Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World

Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World PDF Author: Kathleen Lynch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019163641X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Autobiographical narrative is seldom viewed as a catalyst for the social and political upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century England and its colonies. Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World argues that it should be. Focusing on the inward search for signs of election as a powerful stimulus for new, written forms of self-identification, this study directs critical attention toward the collective processes through which 'truthful' texts of spiritual experience were constructed, validated, and endorsed. This new analysis of the rhetoric of authentic selfhood emphasizes the ways in which personal accounts of religious awakening became another opportunity to conceptualize experience as an authorizing principle. A broad spectrum of Protestant life-writing is explored, from Augustine's Confessions, first translated into English in 1620, through John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696). The forms in which these landmark texts were circulated and the interests that those circulations served are examined in such a way as to put canonical texts back into conversation with the outpouring of individual life writings that dates from the middle of the 17th century on. As the first new historicized account of the seventeenth-century Protestant conversion narrative in a generation, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World contributes to the reintegration of the scholarly fields of literature, religion, and politics. It revitalizes the study of proto-literary forms which, while devotional in nature, were deeply political in their consequences, contributing as they did to the emerging discourse of personal liberties.

Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World

Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World PDF Author: Kathleen Lynch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019163641X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
Autobiographical narrative is seldom viewed as a catalyst for the social and political upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century England and its colonies. Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World argues that it should be. Focusing on the inward search for signs of election as a powerful stimulus for new, written forms of self-identification, this study directs critical attention toward the collective processes through which 'truthful' texts of spiritual experience were constructed, validated, and endorsed. This new analysis of the rhetoric of authentic selfhood emphasizes the ways in which personal accounts of religious awakening became another opportunity to conceptualize experience as an authorizing principle. A broad spectrum of Protestant life-writing is explored, from Augustine's Confessions, first translated into English in 1620, through John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696). The forms in which these landmark texts were circulated and the interests that those circulations served are examined in such a way as to put canonical texts back into conversation with the outpouring of individual life writings that dates from the middle of the 17th century on. As the first new historicized account of the seventeenth-century Protestant conversion narrative in a generation, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World contributes to the reintegration of the scholarly fields of literature, religion, and politics. It revitalizes the study of proto-literary forms which, while devotional in nature, were deeply political in their consequences, contributing as they did to the emerging discourse of personal liberties.

Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World

Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World PDF Author: Kathleen Lynch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199643938
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This book provides a new view of the historical conditions and methods by which godly communities turned personal experience into an authorizing principle. A broad range of life-writing is explored, including Augustine's Confessions, John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae.

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I PDF Author: John Coffey
Publisher:
ISBN: 019870223X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
A study of the fragmented nature of post-Reformation English Protestentism and the Dissenters who offered theological alternatives to Anglican traditions through Presbyterianism, Baptism, and Quakerism. This book explains the spread of these Dissenting traditions and the adoption of religious pluralism as a result of Protestant nonconformity.

The Puritan Literary Tradition

The Puritan Literary Tradition PDF Author: Johanna Harris
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192575589
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
What is meant by the Puritan literary tradition, and when did the idea of Puritan literature, as distinct from Puritan beliefs and practices, come into being? The answer is not straightforward. This volume addresses these questions by bringing together new research on a wide range of established and emerging literary subjects that help to articulate the Puritan literary tradition, including: political polemic and the performing arts; conversion and New-World narratives; individual and corporate life-writings; histories of exile and womens history; book history and the translation and circulation of Puritan literature abroad; Puritan epistolary networks; discourses of Puritan friendship; the historiography of Puritanism defined through editing and publishing; doctrinal controversy; and the history of emotions. This essay collection proposes that a Puritan literary tradition existed that was distinct from broader conceptions of early modern English and Protestant traditions and offers a nuanced account of the distinct and variegated contribution that Puritanism has made to the construction of literature as a concept in English. It ranges from the late sixteenth through to the nineteenth century, and spans British, European, and American Puritan cultures. It offers new analyses of well-known Puritan writers such as Anne Bradstreet, John Bunyan, Richard Baxter, and John Milton, as well as less familiar figures, such as Mary Rowlandson and Joseph Hussey, and writers less often associated with Puritanism, such as Andrew Marvell and Aphra Behn.

The pastor in print

The pastor in print PDF Author: Amy G. Tan
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526152193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
The pastor in print explores the phenomenon of early modern pastors who chose to become print authors, addressing ways authorship could enhance, limit or change clerical ministry and ways pastor-authors conceived of their work in parish and print. It identifies strategies through which pastor-authors established authorial identities, targeted different sorts of audiences and strategically selected genre and content as intentional parts of their clerical vocation. The first study to provide a book-length analysis of the phenomenon of early modern pastors writing for print, it uses a case study of prolific pastor-author Richard Bernard to offer a new lens through which to view religious change in this pivotal period. By bringing together questions of print, genre, religio-politics and theology, the book will interest scholars and postgraduate students in history, literature and theological studies, and its readability will appeal to undergraduates and non-specialists.

Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680

Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 PDF Author: Rachel Adcock
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317176286
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
Although literary-historical studies have often focused on the range of dissenting religious groups and writers that flourished during the English Revolution, they have rarely had much to say about seventeenth-century Baptists, or, indeed, Baptist women. Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 fills that gap, exploring how female Baptists played a crucial role in the group’s formation and growth during the 1640s and 50s, by their active participation in religious and political debate, and their desire to evangelise their followers. The study significantly challenges the idea that women, as members of these congregations, were unable to write with any kind of textual authority because they were often prevented from speaking aloud in church meetings. On the contrary, Adcock shows that Baptist women found their way into print to debate points of church organisation and doctrine, to defend themselves and their congregations, to evangelise others by example and by teaching, and to prophesy, and discusses the rhetorical tactics they utilised in order to demonstrate the value of women’s contributions. In the course of the study, Adcock considers and analyses the writings of little-studied Baptist women, Deborah Huish, Katherine Sutton, and Jane Turner, as well as separatist writers Sara Jones, Susanna Parr, and Anne Venn. She also makes due connection to the more familiar work of Agnes Beaumont, Anna Trapnel, and Anne Wentworth, enabling a reassessment of the significance of those writings by placing them in this wider context. Writings by these female Baptists attracted serious attention, and, as Adcock discusses, some even found a trans-national audience.

The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern

The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern PDF Author: Alan Stewart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191506990
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume2. Early Modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing. The challenges wrought by the upheavals and the sixteenth-century English Reformation and seventeenth-century Civil Wars moulded British and early American life-writing in unique and lasting ways. While classical and medieval models continued to exercise considerable influence, new forms began to challenge them. The English Reformation banished the saints' lives that dominated the writings of medieval Catholicism, only to replace them with new lives of Protestant martyrs. Novel forms of self-accounting came into existence: from the daily moral self-accounting dictated by strands of Calvinism, to the daily financial self-accounting modelled on the new double-entry book-keeping. This volume shows how the most ostensibly private journals were circulated to build godly communities; how women found new modes of recording and understanding their disrupted lives; how men started to compartmentalize their lives for public and private consumption. The volume doesn't intend to present a strict chronological progression from the medieval to the modern, nor to suggest the triumphant rise of the fact-based historical biography. Instead, it portrays early modern England as a site of multiple, sometimes conflicting possibilities for life-writing, all of which have something to teach us about how the period understood both the concept of a 'life' and what it mean to 'write' a life.

The Oxford History of Life-writing

The Oxford History of Life-writing PDF Author: Alan Stewart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199684073
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages' explores the richness and variety of life writing in the Middle Ages, ranging from Anglo-Latin lives of missionaries, prelates, and princes to high medieval lives of scholars and visionaries to late medieval lives of authors and laypeople.

Cultures of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe

Cultures of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Crawford Gribben
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190456280
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Calvinism has been associated with distinctive literary cultures, with republican, liberal and participatory political cultures, with cultures of violence and vandalism, enlightened cultures, cultures of social discipline, secular cultures, and with the emergence of capitalism. Recognizing that Reformed Protestantism did not develop as a uniform tradition, this book assesses the complex character and impact of Calvinism in early modern Europe.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion PDF Author: Andrew Hiscock
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191653438
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 937

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Book Description
This pioneering Handbook offers a comprehensive consideration of the dynamic relationship between English literature and religion in the early modern period. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the most turbulent times in the history of the British church and, perhaps as a result, produced some of the greatest devotional poetry, sermons, polemics, and epics of literature in English. The early-modern interaction of rhetoric and faith is addressed in thirty-nine chapters of original research, divided into five sections. The first analyses the changes within the church from the Reformation to the establishment of the Church of England, the phenomenon of puritanism and the rise of non-conformity. The second section discusses ten genres in which faith was explored, including poetry, prophecy, drama, sermons, satire, and autobiographical writings. The middle section focuses on selected individual authors, among them Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton. Since authors never write in isolation, the fourth section examines a range of communities in which writers interpreted their faith: lay and religious households, sectarian groups including the Quakers, clusters of religious exiles, Jewish and Islamic communities, and those who settled in the new world. Finally, the fifth section considers some key topics and debates in early modern religious literature, ranging from ideas of authority and the relationship of body and soul, to death, judgment, and eternity. The Handbook is framed by a succinct introduction, a chronology of religious and literary landmarks, a guide for new researchers in this field, and a full bibliography of primary and secondary texts relating to early modern English literature and religion.