Poetry and the Eucharist in the English Renaissance Gary Kuchar Kimberly Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacraments and Poetics in Post-Reformation England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 248 pp. $59.95 cloth. Sophie Read, Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 245 pp. $99.99 cloth. The two challenging and elegantly written books under review here are both examples of the New Formalism, a mode of criticism in which the distinctly literary properties of verse are analyzed within their historical contexts without being reduced to them. Moreover, both examine the same literary-historical intersection: eucharistic theology and the seventeenth-century devotional lyric. The major difference between these two studies is that Sophie Read’s formalist criticism is rooted in Renaissance theories of rhetoric whereas Kimberly Johnson’s close readings are inspired by some of the reflexive features of modernist and post-modernist poetics. While Read’s approach is more reliable overall, both works are provocative contributions to our understanding of the relations between poetry and eucharistic worship in early modern England. Johnson’s Made Flesh can be understood as a direct reversal of Stanley Fish’s well-known claim that the seventeenth-century literary artifact often “becomes the vehicle of its own abandonment.”1 According to Fish’s model of reading, seventeenth-century poems often instigate a form of spiritual understanding that transcends the medium of representation through a process of self-consumption. Turning this thesis on its head, Johnson argues that seventeenth-century poems invite attention to their materiality, or what she calls their “objecthood.” In particular, she examines how the poetic surfaces and linguistic materiality of poems concerned with Communion inevitably reproduce the tensions inherent in eucharistic thought and worship, the tensions, that is, between body and spirit, letter and meaning, [End Page 128] signifier and signified. One of her basic claims is that lyric poetry does not always behave well from a theological point of view. The medium has its own inclinations, especially when crossed with eucharistic theologies of presence. As a result, the formal dynamics of seventeenth-century eucharistic poems are said to often violate their immediate theological and spiritual contexts. In many instances, this is an excitingly provocative thesis; in others, however, it results in overly dehistoricized readings in which crucial contexts are overlooked for the sake of ingenious but unpersuasive interpretations.2 The result is a book in which the reader must sometimes play Tuve to her Empson. Made Flesh begins with an excellent overview of eucharistic theology, replete with Johnson’s elegant translations of Greek and Latin texts. In doing so, she sets up the context for her overarching claim that seventeenth-century eucharistic poetry “deploys a set of structural and representational tactics that emphasize the objecthood of language, both as material artifact on the page and as representational surface” (p. 27). Chapter 1 explores this thesis in relation to Herbert’s The Temple. The idea that Herbert attributed a certain kind of spiritual power to the materiality of poetic form and of church architecture is not itself new. Judy Kronenfeld has persuasively argued that Herbert’s “A Wreath” is not a self-consuming artifice, while Martin Elsky has situated Herbert’s pattern poems in the context of Neo-platonic theories of orthography in which signs bear spiritual power and meaning.3 Similarly, Paul Dyck has demonstrated how Herbert conceived of church buildings in terms of biblical textuality, resulting in an incarnational poetics that embraces the spiritual efficacy of the material realm.4 But Johnson offers a far more extreme reading of Herbert’s preoccupation with materiality. In her estimation, Herbert adopts poetic strategies that make his texts resist and obtrude upon the passage from material to spiritual ostensibly summarized in “The Elixir”: A man that looks on glasse, On it may stay his eye;Or if he pleaseth, through it passe, And then the heav’n espie. (ll. 9-12) Rather than reading this passage as exemplifying any sort of movement from material to spiritual (as it would seem to imply), Johnson sees it [End Page 129] as advertising “the interpretive dynamic of aesthetic media” (p. 47). In her interpretation, “The Elixir” focuses our...