Prayer and Performance (Tidsskrift)

Beskrivelse

This book brings together a collection of essays that examine prayer as performance in late sixteenth and seventeenth-century England and its wider European context. The essays are selected to range across a variety of social milieux, practices and controversies to understand the importance of performative gesture and word to the act of prayer and the beliefs that defined it. How did the words and gestures of prayer serve as a means for creating, recognising and shaping religious identity? How were prayer and the controversies that surrounded it reflected in literature and drama? How did the performance of prayer reflect shifts in social perspectives and customs? These questions are addressed in two ways, first by discussing prayer as a social act and second by exploring the representation of prayer on stage and in literature. Organised in this way, the book makes an explicit assertion that these two modes of performed prayer are intrinsically linked, the latter providing imaginative space to explore the former's sincere expressions of belief as well as its contradictions and arbitrary delineations. As a social act, performance means the words and gestures that were recognised as prayer at a time when debate about the proper way to pray was especially intense. Equally important is the performance that might have been construed as non-prayer or prayers that were seen as in some way invalid. We quickly focus, therefore, on the boundaries and definitions of prayer and the ways in which these distinctions are made.

Contributors include: Professors Brian Cummings (York), Graham Parry (York), Helen Wilcox (Bangor), Donald Dickson (Texas A&M), Christopher Hodgkins (UNC, Greensboro), Alison Findlay (Lancaster), Judi Loach (Cardiff), Roy Eriksen (Agder), Dr. Robert Wilcher (Birmingham), Dr. Chloe Preedy (Cambridge), Dr. Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge), Dr. Joseph Sterrett (Aarhus).

Periode	2013 → …
Type af tidsskrift	Tidsskrift