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Criticism 46.1 (2004) 167-190



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The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies

Wayne State University

When the New Historicist scholar Stephen Greenblatt recently published a book on Purgatory as well as an essay and two book chapters on the Eucharist,1 clearly something new was afoot in early modern English studies. Religion was once again at the center in interpretations of early modern culture. Not that religion had ever disappeared as a subject of inquiry in the field, for the prominence of such authors as Spenser, Donne, Herbert, and Milton and the religious politics of the Civil War era guaranteed that a large body of work continued to be produced dealing with religious subject matter, conflicts, and culture.2 And, of course, the vexed question of Shakespeare's religion never stopped stimulating discussion inside or outside the academic world.

Perhaps it is safer to say that interpretation of religious material and contexts never really ceased in early modern literary study but rather that they had just been pushed somewhat to the side by most New Historicists and cultural materialists, who pursued other topics and, when they dealt with religious issues, quickly translated them into social, economic, and political language. Typical of this era was the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, a scholarly organization drawing participation mostly from scholars who began their careers in the 1980s and 1990s. In announcing its first conference in 1993, it defined itself in the following way:

The impetus for this new group grows out of a need for an interdisciplinary organization that spans the Early Modern period and is interested in the way issues such as race, class, gender, the body, sexuality, science, nationalism, and imperialism are being reshaped by recent work in critical and cultural theory.

The rubric of cultural studies enables us to encompass a variety of disciplinary fields and theoretical approaches, among them anthropological, rhetorical, historical, literary, economic, legal, and [End Page 167] sociological studies, as well as feminist, materialist, multiculturalist, gay/lesbian and bisexual, and other directions in political and aesthetic theory.3

Nowhere in this list of topics and approaches does one find religion, even though the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson has acknowledged religion as the "master code" of early modern culture.4 Evidently early modern cultural studies did not, at least initially, want to deal with this lingua franca.

Scholars approach the topic of religion utilizing different critical methodologies and adopting different stances. Those historians and literary scholars who have discussed religious material in political analyses of early modern texts and history (e.g., Christopher Hill and those Marxist critics who write about the English Civil Wars as an "English Revolution")5 approach religion and politics as religion as politics.6 They adopt the stance of analytic observers who know how to decode religious language and ideas as mystifications of economic, political, and social conditions and relationships, usually assuming that religion itself is a form of "false consciousness." There is often a relentless "presentism" in political readings of early modern culture. The otherness of early modern religious agents and culture(s) is translated into (for us) more acceptable modern forms conformable to our own cultural assumptions. For example, Civil War religious sects are portrayed as socialist revolutionaries avant la lettre, radical female preachers as modern feminists. While this approach to religion has produced some astute political criticism in recent years, it has, with regard to religion, distorted our sense of the large and alien cultural landscape of early modern England.

In literary studies that position texts in the context of intellectual history, we find a large body of work that extends the long line of cultural criticism that has its roots in philology and history-of-ideas scholarship.7 Most notably Debora Shuger, more than anyone else, has forced professionals in the field to take seriously religious beliefs, ideas, and history.8 In her most recent book, Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England: The Sacred and the State in "Measure for Measure," 9 she distinguishes between political theory...

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