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Nicole R. Rice

Nicole Rice’s original study analyzes the role played by late medieval English hospitals as sites of literary production and cultural contestation.

The hospitals of late medieval England defy easy categorization. They were institutions of charity, medical care, and liturgical commemoration. At the same time, hospitals were cultural spaces sponsoring the performance of drama, the composition of medical texts, and the reading of devotional prose and vernacular poetry. Such practices both reflected and connected the disparate groups—regular religious, ill and poor people, well-off retirees—that congregated in hospitals. Nicole Rice’s The Medieval Hospital offers the first book-length study of the place of hospitals in English literary history and cultural practice.

Rice highlights three English hospitals as porous sites whose practices translated into textual engagements with some of urban society’s most pressing concerns: charity, health, devotion, and commerce. Within these institutions, medical compendia treated the alarming bodies of women and religious anthologies translated Augustinian devotional practices for lay readers. Looking outward, religious drama and socially charged poetry publicized and interrogated hospitals’ caring functions within urban charitable economies. Hospitals provided the auspices, audiences, and authors of such disparate literary works, propelling these texts into urban social life. Between ca. 1350 and ca. 1550, English hospitals saw massive changes in their fortunes, from the devastation of the Black Death, to various fifteenth-century reform initiatives, to the creeping dissolutions of religious houses under Henry VIII and Edward VI. This volume investigates how hospitals defined and defended themselves with texts and in some cases reinvented themselves, using literary means to negotiate changed religious landscapes.

University of Notre Dame Press

ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern

The Medieval Hospital: Literary Culture and Community in England, 1350-1550

Robert E. Stillman

This book challenges the adequacy of identifying religious identity with confessional identity.

The Reformation complicated the issue of religious identity, especially among Christians for whom confessional violence at home and religious wars on the continent had made the darkness of confessionalization visible. Robert E. Stillman explores the identity of “Christians without names, ” as well as their agency as cultural actors in order to recover their consequence for early modern religious, political, and poetic history.

Stillman argues that questions of religious identity have dominated historical and literary studies of the early modern period for over a decade. But his aim is not to resolve the controversies about early modern religious identity by negotiating new definitions of English Protestants, Catholics, or “moderate” and “radical” Puritans. Instead, he provides an understanding of the culture that produced such a heterogeneous range of believers by attending to particular figures, such as Antonio del Corro, John Harington, Henry Constable, and Aemilia Lanyer, who defined their pious identity by refusing to assume a partisan label for themselves. 

All of the figures in this study attempted as Christians to situate themselves beyond, between, or against particular confessions for reasons that both foreground pious motivations and inspire critical scrutiny. The desire to move beyond confessions enabled the birth of new political rhetorics promising inclusivity for the full range of England’s Christians and gained special prominence in the pursuit of a still-imaginary Great Britain. Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England is a book that early modern literary scholars need to read. It will also interest students and scholars of history and religion.

Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England

Jill P. Ingram

Festive Enterprise reveals marketplace pressures at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama.

In Festive Enterprise, Jill P. Ingram merges the history of economic thought with studies of theatricality and spectatorship to examine how English Renaissance plays employed forms and practices from medieval and traditional entertainments to signal the expectation of giving from their audiences. Resisting the conventional divide between medieval and Renaissance, Festive Enterprise takes a trans-Reformation view of dramaturgical strategies, which reflected the need to generate both income and audience assent. By analyzing a wide range of genres (such as civic ceremonial, mummings, interludes, scripted plays, and university drama) and a diverse range of venues (including great halls, city streets, the Inns of Court, and public playhouses), Ingram demonstrates how early moderns borrowed medieval money-gatherers’ techniques to signal communal obligations and rewards for charitable support of theatrical endeavors. Ingram shows that economics and drama cannot be considered as separate enterprises in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Rather, marketplace pressures were at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama alike.

Festive Enterprise is an original study that traces how economic forces drove creativity in drama from medieval civic processions and guild cycle plays to the early Renaissance. It will appeal to scholars of medieval and early modern drama, theater historians, religious historians, scholars of Renaissance drama, and students in English literature, drama, and theater.

Festive Enterprise: The Business of Drama in Medieval and Renaissance England

Karen A. Winstead

In Fifteenth-Century Lives, Karen A. Winstead identifies and explores a major shift in the writing of Middle English saints’ lives. As she demonstrates, starting in the 1410s and ’20s, hagiography became more character-oriented, more morally complex, more deeply embedded in history, and more politically and socially engaged. Further, it became more self-consciously literary and began to feature women more prominently—and not only traditional virgin martyrs but also matrons and contemporary holy women. Winstead shows that this literature placed a premium on scholarship and teaching. Hagiography celebrated educators and scholars to a greater extent than ever before and became a vehicle for educating readers about Christian dogma. Focusing both on authors well known, such as John Lydgate and Margery Kempe, and on others less known, such as Osbern Bokenham and John Capgrave, Winstead argues that the values promoted by fifteenth-century hagiography helped to shape the reformist impulses that eventually produced the Reformation. Moreover, these values continued to influence post-Reformation hagiography, both Protestant and Catholic, well into the seventeenth century.

In exploring these trends in fifteenth-century hagiography, identifying the factors that contributed to their emergence, and tracing their influence in later periods, Fifteenth-Century Lives marks an important contribution to revisionary scholarship on fifteenth-century literature. It will appeal to students and scholars of late medieval English literature and late medieval religion.

Fifteenth-Century Lives: Writing Sainthood in England

David Aers

Concepts of predestination and reprobation were central issues in the Protestant Reformation, especially within Calvinist churches, and thus have often been studied primarily in the historical context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Versions of Election: From Langland and Aquinas to Calvin and Milton, David Aers takes a longer view of these key issues in Christian theology. With meticulous attention to the texts of medieval and early modern theologians, poets, and popular writers, this book argues that we can understand the full complexity of the history of various teachings on the doctrine of election only through a detailed diachronic study that takes account of multiple periods and disciplines. Throughout this wide-ranging study, Aers examines how various versions of predestination and reprobation emerge and re-emerge in Christian tradition from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. Starting with incisive readings of medieval works by figures such as William Langland, Thomas Aquinas, and Robert Holcot, and continuing on to a nuanced consideration of texts by Protestant thinkers and writers, including John Calvin, Arthur Dent, William Twisse, and John Milton (among others), Aers traces the twisting and unpredictable history of prominent versions of predestination and reprobation across the divide of the Reformation and through a wide variety of genres. In so doing, Aers offers not only a detailed study of election but also important insights into how Christian tradition is made, unmade, and remade.

Versions of Election is an original, cross-disciplinary study that touches upon the fields of literature, theology, ethics, and politics, and makes important contributions to the study of both medieval and early modern intellectual and literary history. It will appeal to academics in these fields, as well as clergy and other educated readers from a wide variety of denominations.

Versions of Election: From Langland and Aquinas to Calvin and Milton

Nancy Bradley Warren

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras adopts a comparative, boundary-crossing approach to consider one of the most canonical of literary figures, Geoffrey Chaucer. The idea that Chaucer is an international writer raises no eyebrows. Similarly, a claim that Chaucer's writings participate in English confessional controversies in his own day and afterward provokes no surprise. This book breaks new ground by considering Chaucer's Continental interests as they inform his participation in religious debates concerning such subjects as female spirituality and Lollardy. Similarly, this project explores the little-studied ways in which those who took religious vows, especially nuns, engaged with works by Chaucer and in the Chaucerian tradition. Furthermore, while the early modern "Protestant Chaucer" is a familiar figure, this book explores the creation and circulation of an early modern "Catholic Chaucer" that has not received much attention. This study seeks to fill gaps in Chaucer scholarship by situating Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition in an international textual environment of religious controversy spanning four centuries and crossing both the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. This book presents a nuanced analysis of the high stakes religiopolitical struggle inherent in the creation of the canon of English literature, a struggle that participates in the complex processes of national identity formation in Europe and the New World alike.

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

Julie Paulson

In Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play, Julie Paulson sheds new light on medieval constructions of the self as they emerge from within a deeply sacramental culture. The book examines the medieval morality play, a genre that explicitly addresses the question of what it means to be human and takes up the ritual traditions of confession and penance, long associated with medieval interiority, as its primary subjects.

The morality play is allegorical drama, a “theater of the word," that follows a penitential progression in which an everyman figure falls into sin and is eventually redeemed through penitential ritual. Written during an era of reform when the ritual life of the medieval Church was under scrutiny, the morality plays as a whole insist upon a self that is first and foremost performed—constructed, articulated, and known through ritual and other communal performances that were interwoven into the fabric of medieval life.

This fascinating look at the genre of the morality play will be of keen interest to scholars of medieval drama and to those interested in late medieval culture, sacramentalism, penance and confession, the history of the self, and theater and performance.

Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play

Matthew J. Smith

In Performance and Religion in Early Modern England, Matthew J. Smith seeks to expand our view of “the theatrical.” By revealing the creative and phenomenal ways that performances reshaped religious material in early modern England, he offers a more inclusive and integrative view of performance culture.

Smith argues that early modern theatrical and religious practices are better understood through a comparative study of multiple performance types: not only commercial plays but also ballads, jigs, sermons, pageants, ceremonies, and festivals. Our definition of performance culture is augmented by the ways these events looked, sounded, felt, and even tasted to their audiences. This expanded view illustrates how the post-Reformation period utilized new capabilities brought about by religious change and continuity alike. Smith posits that theatrical practice at this time was acutely aware of its power not just to imitate but to work performatively, and to create spaces where audiences could both imaginatively comprehend and immediately enact their social, festive, ethical, and religious overtures.

Each chapter in the book builds on the previous ones to form a cumulative overview of early modern performance culture. This book is unique in bringing this variety of performance types, their archives, venues, and audiences together at the crossroads of religion and theater in early modern England. Scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and those generally interested in the Renaissance will enjoy this book.

Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street

Lilla Grindlay

The belief that the Virgin Mary was bodily assumed to be crowned as heaven’s Queen has been celebrated in the liturgy and literature of England since the fifth century. The upheaval of the Reformation brought radical changes in the beliefs surrounding the assumption and coronation, both of which were eliminated from state-approved liturgy.

Queen of Heaven examines canonical as well as obscure images of the Blessed Mother that present fresh evidence of the incompleteness of the English Reformation. Through an analysis of works by writers such as Edmund Spenser, Henry Constable, Sir John Harington, and the writers of the early modern rosary books, which were contraband during the Reformation, Grindlay finds that these images did not simply disappear during this time as lost “Catholic” symbols, but instead became sources of resistance and controversy, reflecting the anxieties triggered by the religious changes of the era.

Grindlay’s study of the Queen of Heaven affords an insight into England’s religious pluralism, revealing a porousness between medieval and early modern perspectives toward the Virgin and dispelling the notion that Catholic and Protestant attitudes on the subject were completely different. Grindlay reveals the extent to which the potent and treasured image of the Queen of Heaven was impossible to extinguish and remained of widespread cultural significance. Queen of Heaven will appeal to an academic audience, but its fresh, uncomplicated style will also engage intelligent, well-informed readers who have an interest in the Virgin Mary and in English Reformation history.

Queen of Heaven: The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin in Early Modern English Writing

Jay Zysk

Shadow and Substance is the first book to present a sustained examination of the relationship between Eucharistic controversy and English drama across the Reformation divide. In this compelling interdisciplinary study, Jay Zysk contends that the Eucharist is not just a devotional object or doctrinal crux, it also shapes a way of thinking about physical embodiment and textual interpretation in theological and dramatic contexts.

Regardless of one’s specific religious identity, to speak of the Eucharist during that time was to speak of dynamic interactions between body and sign. In crossing periodic boundaries and revising familiar historical narratives, Shadow and Substance challenges the idea that the Protestant Reformation brings about a decisive shift from the flesh to the word, the theological to the poetic, and the sacred to the secular. The book also adds to studies of English drama and Reformation history by providing an account of how Eucharistic discourse informs understandings of semiotic representation in broader cultural domains.

This bold study offers fresh, imaginative readings of theology, sermons, devotional books, and dramatic texts from a range of historical, literary, and religious perspectives. Each of the book’s chapters creates a dialogue between different strands of Eucharistic theology and different varieties of English drama. Spanning England’s long reformation, these plays—some religious in subject matter, others far more secular—reimagine semiotic struggles that stem from the controversies over Christ’s body at a time when these very concepts were undergoing significant rethinking in both religious and literary contexts.

Shadow and Substance will have a wide appeal, especially to those interested in medieval and early modern drama and performance, literary theory, Reformation history, and literature and religion.