During his imprisonment for the murder of Gabriel Spencer in 1598, Ben Jonson converted to the outlawed Roman Catholic Church, and for the next 12 years made no attempt to conceal his recusant status. Jonson’s biography and the historical documents treating conversion and recusancy offer evidence of the importance Jonson placed on codified religion, and provide a distinctly religious context for much of what has been long assumed to be an exclusively classically-based secular ethics operating in his writing.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Crowley, J. P., (2025), "The "Honest Style" of Ben Jonson's Epigrams and The Forest", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Crowley, James P. "The "Honest Style" of Ben Jonson's Epigrams and The Forest." Renaissance and Reformation 32 (2): 2010. 33-56. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v32i2.11548. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.