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Introduction: toward a poetics of conversion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

Molly Murray
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
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Summary

Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one:

Inconstancie unnaturally hath begott

A constant habit: that when I would not

I change in vowes and in devotione.

(John Donne, Holy Sonnet 19)

The troubled speaker of Donne's quatrain could be early modern England itself: a nation with a “constant habit” of religious change. From the first emergence of Tudor Protestantism to the last years of the Stuart monarchy, England would officially “change in vowes and in devotione” numerous times according to the religion of its successive rulers, and often seemed poised on the verge of further national conversions. No matter what creed was imposed from above, early modern English Christianity stubbornly comprised various “contraryes [met] in one”: ceremonialist and iconoclast, recusant and orthodox, Anglican and Puritan, and especially the constantly evolving “contraryes” of Catholic and Reformed. The work of revisionist historians, most notably John Bossy, Christopher Haigh, and Eamon Duffy, has effectively dismantled the longstanding Whiggish account of the nation's relatively rapid and ultimately triumphant Protestantization. More recently, a new generation of “post-revisionists” has depicted England's long Reformation as a matter of myriad complex and contested allegiances, and provisional or partial redefinitions of terms. It is now no longer possible to imagine sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English religious culture as dominated by a single struggle between two monolithic churches, one destined to defeat the other.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature
Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden
, pp. 1 - 35
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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