Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton by Patricia Philippy

Abstract

MLR, .,   quite fit with the productively elasticized definitions of knowledge found elsewhere in this collection. en again, any attempt to hypostasize a universally applicable sense of ‘knowing’ would be fundamentally to miss the point of this volume—that religious knowledge was diverse and contested. In his essay on practical manifestations of belief, Ethan Shagan draws our attention to the necessity of recovering older models of believing that complicate ‘our inherited category of “belief”’ (p. ). e collection does this with great success: it stands as an important contribution to an emerging body of literary scholarship that is investigating the history of belief with renewed attention. As Rowan Williams’s wide-ranging Aerword intimates, it may also help us to recover some of the foundations of our present-day habits of thought. G  C C, C J A Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton. By P P. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. A fly caught in amber is a conventional image of eternity. In the early modern period it could be much more than that, as Patricia Philippy shows, discussing just such an object presented to King Alfonso of Naples by the merchant and antiquarian Cyriac of Ancona. It provides her with ‘a parable, a figuration, and a myth that, collectively, define the central concerns of this study’ (p. ), namely the manifold textual, material, and cultural entanglements of post-Reformation memory culture. By not only tracing the fate of this particular amber inclusion, which survives only by virtue of being recollected in a text by the late fieenth-century Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano, but also reconstructing the interconnecting discursive frameworks of antiquarianism, theology, post-Reformation polemic, myth, and gender through which the early modern period made sense of amber more generally (pp. –), Philippy powerfully demonstrates the methodology of her study in nuce. Her ‘interdisciplinary’ (p. ) approach to post-Reformation memory culture is informed by historical phenomenology and new materialism or ‘corporeal feminism’, with Merleau-Ponty and Braidotti as frequent reference points, which lead her to explore ‘the embedded and embodied sets of interrelations’ between subject and object, life and death (p. ). More specifically, the study pursues the notion of a ‘material religion’, aiming ‘to account for changing relationships between worshippers and sacred objects, ceremonies and sites, demonstrating the various ways in which post-Reformation monuments and memorial artefacts were created in the lingering shadow of discarded monuments and icons’ (p. ). In order to do so, Philippy draws on an impressive range of manuscript and printed texts, on objects such as needlework, jewels, rosaries, personal bequests, and antique rarities, on commemorative practices , as well as on personal, national, and confessional narratives (p. ), which gives the lie to the somewhat misleading title promising a trajectory ‘from Shakespeare  Reviews to Milton’ only (the latter features merely in a final subchapter). Like the amber inclusion it chooses as its emblem, this study holds much more in store. Part  proceeds from familiar ground, the influence of a Protestant reconceptualization of the sacraments in sacred and secular works, but it deploys the notion of a ‘sacramental poetics’ (p. ) to draw together an unusual array of historical figures, monuments, and texts. e first two chapters are dedicated to the Montagu family’s practices of commemoration and mourning in the s and s, specifically a ‘memorial program’ erected in a parish church by Sidney Montagu in memory of his three-year-old son, which uneasily negotiated traditional and reformed rites of mourning, and the family’s ‘monumental circle’, at the centre of which Anne Montagu and her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Harington Montagu, created ‘memorial texts and objects that are permeated by and promote the family’s Puritan faith’ (p. ). Gender difference encodes religious difference, and vice versa, when the Montagu brothers’ vision of dynastic affiliation fuses with the Pauline idea of the church body, their conforming Calvinism seeking to contain the more radical Puritanism which the family’s women embraced as a ‘productive field of creativity’ that encourages women’s intellectual, political and literary engagements (p. ). is notion carries over into the next chapter’s reading of Cymbeline: Jachimo’s commemorative description at . . transforms Innogen’s chamber into...