On the night of November 4th 1605, the English authorities uncovered an alleged plot by a group of discontented Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the lords, princes, queen and king in attendance. The failure of the plot is celebrated to this day and is known as Guy Fawkes Day. In Poets, Players and Preachers, Anne James explores the literary responses to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in poetry, drama, and sermons. This book is the first full-length study of the literary repercussions of the conspiracy. By analyzing the genres of poems, plays, and sermons produced between 1605 and 1688, the author argues that not only did the continuous reinterpretation of the conspiracy serve religious and political purposes but that such literary reinterpretations produced generic changes.

Old St Paul’s and Culture is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that looks predominantly at the culture of Old St Paul’s and its wider precinct in the early modern period, while also providing important insights into the Cathedral’s medieval institution. The chapters examine the symbolic role of the site in England’s Christian history, the London book trade based in and around St Paul’s, the place of St Paul’s commercial indoor playhouse within the performance culture of sixteenth and seventeenth-century London, and the intersection of religion and politics through events such as civic ceremonies and occasional sermons. Through the organising theme of culture, the authors demonstrate how the site, as well as the people and trades occupying the precinct, can be positioned within wider fields of representations, practices, and social networks. A focus on St Paul’s is therefore about more than just the specific site on Ludgate Hill: it is about those practices and representations connected to it, which either extended beyond or originated in places other than the Cathedral environs. This points to the range of localised, regional, national, and transnational relationships in which the precinct and its people were situated and to which they contributed.

This first biography of Racine in over half a century for an English-language readership also traces the impact of Racine over three centuries in England as well as France. The plays and their reception are reviewed, using contextual approaches as part of each phase of Racine's life-story, with excerpts and quotations translated. Racine's upbringing and work as poet and historiographer are related to the France of Louis XIV, to audiences and to advancement for this 'man from nowhere', with parallels in Britain and elsewhere. Changing attitudes to Racine are traced across the centuries, across literary movements and on stage, including recent productions. The book provides insights in the specialist field of Racine studies and seventeenth-century French literature and theatre, in comparative literary studies, particularly between France and Restoration England, and to the interaction of Racine and European cultural movements to the present day.

This study utilises John Donne’s works concerning the Jacobean Settlement as a contextualised case study to examine a seriously pressing issue in contemporary society: the issue of Catholic loyalism post-1603 and the disputes that thistopic sparked over the matter of conformity.Altman examines Donne’s polemic in line with the vast expanse of literature relating to the pamphlet war and situates Donne’s arguments within a strong contemporary tradition of conformist thought. Within this context, the study argues that Donne articulated a theory of royal absolutism that would have struck home with many contemporaries who, whether Catholic or not, were faced with a regime determined to bring them into conformity. It further contends that the religio-political standpoint represented by Donne was not only fairly obvious to the English state but was also widely accepted by it.

Conceived in optimism but baptized with blood, Jesuit missions to the British Isles and Ireland withstood government repression, internal squabbles, theological disputes, political machinations, and overbearing prelates to survive to the Society’s sSuppression in 1773 and beyond.

Die Studie analysiert die politische Dimension protestantischer und römisch-katholischer Predigten an den Höfen von Karl II. (1660–1685) und Jakob II. (1685–1688/89), vor dem englischen Parlament und in den Kirchen Londons. Vor dem Hintergrund ungelöster politischer und konfessioneller Spannungen nach der Restauration, suchten Predigten mit Kritik an Machthabern und deren Beratung, Einfluss auf den religiösen und politischen Diskurs zu nehmen. Das Verhältnis von geistlicher und weltlicher Macht sowie der Umgang mit der multikonfessionellen Situation in England sind dabei zentrale Themen. Das Vorhandensein einer differenzierten Rezeptionskultur, für die Predigten als einmalige Aufführung und als Texte bedeutsam waren, zeigt die fortbestehende Wichtigkeit der Predigt in der Restauration. In this volume Christoph Ketterer analyses political preaching during the reigns of Charles II (1660–1685) and James II (1685–1688/89). He argues that the political importance of sermons preached at court, before Parliament and in the churches of London, is based on the unsolved political, and confessional tensions of the era. Preachers relatively freely discussed questions of religious tolerance, models of political power, and could offer counsel and criticism to those in power. They were in a position to influence the political and religious discourse of Restoration England. In addition, a refined culture of reception existed, and listeners, readers as well as preachers were acutely aware of the sermon genre's performative dimension. Sermons therefore continued to be of central importance for the political and religious discourse of the Restoration.

This is the first comprehensive study of sympathy in the early modern period, providing a deeply researched and interdisciplinary examination of its development in Anglophone literature and culture. It argues that the term sympathy was used to refer to an active and imaginative sharing of affect considerably earlier than previous critical and historical accounts have suggested. Investigating a wide range of texts and genres, including prose fiction, sermons, poetic complaint, drama, political tracts, and scientific treatises, Richard Meek demonstrates the ways in which sympathy in the period is bound up with larger debates about society, religion, and identity. He also reveals the extent to which early modern emotions were not simply humoral or grounded in the body, but rather relational, comparative, and intertextual. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Renaissance literature and history, the history of emotions, and the history and philosophy of science.

This book foregrounds the pressures that three transformative technologies in the long sixteenth century—the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass—placed on long-held literary practices, as well as on cultural and social structures. Sheila J. Nayar disinters the clash between humanist drives and print culture; places the rise of gunpowder warfare beside the equivalent rise in chivalric romance; and illustrates fraught attempts by humanists to hold on to classicist traditions in the face of seismic changes in navigation. Lively and engaging, this study illuminates not only how literature responded to radical technological changes, but also how literature was sometimes forced, through unanticipated destabilizations, to reimagine itself. By tracing the early modern human’s inter-animation with print, powder, and compass, Nayar exposes how these technologies assisted in producing new ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the world.

Prayer divided seventeenth-century England. Anglican Conformists such as Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor upheld set forms of prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, a book designed to unite the nation in worship. Puritan Reformers and Dissenters such as John Milton and John Bunyan rejected the prayer book and advocated for extemporaneous or free prayer. In 1645, the mainly Puritan Long Parliament proscribed the Book of Common Prayer and dismantled the Anglican Church in the midst of civil war. This led Anglican poets and liturgists to defend their tradition with energy and erudition in print. In 1662, with monarchy restored, the mainly Anglican Cavalier Parliament reinstated the Church and its prayer book to impose religious uniformity. This galvanized English Nonconformity and Dissent and gave rise to a vibrant literary counter-tradition. Addressing this fascinating history, David Gay examines competing claims to spiritual gifts and graces in polemical texts and their influence on prayer and poetry. Amid the contention of differing voices, the disputed connection of poetry and prayer, imagination and religion, emerges as a central tension in early modern literature and culture.