ABSTRACT

This chapter investigates the "dividuall movables" that John Milton identifies within the Church and that he enlists in his antiprelatical prose to deconstruct the embodied religion of William Laud's liturgical innovations. It explores Milton's references to linen as examples of an embodied uniformity in public devotion, which paradoxically leads to a disembodied experience of religion, as in the example of Areopagitica. The chapter explains Milton's lists of linen vestments as a rhetorical strategy of inventorying that brings to the foreground the commodification of faith and that fragments the unified body of the Church the bishops seek to uphold. It deals with the disembodied devotion of congregations to the Lady's role in A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, performed in 1634 and first published in 1637. The chapter also explains her performance as Milton's early vision of an alternative model of embodied faith whereby the integrity of the Lady's body remains constant, material, and whole, against Comus's materialistic and divided theatricality.