This is a book about early modern literature and representation. In it, I will argue that in Renaissance England, figural representations – that is, fictive and symbolic articulations of something other than themselves – are the site of profoundly important cultural negotiations; that literary criticism of the last two or three decades has, despite its near-obsessive focus on this phenomenon, tended to misrepresent it; that the function of representation in England has a specific, and very important, political and religious history; and that the crucial text in this history is the Book of Common Prayer. Consequently, though the entire book is of literary import, it will deal at some length with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history, theology, and politics to produce a deeper, richer account of early modern English culture and its textually mediated internal network of connections and dislocations. And so, since many of the problems I address involve the way we interpret the past, I would like to begin by talking not about literature, but about the remarkably durable historiographical conflicts surrounding the English Reformation. I want to propose, if not a solution, perhaps at least some grounds for a truce.

The debate, in its general outlines, goes back to the very earliest days of the Reformation. As the Henrician reforms began to be implemented in the 1530s, a (religiously conservative) party argued that these reforms reflected neither popular nor divine will; they were rather the arbitrary caprices of an ambitious monarch, foisted upon a resistant populace which was overwhelmingly committed to, and satisfied with, traditional forms of Catholic piety.