Sarah Beckwith is the Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of English, and Theater Studies at Duke University. She works on medieval and early modern theatre, especially Shakespeare, and the philosophy of Austin, Wittgenstein and Cavell. She is currently writing a book on Shakespeare's late tragedies, and on The Winter's Tale, and essays on the idea of context after Wittgenstein.
... Insofar as Elwood has opened such questions up for historical and theological inquiry, the on... more ... Insofar as Elwood has opened such questions up for historical and theological inquiry, the one inseparable from the other, his book is greatly to be ... By the end of the century, what had started out as a religious battle of wits, largely confined to the press and the courts, turned into ...
This chapter explores theological and ethical dimensions of the Eucharist in the later Middle Age... more This chapter explores theological and ethical dimensions of the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages and in the Reformation. The exploration introduces a number of genres and practices, because the Eucharist was a central and pervasive presence in Christian cultures, including those opposing medieval liturgy and teaching. One of the focal points of the study is the emergence of the doctrine and practice of transubstantiation, a language that became enshrined in thirteenth century orthodoxy. The chapter sets out with St. Augustine, who did not know either this doctrine, or the theological questions it sponsored (such as, what happens when a mouse eats the consecrated host), or its practice, together with its rich visionary accompaniments (such as bleeding hosts and manifestations of bleeding parts of the body of Christ or the Infant Jesus). After Augustine, a cluster of medieval writers and performances are addressed. The chapter concludes with commentary on the Reformation, and some rumination of Shakespeare, especiallyThe Tempest.
Shakespeare, Crypto-Catholicism, Crypto-criticism Lancastrian Shakespeare: Region, Religion and P... more Shakespeare, Crypto-Catholicism, Crypto-criticism Lancastrian Shakespeare: Region, Religion and Patronage, edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 258. Cloth $74.95; Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 267. Cloth $74.95. A HALF century after Shakespeare's death, Richard Davies, chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and later rector of Sapperton, declared that Shakespeare "died a papist."1 For, he suggests, the inscription on Shakespeare's tomb in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford curses anyone who might move his bones, and blesses those who leave them still interred. It is this sepulchral warning that also tempts Richard Wilson, in his fascinating recent book, secret Shakespeare, to guess that Shakespeare's own copy of the Borromeo Testament of faith brought by Campion to Milan is interred with his bones.2 In this way Shakespeare carries his secret Catholicism with him to the grave and ensures that it may remain buried. Only a desecration could reveal such a secret, and so it maintains its potent, hidden power, derived from surmise, taboo, and the fear of violation. But perhaps Wilson's compellingly literal fantasy is better analyzed as a symptom of what might be called the encryption of Catholicism in English historiography, including the history of the page and stage. For Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, the crypt is a relation to the past, a form of repressed and unfinished mourning, a foreign area of incorporation that "keeps the dead alive, intact, safe (save) inside me, but. . . . only to refuse to love the dead as a living part of me, dead save in me, through the process of introjection, as happens in so-called normal mourning."3 Sealed off inside the mourner, the dead one can remain intact but at the price of an internal foreignness. Shut up in this way, the past will be safe, but it can never transform the consciousness of the mourner. Wilson's fantasy about Shakespeare's intact, never to be disturbed secret might be better understood as a fantasy enacted in England's peculiar relation to Catholicism. Preserved in the hermetic form of Catholic apologia, and in the polemical, enduring drives of antipapistry and Whig history, Catholicism can remain hidden, unseen, fully internal, and at the same time foreign, exotic, and alien. It will never get itself mixed up with the history in which it is encrypted. Alison Shell has recently described English Catholicism as a "catacomb culture, defined by secret or discreet worship," studied for a long time only by its own loving ancestors, and exiled from English history.4 Between 1558 when Elizabeth I acceded to the throne and the Supreme Head of the English Church to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Catholicism was mainly associated with certain key events in the Protestant imaginary: the rebellion of the northern earls in 1569, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the Spanish marriage for James I's son, Charles, in the 1620s, the Irish Rebellion of 1641, and the Popish Plot of 1678-81.5 Yet it was a visit to the Christian catacombs outside Rome that helped to convert Sir Toby Mathew, the son of the very Calvinist bishop of Durham, who converted to Catholicism in 1606, and entered the Jesuit order in 1619: "the sight of those most ancient crosses, altars, sepulchers, and other marks of the Catholic religion, having been planted there in the persecution of the primitive Church . . . did strike me with a kind of reverent awe, and made me absolutely resolve to repress my insolent discourse against Catholic religion thereafter."6 Mathew's subsequent history as an exile, poet, chronicler of his own conversion, and historian of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, and later sojourn at Henrietta Maria's court, is precisely an instance of what Anthony Milton has called cross-confessionalism, the imbrication and converse between Catholicism and Protestantism and the movement, surprisingly common, through conversion, between them. …
The tradition of the virtues was the model for moral practice from Aristotle to Luther. This trad... more The tradition of the virtues was the model for moral practice from Aristotle to Luther. This tradition framed practices of living well in relation to visions of the good, and in its later Christian version, of God. One became good through practice, just as a harpist might play well through disciplined habits of exercise. In Alasdair MacIntyre's extraordinary excavations of philosophy and intellectual history, the Reformation is by and large neglected as he traces a path from Aristotle to Hume and beyond. This special issue seeks to put the Reformation(s) back into the picture and to see what avenues might be opened as a result. Articles explore what happens to ancient and medieval habits, practices, and conceptualizations of virtue and the virtue tradition resulting from the complex reorganizations of ritual, sacramental, ecclesiological, theological, and ethical practices during the Reformation era. The essays in this issue explore various strands of the Reformation in which th...
“Hamlet’s Ethics” argues that the critical question of delay in Hamlet has blinded readers to the... more “Hamlet’s Ethics” argues that the critical question of delay in Hamlet has blinded readers to the play’s exploration of questions of agency and vision. The so-called indecision of Hamlet at the point of action is framed in the play, but in such a way as to expose and altogether overturn the prototype of revenge. What does it mean to be the author of one’s own acts, and what does one become in doing them? What are the ends of action? Hamlet opens out these questions of what we become by virtue of our acts. In so doing this tragedy offers us an object lesson in ethics, but not as a question of either obligation or choice, but as a question of the vision by which the world comes into focus for us at all.
This chapter explores theological and ethical dimensions of the Eucharist in the later Middle Age... more This chapter explores theological and ethical dimensions of the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages and in the Reformation. The exploration introduces a number of genres and practices, because the Eucharist was a central and pervasive presence in Christian cultures, including those opposing medieval liturgy and teaching. One of the focal points of the study is the emergence of the doctrine and practice of transubstantiation, a language that became enshrined in thirteenth century orthodoxy. The chapter sets out with St. Augustine, who did not know either this doctrine, or the theological questions it sponsored (such as, what happens when a mouse eats the consecrated host), or its practice, together with its rich visionary accompaniments (such as bleeding hosts and manifestations of bleeding parts of the body of Christ or the Infant Jesus). After Augustine, a cluster of medieval writers and performances are addressed. The chapter concludes with commentary on the Reformation, and some rumination of Shakespeare, especiallyThe Tempest.
At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice was the image of the crucified... more At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice was the image of the crucified Christ. Sarah Beckwith examines the social meaning of this image across a range of key devotional English texts, using insights from anthropology and cultural studies. The image of the crucified Christ, she argues, acted as a place where the tensions between the sacred and the profane, the individual and the collective, were played out. The medieval obsession with the contours of Christ's body functioned to challenge and transform social and political relations. A fascinating and challenging book of interest not only to students of medieval literature, but also to cultural historians and women's studies specialists.
At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice was the image of the crucified... more At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice was the image of the crucified Christ. Sarah Beckwith examines the social meaning of this image across a range of key devotional English texts, using insights from anthropology and cultural studies. The image of the crucified Christ, she argues, acted as a place where the tensions between the sacred and the profane, the individual and the collective, were played out. The medieval obsession with the contours of Christ's body functioned to challenge and transform social and political relations. A fascinating and challenging book of interest not only to students of medieval literature, but also to cultural historians and women's studies specialists.
At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice was the image of the crucified... more At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice was the image of the crucified Christ. Sarah Beckwith examines the social meaning of this image across a range of key devotional English texts, using insights from anthropology and cultural studies. The image of the crucified Christ, she argues, acted as a place where the tensions between the sacred and the profane, the individual and the collective, were played out. The medieval obsession with the contours of Christ's body functioned to challenge and transform social and political relations. A fascinating and challenging book of interest not only to students of medieval literature, but also to cultural historians and women's studies specialists.
... Insofar as Elwood has opened such questions up for historical and theological inquiry, the on... more ... Insofar as Elwood has opened such questions up for historical and theological inquiry, the one inseparable from the other, his book is greatly to be ... By the end of the century, what had started out as a religious battle of wits, largely confined to the press and the courts, turned into ...
This chapter explores theological and ethical dimensions of the Eucharist in the later Middle Age... more This chapter explores theological and ethical dimensions of the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages and in the Reformation. The exploration introduces a number of genres and practices, because the Eucharist was a central and pervasive presence in Christian cultures, including those opposing medieval liturgy and teaching. One of the focal points of the study is the emergence of the doctrine and practice of transubstantiation, a language that became enshrined in thirteenth century orthodoxy. The chapter sets out with St. Augustine, who did not know either this doctrine, or the theological questions it sponsored (such as, what happens when a mouse eats the consecrated host), or its practice, together with its rich visionary accompaniments (such as bleeding hosts and manifestations of bleeding parts of the body of Christ or the Infant Jesus). After Augustine, a cluster of medieval writers and performances are addressed. The chapter concludes with commentary on the Reformation, and some rumination of Shakespeare, especiallyThe Tempest.
Shakespeare, Crypto-Catholicism, Crypto-criticism Lancastrian Shakespeare: Region, Religion and P... more Shakespeare, Crypto-Catholicism, Crypto-criticism Lancastrian Shakespeare: Region, Religion and Patronage, edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 258. Cloth $74.95; Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 267. Cloth $74.95. A HALF century after Shakespeare's death, Richard Davies, chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and later rector of Sapperton, declared that Shakespeare "died a papist."1 For, he suggests, the inscription on Shakespeare's tomb in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford curses anyone who might move his bones, and blesses those who leave them still interred. It is this sepulchral warning that also tempts Richard Wilson, in his fascinating recent book, secret Shakespeare, to guess that Shakespeare's own copy of the Borromeo Testament of faith brought by Campion to Milan is interred with his bones.2 In this way Shakespeare carries his secret Catholicism with him to the grave and ensures that it may remain buried. Only a desecration could reveal such a secret, and so it maintains its potent, hidden power, derived from surmise, taboo, and the fear of violation. But perhaps Wilson's compellingly literal fantasy is better analyzed as a symptom of what might be called the encryption of Catholicism in English historiography, including the history of the page and stage. For Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, the crypt is a relation to the past, a form of repressed and unfinished mourning, a foreign area of incorporation that "keeps the dead alive, intact, safe (save) inside me, but. . . . only to refuse to love the dead as a living part of me, dead save in me, through the process of introjection, as happens in so-called normal mourning."3 Sealed off inside the mourner, the dead one can remain intact but at the price of an internal foreignness. Shut up in this way, the past will be safe, but it can never transform the consciousness of the mourner. Wilson's fantasy about Shakespeare's intact, never to be disturbed secret might be better understood as a fantasy enacted in England's peculiar relation to Catholicism. Preserved in the hermetic form of Catholic apologia, and in the polemical, enduring drives of antipapistry and Whig history, Catholicism can remain hidden, unseen, fully internal, and at the same time foreign, exotic, and alien. It will never get itself mixed up with the history in which it is encrypted. Alison Shell has recently described English Catholicism as a "catacomb culture, defined by secret or discreet worship," studied for a long time only by its own loving ancestors, and exiled from English history.4 Between 1558 when Elizabeth I acceded to the throne and the Supreme Head of the English Church to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Catholicism was mainly associated with certain key events in the Protestant imaginary: the rebellion of the northern earls in 1569, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the Spanish marriage for James I's son, Charles, in the 1620s, the Irish Rebellion of 1641, and the Popish Plot of 1678-81.5 Yet it was a visit to the Christian catacombs outside Rome that helped to convert Sir Toby Mathew, the son of the very Calvinist bishop of Durham, who converted to Catholicism in 1606, and entered the Jesuit order in 1619: "the sight of those most ancient crosses, altars, sepulchers, and other marks of the Catholic religion, having been planted there in the persecution of the primitive Church . . . did strike me with a kind of reverent awe, and made me absolutely resolve to repress my insolent discourse against Catholic religion thereafter."6 Mathew's subsequent history as an exile, poet, chronicler of his own conversion, and historian of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, and later sojourn at Henrietta Maria's court, is precisely an instance of what Anthony Milton has called cross-confessionalism, the imbrication and converse between Catholicism and Protestantism and the movement, surprisingly common, through conversion, between them. …
The tradition of the virtues was the model for moral practice from Aristotle to Luther. This trad... more The tradition of the virtues was the model for moral practice from Aristotle to Luther. This tradition framed practices of living well in relation to visions of the good, and in its later Christian version, of God. One became good through practice, just as a harpist might play well through disciplined habits of exercise. In Alasdair MacIntyre's extraordinary excavations of philosophy and intellectual history, the Reformation is by and large neglected as he traces a path from Aristotle to Hume and beyond. This special issue seeks to put the Reformation(s) back into the picture and to see what avenues might be opened as a result. Articles explore what happens to ancient and medieval habits, practices, and conceptualizations of virtue and the virtue tradition resulting from the complex reorganizations of ritual, sacramental, ecclesiological, theological, and ethical practices during the Reformation era. The essays in this issue explore various strands of the Reformation in which th...
“Hamlet’s Ethics” argues that the critical question of delay in Hamlet has blinded readers to the... more “Hamlet’s Ethics” argues that the critical question of delay in Hamlet has blinded readers to the play’s exploration of questions of agency and vision. The so-called indecision of Hamlet at the point of action is framed in the play, but in such a way as to expose and altogether overturn the prototype of revenge. What does it mean to be the author of one’s own acts, and what does one become in doing them? What are the ends of action? Hamlet opens out these questions of what we become by virtue of our acts. In so doing this tragedy offers us an object lesson in ethics, but not as a question of either obligation or choice, but as a question of the vision by which the world comes into focus for us at all.
This chapter explores theological and ethical dimensions of the Eucharist in the later Middle Age... more This chapter explores theological and ethical dimensions of the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages and in the Reformation. The exploration introduces a number of genres and practices, because the Eucharist was a central and pervasive presence in Christian cultures, including those opposing medieval liturgy and teaching. One of the focal points of the study is the emergence of the doctrine and practice of transubstantiation, a language that became enshrined in thirteenth century orthodoxy. The chapter sets out with St. Augustine, who did not know either this doctrine, or the theological questions it sponsored (such as, what happens when a mouse eats the consecrated host), or its practice, together with its rich visionary accompaniments (such as bleeding hosts and manifestations of bleeding parts of the body of Christ or the Infant Jesus). After Augustine, a cluster of medieval writers and performances are addressed. The chapter concludes with commentary on the Reformation, and some rumination of Shakespeare, especiallyThe Tempest.
At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice was the image of the crucified... more At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice was the image of the crucified Christ. Sarah Beckwith examines the social meaning of this image across a range of key devotional English texts, using insights from anthropology and cultural studies. The image of the crucified Christ, she argues, acted as a place where the tensions between the sacred and the profane, the individual and the collective, were played out. The medieval obsession with the contours of Christ's body functioned to challenge and transform social and political relations. A fascinating and challenging book of interest not only to students of medieval literature, but also to cultural historians and women's studies specialists.
At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice was the image of the crucified... more At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice was the image of the crucified Christ. Sarah Beckwith examines the social meaning of this image across a range of key devotional English texts, using insights from anthropology and cultural studies. The image of the crucified Christ, she argues, acted as a place where the tensions between the sacred and the profane, the individual and the collective, were played out. The medieval obsession with the contours of Christ's body functioned to challenge and transform social and political relations. A fascinating and challenging book of interest not only to students of medieval literature, but also to cultural historians and women's studies specialists.
At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice was the image of the crucified... more At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice was the image of the crucified Christ. Sarah Beckwith examines the social meaning of this image across a range of key devotional English texts, using insights from anthropology and cultural studies. The image of the crucified Christ, she argues, acted as a place where the tensions between the sacred and the profane, the individual and the collective, were played out. The medieval obsession with the contours of Christ's body functioned to challenge and transform social and political relations. A fascinating and challenging book of interest not only to students of medieval literature, but also to cultural historians and women's studies specialists.
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