Introduction

In the academic year 2009-10, the English Department of the University of Texas at Austin inaugurated the first Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies. The institute was made possible through the generous support of university president Bill Powers, who named the department a "priority department" and awarded it a substantial Excellence Fund. We owe him a great debt of gratitude, as we do to the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Randy Diehl, and the chair of the English Department, Elizabeth Cullingford. The institute was run by Professors Wayne A. Rebhorn and Frank Whigham as codirectors, assisted by a hardworking faculty committee, including J. K. Barret, Mary Blockley, Douglas Bruster, James Loehlin, Eric Mallin, John Rumrich, and Hannah Wojciehowski, as well as by a fine graduate assistant, Sara Saylor. We would also like to thank Professor Kurt Heinzelman, the editor of Texas Studies in Literature and Language, for devoting a special issue of the journal to this collection of essays.

We chose literature and religious conflict in the English Renaissance as the topic for the first year of the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies because of the prominence religious conflict has acquired now both in the United States and around the globe, ranging from 9/11 and subsequent Al Qaeda attacks to the Chinese repression of the Falun Gong, the international split of the Anglican/Episcopalian confession over ordaining gay bishops, continuing harsh debates in the United States about abortion, and our current conflict in Afghanistan. The stakes can be very high. In this context, recent scholarship on English literature has turned to a new engagement with its own earlier experience of violent religious conflict—the complex and often violent struggle we now know as the Protestant Reformation, and its complicated and often horrific aftermath, which occupied the better part of the next century and a half.

From 1517, when Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, to the last gasp of the English Civil War, when the Stuart line was restored to the throne in 1660, the age was defined as much by the fierceness of its religious debates, persecution, and warfare as it was by its interest in recovering the classical past, its exploration of the New World, or the great achievements of Leonardo, Michelangelo, or Shakespeare. In England, Henry VIII's severance of the English church from Roman Catholic hierarchy, which led many to the stake, including Sir Thomas More, was followed immediately by the rebellions known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, for which over two hundred people were executed. The guardians of Henry's son, the child-king Edward VI, pressed the new religion much farther than Henry had, and when the boy died, Henry's elder daughter Mary I sought to restore Catholicism as the state religion in 1553, and in six years burned some 290 English reformers (more than were recorded as burned in any continental Catholic country).

Soon after this radicalizing slaughter Mary died, and in 1559 the new queen Elizabeth I secured a settlement that seemed for a time to establish a peaceful via media for English Christians. Yet within a short time there came Spain's horrific repression of the Protestant Dutch revolt in the Low Countries (1568), a rebellion of English Catholics (1569), the papal excommunication of the queen (1570), the inflammatory St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Protestants in France (1572), and a series of Catholic assassination plots against Elizabeth. Those plots culminated in the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587 and the attack of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Some 190 Catholics were executed during the course of Elizabeth's supposedly more tolerant reign.

The new century and the reign of James I began with the notorious Guy Fawkes plot of 1605, when Catholic conspirators sought to blow up the king and all of Parliament with a cellar full of gunpowder. King James is now chiefly remembered for his claims to pacifism and the Bible translation he commissioned, but he propagated royal policies that pushed both anti-Catholic and anti-Puritan antipathies measurably...