Writing and Religion in England, 1558-1689: Studies in Community-Making and Cultural Memory

The fruit of intensive collaboration among leading international specialists on the literature, religion and culture of early modern England, this volume examines the relationship between writing and religion in England from 1558, the year of the Elizabethan Settlement, up until the Act of Toleration of 1689. The collection has a special emphasis on the ways in which acts of writing were communicational in the etymological sense of that term -- i.e. they made (or consolidated) communities -- and on how, as part of that process, they used and expanded the resources of cultural memory.The book takes account of a wide range of written genres - poetry, fictional prose, sermons, devotional works, theology, confessions of faith, church constitutions, tracts, letters, drama, court masque, translation. The denominational spectrum covered extends from several varieties of Dissent, through media via Anglicanism and Laudianism, to Roman Catholicism. Chapters are arranged in roughly chronological order, with some of them exploring religion-writing in large contexts of culture, ideas, attitudes, and law, while others concentrate more on the texts and readerships of particular writers.Several chapters have a richly inter-arts orientation, relating writing to liturgical ceremony, painting, music and architecture. Others have a strong sociological slant, with an explicit emphasis on women writers or writers of different class backgrounds.