Gifts and Graces: Prayer, Poetry, and Polemic from Lancelot Andrewes to John Bunyan DavidGay. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2021. xiv + 209pp. <scp>ISBN</scp> 13:9781487505288. $70.00 (cloth).

In his elegant Gifts and Graces, David Gay explores how the three key terms in his title—prayer, poetry, and polemic—were braided together in the early modern world. In reading this, I was struck again and again by how much prayer defined the period's different confessional groups—and, ironically, of how much prayer also came to divide them. By the seventeenth century, members of the Church of England could generally be defined as those who accepted and relied upon the Book of Common Prayer. In contrast, those who were members of Dissenting congregations—Independents, Baptists, and Quakers, among others—rejected the Prayer Book with its set forms of prayer and wanted ex tempore prayer, speaking spontaneously to God from the heart. Presbyterians occupied an uneasy position in between. Each side thought that the position of the others limited, or even betrayed, the human-divine relationship. For example, Anglicans believed that a fanatical insistence on private, ex tempore prayer isolated believers and tempted them into wild, self-absorbed imaginings (a word Gay usefully discusses). For Dissenters, however, set prayers were mechanical, stultifying, and even idolatrous because they left no room for the moving breath of the Spirit. While there have been many good studies of early modern England's different theological commitments, Gay's book is especially welcome because instead of theology, he is talking about practice. Of course, theology underlies practice, and Gay is keenly aware of the theological foundations of, say, an Andrewes as opposed to a Bunyan. But still, the primary emphasis here is on the activity of prayer, which, as Gay notes, is the foundational activity of faith. Because prayer is the means by which Christian believers enter into a relationship with God, Gay's discussions of early modern prayers capture something profound about how contemporaries expressed their love of their creator and their understanding of the community of faith. And his discussions of three major poets of prayer—Herbert, Vaughan, and Milton—remind us of how much these poets saw their work as extensions of their prayerful outbreaths to God. The book opens with two splendid chapters in which Gay pairs Church of England divines with poets. He traces Lancelot Andrewes's views of prayer and influence on his erstwhile student, George Herbert. In the next chapter, Gay turns to the writings of Jeremy Taylor and then to his influence on Henry Vaughan, who lived in Wales when Taylor was there, having been ejected from his English living. Both Andrewes and Taylor wrote extensively about prayer, both of them defending the set prayers of the liturgy, and I admired Gay's attentiveness to how these men's writings undermine neat either/or divisions. For instance, while Andrewes was a staunch defender of prayers, his personal prayer practice was marked by extraordinary emotional intensity, a rebuke to easy Puritan assumptions that set prayers were rote and heartless. And Taylor, a supporter of set prayers, also wrote about the need to pray extemporaneously. Gay makes a convincing case that Herbert's The Temple is deeply indebted to Andrewes's ideas, as is Vaughan's poetry to Taylor's. I especially enjoyed the discussions of Taylor and Vaughan because they remind us of a counternarrative that is sometimes muted. From the viewpoint of Milton and Bunyan, Anglicans were the ones who trampled on dissent. But from the viewpoint of the Anglican Taylor and the Anglican Vaughan, they were the ones being trampled. Taylor was writing under the fear that the Church of England would remain a church in exile, and Vaughan wrote liturgically inflected poems “in consolation for the loss of the Book of Common Prayer,” a reminder of how much both men felt that the church they loved had been dismantled. Prayer and prayerful poetry became a means to recover what otherwise seemed to be lost (80). The Bunyan chapter is the finest in the book, perhaps no surprise given Gay's deep expertise here. He shows how much Bunyan's writings were organized around his aversion to the Prayer Book, which came roaring back to life at the Restoration and which was imposed with new strictness by the collection of laws known as the Clarendon Code. Gay traces the centrality of prayer to Bunyan's trial and then turns to an examination of his I Will Pray with the Spirit, or A Discourse Touching Prayer, in which inward, spontaneous prayer is the only means by which the believer can commune with God. Indeed, even language must fail sometimes in the presence of God, so the easy eloquence of the Prayer Book means that it is, in Bunyan's view, “Antichristian” (137). Bunyan's concern with the proper nature of prayer explains his anxiety about blasphemy in Grace Abounding: blasphemy could come pouring out of the mouth, disordered and unexpected, and so Bunyan saw it as an inverted counterpart to extemporaneous prayer. This chapter closes with excellent discussions of Bunyan's hostility toward the Quakers (an ironic reminder that the “looseness” that so appalled Anglicans about Bunyan's prayer practice, equally appalled Bunyan when he regarded the Friends) and then a persuasive argument that the Lord's Prayer sits, unnamed, at the heart of Bunyan's Holy War. Readers of this particular journal might naturally be most interested in Gay's two chapters on Milton. In the first of these, Gay discusses A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle and Eikonoklastes. He argues that the Maske is a liturgical drama because it explores the “relationship between individual and collective spiritual experience” in a way typical of Andrewes and because the Lady's trial “evokes the trial of liturgy in treatises on prayers in the 1630s” (86). While these arguments were interesting, I found myself wishing that Gay had also done more with the masque's patent connection to St. Michael's day. The St. Michael's liturgical traces have been previously noted but not discussed recently in any detail, and given that Gay has such a keen ear for liturgical rhythms, he would be the obvious one to probe them further. For example, might the St. Michael's day readings alter our sense of how Milton is responding to Andrewes? Gay then reads Eikonoklastes as a counterpoint, almost a direct rebuttal, of Taylor's understanding of prayer, and it was interesting to see these works brought into such clear opposition. Gay's second chapter on Milton is the only unsatisfying one in this book, unsatisfying not because anything seems amiss or unfounded here, but because the argument feels rushed. Gay first turns to the prayers of Paradise Lost. Satan is, he argues, the great inverter of prayer. Satan's soliloquy in Book 4, his actions during the War in Heaven, and even his temptation of Eve—these are all parodies of prayerful action. Adam and Eve sometimes get prayer right (as when they together pray spontaneously and unanimously, or when Eve urges Adam to ask forgiveness), and sometimes, like Satan, they get it all wrong. Gay then turns to Paradise Regained, reading it as an anagogic journey with the Lord's Prayer as subtext. And he concludes with a discussion of Samson Agonistes as a liturgical drama of dissent. Returning to my concern about being slightly unsatisfied, the sheer scope of this chapter means that Gay doesn't have time to settle for long on any one point. The discussions of Paradise Lost, for instance, are packed into three pages. I would have preferred a chapter that spent more time on just one text, since Gay raises many fascinating issues without having the time to pursue them in detail. Gay notes in passing, for example, that Milton has the difficult challenge of representing prayer without recording it, since a transcription “would be a compromise with the Book of Common Prayer.” Thus, after Book 5 of Paradise Lost, we encounter no word-by-word prayers in Milton's works. This is an astute point, and I found myself wanting more elaboration. This is a fine and incisive study of a hugely important topic in the period. Gay has a keen ear for scriptural and liturgical rhythms and an impressive breadth of reading, especially in some of the lesser-known liturgical and devotional works. He is also an unusually generous writer who makes copious room for the voices of others, so that on almost every page, one encounters an amiable community of scholars. I finished the book in a state of admiration but also wishing for two additions. The first one picks up my comment just above, about the difference between representing prayer from the outside (as when Samson is seen, head bowed, “as one who prayed”) and actually recording the words of prayer. Gay touches on this same issue in his Bunyan chapter, where Bunyan must leave the Lord's Prayer unvoiced as the “nameless instrument” of The Holy War. Some may want here a more detailed discussion of what happens when an author moves from praying on the page to, instead, alluding to or describing the fact of praying, seeing it from the outside, as it were. In other words, I wanted Gay to trace through more of the implications that his own study raises. My second wished-for addition follows in a similar vein. Gay provides a good discussion of Bunyan's negative response to women in his congregation who wished to form prayer groups. This, then, led me to wonder about other women in the period who wrote their prayers (texts such as Elizabeth Richardson's Legacie and Emilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum come to mind) and then to wish that they, too, had been included in this study. To be clear, I recognize that no book can do everything. Moreover, this is not a veiled complaint about a failure of inclusiveness, especially not given Gay's Afterword, where he connects the legacies of prayer and polemic to the modern, escalating violence against faith communities of all kinds (African American, Jewish, Muslim). Rather, I found myself simply wondering to what degree a writer such as Lanyer, who was Andrewes's contemporary but writing within different social and financial structures and with different horizons of possibility, might have re-inflected the prayer/poetry/polemic triad that Gay's book discusses so well.

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