<i>All Wonders in Sight:The Christ Child among the Elizabethan and Stuart Poets</i> Theresa M.Kenney. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: U of Toronto P, 2021. viii + 228pp. <scp>ISBN</scp>: 9781487509064. $68.00 (cloth).

This is a remarkable book. It studies the representation of the Christ child in poems by Robert Southwell, John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, and Richard Crashaw, to deeply analyze, essentially, “what kind of sign is the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger” (5). Though the book announces a focus on individual poems, it considers more. Thus, Chapter 2 examines “The Burning Babe,” “Beholde the father, in his daughters sonne,” and “New Heaven, New Warre” by Southwell; Chapter 3 the sonnet “Immensitie Cloystered in Thy Deare Wombe,” or “Nativitie,” by Donne in La Corona; Chapter 4 “The Starre,” “Easter Wings,” “Christmas (I),” “Christmas (II),” and “Church-Musick” by Herbert in The Temple; Chapter 5 Milton's “On the Morning of Christ's Nativity” and “Upon the Circumcision,” plus connections with Paradise Lost concerning the notion of kenosis; and the last chapter discusses Crashaw's various Nativity and Epiphany hymns. Following Gary Bouchard's argument that Robert Southwell is the father of the metaphysical poets in England, Kenney goes further by underscoring that after the Jesuit and martyr “every major poet of the seventeenth century writes at least one Nativity lyric,” and that Southwell's oeuvre “stands as the pivotal moment in the transition of the Nativity lyric from an instrument of religious education and celebration … to a learned subgenre of the newly elevated poetic craft” (7). In that sense, a tradition of the Nativity lyric in England was initiated by Robert Southwell. The main focuses in the analyses of the selected poems concern variations involving tense use (i.e., differences involving “was” or “is,” or “where was” and “where is” Jesus in the Eucharist, in contrast with his eternity as the Son of God) and profound considerations about the sacramental or spiritual notion of the Christ child in them. To achieve this, Kenney uses sharp critical ability and a noticeable dexterity concerning knowledge of rhetorical methods, metrics, and versification. In addition, the scholarship on theology, religion, and history proves reliable and accurate, and her biblical exegesis and hermeneutic skills are solid. Though the poets considered in All Wonders in Sight are united by the dogma of Incarnation and the eternity of God, as would be expected, they differ in the theology of the Eucharist because of their religious beliefs and denominations. Yet Kenney's analysis goes still further. One of the book's central insights is that the close relationship between the Incarnation and the presence of Christ in the Eucharist seems one important trigger of the growing divide between Catholic and Protestant poetic cultures: Catholic poets imagine a physical and temporal union with the child in the manger and associate the sacrifice of Calvary with the sufferings of the Christ child, whereas the Protestant poets seem less interested in creating any temporal or spatial collapse between themselves and the incarnate Christ child, and tend to use the occasion of the Nativity to focus on their own interior illumination by divine wisdom or power.(29-30) While discussing the problem and the different conceptions of the Presence of Christ in the Eucharistic, Real or Spiritual, the book traces the outlines of a fully comprehensive Anglican sacramentology that is also vital to its arguments: from the Catholicism of Southwell, Donne, and in a particular way Crashaw, to the Milton that “most fully spiritualizes and de-materializes the sacrament, bypassing the material medium of the flesh” and Herbert's awareness “of the absence of Christ's body in both historical and theological terms” (7). Although they all see that the Christ child is God, he “come[s] to us” for the Catholics and “to whom we rise” (Sursum Corda) for the Protestants. In the chapter dedicated to Southwell, Kenney demonstrates linkages with the most orthodox medieval and mystic traditions, not only religiously speaking. The erotic language would be a good example, but the presence in his poems of the proleptic Passion image is noteworthy. Southwell's poetry was paradoxically popular in Elizabethan times, showing at least the cultural prevalence of notions as symbols and allegories. As Kenney argues, “a Roman Catholic understanding of the Real Presence and a sacramental sense of time were intimately tied to the artistic representations of Christ before the Reformation” (33). On the other hand, the figure of Christ in “The Burning Babe” resembles that of Malory and the quest for the Grail. Antithesis, chiasmus, ellipsis, and anaphora are examples of this traditionalism. In addition, Southwell lived and studied in Rome for several years. Since Jesui poetry was fundamentally developed for evangelization, re-conversion, and consolation, Southwell emphasizes the main Catholic “topics” of the Last Supper, the Eucharist, Christ's Passion, martyrdom, love, and sacrifice. Calling attention to the poetic representation of the mysteries of his faith, Southwell’s poetry asserts (notwithstanding the heterodoxies in his poetry), “his belief that the shivering child in a manger was in fact the Lord of the universe, who had all power and authority” (53). Among other considerations, John Donne's Christ child is an object of love. He shows a kind of tenderness in his approach while also addressing the Virgin Mary. Poetry or prayer seems to be the question here; but Christ in the womb of Mary, even the fetal Christ, is above all a matter of poetry. Donne also addresses Mary, the poet's soul, the reader, and St. Joseph, for whom he has an explicit devotion, though in his days “the saint was only recently coming into greater eminence and was almost never portrayed as a young man” (66). Kenney suggests feasible influences of St. Bernard's and Jean Gerson's sermons and the mystical and non-mystical writings of Teresa of Ávila. A major theme in the commentary on “Immensitie Cloystered in Thy Deare Wombe” or “Nativitie,” where the speaker exhibits a great unity with the holy family, is that of “apocryphogenesis,” a term taken from Evelyn Birge Vitz: the creation of the Apocrypha from the canonical texts of the Bible. For a Reformed writer this is at least a potential problem, but the chapter sets it up as a demonstration of Donne's freedom and, especially, his poetical skills. Tenderness appears again, and Kenney notes that “Nativitie” is Donne's “only poem that ends with a kiss” (68). George Herbert is more spiritual in his images of the Christ child, which are always nonphysical. Moreover, “The Starre,” besides its “tone of intimacy and confidence,” shows itself as plainly “desacramentalized” (72). A craftsman of the apostrophe, Herbert amalgamates both biblical (spiritual) allusions and Neoplatonic concepts of union and purification (74-75) as a rejection of scholasticism and medieval popular piety. Showing again her solid scholarship, Kenney deeply explores this topic in the chapter, bringing up Patristic and medieval authors, and writes even of “alchemical influences” (79). She explains that the symbolism of the bee in Herbert's poems is finally used to “disincarnate the incarnation” (90). In fact, “as the seventeenth century progressed, language about divine union and the presence of Christ becomes notably less physical” (83). The Word of Herbert is platonized and incorporeal, which brings him closer to John Milton. The chapter devoted to the author of Lycidas is the most complex of the book. Again, Kenney's skills in metrics, rhetoric, and especially theology are outstanding. The chapter focuses on three points that Milton makes interdependent in his poem: “the intervention of faith in the poetic collapse of the time that the poet imagines between his own day and the birth of Christ, the meditation of the Heavenly Muse; and the infant's smile” (93). Besides its impressive length (244 lines), “On the Morning of Christ Nativity” (1629) is both orthodox and traditional, focusing more on the exorcism of pagan gods from their altars (as will occur in Paradise Lost 1.392-506) than on the manger/altar image, and displaying a “newfangled” emphasis on the Virgin Mary that is in some way odd for a Protestant. The history of its hermeneutics and reception has been varied, but “perhaps [it] is the most important Nativity poem in the English language” (95). A classicism (or neoclassicism) closer to epics coheres well with a conspicuous absence of the bodily in its Christ images; although Milton's portrayal of the Incarnation is more traditional than, say, Herbert's, for Kenney the poem “opens the door to [Milton's] later, heretical Christology” (95). References to its Italian sources are interesting, and interesting too is the intervention of “wisest Fate” and the following discussion of what would it be (as in Paradise Lost again). The question of time and how Milton collapses it is challenging, though for Kenney his “noteworthy innovation in the Nativity lyric is not a mere lack of interest in the eternal perspective of the Christ Child [but] a deliberate restriction of that perspective” (100). The chapter continues with theological considerations of “wisest Fate” as lord of history, the exact conception of the “Heavenly Muse” beyond its epic connotations (she “can overpass the constraints of linear time as the poet cannot” [106]), Nativity and kenosis, fate and fatum, immanence concerning the mighty babe, and so on. Theology and Christology are the main subjects of this substantial chapter, not literature. Chapter 6 deals with Crashaw and his conception of the Incarnation as the central fact in the world's history: “the fullness of time” (Joel 4.15), the Franciscan idea of the Nativity as the intersection of the eternal with the temporal, the eternal day. A former Catholic who studied in the Jesuit English College at Rome, Crashaw's connections with Southwell can be discerned even before his conversion around 1640 occupied his mind and heart. One of them is the portrayal of Christ as corporeally present. Like Southwell, Crashaw believes in the real, physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and this belief supports the theology of his Nativity poems. “He unites both the sacramental ‘Sursum Corda’ of the Calvinist, looking up to Heaven, with the Catholic ‘Heaven itself lies here.’ We see both the idea of joining with Christ spiritually and the coming down of Christ to the altar, the sacramental entry into eternity that contact with the body of Christ permits” (116-17). Crashaw read much of the Catholic tradition in his youth, though the explanation of his bonds with or debts to Lope de Vega is rather unexpected. He was familiar too with the suppressed iconography after the English Christmas Edict of 1549. Significantly, he translated Thomas Aquinas's hymns “Adoro te Devote” and “Lauda Sion,” where among other aspects the manger and the altar are equated. “Crashaw writes the last major English Nativity poem to make use of sacramental space and time” (122) and “is the last major poet of the seventeenth century to look down to see a real child when he looks upon the Christ Child in his Nativity, and the time in which he sees him is now” (132). Christ is “All Wonders in One Sight.” The book ends with a solid conclusion that tracks what happens with the Nativity lyric tradition after these authors and others not included in this study, such as Francis Quarles and Robert Herrick, whose worries about falling into Catholic errors appear with some regularity. But in part the tradition continues, displaying “the difference between Nativity lyric that celebrates the flesh and babyhood of the divine Christ and those that see Christmas more exclusively as the great prototype of the advent of Christ into the heart of the believer” (138). Though the Puritans abolished the celebration of Christmas the conception of the Nativity as the central event of human salvation persisted during the Reformation. But where did the Christ child go in lyrics? The conclusion deals with this problem and the varied ways in which it was poetically imagined after Cromwell. The representation of the Christ child beyond the Stuart period is announced as a probable future study, where Alexander Pope's “Messiah” would be a starting point to continue, afterward, with works as varied as those by Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy and … James Joyce.

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