The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England

by James Kearney

Winner of the Book-of-the-Year Award for 2009 from the Conference on Christianity and Literature In the course of the Reformation, artistic representation famously came under attack. Statues were destroyed, music and theater were forbidden, and poetry was denounced, all in the name of eradicating superstition and idolatry. The iconoclastic impulse that sparked these attacks, however, proved remarkably productive, generating a profusion of theological, polemical, and literary writing from Catholics and Protestants alike. Reformers like Luther had promised a return to the book, attacking Catholicism as a religion of images and icons. Becoming a religion of the book in the way that Reformers proposed, however, proved language is inescapably material; books are necessarily things, objects that are seen and touched. The antitheses at the heart of this opposition—word versus thing, text versus image—have had far-reaching effects on the modern world. James Kearney engages with recent work in the history of the book and the history of religion to investigate the crisis of the book occasioned by the Reformation's simultaneous faith in text and distrust of material forms. Drawing in a wide range of topics—from humanism and hermeneutics to secularization and enlightenment, from iconoclasm and anti-Semitism to barbarism and fetishism—and looking to a range of texts—including Erasmus's Jerome , Spenser's Faerie Queene , and Shakespeare's Tempest— The Incarnate Text tells the story of how this crisis of the book helped to change the way the modern world apprehends both texts and things.

328 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Madeline Birnbaum · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was so excited to read this book, and I’m ultimately glad that I did, but what I got out of it was different than what I expected. The bulk of the book explores the influence of Reformation thought on the depictions of texts/books within an array of literary works. A seemingly natural question to arise from this line of inquiry would be how fiction was perceived in a culture that viewed writing as evidence of a fallen world, but this isn’t touched upon. Nor is how actual early modern people interacted with religious texts, or texts at all, which was the biggest surprise for me: the vast majority of the time, Kearney only addresses how characters in fictions do so. This was illuminating and fascinating literary criticism in its own right, but it seemed like there was a step missing: I don’t feel like I have much of a better understanding of how ordinary people would have encountered and perceived books/texts in daily life. Each chapter does pull in a wide variety of different kinds of sources (polemics of Luther, Tyndale, and More; conversion narratives; sermons; travel accounts from Africa and the Americas) but these are treated as disembodied texts as well: the material quality of books is mostly brought in when discussing books within the main texts that the four chapters center around (Erasmus’ Life of Saint Jerome/Erasmus’ translation of the New Testament, The Faerie Queene, Doctor Faustus, and The Tempest). In this way, there are almost no physical books present in this work at all.

Apart from the premise of the book feeling slightly misaligned with the actual essays in it, I did really enjoy it, particularly the last two chapters on Doctor Faustus as a warped narrative of conversion in which he is seduced by signs and aesthetics, and on Prospero’s book, which never appears on stage, providing an illusion of transcendence that enables his dominance over the island’s inhabitants.

This is a little thing, but one thread in the chapter on The Faerie Queene that I found quite odd was Kearney’s repeated labelling of an early 17th century Puritan’s annotations in the margins of poem as “misreadings.” This bothered be both because, as Kearney himself admits multiple times, the annotator has insightful remarks to make, and, more importantly, because relegating this reader to the status of “misreader” seems to ignore some fascinating questions: Why would a reader who so vehemently opposed this text have owned it and carefully read and written in it? What sort of relationship with the book/text does both the annotator’s treatment of the Faerie Queene itself and the books/texts within it reveal? Kearney mostly uses the annotator as a jumping off point to discuss nuances in Spenser’s thought, but I would have been interested to see at least a bit of the reverse as well, especially because this is the only concrete example of an early modern reader handling a book that Kearney provides.

I may be being a bit harsh and letting my expectations of what I thought this book would be overshadow its virtues: I think it’s obviously excellently-researched and the four individual essays were each quite wonderful. I will say that as a general portrait of the Reformation’s impact on the book’s place as a material object in early modern England, I do feel like I’m just at the very beginning of understanding what that would have looked like after reading this.