Patrick McGrath's Early Modern Asceticism: Literature, Religion, and Austerity in the English Renaissance offers an important modification of Max Weber's widely accepted claim that the Protestant Reformation shifted cultural attention away from ascetic values, such as monasticism, corporal mortification, and the veneration of virginity, and eventually replaced them with the perception that marriage, family life, and productive labor are the loci for fulfilling God's purpose. McGrath argues that, rather than disappearing or being dismissed as Roman Catholic idolatry, asceticism persisted, particularly among the followers of William Laud. According to McGrath, Laudians (or High Church Protestants) believed that asceticism validated the strength and power of the will, and to deny carnal desires or endure corporal pain led the ascetic to a state of holy beauty. For McGrath, the influence of the Laudians perpetuates philosophical considerations about the mind/body paradox that constitute a “major theme” (8) in literature and religion activated by and around the engagement with asceticism. McGrath's work is notable for the depth of his expertise on the complex topic of early modern theology in England and for the range of primary religious texts he consults in order to make his case.

In tracing asceticism in early modern literature, McGrath looks at selected works of John Donne, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and John Bunyan, arguing that there is enough evidence there to “reclaim the presence of asceticism” (22) in the period. McGrath's method is to situate a few select works within a context informed by a meticulous reading of a variety of religious texts and treatises. While McGrath's research reveals an expansive knowledge of religious prose, the narrowness of scope in the literary texts he discusses raises some questions.

In chapter 1, McGrath analyzes Donne's marriage sermons to suggest that the austerity he expresses there—coupled with his decision not to remarry after the death of his wife—constitutes a belief that celibacy is a preferred state to marriage. Much of his argument depends on reading Donne's decision to remain a widower as related to his religious convictions, specifically that to indulge the desires of the body through marriage would distract from his devotion to God. McGrath indicates further that Donne's choice enables him to live a “monastic” life, but the decision not to remarry does not equate to the embracing of celibacy, and a life that involves caring for seven children would hardly resemble the quiet and contemplative existence of a cloistered monk. Perhaps the most confusing omission in this chapter is that McGrath does not discuss Donne's devotional poetry. When he does turn to poetry, McGrath looks only at a sonnet Donne wrote about his wife's death, “Since She Whom I Loved” (1619), one stanza from an earlier poem called “A Litany” (1608), and “To Mr. Tilman after he had Taken Orders” (1618). While McGrath's reading of Donne's sermons and the limited sampling of his poetry does point to his contemplation of a tension between the soul and the body, it seems an overstatement to conclude, as he does, that these texts “reflect the intensity of [Donne's] ascetic feeling” (48).

A similar problem with selectivity occurs in chapters 2 and 3, both of which focus on early works by John Milton. Here, Milton's well-known Puritan leanings are challenged by McGrath's reading of A MASK Presented at LUDLOW-Castle (1634—A Mask) and Lycidas (1637), in which McGrath purports to uncover Laudian sympathies. McGrath is adept at explication, and his discussions about the literary texts are largely convincing, but his statement that this finding “revises Milton's religious affiliation as a staunch radical” (145) is overblown. Both Lycidas and A Mask were composed before Milton turned thirty, and without any fruitful comparison to later works, the religious sentiments entertained in them could easily be dismissed as the questioning of a curious young man. Drawing wide-ranging conclusions based on a few selected texts raises more questions than it answers.

The same narrow scope troubles McGrath's poetic analyses. In one example, McGrath points to the Garden of Adonis in book 3, canto 6 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene as a probable model for Milton's A Mask, but one that omits the “pullulating sexuality” (67) present in Spenser's poem. This omission serves for McGrath as evidence of Milton's discomfort with sexuality and, in his view, muddies readings of the text that see the allusion as prefiguring the celebration of marital sexuality on display in Milton's later works. Sexual activity is certainly one aspect of Spenser's canto, with the garden's sensual delights providing the setting for Venus to enjoy sexual bliss with Adonis. But if Milton were uncomfortable with sexuality, why not allude to the beginning of the same canto, where the twins Belphoebe and Amoret (two characters associated in the poem with chastity) are conceived when their mother Chrysogone is touched by “heaven's fruitful ray” (3.6.6)? If, as McGrath contends, the allusions to Spenser are meant to illustrate Milton's advocation of asceticism, why does not Milton allude to the immaculate conception and virgin births instead of Venus's “mount” in the garden's center?

Chapters 4 and 5 keep a narrow scope but offer firmer support for McGrath's claim. In chapter 4, McGrath turns to Andrew Marvell, a poet whose most regularly anthologized works include “A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body,” a poem that McGrath interestingly has not mentioned. Instead, the chapter focuses on Upon Appleton House (1651), arguing that the poem reveals a scathing critique of the Laudian Church, which as McGrath reads it, Marvell thinks does not go far enough in the “extirpation of sexual desire” (121). McGrath's argument about this poem is solid and convincing, if limited to a single poetic work. The final chapter is McGrath's strongest. Here he turns to John Bunyan and his most well-known work, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678). McGrath's claim that this text “represents one of the most sustained literary engagements with self-denial in the seventeenth century” (122) is well borne out by the astute reading McGrath provides. Here, the context afforded by the religious materials elucidates key aspects of the work.

As a whole, McGrath's Early Modern Asceticism offers scholars a view that complicates some of the monolithic claims about influential writers and their views on religion and sexuality, which leads to a more nuanced appreciation of the intricacies of these ideas. The extensive knowledge McGrath displays about early modern theology provides an instructive context for understanding some of the variations and contradictions on display in the literature from the period.