While John Foxe’s sixteenth-century work Acts and Monuments is recognized as a foundational text for emergent English national identity, I argue that this document of historical progress actually recapitulates rather than discards earlier religious traditions. Acts and Monuments renovates the social and sacramental concept of corpus mysticum , inherited from the Middle Ages, in Protestant martyrological terms. Both textually and visually, Foxe’s work displaces sacramental theology from Eucharistic celebration to martyrological narrative, producing a reformed English corpus mysticum . This argument reveals how the Tudor political theology of the mystical body perpetuated a communitarian tradition formerly associated with the Catholic Mass.
The current focus on political theology in Shakespeare studies is largely devoted to tracing how Shakespeare's dramas illuminate the structural link between religious and political forms in both early modernity and modern liberal democracy. Critics concerned with addressing Shakespeare's engagement with political theology are also interested in how Shakespeare's portrayal of sovereign bodies in crisis constitute an early representation of ‘biopolitics’. These critics draw on theorists ranging from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben to inform their analyses of the way Shakespeare dramatizes sovereignty in a ‘state of emergency’ in his histories and tragedies. Plays such as Richard II, Coriolanus, and Hamlet have drawn particular attention insofar as they vividly interrogate the nature of the sovereign exception and decision highlighted by theorists of political theology. While this line of criticism adds a new theoretical dimension to Shakespeare studies, it also offers the potential for remapping our understanding of the religious and political history of early modern England in its attention to the deforming pressure of religious schism on traditional structures of sovereignty.
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