Description:
Traces how conscience--inner moral conviction--came to shape public life, fueling martyrdom, free speech, and political revolts
Review Quotes:
"This learned, agile book tracks pivotal changes in views of conscience from Luther through Locke. Offering nuanced readings of works by Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, Held demonstrates the emergence of the idea of the bold conscience as a site of political resistance and as the locus of a dawning toleration."--Michael Schoenfeldt, editor of John Donne in Context
"[Held's] ambitions are grand, and call for facility in a wide range of contexts, literary and historical alike. To his great credit, Held shows that he is more than equal to the task. Bold Conscience is the work of a very capable, confident scholar with a particular talent for bringing divergent authors into conversation with each other. It will surely earn a place of prestige amongst the growing body of work on conscience in the period." --Reformation "Bold Conscience is distinguished not only by its learning, desire for rigour, and clarity of exposition but also by the imaginative way it establishes a series of surprisingly effective intertextual, print-enabled patterns. . . It is consistently intelligent and, most importantly, it brings the problem of conscience back to the centre of our attempts to understand the invention of modern individualism."--Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme