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Some Continuing Traditions in English Devotional Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Helen C. White*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin

Extract

One of the things that most surprises the student of the sixteenth century is the place held by religious literature even in the realm of vernacular publication. The product of the early English presses is religious to an extent that the modern reader finds quite outside his experience. It has been estimated that more than forty per cent of all English books published between the beginning of printing in England and 1640 belong to the various types of religious literature. That preponderance is easy to explain in the light of the ecclesiastical traditions of learning, and there is no doubt that certain aspects of the earlier body of publication as compared with that of more recent times are to be explained in terms of those origins, but the fact is that even when the machinery of religious life had been gravely disturbed, the relative predominance of the genre persisted.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1942

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