The Persistence of Catholicism: Literature, Nationhood, and Religion in Early Modern England
Studies and Texts 243; Catholic and Recusant Texts of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods 7 • x, 242 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-243-7 • Cloth • $115.00
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This volume collects previously published studies, now thoroughly updated and revised, with the aim of exploring the religious and political complexities of early modern English Catholicism from the mid-sixteenth through the late seventeenth centuries.
Together, these essays analyze the residual presence of Catholic culture within the larger narrative of English history, using the work of such writers as William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Dame Gertrude More, as well as a range of non-literary evidence, to interpret the varieties of religious experience and the multiple ways in which they related to contemporary audiences and readers. Including the “seigneurial” Catholicism of the upper classes, the popular survival of traditional religious practices, and the different colonial solutions to the problem of religious toleration, this account opposes the oversimplified “Whig” interpretation of English history with the complex forces of a changing political landscape.
Catholic culture had a remarkable persistence in the period and the lived experience of English Catholics varied widely. In its many incarnations, Catholicism remained an important cultural and demographic presence troubling the narrative of English history. Despite the control the government sought to exercise over religious belief, individual Catholics, who negotiated various forms of social functioning, survived beyond this period to emerge finally as a significant, and tolerated, minority within English society.
Author
Arthur F. Marotti is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Wayne State University and Director of its Emeritus Academy. He is the author of John Donne, Coterie Poet (1986); Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995); Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (2005); (with Steven W. May) Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth: A Yorkshire Yeoman’s Household Book (2014); and The Circulation of Poetry in Manuscript in Early Modern England (2021). The editor or coeditor of nine collections of scholarly essays, he was Editor of Criticism from 1985 to 1996, and has served on the advisory boards of several other journals.