Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewMortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. Brian Cummings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. vii+367.Jesse M. LanderJesse M. LanderUniversity of Notre Dame Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBrian Cummings’s Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture is a profoundly serious book that deserves to be read closely and carefully. It is at once extraordinarily capacious (covering figures as diverse as Durer, Tyndale, Foxe, Rembrandt, and Milton) and highly focused; and though Shakespeare appears in the title, Montaigne is the book’s presiding genius. Cummings is clearly in his element when tracing the always subtle exfoliation of Montaigne’s thought. Like Montaigne, Cummings works recursively, returning again and again to a series of themes that undergo expansion and revision. The book’s various meditations are held together by an attention to the intersection between philosophy and death. What interests Cummings is the way in which the post-Reformation moment produced an extraordinary outpouring of writing (and painting) taking up the philosophical implications of death. The conceptual core of the book is the claim (attributed by Montaigne to Cicero) “that to philosophize is nothing but to prepare for death” (50). As Cummings tells it, Webster was not the only one much possessed by death, but the mortality that acts as a strong attractor for the figures discussed in the book is not morbidity. Mortality is instead an enabling condition: human finitude as a necessary condition for meaning. Presented so nakedly, the claim appears ahistorical, but the book’s insistence on history is one of its great strengths, and Cummings brings an extraordinary interpretive intelligence to the events and the texts of the past. While Cummings excels at the close examination of historical particulars—his attention to lexicography is throughout exemplary and powerful—his broad vision of the past draws coherence from a consistent incredulity regarding secularization.The book’s eight chapters are united by a desire to bracket, qualify, or deny the received understanding of secularization. An initial chapter on Dürer and Montaigne serves as a second introduction and focuses on self-portraiture both pictorial and literary in order to make a claim for a “self of limits” that stands as useful corrective to the now clichéd and slightly embarrassing “Renaissance Man” celebrated by Pico della Mirandola. Cummings persuasively marks the distance between Montaigne and Pico, but, embarrassing or not, Pico’s remarkable claims do not as a consequence disappear. A short chapter on “The Reformed Conscience” focuses on the case of Thomas More and displays Cumming’s characteristic method. This involves a brief excursus on Scholastic accounts of conscience, a consideration of the way in which the concept functioned in a legal context, the changes that were wrought by the Reformation, and a patient unpacking of particular uses of the word by More. The upshot is that More’s “conscience” is neither the internal moral compass, celebrated by the tradition of political liberalism, that allows the individual to resist the violence of the state, nor is it the faculty, identified by revisionist historians, that reliably provides individual access to truth in accordance with the teaching of the church. Cummings insists that the situation is more complicated. Instead of providing the ground for a moment of heroic self-assertion, More’s conscience is “ambiguated and etiolated” (88). The chapter that follows, “Writer as Martyr,” provides an illuminating account of the connection between writing and martyrdom in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. Fifteen years ago Tom Bishop observed that “Hand-burning is marked in Foxe as almost a topos of Reformed self-management by its recurrence through his pages,” and Cummings provides a compelling account of the four images in the book that show a hand in flames.1 The image alludes to the classical exemplar of Mucius Scaevola, whose willingness to thrust his hand into flame made him an emblem of Roman courage and thus provides evidence for a distinctly humanist Foxe. At the same time, “The hand signifies the hand of the writer and the hand of the reader” (132), invoking the textual transmission so central to Renaissance humanism. In a rare concession to secularization, Cummings concludes that by presenting his martyrs as “suffering humanists” Foxe “seems in some way to secularize, certainly to demystify, the idea of sainthood” (132). Foxe also features in the next chapter, “Public Oaths and Private Selves,” which considers the way that the state’s use of oaths, especially the oath ex officio, in its pursuit of religious uniformity helped constitute the divide between private and public. Cummings makes a fascinating connection here between formal oaths administered by the state and the expletives that color colloquial speech; speculating that the period saw a dramatic increase in foul language, Cummings suggests that it reveals an extreme nervousness about the divide between the public and the private and concludes with an innovative reading of Othello as “a witness to this cultural crisis of swearing” (159). The fifth chapter treats “Soliloquy and Secularization” in Shakespeare; it seeks to separate the soliloquy from the twinned, modern liberal ideologies of individualism and secularization by suggesting that the soliloquy often has a “religious frame of reference” (178). That God is frequently an implied auditor makes the soliloquy into a quasi prayer. The next chapter, “Hamlet’s Luck: Shakespeare and the Renaissance Bible,” traces the shifting place of “luck” in English translations of the Bible and convincingly shows that the emphasis on contingency that is so central to the play is not a matter of incipient secularism but is instead an engagement with the theology of providentialism. The penultimate chapter considers the treatment of suicide in Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Donne, arguing that “suicide belongs to a skeptical philosophical train of thinking which should not be confused with anti-Christian polemic” (243). The concluding chapter treats the iconography of the fall (in northern European visual arts and in Milton’s Paradise Lost), suggesting that embodiment serves as “a crux for understanding the nature of the human as well as the fundamentals of theology” (281).The descriptions above fail to do justice to the nuance of Cummings’s account of the intersection between identity and secularity in the early modern world. Cummings is a wonderfully alert reader, and he demonstrates again and again that the materials of the past exceed the various interpretive traditions that have emerged to organize and understand them. This is conspicuously so in the case of secularization—a sociological term that is invariably revealed to be inadequate to the variegated details of the historical record. However, there is something predictable and a little too easy about this argument. The version of secularization that Cummings rejects is a blunt concept, and at times the important distinction between the social process of secularization and the political program of secularism gets lost. A desire to write history that is not underwritten by secularization theory is entirely laudable, but this does not amount to a demonstration that secularization never happened. Despite a lucid introduction that frames the problem of secularization clearly, the book does not appear to have a settled position. Occasionally secularization is treated almost as an intentional process, a secularizing “impulse” (169), but it seems much more plausible to imagine that secularization is largely a matter of unintended consequences. For example, Cummings’s cites approvingly Christopher Hill’s suggestion that the state’s administration of oaths to enforce allegiance and conformity provoked in some quarters “a contemptuous disregard for the meaningfulness of oaths” (148). In this case something that was sacred and numinous was emptied of its religious force despite the intentions of the various agents involved. To say that secularization was not inevitable, that it is not unidirectional, that it unfolds unevenly over both geographical and institutional terrain is not, at this juncture, especially controversial. But those of us interested in early modern religion, having accepted all these qualifications, may still find ourselves worrying and wondering about what remains of secularization. Brian Cummings brilliantly demonstrates that one can tell the story of early modern selfhood without drawing on secularization theory, but he does not, finally, make it clear whether he thinks the broad cultural transformation, formerly known as secularization, has a further claim on our attention.Notes1 Tom Bishop, “The Burning Hand: Poetry and Reformation in Shakespeare’s Richard II,” Religion and Literature 32, no. 2 (2000): 46. 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