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Religious identity was a key issue for the people of post-Reformation England. While most conformed to the State-imposed faith, which changed several times in the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, a significant minority were determined to pursue their own independent path. By the mid-Elizabethan period, with confessional divisions becoming more fixed and clearly defined, individuals were increasingly conscious of the need to choose. People disparaged as ‘Nicodemites’ conformed
This article examines English Evangelical novels focused on the conversion of Jewish characters, published from the 1820s to the 1850s. It concentrates particularly on the way these novels emphasised the importance of the Church of England in constructing national and religious identity, and used Jewish conversion as a way to critique Catholicism and Nonconformity. Jewish worship, rabbinic authority and Talmudic devotion were linked to Roman Catholic attitudes towards priesthood and tradition, while Jews were also portrayed as victims of a persecuting Roman Church. Nonconformity was criticised for disordered worship and confusing Jews with its attacks on respectable Anglicanism. As a national religion, novelists therefore imagined that Jews would be saved by a national church, and often linked this to concepts of a national restoration to Palestine. This article develops and complicates understandings of Evangelical views of Jews in the nineteenth century, and their links to ‘writing the nation’ in popular literature.
This text focuses solely on the writing of British writers of South Asian descent born or raised in Britain. Exploring the unique contribution of these writers, it positions their work within debates surrounding black British, diasporic, migrant and postcolonial literature in order to foreground both the continuities and tensions embedded in their relationship to such terms, engaging in particular with the ways in which this ‘new’ generation has been denied the right to a distinctive theoretical framework through absorption into pre-existing frames of reference. Focusing on the diversity of contemporary British Asian experience, the book deals with themes including gender, national and religious identity, the reality of post-9/11 Britain, the post-ethnic self, urban belonging, generational difference and youth identities, as well as indicating how these writers manipulate genre and the novel form in support of their thematic concerns.
This book is the first collection of translated sources on towns in medieval England between 1100 and 1500. Drawing on a variety of written evidence for the significan and dynamic period, it provides an overview of English medieval urban history. Readers are invited to consider the challenges and opportunities presented by a wide range of sources. The merchant, for example, is seen from different angles - as an economic agent, as a religious patron and in Chaucer's fictional depiction. The prominence of London and the other major cities is reflected in the selection, but due attention is also given to a number of small market towns. Occasions of conflict are represented, as are examples of groups and societies which both contributed to and helped to contain the tensions within urban society. Changing indicators of wealth and poverty are considered, together with evidence for more complex questions concerning the quality of life in the medieval town. The book moves between the experience of urban life and contemporary perceptions of it - from domestic furnishings to legends of civic origins and plays in which townspeople enacted their own history.
. 3 Current debates thus emphasize the role of religion as a mechanism for both perpetuating and ameliorating social divisions in post-conflict societies. Using this debate as a starting point, this chapter focuses on religious identity in Northern Ireland and examines the nature and extent of religious conviction as well as its role in perpetuating communal division. The first section outlines
religious activists and links the services they performed to their religious identity. Their religious beliefs and practices were at the core of their existence and integral to their working lives. As missionaries, they were builders of the Roman Catholic Church and were a key factor in the extension of religious devotion and the consolidation 17 Report on the Visitation of Females at their Own Homes in the City of Westminster (1854), p. 3. 18 Catherine Hall, ‘The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology’, in Sandra Burman, ed., Fit Work for Women (London: Croom
discourse in this field has vaguely echoed the ‘communitarian’ assault on liberal political philosophy. Communitarians have criticised liberals for constructing rights theories based on an excessively abstract conception of the ‘self’, detached from the various identities, experiences and commitments that shape individual identity. For Walzer, the liberal self is ‘liberated from all connection [or] common values’ (2007: 98); or for Sandel (1998), ‘unencumbered’ by deeply constitutive identities. Religious identity, they argue, cannot be understood simply as an exercise of
M&H 03_Tonra 01 08/04/2014 07:15 Page 55 3 Exploring religion as a bright and blurry boundary: Irish migrants negotiating religious identity in Britain Louise Ryan We were very holy in those days. (Dympna, nurse, migrated 1950s) I used to go to church every morning, I was holy in those days, to the Brompton Oratory. (Fiona, nurse, migrated 1950s) This chapter uses the sociological concept of boundaries to explore the processes through which migrants may be included in or excluded from national, ethnic and religious collectivities. In so doing, the discussion
culture. The study of conversion between Christianity and Islam has occupied scholars interested in how religious identity was constructed in post-Reformation Europe, as well as those looking in particular at the relationship between the two religions. 2 The function of gender identity in relation to conversion has often been involved in these discussions
Catholicism resulted not ‘in a clear, new religious identity, but in ambivalence and tension’ as she attempted to straddle both religious worlds. 55 As this rapid survey suggests, many women converted in response to domestic and familial situations. Indeed, Natalie Rothman has argued that women often believed that ‘the continuity of their social role as care givers (domestic slaves