Full Description
Religious texts played a central role in the historical development of English. Harnessing corpus linguistic techniques, historical pragmatics, and the history of the English church, this book interrogates the keywords that have dominated English religious expression from the end of the medieval period to the eve of the Darwinian age. Exploring a number of historical religious works from the late medieval period to the nineteenth century, it shows how changes in the deployment of key words reflected their evolving socio-cultural functions, and how their usage subsequently moved beyond religious texts to shape contemporary literary and political works. It includes numerous case-studies involving prophetic women, pamphleteers, preachers and philosophers, alongside prominent theologians, literary authors and other well-known figures. Offering new insights into the growing cross-disciplinary enterprise of theolinguistics in an engaging and accessible way, this study is essential reading for both English historical linguists and historians of English Christianity.
Contents
1. Introduction; 2. 'Smelling lollers in the wind': the premature reformation of the late fourteenth century; 3. Reformation: true witnesses and godly joy; 4. Radical religion: from Martin Marprelate to the Putney Debates; 5. Enthusiasm and enlightenment in the long eighteenth century; 6. 'The new strange notion': lexicons of Romantic religion; 7. Future directions.
