Love's Pilgrimage explores literary adaptations of the Catholic pilgrimage in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant English literature generally, and pays specific regard to Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Bunyan, each of whom deserve a chapter (two for Shakespeare). Its thesis is that while in the sixteenth century, during the early-to-middle stages of the English Reformation, conventional pilgrimages to saints' shrines disappeared from English life (as did the shrines themselves), the imaginative importance of the pilgrimage persisted, and manifested itself in various ways in life and literature. Stephen Greenblatt has recently argued that Purgatory, banished from English faith, found an imaginative place on the Renaissance English stage. This book argues that pilgrimage did so as well, and found not only a place on the stage, but a place in poetry, essay, prose narrative, and, reconfigured in Protestant ways, in English commercial and religious life.
- ISBN10 1611492947
- ISBN13 9781611492941
- Publish Date 1 September 2006 (first published 22 August 2006)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 4 May 2022
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Associated University Presses
- Imprint University of Delaware Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 217
- Language English