The Tomb-Stone, and a Rare Sight.

CARTER, (John, the Younger).

THE MIRACLE-PLAY REVIVED - CHURCH THEATRE IN NORWICH IN 1650

[Part 1: The Tomb-Stone, Or, A broken and imperfect Monument of that Worthy Man (who was just and perfect in his Generations;) ... Erected above eighteen years after his decease. Part 2: A Rare Sight. Or, The Lyon: Sent from a farr Country, and presented to the City of Norwich; in a Sermon upon the Solemne Guild-day, June 18. 1650.].

Engraved portrait of John Carter the elder by Robert Vaughan (backed; slight defects down a central crease), white-on-black full-page woodcut of Vaughan's tomb-stone, six woodcut illustrations of emblematic shields and flags, etc. in the text (mostly full-page).

First Edition. [30], 31, [7], 33-184, [2]pp. Small 8vo. Early nineteenth-century plain calf (upper joint repaired).

London: by Tho. Roycroft, for E.D. and N.E. and are to be sold by John Sprat in Norwich, 1653

Wing C656. Some browning, stain from a cup on a few pages near the end.

In his essay "Perambulative and Consumable Emblems: The Norwich Evidence", Victor Morgan discusses the wide range of visual imagery used in the Norwich midsummer Guild Day celebrations for the inauguration of a new Mayor from sugar-water sculptures to banners and shields and draws attention to the Norwich and Norfolk connections of England's two early emblem book writers Geoffrey Whitney and Henry Peacham - "Intensively, for one day a year, through processions and displays paradoxical conjunctions of the visual and verbal were combined with allusions to their classical and christian sources. These were exploited in order to project for all levels of the populace an ideal of the urban community. It could, indeed, be argued that this transformation of the workaday world of the city into a festive liminal space made of at least its ceremonial heart an emblematic environment that as a whole bodied forth the messages crucial to the creating and sustaining of the civic ethos. The procession involved not only the civic dignitaries and their officials, such as the sword bearer, but also characters such as the so-called whifflers, the dick-fools, and the snap-dragon. These characters had all been incorporated from a purged pre-Reformation ceremonial and their significations had been transformed in order to accomodate them to the increasingly puritanical leanings of the City's governors. The day's proceedings included a sermon at the Cathedral, a swearing in at the Guildhall, and a civic feast at the old Blackfriars which had been municipalised at the dissolution of the monasteries."

It is in the midst of this scene that Carter delivered his sermon A Rare Sight preached on the text "Behold, the Lyon of the Tribe of Judah!" (Revelations 5.5): "At great Solemnities, and extraordinary confluences of people, it is the ancient use, and custome, to bring out strange sights, and shew farr-fetched Rarities. This is a solemne day; the Cities great anniversary Feast, for the Inauguration of the cheife Magistrate: Here's much concourse from several parts. I shal therefore at such a time of this being called to stand in the middest of such a multitude; produce my Spectacle, and present your view, the godliest sight, that ever Heaven or earth afforded; a stately, and a generous Lion from a farre Countrey. Behold the Lion of the Tribe of Judah.".

There can be no doubt that the six crude woodcut illustrations that accompany Carter's sermon (there cannot be many such illustrated sermons of the time) represent costumed characters with shields and banners actually performing in the cathedral, rather as in a mystery or miracle play - vestiges of such medieval pre-Reformation traditions were more likely to survive in the country than in London. When Carter says "Behold the Lion" he means it quite literally and even includes what amount to "stage directions" to the audience: "Its my duty to lift up my voice like a Trumpet to usher in this rare spectacle: and it is required of you, that with Moses, you will now turn aside, and see this great sight" or "So here: it's the sounding of the Trumpet: it invites, it commands you all to fix your Eyes upon this rare, and excellent sight which is comming forth". This must, surely, have been one of the most dramatic sermons ever delivered and, coming at a time when the theatres were closed by order of Parliament, such a "theatrical" religious event must have been hugely popular.

Some time before 1650, when the non-conformist Carter delivered this sermon, he had been removed from his position as head minister at St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich, for his attacks on the magistrates of Norwich "for their weak-kneed devotion to presbyterianism" and the "violence of his language and his fanatical denunciations of monarchy" (DNB) with the result that on the subtitles here he describes himself as "Preacher of the Gospell, and as yet sojourning in the City of Norwich" although he afterwards became minister of St. Lawrence in Norwich before his death in 1655.

Appended to his sermon is a brief (30-page) memoir of his father, the pious vicar of Bramfield and later Belstead in Suffolk who had died in 1635.

Morgan (Victor), "Perambulative and Consumable Emblems: The Norwich Evidence", in Bath (M.) & Russell (D.), eds., Deviceful Settings: The English Renaissance Emblem and its Contexts, (New York, 1999), pp. 167-206.