Forms of Hypocrisy in Early Modern England

Forms of Hypocrisy in Early Modern England PDF

Author: Lucia Nigri

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1351967541

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This collection examines the widespread phenomenon of hypocrisy in literary, theological, political, and social circles in England during the years after the Reformation and up to the Restoration. Bringing together current critical work on early modern subjectivity, performance, print history, and private and public identities and space, the collection provides readers with a way into the complexity of the term, by offering an overview of different forms of hypocrisy, including educational practice, social transaction, dramatic technique, distorted worship, female deceit, print controversy, and the performance of demonic possession. Together these approaches present an interdisciplinary examination of a term whose meanings have always been assumed, yet never fully outlined, despite the proliferation of publications on aspects of hypocrisy such as self-fashioning and disguise. Questions the chapters collectively pose include: how did hypocritical discourse conceal concerns relating to social status, gender roles, religious doctrine, and print culture? How was hypocrisy manifest materially? How did different literary genres engage with hypocrisy?

Law, Literature, and Social Regulation in Early Medieval England

Law, Literature, and Social Regulation in Early Medieval England PDF

Author: Andrew Rabin

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2023-02-21

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1783277602

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Valuable new insights into the multi-layered and multi-directional relationship of law, literature, and social regulation in pre-Conquest English society. Pre-Conquest English law was among the most sophisticated in early medieval Europe. Composed largely in the vernacular, it played a crucial role in the evolution of early English identity and exercised a formative influence on the development of the Common Law. However, recent scholarship has also revealed the significant influence of these legal documents and ideas on other cultural domains, both modern and pre-modern. This collection explores the richness of pre-Conquest legal writing by looking beyond its traditional codified form. Drawing on methodologies ranging from traditional philology to legal and literary theory, and from a diverse selection of contributors offering a broad spectrum of disciplines, specialities and perspectives, the essays examine the intersection between traditional juridical texts - from law codes and charters to treatises and religious regulation - and a wide range of literary genres, including hagiography and heroic poetry. In doing so, they demonstrate that the boundary that has traditionally separated "law" from other modes of thought and writing is far more porous than hitherto realized. Overall, the volume yields valuable new insights into the multi-layered and multi-directional relationship of law, literature, and social regulation in pre-Conquest English society.

People and piety

People and piety PDF

Author: Elizabeth Clarke

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-09-29

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1526150115

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This international and interdisciplinary volume investigates Protestant devotional identities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Divided into two sections, the book examines the ‘sites’ where these identities were forged – the academy, printing house, household, theatre and prison – and the ‘types’ of texts that expressed them – spiritual autobiographies, religious poetry and writings tied to the ars moriendi – providing a broad analysis of social, material and literary forms of devotion during England’s Long Reformation. Through archival and cutting-edge research, a detailed picture of ‘lived religion’ emerges, which re-evaluates the pietistic acts and attitudes of well-known and recently discovered figures. To those studying and teaching religion and identity in early modern England, and anyone interested in the history of religious self-expression, these chapters offer a rich and rewarding read.

Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion

Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion PDF

Author: Naya Tsentourou

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-08

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1351736396

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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.

Religion and life cycles in early modern England

Religion and life cycles in early modern England PDF

Author: Caroline Bowden

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2021-10-12

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1526149222

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Religion and life cycles in early modern England assembles scholars working in the fields of history, English literature and art history to further our understanding of the intersection between religion and the life course in the period c. 1550–1800. Featuring chapters on Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communities, it encourages cross-confessional comparison between life stages and rites of passage that were of religious significance to all faiths in early modern England. The book considers biological processes such as birth and death, aspects of the social life cycle including schooling, coming of age and marriage and understandings of religious transition points such as spiritual awakenings and conversion. Through this inclusive and interdisciplinary approach, it seeks to show that the life cycle was not something fixed or predetermined and that early modern individuals experienced multiple, overlapping life cycles.

Reading Humility in Early Modern England

Reading Humility in Early Modern England PDF

Author: Jennifer Clement

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1317071174

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While humility is not especially valued in modern Western culture, Jennifer Clement argues here, it is central to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understandings of Christian faith and behavior, and is vital to early modern concepts of the self. As this study shows, early modern literary engagements with humility link it to self-knowledge through the practice of right reading, and make humility foundational to any proper understanding of human agency. Yet humility has received little critical interest, and has often been misunderstood as a false virtue that engenders only self-abjection. This study offers an overview of various ways in which humility is discussed, deployed, or resisted in early modern texts ranging from the explicitly religious and autobiographical prose of Katherine Parr and John Donne, to the more politically motivated prose of Queen Elizabeth I and the seventeenth-century reformer and radical Thomas Tryon. As part of the wider 'turn to religion' in early modern studies, this study seeks to complicate our understanding of a mainstream early modern virtue, and to problematize a mode of critical analysis that assumes agency is always defined by resistance.

Mendacity and the Figure of the Liar in Seventeenth-Century French Comedy

Mendacity and the Figure of the Liar in Seventeenth-Century French Comedy PDF

Author: Emilia Wilton-Godberfforde

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-06-14

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1317097416

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The first book-length study devoted to this topic, Mendacity and the Figure of the Liar in Seventeenth-Century French Comedy offers an important contribution to scholarship on the theatre as well as on early modern attitudes in France, specifically on the subject of lying and deception. Unusually for a scholarly work on seventeenth-century theatre, it is particularly alert to plays as performed pieces and not simply printed texts. The study also distinguishes itself by offering original readings of Molière alongside innovative analyses of other playwrights. The chapters offer fresh insights on well-known plays by Molière and Pierre Corneille but also invite readers to discover lesser-known works of the time (by writers such as Benserade, Thomas Corneille, Dufresny and Rotrou). Through comparative and sustained close readings, including a linguistic and speech act approach, a historical survey of texts with an analysis of different versions and a study of irony, the reader is shown the manifest ways in which different playwrights incorporate the comedic tropes of lying and scheming, confusion and unmasking. Drawing particular attention to the levels of communicative or mis-communicative exchanges on the character-to-character axis and the character-to-audience axis, this work examines the process whereby characters in the comedies construct narratives designed to trick, misdirect, dazzle, confuse or exploit their interlocutors. In the different incarnations of seducer, parasite, cross-dresser, duplicitous narrator/messenger and deluded mythomaniac, the author underscores the way in which the figure of the liar both entertains and troubles, making it a fascinating subject worthy of detailed investigation.

John Bunyan’s Imaginary Writings in Context

John Bunyan’s Imaginary Writings in Context PDF

Author: Nancy Rosenfeld

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-27

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1351370162

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Within the last half-century, early scholarly approaches and analysis of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress have seen siginificant advances in mandating and enabling a more contextualized view of Bunyan’s oeuvre. Utilizing this fresh examination of context, John Bunyan’s Imaginary Writings in Context explores Bunyan’s writings in a double context: his fictional works vis-à-vis his own non-fictional writings, and his fictional writings in the context of written materials by other authors – books, tracts, spiritual biographies, and poems available to Bunyan. This volume presents these recent developments by blurring the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, between literature and history, and in the case of Bunyan, between imaginative literatures in fiction and theological writing. Moreover, this book aims to delineate the imaginary world underlying Bunyan’s fictional writings by viewing Bunyan’s own fictional works in tandem with his non-fiction writings. Simultaneously it situates aspects of Bunyan’s fiction in the context of writings available to him, whether these be Holy Scripture, religious tracts by other authors, or ballads and short texts current in the wider culture of the time.

Jewish and Christian Voices in English Reformation Biblical Drama

Jewish and Christian Voices in English Reformation Biblical Drama PDF

Author: Chanita Goodblatt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-01

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1317111060

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English Biblical drama of the sixteenth century resounds with a variety of Jewish and Christian voices. Whether embodied as characters or manifested as exegetical and performative strategies, these voices participate in the central Reformation project of biblical translation. Such translations and dramatic texts are certainly enriched by studying them within the wider context of medieval and early modern biblical scholarship, which is implemented in biblical translations, commentaries and sermons. This approach is one significant contribution of the present project, as it studies the reciprocal illumination of Bible and Drama. Chanita Goodblatt explores the way in which the interpretive cruxes in the biblical text generate the dramatic text and performance, as well as how the drama’s enactment underlines the ethical and theological issues as the heart of the biblical text. By looking at English Reformation biblical drama through a double-edged prism of exegetical and performative perspectives, Goodblatt adds a new dimension to the existing discussion of the historical resonance of these plays. Jewish and Christian Voices in English Reformation Biblical Drama integrates Jewish and Christian exegetical traditions with the study of Reformation biblical drama. In doing so, this book recovers the interpretive and performative powers of both biblical and dramatic texts.

Satire in the Elizabethan Era

Satire in the Elizabethan Era PDF

Author: William Jones

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-28

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1351181068

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This book argues that the satire of the late Elizabethan period goes far beyond generic rhetorical persuasion, but is instead intentionally engaged in a literary mission of transideological "perceptual translation." This reshaping of cultural orthodoxies is interpreted in this study as both authentic and "activistic" in the sense that satire represents a purpose-driven attempt to build a consensual community devoted to genuine socio-cultural change. The book includes explorations of specific ideologically stabilizing satires produced before the Bishops’ Ban of 1599, as well as the attempt to return nihilistic English satire to a stabilizing theatrical form during the tumultuous end of the reign of Elizabeth I. Dr. Jones infuses carefully chosen, modern-day examples of satire alongside those of the Elizabethan Era, making it a thoughtful, vigorous read.