Representing ruins in English Renaissance literature: Empire, identity and the legacy of the English Reformation, c.1530-c.1660

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Ruins - the material remains of decayed buildings, cities, and cultures - have been a recurrent theme in the art and literature of Western Europe since at least the fall of the Roman Empire, and in the early modern period Roman ruins inspired an outpouring of poems and paintings across France, Italy, and the Low Countries. Britain's experience of ruins in this period was highly distinctive, however, defined less by Roman ruins than by the Roman Catholic ruins of the 650 abbeys suppressed during the English Reformation in the 1530s. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was the defining event for representations of ruins in English literature, its significance reflected in the titles of later works like Austen's 'Northanger Abbey' (1798-9) and Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' (1798). Yet while ruins are widely acknowledged as an important motif in Gothic and Romantic literatures, their significance for our understanding of English Renaissance literature has been largely overlooked. There has been some critical recognition of ruins in writing by Spenser and Shakespeare, but no book-length study charting their significance in literature across the early modern period. This project offers an in-depth assessment of this underexplored topic, investigating how and why ruins were represented in English Renaissance literature within the long century following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. While it acknowledges the influence on English literature of French and Italian models for representing Roman ruins, it also argues for the distinctiveness of England's experience of the protestant Reformation and its impact on English literary representations of ruins. Critics have argued that ruins in English Renaissance literature reflect the antiquarian interests of this period. But ruins were more than a window onto the past; they were also a mirror reflecting the future fate of the present, their fragility a reminder of the decline and fall of civilisations. It is as a comment on the vanity of early modern imperial endeavour that the French Renaissance poet Joachim Du Bellay read the ruins of Rome's past in the mid-sixteenth century, and in this project I trace the translation of this perspective to the particular context of protestant England and its own self-image as an empire in the early modern period. In ruins, the project reads a radical undercurrent in English Renaissance writing that questions and critiques the constructs of empire it appears to support. The project brings this approach to ruins into dialogue with current critical debates about the mechanics of British state-formation under the Tudors and Stuarts, arguing against a stream of recent criticism that sees English Renaissance literature as largely supportive of England's imperial ambitions over Britain and Ireland. Its findings will make a significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of both English literature and English identity, its focus on ruins revealing sites of resistance in literature to England's imperial ideology in the early modern period. The project will be based at the University of Hull, where the Andrew Marvell Centre offers an established framework for interdisciplinary research in the medieval and early modern periods, and where significant archival resources on Marvell are housed at the Hull History Centre. Marvell is a poet and politician with lifelong connections to Hull, and his relationship to the medieval monastic ruins of Hull and Yorkshire is a key focus for the project. Alongside the monograph 'Renaissance literatures of ruin: Spenser to Marvell', the project's findings will be disseminated through a journal article, conference paper and academic conference on Marvell, and through a school session, public lecture and the public exhibition 'Marvell and medieval Hull', produced in partnership with the Hull History Centre, and in collaboration with the leading Marvell expert, Professor Nigel Smith (Princeton).