Using Alchemical Memory Techniques for the Interpretation of Literature: John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw (review)

This book can be regarded a sequel to, or rather development out of, Roberta Albrecht's The Virgin Mary as Alchemical and Lullian Reference in Donne (Susquehanna University Press, 2005). Albrecht has certainly carved out for herself a fascinating niche by focusing on the influence of the mystic alchemist Ramon Lull (ca. 1232-ca. 1316) on seventeenth-century English poetry. The earlier book dwelt primarily on Donne: this new book extends its enquiry forward in time to George Herbert and Richard Crashaw.

It is also thankfully shorn of some eccentricities I was obliged to notice when reviewing its predecessor for Renaissance Quarterly. Nevertheless this book, too, comes with a cumbersome title. The part before the colon could surely have been compacted without loss of sense, au contraire: "Alchemical Memory and Literary Interpretation" offers itself. Albrecht's text is prefaced by not one but two introductory pieces: the first is in effect a perceptive review by Helen B. Brooks; the other is a shorter explanatory note on Lull by the hispanicist Mark D. Johnson. This does seem a rather baffling marketing strategy, since with all due respect to both scholars - as well as to the author herself - such a strategy cannot help but unjustifiably give the impression that Albrecht's extra-mural work somehow needs an institutional imprimatur. Surely the work of this independent scholar stands on its own ground as original, interesting, unusual, and challenging. Since neither Brooks nor Johnson seem to agree on the spelling of the Majorcan alchemist, Brooks using the Spanish and parenthesizing the English form, Johnson going for the Majorcan dialect form, I shall simplify matters by henceforth implying an anglicized form as "Raymond Lully."

Albrecht's enquiry is courageous in that it does not "section" the Catholic convert and exile Crashaw from the Protestant convert Donne and quintessential English Church-adherent Herbert in any "confessional" way, and it is consistent with her strategy in the earlier book. There she (in my view rightly) stresses the continuity in religious, meditative, and theological practice as expressed in literary forms from before until well after the Reformation. In that book as in the one under review here, Albrecht encourages this continuity above the discontinuities that have in some quarters been so stridently insisted upon by those either unwilling to see, or (worse) innocent of, the implications of the Henrician emphasis on the uniqueness of the link between Church and State, and the authoritative retention of episcopal government in England right though the period under discussion, this governance only to be interrupted by just one decade after Crashaw's death in 1649.

The cluster of issues I should like to focus on in this short review is one that is well and subtly identified by Albrecht, particularly in her account of the ideas she is discussing that filter through to the sensibility of George Herbert. Albrecht cites with approval Eamon Duffy's remark that purgatory was "the defining doctrine of medieval Catholicism" (p. 1). However, it is unclear whether, and indeed seems fairly unlikely that (as Duffy has elsewhere shown, for instance in his superbly researched micro-historical account The Voices of Morebath [2001]), this doctrine was instantly thrown out with the English Reformation. Indeed, purgatorial thought seems to persist in the form of a poetry of suffering that all three of Albrecht's chosen exemplars illustrate, albeit in very different ways. Of those poems that share a title in Herbert's The Temple, more (five) are given that of "Affliction" than any other. My own view has consistently been that this kind of affliction is related to the Deus absconditus and to Herbert's fleeting, provisional but in the end successful efforts to learn how to "read" and "hear" God's divine signs: this is an orthodox Augustinian stance ("tolle, et lege"). I don't feel that this view is undermined - rather I...