In the stimulating Unknowing Fanaticism, Ross Lerner presents early modern literature as a platform for exploring the relationship between self-annihilation and religious fanaticism. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a reinvigoration of studies looking into the connection of religious violence and literature, and many have focused on this violence and its relation to the power of the state. While Lerner is also concerned with this connection, he convincingly shifts the scope of study by arguing that fanaticism played a major role in shaping both poetics and politics in Reformation literature. Lerner argues that Reformation writers who engaged with ideas of fanaticism and its link to radical self-annihilation for divine purpose can be separated into two groups: those who disavowed and condemned self-annihilation and fanaticism in polemic (Martin Luther, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes) and those who struggled to accept such claims and instead engaged with the issue in philosophical and technical ways (Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton). By asking new questions about well-known Reformation era pieces, Lerner delves into the intricacies of form, origin, and agency of divine possession and offers new insights about early modern religious fanaticism.

During the sixteenth century, thinkers such as Martin Luther began to categorize fanaticism as evil and malicious. Lerner uses Martin Luther's vehement revulsion toward the Anabaptists and Thomas Müntzer, whom Luther refers to as the “Schwärmer,” as an example of polemic focusing on the “asocial antimodern” portrayal of a religious fanatic rather than the complications that radicalism brings to the table (8). While Luther, Locke, and Hobbes provide one of the two approaches to fanaticism that Lerner lays out, only Hobbes gets Lerner's full attention (see chapter 3) as Lerner lays out the ways in which Hobbes seeks to stifle the very questions that Spenser, Donne, and Milton are asking about self-annihilation. While scholars often focus on Hobbes's negation of claims of divine possession, Lerner steers the conversation toward Hobbes's issue in Leviathan of biblical interpretation and how fanatics would “become illegible to sovereignty” (86). In this way, Lerner's inspection of the rhetoric in Leviathan brings important reinterpretations to Hobbes's work and ideas about fanatics.

As important as Luther, Locke, and Hobbes are for Lerner's comparison of approaches to fanaticism, Lerner's engaging deep dive into Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen presents the strongest evidence about new poetic and political forms. Rather than condemning fanatics, Spenser grapples with what it means to be an “organ” for God, to recognize God's organ, to recognize divine vessels, and to understand how communities play a part in following or becoming part of the religious radicals. Lerner's treatment of Redcrosse in Books I and II especially illustrates the problematization of the agency of an individual who may have experienced self-annihilation, and results in the idea that Redcrosse can only be confirmed as God's “organ” in poetry by “los[ing] him as a subject of knowledge and action” (33). In contrast, Lerner's study of the Giant and Talus in Book V asks important questions about true and false claims to divine inspiration, and accentuates the issue of mimetic qualities in fanaticism. Lerner's engagement with the text results in important questions about Spenser's allegorical world and an understanding of the ways in which epistemology threatens that world.

Turning away from Spenser's allegorical, Lerner turns next to the Donne's exploration of sonnets, labor, and will in the context of self-annihilation. In the devotional sonnet “Batter my Hart,” Donne explores how one's demands and will intersect with becoming “nothingness” for the divine. Lerner here demonstrates Donne's attempts to grapple with the origins of self-annihilation through verse, resulting in an important addition to early modern conceptions of martyrdom. While medieval martyrdom had focused on the ability for imitation, Donne's depiction of “antimimetic martyrdom” in his poetic efforts reveals new ideas about how labor will never transform a believer into a martyr or tool for divine violence (81). Lerner's exploration of the sonnet's form accentuates Donne's own grappling with issues of passivity and one's will to become annihilated for God, each important aspects of fanaticism that are not addressed as thoroughly as they are by Spenser or Milton.

Finally, Lerner saves John Milton's Samson Agonistes for his last chapter. Milton's portrayal of religious violence is well known, but Lerner wants his readers to understand how Milton—more so than Spenser or Donne—forces us to reckon with what bearing witness to martyrdom, religious violence, and fanaticism means for both the tragedy's form and the witnesses’ inability to understand the origin of a fanatic's power. While Feisal Mohamed claims that Milton valorizes Samson's religious violence (Milton and the Post-secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism [2011], 32), Lerner argues that Milton's use of dichotomies invites us to explore rather than solve “the fundamental ambiguity Milton sees in Samson” (116). This ambiguity surrounding definitive judgments of religious fanaticism are the common thread in each chapter, but Lerner especially accentuates this ambiguity in his treatment of Milton. Indeed, by the time the reader is finished with the chapter, there is an overwhelming sense of one's inability to know anything solid about divine possession. This is, however, Lerner's goal, and his treatment of Milton's ambivalence especially drives home the implications of how witnesses’ own interpretations create new perils.

Unknowing Fanaticism is a fascinating exploration of the epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic complexities of fanaticism in Reformation literature. As a historian, I found Lerner's devotion to the opacity of fanaticism forced me to reach for the solidity behind Lerner's evidence. After all, the heart of his argument—indeed what he argues separates his work from Feisal Mohamed's scholarship—is the unavoidable ambivalence of Spenser's, Donne's, and Milton's portrayals of those who are “organs” of divine will. However, Lerner's attention to the complex portrayals of self-annihilation in Reformation literature serves as a valuable tool for any wishing to better understand this important aspect of religious radicalism in the early modern era. In short, Unknowing Fanaticism is a captivating and rigorous study concerned about questions of agency, authority, and poetic conflict.