Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton

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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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Hyun-Ah Kim

"John Merbecke (c.1505-c.1585) is most famous as me composer of the first musical setting of the English liturgy, The Booke of Common Praier Noted (BCPN), published in 1550. By situating Merbecke and his work within a broader intellectual and religio-cultural context of Tudor England, this book challenges the existing studies of Merbecke based on the narrow theological approach to the Reformation. Furthermore, it suggests a re-thinking of the prevailing interpretative framework of Reformation musical history." "On the basis of the new contextual study of Merbecke, this book seeks to re-interpret his work, particularly BCPN, in the light of humanist rhetoric. It sees Merbecke as embodying the ideal of the Christian-musical orator, demonstrating that BCPN is an Anglican epitome of the Erasmian synthesis of eloquence, theology and music. The book thus depicts Merbecke as a humanist reformer, through re-evaluation of his contributions to the developments of vernacular music and literature in early modern England. As such it will be of interest, not only to church musicians, but also to historians of the Reformation and students of wider Tudor culture."--BOOK JACKET.

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Thomas L. Thompson

"The Mythic Past is the first accessible overview and synthesis of two decades of scholarship on various aspects of early Palestine history - linguistic, economic, agricultural, and archaeological. While its controversial conclusion - that the Old Testament offers absolutely no historical evidence for the early history of Israel - will surely draw fire from conservative Jews, Catholics, and Evangelicals alike, the author's insistence on the Old Testament as a great collection of literature offers refreshing new ways to read it. By separating the Bible from history, we are not getting rid of the Bible; instead, we are reading it as it was meant to be read - as stories and legends, as some of the world's most beautiful poetry, pious, lyrical, and erotic, as epic narratives and wondrous folktales, often stunningly profound and evocative, as romances and adventure stories both moralistic and sentimental."--BOOK JACKET.

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Rodney Stark

"As we all know and as many of our well established textbooks have argued for decades, the Inquisition was one of the most frightening and bloody chapters in Western history, Pope Pius XII was anti-Semitic and rightfully called "Hitler's Pope," the Dark Ages were a stunting of the progress of knowledge to be redeemed only by the secular spirit of the Enlightenment, and the religious Crusades were an early example of the rapacious Western thirst for riches and power. But what if these long held beliefs were all wrong? In this stunning, powerful, and ultimately persuasive book, Rodney Stark, one of the most highly regarded sociologists of religion and bestselling author of The Rise of Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco 1997) argues that some of our most firmly held ideas about history, ideas that paint the Catholic Church in the least positive light are, in fact, fiction. Why have we held these wrongheaded ideas so strongly and for so long? And if our beliefs are wrong, what, in fact, is the truth? In each chapter, Stark takes on a well-established anti-Catholic myth, gives a fascinating history of how each myth became the conventional wisdom, and presents a startling picture of the real truth"--