Download or read book Literature and the Encounter with God in Post Reformation England written by Michael Martin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each of the figures examined in this study”John Dee, John Donne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry and Thomas Vaughan, and Jane Lead”is concerned with the ways in which God can be approached or experienced. Michael Martin analyzes the ways in which the encounter with God is figured among these early modern writers who inhabit the shared cultural space of poets and preachers, mystics and scientists. The three main themes that inform this study are Cura animarum, the care of souls, and the diminished role of spiritual direction in post-Reformation religious life; the rise of scientific rationality; and the struggle against the disappearance of the Holy. Arising from the methods and commitments of phenomenology, the primary mode of inquiry of this study resides in contemplation, not in a religious sense, but in the realm of perception, attendance, and acceptance. Martin portrays figures such as Dee, Digby, and Thomas Vaughan not as the eccentrics they are often depicted to have been, but rather as participating in a religious mainstream that had been radically altered by the disappearance of any kind of mandatory or regular spiritual direction, a problem which was further complicated and exacerbated by the rise of science. Thus this study contributes to a reconfiguration of our notion of what ’religious orthodoxy’ really meant during the period, and calls into question our own assumptions about what is (or was) ’orthodox’ and ’heterodox.’

Download or read book Literature and the Encounter with God in Post Reformation England written by Michael Martin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each of the figures examined in this study”John Dee, John Donne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry and Thomas Vaughan, and Jane Lead”is concerned with the ways in which God can be approached or experienced. Michael Martin analyzes the ways in which the encounter with God is figured among these early modern writers who inhabit the shared cultural space of poets and preachers, mystics and scientists. The three main themes that inform this study are Cura animarum, the care of souls, and the diminished role of spiritual direction in post-Reformation religious life; the rise of scientific rationality; and the struggle against the disappearance of the Holy. Arising from the methods and commitments of phenomenology, the primary mode of inquiry of this study resides in contemplation, not in a religious sense, but in the realm of perception, attendance, and acceptance. Martin portrays figures such as Dee, Digby, and Thomas Vaughan not as the eccentrics they are often depicted to have been, but rather as participating in a religious mainstream that had been radically altered by the disappearance of any kind of mandatory or regular spiritual direction, a problem which was further complicated and exacerbated by the rise of science. Thus this study contributes to a reconfiguration of our notion of what ’religious orthodoxy’ really meant during the period, and calls into question our own assumptions about what is (or was) ’orthodox’ and ’heterodox.’

Download or read book Religion Literature and Politics in Post Reformation England 1540 1688 written by Donna B. Hamilton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-02-29 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Made Flesh written by Kimberly Johnson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-03-05 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. In Made 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 Flesh examines 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.

Download or read book Marvelous Protestantism written by Julie Crawford and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2005-07-20 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crawford examines accounts of monstrous births in popular pamphlets along with the strikingly graphic illustrations accompanying them, demonstrating how Protestant reformers used these accounts to guide their public through the spiritual confusion and social turmoil of the time.

Download or read book The Plain Man s Pathways to Heaven written by Christopher Haigh and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-09-13 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did ordinary people believe in post-Reformation England, and what did they do about it? This book looks at religious belief and practice through the eyes of five sorts of people: godly Protestant ministers, zealous Protestant laypeople, the ignorant, those who complained about the burdens of religion, and the Catholics. Based on 600 court and visitation books from three national and twelve local archives, it cites what people had to say about themselves, their religion, and the religions of others. How did people behave in church? What did they think of church rituals? What did they do on Sundays? What did they think of people of other faiths? How did they get along together, and what sort of issues produced tensions between them? What did parishioners think of their priests and what did the clergy think of their people? Was everyone seriously religious, or did some people mock or doubt religion? If these questions have been tackled before, it has usually been by way of claims about what the common people believed in books written by members of the educated ranks about their contemporaries. In contrast, by going directly to other sources of evidence such court records and parish complaints, this book illuminates what ordinary people actually said and did. Written by one of our leading historians of early modern England, it is a lively and readable account of popular religion in England under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, dealing with the results of the Reformation, reactions to official policy, and the background to the Civil Wars of the mid-17th century.

Download or read book Remembering the Reformation written by Alexandra Walsham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-04 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stimulating volume explores how the memory of the Reformation has been remembered, forgotten, contested, and reinvented between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. Remembering the Reformation traces how a complex, protracted, and unpredictable process came to be perceived, recorded, and commemorated as a transformative event. Exploring both local and global patterns of memory, the contributors examine the ways in which the Reformation embedded itself in the historical imagination and analyse the enduring, unstable, and divided legacies that it engendered. The book also underlines how modern scholarship is indebted to processes of memory-making initiated in the early modern period and challenges the conventional models of periodisation that the Reformation itself helped to create. This collection of essays offers an expansive examination and theoretically engaged discussion of concepts and practices of memory and Reformation. This volume is ideal for upper level undergraduates and postgraduates studying the Reformation, Early Modern Religious History, Early Modern European History, and Early Modern Literature.

Download or read book Devotional Experience and Erotic Knowledge in the Literary Culture of the English Reformation written by Rhema Hokama and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-20 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the way Calvinist experientialism provided both a theology and an epistemology in the poetry of five early modern English poets: William Shakespeare, Robert Herrick, John Donne, Fulke Greville, and John Milton. In both official church ecclesiology and informal devotional practice, the Reformation introduced the idea that an individual's experience of devotion did not only entail feeling, but also thought. For early modern English people, bodily experience offered a means of corroborating and verifying devotional truth, making the invisible visible and knowable. This volume maintains that these religious developments gave early modern thinkers and poets a new epistemological framework for imagining and interpreting devotional intention and access. These Reformed models for devotion not only shaped how people experienced their encounters with God; the changing religious landscape of post-Reformation England also held profound implications for how English poets described sexual longing and access to earthly beloveds in the literary production of the period. In placing the works of English poets in conversation with devotional writers such as William Perkins, Samuel Hieron, Joseph Hall, and William Gouge, this book demonstrates how the English Calvinist tradition attributed epistemological potential to a wide range of ordinary experience, including sexual experience.

Download or read book Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature written by Mark Kaethler and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Forms of faith written by Jonathan Baldo and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-12 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the role of literature as a means of mediating religious conflict in early modern England. Marking a new stage in the ‘religious turn’ that generated vigorous discussion of the changes and conflicts brought about by the Reformation, it unites new historicist readings with an interest in the ideological significance of aesthetic form. It proceeds from the assumption that confessional differences did not always erupt into hostilities but that people also had to arrange themselves with divided loyalties – between the old faith and the new, between religious and secular interests, between officially sanctioned and privately held beliefs. What role might literature have played here? Can we conceive of literary representations as possible sites of de-escalation? Do different discursive, aesthetic, or social contexts inflect or deflect the demands of religious loyalties? Such questions open a new perspective on post-Reformation English culture and literature.

Download or read book The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought written by Kevin Killeen and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern thought was haunted by the unknowable character of the fallen world. The sometimes brilliant and sometimes baffling fusion of theological and scientific ideas in the era, as well as some of its greatest literature, responds to this sense that humans encountered only an incomplete reality. Ranging from Paradise Lost to thinkers in and around the Royal Society and commentary on the Book of Job, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought explores how the era of the scientific revolution was in part paralyzed by and in part energized by the paradox it encountered in thinking about the elusive nature of God and the unfathomable nature of the natural world. Looking at writers with scientific, literary and theological interests, from the shoemaker mystic, Jacob Boehme to John Milton, from Robert Boyle to Margaret Cavendish, and from Thomas Browne to the fiery prophet, Anna Trapnel, Kevin Killeen shows how seventeenth-century writings redeployed the rich resources of the ineffable and the apophatic—what cannot be said, except in negative terms—to think about natural philosophy and the enigmas of the natural world.

Download or read book Encounters with God in Medieval and Early Modern English Poetry written by Charlotte Clutterbuck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging with four English poems or groups of poems-the anonymous medieval Crucifixion lyrics; William Langland's Piers Plowman, John Donne's Divine Poems, and John Milton's Paradise Lost-this book examines the nature of poetic encounter with God. At the same time, the author makes original contributions to the discussion of critical dilemmas in the study of each poem or group of poems. The main linguistic focus of this book is on the nature of dialogue with God in religious poetry, an area much neglected by grammarians and often overlooked in studies of literary style. It constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between literature and theology.

Download or read book Thomas Vaughan and the Rosicrucian Revival in Britain written by Thomas Willard and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-09-19 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Vaughan’s challenging books on alchemy, magic, and other esoterica make better sense in the context of the Rosicrucian ideas he introduced to English readers in the seventeenth century. This is the first scholarly book on his life, sources, writings, and subsequent influence.

Download or read book The Submerged Reality written by Michael Martin and published by . This book was released on 2015-02-10 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics, Michael Martin challenges us to reimagine theology, philosophy, and poetics through the lens of sophiology. Sophiology, as this book shows, is not a rogue theology, but a way of perceiving that which shines through the cosmos: a way that can return metaphysics to postmodern thought and facilitate a (re)union of religion, science, and art. "This is a brave, powerful, and intensely fascinating book that will certainly prove controversial. The notion of the divine Wisdom, Sophia, has always proved contentious in theology, but has remained persistent. For Michael Martin, it is essentially a poetic intuition, challenging our ways of perception and understanding. Exploring writers left in the shadows by conventional theology, he taps sources from which theology and the life of the Church could find renewal."--ANDREW LOUTH "In The Submerged Reality, Michael Martin suggests why a radicalized orthodoxy in the future will need more to 'walk on the wild side' and appropriate what is best in the esoteric, occult, and even gnostic traditions. He intimates that the past failure to do this is linked to a one-sidedly masculine theology, downgrading the sacrality of life, immanence, fertility, and the 'active receptivity' of the feminine. The consequence of this has been the perverse liberal attempt to distill 'order out of disorder, ' or the denial of real essences, relations, gender difference, and the objective existence of all things as beautiful. Finally, Martin argues that such a genuinely feminist theology would also be concerned with a space between the openly empirical observation of nature on the one hand, and the reflective exposition of divine historical revelation on the other. In this space, continuously new poetic realities are shaped and emerge under the guidance of holy inspiring wisdom."--JOHN MILBANK "This is a very clearly written and lively work of Catholic apologetics. Professors would be well advised to assign it as a text for undergraduate courses in theology. The Submerged Reality could win the hearts and minds of contemporary young people for Christian belief."--FRANCESCA ARAN MURPHY "Sophiology is best understood, not as a 'doctrine, ' but as a way of seeing and feeling the deepest mystery of reality. In this wide-ranging and exhilarating book, Michael Martin gives us the most important theological apologia for the contemplation of divine Sophia since the great Russian Sophiologists of the last century. Drawing on the Russian genius of Vladimir Soloviev and Sergius Bulgakov, Martin's meditation on Sophia ranges across the contributions of figures such as Jacob Boehme and Rudolf Steiner, Edith Stein and Pavel Florensky, Hans Urs von Balthasar and John Milbank. In so doing, he weaves a rich tapestry that illumines how a deeper gaze toward the feminine figure of Sophia begins to yield a more adequate response to the crisis of post-modern secular culture."--AARON RICHES MICHAEL MARTIN is Assistant Professor of English and Philosophy at Marygrove College. He is the author of Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England (Ashgate, 2014), a work of literary criticism, and a volume of poetry, Meditations in Times of Wonder (Angelico Press, 2014).

Download or read book The Poesy of Scientia in Early Modern England written by Subha Mukherji and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book All Wonders in One Sight written by Theresa M. Kenney and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the seventeenth century many leading poets wrote poems about Christ’s infancy, though charm and sweetness were not the leading note. Because these poets were university-educated classicists – many of them also Catholic or Anglican priests – they wrote in an elevated style, with elevated language, and their concerns were deeply theological as well as poetic. In an age of religious controversy, their poems had controversial elements, and because these poems were mostly intended for private use and limited circulation, they were not generally singable hymns of public celebration of Christ’s birth. However far from dry academic pieces, these poems offer a wide variety of approaches to both their subject, the infant Jesus, and the means of presenting it. All Wonders in One Sight examines the ways in which early modern English poets understood and accomplished the poetic task of representing Christ as both Child and God. Focusing on the intellectual and theological content of the poems as well as the devotional aims of the poets, Theresa M. Kenney aims to reveal their understandings of divine immanence and the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Download or read book The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton written by Tiffany Jo Werth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lithic Imagination from More to Miltonexplores how stones, rocks, and the broader mineral realm play a vital role in early modern England's religious and cultural systems, a rolethat, in turn, informs the period's poetic and visual imagination.The scale ofthe human lifespan and the gyre-like turns of England's long Reformation provide a conceptual framework for the various stony textual and visual archives this book studies.Thetexts and images participate in specifically English histories (literary, artistic, political,religious) although Continental influences are frequently in dialogue.The religious orbitencompasses the Christian rivalry with Jewish culture, touches on Christianity'stension with Islam, but most intently centers on the antagonism between Catholic and varians ofProtestant andReformed belief. The volume features canonical writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Milton, and Pulter, but puts them in company with lesser-known religiouspolemicists, alchemists, anatomists, painters, mothers, and stonemasons.Accordingly,the multimediaarchive includes drama, lyric, and prose as well as biblical illustrations, tapestries, church furniture, paintings, anatomicaldrawings, and statues.The lithic too is capaciously construed as a continuum of rocky as well as mineral forms ranging from bodily encrustations like the kidney and bezoarstone, to salt, iron, limestone, marble, flint, and silicon.The assemblage of materialsbears witness to aspirational imperial fantasies and looming colonial conquests; it engages in both syncretism andsupersession; upholds and subverts gender hierarchies; limns the race-making category of hue with desire; and supports, and sometimes thwarts,elitist ideologies of an elect, chosen people.All come together via the storied pathways of stoneas densely material and as a foundation for the abstract imaginary along the scala naturae.Across the lithic-human fold, stone promises, fascinates, betrays. As alpha and omega, stone can herald salvation or it can threaten with damnation.