Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton
Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton
$55.00
USDThis book examines the relationship between literature and religious conflict in seventeenth-century England, showing how literary texts grew out of and addressed the contemporary controversy over ceremonial worship. Examining the meaning and function of religion in seventeenth-century England, the book shows that the conflicts over religious ceremony which were central to the English Revolution had broad cultural significance; they involved not only conflicting attitudes towards art and the body, but a clash between different ways of constructing social relations, human identity, and the relation of the Protestant present to the Jewish, pagan and Catholic past. Achsah Guibbory's readings of Herbert, Herrick, Browne, Donne and Milton explain how their writings show what was at stake in the conflict over ceremonial worship, and how different ideas of community turned on that conflict.
- Historically contextual rereading of major seventeenth-century poets, shedding new light on their work
- Addresses notions of ceremony and community, much discussed in current historical and cultural debates
- Explores the symbolic, cultural significance of the religious conflicts that were an important part of the English Revolution
Reviews & endorsements
"In this well-written and informative book, the author brings together cultural history, the history of religion, and formalist literary analysis to show how imaginative literature functioned in this conflict. A good choice for graduate and research collections supporting studies of 17th-century religious literature." Choice
"...Guibbory is able to enter sympathetically into these several spiritualities while maintaining an appropriate critical perspective and an unostentatious professionalism." R.D. Stock, Christianity & Literature
"Achsah Guibbory's focused and cogently argued Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England serves to remind us of the function of first-rate criticism to provide us with that fresh perspective which enlivens and re-invigorates our approach to often-read works." Seventeenth-Century News
"This learned and imaginative book should prove of major interest to all students of Stuart England and the Interregnum. Its originality, and much of its importance, derive from its fusion of literary and historical evidence; its sensible reassessment of recent scholarship on the bearing of conflicting ideas of ceremonial worship on concepts of religious, cultural, and social community; and its fresh readings and reinterpretations of four major authors of mid-century England." John M. Steadman, Albion
"...a book that is a comprehensively researched, impeccably organized, clearly written, and persuasively argued analysis of some of the key conflicts that energized seventeenth-century England....wonderfully successful. Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton provocatively reimmerses seventeenth-century literature in its broader ideological context and persuasively shows that the properly informed reader of Herbert, Browne, Herrick, and Milton must always be alert to the complex and inextricably mixed mode of their works: as aesthetic artifacts, devotional meditations, and philosophical and political polemics." Sidney Gottlieb, George Herbert Journal
"This valuable book focuses on the implications for literary culture of one of the most divisive issues in seventeenth-century England, the role of ceremony and ritual in religious worship. Written in a clear, engaging style, Ceremony and Community makes an important contribution to our understanding of literary and religious culture in seventeenth-century England. The book's sympathetic account of the ceremonialist mentality is especially appealling. The book's treatment of puritan ideology, if less satisfying, is at any rate certain to provoke further discussion." Kevin J. Donovan, Ben Jonson Journal
Product details
November 2006Paperback
9780521032445
292 pages
227 × 150 × 15 mm
0.438kg
1 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Reading the conflicts: ceremony, ideology and the meaning of religion
- 3. George Herbert: devotion in The Temple and the art of contradiction
- 4. Robert Herrick: religious experience in the 'Temple' of Hesperides
- 5. Sir Thomas Browne: the promiscuous embrace of ritual order
- 6. John Milton: carnal idolatry and the reconfiguration of worship, part I, 1634–1660
- 7. John Milton: carnal idolatry and the reconfiguration of worship, part II, after the Restoration: the major poems
- Notes
- Index.
