Treacherous Faith offers a new and ambitious cross-disciplinary
account of the ways writers from the early English Reformation to
the Restoration generated, sustained, or questioned cultural
anxieties about heresy and heretics. This book examines the dark,
often brutal story of defining, constructing, and punishing
heretics in early modern England, and especially the ways writers
themselves contributed to or interrogated the politics of religious
fear-mongering and demonizing. It illuminates the terrors and
anxieties early modern writers articulated and the fantasies they
constructed about pernicious heretics and pestilent heresies in
response to the Reformation's shattering of Western Christendom.
Treacherous Faith analyzes early modern writers who contributed to
cultural fears about the contagion of heresy and engaged in the
making of heretics, as well as writers who challenged the
constructions of heretics and the culture of religious
fear-mongering. The responses of early modern writers in English to
the specter of heresy and the making of heretics were varied,
complex, and contradictory, depending on their religious and
political alignments. Some writers (for example, Thomas More,
Richard Bancroft, and Thomas Edwards) used their rhetorical
resourcefulness and inventiveness to contribute to the politics of
heresy-making and the specter of cunning, diabolical heretics
ravaging the Church, the state, and thousands of souls; others (for
example, John Foxe) questioned within certain cultural limitations
heresy-making processes and the violence and savagery that
religious demonizing provoked; and some writers (for example, Anne
Askew, John Milton, and William Walwyn) interrogated with great
daring and inventiveness the politics of religious demonizing,
heresy-making, and the cultural constructions of heretics.
Treacherous Faith examines the complexities and paradoxes of the
heresy-making imagination in early modern England: the dark
fantasies, anxieties, terrors, and violence it was capable of
generating, but also the ways the dreaded specter of heresy could
stimulate the literary creativity of early modern authors engaging
with it from diverse religious and political perspectives.
Treacherous Faith is a major interdisciplinary study of the ways
the literary imagination, religious fears, and demonizing
interacted in the early modern world. This study of the early
modern specter of heresy contributes to work in the humanities
seeking to illuminate the changing dynamics of religious fear, the
rhetoric of religious demonization, and the powerful ways the
literary imagination represents and constructs religious
difference.
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