Recent studies in the English Renaissance.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Publication Date: 01-JAN-05

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It is remarkable how many of the books I received are about history: a number are written by historians, and published in a history series. I had expected a couple might be, but most, I thought, would be in "Renaissance nondramatic literature," even as the field has in many instances morphed into cultural history. So I was surprised when I kept receiving shipments of "history" books. Perhaps the traditional boundaries between literature and history (at least on the part of "literary scholars") really are breaking down, not only as we recognize the need to historicize, but also as we enlarge the category of "literature" (in itself a kind of return, with a difference, to the situation in the Renaissance when disciplinary spheres were as yet not sharply differentiated, where one could be a "literary author" and much else). It seems, however, more than that, and prompts me to ask several questions for which it is too early to provide answers.

Have we moved to a situation where the most pressing things concern history? Where, that is, viewing literature as art seems irrelevant--pace Stanley Fish, who's been arguing that we need to look to literature for creative imagination and art, not politics. Perhaps the now-dominant interest among Renaissance scholars in understanding history is an academic counterpart to the current popular interest in memoir, biography, and documentaries, even reality TV.

It is certainly the case that much of the most interesting work these days is in history, or blurs the distinctions between literature and history. Not that there isn't a concern with reading literary texts. As Mihoko Suzuki says in her fine new book (noting Roland Barthes's and Fredric Jameson's advice to wed attention to form with historicism), "my method can be described as formalism in the service of historical analysis" (p. 24). The comment is telling, because it suggests that the goal, the end that gives the whole project value, is "historical analysis," with the sense that historical analysis indeed does touch us and concern us in the present.

Being historically inclined myself, I am very happy reading all these historical and historicist studies. And yet, for all the pleasure and enlightenment, something gives me pause. Is this the only kind of scholarship being done? Or that is being published? I wonder whether scholars reading for presses are unreceptive to studies that don't address issues of historical and cultural interest, or whether presses, driven by market concerns, are themselves shaping scholarship? Certainly the number of presses publishing now in Renaissance nondramatic studies has been shrinking. Cambridge University Press dominates the field, and its commitment to early modern literature as well as history is wonderful. Yale has made a major commitment in the Andrew Marvell prose edition. Fine books are now being published in so-called commercial presses (witness the lists that Palgrave, Ashgate, and D. S. Brewer, for example, have been building). It is disturbing, however, to see that so many major American university presses that we have looked to in the past are publishing very little (in some cases nothing) in the field. I recently heard that a distinguished university press, long reputed for excellence in early modern literature, has decided it will no longer publish in that area. Given such developments, tenure committees must change the way they evaluate publications, paying more attention to the quality of the book than the supposed prestige of a press. But the narrowing of outlets combined with the move to history makes me question whether, in part, literature books have been becoming history books so as to make them current and marketable to and by presses. In other words, to what extent is this a "natural" development, as we expand the canon, situate literary texts, and enlarge the notion of literature, and to what extent is it enforced by market conditions? Maybe the world seems too serious now, our problems too pressing to engage in the pleasures and joys of imaginative writing. Maybe, as Marvell said of Oliver Cromwell in the opening of his Horatian Ode, it is time to put away the arts and muses, a seductive luxury we treasure but that is momentarily useless in a world riven by conflict and war.

So many of the books this year are excellent (given the difficulty of getting published, that's not surprising) that I hate to complain; they truly advance our understanding of the field. Yet, I can't help but feel that we need a recommitment to literature among academic publishers. It's not just a matter that almost no press wants to publish a single-author book. There seem to be precious few publishing books that have much "literary" focus, or that even discuss canonical writers (with the exception of Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton, whose aesthetic/literary texts seem harder to press into service).

I don't want to sound grim. Renaissance studies have been--and are--vital and influential in their historicist bent, in their concern with the ways texts are complexly related to their historico-cultural matrix. But it would be a loss if we were to stop writing--and presses were to stop publishing--on the literature that got us into Renaissance study in the first place and that continues to attract students and enlarge our sense of the world. It would be a shame if "literature" were relegated only to the undergraduate classroom, or a literate (but not academic) public, such as the one that has flocked to see the play Wit.

Having made these observations, I want to celebrate the crop of books this year, many of which cross the disciplines, enriching our idea of the Renaissance, and are exceptionally well written, indeed eloquent. I'm going to categorize the books in this review, understanding that the categories are inevitably imperfect and restrictive. But it's a way of organizing the more-than-100 books I received.

HISTORY OF THE BOOK

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Vol. 4: 1557-1695, edited by John Barnard and the late D. F. McKenzie, with the assistance of Maureen Bell, is an extraordinary resource, with thirty-eight highly informative, accessible essays, grouped into well-conceived sections, following a substantial introduction by Barnard. All the essays are superb; of particular interest to me were two long chapters on "Religious Publishing in England" (one on 1557-1640, by Patrick Collinson, Arnold Hunt, and Alexandra Walsham; the other on 1640-1695, by Ian Green and Kate Peters); Harold Love's on "Oral and Scribal Texts in Early Modern England," Peter Beal's "John Donne and the Circulation of Manuscripts," Graham Parry's on "Patronage and Printing," Adrian Johns on "Science and the Book," and an entire section on "Literary Canons" that includes essays by John Pitcher (literature and the playhouse), Joad Raymond (Milton), Paul Hammond (the Restoration), Nigel Smith (nonconformists), and Bell (women). The entire book is fascinating--an education in the Renaissance. The essays address canonical literary figures as well as the material book. Though a scholarly resource, it would also be accessible to students and the general reader.

David McKitterick's Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 is a major contribution to the "history of the book." Reexamining the nature of "print," and the intertwined relation of print and manuscript in our period, this learned historical bibliographer, in eminently readable prose, dismantles the idea of a "printing revolution." He shows how the changes were gradual and irregular, and how early modern printed books were not necessarily more stable and permanent than manuscripts. The chapters are full of fascinating detail about the complexity of relations between manuscript and print. The most important idea to emerge in this book is that instability characterized each stage in the production of a book, making early English print anything but standardized and stable. In showing how the new technology augmented rather than replaced the previous one, McKitterick implicitly suggests an optimistic prediction for our own electronic age: print will not disappear.

The Uses of Script and Print, 1300-1700, a revisionist volume of essays edited by Julia Crick and Walsham, complements McKitterick's book, for the essays here (many of them on the earlier pre-Reformation period) defy the traditional opposition of medieval and early modern as well as that between script and print. Showing the "hybridity" of manuscript and print (p. 12) and adding the third component of orality/aurality, this volume makes many important points, not the least being that manuscript continued to be useful for expressing heterodox ideas, obscene verse, and religious dissent in the period before the 1640s. The essays are grouped into four sections (focusing on late medieval religion, textual tradition, speech, and persecution). This last includes essays by Walsham (on script and print as a way of preaching for persecuted Catholics, Protestants, and Quakers), by Thomas S. Freeman (on the Marian martyrs who used manuscript networks to communicate), and by Ann Hughes (on the use of Thomas Edwards's Gangraena to stir up persecution of sectaries during the Civil War). We see how print could be used for repression as well as liberation.

Here we might also mention David N. Griffiths's Bibliography of the Book of Common Prayer, 1549-1999, a handsome book with beautiful illustrations, giving a full bibliographical description of the editions and reprints of the Book of Common Prayer, including translations into other languages, from Acholi (Uganda) to Zulu (South Africa). In addition to the highly informative introduction on the Prayer Book's origin and printing history, there are headnotes for each of the successive versions of the BCP (1549, 1552, 1559, 1662), noting significant changes. The gap between 1642 and 1660, during which time only two editions appeared, witnesses to the effect of parliamentary reforms.

Cameron A. MacKenzie's The Battle for the Bible in England, 1557-1582 shows how the different versions and editions of the Bible played a role in the ongoing struggles of the Reformation in England. Paying careful attention to the material history of the various printings and versions of the Bible, MacKenzie convincingly describes the succession of English Bibles in the mid-sixteenth century as a battle for the authoritative "English Bible." He begins with the Geneva Bible produced by the Marian exiles, includes the republishing of the Great Bible at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign and the republishing of the "rival" Geneva Bible under the queen's authority from 1575 on, and ends with the Catholic English New Testament published in 1582 as a polemical (and theologically inflected) response to the Protestant Bibles, and an effort to provide a vernacular Bible for English Catholics. Particularly valuable in explaining how religious struggles (even within Protestantism) were played out in the Bible's publication history in England, this accessible study makes the perspectives of the history of the book illuminate religious history.

Raymond's Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain explores a different dimension of the history of the book. This fresh, lively, well-written, and meticulously researched book explores the rise of "the pamphlet," beginning with the Marprelate controversy (c. 1580) and ending in the late seventeenth century, when the pamphlet had become, not simply ephemera, but a (the?) major means of persuasion, instrumental in creating a public sphere of debate and political opinion. Organized by key events or moments, this book covers many topics (e.g., the nature and limitations of George Thomason's collection, the movement of seditious publications between Edinburgh, Amsterdam, and London, the Scottish origins of the explosion of print at the Revolution) and discusses a variety of pamphlets (e.g., those by Levellers, Ranters, and Quakers, women's petitions, Lady Eleanor Davies's prophecies, the pamphlets by or about Anna Trapnell, Margaret Fell, and Elizabeth Cellier). Raymond makes a compelling argument for the importance and increasing ubiquity of the pamphlet during the century, and concludes that the pamphlet became the preferred form for women. Stressing the "literary" interest and merit of many of these pamphlets (to whose formal and antiformal qualities he pays attention), he offers important readings of Milton's Areopagitica as engaging complexly the pamphlet form, and John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel as a supreme example of how literary writing had become "pamphletised" (p. 380). This rich scholarly book is so lucid and lively that I would recommend it--especially his definition of "what is a pamphlet"--to anyone (including undergraduates) wanting to know more about the material book and the book trade in this period.

HISTORY AND HISTORIES

The slippage between the disciplines of English (or British) "literature" and "history" is evident in the fact that Raymond's book appears in Cambridge University Press's "Studies in Early Modern British History" series. But most of the books this year have a strong historical, even more than historicist, dimension, giving us a better sense of the religion, politics, social relations, and culture of the Renaissance. This section reviews books mainly by historians.

Religion continues to be an important subject, with attention now being focused on the transitional period of the earlier sixteenth century. Susan Wabuda's Preaching During the English Reformation is broader than the title might suggest, for it actually is about the intersections, shifts, and tensions between the late medieval and the Reformation "religious," and between traditional and reformed religion in the crucial first half of the sixteenth century. Evenhanded and generous, she treats Catholic religious culture sympathetically while also taking the Reformation seriously as something that deeply mattered. Correcting the prevailing assumption that preaching the word was distinctive to Protestantism, she shows how the late medieval Catholic Church was involved in a revival that stressed the importance of preaching, making the sermon an essential supplement to the sacraments. In her engaging description and analysis of religious culture of the early sixteenth century, Wabuda gives a vivid sense of material religious experience and its spiritual significance. We come away with a stronger sense of the connections as well as the fault lines between Catholic and reformed.

Ethan H. Shagan similarly complicates our picture of the Reformation in his powerfully written Popular Politics and the English Reformation. Where Wabuda shows the overlap between Catholics and Protestants in their valuing of preaching, Shagan's post-revisionist account of the Reformation in England during the first half of the sixteenth century (from Henry VIII's break with Rome to the death of Edward VI) presents a story of internal division within England, and a process whereby the people both resisted and collaborated with elite attempts to produce the Reformation. Rejecting explanations that have been offered of the Reformation (that it was just political and secular, or, contrarily, that it was a spiritual "conversion"; that it was a top-down imposition, or that it was a popular movement from below), Shagan deftly shows the mixture of resistance, collaboration, and acquiescence. Chapters focus on events that reveal "points of contact" between elite and popular politics (e.g., the phenomenon of the nun and prophetess Elizabeth Barton, who challenged Henry's authority and was executed). Interested in political process (rather than conversion), in negotiations between the elite and the people, Shagan's account gives the people a certain agency in shaping the Reformation in England. The division and inconsistency we see in early Reformation England might shed light on the later divisions, particularly in the Civil War period. Beautifully written, Shagan's book is essential reading for anyone interested in the Reformation.

Focusing on the last decade of Henry VIII's life, Alec Ryrie's The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation shows how at the time there was no clearly defined identity of Protestantism in England. Religious communities were vague and ill-defined, and there were tensions between reformers' loyalties to their king and to their faith. Ryrie analyzes the diverse responses to the "profoundly ambiguous" religious policies of the king (p. 8), and shows how some of the moderates were gradually radicalized. He argues that the more radical evangelicals won out in "the struggle for the soul of English evangelicalism" (p. 10). We learn about Henry VIII's complex mix of religious positions, and there is an interesting discussion of Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey. In this book, too, we see that the Protestant Reformation was neither simple nor inevitable.

Marjo Kaartinen's Religious Life and English Culture in the Reformation also participates in this year's post-revisionist reading of the Reformation. Like some of the best books this year, it emphasizes continuities with the pre-Reformation period rather than radical change. Hoping to get at the way people thought as the Reformation began in England--and to answer the question of "how the dissolutions were possible if people needed religious houses" (p. 9), Kaartinen looks at the ways monks, nuns, and religious houses were viewed by contemporaries. Examining in detail both the core notions and material practices of obedience, poverty, chastity, and stability, she shows that there were varied attitudes toward the religious, and that both Catholics and "evangelicals" shared common values that made the Reformation possible and successful. Among her important arguments is that, in a culture that accepted hierarchy as a given, criticism of some of the religious did not mean a "complete rejection" (p. 152). One comes away from this book with a more appreciative sense of the richness of the life of the religious at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and the ways they were (despite physical separation) bound up with the life of the society and community.

Similarly focusing on the transition to the Reformation, Christine Peters's Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England describes the continuities between late medieval Catholic piety and the early Reformation. The argument is not always easy to follow nor the conclusions easy to find, as the book stresses detail, nuance, and the complications of gender. But what does emerge is a claim that, with the development of Christocentric devotion in late medieval Catholicism, gender distinctions became blurred: the pieta and female saints appealed to men as well as women; Mary and the Magdalen became figures that both men and women could identify with. As Mary and the saints became humanized (and less figures for devotion),...

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