DeCook — Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book

DeCook, Travis, and Alan Galey, eds. Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures. London: Routledge, 2012.

Contents: Introduction: scriptural negotiations and textual afterlives (by Travis DeCook and Alan Galey). — Shakespeare reads the Geneva Bible (by Barbara A. Mowat). — Cain’s crime of secrecy and the unknowable book of life: the complexities of biblical referencing in Richard II (by Scott Schofield). — Paulina, Corinthian women, and the revisioning of Pauline and early modern patriarchal ideology in The Winter’s Tale (by Randall Martin). — The tablets of the law: reading Hamlet with scriptural technologies (by Alan Galey). — Shakespeare and the Bible: against textual materialism (by Edward Pechter). — Going professional: William Aldis Wright on Shakespeare and the English Bible (by Paul Werstine). — “Stick to Shakespeare and the Bible. They’re the roots of civilisation”: nineteenth-century readers in context (by Andrew Murphy). — The devotional texts of Victorian bardolatry (by Charles Laporte). — Apocalyptic archives: the Reformation Bible, secularity, and the text of Shakespearean scripture (Travis Decook). — Disintegrating the rock: Ian Paisley, British Shakespeare, and Ulster Protestantism (by David Coleman).

Lowenstein — Treacherous Faith

Lowenstein, David. Treacherous Faith: The Spectre of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Contents: Part 1: The specter of heresy and religious conflict in English Reformation literary culture. — 1. Religious demonization, anti-heresy polemic, and Thomas More. — 2. Anne Askew and the culture of heresy hunting in Henry VIII’s England. — 3. Burning heretics and fashioning martyrs: religious violence in John Foxe and Reformation England. — 4. The specter of heretics in later Elizabethan and Jacobean writing. — Part 2: The war against heresy in Milton’s England. — 5. The specter of heresy and blasphemy in the English Revolution: from heresiographers to the spectacle of James Nayler. — 6. The specter of heresy and the struggle for toleration: John Goodwin, William Walwyn, and Richard Overton. — 7. John Milton: toleration and “Fantastic terrors of sect and schism.” — 8. Fears of heresy, blasphemy, and religious schism in Milton’s culture and Paradise Lost. — Epilogue: making heretics and Bunyan’s Vanity Fair.

Stranks — Anglican Devotion

Stranks, C. J. Anglican Devotion: Studies in the Spiritual Life of the Church of England Between the Reformation and the Oxford Movement. London: SCM Press, 1961.

Contents: “The Reformation and Personal Religion”; “The Practice of Piety”; “Holy Living and Holy Dying” [Lancelot Andrewes, John Cosin, Jeremy Taylor]; “Centuries of Meditation” [Thomas Traherne]; “The Whole Duty of Man”; “Devotion Based on the Prayer Book”; “A Serious Call” [William Law]; “A Practical View” [William Wilberforce]; “The Christian Year” [John Keble]; “Some Characteristics of Anglican Devotion.”