Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England is the first literary study to compare how Protestant and Catholic martyrs were represented during the Reformation, the most intense period of religious persecution in English history. Through its focus on martyrs, it argues that Catholic and Protestant texts are produced by dialogue, even competition, with texts across the religious divide, rather than simply as part of a stable and discrete doctrinal system. The first section of the book clearly traces the development of competing discourses of martyrdom; the second section considers the deployment of these discourses through a range of Protestant and Catholic literary texts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Monta pays extended attention to many texts popular in their own day but now considered unliterary or insignificant. This study is an important contribution to scholarship on early modern literature, drama, and religious history.

Anthony Copley's A Fig for Fortune was the first major poetic response to Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Written by a Catholic Englishman with an uneasy relationship to the English regime, A Fig for Fortune offers a deeply contestatory, richly imagined answer to sixteenth-century England's greatest poem. Through its sophisticated response to Spenser, A Fig for Fortune challenges a contemporary literary culture in which Protestant habits of thought and representation were gaining dominance. This book comprises the poem's first scholarly edition. It offers a carefully annotated edition of the 2000-line poem, an overview of English Catholic history in the sixteenth century, a full biography of Anthony Copley, an assessment of his engagement with Spenser's Faerie Queene, and information on the book's early print history. Extensive support for student readers makes it possible to teach Copley's poem alongside The Faerie Queene for the first time. -- .

Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England provides a comprehensive comparison of how Protestant and Catholic martyrs were represented during the Reformation, the most intense period of religious persecution in English history. Through its focus on martyrs, it argues that Catholic and Protestant texts are produced by dialogue, even competition, with texts across the religious divide, rather than simply as part of a stable and discrete doctrinal system. The first section of the book clearly traces the development of competing discourses of martyrdom; the second section considers the deployment of these discourses through a range of Protestant and Catholic literary texts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Monta pays extended attention to many texts popular in their own day but now considered unliterary or insignificant. This study is an important contribution to scholarship on early modern literature, drama, and religious history.

To gain a full understanding of the literature and history of early modern England, students need to study the prose of the period. Aiming to make early modern prose more visible to teachers, this volume approaches prose as a genre that requires as much analysis and attention as the drama and poetry of the time. The essays collected here consider the broad cultural questions raised by prose and explore prose style, showing teachers how to hone students' writing skills in the process.

Noting that the inclusion of Renaissance prose in anthologies now makes it easier to teach texts discussed in this volume, the introduction considers the practical and historical reasons prose has been taught less often than poetry and drama. The essays call attention to the range of prose writing and to the variety of definitions that have been developed to describe it. In part 1, contributors outline broad issues concerning early modern prose, looking at rhetoric and pamphlet writing and asking how to classify nonfiction. Essays in part 2 discuss particular genres, such as sermons, martyrologies, autobiographies, and Quaker writings. The third part explores specific prose works, including Francis Bacon's scientific writing, Richard Hooker's prose, and the transcribed speeches of Queen Elizabeth I. The final part, "Crossings and Pairings," examines ways to use prose in teaching early modern attitudes toward issues such as education, imperialism, and the translation of the Bible.