As an editor of an earlier Oxford handbook on literature and theology I know all too well the difficulty of organizing such books, which cannot be comprehensive but must provide a global picture of their subject. Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox have done a brilliant job in providing, in five sections, a scholarly overview of what was the most fertile period in English literature and religious thought, beginning in the late Middle Ages and ending in the seventeenth century. The editors start by advising their reader not to read the book from cover to cover. I did not take their advice and I am glad I did so. Although, inevitably in a volume of this kind, there are some generalizations that skate on debateable critical ice, overall here is a remarkable collection of scholarly essays, none of which let the side down.

This is quite deliberately a handbook of literature and religion, not theology, although there is a great deal of theology present in it. It steers a steady interdisciplinary course, wisely beginning with a historical section that provides the context for the next two, largely literary, sections. Part IV explores different interpretative communities, including the Jewish diaspora, Islamic communities at a time of increasing world travel and exploration, and English communities in the New World. The final Part V is fascinating, though the most difficult to hold together, introducing issues as diverse as the place of the Bible and its translations (Hannibal Hamlin does an excellent job in this most difficult of summaries), the relationship between religion and science, the tradition of the ars moriendi and theological questions regarding sin, judgement and eternity.

The heart of the book lies in Parts II and III, concerned with ‘literary genres for the expression of faith’, and individual examples of ‘the early modern writer’. The examination of literary genres confirms my belief that the study of literature and religion must begin with literature and its forms. But in the age of Shakespeare and Jonson it was not drama that was at the heart of the religious obsessions of the time but the forms of public prayer and sermons. Erica Longfellow begins her essay on prayer and prophecy with George Herbert and the paradox that ‘prayer could not be confined in human words’. Public worship and the reading of the Bible was at the heart of English Renaissance culture and is the key to understanding the poetry of Donne and Herbert as well as the dramatic works of Shakespeare and Marlowe.

Nothing is more difficult than choosing the writers who represent a period in literature and culture, and the selection made in Part III on ‘religion and the early modern writer’ is brilliant. Shakespeare and Herbert are omitted, but alongside Spenser, Marlowe, Donne and Milton we find essays on Colet and More, John Foxe, Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, and Lucy Hutchinson. The selection is indicative of how the study of literature and religion, still largely neglected in the academy, can shift the focus in both literary and religious studies. Andrew Hiscock’s fine essay ‘What England has to offer’, begins with the figure of Erasmus as central to the understanding of Renaissance humanism, and from him to the neglected figure of John Colet, forgotten largely because so much of his work has not survived, and concludes with Thomas More. From there, cunningly, we move to Pincombe and Schwartz-Leeper’s essay on John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs of 1563, a ‘landmark ecclesiastical history and martyrology’, negotiating its way between tragedy and comedy. Then and only then can we move on the great poetic and dramatic figures of Spenser and Marlowe, while the central essay of this section by Nandra Perry and Robert E. Stillman examines the siblings Philip Sidney and his even more intriguing sister, Mary Sidney Herbert and their constructions of piety in poetry. Of the remaining essays on Donne, Hutchinson and Milton, the most challenging is Catherine Gimelli Martin’s on John Milton inasmuch as it avoids simply yet another reading of Paradise Lost or the great poems, but reveals a man of powerful ‘independence of mind’ – a complex religious thinker who expressed himself in both prose and verse. If Milton can be considered as ‘England’s premier religious poet’ then that requires us to acknowledge the peculiarity of his religious and theological beliefs – a reminder that studying literature through religion and religion through literature must be a revisionary exercise for both disciplines, and a fundamental one if either are to be properly understood.

It is rare to find a volume of this sort that is genuinely and boldly interdisciplinary. That it is so is what makes it so challenging and so powerful. The period after the early sixteenth century in English literature and culture was obsessed with religion. Nothing stood outside its boundaries and it was a matter of life and death for the whole of society. For the humblest to the greatest in the land a theological slip could cost you your life. The one text that is omitted from this handbook, though perhaps this is a deliberate decision on the part of the editors, is the Book of Common Prayer in its various forms from 1549, a work of literary genius that was never intended to be such, but has survived in its 1662 form to the present day in English culture. And yet it is everywhere, for better or for worse, and, with the Directory of Public Worship that briefly replaced it in 1645, it is a visible and dramatic presence in virtually all of the literature and theology of the English Renaissance into the seventeenth century. Timothy Rosendale’s masterly essay on ‘Authority, Religion and the State’ recognizes the imperfections of the Book of Common Prayer, while at the same time indicates its central authority as a stabilizing element in Church and State, ‘linguistically, scripturally, sacramentally and interpretively’. The BCP was finally unavoidable and cannot be neglected by students of either literature or religion in the period.

This handbook ought to be a central text used to challenge many scholarly assumptions about late medieval and early modern English literature and religious history. The simple fact is that they cannot be taken apart, and all too often that has been the case, as I discovered many years ago while trying to teach Milton in a department of English Literature that was simply not interested in theology or religious thought. The final essay by P.G. Stanwood addresses the deeply theological themes of sin, judgement and eternity, but concludes with close readings of Spenser’s Mutability Cantos, after a consideration of the writings of Bishop Jeremy Taylor. It is a good place to end. The concluding Appendix offers necessary practical guidance in research methods in a field in which most university libraries have no idea where to place volumes of this kind – in the literature or the theology section.

This is a distinguished volume with very few weak links and a great deal of first class scholarship, and its editors are to be congratulated on their work in bringing it all together. A brief review can barely do it justice, and it deserves to be widely used and read.