Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019163641X
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (916 download)

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Book Synopsis Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World by : Kathleen Lynch

Download or read book Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World written by Kathleen Lynch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autobiographical narrative is seldom viewed as a catalyst for the social and political upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century England and its colonies. Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World argues that it should be. Focusing on the inward search for signs of election as a powerful stimulus for new, written forms of self-identification, this study directs critical attention toward the collective processes through which 'truthful' texts of spiritual experience were constructed, validated, and endorsed. This new analysis of the rhetoric of authentic selfhood emphasizes the ways in which personal accounts of religious awakening became another opportunity to conceptualize experience as an authorizing principle. A broad spectrum of Protestant life-writing is explored, from Augustine's Confessions, first translated into English in 1620, through John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696). The forms in which these landmark texts were circulated and the interests that those circulations served are examined in such a way as to put canonical texts back into conversation with the outpouring of individual life writings that dates from the middle of the 17th century on. As the first new historicized account of the seventeenth-century Protestant conversion narrative in a generation, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World contributes to the reintegration of the scholarly fields of literature, religion, and politics. It revitalizes the study of proto-literary forms which, while devotional in nature, were deeply political in their consequences, contributing as they did to the emerging discourse of personal liberties.

The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191506990
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (915 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern by : Alan Stewart

Download or read book The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern written by Alan Stewart and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume2. Early Modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing. The challenges wrought by the upheavals and the sixteenth-century English Reformation and seventeenth-century Civil Wars moulded British and early American life-writing in unique and lasting ways. While classical and medieval models continued to exercise considerable influence, new forms began to challenge them. The English Reformation banished the saints' lives that dominated the writings of medieval Catholicism, only to replace them with new lives of Protestant martyrs. Novel forms of self-accounting came into existence: from the daily moral self-accounting dictated by strands of Calvinism, to the daily financial self-accounting modelled on the new double-entry book-keeping. This volume shows how the most ostensibly private journals were circulated to build godly communities; how women found new modes of recording and understanding their disrupted lives; how men started to compartmentalize their lives for public and private consumption. The volume doesn't intend to present a strict chronological progression from the medieval to the modern, nor to suggest the triumphant rise of the fact-based historical biography. Instead, it portrays early modern England as a site of multiple, sometimes conflicting possibilities for life-writing, all of which have something to teach us about how the period understood both the concept of a 'life' and what it mean to 'write' a life.

Cultures of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe

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Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190456280
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (94 download)

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Book Synopsis Cultures of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe by : Crawford Gribben

Download or read book Cultures of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe written by Crawford Gribben and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have associated Calvinism with print and literary cultures, with republican, liberal, and participatory political cultures, with cultures of violence and vandalism, enlightened cultures, cultures of social discipline, secular cultures, and with the emergence of capitalism. Reflecting on these arguments, the essays in this volume recognize that Reformed Protestantism did not develop as a uniform tradition but varied across space and time. The authors demonstrate that multiple iterations of Calvinism developed and impacted upon differing European communities that were experiencing social and cultural transition. They show how these different forms of Calvinism were shaped by their adherents and opponents, and by the divergent political and social contexts in which they were articulated and performed. Recognizing that Reformed Protestantism developed in a variety of cultural settings, this volume analyzes the ways in which it related to the multi-confessional cultural environment that prevailed in Europe after the Reformation.

Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 9813295996
Total Pages : 383 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (132 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics by : Jason Gleckman

Download or read book Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics written by Jason Gleckman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the impact of the sixteenth-century Reformation on the plays of William Shakespeare. Taking three fundamental Protestant concerns of the era – (double) predestination, conversion, and free will – it demonstrates how Protestant theologians, in England and elsewhere, re-imagined these longstanding Christian concepts from a specifically Protestant perspective. Shakespeare utilizes these insights to generate his distinctive view of human nature and the relationship between humans and God. Through in-depth readings of the Shakespeare comedies ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and ‘Twelfth Night’, the romance ‘A Winter’s Tale’, and the tragedies of ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Hamlet’, this book examines the results of almost a century of Protestant thought upon literary art.

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019100667X
Total Pages : 542 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I by : John Coffey

Download or read book The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I written by John Coffey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-29 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I traces the emergence of Anglophone Protestant Dissent in the post-Reformation era between the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Act of Toleration (1689). It reassesses the relationship between establishment and Dissent, emphasising that Presbyterians and Congregationalists were serious contenders in the struggle for religious hegemony. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, separatists were few in number, and Dissent was largely contained within the Church of England, as nonconformists sought to reform the national Church from within. During the English Revolution (1640-60), Puritan reformers seized control of the state but splintered into rival factions with competing programmes of ecclesiastical reform. Only after the Restoration, following the ejection of two thousand Puritan clergy from the Church, did most Puritans become Dissenters, often with great reluctance. Dissent was not the inevitable terminus of Puritanism, but the contingent and unintended consequence of the Puritan drive for further reformation. The story of Dissent is thus bound up with the contest for the established Church, not simply a heroic tale of persecuted minorities contending for religious toleration. Nevertheless, in the half century after 1640, religious pluralism became a fact of English life, as denominations formed and toleration was widely advocated. The volume explores how Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers began to forge distinct identities as the four major denominational traditions of English Dissent. It tracks the proliferation of Anglophone Protestant Dissent beyond England—in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean. And it presents the latest research on the culture of Dissenting congregations, including their relations with the parish, their worship, preaching, gender relations, and lay experience.

Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317231384
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain by : Carme Font

Download or read book Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain written by Carme Font and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines women’s prophetic writings in seventeenth-century Britain as the literary outcome of a discourse of social transformation that integrates religious conscience, political participation, and gender identity. The following pages approach prophecy as a culture, a language, and a catalyst for collective change as the individual prophet conceptualized it. While the corpus of prophetic writing continues to grow as the result of archival research, this monograph complements our particular knowledge of women’s prophecy in the seventeenth century with a global assessment of what makes speech prophetic in the first place, and what are the differences and similarities between texts that fall into the prophetic mode. These disparities and commonalities stand out in the radical language of prophecy as well as in the way it creates an authorial centre. Examining how authorship is represented in several configurations of prophetic delivery, such as essays on prophecy, poetic prophecy, spiritual autobiography, and election narratives, the different chapters consider why prophecy peaked in the years of the civil wars and how it evolved towards the eighteenth century. The analyses extrapolate the peculiarities of each case study as being representative of a form of textually-based activism that enabled women to gain a deeper understanding of themselves as creators of independent meaning that empowered them as individuals, citizens, and believers.

The pastor in print

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Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526152193
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

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Book Synopsis The pastor in print by : Amy G. Tan

Download or read book The pastor in print written by Amy G. Tan and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pastor in print explores the phenomenon of early modern pastors who chose to become print authors, addressing ways authorship could enhance, limit or change clerical ministry and ways pastor-authors conceived of their work in parish and print. It identifies strategies through which pastor-authors established authorial identities, targeted different sorts of audiences and strategically selected genre and content as intentional parts of their clerical vocation. The first study to provide a book-length analysis of the phenomenon of early modern pastors writing for print, it uses a case study of prolific pastor-author Richard Bernard to offer a new lens through which to view religious change in this pivotal period. By bringing together questions of print, genre, religio-politics and theology, the book will interest scholars and postgraduate students in history, literature and theological studies, and its readability will appeal to undergraduates and non-specialists.

Writing Illness and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Britain

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137593121
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (375 download)

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Book Synopsis Writing Illness and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Britain by : David Thorley

Download or read book Writing Illness and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Britain written by David Thorley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-24 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a survey of personal illness as described in various forms of early modern manuscript life-writing. How did people in the seventeenth century rationalise and record illness? Observing that medical explanations for illness were fewer than may be imagined, the author explores the social and religious frameworks by which illness was more commonly recorded and understood. The story that emerges is of illness written into personal manuscripts in prescriptive rather than original terms. This study uncovers the ways in which illness, so described, contributed to the self-patterning these texts were set up to perform.

Church Life

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191067466
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Church Life by : Michael Davies

Download or read book Church Life written by Michael Davies and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England addresses the rich, complex, and varied nature of 'church life' experienced by England's Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians during the seventeenth century. Spanning the period from the English Revolution to the Glorious Revolution, and beyond, the contributors examine the social, political, and religious character of England's 'gathered' churches and reformed parishes: how pastors and their congregations interacted; how Dissenters related to their meetings as religious communities; and what the experience of church life was like for ordinary members as well as their ministers, including notably John Owen and Richard Baxter alongside less well-known figures, such as Ebenezer Chandler. Moving beyond the religious experience of the solitary individual, often exemplified by conversion, Church Life redefines the experience of Dissent, concentrating instead on the collective concerns of a communally-centred church life through a wide spectrum of issues: from questions of liberty and pastoral reform to matters of church discipline and respectability. With a substantial introduction that puts into context the key concepts of 'church life' and the 'Dissenting experience', the contributors offer fresh ways of understanding Protestant Dissent in seventeenth-century England: through differences in ecclesiology and pastoral theory, and via the buildings in which Dissent was nurtured to the building-up of Dissent during periods of civil war, persecution, and revolution. They draw on a broad range of printed and archival materials: from the minutes of the Westminster Assembly to the manuscript church books of early Dissenting congregations.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317042069
Total Pages : 586 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England by : Andrew Hadfield

Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England written by Andrew Hadfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.

Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Conversion

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031119614
Total Pages : 206 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (311 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Conversion by : Stephen Wittek

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Conversion written by Stephen Wittek and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-09-17 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a close look at Shakespeare’s engagement with the flurry of controversy and activity surrounding the concept of conversion in post-Reformation England. For playhouse audiences during the period, conversional thought encompassed a markedly diverse, fluid amalgamation of ideas, practices, and arguments centered on the means by which an individual could move from one category of identity to another. In an analysis that includes chapter-length readings of The Taming of the Shrew, Henry IV Part I, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest, the book argues that Shakespearean drama made a unique and substantive intervention in public discourse surrounding conversion, and continues to speak meaningfully about conversional experience for audiences in the present age. It will be of particular benefit to students and scholars with an interest in theatrical history, performance theory, theology, cultural studies, race studies, and gender studies.

Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317176294
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 by : Rachel Adcock

Download or read book Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 written by Rachel Adcock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although literary-historical studies have often focused on the range of dissenting religious groups and writers that flourished during the English Revolution, they have rarely had much to say about seventeenth-century Baptists, or, indeed, Baptist women. Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 fills that gap, exploring how female Baptists played a crucial role in the group’s formation and growth during the 1640s and 50s, by their active participation in religious and political debate, and their desire to evangelise their followers. The study significantly challenges the idea that women, as members of these congregations, were unable to write with any kind of textual authority because they were often prevented from speaking aloud in church meetings. On the contrary, Adcock shows that Baptist women found their way into print to debate points of church organisation and doctrine, to defend themselves and their congregations, to evangelise others by example and by teaching, and to prophesy, and discusses the rhetorical tactics they utilised in order to demonstrate the value of women’s contributions. In the course of the study, Adcock considers and analyses the writings of little-studied Baptist women, Deborah Huish, Katherine Sutton, and Jane Turner, as well as separatist writers Sara Jones, Susanna Parr, and Anne Venn. She also makes due connection to the more familiar work of Agnes Beaumont, Anna Trapnel, and Anne Wentworth, enabling a reassessment of the significance of those writings by placing them in this wider context. Writings by these female Baptists attracted serious attention, and, as Adcock discusses, some even found a trans-national audience.

John Owen and English Puritanism

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190860790
Total Pages : 425 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (98 download)

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Book Synopsis John Owen and English Puritanism by : Crawford Gribben

Download or read book John Owen and English Puritanism written by Crawford Gribben and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-11 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Owen was a leading theologian in seventeenth-century England. Closely associated with the regicide and revolution, he befriended Oliver Cromwell, was appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, and became the premier religious statesman of the Interregnum. The restoration of the monarchy pushed Owen into dissent, criminalizing his religious practice and inspiring his writings in defense of high Calvinism and religious toleration. Owen transcended his many experiences of defeat, and his claims to quietism were frequently undermined by rumors of his involvement in anti-government conspiracies. Crawford Gribben's biography documents Owen's importance as a controversial and adaptable theologian deeply involved with his social, political, and religious environments. Fiercely intellectual and extraordinarily learned, Owen wrote millions of words in works of theology and exegesis. Far from personifying the Reformed tradition, however, Owen helped to undermine it, offering an individualist account of Christian faith that downplayed the significance of the church and means of grace. In doing so, Owen's work contributed to the formation of the new religious movement known as evangelicalism, where his influence can still be seen today.

Sensing Salvation in Early British Methodism

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Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000988791
Total Pages : 150 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis Sensing Salvation in Early British Methodism by : Erika K.R. Stalcup

Download or read book Sensing Salvation in Early British Methodism written by Erika K.R. Stalcup and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-27 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the spiritual experiences of the first British Methodist lay people and the language used to describe those experiences. It reflects on physical manifestations such as shouting, weeping, groaning, visions, and out-of-body experiences and their role in the process of spiritual development. These experiences offer an intimate perspective on the surprisingly holistic origins of the evangelical revival. The study features autobiographical narratives and other first-hand manuscripts in which “ordinary” lay people recount their first impressions of Methodism, their conflicted feelings throughout the conversion process, their approach toward death and dying, and their mixed attitudes toward the task of writing itself. The book will be relevant to scholars of Methodism, evangelicalism and religious history as well as those interested in emotions and religious experience.

A History of English Autobiography

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316538931
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis A History of English Autobiography by : Adam Smyth

Download or read book A History of English Autobiography written by Adam Smyth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of English Autobiography explores the genealogy of autobiographical writing in England from the medieval period to the digital era. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes wide-ranging essays that illuminate the legacy of English autobiography. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered writings of such diverse authors as Chaucer, Bunyan, Carlyle, Newman, Wilde and Woolf. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History is the definitive, single-volume collection on English autobiography and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319965778
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (199 download)

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Book Synopsis Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England by : Abigail Shinn

Download or read book Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England written by Abigail Shinn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of English conversion narratives between 1580 and 1660. Focusing on the formal, stylistic properties of these texts, it argues that there is a direct correspondence between the spiritual and rhetorical turn. Furthermore, by focusing on a comparatively early period in the history of the conversion narrative the book charts for the first time writers’ experimentation and engagement with rhetorical theory before the genre’s relative stabilization in the 1650s. A cross confessional study analyzing work by both Protestant and Catholic writers, this book explores conversion’s relationship with reading; the links between conversion, eloquence, translation and trope; the conflation of spiritual movement with literal travel; and the use of the body as a site for spiritual knowledge and proof.

Flesh and Spirit

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Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526111004
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

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Book Synopsis Flesh and Spirit by : Rachel Adcock

Download or read book Flesh and Spirit written by Rachel Adcock and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology makes accessible to readers ten little-known and under-studied works by seventeenth-century women (edited from manuscript and print) that explore the relationship between spiritual and physical health in the period. Providing a detailed and engaging introduction to the issues confronted when studying women’s writing from this era, the anthology also examines female interpretations of illness, exploring beliefs that toothache and miscarriage could be God’s punishments, but also, paradoxically, that such terrible suffering could be understood as proof that a believer was eternally beloved. The extracts in the anthology explore how illness was an important part of women’s religious conversion, often confirming religious belief, but also how women could advise others about their physical and spiritual health in manuscript and print. The anthology includes a thorough introduction to the period’s medical and religious beliefs, as well as an introduction to contemporary ideas about women’s physical and spiritual make up. Each of the ten extracts also has its own preface, highlighting relevant contexts and further reading, and is fully annotated.