Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England

The primary aim of Knowing Faith is to uncover the intervention of literary texts and approaches in a wider conversation about religious knowledge: why we need it, how to get there, where to stop, and how to recognise it once it has been attained. Its relative freedom from specialised disciplinary investments allows a literary lens to bring into focus the relatively elusive strands of thinking about belief, knowledge and salvation, probing the particulars of affect implicit in the generalities of doctrine. The essays in this volume collectively probe the dynamic between literary form, religious faith and the process, psychology and ethics of knowing in early modern England. Addressing both the poetics of theological texts and literary treatments of theological matter, they stretch from the Reformation to the early Enlightenment, and  cover a variety of themes ranging across religious hermeneutics, rhetoric and controversy, the role of the senses, and the entanglement ofjustice, ethics and practical theology.

The book should appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, theologians and historians of religion, and general readers with a broad interest in Renaissance cultures of knowing. 

• Religion
• Christianity
• Donne
• Catholic
• Protestant
• Literature
• Early Modern England
• British and Irish Literature

“It stands as an important contribution to an emerging body of literary scholarship that is investigating the history of belief with renewed attention. As Rowan Williams’s wide-ranging Afterword intimates, it may also help us to recover some of the foundations of our present-day habits of thought.” (Joseph Ashmore, Modern Language Review, Vol. 116 (1), January, 2021)

• Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  Subha Mukherji

• Department of Politics, University of York, York, United Kingdom

  Tim Stuart-Buttle

Subha Mukherji is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, UK, Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, and Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded interdisciplinary project, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: the Place of Literature. Her publications include Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (2006), Early Modern Tragicomedy (ed. with Raphael Lyne, 2007), Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces (ed.) (2011), Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt (ed. with Yota Batsaki and Jan-Melissa Schramm, 2012), and Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and his World (ed.) (forthcoming, 2018).

Tim Stuart-Buttle is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of York, UK, and Junior Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. From 2014-17 he was a Research Associate on the Crossroads of Knowledge project at the University of Cambridge. His first monograph, From Moral Theology from Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume, is forthcoming.

Policies and ethics