Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell

Stewart Mottram writes on representations of ruin and religious violence across English literature of the long reformation, with particular interests in Edmund Spenser and Andrew Marvell. He has held Leverhulme and AHRC Early Career Fellowships at Aberystwyth and Hull, was appointed to his current post at Hull in 2010, and has also previously taught at the University of Leeds and at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He is author of Empire and Nation in early English Renaissance literature (2008), co-editor of the essay collection, Writing Wales, from the Renaissance to Romanticism (2012), and has published widely on reformation themes in early modern literature, in journals including Spenser Studies and The Seventeenth Century. He is author of the Oxford Bibliographies entry for Andrew Marvell.

Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell explores writerly responses to the religious violence of the long reformation in England and Wales, spanning over a century of literature and history, from the establishment of the national church under Henry VIII (1534), to its disestablishment under Oliver Cromwell (1653). It focuses on representations of ruined churches, monasteries, and cathedrals in the works of a range of English Protestant writers, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Denham, and Marvell, reading literature alongside episodes in English reformation history: from the dissolution of the monasteries and the destruction of church icons and images, to the puritan reforms of the 1640s.

The study departs from previous responses to literature's 'bare ruined choirs', which tend to read writerly ambivalence towards the dissolution of the monasteries as evidence of traditionalist, catholic, or Laudian nostalgia for the pre-reformation church. Instead, Ruin and Reformation shows how English protestants of all varieties-from Laudians to Presbyterians-could, and did, feel ambivalence towards, and anxiety about, the violence that accompanied the dissolution of the monasteries and other acts of protestant reform. The study therefore demonstrates that writerly misgivings about ruin and reformation need not necessarily signal an author's opposition to England's reformation project. In so doing, Ruin and Reformation makes an important contribution to cross-disciplinary debates about the character of English Protestantism in its formative century, revealing that doubts about religious destruction were as much a part of the experience of English protestantism as expressions of popular support for iconoclasm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The first major study to explore the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries and other acts of reformation violence on the literature of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.