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This book is a major new contribution to the study of cultural identities in Britain and Ireland from the Reformation to Romanticism. It provides a fresh perspective on the rise of interest in British vernacular (or "folk") cultures, which has often been elided with the emergence of British Romanticism and its Continental precursors. Here the Romantics' discovery of and admiration for vernacular traditions is placed in a longer historical timeline reaching back to the controversies sparked by the Protestant Reformation. The book charts the emergence of a nuanced discourse about vernacular cultures, developing in response to the Reformers' devastating attack on customary practices and beliefs relating to the natural world, seasonal festivities, and rites of passage. It became a discourse grounded in humanist Biblical and antiquarian scholarship; informed by the theological and pastoral problems of the long period of religious instability after the Reformation; and, over the course of the eighteenth century, colored by new ideas about culture drawn from Enlightenment historicism and empiricism. This study shows that Romantic literary primitivism and Romantic social thought, both radical and conservative, grew out of this rich context. It will be welcomed by historians of early modern and eighteenth-century Britain and those interested in the study of religious and vernacular cultures.
Sommario
1. Introduction.- 2. Ritual, Ceremony, and Custom in the Aftermath of the British Reformations.- 3. "Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaism": Erudition, Polemic, and Apologetics in the Study of British Customs.- 4. The Antiquities of the Common People.- 5. Embodied Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain: "All Mankind Are the Vulgar in This Respect".- 6. Religion in the Bardic Revival.- 7. Against the Cold Calculus of Modernity.- 8. Conclusion.
Info autore
Celestina Savonius-Wroth is Assistant Professor, History Librarian, and Head of the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. She holds a doctorate in British history from Indiana University Bloomington.
Relazione
"Visions of British Culture performs an inestimable service in bridging the classic Reformation historiography of Protestant acculturation and more literary-minded works like those of Raymond Williams and Stephen Prickett, which examine the genesis of the Victorian ideal of culture. And yet, it is a deeply original work, which restores centuries of learned writing about folk culture - in ethnography, natural history, homiletics, poetry, and social critique - to its religious context." (Brent S. Sirota, Church History, Vol. 93 (1), March, 2024)
