Shakespeare, Materialism, Religion
SAA Seminar Proposal
(New Orleans 2016)
Proposed by Jennifer
Waldron and James A. Knapp
A decade ago Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti cautiously
championed a growing body of scholarship devoted to religion in early modern studies. This new scholarship resisted New
Historicist and Cultural Materialist accounts of early modern religion as
ideological mystification, arguing instead for an examination of the complexity
of early modern religious thought on its own terms. Over roughly the same decade, new approaches to materialism
challenged earlier materialist criticism focused variously on a
Hegelian/Marxist interest in material conditions or on material culture studies
and performance theory. Spurred on
by the reassessment of subject-object relations and a renewed interest in
Lucretian atomism, as well as by new interest in phenomenology, affect theory,
and object-oriented ontology, this new (or “new, new”) materialism has a
decidedly philosophical rather than political focus.
Therefore, while a focus on materialist thought may seem to
be at odds with a serious examination of religious belief in the period, the
two are in fact deeply cross-implicated. The turn to religion, on the one hand,
and the turn to philosophical approaches to materialism, on the other, have
created an important opportunity to explore the connections between the two. We
seek papers that put these two critical strands in dialogue, broadly speaking.
How do arguments over religious feeling complicate claims that materialist
thought dominated pre-Cartesian understanding? How are debates over materiality
and immateriality implicated in the religious rhetoric of the period? What can
an exploration of early modern materialisms and religious belief tell us about
contemporary investments in post-Enlightenment empiricism and concerns over the
return of religious radicalism?
