ESC: English Studies in Canada

REVIEWS Roman B. Dubinski, English Religious Poetry Printed 1477-1640: A Chrono­ logical Bibliography with Indexes (Waterloo, Ontario: North Waterloo Aca­ demic Press, 1996). xxix, 844. $390.00 cloth. Scholars ofthe Early Modern Period will be indebted to Roman R. Dubin­ ski’s mammoth contribution to the bibliographical study of religious poetry ofthe period. His text catalogues, annotates, and cross-references a compre­ hensive variety ofreligious verse, including poems, translations, and excerpts in both English and Scots verse. Although it omits religious verse in drama or in quasi-dramatic works, this generously inclusive study spans the vast range of religious poetry: from narratives of saints’ lives and those based on Biblical personae, through lyric poetry (hymns, canticles, and psalms), verse prayers and devotions, instructional, didactic, satirical and polemical verse, to metrical paraphrases of Biblical text. The bibliography contains 2456 entries. In ah, 11,600 individual poems comprising close to a million lines of verse (vii) are itemized. Professor Dubinski’s volume complements several earlier studies. In ad­ dition to The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Vol. I 600-1660 (1974), containing certain bibliographies by type, Dubinski’swork most efficiently supplements two consecutive listings by William A. Ringler, Jr., the first from 1476 to 1500 and the second from 1501 to 1558, in his Bib­ liography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476-1558. Ringler’s study, initiated by his work on Sir Philip Sidney and published posthumously in 1988, has been widely acclaimed, indeed, termed “monumental” by one of its reviewers (May 138). Ringler’s bibliography is not only affirmed by Du­ binski as “indispensable” for poetry printed up to 1558 (ix), but it also serves as a valuable source of cross-reference for his own compilations of verse published before and including that date. While Ringler’s study pro­ vides a detailed bibliography of the whole body of English verse surviving in printed form for the period between the establishment of Caxton’s press and the incorporation of the Stationers’ Company (Kelliher 255), its range is also generically inclusive. Ringler’s Index of Religious Verse, for example, ESC 24 (September 19 98 ) consists oftwo pages with four columns ofentries listed under sub-categories such as Psalms, Controversy, Instruction, Jesus Christ, and Saints’Lives. Dubinski’s achievement is three-fold. First, it not only supplements Ringler ’s generalized study but also other more limited bibliographies ofreligious poetry, such as Rivkah Zim’s English Metrical Psalms (1987), Elsie Leach’s “English Religious Poetry, 1600-1699” (1961), John N. King’s English Ref­ ormation Literature (1982), Tessa Watt’s Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550-1640 (1991), and Peter Lc Huray’s Music and the Reformation in Eng­ land 1549-1660 (1967). Secondly, Dubinski’s study significantly extends its survey 82 years beyond the hitherto most detailed bibliography currently existing, i.e. Ringler’s. And thirdly, his thorough examination of items on University Microfilm (nearly 29,000 items, approximately 95 per cent of the Short-Title Catalogue) in addition to the originals of many items not on microfilm (xi), has produced a comprehensive chronological bibliography. This “user friendly” facility makes possible the progressive scanning of mul­ tiple editions of the same text throughout the period. Other features of its practicability include its eight indexes arranged by the following headings: Author/Translator, Title, First-Line, Subject, Metrical Paraphrases of the Bible, Verse in Hours arid Primers, Works on the Rosary, and a Cross-Index with STC Numbers. The increasing secularization ofthe Early Modern Period was itselfspawn­ ed by transformations that were a consequence of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation movements. As Dubinski points out in his introduc­ tion, the internal divisions within the Church of England are reflected in the poetry of the time. Moreover, such doctrinal and ecclesiastical controversies as ensued arc intricately related to changing modes in devotional writing throughout the period (xii). The chronological arrangement of the entries is particularly conducive to an analysis of the developmental nature of such controversies. As with R.inglcr’s project, Dubinski’s enterprise originated in his own scholarly interests, especially in his teaching and research related to such seventeenth-century religious poets as Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan (x). It is the author...