Dr Beatrice Groves: List of publications

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.