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After the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, the Catholic imagining of England was mainly the project of the exiles who had left their homeland in search of religious toleration and foreign assistance."--BOOK JACKET.
Publisher Description
The survival and revival of Roman Catholicism in post-Reformation Britain remains the subject of lively debate. This volume examines key aspects of the evolution and experience of the Catholic communities of these Protestant kingdoms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rejecting an earlier preoccupation with recusants and martyrs, it highlights the importance of those who exhibited varying degrees of conformity with the ecclesiastical establishment and explores the moral and political dilemmas that confronted the clergy and laity. It reassesses the significance of the Counter Reformation mission as an evangelical enterprise; analyses its communication strategies and its impact on...
After 500 years Henry VIII still retains a public fascination unmatched by any monarch before or since. Through this wide-ranging, yet thematically coherent approach, a fascinating window is opened into the world of Henry VIII and his court. In particular, building on research undertaken over the last ten years, a number of contributors focus on topics that have been neglected by traditional historical writing, for example gender, graffiti and clothing. With contributions from many of the leading scholars of Tudor England, the collection offers not only a snapshot of the latest historical thinking, but also provides a starting point for future research into the world of this colourful, but often misrepresented monarch.
DISSING ELIZABETH is a collection of essays focusing on criticism of Elizabeth I by her contemporaries, and considering the wide range of forms the dissenters used for their critique.
How the English Reformation was Named analyses the shifting semantics of 'reformation' in England between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Originally denoting the intended aim of church councils, 'reformation' was subsequently redefined to denote violent revolt, and ultimately a series of past episodes in religious history. But despite referring to sixteenth-century religious change, the proper noun 'English Reformation' entered the historical lexicon only during the British civil wars of the 1640s. Anglican apologists coined this term to defend the Church of England against proponents of the Scottish Reformation, an event that contemporaries singled out for its violence and illegality. Using their neologism to denote select events from the mid-Tudor era, Anglicans crafted a historical narrative that enabled them to present a pristine vision of the English past, one that endeavoured to preserve amidst civil war, regicide, and political oppression. With the restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England in 1660, apologetic narrative became historiographical habit and, eventually, historical certainty.
In Spenser's Forms of History, Bart Van Es presents an engaging study of the ways in which Edmund Spenser utilized a number of "forms of history"--chronicle, antiquarian discourse, secular typology, political prophecy, and others--in both his poetry and his prose, and assesses their collective impact on Elizabethan poetry.
Most eighteenth-century literary scholarship implicitly or explicitly associates the major developments in English literature and culture during the rise of modernity with a triumphant and increasingly tolerant Protestantism while assuming that the English Catholic community was culturally moribund and disengaged from Protestant society and culture. However, recent work by historians has shown that the English Catholic community was a dynamic and adaptive religious minority, its leaders among the aristocracy cosmopolitan, its intellectuals increasingly attracted to Enlightenment ideals of liberty and skepticism, and its membership growing among the middle and working classes. This community ...
Humphrey Llwyd's Breviary of Britain (1573) is both the first Tudor description of Britain and a passionate and learned defence of Welsh historical traditions. Featuring the first reference in English to the 'British Empire', Thomas Twyne's translation would influence Elizabethan writers from Michael Drayton to John Dee. The volume also includes relevant illustrative selections of David Powel's History of Cambria (1584). Based on Llwyd's own translation of the medieval Welsh chronicle, Brut y Tywysogyon, Powel's History was an important source for Spenser's Faerie Queene and Drayton's Poly-Olbion, and remained the standard history of medieval Wales until the nineteenth century. Philip Schwyzer is Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature in the Department of English, University of Exeter. He has published extensively on Anglo-Welsh literary relations and visions of British antiquity in the early modern period. His books include Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (2004), Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (2007); he is co-editor with Willy Maley of Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly (2010).
Shakespeare's Princes of Wales spotlights the surprising abundance of princes of Wales--English and Welsh alike--appearing onstage in the late Tudor and early Stuart period. In drawing our attention to the oft-overlooked and frequently misunderstood Welsh inheritance, and in investigating its staged and shadowed heirs in plays and court performances by Shakespeare, Peele, Fletcher, Jonson, and more, Marisa R. Cull suggests that the growing scholarly interest in Wales's influence on English national identity must be conditioned by the political and theatrical specificity of the princedom. Illuminating the princedom's unique role as an extension of the Welsh past in contemporary England, Shake...