An Enduring Discourse Community?: Some Studies in Early Modern English History and Culture.

David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, eds. The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. Cambridge University Press, 1998. xiv + 335 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-59436-7.

Lori Anne Ferrell. Government by Polemic: James I, the King's Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity; 1603-1625. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. xiii + 231 pp. $49.50. ISBN: 0-8047-3221-3.

Achsah Guibbory. Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xiii + 275 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-59355-7.

Skiles Howard. The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England. Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. xii + 222 pp. $37.50. ISBN: 1-55849-144-9.

James Loxley. Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword. Early Modern Literature in History. Houndsmill and London: Macmillan Press Ltd. and New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1997. xv + 250 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-312-17608-2 (North America), 0-333-66075-7 (world excluding North America).

Judith Maltby. Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xvii + 310 pp. $64.95. ISBN: 0-521-45313-5.

Peter E. McCullough. Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xv + 237 pp. Includes 1.44 Mb diskette. $64.95. ISBN: 0-521-59046-9.

Andrew Shifflett. Stoicism, Politics and Literature in the Age of Milton: War and Peace Reconciled. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xi + 173 pp. $54.95. ISBN: 0-521-59203-8.

The books considered here share one feature. Written by historians and scholars trained in literary or "cultural" criticism, they lay claim to the terrain of politics (variously defined) or the public face of religion. Either by design or indirectly by virtue of the reconfiguration of disciplines and subjects, they form part of a discourse community linking early modernists employed by departments or faculties of history and those of English or other literatures. More is at work here than the "new historicism" -- now fairly old, as cycles of academic fashion go. New or enhanced institutional configurations sustain these endeavors, which may prove as resilient as the disciplinary divisions -- that is, departments -- of academic labor. Foremost amongst them (affecting scholars on both sides of the Atlantic) is the considerable and increasing patronage of scholarship by the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library. Lunch (highly subsidized) at the Huntington, and the free tea at the Folger are dail y mini-convivia, bringing together leading and emerging scholars in these and other early modern disciplines. More conventional scholarly occasions at these institutions -- whether informal first readings or international conferences -- assemble similar auditories. The seminars of Folger Institute's Center for the History of British Political Thought may have more students attached to literature than history departments; and its invited lecturers and seminar leaders come from all the affected disciplines.

Not far behind in significance have been remarkable changes in leading professional organizations. The North American Conference on British Studies has increasingly opened its conferences and its publications' pages to literary and cultural scholars; the Renaissance Society of America in a parallel development with similar consequences has devoted more of its resources and this journal's pages to treatments of scholarship pertaining to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England, and to works and themes beyond the narrowest construction of "Renaissance."

The result will probably outlast the "new historicism" or the reactions to it. The works at hand in various ways and degrees exhibit the product of the new discourse community -- its successes, failures, prospects, and the stubborn resistances. They range from an unintentional parody of what many historians consider the misdeeds of supposedly historical literary criticism, to works by literary scholars that cannot help but enlighten historians, to an immaculate work of historical scholarship by an Oxford English don on Jacobean court preachers and a historian's bracingly textual study of their rhetorical guiles, to a historian-college pastor's monograph on support for the prayer book and episcopacy in part dependent upon the literary analysts' emphasis upon rhetoric, to works of literary criticism whose engagement with politics is sustained and fruitful.

I

We begin with two "literary" books with similar titles and topics -- and a near polarity of result. Skiles Howard's The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England begins soundly if conventionally, with a terpsichorean version of the familiar tale of the Renaissance withdrawal of the elite from the common culture of the later Middle Ages. But difficulties mount rapidly. No matter how "politics" is defined (here it is race, class, and gender mediated by critical jargon), the book fails in its mission, neither discussing dancing sufficiently for the reader to have learned much about it nor courtly culture sufficiently well to distinguish it from garden-variety gentility.

Worries about accuracy and judgment constantly intrude. A Matthew Zasinger engraving of "The Ball" (ca. 1500) is declared to be a representation of the stately circular processional dance, the pavane. What the engraving shows are three couples in the center of a hall in three wholly distinct postures, moving in different directions (or in one case simply standing), two dogs (one asleep) in their midst, other couples and a miscellany of other figures quite ignoring them, amongst them the master of the house and his lady absorbed in a card game. Two musicians in a gallery play a transverse flute and a tambour, hardly the ensemble expected for a processional. Text too is subjected to the bulldozer style of cultural criticism: if it lacks discretion to get out of the way, then run the text over. A masque of Henry VIII's day in which male virtues rescue female virtues from female vices, ending with the company "danc[ing] together very pleasantly," is declared, despite all appearances, to be "close to a mock rape" (27). The problem here is not just the uncontrollable hyperbole; it is also the misuse of "mock," which if it has any meaning at all must refer to an enactment or shamming of something identifiable as rape. Similarly, Moth's dance-metaphor of courtship in Love's Labor's Lost (3.1.11-17), which elides into other figures (lines 12-27) not discussed because seemingly less convenient, is tortured to refer to "the grotesque, open body," though what is either grotesque or open about it is never made clear and though the rest of the lines in the speech refer mostly to covered body parts. Beatrice's comparison, in Much Ado about Nothing (2.1. 72-80), of wooing, wedding, and "repentance" to three dances, the lively jig, the sedate measure, and the dizzying, fatal cinquepace, is turned into a sermon against "compulsive and pointless upward mobility" (84).

Not only individual texts are tortured. So are whole works. Running thin on pertinent material, Howard simply declares that Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam is "very like a courtly dancer" (108). So are whole dance styles. "Figured dancing" -- dancing using geometric shapes emblematic of "eternal truths and hidden meanings" (115) -- is declared to be "a colonial discourse," apparently because the aboriginals lack the "literacy" to puzzle it out. So also is history. When needed, Howard makes much of the supposed facts, dispensing with the relativism otherwise de rigeur. But what are these facts? One is that "during the reign of Henry VII...a new landed nobility sprang up from the gentry and merchants" (30). Such might be expected from an author who twice cites David Underdown's Revel, Riot, and Rebellion (a study of rural practices and cultural attitudes in the West Country), as an authority on London (69, n. 2 and 134, n.5). Conceptual confusions also abound. Somehow Howard supposes courts to be the pa rticular domain of "male absolutism" (111), apparently on the logic that the most politically absolute must be the most patriarchal. That would require some explaining to what used to be called, politically and culturally, the "country," one of whose grievances against the "court" was that it was effeminate and female-dominated.

Where was the editorial overview and supervision? Three notable early modern historians sit on the advisory board of the series of which this volume is a part, one of them a highly regarded and subtle student of the early seventeenth-century court. It is inconceivable that they knowingly allowed such matter to receive even their indirect imprimatur. Nobody aware of Tom Cogswell's study of A Game at Chess would have permitted Howard to write on Middleton without consulting it. No one familiar with table fare would have allowed her to construe "kickshaw" (as in Twelfth Night 1.3. 122) as a dancer's leap rather than a trifle, from the word's primary meaning as a side-dish (from quelque chose). Equally, no one would have let her miss the obvious point, presumably of vital interest to a study of "the politics of courtly dancing" that a fast court dance and the leading edge of printed news culture in the 1620s shared a name, coranto.

A book like this would appear to dim all prospect of fruitful collaboration of historians and the soi-disant experts in the "politics" of everything except, of course, politics. But if Skiles Howard's "political" world is hermetically sealed off from historians, the collection of essays edited by David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, revels in its proximity. Indeed one contributor, Barbara Ravelhofer, quoting from Howard's dissertation and an early article, acidly remarks that there is more to the subject "than a binary opposition between thrusting phallocrats 'relentlessly' penetrating 'the air' and victimized female performers involuntarily flashing their 'orgiastic feet'..." (248). For most of the essays in the volume, the politics of the court is that recognized by students of court culture: it was characterized by faction, religiously-driven disagreements over foreign policy, and a complex movement (dance may indeed be the right word) of negotiation, rather than ab solutist monomania.

While David Bevington's introduction stresses the volume's unity of conception, Martin Butler's follow-on, "Courtly Negotiations," most neatly encapsulates the spirit of the essays. Acknowledging the court's polycentricity, Butler traces the interests, networks, and commitments of the queen, of Prince Henry, and, later, Prince Charles, as they shaped and were reflected in the masques. Breaking from the unitary, absolutism-centered masque critiques developed by the pioneering new historicists Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, Butler considers Oberon (1611) as a display of the emergence of Prince Henry as an aulic center distinct from James. Henry, of course, was no Absalom, but the young man (all of sixteen in 1611) had already attracted to him the reformist, aggressively Protestant, romantically chivalrous following that would struggle with considerable success against the pro-Spanish, pacifist, absolutist-bureaucratic element identified with the king's own court (if not always James himself). Similarly, a masque of 1623, Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion, created to celebrate Charles's safe return from his happily unsuccessful mission to Spain to procure a Spanish bride, reported upon and reflected the intra-court determination of Charles and Buckingham to dissociate themselves from James's policies. The result, of course, is a reading in line with the most successful examination of the historical moment, Tom Cogswell's The Blessed Revolution.

Other essays make parallel moves. Paul Hamner (the only historian contributor) reads the Accession Day celebrations of 1595 as a contest of wills of Elizabeth and the earl of Essex. Essex sought to use the tournament "as a vehicle to put pressure upon the Queen, even at the cost of upstaging Elizabeth on her own special day" (58). Peter Holbrook boldly regards Jonson's The Masque of Queens as nothing less than "a bid for transfer of power from King to Queen" (79), setting it within a larger matrix of the politics of pacifism and anti-pacifism. Tom Bishop reads Oberon along the lines sketched by Martin Butler -- but with an attempt to focus upon that masque and others not simply as texts but as "kinetic event[s]" (89). Leeds Barroll continues his project of restoring Queen Anne to historic significance in "Inventing the Stuart Masque." Anne used masques as "social constructs ... for her own social and political purposes" (131); amongst these, early in the English reign, was the somewhat paradoxical project (f or the closet Catholic queen) of rehabilitation of the Essex interest. Stephen Orgel ("Marginal Jonson") somewhat elliptically concurs, stressing gender issues that set author Jonson apart from patron queen. Nancy Wright explores another polyvalency -- court and City -- through competitive festival and display, and Barbara Lewalski, in a solid and satisfying contribution, examines Milton's Comus as "in every respect a reformed masque" (315). Barbara Ravelhofer and David Lindley bravely do the volume's heaviest lifting, teasing out the politics within the most ethereal and evanescent elements of masque, dance and music, respectively. Hugh Craig addresses another issue central to masque criticism, the relation of masque and anti-masque. He finds the familiar containment model wanting. In particular, Craig finds Jonson's masques do not fully contain the "riot and exuberant subversion" (183) of his progressively more complex anti-masques.

In the main, then, The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque is as state-of-the-art and reflective of the increasingly close and mutually enriching relations between literary and historical scholarship as The Politics of Courtly Dancing represents pseudo-historical cultural criticism at its most simplistic and least satisfactory. Parts of co-editor David Bevington's introduction and his bold chapter on The Tempest as a commercial, public, and uncourtly treatment of the Elizabeth-Frederick of the Palatinate marriage do seem curiously at odds with the direction of the majority of contributors, relying upon precisely the sort of "decayed aristocracy" (with a bow towards Lawrence Stone) and "capitalism vs. feudalism" themes that other contributors and most early Stuart historians find largely unhelpful. Nevertheless he and Peter Holbrook have assembled a collection of essays as valuable for their manner and method as their content; the brief concluding remarks by Leah Marcus are a challenging self-examination of t he ideological purport of one's own scholarship.

II

Peter E. McCullough's Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching appears in the monograph series "Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History," a series known for the solidity (and some would say the stolidity) of its historical scholarship, often for bulky dissertation-like apparatus and appendices, more than occasionally for intellectual quality, but seldom for fashion and "theory." McCullough's contribution fits comfortably within the mold -- yet McCullough holds his Ph.D. from the English Department of Princeton University and is a Lecturer in English at Oxford. He unapologetically offers this as a contribution to the "institutional and cultural history of the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts" (3).

McCullough argues powerfully for the same vision of polycentric and multivocal court culture that is the keel and bottom of The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. He examines not only preaching before the monarch, but also, in the reign of James, the sermons emerging from the household chaplains of Queen Anne at Denmark House and the princes, Henry and then Charles, at St. James's. Similarly, and tellingly, he identifies the multiple (and sometimes quite discordant) voices of the court preachers. He does, however, enter a strong protest, against the "ahistorical scholarly obsession with the royal patronage of public players and the courtly masque" (3). Modern scholars' "literary tastes and canons," he reiterates, "despite a new wave of 'historicism', remain quite ahistorical" (125).

McCullough begins, not unlike modern masque criticism, with a reconstruction of the scenic apparatus of the court sermons, particularly the structures of the several English chapels royal, which in marked contrast to Scottish practice elevated and closeted the royal auditor. He follows on with a close and much needed treatment of the selection and scheduling of royal preachers, and of their dependence upon the court for advancement. This is the stuff of dissertation research; in a departure from common practice, the fullest form of the data is made available on a diskette included with the volume, a richly-detailed calendar of all known sermons preached at court in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, whether printed or not, even to including a summary of the contents (so far as they can be known and with detail in inverse proportion to accessibility). Thus while the printed volume is not weighed down by this material, the differing protocols of dissertation and book have not led to its truncation or abandonme nt. Yet caveat lector. The file may be difficult or slow fully to convert in some word processing programs. Of more general concern is the publication format itself. The codex's incredible durability will certainly not be matched by the 1.44 Mb diskette; its magnetic data will be compromised by time well before acid-free pages, and the diskette format may be as obsolete in a decade as a dictaphone belt is today.

McCullough examines the nature and style of court preaching in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, viewing the court sermon as a reflection of the ecclesiological preferences of the monarch. He insists upon the distinction between the reigns -- no "Jacobethan" continuity here. For Elizabeth, private, liturgical devotion mattered much more than the sermon, which for her was at best the cod-liver oil of the faith. She wanted her sermons short and rhetorically florid and assumed that her courtiers were no more eager to sit through them than she. The preachers sometimes had unwelcome messages, though smooth-talkers like John Jewell and Richard Fletcher found ways, often through flattery, to speak truth to power. McCullough also plots the trajectory of topic and issue across the queen's long reign. The first twenty-five years saw anti-papal sentiments in the ascendant, with sermons against Protestant non-conformity a lesser motif. With the ascendancy of Whitgift and Bancroft in the 1580s and 1590s, anti-puritan ex pression increased. Though Bancroft himself seems to have remained essentially Calvinist, John Buckeridge (eventually William Laud's tutor) and Launcelot Andrewes pursued different agendas, with Andrewes, notably, already pushing for a sacrament- and liturgy-centered worship in preference to excessively homiletic religion.

If this looks like the leading edge of Laudianism or Arminianism or anti-Calvinism, it reversed direction with James's accession. Predictably nervous about James's religious and political proclivities, Whitgift and Bancroft took pains to secure the appointment of a trustworthy Calvinist but conforming churchman, James Montagu, as Dean of the Chapel Royal; the more theologically adventursome Richard Neill (a Cecil client) became Clerk of the Closet, responsible for the administration of the Chapel Royal. Andrewes continued, indeed increased, his status as primus inter pares of court preachers. But James himself insisted upon the primacy of preaching. James's arrival at chapel was a cue to interrupt the liturgy at any point it might be, and begin the sermon. In addition to the traditional Lenten sermon rota, James established a weekly Tuesday sermon. The anniversaries of the Gowrie and Gunpowder plots provided other occasions, in which preaching and revels sometimes uneasily mingled. While James demanded brevi ty of his preachers (creating, McCullough argues [p. 129], "a distinct sub-genre"), unlike his predecessor James took not only his own but his courtiers' attendance seriously.

McCullough looks closely at the king's favorite preacher, Launcelot Andrewes. For all his oratorical gifts, Andrewes was not a partisan of sermon-centered piety. Indeed his "anti-sermon sermons" (160) were part of a "reaction" against homiletic excess at the apex. Though it gathered speed only at the end of James's reign, the reaction brought court preaching back to its ceremonialist, sacralist late-Elizabethan edge. McCullough also considers the sermon cultures around Anne and Henry/Charles. Anne's is enigmatic: the church-papist was the patroness of the Essexians. That divines of the same connection should fill the pulpit at St. James's is less surprising, although McCullough reinforces the sense that Charles more fully than is realized filled his brother's shoes after Henry's death. Only after the 1623 trip to Madrid did Charles begin "his rejection of an entrenched household tradition of conformist Calvinism" (209).

In another project than that reviewed here, Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough are collaborators, and in Government by Polemic she acknowledges and draws on his book (then in manuscript). But her reading of the rhetorical ploys of the court preachers in James's reign is of an altogether different texture. She simultaneously concedes and quarrels with the revisonist outline of the church that McCullough takes as given: there was a "Calvinist consensus," James's occasional bark was almost invariably worse than his (and many of his bishops') bite, de facto toleration of nonconformity usually trumped de jure insistence upon uniformity. But Ferrell insists that beneath a rhetoric of "moderation" lurked a strategy of marginalization of "puritans." Furthermore, ceremonial issues (rather than church government or soteriological doctrine), when linked to the royal supremacy, were the wedge that split the consensus, by "a resacralizing of things once considered adiaphoric" (109). While McCullough views the sacrali zing tendencies of the late Elizabethan church as effectively arrested at James I's accession, for Ferrell these tentatives were not so much reversed as driven slightly (but only slightly) below the smooth surface, so many termites eating away the fabric of consensus.

James's scheme of union of the two kingdoms was also necessarily a union of kirk and church, a project fraught with anxiety for the English court preachers. Here, in contrast to operating assumptions elsewhere in her study (in which, for example, she is content to see the court preachers en bloc as James's "spokesmen" [11]), Ferrell sees the court preachers with an agenda distinct from the king's and, indeed, with differing agendas amongst themselves. Their sermons and related writings reveal how some bridled at the prospect of union through Scotticization and increased tolerance of English nonconformity, promoting instead a rival union inspired by uniformity along English and more ceremonialist lines. Those most fearful of the former possibility -- including Bancroft -- sought to conflate English moderate nonconformity with Scottish presbyterian "ministerial insolence and disobedience" (62). In the doing, they claimed the center as their own, attempting to push the anti-formalist wing of Jacobean Calvinist doctrinal consensus into the camp of disobedience and anti-monarchism. Similarly, the same crew seized upon the Gunpowder Plot to establish the familiar linkage of the popish and puritan. Ferrell takes William Barlow, who preached the first anniversary anti-Gunpowder Plot sermon, as "the very model of an anti-Puritan conformist" (82; Barlow was also responsible for the authorized, puritan-smearing account of the Hampton Court conference). His sermon was the first in a long line of those deploying the "remarkable bait-and-switch ... tactic" (84) of using the Gunpowder Plot commemoration as an occasion to haul off on the puritans. This, obviously, was an appeal from a segment of the clergy to the king to hate their enemies as his enemies; the second stage was to link indiscipline, for which obviously James had no sympathy, with anti-ceremonialism and anti-formalism, which these same clerics not unreasonably feared their royal auditor very well might favor. Rhetoric ruled: a world of difference was indicated by a tiny tilt towards "prayer" rather than "preaching." Kneeling at communion, a cornerstone of the campaign to promote "the beauty of holiness," was manipulated by clerics who used the king's own words to generate "a focussed cultural critique with consequences both rhetorical and religious." More remarkably still, they led James to "implicate himself in programs that reflected desires once antithetical to his own" (163).

Ferrell is at her strongest in poking beneath the facade of stock phrasing and platitude to get at the very real hostilities and menace that segments of the clergy and committed laity simultaneously feared in their opponents and expressed themselves. At least since Bancroft's 1588 Paul's Cross sermon, the godly had worried that something unsavory was in planning at court, which they linked with attempts to convert the Elizabethan compromise -- in which not fully reformed practice and polity were to be endured so long as they were described as matters indifferent, adiaphora -- into something with a positive even if indirect divine mandate. The educated clergy of her study were trained to be inference hunters; Ferrell's considerable achievement is to re-enter their mental world, which was to other tastes, then as now, overwrought and oversensitive. If at times her analysis shares in those traits, it may be a necessary as well as an understandable occupational hazard.

So, too, perhaps, are her sympathies. Her stance is clearly with the moderate puritans she believes were smeared by mainstream court preaching. As the Scottish presbyterian David Calderwood could damn the whole lot of his opponents as the "Anglo-pisco-papistical" church, Ferrell's analysis, so subtle with words, is sometimes less adept at juggling, or perhaps simply indifferent to, the institutional complications and cross-currents that McCullough delineates. If there is less equivocation and polycentriciry in her reading of court preachers than his, it reflects her own goosebumps at the chill in the air that she was not alone in detecting. Those who find Johann Sommerville's reading of early Stuart political thought more compelling than that of Glenn Burgess will find in Ferrell a congenial companion.

III

Christopher Haigh and others have forced reconsideration of the extent to which Protestantism "really" took hold in the sixteenth century; as Judith Maltby insists in Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England, at some point obviously it did. Her own warrant is to establish how and amongst whom the prayer book (and more generally liturgical religion) and episcopacy (and more generally the English church-state) became spiritual and ecclesiological treasures. It is, of course, a Janus problem: how a reformed service and hierarchy replaced a popish one, but also how that reform became the old and established faith, to be defended from the "godly" who would tear it down. Maltby, an American-born Anglican chaplain and fellow of Corpus Christi College, plants both feet firmly over the threshold, persistently splitting differences between the "popish" and the "godly" outside and within the established church. She would smooth over the rough edges that catch Ferrell's eye. Attachment to the prayer book was neither Catholicism in protestant dress ("church papistry"; 12, 16) nor inimical to preaching (64). The reformed liturgy was neither sterile, as Catholic critics have charged, nor idolatrous, as the godly charged. Equally, Maltby's "committed conformists" were hostile to Laudian worship innovations and jure divino arguments for episcopacy; their attachment was based on respect for tradition, a sense of the sacred, and fear of social disorder. They -- her focus is the conforming laity -- were neither clericalists nor anticlericalists. Not obsessed with doctrinal invigilation, they attended to the "role and purpose of the church in the lives both of individuals and human communities (106). While Maltby insists that "claims" of "superiority" of prayer book spirituality are "outside the historian's remit" (19), they are not beyond the pastor's, and her book, historically meticulous, is also a quietly impassioned defence of conformist religion from the attacks of papists and puritans, along with their la tter-day students and apologists.

Maltby uses several approaches. She turns to what can be gleaned from the records of the church courts about support for conforming clergy, from about 1570 to the outbreak of the Civil War, which have characteristically been used by those studying, usually sympathetically, non-conformity. She concludes (80) that her necessarily anecdotal evidence supports the view that conformity had a fairly wide social appeal (the mirror image, incidentally, of many studies of the appeal of puritanism). She turns next to a more compressed body of evidence -- the petitions from many counties in support of episcopacy and the prayer book in 1641 and 1642, which have long cried for systematic study. Examining their promoters, the subscriptions lists (where they survive), and their language, she refines her portrait of the conforming laity on the eve of civil war. She then turns to the center of her dissertation research, Cheshire and its nearly indefatigable pro-Church activist, Sir Thomas Aston. Aston is a model conforming la yman for Maltby -- not a partisan of Laud or of a jus divinum for episcopacy, but a spiritually committed individual with a layman's hostility to presbyterianism and a profound and appropriate sense of the linkage between social disorder and the puritan iconoclast's violation of sacred space. This adjusts a prevailing view of Aston as simply a social hysteric, though she dismisses too lightly Aston's contempt for his opponents. Cheshire records also allow her to do a micro-historical investigation of the subscribers of two pro-establishment petitions in five communities. While seemingly statistical, the sample is both too small and too subject to non-statistical observations to be anything more than impressionistic -- but it does sustain a sense that whatever may have been Aston's social attitudes, Cheshire found partisans of conformity across the social spectrum.

A tantalizing aspect of the book is the author's own violation of its terminological strictures. Like most leading early Stuart church historians, Maltby is uncomfortable with the term "Anglican" to describe the pre-Restoration church -- hence the terms "conforming" and "conformist." It would seem that her subject is The Faith that Dares Not Speak its Name. But as she repeatedly uses the puritans' term of self-description, "godly," in an ironic way (the introduction is puckishly subtitled "the good, the bad, and the godly"), she cannot quite dispense with "Anglicanism"' (see, for example, 142, 222). As "godly" seems to say too much, "conformist" with its passive overtones says too little, especially to describe the activist sentiments that led people not only to subscribe to petitions but to side with the king in the Civil War. A real "Anglicanism" may well antedate the Restoration, and the exclusive, anti-comprehensive Restoration church used as a model for "Anglicanism" may itself be a reflection of those momentarily ascendant, and thus a caricature of the whole, much as "Laudianism" misrepresents the full picture of the national church in the 1630s. Certainly, Ferrell's interrogation of the nuances of conformist anti-puritan polemic reveals energies that might usefully be reconsidered as more exclusionary, less compromising and tolerant than current revisionist orthodoxy allows.

Maltby's efforts are largely seconded by Achsah Guibbory's fine book, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton. Admirably informed by the historical literature and unusually rich in readings of primary texts not otherwise addressed in detail, her study examines "anti-ritual" and "ritualist ideolog[ies]" that were both "variously empowering and repressive" (3). In this, she naturally draws contrasts more starkly than Maltby, in part because she has greater sympathy for the Laudian project, and credits to it the energies that Maltby locates in non-Laudian conformism. But like her, Guibbory is determined to counter what she takes to be the bias for "puritanism and social activism" and its "struggle, introspection, and spiritual conversion" (119) over the competing claims of religious conformity, social solidarity expressed through religious ritual, and the Laudian program to reassert the interrelationship of body and spirit" (41). Less concerned with defending or advocating a position within her spectrum t han situating writers and texts along it, she provides sensitive and nuanced readings of George Herbert's The Temple, Herrick's Hesperides, and the corpus of writings of Sir Thomas Browne and John Milton.

Herbert has been claimed primarily by the ceremonialist camp, yet his poetry has been dear to some partisans of the inwardness of spirituality, Guibbory sees him as equivocal, and instead of trying to push him towards one or the other polarity, examines the duality of his voice and perspective. Herrick presents Guibbory with a different sort of project: to unify the fleshly and the spiritual, the pagan and the religious. On one level this is easy enough -- on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the ceremonialist priest of the 1640s can find fellowship with others also on the wrong side of the saints. But Guibbory is quite clever in bringing into play, as a kind of mediator between the classically pagan (i.e., Roman) and the Christian, the ritual and sacrificial strictures of Leviticus. Herrick's Julia, she notes, in figured in terms erotic, Roman, Hebraic, and Christian; Herrick's commingling of the pagan, Jewish, and Christian "suggests that, at some level, all these religions are compati ble" (105). Of course, what that earns for Herrick is the common fate of syncretists -- rejection by all parties.

Guibbory follows Sir Thomas Browne's "promiscuous embrace of ritual order" (the subtitle to the chapter dedicated to him) well beyond his most famous work, Religio Medici. She rightly recognizes the combativeness of Browne's irenic posture, "the language of moderation, peace, and charity" Having already become "the language of the anti-puritan prelates" (121), but also sees amidst Browne's conservatism a "positive desire for a more inclusive community" (121) at odds with puritan exclusivity. This is fairly familiar ground; Guibbory's treatment of Browne's curious Urn Burial as politically charged antiquarianism and also an anthropologically informed defence of human custom (though without specific Scriptural warrant) is quite invigorating. So too are the pair of concluding chapters on John Milton -- whose obsession with idolatry obviously places him in the other camp, even, as she notes, after Milton in other respects broke with "orthodox puritanism" (147). As is inevitable with single-focus criticism, her r eadings will strike readers as variously more or less forced, as she attempts to use Milton as top-knot of all the strands of her book. But there are few historians who will not learn as much from it as will the literary critics.

IV

James Loxley's Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword begins and ends with a declaration of revision. Cavalier verse, Loxley insists, was not entirely, not even primarily, a poetics of retirement and disengagement, a celebration of the non-political in an age when politics had become unbearably painful. Earl Miner, notably, is identified with this conventional view, though one of Miner's students, Steven Zwicker, has turned it upside down in a reading of Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler. Loxley continues this project.

He begins before the Civil War, reading the English verse contained in the university poetic miscellanies of the 1630s. These he professes to see within the revisionists' framework of "compliment and criticism" but his own emphasis, if anything, undercuts it. While he detects a "reformatory imperative" (43) in the verse, it was "an element in the broader dynamic of personal rule" and saw itself as "a mimetic performance of the royal will" (43, 45). Following these university wits into the era of the Long Parliament and the Civil War, he sees their panegyric, partly conventional before, as a defiant gesture, a poetics of "armed partisanship" (82). These scribblers also participated in the royalist project of exposing the paradiastole -- the Orwellian Newspeak -- of the parliamentary apologists, in which a bad thing is given a good name. As John Beesley, an Oxford poet, put it in 1643, "Fury is tearm'd Zeale. / Blood-thirsty Faction, Love to Common-weale" (111).

Loxley argues that the deepest challenges to royalists' poetics came from The Kings Cabinet Opened, the exposure of the king through an annotated text of the king's papers captured at the battle of Naseby in 1645, and by the king's own unkingly escape in disguise and surrender to the Scots in 1646. For those who looked to Charles as the imago dei, appearances obviously were everything; Loxley sensitively discusses the means by which royalist poets sought to keep their faith. He also offers an arresting reading of Peter Lely's portraits of the king's children: they were not, he argues, royally commissioned, but made for the royal children's parliament-appointed guardian, the earl of Northumberland. The connection, however, with the rest of Loxley's subject is attenuated. More to the center is a reading of verse of the period when Charles's end was nigh, and of the Eikon Basilike, in which religious figuring was used to snatch some comfort from the despair. A concluding chapter on "the poetry of retirement" re -engages Miner on the otium-negotium axis. Loxley reminds us that otium can mean sloth as well as soul-healing retirement, that Cicero and others saw otium as a way station: negotium ex otio.

To a point, Loxley makes his case. One wonders, though, about some of the mental gymnastics. Any utterance by a poet or of a like sort is turned into a "poetics"; the necessary activism found in any utterance, and especially in publication -- for why write, even to oneself, if there is no intention to communicate? -- is turned to evidence that the royalist retirement was neither absolute nor final. But this is rather like arguing a suicide does not really want to take his or her own life -- this may very well be, but something profound still separates the suicide from the non-suicidal. And there is a promise in the title that is not kept: "the drawn sword." Valuably, Loxley does find, in 1642 and 1643, the sword drawn, the intention sanguinary (74-84), the voice the royalist analogue to Milton's "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd Saints." Remarkably, though, he finds little of it thereafter. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it seems that as the royalists' sword lost its edge, its pen followed.

Andrew Shifflett's Stoicism, Politics and Literature in the Age of Milton is a slim but intense study in several respects paralleling Loxley's, though primarily from the polar political perspective -- loosely described as "republican, libertarian, and oppositional" (3). Quite as Loxley persistently interrogates the supposed withdrawal and quietism of the defeated royalists, Shifflett programatically insists that the Stoicism, Neostoicism, or both of Andrew Marvell, Katherine Philips, and John Milton implied no permanent withdrawal from negotium into an inner paradise of closeted virtue. Moreover, the language of withdrawal in itself constituted a political critique. In this, Shifflett takes issue (1, in the opening sentence) with Quentin Skinner's view -- the prevailing one -- of the Neostoicism of Montaigne and, especially, Lipsius as unwavering on the necessity of obedience to constituted authority. Lipsius, to be sure, had a great deal more to say, especially about virtue, than Skinner's compressed and pu rpose-centered treatment in three pages (2:279-82) of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, and Shifflett identifies threads of English literary Neostoicism that do not conform to the absolutist model. Much the same path is travelled by a nearly contemporaneous monograph, Adriana McCrea's Constant Minds: Political Virtue and the Lipsian Paradigm in England, 1584-1650 (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1997). She, however, pursues a less extreme course with Lipsius, seeing him (and his approving French readers, including Richelieu) as responding to the real horrors of the religious wars in the Netherlands and France, while Lipsius's early English readers had reason and the moral space afforded by relative tranquillity to assume less passive and quietest postures. To Shifflett, however, Stoicism was an inherently paradoxical corpus of attitudes, in which indifference masked or encoded anger, tranquillity and retreat did the like for violence, and privacy became a gesture of wound-licking activism.

Shifflett sees politics underlying his chosen writers, although sometimes he seems closer to the surface of politics than at others. His reading of Marvell's "The Garden," "Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-Borow," and "Upon Appleton House" in the negotium ex otium mode is plausible, as are his readings of Milton's epics as acts of resistance, and of the husbanding of virtue for more propitious times. But the historical context of his reading of Katherine Philips's Pompey (her translation and implicit reworking of Corneille's La Mort de Pomp[acute{e}]e) is out of touch with political realities. Convinced that Charles II was always fully in control in the 1660s and early 1670s, Shifflett sees royal will and royal purpose in the repeated extending and withdrawing of clemency rather the factionalism, coalition-making, and coalition-shattering that were symptomatic of the king's inability to put together a political machine that would respect his religious inclinations and vice versa.

While Shifflett's attenuated sense of politics may overindulge an intellectual's notions of how the game is played, his literary sensibility is remarkable. For all the politicization, Shifflett's criticism is unabashedly and in the finest sense literary, a dazzling exercise in intertextuality. That Marvell's reading and response to Lipsius's De Constantia and to Seneca was "dialectical" is no mere verbal preening; it is a lovely and delicate presentation, almost a ballet. His juggling of Corneille, Philips, the underlying Lucan's Pharsalia, and Thomas May's influential translation of it is astonishingly deft, as is his depiction of the textual dance of Marvell's praise of John Milton in "On Paradise Lost" and Jonson's "To My Chosen Friend," in praise of May's translation of Pharsalia.

V

With the principal exception of a work of a historian seriously engaging "literary" texts, the books reviewed here catalogue most possibilities in the current state of the disciplinary dialogue amongst students of early modern England. If Shifflett's project succeeds (sometimes brilliantly) as "literary" criticism, even as it sometimes seems inattentive to "hard" politics, McCullough's "literary" background appears as a flavorsome garnish to the main course of his historical learning. It may be unfair to compare Skiles Howard's work with that of the essayists in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque simply because the contributors to the latter volume include most of the stars in that constellation of learning, but it does suggest that the strongest work in that area, including that engaging matters of gender, is the most politically informed; the "payout" for the close reading of historians and archival work is a much more sensitive criticism. Perhaps Lori Anne Ferrell and Achsah Guibbory most fully realiz e the potential of the collaboration, compelling historians to consider texts not merely as "evidence" but as thought-moments and political actions not fully recoverable without the critical skills usually developed in literary studies. Maltby's book, sound and suggestive as it is, would have been better had its author had the opportunity to read Guibbory's.

There is, perhaps, a temperamental difference of the disciplines. No less than the literary and cultural critics, historians are moved by cultural and ideological currents as well as by interest and ambition; and many of them are willing enough recruits to one or another scholarly herd. But historians do subject themselves more completely to the scourge of falsification. A historian can expect that others may accuse him or her of being more clever than "right," of squeezing the evidence too hard for the sake of a good case. This constant external chastener ultimately becomes part of each historian's internal control apparatus. Literary and critical studies do not appear to have as strong a professional conscience in such matters. Proceeding, as Loxley and Shifflett do, by constant reference to paradoxes, self-subversions, and the like, by insisting something is not so despite all appearances that it is so, one enters a world where anything can be its opposite, or indeed, as in Howard's extreme case, anything at all. There is too much to gain from such critical strategies to dismiss them, but more to lose by giving them unrestricted or unchallenged play. By way of contrast, not the least of Quentin Skinner's achievements is, oddly, his utterly brilliant superficiality. His topography of political thought dances across the surfaces of his texts, seldom resorting to interpretative tricks. Such apparently effortless grace is, of course, much harder to achieve than the critics' ponderous yet predictable exertions, and it is no mean feat to report on how things seemed. This historian wishes literary and cultural critics would keep it in mind. Critics will reply, inter alia, that there is more to being than seeming. But that is just the point. As this discourse community continues to institutionalize itself, the disciplinary partnership will deepen. Like other partnerships, though, from time to time it requires a good talk.