Theology and Agency in Early Modern Literature. Timothy Rosendale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. vii+282.

Abstract

But the main question is whether the history of theology, with its well-established figureheads and cruxes, looks the same to early modern English writers as it does to us. The answers might range from the relatively safe “well, no, not exactly” to the dangerous “not one bit.” Erasmus provides a vital example. From the abstract perspective of the history of theology represented here, Erasmus is a Catholic: after all, he defends the doctrine of works and free will against Luther. But, as Gregory Dodds has illustrated, from an English standpoint during much of this period, Erasmus was a vital part of the Reformation. His Paraphrases on the New Testament are mandated, exclusively with the vernacular Bible, to be in every Edwardian and Elizabethan church; Thomas Bodley included Erasmus in the Oxford library in friezes of great Reformation figures; Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, architect of the English Church, fondly marked his copy of Erasmus’s diatribe against Luther and listed Erasmus as the only early modern author requiring study in the Cathedral Library—and the list, defying modern theological sense, goes on. In short, early modern readers and writers saw very different polarities from those of modern historiography. To truly reconstruct their world, we must enter it without bearing verities about the past created in our own.