Communities have often shaped themselves around cultural spaces set apart and declared sacred. For this purpose, churches, priests or scholars no less than writers frequently participate in giving sacred figures a local habitation and, sometimes, voice or name. But whatever sites, rites, images or narratives have thus been constructed, they also raise some complex questions: how can the sacred be presented and yet guarded, claimed yet concealed, staged in public and at the same time kept exclusive?
Such questions are pursued here in a variety of English texts historically employed to manifest and manage versions of the sacred. But since their performances inhabit social space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, sacrifice and sacrilege. In this way, all aspects of social life - the family, the nation, the idea of kingship, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or smoking - may become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of religious symbolic forms.
Through critical readings of central texts and authors - such as Sir Gawain, Foxe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, or Vaughan - as well as less canonical examples - the Croxton play, Buchanan, Lanyer, Wroth, or the tobacco pamphlets - the twelve contributions all engage with the crucial question how, and to what end, performances of the sacred affect, or effect, cultural transformation.
CONTENTS
Tobias DÖRING: Introduction
Paul STROHM: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Commemoration and Repetition in Late Medieval Culture
Andrew James JOHNSTON: The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Thomas HEALY: Performing the Self: Reformation History and the English Renaissance Lyric
Andreas HÖFELE: Stages of Martyrdom: John Foxe's Actes and Monuments
Andrew HADFIELD: James VI and I, George Buchanan and the Divine Right of Kings
Verena OLEJNICZAK LOBSIEN: "Transformed in show, but more transformed in mind": Sidney's Old Arcadia and the Performance of Perfection
Susanne RUPP: Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology
Richard WILSON: Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries
Ina SCHABERT: The Lady's Supper: Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum as a Female Celebration of the Eucharist
Irmgard MAASSEN: Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet
Sabine SCHÜLTING: Tobacco-Sacred and Profane
Notes on Contributors
Such questions are pursued here in a variety of English texts historically employed to manifest and manage versions of the sacred. But since their performances inhabit social space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, sacrifice and sacrilege. In this way, all aspects of social life - the family, the nation, the idea of kingship, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or smoking - may become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of religious symbolic forms.
Through critical readings of central texts and authors - such as Sir Gawain, Foxe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, or Vaughan - as well as less canonical examples - the Croxton play, Buchanan, Lanyer, Wroth, or the tobacco pamphlets - the twelve contributions all engage with the crucial question how, and to what end, performances of the sacred affect, or effect, cultural transformation.
CONTENTS
Tobias DÖRING: Introduction
Paul STROHM: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Commemoration and Repetition in Late Medieval Culture
Andrew James JOHNSTON: The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Thomas HEALY: Performing the Self: Reformation History and the English Renaissance Lyric
Andreas HÖFELE: Stages of Martyrdom: John Foxe's Actes and Monuments
Andrew HADFIELD: James VI and I, George Buchanan and the Divine Right of Kings
Verena OLEJNICZAK LOBSIEN: "Transformed in show, but more transformed in mind": Sidney's Old Arcadia and the Performance of Perfection
Susanne RUPP: Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology
Richard WILSON: Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries
Ina SCHABERT: The Lady's Supper: Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum as a Female Celebration of the Eucharist
Irmgard MAASSEN: Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet
Sabine SCHÜLTING: Tobacco-Sacred and Profane
Notes on Contributors