Redcrosse: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today's World

Ewan Fernie is Professor and Chair of Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of Shame in Shakespeare, the editor of Spiritual Shakespeares and general editor (with Simon Palfrey) of the Shakespeare Now! series.

'The Redcrosse project has demonstrated how true liturgy is a quest for liturgy and a continuing self-questioning. It cannot evade the specificity of place and circumstance, even though these might lean towards bias: being reconciled to the tendril of our own path is our only way to attain a specific glimpse of the universal. So here the ambivalent legacy of the English Red Cross and the cult of St George are embraced and yet ritually purged with the help of the mythopoeic vision of Edmund Spenser: the blood of ugly victory becomes the pelican blood of suffering and searching, and triumph is itself turned into the miraculous arrival of always particular and always social grace. The essays in the volume take forward the task of the liturgy and open the way to more such awakenings in future.'

• Contributors \ Acknowledgements \ Part I: Reflections \ 1. Through the Red Cross Ewan Fernie \ 2. For Real Salley Vickers \ 3. A Desire for the Impossible Andrew Shanks \ 4. The Poet's Tale Michael Symmons Roberts \ 5. Fight the Good Fight? Sarah Apetrei \ 6. From Romance to Ritual: Redcrosse and Spenser's Faerie Queene John Milbank \ Part II: Redcrosse \ Redcrosse: A New Celebration of England and St George Ewan Fernie, Michael Symmons Roberts, Jo Shapcott and Andrew Shanks, and featuring a new poem from Andrew Motion