The Christian Wordsworth, 1798-1805

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Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt

The sixteen essays in this collection reflect the individuality and diversity of varied ideas and approaches to Milton scholarship. Readers will no doubt discern points of contiguity among the essays in this volume. For example, several essays investigate sources - literary, pictorial, architectural - and Milton's use of those sources in his poetry. Others view Milton from the perspective of his age and seventeenth-century contemporaries such as Michael Drayton and Aemelia Lanyer. Still others use the twentieth-century methodologies of transformational grammar, deconstruction, and chaos theory to reread Milton's works and assess their prophetic potential. Overall, the essays demonstrate the continued scholarly commitment to a search for truths in and about Milton's works, a process that began in the seventeenth century and promises to continue unabated into the next millennium.

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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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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"--

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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.