ABSTRACT

Throughout Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans, we have traced a progression from the papal-centered Roman Catholic cosmopolitanism of Campion, Sander, and Persons to the secularized imitations of this model found in fictional works by Munday, Harington, Sidney, and Spenser. In the Stukeley plays and later in the poetry and translations of Fanshawe, we see this secularized version of the Christian commonwealth break down once again in favor of a Christian or European commonwealth based less on the extraordinary power of the Roman curia and more on a horizontal and ecumenical alliance among Christian monarchs. During the English civil war and its aftermath, we see this royalist model of cosmopolitanism give way to a further transformation based on Milton’s republican values, which substitute a devout transnational elite for the Episcopal hierarchy of both the Roman and English Churches. Finally, the commercial forces portrayed in Killigrew’s and Behn’s plays about the buying, selling, and duplication of sexualized bodies constitute a final leveling of the Erastian mythologies surrounding the English monarchy, beginning with the cult of Queen Elizabeth. In the context of Behn’s “Language that all nations understand,” national and religious identities become interchangeable and duplicable, queens are compared to courtesans, and the exercise of monarchy is compared to prostitution. The trajectory of cosmopolitanism therefore begins with the transnational values inherent in the universalist claims of Roman Catholicism and ends with the anarchic forces of commerce and capitalism. Ultimately, the fictional works explored in these pages show that our current understanding of the early modern English literary tradition as constituting a “writing of the nation” is incomplete, leaving out the way in which English writers also sought to explore political models that incorporated England into various secularized, ecumenical, and commercialized iterations of the Christian commonwealth. Beyond the emergence of the English nation, English writers of fiction sustained a traditional critique of ethnic nationalism that would evolve and continue into the modern age.