Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts
The Reformation was one of the defining cultural turning points in Western history, even if there is a longstanding stereotype that Protestants did away with art and material culture. Rather than reject art and aestheticism, Protestants developed their own aesthetic values, which Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts addresses as it identifies and explains the link between theological aesthetics and the arts within a Protestant framework across five-hundred years of history.
Featuring essays from an international gathering of leading experts working across a diverse set of disciplines, Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts is the first study of its kind, containing essays that address Protestantism and the fine arts (visual art, music, literature, and architecture), and historical and contemporary Protestant theological perspectives on the subject of beauty and imagination. Contributors challenge accepted preconceptions relating to the boundaries of theological aesthetics and religiously determined art; disrupt traditional understandings of periodization and disciplinarity; and seek to open rich avenues for new fields of research.
Building on renewed interest in Protestantism in the study of religion and modernity and the return to aesthetics in Christian theological inquiry, this volume will be of significant interest to scholars of Theology, Aesthetics, Art and Architectural History, Literary Criticism, and Religious History.
Sarah Covington is Professor of History at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York, USA. She is the author of The Trail of Martyrdom: Wounds, Flesh and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England (2009) and The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth-Century England (2003). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, Albion, Book History, Reformation, the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, History, and Mortality, in addition to numerous book collections.
Kathryn Reklis is Associate Professor of Modern Protestant Theology at Fordham University in New York City, USA. Her first monograph was Theology and the Kinesthetic Imagination: Jonathan Edwards and the Making of Modernity (2014) and she is currently at work on a history of the "Religion and Literature" movement in the mid-twentieth century. She is the On Media columnist for The Christian Century and holds affiliate positions in Comparative Literature and American Studies at Fordham.