Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History
Abstract
This title is part of the the Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature series, edited by Paul Strohm. This book examines cultural history and cultural change in the period between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, a period spanning the medieval and Renaissance. It takes a dynamically diachronic approach to cultural history and brings the perspective of a longue durée to literary history. It redraws historical categories and offers a fresh perspective on historical temporality by challenging the stereotypes that might encourage any iconographic division between medieval and Renaissance modes of thinking. It also discusses the concept of nation in relation to three issues that have particular relevance to cross-period “cultural reformations”: modernity, language, and England and Englishness. The book is organized into nine sections: Histories, Spatialities, Doctrines, Legalities, Outside the Law, Literature, Communities, Labor, and Selfhood. Each contributor focuses on a theme that links pre- and post-Reformation cultures, from anachronism and place to travel, vernacular theology, conscience, theater, monasticism, childbirth, passion, style, despair, autobiography, and reading. The essays highlight the creative and destructive anxieties as well as the legacy of the Reformation.
Keywords:
Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature,
cultural history,
cultural change,
Renaissance,
literary history,
Reformation,
anachronism,
vernacular theology,
monasticism,
autobiography,
theater
Bibliographic Information
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Print Publication Date:
- Jun 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199212484
- Published online:
- Nov 2015
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199212484.001.0001
Editors
James Simpson,
editor
James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University (2004–). Formerly Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, he is an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was educated at Scotch College Melbourne, and the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford. His most recent books are Reform and Cultural Revolution, being volume 2 in the Oxford English Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2002), Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Harvard University Press, 2007), and Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Brian Cummings,
editor
Brian Cummings is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and was founding Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies, 2004–2008. He is the author of The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (2007), the editor, with James Simpson, of Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (2010), and has just completed an edition of The Book of Common Prayer for Oxford World's Classics. He is currently the holder of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for 2009–2012, researching his next book, The Confessions of Shakespeare.
