Religious Nostalgia from Shakespeare to Milton

FAIN: FT-285651-22

Brooke Conti
Cleveland State University (Cleveland, OH 44115-2214)

Research and writing leading to a book on religious nostalgia in English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  

My book manuscript examines seventeenth-century English literature’s nostalgic attachment to the early church. The fact that the Reformation had made the early church rhetorically central to its project—but had manifestly not recovered apostolic religion—made the early church a site of fantasy, projection, and longing for latter-day Protestants coping with the imperfections of their own church. Reading the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton alongside sermons, devotional texts, martyrologies, and works of British history, I show the many ways that early modern English culture fostered a sense of identification with the earliest Christians. Nevertheless, Protestants were not contemplating a stable object when they looked at the early church. I argue that as Protestants grappled with the unfinished business of the Reformation, the early church could represent both a lost, idealized past and a lost future. It was therefore a tool for thinking about the Reformation itself.