Conférence : “‘Courage, Language, Discretion and Learning’: Lancelot Andrewes and Early Modern Religious Culture”, University of York, le 20 et le 21 mars 2020

This conference will be the first to investigate the works of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) and his engagement with early modern cultures of religion, literature and learning. Andrewes was the best renowned elite preacher of his generation. His sermons were celebrated by listeners, readers and poets; he occupied powerful roles in the Jacobean court, and his writings paved the way for later reforms in the English church. Andrewes was a famous polemicist, a major translator of the King James Bible, an internationally respected scholar, and an influential teacher at Cambridge. This conference will undertake a detailed investigation of his writings in all their variety: sermons, polemical tracts, devotional works and university lectures.

Recent research on Andrewes has uncovered the range of influences upon his thinking. We are now in the position to enquire how Andrewes’s own various roles, his use of different genres and his appeals to diverse audiences shaped his writing. In asking these questions, the conference will contribute to a broader understanding of early modern religious writing. It will allow us to investigate the relationship between sermons and other genres, and to study the connections between Andrewes and the work of other early modern scholars, philosophers and thinkers. In the light of the ‘religious turn’ in literary studies and new work on the history of early modern scholarship, an examination of the variety of Andrewes’s literary output will explore connections between seemingly disparate strands of early modern religious, political and scholarly discourses.