Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, theologians, and humanist critics turned to tragedy to understand providence and agencies human and divine in the crucible of the Reformation. Rejecting familiar assumptions about tragedy, vital figures like Philipp Melanchthon, David Pareus, Lodovico Castelvetro, John Rainolds, and Daniel Heinsius developed distinctly philosophical ideas of tragedy, irreducible to drama or performance, inextricable from rhetoric, dialectic, and metaphysics. In its proximity to philosophy, tragedy afforded careful readers crucial insight into causality, probability, necessity, and the terms of human affect and action. With these resources at hand, poets and critics produced a series of daring and influential theses on tragedy between the 1550s and the 1630s, all directly related to pressing Reformation debates concerning providence, predestination, faith, and devotional practice. Under the influence of Aristotle's Poetics, they presented tragedy as an exacting forensic tool, enabling attentive readers to apprehend totality. And while some poets employed tragedy to render sacred history palpable with new energy and urgency, others marshalled a precise philosophical notion of tragedy directly against spectacle and stage-playing, endorsing anti-theatrical theses on tragedy inflected by the antique Poetics. In other words, this work illustrates the degree to which some of the influential poets and critics in the period, emphasized philosophical precision at the expense of-even to the exclusion of-dramatic presentation. In turn, the work also explores the impact of scholarly debates on more familiar works of vernacular tragedy, illustrating how William Shakespeare's Hamlet and John Milton's 1671 poems take shape in conversation with philosophical and philological investigations of tragedy. Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World demonstrates how Reformation took shape in poetic as well as theological and political terms while simultaneously exposing the importance of tragedy to the history of philosophy.

In 1994, Debora K. Shuger published her field-changing study, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity. Shuger’s book offers a wide-reaching and intellectually ambitious exploration of the centrality of the inter-connected discourses of literature and theology in the period. Throughout, Shuger troubles prevailing assumptions about religion and its purview by expanding the archive of "religious writing" far beyond the devotional poetry and prose that had so long been the province of literary history. Shuger deftly traces the connections between biblical scholarship and the histories of politics, nations and peoples, languages, and law, as well as to the most important literary forms of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance: tragedy (ancient and modern), "mythology," and the genres of affective devotion that depict Christ’s inestimable suffering. The Renaissance Bible discovers how early modern readers rendered the worlds of Scripture intelligible, even palpable, and how they located themselves and their endeavors in a history they shared with classical and biblical antecedents alike. The essays collected here lay bare the extraordinary powers and resources of The Renaissance Bible, with contributions by leading scholars of early modernity: Anthony Grafton, Brian Cummings, Russ Leo, Beth Quitslund, and Achsah Guibbory. The chapters in this book were originally published in Reformation.

In 1994, Debora K. Shuger published her field-changing study, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity. Shuger's book offers a wide-reaching and intellectually ambitious exploration of the centrality of the inter-connected discourses of literature and theology in the period. Throughout, Shuger troubles prevailing assumptions about religion and its purview by expanding the archive of "religious writing" far beyond the devotional poetry and prose that had so long been the province of literary history. Shuger deftly traces the connections between biblical scholarship and the histories of politics, nations and peoples, languages, and law, as well as to the most important literary forms of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance: tragedy (ancient and modern), "mythology," and the genres of affective devotion that depict Christ's inestimable suffering. The Renaissance Bible discovers how early modern readers rendered the worlds of Scripture intelligible, even palpable, and how they located themselves and their endeavors in a history they shared with classical and biblical antecedents alike. The essays collected here lay bare the extraordinary powers and resources of The Renaissance Bible, with contributions by leading scholars of early modernity: Anthony Grafton, Brian Cummings, Russ Leo, Beth Quitslund, and Achsah Guibbory. The chapters in this book were originally published in Reformation.

Fulke Greville's reputation has always been overshadowed by that of his more famous friend, Philip Sidney, a legacy due in part to Greville's complex moulding of his authorial persona as Achates to Sidney's Aeneas, and in part to the formidable complexity of his poetry and prose. This volume seeks to vindicate Greville's 'obscurity' as an intrinsic feature of his poetic thinking, and as a privileged site of interpretation. The seventeen essays shed new light on Greville's poetry, philosophy, and dramatic work. They investigate his examination of monarchy and sovereignty; grace, salvation, and the nature of evil; the power of poetry and the vagaries of desire, and they offer a reconsideration of his reputation and afterlife in his own century, and beyond. The volume explores the connections between poetic form and philosophy, and argues that Greville's poetic experiments and meditations on form convey penetrating, and strikingly original contributions to poetics, political thought, and philosophy. Highlighting stylistic features of his poetic style, such as his mastery of the caesura and of the feminine ending; his love of paradox, ambiguity, and double meanings; his complex metaphoricity and dense, challenging syntax, these essays reveal how Greville's work invites us to revisit and rethink many of the orthodoxies about the culture of post-Reformation England, including the shape of political argument, and the forms and boundaries of religious belief and identity.