Editors: David Lowenstein and Janel Mueller
Publisher:  Cambridge University Press – 1,038 pages
Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram

Early modern English literature refers to writings published during the period between the Reformation and the Restoration periods of British history (almost 200 years: 1517-1710, as shown below) according to the editors of this book – David Lowenstein and Janel Mueller.

According to an article in Wikipedia, the Reformation period is said to have begun in 1517, when the book Ninety-Five Theses, written by Martin Luther, was published.

Here is a passage in that article about the Reformation movement:

“The Reformation (also named the Protestant Reformation or the European Reformation was a movement within Western Christianity in sixteenth-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the Roman Catholic Church and papal authority in particular.  

Although the Reformation is usually considered to have started with the publication of the Ninety-five Theses by Martin Luther in 1517, there was no schism between the Catholic Church and nascent Luther until the 1521 Edict of Worms. The edict condemned Luther and banned citizens of the Holy Roman Empire from defending or propagating his ideas. 

The end of the Reformation era is disputed: it could be considered to end with the enactment of the confessions of faith which began the Age of Orthodoxy. Other suggested ending years relate to the Counter-Reformation, the Peace of Westphalia, or that it never ended since there are still Protestants today.”

And when was the Restoration period? Here is another passage in the Wikipedia about this era in British history:

 “The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland took place in 1660 when King Charles II returned from exile in Europe. The preceding period of the Protectorate and the civil wars, came to be known as the Interregnum (1649–1660).

The term Restoration is also used to describe the period of several years after, in which a new political settlement was established. It is very often used to cover the whole reign of Charles II (1660–1685) and often the brief reign of his younger brother James II (1685–1688). 

In certain contexts it may be used to cover the whole period of the later Stuart monarchs as far as the death of Queen Anne and the accession of the Hanoverian George I in 1714; for example Restoration comedy typically encompasses works written as late as 1710.”

 

This book

  • Provides general coverage and specific information about English literature in the twentieth century
  • Its 26 chapters address recent interpretative and methodological developments in English literary studies
  • Literary production in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales is also discussed, besides England
  • Other subjects, less examined in other histories – such as the literature of the English Reformation and Revolution, and women’s writing – are taken up in this book.
  • This book is an essential source for practitioners and students in the field of English literature of this period.

An excellent, substantial source of information and discussion on early modern English literature, this book is highly recommended, if you are serious about advancement.

 

Editors:

David Lowenstein is the Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the author of Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge, 2001) and Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, 1990). He has also co-edited Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge, 1990).

Janel Mueller is the William Rainey Harper Professor in the Department of English and the College at the University of Chicago, where she is currently Dean in the Division of the Humanities. She is the author of Donne’s Prebend Sermons (1971) and The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style, 1380-1580 (1984). More recently she has published on topics in religion and literature and on earlier woman authors.