Barbara Lewalski Research Articles

Milton in China

Milton in China

NicholasMcDowellPoet of Revolution: The Making of John MiltonPrinceton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2020. xvi + 485pp. ISBN 13: 9780691154695. $35.00 (cloth).

NicholasMcDowellPoet of Revolution: The Making of John MiltonPrinceton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2020. xvi + 485pp. ISBN 13: 9780691154695. $35.00 (cloth).

Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89. Matthew C. Augustine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. xi+269.

<i>Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89</i>. Matthew C. Augustine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. xi+269.

Genre in Barbara Lewalski's Career/The Genre of Barbara Lewalski's Career

Genre in Barbara Lewalski's Career/The Genre of Barbara Lewalski's Career

Five Perspectives on Barbara Lewalski's Path‐breaking Scholarship and Career

Five Perspectives on Barbara Lewalski's Path‐breaking Scholarship and Career

Barbara Lewalski, Critical Practice, and the Liberal Milton

Barbara Lewalski, Critical Practice, and the Liberal Milton

George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England. Gary Kuchar. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xv+288.

<i>George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England</i>. Gary Kuchar. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xv+288.

Scant Verses: Henry Lok as a Forerunner of George Herbert

Scant Verses:Henry Lok as a Forerunner of George Herbert Debra Rienstra A generation before Herbert began working through the challenges of “outstripping Cupid” and writing a true hymn, Henry Lok made a grand, initial attempt at defining and solving the challenges of devotional verse. Lok was the son of Anne Lock, who presumably wrote the sonnet sequence published in 1560 based on Psalm 51.1 Henry Lok published the first edition of his sonnet sequence, Sundry Christian Passions, in 1593, the same year George Herbert was born. Lok was responding to the initial fervor of the Elizabethan sonnet craze, hoping to impress potential patrons with over two hundred devotional sonnets, roughly divided into poems of “meditation, humiliation, and prayer” and “comfort, joy, and thankesgiving.” He published a second volume in 1597, expanded with over one hundred additional sonnets.2 Very occasionally, Lok’s Elizabethan contribution to English devotional verse has been noted as a possible influence on Herbert, in particular by Barbara Lewalski, John Ottenhoff, and Thomas Roche.3 Understandably, considering the sheer number of sonnets Lok wrote, no one has yet undertaken a full and careful comparison between Lok and Herbert, nor established that Herbert possessed Lok’s volume.4 Nevertheless, reading through Lok’s poems does yield some arresting similarities to Herbert, especially to certain of Herbert’s most famous poems. So I have to agree with previous speculation: based on textual evidence, it seems plausible that Herbert knew Lok’s poems and found generative suggestions in Lok’s efforts toward assimilating biblical sources into the lyric voice and toward theorizing a defensible devotional poetics. I have elsewhere considered the sources and implications of Lok’s favored parabolic technique in the first century of sonnets, in which he places the speaker of each sonnet into a dramatic tableau taken from a [End Page 80] biblical story.5 Lok’s approach is especially intriguing when we consider where Herbert might have found precedents for his distinctive parable poems. Herbert’s “Redemption,” for example, may well draw directly from two Lok sonnets, sonnets 1.50 and 1.78.6 Roche notes a correspondence between “Redemption” and Lok’s 1.50, arguing that Herbert may have used the Lok poem as “a starting point.”7 His reasoning is that the figures of tenant and lord in Herbert’s poem are improvisations on certain of Jesus’ parables, especially the story of the vineyard owner recounted in Matthew 21, Mark 12, and Luke 20. Roche notes that Herbert could not have gotten the term “tenant” from any English Bible version of this parable available to him, as the figure of the wicked tenant is virtually always translated “husbandman.” Tyndale is the only one who uses the word “tenant.” So Roche posits that Lok used Tyndale, and Herbert got the idea for that term from Lok. This may be the case, although it is not difficult to imagine Herbert choosing the word “tenant” on his own. Still, there is more to support Roche’s theory than only this one curious instance of word choice. When we examine Lok’s sonnet 1.50, we see that it follows the biblical parable much more closely than Herbert’s poem does. A tenant most untrue ô Lord to thee, In vineyard of my bodie have I bin: To crave thy rent thy servants came to me, But nothing but intreatie bad they win:My travell therein was to nourish sin, And wast the wine of thy abounding plant; The more to call me backe thou didst begin, The more to thee my gratitude did want.Ne would my lacke of grace let me recant, When thou thy onely Sonne to me didst send, For sin and Satan did me so supplant, That to his ruine I did also bend: But Lord me lend In time repentant hart, That from this vineyard I may not depart. The speaker posits himself as an “untrue” tenant of his own body, in which he has nourished sin. The poem then traces the contours of the parable in that the speaker mistreats the servants and eventually [End Page 81] “bends” to the “ruin” of the Son as well. However, as is typical...

Annabel Patterson, Milton's WordsMilton’s Words. Annabel Patterson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi+212.

<i>Annabel Patterson</i>, Milton's Words<i>Milton’s Words</i>. Annabel Patterson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi+212.

Christophe Tournu, Milton, Rights and LibertiesMilton, Rights and Liberties. Edited by ChristopheTournu and NeilForsyth. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Pp. viii+522.

<i>Christophe Tournu,</i> Milton, Rights and Liberties<i>Milton, Rights and Liberties</i>. Edited by ChristopheTournu and NeilForsyth. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Pp. viii+522.

The Plague of 1625-26, Apocalyptic Anticipation, and Milton's Elegy III

The Plague of 1625-26, Apocalyptic Anticipation, and Milton's Elegy III Ryan J. Hackenbracht John Milton wrote "Elegia Tertia in Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis" during his first term at Christ's College in the fall or winter of 1626. 1 In the preceding year, London was wracked by one of the most severe outbreaks of plague in the seventeenth century. The final death toll reached 35,417 in the city and 68,596 nationwide, and numerous "trailer epidemics" in 1626 drove the numbers still higher. 2 Studying at Cambridge only sixty miles away, Milton was acutely aware of the devastation that the plague caused in the city and the country. Cedric Brown claims that in Elegy III Milton presents a vision of national unification amid widespread distress through an encounter with England's favorite minister, the recently deceased Lancelot Andrewes. 3 While Brown's reading of Elegy III is generally accurate, it lacks consideration of both the poem's local historical context and its engagement with contemporary apocalyptic discourses. My intention, therefore, is to situate Milton's Elegy III within the context of the 1625-26 plague, an event that—with the possible exception of Charles's accession to the throne—larger [End Page 403] in English consciousness than any other. Once we understand the cultural conditions of the poem's composition, we can then loomed ask, how does Elegy III correspond to other writings on the plague? In what ways does Milton differ from his contemporaries on the proper spiritual response? What can Elegy III show us of what John Rumrich calls Milton's "apocalyptic consciousness" as a young man once we assume that many Londoners believed the plague was the Black Horseman of the Apocalypse descending upon them? 4 And perhaps most importantly, what does Milton's participation in eschatological discourse allow him to accomplish literarily as well as religiously? Milton was clearly haunted by the social implications of messianic anticipation, particularly later in life as he reflected on the coming of Christ's thousand-year reign. As Barbara Lewalski notes, Milton "appealed from beginning to end to the idea of the millennium to urge personal, ecclesiastical, social, and political reformation." 5 Though Milton's millenarianism may indeed have extended from the "beginning to [the] end" of his life, Lewalski speaks apropos of his primary works such as Lycidas (1638), Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and the political treatises, all of which were written in his later years. Lewalski and other critics harbor two assumptions here regarding Milton's apocalypticism. First, they assume that Milton "never refers to specific contemporary events—wars, plagues, fires, apostasies, blasphemies—as signs of impending apocalypse" but instead defers the Apocalypse and the millennial rule of Christ to an indeterminate point in the future. 6 Second, they insist that the vagueness of the few references to doomsday in the juvenilia indicates that Milton was unconcerned with the end times in his youth. Stella Revard asserts that "the early poetry does not speak unequivocally of Christ's coming to rule on earth. It apparently took the events of the 1640s to awaken Milton's millenarian expectations fully." 7 Revard is only partially correct: millenarianism is indeed absent from Elegy III and the other juvenilia, but this does not mean that young Milton lacked convictions about eschatology in general. In addition, she conflates Milton's belief in the chiliast doctrine of the millennium with his apocalypticism; as John Shawcross has demonstrated, the two terms [End Page 404] are hardly interchangeable. 8 Moreover, it is precisely the generality and doctrinal ambiguity of Elegy III that make it so fascinating as a case study in the apocalypticism of the 1620s and in the eschatology of a generation of Englishmen raised in the shadow of the Thirty Years' War. Elegy III is exemplary of the apocalyptic consciousness of that period—a consciousness that was far more concerned with cautious speculation than with establishing dogma. Evident in works as prestigious as Joseph Mede's Clauis Apocalyptica (1627) and even in poems scribbled by idealistic teenage boys, the period's dominant attitude toward the end times was to adopt a hermeneutic of hesitation—of imaginative exploration that facilitated further...

George Herbert, Calvinism, and Reading “Mattens”

In November 1973 Dame Helen Gardner, distinguished editor of Donne and Herbert, wrote me, saying think study of Herbert as 'Calvinist' would be very valuable thing to do (letter to author). Since then literary critics including Barbara Lewalski, Richard Strier, Gene Veith, Christopher Hodgkins, Elizabeth Clarke, Ron Cooley, Cristina Malcolmson, and I have been claiming that George Herbert is significantly Calvinist. Far from reflecting credulity about Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and Seventeenth-Century English Lyric (1979), as Stanley Stewart suggests (A Priest to Geneva Temple 167), such interpretations in fact follow up fruitful suggestions made as early as Joseph Summers' ground-breaking book in 1954. While Rosemond Tuve, Louis Martz (The Poetry of Meditation), and R. V. Young have effectively related elements in Herbert to continental medieval and Roman Catholic backgrounds, other writers named have paid attention to recent historical insights into English church, main leadership of which in most of Herbert's time was Calvinist (Collinson, Fincham, Lake, Tyacke). But objections by Martz (Donne, Herbert, and Worm of Controversy, The Generous Ambiguity of Herbert's Temple), Stewart (Priest), and Young (Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry) to Protestant interpretations deserve an answer. As Stewart notes (Priest 168), there is tendency for critics to pay most attention to those poems or writings in Herbert they find most appealing, or about which they feel equipped to write. That approach should be supplemented and corrected by considering case made for other views. It is no accident that Herbert has attracted good critics with many different approaches, because, as I argue elsewhere (Doerksen, Generous' Ambiguity Revisited), this poet was deliberately reaching out to people of different viewpoints within and outside his church. Herbert scholarship is, and should be, joint enterprise. Critics who use term should explain what they mean by it. William J. Bouwsma in Encyclopaedia Britannica Online says Calvinism is the theology advanced by John Calvin ... and its development by his [Also,] doctrines and practices derived from works of Calvin and his followers.... Historian Anthony Milton, in an important book on Church of from 1600-1640, defines English Calvinism as a general sympathy with continental Reformed tradition in all its purely doctrinal aspects, and sense of identification with West European Calvinist Churches and their fortunes (8). This definition silently acknowledges that other writers, such as Bucer and Bullinger, and of course English ones, were influential in movement. Milton also recognizes that Calvinism, like other aspects of Early Modern Church of England, comprised range of views, and changed as it developed. Milton's definition of Calvinism includes Herbert, who had an enduring in success of international Protestantism (Malcolmson 21)--an interest not shared by Laudians. (1) More specifically, English Calvinism had doctrinal core of Protestant theology, emphasizing God's grace. Although Calvinism was not tied exclusively to writings of Calvin, in those writings were widely circulated and had enormous significance. According to Pettegree, tally of revised Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, 1475-1640 indicates that English editions of Calvin's works easily outstripped all other continental writers, and dwarfed production of native English theologians (281). Pettegree reports that Leedham-Green's substantial survey of books recorded in Cambridge wills, carefully analyzed, confirms the preeminent position of Calvin as dominant theological influence in Elizabethan England (280). Also, he cites Francis Higman's bibliographical studies showing that was far and away biggest market for Calvin's work in translation. …

‘Kings are but Men’ : Elizabeth Cary’s Histories of Edward II

The early modern noblewoman, Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, has long been credited with writing two versions of a history of King Edward II which, although composed in the 1620s, were not published until 1680. In this paper, I first consider Cary’s personal circumstances at the time her manuscripts were written, before investigating the revisions she made between the two versions of her history and assessing what these can tell us about her thoughts on her position as a woman writing history. Expanding on Barbara Lewalski’s suggestion that the Tacitean epigraph to the longer Edward II text links Cary to a new sort of « « politic » history in the vein of Machiavelli and Guicciardini », I propose that it also refers to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a work Cary seems to have been reading after she separated from her husband in 1626. In short, I suggest that the revised text of her Edward II, drawing on Burton, intervenes directly in contemporary political debates, revealing that, despite Cary’s situation as an apparently impoverished Catholic recusant and a woman, she was able both to have and to articulate an opinion about current affairs.

Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism. Edited by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola . Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. Pp. xii+320.

<i>Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism</i>. Edited by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola . Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. Pp. xii+320.

Literature and Complaint in England 1272–1553 by Wendy Scase

MLR, 104.3, 2009 833 Louis Martz and Barbara Lewalski in new contexts, adding many fresh insights of her own. University of St Andrews Neil Rhodes Literature and Complaint inEngland 1272-1553. ByWendy Scase. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. xii+2i5.?50. ISBN 948-0-19-927085-9. 'Clamour of the people' is the stuffthatmight turn up today on celebrity blogs or gossip websites: the libel campaign against John ofGaunt; the petitions against the notorious Nicholas Brembre; the bill campaigns attacking Cardinal Wolsey. Some of it ismuch nastier than today: the 1450s' verse libels against theDuke of York were posted in themouths of dead dogs. Wendy Scase's clearly written and carefully argued book is in the 'literature and law' genre but is not a study of the formal qualities of legal plaints, nor of how plaints are represented in latemedieval literature.Rather it argues that judicial complaint in the period under discussion had a considerable impact on literarypractice. Aimed at advanced scholars of late medieval literature in England, the book's temporal boundaries are defined on the one hand by the emergence of judicial complaint as a result of reforms instituted in the reign of Edward I and on the other by the so-called ploughman texts of the sixteenth century: from the little-known Poem on Disputed Villein Services (c. 1272) to The Decaye ofEngland (1553). The bulk of the book traces the rise and development of the 'literatureof clamour' thatbegan with the 1381 rising and which continued beyond theReformation. The final chapter argues that the production of clamour texts stimulates vernacular (English) letterand document composition as well as literaryproduction. Though not exhaustive, the book covers a great deal of ground, both legal and literary,from libels,petitions, and bills to poems, chronicles, and letters.Besides the usual suspects (the poems ofHarley 2253; the Twelve Conclusions of theLollards), Scase analyses plenty of lesswell-known texts inAnglo-Norman, Latin, and English. The book's strengths are itsclose readings of thevarious types of judicial complaint and its revision of the literary culture that it shaped. Scase is not interested, for example, in recovering the 'voices' ofmedieval peasants; rather, she analyses 'the ways inwhich peasant plaint registers the impact of the new judicial structures, processes, and procedures' (p. 11). Throughout she demonstrates how closely the idea of thevernacular isbound up with the production of legal complaints, arguing, for example, that the new institutions of plaint allowed vernacular poets the oppor tunity 'to imagine how English composition could become a legitimized literature' (p. 3) and speculating thatEnglish, excluded as amedium for legal literature,may well have been used in courts (p. 40). Each legal term (e.g. bill, trailbaston, indictment, oyer and terminer, libellus, eyre) isglossed when itappears, but thebook would have benefited from a glossary listing them together. Scase does not really consider the use, value, and possible audiences of the literary texts.Nor does she advance an argument about the Reformation, 834 Reviews although she provides invaluable resources for such an argument and other scholars will productively mine her book. Though she briefly touches on Christine de Pisan and Hoccleve, there isnothing on 'female complaint': nothing, for example, on The Assembly ofLadies. Scase is scrupulously attentive to the codicological contexts and physical features of the textsbut does not give sufficient weight to the effectof their various media (rolls,manuscript codices, print) on readers and textualmeanings. Although her history traces the emergence ofEnglish as a legal and literary language, what is striking is that the book incidentally demonstrates, in its extensive analysis ofAnglo-Norman, Latin, and macaronic texts,what is now becoming increasingly clear, namely that an account of literary culture in England in this period can no longer confine itselftomaterial written inEnglish. University of Stirling Ruth Evans George Gascoigne. By Gillian Austen. (Studies in Renaissance Literature, 24) Cambridge: Brewer. 2008. xviii+236 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-1-84384-157-9. Gillian Austen's much-awaited monograph, the first to include Gascoigne's illustra tions, tackles thevarious methods forpresenting himself, especially thefigure of the Reformed Prodigal thatGascoigne employed while hewas seeking patronage. In this comprehensive new addition toGascoigne studies Austen highlights the importance ofGascoigne's works and how his fashioning of...

Renaissance ecology: imagining Eden in Milton's England

These essays consider how writers and artists such as John Milton imagined, by way of Eden, a future where human beings would live in greater peace with the natural world. This impressive collection, which includes contributions by such eminent scholars as Barbara Lewalski and Diane McColley, takes an exciting, new, 'green' approach to representations of Eden, while also considering the role of gender, politics, and poetics, discussing relevant issues of both literature and culture.

Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism – Edited by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola

Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism – Edited by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola

Andrew Marvell's Anamorphic Tears

Andrew Marvell's Anamorphic Tears Gary Kuchar What is weeping a metaphor or figure for?What does the body mean to say by trembling orcrying, presuming one can speak here of thebody, or of saying, of meaning and of rhetoric? —Jacques Derrida IN his 2003 edition of Andrew Marvell's English poems, Nigel Smith glosses the subject matter of "Eyes and Tears" as secular, with the proviso that the eighth stanza's description of Mary Magdalene is religious: "Marvell's poem begins and remains secular in subject-matter, like other similar examples in the period: see, e.g. Thomas Carew, 'Lips and Eyes' (1640). Only stanza VIII, with the attached Latin version, is religious and certainly may be regarded as part of the English tradition inaugurated by the Elizabethan Jesuit Robert Southwell."1 Smith's account of "Eyes and Tears," one shared by other Marvell scholars, is inadequate not only because it begs the question of the poem's thematic integrity, but also because it elides how the poem revises the ontotheological vision evident in English tear poems by the Catholic converts William Alabaster and Richard Crashaw.2 Indeed, Marvell's [End Page 345] entire poem and not simply one of its stanzas needs to be read as a critical reassessment of the tradition inaugurated in England by Robert Southwell, for the poem revises the Catholic literature of tears tradition by putting verbal adaptations of anamorphic forms of representation in the service of a theological vision whose irony, epistemological skepticism, and overall ontotheology is distinct from previous Catholic instances of the genre. In order to grasp how Marvell's meditation on tears translates anamorphosis into a poetic register, we must examine the relations between "Eyes and Tears" and two sequences in Shakespeare in which the distinction between true and false weeping is complicated through reference to the curious perspective of "optic works." By situating Marvell's poem in relation to both the religious literature of tears tradition and Shakespeare's meditations on the anamorphic qualities of tears, we can better grasp Marvell's idiosyncratically Protestant and epistemologically skeptical answer to the Pauline question inherent to the ars lachrimandi generally: what does it mean to weep in an authentically devout way, rather than in a narcissistically self-oriented way?3 By considering how the poem's translation of anamorphic forms of representation into a verbal register differs from similar tropes in poems by Alabaster and Crashaw, we can broaden and yet at the same time refine Barbara Lewalski's and Joan Hartwig's interpretations of "Eyes and Tears." Arguing for the poem's distinctly Protestant character, Lewlaski asserts that Marvell's curiously reasoned speaker expresses howrepentance provides "a means of clearer vision about natural [End Page 346] order and its goods," thereby deepening the reformation of tear poetry begun in Herbert's The Temple.4 Examining the philosophical views expressed in the poem, Hartwig sees "Eyes and Tears" as expressing the view that "distortion through tears is a valid way of seeing, and that, if we could but put aside given ways of seeing, of perceiving reality, we might find that all is one—dualities are only apparent. There is no true 'this' and 'other.' "5 Though Lewalski's and Hartwig's readings are notable insofar as they address the ontotheological issues at stake in Marvell's poem, neither examines how "Eyes and Tears" presents a thoroughgoing revaluation of the Neoplatonic vision and specific sacramental ethos visible in poems by Alabaster and Crashaw. For instance, Hartwig's thesis that "Eyes and Tears" arrives at the view that "all is one" collapses Marvell's ironic vision of the relations between divine and mundane orders with the effusively Eucharistic view forwarded in Crashaw's "The Weeper" and Alabaster's Spiritual Sonnets , thereby missing the distinct way in which the paradoxes of incarnationist theology are voiced in Marvell's poem. Rather than articulating a theological view in which differences are only apparent, "Eyes and Tears" presses toward the position that the relation between earthly and heavenly orders is grounded in difference— a difference that exists not only between shadow and substance, subject and object, but within identity itself. Through a serious reflection...

John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit by Jeanne Shami (review)

MLR, ioi.i, 2006 223 Undoubtedly, in terms of disseminating that 'basic information', the volume is a success: with the publication of this collection, a foundation stone has been set down. The volume divides into five sections: a consideration of the material conditions of writing, reading, and publishing, and then four chronological slices from the Tudor era until the Common wealth. Within each section, chapters consider the institutions of literary production: the court, London, the Church, the theatre, the household. There are no chapters on single authors; instead, each chapter ranges across a diver? sity of material?literature is understood in its broadest sense as 'all knowledge [. . .] transmitted in written form' (p. 6)?and so authors recur across various discussions. Old friends crop up in new places. The chapters are, almost without exception, cogent, sometimes masterful, sum? maries of the state of scholarship, written by the scholars one would hope to see in? volved (Martin Butler, David Scott Kastan, Barbara Lewalski, Harold Love, Arthur Marotti, Nigel Smith). There are absolutely no surprises: indeed, many ofthe chap? ters are synopses of their authors' longer works. Lawrence Manley's 'Literature and London', forinstance, is his magnificent Literature and Culture in Early Modern Lon? don (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), in miniature. But it is not really the function of this volume to surprise. As a register of early modern literary studies at the turn of the century?like those epitomes of history and classical learning pub? lished in the seventeenth century?this Cambridge History is a valuable resource. If the collection succeeds in 'general coverage' (p. 1), the ambition to read literature as 'at once [. . .] agent and [. . .] product' is less systematically achieved. Mueller's chapter on the Church demonstrates how productive this methodology can be, as she shows an acute sensitivity to the particular languages of the religious prose of William Tyndale, Simon Fish, and others?demonstrating how texts both 'giv[e] ex? pression to and tak[e] expression from'. Other chapters, however, defy this ambition, and read literature as a passive register of context, an adornment to a pre-textual reality. David Loades on national identity presents a narrative of high politics driven by rulingpersonalities. When Loades makes the magnificently problematic claim that "The partnership between the realm and the monarch was a little like that between a horse and a rider' (p. 214), it feels a long way from the editors' assertion that the 'Cambridge History [. . .] breaks down the background/foreground dichotomy' (p. 4) 'to [. . .] challenge monolithic views of power' (p. 8). In collaborative projects there is inevitably a gap between theoretical claims and contributing chapters; while these inconsistencies do not fundamentally undermine the achievement of this state-of-thenation collection, they are significant since the editors' stated ambition is to embody 'recent [. . .] methodological developments in English literary studies' (p. 1). University of Reading Adam Smyth John Donne and Conformityin Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit. By Jeanne Shami. (Studies in Renaissance Literature, 13) Cambridge: Brewer. 2003. ix + 318 pp. ?50; $85. ISBN 0-85991-789-4. The author of this magnificent book, Jeanne Shami, shot to international scholarly fame with her discovery in December 1992 that the anonymously catalogued British Library MS Royal 17. B. XX was a rare contemporaneous scribal copy of John Donne's 1622 Gunpowder Plot sermon. The real significance of this discovery was Shami's definitive attribution of the correcting hand to Donne himself. Shami makes clear in the book under review how much we lose in approaching any sermon in a printed edition, for of course all sermons originated as performances. Her biblio? graphy alone, listing manuscript and printed primary sources, published secondary 224 Reviews material, and unpublished Ph.D.s and papers, is staggering. Shami furthermore pro? vides an exemplary general index as well as indexes of references to Donne and to his sermons. Shami focuses on 1621-25, the final turbulent years of the reign of James VI & I, concluding with a brilliant account of the firstsermon Donne preached before Charles I, on 3 April 1625 at St James's Palace. There are good grounds for this focus. The Synod of Dort had met in 1618-19 with James's delegation of the...

&amp;quot;To be thy Praise, / And be my salvation&amp;quot;: The Double Function of Praise in The Temple

“To be thy praise, / And be my salvation”:The Double Function of Praise in The Temple Margaret J. Oakes In her comprehensive study of Protestant poetics, Barbara Lewalski notes the forms and variety of George Herbert's poems of praise: Hymns were by definition joyful praises of God or thanksgivings to him: in Herbert this category covers the broad range from the elegant simplicity of the hymn portion of "Easter" to the lofty eloquence of "Providence." (300) Herbert's overall corpus of poetry reflects his obsession with praise: approximately forty-eight poems in the Bodleian MS. of The Temple, two additional from the Williams MS., and his two early sonnets to his mother either directly praise God or talk about the act or writing of praise. When Herbert engages in this type of poetic expression, however, these acts have a double function. Of course, Herbert makes use of praise as a way of honoring or thanking God. But he also intends it to be a means of creating a participatory role in his own salvation: his poems are responses from an individual sparked by the gift of grace. For Herbert, the recognition of one's own salvation establishes a duty to glorify God in return in whatever form, literary or otherwise, the Christian is able. Louis Martz comments that Herbert uses his art as "a means of partaking in the salvation offered by a transcendent power" ("Voices," 103). But Herbert is not only convinced that he must praise, he is obsessed with the proper method of doing so, taking up the subject time and time again in his poetry: Joseph Summers has noted that "One of the chief sources of the Christian's and the poet's 'miserie' was that he could not properly praise God" (106). Thus, it is also important to examine Herbert's concerns about the methods of praising that he attempts and the impediments he overcomes in order to worship the Lord in ways that he considers correct. The physical illness and pain that plagued Herbert throughout hislife distract him from his task, but these problems are exacerbated by [End Page 120] emotional issues such as a lack of confidence and motivation, and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, a concern over exhibiting too much pride in his poetic ability. These complications are what make Herbert's poetry more than just flaccid applause or naïve Sunday School rhymes: Herbert is fully and equally aware of the pitfalls of Christianity and the need to write good poetry. On this last point I depart from Summers, who claims that "the beauty of language, like the soul's, can live only if it is 'lost' to the proper object" (119). In The Temple, Herbert is very careful not to lose his mastery over beautiful language; rather, he knows that a confident use of one's abilities can assist the soul in finding its final place with God. Of course, a major sticking point for a post-Calvinist Protestant in contemplating salvation was the complex and evolving doctrine of predestination. Jean Calvin's notions of unconditional predestination had been interpreted narrowly by later Continental and English thinkers. Calvin's disciple Theodore Beza maintained that God "hathe determined from before all beginning with hym selfe, to create all thyngs in their tyme, for his glory, and namely men: whom he hath made after two sorts, cleane contrarie one to the other" (2.A.iii). English theologian William Perkins declared in 1590 that God "hath ordained all men to a certain and everlasting estate, that is either to salvation or condemnation, for his own glory" (186). But countering these views were theologians such as Jacobus Arminius: his growing rejection of hard-line doctrine in the Netherlands had been crystallized by 1610 into a set of articles which, while not retreating to the Pelagian and semi-Pelagian position that the human will rather than divine grace initiated the steps toward eternal salvation, stood firmly for the propositions that predestination was conditioned by God's foreknowledge of the individual's response to the offer of grace, and that a believer could both resist and fall from grace. Many of the theological and...