The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism by Louis Dupré (review)

extends from the first Christian churches. Catholic novelists like Taylor used their fiction to portray Catholicism’s deeper historical roots in England. Their characters’ enduring loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church and the lasting presence of timeworn monasteries and cathedrals demonstrates Catholicism’s rightful status as progenitors of the Church of England. While these popular religious authors tried to reimagine the Reformation in such a way that supported the historicity and future of either the Protestant or Catholic churches, in Barnaby Rudge Charles Dickens complicates and critiques the arguments of popular religious novels. Dickens does not view the attempts of either side to historicize the past and support their religious agenda as successful. Instead, ‘‘Dickens rejects not only Sir Walter Scott but the foundations of the emergent religious historical novel, which insisted on the potency of cultural memory to guard against Protestant—and, later, Catholic—collapse’’ (185). In Dickens’s novel, neither Protestants nor Catholics possess histories rich enough to entirely supplant the past of the other. A mutual harmony ought to be the goal of both sides and can be achieved if heated debates over abstract theological differences are set aside for the immediate concerns of daily life. In the breadth of six concise yet comprehensive chapters, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein’s Victorian Reformations provides a rich analysis of the connections made between historical fiction and religious controversy in the nineteenth century. Burstein maintains both an expansive scope and meticulous analysis of popular religious authors from both Protestant and Catholic persuasions. She distinguishes herself from past studies not only by devoting critical attention to less-studied authors, but also by the theme of feminine gender concerns threaded throughout her analysis. Burstein notes the essentially feminine character of Protestant novels’ depictions of Bible reading and the exploitation of Mary I’s false pregnancy and obsession with Philip of Spain. In Reformation novels, reading the Bible occurs within a private domestic sphere, implying its essentially feminine character. In novels reimagining the Marian persecutions, Mary I’s defiled femininity is used as evidence of her madness and the cause of her diabolical persecution of Protestants. By including feminine concerns, Burstein’s work prepares the way for further study of popular nineteenth-century religious authors, while also providing new insights into the religious landscape of Victorian novelists. Sierra Davies Baylor University Louis Dupré. The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013; Pp. x+387.: ISBN: 978-0-268-02616-5, $36.00 (pbk). The Quest of the Absolute completes Louis Dupré’s ambitious trilogy on the ‘‘spiritual sources of modern culture’’ (337). Dupré, who is now professor emeritus at Yale, embarked on this endeavor in Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the 350 Christianity & Literature 64(3) Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (Yale, 1993) and continued it in The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (Yale, 2004). Across these volumes, Dupré argues that the nominalist theology of the late Middle Ages drove a wedge between creator and creation. This meant that the links between the mind and a rationally ordered reality were no longer secured by a transcendent God. In light of the resulting epistemological uncertainty, the great project of the Enlightenment was to ‘‘establish a new foundation of truth in reason alone’’ (338). The Romantics became increasingly skeptical of reason’s ability to bear this weight, though: ‘‘In the early nineteenth century, the suspicion that the principle of pure rationality was insufficient to serve as the exclusive ground of consciousness became a certainty’’ (338). Against the at times reductionist models of epistemology and human subjectivity offered up by Enlightenment figures like Locke and Condillac, the Romantics described a complex and even mysterious subject. Dupré concludes that for novelists as different as Goethe, Austen, and Jean Paul, ‘‘What is uniquely Romantic [about their work] is that the person has become a question to himself’’ (190). The most significant Romantic philosophers, meanwhile, plumbed the depths of subjectivity in the hopes of transcending it: ‘‘[S]ince there appeared to be no way to escape the mind’s self-enclosed subjectivity, idealist philosophers as well as Romantic...