The Idolatry of Consensus

• In Event: The Early Modern Public Sphere Revisited: Consensus Politics as Usual?

Abstract

This paper will explore one political dimension of what Daniel Moss has called the “Ovidian vogue” of the late Elizabethan period—namely, the effort of panegyrists like Spenser to adapt Ovid’s strategy in the last book of the Metamorphosis of both presenting and satirizing the deification of Julius Caesar. These poets were responding to the suspicion of many reformers that the Elizabethan establishment had attempted to build consensus at the expense of true religion; indeed, in their view such a consensus was a form of idolatry, a Faustian bargain that placed greater value on the state’s mission to preserve peace and security than its mission to care for souls. By adapting Ovid’s ironic and self-reflexively poetic divination of the sovereign, the panegyrists worked to create a sophisticated audience that could acknowledge the reformist critique while not putting it into practice: consensus may be idolatry, but it was idolatry worth cherishing.

Author

• Ethan John Guagliardo, Boğaziçi University