A Declaration Of The True Manner Of Knowing Christ Crucified

This work is a serious study on the doctrine of predestination as it refers to man’s salvation or reprobation by God’s eternal decree. Perkins teaches from the Bible that the doctrine of predestination and God’s grace is to be founded on the written Word of God, and not on the judgments of men. He also emphatically shows, by a multitude of examples, that this doctrine also agrees with the grounds of common logic and reason as it should. His purpose is to help, almost exhaustively, those who are “stuck on the difficulties of the doctrine of predestination.” This is a classic puritan work, glorifying the sovereign Creator of heaven and earth, and worthy of deep consideration by every professing Christian. This is not a scan or a facsimile, but a newly typeset work updated and made easily readable, with an active table of contents.

This ninth volume brings together nine of Perkins’s lesser known practical treatises and, by so doing, introduces the reader to important facets of his religion of the heart. It opens with two works on what it means to look to Christ: A Declaration of the True Manner of Knowing Christ Crucified and The True Gain . This is followed by A Faithful and Plain Exposition upon Zephaniah 2:1–2, which gives an earnest call to repentance, and The Nature and Practice of Repentance as well as The Combat of the Flesh and Spirit , which give systematic explanations of the doctrine of repentance. A Treatise of Man’s Imaginations discusses man’s desperate need for renewal of mind. A Direction for the Government of the Tongue According to God’s Word argues that one’s speech is the most significant change related to a renewed heart. The volume finishes with A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft and A Resolution to the Country Man on Prognostication , which rebuke those who dally with occult practices. Each treatise in this volume occupies an important place in Perkins’s experiential piety—what he himself described as “the more sincere profession of religion.”

A study of the representation of reading in early modern Englishwomen's writing, this book exists at the intersection of textual criticism and cultural history. It looks at depictions of reading in women's printed devotional works, maternal advice books, poetry, and fiction, as well as manuscripts, for evidence of ways in which women conceived of reading in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Among the authors and texts considered are Katherine Parr, Lamentation of a Sinner; Anne Askew, The Examinations of Anne Askew; Dorothy Leigh, The Mothers Blessing; Elizabeth Grymeston, Miscelanea Meditations Memoratives; Aemelia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum; and Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania. Attentive to contiguities between representations of reading in print and reading practices found in manuscript culture, this book also examines a commonplace book belonging to Anne Cornwallis (Folger Folger MS V.a.89) and a Passion poem presented by Elizabeth Middleton to Sarah Edmondes (Bod. MS Don. e.17). Edith Snook here makes an original contribution to the ongoing scholarly project of historicizing reading by foregrounding female writers of the early modern period. She explores how women's representations of reading negotiate the dynamic relationship between the public and private spheres and investigates how women might have been affected by changing ideas about literacy, as well as how they sought to effect change in devotional and literary reading practices. Finally, because the activity of reading is a site of cultural conflict - over gender, social and educational status, and the religious or national affiliation of readers - Snook brings to light how these women, when they write about reading, are engaged in structuring the cultural politics of early modern England.

Protestants and Mysticism in Reformation Europe, edited by Ronald K. Rittgers and Vincent Evener, is a research handbook on the Protestant reception of mysticism, from the beginnings of the Reformation through the mid-seventeenth century.

In this highly innovative study, Ian Green examines the complete array of Protestant titles published in England from the 1530s to the 1720s. These range from the large specialist volumes at the top to cheap tracts at the bottom, from radical on one wing to conservative on the other, and from instructive and devotional manuals to edifying-cum-entertaining works such as religious verse and cautionary tales. Wherever possible the author adopts a statistical approach to permit a focus on those works which sold most copies over a number of years, and in an annotated Appendix provides a brief description of over seven hundred best selling or steady selling religious titles of the period. A close study of these texts and the forms in which they were offered to the public suggests a rapid diversification of both the types of work published and of the readerships at which they were targeted. It also demonstrates shrewd publishers' frequent attempts to plug gaps in a rapidly expanding market. Where previous studies of print have tended to focus on the polemical and the sensational, this one highlights the didactic, devotional, and consensual elements found in most steady selling works. It is also suggested that in these works there were at least three Protestantisms on offer an orthodox, clerical version, a moralistic, rational version favoured by the educated laity, and a popular version that was barely Protestant at all and that the impact of these probably varied both within and between different readerships. These conclusions shed much light not only on the means by which English Protestantism was disseminated, but also on the doctrinally and culturally diffused nature of English Protestantism by the end of the Stuart period. Both the text and the appendix should prove invaluable to anyone interested in the history of the Reformation or in printing as a medium of education and communication in early modern England.