"I cannot suppose any situation more distressing than for a woman of sensibility with an improving mind to be bound to such a man as I have described." Mary Wollstonecraft's response to one of her ...early critics points to the fact that fiction has long been employed by authors to cast a vision for social change. Less acknowledged, however, has been the role of the Christian faith in such works. In this Studies in Theology and the Arts volume, literary scholar Dalene Joy Fisher explores the work of four beloved female novelists: Jane Austen, Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Each of these authors, she argues, appealed to the Christian faith through their heroines to challenge cultural expectations regarding women, especially in terms of marriage. Although Christianity has all too often been used to oppress women, Fisher demonstrates that in the hands of these novelists and through the actions of their characters, it could also be a transformative force to liberate women. The Studies in Theology and the Arts? series encourages Christians to thoughtfully engage with the relationship between their faith and artistic expression, with contributions from both theologians and artists on a range of artistic media including visual art, music, poetry, literature, film, and more.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Barriers to participation in the court system is a recurring and important problem within the criminal justice system. This significant study reveals how ...participation is supported in the courts and tribunals of England and Wales. Including reflections on changes to the justice system as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, it also details the socio-structural, environmental, procedural, cultural and personal factors which constrain participation.
Prayer divided seventeenth-century England. Anglican Conformists such as Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor upheld set forms of prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, a book designed to unite the ...nation in worship. Puritan Reformers and Dissenters such as John Milton and John Bunyan rejected the prayer book and advocated for extemporaneous or free prayer. In 1645, the mainly Puritan Long Parliament proscribed the Book of Common Prayer and dismantled the Anglican Church in the midst of civil war. This led Anglican poets and liturgists to defend their tradition with energy and erudition in print. In 1662, with monarchy restored, the mainly Anglican Cavalier Parliament reinstated the Church and its prayer book to impose religious uniformity. This galvanized English Nonconformity and Dissent and gave rise to a vibrant literary counter-tradition.
Addressing this fascinating history, David Gay examines competing claims to spiritual gifts and graces in polemical texts and their influence on prayer and poetry. Amid the contention of differing voices, the disputed connection of poetry and prayer, imagination and religion, emerges as a central tension in early modern literature and culture.
This book offers a new assessment of early Christianity in south-west Britain from the fourth to the tenth centuries, a rich period which includes the transition from Roman to native British to Saxon ...models of church. The book will be based on evidence from archaeological excavations, early texts and recent critical scholarship and cover Wessex, Devon and Cornwall. In the south-west, Wessex provides the greatest evidence of Roman Christianity. The fifth-century Dorset villas of Frampton and Hinton St Mary, with their complex baptistery mosaics, indicate the presence of sophisticated Christian house churches. The fact that these two Roman villas are only 15 miles apart suggests a network of small Christian communities in this region. The author uses evidence from St Patrick’s fifth-century ‘Confessions’ to describe how members of a villa house church lived. Wessex was slowly Christianised: in Gloucestershire, the pagan healing sanctuary at Chedworth provides evidence of later use as a Christian baptistery; at Bradford on Avon in Wiltshire, a baptistery was dug into the mosaic floor of an imposing villa, which may by then have been owned by a bishop. In Somerset a number of recently excavated sites demonstrate the transition from a pagan temple to a Christian church. Beside the pagan temple at Lamyatt, later female burials suggest, unusually, a small monastic group of women. Wells cathedral grew beside the site of a Roman villa’s funeral chapel. In Street, a large oval enclosure indicates the probable site of a ‘Celtic’ monastery. Early Christian cemeteries have been excavated at Shepton Mallet and elsewhere. Lundy Island, off the Devon coast, provides evidence of a Celtic monastery, with its inscribed stones that commemorate early monks. At Exeter, a Saxon anthology includes numerous riddles, one of which describes in detail the production of an illuminated manuscript in a south-western monastery. Oliver Padel’s meticulous documentation of Cornish place-names has demonstrated that, of all the Celtic regions, Cornwall has by far the highest number of dedications to a single, otherwise unknown individual, typically consisting of a small church and a farm by the sea. These small monastic ‘cells’ have hitherto received little attention as a model of church in early British Christianity, and the latter part of the text focuses on various aspects of this model, as lived out in coastal and in upland settlements, on islands, and in relation to larger Breton monasteries. Study of 60 Breton sites has demonstrated possible connections between larger Breton monasteries and smaller Cornish cells.
A recovery of the revealing poetic and political commentary produced by the Imperial poet laureate Nicolaus Mameranus for the court of Mary Tudor during the visit of her husband, Philip II of Spain, ...in 1557.
A survey of the life, historical and political impacts, and textual sources associated with the early medieval English missionary and church reformer Boniface, who was active in the eighth century in ...what is today Germany, France, and the Netherlands.
This book explores literary culture in England between 1630 and 1700, focusing on connections between material, epistemic, and political conditions of literary writing and reading. In a number of ...case studies and close readings, it presents the seventeenth century as a period of change that saw a fundamental shift towards a new cultural configuration: neoclassicism. This shift affected a wide array of social practices and institutions, from poetry to politics and from epistemology to civility.
From the 1890s onwards, social reformers, volunteer lawyers, and
politicians increasingly came to see access to affordable or free
legal advice as a critical part of helping working-class people
...uphold their rights with landlords, employers, and retailers - and,
from the 1940s, with the welfare state. Whilst a state scheme was
launched in 1949, it was never fully implemented and help from a
lawyer remained out of the reach of many people. Lawyers for
the poor is the first full-length study of the development of
voluntary action and mutual schemes to make the law more
accessible, and the pressure put on the legal profession and
governments to bring in further reforms. It offers new insights of
the role of access to the law in shaping ideas about citizenship
and civil rights in the twentieth century.
By the early nineteenth century England was very different economically from its continental neighbours. It was wealthier, growing more rapidly, more heavily urbanised, and far less dependent upon ...agriculture. A generation ago it was normal to attribute these differences to the 'industrial revolution' and to suppose that this was mainly the product of recent change, but no longer. Current estimates suggest only slow growth during the period from 1760–1840. This implies that the economy was much larger and more advanced by 1760 than had previously been supposed and suggests that growth in the preceding century or two must have been decisive in bringing about the 'divergence' of England. Sir E. A. Wrigley, the leading historian of industrial Britain, here examines the issues which arise in this connection from three viewpoints: economic growth; the transformation of the urban-rural balance; and demographic change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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