Inventing the Secular: Literature and Religion from Medieval to Modern

Inventing the Secular: Literature and Religion from Medieval to Modern explores how literature has actively shaped, rather than merely reflected, ideas of ‘the secular’. Bringing together leading scholars from medieval to modern studies, it traces the imaginative, moral, and political inventions through which Western secularity emerged from within religious cultures. The volume offers new genealogies of belief, power, and aesthetics, showing how literary forms—from Chaucer’s tales to modernist cityscapes—test and transform inherited theologies. By revealing the secular as a creative, contested, and emotionally charged construction, the book reframes long-standing debates about modernity, faith, and the literary imagination.