Sinfield - Literature in Protestant England, 1560-1660

Alan Sinfield

First published in 1983
by Croom Helm Ltd

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1983 Alan Sinfield

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This book grew out of an interest in Philip Sidney, which threw up the question of the relationship between his imaginative writing and his involvement, politically, with Elizabethan puritanism. As I explored the historical context, it became apparent that literary history was working from constructions of the nature of puritanism and of orthodoxy, and of their relationships with literature, which were at odds with those used by historians. The Elizabethan Church, doctrinally, was broadly Calvinist: the via media (to which puritans objected) mainly concerned liturgy and organization. A.G.Dickens remarks in The English Reformation: Even Archbishop Whitgift [15831604], who so fiercely disciplined Puritan mislikers of the surplice, did not differ from them upon the essential points of theology. He was a strict Calvinist (Batsford, 1964, p. 313). To Michael Walzer, Sidney and his associates represented an ideal alternative to the courtier: animated by a fine sense of personal virtue, they were conditioned at the same time by a new Calvinist zeal (The Revolution of the Saints [Harvard University Press, 1965], p. 241).

So it was necessary to take Calvinism seriously, as the Elizabethans had done. Study of their theological and devotional writing revealed a confident and elaborate attempt to render coherent, persuasive and effective a doctrine which is (for the most part) alien to usI have drawn upon these primary sources in this book where appropriate, hoping to convey something of the manner in which Elizabethans and Jacobeans handled the issues (the editions from which I have cited are listed on pp. 15356). The problems and contradictions also came into focus. When literature of the period is set into this context, its relationships with official religious doctrine emerge as diverse, provocative and significant. This book is organized around aspects of those relationships.

As the work proceeded it became apparent that its contextualising of literature is more radical than is customary; that the historical setting does not mainly point up the centrality of the literature. The book is almost entirely about literary texts, but whilst they are not treated as passively reflecting their context, neither are they perceived as transcending it. Nor is Christianity accorded the vague deferenceas an adjacent and incorporable scheme of transcendencewhich is common in literary studies of the period. Arguably, the thoroughgoing contextualising of literature here attempted makes literature not less but more important, but it runs counter to prevailing assumptions. The questioning of these assumptions in structuralist and Marxist work and (most relevantly) in cultural studies made it possible to theorize the stance of this book, and chapter I attempts to explain the approach taken and to locate it within current thought.