Download or read book Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England written by Jamie H. Ferguson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The expressive and literary capacities of post-Reformation English were largely shaped in response to the Bible. Faith in the Language examines the convergence of biblical interpretation and English literature, from William Tyndale to John Donne, and argues that the groundwork for a newly authoritative literary tradition in early modern England is laid in the discourse of biblical hermeneutics. The period 1525-1611 witnessed a proliferation of English biblical versions, provoking a century-long debate about how and whether the Bible should be rendered in English. These public, indeed institutional accounts of biblical English changed the language: questions about the relation between Scripture and exegetical tradition that shaped post-Reformation hermeneutics bore strange fruit in secular literature that defined itself through varying forms of autonomy vis-a-vis prior tradition.
Download or read book Early Modern Literature and England s Long Reformation written by David Loewenstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assessing early modern literature and England’s Long Reformation, this book challenges the notion that the English Reformation ended in the sixteenth century, or even by the seventeenth century. Contributions by literary scholars and historians of religion put these two disciplines in critical conversation with each other, in order to examine a complex, messy, and long-drawn-out process of reformation that continued well beyond the significant political and religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. The aim of this conversation is to generate new perspectives on the constant remaking of the Reformation—or Reformations, as some scholars prefer to characterize the multiple religious upheavals and changes, both Catholic and Protestant—of the early modern period. This interdisciplinary book makes a major contribution to debates about the nature and length of England’s Long Reformation. Early Modern Literature and England’s Long Reformation is essential reading for scholars and students considering the interconnections between literature and religion in the early modern period. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Reformation.
Download or read book The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology written by Paul Cefalu and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume highlights how the Fourth Gospel and First Epistle of Saint John the Evangelist were leading apostolic texts during the early modern period in England, and the importance of Johannine theology to early modern religious poetry.
Download or read book Early Modern Literature in History written by Cedric C.. Brown and published by . This book was released on 1997* with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Religion Reform and Women s Writing in Early Modern England written by Kimberly Anne Coles and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-17 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long considered marginal in early modern culture, women writers were actually central to the development of a Protestant literary tradition in England. Kimberly Anne Coles explores their contribution to this tradition through thorough archival research in publication history and book circulation; the interaction of women's texts with those written by men; and the traceable influence of women's writing upon other contemporary literary works. Focusing primarily upon Katherine Parr, Anne Askew, Mary Sidney Herbert, and Anne Vaughan Lok, Coles argues that the writings of these women were among the most popular and influential works of sixteenth-century England. This book is full of prevalent material and fresh analysis for scholars of early modern literature, culture and religious history.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion written by Andrew Hiscock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering Handbook offers a comprehensive consideration of the dynamic relationship between English literature and religion in the early modern period. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the most turbulent times in the history of the British church - and, perhaps as a result, produced some of the greatest devotional poetry, sermons, polemics, and epics of literature in English. The early-modern interaction of rhetoric and faith is addressed in thirty-nine chapters of original research, divided into five sections. The first analyses the changes within the church from the Reformation to the establishment of the Church of England, the phenomenon of puritanism and the rise of non-conformity. The second section discusses ten genres in which faith was explored, including poetry, prophecy, drama, sermons, satire, and autobiographical writings. The middle section focuses on selected individual authors, among them Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton. Since authors never write in isolation, the fourth section examines a range of communities in which writers interpreted their faith: lay and religious households, sectarian groups including the Quakers, clusters of religious exiles, Jewish and Islamic communities, and those who settled in the new world. Finally, the fifth section considers some key topics and debates in early modern religious literature, ranging from ideas of authority and the relationship of body and soul, to death, judgment, and eternity. The Handbook is framed by a succinct introduction, a chronology of religious and literary landmarks, a guide for new researchers in this field, and a full bibliography of primary and secondary texts relating to early modern English literature and religion.
Download or read book Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England 1558 1625 written by Victoria Brownlee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bible had a profound impact on early modern culture, and bible-reading shaped the period's drama, poetry, and life-writings, as well as sermons and biblical commentaries. This volume provides an account of the how the Bible was read and applied in early modern England. It maps the connection between these readings and various forms of writing and argues that literary writings bear the hallmarks of the period's dominant exegetical practices, and do interpretative work. Tracing the impact of biblical reading across a range of genres and writers, the discussion demonstrates that literary reimaginings of, and allusions to, the Bible were common, varied, and ideologically evocative. The book explores how a series of popularly interpreted biblical narratives were recapitulated in the work of a diverse selection of writers, some of whom remain relatively unknown. In early modern England, the figures of Solomon, Job, and Christ's mother, Mary, and the books of Song of Songs and Revelation, are enmeshed in different ways with contemporary concerns, and their usage illustrates how the Bible's narratives could be turned to a fascinating array of debates. In showing the multifarious contexts in which biblical narratives were deployed, this book argues that Protestant interpretative practices contribute to, and problematize, literary constructions of a range of theological, political, and social debates.
Download or read book The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature written by Molly Murray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christians in post-Reformation England inhabited a culture of conversion. Required to choose among rival forms of worship, many would cross - and often recross - the boundary between Protestantism and Catholicism. This study considers the poetry written by such converts, from the reign of Elizabeth I to that of James II, concentrating on four figures: John Donne, William Alabaster, Richard Crashaw, and John Dryden. Murray offers a context for each poet's conversion within the era's polemical and controversial literature. She also elaborates on the formal features of the poems themselves, demonstrating how the language of poetry could express both spiritual and ecclesiastical change with particular vividness and power. Proposing conversion as a catalyst for some of the most innovative devotional poetry of the period, both canonical and uncanonical, this study will be of interest to all specialists in early modern English literature.
Download or read book Literature Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England written by Subha Mukherji and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The primary aim of Knowing Faith is to uncover the intervention of literary texts and approaches in a wider conversation about religious knowledge: why we need it, how to get there, where to stop, and how to recognise it once it has been attained. Its relative freedom from specialised disciplinary investments allows a literary lens to bring into focus the relatively elusive strands of thinking about belief, knowledge and salvation, probing the particulars of affect implicit in the generalities of doctrine. The essays in this volume collectively probe the dynamic between literary form, religious faith and the process, psychology and ethics of knowing in early modern England. Addressing both the poetics of theological texts and literary treatments of theological matter, they stretch from the Reformation to the early Enlightenment, and cover a variety of themes ranging across religious hermeneutics, rhetoric and controversy, the role of the senses, and the entanglement of justice, ethics and practical theology. The book should appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, theologians and historians of religion, and general readers with a broad interest in Renaissance cultures of knowing.
Download or read book Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England 1558 1625 written by Victoria Brownlee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the relationship between biblical readings and literary writings in early modern England and it explores the impact of how the Bible was read across a variety of writers and genres.
Download or read book Scriptural Perspicuity in the Early English Reformation in Historical Theology written by Richard M. Edwards and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A consistent, indigenous English doctrine of scriptural perspicuity correlates with a commitment to the availability of the vernacular scriptures in English and supports the English roots of the Early English Reformation (EER). Although political events and figures dominate the EER, its religious component springing from John Wyclif and streaming throughout the tradition must be recognized more widely. This book critically surveys the doctrine of scriptural perspicuity from the beginning of the Church in the first century (noted as early as John Chrysostom) through the seventeenth century, examining its impact on the current debates concerning competing hermeneutical systems, reader response hermeneutics, and the debates in conservative American Presbyterianism and Reformed theology on subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith, the length of «creation days», and other issues.
Download or read book Reading Desire and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry written by Ryan Netzley and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The courtly love tradition had a great influence on the themes of religious poetryjust as an absent beloved could be longed for passionately, so too could a distant God be the subject of desire. But when authors began to perceive God as immanently available, did the nature and interpretation of devotional verse change? Ryan Netzley argues that early modern religious lyrics presented both desire and reading as free, loving activities, rather than as endless struggles or dramatic quests. Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist analyzes the work of prominent early modern writersincluding John Milton, Richard Crashaw, John Donne, and George Herbertwhose religious poetry presented parallels between sacramental desire and the act of understanding written texts. Netzley finds that by directing devotees to crave spiritual rather than worldly goods, these poets questioned ideas not only of what people should desire, but also how they should engage in the act of yearning. Challenging fundamental assumptions of literary criticism, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist shows how poetry can encourage love for its own sake, rather than in the hopes of salvation.
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 Treacherous Faith written by David Loewenstein and published by . This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Treacherous Faith is a major study of heresy and the literary imagination from the English Reformation to the Restoration. It analyzes both canonical and lesser-known writers who contributed to fears about the contagion of heresy, as well as those who challenged cultural constructions of heresy and the rhetoric of fear-mongering
Download or read book Reading Martyred Signs written by Stephanie Meredith Bahr and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract Reading “Martyred Signs”: Reformation Hermeneutics and Literature by Stephanie Meredith Bahr Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor David Landreth, Chair This dissertation—Reading “Martyred Signs”: Reformation Hermeneutics and Literature—contends that Reformation struggles over Biblical interpretation generated a violently unstable hermeneutic environment and exerted a defining influence on Renaissance literature. Although the Reformation hinged on the most fundamental question of literary study—how to interpret texts—most literary scholars encounter these Biblical hermeneutics only indirectly, reduced to doctrinal bullet points. Such a distillation misrepresents as stable product an unstable process fraught with violence, in which the stakes of interpretation were torture, execution, and damnation. Through close analysis of Catholic Thomas More’s and Protestant William Tyndale’s theological polemics, my first chapter shows that the very hermeneutic distinctions often reified by current scholarship—that Catholics embraced myriad allegorical senses, whereas Protestants insisted on a solitary literal sense—were actually in perpetual collapse. Although More’s and Tyndale’s interpretive theories are wildly different, their interpretive practices become nearly indistinguishable. I argue that their vicious print battle and its violently unstable hermeneutics shaped Renaissance textuality, poetics, and the fraught categories by which Renaissance readers understood reading. The dominating pressures of these theological hermeneutics cannot be limited to explicitly religious contexts, nor is their influence a purely passive, environmental phenomenon. My next three chapters demonstrate that Thomas Wyatt’s lyric poetry, Edmund Spenser’s epic allegory, and William Shakespeare’s commercial drama actively take up the challenges these violent and contradictory hermeneutics present. Both stylistically and thematically, Wyatt’s verse hangs poised between More and Tyndale’s hemeneutic ideals, expresses a profound longing for Tyndale’s ideal of the stable, literal sense that it treats as unachievable due to the irredeemable corruption of the multitude on whom More’s ideals depend. Whereas Wyatt’s poetry embodies the uneasy tension between Protestant ideals and Protestant practice, Spenser’s poetry seeks to resolve that tension. Confronted with the iconoclasm and anti-aestheticism of the many Protestants who (like Tyndale) condemned romance, allegory, and poetry, Spenser’s Faerie Queene implements all three to create an orthodox depiction of Protestant doctrine and hermeneutics. Figural allegory is the only way for Spenser to transform the inward, illegible process of reading-as-salvation into an externally legible pedagogical narrative, yet this narrative is inescapably violent—populated by demonic doppelgangers and rife with physical and psychological torture, murder, and rape. A similar brutality dominates Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In Titus, Reformation disputes about whether to read figuratively or literally play out on stage as characters brutally literalize the conventional metonymic fragmentation of the body and as the Romans and Goths enact narratives on the bodies of their enemies. Titus dramatizes the interpretive instability of the Reformation as rape, murder, dismemberment, and cannibalism. By reinvesting in early vernacular theology, my project recovers one of the earliest sources of hermeneutic theories in English, which yoked the physical and psychological violence of the Reformation to the very act of interpretation.
Download or read book Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England written by Abigail Shinn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of English conversion narratives between 1580 and 1660. Focusing on the formal, stylistic properties of these texts, it argues that there is a direct correspondence between the spiritual and rhetorical turn. Furthermore, by focusing on a comparatively early period in the history of the conversion narrative the book charts for the first time writers’ experimentation and engagement with rhetorical theory before the genre’s relative stabilization in the 1650s. A cross confessional study analyzing work by both Protestant and Catholic writers, this book explores conversion’s relationship with reading; the links between conversion, eloquence, translation and trope; the conflation of spiritual movement with literal travel; and the use of the body as a site for spiritual knowledge and proof.
Download or read book Literature and politics in the English Reformation written by Tom Betteridge and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of the English Reformation as a political and literary event. Focusing on an eclectic group of texts, unified by their explication of the key elements of the cultural history of the period 1510-1580 the book unravels the political, poetic and religious themes of the era. Through readings of work by Edmund Spenser, William Tyndale, Sir Thomas More and John Skelton, as well as less celebrated Tudor writers, Betteridge surveys pre-Henrician literature as well as Henrician Reformation texts, and delineates the literature of the reigns of Edward VI, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I. Ultimately, the book argues that this literature, and the era, should not be understood simply on the basis of conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism but rather that Tudor culture must be seen as fractured between emerging confessional identities and marked by a conflict between those who embraced confessionalism and those who rejected it. This important study will be fascinating reading for students and researchers in early modern English literature and history.
