“What’s religion got to do with it?”

Abstract

E nglish Renaissance literary studies have flourished, thanks in large part to Arthur F. Kinney’s editorship of English Literary Renaissance, even in times when the literary has been taken over by other critical preoccupations. Arthur has always combined high standards, intellectual rigor, and generosity, especially in supporting young scholars.ELRwas born just as I was beginningmy career. It quickly became the premier journal inmy field, and one that I aspired to publish in, but it took me thirty years and two rejections to land an essay in ELR. There have beenmany changes in English Renaissance / EarlyModern Studies—for example, the concern with political history, women’s writing, gender, queer studies, and history of the book. There was also the field-changing “new historicism,” even though the new critics like Cleanth Brooks or later Arnold Stein assumed it was important to know the historical and intellectual contexts of Renaissance literature. Over the years historical scholarship has taken many shapes (I think of Douglas Bush, Rosalie Colie, Marjorie Hope Nicolson), and it might well be in the process of shape-shifting once again. I will return to this point at the end of this essay. My own work has been on seventeenth-century English prose and poetry rather than the sixteenth century or drama. I received my Ph.D. training at UCLA (home of the California Dryden project) where “seventeenth century” was a distinct field from “Renaissance.” Starting with my first scholarly publications, I was interested in ideas of history and temporality—unsurprising given the disruptions and destabilization caused by the EnglishCivilWar, right in themiddle of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the idea of revolutions drew me in. My first book, The Map of Time (1986), came out several years after Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance SelfFashioning (1980) and Jonathan Goldberg’s James I and the Politics of Literature (1983) had been published, and Louis Montrose’s important series of