Concepts of predestination and reprobation were central issues in the Protestant Reformation, especially within Calvinist churches, and thus have often been studied primarily in the historical context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Versions of Election: From Langland and Aquinas to Calvin and Milton, David Aers takes a longer view of these key issues in Christian theology. With meticulous attention to the texts of medieval and early modern theologians, poets, and p...

In Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity, David Aers presents a sustained and profound close reading of the final version of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the most searching Christian poem of the Middle Ages in English. His reading, most unusually, seeks to explore the relations of Langland's poem to both medieval and early modern reformations together with the ending of Constantinian Christ...

In pursuing how fourteenth-century English texts engage with philosophical, intellectual, and theological questions, the work of Denise N. Baker has powerfully shaped the field of medieval studies. This collection honors Baker’s legacy as a scholar and teacher by taking a fresh approach to the most salient literary, mystical, and devotional works written in late medieval England. The contributors examine a variety of foundational texts ranging from Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales to...

First published in 1981.The primary purpose of this book is to serve as an introduction to writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition to major Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelly – the authors discuss writers such as Austen, Hazlitt and Burke, who are usually studied in a different context, and genres such as fiction and political writing, which are often cut off from the central body of poetry.An original and highly stimulated s...

First published in 1988, David Aers explores the treatment of community, gender, and individual identity in English writing between 1360 and 1430, focusing on Margery Kempe, Langland, Chaucer, and the poet of Sir Gawain. He shows how these texts deal with questions about gender, the making of individual identity, and competing versions of community in ways which still speak powerfully in contemporary analysis of gender formation, sexuality, and love. Making wide use of recent rese...

First published in 1980, this study of two renowned later fourteenth century English poets, Chaucer and Langland, concentrates on some major and representative aspects of their work. Aers shows that, in contrast to the mass conventional writing of the period, which was happy to accept and propagate traditional ideologies, Chaucer and Langland were preoccupied with actual conflicts, strains, and developments in received ideologies and social practices. He demonstrates that they were genuine...

Regarded as the leading text in Christian theology for the last 25 years, Alister E. McGrath’s The Christian Theology Reader is now available in a new 5th edition featuring completely revised and updated content.Brings together more than 350 readings from over 200 sources that chart 2,000 years of Christian historySituates each reading within the appropriate historical and theological context with its own introduction, commentary, and study questions

“A powerful diagram of the moral life from Shakespeare to the present...a book crowded with insights.”—Geoffrey Hartman, New York TimesOne of the twentieth century’s foremost literary critics traces the idea of the self across five hundred years of Western cultural history.“One cannot both be sincere and seem so,” André Gide once wrote. Attempting to inhabit sincerity to satisfy social expectations makes it into a posture or a pers...

First published in 1985, Between Men was a decisive intervention in gender studies, a book that all but singlehandedly dislodged a tradition of literary critique that suppressed queer subjects and subjectivities. With stunning foresight and conceptual power, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work opened not only literature but also politics, society, and culture to broader investigations of power, sex, and desire, and to new possibilities of critical agency.Illuminating with uncanny...

This selection of writings from the most important moments in the history of Christianity has become established as a classic reference work, providing insights into 2000 years of Christian theological and political debate. While retaining the original material selected by Henry Bettenson, Chris Maunder has added a substantial section of more recent writings. These illustrate the Second Vatican Council; the theologies of liberation; Church and State from 'Thatcher's Britain' to Communist E...

An anthology of exemplary readings by some of the twentieth century’s foremost literary critics, Close Reading presents a wide range of responses to the question at the heart of literary criticism: how best to read a text to understand its meaning. The lively introduction and the selected essays provide an overview of close reading from New Criticism through poststructuralism, including works of feminist criticism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, new historicism, and more....

The King James Bible was a landmark in the history of the English language, and an inspiration to poets, dramatists, artists and politicians. Without the King James Bible there would have been no Paradise Lost, no Pilgrim's Progress, no Handel's Messiah. Yet more than a literary, even more than a religious influence, it was seen as a social, economic and political text. Those seeking to overthrow the English monarchy and those wanting to retain it, both sought support from the same Bible.