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The Catholic contribution to English literary culture has been widely neglected or misunderstood. This book sets out to rehabilitate a wide range of Catholic imaginative writing, while exposing the role of anti-Catholicism as an imaginative stimulus to mainstream writers in Tudor and Stuart England. It discusses canonical figures such as Sidney, Spenser, Webster and Middleton, those whose presence in the canon has been more fitful, and many who have escaped the attention of literary critics. Among the themes to emerge are the anti-Catholic imagery of revenge tragedy and the definitive contribution made by Southwell and Crashaw to the post-Reformation revival of religious verse in England. Alison Shell offers a fascinating exploration of the rhetorical stratagems by which Catholics sought to demonstrate simultaneous loyalties to the monarch and to their religion, and of the stimulus given to the Catholic literary imagination by the persecution and exile so many of these writers suffered.
During his lifetime, the Jesuit priest Robert Persons (1546–1610) was arguably the leading figure fighting for the re-establishment of Catholicism in England. Whilst his colleague Edmund Campion may now be better known it was Persons's tireless efforts that kept the Jesuit mission alive during the difficult days of Elizabeth's reign. In this new study, Person's life and phenomenal literary output are analysed and put into the broader context of recent Catholic scholarship. The book bridges the gap between historical studies, on the one hand, and literary studies on the other, by concentrating on Persons's contribution as a writer to the polemical culture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As well as discussing his wider achievements as leader of the English Jesuits – founding three seminaries for English priests, corresponding regularly with Catholic activists in England, writing over thirty books, holding the post of rector of the English College in Rome, and being a trusted consultant to the papacy on English affairs – this study looks in detail at what is arguably his greatest legacy, The First Booke of the Christian Exercise (more commonly known as the Book of Resolution). That book, first published in 1582, was to prove the cornerstone of Persons's missionary effort, and a popular work of Catholic devotion, running to several editions over the coming years. Although Persons was ultimately unsuccessful in his ambition to return England to the Catholic fold, the story of his life and works reveals much about the ecclesiastical struggle that gripped early modern Europe. By providing a thorough and up-to-date reassessment of Persons this study not only makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the polemical context of post-Reformation Catholicism, but also of the Jesuit notion of the 'apostolate of writing'. This book is published in conjunction with the Jesuit Historical Institute series 'Bibliotheca Instituti Historici Societatis Iesu'.
This study examines the role of anti-Catholic rhetoric in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. This role was long neglected, being at once obvious and distasteful, a reproach to the heirs of the Enlightenment who prided themselves on their tolerance and did not want to confront its origins in intolerance. Raymond Tumbleson discusses how the fear of Popery, a potentially destabilising force under the Stuarts, ultimately became a principal guarantor of the Hanoverian oligarchy. The range of authors discussed runs from Middleton, Milton and Marvell to Swift, Defoe and Fielding, as well as numerous pamphleteers. Crossing traditional generic, disciplinary and chronological boundaries, this book examines hitherto neglected relationships between poetry and prose, literature and polemic, the Reformation and the Augustan age.
After the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, the Catholic imagining of England was mainly the project of the exiles who had left their homeland in search of religious toleration and foreign assistance."--BOOK JACKET.
The fruit of intensive collaboration among leading international specialists on the literature, religion and culture of early modern England, this volume examines the relationship between writing and religion in England from 1558, the year of the Elizabethan Settlement, up until the Act of Toleration of 1689. Throughout these studies, religious writing is broadly taken as being 'communicational' in the etymological sense: that is, as a medium which played a significant role in the creation or consolidation of communities. Some texts shaped or reinforced one particular kind of religious identity, whereas others fostered communities which cut across the religious borderlines which prevailed in other areas of social interaction. For a number of the scholars writing here, such communal differences correlate with different ways of drawing on the resources of cultural memory. The denominational spectrum covered ranges from several varieties of Dissent, through via media Anglicanism, to Laudianism and Roman Catholicism, and there are also glances towards heresy and the mid-seventeenth century's new atheism. With respect to the range of different genres examined, the volume spans the gamut from poetry, fictional prose, drama, court masque, sermons, devotional works, theological treatises, confessions of faith, church constitutions, tracts, and letters, to history-writing and translation. Arranged in roughly chronological order, Writing and Religion in England, 1558-1689 presents chapters which explore religious writing within the wider contexts of culture, ideas, attitudes, and law, as well as studies which concentrate more on the texts and readerships of particular writers. Several contributors embrace an inter-arts orientation, relating writing to liturgical ceremony, painting, music and architecture, while others opt for a stronger sociological slant, explicitly emphasizing the role of women writers and of writers from different sub-cultural backgrounds.
In spite of an upsurge in interest in the social history of the Catholic community and an ever-growing body of literature on early modern 'superstition' and popular religion, the English Catholic community's response to the invisible world of the preternatural and supernatural has remained largely neglected. Addressing this oversight, this book explores Catholic responses to the supernatural world, setting the English Catholic community in the contexts of the wider Counter-Reformation and the confessional culture of early modern England. In so doing, it fulfils the need for a study of how English Catholics related to manifestations of the devil (witchcraft and possession) and the dead (ghosts) in the context of Catholic attitudes to the supernatural world as a whole (including debates on miracles). The study further provides a comprehensive examination of the ways in which English Catholics deployed exorcism, the church's ultimate response to the devil. Whilst some aspects of the Catholic response have been touched on in the course of broader studies, few scholars have gone beyond the evidence contained within anti-Catholic polemical literature to examine in detail what Catholics themselves said and thought. Given that Catholics were consistently portrayed as 'superstitious' in Protestant literature, the historian must attend to Catholic voices on the supernatural in order to avoid a disastrously unbalanced view of Catholic attitudes. This book provides the first analysis of the Catholic response to the supernatural and witchcraft and how it related to a characteristic Counter-Reformation preoccupation, the phenomenon of exorcism.
Stephen Hamrick provides a detailed analysis of how previously understudied Tudor poets, Barnabe Googe, George Gascoigne, and Thomas Watson, incorporated images of Catholic practice within Reformation Petrachanism for the celebration and containment of Elizabeth Tudor and other Court patrons.
This book sets Shakespeare in the religious context of his times, presenting a balanced, up-to-date account of current biographical and critical debates, and addressing the fascinating, under-studied topic of how Shakespeare's writing was perceived by literary contemporaries - both Catholic and Protestant - whose priorities were more obviously religious than his own. It advances new readings of several plays, especially Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale; these draw in many cases on new and under-exploited contemporary analogues, ranging from conversion narratives, books of devotion and polemical pamphlets to manuscript drama and emblems. Shakespeare's writing has been seen both as profoundly religious, giving everyday human life a sacramental quality, and as profoundly secular, foreshadowing the kind of humanism that sees no necessity for God. This study attempts to reconcile these two points of view, describing a writer whose language is saturated in religious discourse and whose dramaturgy is highly attentive to religious precedent, but whose invariable practice is to subordinate religious matter to the particular aesthetic demands of the work in hand. For Shakespeare, as for few of his contemporaries, the Judaeo-Christian story is something less than a master narrative.
In the wake of England's break with Rome and gradual reformation, English Catholics took root outside of the country, in Catholic countries across Europe. Confessional Mobility explores their arrival and the foundation of convents and colleges on the Continent as well as their impact beyond that initial moment of change.