This collection of essays opens a new perspective on the interplay of religious conflict and literary culture in early modern England. Focusing on negotiation instead of escalation, thirteen distinguished international scholars explore the specific ways available to mediate, displace or suspend confessional conflict in and through literature.

1. Introduction: A world of difference: religion, literary form, and the negotiation of conflict in early modern England – Jonathan Baldo and Isabel KarremannPart I: Religious ritual and literary form2. Shylock celebrates Easter – Brooke Conti3. Protestant faith and Catholic charity: negotiating confessional difference in early modern Christmas celebrations – Phebe Jensen4. Singing in the counter: goodnight ballads in Eastward Ho – Jacqueline Wylde5. Romancing the Eucharist: confessional conflict and Elizabethan romances – Christina Wald6. Edmund Spenser’s The Ruines of Time as a Protestant poetics of mourning and commemoration – Isabel KarremannPart II: Negotiating confessional conflict7. Letters to a young prince: confessional conflict and the origins of English Protestantism in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me (1605) – Brian Walsh8. Tragic mediation in The White Devil – Thomas J. Moretti9. ‘A deed without a name:’ evading theology in Macbeth – James R. Macdonald10. Henry V and the interrogative conscience as a space for the performative negotiation of confessional conflict – Mary A. Blackstone11. Formal experimentation and the question of Donne’s ecumenicalism – Alexandra M. Block12. Foucault, confession, and Donne – Joel M. DodsonAfterword: Reformed indifferently – Richard WilsonIndex

This collection of essays explores a range of literary and theatrical forms as means of mediating religious conflict in early modern England. Over the last decade, the area of early modern studies has been significantly reshaped by a ‘religious turn’, which has generated vigorous discussion of the changes and conflicts brought about by the Reformation and the ways in which literature engaged with them. Despite the centrality of confessional conflict, however, it did not always erupt into hostilities over how to symbolize and perform the sacred; nor did it lead to a paralysis of social agency. Rather, people had to arrange themselves somehow with divided loyalties – between the old faith and the new, between religious and secular interests, between officially sanctioned and privately held beliefs. The order of the day may well have been to suspend confessional allegiances rather than enforce religious conflict, suggesting a pragmatic rather than polemical handling of religious plurality, in social practice as well as in textual and dramatic representations. Can we conceive of literary representations as possible sites of de-escalation? Do different discursive, aesthetic or social contexts inflect or even deflect the demands of religious loyalties? How do textual or dramatic works both reflect on and perform such a suspension of confessional tensions? By placing the focus on negotiation instead of escalation, these thirteen essays by distinguished international scholars explore specific means of mediating religious conflict in a time when faith still mattered more than nationhood or race.

‘The well-crafted essays in this interesting collection share the assumption that the diversity of communicative media in early modern culture—including literary genres, festive practices, and sacramental rituals—helped cultivate a generalized interest in imagining what the thought of “religious pluralization and its irenic potential” (p. 2) might look and feel like in an era officially marked by confessional strife.’Professor Lowell Gallagher, Studies in English Literature