300 BEN JONSON JOURNAL

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1 300 BEN JONSON JOURNAL ization inspired by dreams of the Raj, an ornament for the uppermiddle-elass coffee table and, when used with caution, a valuable repository for the Elizabethan specialist. Leah S. Marcus Vanderbilt University Mary Arshagouni Papazian, ed., John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, viii pages. So much attention has lately been focused on the Roman Catholic aspects of John Donne's heritage, life, and writings that a fresh examination of his Protestantism was inevitable; certainly it is welcome. Anything that helps us better understand Donne's profound (if complicated) commitment to Christianity can help us better appreciate his subtle, intricate writings. The focus of the present book is admittedly far more on the sermons and other religious prose than on the poems, and this fact is one of several reasons the volume is perhaps more likely to appeal to specialists than to students or "general readers." Other reasons include a tendency, in a few essays, to presume not only a detailed familiarity with theological (or theoretical) jargon but also a detailed prior grasp of intricate sectarian disputes. In addition, one essay unfortunately evinces a sometimes uncertain grasp of English, making its arguments somewhat hard to follow. On the whole, however, this is a very strong volume; it is handsomely produced, well documented, and enormously well indexed, and the thirteen essays it contains engage in civil, thoughtful dialogue not only with each other but with the broader community of scholars. The collection opens with a very lucid introduction by the editor; the first few pages explain the historical background about as transparently as this could possibly be done, while the remaining pages sketch quite clearly the central arguments of each contributor. Daniel Doerksen's essay, "Polemist or Pastor?: Donne and Moderate Calvinist Conformity," gives the book a very strong opening, providing an excellent survey of previous scholarship

2 Book Reviews 301 and of issues central to the volume as a whole. Doerksen sees Donne in the 1620s not as a proto-laudian but as a "moderate Calvinist" (15) who, rather than "engaging in polemical attacks... regularly tries to bring non-conformists around with pastoral persuasion" (16). Unlike a few other essayists who quote perhaps a bit too much, Doerksen maintains a very nice balance between quotation and analysis; one never is in danger, when reading his essay, of missing the forest for the trees. Doerksen shows a strong familiarity not only with the work of other literary critics but also with the writings of historians, and he also does a fine job of anticipating (and answering) potential objections to his arguments. He ends by arguing that "[u]nlike the Laudians, Donne reserved his polemics for people outside the Church of England Rome and the separatists and exercised pastoral care in his sermons for those within the church who differed from his understandings of what the church should be like" (27). Doerksen himself displays many of the same qualities of intelligence and moderation he attributes to Donne. The same is true of Jeanne Shami, whose essay subtitled "John Donne, the Synod of Dort, and the Early Stuart Church" contends that "Donne's election by the lower clergy as their prolocutor in 1626 signals his importance and reputation as a middle voice on matters of religious controversy in these months" (36). She argues that "the doctrinal positions Donne advocates for the Church of England in these sermons are very similar to those of the English delegates to the Synod of Dort ( ), situated between the rigid Calvinist positions of some Dort delegates and the anti- Calvinist positions of others" (37). She claims that the fact that "Donne was considered acceptable to both houses" of the English convocation in 1626, which were "themselves internally divided, confirms his reputation for learning, fairness, and eloquence and, more importantly, for independence from increasingly sectarian allegiances" (39). Like Doerksen's piece, Shami's is a model of clarity and substance in argument, logic, and style. Mary Arshagouni Papazian's article, "The Augustinian Donne," is not only lucid and substantive but also has the added advantage of engaging with some of Donne's best poems the Holy Sonnets. She has much of interest to say about English responses to Sir To-

3 302 BEN JONSON JOURNAL bie Matthews's 1620 Romanist translation of Augustine's Confessions and shows, in particular, the decidedly Protestant emphasis of Donne's embrace of the great Latin father. "Donne," she contends, "generally turns to Augustine and his Confessions in order to reassert for his parishioners Augustine's predestinarian theology a theology based on original sin and man's dependence on divine grace, an emphasis that recurs throughout the sermons" (78). Her essay ends by emphasizing the relevance of this theology to the speakers of the Holy Sonnets. She notes the irony that "the very ability of these speakers to contemplate their sinfulness is itself a sign of God's presence within them, a tension that produces some irony in the poems themselves" (81). Papazian's essay exemplifies how many of the insights contained elsewhere in this book might be usefully applied to Donne's poems. Jeffrey Johnson's essay on "John Donne and Paolo Sarpi" connects the English writer not to an ancient father of the church but to a famous contemporary, whom Donne may even have met during a trip to Venice in 1605 and whose portrait hung in Donne's collection at the time of the Englishman's death. Johnson's purpose, he says, "is not only to highlight the similarities between Donne and Sarpi as interpreters of the [Roman Catholic] Council of Trent but finally to disclose the departures of their renderings of the council and its rulings. Both Sarpi and Donne argue for religious reform, yet neither pursues a Reformation that can be strictly identified as either Protestant or Catholic/Counter[-Reformation]; each seeks, in his own way, a reformation of a more fundamental nature that transcends the bounds of sectarian allegiance" (91). Like the essays that precede it, Johnson's is lucid, solid, and suggestive. As one of the essays in this volume with an especially clear focus on Donne's poetry, the article by Raymond-Jean Frontain comparing Donne and Dante also has one of the best claims on the attention of a wide readership. Frontain argues that "Donne's Second Anniversary... posits a Reformed fiction of the poet's spiritual authority, one designed specifically to undercut Marian 'mis-deuotion' and put that 'pert' Italian Dante in his place... While Dante's vision depends upon saintly assistance, Donne's poem models how the soul can achieve a progress independent of some mediat-

4 Book Reviews 303 ing agency, through one's own meditative powers" (114). Frontain's efforts to prove this claim lead him down many interesting paths, including numerous Biblical byways. The end result is a stimulating and thought-provoking piece. Paul R. Sellin's lengthy essay on Donne's decades-long connections with the English Protestants who volunteered for service in the Low Countries is typical of the fine work he has produced over many years. Sellin's explorations of Dutch archives nearly always turn up fascinating fresh material, and this article is no exception. He offers exceptionally detailed support for his claim that "Donne had many ties with officers in the senior regiment of English in the Netherlands, and they adumbrate the web of interrelationships linking the military in the Low Countries with supporters of the Dutch among his friends and patrons in London" (154). One important feature of his article is that whereas many others in the volume focus on the 1620s, Sellin makes a case for Donne's involvement with strong Calvinists at least a decade earlier. He also provocatively suggests that English people in the Netherlands may have been among the earliest readers (in manuscript) of some of Donne's most important works of verse and prose (165). Anyone seeking hard, concrete information on Donne's historical contexts will find Sellin's piece a must-read. Having now reviewed at some length the essays from the first half of the volume, I must instead survey more quickly the articles in the second half. Thus, Catherine Gimelli Martin argues that "the aesthetic instability of Donne's Holy Sonnets and Anniversaries reflects the reckless competition for psychic and social assurance prevalent throughout a 'culture of anxiety,' which in his case was greatly aggravated by the competition between rival theological models of salvation" (193). Martin seeks to show that Rene Girard's "analysis of how ressentiment produces a triangulation of desire helps to explain why the Holy Sonnets regularly displace objects of emulation or desire... in favor of a paradoxically hostile rival/friendly mediator frankly revealed as the 'real' object of desire" (203). Of all the essays in the book, Martin's engages perhaps at greatest length with Donne's poems and should therefore be consulted by anyone who cares about the poetry. Chanita Goodblatt's essay on Donne's use of Hebrew texts and scholarship

5 304 BEN JONSON JOURNAL provides, like Sellin's piece, a fascinating excursion into unfamiliar territory. She reviews (and reconciles) the comments of earlier scholars on this topic, considers his examinations of particular Hebrew terms, and touches briefly on the highly provocative topic of his possible anti-semitism (229-30). Meanwhile, Brent Nelson provides particularly interesting rhetorical evidence for the claim that in both the sermons and the Devotions, Donne's purpose "is not chiefly to instruct but to motivate not simply to teach a right way of thinking but also to stimulate the affections and reform attitudes in order to incline his audience to a right way of living" (251). Nelson's attention to the aesthetics of Donne's style is especially welcome. Elena Levy-Navarro begins her essay with the provocative assertion that recent terms developed to describe participants in the polemics of the 1620s are inappropriate when describing Donne "because they make him part of a specific faction rather than the anti-polemicist I believe he is" (273). She quickly concedes that anti-polemicism is itself a polemical stance, but she makes a good case for her argument that "Donne counters an emerging polemicism in the church, evident in the increase of inflammatory pamphlets and sermons in the 1620s, in order to conserve what he sees as the foundation of its Reformation heritage" (273). A particularly valuable aspect of her piece is the attention she gives to King James's 1620 prose meditation on parts of the Gospel of Matthew; she suggests that Donne's treatment of "puritans" is far less combative than the treatment they receive from the king. Meanwhile, Annette Deschner seeks to locate Donne's writings within the contexts of "Continental Irenicism," particularly by showing how, in his ideas about baptism, he sought to heal divisions between many different kinds of Christians (except for Anabaptists). Maria Salenius next discusses "Donne's Art of Rhetoric in Two Candlemas Sermons," although her choice of Thomas Wilson's 1560 Art of Rhetoric as the most appropriate lens for examining sermons delivered in the 1620s is perhaps not as fully explained as it might have been. Also puzzling is her assertion that both "Donne and Wilson write in a time of solid Elizabethan and Stuart Protestantism, at a time when the Renaissance flourished in England and when the Protestant community was being secured in its position" (315). The

Book Reviews 305 cumulative impact of most of the previous essays in the book, however, has been to show the lack of solidity and security and the abundance of contention, even among Protestants,

Examining a "double sermon," they argue that "Donne implied that Roman Catholic papal doctrines led to the same end as did Protestant particularity, an end to true catholicity and the endless

6 Book Reviews 305 cumulative impact of most of the previous essays in the book, however, has been to show the lack of solidity and security and the abundance of contention, even among Protestants, that marked the English reformation. Finally, the volume concludes with an essay jointly written by Gale H. Carrithers, Jr. and James D. Hardy, Jr. Examining a "double sermon," they argue that "Donne implied that Roman Catholic papal doctrines led to the same end as did Protestant particularity, an end to true catholicity and the endless multiplication of sects, conventicles, and separatists" (347). Their essay presumes a reader educated in the intricacies of Christian doctrine and terminology a reader (in other words) like the one who is likely to emerge from an extended encounter with this fascinating, important, and well-edited collection. Robert C. Evans Auburn University at Montgomery Brian Vickers, English Renaissance Literary Criticism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, xiv pages. Well-known Renaissance scholar Brian Vickers, author of Shakespeare, Co-Author and In Defense of Rhetoric among other works, has provided a noble service to scholars and general readers alike by compiling a truly useful and surprisingly provocative new collection of primary texts, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, now available in paper. The sheer usefulness of Vickers's volume seems undeniable for students old and young of the English Renaissance. The only comparable collections of writings from the period Smith's Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904) and Spingarn's Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908) have been long out of print, with the consequence that this rich and fascinating body of writings has proven rather inaccessible, especially for classroom use, though one wonders if higher study of English Renaissance literary criticism and the rhetorical culture supporting it has not likewise been limited or stunted, something Vickers suggests at several points in

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12 seventeenth-century news subscription readership, they were explicitly intended to reward the author. Travel and travel writing, for Taylor, was not only possible, it is profitable. A discussion of