returning to john donne
Collected in this volume are Achsah Guibbory’s most important and frequently cited essays on Donne, which, taken together, present her
distinctive and evolving vision of the poet. The book includes an original, substantive introduction as well as new essays on the Devotions
upon Emergent Occasions, the Songs and Sonnets, and the subject of Donne and toleration.
Over the course of her career, Guibbory has asked different questions about Donne but has always been concerned with recovering multiple
historical and cultural contexts and locating Donne’s writing in relation to them. In the essays here, she reads Donne within various contexts:
the early modern thinking about time and history; religious attitudes towards sexuality; the politics of early modern England; religious conflicts
within the church. While her approach has always been historicist, she has also foregrounded Donne’s distinctiveness, showing how (and why)
he continues to speak powerfully to us now.
christian identity
Jews and Israel in seventeenth-century England
This volume assesses the complexity and fluidity of Christian identity from the reign of Elizabeth I and the early Stuart kings through the English
Revolution, and into the Restoration, when the English Church and monarchy were restored. Throughout this tumultuous period, which included
debate about readmission of the Jews, England was preoccupied with Jews and Israel. As the Reformation sharpened national identity and
prompted reconsideration of the relation of Christianity to Judaism, English people showed intense interest in Jewish history and Judaism
and appropriated biblical Israel's history, looking to the narratives in the Hebrew Bible, even as reformed Christianity was thought to be purged
of Jewish elements. There was an unstable, shifting mix of identification and opposition, affinity and distance, in English attitudes towards Jews -
a mix that held positive possibilities for Jewish/Christian relations as well as negative. Grounded in archival research, this book analyzes writings
ranging from those of Foxe and Hooker to Milton and Dryden, from sermons to lyrics, from church polemic to proposals for legal and economic reform.
ceremony and community from herbert to milton
Literature, religion and cultural conflict in seventeenth-century England
This book examines the relationship between literature and religious conflict in seventeenth-century England, showing how literary texts grew out
of and addressed the contemporary controversy over ceremonial worship. Examining the meaning and function of religion in seventeenth-century
England, Achsah Guibbory shows that the conflicts over religious ceremony that were central to the English Revolution had broad cultural significance.
She offers new and original readings of Herbert, Herrick, Browne and Milton in this context.