Medusa's Gaze : Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance

“Like some of the best recent new historicist studies, this book begins with historical investigations, saying a lot that is new and fascinating about the political world of Elizabethan England. Casuistry is acutely analyzed as an instrument of pastoral care, a colonizing agent (i.e., an instrument of social and political control), and an epistemological procedure focusing on the difficult boundary between culpability and innocence. The language of analysis is perceptive and rigorous, based on real learning.”
- David Bevington, University of Chicago

This book examines the central role of casuistry-the science of resolving problems of moral choice, known as “cases of conscience”-in Elizabethan religious, political, and literary culture. In the process, the author develops a theory of casuistical hermeneutics in a synthesis of new historicist and post-structuralist methodologies, a synthesis made intelligible in terms applied within the discourses of ideological and epistemological crisis that late-sixteenth-century casuistry both addressed and provoked.
Casuistry gained unprecedented notoriety in the last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign, emerging as an ambiguous practice that continued to be claimed as a heuristic procedure while it also came to function as a locus of moral and epistemological uncertainty. The author shows the equivocal nature of casuistry to be the effect of the inherently dialogic activity of the word “conscience.” Believed to be a sacred repository of truth as well as hermeneutic operation, conscience both embodied the culture’s received norms and subjected to scrutiny the social and political negotiations that produced and maintained these norms.
The author examines the application of casuistry in wide-ranging but interrelated documents: Elizabeth’s two speeches to Parliament concerning the fate of Mary, Queen of Scot; representative manuals of casuistry; accounts of the secret movements of the English Catholic mission and Walsingham’s intelligence network; the Siena Sieve” portrait of Elizabeth; and, most notably, the fifth book of Spenser’s, The Faerie Queene. The author establishes casuistical hermeneutics as a central organizing principle of Spenserian narrative and charts the connection between Spenserian narrative and novelistic discourse (in Bakhtin’s send of the term).
The documents yield new insights into the politics of ambiguity and misreading in the Elizabethan period, variously exploiting the casuistical doctrines of equivocation, “honest dissimulation,” and mental reservation, as well as what the author calls the rhetoric of inviolability, which was associated with the voice of conscience and appropriated by monarch and dissidents alike. That rhetoric depended on a politic self-censorship that proved indispensable to the maintenance of the culture’s norms, producing narrative structures that represent scandalous-and theoretically unrepresentable-insights.
Reading the text of casuistry in the Renaissance illumines the pivotal, complementary processes of reading and writing the texts through which Elizabethan culture defined itself-its texts of power, its hierarchy of values and norms, its taboos, and its tacit or naturalized protocol for determining canonical texts and “good” readings.

Lowell Gallagher is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jacket illustration: The “Siena Sieve” portrait of Elizabeth, attributed to Zuccari. (Reprinted by permission of Scala/Art Resource.)

This is a reproduction edition based on a scanned copy of one of the following original editions:

Medusa's Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance
By Lowell Gallagher
Edition: illustrated
Published by Stanford University Press, 1991
ISBN 0804718598, 9780804718592
331 pages