- English, Renaissance Studies, Early Modern Literature, Religious History, Early Modern Catholicism, Liturgical Studies, and 9 moreRitual Theory, New Historicism, Early Modern Intellectual History, Shakespeare, Allegory, Material Culture Studies, Actor Network Theory, Thing Theory, and Book Historyedit
- I am a scholar of early modern English literature, material cultures of religion, and theology who lives and works in the greater Philadelphia area. Currently, I teach literatur... moreI am a scholar of early modern English literature, material cultures of religion, and theology who lives and works in the greater Philadelphia area. Currently, I teach literature and writing at the University of Delaware.
My first book project, Signs That Save: Sacramental Matter and Agency in English Literature, 1550–1700, explores the imaginative interplay between literature and material cultures of religion in Reformation-era England. Viewing that topic through a critical lens informed by new materialist theory, historical theology, and contemporary phenomenology, it analyzes textual representations of matter alongside material objects––baptismal water, communion bread, relics, holy statues, etc.––active within early modern religious economies. Doing so, Signs That Save argues that the English Reformation, especially conflicts over the sacraments and liturgical ritual during it, should be read as a story of negotiating networks of human and nonhuman actors, and it considers the ways in which literary texts from the period provide insights into the Reformation as such. Signs That Save emphasizes that sacred matter was often experienced as active and agential by the humans who encountered it, and this project analyzes sacred matter’s acts of gathering, remaining, saving, narrating, and, transforming in religious and literary texts.edit - Kristen Poole (Dissertation Director)edit
Research Interests:
: This article offers Nick Bottom, the donkey-headed weaver of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , as a textual and performative site that echoes and amplifies Eucharistic theologies. It interprets him, and Shakespeare’s comedy, alongside... more
: This article offers Nick Bottom, the donkey-headed weaver of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , as a textual and performative site that echoes and amplifies Eucharistic theologies. It interprets him, and Shakespeare’s comedy, alongside Reformation theology and current phenomenology, especially Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of saturated phenomena. Bottom and the Eucharist are signs, but they frustrate interpretive methods grounded in sense perception. Instead, they inaugurate unreasonable and transformative encounters of love. While this article contributes to the study of England’s religious and cultural history, more crucially, it offers a contemporary spiritual hermeneutic for interpreting the sacramental poetics of A Midsummer Night’s Dream .
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This article argues that orthodox English writers during the pre-Reformation period conceptualized the liturgy as a type of biblical text interpreted with traditional exegetical tools, especially allegoresis. In particular, it focuses... more
This article argues that orthodox English writers during the pre-Reformation period conceptualized the liturgy as a type of biblical text interpreted with traditional exegetical tools, especially allegoresis. In particular, it focuses upon three devotional works produced during the first several decades of the sixteenth century: B. Langforde’s Meditatyons for Goostly Exercyse, in the Tyme of the Masse (ca. 1515); Wynken de Worde’s 1520 edition of John Lydgate’s The Vertue of the Masse; and John Fisher’s sermon Lamentationes, Carmen, et Vae (ca. 1534). These liturgical exegeses uphold orthodox sacramental theology and maintain that such orthodoxy complements the emphasis placed upon literacy by reformers. Placing each text within a larger context, this analysis complicates narratives of religious culture that insist upon divisions between the medieval and the early modern and the Catholic and the Protestant. It offers a fuller picture of religious experiences surrounding the English ...
Research Interests:
This article offers Nick Bottom, the donkey-headed weaver of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as a textual and performative site that echoes and amplifies Eucharistic theologies. It interprets him, and Shakespeare’s comedy, alongside... more
This article offers Nick Bottom, the donkey-headed weaver of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as a textual and performative site that echoes and amplifies Eucharistic theologies. It interprets him, and Shakespeare’s comedy, alongside Reformation theology and current phenomenology, especially Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of saturated phenomena. Bottom and the Eucharist are signs, but they frustrate interpretive methods grounded in sense perception. Instead, they inaugurate unreasonable and transformative encounters of love. While this article contributes to the study of England’s religious and cultural history, more crucially, it offers a contemporary spiritual hermeneutic for interpreting the sacramental poetics of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Research Interests:
This article argues that orthodox English writers during the pre-Reformation period conceptualized the liturgy as a type of biblical text interpreted with traditional exegetical tools, especially allegoresis. In particular, it focuses... more
This article argues that orthodox English writers during the pre-Reformation period conceptualized the liturgy as a type of biblical text interpreted with traditional exegetical tools, especially allegoresis. In particular, it focuses upon three devotional works produced during the first several decades of the sixteenth century: B. Langforde’s Meditatyons for Goostly Exercyse, in the Tyme of the Masse (ca. 1515); Wynken de Worde’s 1520 edition of John Lydgate’s The Vertue of the Masse; and John Fisher’s sermon Lamentationes, Carmen, et Vae (ca. 1534). These liturgical exegeses uphold orthodox sacramental theology and maintain that such orthodoxy complements the emphasis placed upon literacy by reformers. Placing each text within a larger context, this analysis complicates narratives of religious culture that insist upon divisions between the medieval and the early modern and the Catholic and the Protestant. It offers a fuller picture of religious experiences surrounding the English Reformation’s inception.