- Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture
As many of the essays collected in Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture point out, early moderns debating heresy frequently understood that the question of Christian orthodoxy had been mooted at least since Constantine; but what they understood to be heresy — its referents, its referees, [End Page 1451] and the question of whether to tolerate it once it was located — continued to escape agreement. Castellio, cited here in John Marshall's excellent "Defining and Redefining Heresy up to Locke's Letters Concerning Toleration" aptly sums up the real criterion of heresy: "we are all heretics in the eyes of those who do not share our views" (266).
The book's first essay, David Loewenstein's "Writing and the Persecution of Heretics in Henry VIII's England: The Examinations of Anne Askew," immediately focuses several key issues in the ongoing heresy debates: the gender issue, for example, was to continue to divide even radical Protestants; the Eucharistic controversy for which Askew was martyred was one of the central religious divarications about the sign/the signified in biblical language and its different reception in Catholic and Protestant belief; while the 1539 proclamation Loewenstein cites recognized the subversive potential of the private study of scripture for both church and state. Though no real threat was to materialize in England for yet another century, these authority structures were indeed being questioned across Europe, particularly by the Anabaptists in Germany, as Carrie Euler recognizes in her contribution. Cultural assumptions about women are examined in Christopher Marsh's essay, where he studies theatrical mockery of the Family of Love in two plays, Club Law (staged at Cambridge ca. 1599) and Middleton's Family of Love. Peter Lake argues that Puritanism's reputation for dissent and subversion pro-vides too simple a view of an internally contradictory movement that in its attitudes toward authority "was in fact active on both sides of the heresy-making process" (83). John Coffey's thoroughly researched essay illustrates in detail the sectarian disputes over the definition of orthodoxy, documenting at the same time that in the 1650s "zeal for orthodoxy . . . jostled for position with zeal for liberty of conscience" (122). Ann Hughes, in "Thomas Edwards's Gangraena and Heresiological Traditions," situates Edwards within the long tradition of heresy-hunting and illustrates his pestiferous imagery and disorganized writing, beamed from his own window on truth as he decried the abominations of toleration that had led his fellow Protestants into error's infestations. Appropriately following Hughes's essay are the arguments opposite to Edwards's, presented in Nigel Smith's essay on the anti-Trinitarian heresy. As Smith points out, reason and the primacy of scripture, "the two fundamental instruments of Protestantism" (163), could be used in Socinian arguments just as in fundamentalist Calvinist ones, while his coda on Milton's depiction of the Son in Paradise Regained illustrates the poet's closeness to anti-Trinitarianism. Thomas N. Corns examines five early Winstanley tracts that show his theological system developing systematically toward his equation of God with reason. Opposed to the unreason of appetite for accumulation of material property, Winstanley (ironically) negated key metaphysical doctrines with respect to Jesus as man and the idea of resurrection of the flesh because of his "demystifying materialist hermeneutics" (199). John Rogers finds in books 3 and 11 of Paradise Lost that, by avoiding orthodox beliefs about the centrality of Christ's crucifixion, Milton evidences his "Arianized Socinianism" (213) and goes as far as possible in his Calvinistic milieu "to reassert the role of works . . . in the [End Page 1452] quest for salvation" (214). J. A. I. Champion's essay shows the precarious political contexts of the Restoration giving new resonance to the roles of church and state in defining, and reacting to, heresy. Hobbes's position that orthodoxy is a matter of civil rather than ecclesiastical discipline is countered by the erudite arguments of Thomas Barlow contained in...