Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature is a serious study of the way in which the Protestant theology of salvation informed the account of morality offered in several key texts in the canon of English Renaissance literature. Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert, and John Milton, the mainstays of the Protestant poetic tradition, each get a chapter; this chronological succession of literary figures is interrupted by a central chapter treating conformist and puritan moral theory as articulated by Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, William Perkins, and Richard Sibbes. The large argument that runs through the book is that early modern Protestant theologians were unable to produce a coherent ethics based on their soteriology and that literary authors both recognized this deficiency and offered a range of possible solutions in their poetic work. “Literary ethics” thus serve as an ameliorative supplement to the rigidities of reformed theology. Discontent with the doctrine of predestination, which was routinely attacked as a pastoral disaster that would either encourage despair and moral laxity or self-righteousness and moral security, is a familiar theme in early modern religious controversy, but Paul Cefalu breaks new ground by suggesting that this was also a major preoccupation for more clearly literary authors. Sidney is described as canvassing, in Arcadia, the available moral theories and finding them all deficient; Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, espouses an “ethic of absolutist legalism” (49); for Donne, “the source of normativity … is the body in pain” (132); and Herbert's religious lyrics successfully establish divine love as the source of morality but falter when considering social questions of behavior. Each of these readings is skillfully offered, though there is a consistent asymmetry between the intellectual superstructure and its rather narrow textual foundation. The literary response that seems most to capture the author's attention and win his approbation is Milton's “moral pragmatism,” which, in Cefalu's account, manages to avoid the “soteriological problems facing earlier theologians and writers because he effectively works a measure of self-interest and moral progress into an acceptable Calvinist scheme of salvation” (158).

As a version of intellectual history the book's procedures raise important questions about the way in which we talk about ideas. To return to the example of Milton's “moral pragmatism,” Cefalu writes: “Rather than describe a process through which moral apprentices gradually acquire discrete moral virtues and practical wisdom, late seventeenth-century moral pragmatism assumes instead that early converts make a series of rational choices, based on a sense of temporal and heavenly rewards, to stake unquestioning or automatic belief and faith in God” (158). Moral pragmatism here assumes the status of an agent who describes and assumes; one might object that this is, after all, only a manner of speaking. However, the book is heavily populated with such isms: antinomianism, Aristotelianism, Calvinism, Catholicism, clericalism, cognitivism, consequentialism, covenantilism, devotionalism, dogmatism, dualism, egoism, episcopalianism, Erastianism, functionalism, hedonism, historicism, Hobbism, humanism, internalism, Irenaenism, Jansenism, latitudinarianism, legalism, liberalism, libertarianism, materialism, mechanism, moralism, Paulinism, perfectionism, pietism, pragmatism, predestinarianism, presbyterianism, Protestantism, prudentialism, rationalism, skepticism, utilitarianism, and voluntarism all make an appearance. Too frequently such labels, at best a shorthand, create the impression that the particular term identifies a stable and coherent body of doctrine. Intellectual history understood in this way is a rather bloodless affair in which isms meet and spawn new isms. What is missing from this disembodied account is a recognition of the way in which particular doctrines are always overdetermined, shaped in response to an almost infinite variety of intellectual, social, and political pressures. In other words, isms take shape in and through history: the fashioning of a particular constellation of ideas into an ism is invariably a contested affair. Indeed, before they became the routine stuff of encyclopedia articles, isms were almost always pejorative. Marx was, famously, not a Marxist, and Calvin was not a Calvinist.

The book's spine, the ruling idea that provides the narrative with focus, is moral identity, a phrase that is not an early modern idiom. I mention this not in order to make a case, as some historians have, for rejecting all terms that were not in fact in use during the historical period under consideration; my point is rather that it would be helpful to have some account of this analytical concept. This need is especially felt in the epilogue, where Cefalu connects his concerns to recent work on early modern subjectivity by Stephen Greenblatt, Michael Schoenfeldt, and Deborah Shuger. Moral identity here becomes “early modern moral selfhood” and then “early modern, moral subjectivity” (189, 190). Cefalu is eager to vindicate the claim that Protestant theology had a “shaping influence” on “personal identity” (191), a claim that does not remain in the realm of ideas, or in literature for that matter, but extends to the “lived experience of early modern moral selfhood” (189). It is noteworthy that Cefalu reasserts the case for the consequences of reformed theology at a time when many historians have been insisting that Protestant doctrine was only assimilated at a glacial pace by a small percentage of the population, but perhaps he is right. What is harder to understand is the claim for a specific “early modern, moral subjectivity.” We are familiar with the argument for a peculiar early modern subjectivity, but what are we to make of the assertion of an “early modern, moral subjectivity”? What exactly is the force of “moral”? Is moral subjectivity something that some people or peoples have and others lack, or is it a universal attribute? The concluding excursus on object relations theory and developmental psychology offers some clarification but only further confuses the historical argument. These distractions are unfortunate because they deflect attention from the book's real strength: a smart, learned, and nuanced account of the way in which the ethical implications of Protestant doctrines of salvation preoccupied several of the period's most powerful poets.