The Pathology of the English Renaissance: Sacred Remains and Holy Ghosts

This examination of the fate of lost ideas after the Protestant Reformation explores what might be called the pathology of the Renaissance. The first part of the book treats Spencer’s Faerie Queen and Milton’s Paradise Lost , concentrating on vacant cultural spaces and abandoned icons to trace the gap between sacred and secular life, between poetry and belief. The second part focuses on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Elizabeth Carry’s Tragedy of Mariam to investigate the eshcatological implications of this gap, the ways that history is disentangled from memory and nostalgia severed from experience. The book challenges readings of Renaissance culture as an increasingly secular one, proposing that sacred symbols and practices still powerfully organized the English moral imagination, oriented behaviours and arranged perceptions, and specified the limits of the known world.