Long considered a highly distinctive English writer, Thomas Fuller (1608-1661) has not been treated as the significant historian he was. Fuller's The Church-History of Britain (1655) was the first comprehensive history of Christianity from antiquity to the upheavals of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the tumultuous events of the English civil wars. His numerous publications outside the genre of history--sermons, meditations, pamphlets on current thought and events--reflected and helped to shape public opinion during the revolutionary era in which he lived. Thomas Fuller: Discovering England's Religious Past highlights the fact that Fuller was a major contributor to the flowering of historical writing in early modern England. W. B. Patterson provides both a biography of Thomas Fuller's life and career in the midst of the most wrenching changes his country had ever experienced and a critical account of the origins, growth, and achievements of a new kind of history in England, a process to which he made a significant and original contribution. The volume begins with a substantial introduction dealing with memory, uses of the past, and the new history of England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Fuller was moved by the changes in Church and state that came during the civil wars that led to the trial and execution of King Charles I and to the Interregnum that followed. He sought to revive the memory of the English past, recalling the successes and failures of both distant and recent events. The book illuminates Fuller's focus on history as a means of understanding the present as well as the past, and on religion and its important place in English culture and society.

The Parker Society was the London-based Anglican society that printed in fifty-four volumes the works of the leading English Reformers of the sixteenth century. It was formed in 1840 and disbanded in 1855 when its work was completed. Named after Matthew Parker -- the first Elizabethan Archbishop of Canterbury, who was known as a great collector of books -- the stimulus for the foundation of the society was provided by the Tractarian movement, led by John Henry Newman and Edward B. Pusey. Some members of this movement spoke disparagingly of the English Reformation, and so some members of the Church of England felt the need to make available in an attractive form the works of the leaders of that Reformation.

This book provides new insights into how theatre responded to changing economic practices and structures. It reviews discourses on household management and commerce to create a rich context for the discussion of socio-economic actions and transactions in Macbeth, Othello, and Timon of Athens, as well as in city comedies by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. By approaching discourses on economy and commerce as complementary, the book opens up a diverse field of socio-economic practices, including the gendered division of duties in the household, new modes of valuation, and evolving credit instruments. Theatre provides unique access to this field. In contrast to practical and policy-oriented discourses, it addresses socio-economic change and its vicissitudes in a spirit of experimentation, testing the ethical limits of socio-economic action and accustoming audiences to the demands of a changing socio-economic reality. Theatre thus offers a vital contribution to the prehistory of political economy. On the London stages, self-interest emerges as a key motive of socio-economic action, and theatre playfully explores its ambiguous status as a partly rational and partly excessive force that has a new ordering function but also creates social conflict. At the same time, by staging the contradictory demands of ethics and efficiency in economic decision-making, early modern plays offer access to a changing understanding of prudence that has a Machiavellian touch: by aligning with the pursuit of private interest, prudence sheds some of its ethical content and becomes foremost an instrumental faculty.

Anglican eucharistic theology varies between the different philosophical assumptions of realism and nominalism. This book presents case studies from the Reformation to the Nineteenth Century and avoids the hermeneutic idealism of particular church parties by critically examining the Anglican eucharistic tradition.

Religious issues and discourse are key to an understanding of Shakespeare's plays and poems. This dictionary discusses over 1000 words and names in Shakespeare's works that have a religious connotation. Its unique word-by-word approach allows equal consideration of the full nuance of each of these words, from 'abbess' to 'zeal'. It also gradually reveals the persistence, the variety, and the sophistication of Shakespeare's religious usage. Frequent attention is given to the prominence of Reformation controversy in these words, and to Shakespeare's often ingenious and playful metaphoric usage of them. Theological commonplaces assume a major place in the dictionary, as do overt references to biblical figures, biblical stories and biblical place-names; biblical allusions; church figures and saints.

Starting from the early modern presumption of the incorporation of role with authority, Jean Lambert explores male teachers as representing and engaging with types of authority in English plays and dramatic entertainments by Shakespeare and his contemporaries from the late sixteenth to the early seventeenth century. This book examines these theatricalized portraits in terms of how they inflect aspects of humanist educational culture and analyzes those ideas and practices of humanist pedagogy that carry implications for the traditional foundations of authority. Teachers in Early Modern English Drama is a fascinating study through two centuries of teaching Shakespeare and his contemporaries and will be a valuable resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, writing, and culture.