Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England.

Meg Lota Brown. Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1995. 159 pp. n.p. ISBN: 90-04-19157-8.

During the forty years that John Donne was active as a writer the term "casuistry" gradually changed its meaning. From being a neutral technical term denoting practical theological debate about particular cases of conscience - cases that seemed to require exceptional treatment and to elude general laws and precepts - it began to acquire some of the stigma of sophistical reasoning that now largely governs its usage. The primary reason for this change was, of course, the Reformation, which in broad historical terms required a distinction between Catholic and Protestant casuistry. In terms of the local English history that directly involved Donne, the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance created a whole new territory for casuistical debate, since English Catholics, forbidden by the pope to take the Oath, were faced by a conflict between two binding imperatives. Donne's own defence of the Oath, Pseudo-Martyr (1610), engaged directly with casuistical tradition, as did his disturbing Biathanatos, unpublished but probably dating from the same period of his life, which debates whether "selfe-homicide is not so naturally Sinne, that it may never be otherwise." The complex circumstances in which Donne, a recent convert to Anglicanism, deployed casuistry turned him, paradoxically, into one of its best known critics. Intellectually attracted to an intricate form of reasoning deeply associated with the Jesuits, yet in Pseudo-Martyr using it to attack them, Donne worked on the threshold of, and perhaps contributed to, semantic change.

A reader unfamiliar with the two relatively recent works on Donne and casuistry, Dwight Cathcart's Doubting Conscience (1975) and Camille Slights's The Casuistical Tradition (1981) will find Brown's study a useful and workmanlike book. It firmly establishes Donne's knowledge and use of casuistical tradition; distinguishes clearly between the Catholic tradition, with its emphasis on rules and authorities to determine doubtful cases, and the Protestant tradition, as developed especially by William Perkins, which substituted for those the interrogation of the individual conscience by itself. Brown focuses first on three of Donne's prose works, the two already mentioned, and a sermon on the predicament of Queen Esther; and then turns to the Songs and Sonets, finding in them the same concern with "the justification of doubtful actions, with the relation of the individual to general law or convention" (5). The broader premise is that "the epistemological and ethical crises that post-Reformation polemics engendered" found in casuistry a pre-existent means of expression.

This seems at first thought unexceptionable. However, a minimum of research ascertains how much of Brown's material was in fact presented by Cathcart, who focused on what he saw as casuistical habits of mind in the Songs and Sonets, and Slights, who discussed exactly the same three prose texts, Biathanatos, Pseudo-Martyr and the sermon on Esther. Brown's book is much more effectively organized than Cathcart's, and unlike Slights's is exclusively devoted to Donne. But is there really anything new here, other than some shifts of emphasis? Satire 3 is the only one treated again, whereas Slights had unpersuasively included detailed readings of the other four; some use is made of the Essays in Divinity; and the sermon on Esther is given a much fuller and (with one exception) exemplary reading. The exception is that Brown, who puts such stress on the political aspect of her theme, makes no effort to date or contextualize the sermon, relying placidly on Potter and Simpson's guesswork; whereas its own language seems to cry aloud for a topical as well as a transhistorical reading: "In times of persecution, when no exercise of true Religion is admitted, these private Meetings may not be denied to be lawful."

More seriously, Brown seems unwilling to ask whether Donne is merely typical of a broader epistemological crisis or himself, as a convert from Catholicism, an exceptional case; whether his love-hate relation with casuistry is a personal or a cultural symptom; and to what other texts of his, to which she was not directed by her predecessors, we would turn for answers to these questions.

ANNABEL PATTERSON Yale University