2025 Early Modern Center Conference, “Performing Religion in Early Modern England”

“Whatever his personal beliefs, Shakespeare is in the most important sense of the word a religious writer: not a proponent of any particular religion, but a writer who is aware, and makes his spectators aware, of the mystery of things.”

-Stanley Wells, Shakespeare: For All Time 

Born into a world of religious tumult during the English Reformation, Shakespeare and his playwright contemporaries evoked in their writing performances of religious “mystery.” For instance, we find in Shakespeare’s plays religiously ambiguous characters, such as the Ghost in Hamlet, interpreted as a Catholic purgatorial ghost, or as a hallucination, divine visitor, or other being possible in Protestant theology. Religiously enigmatic characters are also pivotal in Marlowe’s plays, such as the lead character in Tamburlaine, who first identifies as Muslim (2 Tamb. 1.3.109) and later burns the Koran. Middleton similarly evokes religious mystery in his plays through dialogue that couples sin with piety, as evident in the Black King in A Game of Chess declaring his reverence for the “‘rape of devotion’” to his servant, the Black Bishop (2.1.17-25). 

Regardless of the form or even the genre they take, early modern performances of religion hold aesthetic, textual, and cultural import, and inspire topics of discussion important to each of these playwrights, as well as to other writers in early modern England and more widely.

The UCSB Early Modern Center’s 2025 Conference: Performing Religion in Early Modern England will explore these and related related topics such as: 

•  Representations of religious practice or the art or religion in early modern literature and culture
• The relationship between religion and narrative
• Authorship and religion
• The politics of religion in early modern England
•  Representations of religion as a means of subversion and empowerment
•  Religious alliances and/or conflicts in the early modern period
• Approaches to performing religion in early modern England
• Audience reception of religious depictions in theater 
• Embodiment and religion in early modern England
• The impact on English religions by “other” early modern religions
• The impact of global religions on early modern England 

CONTACT FOR SUBMISSIONS: emcfellow@gmail.com

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: May 1, 2025