This book offers the first full study of the challenges posed to an emerging English nationalism that stemmed from the powerful appeal exerted by the leaders of the international Protestant cause. By considering a range of texts, including poetry, plays, pamphlets, and religious writing, the study reads this heroic tradition as a 'connected literary history,' a project shared by Protestants throughout Northern Europe, which opened up both collaboration among writers from these different regions and new possibilities for communal identification. The work’s central claim is that a pan-Protestant literary field existed in the period, which was multilingual, transnational, and ideologically charged. Celebrated leaders such as William of Orange posed a series of questions, especially for English Protestants, over the relationship between English and Protestant identity. In formulating their role as co-religionists, writers often undercut notions of alterity, rendering early modern conceptions of foreignness especially fluid and erasing national borders.

Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine the intersection, conflict, and confluence of religion and the market before 1700. Each chapter analyzes the unique interplay of faith and economy in a different locale: Syria, Ethiopia, France, Iceland, India, Peru, and beyond. In ten case studies, specialists of archaeology, art history, social and economic history, religious studies, and critical theory address issues of secularization, tolerance, colonialism, and race with a fresh focus. They chart the tensions between religious and economic thought in specific locales or texts, the complex ways that religion and economy interacted with one another, and the way in which matters of faith, economy, and race converge in religious images of the pre- and early modern periods. Considering the intersection of faith and economy, the volume questions the legacy of early modern economic and spiritual exceptionalism, and the ways in which prosperity still entangles itself with righteousness. The interdisciplinary nature means that this volume is the perfect resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars working across multiple areas including history, literature, politics, art history, global studies, philosophy, and gender studies in the medieval and early modern periods.

The Introduction and the chapter Toleration and Religious Polemics are available in Open Access. Searching for Compromise? is a collection of articles researching the issues of toleration, interreligious peace and models of living together in a religiously diverse Central and Eastern Europe during the Early Modern period. By studying theologians, legal cases, literature, individuals, and congregations this volume brings forth unique local dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe. Scholars and researchers will find these issues explored from the perspectives of diverse groups of Christians such as Catholics, Hussies, Bohemian Brethren, Old Believers, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, Calvinists, Moravians and Unitarians. The volume is a much-needed addition to the scholarly books written on these issues from the Western European perspective. Contributors are Kazimierz Bem, Wolfgang Breul, Jan Červenka, Sławomir Kościelak, Melchior Jakubowski, Bryan D. Kozik, Uladzimir Padalinski, Maciej Ptaszyński, Luise Schorn-Schütte, Alexander Schunka, Paul Shore, Stephan Steiner, Bogumił Szady, and Christopher Voigt-Goy.

A study of the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England that explores the relationship between the Reformation and literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period through the exploration of the theme of the 'common'.

This volume of primary sources brings together letters, memoirs, petitions, tracts, and stories related to religion and reform around the globe from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The common subject of the sources is the Reformation, and these texts demonstrate the themes and impacts of religious reform in Europe and around the globe. Scholars once framed the Reformation as a sixteenth-century European dispute between Protestant and Catholic churches and states, but now look expansively at connections and entanglements between different confessions, faiths, time periods, and geographical areas. The Reformation coincided with Europeans’ expanding reach across the globe as traders, settlers, and colonists, but the role that religion played in this drive has yet to be fully explored. These readings highlight these reformers’ engagements with Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and indigenous spirituality, and the entanglement of Christian reform with colonialism, trade, enslavement, and racism. Offering a sustained, comparative, and interdisciplinary exploration of religious transformations in the early modern world, this collection of primary sources is invaluable to both undergraduate and postgraduate students working on theology, the Reformation, and early modern society.

This interdisciplinary volume explores core emerging themes in the study of early modern literary-diplomatic relations, developing essential methods of analysis and theoretical approaches that will shape future research in the field. Contributions focus on three intimately related areas: the impact of diplomatic protocol on literary production; the role of texts in diplomatic practice, particularly those that operated as 'textual ambassadors'; and the impact of changes in the literary sphere on diplomatic culture. The literary sphere held such a central place because it gave diplomats the tools to negotiate the pervasive ambiguities of diplomacy; simultaneously literary depictions of diplomacy and international law provided genre-shaped places for cultural reflection on the rapidly changing and expanding diplomatic sphere. Translations exemplify the potential of literary texts both to provoke competition and to promote cultural convergence between political communities, revealing the existence of diplomatic third spaces in which ritual, symbolic, or written conventions and semantics converged despite particular oppositions and differences. The increasing public consumption of diplomatic material in Europe illuminates diplomatic and literary communities, and exposes the translocal, as well as the transnational, geographies of literary-diplomatic exchanges. Diplomatic texts possessed symbolic capital. They were produced, archived, and even redeployed in creative tension with the social and ceremonial worlds that produced them. Appreciating the generic conventions of specific types of diplomatic texts can radically reshape our interpretation of diplomatic encounters, just as exploring the afterlives of diplomatic records can transform our appreciation of the histories and literatures they inspired.

This book challenges the adequacy of identifying religious identity with confessional identity. The Reformation complicated the issue of religious identity, especially among Christians for whom confessional violence at home and religious wars on the continent had made the darkness of confessionalization visible. Robert E. Stillman explores the identity of “Christians without names,” as well as their agency as cultural actors in order to recover their consequence for early modern religious, political, and poetic history. Stillman argues that questions of religious identity have dominated historical and literary studies of the early modern period for over a decade. But his aim is not to resolve the controversies about early modern religious identity by negotiating new definitions of English Protestants, Catholics, or “moderate” and “radical” Puritans. Instead, he provides an understanding of the culture that produced such a heterogeneous range of believers by attending to particular figures, such as Antonio del Corro, John Harington, Henry Constable, and Aemilia Lanyer, who defined their pious identity by refusing to assume a partisan label for themselves. All of the figures in this study attempted as Christians to situate themselves beyond, between, or against particular confessions for reasons that both foreground pious motivations and inspire critical scrutiny. The desire to move beyond confessions enabled the birth of new political rhetorics promising inclusivity for the full range of England’s Christians and gained special prominence in the pursuit of a still-imaginary Great Britain. Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England is a book that early modern literary scholars need to read. It will also interest students and scholars of history and religion.