Brian Cummings

Since the nineteenth century it has been assumed that the concept of personal identity in the early modern period is bound up with secularization. Indeed, many explanations of the emergence of modernity have been based on this thesis, in which Shakespeare as a secular author has played a central role. However, the idea of secularization is now everywhere under threat. The secularity of modern society is less apparent than it was a generation ago. Shakespeare, too, has come to be seen in a religious perspective. What happens to human identity in this different framework? Mortal Thoughts asks what selfhood looks like if we do not assume that an idea of the self could only come into being as a result of an emptying out of a religious framework. It does so by examining human mortality. What it is to be human, and how a life is framed by its ending, are issues that cross religious confessions in early modernity, and interrogate the sacred and secular divide. A series of chapters examines literature and art in relation to concepts such as conscience, martyrdom, soliloquy, luck, suicide, and embodiment. Religious and philosophical creativity are revealed as poised around anxieties about finitude and contingency, challenging conventional divisions between kinds of literary and artistic endeavour. Mortal Thoughts considers incipient genres of life writing (More, Foxe, and Montaigne) and life drawing (Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien) in relation to dramatic representation and literary narration (Shakespeare, Donne, Milton). In the process it asks whether the problem of human identity rewrites historical boundaries.

Religion, Secularity, & Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture

Mortal Thoughts

'In the midst of life we are in death.' The words of the Book of Common Prayer have permeated deep into the English language all over the world. For nearly 500 years, and for countless people, it has provided a background fanfare for a marriage or a funeral march at a burial. Yet this familiarity also hides a violent and controversial history. When it was first produced the Book of Common Prayer provoked riots and rebellion, and it was banned before being translated into a host of global languages and adopted as the basis for worship in the USA and elsewhere to the present day. This edition presents the work in three different states: the first edition of 1549, which brought the Reformation into people's homes; the Elizabethan prayer book of 1559, familiar to Shakespeare and Milton; and the edition of 1662, which embodies the religious temper of the nation down to modern times. 'magnificent edition' Diarmaid MacCulloch,London Review of Books 'superb edition...excellent notes and introduction' Rowan Williams, Times Literary Supplement ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662

The Book of Common Prayer

A book about great recipes and the stories they evoke in the tradition of Alice B. Toklas, "You Said A Mouthful" is a collection of more than 50 recipes and personal stories developed over 30 years of weekend experimentation. The step-by-step instructions are easy to follow and offer tips and insights that lift the finished dish out of the ordinary, making it not just good but exceptional.

You Said A Mouthful: Great Recipes and the Stories They Evoke

Richly illustrated with manuscripts, printed objects, and art works, Bibliophobia tells a 5000-year history of writing and of books to give readers a fascinating account of why books matter and how they impact on our lives.

The End and the Beginning of the Book

Bibliophobia

Mortal Thoughts is a study of the question of human identity in the early modern period. It examines literature (Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton) alongside emerging forms of life writing (More, Foxe, and Montaigne) and also life drawing and self-portraits (Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien). It questions the religious and secular divide, and the way that historical narratives are poised around the concept of secularization. It does so by examining mortalityand the moment of death. A series of chapters examine religious, philosophical and literary concepts such as conscience, martyrdom, soliloquy, chance, suicide and embodiment. Mortal Thoughts is a study in literaryand artistic history which also challenges assumptions in the history of philosophy and religion.

James Simpson

The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the medieval and the early modern. 'Cultural Reformations' initiates discussion on many fronts in which both periods look different in dialogue with each other.

Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History

Cultural Reformations

Alexandra Walsham

Ceri Law

Bronwyn Wallace

Recasts the Reformation as a battleground over memory, in which new identities were formed through acts of commemoration, invention and repression.

Memory and the English Reformation

Karis Riley

This stimulating volume explores how the memory of the Reformation has been remembered, forgotten, contested, and reinvented between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. Remembering the Reformation traces how a complex, protracted, and unpredictable process came to be perceived, recorded, and commemorated as a transformative event. Exploring both local and global patterns of memory, the contributors examine the ways in which the Reformation embedded itself in the historical imagination and analyse the enduring, unstable, and divided legacies that it engendered. The book also underlines how modern scholarship is indebted to processes of memory-making initiated in the early modern period and challenges the conventional models of periodisation that the Reformation itself helped to create. This collection of essays offers an expansive examination and theoretically engaged discussion of concepts and practices of memory and Reformation. This volume is ideal for upper level undergraduates and postgraduates studying the Reformation, Early Modern Religious History, Early Modern European History, and Early Modern Literature.

Remembering the Reformation

The Book of Common Prayer is one of the most influential books in history. First published in the reign of Edward VI, in 1549, it was a product of the English Reformation following the break with Rome. For nearly five centuries, it has formed the order of worship for established Christianity in England. More listeners have heard these prayers, it is said, than the soliloquies of Shakespeare. As British imperial ambitions spread, the Book of Common Prayer became the primary instrument (at least as much as the King James Bible) of English culture, firstly in Ireland in 1551. When the Puritans fled to America in 1620 it was to escape the discipline imposed by of the Book of Common Prayer, yet the book came to embody official religion in America before and after Independence, and is still in use. Today it is a global book: it was the first book printed in many languages, from north America to southern Africa, to the Indian sub-continent. In this Very Short Introduction Brian Cummings tells the fascinating history of the Book of Common Prayer, and explains why it is easily misunderstood. Designed in the 1540s as a radical Protestant answer to Catholic "superstition", within a century (during the English Civil Wars) radical Christians regarded the Book of Common Prayer as itself "superstitious" and even (paradoxically) "Papist". Changing in meaning and context over time, the Book of Common Prayer has acted as a cultural symbol, affecting the everyday conduct of life as much as the spiritual, and dividing conformity from non-conformity, in social terms as well as religious, from birth to marriage to death. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Brian Cummings

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