Overview

Early modern English writers often complained that """"charity had grown cold,"""" lamenting the dissolution of society's communal bonds. But far from diminishing in scope or influence, charity generated heated debates, animated by social, political, and religious changes that prompted urgent questions about the virtue's powers and functions. Charity was as much a problem as it was a solution, a sure sign of trouble even when invoked on behalf of peace and community. Love's Quarrels charts charity's complex history from the 1520s to the 1640s and details the ways in which it can be best understood in biblical translations of the early sixteenth century, in Elizabethan polemic and satire, and in the political and religious controversies arriving at the outset of civil war. As key works from Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, and John Milton reveal, """"reading charity"""" was fraught with difficulty as early modern England reconsidered its deepest held convictions in the face of mounting social disruption and spiritual pressure.

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9781625343819

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This book is magisterial in its grasp of complex issues and so many different early modern texts. It is an important contribution to early modern studies and is welcome in these profoundly uncharitable times. The scholarship is excellent. The insights superb. - Achsah Guibbory, author of Returning to John Donne This is a wide-ranging and ambitious study, which covers theological and political issues as well as literary texts through the lens of charity. . . . Interesting and informative. - Sharon Cadman Seelig, author of Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women's Lives, 1600-1680 Broadly conceived, remarkably detailed, and illuminating in its examples, this study should be the beginning of a new understanding of Renaissance culture. - Arthur F. Kinney, editor of The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500-1600

Author Information

Evan A. Gurney is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

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