Inaugural Lecture, Professor Adrian Streete - Do Puritans Know How To Laugh? Radical Religion and Satire in Early Modern Literary Culture.
Inaugural Lecture, Professor Adrian Streete - Do Puritans Know How To Laugh? Radical Religion and Satire in Early Modern Literary Culture.
English Literature, School of Critical Studies
Date: Wednesday 31 May 2023
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Venue: Senate Room, Main Building
Category: Public lectures, Academic events
Speaker: Professor Adrian Streete, English Literature, School of Critical Studies
Website: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/inaugural-lecture-professor-adrian-streete-university-of-glasgow-tickets-609514342807?aff=ebdshpsearchautocomplete and www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/newsandevents/forthcomingevents/headline_936681_en.html
Puritan laughter is not a contradiction in terms. This lecture counters a still-popular narrative found even in those sympathetic to the godly: E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class speaks of a ‘forbidding Puritan joylessness’. They are anti-art, reformers of others’ manners, serious. We laugh at the Puritans, not with them. Yet throughout the early modern period, radical writers used satire and laughter to argue that the work of reformation was not done. This is laughter where wit serves admonition, laughter used for a serious religious purpose: a godly mirth which foreshadows spiritual joy. Anti-Puritan satire teaches us to look for the self-righteous sneer: this talk recovers the godly half-smile and literature of those religious radicals whose laughter admonishes in anticipation of temporal and spiritual reformation.