English Catholic Women Writers--37132 English 3382 Karen Gevirtz: Reading Shelf

Susan Burney (1755-1800), daughter of the music historian Charles Burney and sister of the novelist Frances (Fanny) Burney, was a knowledgeable enthusiast for music, particularly for opera, with the ability to capture vividly musical life and the personalities involved in it. Her extensive journals and letters, a selection from which is presented here, provide a striking portrait of social, domestic and cultural life in London, the Home Counties and in Ireland in the late eighteenth century. terest to musicologists and historians.

Yielding a wealth of new material concerning the lives of English nuns in exile in the Low Countries between 1619 and 1794, this volume of religious women's Lives is based on previously unpublished manuscripts. An extensive introduction provides historical and cultural contexts for an understanding of the Lives, and a reappraisal of the self-representation of religious women and of paradigms of life-writing in, and beyond, the early modern period.

The tumultuous climate of early modern England had a profound effect on its Catholic population's domestic life, social customs, literary inventions, and political arguments. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism explores the broad spectrum of the early modern English Catholic experience, presenting fresh and often startling assessments of the most problematic topics in post-Reformation English Catholicism. The contributors to this volume #150; all leading or rising scholars of early modern studies #150; conceptualize English Catholicism as a hazardous series of contested territories divided by shifting boundaries, requiring Catholics to navigate with vigilance and diplomacy their status as 'insiders' or 'outsiders.' This collection also presents new ways to understand the connections between reformist and Catholic inflections in the emerging canon of English poetry, despite the eventual marginalization of Catholic poets in English literary history. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism ably demonstrates the profoundly experimental as well as recuperative character of early modern English Catholicism.

This collection of essays explores the survival of Catholic culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England--a time of Protestant domination and sometimes persecution. Contributors examine not only devotional, political, autobiographical, and other written texts, but also material objects such as church vestments, architecture, and symbolic spaces. Among the topics discussed in this volume are the influence of Latin culture on Catholic women, Marian devotion, the activities of Catholics in continental seminaries and convents, the international context of English Catholicism, and the influential role of women as maintainers of Catholic culture in a hostile religious and political environment.   Catholic Culture in Early Modern England makes an important contribution to the ongoing project of historians and literary scholars to rewrite the cultural history of post-Reformation English Catholicism.

As an author who lived during a historical period in which women writers were considered, at best, frivolous or, at worst, immoral, Inchbald worked carefully to mould her own reputation in conservative, dignified terms. As a practicing Catholic living in an intolerant atmosphere of Anglican anxiety over challenges to the official church and government, she had even more incentive to present a public image that was eminently moral and that - at least ostensibly - supported established, conservative codes of conduct. In reality, however, Inchbald seems to have held liberal views and is easily aligned to more radical writers such as William Godwin.Through an examination of her complete works and public response to them, Robertson gauges the extent of Inchbald's reputation as the dignified 'Mrs Inchbald', as well as providing a clear sense of what it meant to be a female Romantic writer. In recent decades, the prose and dramatic writings of women like Inchbald have generated considerable scholarly interest, both in their own right and for their connection with other important Romantic figures. This project aims to expand the scope of that scholarly inquiry.

The tumultuous climate of early modern England had a profound effect on its Catholic population's domestic life, social customs, literary inventions, and political arguments. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism explores the broad spectrum of the early modern English Catholic experience, presenting fresh and often startling assessments of the most problematic topics in post-Reformation English Catholicism. The contributors to this volume #150; all leading or rising scholars of early modern studies #150; conceptualize English Catholicism as a hazardous series of contested territories divided by shifting boundaries, requiring Catholics to navigate with vigilance and diplomacy their status as 'insiders' or 'outsiders.' This collection also presents new ways to understand the connections between reformist and Catholic inflections in the emerging canon of English poetry, despite the eventual marginalization of Catholic poets in English literary history. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism ably demonstrates the profoundly experimental as well as recuperative character of early modern English Catholicism.

"To a rational being there can be but one rule of conduct, justice, and one mode of ascertaining that rule, the exercise of his understanding." Godwin's Political Justice is the founding text of philosophical anarchism. Written in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, it exemplifies the political optimism felt by many writers and intellectuals. Godwin drew on enlightenment ideas and his background in religious dissent for theprinciples of justice, utility, and the sanctity of individual judgement that drove his powerful critique of all forms of secular and religious authority. He predicts the triumph of justice and equality over injustice, and of mind over matter, and the eventual vanquishing of human frailty andmortality. He also foresees the gradual elimination of practices governing property, punishment, law, and marriage and the displacement of politics by an expanded personal morality resulting from reasoned argument and candid discussion. Political Justice raises deep philosophical questions about thenature of our duty to others that remain central to modern debates on ethics and politics. This edition reprints the first-edition text of 1793, and examines Godwin's evolving philosophy in the context of his life and work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expertintroductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

In the late eighteenth-century English novel, the question of feminism has usually been explored with respect to how women writers treat their heroines and how they engage with contemporary political debates, particularly those relating to the French Revolution. Megan Woodworth argues that women writers' ideas about their own liberty are also present in their treatment of male characters. In positing a 'Gentleman's Liberation Movement,' she suggests that Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen all used their creative powers to liberate men from the very institutions and ideas about power, society, and gender that promote the subjection of women. Their writing juxtaposes the role of women in the private spheres with men's engagement in political structures and successive wars for independence (the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars). The failures associated with fighting these wars and the ideological debates surrounding them made plain, at least to these women writers, that in denying the universality of these natural freedoms, their liberating effects would be severely compromised. Thus, to win the same rights for which men fought, women writers sought to remake men as individuals freed from the tyranny of their patriarchal inheritance.

Jane Barker (1652-1732), English poet and novelist, is one of the most important women writers to enter the early modern literary marketplace. This book, the first full-length study of her writing career, draws upon archival sources to reconstruct Barker's beginnings as a manuscript poet,expose the Catholic-Jacobite underpinnings of her best-known fiction, trace her passage into print, and explore connections between her literary imaginings and the national life. It will be valuable to students of manuscript culture, the early marketplace, and the interplay of politics, religion,literature, and gender in the Augustan period. The study also makes a significant contribution to feminist literary historiography, showing how women writers can be approached not only through feminist models of difference but also through more inclusive models of women's involvement in early modernculture.

The eighteenth century in Britain was a transition period for literature. Patronage, either a benefactor or through subscription, lingered even as the publishing and bookselling industries took hold and blossomed. Although the practice of reviewing books was well established during the second half of the century, the first review periodical was not founded until 1749. For the literary scholar, these gradual changes mean that different search strategies may be required to conduct research into primary and secondary source material across the era. Literary research and the British eighteenth century addresses these unique challenges faced by scholars of the period.

James L. Harner's Literary Research Guide, which Choice calls "the standard guide in the field," evaluates important reference materials in English studies. Since the publication of the first edition in 1989, tens of thousands of students and educators have used the Guide as an aid to scholarly research. In the new edition Harner has added entries describing resources published since May 2001 and has revised nearly half the entries from the fourth edition. The fifth edition contains more than 1,000 entries, which discuss an additional 1,555 books, articles, and electronic resources and cite 723 reviews. Readers of earlier editions will notice the inclusion of substantially more electronic resources, particularly reliable sites sponsored by academic institutions and learned societies, to account for the proliferation of bibliographic databases, text archives, and other online resources. This edition also features a new section on cultural studies.

After the Reformation, England's Catholics were marginalised and excluded from using printed media for propagandist ends. Instead, they turned to oral media, such as ballads and stories, to plead their case and maintain contact with their community. Building on the growing interest in Catholic literature which has developed in early modern studies, Alison Shell examines the relationship between Catholicism and oral culture from the mid-sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In order to recover the textual traces of this minority culture, she expands canonical boundaries, looking at anecdotes, spells and popular verse alongside more conventionally literary material. In her archival research she uncovers many important manuscript sources. This book is an important contribution to the rediscovery of the writings and culture of the Catholic community and will be of great interest to scholars of early modern literature, history and theology.

Offering a comprehensive analysis of newly-uncovered manuscripts from two English convents near Antwerp, this study gives unprecedented insight into the role of the senses in enclosed religious communities during the period 1600-1800. It draws on a range of previously unpublished writings-chronicles, confessions, letters, poetry, personal testimony of various kinds-to explore and challenge assumptions about sensory origins.

An Anthology of Writings from 1483 to 1999. Firmly I Believe and Truly celebrates the depth and breadth of the spiritual, literary, and intellectual heritage of the Post-Reformation English Roman Catholic tradition in an anthology of writings that span a five hundred year period between William Caxton and Cardinal Hume. Intended as a rich resource for all with an interest in Roman Catholicism, the writings have been carefully selected and edited by a team of scholars with historical, theological, and literary expertise. Each author is introduced to provide context for the included extracts and the chronological arrangement of the anthology makes the volume easy to use whilst creating a fascinating overview of the modern era in English Catholic thought.

In the seventeenth century, the largely Protestant nation of England was preoccupied with its Catholic subjects. They inspired more prolific and harsher criticism and more elaborate attempts at legal regulation than did any other minority group. To understand this phenomenon, Frances E. Dolan probes the verbal and visual representations of Catholics and Catholicism and the uses to which these were put during three crises in ProtestantCatholic relations: the gunpowder plot (1605), Queen Henrietta Maria's open advocacy of Catholicism in the 1630s and 1640s, and the popish and meal tub plots (16781680). She uses each crisis as a jumping-off point, an opportunity for speculation, as did contemporary writers. Drawing on political, religious, and legal writings and offering fresh readings of literary texts such as Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, Dolan shows how often Catholics and Catholicism were linked to disorderly women. Dolan maintains that since Catholics were members of many English families and communities and prominent at court, the threat they offered was precisely that they could not be readily isolated and assigned to a category--both laws and polemic struggled to identify Catholics, but never succeeded in establishing a clear line between Catholics and everyone else. In seventeenth-century England, Dolan says, the threat of Catholicism lay in the tension between the foreign and the familiar, the different and the same.

The diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821) are rare and fragile documents which present a unique view of Romantic-era Britain. The editorial apparatus also contextualises the diaries and provides biographical details for Inchbald and the other figures she encountered. Full editorial apparatus includes a substantial general introduction, a chronology of Inchbald's life, brief introductions to each diary, bibliographical guides to figures mentioned, and textual notes. There is a consolidated index in the final volume.

Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the satiric fantasy that quickly became a classic and has remained in print for nearly three centuries. Yet Swift also wrote many other influential works, was a major political and religious figure in his time, and became a national hero, beloved for his fierce protest against English exploitation of his native Ireland. What is really known today about the enigmatic man behind these accomplishments? Can the facts of his life be separated from the fictions? nbsp; In this deeply researched biography, Leo Damrosch draws on discoveries made over the past thirty years to tell the story of Swift’s life anew. Probing holes in the existing evidence, he takes seriously some daring speculations about Swift’s parentage, love life, and various personal relationships and shows how Swift’s public version of his life—the one accepted until recently—was deliberately misleading. Swift concealed aspects of himself and his relationships, and other people in his life helped to keep his secrets. .nbsp; Assembling suggestive clues, Damrosch re-narrates the events of Swift’s life while making vivid the sights, sounds, and smells of his English and Irish surroundings.Through his own words and those of a wide circle of friends, a complex Swift emerges: a restless, combative, empathetic figure, a man of biting wit and powerful mind, and a major figure in the history of world letters.

The emblem was big business in early-modern Europe, used extensively not only in printed books and broadsheets, but also to decorate pottery, metalware, furniture, glass and windows and numerous other domestic, devotional and political objects. At its most basic level simply a combination of symbolic visual image and texts, an emblem is a hybrid composed of words and picture. However, as this book demonstrates, understanding the precise and often multiple meaning, intention and message emblems conveyed can prove a remarkably slippery process.

Mary Pix: The Innocent Mistress (1697) Susanna Centlivre: The Busy-Body (1709) Elizabeth Griffith: The Times (1779) Hannah Cowley: The Belle's Stratagem (1780) Oxford English Drama offers plays from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries in selections that make available both rarely printed and canonical works. The texts are freshly edited using modern spelling. Critical introductions, wide-ranging annotation, and informative bibliographies illuminate the plays' cultural contexts and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike. 'The series should reshape the canon in a number of signficant areas. A splendid and imaginative project' Professor Anne Barton, Cambridge University

"To a rational being there can be but one rule of conduct, justice, and one mode of ascertaining that rule, the exercise of his understanding." Godwin's Political Justice is the founding text of philosophical anarchism. Written in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, it exemplifies the political optimism felt by many writers and intellectuals. Godwin drew on enlightenment ideas and his background in religious dissent for theprinciples of justice, utility, and the sanctity of individual judgement that drove his powerful critique of all forms of secular and religious authority. He predicts the triumph of justice and equality over injustice, and of mind over matter, and the eventual vanquishing of human frailty andmortality. He also foresees the gradual elimination of practices governing property, punishment, law, and marriage and the displacement of politics by an expanded personal morality resulting from reasoned argument and candid discussion. Political Justice raises deep philosophical questions about thenature of our duty to others that remain central to modern debates on ethics and politics. This edition reprints the first-edition text of 1793, and examines Godwin's evolving philosophy in the context of his life and work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expertintroductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in 17th-Century England is a cultural history of seventeenth-century England. It assesses the complexity and fluidity of Christian identity from the reign of Elizabeth I and the early Stuart kings through the English Revolution, and into the Restoration, when the English Church and monarchy were restored. Throughout this tumultuous period, which included debate about readmission of the Jews, England was preoccupied with Jews and Israel. As the Reformation sharpened national identity and prompted reconsideration of the relation of Christianity to Judaism, English people showed intense interest in Jewish history and Judaism and appropriated biblical Israel's history, looking to the narratives in the Hebrew Bible, even as reformed Christianity was thought to be purged of Jewish elements. There was an unstable, shifting mix of identification and opposition, affinity and distance, in English attitudes towards Jews - a mix that held positive possibilities for Jewish/Christian relations as well as negative. Grounded in archival research, this book analyzes writings ranging from those of Foxe and Hooker to Milton and Dryden, from sermons to lyrics, from church polemic to proposals for legal and economic reform. Literary texts discussed include Herrick's Hesperides, Vaughan's Silex Scintillans, Bunyan's Grace Abounding, Milton's major prose and poems, and Dryden's Annus Mirabilis and Absalom and Achitophel. Attention is also paid to publications associated with James I, Charles I, and Cromwell, and writings by and about such figures as William Prynne, Gerrard Winstanley, Margaret Fell, George Fox, Menasseh Ben Israel, and self-proclaimed prophets such as John Rogers, Abiezzer Coppe, and Anna Trapnel.

Paul Hammond explores how sexual relationships between men were represented in English literature during the seventeenth century. Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester is built around two principal themes: firstly the literary strategies through which writers created imaginedspaces for the expression of homosexual desire; and secondly the ways in which such texts were subsequently edited and adapted to remove these references to sex between men. The author begins with a wide-ranging analysis of the forms in which both homosexual desire and homophobic hatred wereexpressed in the period, focusing on the problems of defining male relationships, the erotic dimension to male friendships, and the uses of classical settings. Subsequent chapters offer four case studies. The first focuses on how Shakespeare adapted his sources to introduce the possibility of sexualrelations between male characters, with special attention to Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and the Sonnets, and shows how these elements were removed in later adaptations of his plays and poems. Subsequent chapters chart the often satirical representation of homosexual rulers from James Ito William III; the ambiguous sexuality figured in the poetry of Andrew Marvell; and the libertine homoeroticism of the poetry of the Earl of Rochester. Paul Hammond draws on a wide range of poems, plays, letters, and pamphlets, and discusses a substantial amount of previously unknown material fromboth printed and manuscript sources.

Who were the women poets of the eighteenth century? More than a hundred are represented in this anthology, yet only few have hitherto featured in conventional surveys and anthologies of eighteenth-century verse. Unlike the women who wrote fiction, the vast majority of those who wrote versehave been ignored and forgotten since their own day. Yet they speak with vigour and immediacy, in a range of moods from the resentful and melancholic to the humorous and exuberant; about the world they lived in and their experience of life in town and country, of love and marriage. Nor were theyall from one social class: as the biographical headnotes reveal, women at all levels of society, washerwomen and duchesses, both wrote and found their way into print. Usually most at ease writing in informal and unpretentious verse, the women poets grew in confidence during the century, writingeventually in a great variety of poetic forms and on public as well as private topics. The writers in this wide-ranging and unpredictable anthology open a new perspective on their age, and provide the grounds for a reassessment of a neglected aspect of its literature. Roger Lonsdale edited the New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse.

This book is the first to look at the aristocratic adoption of Roman ideals in eighteenth-century English culture. In the century following the Revolution of 1688, the ruling class promoted--by way of its patronage--a classical frame of mind embracing all the arts, on the foundations of "liberty" and "civic virtue". Ayres' study shows that the propensity to adopt the self image of virtuous Romans was the attempt of a newly empowered oligarchy to dignify and vindicate itself by association with an idealized image of Republican Rome.

Jonathan Swift lived through a period of turbulence and innovation in the evolution of the book. His publications, perhaps more than those of any other single author, illustrate the range of developments that transformed print culture during the early Enlightenment. Swift was a prolific author and a frequent visitor at the printing house, and he wrote as critic and satirist about the nature of text. The shifting moods of irony, complicity and indignation that characterise his dealings with the book trade add a layer of complexity to the bibliographic record of his published works. The essays collected here offer the first comprehensive, integrated survey of that record. They shed new light on the politics of the eighteenth-century book trade, on Swift's innovations as a maker of books, on the habits and opinions revealed by his commentary on printed texts and on the re-shaping of the Swiftian book after his death.

In this concise critical survey, Professor Donoghue looks at Swift's whole output, and expresses a fresh sense of his literary character. In particular, he questions the widespread view that Swift is to be understood in terms of irony, persona or mask. He points out, for instance, that Swift's irony is not continuous, and that his sense of form is not ours. We should not see him as producing elaborate artistic structures, but as meeting particular needs which forced themselves upon him. We need also to identify the 'gestures' through which Swift revealed his characteristic mental attitudes, and behind them to sense his general life-stance; to understand his devices - such as the choice and change of perspective; his deeper pre-occupations - such as the relationship between the body, the mind and the soul; his attitude to and use of language; his conception of the nature of humanity; the characteristics of his verse.

In addition to ensuring broad coverage of Jonathan Swift's writing by including early, as well as more well-known later works, this Companion offers access to current critical and theoretical issues concerning the author. Special emphasis is placed on Swift's problematic relationship with the land of his birth, Ireland, and on his place as a political writer in a highly politicized age.

The word 'autobiography' is a late eighteenth-century coinage; yet by 1826 it was used as the title for a multi-volume anthology of self-writing, and in 1834 Thomas Carlyle wrote of 'these Autobiographical times of ours'. Over the course of those few decades, readers and writers came to recognize and name a new genre. This book is the first full study of the phenomenon, examining both the conditions and the practice of autobiographical writing in Romantic literature. Historians of autobiography have often pointed to the turn of the nineteenth century as a pivotal moment. In Rousseau and De Quincey's 'Confessions', Wordsworth's 'Prelude', and other canonical documents, it has been argued, self-writing begins to serve the purpose of expressing the individuality, autonomy, and interiority of the self. A more wide-ranging view of the actual state of autobiography at the time exposes this narrative as a misrepresentation. Self-writing does gain a new kind of prominence around 1800; not, however, because it articulates 'Romantic' ideologies of selfhood, but because it becomes a focus of scrutiny, and of contention. The decades of the Romantic period identified themselves as 'Autobiographical times' - but did so anxiously. This book asks: what forms did that recognition and that anxiety take within the literary culture of the period? What did autobiography mean to Romantic readers and writers? How do autobiographical texts of the period reflect, express, andnegotiate these conditions? As well as reading a wide variety of those documents, with single chapters devoted to works by Coleridge, Byron, and Lamb, Treadwell examines writing on and around autobiography: essays, reviews, and other forms of commentary. By preserving a continuous relation between the texts and their contexts, this book offers the first proper study of what is actually meant by 'Romantic autobiography'.

Modern scholarship has represented Jonathan Swift as both an Old Whig and a non-Jacobite Tory. Ian Higgins' contextual reassessment of Swift's political writing and recorded opinion considers the interpretative problems they present. It explores the consonance of Swift's political writing with militant Jacobite Tory writing on affairs of Church and State, and demonstrates Swift's dissimilarity from the Old Whig writers with whom modern criticism has misleadingly identified him. Swift's writings of the 1690s, during the last four years of Queen Anne's reign, and after the Hanoverian succession are shown to contain Jacobitical political implications when examined in their context in the 'paper wars' of the period. Higgins concentrates on the partisan meanings of the great satires A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, and represents Swift (as he was read by his contemporaries) as a disaffected High Church Anglican extremist with Jacobite inclinations.

As the greatest satirist in the English language, Jonathan Swift was both admired and feared in his own time for the power of his writing, and hugely influential on writers who followed him. Swift transformed models such as utopian writing, political pamphleteering and social critique with his dark and uncompromising vision of the human condition, deepening the outlook of contemporaries such as Alexander Pope, and leaving a legacy of Swiftian satire in the work of Hogarth, Fielding, Austen and Beckett, among others. This collection of essays, with its distinguished list of international contributors, centres on Swift, the genres and authors who influenced him, and his impact on satire and satirists from his own time to the twentieth century.

Political Magic examines early modern British fictions of exploration and colonialism, arguing that narratives of intercultural contact reimagine ideas of sovereignty and popular power. These fictions reveal aspects of political thought in this period that official discourse typically shunted aside, particularly the political status of the commoner, whose "liberty" was often proclaimed even as it was undermined both in theory and in practice. Like the Hobbesian sovereign, the colonist appears to the colonized as a giver of rules who remains unruly. At the heart of many texts are moments of savage wonder, provoked by European displays of technological prowess. In particular, the trope of the first gunshot articulates an origin of consent and political legitimacy in colonial showmanship. Yet as manifestations of force held in abeyance, these technologies also signal the ultimate reliance of sovereigns on extreme violence as the lessthan-mystical foundation of their authority.By examining works by Cavendish, Defoe, Behn, Swift, and Haywood in conjunction with contemporary political writing and travelogues, Political Magic locates a subterranean discourse of sovereignty in the century after Hobbes, finding surprising affinities between the government of "savages" and of Britons.

This lively, accessible book reveals the character - and timeliness - of Alexander Pope's thinking and art. G. Douglas Atkins focuses on the religious position of a poet who would not abandon the Roman Catholic Church. In our own highly partisan culture, such a position offers an important example. Bringing his expertise in religion and literature to bear, Atkins establishes that Pope was, as an anti-sectarian, not a Deist but a Catholic, a layman, and essayist. Through comparison with JohnDryden, Jonathan Swift, and T.E. Eliot, this study sheds new light on 'The Universal Prayer,' 'An Essay on Criticism,' Moral Essays, and the four-part Dunciad. Ultimately, Pope emerges as a religious poet of the first rank.

English Roman Catholic women’s congregations are an enigma of nineteenth-century social history. Over ten thousand nuns and sisters, establishing and managing significant Catholic educational, health care and social welfare institutions in England and Wales, have virtually disappeared from history.nbsp;Despite their exclusion from historical texts, these women featured prominently in the public and private sphere.nbsp; Intertwining the complexities of class with the notion of ethnicity, Contested Identities examines the relationship between English and Irish-born sisters. This study is relevant not only to understanding women religious and Catholicism in nineteenth-century England and Wales, but also to our understanding of the role of women in the public and private sphere, dealing with issues still resonant today. Contributing to the larger story of the agency of nineteenth-century women and the broader transformation of English society, this book will appeal to scholars and students of social, cultural, gender and religious history.

This timely collection of essays, from an international team of authors, spans a wide geographical and chronological spectrum and focuses on female relationships with piety and religious vocations. Ideal for students, each chapter introduces new research and offers a guide to historiographical debates and methodologies.

In this new study, Michael Mullett examines the social, political and religious development of Catholic communities in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland from the Reformation to the arrival of toleration in the nineteenth century. The story is a sequence from active persecution, through unofficial tolerance, to legal recognition. The author brings together original research with the new insights of specialist monographs and articles and provides indispensable information on how Britain's,particularly Ireland's, present religious situation has evolved. The book also offers a timely updated review of the role religion has played in the emergence of collective identities in Britain and Ireland during the period.

In recent years, historians have rediscovered the religious dimensions of the Enlightenment. This volume offers a thorough reappraisal of the so-called #147;Catholic Enlightenment” as a transnational Enlightenment movement. This Catholic Enlightenment was at once ultramontane and conciliarist, sometimes moderate but often surprisingly radical, with participants active throughout Europe in universities, seminaries, salons, and the periodical press. nbsp; In Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History, the contributors, primarily European scholars, provide intellectual biographies of twenty Catholic Enlightenment figures across eighteenth-century Europe, many of them little known in English-language scholarship on the Enlightenment and pre-revolutionary eras. These figures represent not only familiar French intellectuals of the Catholic Enlightenment but also Iberian, Italian, English, Polish, and German thinkers. The essays focus on the intellectual and cultural factors influencing the lives and works of their subjects, revealing the often global networks of intellectual sociability and reading that united them both to the Catholic Enlightenment and to eighteenth-century policies and projects. The volume, whose purpose is to advance the understanding of a transnational "Catholic Enlightenment," will be a reliable reference for historians, theologians, and scholars working in religious studies.nbsp; nbsp; "This is a compelling collection on an important subject. Its transnational and biographical approach helps one to see eighteenth-century Catholicism and the Enlightenment itself in fresh and interesting ways." #151;Darrin M. McMahon, Florida State University

This book explores two seventeenth-century female congregations that became, in France and England, the embodiment of new feminine efforts to become actively involved in the Catholic Reformation. Despite the differences in their national political and religious backgrounds, both the French Ursulines and the Institute of English Ladies shared the same aim. They wanted to revitalize the links between the Catholic faith and the people, reaching out of the cloister and into the world by educating girls who would later become wives and mothers.

The poet and preacher John Donne (1572-1631) was one of the most influential authors of early modern England. Donne's Augustine examines his response to an iconic figure in the history of Western religious thought: Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Katrin Ettenhuber argues that Renaissance culture saw not only a revival of the classics, but was equally indebted to the intellectual and literary legacy of the Church Fathers. The study recovers an Augustinian tradition of interpretation which permeated the religious world of the period, but which has until now been largely overlooked. She presents a comprehensive re-evaluation of Donne's writings, ranging from the poems to less familiar prose works, situates him carefully in the poetic, intellectual, and political contexts which frame his works, and engages with recent developments in both literary and historical studies. Donne's Augustine is the first sustained study of Donne's reading practices, and of the theologicalsources which shaped his thought. It discovers a range of medieval and early modern texts which transformed the imagination of literary writers in the period but which have been neglected so far: devotional manuals, Scripture commentaries, and religious commonplace books (often in Latin). The study pays close attention to the intellectual and political conditions which informed the reception of Augustine's works, and offers detailed readings of Donne's texts which illuminate the literary aspects of his patristic heritage. Donne's Augustine makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the larger reading and writing culture of Renaissance England, and of the religious debates and controversies in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

The early United States was a culture of the episode. In Episodic Poetics, Matthew Garrett merges narrative theory with social and political history to explain the early American fascination with the episodic, piecemeal plot.Since Aristotle's Poetics, the episode has been a vexed category of literary analysis, troubling any easy view of the subsumption of unwieldy narrative parts into well-plotted wholes. Garrett puts forward a new, dialectical theory of episodic form to recast this peculiar object of literary history,looking to the episode as a narrative unit smaller than the genre in order to give an account of all the period's major prose genres. Garrett shows how, in ways both magisterial and mundane, episodic forms gave variegated shape to the social, political, and economic conflicts that defined the momentof national formation.Episodic Poetics proposes a new method of reading and a new way of conceiving of literary history. The book asks how we might understand the cultural role of the episode as a literary micro-unit, one that forces us to read individual narratives in terms of an always partial and fraught developmenttoward plot. Episodic Poetics combines theoretical reflection and historical rigor with careful readings of texts from the early American canon such as The Federalist, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, and the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, along with hitherto understudied texts and ephemerasuch as Washington Irving's Salmagundi, Susanna Rowson's Trials of the Human Heart and the memoirs of the metalworker and failed entrepreneur John Fitch. Garrett recounts literary history not as the easy victory of grand nationalist ambitions, but rather as a series of social struggles expressedthrough writers' recurring engagement with incompletely integrated forms.

Modern scholars, fixated on the 'winners' in England's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious struggles, have too readily assumed the inevitability of Protestantism's historical triumph and have uncritically accepted the reformers' own rhetorical construction of themselves as embodiments of an authentic Englishness. Christopher Highley interrogates this narrative by examining how Catholics from the reign of Mary Tudor to the early seventeenth century contested and shaped discoursesof national identity, patriotism, and Englishness. Accused by their opponents of espousing an alien religion, one orchestrated from Rome and sustained by Spain, English Catholics fought back by developing their own self-representations that emphasized how the Catholic faith was an ancient and integral part of true Englishness. After the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, the Catholic imagining of England was mainly the project of the exiles who had left their homeland in search of religious toleration and foreign assistance. English Catholics constructed narratives of their own religious heritage and identity, however, not only in response to Protestant polemic but also as part of intra-Catholic rivalries that pitted Marian clergy against seminary priests, secular priests against Jesuits, and exiled English Catholics against their co-religionists from other parts of Britain and Ireland. Drawing on the reassessments of English Catholicism by John Bossy, Christopher Haigh,Alexandra Walsham, Michael Questier and others, Catholics Writing the Nation foregrounds the faultlines within and between the various Catholic communities of the Atlantic archipelago. Eschewing any confessional bias, Highley's book is an interdisciplinary cultural study of an important but neglected dimension of Early Modern English Catholicism. In charting the complex Catholic engagement with questions of cultural and national identity, he discusses a range of genres, texts, and documents both in print and manuscript, including ecclesiastical histories, polemical treatises, antiquarian tracts, and correspondence. His argument weaves together a rich historical narrative of people, events, and texts while also offering contextualized close readings of specific works by figures such as Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, Thomas Stapleton, and Richard Verstegan.