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.

"This study sets the debate over clerical marriage within the context of the key debates of the Reformation, offering insights into the nature of the reformers' attempts to break with the Catholic past, and illustrating the relationship between English polemicists and their continental counterparts. The debate was not without practical consequences, and the author sets this study of polemical arguments alongside an analysis of the response of clergy in several English dioceses to the legalisation of clerical marriage in 1549. Conclusions are based upon the evidence of wills, visitation records, and the proceedings of the ecclesiastical courts."--Jacket

This book is a reconsideration of the practice of whitewashing church interiors during the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is the first detailed study of its kind which challenges the view that whitewash was always only a 'cheap coat of paint'. Victoria George pulls together several histories: of the colour white from the biblical period to the present, and ideas about the colour white in philosophy, theology, art, and architecture from antiquity to the present. She links them to case studies of the ways in which reformers Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin thought about colour in a careful analysis of the role of colour-thinking in their theological writings. The social meanings embodied in the word, 'whitewash' as it entered the printed media in the 17th century is explored as part of a chapter on the history of whitewashing itself. The long-term symbolic and aesthetic implications of the practice of whitewashing are examined in the larger context of material culture; in terms of their value as a metaphor, for both the Reformed Protestant and the Catholic in opposition to them; and for the uses to which whitewash has been put over time. George proposes that the practice was not only visually transformative but held importance for religious aesthetics as an agent of change, and for an aesthetics of minimalism generally, especially evident in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Victoria George received an MFA from the Royal College of Art (London), an MA from The Architectural Association, and a Ph.D. from Cambridge. She has taught religion and the arts at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

Cranmer's career set within the intellectual and theological context of 16c England. Fascinating collection of essays - Cranmer's career is set within the context of European politics and religion and his contributions to English liturgy and theology. The scope of the various essays is wide, encompassing his intellectual relations with Erasmus and Luther, his period of ambassadorial service on the Continent, his remarkable command of the English language at one of the most important periods in its development as a vehicle for intellectualand religious debate, and his extensive redrafting of a new code of law in place of the old ecclesiastical canon law. NOTES AND QUERIES Dr PAUL AYRIS is Director of Library Services at University College London; Dr DAVID SELWYN is Reader in Ecclesiastical History, University of Wales, Lampeter.