Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist, and Secular Dimensions

Introduction

1 Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt Introduction In recent work on the religious culture and literature of early modern England, one finds specialized treatments of Catholic culture and texts, of the representation of Jews, of the Hebraic influence on Christian writers, and of women and religion. This collection of essays addresses these topics but also attends to a fifth topic: the relationship of religion to processes of secularization under way in this era. The boundaries between religious confessions, the hybridization of religion, the inflection of religious con- flicts and identities by gender, the representation in polemical and nonpolemical texts of religious “others,” and the secular and/or agnostic and atheistic territory outside religion are all part of the complex and evolving culture of early modern England. Using a variety of critical methods, ranging from historical analysis, deconstruction, feminist inquiry, and intertextual interpretation to pedagogical experimentation, the contributors to this collection deal with this wide range of subjects, but all assume that what is often dismissed as marginal is in a real sense central to the religious and cultural life of what was being defined as the Protestant English nation. Catholics persisted as an important and politically dissident minority , and the residual elements of the “old religion” survived long after the break with Rome; the Hebrew Bible and Jewish biblical scholarship were formative intellectual influences as well as a cultural presence to which Catholics and Protestants responded both positively and negatively; early modern women had a culturally vital role in the religious changes taking place; religious conflicts and de facto pluralism could lead to skepticism , agnosticism, atheism, and the demand for the separation of the religious and secular orders. 2 Introduction In the chapters that follow the contributors deal with topics and writers from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. They discuss not only major and minor canonical authors, such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Aemelia Lanyer, and John Milton, but also lesser known or little known figures whose culturally symptomatic work reflects the religious and cultural changes taking place in this period. The scholars contributing to this collection are North American and Israeli . Many of them originally participated in the conference “Religious Cultures in the Early Modern Period: Tradition, Authority, Heterodoxy,” which was held in Israel in 2005 at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (the conference was supported by the Israel Science Foundation). Although papers from that conference were published in a 2006 volume,1 many of these scholars have continued their dialogue, and the American and Israeli editors of this new collection have shaped this project to retain some of the emphases of the original international meeting. Three particular interests have persisted in the discussion: (1) the relationship of Judaism and Jewish texts to early modern Christianity and its internal conflicts; (2) the relationship of tradition and the hegemonic religious order to heterodoxy in its various forms; and (3) the phenomenon of religious hybridization in an era of sharpened confessional conflicts. To group the individual contributions to this present collection in sections that highlight their shared concerns and focus, we have divided the thirteen essays into five topically focused parts: Minority Catholic Culture ; Figuring the Jew; Hebraism and the Bible; Women and Religion; and Religion and Secularization. There is an undeniable emphasis on figures who were on the margins of the dominant religious culture—Catholics, Jews, women, and incipient secularists—but the assumption of all the contributors is that we cannot understand the culture as a whole without attending to the repressed, the marginalized, and the unacknowledged. Minority Catholic Culture Over the past two decades studies of early modern English Catholic culture have burgeoned in the fields of both history and literary studies. A previously marginalized or ignored Catholic minority community and its writers have received serious attention from scholars who have redefined the cultural functioning of English Catholics within the larger society, complicating our notions of religious change and diversity.2 Whereas earlier studies of recusants emphasized Catholic suffering and martyrdom, current early modern Catholic studies include work on serial converts, church papists, religiously amphibious or ambiguous individuals, and Introduction 3 former Catholics who retained a cultural attachment to the old religion but who were observant Protestants. Historians such as Eamon Duffy and Christopher Haigh emphasize the slow pace of England’s change from being a Catholic country to...