Joseph Sterrett – författare

Early modern England was a nation alive with intense religious debate, with often violent results. Central to these debates were questions of prayer, questions powerful enough to splinter the English church and to fuel a ferocious civil war. This collection of thirteen newly commissioned essays traces the controversy and value given to the performance of prayer, through the body, the spoken word and written text, as well as its representation on stage. Through close readings of the works of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton and Henry Vaughan amongst others, this book examines the performative aspects of prayer in a range of literary modes. This broad range of study is expanded further with chapters focussing on the private religious diaries of men and women throughout the seventeenth century, and the convergence of music and prayer in the work of William Byrd.

The concepts of trust and risk provide important insights into the social and cultural life of early modern England but remain relatively unexplored in early modern literary studies. This collection addresses that gap by exploring a wide range of literary genres and texts including comic drama, lyric verse, emblem books, ledgers, wills, polemical prose and religious epic. Contributors explore issues of personal trust through the faith and lies that characterize Shakespeare’s sonnets, Donne’s sermons and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Following the idea of trust and risk into community brings us to a discussion of The Merry Wives of Windsor, the spiritual trust of faith communities and the network of relationships that are traceable though surviving records of women’s wills. Following this progression outwards from the personal to the communal, the final essays in the collection consider the role of institutional trust, specifically the early modern obsession with credit in its various guises. The Merchant of Venice, Volpone and The Winter’s Tale act as illustrative examples of credit’s significance for understanding trust and risk in the early modern period. Taken together the range of texts and genres considered reveal new insights into early modern English literature and its socio-economic context.

The concepts of trust and risk provide important insights into the social and cultural life of early modern England but remain relatively unexplored in early modern literary studies. This collection addresses that gap by exploring a wide range of literary genres and texts including comic drama, lyric verse, emblem books, ledgers, wills, polemical prose and religious epic. Contributors explore issues of personal trust through the faith and lies that characterize Shakespeare’s sonnets, Donne’s sermons and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Following the idea of trust and risk into community brings us to a discussion of The Merry Wives of Windsor, the spiritual trust of faith communities and the network of relationships that are traceable though surviving records of women’s wills. Following this progression outwards from the personal to the communal, the final essays in the collection consider the role of institutional trust, specifically the early modern obsession with credit in its various guises. The Merchant of Venice, Volpone and The Winter’s Tale act as illustrative examples of credit’s significance for understanding trust and risk in the early modern period. Taken together the range of texts and genres considered reveal new insights into early modern English literature and its socio-economic context.

This book is not designed to define the sacred. It is, rather, a bringing together of case histories (a rich, varied collection from medieval, early modern and nineteenth-century contexts in England and Wales) that goes beyond familiar paradigms to explore the dynamic, protean interaction, in different times and places, between sacred space and text. Essentially an interdisciplinary enterprise, it focuses a range of historical and critical methodologies on that complex process of transformation and transmission whereby spiritual intuitions, experiences and teachings are made palpable ‘in art and architecture, poetry and prayer, in histories, scriptures and liturgies, even landscapes. So the sacred, variously constructed and inscribed, makes itself felt ‘on the pulse’; is a presence, a voice even now not stilled.