Enigma and Revelation in Renaissance Literature

This volume explores how the literature of the English Renaissance was informed by and involved with the twin concepts of ‘enigma’ and ‘revelation.’ The collection includes new readings of poetry, prose, and play-texts. Taken together, these essays suggest that ‘enigma’ and ‘revelation’ (both terms which have profound biblical connotations) are at the very heart of English literature of the Henrican, the Elizabethan, and the Jacobean courts. Each of the essays is radical in the readings it offers of an individual text and their myriad contexts - by turns political, religious, and linguistic/aesthetic. However, the cumulative force of these studies is to suggest that ‘enigma’ and ‘revelation’ were in fact characteristic of, and even central to, the composition and interpretation of the literature of the English Renaissance.