Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1999

Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660. Alison Shell. Cambridge University Press. [pounds]37.50/US$59.95. 309 pages. ISBN 0-521-58090-0. In recent years a new generation of historians has been seriously revising our views of Catholics, or 'Papists', in post-Reformation English life.

This latest publication from Cambridge carries on this reinterpretation by examining the 'imaginative writing' between 1558 and 1660, writing which took as its subjects the controversies between Catholics and Protestants or 'the penalties which successive Protestant governments imposed upon Catholics.' The book discusses poetry, drama, allegory, emblem, romance and, to a much lesser extent, sermons, devotional writing and controversial religious prose. There is an admitted bias towards poetry. The book is concerned with 'the unintended imaginative consequences of religious controversy'. Catholic writers usually wrote for a purpose: to encourage others, even to the point of martyrdom or exile, to live up to their proscribed faith. These same writers also influenced mainstream English thought more than has hitherto been acknowledged. This is a challenging work that will contribute greatly to the reforming of our views of Tudor and Stuart England.