The expressive and literary capacities of post-Reformation English were largely shaped in response to the Bible. Faith in the Language examines the convergence of biblical interpretation and English literature, from William Tyndale to John Donne, and argues that the groundwork for a newly authoritative literary tradition in early modern England is laid in the discourse of biblical hermeneutics. The period 1525-1611 witnessed a proliferation of English biblical versions, provoking a century-long debate about how and whether the Bible should be rendered in English. These public, indeed institutional accounts of biblical English changed the language: questions about the relation between Scripture and exegetical tradition that shaped post-Reformation hermeneutics bore strange fruit in secular literature that defined itself through varying forms of autonomy vis-a-vis prior tradition.
"Interesting and timely. Compellingly demonstrating that central texts of English Renaissance literature were shaped in response to the Bible, Ferguson's work is distinguished by a real familiarity with scripture and illuminating close readings." --Alan Stewart, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University "The publication of the Bible, from Erasmus' 1516 New Testament onwards, might be called the literary event of the century. This is not only a matter of the text itself, but also of the enormous effort of interpretation-and literary theory-which it inspired. Jamie Ferguson carefully takes us through this fascinating and important terrain." --Brian Cummings, Anniversary Professor of English and Related Literature, University of York "Through meticulous, historically informed readings, Jamie Ferguson argues that Reformation hermeneutics shaped early modern English language and literature, including not only religious literature like the Sidney Psalms and Donne's sermons but secular works like Donne's erotic poems and Shakespeare's Sonnets. He compels us to reassess the categories of sacred and secular as well as the relationship between literary authority and the traditions-scriptural, ecclesiastical, rhetorical, Ciceronian, Petrarchan-against which it was tested." --Hannibal Hamlin, Professor of English, The Ohio State University The expressive and literary capacities of post-Reformation English were largely shaped in response to the Bible. Faith in the Language examines the convergence of biblical interpretation and English literature, from William Tyndale to John Donne, and argues that the groundwork for a newly authoritative literary tradition in early modern England is laid in the discourse of biblical hermeneutics. The period 1525-1611 witnessed a proliferation of English biblical versions, provoking a century-long debate about how and whether the Bible should be rendered in English. These public, indeed institutional accounts of biblical English changed the language: questions about the relation between Scripture and exegetical tradition that shaped post-Reformation hermeneutics bore strange fruit in secular literature that defined itself through varying forms of autonomy vis-a-vis prior tradition. Jamie H. Ferguson is Associate Professor of Honors and English at the University of Houston. .
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.
The primary aim of Knowing Faith is to uncover the intervention of literary texts and approaches in a wider conversation about religious knowledge: why we need it, how to get there, where to stop, and how to recognise it once it has been attained. Its relative freedom from specialised disciplinary investments allows a literary lens to bring into focus the relatively elusive strands of thinking about belief, knowledge and salvation, probing the particulars of affect implicit in the generalities of doctrine. The essays in this volume collectively probe the dynamic between literary form, religious faith and the process, psychology and ethics of knowing in early modern England. Addressing both the poetics of theological texts and literary treatments of theological matter, they stretch from the Reformation to the early Enlightenment, and cover a variety of themes ranging across religious hermeneutics, rhetoric and controversy, the role of the senses, and the entanglement of justice, ethics and practical theology. The book should appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, theologians and historians of religion, and general readers with a broad interest in Renaissance cultures of knowing.
Treacherous Faith offers a new and ambitious cross-disciplinary account of the ways writers from the early English Reformation to the Restoration generated, sustained, or questioned cultural anxieties about heresy and heretics. This book examines the dark, often brutal story of defining, constructing, and punishing heretics in early modern England, and especially the ways writers themselves contributed to or interrogated the politics of religious fear-mongering and demonizing. It illuminates the terrors and anxieties early modern writers articulated and the fantasies they constructed about pernicious heretics and pestilent heresies in response to the Reformation's shattering of Western Christendom. Treacherous Faith analyzes early modern writers who contributed to cultural fears about the contagion of heresy and engaged in the making of heretics, as well as writers who challenged the constructions of heretics and the culture of religious fear-mongering. The responses of early modern writers in English to the specter of heresy and the making of heretics were varied, complex, and contradictory, depending on their religious and political alignments. Some writers (for example, Thomas More, Richard Bancroft, and Thomas Edwards) used their rhetorical resourcefulness and inventiveness to contribute to the politics of heresy-making and the specter of cunning, diabolical heretics ravaging the Church, the state, and thousands of souls; others (for example, John Foxe) questioned within certain cultural limitations heresy-making processes and the violence and savagery that religious demonizing provoked; and some writers (for example, Anne Askew, John Milton, and William Walwyn) interrogated with great daring and inventiveness the politics of religious demonizing, heresy-making, and the cultural constructions of heretics. Treacherous Faith examines the complexities and paradoxes of the heresy-making imagination in early modern England: the dark fantasies, anxieties, terrors, and violence it was capable of generating, but also the ways the dreaded specter of heresy could stimulate the literary creativity of early modern authors engaging with it from diverse religious and political perspectives. Treacherous Faith is a major interdisciplinary study of the ways the literary imagination, religious fears, and demonizing interacted in the early modern world. This study of the early modern specter of heresy contributes to work in the humanities seeking to illuminate the changing dynamics of religious fear, the rhetoric of religious demonization, and the powerful ways the literary imagination represents and constructs religious difference.
The courtly love tradition had a great influence on the themes of religious poetryjust as an absent beloved could be longed for passionately, so too could a distant God be the subject of desire. But when authors began to perceive God as immanently available, did the nature and interpretation of devotional verse change? Ryan Netzley argues that early modern religious lyrics presented both desire and reading as free, loving activities, rather than as endless struggles or dramatic quests. Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist analyzes the work of prominent early modern writersincluding John Milton, Richard Crashaw, John Donne, and George Herbertwhose religious poetry presented parallels between sacramental desire and the act of understanding written texts. Netzley finds that by directing devotees to crave spiritual rather than worldly goods, these poets questioned ideas not only of what people should desire, but also how they should engage in the act of yearning. Challenging fundamental assumptions of literary criticism, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist shows how poetry can encourage love for its own sake, rather than in the hopes of salvation.
The central thesis of this book is that skepticism was instrumental to the defense of orthodox religion and the development of the identity of the Church of England. Examining the presence of skepticism in non-fiction prose literature at four transitional moments in English Protestant history during which orthodoxy was challenged and revised, Melissa Caldwell argues that a skeptical mode of thinking is embedded in the literary and rhetorical choices made by English writers who straddle the project of reform and the maintenance of orthodoxy after the Reformation in England. Far from being a radical belief simply indicative of an emerging secularism, she demonstrates the varied and complex appropriations of skeptical thought in early modern England. By examining a selection of various kinds of literature-including religious polemic, dialogue, pamphlets, sermons, and treatises-produced at key moments in early modern England’s religious history, Caldwell shows how the writers under consideration capitalized on the unscripted moral space that emerged in the wake of the Reformation. The result was a new kind of discourse--and a new form of orthodoxy--that sought both to exploit and to contain the skepticism unearthed by the Reformation.
The volume highlights how the Fourth Gospel and First Epistle of Saint John the Evangelist were leading apostolic texts during the early modern period in England, and the importance of Johannine theology to early modern religious poetry.
This book considers the relationship between biblical readings and literary writings in early modern England and it explores the impact of how the Bible was read across a variety of writers and genres.
