Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688

by Edited by Donna B. Hamilton , Richard Strier

• ISBN13: 9780521060875
• ISBN10: 0521060877
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-04-24
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This collection of essays by historians and literary scholars treats English history and culture from the Henrician Reformation to the Glorious Revolution as a single coherent period in which religion is a dominant element in political and cultural life. It seeks to explore the centrality of the religion-politics nexus for this whole period through examining a wide variety of literary and non-literary texts, from plays and poems to devotional treatises, political treatises and histories. It breaks down normal distinctions between Tudor and Stuart, pre- and post-Restoration periods to reveal a coherent (though not all serene and untroubled) post-Reformation culture struggling with major issues of belief, practice, and authority.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Sir John Oldcastle as symbol of Reformation historiography

The 'sacred hunger of ambitious minds': Spenser's savage religion Andrew Hadfield

Subversive fathers and suffering subjects: Shakespeare and Christianity

Kneeling and the body politic

Donne and the politics of devotion Richard Strier

Catholic, Anglican or Puritan? Edward Sackville, Fourth Earl of Dorset, and the ambiguities of religion in early Stuart England

Crucifixion or apocalypse: refiguring the Eikon Basilike

Marvell, sacrilege, and Protestant historiography: contextualising 'Upon Appleton House'

Entering The Temple: women, reading and devotion in seventeenth-century England

Contextualising Dryden's Absolom: William Lawrence, the laws of marriage and the case for King

Reformation in the Restoration crisis, 1679-1682

Shadwell's dramatic trimming

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