Humanism and the reform of sacred music in early modern England

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William A. Ulmer

"Recent scholarship on the British Romantic poet William Wordsworth usually depicts him as a secular humanist during the years of his creative ascendancy. In The Christian Wordsworth, 1798-1805, William A. Ulmer challenges this consensus by arguing that Wordsworth never abandoned his faith in a supernatural Deity and that the poet's theism included important Christian sympathies as early as 1798. By tracing the changes in Wordsworth's religious beliefs - from the early secular period to the later Anglican period - Ulmer reconstructs the strategic indirections by which the poet's faith shapes his major poems. In readings of The Ruined Cottage, the Pedlar narrative, "Tintern Abbey," the Prospectus, the Ode, The Prelude, and other texts, Ulmer presents a poet increasingly determined to stage the prophetic revelations of his poems against carefully established Christian backgrounds. Through this revisionary traditionalism, Wordsworth attempts to preserve England's Christian heritage by adapting it to modern needs. Revisionary in its own right, Ulmer's book provides an innovative perspective on Romantic natural supernaturalism and on William Wordsworth's religious poetics and intellectual development."--BOOK JACKET.

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Kristen Poole

"The figure of the puritan has long been conceived as dour and repressive in character, an image which has been central to ways of reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history and literature. Kristen Poole's study challenges this perception, arguing that, contrary to current critical understanding, radical reformers were most often portrayed in literature of the period as deviant, licentious, and transgressive. Through extensive analysis of early modern pamphlets, sermons, poetry, and plays, the fictional puritan emerges as a grotesque and carnival-esque figure; puritans are extensively depicted as gluttonous, sexually promiscuous, monstrously procreating, and even as worshipping naked. By recovering this lost alternative satirical image, Poole sheds new light on the role played by anti-puritan rhetoric. Her book contends that such representations served an important social role, providing an imaginative framework for discussing familial, communal, and discursive transformations that resulted from the Reformation."--Jacket.

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Anthony Levi

"In this new survey of the development of European intellectual culture between about 1300 and 1535, Anthony Levi offers a fresh view of the Renaissance and the Reformation, calling for a reassessment of the nature of both. Through a radical and detailed examination of the significant intellectual, spiritual, and ideological developments across Europe during this period, Levi disputes the discontinuities commonly understood to explain and defend the events we term the "Renaissance" and the "Reformation." He argues that the renewed cult of the literary, visual, and educational norms of classical antiquity were a consequence - not the essence or cause - of the Renaissance. Further, the Reformation emerged from a cultural movement that neither constituted a historical break nor led to the catastrophic religious clashes of the sixteenth century. He offers a revisionist account of the collapse of scholastic intellectual systems and traces its course."--BOOK JACKET.

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Kristen Poole

"Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest"--