Religion and Culture in Renaissance England

by Edited by Claire McEachern , Debora Shuger

• ISBN13: 9780521034883
• ISBN10: 0521034884
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-12-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

These essays by leading historians and literary scholars investigate the role of religion in shaping political, social and literary forms, and their reciprocal role in shaping early modern religion, from the Reformation to the Civil Wars. Reflecting and rethinking the insights of new historicism and cultural studies, individual essays take up various aspects of the productive, if tense, relation between Tudor-Stuart Christianity and culture, and explore how religion informs some of the central texts of English Renaissance literature: the vernacular Bible, Foxe's Acts and Monuments, Hooker's Laws, Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, the poems of John Donne, Amelia Lanyer and John Milton. The collection demonstrates the centrality of religion to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and its influence on early modern constructions of gender, subjectivity and nationhood.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Notes on contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Form and Community

Biblical rhetoric: the English nation and national sentiment in the prophetic mode

'The noyse of the new Bible': reform and reaction in Henrician England

'Foxe's' Books of Martyrs: printing and popularising the Acts and Monuments

The place of the stigmata in Christological poetics

'Society supernatural': the imagined community of Hooker's Laws

Hooker in the context of European cultural history

Literature and Dogma

Pain, persecution, and the construction of selfhood in Foxe's Acts and Monuments

Love's martyrs: Shakespeare's 'Phoenix and Turtle' and the sacrificial sonnets

The gender of religious devotion

Othello as protestant propaganda

Milton against humility

Index

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