Procuring Immortality: Eschatological Reform and the Pursuit of Worldly Fame in English Renaissance Literature

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My thesis will consider how early modern English citizens envisaged death and the afterlife, exploring how the changing religious culture of the Protestant Reformation influenced traditional eschatological beliefs. Historians such as Eamon Duffy and Peter Marshall have written extensively on the subjects of early modern eschatology and attitudes towards death, however, a distinctive element of my research methodology is to investigate how these topics were portrayed within Renaissance literature. I will conduct a new historicist study considering the extent to which early modern literature mirrors contemporary societal concerns and conversely, how Elizabethan and Jacobean social attitudes were influenced by Renaissance literature. By studying the historical and literary texts of this period, I endeavour to prove that there is a direct correlation between the curtailment of Catholic commemorative rituals, and the emerging societal appetite for worldly fame and self-memorialisation.Thomas Rist, Stephen Greenblatt, Clara Calvo, and Ton Hoenselaars have all published research investigating theatrical depictions of death and remembrance, however their studies overlook the methods adopted by Renaissance characters, prior to death, to secure their own post-mortem remembrance. Therefore, my study will be influential to this critical field as it will argue that Renaissance dramatists responded to the dissolution of the relationship between the living and the dead by portraying characters who endeavour to guarantee their own immortality, by establishing an enduring worldly legacy.I will develop the research of my Master's degree dissertation which considered how changing doctrinal attitudes towards the dead were reflected in Renaissance revenge drama, arguing that revenge essentially functions as an act of remembrance, performed in defiance of Reformed Protestant eschatology. In my PhD thesis, I will expand my focus beyond the revenge tragedy genre to consider the influence of the Protestant Reformation, and the associated changes to eschatological doctrine and funerary commemoration, upon early modern literature and social culture.