debora shuger | University of California, Los Angeles (original) (raw)
Papers by debora shuger
This is a reading of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens in relation both to other versions of the Timo... more This is a reading of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens in relation both to other versions of the Timon story and to cultural contexts almost certainly shared by playwright and audience. . . . It has not been submitted for publication.
The paper traces Melanchthon's highly original formulation of something close to the Romantic not... more The paper traces Melanchthon's highly original formulation of something close to the Romantic notions of artistic genius and the culture-hero, but within the overarching framework of Reformation theology. It is currently unpublished, although destined (one hopes) to becomes the afterward of a volume of essays on Reformation Classicism currently under consideration.
Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England, 2018
In Western culture up to the sixteenth century, asceticism and access to truth are always more or... more In Western culture up to the sixteenth century, asceticism and access to truth are always more or less obscurely linked. Descartes, I think, broke with this when he said, 'To accede to truth, it suffices that I be any subject which can see what is evident.' […] Thus I can be immoral and know the truth. I believe that this is an idea which, more or less explicitly, was rejected by all previous culture. Before Descartes, one could not be impure, immoral, and know the truth. 1 The Reformation would seem, almost inevitably, to have led to the epistemological turn: the re-focusing of Western thought on the question of how the mind comes to know reality. This question presupposes a basic dyadic structure where the mind, understood as a cognitive faculty, stands over and against the world external to it. It further presupposes the related awareness of what Bacon famously termed the mind's idols: the distortions produced by tradition, education, language and temperament that
Oxford University Press eBooks, Apr 21, 2022
Chapter 2 concerns the same Henrician and Edwardian bibles, but focusing now on the humanist scho... more Chapter 2 concerns the same Henrician and Edwardian bibles, but focusing now on the humanist scholarship that infiltrates their paratexts and the related debates over whether the Reformation’s philological–historical turn should be read as a harbinger of Enlightenment demystification, whether its attention to the literal sense rendered the Old Testament largely irrelevant, or whether, at bottom, Reformation-era exegesis differs only superficially from medieval and patristic. The paratexts under consideration, whose humanism does owe much to St. Jerome and Nicholas of Lyra, address translation protocols, biblical authorship, canon formation, exegetic ground rules, the appeal to extra-biblical testimony, and the spiritual relevance of the Old Testament’s literal sense. A fair number remark the underlying Greek or Hebrew, cite Classical sources to elucidate the scriptural text, invoke exegetic principles generally credited to nineteenth-century biblical scholars, or attempt to reconstruct unfamiliar cultural practices implicit in an odd locution or narrative detail. Yet these paratexts appear in the most overtly doctrinal Tudor bibles, their historicist commitments inseparable from their confessional ones.
Religion and the Arts, 2010
The Journal of Theological Studies, 2014
Religion, 2018
Haskell, Ellen D. 2012a. “The Death of Rachel and the Kingdom of Heaven: Jewish Engagement with C... more Haskell, Ellen D. 2012a. “The Death of Rachel and the Kingdom of Heaven: Jewish Engagement with Christian Themes in Sefer ha-Zohar.” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 38 (1): 1–31. Haskell, Ellen D. 2012b. Suckling at My Mother’s Breasts: The Image of a Nursing God in Jewish Mysticism. Albany: SUNY Press. Lachter, Hartley 2014. Kabbalistic Revolution: Reimagining Judaism in Medieval Spain. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Paratexts of the English Bible, 1525-1611
Chapter 3 treats the first editions of the major Elizabethan bibles. These are “official” bibles,... more Chapter 3 treats the first editions of the major Elizabethan bibles. These are “official” bibles, their translation and paratexts, but also their printing, curated by the period’s competing magisteria: Archbishop Parker, the Marian exiles at Geneva, the leadership of the English College at Rheims and Douai; Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor at Geneva; Pierre L’Oiseleur de Villiers, minister to London’s Huguenot congregation. As their provenance implies, these bibles were intended to set forth the distinctive theological visions of their respective faith communities; indeed the early Elizabethan ones—the Geneva and Bishops’ in particular—provide the earliest articulation of what in retrospect one instantly recognizes as hardline Calvinism and Hooker-style Anglicanism. The Rheims preface opens with an equally recognizable defense of Catholic traditionalism against the bible-spouting impudence of English heretics, but what follows is a quite sophisticated discussion, one without Protes...
English bibles over the decades between the Tyndale’s New Testament of 1525 and the 1611 King Jam... more English bibles over the decades between the Tyndale’s New Testament of 1525 and the 1611 King James include indices, calendars, woodcuts, maps, chronologies, prefaces, prologues, prayers, epistles, philological glosses, doctrinal notes, inset historical essays, single-leaf summaries of scripture, a dialogue on predestination, a twelfth-century genealogy of Christ, a ninth-century Jewish chronicle. Their first editions, often magnificent folios, were curated by leading churchmen, who used these paratexts to speak into existence the dominant forms of post-Reformation English Christianity. Subsequent editions—smaller, more affordable, and far more numerous—were left in the hands of printers, who decided which versions to print, which paratexts to drop, add, move, or modify. The most lavish of Elizabethan bibles gets stripped almost to the bare translation; a fiercely Calvinist bible switches doctrinal sides; and a peculiar little New Testament from 1552 remains in print, with its origi...
Censorship and Cultural Sensibility, 2006
Censorship and Cultural Sensibility, 2006
Censorship and Cultural Sensibility, 2006
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2018
coal-face research by other scholars, and he seems to have read everything: aficionados of a well... more coal-face research by other scholars, and he seems to have read everything: aficionados of a well-crafted citation will explore the endnotes with admiration and profit. He has an eye for arresting possibilities, such as the report by the veteran courtier and Catholic recusant Sir Francis Englefield that he had been employed by Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole to exhume and cremate the corpse of King Henry VIII (p. ). He enjoys the observation which in its incongruity invites reflection: as in the fact that the Dutch Sea Beggars-Protestant pirates in the North Sea who might be labelled terrorists todaygloried in an Islamic crescent badge and the motto 'Rather Turkish than popish' (p. ). He also displays a proper historical agnosticism. Having described at p. the typical profile of a convert to evangelical religion in the early Reformationwell-educated, Erasmian humanist, critical of Church abuses, advocate of a vernacular Biblehe points out that this is the profile of Sir Thomas More. This is an utterly reliable history of the English Reformation, but it is also its imaginative biography, treating the story as a single narrative, watching its birth, its growth, its growing complexity, ending with the prospect that finally, as one hopes in a human life, a rueful wisdom may follow. Marshall is an historian's historian, probing the close-up warp and weft of the period with admirable curiosity and archival expertise, but he also enjoys an enviably light touch for the general reader. DIARMAID MACCULLOCH ST CROSS COLLEGE, OXFORD The Oxford history of Anglicanism, I: Reformation and identity, c. -. By Anthony Milton. Pp. xxvi + incl. ills. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, . £. JEH () ; doi:./S As the first volume of the Oxford History of Anglicanism, this collection of twenty-five essays by leading scholars takes the brave, if awkward, decision to renounce the label 'Anglican' on the grounds that, prior to , the Church of England lacked a stable theological identity; it was an institution, not an 'ism'. As one essay wittily notes, whereas on the Continent the different Churches, each with a distinctive theological platform, competed for Christian souls, in England, Christians espousing very different theological platforms, competed for the soul of the English Church (p. ). Hence, whereas prior studies of the fledgling Church of England championed one or another churchmanship as the true 'spirit of Anglicanism'whether Hooker's ceremonious and rationalist traditionalism favoured by Tractarians, the post- Calvinist consensus model, or the mid twentieth-century big-tent non-confessional via mediathe current volume portrays the period between about and as a 'struggle between competing claims' to be 'the authentic and representative voice of the Church of England' (p. ). Yet, although the essays do on the whole avoid privileging any one churchmanship as the orthodox mainstream, most do betray the shaping hand of the past four decades of front-line scholarship, and if they do not fully embrace the Calvinist consensus model, see the Tudor-Stuart Church as unequivocally Reformed in doctrine and self-understanding.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2017
This is a reading of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens in relation both to other versions of the Timo... more This is a reading of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens in relation both to other versions of the Timon story and to cultural contexts almost certainly shared by playwright and audience. . . . It has not been submitted for publication.
The paper traces Melanchthon's highly original formulation of something close to the Romantic not... more The paper traces Melanchthon's highly original formulation of something close to the Romantic notions of artistic genius and the culture-hero, but within the overarching framework of Reformation theology. It is currently unpublished, although destined (one hopes) to becomes the afterward of a volume of essays on Reformation Classicism currently under consideration.
Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England, 2018
In Western culture up to the sixteenth century, asceticism and access to truth are always more or... more In Western culture up to the sixteenth century, asceticism and access to truth are always more or less obscurely linked. Descartes, I think, broke with this when he said, 'To accede to truth, it suffices that I be any subject which can see what is evident.' […] Thus I can be immoral and know the truth. I believe that this is an idea which, more or less explicitly, was rejected by all previous culture. Before Descartes, one could not be impure, immoral, and know the truth. 1 The Reformation would seem, almost inevitably, to have led to the epistemological turn: the re-focusing of Western thought on the question of how the mind comes to know reality. This question presupposes a basic dyadic structure where the mind, understood as a cognitive faculty, stands over and against the world external to it. It further presupposes the related awareness of what Bacon famously termed the mind's idols: the distortions produced by tradition, education, language and temperament that
Oxford University Press eBooks, Apr 21, 2022
Chapter 2 concerns the same Henrician and Edwardian bibles, but focusing now on the humanist scho... more Chapter 2 concerns the same Henrician and Edwardian bibles, but focusing now on the humanist scholarship that infiltrates their paratexts and the related debates over whether the Reformation’s philological–historical turn should be read as a harbinger of Enlightenment demystification, whether its attention to the literal sense rendered the Old Testament largely irrelevant, or whether, at bottom, Reformation-era exegesis differs only superficially from medieval and patristic. The paratexts under consideration, whose humanism does owe much to St. Jerome and Nicholas of Lyra, address translation protocols, biblical authorship, canon formation, exegetic ground rules, the appeal to extra-biblical testimony, and the spiritual relevance of the Old Testament’s literal sense. A fair number remark the underlying Greek or Hebrew, cite Classical sources to elucidate the scriptural text, invoke exegetic principles generally credited to nineteenth-century biblical scholars, or attempt to reconstruct unfamiliar cultural practices implicit in an odd locution or narrative detail. Yet these paratexts appear in the most overtly doctrinal Tudor bibles, their historicist commitments inseparable from their confessional ones.
Religion and the Arts, 2010
The Journal of Theological Studies, 2014
Religion, 2018
Haskell, Ellen D. 2012a. “The Death of Rachel and the Kingdom of Heaven: Jewish Engagement with C... more Haskell, Ellen D. 2012a. “The Death of Rachel and the Kingdom of Heaven: Jewish Engagement with Christian Themes in Sefer ha-Zohar.” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 38 (1): 1–31. Haskell, Ellen D. 2012b. Suckling at My Mother’s Breasts: The Image of a Nursing God in Jewish Mysticism. Albany: SUNY Press. Lachter, Hartley 2014. Kabbalistic Revolution: Reimagining Judaism in Medieval Spain. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Paratexts of the English Bible, 1525-1611
Chapter 3 treats the first editions of the major Elizabethan bibles. These are “official” bibles,... more Chapter 3 treats the first editions of the major Elizabethan bibles. These are “official” bibles, their translation and paratexts, but also their printing, curated by the period’s competing magisteria: Archbishop Parker, the Marian exiles at Geneva, the leadership of the English College at Rheims and Douai; Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor at Geneva; Pierre L’Oiseleur de Villiers, minister to London’s Huguenot congregation. As their provenance implies, these bibles were intended to set forth the distinctive theological visions of their respective faith communities; indeed the early Elizabethan ones—the Geneva and Bishops’ in particular—provide the earliest articulation of what in retrospect one instantly recognizes as hardline Calvinism and Hooker-style Anglicanism. The Rheims preface opens with an equally recognizable defense of Catholic traditionalism against the bible-spouting impudence of English heretics, but what follows is a quite sophisticated discussion, one without Protes...
English bibles over the decades between the Tyndale’s New Testament of 1525 and the 1611 King Jam... more English bibles over the decades between the Tyndale’s New Testament of 1525 and the 1611 King James include indices, calendars, woodcuts, maps, chronologies, prefaces, prologues, prayers, epistles, philological glosses, doctrinal notes, inset historical essays, single-leaf summaries of scripture, a dialogue on predestination, a twelfth-century genealogy of Christ, a ninth-century Jewish chronicle. Their first editions, often magnificent folios, were curated by leading churchmen, who used these paratexts to speak into existence the dominant forms of post-Reformation English Christianity. Subsequent editions—smaller, more affordable, and far more numerous—were left in the hands of printers, who decided which versions to print, which paratexts to drop, add, move, or modify. The most lavish of Elizabethan bibles gets stripped almost to the bare translation; a fiercely Calvinist bible switches doctrinal sides; and a peculiar little New Testament from 1552 remains in print, with its origi...
Censorship and Cultural Sensibility, 2006
Censorship and Cultural Sensibility, 2006
Censorship and Cultural Sensibility, 2006
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2018
coal-face research by other scholars, and he seems to have read everything: aficionados of a well... more coal-face research by other scholars, and he seems to have read everything: aficionados of a well-crafted citation will explore the endnotes with admiration and profit. He has an eye for arresting possibilities, such as the report by the veteran courtier and Catholic recusant Sir Francis Englefield that he had been employed by Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole to exhume and cremate the corpse of King Henry VIII (p. ). He enjoys the observation which in its incongruity invites reflection: as in the fact that the Dutch Sea Beggars-Protestant pirates in the North Sea who might be labelled terrorists todaygloried in an Islamic crescent badge and the motto 'Rather Turkish than popish' (p. ). He also displays a proper historical agnosticism. Having described at p. the typical profile of a convert to evangelical religion in the early Reformationwell-educated, Erasmian humanist, critical of Church abuses, advocate of a vernacular Biblehe points out that this is the profile of Sir Thomas More. This is an utterly reliable history of the English Reformation, but it is also its imaginative biography, treating the story as a single narrative, watching its birth, its growth, its growing complexity, ending with the prospect that finally, as one hopes in a human life, a rueful wisdom may follow. Marshall is an historian's historian, probing the close-up warp and weft of the period with admirable curiosity and archival expertise, but he also enjoys an enviably light touch for the general reader. DIARMAID MACCULLOCH ST CROSS COLLEGE, OXFORD The Oxford history of Anglicanism, I: Reformation and identity, c. -. By Anthony Milton. Pp. xxvi + incl. ills. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, . £. JEH () ; doi:./S As the first volume of the Oxford History of Anglicanism, this collection of twenty-five essays by leading scholars takes the brave, if awkward, decision to renounce the label 'Anglican' on the grounds that, prior to , the Church of England lacked a stable theological identity; it was an institution, not an 'ism'. As one essay wittily notes, whereas on the Continent the different Churches, each with a distinctive theological platform, competed for Christian souls, in England, Christians espousing very different theological platforms, competed for the soul of the English Church (p. ). Hence, whereas prior studies of the fledgling Church of England championed one or another churchmanship as the true 'spirit of Anglicanism'whether Hooker's ceremonious and rationalist traditionalism favoured by Tractarians, the post- Calvinist consensus model, or the mid twentieth-century big-tent non-confessional via mediathe current volume portrays the period between about and as a 'struggle between competing claims' to be 'the authentic and representative voice of the Church of England' (p. ). Yet, although the essays do on the whole avoid privileging any one churchmanship as the orthodox mainstream, most do betray the shaping hand of the past four decades of front-line scholarship, and if they do not fully embrace the Calvinist consensus model, see the Tudor-Stuart Church as unequivocally Reformed in doctrine and self-understanding.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2017