Early Modern Literature and the Bodies of a Reformed Eucharist - (New Directions in Religion and Literature) by Julianne Sandberg (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Choice 2025 Outstanding Academic Title

Examining what the eucharist taught early modern writers about their bodies and how it shaped the bodies they wrote about, this book shows how the exegetical roots of the Eucharistic controversy in 16th century England had very material and embodied consequences.

To apprehend the nature of Christ's body-its nature, presence, closeness, and efficacy-for these writers, was also to understand one's own. And conversely, to know one's own body was to know something particular about Christ's.

Sandberg provides new insights into how Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Aemilia Lanyer use the reformed eucharistic paradigm to imagine the embodied significance of the sacrament for their own bodies, the bodies of their narrative subjects, and the body of their literary work. She shows the significance of this paradigm was for poets and playwrights at this time to represent the embodied self and negotiate how the body was read, interpreted and understood.

Review Quotes

"The book weaves together literary studies and religious studies with a fresh and materialist approach, and yields useful and important new perspectives on the assembled writers and texts." --Kimberly Johnson, Brigham Young University, USA

"The overall tone achieves a level of accessibility that broadens the book's reach beyond a strictly specialist audience, meaning that this text can benefit literary scholars, historians, and early modernists alike. Ultimately, the reader can expect a thorough contextual exposition of the religious climate in the early modern period and a rich analysis of the diverse literary responses to fluctuating understandings of corporeality influenced by the Reformed Eucharist." --Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association

About the Author