Alison Shell. Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 309. $59.95. ISBN 0-521-58090-0.

Abstract

The Catholic contribution to English literature has been widely neglected or misunderstood. Drawing on extensive original research, this book sets out to rehabilitate a wide range of Catholic imaginative writing, while exposing the role of anti-Catholicism as an imaginative stimulus to mainstream writers in Tudor and Stuart England. It discusses canonical figures such as Sidney, Spenser, Webster and Middleton, those whose presence in the canon has been more fitful, such as Robert Southwell and Richard Crashaw, and many who have wescaped the attention of literary critics. Among the themes to emerge are the anti-Catholic imagery of revenge tragedy and the definitive contribution made by Southwell and Crashaw to the post-Reformation revival of religious verse in England. The book also explores the rhetorical stratagems by which Catholics sought to demonstrate simultaneous loyalties to the monarch and to their religion, and of the stimulus given to the Catholic literary imagination by the persecution and exile which so many of these writers suffered.