Studies conformity to the Church of England after the Reformation.

Prayer was regarded as an essential arm of the State and even a method of 'thought control' in early modern England. In the seventeenth Century, the period covered by Richard Ginn's study, Common Prayer dominated people's everyday lives at a national level, in communities and congregations, as well as privately in households. Ginn demonstrates how prayer represented the search for pattern, order and purpose in and between these different layers of society in a period when England was struggling to come to terms with political and social turbulence, rocked by the violence of the Civil War, unease over the Commonwealth and the uncertainties of the Restoration. Ginn argues that the importance of Prayer as a stabilizing force during these times of instability cannot be underestimated; it fostered a sense of national identity, an integrating principle at a vulnerable time for England, putting the social order in a greater context under a sovereign God.

The Parish Church was the primary site of religious practice throughout the early modern period. This was particularly so for the silent majority of the English population, who conformed outwardly to the successive religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What such public conformity might have meant has attracted less attention - and, ironically, is sometimes less well documented - than the non-conformity or semi-conformity of recusants, church-papists, Puritan conventiclers or separatists. In this volume, ten leading scholars of early modern religion explore the experience of parish worship in England during the Reformation and the century that followed it. As the contributors argue, parish worship in this period was of critical theological, cultural and even political importance. The volume's key themes are the interlocking importance of liturgy, music, the sermon and the parishioners' own bodies; the ways in which religious change was received, initiated, negotiated, embraced or subverted in local contexts; and the dialectic between practice and belief which helped to make both so contentious. The contributors - historians, historical theologians and literary scholars - through their commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, provide fruitful and revealing insights into this intersection of private and public worship. This collection is a sister volume to Martin and Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. Together these two volumes focus and drive forward scholarship on the lived experience of early modern religion, as it was practised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Examines the performative aspects of prayer and how they were represented in literature in early modern England.

Common Prayer explores the relationship between prayer and poetry in the century following the Protestant Reformation. Ramie Targoff challenges the conventional and largely misleading distinctions between the ritualized world of Catholicism and the more individualistic focus of Protestantism. Early modern England, she demonstrates, was characterized less by the triumph of religious interiority than by efforts to shape public forms of devotion. This provocatively revisionist argument will have major implications for early modern studies. Through readings of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Richard Hooker's Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry and his translations of the Psalms, John Donne's sermons and poems, and George Herbert's The Temple, Targoff uncovers the period's pervasive and often surprising interest in cultivating public and formalized models of worship. At the heart of this study lies an original and daring approach to understanding the origins of devotional poetry; Targoff shows how the projects of composing eloquent verse and improving liturgical worship come to be deeply intertwined. New literary practices, then, became a powerful means of forging common prayer, or controlling private and otherwise unmanageable expressions of faith.

Scholarly interest in the early modern sermon has flourished in recent years, driven by belated recognition of the crucial importance of preaching to religious, cultural, and political life in early modern Britain. The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon is the first book to survey this rich new field for both students and specialists. It is divided into sections devoted to sermon composition, delivery, and reception; sermons in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; English Sermons, 1500-1660; and English Sermons, 1660-1720. The twenty-five original essays it contains represent emerging areas of interest, including research on sermons in performance, pulpit censorship, preaching and ecclesiology, women and sermons, the social, economic, and literary history of sermons in manuscript and print, and non-elite preaching. The Handbook also responds to the recently recognised need to extend thinking about the 'early modern' across the watershed of the civil wars and interregnum, on both sides of which sermons and preaching remained a potent instrument of religious politics and a literary form of central importance to British culture. Complete with appendices of original documents of sermon theory, reception, and regulation, and generously illustrated, this is a comprehensive guide to the rhetorical, ecclesiastical, and historical precepts essential to the study of the early modern sermon in Britain.

• The first examination of prayer in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. • Written by leading international scholars from interdisciplinary perspectives of history, literature and theology. • Written from interdisciplinary perspectives of history, literature and theology.

Scholars increasingly recognise that understanding the history of religion means understanding worship and devotion as well as doctrines and polemics. Early modern Christianity consisted of its lived experience. This collection and its companion volume (Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain, ed. Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie) bring together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to discuss what that lived experience comprised, and what it meant. Private and domestic devotion - how early modern men and women practised their religion when they were not in church - is a vital and largely hidden subject. Here, historical, literary and theological scholars examine piety of conformist, non-conformist and Catholic early modern Christians, in a range of private and domestic settings, in both England and Scotland. The subjects under analysis include Bible-reading, the composition of prayers, the use of the psalms, the use of physical props for prayers, the pious interpretation of dreams, and the troubling question of what counted as religious solitude. The collection as a whole broadens and deepens our understanding of the patterns of early modern devotion, and of their meanings for early modern culture as a whole.

Mysticism in Early Modern England traces how mysticism featured in polemical and religious discourse in seventeenth-century England and explores how it came to be viewed as a source of sectarianism, radicalism, and, most significantly, religious enthusiasm.

The early modern period in Britain was defined by tremendous upheaval - the upending of monarchy, the unsettling of church doctrine, and the pursuit of a new method of inquiry based on an inductive experimental model. Political Turmoil: Early Modern Literature in Transition, 1623–1660 offers an innovative and ambitious re-appraisal of seventeenth-century British literature and history. Each of the contributors attempts to address the 'how' and 'why' of aesthetic change by focusing on political and cultural transformations. Instead of forging a grand narrative of continuity, the contributors attempt to piece together the often complex web of factors and events that contributed to developments in literary form and matter - as well as the social and religious changes that literature sometimes helped to occasion. These twenty chapters, reading across traditional periodization, demonstrate that early modern literary works - when they were conceived, as they were created, and after they circulated - were, above all, involved in various types of transitions.