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As the sacred text of a modern religious movement of global reach, The Book of Mormon has undeniable historical significance. That significance, this volume shows, is inextricable from the intricacy of its literary form and the audacity of its historical vision. This landmark collection brings together a diverse range of scholars in American literary studies and related fields to definitively establish The Book of Mormon as an indispensable object of Americanist inquiry not least because it is, among other things, a form of Americanist inquiry in its own right—a creative, critical reading of “America.” Drawing on formalist criticism, literary and cultural theory, book history, religious studies, and even anthropological field work, Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon captures as never before the full dimensions and resonances of this “American Bible.”

This is an anthology of 250 hymns plus one, with a foreword by Timothy Dudley‐Smith, one of the greatest living hymn writers (the two hundred and fifty‐first hymn, which is a postscript to the anthology, is by him). It is intended in part as a sequel to the editor's The English Hymn (1997): some of the ideas in that book are here exemplified in hymns taken from the earliest Christian times to the present day. Each of the 250 hymns has a textual, critical, and historical annotation, indicating the circumstances of publication, the church history of the time, and the development of the text, and then drawing attention to special features of the work. The hymns are divided into sections, beginning with ‘Ancient and Medieval Hymns’ (in translation) and continuing through the centuries to the final section, ‘The Mid‐Twentieth Century, and the Hymn Explosion’. Some attention is also paid to the tunes to which each hymn has been set, and their composers, although the tunes are not printed. The foreword and the preface introduce the subject of hymns and hymn singing as a part of worship, and discuss hymns as sacred poetry. The conclusion of the introduction is that hymns are a valuable and underrated art form. The 250 hymns that follow attempt to demonstrate the truth of that argument.

The first study in any language dedicated to the influential theological publications of Antoine de Chandieu begins by introducing us to the memory of Chandieu as it was at Theodore Beza’s death. Poets in Geneva mourned the end of an era of star theologians by reminiscing about Geneva’s Reformed triumvirate of gold, silver, and bronze: gold represented Calvin (d. 1564); silver Chandieu (d. 1591); and bronze Beza (d. 1605). The present work sets Chandieu within the context of Reformed theology in Geneva, the wider history of scholastic method in the Swiss cantons, and the gripping social and political milieus. The book shows why Chandieu developed a very elaborate form of the medieval quaestio disputata and made liberal use of hypothetical syllogisms. Chandieu was far from a mere ivory-tower theologian: as a member of French nobility in possession of many estates in France, he and his family acutely experienced the misery and triumph of the French Huguenots during the Wars of Religion. Connected to royalty from at least the beginning of his career, Chandieu later served the future Henry IV as personal military chaplain and cryptographer. His writings range from religious poetry (put to music by others in his own lifetime) to carefully crafted disputations that saw publication in his posthumous Opera Theologica in five editions between 1592 and 1620. The book argues that Chandieu utilized scholastic method in theology for the sake of clarity of argument, rootedness in Scripture, and certainty of faith.

This book examines the development in medieval European literature of the story of Adam and Eve after the expulsion from paradise. The gaps in what the Bible records of their lives were filled in early and medieval times to a great extent by apocrypha or pseudepigrapha such as the Latin Life of Adam and Eve (which merges at some points with a series of legends of the Holy Rood). It describes their attempt to return to paradise by undertaking penance whilst immersed in a river, Eve's second temptation, and the ways in which Adam and Eve cope with the novelties of childbirth and death. The Vita Adae et Evae is part of a broad apocryphal tradition, but is not a unified text, and there are very many variations within the substantial number of extant versions. It was translated and adapted in prose, verse, and drama (as tracts, in chronicles, or as literary works) in virtually all western and some eastern European languages in the Middle Ages, and survived sometimes beyond that. These adaptations are examined on a comparative basis. There is a limited iconographical tradition. The book argues that the study of the apocryphal tradition demands examination of these vernacular texts; and also brings to light a very widespread aspect of European culture that disappeared to a large extent—though it did not die out completely—at the time of the Renaissance and Reformation, with their renewed insistence on canonicity and on the establishment of a foundation text for works of antiquity.

This volume offers a rereading of several canonical stories in Jewish texts and Greek tragedy using devoted resistance as the interpretative lens. These include the stories of Isaac and Iphigenia who were used as exemplars of a total and unyielding commitment to the values of God and country, the Talmudic “Snake Oven” story, which is considered by many as a triumphant source-text for human autonomy as a Jewish religious value, the iconic Talmudic figure Beruriah and the biblical figure of Hannah, who was elevated by the Talmud into a central paradigm for Jewish prayer. These stories highlight the ways in which cultural heroes can distort key parts of themselves and their traditions in the name of tradition itself. This volume explains the tendency of carriers of culture to enshrine authoritative voices in the collective imagination through their selection of canonical stories and to stigmatize and marginalize traditions seen as standing in opposition to the dominant system. It also discusses the effectiveness of devoted resistance as a literary interpretative tool in allowing us to hear the voices of people who have been marginalized, and yet ultimately preserved, by the often brutal mechanisms of cultural authority.

Beginning with Isaac Watts’s Horae Lyricae (1706) and concluding with the burgeoning poetic print culture of the early nineteenth century, Awakening Verse unfolds how evangelical ministers, itinerants, and laypeople in colonial British North America capaciously engaged prevailing ideas about literary taste and created a distinct transatlantic poetics grounded in Watts’s notion of the “plainest capacity.” From the evangelical women who were instrumental in the development of bountiful verse ministries and the creation of poetic coteries to the itinerant ministers for whom poetics and its attendant sociability were central, evangelicals produced new forms of the “poet-minister,” “print itinerancy,” and “espousal poetics” that emerged as crucial practices of revivalism and facilitated rearrangements of ecclesiastical, gendered, and racialized authority. Well-known poet-ministers, such as the Scottish Ralph Erskine, the Bostonian Sarah Moorhead, and the Virginian James Ireland, reimagined formal poetic elements in the service of saving souls. Others, like Samuel Davies and Phillis Wheatley, became enmeshed in critical debates over the racialization of evangelical verse. Countless others, in print and in manuscript, joined with Watts to save poetry from its “profligate” uses. Awakening Verse shows that American literary and religious histories that regularly exclude one hundred years of verse severely impoverish the understanding of early evangelicalism and American poetry. Taking revival poets and their verse as seriously as they and their contemporaries did provides an entirely new understanding of eighteenth-century evangelical and literary culture, one in which poetry serves as one of the primary actors in the creation, maintenance, and adaptation of evangelical culture and religious enthusiasm animates American poetics.

This study seeks to develop a new context for reading later Victorian fiction, specifically the work of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Mary Ward and Rider Haggard. With Eliot and her successors the Victorian novel acquired greater cultural centrality, just as the authority of the scriptures and of traditional religious teaching seemed to be declining. The book considers whether serious, allegedly secular novelists supplanted the Bible or whether they anticipated some of the insights of contemporary theologians and writers of fiction by reimagining and reformulating rather than abandoning essentially religious themes and insights. The history of Bible reading is reviewed to stress the relatively late insistence on biblical literalism which eventually precipitated loss of confidence in the Bible in the light of modern knowledge. The novelists discussed, all of Anglican nurture though unconventional in different ways, are shown to have continued older traditions of reading the Bible for underlying moral and religious significance rather than just the literal meaning. The novels considered demonstrate new ways of imagining biblical concerns such as the sublime, the messianic and pilgrimage. The conclusion suggests the novelists discussed as pioneers of the pot-secular and proposes connections between their work and the subsequent emphasis on religious experience rather than religious dogma.

William Blake says Jerusalem is written to move readers from a solely rational way of being (called Ulro) to one that is highly imaginative (called Eden/Eternity), and that each word in it is chosen to suit ‘the mouth of a true Orator’. Rational interpretation is of limited use when reading this multifaceted poem. But considering Jerusalem as visionary theatre — an imaginative performance in which characters, settings, and imagery are not confined by mundane space and time — allows readers to enjoy the coherence of its delightful complexities. With his characters, Blake's readers can participate imaginatively in what Blake calls ‘the Divine Body, the Saviour's Kingdom’, a way of being in which all things interconnect: spiritually, ecologically, socially, and erotically. This two‐part book first discusses the theological, literary, and historical antecedents of the poem's imagery, characters, and settings before presenting a scene‐by‐scene commentary of the entire illuminated work. Jerusalem tells the story of a fall, many rescue attempts, escalating violence, and a surprising apocalypse — in which all living things are transfigured in ferocious forgiveness.

This book studies the poetry and culture of Kabir—a great and still popular fifteenth-century religious poet of North India—through the lens of oral-performative traditions. It draws from ethnographic research conducted over a ten-year period, mainly in Malwa, Madhya Pradesh, as well as on the history of written collections. First it focuses on texts—their transmission by singers, the dynamics of textual forms in oral performance, and the connections between texts in oral forms, written forms, and other media. Second, it attends to context, reception, and community. Chapters 1 through 4 draw a portrait of a leading Kabir folksinger of Malwa; demonstrate how texts work in oral-musical performance; analyze discourses of authenticity; and present a typical Kabir singer’s repertoire in Malwa in the early 2000s. Chapter 5 is transitional, considering theories of “orality.” Chapters 6 through 8 emphasize social perspectives, examining communities of interpretation including a religious sect, the Kabir Panth; a secular educational NGO, Eklavya; and urban fans of Kabir. Kabir’s poetry lends itself to rich discussions on topics that range from cultivation of subtle inner states to political argument and activism. A persistent theme is the relation between religious-spiritual and social-political dimensions. An iconoclastic mystic who criticized organized religion, sectarian prejudice, caste, violence, deception, and hypocrisy, Kabir also speaks of self-knowledge, deep inner experience, confrontation with death, and connection to the divine. Ambiguously situated among Hindu, Muslim, Sufi, and yogic traditions, he rejects religious identities and urges fearless awakening.

For thirty years, the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society has met weekly in the medieval colleges of Oxford University. During that time, it has hosted as speakers nearly all those still living who were associated with the Inklings-the Oxford literary circle led by C. S. Lewis-, as well as authors and thinkers of a prominence that nears Lewis’s own. This book offers the reader a chance to join this unique group. The author has worked with Society past-presidents Brendan and Judith Wolfe to select the best unpublished talks, which are here made available to the public for the first time. They represent the best of traditional academic essays, thoughtful memoirs, and informal reminiscences about C. S. Lewis and his circle. The reader will re-imagine Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy with former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams; read philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe’s final word on Lewis’s arguments for Christianity; hear the Reverend Peter Bide’s memories of marrying Lewis and Joy Davidman in an Oxford hospital; and learn about Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles from his former secretary. Representing the best of both personal and scholarly engagement with C. S. Lewis and the Inklings, the talks collected here set a new tone for engagement with this iconic Oxford literary circle-a tone close to Lewis’s own Oxford-bred sharpness and wryness, seasoned with good humour and genuine affection for C. S. Lewis and his circle.

C. S. Lewis is one of the most influential and beloved Christian writers of the past century, and interest in him grows as books about his fantasy, fiction, and biography continue to appear. Although Lewis’s personal journey was a deeply philosophical search for the most adequate worldview, the few extant books about his Christian philosophy focus on specific topics rather than his worldview as a whole. In this book, Michael Peterson develops a comprehensive, coherent framework for understanding Lewis’s Christian worldview—from his arguments from reason, morality, and desire to his ideas about Incarnation, Trinity, and Atonement. All worldviews address fundamental questions about reality, knowledge, human nature, morality, and meaning. Peterson therefore examines Lewis’s Christian approach to these same questions in interaction with other worldviews. Accenting that the intellectual strength and existential relevance of Lewis’s works rest on his philosophical acumen as well as his Christian orthodoxy—which he famously called “mere Christianity”—Peterson skillfully shows how Lewis’s Christian thought engages a variety of important issues raised by believers and nonbelievers alike, including: the problem of evil and suffering, the problem of religious diversity, the problem of meaning, the relation of prayer and providence, the relation of science and religion, and the nature of humanity. Just as Lewis was gifted in communicating philosophical ideas and arguments in an accessible style, Peterson has artfully crafted a major contribution to Lewis scholarship which will interest specialists and benefit the general reader.

This study of C. S. Lewis’s popular Space Trilogy—Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945)—departs from the prevailing emphasis upon Lewis’s affection for the “Medieval Model” of the universe and situates Lewis’s work in the context of modern intellectual, cultural, and political history. It demonstrates that Lewis did not simply dismiss the modern “Developmental Model,” as is often assumed, but discriminated carefully among different kinds of evolutionary theory and the manner in which they influenced modern thinking about human nature, social practice, and religious conviction. It also shows that the “unfallen” imaginary worlds that Lewis constructs on Mars and Venus are derived not only from classical and medieval sources but also from the transfiguration or “taking up” of the same modern evolutionary paradigm he is ostensibly putting down. This perspective on the Space Trilogy (an appendix is devoted to the abortive “Dark Tower”) brings out the enduring relevance of Lewis’s “scientific romances” to contemporary concerns on a wide variety of issues, including our relations to the natural world and the other species with whom we share Earth, the ethical and political problems surrounding the emerging revolution in bio-technology, and the seemingly intractable struggle between religious and naturalistic worldviews in the twenty-first century. Far from a simple struggle between an old-fashioned Christian humanism and a newfangled heresy, Lewis’s Space Trilogy is the searching effort of a modern religious apologist to sustain and enrich the former through critical engagement with the latter.

The argument of this book is that a primary goal in the work of C. S. Lewis is to articulate a Christian worldview. Lewis based this project on his positive view of culture, nature, and human relations. He addresses deficiencies in modern culture and the largely distorted relations of modernity to nature in order to restore culture as a supportive base for a Christian worldview. The book offers discussions of seven interests in Lewis's work: retrieval, reenchantment, houses, culture, character, pleasure, and celebration. The topics provide not only an analysis of Lewis's work but also a basis upon which readers who want to construct a worldview here and now can draw inspiration and direction from him.

When Orthodoxy was published in 1908, Wilfrid Ward hailed Chesterton as a prophetic figure, whose thought was to be classed with that of Burke, Butler, and Coleridge. This book provides a biographical study on Chesterton and draws on the wealth of letters and journalistic writings within the newly released ‘Chesterton Papers’ archive at the British Library. The book brings new biographical details to light that expand on existing Chesterton studies. When Chesterton died in 1936, T. S. Eliot pronounced that Chesterton's ‘social and economic ideas were the ideas for his time that were fundamentally Christian and Catholic’, elaborating that he attached significance also to his ‘development’. The book examines these ‘social and economic ideas’ but focuses on his ‘development’, both imaginative and spiritual — from his early childhood in the 1870s to his intellectual maturity in the first decade of the 20th century. It charts Chesterton's progression from his first story (composed at the age of three) to his masterpiece, Orthodoxy, in which he established the foundations on which the writing of his last three decades would build. Part One explores the years of Chesterton's obscurity — his childhood, his adolescence, his years as a young adult. Part Two examines his emergence onto the public stage, his success as one of the leading journalists of his day and his growing renown as a man of letters.

Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith suggests that the life and works of Christina Rossetti offer a commentary on the relationship between Christianity and ecology. It counters readings of her as a withdrawn or apolitical poet by reading her Anglo-Catholic faith in the context of her commitment to the nonhuman. Rossetti considered the doctrines and ideas associated with the Catholic Revival to be revelatory of an ecology of creation in which all things, material and immaterial, human and nonhuman, divine and embodied, are interconnected. The book focuses on her close attention to the Bible, the Church Fathers, and Francis of Assisi to show how her poetry, prose, and letters refused the nineteenth-century commodification of creation and declared it as a new and shared reality kept in eternal flux by the nondual love of the Trinity. In chapters on her early involvement in the Oxford Movement, her relationship to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Franciscan commitment to the diversity of plant and animal life through her anti-vivisection activism, and green reading of the apocalypse as transformative rather than destructive, the book traces an ecological love command in her writing, one she considered it a Christian duty to fulfil. It illuminates Rossetti’s at once sensitive and keenly ethical readings of the place of flora and fauna, stars and planets, humans and angels in creation, and is also the first study of its kind to argue for the centrality of spiritual materialism in her work, one driven by a prevenient and green grace.

This book argues that the metres of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy are arranged in patterns that have a therapeutic and liturgical purpose. The argument moves from an examination of the prosodical interplay of metre, meaning, and sound in the Consolation’s first seven poems; to a consideration of the therapeutic use of the same metre in different poems; to the discovery and exploration of an intricate system of metric repetition that comprehends every poem; and finally, to reflection on how this acoustic system shapes the listener’s memory to an intelligible design. It is argued that the metres enable a bodily mediation of the text’s consolation, in which, by repetition and meditation, the hearer comes to discern the eternal in the movement of time.

This book concerns itself with two major, interrelated phenomena of the long eighteenth century: the onset of capital accumulation and the loosening of religious discourse to describe intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical experiences. Through this unusual pairing, the book shows that debates around religious radicalism are bound to the advent of capitalism at its very root: as legal precedent, as financial rhetoric, and as aesthetic form. As a result, we must contextualize the histories of religion and secularization in terms of the economic landscape of early modernity. The book contributes to new directions of scholarship in literary and legal history, secularization studies, and economic criticism. It is unique among other such projects, given that it produces a model for literary study that is simultaneously attuned to the history of capital accumulation and to the forces of religious dissent. Adopting a comparative, transatlantic approach, the book situates the rhetoric of enthusiastic rapture in the context of the major institutional transformations of early modernity—transformation that now drive our contemporary world order: the dispossession and plunder of the globe, the rise of finance, legal reform, and the administration of racialized labor. By approaching the history of capitalism through religious debates, the book discloses legacies of aesthetic form and of global flows of capital that have been hitherto inaccessible to our study of the period. Chapters bring together the moral philosophy of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, French Camisard religious prophesy, early modern statute law, Swift’s poetry, and the political theory of Hobbes, Hume, and Locke.

This volume unites research on the problem of gender and magic in three ancient Mediterranean societies: early Judaism, Christianity, and Greco-Roman culture. The book brings together diverse critical methodologies derived from research carried out in ancient fields. It is divided into three sections that reflect distinct perspectives. This interdisciplinary approach challenges presumed associations of women and magic by probing the foundations and processes of, and motivations behind, gendered stereotypes, beginning with Western culture’s earliest associations of women and magic in the Bible and Homer’s Odyssey. The book interrogates gendered stereotypes that are as relevant now, for understanding contemporary popular culture, as for understanding antiquity or the early modern witch hunts. The chapters in this volume collectively illuminate the reality as well as ideology and fantasy behind ancient constructions of the “witch.”