Faithful Reading

Faithful Reading: Religious Allegiances in Early Modern Literary Scholarship explores how the religious identities and critical work of literary scholars reciprocally shape each other. The past hundred years of literary scholarship have seen a vigorous correction of the idea that academic study is objective and conducted in a preconception-free vacuum. Despite this climate of increased self-awareness and honesty, scholars are often quite reserved about their own religious or irreligious beliefs and backgrounds. Faithful Reading discusses how these shape which texts scholars choose to study, the questions they ask about them, and the kinds of experientially informed answers they can provide. Contributors include early-career to senior scholars with a variety of religious (Catholic, Jewish, Protestant) and non-religious (secular) allegiances. They consider how these allegiances inform their scholarship on various genres. These include biblical texts (Canticles/Song of Songs; Book of Ruth) and religious prose by Richard Baxter, John Donne, and John Selden. They also include drama and poetry of the period, for example by Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Cary, Richard Crashaw, George Herbert, John Milton, and William Shakespeare. They ask such questions as:- Do particular early modern authors and works attract scholars of certain religions? Which ones, and why? - How do scholars of Jewish backgrounds respond to the Christianization of the Hebrew Bible and its politicization in the Reformation, as well as to emphatically religious early modern texts? - How do scholars bring their denominational identities to bear on the works of their anglophone Christian forerunners? and - How should a religiously diverse community of scholars converse with each other, both in and out of print, about the literary texts we study?