This book is a major new contribution to the study of cultural identities in Britain and Ireland from the Reformation to Romanticism. It provides a fresh perspective on the rise of interest in British vernacular (or “folk”) cultures, which has often been elided with the emergence of British Romanticism and its Continental precursors. Here the Romantics’ discovery of and admiration for vernacular traditions is placed in a longer historical timeline reaching back to the controversies sparked by the Protestant Reformation. The book charts the emergence of a nuanced discourse about vernacular cultures, developing in response to the Reformers’ devastating attack on customary practices and beliefs relating to the natural world, seasonal festivities, and rites of passage. It became a discourse grounded in humanist Biblical and antiquarian scholarship; informed by the theological and pastoral problems of the long period of religious instability after the Reformation; and, over the course of the eighteenth century, colored by new ideas about culture drawn from Enlightenment historicism and empiricism. This study shows that Romantic literary primitivism and Romantic social thought, both radical and conservative, grew out of this rich context. It will be welcomed by historians of early modern and eighteenth-century Britain and those interested in the study of religious and vernacular cultures.

This book is a major new contribution to the study of cultural identities in Britain and Ireland from the Reformation to Romanticism. It provides a fresh perspective on the rise of interest in British vernacular (or "folk") cultures, which has often been elided with the emergence of British Romanticism and its Continental precursors. Here the Romantics' discovery of and admiration for vernacular traditions is placed in a longer historical timeline reaching back to the controversies sparked by the Protestant Reformation. The book charts the emergence of a nuanced discourse about vernacular cultures, developing in response to the Reformers' devastating attack on customary practices and beliefs relating to the natural world, seasonal festivities, and rites of passage. It became a discourse grounded in humanist Biblical and antiquarian scholarship; informed by the theological and pastoral problems of the long period of religious instability after the Reformation; and, over the course of the eighteenth century, colored by new ideas about culture drawn from Enlightenment historicism and empiricism. This study shows that Romantic literary primitivism and Romantic social thought, both radical and conservative, grew out of this rich context. It will be welcomed by historians of early modern and eighteenth-century Britain and those interested in the study of religious and vernacular cultures. Celestina Savonius-Wroth is Assistant Professor, History Librarian, and Head of the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. She holds a doctorate in British history from Indiana University Bloomington.

This book is a major new contribution to the study of cultural identities in Britain and Ireland from the Reformation to Romanticism. It provides a fresh perspective on the rise of interest in British vernacular (or “folk”) cultures, which has often been elided with the emergence of British Romanticism and its Continental precursors. Here the Romantics’ discovery of and admiration for vernacular traditions is placed in a longer historical timeline reaching back to the controversies sparked by the Protestant Reformation. The book charts the emergence of a nuanced discourse about vernacular cultures, developing in response to the Reformers’ devastating attack on customary practices and beliefs relating to the natural world, seasonal festivities, and rites of passage. It became a discourse grounded in humanist Biblical and antiquarian scholarship; informed by the theological and pastoral problems of the long period of religious instability after the Reformation; and, over the course of the eighteenth century, colored by new ideas about culture drawn from Enlightenment historicism and empiricism. This study shows that Romantic literary primitivism and Romantic social thought, both radical and conservative, grew out of this rich context. It will be welcomed by historians of early modern and eighteenth-century Britain and those interested in the study of religious and vernacular cultures.

Exploring the intense relationship between Romantic literature and Methodism, Helen Boyles argues that writers from both movements display an ambivalent attitude towards the expression of deep emotional and spiritual experience. Boyles takes up the disparaging characterization of William Wordsworth and other Romantic poets as 'Methodistical,' showing how this criticism was rooted in a suspicion of the 'enthusiasm' with which the Methodist movement was negatively identified. Historically, enthusiasm has generated hostility and embarrassment, a legacy that Boyles suggests provoked concerted efforts by Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and the Methodist leaders John and Charles Wesley to cleanse it of its derogatory associations. While they distanced themselves from enthusiasm's dangerous and hysterical manifestations, writers and religious leaders also identified with the precepts and inspiration of a language and religion of the heart. Boyles's analysis encompasses a range of literary genres from the Methodist sermon and hymn, to literary biography, critical review, lyric and epic poem. Balancing analysis of creative content with a consideration of its critical reception, she offers readers a detailed analysis of Wordsworth's relationship to popular evangelism within a analytical framework that incorporates Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and William Hazlitt.

The book of Genesis records the fiery fate of Sodom and Gomorrah—a storm of fire and brimstone was sent from heaven and, for the wickedness of the people, God destroyed the cities “and all the plains, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.” According to many Protestant theologians and commentators, one of the Sodomites’ many crimes was homoerotic excess. In Visions of Sodom, H. G. Cocks examines the many different ways in which the story of Sodom’s destruction provided a template for understanding homoerotic desire and behaviour in Britain between the Reformation and the nineteenth century. Sodom was not only a marker of sexual sins, but also the epitome of false—usually Catholic—religion, an exemplar of the iniquitous city, a foreshadowing of the world’s fiery end, an epitome of divine and earthly punishment, and an actual place that could be searched for and discovered. Visions of Sodom investigates each of these ways of reading Sodom’s annihilation in the three hundred years after the Reformation. The centrality of scripture to Protestant faith meant that Sodom’s demise provided a powerful origin myth of homoerotic desire and sexual excess, one that persisted across centuries, and retains an apocalyptic echo in the religious fundamentalism of our own time.

The three volumes weave together the histories of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales and their peoples. Volume II includes the formation of the nation-state, the industrialization of the British economy and the emergence of Victorian society.

This book provides a historical cultural sociological analysis of cultural representations of Italy in England and later Britain, from the period of the Italian Renaissance to the present day. Rooted in a critical account of orthodox social scientific approaches to thinking and theorising cultural representation, the study combines analytical frames and conceptual apparatus from Bourdieu’s Field theory and Yale School cultural sociology. Drawing from a wide range of empirical data and studies, the book demonstrates the significance of representations of the Italian peninsula and its people for exploring a range of cultural sociological phenomena, from the ‘classing’ and ‘commodification’ of Italy to the role of Italian symbolism for negotiating cultural trauma, identify formation, and expressions of cultural edification, veneration, and emulation. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of (cultural) sociology, history, anthropology, Italian studies as well as scholars in international studies interested in intercultural exchange and representations of other nations, national cultures, and otherness.