Alison Shell Research Articles

Early Modern Literature and England's Long Reformation. David Loewenstein and Alison Shell, eds. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. x + 168 pp. $160.

Early Modern Literature and England's Long Reformation. David Loewenstein and Alison Shell, eds. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. x + 168 pp. $160.

Anglican Women Novelists: From Charlotte Brontë to P. D. James ed. by Judith Maltby and Alison Shell

Reviewed by: Anglican Women Novelists: From Charlotte Brontë to P. D. James ed. by Judith Maltby and Alison Shell Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook (bio) Anglican Women Novelists: From Charlotte Brontë to P. D. James Edited by Judith Maltby and Alison Shell T & T Clark, 2019. xvi + 274 pp. $103.50 cloth. $37.95 paperback. Anglicanism has a rich literary heritage; however, women novelists are often excluded from the canon, or undervalued for their contributions. This compelling anthology edited by Judith Maltby and Alison Shell demonstrates the depth, breadth, and longevity of Anglican women novelists. Each of the chapters in the volume serves as an introduction to one of thirteen Anglican women novelists, offering a nuanced and critical perspective on their legacy and influence. In their eloquent introduction, Maltby and Shell assert that these Anglican women novelists "demonstrate the range of theologies, convictions, and devotional practices that the members of any one denomination can hold, while still being part of the same church" (10). Though their writing is diverse, these novelists address similar themes, [End Page 159] such as the problem of evil and the limitations of traditional gender roles. These Anglican women novelists were also inspired by each other as their literary predecessors. In chapter one, Sara L. Peterson discusses the physical and spiritual presence of the Anglican Church throughout Charlotte Brontë's novels. Brontë was a practicing Anglican who believed the church was a source of stability, yet always located church reform within her female characters. Lesser-known Anglican evangelical Charlotte Maria Tucker is the focus of chapter two by Nancy Jiwon Cho. Cho argues that Tucker, unable to engage directly in ecclesiological controversies, instead advocated for the Protestant identity of the Anglican Church through the domestic sphere of children's literature. In chapter three, Alison Milbank investigates the mystical Christianity found in the works of Margaret Oliphant, including her parochial novels, ghost stories, and supernatural tales. Throughout, Oliphant balances her allegiance to the Anglican Church with the hope for a wider salvation for all of humankind. A nuanced treatment of Charlotte M. Yonge and Victorian Anglicanism is the focus of chapter four, contributed by Charlotte Mitchell. Mitchell argues that Yonge was the Victorian novelist most influential in the Anglican Church, though her reputation diminished during the interwar period. "She was despised for being a spinster, religious, and a conservative. Yet of all the novelists who entered the Victorian debate about the supposed problem of single middle-class women, she was one of the few who genuinely saw their function in society as multiple and satisfying" 70). The fiction of notable English mystic Evelyn Underhill is the focus of chapter five by Ann Loades. Loades recognizes the impact of Underhill's spiritual formation on her fiction; her commitment to "sanctity," through Anglican living and worship; and the evolution of her fiction through her relationship with the church. Jessica Martin writes on the detective fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers, and the limitations of the genre when balancing justice with mercy is the focus of chapter six. In the later years of her life, writes Martin, Sayers breaks from the genre. "The narrative journey on which she settles in the end proves not to be one of detection, not one of the moves from problem to solution. Instead it is an act of divine sacrifice in the person of Christ: and experience of redemptive change which sidesteps neither pain nor death, nor even despair, but which will end in eternal joy" (101). "Anglican Apologist?" is the subtitle of chapter seven on Rose Macaulay by Judith Maltby. The chapter centers on Macaulay's literary conflicts with Evelyn Waugh and her last completed novel, The Towers of Trebizond. Chapter eight is dedicated to novelist Barbara Pym, an unconventional yet practicing Anglican who populated her books with an assortment of characters [End Page 160] from the parish, including spinsters and clergymen. Author Jane Williams argues that Pym most valued the quality of the community within churches, through the depth of love and acceptance she found there. Just as Barbara Pym's characters inhabited a predominantly women's world, in chapter nine Susan D. Amussen addresses the critique of masculinity found in the novels of...

Anglican Women Novelists: From Charlotte Brontë to P. D. James ed. by Judith Maltby and Alison Shell, and: Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith by Emma Mason (review)

Anglican Women Novelists: From Charlotte Brontë to P. D. James ed. by Judith Maltby and Alison Shell, and: Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith by Emma Mason (review)

Judith Maltby and Alison Shell (eds), Anglican Women Novelists: From Charlotte Brontë to P. D. James

Judith Maltby and Alison Shell (eds), <i>Anglican Women Novelists: From Charlotte Brontë to P. D. James</i>

Shakespeare’s Religious Language: A Dictionary by R. Chris Hassel, and: Shakespeare and Religion by Alison Shell, and: The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare by Steven Mullaney (review)

Shakespeare’s Religious Language: A Dictionary by R. Chris Hassel, and: Shakespeare and Religion by Alison Shell, and: The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare by Steven Mullaney (review)

Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750 ed. by Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith

Reviewed by: Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750 ed. by Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith Matthew Rivera Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750, ed. Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2015) 400 pp., ill. The authors of the volume Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750 examine the place of mysticism within Reformation discourse. They seek to evoke themes within literature that paralleled the challenge to widely-held conceptions of power and authority that the Reformation posed. In the process, they identify several motifs, such as millenarianism, state intervention in the mystical tradition—either in its repression or propagation—and the gendering of spirituality. Euan Cameron’s piece provides a fine summary of how the Reformation was a watershed in European intellectual history. He argues that the Reformation was a moment when traditional epistemologies sustained forceful attack. As he explains, the ways of knowing were transformed by what he calls “the more objective sources of authority” encouraged by the Protestant Reformers (35, emphasis mine). The Protestants defined this objectivity as textual, and this at the expense of tradition that the Catholic Reformers argued was also a valid source of spiritual authority (36). But instead of making the well-worn—and erroneous—contrast between Protestant empirical rationality and Catholic “superstition,” Cameron casts the mystic impulse as a reaction to the stress created by rapidly shifting orthodoxies. As he astutely observes, “[m]ystical seeking will often, in one sense or another, arise as a reaction against dogmatic over-elaboration and over-definition” (45). Building upon Cameron’s notion of mysticism as a response to conflicting epistemologies, Alana King maintains that the shift would yield two spiritualities that were antithetical: intellectual spirituality and “supernatural cognition,” or the mystical impulse. Importantly, she finds a gendered component to the Reformers’ debates over mysticism, and associates it with feminine passivity in [End Page 314] contrast with intellectual spirituality understood as active and gendered masculine (64). The volume’s contributors transition from the theory underpinning mysticism to a discussion of the language used to describe it. Their analysis is instructive to understanding the mentalities that animated church reform and confessionalization. Two pieces, one by Kees Schepers and the other by Alison Shell, broach this topic. In both cases, language was critical to forming identity and praxis among Reformation-era mystics. For example, Schepers observes the use of spatial metaphors. At the Saint Agnes Convent, detachment (Gelassenheit) appears in the sisters’ writings in conjunction with the language of attachment to Christ through the practice of a “self-annihilation” characteristic of imitatio Christi. Schepers suggests that the use of the language of detachment-attachment was also politicized. The dual process of detachment from the world and fleshly desires and attachment to Christ was impossible barring a miracle. Although circular, church and lay grandees asserted that mystical union with Christ demonstrated the veracity of the Catholic faith, and thus mysticism became a puissant tool in confessionalization. On the theme of language, Shell perceives a link between the mystical tradition and the Psalms. Mystics found Scriptural warrant for their ecstasies in the soaring passion of the Psalmists’ verse. In addition, the gendered language of the mystical experience was often eroticized. For the mystic, to attach to Christ was to become one with him. As Franz Eybl notes, this understanding of attachment was particularly poignant for Catholics whose Eucharistic theology held erotic overtones of union with Christ’s body through communicating with the elements. Indeed, as Eybl observes, the passion evoked within the communicant was described as fire, a burning and consuming heat. For churchmen, however, the female communicant-mystic could be at odds with male authority, and by extension, Church hierarchy. Kristen Christensen, in her analysis of mystic Maria van Hout (d. 1547), finds such an example. If one with Christ, the female communicant was empowered to speak by virtue of his divine body coursing through her veins. And with transubstantiation the most tauted of theological distinctives during the Reformation, the weight of the conundrum that Catholic mystics posed was significant indeed. According to Arthur Marotti, Sarah Apetrei, and Genelle Gertz, mysticism was a popular outlet for many who perceived that its relative disadvantages with respect to...

Shakespeare and Religion (The Arden Critical Companions). By Alison Shell.

<i>Shakespeare and Religion (The Arden Critical Companions)</i>. By Alison Shell.

Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain Edited by Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (review)

EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. Edited by Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie. [St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. xi, 285. $134.95. ISBN 978-1-40943131-2.)This is an excellent and illuminating collection that not only deepens our understanding of lived religion in Protestant England and Scotland; it also showcases some of the innovative new directions and methodologies employed by those studying early-modern religious cultures. The volume explores the myriad ways in which people prayed when they were not in church and serves as a companion volume to Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie's edited collection Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Burlington, VT, 2013). Indeed, the relationship between private devotion in the household and public worship in the parish church is a persistent refrain in the volume. For instance, in the volume's opening chapter Ian Green characterizes devotion as a blend of official or clerical recommendations with personal preferences and priorities. Jane Dawson's chapter on the Scottish context similarly demonstrates that the Christian duty to practice private devotion was closely supervised by the Kirk, whose elders sought to shape the household into a domestic seminary.Following these overviews are chapters that explore where people prayed and how they prayed, revealing the sheer variety of opportunities available to contemporaries; the volume's interdisciplinary approach allows for wide-ranging coverage of these. Literary scholars Micheline White, Jessica Martin, and Alison Shell explore the texts that people used to structure and focus their devotions, revealing strong continuities with earlier pre-Reformation practices whilst also indicating the strategies adopted by evangelicals to persuade people to adopt new devotional habits. Prayer as a means to change embedded practices is also an issue with which Ryrie engages in his admirable chapter on devout activities associated with sleep, a chapter that is also a reminder of the evangelical principle of strict spiritual discipline during every moment of life, waking or not. Many of the chapters survey the devotional aids available to the laity to assist and guide their spiritual regimeadvice literature, prayer manuals and handbooks were thick on the ground, and devotions utilizing the Psalms were evidently extremely widespread, as both Beth Quitsland and Hannibal Hamlin show. In her innovative chapter focusing on the place of visual and material artifacts in household devotion, Tara Hamling persuasively argues that practice also continued to rely on visual and material props, which served as visual emblems of godly identity and agents of comfort as well as practical aids to memory. …

Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism ed. by Lowell Gallagher (review)

Reviewed by: Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism ed. by Lowell Gallagher Christopher Haigh Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism. Edited by Lowell Gallagher. [Clark Memorial Library Series.] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. 2012. Pp. x, 342. $75.00. ISBN 978-1-4426-4312-3.) This reviewer groaned as he began to read the barely comprehensible editorial introduction to this volume: more pretentious, jargon-ridden, English-lit. theorizing seemed in prospect, with little that is useful to historians of religion. It is striking how much of the work on early-modern English Catholicism is now being done in English departments in the United States, probably because so many of the easily available sources are literary texts of one sort or another, and archival resources of the kind historians often use are limited (and on the other side of the Atlantic). For all its achievements, this scholarly effort has unbalanced our understanding of post-Reformation Catholicism, with its concentration on poetry, hagiography, heroic piety, priests, and the nobility and gentry—at the expense of conventional practice, social relations, and the lower social orders. But this groaning reviewer fretted too much—although ten of the twelve contributors to this collection work in English departments, most of them can, unusually, write comprehensible English, and some make serious contributions to historical understanding. Eleven essays are organized in three sections: three in “Signposts” (on “signature topics”), four in “Poetics” (on Catholic poetry) and four in “Communities” (on confessional identity). Arthur Marotti looks carefully at Catholic responses to Protestant attacks on Catholic worship as idolatry, but finds there is more to say about John Donne and John Milton than Nicholas Sander and Thomas Harding. It looks as if Catholics gave up trying. Frances Dolan cleverly analyzes a ponderous official text exposing the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and a murder pamphlet from 1681, although it is not clear that they go together in any helpful way. Holly Crawford Pickett tells the stories of three “serial converts” (William Alabaster, Marc Antonio De Dominis, and William Chillingworth) and suggests that they were irenic and ecumenical rather than hypocrites or shallow time-servers: in these three cases, it looks as [End Page 363] if she is right, although others are more problematical. Alison Shell sensitively examines Alabaster’s poetry and prose of conversion in more detail, and Richard Rambuss defends Richard Crashaw’s style as devotional, intellectual, and both Anglican and Catholic. Gary Kuchar convincingly characterizes St. Robert Southwell’s poem on St. Peter’s repentance as an alchemical allegory of transmutation, and Jennifer Rust presents a canto of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96) as a response to Southwell’s Marie Magdalens Funerall Teares (1591).The “Communities” section is more obviously historical. Phebe Jensen shows neatly how traditional and Counter-Reformation Catholicism interacted in Catholic celebrations of Christmas, using manuscript collections of carols. Susannah Monta offers a thoughtful assessment of Southwell’s Short Rule for a Good Life and other Catholic texts on holy living, as patterns of domestic piety that fostered communal identity and were copied by Protestants. Anne Dillon reconstructs in meticulous detail the piety and practice of the Confraternity of the Rosary that flourished at Cardigan House in London between c.1650 and 1678, and Stefania Tutino emphasizes the Catholic elements of Thomas White’s The Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655). The editor’s introduction is probably best ignored, but the eleven other essays all have something useful to say and those by Pickett, Jensen, and Dillon in particular have real significance for historians of English Catholicism. It is, therefore, a worthwhile collection. But how can we convince editors in search of a title that “Remapping” and “Redrawing the Map” have been done to death? Christopher Haigh The Catholic University of America Copyright © 2013 The Catholic University of America Press

English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-Century Paris (review)

English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-Century Paris. By Katy Gibbons. [Studies in History, New Series.] (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer, for the Royal Historical Society. 2011. Pp.x, 206. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-861-93313-6.) This engaging and stimulating book focuses on the English Catholic lay in Paris in the 1580s and 1590s. It is composed of five chapters. The first gives a brief overview of the English and French political and religious context. The second chapter contains fascinating pages on the different circumstances that prompted some English Catholics leave England and move Paris, as well as on the social and economic challenges they faced in a city that had an urban and juridical structure different from that of London and other English towns. Notwithstanding the difficulties, however, Paris offered important opportunities the exiles, who were free practice their religion publicly and take advantage of the city's printing houses, colleges, and universities, which became venues for English Catholics to interact with their hosts, appeal their continental coreligionists, and articulate their identity as Catholic exiles (p. 75). In the third chapter Gibbons insightfully shows how French polemical works in the 1580s exploited the English Catholic cause and how, conversely, the French polemical atmosphere contributed radicalize the political and religious positions of some members of the English Catholic community in Paris. The fourth chapter discusses how English Catholics articulated their condition of exile. Although in the rest of her work Gibbons persuasively argues for the specificity and the importance of the Paris community, in this chapter she mainly relates common tropes of Catholic that scholars such as Anne Dillon and Alison Shell have already analyzed. Moreover, when Gibbons examines how the English in Paris grappled with the relationship between religious exile and political loyalty, she neglects important questions. For instance, a fuller discussion of how the English in Paris related Gallicanism (especially the political Gallicanism of the Parlement and a part of the Sorbonne) would have been useful, especially given the fact that, as Gibbons shows, the English did not leave Paris with the League, but they remained a significant presence even after the accession of King Henri IV The final chapter contains a lucid and rich analysis of the nature of the English Catholic community in Paris and of what the Parisian case can teach us on the nature of early-modern English Catholicism. …

Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England. By Alison Shell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xi + 244 pp. $95.00 cloth; $36.99 paper.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England. By Alison Shell and Catholic Culture in Early Modern England. Edited by Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti

Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England. By Alison Shell and Catholic Culture in Early Modern England. Edited by Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti

Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England - By Alison Shell

Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England - By Alison Shell

Alison Shell. Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 244. $95.00 (cloth).

Alison Shell. Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 244. $95.00 (cloth).

Oral culture and Catholicism in early modern England

After the Reformation, England’s Catholics were marginalised and excluded from using printed media for propagandist ends. Instead, they turned to oral media, such as ballads and stories, to plead their case and maintain contact with their community. Building on the interest in Catholic literature which has developed in early modern studies over the last few years, Alison Shell examines the relationship between Catholicism and oral culture from the mid-sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In order to recover the textual traces of this minority culture, she expands canonical boundaries, looking at anecdotes, spells and popular verse alongside more conventionally literary material. In her archival research she has uncovered many important new manuscript sources. This book is an important contribution to the rediscovery of the writings and culture of the Catholic community and will be of great interest to scholars of early modern literature, history and theology. • An important contribution to the growing field of Catholic literature and culture studies • Contains much original scholarship on important yet little-known texts • Of great interest to literary, historical and theological scholars

Index to the Court Books of the Stationers' Company, 1679–1717. Alison Shell , Alison Emblow , Robin Myers

<i>Index to the Court Books of the Stationers' Company, 1679–1717</i>. Alison Shell , Alison Emblow , Robin Myers

The Literary career and legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680

Heather Wolfe, ed. The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. xiv+258pp. ISBN 978 1 4039 7016 9.1. Slender though it may be, the corpus of Elizabeth Cary's literary works, or at least those works attributed to her, has provoked a large and varied range of critical responses. As Heather Wolfe comments in her introduction to this collection of essays, Cary's former image as 'a nearly forgotten playwright and eccentric Roman Catholic convert' has been replaced with a fresh evaluation of her status as an accomplished 'Renaissance woman historian, playwright, translator, and poet' (1). After a lengthy period of obscurity Cary has provoked a remarkably robust range of criticism in a relatively short space of time to which this collection of essays represents a significant contribution.2. The book is divided into four sections, each focusing upon a specific work or a certain aspect of her literary legacy. The subject of the essays in the first section is Cary's most famous work, the neo-Senecan closet play, The Tragedy of Mariam. Written during the first decade of James I's reign, Mariam is noted as the first printed example of an original dramatic work written by a female author. The first chapter, by Ilona Bell, looks at the way in which the play is influenced by contemporary traditions of lyric poetry, particularly the Petrarchan sonnet. As Bell points out, 'Cary's play is writ all in verse and in rhyme. The iambic pentameter lines, quatrains with alternating rhymes, are punctuated by occasional couplets that produce sonnets, or truncated sonnets, throughout the play' (17). Of particular interest to Bell is the way that the appropriation of poetic forms interrogates social conventions, especially relating to the social status of women. The second chapter, by Erin E. Kelly, examines Mariam's status as Christian martyr, which, as Kelly acknowledges, has become 'a critical commonplace' (35), although 'no one has discussed how Cary's depiction of Mariam fits into the complex history of martyrology' (35), an imbalance Kelly seeks to redress. She argues that Mariam diverges from the typical image of female martyrs through her failure to conform to contemporary models of feminine behaviour yet, paradoxically, it is this subversive non-conformity that seals her status as a martyr. In the third and final chapter of this section, Alison Shell looks at the relationship between Mariam and its principal source, Thomas Lodge's translation of Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews, focusing primarily upon the view of history advanced by the preface rather than the play's fidelity to the source.3. The second, and longest, section of this volume is dedicated to Cary's prose history, Edward II, written during the 1620s but not published until 1680. The first two entries in this section concentrate on the political aspects of the text beginning with Curtis Perry's reading of it against the culture of favouritism, particularly that which he labels 'the Buckingham phenomenon' (71). Mihoko Suzuki also considers the political aspects of Edward II, particularly the way in which it was influenced by, and participated in, a Machiavellian tradition of political writing which included the works of John of Salisbury and John Fortescue. The final two chapters examine the history of the text in print. Jesse G. Swan considers the critical reputation of the octavo version which, he argues, has been unjustly marginalized in favour of the longer folio version. Swan argues that the octavo text can effectively be considered as a separate work with an agenda independent to that of the folio text. …

:Catholics and the Protestant Nation: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England

Contents Contributors Preface and acknowledgements Abbreviations 1. Introduction: English Catholic history in context - Ethan Shagan 2. Is the pope Catholic? Henry VIII and the semantics of schism - Peter Marshall 3. Confronting compromise: the schism and its legacies in mid-Tudor England - Ethan Shagan 4. Elizabeth and the Catholics - Michael C. Questier 5. Construing martyrdom in the English Catholic community, 1582-1602 - Thomas M. McCoog, S.J. 6. From Leicester his Commonwealth to Sejanus his fall: Ben Jonson and the politics of Roman (Catholic) virtue - Peter Lake 7. Papalist political thought and the controversy over the Jacobean oath of allegiance - Johann Sommerville 8. 'Furor juvenilis': post-Reformation English Catholicism and exemplary youthful behavior - Alison Shell Index

William Blake's Comic Vision by Nick Rawlinson (review)

200 Reviews Thomas Egerton; Johann P. Sommerville uses an analysis of Pseudo-Martyr to rebut modern accounts of Donne as politically subversive and residually Catholic; David Cunnington deals with 'professions' of friendship to female patrons; while Alison Shell provides evidence forcollaboration between Donne and Sir Edward Hoby. The second section, on 'Professing the Word', is perhaps the strongest and most focused in the volume. It opens with a piece by Jeanne Shami on Donne's vocational identity and the politics of labelling in seventeenth-century religious polemic?which incidentally offerssome pertinent reflections on modern scholars' own professional habits of ca? tegorization; Mary Morrisey offersan in-depth analysis of three sermons preached at Paul's Cross; and Peter E. McCulloch considers Donne as a preacher at the courts of James I and Charles I, looking at the complexity of the court as a venue, at Donne's theological position, and at the canon of his sermons. Finally, we have 'Professing the Body', in which James Cannon discusses Donne's 1623 Encaenia sermon and the theology of consecration, Stephen Pender investigates 'medical semiotics', and Jessica Martin examines Walton's Life of Donne as mediated through Donne's own self-representations and language. This is an intriguing collection of essays, lucidly introduced by David Colclough. It fully bears out his argument that scholars need to pay attention to the full range of Donne's writings, and also suggests a number of ways in which we might care to rethink the relationship between the amateur and the professional in seventeenthcentury culture. It is, finally,a handsomely produced volume, although something very peculiar has happened to the parentheses in chapters 6 and 11 of this re? viewer's copy. University of St Andrews Alex Davis William Blake's Comic Vision. By Nick Rawlinson. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. xiii + 292pp. ?40. ISBN 0-333-74565-5. It is true of Blake, as of Dostoevsky, that his intensity and scale of vision occlude a salient fact: that he is a hugely funny writer. In Europe, Isaac Newton (of all people) seizes and blows the trumpet of secular apocalypse, whereupon the angelic hosts (newly endowed with gravitational mass?) fall from the sky. From Songs of Experi? ence: 'My Pretty Rose Tree' is marital sitcom-farce; in 'The Fly' we hear the cosmic bitterness of a Gloucester as filteredthrough the mentality of a member of the Drones Club. Despite their vast symbolic freight, Urizen and Orc as they appear in America and The Four Zoas constitute one of literature's great comic duos. One comes to Nick Rawlinson's book, therefore, with great expectations. In one respect these are borne out: Rawlinson's mastery of the scholarship, both critical opinion and many dimensions of historical context, is overwhelmingly impressive. In most other ways, though, the book delivers far less than its title leads us to expect. It deals almost entirely with the early works of Blake and, of these, mainly with relatively minor ones. We get thirtypages on Poetical Sketches and Tiriel, sixty-five pages on An Island in theMoon, only twenty on Songs ofInnocence and ofExperience, and next to nothing on The Book of Thel (a work possessing, among other dimensions, a comic one) or the Lambeth prophecies. On the long epics we get only a few pages near the end. Since Rawlinson argues that comedy is for Blake a key visionary strategy, his argument is weakened to the extent that he focuses on relatively peripheral works. In making this argument Rawlinson means something rather idiosyncratic. For him comedy seems to have little to do with ordinary laughter; his book does not often invite us to experience hilarity,or even amusement. Nor is he much interested even in the hard-surfaced comedy that serves satire, a mode from which Rawlinson tends MLRy ioo.i, 2005 201 to distance Blake, satire being too exclusively negative, whereas Blake's intent is, ul? timately, to go beyond the corrosive to affirmativespiritual values. For Rawlinson, the heart of Blakean comedy is the 'carnivalesque', a kind of egalitarian, communally founded, celebratory social liturgy. (Rawlinson is at some pains to locate the origins of the carnivalesque in religion.) The question, for...

John Donne's Professional Lives by John Donne , David Colclough (review)

MLR, ioo.i, 2005 199 pretence to redress what Morose represents, the mysogynistic, Lenten rejection ofthe festive: 'Morose is an eccentric whose persecution is carnivalised, rather than an eccentric who can be redeemed by festive lampooning' (p. 103). Here, as elsewhere, the discussion is enriched by comparative materials (plays of Aretino and Macchiavelli). Bartholomew Fair (1614) should have been perfect for Coronato's approach: while seemingly capitulating to vulgarity in providing carnivalesque realism, Jonson is asserting a metadramatic defence of his artistic judgement and authority in that 'special decorum' of his poetic licence. The play is almost wholly concerned with the abuse of authority, and the discerning auditor is expected to recognize the satire on the groundlings' incapacity forjudgement. Coronato allows his tendency to learned digressiveness belatedly to diffuse his argument until the last pages on 'license'. Shrovetide is announced at the opening of The Staple of News (1631), setting the stage for a version of Carnival vs. Lent, here Peniboy Junior vs. Peniboy Senior, prodigality versus usury. Drawing on Lucian, the traditions of moralities and interludes , and following Breugel, Jonson stresses the culinary grotesque. Coronato is at his best here, subtly analysing self-consuming miserliness and Lenten repast, and helping to rescue such an absorbing play from relegation to 'dotage'. This study makes an interesting contribution to early modern English theatre stu? dies and to the debate on Bakhtinian carnivalesque. Coronato's writing is at times very subtle, but at times difficultto follow: it is hard to believe that a native Englishspeaking editor could have accepted such obsolete baroque inkhornisms as 'coacervate ', 'mordaceous', 'erubescent', 'edulcorated', and several others. Still, Ben Jonson would have been tickled? University of Reading Ronald Knowles John Donne's Professional Lives. Ed. By David Colclough. (Studies in Renaissance Literature) Cambridge: Brewer. 2003. xiii + 272pp. ?45; $75. ISBN 0-859911775 -4. The professional poet, making a living only from his writing, is a relatively new phe? nomenon, and rarer than one might think even today. Geoffrey Chaucer earned his living as a customs officer;Edmund Spenser was a colonial administrator and Christo? pher Marlowe, a spy; while John Donne, the subject of this volume, was by turns a secretary, a diplomatic aide, and Dean of St Paul's. Are such facts of anything more than historical interest? The answer, as supplied by this collection of essays on John Donne's Professional Lives, is an emphatic 'yes'. Even the casual reader of Donne's verse cannot fail to notice the way in which itborrows and redeploys ideas and vocabu? lary froma dizzying variety ofprofessional fields: the law; science; theology; medicine. (Indeed, the notion of the conceit, which dominates discussion of his poetry,depends upon just such a collision of distinct semantic fields.) The opening essay here, by the late Jeremy Maule?to whom the volume is dedicated?provides an exemplary instance of analysis in this vein, demonstrating the dependence of the twelfth Holy Sonnet upon the language and structure of a legal plea. More generally, however, this volume explores the various senses in which Donne's writings (and not just the verse) might be considered in the context ofthe idea of 'profession', from poetry as a means of angling for a professional position, to Donne's engagement with a variety of pro? fessional languages and, finally,a 'professional' as one professing faith or friendship. The book is divided into three sections. In the first,'Law and Letters', we have Jeremy Maule on Donne's engagement, not just with specific legal coteries, but also with 'the idea of the law and with its language'; Louis A. Knafla provides an extraordinarily detailed account of Donne's legal background and work as secretary to Sir 200 Reviews Thomas Egerton; Johann P. Sommerville uses an analysis of Pseudo-Martyr to rebut modern accounts of Donne as politically subversive and residually Catholic; David Cunnington deals with 'professions' of friendship to female patrons; while Alison Shell provides evidence forcollaboration between Donne and Sir Edward Hoby. The second section, on 'Professing the Word', is perhaps the strongest and most focused in the volume. It opens with a piece by Jeanne Shami on Donne's vocational identity and the politics of labelling in seventeenth-century...