John Foxe at Home and Abroad (review)
out that the still-dominant Louis Martz-Barbara Lewalski binary (either English devotional poets were influenced by the Catholic, Ignatian meditative tradition or they drew their inspiration from the Protestant Bible) is too simple a view given the complex interweavings of the English Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Pilarz demonstrates how Southwell’s impulse toward reconciliation emerged out of his Jesuit training. Pilarz’s own membership in the Society of Jesus gives him a vantage point from which to probe the theological tradition that Southwell knew, and the result is an accurate, modulated view of how Southwell both relies on and yet adapts Jesuit principles. This theological awareness is presented clearly, and it provides a fresh understanding of how Southwell mingles a classically Jesuit intellectual energy, a commitment to literature, and an unflagging pastoral care. Pilarz, unlike some other writers, manages to steer clear of hagiography. He allows Southwell’s life as covert priest and martyr to speak for itself, and he does not flinch at exposing Southwell’s emotional immaturity while in Douai and Rome. In the process, Pilarz creates a more complex picture of this important English writer. Despite these many strengths, the book has an organizational weakness. Pilarz seeks to reassess Southwell’s “life and works” (xiv, xxviii, emphasis added), but this mingling of biography and literary criticism can sometimes be confusing as first one then the other mode dominates. For example, the middle of the book settles into a predominantly biographical pattern as Pilarz describes in detail Southwell’s years in Douai and Rome. Pilarz uses these events as background for discussing, among other works, Southwell’s “The Sequence,” a series of Marian poetic meditations written in Rome. He then shifts in the same chapter to Southwell’s Humble Supplication, a work composed after five years as a fugitive priest back in England. Pilarz wishes here to draw a thematic link between two works written in praise of women (the Virgin Mary and Queen Elizabeth), but the unsignaled shift is disorienting in a work organized biographically in the preceding chapters. At other moments, the book seems to waver between a chronological discussion of Southwell’s writings and a looser, more thematic one. It is fitting, however, that a work about Southwell’s own literary attempts to find a middle ground between opposing tensions should itself seek to carve out a middle ground between straight historical biography and straight literary criticism. Although Pilarz’s text occasionally fails to integrate the two fully, even these minor lapses serve as a fitting tribute to this under-appreciated English writer. ALISON A. CHAPMAN University of Alabama at Birmingham