The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace by Brian Cummings, and: Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England by Timothy Rosendale (review)

710 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE matter" (71) but more likely promises of physical health in this world and of a glorified resurrected body in the next. The Lollards distrusted depictions of the Trinity because they thought them idolatrous, not because they depicted its persons "asliving beings" (19). Stanbury generally treats the Lollards as if they were Manicheans, horrified by matter itself. While I find Stanbury in The Visual Object of Desire shaky on religious terminology, I genuinely admire her skills as a literary critic. Her virtues come to the fore whenever she pays minute attention to the language of texts, but especially in the second ofthis book's three sections, "Chaucer's Sacramental Poetic:' In three chapters focusing respectively on Chaucer's classical romances and dream visions, The Clerk's Tale, and The Prioress's Tale, Stanbury offers sharp-eyed, subtle, and provocative interpretations of the interactions among vision, bodies, and ritual. Stanbury's readings of Chaucer show the complexity of medieval literary treatments of vision, how acts of seeing raise issues of political and ecclesiastical power, erotic subjectivity, literary authority, vernacular poetics, and the relationship ofindividual to community. If I was not persuaded by some of the arguments tying specific texts to the Lollard image debate, I found the book clever and often fun to read. While it cannot be recommended as a primer about the literary influences of the Lollard image controversy, it can be appreciated as the work of a mind as livelyas the images it contemplates. Monica Brzezinski Potkay TheCollege of William & Mary The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace. By Brian Cummings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 (paperback: 2007). ISBN 9780 -19-818735-6 (cloth), 978-0-19-922633-7 (paper). Pp. xviii + 470. $209.00 (cloth), $55.00 (paper). Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England. By Timothy Rosendale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-521-877749 . Pp. x + 237. $95.00. Scholarly interest in the impact of religious controversy on the literature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England is stronger now than it has ever been. However, while fine studies of individual authors and works abound, Brian Cummings' The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace and Timothy Rosendale's Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England provide a larger perspective on the Reformation's crises of interpretation and representation. Cummings' book, at 431 pages (not counting notes and bibliography) is the wider-ranging of the two, covering more than 150 years and BOOK REVIEWS 711 examining the literary productions of everyone from Luther, Erasmus, and Calvin to Sidney, Donne, and Milton. Rosendale's book, which focuses on the Book of Common Prayer and its impact on the English religious and literary imagination, is more modest in scope; however, the two books complement rather than compete with one other, and both are essential reading for anyone interested in the literature of the English Reformation. In Cummings' hands, "Reformation literature" is a capacious category indeed, encompassing a range of genres and authors who are Catholic, Calvinist, and everything in between. The violence and extremism that raged through all of Early Modern Christendomfor more than acenturywas,Cummingsargues,partofaSingle crisis: one that was about textual interpretation and ultimately about grammar. In turning from the Vulgate Bibleto the Hebrew and Greek texts of scripture, scholars had to wrestle with the fact that aspects of Christian doctrine-most crucially, issues of grace and justification-sometimes depended on the tenses, moods, and syntax of one language and could not be rendered perfectly in another. Although the Reformation promised the "literal truth" of the Bible,"the phrase 'literal truth' is at best a paradox, perhaps an oxymoron. What is literal is made up of letters, of words. This expression, then ... depends on a process inevitably interpretative" (5). As Cummings argues, in an age of religious conflict, when so much was at stake, "[l]inguistic solecism could hardly be distinguished from theological error" (IO). Starting from this premise, Cummings traces the interrelationship of grammar and grace through the lives and works of more than a dozen writers in genres that include polemics, sermons, grammatical handbooks, theological treatises, and lyric and epic verse; indeed, everyone...