Download or read book Prayer Despair and Drama written by Peter Iver Kaufman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prayer, Despair, and Drama explores the godly sorrow of Elizabethan Calvinists and finds that what some have characterized as an evangelism of fear functioned more as a kind of religious therapy. In this major contribution to discussions of the relationship between religion and literature in Elizabethan England, Peter Iver Kaufman argues that the soul-searching and self-scourging typical of late Tudor Calvinism was reflected in the rhetoric of self-loathing then prevalent in sermons, sonnets, and soliloquys. Kaufman shows how this spiritual psychology informs major literary texts including Hamlet, The Faerie Queene, Donne's Holy Sonnets, and other works.
Download or read book Predestination written by Peter J. Thuesen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-06 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Christianity Today 2010 Book Award for History/Biography, and praised in Christian Century as "witty...erudite...masterful," this groundbreaking history, the first of its kind, shows that far from being only about the age-old riddle of divine sovereignty versus human free will, the debate over predestination is inseparable from other central Christian beliefs and practices--the efficacy of the sacraments, the existence of purgatory and hell, the extent of God's providential involvement in human affairs--and has fueled theological conflicts across denominations for centuries. Peter Thuesen reexamines not only familiar predestinarians such as the New England Puritans and many later Baptists and Presbyterians, but also non-Calvinists such as Catholics and Lutherans, and shows how even contemporary megachurches preach a "purpose-driven" outlook that owes much to the doctrine of predestination. For anyone wanting a fuller understanding of religion in America, Predestination offers both historical context on a doctrine that reaches back 1,600 years and a fresh perspective on today's denominational landscape.
Download or read book Rituals of Spontaneity written by Lori Branch and published by Baylor University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Book of the Year Award for the Conference on Christianity and Literature.--Thomas H. Luxon, Dartmouth College "CHOICE"
Download or read book Practical Divinity written by Kenneth L. Parker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Greenham was one of the most important and respected figures among the Elizabethan clergy. His contemporaries described him as the founder of a previously unknown pastoral art: the cure of cases of conscience. Despite his fame in the Elizabethan period as a model pastor, pioneer in reformed casuistry, and founder of one of the first rectory seminaries, scholars have made little use of his life and works in their study of Elizabethan religious life. This study restores Richard Greenham to the central place he held in the development of Elizabethan Reformed parochial ministry. The monograph-length introduction includes a biography, an analysis of his pastoral style, and a study of his approach to curing cases of conscience. The transcription of Rylands English Manuscript 524, cross-referenced with the published editions of the sayings, offers a useful source to scholars who wish to study the collecting and ’framing’ process of the humanist pedagogical tradition. The selection of early published works includes Greenham’s (unfinished) catechism, treatises on the Sabbath and marriage, and advice on reading scripture and educating children.
Download or read book The End of Satisfaction written by Heather Hirschfeld and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-17 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heather Hirschfeld recovers the historical specificity and the conceptual vigor of the term "satisfaction" as used in dramas of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Download or read book Religion and Drama in Early Modern England written by Elizabeth Williamson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering fuller understandings of both dramatic representations and the complexities of religious culture, this collection reveals the ways in which religion and performance were inextricably linked in early modern England. Its readings extend beyond the interpretation of straightforward religious allusions and suggest new avenues for theorizing the dynamic relationship between religious representations and dramatic ones. By addressing the particular ways in which commercial drama adapted the sensory aspects of religious experience to its own symbolic systems, the volume enacts a methodological shift towards a more nuanced semiotics of theatrical performance. Covering plays by a wide range of dramatists, including Shakespeare, individual essays explore the material conditions of performance, the intricate resonances between dramatic performance and religious ceremonies, and the multiple valences of religious references in early modern plays. Additionally, Religion and Drama in Early Modern England reveals the theater's broad interpretation of post-Reformation Christian practice, as well as its engagement with the religions of Islam, Judaism and paganism.
Download or read book Grace Overwhelming written by Anne Dunan-Page and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded the 2007 National Research Prize SAES/AEFA. This study is a reappraisal of John Bunyan in the light of the dissenting religious culture of the late-seventeenth century. Charges of schism and fanaticism were repeatedly levelled against Bunyan, both from within the dissenting community and without, but far from being chastened by these accusations, Bunyan responded with a religious discourse marked by a rhetoric of excess. The focus of this book is therefore upon Bunyan's overwhelming spiritual experiences, especially the representation of torment, in his literary and polemical works. The believers' suffering was an obsessive concern of dissenting ministers, even to the point where their writings are often remembered today for little else. Hitherto, most scholars have termed all the mental states that they invoke 'despair', but this simplifies the experiences at issue. A wealth of contemporary material helps to restore the nuances of seventeenth-century physical and spiritual conditions, from enthusiasm to melancholy and madness; from fear to desertion and sloth. These chapters explore fresh ways in which this subtle typology of torment and its extreme manifestations form the core of the literary expression of Restoration dissent, challenging Bunyan to represent spiritual equilibrium as the ultimate quest of the earthly pilgrimage.
Download or read book George Gifford and the Reformation of the Common Sort written by Timothy Scott McGinnis and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2004-09-24 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This careful study explores puritan attitudes through the life and works of Elizabethan minister George Gifford. He was on the front lines of religious controversies in a time when the English church was being shaped by Protestant evangelicals who felt compelled to carry their understanding of “true religion” to all corners of England. Known among themselves as “the godly” or “gospellers” and to their enemies as “puritans” or “precisionists,” these ministers believed the Church of England was only partially reformed. Gifford tried to convert the many parishioners whom he believed to be Protestant in name only, or “men indifferent” due to their acceptance of whatever religion was thrust upon them. Using archival records and Gifford's large corpus of published treatises, dialogues, and sermons, McGinnis looks at Gifford’s support and opposition in his ministry at Maldon, and his recurring conflicts with ecclesiastical authorities. He explores Gifford's writings on Catholicism, separatism, and witchcraft, and considers how Gifford’s attention to practical ministry interacted with national debates. McGinnis also analyzes Gifford's attempt to translate Protestant doctrines into a language accessible to the average layperson in his sermons and catechism. Those interested in popular religion and culture, pastoral ministry, and puritanism on both sides of the Atlantic will benefit from this study of one on the front lines of religious controversies during the turbulent years of Elizabeth's reign.
Download or read book Tropes and the Literary Scientific Revolution written by Michael Slater and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof argues that the rise of mechanical science in the seventeenth century had a profound impact on both language and literature. To the extent that new ideas about things were accompanied by new attitudes toward words, what we commonly regard as the “scientific revolution” inevitably bore literary dimensions as well. Literary tropes and forms underwent tremendous reassessment in the seventeenth century, and early modern science was shaped just as powerfully by contest over the place of literary figures, from personification and metaphor to anamorphosis and allegory. In their rejection of teleological explanations of natural motion, for instance, early modern philosophers often disputed the value of personification, a figural projection of interiority onto what was becoming increasingly a mechanical world. And allegory—a dominant mode of literature from the late Middle Ages until well into the Renaissance—became “the vice of those times,” as Thomas Rymer described it in 1674. This book shows that its acute devaluation was possible only in conjunction with a distinctively modern physics. Analyzing writings by Sidney, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, and more, it asserts that the scientific revolution was a literary phenomenon, just as the literary revolution was also a scientific one.
Download or read book Precarious Identities written by Vassiliki Markidou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the construction of identity and the precarity of the self in the work of the Calvinist Fulke Greville (1554–1628) and the Jesuit Robert Southwell (1561–1595). For the first time, a collection of original essays unites them with the aim to explore their literary production. The essays collected here define these authors’ efforts to forge themselves as literary, religious, and political subjects amid a shifting politico-religious landscape. They highlight the authors’ criticism of the court and underscore similarities and differences in thought, themes, and style. Altogether, the essays in this volume demonstrate the developments in cosmology, theology, literary conventions, political ideas, and religious dogmas, and trace their influence in the oeuvre of Greville and Southwell.
Download or read book Being Elizabethan written by Norman Jones and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-03-20 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Captures the worldviews, concerns, joys, and experiences of people living through the cultural changes in the second half of the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century, Shakespeare’s age. Elizabethans lived through a time of cultural collapse and rejuvenation as the impacts of globalization, the religious Reformation, economic and scientific revolutions, wars, and religious dissent forced them to reformulate their ideas of God, nation, society and self. This well-written, accessible book depicting how Elizabethans perceived reality and acted on their perceptions illustrates Elizabethan life, offering readers well-told stories about the Elizabethan people and the world around them. It defines the older ideas of pre-Elizabethan culture and shows how they were shattered and replaced by a new culture based on the emergence of individual conscience. The book posits that post-Reformation English culture, emphasizing the internalization of religious certainties, embraced skepticism in ways that valued individualism over older communal values. Being Elizabethan portrays how people’s lives were shaped and changed by the tension between a received belief in divine stability and new, destabilizing, ideas about physical and metaphysical truth. It begins with a chapter that examines how idealized virtues in a divinely governed universe were encapsulated in funeral sermons and epitaphs, exploring how they perceived the Divine Order. Other chapters discuss Elizabethan social stations, community, economics, self-expression, and more. Illustrates how early modern culture was born by exposing readers to events, artistic expressions, and personal experiences Provides an understanding of Elizabethan people by summarizing momentous events with which they grew up Appeals to students, scholars, and laymen interested in history and literature of the Elizabethan era Shows how a new cultural era, the age of Shakespeare, grew from collapsing late Medieval worldviews. Being Elizabethan is a captivating read for anyone interested in early modern English culture and society. It is an excellent source of information for those studying Tudor and early Stuart history and/or literature.
Download or read book Prayer and Performance in Early Modern English Literature written by Joseph Sterrett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the performative aspects of prayer and how they were represented in literature in early modern England.
Download or read book George Herbert and the Business of Practical Piety written by Ceri Sullivan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-25 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary nudge theory points out that people make good choices over issues where they have had past experience of similar circumstances, where there is reliable, substantial, and relevant information about the situation, and where they will get prompt feedback about the effect of their decision. Yet none of these conditions apply to the most vital choice of action facing early modern Protestants: how can they be saved? In George Herbert and the Business of Practical Piety, Ceri Sullivan uses nudge theory to show how practical divinity disregards the doleful conclusions of predestination--that salvation cannot be earned--to supply readers with suggestions on how to prepare to act, regardless of their final destiny. Such texts create cognitive niches to support cheerful, godly thought and action, in a way which is far from being despairing or compulsive. Their nudges were repeatedly put into practice by Herbert's friends, the Ferrars, who tried to form an ideal religious community at Little Gidding. These prescriptions and examples illustrate how George Herbert's The Temple (1633) is a compendium of the techniques of choice architecture. Herbert's poems are full of the humour emerging from a life of faith which is willing to guard high ideals by low cunning, stooping to use the least little things to change a self. George Herbert and the Business of Practical Piety initially calls on theories of the extended mind to ask what sort of minor physical and social structures scaffold decisions, then examines a selection of nudges used by Herbert: contracts with the self, building a mind, cleaning a heart, conversing with God, making to-do lists, and working on working well.
Download or read book The Beginnings of English Protestantism written by Peter Marshall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-30 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy written by Claire McEachern and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-08 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revised and updated Companion acquaints the student reader with the forms, contexts, critical and theatrical lives of the ten plays considered to be Shakespeare's tragedies. Thirteen essays, written by leading scholars in Britain and North America, address the ways in which Shakespearean tragedy originated, developed and diversified, as well as how it has fared on stage, as text and in criticism. Topics covered include the literary precursors of Shakespeare's tragedies, cultural backgrounds, sub-genres and receptions of the plays. The book examines the four major tragedies and, in addition, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. Essays from the first edition have been fully revised to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship; the bibliography has been extensively updated; and four new chapters have been added, discussing Shakespearean form, Shakespeare and philosophy, Shakespeare's tragedies in performance, and Shakespeare and religion.
Download or read book Religions in Shakespeare s Writings written by David V. Urban and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a wide range of scholarly perspectives, Religions in Shakespeare’s Writings explores Shakespeare’s depictions, throughout his canon, of various religions and matters related to them. This collection’s fifteen essays explore matters pertaining to Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan Christianity, the Albigensian heresy of the high middle ages, Islam, Judaism, Roman religion, different manifestations of religious paganism, and even the “religion of Shakespeare” practiced by Shakespeare’s nineteenth-century admirers. These essays analyze how Shakespeare depicts both tensions between religions and the syntheses of different religious expressions on topics as diverse as Shakespeare’s varied portrayals of the afterlife, religious experience in Measure for Measure, and Black natural law and The Tempest. This collection also explores the political ramifications of religion within Shakespeare’s works, as well as Shakespeare’s multifaceted uses of the Bible. Additionally, while this collection does not present a Shakespeare whose particular religious beliefs can definitely be known or are displayed uniformly throughout his canon, various essays consider to what extent Shakespeare’s individual works demonstrate a Christian foundation. Contributors include John D. Cox, Cyndia Susan Clegg, Grace Tiffany, Matthew J. Smith, Bethany C. Besteman, Sarah Skwire, Feisal Mohamed, Benedict J. Whalen, Benjamin Lockerd, Bryan Adams Hampton, Debra Johanyak, John E. Curran, Emily E. Stelzer, David V. Urban, and Julia Reinhard Lupton.
Download or read book Believing in Shakespeare written by Claire McEachern and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground breaking and accessible study explores the connections between the English Reformation's impact on the belief in eternal salvation and how it affected ways of believing in the plays of Shakespeare. Claire McEachern examines the new and better faith that Protestantism imagined for itself, a faith in which scepticism did not erode belief, but worked to substantiate it in ways that were both affectively positive and empirically positivist. Concluding with in-depth readings of Richard II, King Lear and The Tempest, the book represents a markedly fresh intervention in the topic of Shakespeare and religion. With great originality, McEachern argues that the English reception of the Calvinist imperative to 'know with' God allowed the very nature of literary involvement to change, transforming feeling for a character into feeling with one.
