Course No: 350:621
Index #: 17961
Distribution Requirement: A2
Thursdays - 2:00 PM
MU 207
Renaissance and Reformation from Erasmus to Milton
Fulton, Thomas
Few events in history had as profound an effect on English literature as the Protestant Reformation. Its proponents advocated the wide dissemination of the most read of vernacular texts, the Bible, and with this wildly popular text came a set of radical instructions, overturning those of the Catholic middle ages, on how the text should be interpreted. New ways of reading formed new modes of writing – writing that attended closely to the directives of the great reformers such as Luther, Calvin, and Tyndale.
Or, at least, so the story has been told. The triumphalist account of literary culture has recently been questioned from several points of view. The Reformation is no longer seen as a single event that sweepingly converted the English-speaking world, but a series of tumultuous “reformations,” none of them particularly complete, with England’s hybrid forms of religion being among the most generative for its very contradictions. Authors of the English Renaissance – John Donne, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Lucy Hutchinson, even John Milton – have now proven far less susceptible to categorization; their relationship to the Reformation far more agonistic – and far more interesting – than has been maintained. English poetry may be shaped more by antagonism to than by acquiescence in Reformation ideas.
This course will read literature and literary theory from before and after the Reformation – starting briefly with Dante and medieval examples before moving forward through the role of Humanism and the pivotal figure of Erasmus and to a series of case studies on such figures as Ann Lock, Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, Donne, Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, among others. Readings of primary material will be accompanied by both traditional and revisionary scholarship in the field, including Erich Auerbach, Brian Cummings, Stephen Greenblatt, Northrop Frye, Barbara Lewalski, and James Simpson. The course requires occasional short reflection papers and one longer seminar paper.