Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England
Cambridge University Press, 3/10/2005
EAN 9780521844987, ISBN10: 0521844983
Hardcover, 254 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England provides a comprehensive comparison of how Protestant and Catholic martyrs were represented during the Reformation, the most intense period of religious persecution in English history. Through its focus on martyrs, it argues that Catholic and Protestant texts are produced by dialogue, even competition, with texts across the religious divide, rather than simply as part of a stable and discrete doctrinal system. The first section of the book clearly traces the development of competing discourses of martyrdom; the second section considers the deployment of these discourses through a range of Protestant and Catholic literary texts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Monta pays extended attention to many texts popular in their own day but now considered unliterary or insignificant. This study is an important contribution to scholarship on early modern literature, drama, and religious history.
Introduction
Part I. Non poena sed causa
Martyrdom and the Hermeneutics of Controversy
1. Controverting consciences
2. Too many brides
the interpretive community and ecclesiological controversy
3. Material witnesses
Part II. Conflicting Testimonies in the English Literary Imagination
4. En route to the New Jerusalem
martyrdom and religious allegory
5. When the truth hurts
suffering and religious confidence in Robert Southwell and John Donne
6. The polemics of conscience in the history play
7. Martyrdom, nostalgia, and political engagement
Conclusion
admiration and fear.