A Lineal Temple

Abstract

The end of the twentieth century saw an emphasis on more spiritual or metaphorical interpretations of Mormon historic sites, yet that spiritual turn included an affective, experiential element as well. Thus, the late twentieth-century activities made of the Mormon Trail a museum, a playground, and a temple: a “lineal temple,” a sacred space, where members could come to experience their history and theology under the umbrella of authenticity.

Reading politics in 1562: Arthur Brooke’s Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet reconsidered

“…39 Given the turbulent political and socio-economic effects experienced during the initial decades after the Reformation, these reading practices are to be expectedand we should not be surprized to find the presses issuing texts through which England likely to be entry codes to precisely the kind of reading they protest against'. 45 So we should not accept the prefatory passage at its wordand, nevertheless, the longer prefatory passage (which no one ever quotes) is much less partisan. The anti-Catholic lines are actually framed within a longer passage which focuses upon the importance of diversity and toleration: the first line states that 'The God of all glory created universally all creatures, to set forth his prayers, both those which we esteem profitable in use and pleasure, and also those which we accompt noisome and loathsome'; it then attests that 'the good doings of the good, & the evil acts of the wicked, the happy success of the blessed, and the woeful proceedings of the 47 This emphasis on multiplicity of worship might be nothing more than moralising spin, but if we read it against the Brooke poem's wider resistance to anti-Catholicism, it may well have meant more to its Elizabethan readers (and appropriators) than recent critics have allowed.…”

“…Here we might also apply Patterson's sixth principle: that censorship 'encouraged the use of historical or other uninvented texts, such as translations' that 'provided an interpretive mechanism' to distance an author from sensitive content 52. Whilst scholars have not traced forms of confessional bias in Boaistuau's Romeo and Juliet adaptation, scholars have identified that the early editions of the Histoires Prodigieuses were marked by anti-Catholicism, and Boaistuau has himself been identified as a Huguenot by Alexandra Walsham.…”