Edified by the Margent: early modern readings of biblical marginalia
November 2023
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Journal article
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Renaissance Quarterly
This article traces the evidence left by early modern readers who marked their Bibles’ annotations—both by taking attentive notice of them and by leaving their own inky traces on them. Among the burgeoning critical interest in both printed and manuscript marginalia there has been little interrogation of the intersection between the two. This article traces the evidence of what the readerly marginalia of biblical annotations can tell us about their readers. It argues that literacy formed and fostered by reading annotated Bibles was likely to be skillful and attuned to issues of interpretation and meaning-making.
Transposed appetites: Mary of Jerusalem’s cannibalism in post-Reformation narratives
October 2021
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Journal article
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Modern Philology
This essay examines the intersection of ritual sacrifice, blood libel, and child murder in the story of Mary of Jerusalem, whom Josephus describes as having killed and eaten her own son during the 70 CE destruction of Jerusalem. While Reformation accounts of Mary’s cannibalism served, unsurprisingly, as an opportunity for satirical attack on the host, it is striking that pre-Reformation writers also relied on the same Eucharistic association. Juxtaposing medieval and early modern Protestant accounts of Mary’s cannibalism reveals a shared value system that elevates the symbolic or sacramental over the literal or corporeal. Notably, these stories overlap when they commend the religious praxis of the writers by disparaging that of their predecessors as stubbornly carnal: the Jews in the case of the medieval writers, and the Catholics for those interpreting the story after the Reformation. Although there are some key differences—Protestant texts are less implicated in the blood libel literature that dominated medieval Europe—both pre-and post-Reformation narratives confirm the overwhelming appeal of healing flesh, particularly as it pertains to the powerful mediation of Mary’s holy namesake, the Virgin. Linking pre-Reformation accounts of Mary’s cannibalism to their post-Reformation counterparts, this essay illuminates an important aspect of the Protestant reception of medieval theology: specifically, the degree to which both parties were preoccupied with the power of the Eucharist and the Virgin Mary’s part in it, how similarly they sought to expel its resultant anxieties about anthropophagy, and further, how the practical theology of the Eucharist changed in the Protestant world.
FFR
Early modern tragedy and the Mystery plays: New material evidence
November 2019
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Chapter
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Transformations of Tragedy
"The ears of profiting:” Listening to Falstaff’s Biblical Quotations
June 2018
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Chapter
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Shakespeare and Quotation
England’s Jerusalem in Shakespeare’s Henriad
April 2018
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Chapter
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The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England
Bringing together the foremost international scholars in the field of Shakespeare and the Bible, these essays explore Shakespeare's engagement with scriptural interpretation in the tragedies, histories, comedies, and romances.
Literary Criticism
Literary Allusion in Harry Potter
June 2017
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Book
Literary Allusion in Harry Potter builds on the world-wide enthusiasm for J. K. Rowling’s series in order to introduce its readers to some of the great works of literature on which Rowling draws. Harry Potter’s narrative techniques are rooted in the western literary tradition and its allusiveness provides insight into Rowling’s fictional world. Each chapter of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter consists of an in-depth discussion of the intersection between Harry Potter and a canonical literary work, such as the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Homer, Ovid, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Milton and Tennyson, and the novels of Austen, Hardy and Dickens. This approach aims to transform the reader’s understanding of Rowling’s literary achievement as well as to encourage the discovery of works with which they may be less familiar. The aim of this book is to delight Potter fans with a new perspective on their favourite books while harnessing that enthusiasm to increase their wider appreciation of literature.
The salvation of my oath': Contractual Relationships and the Operation of Grace in Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy
October 2016
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Chapter
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The Revenger's Tragedy: A Critical Reader
The Revengers Tragedy is one of the most vital, important, and enduring tragedies of the Jacobean era, one of the few non-Shakespearean plays of that period that is still regularly revived on stage and taught in classrooms. The play is notable for its piercing insight into human depravity, its savage humour, and its florid theatricality. This collection of new essays offers students an invaluable overview of the play's critical and performance history as well as four critical essays offering a range of new perspectives.
Literary Criticism
Christ’s tears over Jerusalem and maternal cannibalism in early modern London
May 2016
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Chapter
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Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550-1700 1550-1700
What this book makes clear is that the names, images and narratives of the Bible's women are persistently difficult to evade.
Literary Criticism
September 2015
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Book
The Siege of Jerusalem and subversive rhetoric in King John
January 2015
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Chapter
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Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion
This volume freshly illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs, practices and issues, and their representation in Shakespeare's plays.
Drama
The Morality of Milk: Shakespeare and the Ethics of Nursing
July 2014
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Chapter
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Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics
Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics examines representations of moral choice in Shakespeare's plays, focusing on intellectual history, Montaigne, and Christian ethics.
Drama
Heraldic Language and Identity in Shakespeare’s Plays
January 2014
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Chapter
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Heralds and Heraldry in Shakespeare’s England
‘One man at one time may be in two placys?’: Jack Juggler, proverbial wisdom and eucharistic satire
January 2014
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Journal article
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Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: an annual gathering of research, criticism, and reviews
Pilgrimage in Paradise Lost
January 2012
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Chapter
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Milton Studies
Urban Identity and the Old Jewry in Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour
January 2012
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Journal article
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The Ben Jonson Journal
”Those sanctified places where our Sauiours feete had trode”: Jerusalem in Early Modern English Travel Narratives
January 2012
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Journal article
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The Sixteenth-Century Journal
”They repented at the preaching of Ionas: and beholde, a greater than Ionas is here”: A Looking Glass for London and England, Hosea and the Destruction of Jerusalem
November 2011
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Chapter
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Early Modern Drama and the Bible
These essays offer fresh and exciting readings of early modern drama by resituating the theatre as a site of public and communal engagement with, and interrogation of, scripture.
Laughter in the Time of Plague: A Context for the Unstable Style of Nashe's 'Christ's Tears over Jerusalem'
January 2011
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Journal article
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Studies in Philology
The Redcrosse Knight and the George
January 2010
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Journal article
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Spenser Studies: a Renaissance poetry annual
’The Complaynt of the Lover of Cryst’ 1520
January 2008
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Chapter
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Early English Books Online Introduction Series
Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Genevan marginalia
May 2007
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Journal article
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Essays in Criticism: a quarterly journal of literary criticism
Now wole I a newe game begynne”: Staging suffering in King Lear, the mystery plays and Hugo Grotius’s Christus Patiens
April 2007
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Journal article
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Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: an annual gathering of research, criticism, and reviews
Texts and Traditions Religion in Shakespeare 1592 - 1604
January 2007
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Book
Texts and Traditions explores Shakespeare's thoroughgoing engagement with the religious culture of his time.