Judaism, Islam, and English Reformation literature.

Abstract

This dissertation traces the influence of travel, trade, and cross-cultural contact on English Reformation literature and culture. Focusing particularly on English interaction with Muslims and Jews, who operated extensive ambassadorial and trade routes in the Mediterranean, the research places sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century religious controversies in geo-political and economic context. Protestantism developed during a period in which early modern English cross-cultural contact was increasing through travel, trade, and geo-political relations. As the English were engaged in the project of expanding global relations, they were also conceptualizing their new national religion. As part of this conceptualization, English Protestant writers explored the relationship between different forms of Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism. Though travel and trade would seem to have little impact on Reformation battles internal to Christianity, Protestant polemicists repeatedly refer to contemporary religious, geo-political, economic, ambassadorial affairs in their treatises, demonstrating a painful awareness of their position as one of many religious groups vying for power, status, and believers. Far from being bound by intra-Christian or intra-English disputes, I argue, English Reformation debates addressed contemporary geo-political events and responded to the pressures of expanding global relations by engaging other religions on specifically theological and ecclesiastical terms. Extant sources suggest that early modern English Protestants were preoccupied with three central concerns fundamental to the project of Reformation. The first centers on the development of anti-Catholic rhetoric, based primarily on accusations of idolatry. The second focuses on the reform of ceremonial practices in the English church. The third analyzes the nature and processes of conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism. Each chapter considers how these concerns shaped, and were shaped by, references to Judaism and Islam. From investigating the ways travel, trade, and geo-politics shaped anti-Catholic rhetoric on idolatry, to examining the ways references to Jewish and Muslim rituals were used to mediate official ecclesiastical disputes over Protestant ceremonial practice, to considering how Judaism and Islam became relevant in the personal investments required to convert from Catholicism to Protestantism, this dissertation reorganizes our understanding of the three central preoccupations of the English Reformation.