Closely argued and convincing, this book is an excellent introduction to and interpretation of one of John Donne’s comparatively neglected pre-ordination prose works, Pseudo-martyr. There, Donne argues that Catholics have no legitimate grounds to refuse to take the Jacobean oath of allegiance, and that therefore those who refuse to take it are not martyrs for the faith, but rather pseudo-martyrs, who in fact committed idolatry, in Donne’s view, by dying for a mere human theological opinion. Altman argues that in this work Donne ‘attempted to displace the Catholic/Protestant binary and overlay it with a recusant/conformist opposition that disentangled a subject’s political stance from his or her religious conscience, and which therefore presented the latter as being of little interest to the state’ (p. 84). Far from seeing the absolute power of the monarch as a threat to the individual liberty of conscience, Donne framed this as its protection:

Doubt, for Donne, is essential, and because the state demands only outward conformity and does not judge internal belief, it guards the individual conscience from the more totalising demands of fallible human Churches. Conformity is therefore decoupled from true belief, and because the state does not make demands on the conscience, those who die for their theological opinions are not dying for the sake of their conscience, but because of their outward, political actions in defiance of a divinely appointed monarch.

Of course, the early Christian martyrs, universally agreed in Jacobean English society to have been true martyrs, in fact did defy the edicts of emperors. But Donne distinguished this from the cause of his Catholic contemporaries on the grounds that while early Christians died for the foundational truths of the faith, to die out of obedience to the pope would be to die for the sake of an institution capable of error and would therefore be idolatry (p. 53). Instead, Catholics should conform to the ‘absolute power’ (p. 44) of the monarch, while also keeping their inner consciences free to wrestle with religious questions. Because of Donne’s political absolutism (for which Altman argues strongly in the first chapter) he held that in most circumstances a subject should obey a monarch even when he disagreed with the monarch’s command, and therefore that a Catholic could in good conscience disagree with the oath of allegiance, and yet still swear it. This allowed Donne to distinguish between subjects not on the basis of their religious opinions (since such opinions were irrelevant to the taking of the oath) but rather on their political conformity or nonconformity.

This core argument having been established in the first chapter, in the second Altman shows how Donne reinforces this division through drawing a firm line between obedient Catholics and Jesuits. Here she draws extensively on another of Donne’s works from this period, Ignatius his conclave, a convoluted satire in which the founder of the Society of Jesus schemes against other notorious villains to attain the highest place in Hell, displacing even the Devil himself. Altman argues that Donne’s comically over-the-top portrait of the Jesuits as mindlessly fanatical evildoers enables him more easily to draw a distinction between the Jesuits and the great mass of politically obedient English Catholics. Though Altman repeatedly indicates that Donne also makes this distinction through attacks on non-conformist Protestants, lumping them in together with the Jesuits they despised, these attacks are never explored in this book, and Altman focuses exclusively on the Jesuits. Though this reflects Donne’s own emphases, even a brief treatment of his attacks on non-conformist Protestants would have added balance to the work, and strengthened Altman’s argument that Donne is seeking to redraw the boundaries of English society along political rather than religious lines.

In the third and final chapter, Altman contextualises Donne’s analysis of the role of the will in martyrdom in a broader Christian debate stretching back to the earliest days of the Church, at the core of which is the question of whether someone can volunteer themselves for martyrdom. Donne does not simply reject the notion of voluntary martyrdom absolutely, but argues that a would-be martyr can only make such an offering on behalf of a fundamental truth of Christianity (which he argues is impossible because no one is persecuting Christians for fundamental tenets of the faith in seventeenth-century England) and if s/he is certain s/he is acting out of perfect Christian charity and not pride (which is impossible to know for certain, since our own reason may be corrupted by that very pride). Luckily, God has ordained a solution: ‘our urges are governed by our fallen nature; our fallen nature is governed by our fallen reason; our fallen reason is governed by the state; and the state is governed by God through a divinely ordained monarch’ (pp. 137–8). Therefore, any voluntary martyr acting in defiance of a Christian state cannot be a true martyr, but only a pseudo-martyr.

Perhaps the most startling conclusion Altman draws is that ‘the commonplace assumption that, at some point in his life, Donne converted from Catholicism to Protestantism’ is misguided; ‘Instead … Donne undermines the idea of converting from one religious institution to another since he establishes that there is only a single true and foundational Christianity, which the Churches, as man-made institutions, have the capacity to corrupt’ (p. 14). In this telling, ‘Pseudo-Martyr suggests … that during his middle years Donne did not convert: he conformed’ (p. 58). It is perhaps worth observing that conversion has a far richer and older range of meanings than merely that of shifting allegiance from one institution to another, and that many religious propagandists of this period claimed to represent not a particular faction but the true and original Christianity. Altman’s claim concerning conversion might have been strengthened by engagement with the theology (implicit and explicit) in Donne’s writings of this period.

That said, Altman’s core argument, that Pseudo-Martyr uses political absolutism to carve out a protected space for the doubts and quests of the individual conscience, is convincing and well made, and this work makes an important contribution to the study of both Donne and absolutism in Jacobean England, as well as providing an excellent introduction to one of Donne’s most neglected works. Though full of stimulating ideas and arguments, at times the book can have the feeling of a patchwork quilt, stitched together from writings previously composed upon other ‘emergent occasions’, leading to a slightly confusing structure. Different sections also assume varying levels of prior knowledge – while the first chapter immediately engages contemporary literature on political discourse in early seventeenth-century England, the conclusion offers a survey of revisionist and post-revisionist debates on absolutism in this period. The reader envisioned by the first chapter of the work would not need such an essay, while the reader envisioned by the conclusion would need it at the start of the book and not the end.

Quibbles aside, Witnessing to the faith offers a valuable introduction to and fascinating analysis of one of the most unusual, interesting and neglected contributions to political discourse in Jacobean England, and is very much to be welcomed.