Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England.

by Ramie Targoff Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001

Ramie Targoff takes as her focus a chief tenet held by early modern defenders of decency and prescription in public worship, namely, the conviction that liturgical norms or paradigms serve to shape and enhance the private spiritual life of a parishioner. In tracing the reformation of liturgical practice from the early days of English Protestantism through the 1630s and 40s, Targoff ends up in pursuit of the thesis that the Protestant institution of common prayer greatly helped to produce the brilliant flowering of devotional poetry in the seventeenth century, especially the poetry of Herbert. Underlying this study is the often repeated irony that Protestantism was far less conducive to private worship than was the Catholicism that it replaced. In sustaining these provocative claims, Targoff's is a good but an uneven book, and ultimately a book divided against itself.

Even though the book is divided into two groups of chapters--one dealing with public prayer, the other with poetry as common prayer--there is no formal division between sections in the makeup of the book, and the trajectory of the argument is essentially chronological. Chapter 1 commences with the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, "the first vernacular liturgy used in the Church of England" (16), then studies the liturgical thought of Thomas Cranmer and the several revisions of the prayer book over the next few years. Chapter 2 centers on the Elizabethan debate over whether prescribed conformity or extemporaneous worship were more conducive to true and godly devotion, with a section on Richard Hooker's defense of the "devotional efficacy" of common prayer. Chapter 3 stays with the theme of "devotional efficacy," but it shifts attention to the value placed on verse Psalters as against the prose formulae of the Book of Common Prayer. This chapter takes as its main subjects Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert. The fourth chapter offers a reading of George Herbert, while the conclusion shifts ground to the New World and to the defense of liturgical poetry in Massachusetts Bay. Over the course of these chapters, Targoff contributes many insightful readings and formulations to the study of religious culture. But there are some serious problems with her argument, too.

No small part of the book's problems arises from the fact that the introduction is its weakest segment. Only thirteen pages long, it devotes four of those pages to reading a scene in Hamlet, which would be more agreeable if the other nine pages were satisfactory. But they are not. Targoff is perhaps right to maintain that recent literary critics have privileged the individualistic over the normative in their studies of English Protestantism, but the same can not really be said for church historians, and her engagement with church history is far too sketchy. Targoff wants to combat the Collinson thesis of a Puritan mainstream in the English church, but she pays far too little attention to the vast material of church history from Horton Davies to Kenneth Fincham and Judith Maltby, a few occasional citations notwithstanding. At a smaller level, the language of the opening suffers from a New Historicist hangover; I put the point that way for the simple reason that the critical language of the book astonishingly changes by the conclusion, indeed, even when some of the key words (especially "powerfully") remain the same. The introduction likes to talk about the English Protestant "establishment," thereby lumping together countless thinkers and writers whose differences matter as much as their similarities. It likes to imagine that this "establishment" seeks to "subsume" private devotion (as we shall see, the way in which this argument is put crucially changes over the course of the book) so as to produce uniformity. When Targoff seeks to concretize this establishment with its "overarching desire" for uniformity, she quotes Lancelot Andrewes, Robert Shelford, Foulke Robarts, John Browning, and Thomas Browne--all early Stuart writers, and by and large on the "Laudian" or neo-ceremonialist side of church debates. Early on, Targoff adopts a New Historicist suspicion of this "establishment," the one with which she would supplant Collinson's "Puritans." By the end of the book, she is offering up virtual paeans to their "powerful" enhancement of worship in religious poetry, with her critical models such sympathetic close readers of Herbert's poetry as Joseph H. Summers. The introduction then ends with a little blurb on the execution of Charles I, a point without payoff in the book itself.

Chapter 1 stresses what Targoff considers a key paradox: the Catholic church allowed more space and time for private worship during the service (since the priest essentially had his back turned during the Mass) than did the Protestant church, which fully engaged the attention of the congregation in the exercise of common prayer. With this feature as her only evidence for reversing the critical consensus, Targoff is largely satisfied with repeating this paradox rather than pursuing it or modifying it in a systematic way. At times this means that she writes as though (repeating a charge leveled against one of her subjects) she "seem[ed] almost entirely indifferent to what transpires outside the walls of the church" (51). At other times, she either ignores or contradictorily considers the Protestant fear of those anarchical "fancies" unleashed by the Reformation. Set on keeping the "establishment" high and on asserting the paradox that historians and critics have gotten the private-public divide backwards in considering differences between Reformed and Catholic, Targoff at still other times allows the diacritical language of her argument to slip and slide from one state of liturgical affairs to another. Early on, then, the "establishment" has a "strategy" for "transforming" and "shaping" the potentially wild but largely malleable individual soul, a "powerful" strategy, I should add. "English Protestants"--all of them, presumably--are committed to controlling and confining the extemporaneous prayer. Over the course of chapter 1, however, Targoff insists that she is interested in devotional efficacy rather than political strategy, and in her notes we begin to read about such church historians as Judith Maltby, whose work on the prayer book ought to have been foregrounded in Targoff's argument.

Once she has shifted from the language of strategy to the language of devotional efficacy (see 18: "the invention of common prayer was not strictly part of a political strategy"), her argument becomes richer--in its characterization of liturgical reform, in its sense of developing Protestant notions of community, in its reading of particular writers, and in its understanding of a spectrum of views in English Protestantism itself. As a consequence, it is not too long before Targoff's characterization of the way in which common prayer was thought to work in the sixteenth century has left behind the static and simplistic model of establishmentarian confinement. On page 26, we come at last to the Protestant critique of how the Catholic church has "eliminated the laity's essential role in the service." Common prayer is said, quite rightly, to involve the serious and complex question of how authority is delegated in religion, with the Protestants believing that the laity plays a major part in authenticating that delegation, a part that considers the matter of how well they have understood, digested, and consented to the priest's words. Thus, "to 'answer ... in your own person' is not to assent to whatever the priest may or may not have said, but instead to affirm that your personal voice has been justly represented" (27). The Elizabethan chapter on reading prayer finds Targoff doing a much better job with capturing the contentiousness within Protestantism; she is much less prone to lump everyone under the "establishment." The chapter covers familiar territory, but her discussion of the Admonition controversy is concise and cogent, and she isolates what is extraordinary about Hooker's defense of the spiritual benefits of common prayer in a convincing and compelling manner.

If Targoff's argument begins in the land of establishmentarian strategy then moves to a more dynamic and rational lay worship, it has one further shift to make. As she moves toward the Sidneys, Donne, Wither, Herbert, and early modern Protestant poetics, Targoff begins once again to stress what is "powerful" (rather than historically accurate) about her subject. Only now a suspect strategic power gives way in her rhetoric to a celebrated kind of appropriate fusion between Christian paradigms and creative selves.

Having offered a useful background on the development of metrical Psalms, Targoff turns her attention to Philip Sidney and his sister Mary, showing how, in theory and practice, they contributed to the emergence of "poetry as a legitimate devotional practice" (74). In this section, she resumes the language of power ("powerfully" is used twice in a row on page 78), but now this terminology serves to corroborate Targoff's new critical assessment of what she considers an "inherent" suitability connecting liturgical norm to poetic form. Targoff leaves no doubt about this program and sees it as repudiating a critical consensus that links private selfhood to good poetry. It is doubtful that there has been a critical consensus in this matter, especially if one considers such slightly older critics as Rosemund Tuve and Joseph Summers. But whether or not Targoff is alone in her recovery of a liturgical poetics, her language is unmistakably that of a critic's organic unity, a move accompanied by the repetition of the word "seems" in her sentences. It is true that she continues to press home a historical thesis about the reformation of devotional practice as well as the emergence of devotional poetry as a form of common prayer. But history runs cheek by jowl with what can only be called prayer appreciation, especially once Targoff turns to Herbert.

Targoff's thesis about Herbert is that his volume of poetry parodies the Book of Common Prayer, and she is especially convincing when discussing the provenance (Cambridge University Press) and the physical composition (especially the use of the "pilcrow") of the Temple. Textually, however, the reader might expect a detailed treatment of how Herbert's poetry appropriates motifs from the prayer book, but this is not what the reader gets. The chapter commences with a slight critique of Louis Martz and Barbara Lewalski; offers a dubious dismissal of the Puritans as proto-Romantics with an antagonism toward poetry (this, despite the last chapter's argument that the Puritans in the New World prized devotional poetry); offers a paragraph-long paean to liturgical poetry, which she equates with the "power of eloquent verse" and with the "possibility for a new form of poetry ... released into the world" (87); and persists in deploying the language of "inherent" suitability, of "seeming," "affective force" (105), and "perfect yoking" (110, elsewhere, an "interweaving of the personal and the universal" that defies "critical binaries" [107], or "the perfect fusion of personal and universal voice" that a reader might experience [117]). Her seventeenth-century heroes are Izaak Walton's: Hooker, Donne, and Herbert. In short, we get close readings with generalized connections between the characteristics of liturgy and the assets of Herbert's poetry. Targoff is on better ground when she asserts something historical, when she discusses what Herbert hopes for or "aims" at, or what his like-minded churchmen also seek in a unity between liturgy and devotional efficacy. But the historical assertions are pretty familiar (e.g., "Herbert firmly believed that no opposition ought to exist between outward worship and the cultivation of inwardness" [100]), and even when Targoff turns to "The Forerunners" in order to complicate such statements, there is little that has not been offered up by previous Herbert scholars. And even in that final analysis of "The Forerunners," Targoff emphasizes the power of poetry's suitable fusion with liturgy over and above any kind of complicating historical or literary factor.

Despite the fact that her book begins with a reversal of the commonplace that the Protestants cared more about private worship than did the Catholics, Targoff ends with the admission that those Protestants going off to the New World shared in an "antiliturgical spirit" (119) that embraced spiritual spontaneity and "the individual voice of the minister over the collective voice of the congregation" (120). Even so, her two concluding points are well worth making: that in Massachusetts as in England, Protestants sought out bold new ways to devise community and that poetry came to play a major role in the reformation of devotional practice. Much of the slender Common Prayer is interesting, provocative, and useful. But the critical voice and method of the book are too divided and haphazard for the argument to develop with sufficient complexity or rigor. The book moves from one critical terrain to another, one antipathetic to her subject and the other highly sympathetic, and in between these two affective registers lies the solid yet original historical work that Targoff is clearly capable of doing very well.

REID BARBOUR is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction (1993); English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (1998); Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (2002); and John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England (forthcoming, 2003). He is currently at work on the Oxford edition of Lucy Hutchinson (under the general editorship of David Norbrook).