John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit

John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit PDF

Author: Jeanne Shami

Publisher: DS Brewer

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780859917896

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The sermons of John Donne are seen to embody the tensions and pressure on public religious discourse 1621 - 25. This book considers the professional contribution of John Donne to an emerging homiletic public sphere in the last years of the Jacobean English Church (1621-25), arguing that his sermons embody the conflicts, tensions, and pressures on public religious discourse in this period; while they are in no way "typical" of any particular preaching agenda or style, they articulate these crises in their most complex forms and expose fault lines in the late JacobeanChurch. The study is framed by Donne's two most pointed contributions to the public sphere: his sermon defending James I's Directions to Preachers and his first sermon preached before Charles I in 1625. These two sermons emerge from the crises of controversy, censorship, and identity that converged in the late Jacobean period, and mark Donne's clearest professional interventions in the public debate about the nature and direction of the Church of England. In them, Donne interrogates the boundaries of the public sphere and of his conformity to the institutions, authorities, and traditions governing public debate in that sphere, modelling for his audience an actively engagedconformist identity. Professor JEANNE SHAMI teaches in the Department of English at the University of Regina.

John Donne and the Protestant Reformation

John Donne and the Protestant Reformation PDF

Author: Mary Arshagouni Papazian

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9780814330128

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The early transition from Catholicism to Protestantism was a complicated journey for England, as individuals sorted out their spiritual beliefs, chose their political allegiances, and confronted an array of religious differences that had sprung forth in their society since the reign of Henry VIII. Inner anxieties often translated into outward violence. Amidst this turmoil the poet and Protestant preacher John Donne (1572-1631) emerged as a central figure, one who encouraged peace among Christians. Raised a Catholic but ordained in 1615 as an Anglican clergyman, Donne publicly identified himself with Protestantism, and yet scholars have long questioned his theological orientation. Drawing upon recent scholarship in church history, the authors of this collection reconsider Donne's relationship to Protestantism and clearly demonstrate the political and theological impact of the Reformation on his life and writings. The collection includes thirteen essays that together place Donne broadly in the context of English and European traditions and explore his divine poetry, his prose work, the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and his sermons. It becomes clear that in adopting the values of the Reformation, Donne does not completely reject everything from his Catholic background. Rather, the clash of religion erupts in his work in both moving and disconcerting ways. This collection offers a fresh understanding of Donne's hard-won irenicism, which he achieved at great personal and professional risk.

The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700

The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700 PDF

Author: Kevin Killeen

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2015-08-27

Total Pages: 951

ISBN-13: 0191510599

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The Bible was, by any measure, the most important book in early modern England. It preoccupied the scholarship of the era, and suffused the idioms of literature and speech. Political ideas rode on its interpretation and deployed its terms. It was intricately related to the project of natural philosophy. And it was central to daily life at all levels of society from parliamentarian to preacher, from the 'boy that driveth the plough', famously invoked by Tyndale, to women across the social scale. It circulated in texts ranging from elaborate folios to cheap catechisms; it was mediated in numerous forms, as pictures, songs, and embroideries, and as proverbs, commonplaces, and quotations. Bringing together leading scholars from a range of fields, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, 1530-1700 explores how the scriptures served as a generative motor for ideas, and a resource for creative and political thought, as well as for domestic and devotional life. Sections tackle the knotty issues of translation, the rich range of early modern biblical scholarship, Bible dissemination and circulation, the changing political uses of the Bible, literary appropriations and responses, and the reception of the text across a range of contexts and media. Where existing scholarship focuses, typically, on Tyndale and the King James Bible of 1611, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in England, 1530-1700 goes further, tracing the vibrant and shifting landscape of biblical culture in the two centuries following the Reformation.

Literature and Politics in the 1620s

Literature and Politics in the 1620s PDF

Author: P. Salzman

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-07-31

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1137305983

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Literature and Politics in the 1620s argues that literature during this decade was inextricably linked to politics, whether oppositional or authoritarian. A wide range of texts are analyzed, from Shakespeare's First Folio to Middleton's A Game At Chess, from romances and poetry to sermons, tracts and newsbooks.

Theologies of Language in English Renaissance Literature

Theologies of Language in English Renaissance Literature PDF

Author: James S. Baumlin

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2012-05-30

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0739169610

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James S. Baumlin’s Theologies of Language in English Renaissance Literature offers a revisionist history of discourse, taking Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton as its touchstones. Their works mark stages in dieEntzauberung or “disenchantment,” as Max Weber has termed it: that is, in the “elimination of magic from the world.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet questions the word-magic associated with medieval Catholicism; Donne’s love lyrics ironize the sacramental gestures of their poetic-priestly speakers; more radical still, Milton’s major poems and polemical prose empty language of sacral power, repudiating human persuasion entirely over matters of “saving faith.” Baumlin describes four archetypes of historical rhetoric: sophism, skepticism, incarnationism, and transcendence. Undergirding the age’s competing theologies, each makes unique assumptions regarding the powers of language (both communicative and performative); the nature of being (including transcendent being or deity); the structure of the psyche (whether sin-weakened or self-sufficient); and the capacities of human knowing (whether certain knowledge is communicable—or even possible). Working within divergent theologies of language, the poets here studied take theological controversies as explicit themes. The crisis of Hamlet begins not in a king’s murder simply, but in his dying without benefit of the sacraments. As if compensating for their loss, young Hamlet “minister[s]” to Gertrude while acting as “scourge” to Claudius. Alternating between soul-cursing and soul-curing, Hamlet plays sorcerer and priest indiscriminately. Appropriating the speech-acts of Catholic sacramentalism, Donne’s lyrics describe a private “religion of Love,” over which the poet-lover presides as officiant. Or rather, some lyrics present him as Love’s Priest, there being as many personae as there are theologies of language. Beyond Love’s Priest, Baumlin describes three such personae: Love’s Apostate, Love’s Atheist, and Love’s Reformer. Focusing on “Lycidas” and De Doctrina Christiana, Baumlin outlines Milton’s plerophoristic “rhetoric of certitude.” Such texts as these explore the problematic status of preaching. (Can human eloquencecontribute to salvation?) They explore competing definitions (Aristotelian vs. Pauline) of pistis—meaningalternatively (religious) “faith” and (rhetorical) “persuasion.” And they invoke conflicting typologies (classical vs. Hebraic) of authorial ethos. Baumlin’s study ends with a glance at the Restoration and Royal Society’s final “disenchantment” or secularization of discourse.

Donne's Augustine

Donne's Augustine PDF

Author: Katrin Ettenhuber

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2011-07-07

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0199609101

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A comprehensive re-examination of John Donne, through his response to the most iconic religious figure in Western theology, Saint Augustine of Hippo. This book significantly enriches our understanding of the reading and writing culture of Renaissance England, and of the religious debates and controversies in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

Donne’s God

Donne’s God PDF

Author: P.M. Oliver

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-05-15

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1351660683

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His contemporaries recognised John Donne (1572-1631) as a completely new kind of poet. He was, wrote one enthusiast, ‘Copernicus in Poetrie’. But in the winter of 1614-15 Donne abandoned part-time versification for full-time priestly ministry, quickly becoming one of the most popular preachers of his time. While his verse has never been short of modern admirers, his sermons have recently begun to receive their full share of serious attention. Yet there exists almost no theologically-informed criticism to assist readers with navigating, let alone appreciating, the intricacies of Donne’s religious thinking. The need for such criticism is especially urgent since many readers approach his writing today with little previous knowledge of Christian doctrine or history. This book supplies that deficiency. Starting from the assumption that theology is inevitably the product of the human imagination, a perception that is traced back to major early Christian writers (and something that Donne implicitly acknowledged), it probes the complex amalgam that constituted his ever-shifting vision of the deity. It examines his theological choices and their impact on his preaching, analysing the latter with reference to its sometimes strained relationship with Christian orthodoxy and the implications of this for any attempt to determine how far Donne may legitimately be viewed as a mouthpiece for the Jacobean and Caroline Church of England. The book argues that the unconventionality that characterises his verse is also on display in his sermons. As a result it presents Donne as a far more creative and risk-taking religious thinker than has previously been recognised, especially by those determined to see him as a paragon of conventional Christian orthodoxy.

Witnessing to the faith

Witnessing to the faith PDF

Author: Shanyn Altman

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2023-07-18

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1526154854

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This study utilises John Donne’s works concerning the Jacobean Settlement as a contextualised case study to examine a seriously pressing issue in contemporary society: the issue of Catholic loyalism post-1603 and the disputes that thistopic sparked over the matter of conformity.Altman examines Donne’s polemic in line with the vast expanse of literature relating to the pamphlet war and situates Donne’s arguments within a strong contemporary tradition of conformist thought. Within this context, the study argues that Donne articulated a theory of royal absolutism that would have struck home with many contemporaries who, whether Catholic or not, were faced with a regime determined to bring them into conformity. It further contends that the religio-political standpoint represented by Donne was not only fairly obvious to the English state but was also widely accepted by it.

Skepticism and Belief in Early Modern England

Skepticism and Belief in Early Modern England PDF

Author: Melissa M. Caldwell

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1317054555

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The central thesis of this book is that skepticism was instrumental to the defense of orthodox religion and the development of the identity of the Church of England. Examining the presence of skepticism in non-fiction prose literature at four transitional moments in English Protestant history during which orthodoxy was challenged and revised, Melissa Caldwell argues that a skeptical mode of thinking is embedded in the literary and rhetorical choices made by English writers who straddle the project of reform and the maintenance of orthodoxy after the Reformation in England. Far from being a radical belief simply indicative of an emerging secularism, she demonstrates the varied and complex appropriations of skeptical thought in early modern England. By examining a selection of various kinds of literature-including religious polemic, dialogue, pamphlets, sermons, and treatises-produced at key moments in early modern England’s religious history, Caldwell shows how the writers under consideration capitalized on the unscripted moral space that emerged in the wake of the Reformation. The result was a new kind of discourse--and a new form of orthodoxy--that sought both to exploit and to contain the skepticism unearthed by the Reformation.

Conflicts of Devotion

Conflicts of Devotion PDF

Author: Daniel R. Gibbons

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2017-03-30

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 026810137X

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Who will mourn with me? Who will break bread with me? Who is my neighbor? In the wake of the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, such questions called for a new approach to the communal religious rituals and verses that shaped and commemorated many of the brightest and darkest moments of English life. In England, new forms of religious writing emerged out of a deeply fractured spiritual community. Conflicts of Devotion reshapes our understanding of the role that poetry played in the re-formation of English community, and shows us that understanding both the poetics of liturgy and the liturgical character of poetry is essential to comprehending the deep shifts in English spiritual attitudes and practices that occurred during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The liturgical, communitarian perspective of Conflicts of Devotion sheds new light on neglected texts and deepens our understanding of how major writers such as Edmund Spenser, Robert Southwell, and John Donne struggled to write their way out of the spiritual and social crises of the age of the Reformation. It also sheds new light on the roles that poetry may play in negotiating—and even overcoming—religious conflict. Attention to liturgical poetics allows us to see the broad spectrum of ways in which English poets forged new forms of spiritual community out of the very language of theological division. This book will be of great interest to teachers and students of early modern poetry and of the various fields related to Reformation studies: history, politics, and theology.