Tropologies

<p><i>Tropologies</i> is the first book-length study to elaborate the medieval and early modern theory of the tropological or moral sense of scripture. Ryan McDermott argues that tropology is not only a way to interpret the Bible but also a theory of literary and ethical invention. The tropological imperative demands that words be turned into works--books as well as deeds. Beginning with Augustine Jerome and Gregory the Great then treating monuments of exegesis such as the <i>Glossa ordinaria</i> and Nicholas of Lyra as well as theorists including Thomas Aquinas Erasmus Martin Luther and others <i>Tropologies</i> reveals the unwritten history of a major hermeneutical theory and inventive practice. Late medieval and early Reformation writers adapted tropological theory to invent new biblical poetry and drama that would invite readers to participate in salvation history by inventing their own new works. <i>Tropologies</i> reinterprets a wide range of medieval and early modern texts and performances--including the Patience-Poet <i>Piers Plowman</i> Chaucer the York and Coventry cycle plays and the literary circles of the reformist King Edward VI--to argue that tropological invention provided a robust alternative to rhetorical theories of literary production. In this groundbreaking revision of literary history the Bible and biblical hermeneutics commonly understood as sources of tumultuous discord turn out to provide principles of continuity and mutuality across the Reformation's temporal and confessional rifts. Each chapter pursues an argument about poetic and dramatic form linking questions of style and aesthetics to exegetical theory and theology. Because <i>Tropologies</i> attends to the flux of exegetical theory and practice across a watershed period of intellectual history it is able to register subtle shifts in literary production fine-tuning our sense of how literature and religion mutually and dynamically informed and reformed each other.</p>