Religion and Culture in Renaissance England

Front Cover
Claire McEachern, Debora Shuger
Cambridge University Press, Jun 28, 1997 - Literary Criticism - 292 pages
These essays by leading historians and literary scholars investigate the role of religion in shaping political, social and literary forms, and their reciprocal role in shaping early modern religion, from the Reformation to the Civil Wars. Reflecting and rethinking the insights of new historicism and cultural studies, individual essays take up various aspects of the productive, if tense, relation between Tudor-Stuart Christianity and culture, and explore how religion informs some of the central texts of English Renaissance literature: the vernacular Bible, Foxe's Acts and Monuments, Hooker's Laws, Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, the poems of John Donne, Amelia Lanyer and John Milton. The collection demonstrates the centrality of religion to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and its influence on early modern constructions of gender, subjectivity and nationhood.
 

Contents

the English nation and national
15
reform and reaction
46
printing and popularizing
69
The place of the stigmata in Christological poetics
93
the imagined community
116
Hooker in the context of European cultural history
142
Pain persecution and the construction of selfhood
161
Shakespeares Phoenix and Turtle
188
Amelia Lanyer
209
Othello as protestant propaganda
234
Milton against humility
258
Index
287
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