| Portion of title |
Heresy in early modern English literature and culture |
| Contents |
Introduction -- Part I : The specter of heresy and religious conflict in English Reformation literary culture -- Religious demonization, anti-heresy polemic, and Thomas More -- Anne Askew and the culture of heresy-hunting in Henry VIII's England -- Burning heretics and fashioning martyrs : religious violence in John Foxe and Reformation England -- The specter of heretics in later Elizabethan and Jacobean writing -- Part II : The war against heresy in Milton's England -- The specter of heresy and blasphemy in the English Revolution : from heresiographers to the spectacle of James Nayler -- The specter of heresy and the struggle for toleration : John Goodwin, William Walwyn, and Richard Overton -- John Milton : toleration and "Fantastic terrors of sect and schism" -- Fears of heresy, blasphemy, and religious schism in Milton's culture and Paradise lost -- Epilogue : making heretics and Bunyan's Vanity Fair. |
| Abstract |
"Treacherous Faith offers a new and ambitious cross-disciplinary account of the ways writers from the early English Reformation to the Restoration generated, sustained, or questioned cultural anxieties about heresy and heretics. This book examines the dark, often brutal story of defining, constructing, and punishing heretics in early modern England, and especially the ways writers themselves contributed to or interrogated the politics of religious fear-mongering and demonizing. It illuminates the terrors and anxieties early modern writers articulated and the fantasies they constructed about pernicious heretics and pestilent heresies in response to the Reformation's shattering of Western Christendom. Treacherous Faith analyzes early modern writers who contributed to cultural fears about the contagion of heresy and engaged in the making of heretics, as well as writers who challenged the constructions of heretics and the culture of religious fear-mongering." -- Publisher website. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 438-468) and index. |
| LCCN | 2012277988 |
| ISBN | 9780199203390 (hardcover) |
| ISBN | 0199203393 (hardcover) |
