{"id":1169,"date":"2017-11-20T13:47:34","date_gmt":"2017-11-20T13:47:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=1169"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:37:44","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:37:44","slug":"brooke-conti-confessions-of-faith-in-early-modern-england","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2017\/11\/20\/brooke-conti-confessions-of-faith-in-early-modern-england\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooke Conti. Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Brooke Conti. Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England<\/a>.<\/em> Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. viii, 240p. ISBN 9780812245752. US$ 55.00 (hardback).<\/p>\n

Literary criticism continues to be taken with the complex, dynamic nature of early modern religious belief. Such is the case with Brooke Conti\u2019s Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England<\/em>, which considers short bursts of religious self-confession amidst the political prose works of King James I, John Donne, John Milton, Thomas Browne, John Bunyan, and King James II. Conti defines these \u201cconfessions of faith\u201d as \u201cpolemically inspired autobiographies that purport to lay bare their authors\u2019 beliefs but that tend, instead, to complicate and obscure them\u201d (2). Marked by \u201cincoherence, with suddenly tangled syntax, complicated negative constructions, and the like\u201d (6), these confessions signal religious belief caught between individual complexity and a social landscape impatient with ambiguity.<\/p>\n

The book contains three parts. \u201cOaths of Allegiance\u201d pairs James I\u2019s and Donne\u2019s conversions to Protestantism. Throughout Basilikon Doron<\/em> and later speeches and pamphlets, James I\u2019s royal voice gives way to moments of \u201cnervous repetition\u201d (27) and \u201cambiguity\u201d (42), as he tries and fails to align his Catholic heritage with his role as leader of the Protestant church. Donne parallels him throughout Pseudo-Martyr<\/em> and Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions<\/em>, where \u201cmessy emotional backstory\u201d (56) plagues an otherwise confident conversion, suggesting lingering Catholic nostalgia. \u201cPersonal Credos\u201d turns to Milton\u2019s and Browne\u2019s emphasis on reason and personal knowledge. Throughout his anti-prelatical tracts and Defences<\/em>, Milton offers \u201cnervous and evasive\u201d self-references that \u201cseem to emerge from a sense of uncertainty about his mission\u201d (79). Likewise, revisions to Religio Medici<\/em> before its authorized printing reveal similar \u201ctheological uneasiness\u201d (112) in Browne. His later removed \u201cnervous gestures in the direction of orthodoxy\u201d belie the \u201cdeclarative mode\u201d (127) of the final version. \u201cLoyal Dissents?\u201d considers Bunyan\u2019s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners<\/em> and the speeches and pamphlets of James II. Whereas Bunyan\u2019s work purports to vindicate his spiritual beliefs, it tends to read his victorious conversion through the later \u201cfears, doubts, and temptations\u201d (162) of his imprisonment. In conclusion, James II\u2019s confessions practice unconcerned misalignment between his private Catholicism and Protestant leadership. This tonal shift suggests to Conti that religion had lost its privilege as a defining public quality. She concludes that the confession of faith, thriving in outdated debates over private and public worship, no longer mattered as a rhetorical strategy.<\/p>\n

These incidents reveal real concern over belief amidst the religious controversies of the seventeenth century. Given the complexity of these controversies, the book\u2019s religious inquiry might have gone deeper. It claims that for belief, \u201coptions were generally binary: Catholic or Protestant, conformist or non-\u201d (4), yet the first part explores two decidedly non-binary major figures. This oversimplification leads the book to problematize the unevenness of religious confessions. Yet as the book recognizes, religion is as central and complex to identity as race (8), underlining that change and contradiction are to be expected as people grow. Closer consideration of specific spiritual debates, perhaps as also echoed in these figures\u2019 fictional works, could have framed these issues positively as extensions of human reflection.<\/p>\n

However, Confessions of Faith<\/em> is also to be greatly admired, particularly for the ways in which it carefully traces a protean, fleeting genre, offering fresh insights into some of literature\u2019s most traditional names. The study helpfully makes visible and decodes a swath of prose that is too often dismissed in these lengthy prose works. Conti\u2019s ability to manipulate the different dimensions of her argument, including religious confession, \u201cautobiographical endeavor\u201d (169), and literary genre, provides for a study useful to multiple sub-disciplines. SHARP readers will find her description of Religio Medici<\/em>\u2019s transformations through manuscript and unauthorized publication fascinating, as well as the confessional through-lines Conti traces that tie disparate works together in new ways. Confessions of Faith<\/em> brings fresh observation and insight to classic early modern texts, and proves fruitful reading for literary, religious, and political interests.<\/p>\n

Kyle Vitale
\nYale University<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brooke Conti. Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. viii, 240p. ISBN 9780812245752. US$ 55.00 (hardback). Literary criticism continues to be taken with the complex, dynamic nature of early modern religious belief. Such is the case with Brooke Conti\u2019s Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England, which considers short […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1957],"class_list":["post-1169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-religion-theology"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1169"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1228,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1169\/revisions\/1228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}