The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity.

Debora Kuller Shuger. (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 29.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 5 pls. + xv + 297 pp. $40.

Debora Shuger gained due prominence in the field with Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (1990) as the methodological and theoretical innovations of that text--as well as the authors and works it focused on--brought her new readers in addition to those which Sacred Rhetoric (1988) had earned. The Renaissance Bible is something like a synthesis of these earlier texts in that it continues the analytical experimentation of her second book while dealing with the (now) seldom-read "sacred" texts that formed the basis of her first study. The result is a provocative analysis of sacred works with questions and paradigms typically confined to studies of decidedly secular texts.

The title here is slightly misleading, for Shuger takes up 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" (2). She offers that "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" (3). Two strands of argument support her belief that we need to give new priority--even respect--to the sacred when seeking to recapture cultural and individual modes of experience operative in the early modern era. The first of these strands holds that biblical scholarship, commentary, and exegesis were deeply implicated in cultural analysis. It is toward proving this that Shuger's first two chapters respectively explore writings on Matthew 26-27 by such figures as Casaubon, Erasmus, and Grotius, along with other scholarship by Grotius (De Satisfactione Christi) and--staking a claim to ethnographical richness--explorations by Las Casas (In Defense of the Indians).

The second chapter introduces the issue of sacrifice on which the book's final three pieces center. In essays dedicated to Calvin's version of the Passion, Buchanan's Latin drama Jepthah, and Magdalene narratives from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, Shuger argues that, prior to the "phallocentric individualism" (120) which Burkhardt and Greenblatt have located in the Renaissance, forms of subjectivity in the West were based on Christian self-sacrifice and passion: "Christ's agony provides the primary symbol for early modern speculation on selfhood and society" (127). Shuger's analysis of Buchanan's Jepthah and selected Magdalene narratives shows that pre-Reformation Christianity offered powerful models for female subjectivity, models that did not immediately migrate to secular literature.

No less than their content, the reverse chronological order of these chapters indicates that Shuger has certain misgivings with the project of modernity. In fact, her use of Los Angeles's four-level freeway interchange as a metaphor for the interdisciplinary maze of Renaissance biblical scholarship (4) hints that she sees deep and positive affinities between the early modern and the postmodern. A decade younger than many New Historicists, Shuger understands the early modern era in ways not obviously connected to an older generation's concerns with power and the political; her interest in gender here also works to expand the disciplinary boundaries of the New Historicism.

Yet one question raised by this study concerns its pedagogical implications. Granting that Shuger and others are right to remind us of the intensively religious character of the early modern era, how might this translate into the classroom? Can Jepthah successfully compete with King Lear and The Duchess of Malfi in undergraduate and graduate classes? Or Nashe's Christ's Tears over Jerusalem with The Unfortunate Traveller? However unrepresentative the "golden" works of the secular Renaissance may be, they entertain as well as instruct. The expertise that makes much of Shuger's work virtually inimitable also suggests a certain unwieldiness for the classroom, since "to understand Grotius's arguments, it is necessary to untangle . . . Socinus's quarrel with the Anselmian analysis of the Atonement" (57).

This remains a groundbreaking study. Its primary achievement may well be to persuade scholars of secular literature that biblical discourses form a rich field for analysis; if it does not, it is difficult to imagine what study could.