David Loewenstein and John Marshall, eds. Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture

Seventeenth-Century News, Spring-Summer, 2008 by Eugene D. Hill

David Loewenstein and John Marshall, eds. Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. X 318 pp. $96.00. Review by EUGENE D. HILL, MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE.

"For there must be ... heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest ...," the Scripture asserts categorically, though where King James cited here (with the Rheims) transliterates the Greek haereseis of I Corinthians 11.19, more recent Bibles give the safely insipid "factions." Thereby hangs a tale, indeed many tales, not least in Elizabethan and Stuart England, as this valuable collection of a dozen articles by as many hands makes evident. Just what, after all, is a heresy? The strongest papers here exhibit seventeenth-century authors posing just that question.

The pieces may be divided into three rough groups: those exploring authors recognized or claimed in their day as heretics; pioneers of tolerationist thought who downplayed the role of heresy in their writings; and philosophers of heresy who offered synoptic accounts or phenomenological or genealogical definitions of the phenomenon of heresy.

Worthwhile contributions here explore in welcome breadth Anne Askew, the Anabaptists and their opponents, the so-called Family of Love, and Gerrard Winstanley. By way of contrast, the essay on Paradise Lost by John Rogers focuses on a brief passage early in Book Eleven (14-44), in which we are asked to locate the poet's "curious amalgam of Arminianism, Socinianism and ... Arianism" (204). This Polonian classification Rogers explains as follows: "the actual work that the Socinian Christ performed as priest stands in the starkest possible opposition to the work of Christ as represented by mainstream Trinitarian theologians. Christ's priestly sacrifice, for example, has to be imagined as comprising two distinct actions, mactation and oblation." The analysis continues: "What the Socinian Father accepts at the altar of the heavenly tabernacle, after the Resurrection and Ascension, is not Christ's life, or his body, but his offer; he accepts Christ's voluntarily undertaken act of oblation. And it is the freely willed gesture of the priestly offering that is the single most consequential act performed by the Socinian Christ, and the primary reason he merits his elevation to the Father's right hand" (209). Not all readers will easily and happily follow Rogers' invitation to view this distinction of priestly offices as vital to the passage in question, or to the epic as a whole .

The collection ends with a pair of worthwhile papers on late seventeenth-century tolerationist thought. John Marshall provides an exemplary account of the context in which Locke penned his three Letters on Toleration in the period 1685-89, reminding us of how alive virulent earlier views remained in those years. "For Beza, whose 1554 De Haereticis remained the subject of widespread discussion as late as the 1680s, liberty of conscience was a 'diabolical doctrine.' Edwards asserted that toleration was 'a most transcendent ... and fundamentall evil'; as 'original sin ' was the 'most fundamentall sin, all sin: having the seed and spawn of all in it: So a Toleration hath all errors in it, and all evils." And "Jurieu argued that toleration was itself 'a Socinian doctrine, the most dangerous of all those of that sect, since it was on the way to ruin Christianity and place all religions on the same plane,' holding that only Arminians and Socinians had supported universal religious toleration" (265-66). Marshall makes it clear how carefully Locke had to tread in arguing for generosity toward readily bruised consciences, as does N.H. Keble in an informed essay on Richard Baxter.

Some of the best pieces in Loewenstein and Marshall consider the curious genre of heresiography--"a neologism derived from Ephraim Pagitt's 1645 book of that title" (137), as Ann Hughes notes in her fine contribution entitled "Thomas Edwards's Gangraena and heresiological traditions." John Coffey (in the preceding piece, also of great merit) views Edwards' panoramic taxonomy of heresy as one of several "rambling hate lists" in which, "beneath the veneer of objectivity and precision, Edwards's method was pretty haphazard. He made no effort to grade his sects and heresies in order of seriousness, and implied that all of these movements belonged to a single demonic conspiracy against the kingdom of god" (111). Hughes assumes a more sympathetic stance: for her the constant breakdown of systematic arrangement betokens an historical moment and a stylistic choice: "The structure (or lack of structure) ... parallels his account of the 'reality' of religious turmoil." " The organization of the text is always breaking down in the face of the pressures of his immediate situation, with the continued emergence of ever more horrifying errors. The very look" of the tome "was affected, as the last pages of each part resorted to a tiny type in order to incorporate information pouring in at the last moment" (150-51). Hughes takes this stance of overwhelmed chronicler very seriously, seeing it as vouching for the reliability of Gangraena as a historical source. Perhaps she's right, though a touch of Defoe-like posing may underlie the faux naivete.