Description
Book SynopsisThis interdisciplinary project offers a rereading of the 1590 Arcadia as an apocalyptic allegory, maintaining that Sidney's revised work participates in contemporary debates on church reform and church history in previously unrecognized ways. The book views Sidney's work in relationship to Protestant Revelation commentaries and apocalyptic church histories and treatises on church reform by Philippe Du Plessis Mornay, George Gifford, William Fulke, Heinrich Bullinger, John Foxe, John Bale, and others. The interpretation is supported by careful analysis of Sidney's additions to and alterations of the original Arcadia, as well as of his allusions to and reworkings of prior epics.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. Apocalyptic History, Protestant Politics, and Allegorical Methodology in the Revelation Commentaries
2. Protestant Church Historiography and Revelation Commentaries and the Asia Minor Narratives
3. The Early Asia Minor Narratives and the Primitive Church
4. Apocalyptic Arcadia and Elizabethan England
5. Feeding upon Urania’s “Sweet Words”: Overthrowing Antichrist through Devotion to the Word
6. Erasmus in Arcadia
7. Cecropia, Amphialus, and the Church of Antichrist
8. Amphialus and the Half-Reformed Church of England
9. The English Church under the Tudor Queens in Sidney’s Topical Allegory
10. Sidney’s Revised Arcadia as Epic and Apocalypse: An Overview
Bibliography
Index of Biblical References
General Index
