Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street. Matthew J. Smith. ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. xiv + 388 pp. $45.
of hunting and the pursuit of prey (in John Gerard’s autobiographical account); the viewing of dancing from afar, without yet hearing the music (as is central to William Crashaw’s translation of The Italian Convert); or the generative powers of flowing water (in Edward Meetkerke’s epistle to his translation of the conversion of two French Catholics to Protestantism). Many of these figures of speech have scriptural roots. As many reach for the arts of eloquent speech in an attempt to recover prelapsarian experience. The early modern convert who travels does so in a post-pilgrimage world. What metaphors of journeys are operative and how do the motions of journey create credibility and accrue heuristic value for the traveling convert? One place above all exerts a powerful pull on the spiritual traveler. That is Rome, but as Shinn demonstrates with three differently motivated journeys to Rome—Tobie Matthew, Richard Norwood, and Signeur Melchior—that magnetism is exerted in various ways. This chapter’s attention to the impact of environment on the porous humoral body resets with the next convert, the one whose body acts as a source of proof of authentic belief. In the absence of physical signs of difference among Christian confessional traditions, somatic evidence of altered belief becomes self-consciously performed. Whether voluntary or involuntary, bodily behaviors are observable phenomena and thus “a contentious site for analysis” (184), Shinn argues in this highly original chapter. Shinn’s reading of the turn in Pilgrim’s Progress toward allegory in the concluding chapter emphasizes the detachment of the tropes of turning from the lived experience of an individual. As Shinn’s ambitious monograph argues persuasively, this turn would not have been possible without the extended explorations of narrative typologies and rhetorical strategies that preceded it—across confessional divides. Most promisingly, Shinn’s fresh perspective reorients scholarly conversations to the inescapable dependence of conversion narratives on the language arts. Always inadequate to the task of representing spiritual experience, they are nevertheless among the most powerful tools at hand.