Discovering and (re)covering the seventeenth century religious lyric

Abstract

Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Edited by Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. viii + 408 pp. $59.00 cloth. Although the title-page of this essay collection does not indicate its status as a festschrift, one of its main purposes is evidently honor the teaching and scholarly career of John R. Roberts (viii). The focus chosen for the collection is indeed most apt, since extending the informed critical discussion of early modern English religious lyrics has been the achievement of Jack Roberts's career. His pioneering annotated bibliographies of critical writing on Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw, as well as his own articles and essay collections, and his unfailing support of younger scholars, have combined to enable the increased attention given to the religious lyric over the past three decades. As Claude Summers writes in the closing contribution to this volume, Roberts's calculated strategy of restraint in the bibliographies has made them available to critics of every tradition (336). His evenhandedness in presenting critical approaches with which he might not personally agree bespeaks, in Summers's elegant formulation, Roberts's of the winding ways of scholarship and the mysteriousness of the creative process (337). An annotated bibliography, in the hands of a sensitive and objective scholar such as Jack Roberts, can function as literary history in itself, charting the shifting currents of critical taste. Criticism, after all, is an expression of an age as well as of the individuals who contribute to it. The volume under discussion is no exception, being very much an essay collection of our time in its expressed aim to extend the canon of the poems generally implied by the phrase seventeenth-century English religious lyric. The essays devote attention to a number of hitherto neglected groups, including women writers and English Catholics, as well as to poets who might be termed minor but whose work nevertheless adds to our understanding of the religious lyric and of the era. As Kari Boyd McBride vividly puts it, the canon can have the same effect as urban light pollution, erasing the dimmer and leaving us with a manageable set of constellations and bright suns. This volume takes us away from the familiar perspective, into the desert, where darkness reveals the innumerable of the night sky and masks the relationships we thought we understood (40). The rediscovered heavenly lights in this volume span the period from Robert Southwell and Elizabeth Middleton in the late sixteenth century to Joseph Beaumont and Thomas Traherne towards the end of the seventeenth. Holding true to the editors' conviction that there are many more stars in the sky than the sparkling Donne and Herbert, the fifteen essays explore exciting new constellations. The Scottish poet William Drummond keeps company with the anonymous author of Eliza's Babes, and the failed monk Patrick Cary finds himself in an adjacent essay to the maternal Mary Carey, author of the verse lament Upon ye Sight of my abortive birth. In reviewing an essay collection it is impossible to give detailed attention to every contribution, though there are many here deserving of serious reading. Among the most valuable, in my view, are those which implicitly or explicitly redefine the religious lyric through the individual case studies they have chosen: Patrick Cook's perceptive reading of Aemilia Lanyer's Description of Cookeham as a devotional lyric, for example, and Donna J. Long's plausible claim that women's elegies form a gendered subgenre, the recuperative religious lyric. Several essays situate devotional poets more firmly in their appropriate denominational group or doctrinal context, such as Ann Hurley's discussion of the vivifying force of Protestantism in the work of An Collins (234), and Kate Narveson's invented term Anglianism for the conformity to the established church evinced in the poems of William Austin (163). …