Idols of the Marketplace
Idols of the Marketplace

Author: D. Hawkes

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2001-10-11

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0312292694

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Postmodern society seems incapable of elaborating an ethical critique of the market economy. Early modern society showed no such reticence. Between 1580 and 1680, Aristotelian teleology was replaced as the dominant mode of philosophy in England by Baconian empiricism. This was a process with implications for every sphere of life: for politics and theology, economics and ethics, aesthetics and sexuality. Through nuanced and original readings of Shakespeare, Herbert, Donne, Milton, Traherne, and Bunyan, David Hawkes sheds light on the antitheatrical controversy, and early modern debates over idolatry and value and trade. Hawkes argues that the people of Renaissance England believed that the decline of telos resulted in a reified, fetishistic mode of consciousness which manifests itself in such phenomena as religious idolatry, commodity fetish, and carnal sensuality. He suggests that the resulting early modern critique of the market economy has much to offer postmodern society.

Ehud's Dagger
Ehud's Dagger

Author: James Holstun

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13:

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Seventeenth-century England saw the first capitalist revolution of the modern world – a struggle by working men and women to create a libertarian future and keep themselves from being dragged into the slough that many are still struggling to escape. In Ehud's Dagger, James Holstun reconstructs their radical projects and calls for a return to and development of marxist history from below. He begins with a powerful critique of those anti-communist historians and literary critics who have tried to ignore or deny the role of working people in shaping the English Revolution. Then, drawing on Ernst Bloch's utopian marxism, Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis of practical ensembles, and the political marxism of the British marxist historians, he begins his reconstruction of five seventeenth-century radical projects. In a Caroline prologue, he examines the political and poetic furor surrounding John Felton, who assassinated the Duke of Buckingham in 1628, enabling anonymous writers, readers and circulators of verse libels to contemplate a republican alternative to Charles's attempted absolutism. He then turns to the Revolution proper, focusing on the common soldiers of the Puritan New Model Army, who formed a military soviet in the summer of 1647 and bested their capitalist officers in debate; the Fifth Monarchist visionary Anna Trapnel, who wrote, preached, and prophesied publicly against the Protectorate on behalf of sectarian small producers; the Leveller theorist and desperado Edward Sexby, who wrote the brilliant republican treatise Killing Noe Murder and attempted to assassinate Oliver Cromwell; and the agrarian communist Diggers of Surrey, whose comrade and leader Gerrard Winstanley was the foremost social theorist of seventeenth-century England. Richly detailed and rigorously argued, Ehud's Dagger will spark renewed historical and literary critical interest in the prophetic writing, political struggle, and creative practical consciousness of working people in the early modern world.

Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England
Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England

Author: Dr Jonathan Willis

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-06-28

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 140948081X

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'Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England' breaks new ground in the religious history of Elizabethan England, through a closely focused study of the relationship between the practice of religious music and the complex process of Protestant identity formation. Hearing was of vital importance in the early modern period, and music was one of the most prominent, powerful and emotive elements of religious worship. But in large part, traditional historical narratives of the English Reformation have been distinctly tone deaf. Recent scholarship has begun to take increasing notice of some elements of Reformed musical practice, such as the congregational singing of psalms in meter. This book marks a significant advance in that area, combining an understanding of theory as expressed in contemporary religious and musical discourse, with a detailed study of the practice of church music in key sites of religious worship. Divided into three sections - 'Discourses', 'Sites', and 'Identities' - the book begins with an exploration of the classical and religious discourses which underpinned sixteenth-century understandings of music, and its use in religious worship. It then moves on to an investigation of the actual practice of church music in parish and cathedral churches, before shifting its attention to the people of Elizabethan England, and the ways in which music both served and shaped the difficult process of Protestantisation. Through an exploration of these issues, and by reintegrating music back into the Elizabethan church, we gain an expanded and enriched understanding of the complex evolution of religious identities, and of what it actually meant to be Protestant in post-Reformation England.

Religious Politics in Post-reformation England
Religious Politics in Post-reformation England

Author: Kenneth Fincham

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1843832534

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New scrutinies of the most important political and religious debates of the post-Reformation period. The consequences of the Reformation and the church/state polity it created have always been an area of important scholarly debate. The essays in this volume, by many of the leading scholars of the period, revisit many of the important issues during the period from the Henrician Reformation to the Glorious Revolution: theology, political structures, the relationship of theology and secular ideologies, and the Civil War. Topics include Puritan networks and nomenclature in England and in the New World; examinations of the changing theology of the Church in the century after the Reformation; the evolving relationship of art and protestantism; the providentialist thinking of Charles I;the operation of the penal laws against Catholics; and protestantism in the localities of Yorkshire and Norwich. KENNETH FINCHAM is Reader in History at the University of Kent; Professor PETER LAKE teaches in the Department of History at Princeton University. Contributors: THOMAS COGSWELL, RICHARD CUST, PATRICK COLLINSON, THOMAS FREEMAN, PETER LAKE, SUSAN HARDMAN MOORE, DIARMAID MACCULLOCH, ANTHONY MILTON, PAUL SEAVER, WILLIAM SHEILS