Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton

Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton PDF

Author: Kristen Poole

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-03-30

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780521025447

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The figure of the puritan has long been conceived as dour and repressive in character, an image which has been central to ways of reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history and literature. Kristen Poole's original study challenges this perception arguing that, contrary to current critical understanding, radical reformers were most often portrayed in literature of the period as deviant, licentious and transgressive. Through extensive analysis of early modern pamphlets, sermons, poetry and plays, the fictional puritan emerges as a grotesque and carnivalesque figure; puritans are extensively depicted as gluttonous, sexually promiscuous, monstrously procreating, and even as worshipping naked. By recovering this lost alternative satirical image, Poole sheds new light on the role played by anti-puritan rhetoric. Her book contends that such representations served an important social role, providing an imaginative framework for discussing familial, communal and political transformations that resulted from the Reformation.

Milton & Toleration

Milton & Toleration PDF

Author: Sharon Achinstein

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007-08-02

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 019929593X

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Fifteen leading Milton scholars examine the idea of toleration in Milton's poetry and prose. Looking at how Milton himself imagined tolerance and locating his works in their literary, historical, and philosophical context, the essays address central issues including violence, heresy, church polity, liberalism, libertinism, natural law, equity, imperialism, republicanism, and Milton and his Muslim readers.

Shakespeare and Religious Change

Shakespeare and Religious Change PDF

Author: K. Graham

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2009-07-16

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0230240852

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This balanced and innovative collection explores the relationship of Shakespeare's plays to the changing face of early modern religion, considering the connections between Shakespeare's theatre and the religious past, the religious identities of the present and the deep cultural changes that would shape the future of religion in the modern world.

Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood

Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood PDF

Author: Elizabeth Sauer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1107041945

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This study examines how Milton's polemical and imaginative literature intersects with representations of English Protestant nationhood. Through detailed case studies of Milton's works, Elizabeth Sauer shows the extent to which seventeenth-century English notions of nationhood and toleration can be subjected to literary and historicist inquiry.

Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost PDF

Author: John Milton

Publisher: Mercer University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 0881462365

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John Milton (1608-1674) was arguably one of the best-read persons of his epoch. Miltonâ¿¿s commonplace book reveals that in addition to the thoroughly humanistic education that he received at Trinity College Cambridge (1625-1632), he also conducted an extensively broad reading program of his own immediately after concluding his university studies which included forays into nearly every branch of learning in a period that he affectionately referred to as his â¿¿studious retirementâ¿¿ (1632-38). For over 400 years, many literary critics have declared this monumental work, Paradise Lost, to be the greatest poem in the English language. Dr. Stallard contends that a full understanding of the Bible as the poemâ¿¿s primary inter-text is essential to appreciating the poem in its Puritan context. John Miltonâ¿¿s Bible is lavishly annotated with Biblical references that demonstrates that Milton was mining a wide variety of translations including the 1540 Great Bible, the 1560 Geneva Bible, the Bishops Bible of 1568, the Douay-Rheims of 1582, and the revised Authorized Version of 1612. This Biblically annotated edition of Paradise Lost will be useful to all scholars and students of Milton alike. That a lack of familiarity with the Bible should discourage students of English literature from reading the pinnacle achievement of one of the finest poets and minds in the English language is both sad and avoidable. This edition makes Milton more accessible, comprehensible, and enjoyable for everyone.

Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England

Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England PDF

Author: Walter S H Lim

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2024-01-20

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 3031400062

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This book analyzes Shakespeare’s use of biblical allusions and evocation of doctrinal topics in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II, and The Merchant of Venice. It identifies references to theological and doctrinal commonplaces such as sin, grace, confession, damnation, and the Fall in these plays, affirming that Shakespeare’s literary imagination is very much influenced by his familiarity with the Bible and also with matters of church doctrine. This theological and doctrinal subject matter also derives its significance from genres as diverse as travel narratives, sermons, political treatises, and royal proclamations. This study looks at how Shakespeare’s deployment of religious topics interacts with ideas circulating via other cultural texts and genres in society. It also analyzes how religion enables Shakespeare’s engagement with cultural debates and political developments in England: absolutism and law; radical political theory; morality and law; and conceptions of nationhood.

Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith

Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith PDF

Author: J. Mayer

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2006-08-04

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0230595898

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This book throws new light on the issue of the dramatist's religious orientation by dismissing sectarian and one-sided theories, tackling the problem from the angle of the variegated Elizabethan context recently uncovered by modern historians and theatre scholars. It is argued that faith was a quest rather than a quiet certainty for the playwright.

Making Milton

Making Milton PDF

Author: Emma Depledge

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2021-03-04

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0198821891

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A collection of essays exploring John Milton's rise to popularity and his status as a canonical author. The volume considers Milton's 'authorial persona' in the context of his relationships with his contemporary writers, stationers, and readers.

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.

Shakespeare's Stationers

Shakespeare's Stationers PDF

Author: Marta Straznicky

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-10-08

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 0812207386

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Recent studies in early modern cultural bibliography have put forth a radically new Shakespeare—a man of keen literary ambition who wrote for page as well as stage. His work thus comes to be viewed as textual property and a material object not only seen theatrically but also bought, read, collected, annotated, copied, and otherwise passed through human hands. This Shakespeare was invented in large part by the stationers—publishers, printers, and booksellers—who produced and distributed his texts in the form of books. Yet Shakespeare's stationers have not received sustained critical attention. Edited by Marta Straznicky, Shakespeare's Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography shifts Shakespearean textual scholarship toward a new focus on the earliest publishers and booksellers of Shakespeare's texts. This seminal collection is the first to explore the multiple and intersecting forms of agency exercised by Shakespeare's stationers in the design, production, marketing, and dissemination of his printed works. Nine critical studies examine the ways in which commerce intersected with culture and how individual stationers engaged in a range of cultural functions and political movements through their business practices. Two appendices, cataloguing the imprints of Shakespeare's texts to 1640 and providing forty additional stationer profiles, extend the volume's reach well beyond the case studies, offering a foundation for further research.