Inventing the Secular : Literature and Religion from Medieval to Modern / edited by Erik Tonning and Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Tonning, Erik, editor.

Tonning, Fionnuala O’Neill, editor.

Series:

Religious Studies, Theology and Philosophy E-Books Online, Collection 2026.

Studies in Religion and the Arts ; 25.

Religious Studies, Theology and Philosophy E-Books Online, Collection 2026

Studies in Religion and the Arts ; 25

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature and Cultural Studies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (413 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Literature and Religion from Medieval to Modern

Place of Publication:

Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2026.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Inventing the Secular: Literature and Religion from Medieval to Modern explores how literature has actively shaped, rather than merely reflected, ideas of ‘the secular’. Bringing together leading scholars from medieval to modern studies, it traces the imaginative, moral, and political inventions through which Western secularity emerged from within religious cultures. The volume offers new genealogies of belief, power, and aesthetics, showing how literary forms—from Chaucer’s tales to modernist cityscapes—test and transform inherited theologies. By revealing the secular as a creative, contested, and emotionally charged construction, the book reframes long-standing debates about modernity, faith, and the literary imagination.

Contents:

Front Cover

Half Title

Series Informations

Title Page

Copyrights Page

Contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Inventing the Secular? A Roadmap for Literary Studies

Bibliography

Part 1: Medieval

1 Ways around Doctrine in the Middle Ages

2 Marriage after Aristotle: Late-Medieval Secularization of the Marital Estate

3 Willful Griselda: Geoffrey Chaucer's The Clerk's Tale, Voluntarism and the Secularization

1 Griselda's Expression of Free Will

2 Griselda's Voluntarist Interiority and Personhood

3 Obedience as an Act of the Will

4 Griselda's Obedience and the Voluntarist Virgin Mary

5 Conclusion

Note on the Text

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources

Part 2: Early Modern

4 Secular Commemorations of Shakespeare

5 Christ as Tragic Hero: Sixteenth-Century Neo-Latin Passion and Resurrection Plays

1 Catholic Passion Tragedies

2 Reforming Neo-Latin Sacred Tragedy: Grimald's Christus Redivivus and Grotius' Christus Patiens

3 Conclusion

Primary

Secondary

Part 3: The Eighteenth Century and Beyond

6 A True Relation of the Secularization of One Mrs. Veal: a Review

7 Jonah and the Uses of Scripture: Defoe, Melville, Conrad

Part 4: The Nineteenth Century

8 Secular Theodicies, Revolutionary Historiography and The Wreck of the Deutschland

1 Theodicy

2 What Did She Mean?

3 Stress and Shipwreck

4 Shipwreck and Spectator

5 Secularism

9 Contemplation and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century Catholicism

1 Pius, Thomism and Kenosis

2 De Vere's Contemplative Ecology

10 Enacting the Secular: Freethinker Stories of the Nordic "Modern Breakthrough"

1 Realizing a World without God.

2 The Modern Breakthrough and the Nordic Freethinker Movement

3 Kindling the Absence of God

4 Sampling Strategies for a World without God

5 The Spirit of Reaction

6 Conclusion: Being Secular

Part 5: The Twentieth Century

11 "As We Sit Here/There in the Arena": Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and the Modernist Fall 1910-1933

1 Modernism and the Fall

2 In the Arena

12 The Eye Watching the Man: T.S. Eliot, Secularism and the Social Sciences

13 Secular Cityscapes: London in Modernist Fiction

1 Bloomsbury

2 Modernist Churchscapes

14 Poets Sacralizing the Secular: David Jones, Les Murray and Michael Symmons Roberts

Part 6: Interdisciplinary, Theoretical and Contemporary Approaches

15 Lifetimes of the Secular: a Thanatography

1 Birth: the Generation of the Saeculum

2 Middle Age(s): Exclusionary Time

3 Senescence: Presentiments of Death

16 A Lonely Voice: Charles Taylor, John Milbank and the Retrieval of Charles Péguy's

1 Introduction

2 Péguy and the Problem of Excarnation

3 Poetic Metaphysics: Milbank's Reception of Péguy

4 Péguy on Vieillissement

5 Returning to the Present

6 Conclusion

17 "Crush the Enemy": Hymns of the Insurrection

1 "Revelation Song" and the Pious Gesture

1.1 The Call to Worship

1.2 The Pious Gesture

1.3 The Name

2 Crush the Enemy: "Worship Singing" and "A Crowd of Worship Singers"

2.1 Time Frame

2.2 The Tailgaters' Fight Song: Worship Singing

2.3 The Figurative and the Literal

2.4 A Crowd of Worship Singers

3 The Lion, the Crowd and "Amazing Grace"

3.1 The Crowd

3.2 The Lion

3.3 Amazing Grace

4 Epiphany

Notes on the Text

Index

Back Cover.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Tonning, Erik Inventing the Secular

ISBN:

9789004737860

OCLC:

1609710885

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789004737860 DOI