Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xlv + 802pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-967280-6. $150.00 cloth.
This collection of thirty-nine essays by an impressive group of established and emerging scholars joins the growing number of guidebooks on the connections between literature and religion. It bears the closest relationship to The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Literature, ed. Andrew Hass, David Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), which also includes several chapters on early modern authors, including Shakespeare and Marlowe (Thomas Healy), Herbert and Donne (Helen Wilcox), and John Milton (Michael Lieb), along with chapters on the English Reformations (Brian Cummings) and the Bible and Prayer Books (Lynne Long). The volume offers a more focused consideration of the topic than the chronologically broader and more comparative overview of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion, ed. Susan M. Felch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), and it complements the emphasis on modern literature and theory of The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion, ed. Mark Knight (New York: Routledge, 2016). At the outset, it is worth noting that the editors do not define religion specifically in their introduction. Instead, they characterize the relationship between religious developments during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and literature as ‘profound and fascinating’; what emerges over the course of the collection, as one of the contributors puts it, is a view of religion as ‘a multifarious concept encompassing both beliefs and practices’ (243). The collection is divided into five parts: 1 an historical overview; 2 analysis of literary genres used to express faith; 3 early modern texts and authors; 4 interpretive communities; and 5 debates and issues.
The first part, titled ‘The Religious History of Early Modern Britain,’ examines changes in religion, theology, and doctrine from the medieval period through the Revolution of 1688, with glances toward later theological and ecclesiastical developments in Anglicanism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The seven chapters in this section are organized around familiar historical periods, with chapters on the pre-Reformation English Church (Stephen Kelly), Henrician Reformation (David Bagchi), the mid-Tudor Church (John N. King), the Elizabethan Reformation (Torrance Kirby), early Stuart Church (Charles W.A. Prior), Civil War Period (Jacqueline Eales), and the later Stuart Church (Grant Tapsell). In the opening chapter, Kelly tackles the difficult project of analyzing the many changes in the medieval Church, both in England and Western Europe. He balances his discussion of ecclesiastical history with a treatment of vernacular translations of the Bible and other pertinent texts, such as William Langland’s Piers Plowman and The Pricke of Conscience as well as more unfamiliar devotional texts like the Carthusian John Fewterer’s Myrrour of Glasse (1533). Kelly nicely highlights the development of ‘affective piety’, with its emphasis on ‘emotionalism and vivid pictorialism’, and suggests that this mode of devotion ‘prefigures the highly individuated spirituality that would be a mark of Protestantism’ (11-12).
The two following chapters on the Henrician Reform and the mid-Tudor Church offer excellent surveys of religious polemic and propaganda during their respective periods. For instance, King’s discussion of the Edwardian evangelical writer William Baldwin’s A marvelous hystory intitulede Beware the Cat (1533), ‘a fanciful satire on the concealed survival of Roman Catholic ritual practices’, provides a representative example of Edwardian polemic (51). Kirby’s treatment of the Elizabethan Church stands out as one of the most ecclesiastically oriented chapters of the volume; and his focus on John Jewel’s prominent contribution (taken from Augustine) to defining the theology of the early modern English Church, especially the distinction between sign (signum) and thing (res significata), is detailed but accessible. As Kirby explains, ‘Jewel succinctly summarizes the key principle which would be definitive of Anglican hermeneutics for centuries to come: ‘we put a difference between the sign and the thing signified’ (60).
Subsequent chapters on the early Stuart Church and English Civil War offer clear examinations of the complex intersections between politics and religion, with Eales’s helpful reminder that points of connection exist ‘between the Elizabethan puritan movement and civil war years’, as exemplified by the 1641 will of Presbyterian minister Humphrey Fenn, ‘who had been one of the ministers arrested and tried with [Thomas] Cartwright in 1590’ (93). In his chapter on the later Stuarts, Tapsell underscores the proliferation of religious polemic in the press; his reminder about the sheer amount of material — with ‘[j]ust over 140,000 catechisms, primers, and psalters and psalms produced in 1663’ alone and ‘between five and ten million pamphlets flood[ing] the country between 1679-81’ —foregrounds the importance of the printed word in shaping religious and political change (110-11).
The second part of the volume, ‘Literary Genres for the Expression of Faith,’ turns to how religion is communicated through a variety of literary genres, with chapters on translation (Rachel Willie), prayer and prophecy (Erica Longfellow), lyric poetry (Elizabeth Clarke and Simon Jackson), drama (Adrian Streete), the sermon (Jeanne Shami), autobiographical writing (Katharine Hodgkin), satire and prophecy (Anne Lake Prescott), and neo-Latin writings (Jan Bloemendal). These chapters succeed, as the editors advertise, in ‘lay[ing] the basic foundations for the discussion of religion and literature by studying the basic materials to writers in this era’ (xxviii). Part 2 is bookended by two chapters that center on language, beginning with Willie’s survey of Reformist approaches to translation and treatment of three examples of translation by Erasmus, particularly The Praise of Folly, the Sidneys, and Munday; and ending with Bloemendal’s examination of theological writings, Latin drama, Psalm paraphrases (including those by George Buchanan), and religious poetry. While both chapters cover many authors and a great deal of material, readers may find them to be too much of a ‘snapshot’ (134).
In the chapter on prayer and prophecy, Longfellow outlines Protestant definitions of prayer, beginning with George Herbert’s ‘seemingly mundane’ definition of it as ‘something understood,’ and goes on to discuss a variety of early modern experiences of private and public prayer (135). In the section on prayer and literary inspiration, her attention to Anne Locke’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner (1560), the first sonnet sequence in English, highlights how a secular poetic form may be transformed for religious ends. Logically picking up from the influence of prayer on literature, Clarke and Jackson’s following chapter, which is titled ‘Lyric Poetry’ but focused entirely on devotional lyrics, examines biblical poetics, especially the Psalms and the Song of Songs, and concludes with a section on religious lyric in its wider contexts, with a discussion of Donne, Herbert, and Thomas Campion. The authors consider well-known texts such as the Sidney Psalter as well as lesser known texts by Elizabeth Melville, which include a revision of Marlowe’s ‘A Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ and an adaptation of Philip Sidney’s Petrarchan verse, and the Scottish Presbyterian noblewoman Barbara Mackay’s manuscript paraphrase of the Song of Songs. Clarke and Jackson effectively note that the Song of Songs authorized a woman like Mackay to ‘use its extravagant language, and even elaborate on it, without the fear … that she will be carried away in excessive and illegitimate action’ (159). Prescott’s chapter on satire and polemic builds on the significant presence of religion in early modern poetry, though the chapter also includes prose polemic as well. Prescott notes the ‘conservative’ nature of much verse satire produced in the 1590s, with its emphasis on singling out the ‘eccentric and deviant’ (225). Her examinations of satires of rank and the monstrous, emergence of the early modern epigram, and, finally, the polemic of Thomas More and the Marprelate tracts provide representative subjects for considering the various modes that religious invective could take.
The complex intersections of the religious and the dramatic are central to Streete’s excellent chapter on drama. He details the attempts to regulate the stage on the part of magistrates and religious reformers, noting that they were inconsistent in their effectiveness. And he makes the insightful observation that the recent critical tendency to see ‘this period of religious flux or fluidity … may say more about current preoccupations in the modern academy than it does about religion in the early modern period’ (175). The chapter also includes a section of the importance of biblical grammar and early modern biblical hermeneutics as well as an overview of dramatic representations of religious passion. Shami’s chapter on the sermon, which she describes as ‘the dominant cultural form of post-Reformation English literature’, outlines the different types of sermons, ecclesiastical restraints on preaching (especially on the lower classes, women, and Catholics), and the various experiences of auditors (185). The chapter deftly balances coverage of the technical terminology that built up around the sermon with memorable anecdotes and analysis of the far-reaching influence of the sermon on literature and culture. Equally engaging is Hodgkins’s chapter on autobiographical writings. Focusing primarily on early 17th-century primary texts, Hodgkins underscores the deep tensions between the religious aims of the writer and place of the self within the genre: ‘Subjectivity is complicated by a spiritual discourse that sees selfhood as a problem rather than something to be celebrated’ (210). The chapter’s discussion of the problem of memory in conversion narratives builds on the vexed understandings of the self during the period.
The third part of the volume, ‘Religion and the Early Modern Writer’, tightens the focus to individual or small groups of authors. In the opening chapter on Erasmus, John Colet, Thomas More, and their humanist circle, Andrew Hiscock highlights the deep personal friendships and intellectual collaboration within Christian humanism. He demonstrates the prominence of Colet within humanism despite the paucity of his surviving writings. In particular, Colet’s influence is visible through his close relationship with Erasmus (who lamented, ‘I feel only half a man, with myself alive and Colet dead!’), his correspondence on Platonic philosophy, and his handling of good works in his Convocation Sermon (1510/1511?). In the following chapter on John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Mike Pincombe and Gavin Schwartz-Leeper reconstruct the cultural and political importance of Foxe’s magnum opus by interpreting it as an apocalyptic tragedy. They argue that in Reformist apocalyptic tragedy causality is due to Satan, and ‘[t]his structural clarity gives rise to a basic scenario which is repeated again and again and again: the agon between the “martyr” and the “tyrant’’’ (284). By taking such a structural reading, Pincombe and Schwartz-Leeper offer a helpful point of departure for many readers to approach Foxe’s daunting text.
Later chapters on Spenser (Elizabeth Heale), Marlowe (Lisa Hopkins), Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert (Nandra Perry and Robert E. Stillman), Donne (Hugh Adlington), Hutchinson (Robert Wilcher), and Milton (Catherine Gimelli Martin) all provide well-researched and accessible entries on their respective authors. Heale’s chapter on Spenser provides an overview of recent scholarship on Spenser and religion and complements Carol Kaske’s chapter on ‘Spenser and the Bible’ and Claire MacEachern’s chapter on ‘Spenser and Religion’ in Richard McCabe’s Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (2010). Hopkins’s chapter takes on the slippery subject of Marlowe’s religion with the caveat that ‘[a]s so often in Marlowe, we don’t know what to think,’ and goes on to suggest that Marlowe may have in fact ‘cultivat[ed]’ a form of ‘dramatic ambiguity’ often associated with what John Keats described as Shakespeare’s negative capability (313, 320). Perry and Stillman insightfully read Philip Sidney as a cosmopolitan writer ‘commit[ed] to inclusiveness’ in his poetry and fiction, and Mary Sidney as ‘the author of the self-authorizing fiction that is Philip and Mary Sidney’ (332, 340). Using Donne’s holy sonnet ‘Oh, to vex me’ as representative of the complexity of Donne’s religious thought, Adlington registers the ‘pressure of contemporary religious disputes and controversies … that bear down upon and at least inform Donne’s religious writing, even apparently, introspective lyrics’ (351). Wilcher’s chapter on Lucy Hutchinson, which also pays close attention to the political career of her husband John Hutchinson, stands as an excellent introduction to the religio-political contexts that shaped her career. Especially noteworthy is Wilcher’s attention to Hutchinson’s evolving relationship with Epicureanism in her translation of Lucretius’s De rerum natura from the 1650s to the 1670s. Part three concludes with Martin’s chapter on Milton’s life and complicated literary career, particularly his emphasis on individual choice, which ‘is always God-Given, the result and the proof of the deity’s supreme respect for liberty’ (393). However, when discussing Spenser’s influence on Milton, her identification of Spenser as an advocate of ‘the optimistic philosophy of Italian Neoplatonism [rather] than the gloomy doctrine of sin and predestination stressed by Calvin and his followers’ maybe too reductive for some readers (383).
Broadening the focus from authors and texts to ‘Interpretive Communities,’ the fourth section of the handbook ranges from specific and, at times, loosely defined Christian groups such as sectarians (Johanna Harris), exiles at home (Alison Searle), and exiles abroad (Jaime Goodrich) to chapters on the Jewish diaspora (Jeffrey Shoulson) and Islamic communities (Bernadette Andrea). These chapters expand on the historical overviews in Part 1, and they provide detailed case studies of the different communities. To give a typical example, Nicky Hallett, in her examination of ‘Female Religious Houses,’ considers how English Catholic nuns living in Cambrai interpreted the Bible and create a sense of ‘spiritual surrogacy’ through their annals and devotional writings (419). Likewise, Suzanne Trill, in her chapter on lay households, examines the ‘problematic politics of household devotion’ surrounding the ‘Arminian nunnery’ of Little Gidding (399). As a whole, this section works best when the subject matter is most clearly defined and can be treated in a clear historical arc. For instance, in the chapter on Quakers, Catie Gill offers an accessible historical overview, highlights the recurrent theme of ‘divinizing light, or illuminated conscience’ in Quaker writings, and emphasizes the importance of print to Quakers’ presentation of their sufferings to a larger readership (449). Along the same lines, Christopher Hodgkins’ excellent chapter, ‘Settlers in the New World,’ begins by recounting how the Spanish colonial project created ‘imaginative paradigms that would define how English settlers saw American lands and native peoples’ before turning to the texts about and from America (528). Despite the strengths of each chapter, however, this section could have had a tighter organizational principle, such as religious sects or denominations or even geographical areas. For instance, the diffusion of English Catholic writers into multiple chapters makes it difficult for readers to assess in any comprehensive manner the different Roman Catholic religious and literary responses during the period.
The fifth and final section of the volume, ‘Early Modern Religious Life: Debates and Issues,’ analyzes the ‘recurring themes’ in religion, culture, and literature (xxix). Hannibal Hamlin’s excellent opening chapter on the Bible discusses biblical translation, interpretation, paraphrase, and the Bible as literature. When treating the impact of the Bible on the development of early modern literature, he makes the important (even corrective) observation that ‘metrical Psalms were as dominant a component of English Renaissance lyric as Petrarchan love poems, and just as important to the development of English poetry’ (555). The section moves on to include Timothy Rosendale’s more thematically oriented chapter on ‘Authority, Religion, and the State,’ which helpfully encapsulates how the Reformation altered the authority of the medieval church: ‘One might say generally that the Reformation trifurcated the authority of Roman Catholicism into three parcels: its jurisdictional claims were handed over to secular rulers, its institution truth claims were recentered in the Bible, and its interpretive authority was distributed finally (if somewhat anxiously) among readers’ (571).
Turning to the relationship between religion and science, Bronwen Price’s chapter focuses on importance of religion in the writings of Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Henry More and the Cambridge Platonists. Margaret Ezell’s subsequent chapter nicely develops the discussion of science and religion by tracing how the debates about the relationship between the body and soul ‘had profound implications in how human and divine nature were represented in early modern literature’; and Ezell’s treatment of the debates about whether the soul has a gender offers an illuminating example of the intersection between gender, sexuality, and religion. In his chapter on the ars moriendi (art of dying), Peter Carlson argues that the anxieties about death and dying were rooted in ‘the uncertainty of authority itself,’ and goes on to trace how different religious practices responded to these cultural and social concerns (635); but it is noticeable that he does not reference Philippe Ariès’s pioneering study The Hour of Our Death (1981), especially in the section on untimely deaths. The collection appropriately concludes with P.G. Stanwood’s analysis of sin, judgment, and eternity, and, like many of the previous chapters, emphasizes the importance of authority for the development of each of these interrelated topics.
In their introduction, Hiscock and Wilcox explain that they ‘do not anticipate (or advise) that users of this handbook will read it from cover to cover,’ and it is true that each of the chapters (though some to a lesser extent) are relatively self-contained and provide points of entry into very complex historical and literary conversations (xxx). But, when considered as a handbook, the most significant shortcoming of the volume is the lack of a list of selected or recommended readings at the end of each chapter. Instead, the reader must turn to a comprehensive bibliography that is divided into primary and secondary texts and spans 103 pages. This is not only time consuming, but also fails to identify important way markers for readers who are less familiar with a particular subject. In addition, although it is impossible for any handbook to be comprehensive, there are nevertheless certain subjects noteworthy by their absence: religiously-inflected texts like Robert Southwell’s Saint Peter’s Complaint (passed over completely), John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (mentioned once), and, most importantly, the highly influential and bestselling pseudo-autobiography of Charles I Eikon Basilike (passed over completely) certainly warrant more extensive treatment. A few historical errors could also have been addressed. William Tyndale, for instance, is described vaguely at one point as ‘meeting his end as an impenitent heretic against a stake outside Brussels’ (35), at another as ‘be[ing] burnt alive’ (42), and at another as being ‘tried and burned at the stake for heresy’ (501), until Hannibal Hamlin accurately explains that he was ‘garroted’ ‘for heresy’ (546). (David Daniell records that Tyndale was strangled to death and then burned [William Tyndale: A Biography (2001) 382-83]). More glaring are some formatting issues, such as a footnote that includes the following editorial instruction, ‘[database to be launched in May 2017—author will supply details at that point]’ (204), and the presence in the body text of a contributor’s acknowledgment statement that was meant to be in a footnote (463). Despite these issues, the handbook offers an important contribution to the ongoing work on religion and literature. The editors’ inclusion of a range of diverse voices highlights the extent to which religion shaped the culture and literature of the early modern period.
Paul D. Stegner
California Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo
48.2.4
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The collection is divided into five parts: 1 an historical overview; 2 analysis of literary genres used to express faith
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