Signs that save: sacramental matter and agency in English literature 1590-1660
Date
2020
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation, Signs That Save: Sacramental Matter and Agency in English Literature 1590–1660, explores the imaginative interplay between literature and material cultures of religion in Reformation-era England. Viewing that topic through a critical lens informed by new materialist theory, historical theology, and contemporary phenomenology, it analyzes textual representations of matter alongside material objects—baptismal water, communion bread, relics, holy statues, and the like—active within early modern religious economies. In doing so, Signs That Save argues that the English Reformation, especially conflicts over the sacraments and liturgical ritual during it, should be read as a story of negotiating networks of human and nonhuman actors, and it considers the ways in which literary texts from the period provide insights into the Reformation as such. This project emphasizes that sacred matter was often experienced as active and agential by the humans who encountered it, and it analyzes sacred matter’s acts of saving, transforming, gathering, and remaining in religious and literary texts. ☐ The literary works of special interest to this project are Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, the lyric poetry and sermons of John Donne, and the manuscript poetry of Hester Pulter. Interpreting these works, Signs That Save contributes to scholarly conversations about Reformation-era English history and early modern sacramental poetics and theater. It does so by unpacking some of the ways in which early modern religion was expressed through affective and aesthetic modalities. It also decenters the interpretive subject in order to broadcast more fully the agentive effects of the early modern sacramental sign. Additionally, this project offers insights into transhistorical issues like the Anthropocene and object-oriented ontology by highlighting early modern sacred matter as an actant within this larger context of material culture. Finally, by tracing human-nonhuman assemblages and broadening definitions of the social, Signs That Save recognizes and advocates for community-making as a potentially powerful encounter of recognition, response, and obligation.
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Keywords
Early Modern English Studies, Material Culture Studies, Reformation History, Shakespeare