Yorick’s Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne by Martha F. Bowden

Abstract

42 Mr. Gordon discusses two works beyond the Scriblerian’s purview, Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–1785) and Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). In both, the general epistemological ‘‘difficulty of knowing others and even myself’’ (quoting William Godwin) is highlighted; in the latter, the practice of quixotism is seen as salutary and spiritualizing. By the end of the century, Mr. Gordon concludes, we have arrived at the opposite pole of Bacon’s project to achieve a passive, mirror-like experience of reality. Replying to recent critical theory, according to which all human beings are quixotes incapable of seeing the surrounding world except through ‘‘cultural lenses of which we are largely and necessarily unaware,’’ Mr. Gordon in the final chapter defends agency and argues that we need not be blindly gripped by our beliefs. We can surely be self-conscious quixotes who take responsibility for preconceptions and ‘‘actively’’ shape the world we ‘‘ostensibly find.’’ He sets his analysis of these quixote stories against an impressive panorama of eighteenth-century works. From his reflections—a further development of his previous work, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770 (Cambridge , 2002, reviewed in the Scriblerian, 37–38, 2005, 111–113)—one might conclude that by the eighteenth century, the project for the advancement of learning through the embrace of an epistemology without metaphysics was already in trouble. The ‘‘unorthodox’’ quixote stories upon which Mr. Gordon expatiates suggest that private reason contemplating Nature was hardly more successful than private judgment contemplating Scripture at reaching certainty, or universally agreed-upon knowledge of reality. Anne Barbeau Gardiner John Jay College, CUNY BOOKS BRIEFLY NOTED MARTHA F. BOWDEN. Yorick’s Congregation : The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne. Newark: Delaware , 2007. Pp. 291. $57.50. Yorick’s Congregation has at least two handles: one, a broad history of the Church of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the role of the parish church in everyday life; the other, a study of Sterne in his Anglican context. Ms. Bowden points out that the Anglican tradition is in constant change (and so assumptions about eighteenth-century practice based on today ’s Anglican Church can be wrong— not to mention assumptions made by modern readers unfamiliar with any church practices at all). We encounter details about church architecture and its social significance. We learn of the local committees struck to decide who should sit where, whether the preacher could be heard from all parts of the church, and who should pay for changes to the physical arrangements in the church. Individual chapters treat the role of women in the church and the parish, shifts in anti -Catholicism, the typical shape of a church service and variations in its theological content. In addition to correcting assumptions, and filling in knowledge , another aim of this book is to 43 reassess the vitality of the Anglican Church in this period. Long thought a sleepy home for the second-born sons of the lower gentry, the eighteenth-century church, in Ms. Bowden’s account, maintained a continuing centrality to English life, eliciting a high degree of activity from its parish communities. A glossary of church terms (such as liturgical, architectural , theological) is included. Sterne’s clerical family is the focus of the first chapter. His great-grandfather Richard supported (and suffered for) the Royalist cause in the Civil War (bringing him preferment as Archbishop of York after the Restoration) and had a hand in the development of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (the version still in use today). His uncle Jaques (Archdeacon of Cleveland) was an unpleasant political operator who used his power to manipulate his nephew’s ambitions to rise in the church before their final falling out. We learn that all but one of the many prints of Sterne— satirical or otherwise—show him in clerical clothing, indicating the importance his church position had for his first readers, and the way in which this would influence their reading of his work. At the end of most chapters Ms. Bowden turns to succinct readings of Sterne’s works. In his day, and ever since, Sterne’s public reputation was...