In his "Challenge Sermon" delivered at St. Pauls Cross on November 26, 1559, Bishop John Jewel argued that the Church Fathers were the true architects of the Christian religion and that the English people would no longer be subjected to the sort of medieval tampering that had led the one true Church astray. "The first five hundred years of the church," he would argue, "are worth more than the whole thousand that followed afterward." For this collection, we are seeking essays that address the topic of the Church Fathers in early modern English culture. Topics addressed may include (but will not be limited to) the rhetorical, political, ethical, and material uses of the Church Fathers and the influence of the Fathers on education, rhetoric, science, philosophy, philology, the stage, book production, devotional and polemical writing, women and writing, the body, colonialist discourse, and the rise of capitalism.

Please address queries to the collections editors, Mitchell Harris (mharris@gustavus.edu) and Steven Matthews (smatthew@d.umn.edu). Essay proposals should be between 500 and 800 words. Completed essays should be between 4,000 and 9,000 words in text, approximately 16-36 double-spaced pages, and should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). Please use endnotes. Proposals and completed essays should be sent electronically as a Microsoft Word document or PDF file.