The introduction situates the book’s intellectual project within what scholars have described as an “affective turn” or “emotional turn” across disciplines and, more specifically, a recent attention to the relations between emotion, religion, and literature in the Renaissance. The introduction calls attention to a disproportionate scholarly focus on negative affect, and it provides the intellectual framework for the close readings of religious and literary texts in the chapters that follow. Theorists and literary critics have equated contentedness with passivity and resignation, but I reveal a model of contentment as dynamic, protective, and productive. Although Renaissance articulations were indebted to preceding philosophical schools, especially Stoicism, the English Reformation defined the ways in which writers constructed contentment from available texts and traditions. Reformers explored contentedness as an emotional means to preserve the self and prepare the individual to endure and engage the outside world. These efforts existed alongside representations and revisions of contentment by authors like Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, especially in their pastoral works.

While the five chapters examine aspects of early modern contentment that often challenge reigning critical and theoretical assumptions, the conclusion revisits the significance of those assumptions. In this way, the book not only provides a literary and intellectual history of contentedness in the Renaissance, but it also explores the merits such contentment might have in a contemporary context. Just as an emergent Protestant culture and an outpouring of English literature on page and stage precipitated widespread interest in contentedness, subsequent shifts in philosophy, science, global affairs, and artistic sensibilities led to yet another reappraisal. The consequences of that reappraisal, the deformation of contentment, persist to the present day.