Katherine
Gillen
Book Review
Brooke
Conti, Confessions of Faith in Early
Modern England. University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, 2014), 240pp.
ISBN: 978-0-8122-4575-2
1> The rise of autobiography has long been
associated with the Reformation, as the Protestant emphasis on personal faith and
the written Word was thought to inspire both reflective interiority and the
desire to express it in writing. Although scholars have questioned this view,
noting in particular the existence of autobiography in Catholic countries, the
assumption has remained that religious autobiographies follow a Pauline or an
Augustinian model in which an individual narrates his conversion in great
personal detail. In her insightful study Confessions
of Faith in Early Modern England, Brooke Conti calls our attention to an
alternate form of life writing that she calls the confession of faith:
autobiographical passages of varying lengths that appear in essentially
polemical works, ostensibly serving as evidence of the author’s religious
beliefs. Bridging the religious definition of a “confession of faith” as a
creedal statement with the more literary connotations of confessional writing,
Conti isolates autobiographical moments in the religious writings of James I,
John Donne, John Milton, Thomas Browne, and John Bunyan. Although these
passages contain personal information, the manner of their articulation, Conti
argues, is produced by England’s contentious religious climate, which demanded unambiguous
statements of religious affiliation. However, as Conti adroitly demonstrates,
these confessions of faith are anything but straightforward, often giving rise
to more questions than they answer. “Indeed,” she writes, “it often seems that
the more a writer says about his religion the less clear his beliefs or denominational
identity become” (2). This paradox arises from the tension inherent to the
genre between public declaration and private reflection, as the author’s
personal beliefs, experiences, and family histories prove too complicated and
idiosyncratic to align precisely with a generalized creed. As collective as it
is individual, the confession of faith complicates our understanding not only
of the history of life writing but also of the significance of religion to
seventeenth-century identity.
2> Part I, “Oaths of Allegiance,” traces the
efforts of James I and John Donne to wrangle their complex familial and
personal histories into coherent narratives demonstrating their allegiance to
the Church of England. Born to Mary Queen of Scots but educated by Presbyterians,
James I endeavored to present himself as spiritually consistent without
disowning his famously Catholic parents, on whose lineage depended his claim to
the throne. Through nuanced examinations of Basilikon
Doron (1599), An Apologie for the
Oath of Allegiance (1609) and many of James’s speeches and letters, Conti
demonstrates that, although James turns to autobiography to shore up this
narrative, these moments of autobiography inevitably raise complexities and
expose gaps that undercut his claims. While he does not face the pressure of
fashioning himself as a legitimate English King, Donne similarly relies on autobiography
to prove his loyalty to the Church of England. Whereas James stresses
continuity, Donne emphasizes his conversion. Despite repeated references to his
conversion in both Pseudo-Martyr (1610)
and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623),
however, Donne fails to narrate this pivotal event in sufficient depth, leaving
the reader hungry from more information about his break from Catholicism. As
with James’s assertions, Donne’s personal claims seem inadequate because “[t]he
constraints of polemic and polemical culture do not permit the kinds of
detailed autobiographical investigations that they seem to inspire” (51).
3> Part II, titled “Personal Credos,” addresses
Milton’s political tracts and several editions of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, texts that emphasize the
authors’ use of reason and individual choice even as they claim religious
affiliation. In his antiprelatical tracts of the 1640s and Defenses of the 1650s, Milton’s makes unusually extensive use of
autobiography, revealing, Conti argues, anxiety about his status as a great
poet and about the commensurability of his literary and spiritual pursuits. Despite
his often authoritative tone, Milton’s overreliance on autobiography seems
defensive, as he endeavors to justify his literary ambitions and spiritual
integrity to his audience, to his God, and most of all to himself. Similarly,
Thomas Browne’s recursive and almost compulsive autobiographical forays in his Religio have their “roots in what cannot
be spoken” (81), in this case a materialist skepticism regarding certain
aspects of Christian orthodoxy. Indicative of her thorough research, Conti
considers three distinct versions of Browne’s Religio, whereas most scholars rely only on the authorized 1643
edition. As a result, she challenges the common view that Browne’s intellectual
broadmindedness reflects the tolerance of the Church of England, revealing instead
substantial apprehension in the Religio regarding
the heterodoxies and heresies Browne entertained as a medical student on the
Continent. As Conti demonstrates, many of these transgressions were discussed
at length in the first Religio but
were redacted or revised in later iterations. Browne, like the other authors
addressed in Confessions of Faith, turns
to autobiography to support an official statement—in this case that he has
repudiated his youthful skepticism and allied himself firmly with the Church of
England—but his seemingly honest reflections raise more questions than they
answer and his often tortured explanations belie profound religious
uncertainty.
4> Conti’s final section, “Loyal Dissents?”
focuses primarily on John Bunyan’s Grace
Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), which largely follows the
conventions of the Puritan spiritual autobiography. Conti argues convincingly
for reading Grace Abounding as a
confession of faith, however, treating it as a response to the crisis of the
Restoration and, more specifically, to the resulting twelve years Bunyan spent
in prison. Signaling an evolution in the confession of faith, though, Bunyan’s
text evinces less concern about his relationship to an institutional church than
do the other authors, seeming more interested in his own private spiritual
condition. Confessions of Faith concludes
with an epilogue on James II, who abandons the confession of faith altogether
by declaring his conversion to Catholicism without taking any pains to
reconcile it with his office as head of the Church of England.
5> Confessions
of Faith will be valuable to anyone interested in seventeenth-century
prose, life writing, the history of religion, and the development of the modern
subject. With her deep archive, Conti calls our attention to texts that have
been largely overlooked by literary scholars, such as early drafts of Browne’s Religio Medici, and offers compelling
re-readings of well-known texts such as Milton’s antiprelatal tracts and
Donne’s Devotions. As such, Conti presents
her authors in a new light: we come to see James I and Donne as thoughtful, if
tortured, negotiators of personal and political demands; Milton and Browne as
anxious about their spiritual fates and possible transgressions; and Bunyan as
deeply shaken by the spiritual implications of his imprisonment and of the
Restoration. Showing how integral religion was to personal and political
identity in the seventeenth century, Confessions
of Faith also points to the difficulty of discerning an author’s specific
spiritual beliefs, even in his most autobiographical moments. By reading these
autobiographical moments through the lens of the confession of faith, moreover,
Conti complicates our understanding of life writing more generally, suggesting
that even the most seemingly personal writing is shaped by public exigencies.
_____
Katherine
Gillen is assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University-San
Antonio. She is working on a book project considering the economic significance
of chastity tropes in early modern drama, and she has published articles in
several venues including Studies in
English Literature and Shakespeare
Jahrbuch.
_____
APPOSITIONS:
Studies
in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume
Eight (2015): Dialogues & Exchanges
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