Overview
- First book-length account of the rise of interest in British vernacular cultures, from the Reformation to Romanticism
- Reveals the importance of religious controversy and biblical scholarship in forming Romantic-era cultural identities
- Challenges the view that the Romantics were the first Protestants to value British vernacular tradition
Part of the book series: Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000 (HISASE)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Visions of British Culture from the Reformation to Romanticism
Book Subtitle: The Protestant Discovery of Tradition
Authors: Celestina Savonius-Wroth
Series Title: Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82855-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-82854-7Published: 18 January 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-82857-8Published: 19 January 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-82855-4Published: 17 January 2022
Series ISSN: 2946-3351
Series E-ISSN: 2946-336X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 311
Topics: History of Britain and Ireland, History of Religion, Cultural History, Social History