Reviewing a collection of thirty-five essays could very easily result in a vapid survey, with a brief description and scorecard shown for each contribution. I have decided not to write such a piece. Instead, I take two soundings: How are we doing literary history these days? And how are we doing early modern religious literary history, almost ninety years after Herbert Butterfield’s signal intervention of 1931, The Whig Interpretation of History? I will, however, give a scorecard for the work of the editors of this volume. Working with thirty-five contributors (effectively thirty-six, when one counts the excellent beginner’s guide to bibliographical resources) demands gargantuan effort, which these editors have made.

The book’s division tells us how we are doing literary history: We start with actual institutions (part 1, “The Religious History of Early Modern Britain: Forms, Practices, Belief,” seven chapters, the most original being devoted to the “Origins of Anglicanism”). Literary institutions (i.e., genres) occupy part 2 (“Literary Genres for the Expression of Faith,” eight chapters). Only in part 3 (“Religion and the Early Modern Writer”) do we move to specific authors (Colet, Foxe, Spenser, Marlowe, the Sidneys, Donne, Hutchinson, Milton). Part 4 (“Interpretative Communities,” nine chapters) is devoted to smaller-scale reading communities (e.g., lay households, female religious houses, sectarian groupings, the Jewish diaspora, or New World writers). Part 5 (“Early Modern Religious Life: Debates and Issues,” seven chapters) is a kind of vacuuming up of topics not suited to the previous divisions (e.g., the Bible, science and religion, body and soul, the craft of dying, or secular and religious love).

The most obvious inference to draw from this structural arrangement is that we do literary history from general to particular—that is, we look at works through the lenses of institutions, both actual and literary. The question of the competing jurisdictions of church and state from the late fourteenth to the late seventeenth centuries dominates part 1, while the eight chapters devoted to genres in part 2 prepare for consideration of the species of our discipline, authors. Women writers and coadjutants, such as Lucy Hutchinson and Mary Sidney Herbert (about whom there is an especially brilliant essay) play a very significant part here. Authors whom we might have expected to play greater roles (e.g., John Bale, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Fulke Greville, Andrew Marvell, or John Bunyan) are demoted to bit parts. Shakespeare looms in absence for understandable reasons. The mode is, for the most part, that of an overview; we do not argue enough or disagree much in volumes of this kind.

The disposition of matter, moving as it does from historical to literary generic to literary specific, out again to literary communities, and then to thematic issues, makes complete sense to me. One might, however, note that, from the ample evidence of this volume, and from some excellent essays in part 3, our discipline is very much more competent in dealing with specific authorial careers. Some of the generic chapters (e.g., “Prayer and Prophecy,” “Drama,” “Sermon,” “Autobiographical Writings”) are excellent introductions to a field. Others are examples of what literary history was for far too much of the twentieth century: a descriptive catalogue of random items found while the literary historian rummaged through the literary attic.

How are we doing religious cultural history? The most obvious dates from which to gain perspective on that question might be 1992, when Eamon Duffy initiated a revisionist account of the English Reformation, or 2004, when Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti gave voice and dynamism to a “religious turn” in early modern English literary studies. I myself think we need to lengthen the historiographical measure still further—back to Butterfield’s intervention in 1931—in order to understand where a volume of this kind takes us with regard to Protestant triumphalism. Butterfield had it that the Whig historian “likes to imagine religious liberty issuing beautifully out of Protestantism when in reality it emerges painfully and grudgingly out of something quite different, out of the tragedy of the post-Reformation world” (88). Historians tried for the last two thirds of the twentieth century to take this profound observation on board. For specifically literary historians, however, it was more difficult to absorb Butterfield, since the master code of liberty, which is also the master code of Whig history, is wound tightly into the DNA of literary studies itself. Does the volume under review absorb the Butterfieldian perception?

In some ways, yes, but in many other ways, no. Many essays work out from the sheer intensity and extremities, not to say agonies, of early modern religion, in its Catholic as well as its various Protestant forms (take, for example, “Lyric Poetry, The Sermon, Autobiographical Writings,” the essay on John Foxe). Other essays, however, remain firmly locked in the master code of both Whig historiography and Whig literary criticism, whereby radical dissent (regardless of its content) is always preferred over intelligent commitment to tradition, and dissent is always assumed to be progressive. That still-vital Whig tradition underplays, among other things, the destruction of popular religious practice, such as that produced by Protestant iconoclasm, Biblical literalism, the relentless denial of free will (only minimally rescued by Arminianism), and the fact that the radical frequently shifts to become the repressive establishment in the English Reformations.

This volume as a whole has no account of iconoclasm or the Puritan attack on theater, and only passing and superficial accounts of literalism. More surprisingly, it has no sustained account of Calvinist theology, particularly the soul-crushing Calvinist soteriology of double predestination. I sense that early modern English religious history will soon undergo very significant revision, again—many of the essays in this volume point in that direction. Others, such as those on sectarian groups and on Milton, will provide good examples of still-determined Whig scholarship.