Religion and Culture in Renaissance England

by Claire McEachern, Debora Shuger

Overview

Essays by leading historians and literary scholars investigate the role of religion in shaping political, social, and literary forms from the Reformation to the Civil Wars. Individual essays discuss the relationship between religion and culture, and explore how religion informs some of the central texts of English Renaissance literature, including work by Foxe, Hooker, Shakespeare, Donne, Lanyer, and Milton. The collection demonstrates the massive centrality of religion to early modern constructions of gender, subjectivity, and nationhood.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521034883
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/14/2006
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Notes on contributors; Acknowledgments; 1. Introduction Claire McEachern; Part I. Form and Community: 2. Biblical rhetoric: the English nation and national sentiment in the prophetic mode Patrick Collinson; 3. 'The noyse of the new Bible': reform and reaction in Henrician England David Scott Kastan; 4. 'Foxe's' Books of Martyrs: printing and popularising the Acts and Monuments Jesse Lander; 5. The place of the stigmata in Christological poetics Lowell Gallagher; 6. 'Society supernatural': the imagined community of Hooker's Laws Debora Shuger; 7. Hooker in the context of European cultural history William J. Bouwsma; Part II. Literature and Dogma: 8. Pain, persecution, and the construction of selfhood in Foxe's Acts and Monuments Janel M. Mueller; 9. Love's martyrs: Shakespeare's 'Phoenix and Turtle' and the sacrificial sonnets Richard C. McCoy; 10. The gender of religious devotion: Amelia Lanyer and John Donne Michael Schoenfeldt; 11. Othello as protestant propaganda Robert N. Watson; 12. Milton against humility Richard Strier; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"This is a worthy volume, learned and well-written....Religion and Culture in Renaissance England is a valuable addition to the working scholar's library, and a healthy sign as well of the drift away from old-fashioned New Historicism." Stanley Stewart, Ben Jonson Journal

From the Publisher