Shell 1999

Shell, Alison. ‘’Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

argues that prejudice against study of Catholics / Catholic literature is ongoing

argues for including Catholics among the downtrodden of early modern England; women, homosexuals, Jews

The livid flash: decadence, anti-Catholic revenge tragedy and the dehistoricised critic

"All critics are agreed that the strobe-like imagery of Italianate revenge-tragedy lights up the corrupt world inhabited by the speaker and the other characters; none has demonstrated an awareness that both the corruption of that world, and the means of its illumination, are conceived in speci®cally anti-Catholic terms. In fact, there are innumerable parallels between the imagery of Webster and Middleton and the apocalyptic image-clusters of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century anti-Catholic polemic, and the former is designed to evoke the latter.” (23)

Catholic poetics and the protestant canon

”But though Crashaw has been deracinated by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he was certainly not isolated at the time. Among his countrymen, he was in ̄uential; plenty of English poetry is Crashavian, both in print and -- as so often with Catholic verse -- in manuscript” (57)

Robert Southwell, Richard Crashaw — tears poetry

"Though it would be a mistake to claim that Southwell single-handedly re-introduced imaginative religious poetry to England after the Reformation, the posthumous publication in 1595 of his collection Saint Peters Complaint gave sacred verse a definitive new direction, and helped to create a climate in which non-biblical religious poetry became increasingly acceptable.” (57)

"Scholarship has tended to concentrate on the in ̄uence of South- well's short poems upon the religious lyricists of the next generation: naturally enough, given how ®rmly literary studies are still tied to anthological familiarity. But a wider view of Southwell's in ̄uence ± on the longer religious poem, and on private meditations ± indicates how he met a common devotional need which, in Protestant circles, was only just beginning to be acknowledged again.” (61)

Southwell executed in 1595, poems published in printed very shortly thereafter; widely read and popular