Introduction

Modern society, at least in the West, emerges out of the differentiation between church and state. In the late twentieth century, Americans presuppose this separation along with the consequent confinement of religion to private beliefs. Writing this book has been a lengthy struggle with this rupture; I am a Christian and an academic and have no idea how to put these two together, how to formulate a language that would be both reverent and professional. I mention this not as a confession (although, given the topic, I felt obliged to put my cards on the table) but to register the difference between our social and discursive categories and those operative in the Renaissance, where Hooker could still maintain that the established church included the entire population of England and hence that church and nation were simply two aspects of the same entity. He does not say that they are identical—Western ecclesiology since Augustine is based on the separation of temporal from sacred order—but in practice social and religious existence formed a continuum at least up to the English Civil Wars and much later in many communities. "In sixteenth-century England," as Richard Helgerson succinctly observes, "there was very little to which religion was irrelevant."^[1] Baptism, marriage, burial—the threshold rites of ordinary life—took place in church and were documented in the parish register. The first three Books of Common Prayer have, in fact, no rite for adult baptism, since (at least in theory) everyone was baptized in infancy.^[2] The state mandated Lenten fasts and the burning of heretics; churchmen probated wills and ran universities. In England, virtually all advanced degrees were in theology, and more than half the books published during the reign of Elizabeth dealt with religious subjects.^[3] During this period, as "never before or after ... science, philosophy, and theology [were] seen as almost one and the same occupation."^[4] Throughout the era, politics and religion remained impenetrably entangled.

All this is trita et obvia but at the same time curiously invisible in modern Renaissance scholarship, which, for complex political, ideological, and institutional reasons, brackets off religious materials from cultural analysis and vice versa. Books on the English Reformation do not usually engage questions of gender, sexuality, class, power, and selfhood; conversely, studies of Tudor and Stuart culture rarely consider sermons, sacraments, bishops, or prayer books. This peculiar division of mental labor derives, at least in part, from Burkhardt's monumental study of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, which conceptualized the Renaissance as an episode within secular culture—as the secularization of Western culture. Correspondingly, scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious history developed along confessional lines—Lutherans studying Luther, Catholics researching the Counter-Reformation, and so forth—and hence tended to focus on theological controversy rather than the sociocultural imbrications of religion.^[5]

One result of this disciplinary segregation is that there exists no broadly conceived scholarship on the Bible between the decline of medieval allegory and the rise of Higher Criticism. There are some splendid books on Milton's biblical learning, a couple of monographs on Renaissance anticipations of modern exegesis, and little else. Yet, in A. G. Dickens's words, "concerning the immense influence of the vernacular Bible upon both the religious and the secular history of the English people and their colonial offspring, one cannot write save in the danger of perpetrating cant and cliché."^[6] This book may achieve, it would seem, the rare distinction of being simultaneously arcane and commonplace. I have tried, however, to avoid both overspecialization—a pitfall endemic to modern biblical scholarship with its articles on such tantalizing subjects as baptismal regeneration in Bullinger's commentary on Galatians—and the obvious. I will not recount the story of the King James Bible or the controversy over vowel points or the hexameral background to Paradise Lost —not because these are not important topics but because they have been excellently discussed elsewhere. This book is instead an essay in the literal sense of the term, a tentative and partial exploration of the cultural work done by the Renaissance Bible—or rather by Renaissance biblical discourses: the heterogeneous mass of scriptural commentaries, treatises, plays, meditations, and poems filling the columns of the Short Title Catalogue and the early Bodleian inventories.^[7]

The Bible remained the central cultural text in England, as in the rest of Europe, through the seventeenth century, although less exclusively so than in the Middle Ages. By this I do not mean simply that most people

had read (or heard) it, but that it continued to generate knowledge and narrative. One might usefully think of the aggregate of biblical discourses circulating in the Renaissance as similar in function to Greco-Roman myth, where by "myth" I mean the sum total of scholia, tragedies, poems, histories, essays, and rituals that interpret and perform the stories of gods and heroes. In both cases, earlier religious materials (the Bible itself or the archaic myths of the prehistoric Mediterranean civilizations) were reshaped according to self-conscious exegetic and mythopoeic/literary procedures; often, as in Calvin's New Testament scholarship or Plutarch's essay on the Egyptian gods, learned commentary and mythic symbolization occurred together. In such gentile midrashim , the ancient stories served as a primary locus for synthetic, speculative, and symbolic production.

The Bible operated as a synthetic field, the site where the disciplines converge. To claim, however, that the Bible remained an active arena of discursive exchange reverses the accepted picture of early modern cultural transactions. Renaissance scholarship, speaking very generally now, operates in terms of three basic categories: Classical antiquity, the secular culture of the Renaissance, and Christianity. Traditional scholarship focused on the unidirectional influence of the first category on the second; in Foucault, Greenblatt, and other contemporary thinkers, one notes a growing interest in the passage of sacred forms and practices—monastic discipline, confession, exorcism, the cult of the Virgin Queen, Wolsey's hat—into the social and literary structures of secular culture. If the first model tends to marginalize religion, the second conceptualizes the sacred as that which is drained, is emptied out, in order to provide modern culture with sufficient intellectual and symbolic capital to start up its own economy.

The reverse or correlative circulation—from antiquity and secular culture to "religion"^[8] —has received far less recognition or theoretical formulation, even though a vast quantity of specialized research has mapped the Classical prototypes for Renaissance altarpieces, the Christian appropriations of ancient philosophy, and the volatile interchanges between civic republicanism and radical millenarianism. It is, moreover, perfectly obvious that the canonical texts of English literature from Spenser to Milton rework Classical and secular materials as Protestant romance, devotional lyric, and biblical epic. But this double vector from Classical and secular discourses to sacred representation rarely figures into more broadly conceived studies of Renaissance culture and hence into the conceptualization of the Renaissance.^[9] Nor has attention been paid to the centripetal pull of biblical inquiry on the disciplines—on philology, law, history, and related fields—and the sorts of knowledge resulting from these syntheses.

Renaissance biblical scholarship, however, is less a specialized discipline with its own internally generated topoi and methods than a disciplinary matrix where philological, historical, legal, antiquarian, and rhetorical procedures combine and recombine in response to fluctuations within the larger intellectual culture. It does not so much resemble a midwestern highway—a ribbon stretched across quiet fields connecting no place in particular to somewhere or other—as it does the four-level interchange in Los Angeles, where all roads meet, intersect, and divide; where lanes converge and split down unforeseen left- and right-hand exits; an arcing structural marvel littered with accidents and overloaded with interminable traffic.^[10] The syncretic and interdisciplinary methods of such scholarship bear a lurking affinity to those characteristic of contemporary cultural studies; in the same way that Marxist economics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, structuralist anthropology, and Saussurean linguistics converge in a work like Goux's Symbolic Economies , so Grotius's De satisfactione Christi knits together Classical jurisprudence, universal history, colonial apologetics, and international law. In both cases, disciplinary fusion results in discursive synergy; synthetic procedures are themselves mothers of invention.

Hence, such discourses serve as modes of inquiry as well as exchange. This function has particular significance for the Renaissance in that, prior to the emergence of the social sciences as the secular disciplines of human nature and culture, speculation on such topics was frequently negotiated in terms of biblical commentary and narrative. By the sixteenth century, certain fields, especially law and political theory, had already broken off to form separate disciplines, albeit still shot through with biblical proof-texts and polemic. But the Bible remained the primary locus for a good deal of what we might classify as cultural, psychological, or anthropological reflection.

At times such theorization occurred in a fairly straightforward fashion; thus, the earliest arguments for liberalizing the canons on divorce show up in Erasmus's commentary on I Corinthians and Bucer's on Matthew. But more often, speculations that would later be analyzed in a more technical vocabulary remained enfolded within the symbolic forms of biblical narrative.^[11] Theology, Aristotle remarked, stands between myth and philosophy—a speculative myth, as it were. Thus, as the Greek tragic poets use the old stories of Troy and Thebes to fashion their analyses of guilt, ethical conflict, and desire, so Milton articulates his reflections on gender, history, sin, and freedom by rewriting the first two chapters of Genesis. Such narratives, in Eric Voegelin's words, create "in the form of the myth, a highly theorized body of knowledge concerning the position of man in his

world."^[12] In the Renaissance, discussions of Christ's agony in the garden unfold into meditations on the conflictual and decentered structures of subjectivity, comparative anthropology unexpectedly surfaces in theological speculation on the Atonement, and passion narratives explore the psychological and historical dialectics of male violence and victimage—matters to which we shall return.

Specialized technical and philosophic vocabularies, when they develop, tend to take over the discursive spaces previously occupied by myth. But not infrequently (although not invariably) such encroachment radicalizes myth, freeing it, so to speak, from traditional and communal responsibilities. In Greece, the pre-Socratics and tragic poets were contemporaries. While the pre-Socratics bear little resemblance to Protestant scholastics, one suspects that the elaboration of dogma likewise allowed biblical myth to become an instrument for the symbolization of "transcendental border-problems," the tensions and mysteries massed along the outer walls of explicit ideological systems.^[13] The devil, who disappeared from theology in the high Middle Ages, presided over the fantastic mythology of the witch craze. Less ominously, Christ's sacrifice, which occupied only a very minor place in Reformation controversy, became a resonant and volatile symbol for psychological and social exploration. The last four chapters of this study examine various translations of the Crucifixion into the language of border-problems—of sacrifice, selfhood, cruelty, sexuality.

Such mythic transformations were possible because in Renaissance practice the biblical narratives retained a certain (if limited) flexibility: not necessarily a theological flexibility but a sort of extradogmatic surplus of undetermined meaning—or rather meaning capable of being determined in various ways. Thus, Milton uses Christ's temptation in the wilderness to brood over the outcome and implications of the Civil War; similarly, scholarly Protestant exegetes analyze the Crucifixion in the context of first-century cultural praxis, while Grotius treats this sacrifice in terms of Roman law and archaic ritual, and Calvinist writers explore the same event as a paradigmatic narrative of psychological and social conflict. Such specific "determinations" of biblical narrative cannot and should not be reduced to theological positioning (although they have theological implications); they take shape at the intersection between the biblical text and other cultural materials, including English history, colonial policy, humanist jurisprudence, and late-medieval Christology. Precisely because Renaissance biblical narratives exerted a synthetic, centripetal pull on a disparate range of discourses and disciplines, they need to be read as cultural documents in the broadest sense.

Such claims, of course, do not apply to all Renaissance rewritings of the Bible. Lily Bess Campbell's painstaking Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth-Century England , for instance, leaves the unmistakable impression that much biblical "literature" kept to the safety of paraphrase. In general, however, such hermeneutic timidity seems to have had a stronger grip on the vernacular than on neo-Latin texts. It occurred to me as I was sketching this introduction that most of the material I finally decided to discuss had been written in Latin, often by Continental rather than English authors. All advanced biblical scholarship and many of the finest biblical poems and dramas written during the Renaissance belonged to an international, Latinate culture, although, since works like Calvin's commentaries were quickly translated into English, originally neo-Latin texts did not always remain the exclusive property of an elite readership.^[14] One therefore cannot get an accurate picture of the cultural workings of the Bible—of the polymorphic paper mountain of biblical discourses—in the English Renaissance by examining only insular, vernacular material. The intellectual culture of the English Renaissance, as well as a good deal of its literature, theology, and devotion, was part of a European discursive economy whose organization differed according to the textual commodities in question: the romantic epic imported from Italy, neo-Senecan drama from France, scholarship and theology from the Protestant civilizations of northern Europe. I point this out to clarify why I have drawn extensively on neo-Latin Dutch and French materials (although less on Italian and Spanish) while at the same time focusing on English culture. To deal with the Bible in Roman Catholic societies would require another book; to ignore the textual commerce linking England to Continental humanism and Protestantism would have produced a useless one.^[15]

I had originally planned to range fairly broadly throughout the Bible, each chapter starting from a specific biblical passage and the various discourses accreting around it. For the first chapter, I thought I would focus on Matthew 26–27, which covers the Last Supper through the Crucifixion, looking initially at scholarly exegesis and then whatever else seemed important and interesting. This material, however, outgrew its preliminary framework, so that Matthew 26–27 and related passages ended up filling three chapters. Chapter 1 uses the passage from Matthew to survey advanced biblical scholarship between the decline of allegorical exegesis and the beginnings of Higher Criticism, particularly the crucial developments during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that transformed humanistic exegesis from a philological into a historical disci-

pline. I have tried to avoid plotting the history of Renaissance biblical scholarship as a preface to the Enlightenment, instead focusing on the specific character of its historical method—the study of legal and customary codes, the fascination with the material culture of antiquity, and the unfamiliar coupling of essentialist and historicist interpretation that renders the past simultaneously exemplary and alien.

The second chapter deals with one of the most original and striking pieces of humanist biblical scholarship: Hugo Grotius's 1617 De satisfactione Christi , a defense of the orthodox theology of the Atonement whose final section unexpectedly invents comparative anthropology in order to explain the logic of sacrifice, including Christ's sacrifice. The chapter attempts to trace the genealogy of this method through international law, universal history, Spanish scholasticism, and New World ethnography—a case study of the synthetic and speculative operations of biblical scholarship in the early seventeenth-century intellectual economy.

But Grotius's essay also suggests that the problematic nature of sacrifice—at once the astonishing revelation of divine love and savage ritual—lay at the center of a cluster of theological and ethical controversies fissuring the intellectual landscape of the late Renaissance. This possibility shifted the focus of the book from the Bible as a whole to the Crucifixion and other biblical stories of sacrifice. Chapter 3 pursues this line of investigation from a rather different angle. The advanced biblical scholarship I examine in the first two chapters conspicuously ignores theological exegesis. In order to see whether the same sorts of issues that dominate scholarly discussions of the Atonement trickled down into more popular homiletic texts, I decided to look at Calvin's treatment of the Passion in his Harmony of the Evangelists and any English materials that seemed dependent on it. These Calvinist passion narratives turned out to be utterly unlike the scholarly commentaries—and also unlike patristic and medieval passion narratives. They are curious and problematic texts, particularly in their ambivalent fascination with revenge, torture, and the dialectics of male violence and victimization. The Calvinist passion narratives seem to encode some sort of cultural disturbance involving manhood, violence, and urban decadence. But they also present the Crucifixion as an allegory of subjectivity. By forcing the reader to identify with all the dramatis personae, good and evil, involved in the Crucifixion, these texts attempt to produce a specific version of Christian selfhood—a divided selfhood gripped by intense, contradictory emotions and an ineradicable tension between its natural inclinations and religious obligations. Although I did not realize it

until I reached the last chapter of this book, it now seems to me that before the Enlightenment the dominant models of subjectivity in the Christian West originate as passion narratives.

Chapters 4 and 5 abandon Matthew's Gospel in order to examine biblical accounts of female sacrifice, focusing on two women—Jephthah's daughter and Mary Magdalene—whom Renaissance texts explicitly liken to the dying Christ. Chapter 4 concerns sacrifice and tragedy. It begins by examining sixteenth-century lexicons for evidence of the philological connections between sacrifice, tragedy, katharsis , scapegoats, and the Crucifixion. The bulk of the chapter, however, concerns the seminal instance of the transformation of sacrificial narrative into tragedy: George Buchanan's Jephthah —the first biblical play based on Attic models and one of the half-dozen or so greatest and most influential Renaissance tragedies, although now virtually unknown. (The modern division of academic labor cannot cope with a neo-Latin play written by a Scotsman living in France.) Like Grotius's De satisfactione, Jephthah struggles with the moral and theological implications of sacrifice. Moreover, in Jephthah the sacrificial victim is not only a type of Christ but a girl, which raises another and more current cluster of questions about female sacrifice, fathers and daughters, the erotics of violence (particularly violence against women), and so forth. These questions are hard to answer well; they often elicit the sort of sociological literalism that reads the representation of female suffering as a commentary on the actual plight of women. No one, however, maintains that passion narratives reflect the victimization of men in Christian societies. The notion that hermeneutics should be gender-specific seems to me untenable; the notion that a biblical tragedy should be read like a Victorian novel, unhistorical. In both this and the following chapter, therefore, I attempt to find a way to interpret stories about female sacrifice and sexuality that respects the otherness of Renaissance symbolic forms and makes them comprehensible.

The final chapter looks at an exceedingly popular group of texts—a mix of poems and sermons—that depict Mary Magdalene's lonely vigil at the tomb of Christ. The texts insist on the erotic character of Mary's longing for her beloved Lord. However, they present Mary Magdalene not as either a hysteric or a seductress but as an exemplary figure of Christian inwardness. The chapter investigates the premodern constructions of bodily, religious, and intellectual desire in order to explain how, in the Renaissance, female eroticism could provide the decorous symbol for a second dominant model of ideal subjectivity—a model vastly different from that

found in the Calvinist passion narratives, although, like it, crystallized in a speculative myth about the death of Christ.

The decision to concentrate on sacrificial narratives seems plausible enough since the Crucifixion occupies the theological center of Western Christianity.^[16] But I am not particularly concerned with theology per se, and, in any case, official Protestant teaching on the Atonement tends to be unremarkable. The Renaissance retellings of the Passion fascinated me because (outside of dogmatic formulations) they seemed to draw into themselves a wildly problematic and complex range of cultural issues. They are haunted by questions of selfhood, violence, gender, and history and provide the symbolic forms for such speculations. In the same way that the story of Antigone held a peculiar significance for the nineteenth century—the luminous symbol for its preoccupation with the conflict between the individual conscience and the state—so these biblical narratives of sacrifice encode the Renaissance's confrontation with the alien and its constructions of the self. In the Renaissance, the paradox of sacrifice—its double character as loving self-oblation and barbaric ritual—epitomized the pervasive ambiguities attached to the humanist interpretation of the past as simultaneously authoritative and alien, the same paradox infiltrating Renaissance attempts to locate New World cultures in relation to Christianity. Such confrontations with the alien sacrificial cultures of antiquity, Israel, and the Americas motivated both the new social sciences of the age and the new rationalist critique of Christian orthodoxy. In the theological and devotional writings of the period, however, stories of Christ's sacrifice supplied the primary language for the profoundly divergent Reformed and Catholic models of Christian selfhood. Yet in both, the torment, terror, grief, anguish, and longing that suffuse the biblical accounts of the Crucifixion shape, although in different ways, the early modern constructions of ideal subjectivity.

Yet by classifying Renaissance interpretations and representations of sacrifice, I do not mean to suggest that these should be viewed as connected moments in an intellectual history. Because sacrifice—the sacrifice of Christ—is the mythic center of a civilization rather than a specific topos like carpe diem or the problem of future contingents, the various dramatic, homiletic, exegetic, and systematic rewritings of this story do not share an intertextual genealogy but instead are diffusely embedded throughout their cultural field. Central discourses, paradoxically, tend toward dispersal and fragmentation (ideological conditions permitting); in contemporary feminisms, the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment has

few methodological or conceptual affinities with French feminist theory, and both seem fairly marginal to the novels of Alice Walker. The level of generalization at which these differences no longer matter is not a very interesting one. Hence, chapter 1, which treats scholarly exegesis, has little to say about sacrifice per se for the simple reason that the philological commentaries on the Crucifixion do not address this topic; yet this chapter pertains to the subsequent discussions of sacrificial narratives not only because the methods of scholarly exegesis made possible the recognition of sacrifice as a historical phenomenon (the focus of chapter 2) but also because the contrast between the scholarly commentaries and the Calvinist passion narratives discussed in the third chapter clarifies the implications of each. The historical import of a particular discourse emerges against the range of available discourses that could have been chosen and were not. To determine what sorts of cultural work take place at the site of sacrifice, one has to take up one by one the disparate filaments that get knotted together with these biblical narratives. What threads are interwoven—or discarded—here and what patterns do they form? What are, quite literally, the implications of sacrifice? The chapters that follow do not tell a story (and most assuredly do not point a moral); they are rather tentative and fragmentary attempts to map the early modern discourses criss-crossing the redemptive bodies of dead virgins.