Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton
Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England

Study of religious non-conformity in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

Kristen Poole (Author)

9780521641043, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 June 2000

288 pages, 11 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.59 kg

"Poole masterfully uncovers and links together a group of lively and diverse materials that treat puritans as grotesque and aberant.... Radical Religion fills a significant and long-standing gap in the history of represntation, as previous booklength treatments of satiric images of puritans date back to the 1940s....Kristen Poole makes a major contribution to discussions of religion, literature, and culture in the early modern period. This groundbreaking book should be of considerable value and interest to literary scholars and historians alike." Journal of English and Germanic Philology

The figure of the puritan has long been conceived as dour and repressive in character, an image which has been central to ways of reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history and literature. Kristen Poole's original study challenges this perception arguing that, contrary to current critical understanding, radical reformers were most often portrayed in literature of the period as deviant, licentious and transgressive. Through extensive analysis of early modern pamphlets, sermons, poetry and plays, the fictional puritan emerges as a grotesque and carnivalesque figure; puritans are extensively depicted as gluttonous, sexually promiscuous, monstrously procreating, and even as worshipping naked. By recovering this lost alternative satirical image, Poole sheds new light on the role played by anti-puritan rhetoric. Her book contends that such representations served an important social role, providing an imaginative framework for discussing familial, communal and political transformations that resulted from the Reformation.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: deforming Reformation
1. The Puritan in the alehouse: Falstaff and the drama of Martin Marprelate
2. Eating disorder: feasting, fasting, and the Puritan bellygod at Bartholemew Fair
3. Lewd conversations: the perversions of the Family of Love
4. Dissecting sectarianism: swarms, form, and Thomas Edwards's Gangrœna
5. The descent of dissent: monstrous genealogies and Milton's antiprelatical tracts
6. Not so much as fig leaves: Adamites, naked Quakers, linguistic perfections and Paradise Lost
Epilogue: the fortunes of Hudibras
Notes
Selected bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]