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Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte
Titel
Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England ed. by James D. Mardock and Kathryn R. McPherson, and: Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England by Kimberly Johnson (review)
Ist Teil von
  • Christianity & Literature, 2016, Vol.66 (1), p.168-174
Ort / Verlag
Malibu: Johns Hopkins University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2016
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
ProQuest_Literature Online_英美文学在线
Beschreibungen/Notizen
  • In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: terms love (agape, caritas) is not alien to Christian theology, but the very heart of it. One might say that Herbert is a theologian of love in the Pauline-Augustinian tradition. Elsewhere Drury says as much when he notes Herbert’s debt to the great Doctor of the Western Church: ‘‘St. Augustine was Herbert’s favourite and most congenial theologian, the philosopher of love and the author of the autobiographical Confessions which were a stimulus for Herbert’s autobiographical poetry’’ (252). Drury is finally too good a reader to sustain the argument that George and Edward are ‘‘at one’’ theologically speaking. Drury notes in his analysis of George’s poem ‘‘Divinity’’ that the penultimate stanza exalts the Eucharist as one of the elements of his core beliefs. Yet there is no place for ritual and the sacraments in brother Edward’s minimalist theological scheme. Drury concedes: ‘‘Although suspicion of speculative or ‘discursive’ reason is something George and Edward Herbert shared, that penultimate verse [concerning the Eucharist] is very much George, not Edward Herbert’’ (109). It should be said: other major elements of George’s theology are not ‘‘at one’’ with brother Edward’s beliefs. These complaints do not diminish my enthusiasm for Music at Midnight. The book is exceptional at bringing to life a fascinating musician, poet, thinker, and believer who remains relevant to our times and its challenges. Drury interprets with unfailing sympathy and sensitivity, demonstrating a remarkable gift for discerning the poetics and rhythms of Herbert’s great poems. He is superb at uncovering the smallest details in the poems and the life record to show their importance to understanding Herbert. He is masterful at highlighting wonderful poems seldom anthologized and too little discussed. Rarely does a biography succeed in addressing such a broad audience: literary specialists and novices and general readers of all types (believing and secular alike). Music at Midnight proves that lucid literary criticism free of obfuscating theoretical machinery is still possible. With a keen eye and a faultless ear, John Drury proves just how entertaining, informative, and spiritually nourishing the poet-priest of Bemerton continues to be. Darryl Tippens Abilene Christian University Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England. Ed. James D. Mardock and Kathryn R. McPherson. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8207-0473-9. Pp. viii + 351. $70.00. Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England. By Kimberly Johnson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8122-4588-2. Pp. 237. $59.95. In his afterword to Stages of Engagement John Cox observes, ‘‘Criticism that takes religion seriously is often assumed to arrogate exclusiveness or privilege to itself, 168 Christianity & Literature 66(1) setting itself apart in a narrow realm that distinguishes it from broad-minded and generous critical methods’’ (275). Written with vivid prose and genuine delight, Stages of Engagement and Made Flesh prove truly broad-minded and generous, extending the work of the literary religious turn through a variety of subjects like incarnational poetics, new formalism, periodization, political conciliarism, Reformation, performance theory, and publication history. They exhibit critically contextualized theoretical approaches that have been developing for years, while opening new avenues of research and original inquiry. Mardock and McPherson’s Stages of Engagement positions itself as a quintessential text in ‘‘The Religious Turn’s Second Wave’’ (1). The editors’ introduction and Cox’s afterword disagree on dating the first wave, starting either with Haigh’s and Duffy’s revisionist accounts of the Reformation or with new interest in Shakespeare’s Catholicism, led by Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (2001). They mark the second wave, beginning five or six years ago, by efforts to trade ‘‘the specific belief systems of playwrights or their audiences’’ for ‘‘post-Reformation’s often chaotic confessional sea’’ and ‘‘the blurry spectrum of individual religious experience’’ (9). Growing from that effort, the editors’ decision to address drama arises from theater’s ability ‘‘to highlight the faultlines and the compromises in the stories that Post-Reformation England told itself’’ (6). They avoid the first wave’s ‘‘common habit of conflating religion with politics’’ (10) by exploring drama and ‘‘cultural memory, theology, and the...

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