English Religious Cultures Research Articles

Nancy Bradley Warren. The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700. Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. xi + 339 pp. index. $36. ISBN: 978–0–268–04420–6.

Nancy Bradley Warren. The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700. Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. xi + 339 pp. index. $36. ISBN: 978–0–268–04420–6.

Tudor Religious Cultures in Practice: The Piety and Politics of Grace Mildmay and Her Circle

AbstractThis essay explores the diversities, complexities, and ambiguities of English religious cultures during the period of religious and political turmoil that constituted the Tudor era. An examination of the religious practices and writings of Grace Sharington Mildmay, members of her natal and conjugal families, and her Northamptonshire neighbors provides a snapshot of the diverse, complex range of Catholicisms and Protestantisms in existence from the beginning of the reign of the first Tudor monarch Henry VII through the end of the Elizabethan regime. The essay emphasizes continuity as well as change, providing an overview of competing versions of the historiography of Tudor religion and underlining the need to reconsider overly simplified understandings of such terms as “Calvinist,”“Puritan,”“recusant,” and “church papist.” It also highlights, through a comparative reading of texts written by Grace Mildmay and the medieval mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich, the need to rethink the binaries of “medieval” and “early modern” as well as “Catholic” and “Protestant.”

Review: Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800: Samuel Johnson and Languages of Natural Description

Review: Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800: Samuel Johnson and Languages of Natural Description

Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy ed. by David B. Ruderman, Giuseppe Veltri, and Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe ed. by Allison P. Coudert, Jeffrey S. Shoulson (review)

REVIEWS 214 gious debates and gender constructions. Coletti’s scholarship is a significant contribution to our knowledge of late medieval and early Tudor English religious culture. Her insights into England on the eve of the Reformation illustrate an existent tension between mystical spirituality and sacramental spirituality of the church as well as a counter discourse to the dominant conceptualization of femininity and its association with sexuality and sinfulness. STACY NISPEROS, California State University, Fullerton Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, ed. David B. Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2004) 304 pp.; Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison P. Coudert and Jeffrey S. Shoulson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2004) x + 327 pp. The study of Jewish-Christian interactions in early modern Europe has yielded a great deal of solid scholarship in recent years, in a way that happily contributes to a host of disciplines without falling into too many clichés or relying on gross simplifications. Such scholarship has been successful in breaking apart stereotypes about the interactions between both communities based on a facile historiography favoring sweeping generalizations and binary oppositions. Two new collections of scholarly essays published by the University of Pennsylvania Press as part of the Jewish Culture and Contexts series continue this trend by bringing together European, American, and Israeli scholars whose work contributes to the increased understanding of this time period. The first, Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy focuses, as its title states, on those thinkers whose lives and work were shaped by the Renaissance milieu in the cultural centers of the Italian Peninsula . David B. Ruderman, and editor of the series, co-edits the collection with Giuseppe Veltri. (Ruderman also edited Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy [1992]). The book’s twelve essays focus on profiles of individual protagonists of Jewish scholarship during the Renaissance rather than on broad historical currents. Veltri, the co-editor, for example, examines the emblematic figure of Yehuda Abravanel, better known as Leone Ebreo. Often considered the emblem of the harmonization of Jewish and Christian Neoplatonism, Veltri argues that he was a solidly Jewish philosopher who was misunderstood by his gentile readership. Simply put, “Leone’s philosophy of Judaism was too “pale” to be noticed by a contemporary Christian audience” (60). The emerging humanist practice of historiography trained on catastrophic events such as the fall of Constantinople intrigued Jewish scholars at the same time that it seemed to challenge a view of history as guided by a divine hand. Martin Jacobs points to the “ambiguities in Joseph ha-Kohen’s historical writings ” as “an expression of the ambivalent status of a Jewish intellectual who, thanks to the invention of the printing press, had access to new sources of information , but who lived under quite different social conditions from those of the well-known humanist historians” (78). Eleazar Gutwirth shows how the advent of printing not only provided access to new sources of information, but also to new approaches to the text itself. REVIEWS 215 Amatus Lusitanus (João Rodrigues de Castelo) employed emerging practices such as “evaluating translations and differentiating them from originals, constantly questioning translations (word by word)” to contribute to a new notion of the fixity of the text (235). Moshel Idel, whose essays appear in both volumes being reviewed, investigates the kabbalistic culture that grew up in the Galilean community of Safed and its assimilation by and effect on Italian kabbalists, who, “like Pico before them … were not so much original thinkers, but rather played a synthetic role, bringing together divergent forms of knowledge” (261). One might ask in what way were Jewish intellectuals cultural intermediaries in early modern Europe? At the end of his introduction, David B. Ruderman addresses the issue: “In the Middle Ages, the Jewish intellectual was a primary mediator between Islamic and Christian culture” (13). Clearly this was not the case in the early modern period. Rather, the judgment that emerges from this volume is that Jews were intermediaries between their own traditions and the nascent historicism and philological interest linked with humanism. Yet in the following assertion Ruderman shows...

Landscape, literature, and English religious culture, 1660-1800: Samuel Johnson and languages of natural description

Acknowledgements PART I: HISTORIOGRAPHY AND LANDSCAPE STUDIES Contextualising Landscape History Landscape History: An Essay in Historiographical Method PART II: LANDSCAPE AND RELIGION, 1660-1800: PRELIMINARY CONTEXTS Diversity and Coherence in the Discourse of Landscape in the 'Long' Eighteenth Century: A Preliminary Survey Latitudinarianism and Landscape: Low Church Attitudes to Nature, 1660-1800 PART III: SAMUEL JOHNSON, HIGH CHURCHMANSHIP AND LANDSCAPE The Lexicon of Landscape: Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Natural Description The Moral Landscape: Johnson's Doctrine of Landscape, 1738-59 The Empirical Landscape: Johnson and the Factual Description of the Natural World, 1735-75 Life, Literature and Landscape: The Role of the Natural World in Johnson's Biographies and Biography, 1739-84 Conclusion: The Unfamiliar Prospect of Eighteenth Century Landscape Studies Notes Bibliography

God’s Time, Rome’s Time, and the Calendar of the English Protestant Regime

“God’s Time, Rome’s Time, and the Calendar of the English Protestant Regime.” This paper examines calendar compulsion and calendar contest in English religious culture in the century following the Reformation. Using legal, liturgical, literary, and folkloric sources, it exposes the tensions between authority and custom, power and choice, as governments regulated the year for religious and political purposes. It shows how the liturgical calendar remained a work in progress in Protestant England, how saints’ days suppressed under the Tudors had a vestigial half-life under the Stuarts, and how the national Protestant dynastic state created time-markers of its own providential deliverances and political anniversaries. The calendar provided prompts to memory, aids to devotion, and stimuli to expressions of allegiance. Involving clergy and laity, traditionalists and reformers, governors and governed, England’s early modern calendar remained a zone of controversy and enduring contest over the marking and management of time. Traditional, official, and reformed calendars narrated nuanced stories of divine intervention, with varying shadings of confessional, national, and political significance.

The English “Post‐Reformation”?

A new term is infiltrating the lexicon of historians of early modern English religion. What was once neutral shorthand for an indeterminate period after the English Reformation is acquiring greater significance. Its initial uses were adjectival: “the patchwork of beliefs” to be found in England by 1600 “may be described as distinctively ‘post-Reformation,’ but not thoroughly ‘Protestant,’” concluded Tessa Watt; “we are beginning to see the outlines of a religious culture which if not thoroughly protestant by exacting clerical standards, was distinctively post-Reformation,” agrees Alexandra Walsham. But occasionally this quality of English religious culture has hardened into a noun—as in the title of John Bossy’s Peace in the Post-Reformation—for in Bossy’s view this term has the “benefit of putting due weight on the state of affairs, on both sides of the confessional fence, as the seismic upheavals of the sixteenth century settled down into everyday continuity.”1 The Post-Reformation, then, is all about living with the Reformation; it is a label to describe the quotidian business of rubbing along with Protestantism. We are, however, still living with the effects of the Reformation. So when did the “PostReformation” end? And when, for that matter, did it begin? When was England “post” the Reformation? Those who favor the term tend to work on the decades

Immaculate flesh and the social body: Mary and the Jews

Despite the fact that no practicing Jews were permitted to reside in fourteenth and fifteenth-century England, late-medieval English devotional culture is rife with images of Jews, from the Old Testament patriarches in the Corpus Christi Plays to the blasphemous, terrifying host desecrators dramatized in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and legitimized in Middle English sermons.1 Baffled by the paradoxical centrality of Jews to late-medieval English literature and art, scholars have acknowledged a continuing English tradition of anti-Judaism, while simultaneously asserting that Jews function in this literature to represent a generic "Other," or as a displacement for the Lollard sect that threatened religious orthodoxy with its iconomachia and reformist ecclesiology.2 The tension between these positions is obvious. The evidence of a continuous anti-Judaic iconographie tradition in lay devotional manuscripts necessarily challenges this theory of displacement, suggesting that Jews were not merely symbols of alterity in English culture, whether generic or specific, but rather that their presence was a necessary element in the devotional world of the later medieval English laity. Anti-Judaic images and ideas were particularly closely associated with the cult of the Virgin in late-medieval England. Marian devotional works, whether fictional like Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale" or liturgical like Books of Hours and devotional compendia, allow us therefore to investigate in some detail the significance of Jewish presence in late-medieval English religious culture. A number of the famous extant Middle English manuscripts, including the Bohun Hours and the Vernon manuscript, contain narratives and symbol clusters with a decidedly anti-Judaic thrust;3 but the most sustained program of anti-Judaic images I have found is in the elegant Carew-Poyntz Hours, Cambridge Fitzwilliam Ms. 48. In this encyclopedia of late-medieval religious imagery, a thread of cultic anti-Judaism - an anxiety about Jews violating the Catholic sacraments - links