- Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History
The argument of Cultural Reformations is that the religious transformations in English Protestantism concomitantly transformed culture as a whole. Thirty-three contributors consider the impact of the English, Protestant, religion on what the editors categorize as histories, “spatialities,” doctrines, legalities, “outside the law,” literature, communities, labor, and selfhood. The book largely treads familiar ground as it considers the ways the long and evolving religious changes, ranging from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, may have directly reformed other aspects of life. While it transcends a narrow definition of literature, it pays little attention to voyages of discovery, diplomacy, and trade, or even travel writing; or other religious writing such as Bible translation, polemic, sermons, and homilies (though they round up the usual mystics); or international book history and the reprint culture in which translation played such a crucial role. The asymmetries of status, gender, or age, as might be found in domestic writing such as letters, cookery, and health manuals, do not appear, though Colin Burrow on “households” is one of the book's outstanding essays. Nor do Scotland, Ireland, and Wales make much of an appearance, and neither does the flowering of long poems and national histories (Ardis Butterfield's chapter of that name is about diversity). There is a distinct lack of sex and an almost complete failure of merriment.
As one would anticipate, there are some very good essays in the collection. [End Page 324] Some of the best are at an angle to literature, such as the chapters on medical writing about childbirth or the survey of London bookselling, buying, and reading. Tim Machan's analysis of semantic and morphological change in the English language is an overview that manages to explain the language, the ambitions of the grammarians, and the bedrock nationalism of their defense and demonstration of English grammar, though it is not clear that the changes he describes can be due to an evolving Protestantism. The chapter titled “Idleness” ranges beyond its key word, and, incidentally, contains the book's best subtopic: “the rise and rise of the sturdy beggar.” Room should always be made for good work only loosely connected to a book's subject: the final chapter is a history of Continental readings of Augustine's Confessions, not broadly about autobiography at all, as is evidenced by its innocence of the long bibliography on life writing from Georg Misch via psychoanalytically-oriented medieval analyses of writers and artists to the Annales school.
Pride of place goes to the chapters that rehearse key concepts in Western religious culture, such as ideas about saints or the Eucharist. These chapters have a similarly angular relationship to the ambitions of the book's intended scope. They do, however, point to the most striking aspect of Cultural Reformations: the editors’ unwillingness to examine presuppositions and received ideas about the triumph of an innate, Insular Protestantism, to consider the jagged nature of “reform's” eventual victory, or indeed what ended up being victorious. This is a book with an apparent grand narrative about cultural change in one country, and largely in one vernacular, that ignores the secular incursions of globalism into everyday life: trade, exploration, migration, as well as the unprecedented expansion of learning through books imported and translated. That is, the book seems to endorse the reformers’ claim to reestablish an originary dispensation, rather than looking around and forward to arguably equally influential changes. Many of its determinedly theological contributors take for granted the often-repeated assumption that knowledge was always moral, despite the fact that really, often, it was not. Rome is the site of contestation; but that Thomas More should be the book's central figure (and central Latinist) is an instance of the contradictions inherent in its orientation. One might argue that this is a plus.
This volume appears in a new series, in which the publishers insist that they “mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather [End Page 325] than codify. Instead of summarizing...