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Book Review: “You Have Stept Out of Your Place”: A History of Women and Religion in America

much the same way, P. argues, the Romantics appropriated the Bible from a sacred, religious tradition, and used it to their own, often secular imaginative ends. At the center of P.'s book is a consideration of how British, French, and German Romantic writers reshaped Europe's concept of the Bible and of the Christian religion for their own era. In the chapter 'The Bible as Novel" he argues that William Lowth initiated an era in which an empathetic, sentimental approach to reading Scriptures led to people like Sarah Trimmer, who in her Help to the Unlearned in the Study of the Holy Scriptures (1805) is "totally engrossed in the [biblical] narrative . . . and reads it with the same attention to character and plot as she might any secular novel" (130). P.'s other examples of this method are a sermon by Sterne and a typological interpretation, which he himself makes, of garden imagery in Austen's Mansfield Park. One wants to agree with P. that popularizers like Trimmer might indicate how ordinary folk in the Romantic period read the Bible; but this slender and very odd trio of examples cannot convince anyone that a particular mode of reading was widespread or authoritative, and P. does not do the kind of historical and sociological research needed to make his case convincing. Other chapters take a more congenial, persuasive form. "Appropriating the Revolution" deals with Chateaubriand's witty reversals of Volney's efforts to undermine biblical authority. "The Bible as Metatype" considers the German fascination with epigrammatic fragments, the necessary consequence of a conviction that "no aesthetic idea can be fully expressed or presented" (188), and P. magisterially surveys a complex tradition which stretches from Schleiermacher to Julius Hare's Guesses at Truth. His fined chapter deals with Victorian novels set in ancient Rome, texts such as Kingsley's Hypatia and Newman's fictional response, Callista. Here P. finds an eroticized religious sensibility which he links to passages from Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion and Schlegel's earlier novel Lucinde. A relatively brief epilogue on Mann's Joseph and His Brothers ends the book. P. points the reader's attention in many directions. He initiates a large number of inquiries which the reader may be eager to follow further. As with much in contemporary theory and criticism, the book's thought provokes rather than satisfies.