Religion, Allegory, and Literacy in Early Modern England, 1560-1640

Religion, Allegory, and Literacy in Early Modern England, 1560-1640 PDF Author: John S. Pendergast
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754651475
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Using as a primary focus the manner in which Protestant and Catholic paradigms of the Word affect the understanding of how meaning manifests itself in material language, this book develops a history of literacy between the middle of the sixteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth century. The author emphasizes how literacy is defined according to changing concepts of philological manifestation and embodiment, and how various social and political factors influence these concepts. The study looks at literary texts such as The Fairie Queene, early Shakespearean comedies, sermons and poems by John Donne, Latin textbooks and religious primers, and educational and religious treatises which illustrate how language could be used to perform spiritual functions. The cross section of texts serves to illustrate the pervasive applicability of the author's theories to early modern literature and culture, and their relationship to literature. the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature: Protestant reading and exegetical strategies in contrast with Catholic strategies, and secular versus spiritual literacies.

Religion, Allegory, and Literacy in Early Modern England, 1560-1640

Religion, Allegory, and Literacy in Early Modern England, 1560-1640 PDF Author: John S. Pendergast
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754651475
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Using as a primary focus the manner in which Protestant and Catholic paradigms of the Word affect the understanding of how meaning manifests itself in material language, this book develops a history of literacy between the middle of the sixteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth century. The author emphasizes how literacy is defined according to changing concepts of philological manifestation and embodiment, and how various social and political factors influence these concepts. The study looks at literary texts such as The Fairie Queene, early Shakespearean comedies, sermons and poems by John Donne, Latin textbooks and religious primers, and educational and religious treatises which illustrate how language could be used to perform spiritual functions. The cross section of texts serves to illustrate the pervasive applicability of the author's theories to early modern literature and culture, and their relationship to literature. the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature: Protestant reading and exegetical strategies in contrast with Catholic strategies, and secular versus spiritual literacies.

Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625

Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625 PDF Author: Victoria Brownlee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192540572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The Bible had a profound impact on early modern culture, and bible-reading shaped the period's drama, poetry, and life-writings, as well as sermons and biblical commentaries. This volume provides an account of the how the Bible was read and applied in early modern England. It maps the connection between these readings and various forms of writing and argues that literary writings bear the hallmarks of the period's dominant exegetical practices, and do interpretative work. Tracing the impact of biblical reading across a range of genres and writers, the discussion demonstrates that literary reimaginings of, and allusions to, the Bible were common, varied, and ideologically evocative. The book explores how a series of popularly interpreted biblical narratives were recapitulated in the work of a diverse selection of writers, some of whom remain relatively unknown. In early modern England, the figures of Solomon, Job, and Christ's mother, Mary, and the books of Song of Songs and Revelation, are enmeshed in different ways with contemporary concerns, and their usage illustrates how the Bible's narratives could be turned to a fascinating array of debates. In showing the multifarious contexts in which biblical narratives were deployed, this book argues that Protestant interpretative practices contribute to, and problematize, literary constructions of a range of theological, political, and social debates.

Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England

Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England PDF Author: Charlotte-Rose Millar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134769881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This book represents the first systematic study of the role of the Devil in English witchcraft pamphlets for the entire period of state-sanctioned witchcraft prosecutions (1563-1735). It provides a rereading of English witchcraft, one which moves away from an older historiography which underplays the role of the Devil in English witchcraft and instead highlights the crucial role that the Devil, often in the form of a familiar spirit, took in English witchcraft belief. One of the key ways in which this book explores the role of the Devil is through emotions. Stories of witches were made up of a complex web of emotionally implicated accusers, victims, witnesses, and supposed perpetrators. They reveal a range of emotional experiences that do not just stem from malefic witchcraft but also, and primarily, from a witch’s links with the Devil. This book, then, has two main objectives. First, to suggest that English witchcraft pamphlets challenge our understanding of English witchcraft as a predominantly non-diabolical crime, and second, to highlight how witchcraft narratives emphasized emotions as the primary motivation for witchcraft acts and accusations.

Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England

Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England PDF Author: Abigail Shinn
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319965778
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This book is a study of English conversion narratives between 1580 and 1660. Focusing on the formal, stylistic properties of these texts, it argues that there is a direct correspondence between the spiritual and rhetorical turn. Furthermore, by focusing on a comparatively early period in the history of the conversion narrative the book charts for the first time writers’ experimentation and engagement with rhetorical theory before the genre’s relative stabilization in the 1650s. A cross confessional study analyzing work by both Protestant and Catholic writers, this book explores conversion’s relationship with reading; the links between conversion, eloquence, translation and trope; the conflation of spiritual movement with literal travel; and the use of the body as a site for spiritual knowledge and proof.

The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science

The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science PDF Author: Howard Marchitello
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137463619
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 571

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Book Description
This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. It does not cast the literary and the scientific as distinct, but rather as productively in-distinct cultural practices: for the two dozen new essays collected here, the presiding concern is no longer to ask how literary writers react to scientific writers, but rather to study how literary and scientific practices are imbricated. These specially-commissioned essays from top scholars in the area range across vast territories and produce seemingly unlikely unions: between physics and rhetoric, math and Milton, Boyle and the Bible, plague and plays, among many others. In these essays so-called scientific writing turns out to traffic in metaphor, wit, imagination, and playfulness normally associated with literature provides material forms and rhetorical strategies for thinking physics, mathematics, archeology, and medicine.

English Literature in Context

English Literature in Context PDF Author: Paul Poplawski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107141672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 757

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Book Description
From Anglo-Saxon runes to postcolonial rap, this undergraduate textbook covers the social and historical contexts of the whole of the English literature.

Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion

Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion PDF Author: Naya Tsentourou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351736396
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Miton and Early Modern Devotional Culture analyses the representation of public and private prayer in John Milton’s poetry and prose, paying particular attention to the ways seventeenth-century prayer is imagined as embodied in sounds, gestures, postures, and emotional responses. Naya Tsentourou demonstrates Milton’s profound engagement with prayer, and how this is driven by a consistent and ardent effort to experience one’s address to God as inclusive of body and spirit and as loaded with affective potential. The book aims to become the first interdisciplinary study to show how Milton participates in and challenges early modern debates about authentic and insincere worship in public, set and spontaneous prayers in private, and gesture and voice in devotion.

Political and religious practice in the early modern British world

Political and religious practice in the early modern British world PDF Author: William J. Bulman
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526151340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This volume brings together cutting-edge research by some of the most innovative scholars of early modern Britain. Inspired in part by recent studies of the early modern ‘public sphere’, the twelve chapters collected here reveal an array of political and religious practices that can serve as a foundation for new narratives of the period. The practices considered range from deliberation and inscription to publication and profanity. The narratives under construction range from secularisation to the rise of majority rule. Many of the authors also examine ways British developments were affected by and in turn influenced the world outside of Britain. These chapter will be essential reading for students of early modern Britain, early modern Europe and the Atlantic World. They will also appeal to those interested in the religious and political history of other regions and periods.

Apocalypse and Anti-Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century English Drama

Apocalypse and Anti-Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century English Drama PDF Author: Adrian Streete
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108416144
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Streete studies the political uses of apocalyptic and anti-Catholic rhetoric in a wide range of seventeenth-century English drama, focusing on the plays of Marston, Middleton, Massinger, and Dryden. Drawing on recent work in religious and political history, he rethinks how religion is debated in the early modern theatre.

The Children's Troupes and the Transformation of English Theater 1509-1608

The Children's Troupes and the Transformation of English Theater 1509-1608 PDF Author: Jeanne McCarthy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315390809
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
The Children’s Troupes and the Transformation of English Theater 1509–1608 uncovers the role of the children’s companies in transforming perceptions of authorship and publishing, performance, playing spaces, patronage, actor training, and gender politics in the sixteenth century. Jeanne McCarthy challenges entrenched narratives about popular playing in an era of revolutionary changes, revealing the importance of the children’s company tradition’s connection with many early plays, as well as to the spread of literacy, classicism, and literate ideals of drama, plot, textual fidelity, characterization, and acting in a still largely oral popular culture. By addressing developments from the hyper-literate school tradition, and integrating discussion of the children’s troupes into the critical conversation around popular playing practices, McCarthy offers a nuanced account of the play-centered, literary performance tradition that came to define professional theater in this period. Highlighting the significant role of the children’s company tradition in sixteenth-century performance culture, this volume offers a bold new narrative of the emergence of the London theater.