Abraham Stoll, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2017).

Within the early modern contexts of theology and jurisprudence, conscience was perceived as an important faculty of consciousness, determining for an individual Christian or for a judge or for the sovereign or for the community what was right and what was just. As Stoll shows in this monograph, it was also crucially important within the context of early modern fictional works. It had its own array of imagery and metaphors that were associated with it—most prominently it was that faculty that pricks or pierces the mind, and it also occupies a central thematic role within some of the most important dramatic works of the period including Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Richard III and Macbeth. But Abraham Stoll’s Conscience in Early Modern English Literature has a still more ambitious purpose than that of simply tracing the linguistic and metaphorical associations of the term throughout prominent fictional works from the period.

To be sure, Stoll’s larger purpose here is to advance the Weberian thesis that contemporary ideals of pluralism and the modern notion of an intimate conscience, sovereign and based on individual authority, originate within sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Protestantism. This is the species of conscience that, according to Stoll, would eventually inspire both Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ and Martin Luther King’s civil rights struggle (14). According to Stoll, it also prefigures Sigmund Freud’s conception of the modern unconscious and Judith Butler’s post-modern theorisation of subjectivity. With respect to his reliance on Butler’s work, especially within the Macbeth chapter, Stoll’s ambitious claim is that early modern Protestant appeals to conscience ultimately presage the conception of conscience valued in the academy today—one that implies pluralism and inclusion, that includes tolerance for other competing acts of conscience, and above all that entails individual sovereignty over the self. Never mind that most humans living today in 2019 probably do not view their conscience as radically destructured or divorced from any religious community or religious or civil authority or from rationality itself. According to Stoll, the modern notion of conscience is embodied in the Anglo-American academy, and sooner or later the rest of humanity will catch up.  

The protagonist of Stoll’s book is William Perkins, whose three tracts on conscience printed during the late sixteenth century were influential among English Protestants. According to Stoll, Perkins’ work on conscience ignored an earlier scholastic notion of syllogistic reasoning involving a bipartite structure in which the general and shared principles of synderesis are applied to particular cases in order to form acts of conscientia. Stoll calls this earlier traditional perspective the syllogistic conscience, and it is eventually superseded by Perkins, who follows Luther and Calvin, in jettisoning synderesis and elevating a ‘destructured’ conception of conscience in its place. This destructured conscience enables the individual to engage in the ‘kinetics of self-reflection’ at the same time that it effaces ‘any clear origin to anchor the process, or clear endpoint to conclude it’ (43). Stoll goes on to explain that within the gamut of this new Protestant notion of conscience, there is an ‘active sense of pursuing moral truth, rather than simply receiving it’ (43).  Stoll goes on to describe ‘a sense of pursuing a thing which ever recedes from us….Conscience is no longer understood as a completed and totalizing faculty, but rather as an unfolding experience’ (43). Note the implicit references here to the modern or contemporary experience of existential angst (a never-ending process of ‘self-reflection’) and the inability to arrive at anything resembling a fixed truth.

Within a subsequent series of chapters, Stoll shows how examples of what he calls the ‘inchoate’ or ‘reflexive’ or ‘destructured’ conscience emerge within the fiction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first of these chapters is on Spenser’s use of conscience within Book One and Book Five of The Faerie Queene. In his first illustration of a literary engagement with conscience, Stoll focusses on Redcrosse in the Cave of Despaire and later in the House of Holinesse. In the Cave of Despaire, Redcrosse’s conscience is first pricked by his consciousness of his own sinfulness, while in the House of Holinesse, his conscience is restructured according to antiquated medieval conceptions of spiritual redemption and regeneration. Within the first part of this reading (the part on the Cave of Despaire), Stoll shows how Spenser’s account of conscience is in conversation with some of the contemporary Protestant theologians on conscience, while in the second part (on the House of Holinesse), Stoll shows that Spenser relies on an archaic—almost Roman Catholic—method of rehabilitating Redcrosse. Stoll certainly deserves credit here for attending to the archaic feel of Spenser’s allegory and for not forcing Book One, the end of which really does feel quite medieval, into his larger theoretical scheme (from syllogistic and rational appeals to conscience to Protestant dislocation).

The second half of the chapter focuses on the juridical aspects of equity—the concept of juridical conscience of the courts and, in particular, of the court of Chancery— within Book Five. As other commentators have noted, although Artegall is trained in the ways of equity, it is really Britomart who allegorises equity within Book Five, and so it is of interest that the Iron man, Talus, finds his conscience and consciousness within his interactions with Britomart. Stoll claims that Britomart and Talus together strike the correct balance between equity and justice—a balance that is missing in the scenes with Artegall. However, this balance is short-lived—dislocated—by the post-Britomart cantos of Book 5, in which Artegall dispenses a form of rigorous justice that is lacking in equity.

The next chapter, on Macbeth, focuses on what Stoll calls the ‘uncanny conscience’ within the mental anguish of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, especially the latter’s ‘infected mind’ in Act 5. Here Stoll engages anachronistically with Freud and Butler; however, within the trajectory of Stoll’s account of the development of Protestant perspectives on conscience, such anachronism would, according to Stoll’s logic, be fully justified since what he calls the uncanny conscience found in these scenes leads directly to the modern unconscious of Freud and the post-modern subjectivity theorised by Butler. One of the more interesting parts of the chapter is at the end where Stoll opposes the dislocated and reflexive Protestant conscience to the casuistry of Jesuit Henry Garnett’s defence of equivocation during his arrest and interrogation for the Gunpowder Plot. According to Stoll, casuistry somehow emerges from the inwardly-focused conscience of Perkins, at the same time that its rational and communicable properties stand in opposition to it. Starting with Garnett, Stoll traces two traditions of conscience that emerge during the seventeenth century: the casuistic one that returns to the syllogistic reasoning of the scholastics, and the antinomian one which conceives of conscience as inspiration. Both are oriented in some sense towards the public realm, but the second antinomian conscience has fundamentally private characteristics that ironically make it more revolutionary.

In general, Stoll is more convincing in his account of mid-seventeenth-century uses of conscience than in the earlier chapters. If there is a problem with these middle chapters, on the political uses of conscience, it concerns the extent to which the Protestant casuists with which Stoll engages were influenced by and responding to Jesuit casuists on the continent—only Garnett is mentioned here. Similarly, the question of how and to what extent English Jesuits and English Roman Catholics were themselves influenced by casuistry is completely missing from Stoll’s account.

The next chapter considers the emergence of the conceptions of liberty of conscience and of a public conscience within mid-seventeenth-century England within the context of the two traditions introduced in the prior chapter: the casuist and the antinomian traditions. His focus is on several writers from this period, including Henry Robinson, William Walwyn and John Milton. As Stoll notes, however, there existed neither any concept of absolute toleration nor of absolute liberty in terms of conscience. Catholics and atheists enjoyed no liberty of conscience, and Protestant sects were sometimes suppressed for heresy during the period. Catholics were of course a special case, because of their belief in both papal supremacy and the papal power of deposing. Stoll mentions the threat that the Pope was perceived to pose to the state, but within Stoll’s account of the origins of modern liberalism and pluralism, the English Protestant intolerance for Roman Catholicism is viewed mostly as a contradiction. Nowhere here is there the sense that Arthur Marotti has elsewhere provided: that Roman Catholic beliefs, those in particular concerning the papal power of deposing, could never be reconciled with the Erastian foundations of post-Reformation England.[1]  In any case, Stoll’s account of the origins of modern liberalism will tolerate some detours from and approximations of what would eventually emerge. One of these detours might seem to be the work of Thomas Hobbes, but Stoll incorporates him into the historical trajectory he is tracing by showing that Hobbes posits a public conscience of the sovereign that ameliorates the deleterious effects of too many private appeals to conscience, by which ‘the Common-wealth must needs be distracted’ (Lev, II: 29, 223, quoted in Stoll, 150).

The hero of the latter half of Stoll’s book is Milton, who blends the two traditions of conscience, one rational and casuistic and the other antinomian and inspired. Stoll is particularly interested in the Areopagitica here and Milton’s notion of the English people as a ‘Nation of Prophets’ endowed with a vigorous public sphere in pursuit of the truth. He then turns to Milton’s later prose tracts, in particular De Doctrina Christiana and A Treatise of Civil Power, where Milton begins to champion a more antinomian version of conscience. In these tracts, the focus of Milton’s attention is on biblical hermeneutics. Interpretation, according to Milton, is an act of conscience, which in turn functions under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. It is in Of Civil Power that Stoll identifies a reflexive scene of conscience, in which the political subject becomes aware of the limits of ‘even an inspired conscience’, an awareness that once again leads to contemporary ideals of pluralism, tolerance and inclusion (181). The book ends on a related reading of Samson Agonistes, which presents Samson as embodying the self-reflexive conscience that Stoll locates in Milton’s prose tracts.

In general, this is an ambitious book, which attempts to trace the permutations and evolution of appeals to conscience for more than one hundred years during the early modern period. The opposition which Stoll draws between casuistry and antinomian or inspired conscience in the second half of the book will be of genuine interest to scholars of seventeenth-century political thought, as will the last chapter on Milton. Stoll’s thesis is most convincing within these later chapters which focus on seventeenth-century political thought and literature. What is missing from Stoll’s account is the entire Catholic side of things, which Stoll reduces to a straw man of obedient communitarianism and deference to papal and medieval scholastic authority. In practice, English Catholics acted and wrote independently from papal direction and from the direction of religious authorities—there were church papists whose conscience told them to attend Anglican church service and there were those that chose recusancy. There were two sides to the Appellant Controversy, multiple and competing sides among the Bye Plotters, some of whom revealed the plot to English authorities, and among the Gunpowder Plotters. Pope Clement VIII was against Catholics taking up arms against their sovereign within England, but the plotters went ahead anyway. One also might recall the diversity of views on Pius V’s excommunication of Queen Elizabeth in 1570, which Nicholas Sander defended and about which Cardinal Allen expressed fear and apprehension. Allen’s fear was that the Bull of Excommunication was too harsh and would make conditions worse for English Catholics.

Similarly, on the Protestant side, Stoll glosses over the way in which Protestant sects did not jettison excommunication, a process which for them was communal and based within the congregation. In this respect, they never believed anything approximating a complete liberty of conscience. Luther had a process for excommunication, which was both authoritarian and communitarian—initiated by the pastor and the congregation. In Reason of Church Government, Milton favoured a similar process of excommunication, which involved councils and the community of the church (CPW, 1, 844-47). Such communal acts of excommunication were obviously premised on a notion of conscience shared by the congregation—the community of right Christians. In this respect, I could imagine a competing monograph on the topic of conscience, based on such evidence, which presented individual conscience as emerging from the Roman Catholic side and which presented the Protestant view of conscience as communitarian. In other words, there is widely available evidence to make a reasonable case in direct opposition to the one that Stoll makes here.

In the end, it seems to me, there existed both private and communitarian appeals to conscience throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English religious communities—both among the various sects comprising Protestantism and among diverse Catholics. In fact, every appeal to conscience is in some sense both private and communal, since the entire purpose of an appeal of conscience is to convince one’s community of what the individual perceives as right and just. This is yet one more way in which the entire trajectory of Stoll’s book, in which figures such as Perkins, Thomas Goodwin, Henry Robinson and Milton are enlisted as prefiguring modern notions of pluralism and subjectivity, is problematic. This is the fallacy of Whig history, one that Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age has so effectively countered. Part of Stoll’s thesis here is one about the emergence of secularism, but Taylor is completely overlooked in this monograph. There are other more minor problems. Stoll is wrong in his claim that Christopher St. German became a reformer (23). All the evidence points to St. German remaining a Roman Catholic—it is true, one with unorthodox views on the Church hierarchy— until his death in the late 1530s, although his manuscripts were found among the possessions of chief reformer Thomas Cromwell. In addition, Milton was inconsistent on the notion of England as a ‘Nation of Prophets’ (CPW, 2, 554). Stoll focuses on the Areopagitica, in which Milton describes England in this way, but elsewhere in the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton speaks of ‘a mutual bond of amity and brother-hood between man and man over all the world’. He goes on to remark that ‘He … that keeps peace with me, neer or remote, of whatsoever Nation, is to be as farr as all civil and human offices an Englishman and neighbour: but if an Englishman… offend against life and liberty, … he is no better then a Turk, a Sarasin, a Heathen’ (CPW, 3, 214-5).

Ultimately, literary monographs that attempt to trace the evolution of important theological concepts such as conscience are crucially important to the field of literary studies, and Stoll deserves a great deal of credit for taking on such a complex and ambitious project. In particular, readers of this book will gain valuable insights into the importance of William Perkins and the political, theological and literary deployments of conscience during the turbulent seventeenth century in England. As I have noted, however, a fuller investigation of this topic would also have to take into account what is happening on the Continent, since Protestant theology does not simply supersede and replace Roman Catholic theology. It rather emerges from it, and then it exists uneasily alongside it, with all of the conflictual antagonisms and symbiotic correspondence that proximity entails. Such an investigation would also be more cautious about enlisting the early modern conception of conscience to serve within a teleological grand narrative, which ends with such a narrow perspective on contemporary appeals to conscience. Much of Stoll’s work will be of value to early modern scholars, but the selective lens employed here prompts the question of what belongs to the early modern conception of conscience and what belongs to the author’s selective biases about contemporary ideals of pluralism and modern liberalism.

Brian Lockey

St John’s University

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