. He lived in Tuscany for two years before he was summoned to Madrid in 1623 by his powerful relative John Digby, the Earl of Bristol, who was embroiled in the negotiations to marry the future Charles I, then Prince of Wales, to the Spanish Infanta. Digby arrived in Madrid shortly after Charles and Buckingham made their remarkable and ill-advised trip to the city, incognito and in disguise, and was able to observe these events from close quarters. He returned to England with Charles, and was named a gentleman of the Prince’s privy chamber. It was a few years later – at the end of 1627, by which point England was at war with both France and Spain – that Digby undertook his privateering voyage into the Mediterranean, and it was following his return from this voyage that the Venetian ambassador reported his initial conversion, as we saw above.40
When Digby discusses the workings of the senses in his Treatise…of Body, he turns repeatedly to experiences from this earlier period in his life: the time spent in Spain with Charles, and his year in the Mediterranean. This begins even before he arrives at the detailed account of the senses in this work, when he is arguing near the outset for the corporeity of light. Digby acknowledges that ‘among all corporeall thinges, [light] seemeth to ayme rightest at a spirituall nature, and to come neerest unto it’, and anticipates objections to his arguments for ‘the corporeity of this subtle thing, that so queintly playeth with our eyes’.41 But, he insists, just because an entity seems akin to a spirit, this does not mitigate or reduce its fundamental physicality, and to make this point he shifts between the senses, from vision to olfaction:
When they that are curious in perfumes, will have their chamber filled with a good sent in a hoat season, that agreeth not with burning perfumes, and therefore make some odoriferous water be blowne about it by their servants mouthes that are dexterous in that Ministery, (as is used in Spaine in the summer time;) every one that seeth it done, though on a suddaine the water be lost to his eyes and touch, and is onely discernable by his nose; yet he is well satisfyed that the sent which recreateth him, is the very water he saw in the glasse extremely dilated by the forcible sprouting of it out from the servants mouth, and will by litle and litle fall downe and become againe palpable water as it was before; and therefore doubteth not but it is still water whiles it hangeth in the ayre divided into litle atomes.42
The argument is quite cogent and straightforward: we accept that water can be rarefied and distributed through the air without any change in its atomic constitution, and no one would argue that water becomes spirit, so why can the same not be true of light?43 The basis for this argument, however, is deliberately made both cosmopolitan and amusing, for it is located in Spain, a place which Digby offhandedly reminds the reader that he had experienced first-hand, and it depends on a particularly odd Spanish custom, whereby a servant is transformed into a sort of primitive air-freshener. Rather than reducing everyday phenomena to fundamental physical facts, Digby dwells with the most eclectic experiences of the senses, and insists that they can be of philosophical import in illuminating the material constitution of reality.
In this moment Digby draws the senses close together and implicitly argues for their shared material basis by drifting from an account of vision to one of scent; when he turns in greater detail to the senses he continues both his synaesthetic claims, and the type of anecdote through which he supports them. He prepares to illustrate the manner in which ‘one sense will oftentimes supply the want of an other’ with a strikingly blunt claim: ‘I have seene one, who could discerne soundes with his eyes’.44 This claim turns out to be less astounding than it initially appears, but only just. The man in question is ‘a noble man of great quality that I knew in Spaine, the yonger brother of the Constable of Castile’, who ‘was borne deafe; so deafe, that if a gunne were shott off close by his eare, he could not heare it’. The young man was eventually taught to understand and to speak by a priest: ‘after strange patience, constancy and paines; he brought the yong Lord to speake as distinctly as any man whosoever; and to understand so perfectly what others said that he would not loose a word in a whole dayes conversation’. Acknowledging that the overcoming of these great obstacles to speech might be difficult for his readers to credit, Digby writes that:
The priest who by his booke and art, occasioned this discourse, I am told is still alive, and in the service of the Prince of Carignan, where he continueth (with some that have neede of his paines) the same employment as he did with the Constables Brother: with whom I have often discoursed, whiles I wayted upon the Prince of Wales (now our gratious Soveraigne) in Spaine. And I doubt not but his majesty remembreth all I have said of him and much more: for his majesty was very curious to observe and enquire into the utmost of it.45
What is notable here, once again, is that Digby’s account both tends towards unusual and marginal rather than everyday sensory experiences, and that he again locates such experiences in Spain. Here he is much more precise, detailing not only the kind of sense experiences involved, as was the case with the perfume-breathing servants, but specific individuals – most importantly, Charles himself. Writing in the midst of civil war, at the time of his own imprisonment, Digby looks back to earlier halcyon days, when he enjoyed easy intimacy with the future monarch, and they could concern themselves with sensory curiosities, not the violent struggles of politics and religion. By vividly re-imagining the events of the 1620s in the 1640s, however, Digby not only draws an unspoken contrast with his own embattled present, but implicitly claims that his own identity and experiences have proceeded in unbroken continuity since that point: so immediate are the memories of that time, before his double conversion, that he appears as the same man who once experienced the sensory wonders of Spain, and the Treatise…of Body becomes an argument for Digby’s own biographical continuity even as it presents a general account of the senses and their workings. The same is very much true of the reminiscences of his Mediterranean voyage. In discussing the sense of touch, Digby makes the general point that ‘severall men of differing constitutions, do frame different notions of the same thinges’. He first makes the general observations that ‘the same liquor is sweete to some mens taste; which to an others appeareth bitter: one man taketh that for a purfume; which to an other, is an offensiue smell’. To make the same point in relation to the fluctuating experiences of touch, he then observes that
in the Turkesh bathes; (where there are many degrees of heate in divers roomes, through all which the same person useth to passe, and to stay a while in euery one of them, both att his entrance and going out, to season his body by degrees, for the contrary excesse he his going unto) that seemeth chilly cold att his returne; which appeared melting hoat att his going in; as I my selfe have often made experience in those countries.46
Digby’s account is very different from the ways in which experiences from far-flung locales were typically treated by seventeenth century natural philosophers. An illuminating contrast can be drawn with the writings of Robert Boyle, whom Digby knew personally and provided with alchemical manuscripts.47 When Boyle’s argument requires knowledge of an exotic or inaccessible place, he disavows any responsibility for experiencing it directly in order to provide a reliable interpretation. In his discussion of the temperature of the undersea regions, Boyle writes that ‘I do not pretend to have visited the bottom of the sea; [and] none of the naturalists whose writings I have yet met with, have been there any more than I’.48 In response to this difficulty, as Stephen Shapin notes, Boyle ‘sought reliable testimony wherever he could’, and carefully sifted and assessed its reliability, performing his expertise and sceptical discernment in the process.49 Digby refused to maintain a stance of refined withdrawal in his own writings (and, while he may never have visited the bottom of the sea, he had enjoyed night swimming off the island of Zante, and ‘found the water warmer than att any time in England’).50 Where Boyle admitted that he had not experienced these distant phenomena for himself and then developed strategies by which he – and his reader – could nonetheless assess them, Digby insisted that he had undergone a range of sensory experiences of a sort that the reader was unlikely to replicate. The mixture of sensory vividness of description and exoticism of location makes a different sort of claim on the reader’s credulity. The fluctuating and relative experiences of heat and cold are commonplace enough, easily identifiable by the reader; but the location of the experience through which Digby illustrates these everyday shifts are calculatedly alien and exotic. He draws upon an emphatically personal reservoir of sensory experiences: ‘as I my selfe haue often made experience in those countries’. Readers are asked both to believe that such experiences took place as described, and accept that they could never experience them for themselves. When Digby proceeds to treat the sense of hearing, he similarly draws upon the experiences of his Mediterranean voyage: his expedition is rewritten in retrospect as an excursion into new sensory as well as geographical regions. Arguing for the materiality of sounds, Digby considers the violent physical effects that they can have, and recalls that
after a fight I once had with some galleasses and Galliones in the roade of Scanderone (which was a very hoat one for the time, and a scarce credible number of pieces of ordinance were shott from my fleete) the English Consull of that place coming afterwardes aboard my shippe, tould me that the report of our gunnes, had, during all the time of the fight, shaken the drinking glasses that stood upon shelues in his house; and had splitte the paper windowes all about; and had spoyled and cracked all the egges that his pigeons were then sitting upon: which losse, he lamented exceedingly.51
A decade and a half after this battle was fought, Digby cannot resist a passing brag regarding the ‘scarce credible’ prowess of the artillery under his command. He breezily reminds the reader of his naval triumph, while shifting the focus away from the more obvious havoc that his guns created among the French and Venetian ships towards intriguing forms of collateral damage – the cracked eggs of carrier pigeons, a communication network for which Scanderoon was famous.52 The cannons that his crews fired did obvious and decisive damage to the vessels of their foes, but the sounds that they made were so great that they acquired a physical force of their own, akin to a hurtling projectile but on a much smaller scale, that did more delicate and incidental damage to the crystalline glassware and frail eggshells belonging to the English consul. The cumulative effect of these examples is to ground Digby’s account of the shared material basis of the senses in a series of evoked instances, with multiple effects. They delight and engage the reader; they remind the reader that Digby himself is a remarkable and atypical sensory agent, a man who has had the opportunity to exercise his senses in far-flung locales, and derived philosophical significance from what he has sensed there; and they implicitly suggest that the author, the Kenelm Digby who writes his Two Treatises at the beginning of the 1640s, is the same extraordinary sensory agent who underwent them in the 1620s. In this way, his descriptions silently elide the transformations of Digby’s double conversions, and present the reader with a smooth and seamlessly integrated account of his life and the sensory experiences that he has undergone.
IV
In the letters, theological writings, and philosophical treatises written in the decade and a half following his original conversion, then, Kenelm Digby turned repeatedly to the nature and basis of the senses in order to manage the challenges to the coherence of his individual life that a double conversion – a decisive return to a religious position previously occupied, as a matter of choice rather than birth – presented to him. In closing, I would like to argue that we can usefully understand the role of the senses in his writings by considering them as forms of sensory autobiography. I adapt this term from the notion of ‘sensory biography’, which has been important in contemporary anthropological writings, but has as yet had little impact in literary and historical studies.53 The phrase was, to my knowledge, first used by Nadia Seremetakis in her discussion of ‘perceptual memory as a cultural form’, which is ‘encased and embodied out there in a dispersed surround of created things, surfaces, depths and densities that give back refractions of our own sensory biographies’.54 There is a deliberate tension in her description between a notion of possession – ‘our sensory biographies’, which might be ours alone to define and relate – and a notion of dispersal, in which these biographies emerge only through transformative encounter, and can never be individually defined and demarcated. The multiplicity and complexity of this understanding was taken as a guiding orientation by Robert Desjarlais, in his book Sensory Biographies, an account of the Yolmo Wa population of Nepal, which, by focusing on the role of the senses in the telling of individual life stories, sought to identify patterns and emphases in Yolmo culture rather than arguing for a unified sensory regime, concluding that ‘Sensory engagements are as much intersubjective processes as they are personal ones’.55
Kenelm Digby’s sensory autobiography, I have argued, emerged in part from the tension between two imperatives: to argue that all sensing functions on a material basis, and to develop a coherent account of his own individual development, which elided in various ways the challenging transformations of his double conversion. He was able to turn to the senses as a coherent response to these challenges in part because they are common to all humans, even as their exercise is deeply individual to each. The senses are a privileged site for continuing to think through the implications of human commonality and human difference, and this general point can in large part explain the growth of studies surrounding the senses across disciplines in recent years: Digby is of interest because he grasped this issue so clearly, and responded to it so acutely. The notion of sensory autobiography is helpful precisely because it contains in nuce the central question raised by the senses themselves in the early modern period: are the senses the basis of an individual life story, those memories and experiences that can be related but not truly shared, just as Digby’s readers could not travel to Scanderoon or Algiers and feel or listen for themselves? Or are the senses precisely the route by which the lives of others and their stories can be made available, rendered vivid? Digby for his part insisted that his sensory experiences – whether of his recently deceased wife or of the Mediterranean Sea – were both vividly accessible, and irreducibly his and his alone, both transformed utterly and entirely unchanged by his double conversion.
Notes
1 Multiple conversion in this period has been relatively little studied as a phenomenon in its own right. For an exception see Alison Shell, ‘Multiple Religious Conversion and the Menippean Self: the Case of Richard Carpenter’, in Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century Texts, ed. Arthur K. Marotti (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 154–97.
2 The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Dispatches, ed. William Lowler (London, 1739), 1.474. Emphases in the original. The news was almost certainly broken with Digby’s approval, if not at his direction, since he and Howell were life-long friends. There are a series of letters to Digby in Howell’s Epistolae Ho-Elianae, and in Digby’s late work on the so-called ‘Powder of Sympathy’, it was Howell’s wounded hand that he claims to have cured from a distance with his amazing invention.
3 See Michael Foster, ‘Walter Montague, Courtier, Diplomat and Abbot, 1603–77 – I’, The Downside Review 96 (1978): 85–102, 95–8; Richard W. Serjeantson, ‘Elizabeth Cary and the Great Tew Circle’, in The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680, ed. Heather Wolfe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 165–82.
4 See Philip Hughes, ‘The Conversion of Charles I’, The Clergy Review 8 (1934): 113–25; 114–16; Gordon Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome (Louvain: Bureaux du Recueil, Bibliotheque de l’Université, 1935), 193–215; Elfriede Dubois, ‘Conversions a la Cour de la Reine Henriette-Marie’, in La Conversion au XVIIe Siecle: Actes du XIIe Colloque de Marseille (Marseille: CMR, 1983), 201–208; Caroline Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
5 For Everard Digby’s trial and execution see Mark Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 19–20, 34, 42, 52–57; Antonia Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), 225–26, 229–32.
6 For brief discussions of Digby in the context of conversion see Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 84, 233–34; Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),182n62; Molly Murray, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 114–15, 121; passim for an excellent account of the impact and expressive implications of conversion.
7 Giovanni Soranzo to the Doge and Senate of Venice, 27 December 1630, Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy, Volume 22: 1629–1632, ed. Allen B. Hinds (London: Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1919), 452.
8 I discuss these events, and the literary dimensions of Digby’s voyage, in detail in ‘“Spencerus isthic conditur”: Kenelm Digby’s Transcription of William Alabaster’, Spenser Studies 27 (2012): 315–28, and in ‘Sir Kenelm Digby’s Interruptions: Piracy and Lived Romance in the 1620s’, Studies in Philology 113 (2016): 424–483.
9 Francis Haskell, The King’s Pictures: The Formation and Dispersal of the Collections of Charles I and his Courtiers, ed. Karen Serres (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 7.
10 Samuel R. Gardiner, History of England, 1603–42 (London: Longmans, Green, 1889–93), 8.231. For Gardiner’s wider tendency to distinguish Protestant men of character as agents of historical change from others who were irrelevant to it see John S. A. Adamson, ‘Eminent Victorians: S.R. Gardiner and the Liberal as Hero’, The Historical Journal 33 (1990): 641–57.
11 For an account of Venetia’s death which recognises but ultimately overstates its significance to Digby’s later intellectual output see Bruce Janacek, ‘Catholic Natural Philosophy: Alchemy and the Revivification of Sir Kenelm Digby’, in Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 89–118.
12 The fullest discussion of these events, though unevenly reliable, are the essays collected in Death, Passion and Politics: Van Dyck’s Portraits of Venetia Stanley and George Digby, ed. Ann Sumner (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1995). The poems by Jonson and others are contained in British Library MS Additional 30259. For the funeral monument see Brian Burch, ‘Sir Kenelm Digby and Christchurch, Newgate Street’, Guildhall Miscellany 2 (1964): 248–56.
13 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. John Buchanan-Brown (London: Penguin, 2000), 113.
14 Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Buchanan-Brown, 113.
15 I am grateful to my student, Ted Tregear, for discussion of this point.
16 This is made clear by a note written on the surviving copy of the letter in the library of the Society of Antiquaries, London.
17 The History of the Troubles and Tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God, and blessed martyr, William Laud…and some other things relating to the history (London, 1695), 614.
18 Kenelm Digby, A Conference with a Lady about Choice of Religion (Paris, 1638), 20–21.
19 Ibid., 37.
20 Ibid., 66.
21 Ibid., 79.
22 Ibid., 85.
23 Ibid., 102.
24 John 20:29, King James Version.
25 Glenn Most, Doubting Thomas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), esp. 145. Elsewhere, though, I have argued that Most overstates the Protestant minimization of Thomas’s touch, and explored the enduring role of Doubting Thomas in cross-confessional seventeenth century writing: see Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 75–7, 81–2.
26 Digby, A Conference with a Lady, 102.
27 These notes are in BL MS Add 41846, ff.166–8.
28 For further discussion see my article, ‘“A sensible touching, feeling and groping”: Metaphor and Sensory Experience in the English Reformation’, in Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture, ed. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 183–99, and Feeling Pleasures, chapters 1–2.
29 Kenelm Digby to Kenelm, John and George Digby, 18 May 1633, in ‘A New Digby Letter-Book: “In Praise of Venetia,”’ ed. Vittorio Gabrieli, National Library of Wales Journal 9 (1955): 129–30.
30 ‘A New Digby Letter-Book’, 130.
31 Kenelm Digby to John Digby, 24 June 1633, in ‘A New Digby Letter-Book’, ed. Gabrieli, 143.
32 ‘A New Digby Letter-Book’, 145.
33 ‘A New Digby Letter-Book’, 101.
34 Kenelm Digby, Observations Upon Religio Medici (London, 1643), 11.
35 Kenelm Digby, Two treatises in the one of which the nature of bodies, in the other, the nature of mans soule is looked into in way of discovery of the immortality of reasonable soules (Paris, 1644), unpaginated preface.
36 John Henry, ‘Atomism and Eschatology: Catholicism and Natural Philosophy in the Interregnum’, The British Journal for the History of Science 15 (1982): 211–239 (at 225).
37 See Christa Mercer, ‘The Vitality and Importance of Early Modern Aristotelianism’, in The Rise of Modern Philosophy: The Tension Between the New and Traditional Philosophies from Machiavelli to Leibniz, ed. Tom Sorrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 33–67 (at 62–66).
38 See Ann Wilbur Mackenzie, ‘The Reconfiguration of Sensory Experience’, in Reason, Will and Sensation: Studies in Descartes’s Metaphysics, ed. John Cottingham (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 251–72.
39 On the rhetorical basis of this scene see Michel Foucault, ‘My Body, This Paper, This Fire’, trans. Geoff Bennington, The Oxford Literary Review 4 (1979): 9–28.
40 I discuss these events in significantly more detail in ‘Sir Kenelm Digby’s Interruptions’.
41 Digby, Two Treatises, 39, 45.
42 Ibid., 48.
43 For the wider debates in this period regarding the corporeality of light see David Park, The Fire Within the Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), chapter 6.
44 Digby, Two Treatises, 253.
45 Ibid., 258.
46 Ibid., 243. See my discussion in Feeling Pleasures, 211.
47 For their connections see Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 167.
48 Robert Boyle, ‘Of the Temperature of the Submarine Regions’, in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1744), 3. 342–49; 342.
49 Stephen Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 260.
50 Kenelm Digby, Journal of a Voyage into the Mediterranean, ed. John Bruce (London: J.B. Nichols and Sons, 1868), 58.
51 Digby, Two Treatises, 251.
52 For the fame of Scanderoon’s carrier pigeons see ‘Part of a Letter from William Biddulph, from Aleppo’, in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905–7), 8.260; James Mather, Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 19.
53 I am grateful to Mark Jenner for first alerting me to the notion of sensory biography.
54 C. Nadia Seremetakis, ‘Implications’, in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. C. Nadia Seremetakis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 123–45 (at 129).
55 Robert Desjarlais, Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths Among Nepal’s Yolmo Buddhists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 341–43.