Assessing early modern literature and England’s Long Reformation, this book challenges the notion that the English Reformation ended in the sixteenth century, or even by the seventeenth century. Contributions by literary scholars and historians of religion put these two disciplines in critical conversation with each other, in order to examine a complex, messy, and long-drawn-out process of reformation that continued well beyond the significant political and religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. The aim of this conversation is to generate new perspectives on the constant remaking of the Reformation—or Reformations, as some scholars prefer to characterize the multiple religious upheavals and changes, both Catholic and Protestant—of the early modern period. This interdisciplinary book makes a major contribution to debates about the nature and length of England’s Long Reformation. Early Modern Literature and England’s Long Reformation is essential reading for scholars and students considering the interconnections between literature and religion in the early modern period. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Reformation.
Assessing early modern literature and England's Long Reformation, this book challenges the notion that the English Reformation ended in the sixteenth century, or even by the seventeenth century. Contributions by literary scholars and historians of religion put these two disciplines in critical conversation with each other, in order to examine a complex, messy, and long-drawn-out process of reformation that continued well beyond the significant political and religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. The aim of this conversation is to generate new perspectives on the constant remaking of the Reformation--or Reformations, as some scholars prefer to characterize the multiple religious upheavals and changes, both Catholic and Protestant--of the early modern period. This interdisciplinary book makes a major contribution to debates about the nature and length of England's Long Reformation. Early Modern Literature and England's Long Reformation is essential reading for scholars and students considering the interconnections between literature and religion in the early modern period. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Reformation.
Long considered marginal in early modern culture, women writers were actually central to the development of a Protestant literary tradition in England. Kimberly Anne Coles explores their contribution to this tradition through thorough archival research in publication history and book circulation; the interaction of women's texts with those written by men; and the traceable influence of women's writing upon other contemporary literary works. Focusing primarily upon Katherine Parr, Anne Askew, Mary Sidney Herbert, and Anne Vaughan Lok, Coles argues that the writings of these women were among the most popular and influential works of sixteenth-century England. This book is full of prevalent material and fresh analysis for scholars of early modern literature, culture and religious history.
Our built environment inspires writers to reflect on the human experience, discover its history, or make it up. Buildings tell stories. Castles, country homes, churches, and monasteries are “documents” of the people who built them, owned them, lived and died in them, inherited and saved or destroyed them, and recorded their histories. Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England examines the relationship between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architectural and literary works. By becoming more sensitive to the narrative functions of architecture, Anne M. Myers argues, we begin to understand how a range of writers viewed and made use of the material built environment that surrounded the production of early modern texts in England. Scholars have long found themselves in the position of excusing or explaining England’s failure to achieve the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance in the visual arts. Myers proposes that architecture inspired an unusual amount of historiographic and literary production, including poetry, drama, architectural treatises, and diaries. Works by William Camden, Henry Wotton, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Anne Clifford, and John Evelyn, when considered as a group, are texts that overturn the engrained critical notion that a Protestant fear of idolatry sentenced the visual arts and architecture in England to a state of suspicion and neglect.
Designed to accompany the survey text Early Modern England: 1485-1714, this updated and expanded Sourcebook brings together an impressive array of Tudor-Stuart documents and illustrations, as well as extensive bibliographies and research and discussion guides. New edition contains 50 new documents, more explanatory text, illustrations, biographical background, and study questions Wide range of documents, from both manuscript and print sources, and from transcripts of private and public life Editorial material introduces students to the critical context; chapter bibliographies and questions allow ready integration into classroom, and research and source analysis assignments. Bibliography of Historians’ Debates with the latest articles and essays Accompanies the survey text Early Modern England: 1485-1714 Click here for more discussion and debate on the authors’ blogspot: http://earlymodernengland.blogspot.com/ [Wiley disclaims all responsibility and liability for the content of any third-party websites that can be linked to from this website. Users assume sole responsibility for accessing third-party websites and the use of any content appearing on such websites. Any views expressed in such websites are the views of the authors of the content appearing on those websites and not the views of Wiley or its affiliates, nor do they in any way represent an endorsement by Wiley or its affiliates.]
These essays examine the long-term impact of the Protestant reformation in England. This text should be of interest to historians of early modern England and reformation studies.
This compelling new history situates the religious upheavals of the civil war years within the broader history of the Church of England and demonstrates how, rather than a destructive aberration, this period is integral to (and indeed the climax of) England's post-Reformation history.
Notions of which behaviours comprised sin, and what actions might lead to salvation, sat at the heart of Christian belief and practice in early modern England, but both of these vitally important concepts were fundamentally reconfigured by the reformation. Remarkably little work has been undertaken exploring the ways in which these essential ideas were transformed by the religious changes of the sixteenth-century. In the field of reformation studies, revisionist scholarship has underlined the vitality of late-medieval English Christianity and the degree to which people remained committed to the practices of the Catholic Church up to the eve of the reformation, including those dealing with the mortification of sin and the promise of salvation. Such popular commitment to late-medieval lay piety has in turn raised questions about how the reformation itself was able to take root. Whilst post-revisionist scholars have explored a wide range of religious beliefs and practices - such as death, providence, angels, and music - there has been a surprising lack of engagement with the two central religious preoccupations of the vast majority of people. To address this omission, this collection focusses upon the history and theology of sin and salvation in reformation and post-reformation England. Exploring their complex social and cultural constructions, it underlines how sin and salvation were not only great religious constants, but also constantly evolving in order to survive in the rapidly transforming religious landscape of the reformation. Drawing upon a range of disciplinary perspectives - historical, theological, literary, and material/art-historical - to both reveal and explain the complexity of the concepts of sin and salvation, the volume further illuminates a subject central to the nature and success of the Reformation itself. Divided into four sections, Part I explores reformers’ attempts to define and re-define the theological concepts of sin and salvation, while Part II looks at some of the ways in which sin and salvation were contested: through confessional conflict, polemic, poetry and martyrology. Part III focuses on the practical attempts of English divines to reform sin with respect to key religious practices, while Part IV explores the significance of sin and salvation in the lived experience of both clergy and laity. Evenly balancing contributions by established academics in the field with cutting-edge contributions from junior researchers, this collection breaks new ground, in what one historian of the period has referred to as the ‘social history of theology’.
As seventeenth-century England wrestled with the aftereffects of the Reformation, the personal frequently conflicted with the political. In speeches, political pamphlets, and other works of religious controversy, writers from the reign of James I to that of James II unexpectedly erupt into autobiography. John Milton famously interrupts his arguments against episcopacy with autobiographical accounts of his poetic hopes and dreams, while John Donne's attempts to describe his conversion from Catholicism wind up obscuring rather than explaining. Similar moments appear in the works of Thomas Browne, John Bunyan, and the two King Jameses themselves. These autobiographies are familiar enough that their peculiarities have frequently been overlooked in scholarship, but as Brooke Conti notes, they sit uneasily within their surrounding material as well as within the conventions of confessional literature that preceded them. Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England positions works such as Milton's political tracts, Donne's polemical and devotional prose, Browne's Religio Medici, and Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners as products of the era's tense political climate, illuminating how the pressures of public self-declaration and allegiance led to autobiographical writings that often concealed more than they revealed. For these authors, autobiography was less a genre than a device to negotiate competing political, personal, and psychological demands. The complex works Conti explores provide a privileged window into the pressures placed on early modern religious identity, underscoring that it was no simple matter for these authors to tell the truth of their interior life—even to themselves.
