Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England

by Kristen Poole

• ISBN13: 9780521641043
• ISBN10: 0521641047
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-06-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The figure of the puritan has long been conceived as dour and repressive in character, an image which has been central to ways of reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history and literature. Kristen Poole's original study challenges this perception arguing that, contrary to current critical understanding, radical reformers were most often portrayed in literature of the period as deviant, licentious and transgressive. Through extensive analysis of early modern pamphlets, sermons, poetry and plays, the fictional puritan emerges as a grotesque and carnivalesque figure; puritans are extensively depicted as gluttonous, sexually promiscuous, monstrously procreating, and even as worshipping naked. By recovering this lost alternative satirical image, Poole sheds new light on the role played by anti-puritan rhetoric. Her book contends that such representations served an important social role, providing an imaginative framework for discussing familial, communal and political transformations that resulted from the Reformation.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	viii
Acknowledgements	x
Note on the text	xiii
Introduction: deforming Reformation	1	(15)
The puritan in the alehouse: Falstaff and the drama of Martin Marprelate	16	(29)
Eating disorder: feasting, fasting, and the puritan bellygod at Bartholomew Fair	45	(29)
Lewd conversations: the perversions of the Family of Love	74	(30)
Dissecting sectarianism: swarms, forms, and Thomas Edwards's Gangrana	104	(20)
The descent of dissent: monstrous genealogies and Milton's antiprelatical tracts	124	(23)
Not so much as fig leaves: Adamites, naked Quakers, linguistic perfection and Paradise Lost	147	(35)
Epilogue: the fortunes of Hudibras	182	(5)
Notes	187	(54)
Selected bibliography of pamphlets and sermons	241	(17)
Index	258