Full Description
The primary aim of Knowing Faith is to uncover the intervention of literary texts and approaches in a wider conversation about religious knowledge: why we need it, how to get there, where to stop, and how to recognise it once it has been attained. Its relative freedom from specialised disciplinary investments allows a literary lens to bring into focus the relatively elusive strands of thinking about belief, knowledge and salvation, probing the particulars of affect implicit in the generalities of doctrine. The essays in this volume collectively probe the dynamic between literary form, religious faith and the process, psychology and ethics of knowing in early modern England. Addressing both the poetics of theological texts and literary treatments of theological matter, they stretch from the Reformation to the early Enlightenment, and cover a variety of themes ranging across religious hermeneutics, rhetoric and controversy, the role of the senses, and the entanglement ofjustice, ethics and practical theology.
The book should appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, theologians and historians of religion, and general readers with a broad interest in Renaissance cultures of knowing.
Contents
1. Crossroads of Knowledge: Literature and Theology - Subha Mukherji.- 2. Erasmus on Literature and Knowledge - Brian Cummings.- 3. The Hermeneutics of Richard Hooker's Defence of the "Sensible Excellencie" of Public Worship' - W. J. Torrance Kirby.- 4. Seeing and Believing: Thomas Traherne's Poetic Language and the Reading Eye' - Jane Partner.- 5. The Absence of Epistemology, or Drama and Divinity before Descartes - Debora Shuger.- 6. 'Qui enim securus est, minime securus est': The Paradox of Securitas in Luther and Beyond' - Giles Waller.- 7. Allegory and Religious Fanaticism: Spenser's Organs of Divine Might - Ross Lerner.- 8. What the Nose Knew: Renaissance Theologies of Smell - Sophie Read.- 9. Nosce Teipsum: The Senses of Self-knowledge in Early Modern England - Elizabeth L. Swann.- 10. Knowing and Forgiving - Regina Schwarz.- 11. How to Do Things with Belief - Ethan Shagan.- 12. Locke's Cicero: Between Moral Knowledge and Faith- Tim Stuart-Buttle.- 13. Afterword - Rowan Williams.
