Overview

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. -- .

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9781526143549

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Reviews

'The well-crafted essays in this interesting collection share the assumption that the diversity of communicative media in early modern culture-including literary genres, festive practices, and sacramental rituals-helped cultivate a generalized interest in imagining what the thought of religious pluralization and its irenic potential (p. 2) might look and feel like in an era officially marked by confessional strife.' Professor Lowell Gallagher, Studies in English Literature -- .

‘The well-crafted essays in this interesting collection share the assumption that the diversity of communicative media in early modern culture—including literary genres, festive practices, and sacramental rituals—helped cultivate a generalized interest in imagining what the thought of “religious pluralization and its irenic potential” (p. 2) might look and feel like in an era officially marked by confessional strife.’ Professor Lowell Gallagher, Studies in English Literature -- .

Author Information

Jonathan Baldo is Professor of English at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, New York Isabel Karremann is Professor of English Literature at the University of Wrzburg, Germany

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