Students of religion and of literary theory are accustomed to contrasts between “religious” and “secular” sensibility, particularly when attending to emotion and sentiment in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Standard textbook accounts characterize Romantic views of poetic inspiration and expressions of religious feeing as arising naturally in reaction to Enlightenment conceptions of reason. Religious belief and practices are regarded as subject to rationalist social and economic forces of secularization arising outside of religion. Lori Branch's highly original investigation proposes to understand secularization “as a rhetorical process which takes place first of all within religious discourse itself” (5). Her work reveals a much more complex picture of this period in England, providing a forceful account of the dialectics of religion and secularism in the emergent eighteenth-century culture of sensibility. By concentrating on forms of rhetoric defending spontaneity in both religious and literary discourses, she reveals multiple tensions troped in her book's title—“rituals of spontaneity.”

Drawing capaciously on a wide range of literary and philosophical sources, she uses archival materials and the works of John Bunyan, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Oliver Goldsmith, Christopher Smart, and William Wordsworth to disclose how the languages of science and the market economy shape their defenses of spontaneity and the language of feeling. She is equally at home in the sixteenth-century English Reformation and its aftermath in setting the stage for her thesis in the rise of free prayer and the rejection of Christian liturgy and its attendant ritual practices. The Puritan and dissenting rejection of the formalities of superstitious and “dead” ritual actually harbor a host of intractable issues swirling around questions of religious uncertainty and anxiety.

In the introduction, we learn her indebtedness to historical and philosophical thinkers, especially to William Bousma, Talal Asad, Danièle Hervieu-Leger, Jean-François Lyotard, John Caputo, and Graham Ward. The opening chapter details the emergence of arguments for spontaneity in seventeenth-century debates over liturgy and free prayer. There she deploys the critical notion of an “ideology of spontaneity.” The second chapter is a detailed examination of Bunyan's Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress, tracing his spirituality, “simultaneously resisting and enmeshed in economic epistemology and … emotional empiricism” (88). Chapter 2 takes on Shaftesbury's formulation of moral-sense philosophy against a disturbing picture of his deeply conflicted self. Chapter 4 carries on the fate of the “logic of spontaneity” in Goldsmith and Smart in the ethos of John Newbery's commercial literary enterprise. This line of exposition culminates in Branch's insightful reading of Wordsworth's poetry against standard renderings of Wordsworth as a paradigm of spontaneous emotional expression.

The great irony, of course, in the Puritan rejection of liturgy and ritual is that it generated a highly restricted and ruled notion of spontaneous religious behavior and imagination, generating rituals of self-preoccupation. Even more, if we follow Branch's argument about the children of Calvinist covenant theology, the irony is that Calvin wanted nothing more than to love God for God's own sake, not for the sake of the believer and all the attendant anxieties of self-preoccupation. Yet as Branch points out, the latter was precisely the result of the language of commerce and science becoming the idiom of religious and literary defenses of spontaneity.

Occasionally Branch's style borders on the prolix, partly due to how her syntax reaches to take in so many subtleties, and to her absorption of eighteenth-century rhetorical styles. Yet one finds remarkable passages throughout. To cite but one example: in holding Smart's imprisoned poetry as a “profoundly liturgical vision of the world” in contrast to Goldsmith, she writes: “It is precisely the world … of frantic production and spending, and of impotent, sentimentalized virtue that is the context of Smart's incarceration for disruptive prayer—and of the composition of Jubilate Agno as a poem of the recovery of agency, praxis, and prayer outside the parameters of politeness. It is as though the literature of active ritual or resistance that Goldsmith aspired to, literature outside the logic of the market, of consumption, and of display, could only be produced by a man swallowed up in the belly of Grub Street and vomited forth into the madhouse, isolated and away from its modes of valuing, appraising, and orchestrating life into delineated patterns of productivity and consumption” (163).

It is the “recovery of agency, praxis and prayer” that reappears in the conclusion, “On the Religiousness of Criticism.” Here she draws out implications for the present travail of literary and religious studies, showing special dependence on the thought of Caputo, especially in his reading of Jacques Derrida. Literary critics and theorists wedded to dominant epistemological constructs and forms of criticism may resist her call for a new and more resilient aggiornamento with religious sensibility—sharpened by the late twentieth century's deconstructionist deployment of the “linguistic turn.” But Branch's detailed account of the figures and modalities in this book provide, in my judgment, a strong argument based on specific examples. There is much yet to untangle in the symbiotic relationship between prayer, liturgy, reflective faith, and what we call the “secular” that this book does not address. Nevertheless, Branch breaks genuinely new and promising ground by showing why literary (and theological!) scholarship ignores the particularity of faith to its impoverishment. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature and religion exemplify the necessity of such engaging scholarship.

Rituals of Spontaneity weds religious studies, especially the place of ritual and liturgy, with the study of literary history in a persuasive manner. This is a double contribution. It restores the study of forms of faith and religious belief to a legitimately prominent place in the study of literature. At the same time the author has contributed to new ways in which the study of literary composition sheds light on conceptions of emotion and reasoning, subverting our easy assumptions about religion and secularization.