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Literature and Church Discipline in Early Modern England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Nigel Smith
Nigel Smith*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

That English literature is suffused with religion is news to no one; the English language is throughout history part of the structure of the Church or churches. But there is a way in which Church history and English literature have been missing each other for a good many years. This is in part because, until recently, religion in literature has been the preserve of relatively small groups of enthusiasts with partisan views. Their work has appeared unattractive or irrelevant to a largely secular mainstream that has been preoccupied with the ‘political’ (as opposed to the religious) in early modern literary studies (this is especially so with regard to the drama). But we now have an account of Church history that is more sophisticated and variegated, more attuned to confessional variety and its politics, local and national. This is crying out for engagement with literary studies in ways that literary scholars would find compelling, not least in offering many solutions to the kinds of questions they have come to ask. To some extent the dialogue has already begun, and indeed several exemplary studies are cited in what follows. Nonetheless, we are at the beginning of what may well be a long and extremely fruitful interdisciplinary encounter.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 43: Discipline and Diversity , 2007 , pp. 317 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2007

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References

1 For two benchmark publications of this kind, see Dollimore, Jonathan and Sinfield, Alan, eds, Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (London and Ithaca, NY, 1985; 2nd edn, 1994)Google Scholar; Drakakis, John, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London and New York, 1985).Google Scholar

2 Knapp, Jeffrey, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago, IL 2002).Google Scholar

3 See, e.g., Parker, John, The Aesthetics of Antichrist: from Christian Drama to Christopher Marlowe (Ithaca, 2007 forthcoming).Google Scholar

4 Perkins, William, A declaration of the true maner of knowing Christ crucified (London, 1596), 33 Google Scholar. See also his Two Treatises: of the nature and practise of Repentance: of the combat of flesh and spirit (London, 1597).Google Scholar

5 See Waldron, Jennifer, ‘Eloquence of the Body: Aesthetics, Theology, and English Renaissance Theater’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 2004.Google Scholar

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7 Another topic that has returned with much interest: see most recently Asquith, Clare, Shadowplay: the Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York, 2005).Google Scholar

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9 Ibid., 6.

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15 One interpretation among very many here in this tradition would be Wall, John N., Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (Athens, GA, 1988)Google Scholar. The point in respect of studies of the seventeenth-century religious lyric in particular is that literary scholarship and the new Church history referred to in this essay have yet to connect.

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18 See Smith, Nigel, ‘Elegy for a Grindletonian: Poetry and Heresy in Northern England, 1615–1640’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33: 2 (2003), 335–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and more generally Como, David, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA, 2004).Google Scholar

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20 Ibid., 238.

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26 John Biddle, Preface to second edition of A Confession of Faith touching the Holy Trinity in The Apostolical and True Opinion concerning the Holy Trinity (1653), BL, Thomason Tracts E1479(1), sig. [D51:].

27 See Nye, Stephen, A brief history of the Unitarians, called also Socinians in four letters, written to a friend (London, 1687), 31 Google Scholar, where Erasmus is cited defending the Arians.

28 Biddle, , A Confession of Faith (2nd edn, London, 1653), 38.Google Scholar

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32 And as extensively discussed in Stachniewski, John, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar, Pt I.