cfp.english.upenn.edu

This conference is concerned with re-visiting the politics of religious writing in the ‘Long Reformation’, a broad chronology of early modern literary and political culture and across an inclusive range of literary genres. Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers that consider puritan and nonconformist writing and its engagement with / impact on a wide range of political and cultural contexts. Recent work by historians and literary scholars has led to a resurgence of interest in the religious history of the period and how various forms of faith and belief engaged with culture and politics in a period sometimes described as the Post-Reformation. How did writers in the Tudor and Stuart world engage with the constantly evolving religious contexts that witnessed experimentation with highly controversial religious beliefs?

Themes to address might include:

- Catholicism and anti-Catholicism
- Separatists and sectarians
- Puritanism, nonconformity and the established Church
- Puritanism and dissent
- Print culture, Puritanism and nonconformity, 1558-1689
- Non-conformity and the stage
- Literature and politics of toleration
- Royalist Puritanism 1642-60
- Satire
- Migration, exile, and non-conformity
- Persecution and propaganda
- Puritan places and literary production

Confirmed plenary speakers: Adrian Streete(Queen’s University Belfast); Glyn Parry,(Northumbria University)