GOODNESS N O S E STERNE’S SLAWKENBERGIUS, THE REAL PRESENCE, AND THE SHAPEABLE TEXT

Slawkenbergius’s Tale, which begins (and prefaces) the fourth volume of Tristram Shandy, is of course the centre piece of Tristram’s discussion of noses. It relates the wonder-provoking visit to Strasburg of a ‘courteous stranger’ blessed with what Viz would call an unfeasibly large nose. One aspect at least of the nature of that massive and marvelous nose has never been much in doubt.’ It is one of a number of long, stiff objects - scymetars, sticks, trumpets, fingers, sausages - which frequently appear, here and elsewhere in Sterne’s book, in association with soft, or round, or covered, or breakable, objects - buttered buns, covered ways, ditches, hats, poultices, draw-bridges, et cuetera. Here, ‘the stranger’s nose took this liberty of thrusting itself [...I into the dishes of religious orders’, not quite as mixed a metaphor as Mr Shandy’s apologetic footnote suggests. Slawkenbergius’s Tale itself belongs to a familiar genre, of the magical and mysterious visitor who supplies a long-felt want: representatives may be found for example in the seventeenth century in Rochester’s ‘Signior Dildo’, or in our century in Bob Dylan’s song ‘The Mighty Quinn’.

Like so much else, however, in the Shandean comedy of sex, the nose has other kinds of significance. The nose is presented to us as an object that arouses speculation and requires both examination by the senses and rational definition. Is it a true or a false, a possible or an impossible nose? Slawkenbergius himself complains that ‘the point of long noses had been too loosely handled by all who had gone before’ (111, 38), and the inhabitants of Strasburg, not content with smelling it (the master of the inn claims to ‘smell the turpentine’), yearn to touch it; a test to which the courteous stranger is determined, for theological reasons which will become clearer, not to submit. The trumpeter’s wife expounds ‘her theory’ about it in the streets of Strasburg, the centinel and bandy-legg’d drummer ‘read their lectures under the city gates’, the inn-keeper reads his ‘under the portico [. . .] of his stable-yard’ and his wife ‘more privately in a back room’. Mostly the nose becomes, with placket holes and Martin Luther’s birth date, a topic of metaphysical debate for the learned: the medics, the logicians, the lawyers, and, above all others, the theologians. Evidently Slawkenbergius’s Tale is targeted against pedantic and obsessive curiosity in matters trivial in themselves. In a letter to Stephen Croft in 1760 Sterne remarked, of his chapter of Noses, that ‘the principal satire throughout that part is levelled at those learned blockheads who, in all ages, have wasted their time and much learning upon points as foolish’.2

Slawkenbergius’s Tale has been discussed by relatively few modern com- mentators on Sterne, and the nose itself scarcely at all. Melvyn New’s com- mentary to the Florida edition of Tvistram remains the only significant and extended exploration of the Tale’s possible intellectual analogues and allusions.3 Recent criticism of Tristram understandably has stressed what Sterne himself called the ‘motly’ nature of his work, its openness, its celebration of the

56 Marcus Walsh

fragmentary, its polysemy. The climate has been less hospitable to the assump- tions upon which explicatory annotation must work: Jonathan Lamb has recently written, of the Florida editors, that ‘an unhappy result of their labours has been to re-position Sterne in a grid of borrowings, quotations and allusions that considerably restricts the freedom to read beyond the annotated pale’.4 Little is certain, certainly, in the Shandean world. It is unsafe to attempt an anatomy of the nose, such as Bitzer might provide of a horse. Nonetheless I wish to make a small contribution to the ‘grid of borrowings, quotations and allusions’ in which Sterne’s work might be positioned, and in doing so to add a piece of local evidence to what seems to me the overwhelming case presented in a celebrated and exemplary article by D. W. Jefferson:s that Tristram Shandy is a work deeply implicated within a tradition of learned scholastic and humanist wit, and more especially of humanist parodies of scholastic methods, whose most important instances include the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, the Encomium Moriae, Gargantua and Pantagruel, the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, and A Tale of a Tub. To set Sterne within the intellectual contexts from which his writings draw a substantial part of their meaning does not entail a restriction or policing of the reader’s response. Some at least of the indeterminacies of Sterne’s writing themselves derive from the tradition of learned wit Jefferson describes. Sterne of course insists that ‘the truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to [. . .] leave him something to imagine’ (Tristrarn, 11. 1 1 ) . Everything including noses is capable (to borrow a phrase from a learned and probably Swiftian footnote in A Tale of a Tub) of ‘more than one interpretation’.6 Sterne finds an emblem for his equivocal methods in a curious walking stick given him by his friend Dr John Eustace, which ‘is in no sense more shandaic than in that of its having more handles than one’;7 the image, which is recognisably and annotatably akin to Swift’s hack’s account of the pulpit as a ‘type with a pair of handles’ in the Tale,s underlines Sterne’s affiliation with this learned humanist tradition of ironic doubleness.

I wish to make two points in particular about the courteous stranger’s nose and its intellectual analogues. Both will suggest or confirm that in Slawkenberg- ius’s Tale Sterne is concerned with some significant issues in interpretation. Firstly, the debate about the substance of the nose is a parody of debates about the doctrine of the Real Presence,Y and about the interpretation of the biblical texts upon which it is based. Secondly, Sterne’s use of the nose may have a significant parallel in the Reformation topos of the nose of wax as an image of the text shaped and twisted by the wilful and self-interested interpreter.

In the argument about the nose the Catholic and Protestant positions are stated and distinguished. There are, from the courteous stranger’s first appear- ance, two parties in Strasburg, the Nosarians and the Antinosarians. The Nosarians believe the stranger’s is a real nose, a nose of flesh. The Antinosarians believe that it is a nose of brass, or of fir-tree, or (most appropriately for a text to be interpreted) of parchment; it cannot be a real nose, as no man’s lungs could produce enough blood to sustain one of such a size. The Nosarians are the Papists: ‘As I am a true catholic - except that it is six times as big - ’tis a nose, said the centinel, like my own’. (Here Tristram’s ‘catholic’ translates Slawkenbergius’s ‘christianus’.) The Antinosarians are the Lutherans. One

Goorlness nose: Sterile’s Slarckenhergius 5 7

passage in particular of debate between the Papist and Protestant doctors makes clear that the stranger’s nose has to do with a crucial point of contested interpretation of the Holy Scriptures: ’Tis above reason, cried the doctors on one side. ‘Tis below reason, cried the others. ’Tis faith, cried the one. ’Tis a fiddle-stick, said the other. ’Tis possible, cried the one. ‘Tis impossible, said the other. God’s power is infinite, cried the Nosarians, he can d o any thing. He can do nothing, replied the Antinosarians, which implies contradictions. He can make matter think, said the Nosarians. As certainly as you can make a velvet cap out of a sow’s ear, replied the Antinosarians. He can” make two and two five, replied the Popish doctors. - ’Tis false, said their opponents. - Infinite power is infinite power, said the doctors who maintained the reality of the nose. - It extends only to all possible things, replied the Lutherans.

Melvyn New, in the notes on this passage in the Florida edition of Tristram, glosses the line ‘He can do nothing [. . .] which implies contradictions’ by quoting in full the article in Chambers’s Cyclopaedia on Imply a contradiction, which explains the phrase as one ‘used among philosophers, in speaking of the object of divine omnipotence [...I God can do whatever does not imply a contradiction to some other of his attributes’. Of the section I have quoted as a whole. New suggests that Sterne may have been ‘parodying a specific debate’ such as that between Clarke and Leibniz on the attributes of God, ‘or between Catholics and Lutherans on any number of issues’, but nonetheless considers it probable that the section is ‘a more generalized satire on scholasticism’.” However, though it would scarcely be possible to establish any particular source, i t may be shown that the ideas and terms of this Slawkenbergian dialogue about the fleshly reality of the stranger’s nose are identifiable as almost a set parodic rehearsal of the ideas and terms of debates between Catholics and Protestants concerning a more specific question, the interpretation of Christ’s words hoc esf corpus meum (Matthew 26.26) , concerning, that is, the Real Presence of Christ’s body in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. I offer representative illustration from one of the more important later phases in that extended and widespread debate, which would no doubt have been known to Sterne. In the heated controversies of the later decades of the seventeenth century, the Roman Catholic side of the argument may be found in Jacques Benigne Bossuet’s manual of Catholic belief, Exposition de la Doctrine de 1’Eglise Catholique (Paris, 1671), which was widely read in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as in France, and in the writings of English Romanist pol- emicists, including Joseph Johnston and John Gother. The words ‘this is my body’ are to be taken not as a figure, but literally. The bread and wine may appear to be only bread and wine, but the difficulty of seeing them as Christ’s body and blood disappears, Bossuet argues, ‘quand on considere que celuy qui parle est d’une autorite qui prevaut aux sens, & d’une puissance qui domine toute la nature.’I2 God’s power, in fact, as the Nosarians believe, overrules the evidence of the senses, and transcends natural law. God’s testimony in the

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matter of the Real Presence must have ‘more force to persuade our minds, than the most convincing reasons’, for it is that of a being ‘infinitely powerful, infinitely wise, infinitely good, and infinitely true’.Ij The infinitely powerful God who can turn bread into flesh is a being capable, the Papist Nosarians argue, of making real noses which defy the laws of physiology and reason. The Real Presence is, in the theological sense, a mystery. Like the Trinity, and like the courteous stranger’s nose, i t is one of the ‘Mysteries of Faith above Reason, not contrary to it’.’4 It is to be believed as ‘a Truth that is evident upon the Authority of the Revealer’.’S Like Nosarianism, it is a matter of faith in a God who can do anything: ‘la Foy attentive a la parole de celuy qui fait tout ce qu’il plaist dans le Ciel & dans la terre, ne reconnoist plus icy d’autre substance que celle qui est d6signi.e par cette mesme parole, c’est a dire le propre Corps, & le propre Sang de JESUS-CHRIST’.16 As the Roman Church had insisted since Trent, the ‘substance’ of the bread and wine is an internal reality, not capable of empirical observation. ‘Sense, Reason, and Faith, are three various Perfections; so likewise are their Objects distinguished’; and sense cannot ‘reach further than to the Accidents and Appearances of things.”’ For theologians of the Roman Church the Real Presence is therefore not susceptible to the test of the senses, and in this they concur with the courteous stranger of Slawkenbergius’s Tale, whose nose ‘shall never be touched whilst heaven gives me strength’.

By contrast, Protestant theologians were Antinosarians, as may be readily illustrated from a number of tracts written in defence of the Trinity, and against transubstantiation. The Trinity is indeed a mystery. I t is, as Robert South explains, ‘really true’, though even when revealed by God ‘very difficult, if not above finite Reason’. If we cannot believe in the Trinity, South argues, making use of an instance employed also by Slawkenbergius’s Antinosarians, we can have certainty of nothing that is not present to our senses, ‘which assertion [. . .] would be as absurd [. . .] as to deny that two and two make four in Arithmetick’.18 The truth of the Trinity is not subject to the test of the senses, because, as William Sherlock points out, God is a spirit, and ‘we know not, what the Nature of a Spirit is’.I9 Transubstantiation, however, is a very different matter for, unlike the Trinity, but entirely like the courteous stranger’s nose, it is in the Antinosarian view properly an object of sense. Tillotson insists, in his Discourse against Transubstantiation (1684), that it is ‘a matter of Sense’, and ‘cannot be true unless our Senses and the Senses of all mankind be deceived about their proper objects’ (pp.2,3). For South, the bread and wine being ‘endued with Quantity, Colour, and the like, are the proper Objects of Sense, and so fall under the Cognizance of the Sight and Touch’; hence transubstantiation is ‘contradictory to all those Principles by which Sense judges of those Things, that properly fall under the Judgment of Sense’.zo Familiarly, Peter’s brothers in Swift’s Tale o f a Tub submit the bread to the test of sense: ‘to my Eyes, and Fingers, and Teeth, and Nose, it seems to be nothing but a Crust of Bread’.21 Like the Antinosarians, who argue the physiological impossibility of the nose, the English Protestant divines insist that even an infinitely powerful being cannot effect what is contradictory or impossible, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into Christ’s flesh and blood. ‘God cannot enjoin any Thing absurd or impossible’, writes South.zz In words remarkably close to those used

Goorlriess nose: Sterne ‘s Slawkenhergius 59

by the Lutheran doctors of Hafen Slawkenbergius’s Tale, Tillotson asserts that the Romish priest’s claim ‘lo make CodhirnseFf‘ in the process of transubstantia- tion is ‘to pretend to a power above that of God himself, for he [.. .I cannot [. ..] do any thing that implies a contradiction. [. . . I to make that which already is, [. . . I is impossible because it implies a contradiction.’*3 In his pamphlet entitled The Absolute Impossibility of Tran.Fuhstuntiation Demonstrated ( I 688), Samuel Johnson (1649-1703) asserted the impossibility of bread being wine and flesh at the same time, or of bread being anything but b ~ e a d . ~ 4 William Wake, answering Bossuet’s Exposition, like the Antinosarians acknowledged ‘the power of God to do whatever he pleases’ while insisting ‘that Contradictions, [...I even i n their [i.e. the Romans’] own Schools are usually excepted’.’5

It will be clear from this how extensively the ideas and terminologies of the Nosarians and Antinosarians of Slawkenbergius’s Tale coincide with those of the contestants in this crucial post-Reformation theological argument. One might expect Sterne’s preference for the Protestant or Antinosarian side to be clearer: his anti-scholastic satire normally has recognizably papist targets, as in the case of the memorandum presented to the theologians of the Sorbonne on the subject of baptism ‘par le moyen d’une perire canulle’ (I, 20). Here however the main issue is the moral and practical futility of sailing off into the metaphys- ical ‘gulph of school-divinity’, from whichever side one approaches it. In Strasburg both the Papist and the Lutheran Doctors are ‘learned blockheads’ who allow themselves to be led to the devil by way of Thomas Aquinas, and are equally guilty of abandoning fact, evidence, and humanity for pointless speculation and mere reasoning. The Tale’s sexual comedy mocks the Strasburg- ers’ pedantic gloom, setting the merry wisdom of ‘True Shundeism’ against the ‘bilious and more saturnine passions’ ( IV, 3 2 ) displayed in the querelle du nez.

There is a further specific way in which Slawkenbergius’s Tale relates to questions of scriptural interpretation. The central argument about the nose concerns, as we have seen, its substance. Is i t a real nose, as soft as a pudding, malleable, and touchable? Or is i t a false nose, of brass or parchment or fir- tree, materials less yielding and shapeable‘? The question of the material from which the stranger’s nose is made, and its properties, especially its shapeability, may owe something to a topos which was to become familiar in the religious polemic of the early Reformation and whch seems to have originated with Alain de Lille. Referring to Plato’s words in the Timaeus and Phaedo on the immortality of souls, Alain remarks that ‘quia auctoritas cereum habet nasum, id est in diversum potest flecti sensum, rationibus roborandum est’:26 because authority ~ that is, textual authority ~ has a waxen nose capable of being turned to various senses, it needs to be reinforced with reasons. This has some resonances with Slawkenbergius’s Tale especially as it has to do with issues of interpretation. An informed eighteenth-century English reader would have understood Alain’s words as briefly defining his method in relation to scholastic theology, which, as Chambers’s CJdopaedin pointed out, ‘discusses questions, by reason, and arguments’. In this it is distinct from ‘positive’ or ‘expositive’ theology, which is founded on textual authorities, being ‘the knowledge of the holy scriptures, and of the signification thereof, conformably to the opinions of the fathers and c0uncils’.~7 In the early years of the sixteenth century the nose

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of wax was to become a standard metaphor for scripture in particular as a shapeable text. Erasmus’s Folly, in 151 I , accused modern theologians of treating the Scriptures quasi cereae sint, and Thomas Chaloner, in his English translation of the Encomium Moriae (1549), expanded the image: ‘they take upon them to form and reform holy scriptures at their pleasure, as it were a nose of wax’.zs Pighius wittily expressed the Roman Catholic view that the scriptures could be no dependable guide to doctrine because they could be shaped at any reader’s will: ‘sunt scripturae, ut non minus vere quam festive dixit quidam, velut nasus cereus qui se horsum illorsum et in quam [cunque] volueris partem, trahi, retrahi, fingique facile ~ermitt i t’ .~g (Pighius’s use ofjingere ~ to stroke, to mould, to shape - brings the metaphor especially close to Slawkenbergius.) Protestants retorted that the Papists were themselves guilty of reducing Holy Writ, which ought to be the touchstone of belief, to a nose of wax, distorting i t to demonstrate their doctrines. Tyndale thundered against the ‘dark, damnable, and devilish [...I doctrine’ of the papists who believe that ‘they need not to regard the scripture, but to do and say as their Holy Ghost moveth them; and if the scripture be contrary, then make it a nose of wax, and wrest it this way and that way, till i t agree.”O Whitgift uses the ropos repeatedly, at one point admonishing Thomas Cartwright that ‘if you [. . .] imagine that which was never meant, and make the scriptures a nose of wax, as the papists do, you may conclude what you list’.3’ In Roger Hutchinson’s ‘Second Sermon on the Lord’s Supper’ the topos of the nose of wax is specifically applied to twistings of the sense of the words of institution of the Holy Communion, ‘This is my body’, and ‘this is my blood’ (Matthew 26.26,28) . Christ’s words ordain, as Hutchinson puts it, ‘a sacrament of unity’, but the devil, ‘by his ministers, the papists, the questionists, schoolmen, and the anabaptists’, sows debate and argument: ‘And whereas they should [. . .] submit their judgments to God’s scriptures [. . .] they rather do rack and wrest God’s word, making it a mariner’s slop, or a nose of wax, and bowing it unto every purp0se’.3~ An image, then, which began with the schoolmen, and was used by Roman Catholics to argue the instability of the scripture as a rule of faith, becomes a standard figure amongst the early reformers for appropriation and abuse, especially by the papists, of holy writ. The courteous stranger’s nose, which so solicits the touching and shaping impulses of the citizens of Strasburg, whose substance is so much at issue, and which becomes the symbolic focus of questions of knowledge and belief in the Tale, has surely a relation to the waxen nose which had so long-established and familiar a connection with arguments about textual and more especially scriptural interpretation, including arguments about the textual basis of the doctrine of the Real Presence.

A final and more general point. That the debate in Slawkenbergius’s Tale is concerned with issues of interpretation, more particularly with issues of scrip- tural interpretation, is confirmed by expectations aroused in the chapters which conclude volume 3, and which introduce the subject of noses taken up in volume 4 (the two volumes were of course published together, in 1761). Erasmus, in his De captandis sacerdotis, addresses himself to the subject of noses, but, to Walter Shandy’s disappointment, ‘without any of that speculative subtilty or ambidexterity of argumentation upon it, which heaven had bestow’d upon man

Gooclnt~ss nose: Sterne’s Slawkenhergius 6 I

on purpose to investigate truth and fight for her on all sides’ (Tristram, III, 37). Even reading with that ‘world of Application‘ which Swift’s hack author enjoins on the reader of A Tale of a Tub, and with Brother Peter’s concern for interpretation both totidem verhis and totidern .ryllubis,~3 Walter can find nothing to his scholastic taste by a merely ‘strict and literal interpretation’ of Erasmus’s colloquy. Believing that ‘learned men [. . .] don’t write dialogues upon long noses for nothing’ Walter resorts, as pre-Reformation biblical hermeneuts typically did, to ‘the mystic and the allegoric sense’, and, employing a scholiast’s methods of verbal criticism to aid him, discovers that by the alteration of a single letter Erasmus’s innocent original might be turned (as editors of Tristram Shandy have pointed out) to two indecent senses.34 Walter Shandy is like Swift’s Peter a seeker after dark meanings, a scholastic reader in search of hidden senses. Ranged against him as believers in the simple or literal sense are not only Erasmus, but also Tristram, and Toby, and Rabelais. Tristram has already felt obliged, both as a reader of the third book of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and to protect his readers against the temptations of the devil, to define the word nose, in his own usage, as meaning ‘a Nose, and nothing more, or less’ (111, 31). In face of Walter’s manifold ‘solutions of noses’ (111, 41), Toby, being a plain reader, offers a simple and single explanation: ‘There is no cause but one [...I why one man’s nose i s longer than another’s, but because that God pleases to have it so’. Toby’s explanation derives from Rabelais. with Erasmus Sterne’s main humanist and anti-scholastic model: ‘What is the cause’, said Gargantua, ‘that Friar John hath such a goodly nose?’ ‘Because,’ said Grangousier, ‘that God would have i t so’ (Gurguntuu and Puntugruel, translated by Thomas Urquhart, I, 40). This Rabelaisian rationale is. as Walter himself points out. ‘pious’ rather than ‘philosophical’; ‘there is more religion in it than sound science’. But Walter’s science is no more sound than the physiology of the Nosarians, and in reading the universe. as in writing books, ‘trusting to Almighty God’ (VIII, 2 ) rather than to scholastic metaphysics is the most religious way.

Marcus Walsh University of Birmingham

I . On the history of the nose as phallic symbol. as well as the background to Walter Shandy’s concern about the nasal inadequacy of the Shandy line, see Alfred David. ‘An Iconography of Noses: Directions in the History of a Physical Stereotype’. in Mapping the Cosmu.s. ed. by Jane Chance and R. 0. Wells, J r (Houston, 1985), pp.82-83, 89. Tristram Shandy is quoted throughout this article from thc Florida Te\-t. ed. by Melvyn New and Joan New. 2 vols (Gainesville, 1978). References arc given where necessary by Sterne’s volume and chapter numbers. Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. by L. P. Curtis (Oxford. 1935). p.126. Tristrarn Shandy. I I I , The Notes, by Melvyn New with Richard A. Davies and W. G. Day (Gainesville, 1984). pp.279-300. Amongst briefer discussions may be noted those by John M. Stedmond, The Cumic Arl uf Luurcwcv S/rrnc, (Toronto. 1967). pp.58. 102- 105; James E. Swearingcn, Reflr.uivit.v in Tristrani Sliondi, (New Haven and London, 1977). pp. 198-203; Max

2.

3 .

6 2 Marcus Walsh

4. 5 . 6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

I 1.

12.

14. 15.

I 6. 17.

18.

2 8 .

29.

30.

31.

Byrd, Tristram Shundy (London, 1985). pp. 105-107: Sidney Gottlieb, ‘Sterne’s Slawkenbergius and Joseph Hall’. Cahirrs Elisuhethoins. 30 (1986). 79-80. Sternek Fiction and the Double Principle (Cambridge, 1989) p.2. ‘Tristram Shundy and the Tradition of Learned Wit’. Essuys in Criticism I (1951), 225-48 A T u l e u f n Tub, ed. by A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (2nd edn. Oxford, 1973). p.17911. Letters, ed. by Curtis, p,41 I

A Tule o f u Tub, p.62. This has sometimes been assumed, though never fully documented, by recent commentators. See, for example, Swearingen, pp.200-zo1. The first and second editions of Trisrrcrni read ‘cannot’. The internal logic of this dialogue, as well as the clear outlines of the intellectual debate it parodies, establish that the emendation ‘can’, as adopted by Melvyn and Joan New and most modern editors. is correct. See New’s textual note, Tristram Shundy: the Tert. p.854. Notes, pp.292-93. Bossuet. Exposition. 12th edn (Paris, 1686). p.98. A translation of Bossuet’s Exposition into English by W. M[ontague] was published in 1672: the later translation by Joseph Johnston went through numerous editions (1685. 1686, 1687, 1729, 1735. 1753. and others). Port Royul Logick. Part 4, chs 3, I I : cited by [Samuel Johnson,] The Absolute Impossibility of Trunsubstantiution Demonstrated (2nd edn, I 688). p.vi. [John Gother,] The Cutholic Representer. Second Part (1687), p.41. Trunsubstantiution Defended (1687). p.9 Bossuet, Exposition, pp.98, 140 Quoted from one of the replies to Tillotson, An Answer to a Discourse ugainst Trnnsubsttrntiution (London 1687), p.5. ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity Asserted, and Proved not Contrary to Reason: in a Sermon preached between the Years 1663 and 1670’. in Sermons, IV (1715), 285. 287. A Vindication of the Doctrine (I f the Holy and ever Bles.ved Trini1.v (2nd edn, 1691). p.4. Doctrine of the Blessed Trinity, p.303. A Tale o f n Tub. p.118 Doctrine uf the Blessed Trinit:,,. p.291 Discourse, p.3 I

2nd edn (1688), p.36 An E.xposition of the Doctrine o f Ihe Church of Eiiglnnd (1686), p.53 De,fide ccrtholica contrcr 1iuercrico.s. lib. I . cap. 30 (Migne, Putrologiu Lutinu 210. col. 333) Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia (5th edition, 2 vols. 1741, 1743). s.vv. scholastic divinity, theology. Quoted by H. C. Porter in his important article on this topic, ‘The Nose of Wax: Scripture and the Spirit from Erasmus to Milton’, Trtrn.sucrioiz.s of the R o w / Historicul Society. 5th ser., 14 (1964). 155-74. Quoted by John Jewel, who translates: ‘As one man both truly and merrily said. The scripture is like a nose of wax, that easily suffereth itself to be drawn backward and forward, and to be moulded and fashioned this way and that way, and howsoever ye list.’ ( A Defence of the Apologie sf the Church of England ( I 564); Works, ed. by John Ayre, IV (Cambridge: Parker Society. 1850), pp.758-59). Expositions und Notes on Sundr), Portions of the Ho1.v Scriptures. ed. by Henry Walter (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1849), p. 103. Compare William Fulke’s accusation that the papists are especially pleased when the ‘nose of wax’ which is scripture ’may be wrested to some colour of your error’ ( A Defence of the Sincere and True Trunslutions of the Holy Scriptures into the English Tongue. in Reply t o Grrgor:,. Martitz’s Discovery of Corruptions b). Herelics (1583). ed. by Charles H. Hartshorne (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1843). pp.539-40). Works. ed. by John Ayre, 111 (Cambridge: Parker Society. 1853), p.33. Cf. pp. I 57. I 63

Goocliirc 5 t iosc-’ . Sternr ‘s SIm h-enhergius 63

3 2 .

33. 34.

In Tliriv SiJrnioiis on the L o r A Suppiv ( I 560). W’orXs, ed. by John Bruce (Cambridge: Parker Society. 1842). pp.235-36. A Tale o f u Tuh, pp.81. 83 Sterne changes Erasmus’s ‘Conducut cxci tando foculo, si desuerit follis’ to ‘ad exci tandum focum’; as James A. Work points out in his edition of Tristrunr .Shund.v (New York, 1940. pp.229-30, nn.3 and 4). ‘focum’ may be amended to read ‘locum’ or ‘ficum’. Melvyn New, in the Florida No/E.E, compares Walter’s taste foi- the mystic sense with Peter’s interpretation of his father‘s prohibition of silver fringes as ‘a hfI..s/cr‘~,’. to be ‘understood in a M~/ho /ng ica l . and All i~goricul Sense’ (p.272).