Early modern stereotypes and the rise of English

Stereotyping is a mode of stigmatisation and polarisation, and so we tend to think of the stereotype as a deadening force which closes down conversation. But we need to appreciate further the extent to which the transmission of stereotypes can facilitate and shape creative cultural response, even if that response is designed to simplify and satirise in the service of an ideological imperative. The stereotype of the Puritan as ignoramus in Ben Jonson's seventeenth‐century comedies reappears in, and helps to structure, aesthetic discussions over three centuries, beginning with Dryden's post‐Restoration literary criticism. These discussions were central to the generation of a dominant narrative of English literary history, to the development of notions of literary refinement and politeness and to the construction of a literary canon. Incorporated by Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot into their versions of literary history ‐ versions which were themselves a response to what Arnold and Eliot perceived as the cultural crises of their own time ‐ early modern dramatic stereotypes became naturalised in university courses and school textbooks. Ultimately, this essay suggests, the transmission of the early modern stereotype of the Puritan was bound up with the rise of English as an academic discipline

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• The stigmatizing of Puritans as Jews in Jacobean England

  Open Access•Nicholas Mcdowell•Renaissance Studies•2005

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