The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity

This is the first book on the Renaissance Bible by an Anglo-American scholar in nearly fifty years. It is an immensely scholarly work, but at the same time immensely suggestive and wide-ranging. The Renaissance Bible does not confine itself to the history of exegesis; rather, a study of renaissance culture - a culture whose central text was the Bible. The book explores, among other topics, the links between late medieval Christology and early modern subjectivity; religious eroticism and the origins of the sexualized body; the interweavings of jurisprudence, colonial discourse, and the theology of the Atonement; the transformation of humanist philology into comparative religion; and the representation of daughter sacrifice and female erotic desire. If Norbert Elias's Civilizing Process has described the formation of the early modern body, then Shuger's Renaissance Bible describes the formation of its soul and mind. The book treats the Protestant cultures of northern Europe, particularly England, examining biblical commentaries, plays, poems, sermons, and treatises, as well as the often startling negotiations between these texts and other cultural discourses. In Shuger's hands, these biblical materials serve to illuminate, and often radically reinterpret, the dominant issues in contemporary Renaissance studies: gender, the body, colonialism, subjectivity, desire, law, and history. Her work forcefully demonstrates the cultural centrality of Renaissance religion.