It is one thing to claim that the spectre of old religion haunts Renaissance England. It is quite another to claim, as Thomas Rist does in his recent book, that English literature demonstrates a pattern of cultural continuity with the Church of Rome. Rist’s account begins with the Book of Common Prayer, which he calls ‘among the major literary monuments of early modern England’, authorized by church and state ‘to effect reformation by turning England into a country of obedient scripture readers’ (pp. 3, 7). Rist’s claim is that, at least until the end of the seventeenth century, this reformation remained largely incomplete, especially when one considers English poetry, drama and other English works of fiction.

One significant aspect of the Protestant mission was of course to oppose the Roman Catholic theology concerning salvific works. Rist makes the case that theological ‘works’ included works of the imagination: what we now call literary works. The preface to the Prayer Book condemned human imagination—‘the wit of man’—as irredeemable and corrupted (p. 9). To be sure, the 1559 edition’s preface, standard until the mid-seventeenth century, followed the Act of Uniformity in condemning any ‘Enterludes, Plays, Songs, Rimes’ or ‘other open words’ that ‘speak any thing in the derogation, depriving, or despising of the same’ Book of Common Prayer (p. 10). Rist makes the case that the phrasing here (‘derogation, depriving, or despising’) should be understood according to the broadest interpretation: since the Book of Common Prayer was essentially an appendix to the Act of Uniformity, passed by an act of Parliament, and since the Book itself was so central to the English reformation, almost any work of the imagination could be understood as undermining it or leading away from it, i.e. to its ‘derogation’. As Rist explains, ‘Since the authority of the Prayer Book extended from the Queen, the Lords and Commons to the ritual action and theology which the Prayer Book propagated, any literary interlude, play, song, rhyme, or open words weakening that authority is within the scope of the Act of Uniformity’ (p. 12). In this respect, the Book of Common Prayer both defined and exemplified a narrow poetics of Protestant writing—Protestants henceforth preferred ‘texts that were patchworks or mosaics of scripture’ to (Catholic-inscribed) imaginative works, with Milton’s longer narrative poems being the most ambitious attempt at the Protestant genre (p. 8).

The first chapter begins with Ben Jonson and what Rist deems his Roman Catholic ‘works’. The focus here is on the way in which Jonson construes his own poetry and drama, collected in 1616 and printed as The Works of Ben Jonson. Rist argues that Jonson intended his printed Works to serve as salvific in a theological sense. An ancillary aspect of Jonson’s poetics relates to the use of memorialization and commemoration in epitaphic poetry. Rist argues that, despite the fact that Jonson was outwardly Protestant after 1610, these aspects of Jonson’s self-fashioning provide a ‘theologically Catholic face’ to his corpus (p. 26). His Works are from the outset opposed to the Protestant doctrine of faith alone— i.e. Jonson’s own poetic works and the poetic and dramatic works of his imitators are all premised upon a notion of pious and redemptive work with the ultimate telos of salvation. Rist relates all of this to Catholic monuments and iconography, with the focus being on the importance of sacrificial and Eucharistic works within Roman worship. The subsequent chapter on how Catholic monuments and a theology of works are prefigured within the pre-Christian context of Jonson’s Sejanus and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is especially noteworthy.

Other chapters explore the role of purgatory, Christian worship, and representations of the Virgin Mary across a wide array of English literary works. Chapter three explores rituals of burial and Roman Catholic doctrine concerning purgatory, pardons, and intercession for the dead. The Prayer Books of 1549 and 1559 shortened and minimized the importance of the traditional funeral ritual, with both versions cutting out any implied reference to purgatory and to intercession and with the 1559 edition removing the funereal rite of holy communion altogether. The logic of reformation at work here was godly discipline in which the bereaved were encouraged to ‘comfort your selves’ (p. 79). In contrast, Rist shows that early modern drama repeatedly emphasized dramatic scenes associated with mourning, essentially crying out for ‘the comfort of the dead’ (p. 80). Rist explores a wide array of dramatic works here—including Hamlet, Dr. Faustus, Gorboduc, Tamburlaine II, The Spanish Tragedy, and an array of Shakespeare’s comedies and history plays—in which grieving and elaborate commemorations of the dead are staged.

Next, Rist shows how English devotional poetry, including poetry by Crashaw, Herbert, Herrick, and Donne, owes a debt to Robert Southwell’s Roman Catholic influence. All of these poets, Rist argues, display features that reference Eucharistic worship, transubstantiation, ritual procedures of the Mass, Roman Catholic saints and what Brian Cummings has called the Petrine context of Southwell’s Roman Catholic Church. Whereas Cummings saw Southwell’s influence as having been eventually reabsorbed into English Protestantism, Rist finds echoes of Southwell’s Catholicism all throughout later English poetry. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of this continued influence concerns the evidence of Mariology that Rist finds in poetry by Jonson and recusants such as Henry Constable and Richard Verstegan, both of whom seemed to have a Protestant audience in mind and to be consciously representing Mary with an ecumenical purpose. The plays discussed in this section include a series of dramatic presentations of Robin Hood and Matilda (Anthony Munday and Robert Davenport), Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, as well as a selection of Restoration plays by Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn. In the Robin Hood legend plays, Robin Hood’s love interest Matilda assumes, by means of an obliquely scripted process of renaming, the sobriquet of Maid Marian and henceforth associates herself with convented virginity, becoming the holy woman linked with virginal Mary against tyranny. This process undergoes further permutation in Dekker and Middleton’s portrayal of the cross-dressing Mary Firth, who despite her reputation for loose morals, is intended to remind us of manly female saints from the medieval period, whose very cross-dressing became a sign of their chaste purity.

Rist deserves credit for covering such a wide selection of poetic and dramatic works stretching from the late sixteenth century to the Restoration. Readers will have their favorite parts—for me, Rist’s argument about Jonson’s self-conscious construal of his own poetic and dramatic Works as salvific in a theological sense was especially convincing. I also found convincing the later chapters on the continued veneration of saints, especially the final chapters on overt and implicit veneration of the Virgin Mary. At the same time, scholars who specialize in early modern religion may have reservations about how starkly Rist draws the boundary between Catholic and Protestant theologies. For example, Rist follows an earlier generation of scholars such as Alan Sinfield and Andrew Weiner who tended to see Philip Sidney as defying his own Calvinist upbringing in favorably comparing the poet as maker of imaginary worlds to God the creator. Here Rist omits any mention of Robert Stillman’s groundbreaking work on Sidney’s debt to the ecumenical reformer Philip Melanchthon, who praised even the pagan poets as using their God-given gifts to ameliorate the effects of a fallen world. Melanchthon pointedly did not follow Calvin in consigning the study of moral philosophy to the purview of divine scripture, and as Stillman’s work shows, Sidney was similar to other sixteenth-century Philippists in seeing moral instruction as something that poetry shared with God and with Biblical scripture. In other words, what Rist presents as a radical break with Protestant dogma in this case is actually Sidney adhering to the teachings of one of the most important and influential Protestant thinkers who himself drew similar analogies between the effects of poetry and human learning and those of Christian doctrine. In the end, the reformer’s (and Sidney’s) attitude towards imaginative works was more nuanced than what Rist presents here.

A related problem has to do with what Rist perceives as the origin of so many echoes of Catholicism in English works of fiction. Rist for example sees the portrayal of purgatory in dramatic works by Shakespeare and other playwrights as amounting to an almost intentional theological endorsement of a crucial element of Catholic dogma. But by the same logic, why should one not perceive the inclusion of pagan religious and cultural rites and practices in the Roman plays as an endorsement of Paganism? In both cases, it seems more likely that the playwright’s role in the temporal realm, which demanded remaining at least somewhat faithful to pre-Christian and pre-reformation source materials, devising exciting and compelling spectacles, and educating spectators and readers within existing cultural exigencies, dictated such decisions. Whereas reformers and controversialists often worked in an official capacity in trying to purify that existing world and in the process to transform the world’s religious culture and dogma, poets and playwrights had to appeal to readers within a world that had existed before them. An even more fundamental objection may yet be the traditional one, namely how to explain why the greatest flowering of English literature occurred after and not before the reformation. Despite such reservations, the combination of breadth and the depth and nuance of Rist’s readings will make this book essential for further research on the religious cultures that persisted in early modern England.