Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern Literature and Culture by David Loewenstein

Abstract

Reviewed by: Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern Literature and Culture by David Loewenstein Mark Rankin (bio) Loewenstein, David. Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. $105 hardback, $50 paperback. In this important book, David Loewenstein investigates the representation of heresy and heretics in literary and polemical works, from the English Reformation during Henry VIII's reign through to the Civil War and the writings of John Milton. Its thesis is two- fold. On the one hand, the language used to describe heresy during this period is highly malleable and protean. Because they dissented from prevailing understandings of religious orthodoxy, heretics were perceived as seditious rebels, or as propagators of dangerous diseases. Heretics' ideas were said to threaten people's souls, and so heretics were viewed as harmful members of the body politic, capable of subverting and eroding the government's authority in both church and state. This language of contagion and sedition associated with the representation of heresy, Loewenstein argues, is constant across this entire period. One of the book's virtues is to demonstrate that Catholics and all kinds of Protestants were represented at one time or another through a uniform discursive register, one based upon irrational fear and anxiety as well as dark fantasies. At the same time, this book shows how the fears and linguistic strategies used to represent heretics themselves fueled creative textual production in numerous works, situated both within and without the canon of early modern English literature. Ultimately this conclusion constitutes the book's most enduring component—namely, that authorial choices made in representing heresy pushed writers into creative and imaginative terrains of composition that they might not otherwise have reached. This book offers readers a remarkable reach, in a chronological and a conceptual sense. It stretches from Thomas More's debate over religious orthodoxy with William Tyndale, during the early 1530s, through to Paradise Lost. Loewenstein includes chapters on the Lincolnshire gentlewoman Anne Askew, whose Examinations (1546–47) record her successive interrogation and torture during Henry VIII"s final years; on John Foxe's influential martyrology, the Actes and Monuments; on representations of Puritan, or forward Protestant, dissent in Elizabethan works such as Thomas Nashe's proto- novel The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) and Edmund Spenser's Faerie [End Page 178] Queene (1596); on mid- seventeenth- century heresiographies like Thomas Edwards's Gangraena (first published 1646); on imaginative responses to such works by selected radical Protestant dissenters; and on John Milton's imaginative engagement with the culture of heresy- making, both in his controversial prose and in Paradise Lost. Loewenstein demonstrates that a writer such as Edwards approaches the perceived heresy of unorthodox Independent Protestant "sects" that proliferated in his day, by employing nearly identical language, words and images, as those used by Thomas More to describe the Bible translator and reformer William Tyndale during the 1530s. By bringing together sixteenth- and seventeenth- century texts in this fashion, Treacherous Faith unites the study of English Reformation and Civil War- era literature in very productive ways. Few studies are able to do this. At the same time, Loewenstein convincingly traces a genealogical debate over "toleration" and "blasphemy," two terms related conceptually to the notion of the seditious and dangerous heretic. Both were understood differently in the early modern period than today. Orthodox seventeenth- century Presbyterian writers feared toleration because they viewed it as affording heretics a license to operate. The Quaker James Nayler allegedly blasphemed in 1656 when he rode a donkey into Bristol in reenactment of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, as told in the New Testament. Hysteria and paranoia in the Parliamentary debate over Nayler, Loewenstein argues, provide "the most striking illustration of the demonizing religious imagination at the very highest political levels" of seventeenth- century England (229). Treacherous Faith parts company with many studies by taking early modern polemical writing seriously and on its own terms. In his account of More's Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529), for instance, Loewenstein documents how More's interest in exploring religious tension through his use of the dialogic form conflicts with his uncompromising religious outlook. Most productive in this section, however, is...