Thomas Fulton | Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (original) (raw)

Publications by Thomas Fulton

Research paper thumbnail of “Introduction: Popular Hermeneutics in Shakespeare’s London.” Co-authored with Thomas Fulton. In The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England. Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 1-14.

Research paper thumbnail of Political Theology from the Pulpit and the Stage: Sir Thomas More, Richard II, and Henry V

This book chapter, “Political Theology from the Pulpit and the Stage: Sir Thomas More, Richard II... more This book chapter, “Political Theology from the Pulpit and the Stage: Sir Thomas More, Richard II, and Henry V,” comes from the volume of essays edited by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole, The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Research paper thumbnail of Bibles in the Hands of Readers: Dutch, English, French, and Italian Perspectives

Journal of Early Modern Christianity

Vernacular Bibles and biblical texts were among the most circulated and most read books in late m... more Vernacular Bibles and biblical texts were among the most circulated and most read books in late medieval and early modern Europe, both in manuscript and print. Vernacular scripture circulated throughout Europe in different ways and to different extents before and after the Reformation. In spite of the differences in language, centers of publication, and confessional orientation, there was nonetheless considerable collaboration and common ground. This collection of essays explores the readership of Dutch, English, French, and Italian biblical and devotional texts, focusing in particular on the relationships between the texts and paratexts of biblical texts, the records of ownership, and the marks and annotations of biblical readers. Evidence from early modern biblical texts and their users of all sorts – scholars, clerics, priests, laborers, artisans, and anonymous men and women, Protestant and Catholic – sheds light on how owners and readers used the biblical text.

Research paper thumbnail of The Elizabethan Catholic New Testament and Its Readers

Journal of Early Modern Christianity

Printed vernacular Bibles appeared in many European languages well before the Protestant Reformat... more Printed vernacular Bibles appeared in many European languages well before the Protestant Reformation, but in England the story is quite different. The first Catholic English New Testament was not printed until 1582, long after numerous Protestant editions had flooded the English Bible market. This article focuses on readers of this 1582 annotated Rheims New Testament, published by exiles in France and shipped surreptitiously northward for missionaries to convert, affirm, and educate British Catholics. Once in England this edition garnered an immense outpouring of printed confutations. Particularly significant was a 1589 dual printing of the Rheims text alongside the official version of the Church of England with extensive annotations by William Fulke. Reader markings in both the 1582 Rheims New Testament and its 1589 confutation, however, show early readers staking out confessional positions independent of the polemic of the printed texts, often putting these texts to purposes contr...

Research paper thumbnail of The Elizabethan Catholic New Testament and Its Readers

Journal of Early Modern Christianity, 2019

Printed vernacular Bibles appeared in many European languages well before the Protestant Reformat... more Printed vernacular Bibles appeared in many European languages well before the Protestant Reformation, but in England the story is quite different. The first Catholic English New Testament was not printed until 1582, long after numerous Protestant editions had flooded the English Bible market. This article focuses on readers of this 1582 annotated Rheims New Testament, published by exiles in France and shipped surreptitiously northward for missionaries to convert , affirm, and educate British Catholics. Once in England this edition garnered an immense outpouring of printed confutations. Particularly significant was a 1589 dual printing of the Rheims text alongside the official version of the Church of England with extensive annotations by William Fulke. Reader markings in both the 1582 Rheims New Testament and its 1589 confutation, however, show early readers staking out confessional positions independent of the polemic of the printed texts, often putting these texts to purposes contrary to those intended.

Research paper thumbnail of Intro English Bibles and Their Readers 1400 1700

The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2017

Bibles were among the most circulated books in medieval and early modern England, the most studie... more Bibles were among the most circulated books in medieval and early modern England, the most studied and most read, and as such they provide a profoundly valuable archive for the history of reading. Because the biblical text underwent intense and often contentious hermeneutic scrutiny during the period, a material history of reading intersects with a less material history of interpretation. Evidence from early bibles and their users of all sorts—known biblical scholars, literary figures, or anonymous readers—sheds light on how readers confronted the changing problems of interpretation, translation, and textual format, and how they reworked these in literary and cultural production. Working with Latin and vernacular translations, contributors to this volume rethink the cultural role of the Bible using a wide range of material evidence, including manuscript notes, defacement, graffiti, printed annotations and paratextual devices, forms of textual circulation, and the nature of literary allusion and cultural reuse.

Research paper thumbnail of Toward a New Cultural History of the Geneva Bible

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2017

The most widely circulated bible in the English Renaissance was produced by exiled English Protes... more The most widely circulated bible in the English Renaissance was produced by exiled English Protestants living in Geneva during the reign of Queen Mary I. With over 140 editions and half a million copies in circulation, the Geneva Bible and its complex marginal devices played a major role in shaping the English reader. Two of its innovative paratextual features are of particular importance: the breaking down of chapters into enumerated verses, facilitating the easy extraction of individual passages, and the expanded use of annotations, animating and enabling the application of biblical passages in contemporary social and political contexts. This essay rethinks the interpretive procedures and the cultural contexts of the notes, which, though influential in Elizabethan England, reflect the condition and polemical discourses of their exiled Marian community. Consequently, the Geneva Bible's notes construct a vision of the English “nation” as persecuted, captivated, and threatened by idolaters.

Research paper thumbnail of “Gilded Monuments: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Mediated Text”

Comparative Textual Media, 2013

This chapter considers the Donne’s “Letter to the Lady Carey” (or Carew), a unique autograph manu... more This chapter considers the Donne’s “Letter to the Lady Carey” (or Carew), a unique autograph manuscript among thousands of others that survive as copies. The surviving manuscript poem is particularly remarkable because it is on gilded paper. Donne employs in a complex intermedial pun in the original poem that would be obscured by the printed version and, indeed, by subsequent copies. The remarkable instance of this mediated text – a text that self-consciously represents the medium in which it is preserved – is one of many in the early modern period, and these commonly occur when the text paradoxically concerns the vulnerability of the medium. The paper explores other instances of mediated texts, and wonders whether the eternizing trope of the “guilded monument” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55 might also draw on the materiality of its medium.

Research paper thumbnail of "Combing the Annals of Barbarians: The Commonplace Book and Milton's Political Scholarship"

“Combing the Annals of Barbarians” is the central chapter in my book, Historical Milton: Manuscri... more “Combing the Annals of Barbarians” is the central chapter in my book, Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (2010). The phrase “Annals of Barbarians” is from Erasmus, who mentions it as one of the important categories of books that might be mined for vital information. The chapter is a close study of Milton’s commonplace Book, and particularly its “Index Politicus,” the largest of three sections of this manuscript. It places Milton’s commonplacing methods in the context of his contemporaries, and explores what these notes reveal about his rhetorical methods.

Research paper thumbnail of Milton in the Library

The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, 2012

Research paper thumbnail of Mankind in a Year without Kings

Research paper thumbnail of Areopagitica and the Roots of Liberal Epistemology

English Literary Renaissance, 2004

Areopagtica and the Roots of Liberal Epistemology riticism of Areopagitica has often sought eithe... more Areopagtica and the Roots of Liberal Epistemology riticism of Areopagitica has often sought either to extol the work as a cornerstone in the foundation of the liberal tradition or to diminish and even renounce such claims as misreading of Milton's more totalitarian intentions. Following the Whig and Romantic lionization of Milton during the nineteenth century, readers have traditionally seen the tract as "one of the founding and canonical texts of modern liberalism,"' and have even gone so far as to call it "unique in its period, and perhaps unequalled in the range of freedom it demands until the Liberty of John Stuart Mill."' This liberal humanist account of Areopagitica's position in intellectual history has been challenged from a postmodern perspective by readers who cast suspicion even on the discourse of philosophy itself as an unconscious instrument of power.' Such cynicism seems almost justified by the fact that five years after writing Areopagitica, with his party now in power, Milton took the very role as licenser that he had railed against. Some critics have accordingly suggested that "as Petrograd in 1919 and Havana in 1965, so was Milton's Protestant London in 1644,"~ while others see in Areopagitica a "complicity with the I have accrued many debts in writing this essay, particularly to

Research paper thumbnail of "The True and Naturall Constitution of That Mixed Government": Massinger's "The Bondman" and the Influence of Dutch Republicanism

Studies in Philology, 2002

Focuses on the text and context of 'The Bondman' by Philip Massinger in late Jacobean England. In... more Focuses on the text and context of 'The Bondman' by Philip Massinger in late Jacobean England. In particular, it looks at the relationship of Massinger's play to the polemics of Thomas Scott, who wrote about Dutch Republicanism. Features of the play; Description of the Stuart rule; Manifestation of anti-Spanish sentiment; Attitude of Massinger toward Timoleon's Republicanism.

Research paper thumbnail of Edward Phillips and the Manuscript of the Digression.pdf

Milton Studies, 2008

Milton's "Digression" to The History of Britain is a manuscript that has survived in only one cop... more Milton's "Digression" to The History of Britain is a manuscript that has survived in only one copy, and questions remain about its date of composition and about the nature of its circulation. As I argue here and in my book "Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England," Milton wrote the "Digression" during the political stalemate before the execution of Charles I. The manuscript criticizes the British for their political inaction. This article analyzes evidence of corrections to the manuscript, probably by Milton's nephew Edward Phillips, which sheds light on its function as an addition to Milton's History, and on its potential circulation. For the online digital copy of the manuscript, see John Milton’s “Digression” in The History of Britain: An Online Facsimile Edition of Harvard MS Eng 901 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010, https://scholarworks.umass.edu/umpress_hm/1/

Research paper thumbnail of SpeculativeShakespeares.pdf

Research paper thumbnail of Hamlet's Inky Cloak and Donne's Satires.pdf

This essay places Donne's Satire 3 and other Satires in the context of other Satirists, mainly Ev... more This essay places Donne's Satire 3 and other Satires in the context of other Satirists, mainly Everard Guilpin. It traces the satiric criticism of the doctrine of obedience -- particularly around religion -- as it moved after the Bishops' Ban of 1599 from formal verse satire to the Shakespearean stage, and particularly to Hamlet.

Books by Thomas Fulton

Research paper thumbnail of Historical Milton: manuscript, print, and political culture in revolutionary England

Research paper thumbnail of The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England. Co-edited with Thomas Fulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Reviews by Thomas Fulton

Research paper thumbnail of The Divorce Tracts of John Milton: Texts and Contexts by Sara J.van denBerg andW.Scott Howard, eds. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 2010

Milton Quarterly, 2012

Sara J. van den Berg and W. Scott Howard have produced an elegant and accessible edition of Milto... more Sara J. van den Berg and W. Scott Howard have produced an elegant and accessible edition of Milton's divorce tracts. Unlike previous editions of the tracts, this collection is both lightweight and thorough, making it useful for undergraduate and graduate courses. It includes complete texts of the five different publications on divorce that Milton produced in 18 months: the two versions of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (the 1643 edition and the much expanded 1644 edition), The Judgement of Martin Bucer (1644), and Tetrachordon and Colasterion, published on the same day in 1645. It also contains selections from three contemporary pamphlets that represent the first major assault on Milton's views-William Prynne's Twelve Considerable Serious Questions (1644), Herbert Palmer's Glasse of Gods Providence (1644), and Daniel Featley's Dippers Dipt (1645)-and a complete text of the anonymous Answer to a Book, Intituled,The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1644), reproduced here for the first time in a modern edition. In a lucid introduction, van den Berg and Howard position Milton's arguments for divorce in the context of its legal history in England and in relation to continental Protestantism.

Research paper thumbnail of Christophe Tournu, Milton, Rights and Liberties Milton, Rights and Liberties . Edited by Christophe Tournu and Neil Forsyth . Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Pp. viii+522

Research paper thumbnail of “Introduction: Popular Hermeneutics in Shakespeare’s London.” Co-authored with Thomas Fulton. In The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England. Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 1-14.

Research paper thumbnail of Political Theology from the Pulpit and the Stage: Sir Thomas More, Richard II, and Henry V

This book chapter, “Political Theology from the Pulpit and the Stage: Sir Thomas More, Richard II... more This book chapter, “Political Theology from the Pulpit and the Stage: Sir Thomas More, Richard II, and Henry V,” comes from the volume of essays edited by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole, The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Research paper thumbnail of Bibles in the Hands of Readers: Dutch, English, French, and Italian Perspectives

Journal of Early Modern Christianity

Vernacular Bibles and biblical texts were among the most circulated and most read books in late m... more Vernacular Bibles and biblical texts were among the most circulated and most read books in late medieval and early modern Europe, both in manuscript and print. Vernacular scripture circulated throughout Europe in different ways and to different extents before and after the Reformation. In spite of the differences in language, centers of publication, and confessional orientation, there was nonetheless considerable collaboration and common ground. This collection of essays explores the readership of Dutch, English, French, and Italian biblical and devotional texts, focusing in particular on the relationships between the texts and paratexts of biblical texts, the records of ownership, and the marks and annotations of biblical readers. Evidence from early modern biblical texts and their users of all sorts – scholars, clerics, priests, laborers, artisans, and anonymous men and women, Protestant and Catholic – sheds light on how owners and readers used the biblical text.

Research paper thumbnail of The Elizabethan Catholic New Testament and Its Readers

Journal of Early Modern Christianity

Printed vernacular Bibles appeared in many European languages well before the Protestant Reformat... more Printed vernacular Bibles appeared in many European languages well before the Protestant Reformation, but in England the story is quite different. The first Catholic English New Testament was not printed until 1582, long after numerous Protestant editions had flooded the English Bible market. This article focuses on readers of this 1582 annotated Rheims New Testament, published by exiles in France and shipped surreptitiously northward for missionaries to convert, affirm, and educate British Catholics. Once in England this edition garnered an immense outpouring of printed confutations. Particularly significant was a 1589 dual printing of the Rheims text alongside the official version of the Church of England with extensive annotations by William Fulke. Reader markings in both the 1582 Rheims New Testament and its 1589 confutation, however, show early readers staking out confessional positions independent of the polemic of the printed texts, often putting these texts to purposes contr...

Research paper thumbnail of The Elizabethan Catholic New Testament and Its Readers

Journal of Early Modern Christianity, 2019

Printed vernacular Bibles appeared in many European languages well before the Protestant Reformat... more Printed vernacular Bibles appeared in many European languages well before the Protestant Reformation, but in England the story is quite different. The first Catholic English New Testament was not printed until 1582, long after numerous Protestant editions had flooded the English Bible market. This article focuses on readers of this 1582 annotated Rheims New Testament, published by exiles in France and shipped surreptitiously northward for missionaries to convert , affirm, and educate British Catholics. Once in England this edition garnered an immense outpouring of printed confutations. Particularly significant was a 1589 dual printing of the Rheims text alongside the official version of the Church of England with extensive annotations by William Fulke. Reader markings in both the 1582 Rheims New Testament and its 1589 confutation, however, show early readers staking out confessional positions independent of the polemic of the printed texts, often putting these texts to purposes contrary to those intended.

Research paper thumbnail of Intro English Bibles and Their Readers 1400 1700

The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2017

Bibles were among the most circulated books in medieval and early modern England, the most studie... more Bibles were among the most circulated books in medieval and early modern England, the most studied and most read, and as such they provide a profoundly valuable archive for the history of reading. Because the biblical text underwent intense and often contentious hermeneutic scrutiny during the period, a material history of reading intersects with a less material history of interpretation. Evidence from early bibles and their users of all sorts—known biblical scholars, literary figures, or anonymous readers—sheds light on how readers confronted the changing problems of interpretation, translation, and textual format, and how they reworked these in literary and cultural production. Working with Latin and vernacular translations, contributors to this volume rethink the cultural role of the Bible using a wide range of material evidence, including manuscript notes, defacement, graffiti, printed annotations and paratextual devices, forms of textual circulation, and the nature of literary allusion and cultural reuse.

Research paper thumbnail of Toward a New Cultural History of the Geneva Bible

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2017

The most widely circulated bible in the English Renaissance was produced by exiled English Protes... more The most widely circulated bible in the English Renaissance was produced by exiled English Protestants living in Geneva during the reign of Queen Mary I. With over 140 editions and half a million copies in circulation, the Geneva Bible and its complex marginal devices played a major role in shaping the English reader. Two of its innovative paratextual features are of particular importance: the breaking down of chapters into enumerated verses, facilitating the easy extraction of individual passages, and the expanded use of annotations, animating and enabling the application of biblical passages in contemporary social and political contexts. This essay rethinks the interpretive procedures and the cultural contexts of the notes, which, though influential in Elizabethan England, reflect the condition and polemical discourses of their exiled Marian community. Consequently, the Geneva Bible's notes construct a vision of the English “nation” as persecuted, captivated, and threatened by idolaters.

Research paper thumbnail of “Gilded Monuments: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Mediated Text”

Comparative Textual Media, 2013

This chapter considers the Donne’s “Letter to the Lady Carey” (or Carew), a unique autograph manu... more This chapter considers the Donne’s “Letter to the Lady Carey” (or Carew), a unique autograph manuscript among thousands of others that survive as copies. The surviving manuscript poem is particularly remarkable because it is on gilded paper. Donne employs in a complex intermedial pun in the original poem that would be obscured by the printed version and, indeed, by subsequent copies. The remarkable instance of this mediated text – a text that self-consciously represents the medium in which it is preserved – is one of many in the early modern period, and these commonly occur when the text paradoxically concerns the vulnerability of the medium. The paper explores other instances of mediated texts, and wonders whether the eternizing trope of the “guilded monument” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55 might also draw on the materiality of its medium.

Research paper thumbnail of "Combing the Annals of Barbarians: The Commonplace Book and Milton's Political Scholarship"

“Combing the Annals of Barbarians” is the central chapter in my book, Historical Milton: Manuscri... more “Combing the Annals of Barbarians” is the central chapter in my book, Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (2010). The phrase “Annals of Barbarians” is from Erasmus, who mentions it as one of the important categories of books that might be mined for vital information. The chapter is a close study of Milton’s commonplace Book, and particularly its “Index Politicus,” the largest of three sections of this manuscript. It places Milton’s commonplacing methods in the context of his contemporaries, and explores what these notes reveal about his rhetorical methods.

Research paper thumbnail of Milton in the Library

The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, 2012

Research paper thumbnail of Mankind in a Year without Kings

Research paper thumbnail of Areopagitica and the Roots of Liberal Epistemology

English Literary Renaissance, 2004

Areopagtica and the Roots of Liberal Epistemology riticism of Areopagitica has often sought eithe... more Areopagtica and the Roots of Liberal Epistemology riticism of Areopagitica has often sought either to extol the work as a cornerstone in the foundation of the liberal tradition or to diminish and even renounce such claims as misreading of Milton's more totalitarian intentions. Following the Whig and Romantic lionization of Milton during the nineteenth century, readers have traditionally seen the tract as "one of the founding and canonical texts of modern liberalism,"' and have even gone so far as to call it "unique in its period, and perhaps unequalled in the range of freedom it demands until the Liberty of John Stuart Mill."' This liberal humanist account of Areopagitica's position in intellectual history has been challenged from a postmodern perspective by readers who cast suspicion even on the discourse of philosophy itself as an unconscious instrument of power.' Such cynicism seems almost justified by the fact that five years after writing Areopagitica, with his party now in power, Milton took the very role as licenser that he had railed against. Some critics have accordingly suggested that "as Petrograd in 1919 and Havana in 1965, so was Milton's Protestant London in 1644,"~ while others see in Areopagitica a "complicity with the I have accrued many debts in writing this essay, particularly to

Research paper thumbnail of "The True and Naturall Constitution of That Mixed Government": Massinger's "The Bondman" and the Influence of Dutch Republicanism

Studies in Philology, 2002

Focuses on the text and context of 'The Bondman' by Philip Massinger in late Jacobean England. In... more Focuses on the text and context of 'The Bondman' by Philip Massinger in late Jacobean England. In particular, it looks at the relationship of Massinger's play to the polemics of Thomas Scott, who wrote about Dutch Republicanism. Features of the play; Description of the Stuart rule; Manifestation of anti-Spanish sentiment; Attitude of Massinger toward Timoleon's Republicanism.

Research paper thumbnail of Edward Phillips and the Manuscript of the Digression.pdf

Milton Studies, 2008

Milton's "Digression" to The History of Britain is a manuscript that has survived in only one cop... more Milton's "Digression" to The History of Britain is a manuscript that has survived in only one copy, and questions remain about its date of composition and about the nature of its circulation. As I argue here and in my book "Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England," Milton wrote the "Digression" during the political stalemate before the execution of Charles I. The manuscript criticizes the British for their political inaction. This article analyzes evidence of corrections to the manuscript, probably by Milton's nephew Edward Phillips, which sheds light on its function as an addition to Milton's History, and on its potential circulation. For the online digital copy of the manuscript, see John Milton’s “Digression” in The History of Britain: An Online Facsimile Edition of Harvard MS Eng 901 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010, https://scholarworks.umass.edu/umpress_hm/1/

Research paper thumbnail of SpeculativeShakespeares.pdf

Research paper thumbnail of Hamlet's Inky Cloak and Donne's Satires.pdf

This essay places Donne's Satire 3 and other Satires in the context of other Satirists, mainly Ev... more This essay places Donne's Satire 3 and other Satires in the context of other Satirists, mainly Everard Guilpin. It traces the satiric criticism of the doctrine of obedience -- particularly around religion -- as it moved after the Bishops' Ban of 1599 from formal verse satire to the Shakespearean stage, and particularly to Hamlet.

Research paper thumbnail of Historical Milton: manuscript, print, and political culture in revolutionary England

Research paper thumbnail of The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England. Co-edited with Thomas Fulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Research paper thumbnail of The Divorce Tracts of John Milton: Texts and Contexts by Sara J.van denBerg andW.Scott Howard, eds. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 2010

Milton Quarterly, 2012

Sara J. van den Berg and W. Scott Howard have produced an elegant and accessible edition of Milto... more Sara J. van den Berg and W. Scott Howard have produced an elegant and accessible edition of Milton's divorce tracts. Unlike previous editions of the tracts, this collection is both lightweight and thorough, making it useful for undergraduate and graduate courses. It includes complete texts of the five different publications on divorce that Milton produced in 18 months: the two versions of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (the 1643 edition and the much expanded 1644 edition), The Judgement of Martin Bucer (1644), and Tetrachordon and Colasterion, published on the same day in 1645. It also contains selections from three contemporary pamphlets that represent the first major assault on Milton's views-William Prynne's Twelve Considerable Serious Questions (1644), Herbert Palmer's Glasse of Gods Providence (1644), and Daniel Featley's Dippers Dipt (1645)-and a complete text of the anonymous Answer to a Book, Intituled,The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1644), reproduced here for the first time in a modern edition. In a lucid introduction, van den Berg and Howard position Milton's arguments for divorce in the context of its legal history in England and in relation to continental Protestantism.

Research paper thumbnail of Christophe Tournu, Milton, Rights and Liberties Milton, Rights and Liberties . Edited by Christophe Tournu and Neil Forsyth . Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Pp. viii+522

Research paper thumbnail of Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns . John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2008 . xiii + 488 pp. index. illus. map. bibl. $39.95. ISBN: 978–0–19–928984–4

Renaissance Quarterly, 2009

Research paper thumbnail of Shakespeare and Republicanism (review)

Shakespeare Quarterly, 2007

Research paper thumbnail of Thomas Fulton - Pursuing Shakespeare's Dramaturgy: Some Contexts, Resources, and Strategies in His Playmaking (review) - Renaissance Quarterly 58:1

Research paper thumbnail of Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama, 1350–1600. Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken, eds. Ludus: Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama 14. Leiden: Brill, 2016. viii + 414 pp. $193

Research paper thumbnail of Late Medieval and Early Modern Bibles and their Readers

Research paper thumbnail of Late Medieval and Early Modern Bibles and their Readers

Research paper thumbnail of The Politics of Renaissance Historicism

Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton

Research paper thumbnail of Old, New, Now

Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton

Research paper thumbnail of Milton and Toleration (review)

Renaissance Quarterly, 2008

Research paper thumbnail of Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Milton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. xi + 715 pp. index. illus. chron. $150. ISBN: 978–0–19–021088–6

Renaissance Quarterly, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558–1625. Victoria Brownlee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiii + 256 pp. $70

Renaissance Quarterly, 2020

flesh. Neelakanta's treatment of Morwen and Nashe exemplifies the sophistication and unexpectedne... more flesh. Neelakanta's treatment of Morwen and Nashe exemplifies the sophistication and unexpectedness of post-Reformation England's use of Jewishness and the Siege of Jerusalem to define its own identity. The success of this book derives from its openness to the different and overlapping interests held by various groups throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She creates a cultural imaginary around the siege, and the texts she examines are not only translations of Josephus but also appropriations deployed to address such contexts as the Stuart court, the plague, the Civil War, the Restoration, and England's imperial ventures. As demonstrated in Neelakanta's wonderful treatment of Mary of Bethezuba, her research into print culture, translation, politics, and religion is expansive, but these dense networks of influence are delivered in an accessible style, carefully tracing the steps of a given document's antecedents and critical histories. Many readers will not previously be aware of the cultural prominence of the Siege of Jerusalem, except perhaps through theological discourses such as early modern speculations about eschatology and anti-Catholic polemics. The author goes beyond these discourses by creating a narrative out of the many early modern works that address the siege, including books by Thomas Lodge, George Percy, William Heminge, Thomas Dekker, and John Crowne. The last chapter, on Crowne's The Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian (published in 1677), completes the thesis toward which her cultural biography builds. As Neelakanta follows the siege from providentialist renderings into somewhat more secular topics such as barbarism, politics, and the cultural capital of historical knowledge, she demonstrates how Jerusalem became a malleable and essential bearing point for early modern England's self-consciousness as a Christian nation. What may seem to be an eclectic topic of study will prove to be of clear relevance to scholars of early modern religion, drama, fashion, politics, and empire.

Research paper thumbnail of The Book of Books: Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton

Research paper thumbnail of Political Theology from the Pulpit and the Stage: Sir Thomas More, Richard II, and Henry V

The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage

This book chapter, “Political Theology from the Pulpit and the Stage: Sir Thomas More, Richard II... more This book chapter, “Political Theology from the Pulpit and the Stage: Sir Thomas More, Richard II, and Henry V,” comes from the volume of essays edited by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole, The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Research paper thumbnail of The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England. Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xvi + 304 pp. $99.99

Renaissance Quarterly, 2019

Beginning with the universally acknowledged truth that the Bible turns up everywhere in Renaissan... more Beginning with the universally acknowledged truth that the Bible turns up everywhere in Renaissance culture, and that Shakespeare's allusions to biblical stories have been abundantly cataloged by scholars, this superbly lively collection of essays adds to that list of allusions and goes further to show the ways in which Shakespeare could count on his audiences to have been well acquainted with the practices and methods of biblical interpretation. Reformation readers and audiences alike made it their business not simply to read the biblical text but to ponder carefully how the text offered itself to be read. This habit of mind is what the editors of this collection call "popular hermeneutics" (1-2)-that is to say, a method that had long been the purview of an intellectual elite that was now rapidly becoming a set of skills available to London's general populace. Fascination with biblical hermeneutics grew rapidly, especially among the Protestants who learned to read the Bible in new printed editions, in Reformation sermons, in scenic representations, and in plays. Literacy rates markedly increased. "The Protestant Reformation was, at its heart, a debate over the nature of language and the nature of reading," the editors tell us (2). Interpreting the Bible in this culturally expansive context necessarily and intentionally touched on social, political, and religious issues. For example, as Bruce Gordon shows, the Geneva Bible of 1560 and others that followed offered to Elizabethan Protestants a series of heavily glossed texts with learned insights from Continental scholars like Theodore Beza, Francis Junius, and Immanuel Tremellius. Behind them, in turn, was the scholarship of Erasmus, Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, William Tyndale, Philip Melanchthon, and John Calvin, among others. Adrian Streete argues that the author or authors of Titus Andronicus were attuned to "the biblical rhetoric of lament," especially in the book of Lamentations, as a way of studying how the extreme emotions of utter loss could be conveyed to those who are still living. Especially in the opening of act 3, how could playwrights convey a scene of almost unbearable pain that could somehow be seen, spoken, and endured? In both the play and its biblical precursors, the audience or the reader is asked to consider a bottomless sorrow that "cannot attain, or else does not elicit, a response" (122). Hannibal Hamlin interprets the acts of Pericles as "Shakespeare's Biblical Romance" (140), in which voyaging by sea is perceived to be a test of providence. Is human life guided by fortune, dumb luck, or divine purpose? The playwright REVIEWS 1173

Research paper thumbnail of Book Review: Milton's Scriptural Reasoning: Narrative and Protestant Toleration

Christianity & Literature, 2011

Research paper thumbnail of Thomas Fulton - Shakespeare and Republicanism (review) - Renaissance Quarterly 59:4

Research paper thumbnail of Gilded Monuments: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Donne’s Letters, and the Mediated Text

Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of John Milton’s “Digression” in The History of Britain

Research paper thumbnail of John Milton and the cultures of print : an exhibition of books, manuscripts, and other artifacts

at the age of 62, in The hisTory of BriTain (1670), by the english engraver WilliaM faithorne, ta... more at the age of 62, in The hisTory of BriTain (1670), by the english engraver WilliaM faithorne, taken froM life. Cover illustration: illustration by WilliaM blake froM Blake, MilTon a poeM (1804)