Discovering and Covering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. . - Re - book review

Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Edited by Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. viii + 408 pp. $59.00 cloth.

Although the title-page of this essay collection does not indicate its status as a festschrift, one of its main purposes is evidently "to honor the teaching and scholarly career of John R. Roberts" (viii). The focus chosen for the collection is indeed most apt, since extending the informed critical discussion of early modern English religious lyrics has been the achievement of Jack Roberts's career. His pioneering annotated bibliographies of critical writing on Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw, as well as his own articles and essay collections, and his unfailing support of younger scholars, have combined to enable the increased attention given to the seventeenth-century religious lyric over the past three decades. As Claude Summers writes in the closing contribution to this volume, Roberts's "calculated strategy of restraint" in the bibliographies has made them available to critics of every tradition (336). His evenhandedness in presenting critical approaches with which he might not personally agree "bespeaks," in Summers's elegant formulation, Roberts's "understanding of the winding ways of scholarship and the mysteriousness of the creative process" (337).

An annotated bibliography, in the hands of a sensitive and objective scholar such as Jack Roberts, can function as literary history in itself, charting the shifting currents of critical taste. Criticism, after all, is an expression of an age as well as of the individuals who contribute to it. The volume under discussion is no exception, being very much an essay collection of our time in its expressed aim to extend the canon of the poems generally implied by the phrase "seventeenth-century English religious lyric." The essays devote attention to a number of hitherto neglected groups, including women writers and English Catholics, as well as to poets who might be termed "minor" but whose work nevertheless adds to our understanding of the religious lyric and of the era. As Kari Boyd McBride vividly puts it, the canon can have the same effect as urban light pollution, erasing the "dimmer stars" and leaving us with a "manageable set of constellations and bright suns." This volume takes us away from the familiar pe rspective, into the "desert, where darkness reveals the innumerable lights of the night sky and masks the relationships we thought we understood" (40).

The rediscovered heavenly "lights" in this volume span the period from Robert Southwell and Elizabeth Middleton in the late sixteenth century to Joseph Beaumont and Thomas Traherne towards the end of the seventeenth. Holding true to the editors' conviction that there are many more stars in the sky than the sparkling Donne and Herbert, the fifteen essays explore exciting new constellations. The Scottish poet William Drummond keeps company with the anonymous author of Eliza's Babes, and the failed monk Patrick Cary finds himself in an adjacent essay to the maternal Mary Carey, author of the verse lament "Upon ye Sight of my abortive birth."

In reviewing an essay collection it is impossible to give detailed attention to every contribution, though there are many here deserving of serious reading. Among the most valuable, in my view, are those which implicitly or explicitly redefine the religious lyric through the individual case studies they have chosen: Patrick Cook's perceptive reading of Aemilia Lanyer's "Description of Cookeham" as a devotional lyric, for example, and Donna J. Long's plausible claim that women's elegies form a gendered subgenre, the "recuperative religious lyric." Several essays situate devotional poets more firmly in their appropriate denominational group or doctrinal context, such as Ann Hurley's discussion of the "vivifying force" of Protestantism in the work of An Collins (234), and Kate Narveson's invented term "Anglianism" for the conformity to the established church evinced in the poems of William Austin (163).

As Robert C. Evans properly reminds us, however, context is not all; "no poet," he writes, "no matter how historically interesting, is ever likely to be fully recovered unless we feel that his or her words merit attention as words" (120). Evans goes on to demonstrate the verbal artistry of Drummond of Hawthornden's devotional verse, and George Klawitter's sensitive analysis of William Alabaster's sonnets is in the same mode. Among the most inventive of the essays, however, is one which combines attention to text, lives, gender and cultural context--Patricia Demers's study of An Collins, Elizabeth Major, and "Eliza" as a "triptych" of female religious melancholy--in an ingenious analysis inspired by Van Dyck's triple portrait of Charles I.

Despite these strong points, there are a number of weaknesses to be found in the book as a whole (and not just in the fussily playful title, which conjured up distracting images of re-covering old or threadbare furnishings). There is--perhaps inevitably--a tendency for the contributors to make overinflated claims for the importance of the individual writers, which is a refreshing sign of critical enthusiasm and appropriate partisanship, but can occasionally lead to disgruntled disbelief on the part of the reader. This problem is countered, however, by the fact that the cumulative effect of the collection is finally more significant than its particular readings, as our sense of the depth and range of the phenomenon of the religious lyric is repeatedly extended. There are some difficulties with terminology in the book, most strikingly the misleading use of "Anglo-Catholic" to mean English Catholics rather than its more common usage (members of the Church of England whose practice is closer to the Roman Catholic than the evangelical wing of the Anglican church).

I am also not convinced by the editors' claim that scholarship on the religious lyric has been dominated by a "hegemonic emphasis on Protestant/Puritan aesthetics" (15); one has only to think of the founding work of Louis Martz in The Poetry of Meditation, or the relative neglect of radical Protestant poetry, to qualify this assumption. On a practical note, the quality of the proof-checking leaves a lot to be desired, with far more misprints than one would hope to encounter in a scholarly collection. But the spirit of enquiry leaping from its pages, the respect shown for the excellence represented by its dedicatee, and the devoted scholarship brought to bear on a range of religious lyricists make the volume well worth a positive mention in Jack Roberts's next annotated critical bibliography of early modern English poetry.

Other Work Cited

Martz, Louis L. The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955; rev. ed., 1969.

Helen Wilcox ([email protected]) is professor of English literature at Groningen University, The Netherlands, and among her publications are George Herbert, Sacred and Profane (1995, with Richard Todd), Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700 (1996), and Betraying Our Selves. Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts (2000, with Henk Dragstra and Sheila Ottway).

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