Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Seduction, Resistance, and Redemption: “Turning Turk” and the Embodiment of Christian Faith
- 1 Dangerous Fellowship: Universal Faith and its Bodily Limits in The Comedy of Errors and Othello
- 2 Recycled Models: Catholic Martyrdom and Embodied Resistance to Conversion in The Virgin Martyr and Other Red Bull Plays
- 3 Engendering Faith: Sexual Defilement and Spiritual Redemption in The Renegado
- 4 “Reforming” the Knights of Malta: Male Chastity and Temperance in Five Early Modern Plays
- 5 Epilogue: Turning Miscegenation into Tragicomedy (Or Not): Robert Greene's Orlando Furioso
- Notes
- Index
1 - Dangerous Fellowship: Universal Faith and its Bodily Limits in The Comedy of Errors and Othello
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Seduction, Resistance, and Redemption: “Turning Turk” and the Embodiment of Christian Faith
- 1 Dangerous Fellowship: Universal Faith and its Bodily Limits in The Comedy of Errors and Othello
- 2 Recycled Models: Catholic Martyrdom and Embodied Resistance to Conversion in The Virgin Martyr and Other Red Bull Plays
- 3 Engendering Faith: Sexual Defilement and Spiritual Redemption in The Renegado
- 4 “Reforming” the Knights of Malta: Male Chastity and Temperance in Five Early Modern Plays
- 5 Epilogue: Turning Miscegenation into Tragicomedy (Or Not): Robert Greene's Orlando Furioso
- Notes
- Index
Summary
There is neither Iewe nor Greeke, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Iesus.
Galatians 3.28St. Paul's famous statement of universal fellowship radically proposes that Christian faith renders indifferent the distinctions of ethnicity, caste, and gender. His contention that Israel's covenantal bonds were illegitimately dividing the early Christian church suggested that all people were eligible for conversion regardless of their earthly stations. Relegating the rite of circumcision to local custom, St. Paul replaced the Jewish covenant with a broader universalism whose basis for inclusion was faith – an intrinsically internal state. As Julia Reinhard Lupton explains, “Once spiritualized, [God's covenant] can also be infinitely extended: No longer the singular badge of Jewish men, this new circumcision of the heart joins both sexes, all peoples, and all classes into common fellowship with Christ.” This spiritual ideal was a particular source of tension in early modern England during a time when the reverberations of the Reformation were still strongly felt and expanding Mediterranean trade was shifting England's worldview. On the one hand, St. Paul's assertion that outward rituals like circumcision held no value, that “the only thing that counts is faith which worketh by loue” (Galatians 5.6), constituted an important touchstone by which Protestants distinguished themselves from Catholics. It was an ideal frequently alluded to in English sermons by preachers such as John Donne, William Attersoll, and William Perkins, who embraced the notion of a “circumcision of the heart” as the true mark of Christianity.
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- Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010