Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“In our scholarly rush to classify early modern thinkers and writers according to religious confessions, we have unwittingly overlooked thinkers who regretted the fragmentation that confessionalism imposed, those who longed for a united Christianity however impractical its realization may have been. Stillman’s argument is fresh, persuasive, and important.” —Susannah Monta, author of Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England
“Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England is brilliant. The writing is always distinguished and occasionally more than that. Such a pleasure.” —Roger Kuin, editor of The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney
“This broad, energetic, important study deserves to be widely assimilated . . . Stillman's book has the potential both to refine future Reformation-era taxonomies, and to show where those taxonomies cannot reach.” —British Catholic History
“The most significant engagement with the confessionalization thesis in early modern literary studies to date....an indispensable guide for future work.” —Reformation
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction: Peace-Wars on the Continent and in Britain
1. John Harington and the Confessional Beyond
2. Neuters and the Politics of Language in Early Modern Polemic,
Or How to Trouble the Confessional Divide
3. Imagining Christendom in Britain. Political Romance in 1589 and Disenchantment
4. Enacting the Politics of Christendom. After the Scottish Mission (1590), James VI and I
5. Poetic Energy and Poetic Economy in the Post-Reformation
6. Examining Constable’s Sonnets, Or the Pleasures of Pious Miscegenation
7. Reading the Critical Conversation about Aemilia Lanyer: Performing Presence in the Confessional Beyond
Conclusion
