The term early modern necessarily invokes definitions of modern and modernity, and while all such terms have long been qualified and contested, Crawford’s book further ruptures historical borders. In his well-reasoned introduction, Crawford defines modernity according to its impulse toward disenchantment and then traces this modern disenchantment to its ancient and early modern roots. He follows this trajectory through allegory because “the dynamics of disenchantment are in fact closely related to the dynamics of allegory” (11): both are fueled by skepticism, interrogation, exposure, renunciation. While allegory often embodies the enchantment modernity purportedly displaces, Crawford argues that allegory is no less marked by projects of disenchantment and that these paradoxical impulses constitute the form’s very existence. Allegory, much like disenchanted modernity, repudiates and seeks to escape from the past but also echoes, reinscribes, and even mourns that past. This historical rupture coincides with allegorical rupture as allegory asserts its vitality even while announcing its own inevitable failures. As such, allegory is—and always has been—a modern form.

In chapter 1, Crawford finds the ancient origins of early modern allegory first in Plato, who resists allegory but reinstates the very paradoxes that sustain it, and next in Augustine, whose theology of incarnation concurrently pulls toward and away from both matter and time. These classical forms “become the primal stuff, the genetic material” (68) that constitutes subsequent allegory. What follows are studies of four early modern allegories that manifest the dualities (material/immaterial, past/future, temporal/eternal) that simultaneously generate allegory and threaten to undo it.

Chapter 2 illustrates how Langland, even as he deploys the language of incarnation to sustain the embodied figures of Piers Plowman, anxiously exposes the potential collapse of this theology and its corresponding allegory. This rupture reflects both a theological and a historical crisis because the bodies of allegory, even as they point toward eternity, fall into the corruption and failure that constitute the temporal sphere, a historical order Langland fears may be irredeemable. As argued in chapter 3, Skelton’s poetry registers an escape from such a threatening history, but this retreat leaves the embodied subject riddled with paranoia and exiled to solitude. Bereft of the cosmic and moral orders that traditionally define it, allegory in Skelton’s hands is defined by the physical and psychological isolation that accompanies disenchantment. Chapter 4 examines the paradoxes of allegory and modernity in The Faerie Queene and its orientation toward an eternity that “both cancels and fulfills history” (146). Even as Spenser casts a vision for an apocalyptic world absent of the enchanting powers of error and vice, the narrative’s movement toward this eschaton is continually, and often violently, thwarted in loss, negation, and inaction. The Redcrosse Knight in the Legend of Holiness thus finds himself suspended between time and eternity, loss and escape, negation and fulfillment. In chapter 5, Crawford describes The Pilgrim’s Progress as an “experiment in disenchanted modernity” (182) that reflects the striving of the secular self to assert a rational, independent, authentic subjectivity. But this secularizing tendency leads Bunyan, as it leads Pilgrim, back toward enchantment, to theologies of incarnation that sustain allegory and propel the subject’s quest. The Pilgrim’s Progress thus suggests that willful enchantment and incarnational poetics can guide, even energize, the projects of secular modernity.

For all its talk of history, the book does little historicizing. Its focus on poetics (as the title indicates) perhaps explains this minimal treatment, but grounding abstract concepts like time and enchantment in historical and material contexts would be helpful to readers. While the connections Crawford forges—between Plato and Augustine, Boethius and Skelton, Spenser and Bunyan, for instance—reflect skillful bridging, they at times border on anachronistic leaping, though always thought provoking. The best historicizing occurs in the Spenser chapter where Crawford explains why it is that allegory in England takes the shape it does in the 1590s. The Bunyan chapter is particularly enjoyable as it challenges the often simplistic and sometimes cursory treatment of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Crawford’s insightful readings of a wide range of literary and philosophical texts will be attractive to a large spectrum of readers, and each chapter offers fresh and compelling interpretations of its central sources. As such, the book promises to be one with which future scholarship on allegory must reckon and contend.