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Kristen PooleAssociate Professor Radical Religion: Figures of Nonconformity from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge University Press, 2000)The image of the puritan as a dour and repressive character has been central to ways of reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history and literature. Kristen Poole's original study challenges this perception arguing that radical reformers were most often portrayed in literature of the period as deviant, licentious and transgressive. Through extensive analysis of early modern pamphlets, sermons, poetry and plays, the fictional puritan emerges as a grotesque and carnivalesque figure. By recovering this lost satirical image, Poole sheds new light on the social role played by anti-puritan rhetoric.
Reviews "This fascinating and well-researched book is an important contribution to a sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century literary tradition... only praise for her general clarity of style and for the accompanying apparatus of useful notes, bibliography, and extraordinarly detailed index." Sixteenth Century Journal "Poole masterfully uncovers and links together a group of lively and diverse materials that treat puritans as grotesque and aberant....Kristen Poole makes a major contribution to discussions of religion, literature, and culture in the early modern period. This groundbreaking book should be of considerable value and interest to literary scholars and historians alike." Journal of English and Germanic Philology Current Research I am currently working on a book with the tentative title Ovidean Physics: Environment, Eschatology, and the English Literary Imagination 1580-1620. This book explores how English men and women around the turn of the seventeenth century imagined and experienced their environment. The project seeks to recover a pre-Newtonian environmental consciousness, one in which space and time were not perceived as absolute and subject to mathematical laws. The book begins with the late sixteenth-century eschatological revolution, as the disappearance of purgatory entailed re-mapping the relationship between earthly and netherworldly spatio-temporal constructs. Using encounters with the demonic as nodes through which to examine the operations of space and time, Ovidean Physics argues that many Englishmen and women understood their environment as labile, molten, and metamorphic. This consciousness would be challenged, and ultimately overcome, by a post-Cartesian sense of space as static and geometric. In addition to working on this book, I am also editing John Webster’s The White Devil for the Arden Early Modern Drama series and William Shakespeare’s All's Well That Ends Well for the Barnes and Noble Shakespeare series. When these projects are done, I plan to write a book on Milton and theology. For more information, see the English Department's faculty profile for Kristen Poole.
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