Reformation Fictions

‘This is an unashamedly interdisciplinary project, situated between cultural history and historicist literary criticism’, proclaims the author (twice: on pp. vii and 7). At times the end product may tilt towards the latter, but historians will find this highly intelligent reassessment of twenty polemical Protestant dialogues of the Elizabethan period both very readable and well worth the read. The sample contains works by some familiar authors (such as Gilby, Udall, Throckmorton and Gifford) and some less so (such as John Véron), mostly ‘university-trained puritans’ whose prime motive was to attack Catholicism or to try to reform the version of Protestantism established in England by 1560. But, rather than adopting the usual point-scoring or didactic modes, the authors of these dialogues chose to develop a ‘popular’, hybrid form that combined elements of story-telling, lively characterisation, humour, rhetoric, dialectic and theology. This approach, it is argued, reduced the risk of censorship, which a formal, frontal attack might have provoked, and held out the prospect of grabbing and holding the attention of ‘carnal’ readers who might well have steered clear of blatant attempts at edification. Dr Bevan Zlatar wisely places these dialogues in the wider context of Erasmian, Lutheran and Calvinist dialogues, as well as other question-and-answer forms deployed in England, and rightly stresses the role of contemporary humanist education in providing the many rhetorical devices which interlocutors used to demolish opponents’ arguments or sway the emotions of the biddable. (A helpful ‘Glossary of rhetorical terms’ explains the use of antirrhesis, apodioxis and another dozen terms for the benefit of those modern readers who lack a classical education.) She also stresses the fluidity of a genre which ranged from harsh and even scurrilous invectives against the papacy and the Jesuits, through scholarly debates on topical issues within the Church of England such as vestments and episcopacy, to the equally serious but milder ‘road dialogues’ in which a ‘godly’ clergyman tries to convert obstinate or ignorant laymen from an outward, formal religion to a piercing sense of sin and the need for grace

Art · Context (archaeology · Criticism · Humanism · Literature · Piety · Protestantism · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies · Religious Studies