The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (review)

How should we understand Bishop John Fisher's claim in his "Sermon [. . .] preached upon a good Friday" (ca. 1531-1534) that "the leaves of this booke be the armes, the handes, legges, and feete, with the other members of his most precious and blessed body [of Christ]" (quoted in Kearney, 5)? Fisher's equation is the avowed starting point of James Kearney's remarkable study of the various, complex, and often surprising manifestations of and responses to the "crisis of representation" attending the Reformation's return to the book; a crisis precipitated by an ambivalence about the "carnal dimension of texts" (3) such as that explicated and celebrated in Fisher's sermon. The contours of this crisis are brilliantly outlined by Kearney in chapters devoted to works by Erasmus, Tyndale, More, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Bacon. As Kearney's incisive exegesis unravels a wealth of examples and passages drawn from these texts, the result is a masterful and imaginative history of the recalcitrant "incarnate text" — at once object and idea, immanent and transcendent, letter and spirit, image and word — which follows this wayward item from its origins in the Reformation, through its seventeenth-century deployment in formulations of civility and barbarism, to its reinscription in modern scientific discourse with Bacon's consignment of the sacred text to a continually-deferred "second coming" (41).

This ambitious project is everywhere governed by Kearney's prodigious intelligence, and his ability to make the familiar strange by re-examining the commonplaces of critical and historical approaches to the Reformation is as engaging as it is revealing. His consideration of Fisher's allegory of textual corporality, for instance, deepens and corrects the reductive view of the Reformation as fundamentally a movement from Catholic embodiment to Protestant transcendence. Elsewhere, Kearney shows that the familiar dichotomy between word and image, traditionally set at the heart of Reformation iconoclasm, is at once far from concrete in the period and a product of the crisis of representation his study describes. When he concludes his discussion of Erasmus' flirtation with "logolatry" (53) by showing that "the Lutheran Tyndale adopts an Erasmian optimism about the ability of writing to transmit God's word and will, while Erasmus' friend and colleague More adopts a Lutheran pessimism about the ability of written language to transcend its fallen condition" (84), the subtleties and nuances of Kearney's engagement with the "paradoxes of the material letter" (84) are clear and compelling.

The Incarnate Text opens with a lengthy and helpful introduction which details Kearney's method in relation to intellectual history and more recent material cultural approaches to the history of objects, and describes his specific contribution as lying in his insistence that Reformation subjects' relationships to materiality must be referred to early modern religious culture. As it unfolds throughout the book, this argument is enabled by Kearney's thoughtful merger of methodologies, a union so well-suited to his subject that it brings forth epiphanies, large and small, in every chapter. We are reminded, for instance, that the incarnate text of Fisher's sermon is both literally and figurative flesh, since "once can see hair follicles, tiny veins, discolorations where the living skin carried scars or blemishes", evidence of parchment's "history as flesh" (7). When Spenser's Redcrosse Knight gives away the sacred book in his exchange of gifts with Prince Arthur, Kearney convincingly argues that the knight's subsequent career in Book One of The Fairie Queene demonstrates his failure to distinguish between book and text — one an object that can be given away, the other transcendent and spiritual, which "any Christian reader ought always to 'have' regardless of his or her proximity to any material manifestation of that text" (122). In his discussion of Augustine's narrative of Christian conversion, which is offered as the flip-side of the transformation to apostasy staged in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Kearney focuses on the textual detail [End...