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The Evolution of the Reform of Port-Royal: From the Rule of Citeaux to Jansenism . By F. Ellen Weaver. Paris: Beauchesne, 1978. 176 pp. F. 70.

The place of ridicule and of jesting has always been a disputed issue in Christian rhetoric. On the one hand, ridicule seems to violate the precepts of charity; on the other hand, there is much biblical precedent, including Christ's own example, for sharp, zealous, and biting speech. On jesting, the biblical testimony is less ambiguous, but the rhetorical advantages of humor, and the place of humor in the rhetorical tradition, make it almost impossible for the Christian rhetorician not to allow humor some place. The problem of humor is compounded, moreover, by the same word for jesting (or a certain sort of jesting), eutrapelia, appearing as both an Aristotelian virtue (NE 1128) and a Pauline vice (Ephesians 5:4). Raymond Anselment's study of "the decorum of religious ridicule" in major English texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries surely can be seen, therefore, as addressing an issue of some interest and complexity. Anselment's treatment, however, does not match the interest of his topic. The main problem with his book is that it lacks an overall argument, either thematic or historical, and it tends to blur important distinctions. Anselment uses an Isaac Barrow sermon (1678) as a framework for examining all four of his religious satirists. This initial move prevents Anselment's study from being genuinely historical, leading him to use Restoration standards as norms for his whole era, and to assimilate all his authors to a very bland and vacuous "tradition of humanism" (pp. 128, 149, 157). When Anselment does have precise observations, they are either undeveloped (as on Marprelate's views of language and of community) or technical, as on some of MarvelPs satiric strategies. Anselment would have done better either by focusing on matters of technique such as personae or parody or on the Restoration period itself, about which he seems most fully informed. Religious ridicule still awaits its historian.