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Sapientia Classics Series Shakespeare, who wrote at the beginning of the long period in which the Catholic faith as violently suppressed in the British Isles, has long enjoyed an iconic status. Some readers have interpreted him as an early agnostic, expressing modern angst about whether anything exists besides "this mortal coil" that seems to be merely "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." In recent years, however, thanks largely to the work of Peter Milward, close study of Shakespeare's plays has raised the question: Was Shakespeare in fact a believing Catholic? To this question, which radically changes the way that Shakespeare's plays should be read, Milward here offers, in his definitive study of the topic, a resounding "Yes."
The subject of Shakespeare's own religion has been little discussed until recently. The prevailing impression has been that almost nothing is known of the poet's life, and consequently that no light can be shed on the plays by consideration of his beliefs. However, it is now increasingly accepted, on the basis of sound historical research, that Shakespeare had a strongly Catholic religious background and may well himself have been a recusant. In The Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays, Fr. Peter Milward examines the traces of Shakespeare's Catholic influences within the plays themselves, and argues convincingly that they are best understood as the works of a playwright whose outlook was forme...
The local tradition in Stratford is that Shakespeare "died a Papist", having sent for a Catholic priest to give him the last rites. It is clear from his plays that he was against the strictures of Puritanism, but in The Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays, Professor Peter Milward argues that the whole of Shakespeare's work reveals a common thread of sympathy with the plight of the suffering persecuted Catholics under Queen Elizabeth and King James I.
Following his recent study, The Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays, Fr. Peter Milward examines more closely the themes of doomsday and judgement in the great dramas. As recent research establishes ever more securely Shakespeare's own Catholic background, we are invited to consider the symbolism of the plays from the perspective of the Elizabethan and Jacobean recusant community of which the poet was a member. Fr. Milward draws attention to the profound feeling manifest in the treatment of the desolation of England following the destruction of her Catholic culture, and the persecution of the Church by the new Establishment -- long missed in critical studies. At the end of the second Christian millennium, when the popular mind has been preoccupied with strange predictions of doom, we follow Shakespeare's reflections on the real judgement then being visited upon an apostate nation, and see how England's real and only hope lies in a return to her first allegiance to a greater Royal supremacy than that of the Tudors, under a loftier Queen -- not Elizabeth, but Mary who reigns in Heaven.
Reflecting on the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom in higher education and in life, this thoughtful treatise considers the roots and philosophical underpinnings of university education. Examining such subjects as philosophy, science, nature, art, religion, and finding one's place in the world, Peter Milward shares his sage thoughts on obtaining a well-rounded base of knowledge.
Every science, including the study of insects, may have circumscribed limits, but its deeper principles open up new worlds of possibility. Milward uncovers these hidden principles by examining the daily lives and habits of insects. His studies lead him to fascinating speculations, taking the reader into the realms not only of literature, as suggested by the subtitle, but also of philosophy and theology. When Milward discusses what everybody knows about insects and what he has personally observed, he relates insects to human life in general. His insights help us feel a certain fellowship with the insects, or at least with some of the more familiar insects. He does not let us forget that there...
This volume explores the influences of Catholicism and Protestantism in a trio of Shakespeare's tragedies: Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Bypassing the discussion of Shakespeare's personal religious beliefs, Batson instead focuses on distinct footprints left by Catholic and Protestant traditions that underlie and inform Shakespeare's artistic genius.
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Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.
In With Eyes and Ears Open: The Role of Visitors in the Society of Jesus, twelve historians examine important visitations in the history of the Society. After a thorough investigation of the nature and role of the “visitor” in Jesuit rules and regulations, ten visitations of missions and provinces—from Peru in the sixteenth century, to Ireland in the seventeenth, to the Zambesi mission and Australia in the twentieth—are considered. Visitors, appointed by the superior general in Rome, surveyed the situation for fidelity to the Jesuit way of life, resolved any problems, and recommended future paths, often to the disapproval of Jesuit hosts. One contribution concerns the canonical visitation of the non-Jesuit Francis Saldanha da Gama in 1758, which resulted in the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759.