Renaissance Profanations: Religion and Literature in the Age of Agamben

Abstract

RENAISSANCE PROFANATION S: RELIGION AND LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF AGAMBEN Julia Reinhard Lupton Christmas wars,‘ priest holes,’jewtowns,3 suspect saints,‘ and bare mined choirs-q have become increasingly familiar monuments on the scholarly land- scape of the English Renaissance. Uneven development, missed encounters, imperfect suppressions, and uncanny returns have displaced or modified national narratives of Protestant ascendancy; in this massive redistricting project, moreover, the porous, self-reflexive catacombs of literature extend sanctuary to freshly conjured memories of confessional diversity, recusant terror, state-sanctioned martyrdom, and crises in conformity. Thanks to the rise of anthropological and materialist approaches to religion, scholars are more likely to engage a range of media, performance practices, and ritual objects in the search to variegate our picture of religious life and thought as well as the different shapes and possibilities for secularization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.“ And it’s not all historicism. The “religious turn” in critical theory and philosophy, which includes or addresses work by such figures as Derrida, Marion, Lubac, Schmitt, Kantorowicz, Agamben, Ba- diou, Ziiek, and Santner, has encouraged Renaissance scholars to pursue questions of religious expression, confessional conflict, and post-religious forms of life via exegetical and philosophical frameworks that look to the early modern period for their points of departure, but spread their roots RG51 41.2 (Summer 2009) 246

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