The Religions of the Book: Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660 by Matthew Dimmock, Andrew Hadfield

Abstract

MLR, 104.2, 2009 545 on Chaucer, MR His Parliament of Fowls ismined for political-theoretical and allegorical-romantic moieties' (p. 132) on doings atWestminster. Also examined are his attitudes to theWonderful Parliament of 1386 and the grim consequences of theMerciless Parliament in 1388, which included the lynching of a Chief Justice (pp. 164-67). Biographical facts being few, the author then challenges comment by calling Chaucer's pilgrims a parliament, summoned from every shire's end, and with a vote on stories as theirbusiness (p. 170). In Chapter 5Piers Plowman and theGood Parliament of 1376 receive attention, with emphasis on 'reformof the public voice'. Chapter 6 indicates the disillusion ment (p. 239) that set in after 1400, where petitions from the people, Crowned King, Richard theRedeless, andMum and theSothsegger are diverse evidence for the malaise ofHenry I V's times, but also (a healthier sign) the ascendancy of English. Matthew Giancarlo has written a serious, professional work. Itwill be an es sential guide to the no man's land between the legislative assemblies and poetry of latemedieval England. It offers varied insights on how parliament was viewed and what ideologies its members possessed, thereby usefully complementing Jenni Nuttall's The Creation ofLancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language, and Politics in LateMedieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), reviewed in MLRy 104 (2009), 159. She discusses theCrown, Giancarlo lords and commons, but they together portray an age when courtiers,MPs, and civil servants read political poetry, and sometimes even wrote it. University of Navarre, Pamplona Andrew Breeze The Religions of theBook: Christian Perceptions, 1400-1660. Ed. byMatthew Dim mock and Andrew Hadfield. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008. xv+ 213 pp. ?45- ISBN 978-0-230-02004-7. This compelling and innovative collection of essays commemorates a one-day con ference on 'Religions of the Book\ which convened at the University of Sussex in September 2005. Its eight essays plus an introduction and afterword will be of interest tohistorians and literaryscholars working on earlymodern representations of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, as well as the history of the book. As is to be expected in a collection of this kind, some material ismissed. One looks in vain for sustained discussion of the onstage figureof the Jew,for instance?but the new questions raised in thisvolume have more than compensated for any deficiencies. The overarching claim is that religions of the book existed in a shared cultural and semantic fieldduring thisperiod, and, as a result, it isnot useful for scholars to employ a clearly demarcated 'us' vs. 'them' binary in explaining earlymodern Chris tianity's relationship with Judaism and Islam. The documentary and literaryrecords are much more nuanced than is often supposed; Christian writers often advocate intolerance while simultaneously expecting readers to share inunderstanding of the similarities between these three faiths.One of the strengths of this collection lies in its ability to revise existing approaches to Renaissance self-definition while laying down models for continued research. Christian selfhood only emerged following 546 Reviews highly sophisticated processes of theological exchange and adversarial confronta tion. The essays gathered here lodge a compelling case formodern scholars' need to increase comparative research across cultures, to investigate archives thathave not fullybeen tapped, and to expand the limits of earlymodern material culture beyond written texts. Anthony Bale opens the collection by investigating the sources of anti-Semitism in The Book of Margery Kempe. Kempe conflates her English opponents with 'Jews', whose attributes come to her through cultural memory and mediation rather than codices. Next, Colin Imber selects themid-fifteenth-century Crusade of Varna in order to examine crusading ideology more generally. He concludes that this cam paign, which represented a loose political (rather than religious) alliance, co-opted the idea of crusade inorder to legitimize a host of largely secular motives. Matthew Dimmock follows with a penetrating analysis of how early modern Christianity portrayed Islam, and especially Muhammad, as monstrous aberrations. Islamic monstrosity signifies contagion and a departure from normative Christian order'. Theological difference invariably translates into grotesque physical manifestation. In the succeeding chapter, Raphael Hallett argues thatMartin Luther's late treatise 'On the Jews and their Lies' (1543) shares with his earlier work 'That JesusChrist was Born a Jew' (1523...