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

我的论文将考虑早期现代英国公民是如何看待死亡和来世的，探索新教宗教改革的宗教文化变化如何影响传统的末世论信仰。埃蒙·达菲和彼得·马歇尔等历史学家就早期现代末世论和对死亡的态度撰写了大量文章，然而，我的研究方法中的一个独特元素是调查这些主题在文艺复兴时期的文学中是如何被描绘的。我将进行一项新的历史决定论研究，考虑早期现代文学在多大程度上反映了当代社会关切，反过来，文艺复兴时期的文学如何影响伊丽莎白和雅各布时期的社会态度。通过研究这一时期的历史和文学文本，我努力证明天主教纪念仪式的减少与社会对世俗名声和自我纪念的新兴胃口之间存在着直接的联系。托马斯·里斯特、斯蒂芬·格林布拉特、克拉拉·卡尔沃和顿·亨塞拉尔都发表了关于戏剧中对死亡和记忆的描述的研究，但他们的研究忽略了文艺复兴时期的人物在死前为了获得自己的死后记忆而采取的方法。因此，我的研究将对这一批评领域产生影响，因为它将辩称，文艺复兴时期的剧作家通过刻画努力确保自己不朽的人物，建立了不朽的世俗遗产，以应对生者和死者之间关系的解体。我将发展我的硕士学位论文的研究，该论文考虑了文艺复兴时期复仇剧中如何反映出对死者的教义态度的变化，认为复仇本质上是一种记忆行为，无视改革新教的末世论。在我的博士论文中，我将把我的重点从复仇悲剧流派扩展到考虑新教改革的影响，以及与之相关的末世论教义和葬礼纪念活动对早期现代文学和社会文化的影响。

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.