Religion around Emily Dickinson by W. Clark Gilpin (review)

and synthetic’’ and notes that religion scarcely figures in A View (47, 207). Hadfield’s biography will prove useful to any scholar of Renaissance England, and it is an absolute must-read for anyone even remotely invested in Spenser studies. This book will remain important for many years to come. Paul Joseph Zajac McDaniel College W. Clark Gilpin. Religion around Emily Dickinson. Religion Around, Vol. 2. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-27106476 -5. Pp. x + 201. $34.95. The second volume of a new series edited by Peter Iver Kaufman that examines the religious forces surrounding cultural icons, Religion around Emily Dickinson considers the ways in which Emily Dickinson appropriated and imaginatively reshaped religious practices and ideas found in 19th-century New England Protestant culture . Gilpin evinces a broad knowledge of American religious history, as one would expect from the Margaret E. Burton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity and Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School, but he also demonstrates competency in current Dickinson scholarship. Religion around Emily Dickinson contains several insightful readings of individual poems, including a provocative account of ‘‘Some—keep the Sabbath—going to church—’’ that identifies a tinge of mortality underlying the more apparently cheerful declarations, but Gilpin makes few new interpretive claims about Dickinson’s poetry, artistry, or beliefs. He essentially views Dickinson as blending elements of Puritan ideas and practices with selected features of the various emerging romanticisms of her period, resulting in poetry that celebrates the transcendent power of the human mind in a relentlessly naturalistic and death-haunted world. While the book usefully sketches some lesser-known elements of Dickinson’s religious context (including the poetry and prose of Methodist Phoebe Palmer; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s best-selling novel about heaven, The Gates Ajar; and the memoir of evangelical Sarah Osborn), it does not cover the full range of that context or of Dickinson’s religious interests. For example, there is no mention of the immigrant-fueled spread of Catholicism, Dickinson’s use of Madonna imagery, or her appreciation for Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Gilpin deliberately limits his focus to the expanding diversity of 19th-century Protestant thought and two religious issues: the practice of solitude, and ideas concerning heaven, immortality, and eternity. And although he refers to the central concerns and rhetorical strategies of male religious figures such as Henry Ward Beecher, Edward Hitchcock, and William Ellery Channing, Gilpin oddly makes no mention of Charles Wadsworth, the dark and brooding minister of the Philadelphia Arch Street Presbyterian Church, who is a frequently mentioned candidate for Dickinson’s mysterious ‘‘Master.’’ After Beecher, Wadsworth was the most Book Reviews 115 renowned pulpit orator in America in the 19th century, and Dickinson probably heard him preach on more than one occasion, corresponded with him, and owned his published sermons, many of which concerned heaven. The first chapter of Religion around Emily Dickinson, ‘‘Intersections between American Religious History and Literary History,’’ outlines the move in American studies from the initial attention in the 1950s to Puritan thought as centrally formative of American national identity to more recent considerations of the variety of 19th-century religious movements, the transatlantic circulation of religious and philosophical thought, and accounts of women religious leaders and writers—all of which have opened up profitable new lines of thought and interpretation . Gilpen traces Dickinson’s youthful resistance to conversion during the revivals that swept her school and church, and argues that revivalism served as a stimulus for Dickinson’s concern with interiority; however, he says little about other biographical matters concerning religion, such as Dickinson’s numerous appreciative comments on sermons and ministers, her church attendance until well into her thirties, or Rev. Jonathan Jenkins’s assurance to her father in 1873 that Dickinson’s spiritual state was ‘‘sound.’’ As many scholars before him, Gilpen highlights the evidence of Dickinson’s doubt, particularly in the 1850s, without giving equal time to her expressions of faith. Chapters 2 and 3 concern the 19th century’s ‘‘cultural preoccupation with solitude’’ (45), tracing its practice through Jonathan Edwards’s long solitary walks in nature to experience God...