30 October 2007

Dear Colleague:

I look forward to receiving your application for this NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers on “Religion in English History and Literature from The Canterbury Tales through Pilgrim’s Progress.” Investigating the interrelationship of religion, literature, and history of late medieval and early modern England (c. 1385-1685), this seminar will convene from June 23 until July 18, 2008 at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. This letter provides an outline of our forthcoming program, our schedule, core faculty, qualifications of applicants, application procedure and deadline, the seminar stipend, academic resources and the status of applicants at Ohio State, housing, and cultural and recreational resources available at the seminar site. For further details including a working weekly schedule, please consult this website listed above.

Pilgrimage represents one of ongoing concerns of this program, because our discussions will include consideration of a Chaucerian tale told by a fictive pilgrim to Canterbury; the attack lodged by a onetime pilgrim to Rome, Martin Luther, on ritual practices associated with pilgrimage; and the pilgrimage allegory by John Bunyan, who writes of a pilgrim named Christian, whose flight from the City of Destruction impels him to travel on foot to the Celestial City.

Our study will open with the Lollards’ fruitless demands for reform of the English church, to which Chaucer refers in The Canterbury Tales, and end with the persecution of nonconformists during the Restoration, when Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress during imprisonment in Bedford jail. Seeming to anticipate the Protestant Reformation, Lollard followers of John Wyclif claimed biblical authority in denying transubstantiation, papal primacy, sacrosanct status of clergy, and veneration of relics and religious images. Their call for preaching and worship based upon the Bible continued to inspire nonconformists three centuries later.

The absence of print technology in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries may provide one explanation for the failure of this “premature Reformation.” The labor-intensive production of manuscripts inhibited the Lollards’ ability to disseminate their writings and to supplant the Vulgate Bible with a Wycliffite translation. By permitting the rapid production of printed books on a scale that dwarfed manuscript production, the “Gutenberg Revolution” exerted a powerful influence on literature, religion, society, and culture. The printing press nurtured the humanistic critique of late medieval educational practices and religious beliefs. In the manner of the Lollards and orthodox predecessors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus, and their Protestant successors satirized popular religious beliefs that centered on pilgrimages, fabrication of fraudulent relics, and the lucrative trade in indulgences.

We shall therefore consider the impact of printing as one of the themes of this seminar. By emphasizing the culturally productive power of books and their use in different social spheres, our study of current thinking about the History of the Book would introduce ways of enriching teaching. For example, consideration of continuity and change during an era when manuscript and print culture coexisted would help us to understand differences between the understanding and reception of classics that circulated in manuscript such as the Canterbury Tales or poetry by John Donne, as opposed to William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament into English or John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which were designed for production and reading in print. Debate continues over whether the emergence of Bible reading by a broad popular readership made Protestantism a “religion of the book.” Although Catholicism drew criticism from reformers as a “religion of the eye” centered on devotion to religious images, printers published many books for an increasingly literate Roman Catholic population.

In addition to considering pre-Reformation religious beliefs and practices, our seminar would enter into present discussion of whether the advent of printing was a necessary precondition for the spread of the Protestant Reformation. This question is related to current debate over whether the Reformation was inevitable, whether it fully supplanted older devotional practices, and whether it sowed the seeds for modern conceptions of religious freedom and political liberty. Although we would give thought to origins on the European continent, our focus will be on the interplay of English history, literature, and religion. Contemporary historians disagree on whether the English Reformation originally possessed broad popular appeal, or whether it was an imposition “from above” by Protestants who controlled church and state in the face of resistance “from below.”

Overview of Program (consult website for further details):

We shall begin with an overview of interrelationships among late medieval and early modern English literature, history, and religion, along with an examination of current scholarship concerning the History of the Book. We would then focus upon Chaucer’s satire on deficient clerics in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales (c. 1400). Scrutiny of the Pardoner’s Tale, in particular, should shed insight on Chaucer’s genial critique of religious abuses. In the second week, we would move on to study the humanistic attack on 1) late medieval devotional practices and 2) papal claims to authority in religious and political affairs. Among other things, we would discuss how school teachers may employ literary texts and historical documents to illuminate the interrelationship between the Renaissance and Reformation. In addition to considering Erasmus’s authorship of biblical scholarship and religious satire, we would give thought to whether Martin Luther’s demand for religious reform represented as sharp a break with tradition as scholars often assume. In addition to examining John Calvin’s attack on relics, we would move on to England to consider the 1530s battle of books engaged in by Sir Thomas More, an important defender of religious orthodoxy, and William Tyndale, whose commitment to Lutheran ideas led him to publish Bible translations for a broad popular readership. We would end by looking at early efforts to commemorate More and Tyndale respectively in line with antithetical Catholic and Protestant definitions of sainthood. In addition to selections from the earliest biography of Tyndale, we would read a few of the lives that John Foxe incorporated into his famous Book of Martyrs (1563-84).

During our third week, we would study the most often taught part of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590-96), “The Legend of Holiness” (Book I). Praise of Queen Elizabeth I for her endorsement of Protestant theology is central to this allegory of the English Reformation. Spenser wrote under the poetic influence of Chaucer. Even though participants may lack opportunities to teach The Faerie Queene, our study would inform classroom approaches to literary, psychological, social, and religious issues central to commonly taught texts such as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. This week will close with a two-day workshop organized by Professor Jack Zevin, a specialist in the teaching of secondary education with a particular emphasis on history and humanities. He is experienced in the training of high school teachers, curriculum revision, and modeling classroom applications of historical materials, literature, and artistic images.

Our final week will begin with consideration of verse by John Donne, whose writings hold an important place in high school curricula, in relation less-well-known poetry by certain Protestant and Catholic contemporaries: George Herbert, Robert Southwell, and Richard Crashaw.  Members of this seminar may lack an opportunity to teach their verse, but they could exploit it in addressing Donne’s verse in literature classes or the cultural impact of the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation (also known as Catholic Reformation) in social studies classes. In considering selections from Paradise Lost (1667), we would give thought to Milton’s engagement with ideas that we may trace from Chaucer through Erasmus, Luther, Tyndale, Spenser, and Donne. Nonconformist thought is encoded within a text that is still commonly assumed to be sublimely detached from contemporary religious affairs. In fact, Paradise Lost emerges out of a heterodox literary tradition, and its author contributed to the revolutionary ferment of mid-seventeenth-century England.  Comparing some of its episodes with selections from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678-84) will serve to clarify Milton's artistry in general and religious engagement in particular. We would consider strategies for using these texts in teaching about the nature of Puritanism in social studies and literature classes. The History of the Book would come into play when we consider issues such as Donne’s composition of verse for circulation in manuscript rather than print and booksellers’ employment of different strategies to market elite verse by Milton, as well as Spenser before him, as opposed to the allegory that Bunyan composed for a very popular readership.

Qualifications of Applicants and Nature of Our Proceedings:

This program should appeal to teachers at the eleventh- and twelfth-grade level of public and private schools, including those who teach AP courses in British literature or European history. Our three-hour-long seminar sessions would combine exploration of new concepts with fresh sources for teaching. We would generally meet three or four times each week. Participants should expect to have abundant time for discussion and reflection. This seminar has no formal paper requirement, but written work is appropriate as a way of aiding discussion and furthering synthesis. It may take the form of reports, personal or interpretive essays, critiques, journals, writing or revision of curricula or lesson plans, and so forth. Our flexible schedule will allow, but not require, volunteers to deliver informal presentations or more formal reports. Rather than embrace any particular outlook, participants ought to evaluate and apply a range of theories, approaches, and methods suitable to their needs.

My role would be that of an initiator and facilitator of interaction among peers, rather than that of a teacher of students. I assume that I shall often open meetings with introductory remarks designed to outline issues that might profit from discussion, but members of the group should collaborate in defining our agenda. As teachers of literature or history of centuries past, we need to face the task of eliciting an enthusiastic response from students who have grown up during the age of video games. In addition to modeling how teachers may use internet-based electronic resources to demonstrate the tactile experience of reading early books in manuscript and print, I would like to share ways in which I have employed visual aids. I plan to invite participants to schedule a private appointment with me during the first week, and to meet with me again during later weeks. I shall schedule office hours during which participants may meet with me on a walk-in basis or by appointment in order to discuss their academic and professional concerns.

By providing an occasion for broad reading and discussion, this seminar should enable participants to enhance their personal knowledge and classroom instruction. Literature teachers should profit from visiting more or less familiar terrain with a historically informed “road map.” Teachers of social studies should profit from applying literary and cultural studies to familiar historical concerns. Regardless of whether participants have an opportunity to teach specific texts under study, they should come away with intellectual refreshment and an awareness of skills that school teachers may apply in teaching a range of different classes. Consideration of books as material objects as well as intellectual containers, for example, may yield insights that teachers could bring to bear in a variety of classes.

Sincerely yours,

John N. King

Distinguished University Professor

Distinguished Professor of English & of Religious Studies