Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism

—a conference organized by Lowell Gallagher, University of California, Los Angeles

The conference investigates the imaginative, social and literary resources of English Catholic diaspora populations in the early modern period. The forum will also take stock of recent efforts to reevaluate the place of English Catholic authors in the literary canon of the English Renaissance. More broadly, the forum addresses the critical legacy of problems associated with early modern cultures of English Catholicism, problems that are being voiced with new accents in contemporary concerns of political and ethical theory: Who counts, finally, as my neighbor? How can the ethical being of cultural “others” be recognized and valued outside the normative dyad of sameness and difference?

By addressing the nexus of social, political, religious, theological, and literary discourses through which early modern Catholic identities were negotiated, the symposium aims to enhance scholarly purchase on lost or forgotten aspects of the rich texture of the experience of scattered Catholic communities within English literary tradition and political cultures; and it will promote channels of communication between early modern cultural studies of religion, current debates over the effects of secularization, and changing notions of the sacred vis-à-vis religious identity and practice in an era of globalization.

Program

Session 1
Moderator: Lori Anne Ferrell, Claremont Graduate University

Chris Highley, Ohio State University
“First Wave: Exile and Catholic Identity 1558–1570”

Frances E. Dolan, University of California, Davis
“True and Perfect Relations: Or, Identifying Confessions”

Arthur F. Marotti, Wayne State University
“In Defense of Idolatry: Residual Catholic Culture and the Protestant Assault on the Sensuous in Early Modern England”

Session 2
Moderator: Ulrike Strasser, University of California, Irvine

Alice Dailey, Villanova University
“Wonders of Devotion and Polemic: Tracking the Counter-Reformation Miracle”

Anne Dillon, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge
“The Rosary Transfigured: Devotional Life in Recusant Households”

Susannah Brietz Monta, Louisiana State University
“Uncommon Prayer? Catholic Devotion in Post-Reformation England”

Session 3
Moderator: Debora Shuger, Univeristy of California, Los Angeles

Phebe Jensen, Utah State University
“‘Honest Mirth & Merriment’: Catholicism and Festivity in Early Modern England”

Gary Kuchar, University of Victoria
“The Theology of Form in Southwell’s ‘St. Peter’s Complaint’ and Crashaw’s ‘The Weeper’”

Richard Rambuss, Emory University
“Richard Crashaw’s Two Temples”

Session 4
Moderator: Jennifer Rust, University of California, Irvine

Holly Crawford Pickett, Washington and Lee University
“Serial Conversion and Ecumenism”

Alison Shell, Durham University
“William Alabaster: The Career and the Canon”

Stefania Tutino, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Obedience and Consent: Thomas White and English Catholicism, 1640–1660”