ABSTRACT
Sir Philip Sidney narrator portrays “a sight full of piteous strangeness: a ship, or rather the carcase of the ship, or rather some few bones of the carcase hulling there, part broken, part burned, part drowned – death having used more than one dart to that destruction”. Protestantism provides an alternate focus for Sidney’s career, but his religion appears no less contradictory than his humanism. Sidney’s defense of reason never becomes as explicit as Hooker’s, but he strains against the orthodox reformed position. The tautology at the heart of Mornay’s definition of Providence opens the door for Sidney’s literary experiment. Sidney’s concern with the status of reason in a fallen world, as Ake Bergvall has noted, has made him “a focal point for a broader investigation of the interaction between humanism and reformation”. Sidney’s romance begins by juxtaposing the fishermen’s faux-Calvinist submission to divine power against the narrator’s claims for “human inhumanity”.
