Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An in-depth investigation of a specific case of religious history and tradition. Religion will be studied through the cultural and historical contexts that pervade and structure religious meaning and expression. This course may be repeated for credit. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

John Knox (c. 1514-72) was the "author" of the Scottish Reformation in a double sense of the word: as the spiritual leader of the Protestant movement and as the author of an historical narrative which came to be regarded, albeit on partisan grounds, as the definitive account of Scotland's change in religion. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Knox's "fine eye for the telling, and often humorous, detail and his enjoyment in coining a pithy or alliterative phrase give his History [of the Reformation] great immediacy . . . [and have] maintained interest in it . . . down to the present." However, this continuity of interest in Knox's book has helped "to abstract it from its place among Knox's other writings and [to] dislocate it from its contemporary contexts."  

This course will restore Knox's History of the Reformation (composed c. 1566) to its contexts as a product of sixteenth-century literary culture, as a development of Knox's religious thought, and as an intervention into the fraught politics of the Reformation era. In addition to other writings by Knox, our collateral readings will draw on popular balladry and on the canonical poets William Dunbar and Sir David Lyndsay; on Knox's Roman Catholic adversaries John Leslie and Ninian Winzet; on John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, with which Knox's History is intertextually entangled; on the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, which provided Knox with an important model; and on the Geneva Bible.  

Special attention will be given to the early modern science of rhetoric and the classical models on which it was based.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: