The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature

Beatrice Groves is Research Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Trinity College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592-1604 (2007) and has published articles in journals, such as Milton Studies, Shakespeare Survey, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England and Studies in Philology, and her essay in The Sixteenth Century Journal won the 2013 Sixteenth Century Society's Literature Prize. Her essays have also appeared in edited collections, including Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics (Cambridge, 2014) and Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (Cambridge, 2015).

• Introduction; Part I. The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern Literary Culture: 1. From Roman to Jew: Josephus, the Josippon and the destruction of Jerusalem in early modern culture; 2. Continuity and change: staging Jerusalem and staging 'the Jew'; 3. Preachers and players: the sack of Jerusalem from pulpit and stage; Part II. The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern Texts: 4. Marlowe's Jew of Malta and the destruction of Jerusalem; 5. The siege of Jerusalem and subversive rhetoric in Shakespeare's King John; 6. The fall of Jerusalem and the rise of a metropolis: Nashe's Christ's tears over Jerusalem, Dekker's plague pamphlets and maternal cannibalism in early modern London; 7. The New Jerusalem: Josephan portents and Milton's Paradise Lost; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'This is an important book … Groves demonstrates how political and theological discourses in late medieval and Renaissance England used and elaborated what James Shapiro has called 'Jewish questions' (the past) in order to 'answer English ones' (the present). … This work is not only a major contribution to the understanding of early modern English Protestant elaborations on the destruction of Jerusalem, and of the use of historical narratives in the fashioning and understanding of the present: her work rereads early modern English literature to enhance the dialogue between the two sides of an (apparently) irreconcilable dichotomy.' Yaakov Mascetti, Renaissance Quarterly