James S. Baumlin

Redescribing renaissance literature as a battleground of competing “theologies of language,” Baumlin reads Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Donne’s Songs and Sonets, and Milton’s “Lycidas” within a revisionist history of rhetoric: these works, Baumlin argues, mark stages in the Weberian Entzauberung or “disenchantment” of literature, as they move from the word-magic of medieval Catholicism to a puritan-reformed “rhetoric of certitude.” Historians of rhetoric, of Reformation theology, and of renaissance literature will find this a carefully-argued, controversial, ground-breaking study.

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