Debora Shuger's

The Renaissance Bible:
Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity

This is the first book on the Renaissance Bible by an Anglo-American scholar in neatly 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; it is, 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.

"Debora Shuger is one of the most original interpreters of the English Renaissance now writing, and The Renaissance Bible is her best book yet. There are few other critics who could treat humanist biblical scholarship and early-modern subjectivity as topics in the same critical universe, let alone make such absorbing and persuasive connections between the two. But an equally impressive feature of this book is the rigor with which Shuger distinguishes genres or disciplines or discourses from one another and then charts their separate histories. The Renaissance Bible will help revitalize the study of religion for Renaissance scholars and cultural critics generally."

--Jeffrey Knapp, author of An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from UTOPIA to THE TEMPEST

"This book is of vital importance to Renaissance studies. It demonstrates clearly and forcefully that Renaissance biblical scholarship is not a specialized discipline set apart, but one embedded deeply in the cultural matrices of the period. Shuger's graceful and seamless juxtapositions of evidence drawn from theology, philology, history, legal studies, politics, literature, and social institutions make her own method recapitulate the aura of the cultural grab-bag that characterized the wide-ranging richly-textured Renaissance biblical discourse."

--Regina Schwartz, author of Remembering and Repeating: On Milton is Theology and Poetics