Though the paradigm of modernist progression has been challenged on many fronts, Erasmus and other sixteenth-century figures are still commonly viewed as people who led the transition from a religious Middle Ages to a more godless modern era. Erasmus, Contarini and the Religious Republic of Letters, published in 2005, complicates this transition by analysing a unique realm of spiritualised scholarship that cannot fit easily into any conventional intellectual chronology. By analysing the lives, work, and correspondence of Erasmus, Thomas More, Margaret More Roper, Reginald Pole, Gasparo Contarini, and Vittoria Colonna, this book demonstrates how these Catholic men and women of letters created a distinctive kind of religious community rooted in friendship and spiritualised scholarship. By spanning the too frequently respected gap between humanist reformers in northern and southern Europe, the book uncovers a widespread, if previously less visible, network that exhibited concerns we still grapple with today.

Though the paradigm of modernist progression has been challenged on many fronts, Erasmus and other sixteenth-century figures are still commonly viewed as people who led the transition from a religious Middle Ages to a more godless modern era. Erasmus, Contarini and the Religious Republic of Letters, published in 2005, complicates this transition by analysing a unique realm of spiritualised scholarship that cannot fit easily into any conventional intellectual chronology. By analysing the lives, work, and correspondence of Erasmus, Thomas More, Margaret More Roper, Reginald Pole, Gasparo Contarini, and Vittoria Colonna, this book demonstrates how these Catholic men and women of letters created a distinctive kind of religious community rooted in friendship and spiritualised scholarship. By spanning the too frequently respected gap between humanist reformers in northern and southern Europe, the book uncovers a widespread, if previously less visible, network that exhibited concerns we still grapple with today.

Three scholars of religion explore literature and the literary as sites of critical transformation. We are living in a time of radical uncertainty, faced with serious political, ecological, economic, epidemiological, and social problems. Scholars of religion Constance M. Furey, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Amy Hollywood come together in this volume with a shared conviction that what and how we read opens new ways of imagining our political futures and our lives. Each essay in this book suggests different ways to characterize the object of devotion and the stance of the devout subject before it. Furey writes about devotion in terms of vivification, energy, and artifice; Hammerschlag in terms of commentary, mimicry, and fetishism; and Hollywood in terms of anarchy, antinomianism, and atopia. They are interested in literature not as providing models for ethical, political, or religious life, but as creating the site in which the possible-and the impossible-transport the reader, enabling new forms of thought, habits of mind, and ways of life. Ranging from German theologian Martin Luther to French-Jewish philosopher Sarah Kofman to American poet Susan Howe, this volume is not just a reflection on forms of devotion and their critical and creative import but also a powerful enactment of devotion itself.

Three scholars of religion explore literature and the literary as sites of critical transformation. We are living in a time of radical uncertainty, faced with serious political, ecological, economic, epidemiological, and social problems. Scholars of religion Constance M. Furey, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Amy Hollywood come together in this volume with a shared conviction that what and how we read opens new ways of imagining our political futures and our lives. Each essay in this book suggests different ways to characterize the object of devotion and the stance of the devout subject before it. Furey writes about devotion in terms of vivification, energy, and artifice; Hammerschlag in terms of commentary, mimicry, and fetishism; and Hollywood in terms of anarchy, antinomianism, and atopia. They are interested in literature not as providing models for ethical, political, or religious life, but as creating the site in which the possible-and the impossible-transport the reader, enabling new forms of thought, habits of mind, and ways of life. Ranging from German theologian Martin Luther to French-Jewish philosopher Sarah Kofman to American poet Susan Howe, this volume is not just a reflection on forms of devotion and their critical and creative import but also a powerful enactment of devotion itself.