The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature

Abstract

This book explores the fall of Jerusalem and restores to its rightful place one of the key explanatory tropes of early modern English culture. Showing the importance of Jerusalem's destruction in sermons, ballads, puppet shows and provincial drama of the period, Beatrice Groves brings a new perspective to works by canonical authors such as Marlowe, Nashe, Shakespeare, Dekker and Milton. The volume also offers a historically compelling and wide-ranging account of major shifts in cultural attitudes towards Judaism by situating texts in their wider cultural and theological context. Groves examines the continuities and differences between medieval and early modern theatre, London as an imagined community and the way that narratives about Jerusalem and Judaism informed notions of English identity in the wake of the Reformation. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this volume will interest researchers and upper-level students of early modern literature, religious studies and theatre.

Before Shakespeare, during the Renaissance: John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester (d. 1470) and the uses of Padua

“…The patterns of devotional travel of which Tipoft and Wey were two representatives continued apace for at least a half-century after their pilgrimage, and a journey from England to the Holy Land was not entirely unheard of in Shakespeare's own lifetime. 42 The best-remembered of those later travellers is Thomas Coryat (d. 1617), who spoke of his time in Padua. We might detect some similarities between his experience of the city's holy sites and that of Tiptoft.…”