Art, Literature and Religion in Early Modern Sussex Culture and Conflict

Art, Literature and Religion in Early Modern Sussex is an interdisciplinary study of a county at the forefront of religious, political and artistic developments in early-modern England. Ranging from the schism of Reformation to the outbreak of Civil War, the volume brings together scholars from the fields of art history, religious and intellectual history and English literature to offer new perspectives on early-modern Sussex. Essays discuss a wide variety of topics: the coherence of a county divided between East and West and Catholic and Protestant; the art and literary collections of Chichester cathedral; communities of Catholic gentry; Protestant martyrdom; aristocratic education; writing, preaching and exile; local funerary monuments; and the progresses of Elizabeth I. Contributors include Michael Questier; Nigel Llewellyn; Caroline Adams; Karen Coke; and Andrew Foster. The collection concludes with an Afterword by Duncan Salkeld (University of Chichester). This volume extends work done in the 1960s and 70s on early-modern Sussex, drawing on new work on county and religious identities, and setting it into a broad national context. The result is a book that not only tells us much about Sussex, but which also has a great deal to offer all scholars working in the field of local and regional history, and religious change in England as a whole.

Contents: Introduction: contesting early modern Sussex, Matthew Dimmock, Andrew Hadfield and Paul Quinn; Elizabeth I’s progresses into Sussex, Caroline Adams; Two Sussex writers: Thomas Drant and Anthony Copley, Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield; Lambert Barnard, Bishop Shirborne’s ’paynter’, Karen Coke; Intellectual networks associated with Chichester Cathedral, c.1558-1700, Andrew Foster; ’This strange conglomerate of books’, or ’Hobbs’ Leviathan’: Bishop Henry King’s library at Chichester Cathedral, Daniel Starza Smith; ’Your daughter, most devoted’: the sententious writings of Mary Arundel, Duchess of Norfolk, given to the Twelfth Earl of Arundel, Elizabeth McCutcheon; ’The government of this church by Catholic bishops hath always been a strength and defence unto the kingdom’: episcopacy and the Catholic community in early 17th-century Sussex and beyond, Michael Questier; Richard Woodman, Sussex Protestantism and the construction of martyrdom, Paul Quinn; ’The happy preserver of his brother’s posterity’: from monumental text to sculptural figure in early modern Sussex, Nigel Llewellyn; Afterword: not the last word: scraps of history, Duncan Salkeld; Index.

Matthew Dimmock is Professor of Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex. His work focuses on the field of cultural encounter and amongst other publications he is author of New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (2005) and Mythologies of Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture (2013) and editor of William Percy’s Mahomet and His Heaven: A Critical Edition (2006). Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, Visiting Professor at the University of Granada and Vice-Chair of the Society for Renaissance Studies. He is the author of a number of books on the literature and culture of Early Modern England including Edmund Spenser: A Life (2012), Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005) and Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing, 1540-1620 (1998). He is also the editor of the Oxford Handbook to Early Modern Prose, 1500-1640 (2013). Paul Quinn is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the School of English at the University of Sussex. His current research on the culture of Early Modern Sussex will culminate in a major exhibition in 2015. He has taught at the University of Chichester, Birkbeck College and at Oxford and his research interests include staged anti-Catholicism, intra-Protestant debate, and representations of martyrdom in popular texts.