For a book about early modern literature, Ross Lerner's Unknowing Fanaticism enters the scene with guns blazing. It begins with a lively account of book 1 of The Faerie Queene and asks if Redcrosse's adventures may not “sound like a parable taught at what in mainstream Western media are often called terrorist training camps” (2). Like John Carey's condemnation of Milton's Samson as a terrorist in “A Work in Praise of Terrorism? September 11 and Samson Agonistes” (London Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 2002), the book has a no-nonsense, presentist tone, urging us to see the past in clear ethical and political connection to the present. Except, Lerner conveys, in no uncertain terms, the difference between the politics of Carey's essay and his book: “We live in a world in which Reformation condemnations of fanaticism, usually meant to justify state violence, live on in systemic strategies of racialized neocolonial brutality that rely on terms such as ‘terrorist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ to vindicate war, indefinite detention, torture, murder, dispossession, and economic immiseration” (3).

Given the spirited beginning, it comes as a surprise that the rest of the book conducts a conventional survey of the topic of fanaticism in the work of Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Thomas Hobbes, and John Milton—that is, four of the five most canonical authors in the period (only Shakespeare is missing from the list). Another thing to notice about this list is that the argument's targets are somewhat underrepresented. Of early modern authors practicing the “Reformation condemnations of fanaticism, usually meant to justify state violence,” only Hobbes receives a chapter, with brief discussions of Luther and Locke in the introduction. This makes the clash that the book stages skewed toward the poets, depicted here as authors whose “experiment[s] with poetic techniques . . . allow them to address fanaticism's tendency to unsettle the boundaries between human will and divine agency and between individual and collective bodies” (3). That is, while for Carey if it looks, swims, and quacks like a duck, it is a duck, in Lerner's book the poets are invoked to show us that the duck always also looks like a rabbit. The argument has a traditional flavor to it, then, not only because it focuses on canonical authors, but because it defends the value of literature as a way of noticing, embracing, and cultivating ambiguity (a key term of Anglophone literary studies ever since William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity [Chatto and Windus, 1930]) where other approaches pursue definitions, condemnations, and justifications.

Once the surprise wears off, though, this discrepancy between the book's bold framing and its more conventional contents turns out to be the point. For, while Lerner does not quite put it in this way, the question at the heart of the project is whether fanaticism, often considered the polar opposite of ambiguity, proves to be a case—perhaps even a paradigmatic case—of it.

Hobbes's critique of fanaticism is also a critique of ambiguity: in order to condemn religious violence without dismissing religion itself, he insists on a set of epistemological criteria that help demarcating Jesus's martyrdom, for instance, from a seventeenth-century act of fanaticism. While Lerner explores the gaps in Hobbes's own argument, the purpose of the book is to contrast Hobbes's attempt to seal these holes and the poets’ efforts to locate and cultivate them as spaces in which agency itself might be reconsidered. Thus, Lerner's Spenser poses the question of whether knights in The Faerie Queene are agents of their actions or divine organs of God's will but does not offer a clear answer; Donne carves out a sense of martyrdom that involves the annihilation of the will but insists that this annihilation makes martyrdom singular and inimitable; and Milton focuses on what it means to witness an act of fanaticism without a definite answer to the question of whether the act was divinely inspired.

While the focus on four authors may have at first felt too narrow, eventually I found myself wishing that the book engaged with fewer of them but more in-depth. Take Donne as an example. Lerner argues that Donne, instead of simply condemning martyrdom in order to support James I's religious regime, distinguishes between authentic and inauthentic martyrdom. Authentic martyrdom involves complete passivity in order to become a pure vessel of God's will. But this also means, Lerner suggests, that true martyrdom is unexemplary: since it involves a self-annihilation that relinquishes any sense of agency, imitating it is impossible since the act of imitation requires agency. This is an ingenious argument, but it relies on a selective reading of Donne and leaves out texts that directly contradict it. For instance, in what is among his most extensive treatments of martyrdom in the sermons, Donne focuses on the protomartyr Saint Stephen. Annihilation does not come up at all, and instead of emphasizing inimitability, Donne's main goal is to encourage his audience to follow Stephen's example in their own callings. Lerner acknowledges that his account does not include all of Donne's discussions of martyrdom, yet I could not help wondering how the chapter's argument about unexemplary martyrdom might be inflected by Donne's insistence that following Stephen's example could be as simple as performing one's duties as a judge, merchant, or even courtier.

If this feels like splitting hairs, it is because Lerner's overarching argument is persuasive, perhaps even inevitably so. The literary representations of fanatical acts in Spenser, Donne, and Milton do often involve ambiguity, as poetry—especially poetry that invokes divine inspiration or relies on Biblical hermeneutics—often does. But what do we learn from recognizing that literature's tendency to exploit ambiguity for aesthetic effect extends even to those seemingly unambiguous acts that other discourses like to demarcate as “fanaticism?” Lerner invokes Gillian Rose's The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society (Blackwell, 1992) to suggest that “these poets find that a ‘deeper submission to uncertainty leads to a more inclusive activity—to cultivation of plasticity rather than culture of terror’” (29). This is an intriguing claim, but it receives no sustained attention in the chapters. It is one thing to say that in The Faerie Queene Spenser left open the question of whether Sir Guyon destroys the Bower of Bliss out of his own will or as a vessel of divine inspiration. But can we assume that Spenser would have urged “deeper submission to uncertainty” during a civil war? I do not invoke this frivolous question to suggest that Lerner should have speculated about the politics of Spenser, Donne, and Milton but to point out that it is one thing to find the depictions of fanaticism more ambiguous in poetry than in political philosophy and quite another to then translate this poetic ambiguity back into the language of politics. How such a translation may happen is the question Unknowing Fanaticism ultimately raises but does not answer.