Forms of Faith ─ Literary form and religious conflict in early modern England

This collection of essays by distinguished international scholars explores the role of literature as a means of mediating religious conflict in early modern England. Marking a new stage in the 'religious turn' that generated vigorous discussion of the changes and conflicts brought about by the Reformation, it unites new historicist readings with an interest in the ideological significance of aesthetic form. It proceeds from the assumption that confessional differences did not always erupt into hostilities but that people also had to arrange themselves somehow with divided loyalties between the old faith and the new, between religious and secular interests, between officially sanctioned and privately held beliefs. What role might literature have played in these efforts? Can we conceive of literary representations as possible sites of de-escalation? Do different discursive, aesthetic, or social contexts inflect or even deflect the demands of religious loyalties? Pursuing such questions, this collection open a new perspective on post-Reformation English culture and literature.

Jonathan Baldo is Professor of English at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, New York

Isabel Karremann is Professor of English Literature at the University of Wurzburg, Germany