Ruin and reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell / Stewart Mottram
- Author:
- Mottram, Stewart James
- Published:
- Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2019.
- Physical Description:
- vi, 247 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
- Contents:
- Machine generated contents note: 1.Spenser, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the Decline of the Preacher's Plough -- The Shepheardes Calender and the Language of the Plough -- Planting Religion in A View of the Present State of Ireland -- 2.Wondering at Ruins: Vallans, Spenser, and the Reformation of St Alban -- Vallans's A Tale of Two Swannes -- Spenser's The Ruines of Time -- 3.Warriors and Ruins: Loyalism, Rebellion, and Recusancy in Cymbeline's Wales -- Cymbeline, Wales, and the Stuart Union of Crowns -- The Essex Rising and Welsh Catholicism -- Love's Martyr and Catholic Loyalism -- Cymbeline and the Call for Religious Toleration -- 4."Where mine must refbrme'? John Denham's Coopers Hill (1642) -- The Sophy and the Earl of Strafford -- Coopers Hill and the Cathedral Debates -- 5.Cloistered Virtue: Nun Appleton Priory and Pres byte nanism in Marvell's Upon Appleton House (1651) -- Upon Appleton House. Priory Ruins and Presbyterian Satire -- Thomas Edwards's Gangraena and English Presbyterianism -- Gardening Eden: Marvell's Fairfax and the Governorship of Hull.
- Summary:
- Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell' explores writerly responses to the religious violence of the long reformation in England and Wales, spanning over a century of literature and history, from the establishment of the national church under Henry VIII (1534), to its disestablishment under Oliver Cromwell (1653). It focuses on representations of ruined churches, monasteries, and cathedrals in the works of a range of English Protestant writers, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Denham, and Marvell, reading literature alongside episodes in English reformation history: from the dissolution of the monasteries and the destruction of church icons and images, to the puritan reforms of the 1640s. 0The study departs from previous responses to literature's 'bare ruined choirs', which tend to read writerly ambivalence towards the dissolution of the monasteries as evidence of traditionalist, catholic, or Laudian nostalgia for the pre-reformation church. Instead, Ruin and Reformation shows how English protestants of all varieties-from Laudians to Presbyterians-could, and did, feel ambivalence towards, and anxiety about, the violence that accompanied the dissolution of the monasteries and other acts of protestant reform. The study therefore demonstrates that writerly misgivings about ruin and reformation need not necessarily signal an author's opposition to England's reformation project. In so doing, Ruin and Reformation makes an important contribution to cross-disciplinary debates about the character of English Protestantism in its formative century, revealing that doubts about religious destruction were as much a part of the experience of English protestantism as expressions of popular support for iconoclasm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
- Subject(s):
- Genre(s):
- ISBN:
- 0198836384
9780198836384
View MARC record | catkey: 26772564