Jennifer R. Rust – författare

In The Body in Mystery, Jennifer R. Rust engages the political concept of the mystical body of the commonwealth, the corpus mysticum of the medieval church. Rust argues that the communitarian ideal of sacramental sociality had a far longer afterlife than has been previously assumed. Reviving a critical discussion of the German historian Ernst Kantorowicz’s 1957 masterwork, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Rust brings to bear the latest scholarship. Her book expands the representation of the corpus mysticum through a range of literary genres as well as religious polemics and political discourses. Rust reclaims the concept as an essential category of social value and historical understanding for the imaginative life of literature from Reformation England. The Body in Mystery provides new ways of appreciating the always rich and sometimes difficult continuities between the secular and sacred in early modern England, and between the premodern and early modern periods.

Early modern Europe provides a rich context from which to challenge the rigid opposition between science and religion in this bold new edited collection. Rethinking Science and Religion in Early Modern Culture approaches “science” and “religion” as overlapping and mutually defining modes of thought, belief, and practice. In addition to reconceptualizing the boundaries between science and religion as practiced and represented in early modern culture, essays develop new perspectives on gender and embodiment in considering works and ideas of the past. Some authors demonstrate how early modern natural philosophers understood their objects of inquiry, from human bodies to the cosmos, in theological terms. Others demonstrate how religious ideas shaped colonial exploration and the nascent slave trade as scientific enterprises. Still others put early modern poetry and drama in conversation with influential debates between religion and science. Across these various inquiries, our contributors challenge received narratives of secular disenchantment and liberal progress while questioning conventional assumptions about divisions between scientific and religious communities.Together, these essays seek to redefine both early modern religion and science as fluid and expansive discourses in which the rhetoric of the past continues to return uncannily within the controversies of the present. Science and religion were and remain mutually and dialogically constituted forms of knowledge, belief, practice, and power. These wide-ranging explorations return to fundamental questions and assumptions that underwrite both fields while also working to establish new questions, archives, and intellectual genealogies.

Early modern Europe provides a rich context from which to challenge the rigid opposition between science and religion in this bold new edited collection. Contributors reveal how modes of science or natural philosophy, and religion, were mutually interdependent, even if they were also fluid and contested. Essays break new ground by situating texts and artefacts of early modern science and religion in terms of contemporary scholarly developments, including ecocriticism, postcolonial, race and affect studies. By foregrounding questions of gender, embodiment, evidence and the historical formation of scientific colonialism, this collection locates the early modern body and its empirical study as a source of both religious and scientific knowledge.Essays cover the soteriological body at the heart of Andreas Vesalius' seminal studies of anatomy, depictions of the hymen in Shakespeare and medical texts and forms of empiricism in John Donne. Where some of the essays address non-literary works, many chapters explore the role of imaginative literature and aesthetics more broadly. Beyond the centrality of Protestant Christianity to early modern European science, some contributors consider the influence of hermetic writings on Francis Bacon and read the Mayan K'iche' epic of creation known as the Popul Wuj alongside Milton's Paradise Lost. These inquiries demonstrate the value of comparative perspectives in a period in which radical social, political and religious changes caused a series of epistemic ruptures.