English Reformation Literature

Abstract

The English Reformation produced a vibrant literature, which entertained and consoled readers and audiences, and attempted to influence the direction of religious change. Scholars long overlooked this literature because they clung to assumptions of canon-formation by which the medieval poet Chaucer and his imitators were thought to lead seamlessly to the Italianate aesthetic standards of the 1570s and the careers of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare during the reign of Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603). The field of “English Renaissance Literature” still to some degree neglects the Reformation, despite recognizing a “religious turn” in the study of Shakespeare’s plays. This subject encompasses religious literature produced prior to Elizabeth’s reign, as well as Elizabethan and early Stuart religious writing. The Protestant literary tradition which flourished into the 17th century in the poetry of George Herbert and John Milton is rooted in English biblical translation and in the creative poetry and prose produced during the reigns of Tudor monarchs, especially Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547), who broke from the Catholic Church, and Edward VI (r. 1547–1553), whose government instituted a radical Protestant reformation. English Reformation authors experimented with a large variety of genres and forms, in verse and prose, in order to counsel those in power or influence public opinion. Allegories, ballads, beast fables, biblical paraphrases, comedies, courtly and popular interludes, dialogues, epistles, examinations and trial records, flytings, historical chronicles, liturgical and devotional writing, martyrologies, millennial prophecies, morality plays, orations, parables, polemics and argumentative writing, proverbs, satires, sermons, theological treatises, tragedies, and more circulated as manuscripts and printed books well into the Stuart era (1603–1714). This material drew upon medieval antecedents while it simultaneously incorporated continental ideas. When Mary I (r. 1553–1558) reversed the religious policies of her father and brother, Catholic authors used the written word to solidify the return to orthodoxy. Under the Protestant rule of Mary’s half-sister, Elizabeth, English Catholics produced controversial poetry, historical writing, martyrologies, and devotional material. Apologists for successive Tudor monarchs wrote in Latin and English to justify royal policies. As those policies shifted across the reigns of Henry VIII and his successors, Protestant as well as Catholic authors who found themselves on the wrong side produced illicit literature on underground presses or in secret scriptoria, or they smuggled such writing to England from the relative safety of continental exile. Scholars examine the history of books and of reading in order to understand how this literature was produced and consumed. See the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation article “English Reformation.”