Sara
van den Berg
Book
Review
Katherine
Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature,
Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England. University of
Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, 2015), 368 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4751-0
1> Living in a period of
profound cultural change is hard, as people in seventeenth-century Europe knew
all too well. “Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,” lamented John Donne. That
“coherence,” the presumed seamless link between physical and spiritual reality,
had been the consensus belief of Christian Europe. Katherine Eggert explores
the undoing of that consensus in Disknowledge,
her remarkable study of four disparate domains: theology, kabbalah, human
reproduction, and the English theatre. She argues that the European humanist
vision of a moral leadership grounded in classical learning degenerated into
the education of bureaucrats who were content to know only piecemeal and
superficial ideas. As humanism decayed, people were too often content to rely on
classical ideas that were no longer persuasive, while at the same time
remaining ignorant of, or at best indifferent to, the substance and
implications of those ideas. At the same time, new modes of knowledge that
excited scholars and investigators yielded innovative ideas that were often
rejected by others in favor of received ideas, or that were not critically
examined for their implications for a new world view. As Eggert puts it, people
chose “disknowledge”: not knowing what they knew, deliberately “setting aside”
one theory in favor of another (3). To illustrate the practice of
“disknowledge,” Eggert focuses on transubstantiation, kabbalah, and human
reproduction. These disparate domains have one thing in common: transformation,
whether physical, metaphysical, or biological. In all three, she argues, it was
equally possible “to rely on theories of transformation” and to reject them as
“spurious” (10).
2> Katherine Eggert’s unifying
theme is alchemy, a theory that rested on a belief in changeable, uncertain
matter that could be manipulated by human knowledge. At once a scam, a mode of
esoteric learning, and a model of scientific investigation, alchemy was present
throughout English culture, from the urban swindlers mocked by Ben Jonson to
virtuosi like Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton whose work we respect as science.
Katherine Eggert does not simply trace the history of alchemy or explain its
esoteric language and methods. Instead, she shows how a mode of thinking that
we could call “alchemical” pervades disciplines of thought from the Reformation
onward.
3> Eggert appropriately begins
her study with the central transformative act in Christian Europe: the
transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
Catholics and Protestants debated the nature of that central moment in the
Mass. Since the bread and wine remained visibly bread and wine, what
transformation had occurred? For Catholics, the “substance” was transformed
into Christ’s body and blood (“the real presence”) and only the appearances of
bread and wine remained. For Protestants, the transformation was symbolic and
commemorative. Eggert argues that transubstantiation rested on a kind of
alchemical thinking, a belief that matter could be changed and
perfected—whether into physical or spiritual gold. Discussing “How to Forget
Transubstantiation,” Eggert shows that Europeans discarded classical
Aristotelian ideas but had not as yet agreed on a new model of materiality.
Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan used the rhetoric of alchemy in their poetry about
communion, yet both transubstantiation and alchemy rested on unsustainable
precepts. Alchemy could only be a provisional mode of religious meditation.
Faith required forgetting.
4> In the third chapter, “How
to Skim the Kabbalah,” Katherine Eggert shows that Christians who used the
Hebrew kabbalah could do so only by ignoring its foundation and appropriating
its surface. Here, faith required not erasure but distortion and deliberate
superficiality. To do otherwise would have yielded to the truth claims of the
Hebrew texts, and would have challenged the truth claims of Christian doctrine. In this chapter, she offers interpretations
of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and
Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Her
reading of The Tempest does not
always seem to build on her theoretical ideas. Eggert follows Julia Lupton in
reading Caliban in terms of the master/slave relationship. Eggert treats
Caliban as a golem, the figure of earth shaped into a hostile being, and
chooses to disregard colonial interpretations of Caliban. Only in a footnote
does Eggert mention Ariel, whose connection to Prospero’s magic art is much
more direct and whose name can be traced to Jewish mysticism.
5> Turning to another
prominent issue in classical Greece and Renaissance Europe, Eggert describes
other ways to relate old and new ideas: avoidance and contradiction. In her
fourth chapter, “How to Avoid Gynecology,” Eggert offers a compelling account
of how anatomists struggled to reconcile their discoveries about the female
body with long-held ideas about woman’s passive role in reproduction. No less
than the understanding of life itself was at stake in the debates about
reproduction, or “generation.” In addition to describing the work of William
Harvey and Helkiah Crooke, Eggert shows how Spenser and Shakespeare use
alchemical rhetoric to imagine masculine parthenogenesis. In The Faerie Queene, she suggests, Spenser
“introduces alchemy to explore what men desire to know, what they think they
know, and what they avoid knowing about women’s bodies” (181). The ideals and
practices of male learning are comically inscribed in Love’s Labours Lost. This chapter owes much to feminist scholars of
science, but the synthesis of their insights is Eggert’s own.
6> It is in the final chapter,
“How to Write Fiction,” that Katherine Eggert brings together her ideas about
alchemy, transubstantiation, kabbalah, and generation into a discussion about
literature itself. She rightly reminds us that Sidney used alchemical language
when he described poetry as a “golden world,” in contrast to the brazen world
of history and “mouse-eaten records.” In order to discuss this new theory of
literature, she offers interpretations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Jonson’s The
Alchemist, and Cavendish’s The
Blazing World. The Alchemist
relies on alchemical language, and Eggert could easily have built on her
earlier chapters to relate kaballah to the Hebrew elements in the play, and the
issues of reproduction and women’s bodies to the alchemical language of male
and female and the depiction of the female characters. Jonson converts the
detritus of urban life and characters into comic gold, making us ignore,
forget, avoid, or deny what we know in favor of the comic gold he creates.
These comments, however, should not detract from an appreciation of Eggert’s
book. Her learning and her argument are compelling, and the reader wants even
more.
7> Writing in our own time of
cultural change, Katherine Eggert is all too aware of the threadbare legacy of
humanism. In a coda at once modest, skeptical, and affirmative, she brings her
thesis to bear on literary criticism. She laughs at and with her fellow
critics, who stand apart in our comfortable disciplines and only indirectly
explain the world to the world. Like Prospero, our strength is “most faint.”
Yet in modesty lies a hope for the strength of interpretation and scholarship
like that of Katherine Eggert. Read this book.
_____
Sara
van den Berg
specializes in seventeenth-century literature, medical humanities, and disability
studies. She and W. Scott Howard co-edited The
Divorce Tracts of John Milton, and she also co-edited Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J. Her
other publications include The Action of
Ben Jonson’s Poetry and essays on Milton, Jonson, Shakespeare, Freud, and
medical humanities. Her current project is a study of the cultural meanings of
dwarfism since the Renaissance.
_____
APPOSITIONS:
Studies
in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/,
ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume
Nine (2016): Texts & Contexts
_____
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