Imagining a National Church: Election and Education in the Works of Anne Cooke Bacon.

This essay is one of a Literature Compass conference cluster based on a panel presented at the Renaissance Society of America convention 2010. The essays by Danielle Clarke, Johanna Harris, Lynne Magnusson and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann will appear in longer form in The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680, ed. Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Palgrave, forthcoming 2010). In this paper, Magnusson argues that over 50 years and three reigns, Anne Bacon put her education to use to advance 'right reformation' in England. This paper explores the consistent humanist basis of her contribution towards the erection of a national church, especially during the period of her widowhood when she actively supports the losing presbyterian cause. It considers the afterlife in the 1580s and 1590s of her 1564 translation of the Apologie... of the Churche of Englande, showing how the bishops cited her words to support positions radically divided from her own views. Arguing against the widespread perception that her patronage of radical preachers in the 1580s and 1590s marked a descent into zealotry and a falling away from humanist ideals, Magnusson reads her 1585 epistle to Lord Burghley calling for a fair hearing of the radical puritan cause as a humanist's civic speech act and active intervention into the contentious religious politics of the time. Throughout her life, the combined ideals of civic humanism and Calvinist election shaped an energizing sense both of a significant personal vocation and of an effectual imagined community in which she and all the faithful could be fully contributing members. That is, humanism and protestantism opened up the prospect of a reformed church and social order, a reformed English nation, with imagined roles and relationships that motivated her action and shaped her identity. Bacon might be regarded as an exemplary officer of a church never fully erected, an exemplary citizen of a state that never came fully into being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]