Tropologies – Ethics and Invention in England, c.1350–1600

"This is a major book, which takes us back to a body of well-known vernacular texts and asks us to look at them in an entirely new light. Students of the history of Christian thought and of Middle English literature alike will want to pay careful attention to Tropologies as it traces the close connections between medieval biblical exegesis and vernacular poetics and demonstrates the extent of their interdependence. McDermott’s concern is with literary and religious history, bringing often brilliant new insights to the study of the relationship of Latin and vernacular, the effects of the Reformation on the practice of 'thinking with Scripture,' and the poems and plays that lie at the center of his analysis. In another sense, however, Tropologies is itself an exercise in tropological exegesis, obliging us to confront basic questions about the ethical demands of writing, reading, and living in time. It will be widely read and broadly influential." —Nicholas Watson, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature, Harvard University

"Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600 is a work of great and generous ambition, of intelligence both sharp and warm. It takes with equal seriousness the concerns of literary scholarship in our present and the concerns of biblical exegesis in the medieval and Reformation past, and shows how brightly they illuminate each other. At once irenic and challenging, this is a book that needs seriously to be reckoned with." —Steven Justice, Chancellor's Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley

"This is an original book. It draws confidently on a wide range of medieval critical and scholarly work, as well as on a cogent body of contemporary theory and theology. It not only moves easily and eloquently between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries but also delves back into the 'tropological' Christian thought of the previous thousand years." —Nicolette Zeeman, University of Cambridge

“Ryan McDermott offers an impressive new study on biblical interpretation with Tropologies. He pushes us to consider, to an extent heretofore not done, the importance of the tropological mode of biblical interpretation, which is an approach to finding ethical meaning in biblical passages (even or especially those without explicit moral messages), not only for the late medieval and early modern periods, but also in present day biblical studies.” —Reading Religion

Ryan McDermott is assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.