Reading 'Martyred Signs': Reformation Hermeneutics and Literature

Reading “Martyred Signs”: Reformation Hermeneutics and LiteraturebyStephanie Meredith BahrDoctor of Philosophy in EnglishUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor David Landreth, Chair This dissertation—Reading “Martyred Signs”: Reformation Hermeneutics and Literature—contends that Reformation struggles over Biblical interpretation generated a violently unstable hermeneutic environment and exerted a defining influence on Renaissance literature. Although the Reformation hinged on the most fundamental question of literary study—how to interpret texts—most literary scholars encounter these Biblical hermeneutics only indirectly, reduced to doctrinal bullet points. Such a distillation misrepresents as stable product an unstable process fraught with violence, in which the stakes of interpretation were torture, execution, and damnation. Through close analysis of Catholic Thomas More’s and Protestant William Tyndale’s theological polemics, my first chapter shows that the very hermeneutic distinctions often reified by current scholarship—that Catholics embraced myriad allegorical senses, whereas Protestants insisted on a solitary literal sense—were actually in perpetual collapse. Although More’s and Tyndale’s interpretive theories are wildly different, their interpretive practices become nearly indistinguishable. I argue that their vicious print battle and its violently unstable hermeneutics shaped Renaissance textuality, poetics, and the fraught categories by which Renaissance readers understood reading. The dominating pressures of these theological hermeneutics cannot be limited to explicitly religious contexts, nor is their influence a purely passive, environmental phenomenon. My next three chapters demonstrate that Thomas Wyatt’s lyric poetry, Edmund Spenser’s epic allegory, and William Shakespeare’s commercial drama actively take up the challenges these violent and contradictory hermeneutics present. Both stylistically and thematically, Wyatt’s verse hangs poi