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WORK TITLE: John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture
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BIRTHDATE: 1971
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http://english.uconn.edu/gregory-kneidel/ * http://english.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/451/2014/04/kneidel.pdf * http://www.dupress.duq.edu/blogs/news/gregory-kneidel-wins-the-john-donne-society-award-for-distinguised-publication-in-donne-studies * http://www.dupress.duq.edu/products/john-donne-and-early-modern-legal-culture-the-end-of-equity-in-the-satyres
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1971.
EDUCATION:Trinity University, B.A., 1993; University of Chicago, M.A., 1994, Ph.D., 1998.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, lecturer, 1999-2001. University of Connecticut, West Hartford, CT, assistant professor, 2001-08, associate professor of English, 2008—.
AWARDS:Research fellowship, Huntington Library, 2012; faculty fellow, University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, 2013-14; John Donne Society Award, 2017.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Margaret Ferguson and Susannah Monta, editors, Teaching Early Modern English Prose, Modern Language Association of America (New York, NY), 2010; Dennis Flynn et al., editors, The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2011; Peter McCullugh et al., editors, The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2011; Margaret Sonser Breen, editor, Critical Insights: Good and Evil, Salem Press (Ipswich, MA), 2012; Julia Reinhard Lupton and Graham Hammill, editors, Political Theology and Early Modernity, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2012; Andrew Escobedo, editor, Edmund Spenser in Context, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 2017; Michael Schoenfeldt, editor, John Donne in Context, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England).
Contributing editor, Poetry of John Donne, vol. 4.1: Songs and Sonnets, Variorum Edition, Indiana University Press; textual editor and associate general editor, Poetry of John Donne, vol. 5: Verse Epistles, Variorum Edition, Indiana University Press.
Contributor to professional journals, including Modern Philology and Review of English Studies.
SIDELIGHTS
University of Connecticut associate professor of English Gregory Kneidel specializes in the study of early modern English prose and poetry, concentrating on canonical authors like Edmund Spenser and—most particularly—John Donne. Donne was a cleric as well as a respected poet and thinker; he came from a Catholic family and had attended both Oxford and Cambridge universities before enrolling as a law student at Lincoln’s Inn. It was not until 1615 that he was ordained into the Church of England, and it was not until 1621 (only ten years before his death) that he was made Dean of St. Paul’s, an important ecclesiastical position. Kneidel’s monographs Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature: The Poetics of All Believers and John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres examine the interrelationship between belief and literature that blossomed in Protestant England at the turn of the seventeenth century.
Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature
In Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature, Kneidel examines the ways in which the theology of St. Paul of Tarsus, one of the most important figures of the early Church, was reflected in the religiously-influenced writings of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. “This densely-written study has a promising thesis,” explained William Gentrup in Christianity and Literature. “It attempts to approach Christian literature of the English Renaissance, so heavily influenced by Reformation subjectivism, from a different theological angle. Instead of the traditional focus on individual sin, guilt, angst, and salvation representative of the Augustinian-Lutheran interpretation of Paul’s theology, it looks for the influence that Paul’s other scriptural teachings had on early modern English literature, particularly the concept of the `poetics of all believers,’ by which Professor Kneidel primarily means Pauline teachings about the church, communal life, and even universal salvation.” “Kneidel wishes to draw attention to how `major writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries struggled to conceptualize an enduring, collective, public ethic of all believers,’” Gentrup said.
Kneidel’s analysis “accords with a growing numbers of scholars who have shown the deeply collectivist nature of English Protestantism and thereby undermined the long-standing coupling of Protestantism with interiority and individualism and Catholicism with exteriority and community,” declared Alison A. Chapman in the Renaissance Quarterly. “While a scholar like Judith Malthy makes this case based on the history of the Book of Common Prayer, Kneidel makes it from a theological angle, showing that the emphasis on communal identity … was a fulfillment of … Paul’s own vision.” “Kneidel’s thesis fits in very well with historical scholarship about the state of the English Church,” wrote Elizabeth Clarke in Modern Philology. “The sense that there is an identification with the plight of the Christian community as well as that of the individual within English Protestantism resonates with the paradox in the early modern Calvinist Church of England identified by historians such as Peter Lake and Anthony Milton—that although Calvinist theology demanded an individual, saving response to God, the ceremonies of the Church of England such as baptism implied a kind of universalism, as did the parish system itself. … The subtitle of this book, `The Poetics of All Believers,’ stresses its vision of St. Paul as homo rhetoricus and gestures toward the essential respect for rhetoric in religious poetry of the early modern period.”
John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture
In the award-winning study John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture, Kneidel links Donne’s background as a lawyer with his later writing. “By examining this argument about the rivalry of equity and law within Donne’s satires,” stated a contributor to the Duquesne University Press Web site, “we achieve a much clearer picture of the complexities of that historical moment.”
Writing in Choice, J.P. Baumgaertner declared that “Kneidel argues that the Satyres are themselves a form of early modern law and, like equity, argue [for] discretion.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, June, 2016, J.P. Baumgaertner, review of John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres, p. 1476.
Christianity and Literature, summer, 2012, William Gentrup, review of Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature: The Poetics of All Believers, p. 669.
Modern Philology, August, 2012, Elizabeth Clarke, review of Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature, p. E28.
Renaissance Quarterly, summer, 2009, Alison A. Chapman, review of Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature, p. 643.
ONLINE
Duquesne University Press, https://www.dupress.duq.edu/ (May 12, 2017), review of John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture; (February 27, 2017), Lori Crosby, “Gregory Kneidel Wins the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies.”
University of Connecticut Department of English, http://english.uconn.edu/ (May 12, 2017), author profile.
Gregory KneidelAssociateProfessor, Department of EnglishUniversity of Connecticut(Rev. May 2016)Date of Appointment at UConn:Aug. 2001EDUCATIONMA/Ph.D. 1994/1998 University of Chicago, English Language and LiteratureB.A.1993Trinity University magna cum laudeEconomics and EnglishPROFESSIONAL HISTORY2008-Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Connecticut2001-2008Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Connecticut1999-2001Lecturer, Department of English, Texas Christian UniversityPUBLICATIONSMonographs╙John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres(Duquesne University Press, Nov. 2015).╙Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature(Palgrave, 2008)Edited Volumes╤Contributing Commentary Editor for Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John DonneVol. 4.1: Songs and Sonets(forthcoming Indiana University Press). ╤Textual Editor and Associate General Editor for Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John DonneVol. 5: Verse Epistles(forthcoming Indiana University Press). Recent Peer Reviewed Book Chapters, Journal Articles, Review Articles╘“Donne’s Sermons in the New Edition” Review of English Studies(forthcoming)╘“Church Controversy” in Andrew Escobedo, ed., Edmund Spenser in Context(forthcoming Cambridge University Press).╘“Law” in Michael Schoenfeldt, ed., John Donne in Context(forthcoming Cambridge UniversityPress).╘“Legal Evidence, Self Betrayal, and the Case of John Donne’s ‘Perfume’,” Modern Philology112:1 (August 2014): 130-53.╘“The Death of Christ in and as Secular Law,” in Julia Reinhard Lupton and Graham Hammill, eds., Political Theology and Early Modernity(University of Chicago Press, 2012),264-81.╘“Bonds, Need, and Morality in King Lear” in Margaret Sonser Breen, ed., Critical Insights: Good and Evil(Salem Press, 2012), 200-12.╘“Ars Praedicandi,” in Peter McCullugh et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon(Oxford University Press, 2011), 4-20.╘“The Formal Verse Satire,” in Dennis Flynn et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of John Donne Studies(OxfordUniversity Press, 2011), 122-33.╘“Teaching the Renaissance Bible, Fully and Perfectly,”inMargaret Ferguson and Susannah Monta, eds., Approaches to Teaching Early Modern English Prose(MLA Publications, 2010),344-52.SELECTEDPROFESSIONAL SERVICEUniversity of Connecticut English Department Promotion, Tenure, Reappointment Committee (2006-09, 2011-13)University of Connecticut English Department Executive Committee (2015-16)President, John Donne Society (2014-15)Secretary/Treasurer, John Donne Society of America (2010-current)NEH Grant Reviewer: Scholarly Editions (2016)Manuscript Reviewer:Christianity and Literature(x2), Modern Philology(x2), PMLA, Religion and Literature(x3),Spenser StudiesNorthwestern University Press, Delaware University Press, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,AshgateSELECTEDHONORS AND AWARDSNEH Major Research Grant for Donne Variorum (co-PI, $270K; 2014-17)UConn Humanities Institute Faculty Fellow (2013-14)Huntington Library Short-Term Research Fellowship (2012)
Gregory Kneidel
Associate Professor
gregory.kneidel@uconn.edu
Phone: 860-570-9188
Office: Hartford Campus
Mailing Address:
University of Connecticut
85 Lawler Road
West Hartford, CT 06110
Gregory Kneidel
Associate Professor. Hartford Campus.
Specialties: Renaissance (poetry and prose), law and literature, textual editing.
Gregory Kneidel wins the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Pu
Congratulations Dr. Gregory Kneidel, recipient of the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies for his book, John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres.
Dr. Kneidel was presented the award at the John Donne Society 32nd Annual Conference.
“Kneidel . . . has with this book filled a significant gap in Donne scholarship. In an original reading of these five largely neglected poems, Kneidel reveals how much a student of the law Donne was . . . [and] argues that the Satyres are themselves a form of early modern law. Highly recommended.” — Choice
Posted by Lori Crosby on February 27, 2017 in News.
John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres
John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres
John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres
Gregory Kneidel
$70.00
November 2015 | $59.00 | cloth | ISBN: 978-0-8207-0481-4
Reviews:
“Kneidel . . . has with this book filled a significant gap in Donne scholarship. In an original reading of these five largely neglected poems, Kneidel reveals how much a student of the law Donne was . . . [and] argues that the Satyres are themselves a form of early modern law. Highly recommended.” — Choice
Book Information:
Though law and satire share essential elements — both aim to correct individual vice, to promote justice, and to claim authority amid competing perspectives — their commonality has gone largely unexplored by both legal theorists and literary critics. Gregory Kneidel, in this thoroughly original work, finds that just such an exploration leads to fascinating new insights for both fields of study.
Reversing the more common association of satire with illegality, especially with libel, Kneidel takes as his test case the five formal verse satires written by a young John Donne in the mid-1590s. The Satyres, a highly regarded but difficult and little-studied group of poems, appeared just as “legal culture” was beginning to emerge in something like its modern, secularized form. By placing the Satyres within the broader historical narrative explaining the triumph of the Anglo-American common-law tradition over other legal jurisdictions, Kneidel demonstrates, too, that Donne was clearly informed about and interested in the legal controversies of the time, those that pitted the common-law tradition against ideas of equity as well as Roman civil and canon law, parliamentary legislation, and royal prerogative.
In fact, Kneidel argues, Donne clearly conceived of his satires as a supplement to — or even a form of — early modern law. The poems specifically engage with jurisprudential conflicts over the role of equity amid the numerous other forms of law that dominated the English legal landscape, as equity was just then losing its independent status and being absorbed by the common-law tradition. Like satire, equity considers and attempts to bridge the distance between justice and law, taking into account the unique circumstances of individual cases. Thus, by examining this argument about the rivalry of equity and law within Donne’s satires, we achieve a much clearer picture of the complexities of that historical moment, together with a fresh and insightful addition to the growing field of literature and early modern legal studies.
Author Information:
GREGORY KNEIDEL is associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature and currently serves as the associate general editor and textual editor of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne.
Kneidel, Gregory. John Donne & early modern legal culture: the end of equity in the Satyres
J.P. Baumgaertner
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.10 (June 2016): p1476.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Kneidel, Gregory. John Donne & early modern legal culture: the end of equity in the Satyres. Duquesne, 2015. 245p bibl index afp ISBN 9780820704814 cloth, $59.00; ISBN 9780820706122 ebook, contact publisher for price
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Kneidel (Univ. of Connecticut), associate general editor and textual editor of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (CH, Feb'01, 38-3183), has with this new book on Donne's Satyres filled a significant gap in Donne scholarship. In an original reading of these five largely neglected poems, Kneidel reveals how much a student of the law Donne was: he was aware of Roman civil and canon law as well as the various systems of legal thinking operative during his day. Early modern English law was, Kneidel claims, as much in the shadows as Donne was in the famous Lothian portrait of him. The clarity, formality, and secularity of the contemporary English court of law had not yet coalesced around common law, which was based on precedent and case law created by court judgments. Instead, among other institutions, equity reigned but was soon to decline. Kneidel argues that the Satyres are themselves a form of early modern law and, like equity, argue discretion based on the circumstances of individual cases. In fact, the author insists that "equity needs satire." Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--J. P. Baumgaertner, Wheaton College (IL)
Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English: The Poetics of All Believers
William Gentrup
Christianity and Literature. 61.4 (Summer 2012): p669.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Sage Publications, Inc.
http://www.sagepub.com
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Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English: The Poetics of All Believers. By Gregory Kneidel. Early Modern Literature in History. Eds. Cedric C. Brown and Andrew Hadfield. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ISBN 978-0230573680. Pp. viii + 203. $85.00.
I was first asked by the Sixteenth Century Journal book review editor to review this volume. Extra duties and pressures at work caused me to miss his deadline. A year and a half later, Christianity and Literature asked for a review of the same book (after the first reviewer chosen returned it). In the end, this seems a more suitable venue because an alternative view of Paul would probably be more appreciated by C&L readers.
This densely-written study has a promising thesis. It attempts to approach Christian literature of the English Renaissance, so heavily influenced by Reformation subjectivism, from a different theological angle. Instead of the traditional focus on individual sin, guilt, angst, and salvation representative of the Augustinian-Lutheran interpretation of Paul's theology, it looks for the influence that Paul's other scriptural teachings had on early modern English literature, particularly the concept of the "poetics of all believers," by which Professor Kneidel primarily means Pauline teachings about the church, communal life, and even universal salvation. In the history of Western thought Reformation theology is viewed as having been a chief cause of modern introspection, anxiety, subjectivity, and individualism. Kneidel wishes to draw attention to how "major writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries struggled to conceptualize an enduring, collective, public ethic of all believers" based on other scriptural topoi in the writings of Paul that emphasize "corporate Christianity," "a Christian identity based in communal life ... threatened by a growing spiritual individualism" (3). He attempts to examine this thesis in very specific places in the works of Spenser, Daniel, Donne, Herbert, and Milton, who, he claims "reformulated corporate Christianity using a scriptural vocabulary that has been overlooked by literary critics more interested in inwardness, subjectivity, and selfhood" (3).
In practice, applying this focus of "Paul's complex ecclesiology" (4) to English Renaissance literature amounts to giving attention to such matters as church continuity and unity, communal order and coherence, messianic rhetoric with its inherent dichotomy between fulfillment and delay, and humanist rhetoric deployed (as Paul did) in the defense of his teachings and controversies in the church, among others (5). While some of these issues seem directly related to ecclesiology, others do not, and hence there is sometimes a disconnect created by Kneidel's exegesis of Renaissance literature as it branches away from his main thesis of alternative communalism versus mainstream individualism.
The bases of these ideas are the following scriptures in which Paul emphasizes a more universalized gospel identity: "I am made all things to all men that I might by all means save some" (1 Cor. 9:22); "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28); Rom. 9-11, especially 10:2 ("there is no difference between the Jew and the Greeke"), in which Paul deals with the relationship between Jews and Gentiles while expecting the fulfillment of a universalizing providence (10). This Paul is "our contemporary" (13), a multiculturalist if you will. He does not advocate the abolition of all identities of race, religion, gender, etc., but the harmonization of them; he does not annihilate all Jewish traditions in his gospel but shows how there is continuity between the old covenant and the new.
As with the scriptural sources, only a few literary passages are employed to illustrate this thesis. Sections of Cantos 1, 10, and 12 of Book I of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Musophilus by Samuel Daniel, four sermons on the conversion of Saint Paul by John Donne, two poems and a few paragraphs from The Country Parson by George Herbert, and, in two separate chapters, some passages of The Reason of Church Government and Adam's soliloquy in Book 10 of Paradise Lost by John Milton comprise the lot. For such a big idea one would expect more manifestation in less obscure places. To be fair, the author admits that this particular view of Paul did not prevail in sixteenth--and seventeenth-century England and that only "traces" of it "influenced the period's scriptural poetics" (8). Much close reading and ingenious exegesis is required to elucidate the topic. The "universalist vocabulary of expecting, anticipating, fulfilling, repeating, waiting, remaining, and delaying" (17) is deployed by these poets for the purpose of advocating, like Paul, "common norms among the many forms of communal life and cultural identity" (19) within the English church. At least that is the plan. The resulting analysis sometimes seems only remotely related.
For example, the chapter "Spenser and Messianism" begins by allegorizing the "old dints" on Redcrosse's shield as the wounds of Christ, and then, via St. Bonaventure, St. Francis, and Calvin on Gal. 6:17 ("I bear the marks of Christ"), these stigmata are interpreted as related to the "continuity" of Christ's warfare (33), and hence, I suppose, church continuity (the main theme). The rest of the chapter is determined to associate Redcrosse with messianism (instead of apocalypticism) in Canto 10, through his "recommissioning" as a "saintly aristocrat" by the hermit Contemplation, and in Canto 12 through connecting him to Moses. Messianic time takes over in Canto 12: Eden's fulfillment is "suspended" because Redcrosse leaves to serve Gloriana. These disparate elements, along with numerous digressions, do not cohere and do not say much that is significant about Spenser's use of Paul's concepts of corporate belief. I think Kneidel wants us to learn that Spenser consciously imitates Paul's notion of the fulfillment/delay dichotomy of messianic prophecy to say something about the English church, but the discussion of the idea does not persuade and, indeed, loses the reader.
As another example, in the last chapter, "Milton and Delay," Kneidel argues that the delay of punishment of Adam in Book 10 of Paradise Lost can be compared to Paul's "messianic, 'already and not yet' rhetoric" (147). Yet, we are told, Adam's questions about the delay of God's justice are based on Milton's use of two classical sources: Plutarch's "On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance" and the "feminine laments of Ovid's Heroides"(!). Kneidel justifies the detailed exposition of these works because they were part of Paul's Greco-Roman world. And yet again, we are told that "Paul was not preoccupied by the delay in divine punishment" (156); he was more concerned about the delay in the Second Coming. And so the exegesis of Adam, Plutarch, and Ovid are only analogous to Paul's teaching: "If Adam's soliloquy means anything, it shows that Milton, like other post-Reformation writers, had to rely on secular, Greco-Roman, and non-Pauline themes in order to give literary life to their version of Paul's theology" (160). This is typical of Kneidel's methodology.
The literature chosen for explication is analyzed according to some framework (neo-Stoicism, property contracts, humanist rhetoric) that is only tangentially or analogously related to the universalist theology of Paul. Heterogeneous elements seem yoked together. The persuasiveness of the argument does not go much further than the following abstraction: "Thus English verse is to humanist poetics and the English nation is to human civilization as diverse members are to the mystical body of Christ" (73).
Rethinking the Turn to Religion might be considered a learned book. There are excursions and diversions into many theological, cultural, and literary byways, but the overall argument of the book just does not cohere.
William Gentrup
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Gentrup, William
Renaissance Quarterly
Summer 2009
Alison A. Chapman
p. 643.
Gregory Kneidel.
Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature.
Early Modern Literature in History Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. vii + 203 pp. index, illus. bibl. £45. ISBN: 978-0-230-57368-0.
Biblical scholarship of the past fifty years has provided a crucial reevaluation of the writings of the apostle Paul. Whereas Paul has traditionally been seen as articulating an introspective, divided self looking inward to his entrenched sinfulness, the vein of scholarship known as the New Perspective has shown us a more outward-oriented Paul, one primarily concerned with welding diverse groups (Jews and Creeks, women and men, slaves and free, etc.) into a single church. The consequences of this alternative view are enormous, for they deemphasize the traditional Pauline view of the soul as divided between the flesh and the spirit. The New Perspective shows us a communal-minded Paul, a writer focused as much on questions of social and political unions as on the individual's interiorized spiritual landscape.
This New Perspective criticism is particularly relevant to scholars of early modern literature and culture since the Reformation was largely fought under the theological banner of Paul. Cregory's Kneidel's interesting, learned, and wideranging book importantly argues that "even during the Reformation, the reinvented Paul of modern biblical scholarship and critical theory was known and imitated" (147). Kneidel's thesis is that key early modern writers (Spenser, Daniel, Donne, Herbert, and Milton) were aware of Paul as homo rhetoricus, and that they used this version of Paul to work toward similarly corporate visions of Englishness and English Protestantism. (Kneidel's title is somewhat misleading since his book is more interested in tracing this strand of Pauline infiuence than in reflecting on what has come to be known as the "turn to religion" in early modern studies). Kneidel's project of tracking appearances of the "activist Paul" through early modern literature proves consistently provocative and provides him with a series of original insights into the texts under scrutiny.
Although he does not categorize them in these ways, Kneidel seemingly has two different kinds of chapters. First, there are those in which the authors under scrutiny are indisputably and pointedly using Paul. In others, Kneidel argues for Pauline infiuence based on a less-specific allusiveness or on a homology between early modern texts and Pauline writings. Not surprisingly, chapters of the first type are the strongest in the book. Exemplary of the first category is Kneidel's brilliant chapter on Donne in which he discusses Donne's relatively neglected sermons preached on the feast day of the Conversion of St. Paul. Paul's conversion has been read as the quintessential expression of inwardness, and given the analogies to Donne's own conversion, we might expect that, in these sermons, Donne would take up very personal matters of faith and sin. Instead, as Kneidel splendidly shows, Donne is here consistently preoccupied with the community of the church. In chapters 5 and 6 and in his conclusion, Kneidel argues convincingly that the collectivist Paul influenced the works of Herbert and Milton.
In other chapters, Kneidel relies more on a homology between early modern texts and Paul's writings, and here his arguments are less watertight. His discussion of Daniel's Musophilus rests on the observation that both Paul and Daniel pervasively use images of building and destroying to discuss communal life. This similarity is thought-provoking, but Kneidel may move a bit too quickly from similarity to assumptions about causal relationship and decisive influence. In his Spenser chapter, Kniedel argues for the influence of Paul-the-collectivist, and his focus on Paul's messianism in book 1 of The Eaerie Queene offers an interesting alternative to Spenserian scholarship's privileging of apocalypticism. His argument, however, occasionally over-leverages textual details in a way that does not seem wholly convincing.
This book's most valuable contribution is the way it allows us to think outside the governing critical assumption that Pauline thinking is interiorized thinking. This assumption, in turn, bas led to another one: that in studying Christianity in early modern literature (and especially in the devotional poets), we are studying individual subjectivity. As Kneidel shows, however, paying attention to the "other" Paul shows us "a more political and humanistic view of the Englisb Reformation's scriptural poetics than is usually afforded to literary crides" (146). Kneidel's argument here is excellent, and it accords with a growing numbers of scholars who have shown the deeply collectivist nature of English Protestantism and thereby undermined the longstanding coupling of Protestantism with interiority and individualism and Catholicisim with exteriority and community. While a scholar like Judith Malthy makes this case based on the history of the Book of Common Prayer, Kneidel makes it from a theological angle, showing that the emphasis on communal identity articulated by writers like Spenser and Milton was a fulfillment of, rather than a falling away from, Paul's own vision for the early Christian church.
ALISON A. CHAPMAN
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Review:
Gregory Kneidel, Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English
Literature: The Poetics of All Believers
Reviewed Work(s): Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature:
The Poetics of All Believers by Kneidel
Review by: Elizabeth Clarke
Source:
Modern Philology,
Vol. 110, No. 1 (August 2012), pp. E28-E31
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature: The Poetics of All Believers.
Gregory Kneidel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. vii þ 203.
The title of this book is an index of its debt to a similarly titled 2004 article by Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti, published in the journal Criticism, the ideological commitment of which is thinly veiled, and this might explain some of the aspects of this book that at first appear confusing. I was very pleased by the enthusiastic citing of John Coolidge’s excellent volume (The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible [Oxford University Press, 1970]) but confused by many of the theological terms used in the introduction to this book, such as ‘‘Pauline universalism,’’ not to mention the insistent citing of the original Greek for key terminology. In fact, chapter 1 functions much better as an introduction: it makes clear that the book is using the reassessment of Paul by theologians in the ‘‘New Perspective’’ movement and by literary theorists such as Alain Badiou, Giorgi Agamben, and Slavoj Zˇizˇek, admitting that ‘‘both are hostile to the version of Paul that the Reformation institutionalized’’ (9). The ‘‘New Perspective’’ reading of Romans privileges chapters 9–11, which deal with the difficulties of maintaining Christian community during the delayed expectation of Christ’s return, over an intensely individualized reading of chapters 6–8, which has informed many Reformed Protestant accounts of early modern religious poetry. Although this book sometimes looks like a historicist account (the images of contemporary legal texts in the discussion of Herbert are a good example) it is more often than not concerned with ideologically committed interpretation rather than historical context. Thus the reading of the ‘‘old dints’’ in Redcrosse’s armor as stigmata is less convincing to a historicist reader than the interpretation of Herbert’s ‘‘Obedience’’ in the light of early modern legal texts
A key aspect of the difference between Calvinist and Catholic paradigms of salvation, and indeed of the division within the Church of England into what was often seen as the ‘‘church visible’’ and the ‘‘church invisible,’’ is the event of conversion, that most intimate encounter between holy God and individual human being. In a rhetorical analysis of four of Donne’s sermons, Kneidel claims that the theological imperative of conversion is reduced to a rhetorical commonplace. About Donne’s version of Acts 28, he states, ‘‘Paul gets buffeted around by the storm and then hastily condemned and then deified by the Maltese—that’s about it’’ (88). Dismissive as it sounds, this judgment is arrived at by an authoritative assured rhetoric that is ultimately persuasive. However, this analysis leaves the reader feeling a little cheated. Kneidel is right to raise the implausibility of the various claims of previous critics to see into Donne’s mind, and he does recognize that these sermons have been overlooked by critics and therefore are perhaps of minor interest, but the approach here fails to do justice to the range of emotion expressed across the body of Donne’s sermons, let alone the intense subjectivity of the Holy Sonnets.
The discussion of meritorious suffering in chapter 5 is very relevant to Herbert’s poetry and to much early modern discourse in the wake of the hegemony of Catholic doctrine on this point. However, to ask whether the expression of personal anguish at the end of the poem ‘‘Dialogue’’ is an indication of extra, meritorious suffering—‘‘Does the speaker’s heart-break complete the redemptive suffering that Christ had already completed?’’ (103)—is surely a mistake. In Herbert’s theology, the exclamation is an emotional response to the suffering of Christ, a response that is salvific because it acknowledges the impossibility of adding to Christ’s sufferings. Like ‘‘The Thanksgiving,’’ which also tries to weigh up Christ’s suffering, and specifically to compensate for it by human effort, the poem ends with an incoherent recognition that God does not demand recompense. The implicit message of both poems is that Christ’s suffering carries a message of love to the individual who has only to respond to God’s overtures. The treatment of ‘‘Obedience’’ is much more successful in terms of the aim of the book: the imagery engages a body of l aw that deals not with the believer only but with all subjects to the crown. The background of conveyancing law that Kneidel sketches out is used with acute sensitivity to illuminate the language of the poem.
One of the disappointing aspects of this book is that it deals with such a tiny fraction of early modern writing by well-known authors—canto 12 of The Faerie Queene , two poems of The Temple, four sermons of Donne’s. If the big idea spelled out in the introduction is really the corrective to current criticism that the author seems to believe, the reader would expect a more thoroughgoing rereading of the major works of these poets. It may be that the concern with marginal works is an acknowledgment that this thesis merely tweaks conventional criticism: at various points in the book Kneidel does admit that his observations do not hold true for all the works of all the authors he deals with. For instance, the ‘‘betrothal plot’’ between Christ and the Church that he sees as central to Milton’s Of Reformation is, in its more familiar form, the betrothal of the individual soul to Christ, a reading of the trope popular in the Reformation that gives rise to some of the most sublime poetry of the seventeenth century. The reader of this book longs for its careful rereadings and intelligent contextualization to be exercised on some of the familiar and great poetry of the early modern period, as in the conclusion, when Kneidel’s considerable intelligence, stylishness, and profound reading are brought to bear on Paradise Lost. The insight that Adam’s speeches in book 10 are influenced as much by Plutarch and Ovid as by Paul is convincingly demonstrated, and the implications of the idea that Milton needs the classical authors to represent Paradise effectively go a long way to demonstrate the ‘‘universalism’’ that is encoded in the quotation from Paul that begins this book: ‘‘I am made all things to all men that I might by all means save some’’ (I Cor. 9:22).
What is missing from much of this book is the kind of evidence that a reader has come to expect from historicist writing and that has strengthened early modern literary criticism enormously: evidence from contemporary bible commentary, evidence of the popularity of certain ways of interpreting Paul in the late sixteenth century, evidence that the writer under consideration is using a particular text or has historical links to a certain political position. The chapter on ‘‘Daniel and Edification’’ is perhaps the most brilliantly argued in the book. As well as an impressive range of contemporary texts, Kneidel adduces an ecclesiastical context that is extremely convincing, pitting the neo-Stoic Samuel Daniel against the Puritan Fulke Greville. The reader almost does not notice the lack of evidence about contemporary readings of Paul, which is the specific context Kneidel has claimed for his book. In fact, Kneidel’s thesis fits in very well with historical scholarship about the state of the English Church. The sense that there is an identification with the plight of the Christian community as well as that of the individual within English Protestantism resonates with the paradox in the early modern Calvinist Church of England identified by historians such as Peter Lake and Anthony Milton— that although Calvinist theology demanded an individual, saving response to God, the ceremonies of the Church of England such as baptism implied a kind of universalism, as did the parish system itself, hangover as it was from a Catholic system. A study of the communal, “universalist” element, in Kneidel’s terms, would indeed be an interesting corrective to much recent theologically sensitive literary criticism, which tends to focus on the holiness of the individual. The author is right to suggest that the very appeal to rhetorical norms is in fact a universalist one—Calvinist poets who ignore rhetorical conventions in the interests of subjective religion are universally bad. The subtitle of this book, ‘‘The Poet-ics of All Believers,’’ stresses its vision of St. Paul as homo rhetoricus and gestures toward the essential respect for rhetoric in religious poetry of the early modern period. This vision could be a historicist one, and indeed claims to be so in the introduction, where Kneidel states that the authors studied ‘‘did not reject the ethic of corporate Christianity even as they rejected many of the theological doctrines and some of the ecclesiastical disciplines of mediaeval Catholicism’’ (3). However, the range of evidence adduced here is not usually sufficient to convince the reader, drawing fundamentally as it does on the ideas of twentieth-century theology, although the thesis is supported by some admittedly acute literary criticism throughout.
Elizabeth Clarke
University of Warwick