Christopher Baker
Book Review
Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt, eds. Religious Diversity and Early Modern English
Texts. Wayne State University Press (Detroit, MI, 2013), vi + 367 pp. Illus.
ISBN: 9780814339558. $54.95 (USD)
1> In a 2004
essay in Criticism, Ken Jackson and
Arthur Marotti outlined “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern Studies” that had
begun to influence Tudor-Stuart literary scholarship. A decade on, religion as
a vitally contested element in early modern culture is now an established topic
of academic interest. In 2011, Jackson and Marotti extended their work by
editing Shakespeare and Religion: Early
Modern and Postmodern Perspectives. Now Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt have
assembled a new collection of essays highlighting the hybrid nature of early
modern religious experience, presenting an era in which Catholic, Reformed,
Jewish, and secular influences complicate prior monolithic assumptions about religious
belief and practice. The thirteen essays offered here (seven by Israeli
scholars) bring fresh perspectives to both familiar and lesser-known works and literary
figures.
2> The
opening section of three essays addresses “Minority Catholic Culture,”
beginning with Marotti’s essay contending that, since Elizabeth would have no
other virgin queens before her, the composition of Marian verse constituted an
act of both devotion and subversion. William Frost’s unpublished poetry, written
under the reigns of both Mary and Elizabeth I, bemoans his country’s “fall into
Heresy in the Henrician era and criticizes the Protestant assault on
traditional Catholic devotion, particularly devotion to Mary” (27). Marotti
notices more familiar names such as Southwell, Lodge, Constable, and Henry
Garnet, but he sheds light as well on lesser-known Catholics such as Richard
Verstegan and the convert Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel. Catholic resistance
also took non-literary forms, as in William Blundell’s 1611 discovery of a
cache of Anglo-Saxon coins on his Chester farm, which he took as evidence of an
ancient Catholic heritage. As Phebe Jensen argues, “the early modern Catholic
estate could itself be seen as a newly sacred site that had replaced the
desecrated saints’ shrines, monasteries, and abbeys” (61); the English
countryside itself became a “material text” (71) of recusant opposition. A
third example of such resistance was the career of “Jesuitess” convent leader Mary
Ward (1585-1645). Lowell Gallagher contends that the paintings of Ward’s life in
her Augsburg center recapitulate Irenaeus’s reading of Lot’s wife in the Adversus haereses. Rather than a symbol
of “sin or depravity”, Lot’s wife is “the biblical type of ecclesia, the sanctified community: suffering, patient, stranded in
history, and holding onto the promise of the bridegroom’s return” (84). Gallagher
answers early critiques of Ward by her Protestant and Catholic contemporaries
by energetically employing Derrida’s concept of the equivocality of testimony
to equate the biblical pillar of salt with the red chair in Ward’s paintings.
3> Section
II, “Figuring the Jew,” opens with Avrahm Oz’s essay justifying the inclusion
of “secular” in this volume’s subtitle, for Oz argues resolutely for Shylock as
an irreligious, thoroughly material individual defined by commerce: his major characteristic
“may be epitomized as the commodification of any [emphasis added] concept, value, or moral tenet” (109). In his
“Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech, Shylock mimics the Venetians, calling attention
to his shared similarities with them to create a “vision of nationhood” (118)
that appropriates Machiavelli’s rewriting of the identity of the nation-state. Oz’s discussion
is provocatively reductive in its vision of the money-lender, prompting a reader
to wonder if the ethical “riddle” posed by the trial scene can so neatly excise
religion altogether. In contrast to Oz’s critical frame of material culture, Achsah
Guibbory documents that Milton’s view of England was decidedly biblical,
Israel’s history being the lens through which he saw Stuart politics. Though a
chosen people, the English were nevertheless “an Israel rampant with
corruption” whom he is called to summon to virtue (139). Yet, in Areopagitica, England is also “the
redeemed Zion or Jerusalem described by Isaiah”, and “London is England’s
Jerusalem” (140); in his Second Defense
of the English People (1654) and The
Readie and Easie Way (1660) it is a “reprobate Israel” with the potential
to become “the restored Israel” (148). Guibbory helpfully synthesizes a variety
of Milton’s works to show how the fraught Old Testament vision of a stubborn
yet chosen nation became a working template for Puritan politics.
4> The longer
Section III, “Hebraism and the Bible,” opens with Chanita Goodblatt’s
discussion of six graduate students’ production of the mid-sixteenth century play
The Historie of Jacob and Esau at
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. After pedagogically summarizing the play’s staging
and production, she presents her parshanut
(exegesis) of the Genesis account, drawing upon Calvin, rabbinical commentary,
Geneva text scholia, and the students’ responses. She generously allows that
the student performers/commentators “were able to establish the authority of
their interpretive process, ultimately vying successfully with the Reformation
commentators and translators” (174). Anne Lake Prescott’s witty and “much
abbreviated tale of Saul in Renaissance England” (190) tracks
recontextualizations of the biblical king by early modern polemicists to serve
their varying sectarian purposes; for example, “one finds allusions that
situate endangered Protestants as fresh Davids and their Catholic persecutors
as displaced or displaceable Old Sauls” (182). As Hannibal Hamlin demonstrated
in Psalm Culture in Early Modern English
Literature (2007), few biblical books were as influential in the
Renaissance as the Psalms, and Elliot M. Simon argues for two medieval
influences on the Psalm translations of Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert: the
conceptions of prophecy of the twelfth-century Cistercian Joachim de Fiore
(with whom they “could see themselves as historical incarnations of David”) and
the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (who modeled for them the interpreting
of “equivocal language of biblical texts”) (196). Using comparisons rather than
directly demonstrable linkages to these medieval thinkers, Simon illuminates a
larger Judaeo-Christian heritage for these translations. Opening a new avenue
into the implications of George Herbert’s possible knowledge of Jewish oral tradition,
Noam Flinker explores Hebraic sources “submerged” in Herbert’s “The
Collar” and “The Pearl.” He finds that echoes of Genesis and the Psalms in “The
Collar” intensify the “psychic destabilization and rebellion of the speaker”
(238), while “The Pearl” draws upon the spiritual implications of the material
jewel as discussed in the Talmudic commentary of Rabbi Joshua which Herbert may
have known.
5> The first
of two essays in Section IV on “Women in Religion”, by Yaakov Mascetti, argues
for a Calvinist and gendered reading of Emilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum; this work incorporates a Reformed
iconoclasm, serving “Calvin’s ideal reader [who] would thus see the living image of the Christian
truth, not perceive it physically” (257). However, men, such as Caiaphas,
because of their intentioned misapprehension, are more prone to miss Christ’s
salvation than are women, who sin by virtue of their “undiscerning ignorance”
(272). Jeanne Shami seeks to recover traces of early modern women’s religious
lives by scrutinizing their representations in funeral sermons, a challenging task
because this genre holds up women as virtuous models in ways that obscure
historical details of their lived experience. Shami ends with six helpful suggestions
for researchers interested in the ways “women engaged in post-Reformation sermon
culture” (303).
6> The final
section, on “Religion and Secularization”, opens with Noam Reisner’s discussion
of Marlowe’s use of rhetorical style to subvert conventional religious
assumptions with posited worlds that extend beyond the theatrical space. Oz’s
Shylock would approve of Reisner’s Barabas as an agent of an exclusively
material culture, The Jew of Malta creating
“an irruption of ruthless Machiavellian pragmatism in a social and political
world otherwise shaped by theories of providence and religious dogma” (318). In
the closing essay, Sanford Budick grapples thoughtfully with the old question
of whether King Lear is finally a
declaration of nihilism or an assertion—however bleak—of an ultimate hope. For Budick,
King Lear is a tragic community of
figures playing out a “zero narrative” of successive humiliations, nevertheless
culminating in a Kantian and sublime “recognition of a moral feeling that is
completely separate from any thought of preserving their own lives” (333), a
feeling necessary for their moral growth. Readers eager for an affirmative Lear will find new grounds for hope; those favoring a darker Lear will concur that the play’s affirmations are “by no means
self-evident” (333). Scholars generally now recognize the syncretized religious
culture of early modern England and its equally hybrid expression in a variety
of literary genres. This valuable collection of essays presents new avenues of
investigation into this complex milieu and new topics for debate among students
and commentators.
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Christopher Baker,
author of Religion in the Age of Shakespeare (2007) and editor of Absolutism
and the Scientific Revolution (2002) is Professor of English at Armstrong
State University. His
work has appeared in Milton Studies, the Ben Jonson Journal, Studia
Neophilologica, Comparative Drama, and elsewhere. He is an assistant
editor of the forthcoming MLA Variorum Cymbeline.
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APPOSITIONS:
Studies
in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume Seven (2014): Genres & Cultures
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