RIB, WHY THE FIRST WOMAN FORMED FROM.
Allow me to request a place for the following curious and quaint exposition of the propriety of the selection of the rib as the material out of which our first mother Eve was formed; and the ingenious illustration which it is made to afford of the relation between wife and husband.
"Thirdly, God so ordered the matter betwixt them, that this adhæsion and agglutination of one to the other should be perpetuall. For by taking a bone from the man (who was nimium osseus, exceeded and was somewhat monstrous, by one bone too much) to strengthen the woman, and by putting flesh in steede thereof to mollifie the man, he made a sweete complexion and temper betwixt them, like harmony in musicke, for their amiable cohabitation.
"Fourthly, that bone which God tooke from the man, was from out the midst of him. As Christ wrought saluation in medio terræ, so God made the woman è medio viri, out of the very midst of man. The species of the bone is exprest to be costa, a rib, a bone of the side, not of the head: a woman is not domina, the ruler; nor of any anterior part; she is not prælata, preferred before the man; nor a bone of the foote; she is not serva, a handmaid; nor of any hinder part; she is not post-posita, set behind the man: but a bone of the side, of a middle and indifferent part, to show that she is socia, a companion to the husband. For qui junguntur lateribus, socii sunt, they that walke side to side and cheeke to cheeke, walke as companions.
"Fifthly, I might adde, a bone from vnder the arme, to put the man in remembrance of protection and defense to the woman.
"Sixthly, a bone not far from his heart to put him in minde of dilection and loue to the woman. Lastly, a bone from the left side, to put the woman in minde, that by reason of her frailty and infirmity she standeth in need of both the one and the other from her husband.
"To conclude my discourse, if these things be duely examined when man taketh a woman to wife, reparat latus suum, what doth he else but remember the maime that was sometimes made in his side, and desireth to repaire it? Repetit costam suam, he requireth and fetcheth back the rib that was taken from him," &c. &c.—From pp. 28, 30, of "Vitis Palatina, A sermon appointed to be preached at Whitehall, upon Tuesday after the marriage of the Ladie Elizabeth, her Grace, by the B. of London. London: printed for John Bill, 1614."
The marriage actually took place on the 14th of February, 1612. In the dedication to the Prince of Wales, afterwards Charles I., the Bishop (Dr. John King) hints that he had delayed the publication till the full meaning of his text, which is Psalm xxviii. ver. 3, should have been accomplished by the birth of a son, an event which had been recently announced, and that, too, on the very day when this Psalm occurred in the course of the Church service.
The sermon is curious, and I may hereafter trouble you with some notices of these "Wedding Sermons," which are evidently contemplated by the framers of our Liturgy, as the concluding homily of the office for matrimony is by the Rubric to be read "if there be no sermon." It is observable that the first Rubric especially directs that the woman shall stand on the man's left hand. Any notices on the subject from your correspondents would be acceptable.
In the first series of Southey's Common Place Book, at page 226., a passage is quoted from Henry Smith's Sermons, which dwells much upon the formation of the woman from the rib of man, but not in such detail as Bishop King has done. Notices of the Bishop may be found in Keble's edition of Hooker, vol. ii. pp. 24, 100, 103. It appears that after his death it was alleged that he maintained Popish doctrines. This his son, Henry King, canon of St. Paul's, and Archdeacon of Colchester, satisfactorily disproved in a sermon at Paul's Cross, and again in the dedication prefixed to his "Exposition upon the Lord's Prayer," 4to., London, 1634. See Wood's Athenæ Oxon., fol. edit. vol. ii. p. 294.
As for the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth, afterwards celebrated for her misfortunes as Queen of Bohemia, it was celebrated in an epithalamium by Dr. Donne, Works, 8vo. edit. vol. vi. p. 550. And in the Somer's Tracts, vol. iii., pp. 35, 43., may be found descriptions of the "shewes," and a poem of Taylor the Water Poet, entitled "Heaven's Blessing and Earth's Joy," all tending to show the great contemporary interest which the event occasioned.
Balliolensis.