Reforming the Holy Name: The Afterlife of the IHS in Early Modern England

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-298
Author(s):  
David J. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Multiple Contexts ◽  
Multiple Meanings

Abstract This article challenges the prevailing understanding of the Holy Name of Jesus as largely a Roman Catholic representation in early modern England. Although the Holy Name was attacked intermittently by Protestant iconoclasts, the article uses both visual and literary texts to set out a more nuanced relationship between the symbol and the broader religious culture of the period. As a symbol, the IHS served as a polysemous representation in a period of religious turmoil, creating not only multiple meanings but also multiple contexts in which the symbol could be found. The article both addresses the reasons why scholars tend to see the IHS as a particularly Catholic symbol and demonstrates the continued importance of the Holy Name in Protestant devotion.

Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Chiari
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Ability To Act

While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph explores the importance of weather and changing skies in early modern England while acknowledging the fact that traditional representations and religious beliefs still fashioned people’s relations to meteorological phenomena. At the same time, a growing number of literati stood against determinism and defended free will, thereby insisting on man’s ability to act upon celestial forces. Yet, in doing so, they began to give precedence to a counter-intuitive approach to Nature. Sophie Chiari argues that Shakespeare reconciles the scholarly views of his time with more popular ideas rooted in superstition and that he promotes a sensitive, pragmatic understanding of climatic events. She pays particular attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Taking into account the influence of classical thought, each of the book’s seven chapters emphasises specific issues (e.g. cataclysmic disorders, the dog days’ influence, freezing temperatures, threatening storms) and considers the way climatic events were presented on stage and how they came to shape the production and reception of Shakespeare’s drama.

Martyrdom in Early Modern England

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shanyn Altman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Temporal Control ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Papal Authority ◽  
Papal States

At the advent of England’s Reformation, the monarch assumed sovereignty over the English Church. This created an established state church, which was designed to counter the papacy’s assertion of supremacy. In doing so, the English Church more emphatically linked itself to the monarchy’s temporal control and its attendant realpolitik than was the case with the Pope’s authority over Roman Catholic territories, barring the small Papal States. For those in England who remained faithful to Roman Catholicism, this created an environment where some Protestants took “popery” to be akin to sedition. Whereas during Mary I’s regime, where the English Church was back under papal authority and martyrs died under heresy statutes rather than treason statutes, it was held under Protestant regimes that to act against the English Church was to act against the English state. Given the wide sway of perspectives within English Protestantism from Presbyterianism to Arminianism, as well as the old faith’s continuing appeal among many, English subjects were confronted with competing notions of what it meant to be a good Christian and, consequently, conflicting views about who qualified as a Christian martyr and what precisely Christian martyrdom involved. Martyrologies and other discourses on martyrdom were powerful tools for defining true religion and influencing the behavior of religious adherents, even if the popular representation of the martyr-figure that arises from these works did not necessarily reflect all of the views on martyrdom held by Catholics and Protestants in contemporary society.

Whose Saint Crispins Day Is It?: Shoemaking, Holiday Making, and the Politics of Memory in Early Modern England

2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (4-Part2) ◽  
pp. 1467-1494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison A. Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
English Politics

This article demonstrates an early modern association between the trade of shoemaking and the act of altering the festal calendar. It traces this link through a series of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literary texts including Thomas Deloney's Gentle Craft, Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday, and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and — most notably — Henry V. The article argues that the depictions of cobblers making holidays resonated with the early modern English politics of ritual observance, and its concluding discussion of the Saint Crispin's Day speech in Henry V shows how the play imagines king and cobblers vying for control of England's commemorative practice.

The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith.

1993 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 449
Author(s):  
William E. Burns ◽  
C. John Somerville
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Religious Culture

Ben Jonson and Religion

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Searle
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
Religious Conversions ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the complex role played by religion in Jonson’s life; his relationship to the theatre; his works in various genres (plays, poetry, and masques), and in the critical reception of his writings. It considers the biographical evidence surrounding Jonson’s multiple religious conversions within the broader context of recusancy culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. It then examines some of the ways in which religion is represented in his plays and how this influenced and was shaped by the changes in religious culture that characterized Jonson’s lengthy professional career from the 1590s until the 1630s. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the relationship between religion and the theatre as it impacted upon Jonson’s writing and his own instrumentality—as a key cultural player—in redefining that relationship in early modern England.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit Heyam
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
Sexual Transgression ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

This introduction discusses the reputation of King Edward II (1307–1327) in medieval and early modern England, and the implications of this reputation beyond its immediate relevance to scholars of Edward II’s reign and afterlife: as a case study for the history of sex and the changing vocabulary of sexual transgression; as a source of positive depictions of love between men; as a paradigmatic exemplum for discussions of favouritism and deposition, and thereby a case study providing insight into the early modern use of medieval history; as a means of developing our understanding of literary texts such as Marlowe’s Edward II; and as a process that illuminates the literary nature of medieval and early modern historical narratives.

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