The Renaissance Bible

Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity

Debora Kuller Shuger

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley \u0097 Los Angeles \u0097 Oxford

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Acknowledgments

This book owes its being to the splendid collections and staff of the UCLA, Folger, Huntington,
and Yale libraries, but particularly to the UCLA librarian who let me check out the 1698 edition
of the Critici sacri , saving me endless, miserable hours trapped in Special Collections. I am
also profoundly grateful to various friends, colleagues, and foundations for their unflagging
assistance, both intellectual and financial. Without the generous support of the Guggenheim
Foundation, the University of California President's Fellowship, and the Huntington Library
Mellon Foundation, I could never have completed this book in a timely fashion. I am equally
indebted to another kind of fellowship: my deepest thanks to William Bouwsma, the Reverend
Howard Happ, Lorraine Helms, Peter Kaufmann, Anthony Low, David Riggs, Michael
Schoenfeldt, and Robert Watson for their valuable corrections and invaluable encouragement.

I am likewise grateful for the incisive and helpful comments of the readers for the University
of California Press\u2014Jeffrey Knapp and Regina Schwartz. Many thanks to Doris Kretschmer,
Rose Anne White, and Dan Gunter for their ever-attentive supervision of the editorial process.
Finally, I would like to thank the editor of Bucknell University Press, Julien Yoseloff, for
permission to reprint material from my article in Reconfiguring the Renaissance in chapter 5
of this book.

One little book incurs so many debts: to a trusty computer, to teachers and mentors, to
the patient souls who microfilmed every English book printed before 1700, to parents and
grandparents who underwrote a long and costly education, and above all to a family that
survived yet another book with good humor and loyal enthusiasm.

For the sake of uniformity, I have modernized theu/v andi/j orthography in both the

Latin and early modern English quotations throughout the text.

\u20151\u2015

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\u2014
Western ecclesiology since Augustine is based on the separation of temporal from sacred
order\u2014but 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\u2014the threshold rites of ordinary life\u2014took 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)every one 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.

\u20152 \u2015

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\u2014as the secularization of Western culture.
Correspondingly, scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious history
developed along confessional lines\u2014Lutherans studying Luther, Catholics researching the
Counter-Reformation, and so forth\u2014and hence tended to focus on theological controversy
rather than the sociocultural imbrications of religion.[5]

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