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"Christianity and literature -- England -- History -- 17th century"
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Print culture and the early Quakers
Kate Peters examines the important role played by print media in the early Quaker movement & how, under the direction of the leaders of the movement, the printed tract enabled Quakerism to emerge as a uniform, national phenomenon.
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Made Flesh
During the Reformation, the mystery of the Eucharist was the subject of contentious debate and a nexus of concerns over how the material might embody the sublime and how the absent might be made present. For Kimberly Johnson, the question of how exactly Christ can be present in bread and wine is fundamentally an issue of representation, and one that bears directly upon the mechanics of poetry. InMade Flesh, she explores the sacramental conjunction of text with materiality and word with flesh through the peculiar poetic strategies of the seventeenth-century English lyric.Made Fleshexamines the ways in which the works of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Edward Taylor, and other devotional poets explicitly engaged in issues of signification, sacrament, worship, and the ontological value of the material world. Johnson reads the turn toward interpretively obstructive and difficult forms in the seventeenth-century English lyric as a strategy to accomplish what the Eucharist itself cannot: the transubstantiation of absence into perceptual presence by emphasizing the material artifact of the poem. At its core, Johnson demonstrates, the Reformation debate about the Eucharist was an issue of semiotics, a reimagining of the relationship between language and materiality. The self-asserting flourishes of technique that developed in response to sixteenth-century sacramental controversy have far-reaching effects, persisting from the post-Reformation period into literary postmodernity.
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Hamlet in purgatory
This book delves into the author's longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet. In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false poem, they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly prison house of souls had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition.
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Comparative essays on the poetry and prose of John Donne and George Herbert : combined lights
This book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association. The contributors' distinctive new approaches and insights illuminate a variety of topics and fields while suggesting new directions that future study of Donne and Herbert might take. Some chapters explore concrete instances of collaboration or communication between Donne and Herbert, and others find fresh ways to contextualize the Donnean and Herbertian lyric, carefully setting the poetry alongside discourses of apophatic theology or early modern political theory, while still others link Herbert's verse to Donne's devotional prose. Several chapters establish specific theological and aesthetic grounds for comparison, considering Donne and Herbert's respective positions on religious assurance, comic sensibility, and virtuosity with poetic endings.
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Milton and Catholicism
\"This collection of original essays by literary critics and historians analyzes a wide range of Milton's writing, from his early poetry, through his mid-century political prose, to De Doctrina Christiana, which was unpublished in his lifetime, and finally to his last and greatest poems. The contributors investigate the rich variety of approaches to Milton's engagement with Catholicism and its relationship to reformed religion. The essays address latent tensions and contradictions, explore the nuances of Milton's relationship to the easy commonplaces of Protestant compatriots, and disclose the polemical strategies and tactics that often shape that engagement. The contributors link Milton and Catholicism with early modern confessional conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that in turn led to new models and standards of authority, scholarship, and interiority. In Milton's case, he deployed anti-Catholicism as a rhetorical device and the negative example out of which Protestants could shape their identity. The contributors argue that Milton's anti-Catholicism aligns with his understanding of inwardness and conscience and illuminates one of the central conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the period. Building on recent scholarship on Catholic and anti-Catholic discourses over the English Tudor and Stuart period, new understandings of martyrdom, and scholarship on Catholic women, Milton and Catholicism provides a diverse and multifaceted investigation into a complex and little explored field in Milton studies. Contributors: Alastair Bellany, Thomas Cogswell, Thomas N. Corns, Ronald Corthell, Angelica Duran, Martin Dzelzainis, John Flood, Estelle Haan, and Elizabeth Sauer\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry
Reading, Desire, and the Eucharistanalyzes the work of prominent early modern writers-including John Milton, Richard Crashaw, John Donne, and George Herbert-whose religious poetry presented parallels between sacramental desire and the act of understanding written texts.
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Fleshly tabernacles : Milton and the incarnational poetics of revolutionary England
Proclaiming the Word -- Milton's incarnate reader -- Revolutionary incarnations and the metaphysics of abundance.
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The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan
John Bunyan was a major figure in seventeenth-century Puritan literature, and one deeply embroiled in the religious upheavals of his times. This Companion considers all his major texts, including The Pilgrim's Progress and his autobiography Grace Abounding. The essays, by leading Bunyan scholars, place these and his other works in the context of seventeenth-century history and literature. They discuss such key issues as the publication of dissenting works, the history of the book, gender, the relationship between literature and religion, between literature and early modern radicalism, and the reception of seventeenth-century texts. Other chapters assess Bunyan's importance for the development of allegory, life-writing, the early novel and children's literature. This Companion provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to an author with an assured and central place in English literature.
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American literature and the new Puritan studies
\"This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Imitatio Christi
In
Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern
England , Nandra Perry explores the relationship of the
traditional devotional paradigm of imitatio Christi to the
theory and practice of literary imitation in early modern
England. While imitation has long been recognized as a central
feature of the period's pedagogy and poetics, the devotional
practice of imitating Christ's life and Passion has been
historically regarded as a minor element in English Protestant
piety. Perry reconsiders the role of the
imitatio Christi not only within English devotional
culture but within the broader culture of literary imitation.
She traces continuities and discontinuities between sacred and
secular notions of proper imitation, showing how imitation
worked in both contexts to address anxieties, widespread after
the Protestant Reformation, about the reliability of \"fallen\"
human language and the epistemological value of the body and
the material world.
The figure of Sir Philip Sidney-Elizabethan England's
premier defender of poetry and internationally recognized
paragon of Christian knighthood-functions as a nexus for
Perry's treatment of a wide variety of contemporary literary
and religious genres, all of them concerned in one way or
another with the ethical and religious implications of
imitation. Throughout the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods,
the Sidney legacy was appropriated by men and women, Catholics
and Protestants alike, making it an especially useful vehicle
for tracing the complicated relationship of
imitatio Christi to the various literary,
confessional, and cultural contexts within and across which it
often operated. Situating her project within a generously drawn
version of the Sidney \"circle\" allows Perry to move freely
across the boundaries that often delimit treatments of early
modern English piety. Her book is a call for renewed attention
to the imitation of Christ as a productive category of literary
analysis, one that resists overly neat distinctions between
Catholic and Protestant, sacred and secular, literary art and
cultural artifact.
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