This book provides a reassessment of the relationship between Reformed theology and early modern literature, with analysis of key writers and thinkers.

Huston Diehl sees Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as both a product of the Protestant Reformation--a reformed drama--and a producer of Protestant habits of thought--a reforming drama. According to Diehl, the popular London theater, which flourished in the years after Elizabeth reestablished Protestantism in England, rehearsed the religious crises that disrupted, divided, energized, and in many respects revolutionized English society. Drawing on the insights of symbolic anthropologists, Diehl explores the relationship between the suppression of late medieval religious cultures, with their rituals, symbols, plays, processions, and devotional practices, and the emergence of a popular theater under the Protestant monarchs Elizabeth and James. Questioning long-held assumptions that the reformed religion was inherently antitheatrical, she shows how the reformers invented new forms of theater, even as they condemned a Roman Catholic theatricality they associated with magic, sensuality, and duplicity. Using as her central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic.

Offering fuller understandings of both dramatic representations and the complexities of religious culture, this collection reveals the ways in which religion and performance were inextricably linked in early modern England. Its readings extend beyond the interpretation of straightforward religious allusions and suggest new avenues for theorizing the dynamic relationship between religious representations and dramatic ones. By addressing the particular ways in which commercial drama adapted the sensory aspects of religious experience to its own symbolic systems, the volume enacts a methodological shift towards a more nuanced semiotics of theatrical performance. Covering plays by a wide range of dramatists, including Shakespeare, individual essays explore the material conditions of performance, the intricate resonances between dramatic performance and religious ceremonies, and the multiple valences of religious references in early modern plays. Additionally, Religion and Drama in Early Modern England reveals the theater's broad interpretation of post-Reformation Christian practice, as well as its engagement with the religions of Islam, Judaism and paganism.

"The prevalent worldview of early modern England, shaped by Protestantism, dismissed magical belief as an ideological delusion inherent to Catholicism, while also encouraging a strong sense of individualism, through which a new masculinity found expression. This study asks why, then, did magical self-empowerment retain such a hold on that society's imagination?"--Provided by publisher.

A cross-religious exploration of conversion on the early modern English stage offering fresh readings of canonical and lesser-known plays.

A great deal of scholarship has too often juxtaposed scholasticism and piety, resulting in misunderstandings of the relationship between Protestant churches of the early modern era and the theology taught in their schools. But more recent scholarship, especially conducted by Richard A. Muller over the last number of decades, has remapped the lines of continuity and discontinuity in the relation of church and school. This research has produced a more methodologically nuanced and historically accurate representation of church and school in early modern Protestantism. Written by leading scholars of early modern Protestant theology and history and based on research using the most relevant original sources, this collection seeks to broaden our understanding of how and why clergy were educated to serve the church. Contributors include: Yuzo Adhinarta, Willem van Asselt, Irena Backus, Jordan J. Ballor, J. Mark Beach, Andreas Beck, Joel R. Beeke, Lyle D. Bierma, Raymond A. Blacketer, James E. Bradley, Dariusz M. Bryćko, Amy Nelson Burnett, Emidio Campi, Heber Carlos de Campos Jr, Kiven Choy, R. Scott Clark, Paul Fields, John V. Fesko, Paul Fields, W. Robert Godfrey, Alan Gomes, Albert Gootjes, Chad Gunnoe, Aza Goudriaan, Fred P. Hall, Byung-Soo (Paul) Han, Nathan A. Jacobs, Frank A. James III, Martin Klauber, Henry Knapp, Robert Kolb, Mark J. Larson, Brian J. Lee, Karin Maag, Benjamin T.G. Mayes, Andrew M. McGinnis, Paul Mpindi, Adriaan C. Neele, Godfried Quaedtvlieg, Sebastian Rehnman, Todd Rester, Gregory D. Schuringa, Herman Selderhuis, Donald Sinnema, Keith Stanglin, David Steinmetz, David Sytsma, Yudha Thianto, John L. Thompson, Carl Trueman, Theodore G. Van Raalte, Cornelis Venema, Timothy Wengert, Reita Yazawa, Jeongmo Yoo, and Jason Zuidema.

This volume is the first attempt to assess the impact of both humanism and Protestantism on the education offered to a wide range of adolescents in the hundreds of grammar schools operating in England between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. By placing that education in the context of Lutheran, Calvinist and Jesuit education abroad, it offers an overview of the uses to which Latin and Greek were put in English schools, and identifies the strategies devised by clergy and laity in England for coping with the tensions between classical studies and Protestant doctrine. It also offers a reassessment of the role of the 'godly' in English education, and demonstrates the many ways in which a classical education came to be combined with close support for the English Crown and established church. One of the major sources used is the school textbooks which were incorporated into the 'English Stock' set up by leading members of the Stationers' Company of London and reproduced in hundreds of thousands of copies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the core of classical education remained essentially the same for two centuries, there was a growing gulf between the methods by which classics were taught in elite institutions such as Winchester and Westminster and in the many town and country grammar schools in which translations or bilingual versions of many classical texts were given to weaker students. The success of these new translations probably encouraged editors and publishers to offer those adults who had received little or no classical education new versions of works by Aesop, Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, Seneca and Caesar. This fascination with ancient Greece and Rome left its mark not only on the lifestyle and literary tastes of the educated elite, but also reinforced the strongly moralistic outlook of many of the English laity who equated virtue and good works with pleasing God and meriting salvation.