The Renaissance Bible

Book excerpt: The book treats the Protestant cultures of northern Europe, particularly England, examining biblical commentaries, plays, poems, sermons, and treatises, as well as the often startling negotiations between these texts and other cultural discourses. In Shuger's hands, these biblical materials serve to illuminate, and often radically reinterpret, the dominant issues in contemporary Renaissance studies: gender, the body, colonialism, subjectivity, desire, law, and history. Her work forcefully demonstrates the cultural centrality of Renaissance religion.