Overview
Treacherous Faith offers a new and ambitious cross-disciplinary account of the ways writers from the early English Reformation to the Restoration generated, sustained, or questioned cultural anxieties about heresy and heretics. This book examines the dark, often brutal story of defining, constructing, and punishing heretics in early modern England, and especially the ways writers themselves contributed to or interrogated the politics of religious fear-mongering and demonizing. It illuminates the terrors and anxieties early modern writers articulated and the fantasies they constructed about pernicious heretics and pestilent heresies in response to the Reformation's shattering of Western Christendom. Treacherous Faith analyzes early modern writers who contributed to cultural fears about the contagion of heresy and engaged in the making of heretics, as well as writers who challenged the constructions of heretics and the culture of religious fear-mongering. The responses of early modern writers in English to the specter of heresy and the making of heretics were varied, complex, and contradictory, depending on their religious and political alignments. Some writers (for example, Thomas More, Richard Bancroft, and Thomas Edwards) used their rhetorical resourcefulness and inventiveness to contribute to the politics of heresy-making and the specter of cunning, diabolical heretics ravaging the Church, the state, and thousands of souls; others (for example, John Foxe) questioned within certain cultural limitations heresy-making processes and the violence and savagery that religious demonizing provoked; and some writers (for example, Anne Askew, John Milton, and William Walwyn) interrogated with great daring and inventiveness the politics of religious demonizing, heresy-making, and the cultural constructions of heretics. Treacherous Faith examines the complexities and paradoxes of the heresy-making imagination in early modern England: the dark fantasies, anxieties, terrors, and violence it was capable of generating, but also the ways the dreaded specter of heresy could stimulate the literary creativity of early modern authors engaging with it from diverse religious and political perspectives. Treacherous Faith is a major interdisciplinary study of the ways the literary imagination, religious fears, and demonizing interacted in the early modern world. This study of the early modern specter of heresy contributes to work in the humanities seeking to illuminate the changing dynamics of religious fear, the rhetoric of religious demonization, and the powerful ways the literary imagination represents and constructs religious difference.
Full Product Details
Author: David Loewenstein (Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and the Humanities , Penn State University)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.50cm
, Height: 2.70cm
, Length: 23.20cm
Weight: 0.756kg
ISBN: 9780198778332
ISBN 10: 0198778333
Pages: 512
Publication Date: 30 June 2016
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
This is a book of profound learning and powerful argument ... Above all, for its acute analysis of the construction of heresy, for its exploration of the dynamics and language of fear, and for its fresh contextualization and interpretation of Milton's writings, this book will be essential reading for literary scholars and historians of early modern England. David L. Smith, Milton Quarterly The timeliness of Treacherous Faith as both a study of heresy and of extreme religious understandings makes this study one which should become required reading for a range of scholars and students across a number of disciplines. Indeed, Loewenstein's work provides an exemplum to anyone who poses questions over the significance of early modern study to the modern world. Christopher Stone, Journal of the Northern Renaissance This is a detailed and careful assessement combining insights from studies of history, literature and culture to offer an interdisciplinary appreciation of the ways that the fear of supposed heretics could be used to shape public and political attitudes. Stephen Copson, Baptist Quarterly
`This is a book of profound learning and powerful argument ... Above all, for its acute analysis of the construction of heresy, for its exploration of the dynamics and language of fear, and for its fresh contextualization and interpretation of Milton's writings, this book will be essential reading for literary scholars and historians of early modern England.' David L. Smith, Milton Quarterly `The timeliness of Treacherous Faith as both a study of heresy and of extreme religious understandings makes this study one which should become required reading for a range of scholars and students across a number of disciplines. Indeed, Loewenstein's work provides an exemplum to anyone who poses questions over the significance of early modern study to the modern world.' Christopher Stone, Journal of the Northern Renaissance `This is a detailed and careful assessement combining insights from studies of history, literature and culture to offer an interdisciplinary appreciation of the ways that the fear of supposed heretics could be used to shape public and political attitudes.' Stephen Copson, Baptist Quarterly
`This is a book of profound learning and powerful argument ... Above all, for its acute analysis of the construction of heresy, for its exploration of the dynamics and language of fear, and for its fresh contextualization and interpretation of Milton's writings, this book will be essential reading for literary scholars and historians of early modern England.' David L. Smith, Milton Quarterly `The timeliness of Treacherous Faith as both a study of heresy and of extreme religious understandings makes this study one which should become required reading for a range of scholars and students across a number of disciplines. Indeed, Loewenstein's work provides an exemplum to anyone who poses questions over the significance of early modern study to the modern world.' Christopher Stone, Journal of the Northern Renaissance `This is a detailed and careful assessement combining insights from studies of history, literature and culture to offer an interdisciplinary appreciation of the ways that the fear of supposed heretics could be used to shape public and political attitudes.' Stephen Copson, Baptist Quarterly
Treacherous Faith is an ambitious, scholarly and compelling survey of the fear of heresy and blasphemy across two centuries. It provides shocking evidence of the effects of that fear on the rhetoric and actions of both Catholics and Protestants. Yet does so from a modern liberal standpoint. Gerard Kilroy, The Times Literary Supplement
Author Information
David Loewenstein is Helen C. White Professor of English and the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. His books include Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (CUP, 2001), which received the Milton Society of America's James Holly Hanford Award. He has co-edited The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Oxford University Press, 2009), and has edited John Milton, Prose: Major Writings on Liberty, Politics, Religion, and Education (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). With Thomas N. Corns, he is editing Paradise Lost for The Complete Works of John Milton (OUP).
