Chapter 1 investigates the English Reformation conversation on contentment, beginning with early sixteenth-century translations of St. Paul’s epistles and Martin Luther’s works and ending with texts from the English Revolution. Renaissance authors did not invent contentedness, but they drew upon available traditions to reinvent a contentment consistent with Protestant ideals and adapted to the needs of English audiences. Chapter 1 charts the role of contentment in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Charles I’s Eikon Basilike, and Hobbes’s Leviathan, as well as an archive of sermons and theological treatises. First, it traces the notion of Christian contentment to two passages in 1 Timothy 6 and Philippians 4, which featured heavily in the cultural discourse. Next, it examines how reformers reconcile contentment, suffering, and even martyrdom. Then, it analyzes the relationship between contentment and contemporary theories of embodiment and the passions. Finally, it shows how authors extended individual contentedness to the body politic. During the Renaissance, contentment became a prominent Protestant principle of fortifying self and society.

Chapter 3 redirects the scholarly trend of characterizing Spenser’s works as defined by personal and political discontent, and it instead examines their relationship to sixteenth-century models of contentedness. This study of The Faerie Queene and the Complaints volume demonstrates that Spenser privileges a situational contentment. In Book I, neither Red Cross nor Una can maintain contentment at all times, but the emotion punctuates experiences like productive sadness and pious anger, and it protects against overly destructive passions. While Book I presents contentedness coexisting with other emotions, Mother Hubberds Tale imagines an uneasy alliance between contentment and complaint. Finally, through the character of Melibee in Book VI, Spenser makes his most explicit case for contentment, yet it is embedded in an episode that emphasizes the sway of sexual desire and the intense threat it can pose when unrestrained. In his last concerted representation of contentment, Spenser emphasizes its appeal and fragility. Thus, Chapter 3 highlights the affective continuities between the 1590 and 1596 Faerie Queene, and between Spenser’s major and minor works.

Chapter 4 examines the relationship between individual, communal, and political contentment in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare presents contentment as most successful when shared between selves, whereas an overly possessive attitude toward one’s contentment jeopardizes its existence. As You Like It depicts a commonwealth built upon the bonds between subjects and preserved through mutual contentment. By contrast, the malcontent Iago identifies vulnerabilities in Othello’s understanding of contentedness to destroy his relationships with Desdemona and Venetian society writ large. In As You Like It, communal contentment counteracts the social threat of envy, but in Othello jealousy distorts content beyond the point of recognition or redemption. Shakespeare does not shy away from the challenges to contentment, but he attempts to provide audiences with collective experiences of positive emotion and to unite them in the face of tragedy. Though recent critics have described the Renaissance theatre as an arena for emotional extremes, this chapter broadens our perspective of Shakespearean emotion to include a contentment that shares the stage with other affects.

The introduction situates the book’s intellectual project within what scholars have described as an “affective turn” or “emotional turn” across disciplines and, more specifically, a recent attention to the relations between emotion, religion, and literature in the Renaissance. The introduction calls attention to a disproportionate scholarly focus on negative affect, and it provides the intellectual framework for the close readings of religious and literary texts in the chapters that follow. Theorists and literary critics have equated contentedness with passivity and resignation, but I reveal a model of contentment as dynamic, protective, and productive. Although Renaissance articulations were indebted to preceding philosophical schools, especially Stoicism, the English Reformation defined the ways in which writers constructed contentment from available texts and traditions. Reformers explored contentedness as an emotional means to preserve the self and prepare the individual to endure and engage the outside world. These efforts existed alongside representations and revisions of contentment by authors like Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, especially in their pastoral works.

Chapter 2 explores how Sidney uses literary form for passionate experimentation and develops a sophisticated affective vocabulary that intersects with the reformation of contentment. Neither The Old Arcadia nor the revised New Arcadia reproduce Protestant concepts of contentedness or proselytize an idealized Christian psychology. Instead, in The Old Arcadia Sidney pursues the strategies of romance, including the “wandering,” “error,” and “trial” described by Patricia Parker, and arrives at counter-intuitive and potentially scandalizing conclusions about the emotion. More specifically, Sidney aligns both sexual satisfaction and virtuous endurance with contentment, and he makes the character Pyrocles’s erotic fulfillment in Books 3 and 4 instrumental to his pious suffering in Book 5. However, in The New Arcadia, Sidney displaces the most extreme manifestations of desire from the four young lovers onto their antagonists, and he disentangles contentment and constancy in the face of adversity. By pushing contentment to the pastoral peripheries to emphasize the revised work’s more chivalric tenor, Sidney recoils from his most innovative contribution to the Renaissance discourse.

Chapter 5 illuminates the literary, political, and ecological significance of Milton’s depiction of contentment. In Eikonoklastes, Milton responds directly to the appropriation of contentment discourse in Eikon Basilike. Charles I had identified his opponents as malcontents and positioned himself as a contented martyr-king. By contrast, Milton describes Charles’s discontent as the immediate cause of the English Civil War and as the epitome of tyranny. In Paradise Lost, he adds an environmental dimension to the religious and republican significances of content and discontent. The language of self-containment has limited applications for unfallen Adam and Eve, who interact harmoniously with their environment. Satanic discontent reconstitutes the experience of selfhood as a space defined in opposition to the natural world. Satan perverts contentment and finds it impossible to relate to the world around him in any way other than as a conqueror. When Adam and Eve choose to sin, they emulate diabolic discontent and subject all of creation to imperialism. Milton’s revision of Christian contentment reveals his efforts to endure, lament, and resist the Restoration.

While the five chapters examine aspects of early modern contentment that often challenge reigning critical and theoretical assumptions, the conclusion revisits the significance of those assumptions. In this way, the book not only provides a literary and intellectual history of contentedness in the Renaissance, but it also explores the merits such contentment might have in a contemporary context. Just as an emergent Protestant culture and an outpouring of English literature on page and stage precipitated widespread interest in contentedness, subsequent shifts in philosophy, science, global affairs, and artistic sensibilities led to yet another reappraisal. The consequences of that reappraisal, the deformation of contentment, persist to the present day.