Confession and Memory in Early Modern English Literature

This is the first study to consider the relationship between private confessional rituals and memory across a range of early modern writers, including Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Robert Southwell.

Stegner's introduction neatly traces the gradual erasure of Catholic private auricular confession after the Reformation and how confession was reoriented by the Elizabethan settlement. this wide-ranging study offers a timely appraisal of the relationship between memory, the penitential tradition, and early modern English literature. (Rachel Willie, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 70 (1), 2017)

Autorentext
Paul D. Stegner is Associate Professor of English at California Polytechnic State University, USA. His essays have appeared in Shakespeare Studies, Studies in Philology, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, and several edited collections, including The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser.

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Acknowledgements

1. Confession and Memory in the Age of Reformations
2. Confession and Redemptive Forgetting in Spenser's Legend of Holiness: Memories of Sin, Memories of Salvation
3. The Will to Forget: Ovidian Heroism and the Compulsion to Confess in Marlowe's
4. 'Try what repentance can': , Confession, and the Extraction of Interiority
5. Will and the Reconciled Maid: Rereading Confession and Remembering Sin in Shakespeares
6. Treasonous Reconciliations: Robert Southwell, Religious Polemic, and the Criminalization of Confession
   Conclusion: Memories of Confession in Seventeenth-Century England
   Notes
   Bibliography
   Index