Review Reviewed Work(s): Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West by James D. Tracy and Marguerite Ragnow Review by: Valerie A. Kivelson Source: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 45, No. 4 (October 2006), pp. 896-898 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on British Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/509349 Accessed: 12-09-2017 21:23 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Cambridge University Press, The North American Conference on British Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of British Studies This content downloaded from 35.1.37.254 on Tue, 12 Sep 2017 21:23:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 896 䡵 BOOK REVIEWS all such changes and their lasting significance synthesizes the elaborate evidentiary details about those years. Similarly, Rogers’s striking aim to show Windsor-Forest as “much possessed by death” (311), thus marking the early end of Pope’s optimism and start of his oppositional stance as vehement satirist, needs emphasis sooner. Even the gracious nod to Wasserman appears as afterthought, despite providing Rogers the “most searching account of the moral and political ideology” (281) and a “fuller basis for understanding the poem than any other schema” (282). Rogers so persuasively details how thoroughly the poem absorbs the tumultuous period culminating in the 1715 Jacobite rising and why J. F. E. Stuart formed the only supportable successor to Anne for Catholics and cashiered Tory ministers alike that his more tentative alignment of Pope with Jacobitism is overly cautious. Once peace and plenty is made synonymous with a Stuart in 1713, Pope’s poem indeed becomes an “intimation of Jacobite mortality” (5) but one best expressed by a true believer in that cause. As Rogers emphasizes, “Finally, if the reading . . . which this book offers has any validity, then Pope needed a Jacobite as much as he needed a peace negotiator” (20). Rogers’s connection of the Jacobite dots in Pope’s influential circle—Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Francis Atterbury, Thomas Southcote, and much of the Caryll family—dovetails well with comparable claims for Jacobitism in works immediately following Windsor-Forest, including the 1714 Rape of the Lock and its doubly deceptive Key and, as I have argued elsewhere, the Iliad translation. Destiny primarily emphasizes political contexts, yet sections on heraldry, armorial customs, alchemy, and the orders of St. George and the Garter mix more formalist interests that blur its difference from Design. These topics also answer a more dubious introductory concern that Whitwell Elwin’s Victorian bias against allegory and classical allusion in the little Queen Anne’s man still prevails. Hence Rogers revisits the arcana of alchemical language and the courtly, ceremonial symbols by which Stuart rule was promulgated and legitimized in Royalist panegyric drawn from Renaissance ideology. The chapter on Windsor as Anne’s favored place expatiates on these signs via the palace’s art and architecture. The chapter on classical allusion expands Rogers’s own Oxford edition of the poem. Echoes of Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, John Milton, and William Camden are joined with neatly turned summaries of the roles of John Denham, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and John Evelyn as influences, and all those later voices are appropriately framed by the more commanding role of Virgil as exemplar of the Forest’s key organizing georgic metaphor: “identifying the health of the landscape with the health of the state” (246). Overall, Rogers’s highly detailed exploration targets advanced students and scholars. Its length and depth will require further careful framing by professors aiming to use it to introduce those new to the Age of Anne to the complex world of this poem. All, however, can learn from Rogers how thoroughly polarized politics may grow over responsibility for war, peace, and succession; how opposition in such climates is often voiced in symbols; and how literature may offer cultural continuity and solace during such times yet also require our careful analysis whenever strong, competing interests represent historical change as cultural crisis. John Morillo, North Carolina State University JAMES D. TRACY and MARGUERITE RAGNOW, eds. Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West. Studies in Comparative Early Modern History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii⫹415. $80.00 (cloth). Ideally, comparative history can illuminate familiar historical problems by casting them in a new light and can raise fresh questions for investigation. Alternatively, comparative history This content downloaded from 35.1.37.254 on Tue, 12 Sep 2017 21:23:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BOOK REVIEWS 䡵 897 can offer new examples of familiar models. The essays collected by James D. Tracy and Marguerite Ragnow conform more to the second paradigm than to the first. Each of the essays is excellent, and the brief, insightful introduction integrates them well with an effective overview of the dominant trends in the historiography on religion and state in early modern Europe, from the traditional view that religion was a matter of state policy, imposed from above, to more recent approaches that envision religious reform as a reciprocal process, involving give-and-take from above and below. The volume is divided into three overlapping thematic sections, each of which includes one essay on England and several on other parts of Eurasia. “Part I: Lived Religion and Official Religion” starts off with one of the most provocative pieces, Richard Shek’s “The Alternative Moral Universe of Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China.” Shek argues that the authorities were absolutely correct when they identified religious dissenters as endangering the entire social and political system. Chinese sectarians advocated profoundly subversive inversion of all social hierarchies. Moreover, with their glorification of this-worldly suffering in pursuit of otherworldly goals, dissenters placed themselves beyond the disciplinary power of the authorities. Robert O. Crummey’s article on “Ecclesiastical Elites and Popular Belief and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Russia” conveys the nature and complexity of religious policy and practice at a time when the official church joined forces with the state to enforce a standard, uniform Orthodoxy in a manner strikingly similar to the “confessionalization” taking place in western Europe at the time. Crummey then complicates the picture by describing the serious threat to this church-state Orthodoxy posed by the growing Old Belief movement, provoked into action by official persecution of popular practices and dedicated to resisting the new religious order even to the point of self-immolation. In a short but ambitious essay on “The State, the Churches, Sociability, and Folk Belief in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic,” Willem Frijhoff peels apart layers of differences within the Dutch Republic, demonstrating the meaningful distinctions among various groups involved in negotiating the fine line between religious and civic values, Calvinism and Catholicism, reform and continuity, religious tolerance and a more precarious confessional coexistence. Caroline J. Litzenberger’s article is the first of several in the collection to examine the practical, on-the-ground accommodations and resistance of particular communities to the successive rounds of religious reform undertaken by the English church and state. Based on two diocesan visitation reports, one from 1551, the other from 1576, the article reveals the layers of accommodation, persistence, and concealment that characterized local religious practice through these decades of religious reform. This essay is particularly affecting in its description of the painstaking and costly efforts of the Gloucester community to keep up with the architectural changes mandated from above. Altars were lowered, raised, and lowered, moved forward and back, stripped and embellished as Tudor policy veered from one extreme to another. Ultimately, the process apparently ran out of steam, not always because of an absence of goodwill but because funds ran dry. “Part II: Forms of Religious Identity” opens with Romeyn Taylor’s essay on “Spirits of the Penumbra: Deities Worshiped in More than One Chinese Pantheon.” Taylor establishes a taxonomy of Chinese religions and evaluates the flexible meanings attributed to those deities that functioned in more than one of these religious spheres. Flexibility is also key to Frank E. Sysyn’s discussion of “Orthodoxy and Revolt: The Role of Religion in the Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.” He provides a lucid description of the religious, political, and diplomatic currents that shaped this international crossroads and then demonstrates the ways in which religion acted as just one of a number of sources of identity and affiliation for the Ukrainian churchmen and Cossacks who rebelled against Polish domination in the mid-seventeenth century. Raymond A. Mentzer’s study of the Huguenot minority in early modern France focuses on the lures of Catholic festivals and the problems associated with marriage to demonstrate both the strengthening effects on the Huguenot community and the hindrances posed by its status This content downloaded from 35.1.37.254 on Tue, 12 Sep 2017 21:23:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 898 䡵 BOOK REVIEWS as persecuted minority. Paul S. Seaver’s article on “State Religion and Puritan Resistance in Early Seventeenth-Century England” chronicles how Puritan (as opposed to Litzenberger’s Catholic) practices survived official proscription and persecution. Instead of fostering religious uniformity, Seaver argues, official policy created the “Puritan personality, prepared to respond not to command but to conscience, a people disciplined not for conformity, but for the coming revolution” (249). “Part III: The Social Articulation of Belief” continues the investigation of the ways various communities expressed religious belief and commitment. Eve Levin’s colorful piece on “False Miracles and Unattested Dead Bodies: Investigations into Popular Cults in Early Modern Russia” describes the inquiries conducted by the governing institution of the Russian Orthodox Church in the early eighteenth century. Sharing with its Western counterparts a growing suspicion of unregulated local practices and superstitions, the church attempted to enforce clear, rigorous standards and to impose uniformity onto popular belief. Investigations focused particularly on the cults of saints whose sole or primary claim to sanctity rested on the miraculous incorruptibility of their relics, an Orthodox tradition with enduring resonance. In her study of liturgical rites in the Protestant German lands, Susan C. KarantNunn employs an anthropological approach to ritual. She offers a sophisticated formulation according to which ritual itself carries transformative meaning while participants are also capable of maintaining or imputing their own meanings within the parameters available to them. The stable hierarchies of place in Protestant churches and the elimination of visual affirmations of female or affective spirituality worked internalized changes in belief systems and order, but believers were nonetheless able to sustain their own certainty that supernatural forces remained accessible to the human world and to maintain the communal social and economic aspects of ritual life that Protestant reformers wished to eliminate. In a welcome inclusion on the Catholic side of things, Sara T. Nalle’s “Self-Correction and Social Change in the Spanish Counter-Reformation” identifies reformist currents parallel to those occurring in Protestant regions and finds quantifiable indicators of compliance with new reformist norms in matters as intimate as funerary rites and patterns of marital and premarital sex. Eamon Duffy’s delightful contribution, “The Disenchantment of Space: Salle Church and the Reformation,” traces the currents of the Reformation in the patronage, configuration, and uses of a single church through several centuries of religious change. Finally, Nicholas Orme examines the persistence of pre-Reformation folk practices in Cornwall long after the Reformation had stripped them of their religious meaning. Returning to a theme raised by Frijhoff, he demonstrates that the survival of rituals does not necessary connote continuity of meaning. Any reader can be confident of learning a great deal from this collection, which covers so many, varied situations in which church and state interacted with popular belief and practice. Readers are less certain to find new questions or new ways of posing old ones. That, of course, is a tall order, and the volume makes a significant contribution as is. Valerie A. Kivelson, University of Michigan ROS BALLASTER. Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1622–1785. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 408. $49.95 (cloth). ROS BALLASTER, ed. Fables of the East: Selected Tales, 1662–1785. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 278. $99.00 (cloth). While reading the oriental tales collected by Ros Ballaster in Fables of the East (FE), I was surprised to find myself constantly reminded of reading Samuel Richardson. It turns out I This content downloaded from 35.1.37.254 on Tue, 12 Sep 2017 21:23:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms