Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism by James Simpson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism by James Simpson Carole M. Cusack Simpson, James, Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism, Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019; hardback; pp. xv, 444; R.R.P. US$35.00; ISBN 9780674987135. James Simpson, a literary historian of the late medieval era, has contributed to the study of early modernity in Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation (Harvard University Press, 2007). His insights always lead to the present era and illuminate aspects of the past that are often ignored or elided. In Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism, Simpson argues that the triumphalist narrative of Whig history, which viewed the Reformation as the direct ancestor of modern liberalism, depends on taking the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the entry point for historical studies. However, historians starting with Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses in 1517 expose a different Reformation, which was illiberal, repressive, and characterized by phenomena often termed medieval, including ‘iconoclasm, slavery, persecution of “witches”, judicial torture in England, Biblical fundamentalism, political absolutism’ (p. 6). Part 1, ‘Religion as Revolution’, argues that evangelical Protestantism produced theology that was inherently revolutionary, in that it demanded the destruction of what came before (Catholicism) to remake the world according to God’s will. Simpson further asserts that the radicalism of Puritan theology proposed ‘permanent revolution’ in which anti-Catholicism dissolved in the face of violent internecine conflict between factions within Protestantism itself. Part 2, ‘Working Modernity’s Despair’, posits that while forms of despair are detectable in the later Middle Ages, an epidemic of hopelessness resulted from Protestants who ‘placed despair-producing inadequacy and depravity […] front and brutally center of a theological program’ (p. 58). Predestination of the elect resulted in a psychology that was very different from the concern in Piers Plowman with how Christians may work toward salvation. Simpson contrasts the dramatic moment of being born again (which involved the absolute rejection of the past [End Page 264] self) with the idea of advancing virtue by incremental self-reform. This section concludes with analyses of literary texts, including Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, poems by Thomas Wyatt and Fulke Greville, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Part 3, ‘Sincerity and Hypocrisy’, continues the discussion of psychology, noting that, like despair, hypocrisy was not deeply important in medieval thought, but accusations of hypocrisy were characteristic of Protestantism, as revolutionaries ‘often fall victim to profound self-doubt and doubleness precisely because they set the bar for wholly consistent, unitary authenticity at so high a level’ (p. 114). This requirement of absolute sincerity is especially dangerous to theatre and the visual arts and produces an iconoclastic culture. This section ends with a review of a range of theatrical texts. Part 4, ‘Breaking Idols’, considers phases in the history of Puritan iconoclasm, from the early, ‘energetic’ years from 1538 to 1553 to the ‘more painful, unjoyful’ (p. 161) years from 1558 to 1625. First, images of the saints were banned, and idolatry was condemned. Second, Simpson argues that ‘the seductions of the image’ (p. 175) were combatted in the human mind itself, and he analyses William Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale (1610–11) as an artistic rehabilitation of the image as true and therapeutic. Part 5, ‘Theater, Magic, Sacrament’, discusses the shift from medieval Catholic allegory to Protestant literalism, noting that Evangelicals’ hostility to theatre was essentially identical to their opposition to Catholic sacraments, a rejection of the view that performative language could ‘mak[e] something happen in the world’ (p. 205). Simpson contrasts the Corpus Christi cycles of the Middle Ages with John Bale’s evangelical plays and notes how in the former God acts in a theatrical manner, but in the latter only diabolical figures perform magical actions. Evangelical hostility to magic in the theatre was played out in the world via persecution of witches, which had medieval precursors but was intensified from 1580 to 1620 and then throughout the Civil War, tailing off after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Part 6, ‘Managing Scripture’, tackles the Protestant triumphalist narrative of the Bible democratizing...