Books by Jennifer Rust
In The Body in Mystery, Jennifer R. Rust takes the political concept of the mystical body of the ... more In The Body in Mystery, Jennifer R. Rust takes the political concept of the mystical body of the commonwealth, back to the corpus mysticum of the medieval church. Rust argues that the communitarian ideal of sacramental sociality had a far longer afterlife than has been previously assumed. Reviving a critical discussion of Ernst Kantorowicz’s masterwork, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957), Rust brings to bear the latest scholarship, and expands the representation of the corpus mysticum through a range of literary genres as well as religious polemics and political discourses. She reclaims the concept as an essential category of social value and historical understanding for the imaginative life of the major literature of Reformation England. The Body in Mystery provides new ways of appreciating the always rich and sometimes difficult continuities between the secular and sacred in early modern England.
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Papers by Jennifer Rust
Textual Practice, 2023
Discourses of health and disease pervade More's Utopia. The text insistently plays upon the ambig... more Discourses of health and disease pervade More's Utopia. The text insistently plays upon the ambiguities of salus, a term with a wide semantic range including spiritual salvation, the physical health of the individual body, and the wider welfare of the commonwealth. More's text draws on this network of metaphors of health, disease and medicine to transfigure forms of Christian pastoral government in a radical experiment in state governmentality. The Utopian hospital is a microcosm of the Utopian project, yet its prominence in the spatial structure of the ideal republic reveals tensions between individual and collective forms of care. More's text can be productively put into dialogue with Foucault's analysis of the Christian pastorate as a significant precursor to liberal governmentality and modern medical institutions. More and Foucault illuminate the long pastoral legacy of medical institutions, including the hospital as a governmental space with utopian and dystopian possibilities.
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Political Theology, 2021
Foucault’s genealogy of pastoral power as “a power of care” challenges us to think of modern medi... more Foucault’s genealogy of pastoral power as “a power of care” challenges us to think of modern medical institutions and practices in terms of political theology by emphasizing their continuities with older ecclesiastical practices. Both ecclesiastical and medical forms of pastoral power generate forms of resistance or “counter-conduct” with theological and biopolitical implications. Foucault’s prescient remarks on the relationship between forms of religious counter-conduct and modern movements to resist vaccines and other public health measures raise questions about the legacy of pastoral power in the contemporary world and the limits of rhetorical appeals to science and medical rationality.
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Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare, ed. Christopher Pye. Northwestern University Press, 2020
“Bottom’s Dream” at the end of act 4 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has long been rec... more “Bottom’s Dream” at the end of act 4 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has long been recognized as an extended allusion to Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. This passage also develops a complex version of political aesthetics. In this essay, I trace how the peculiar aesthetics of Bottom’s discourse are intertwined with the theological and political concerns of the Pauline text. The aesthetics of “Bottom’s Dream” are intrinsically linked to the way that Paul’s epistle composes the mystical body, a major trope for religious and social order in premodern Europe. Paul’s text develops the incarnational and eschatological elements of the mystical body that will form the foundation for a liturgical tradition that remained resonant into the sixteenth century. Bottom’s allusive vision maintains an essential relation to the eschatological aspects of the Pauline original even as its synesthetic elements reimagine the incarnational dimensions of Paul’s text. “Bottom’s Dream” merges aesthetics with politics and theology, but this aesthetics cannot be reduced to either pure politics or theology. Ultimately, the multifaceted character of this aesthetic vision resists becoming assimilated to the instrumental politics of the Athenian elite at the end of the play.
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Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare, Ed. Katherine Steele Brokaw and Jay Zysk. Northwestern University Press., 2019
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The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion, Ed. Hannibal Hamlin. Cambridge University Press. , 2019
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This article argues that elements of Michel Foucault's genealogy of governmentality, specifically... more This article argues that elements of Michel Foucault's genealogy of governmentality, specifically his account of premodern Christian pastoral government and resistances to it, illuminate crucial aspects of Ben Jonson's 1610 comedy The Alchemist. Pastoral government, an array of tactics that seek to direct the intrinsic qualities of persons and things toward salvific ends, is a more relevant paradigm for understanding the alchemical plot of the play than sovereignty, which is focused on the assertion of autonomous rights and external laws. The sovereign challenged in this reading is primarily the figure of the sovereign individual, the agent of capitalism and liberalism that critics often discern emerging from Jonson's play. Analyzing the play in relation to a genealogy of governmentality throws the secularity and sovereignty of the individual characters into question insofar as they are compelled to act within an alchemical scheme governed by pastoral principles.
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While John Foxe’s sixteenth century Actes and Monuments (Book of Martyrs) is recognized as a foun... more While John Foxe’s sixteenth century Actes and Monuments (Book of Martyrs) is recognized as a foundational document for an emergent English national identity and a key record of early Protestant subjectivity, I argue that this document of historical progress actually recapitulates rather than discards earlier religious traditions. I demonstrate how The Book of Martyrs renovates the social and sacramental concept of the corpus mysticum, inherited from the Middle Ages, in specifically Protestant martyrological terms. Both textually and visually, Foxe’s work displaces sacramental theology from Eucharistic celebration to martyrological narrative in order to produce a reformed English corpus mysticum. To the extent that Foxe’s work pursues a political as well as theological agenda, this reading reveals how Tudor conceptions of the mystical body perpetuate a communitarian tradition formerly associated with the Catholic Mass.
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Political Theology and Early Modernity, Oct 2012
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The current focus on political theology in Shakespeare studies is largely devoted to tracing how ... more The current focus on political theology in Shakespeare studies is largely devoted to tracing how Shakespeare's dramas illuminate the structural link between religious and political forms in both early modernity and modern liberal democracy. Critics concerned with addressing Shakespeare's engagement with political theology are also interested in how Shakespeare's portrayal of sovereign bodies in crisis constitute an early representation of ‘biopolitics’. These critics draw on theorists ranging from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben to inform their analyses of the way Shakespeare dramatizes sovereignty in a ‘state of emergency’ in his histories and tragedies. Plays such as Richard II, Coriolanus, and Hamlet have drawn particular attention insofar as they vividly interrogate the nature of the sovereign exception and decision highlighted by theorists of political theology. While this line of criticism adds a new theoretical dimension to Shakespeare studies, it also offers the potential for remapping our understanding of the religious and political history of early modern England in its attention to the deforming pressure of religious schism on traditional structures of sovereignty.
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Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism, 2012
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Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, 2003
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Book Reviews by Jennifer Rust
Modern Philology
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Dotan Leshem’s study is a valuable intervention in the larger project of developing a theological... more Dotan Leshem’s study is a valuable intervention in the larger project of developing a theological genealogy of the modern concepts of economy and government, a project inspired by Michel Foucault’s lectures on governmentality in the late 1970s and extended more recently in Giorgio Agamben’s latest contributions to the Homo Sacer series. In my remarks, I will focus mainly on Leshem’s dialogue with Foucault and Agamben, highlighting areas where I believe his work has clarified and furthered their established discourses. I will then turn to several questions that I believe are productively opened in the conclusion of Leshem’s book. These questions revolve around the mechanisms through which the theological heritage of economy mutates into the neoliberal market of the contemporary world. Leshem’s work seems ambivalent about whether this mechanism should be understood as a process of secularization or something more radical. I suggest that a deeper engagement with the Reformation moment, and particularly the classic understanding of the Reformation’s impact on the economic subject established in Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, might be pursued in future work. Moreover, I suggest that a more extended engagement with Foucault’s own account of the transformation of the Christian pastorate in the wake of the Reformation and the pastorate’s implicit transformation into the regime of neoliberal governmentality could also illuminate some of the questions raised by Leshem’s study.
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Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2012
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Renaissance Quarterly, 2011
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Conference Presentations by Jennifer Rust
Jennifer R. Rust (Saint Louis University)
This seminar invites papers that put Foucault’s Colleg... more Jennifer R. Rust (Saint Louis University)
This seminar invites papers that put Foucault’s College de France lectures of the late 1970s into dialogue with early modern literary works. How does late Foucault intersect with recent research on law, political theology, biopolitics, religion? Topics might include: governmentality, pastoral power, counter-conduct, parrhesia, biopower, analytics of “race struggle,” prehistories of liberalism or neoliberalism, or assessments of Foucault’s engagement with figures such as Machiavelli or Hobbes.
Only current members of the SAA are eligible to register
for seminars and workshops for the Los Angeles
meeting ...To join or to renew your membership, visit http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/membership.
The deadline to enroll in seminars and workshops is 15 September 2017.
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Books by Jennifer Rust
Papers by Jennifer Rust
Book Reviews by Jennifer Rust
Conference Presentations by Jennifer Rust
This seminar invites papers that put Foucault’s College de France lectures of the late 1970s into dialogue with early modern literary works. How does late Foucault intersect with recent research on law, political theology, biopolitics, religion? Topics might include: governmentality, pastoral power, counter-conduct, parrhesia, biopower, analytics of “race struggle,” prehistories of liberalism or neoliberalism, or assessments of Foucault’s engagement with figures such as Machiavelli or Hobbes.
Only current members of the SAA are eligible to register
for seminars and workshops for the Los Angeles
meeting ...To join or to renew your membership, visit http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/membership.
The deadline to enroll in seminars and workshops is 15 September 2017.
This seminar invites papers that put Foucault’s College de France lectures of the late 1970s into dialogue with early modern literary works. How does late Foucault intersect with recent research on law, political theology, biopolitics, religion? Topics might include: governmentality, pastoral power, counter-conduct, parrhesia, biopower, analytics of “race struggle,” prehistories of liberalism or neoliberalism, or assessments of Foucault’s engagement with figures such as Machiavelli or Hobbes.
Only current members of the SAA are eligible to register
for seminars and workshops for the Los Angeles
meeting ...To join or to renew your membership, visit http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/membership.
The deadline to enroll in seminars and workshops is 15 September 2017.
"This panel invites papers that explore the idea of the mystical body during the English Reformation. We are particularly interested in papers that relate the mystical body and sacramental theology to larger cultural energies or social relations. Topics may include but are not limited to:
• the mystical body in political discourse
• the mystical body and economy
• the mystical body in early modern English drama or poetry
• rhetorics and poetics of the mystical body
• the mystical body and the body natural (early modern scientific discourses)
• gender and the mystical body
• ideas of the mystical body that span religious confessions or Medieval and Early Modern periodic divides
• the mystical body and ideas of community (sacramental, ecclesiological, political, domestic)
For consideration, please submit a brief abstract of your paper (150 words maximum) and a one-page cv to Jennifer Rust (jrust2@slu.edu) and Jay Zysk (Jay.Zysk@unh.edu) by Monday, June 3, 2013. This panel is sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University."