Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist, and Secular Dimensions

• Published in: Seventeenth - Century News (Online) Vol. 72; no. 3/4; p. 203
• Main Author: Bentley, Greg
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: College Station Seventeenth-Century News 01.10.2013
• Subjects: Early Modern English; Feminism; Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon) (1135-1204); Sidney, Mary

In "Marian Verse as Politically Oppositional Poetry in Elizabethan England" Arthur F. Marotti closely examines a number of Marian verses that extend through the reigns of Queen Elizabeth, King James I, and King Charles I to claim that: "Through the Elizabethan period and beyond, during England's slow religious transition from Catholicism to Protestantism the figure of Mary could be invoked by Catholic recusants and religious conservatives to proclaim religious resistance to what was officially being imposed on the country and what was anthropologically changing on a grassroots level. [...]in "Shakespeare's Secular Benediction: The Language of Tragic Community in King Lear" Sanford Budick starts from the idea that "ethical values continually emerge in the narrative of a community" (330) to claim that a narrative of community and an ethical language are, in fact, made central [in King Lear] by enlarging the focus of awareness from the tragic hero to a group of tragic protagonists" (330). The blurred boundaries between Catholicism and Protestantism, the sectarian and theological fault lines in the established church, and the development of national and international religious diversity and the debates about the possibility and limits of religious toleration, the renewed examination of the Judaic roots of Christianity and of the importance of the Hebrew scriptures and commentary traditions, the conflict between religious authority and the spiritual autonomy of the individual (male and female) believer, the growing awareness of a space outside religion from which one could critically examine religious belief systems and truth claims-all these factors were part of a complex and evolving culture.