This book explores the role of literature as a means of mediating religious conflict in early modern England. Marking a new stage in the 'religious turn' that generated vigorous discussion of the changes and conflicts brought about by the Reformation, it unites new historicist readings with an interest in the ideological significance of aesthetic form. It proceeds from the assumption that confessional differences did not always erupt into hostilities but that people also had to arrange themselves with divided loyalties - between the old faith and the new, between religious and secular interests, between officially sanctioned and privately held beliefs. What role might literature have played here? Can we conceive of literary representations as possible sites of de-escalation? Do different discursive, aesthetic, or social contexts inflect or deflect the demands of religious loyalties? Such questions open a new perspective on post-Reformation English culture and literature.

1 Introduction: a world of difference: religion, literary form, and the negotiation of conflict in early modern England - Jonathan Baldo and Isabel KarremannPart I: Religious ritual and literary form2 Shylock celebrates Easter - Brooke Conti3 Protestant faith and Catholic charity: negotiating confessional difference in early modern Christmas celebrations - Phebe Jensen4 Singing in the counter: goodnight ballads in Eastward Ho - Jacqueline Wylde5 Romancing the Eucharist: confessional conflict and Elizabethan romances - Christina Wald6. Edmund Spenser's The Ruines of Time as a Protestant poetics of mourning and commemoration - Isabel KarremannPart II: Negotiating confessional conflict7 Letters to a young prince: confessional conflict and the origins of English Protestantism in Samuel Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me (1605) - Brian Walsh8 Tragic mediation in The White Devil - Thomas J. Moretti9 'A deed without a name:' evading theology in Macbeth - James R. Macdonald10 Henry V and the interrogative conscience as a space for the performative negotiation of confessional conflict - Mary A. Blackstone11 Formal experimentation and the question of Donne's ecumenicalism - Alexandra M. Block12 Foucault, confession, and Donne - Joel M. Dodson13 Afterword: reformed indifferently - Richard WilsonIndex