Treacherous faith : the specter of heresy in early modern English literature and culture / David Loewenstein.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Loewenstein, David, author.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Religion and literature--England--History--16th century.

Religion and literature.

Christian heretics.

History.

England.

Religion and literature--England--History--17th century.

Christian heresies in literature.

Christian heretics--England--History--16th century.

Christian heretics--England--History--17th century.

England--Church history--16th century.

Church history.

England--Church history--17th century.

Physical Description:

xii, 497 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Other Title:

Heresy in early modern English literature and culture

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2013.

Summary:

Treacherous Faith offers a new and ambitious cross-disciplinary account of the ways writers from the early English Reformation to the Restoration generated, sustained, or questioned cultural anxieties about heresy and heretics. It examines the dark, often brutal story of defining, constructing, and punishing heretics in early modern England, and the ways writers themselves contributed to or interrogated the politics of religious fear-mongering and demonizing. David Loewenstein illuminates the terrors and anxieties early modern writers articulated and the fantasies they constructed about pernicious heretics and pestilent heresies in response to the Reformations shattering of Western Christendom. The responses of early modern writers in English to the specter of heresy and the making of heretics were varied, complex, and contradictory, depending on their religious and political alignments. Some writers used their rhetorical resourcefulness and inventiveness to contribute to the politics of heresy-making and the specter of cunning, diabolical heretics ravaging the Church, the state, and thousands of souls; others questioned heresy-making processes and the violence and savagery that religious demonizing provoked; and some writers interrogated with great daring and inventiveness the politics of religious demonizing, heresy-making, and the cultural constructions of heretics. Treacherous Faith examines the complexities and paradoxes of the heresy-making imagination in early modern England: the dark fantasies, anxieties, terrors, and violence it was capable of generating, but also the ways the dreaded specter of heresy could stimulate the literary creativity of early modern authors engaging with it from diverse religious and political perspectives. Treacherous Faith is a major interdisciplinary study of the ways the literary imagination, religious fears, and demonizing interacted in the early modern world. This study of the early modern specter of heresy contributes to work in the humanities seeking to illuminate the changing dynamics of religious fear, the rhetoric of religious demonization, and the powerful ways the literary imagination represents and constructs religious difference. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I The Specter of Heresy and Religious Conflict in English Reformation Literary Culture

1 Religious Demonization, Anti-Heresy Polemic, and Thomas More 23

Thomas More: Heretic Hunter or Humanist Saint? 26

The Specter of Evangelical Heresy and A Dialogue Concerning Heresies 33

New Heretics and Cunning Theatricalism 47

Mores Dialogue Shuts Down 50

Defender of the Faith: Making Heretics and Demonizing Tyndale in Mores Confutation 54

Conclusion: More, Heresy-Making, and Religious Fear 66

2 Anne Askew and the Culture of Heresy-Hunting in Henry VIII's England 69

Fears of Sacramentarianism and the Hunt for Heretics 72

Polemical Tactics and Reformation Hermeneutics 85

3 Burning Heretics and Fashioning Martyrs: Religious Violence in John Foxe and Reformation England 103

Foxe's Emergence and the Culture of Heresy-Hunting 106

Religious Extremism and Mild Martyrdom 108

Representing "Heretics" and Fashioning Martyrs: From Tyndale to Cranmer 123

Conclusion: "Seas of Discord and Contention" 152

4 The Specter of Heretics in Later Elizabethan and Jacobean Writing 157

Constructing Heretics at St. Paul's Cross: Richard Bancroft and Fears of Puritan Separatism 158

Creating the Specter of Anabaptism and Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller 164

Spenser and Anabaptist Subversion 172

The Specter of Familism to James VI and I 176

Part II The War Against Heresy in Milton's England

5 The Specter of Heresy and Blasphemy in the English Revolution: From Heresiographers to the Spectacle of James Nayler 191

Heresy-Making and Religious Warfare 192

The Heresiography: Constructing Heretics and the Demonizing Imagination 197

The Warfaring Heresiographer: Thomas Edwards's Self-Presentation 213

Monstrous Toleration and the Specter of Heresy 217

Fears of Blasphemy in the Interregnum: James Nayler as Blasphemous Heretic and Cause Célèbre 224

6 The Specter of Heresy and the Struggle for Toleration: John Goodwin, William Walwyn, and Richard Overton 237

John Goodwin: Heresy, Independency, and the Struggle for Toleration 238

William Walwyn: Religious Demonizing and the Tolerant Imagination 244

Richard Overton: The Culture of Heresy-Making and the Dramatic Pamphlet 256

7 John Milton: Toleration and "Fantastic Terrors of Sect and Schism" 267

Milton and the "Terrors" of Heresy in the 1640s 267

Milton's Later Prose and the "Terrors" of Heresy, Blasphemy, and Toleration 282

8 Fears of Heresy, Blasphemy, and Religious Schism in Milton's Culture and Paradise Lost 297

Heresy Fears in Milton's Culture from the English Revolution to the Restoration 299

Cunning Heretics and Milton's Satan 307

Religious Schism, Faction, and Uniformity 318

Blasphemy in Milton's Culture and Paradise Lost 324

Paradise Lost as a Poem of Toleration? 341.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [438]-468) and index.

ISBN:

9780199203390

0199203393

OCLC:

858967817