Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling

Musa Gurnis’s Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling is a deeply researched, methodologically sophisticated, and interpretively compelling intervention in current studies of the relationship between the post-Reformation religious landscape and the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century commercial drama. Gurnis offers a fresh conceptualization of that relationship, supplying terms that deliberately jostle against now-standard narratives of the early modern theater’s role in processes of secularization, in messages of Erasmian toleration, or in the transmission of explicit, if dramatized, doctrine. In their place, Gurnis describes a theater of confessional entanglement, mediation, and “imaginative stretching.” Early modern plays, she writes, “dr[e]w contradictory scraps of confessional practice together in powerful fantasies that reconfigured existing structures of thought and feeling” (1). Above all, they “lure[d] playgoers astray from their everyday religious orientation” (3). This key claim—that when early modern playgoers entered the playhouse they walked into a space of emotional and experiential “micromovements” (5)—is grounded in Gurnis’s nuanced weaving together of religious history, cultural materialism, and performance studies. Such a methodological frame emphasizes heterogeneity: the heterogeneity of early modern religious practices, the heterogeneity of early modern performance practices, and the heterogeneity of the effects on audiences of these practices. But Gurnis’s most striking example of heterogeneity is that of the early modern audience itself, a group whose “mixed faith” informs her readings of a stimulating range of plays.

Aesthetics · Art · Confessional · Drama · Epistemology · Faith · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Religious experience · Secularization · Sociology · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies