Mindful of the complex position of Christ’s mother, Mary, in post-Reformation Europe, this article examines how two women writers read Mary’s fleshly relationship with Christ. Reading the Bible typologically, Aemilia Lanyer and Dorothy Leigh determine that Mary’s material labor has spiritual consequences, because, in delivering Christ, she delivers God’s plan for salvation and inaugurates the new covenant. But, interpreting Marian maternity in this way, Lanyer’sSalve Deus Rex Judaeorumand Leigh’sThe Mothers Blessingalso suggest that the new covenant initiates a form of maternity that has sustained spiritual resonance for all women and has profound implications for the female writer.

This book provides an account of the how the Bible was read and applied in early modern England, and maps the connection between these readings and various forms of writing. The Bible had a profound impact on early modern culture, and Bible-reading shaped the period’s drama, poetry, and life writings, as well as sermons and biblical commentaries. This book argues that literary writings bear the hallmarks of the period’s dominant exegetical practices, and do interpretative work. Tracing the impact of biblical reading across a range of genres and writers, the discussion demonstrates that literary reimaginings of, and allusions to, the Bible were common, varied, and ideologically evocative. The book explores how a series of popularly interpreted biblical narratives were recapitulated in the work of a diverse selection of writers, some of whom remain relatively unknown. In early modern England, the figures of Solomon, Job, and Christ’s mother, Mary, and the books of Song of Songs and Revelation, are enmeshed in different ways with contemporary concerns, and their usage illustrates how the Bible’s narratives could be turned to a fascinating array of debates. Showing the multifarious contexts in which biblical narratives were deployed, this book argues that Protestant interpretative practices both contribute to, and problematize, literary constructions of a range of theological, political, and social debates.

Chapter 2 investigates the importance of King Solomon to visual conceptions of monarchical authority after the break with Rome. Although popular, figurations of England’s monarchs as antitypes of Solomon were complex and exegetically demanding, not least because Solomon ended his life as an idolater. Unsurprisingly, contemporary applications of Solomon’s narrative use this biblical text selectively. Yet, when scrutinized more closely, many such readings struggle to occlude fully the unhappy death of scripture’s famously wise king. This chapter considers the anonymous Latin play Sapientia Solomonis (1565/6), George Peele’s The Love of King David (1594), and John Williams’ funeral sermon for King James I (1625) to argue that the biblical narrative of scripture’s famously wise king became a popular, yet problematic, means of responding to the relocation of sacred authority after the Reformation.

Chapter 5 focuses on female readings of the fleshly connection between Christ and his mother, Mary. For Aemilia Lanyer and Dorothy Leigh, Mary’s material labour had spiritual consequences because, in delivering Christ, she delivered God’s plan for salvation and inaugurated the new covenant which atones for Eve’s sin. Yet a typological reading of the scriptures also allows these writers to suggest that the new covenant initiates a form of maternity that has, within the Christological dispensation, profound spiritual resonance. For if, as Salve Deus and The Mothers Blessing advocate, the Bible is read typologically, Mary’s maternity becomes a mechanism of deliverance for all women, and inaugurates a form of maternity rich in spiritual issue and consequence.

This chapter examines the reception and circulation of the Bible and early modern exegetical culture. It begins by tracing how the laity encountered the scriptures, paying particular attention to the accessibility of the Bible’s narratives through non-textual media. Acknowledging the emphasis Protestantism placed on individual reading of the Bible, the discussion then moves to address the question of how the Bible was to be read; that is, the perceived benefit of sequential reading for understanding scripture’s two Testaments. This consideration of the importance of orderly reading then opens into a discussion of the central tenets of biblical typology, and the expansion of this methodology in the sixteenth century to include the present within a continuing process of typological fulfilment. The chapter concludes by elucidating how typology points up the capacious, and contradictory, nature of Protestant literalism, and the contested nature of reformed hermeneutics more generally.