Doctor Faustus Research Articles

Anti-Theatrical Costume: Catholic Vestments and Post-Reformation Visual Rhetoric in Doctor Faustus

Anti-Theatrical Costume: Catholic Vestments and Post-Reformation Visual Rhetoric in Doctor Faustus

Anti-Theatrical Costume: Catholic Vestments and Post-Reformation Visual Rhetoric in Doctor Faustus

Anti-Theatrical Costume: Catholic Vestments and Post-Reformation Visual Rhetoric in Doctor Faustus

THEOLOGY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE: FROM CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE TO ALEXANDER POPE

Generally, it is not obvious to people that theology has contributed a lot in the formation of English literature. So, this paper tries to picture and convince how the writings of English Literature writers have impacts and influences in themselves from the biblical theology. Writers like William Shakespeare uses the theology of grace in his play All’s Well That’s End Well. John Milton pens theology of Freedom of Choice.John Donne writes Trinitarian Theology. Christopher Marlowe shows the theology of Doctor Faustus, which shines under the title like purgatory the highest junction. Alexander Pope reflects the theology of participation in self Salvation and shows theodicy in his work. Theology and English literature go together. They are inseparable. Theology is interwoven in English Literature. It appears convincingly that William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, and Alexander Pope have sufficiently left grains in their writings which compel to justify the significance of theology in English Literature.Thus, a high degree of significance the biblical theology immerges within the arena of English Literature which may be taught to the English literature readers with a well stuff of biblical theology which is very much beneficial for the understanding of English literature knowers.

Faustus Face to Face with Damnation: Another Morality Model

This article employs close textual analysis to propose as a source for the final despairing soliloquy of the protagonist of Christopher Marlowe's tragedy _Doctor Faustus_ (1592) the analogous despair of the protagonist of the neo-Latin tragedy _Mercator seu Judicium_ (1540) by the German Protestant polemecist Thomas Kirchmeyer (alias Naogeorgus). In addition, the French translation of this work by Jean Crespin, as _Le Marchant converti_ (1558), appears to have influenced the anonymous revisers of Marlowe's original tragedy (the so-called A-text), who supplied the scene (in the B-text) with a more spectacular theatrical dimension, including a gaping hell-mouth. Finally, comparison is also made with the soliloquy of the penitent Usurer in the fantastic biblical morality play, _A Looking Glass for London and England_, by Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene (1589-90), which also owes a debt to Kirchmeyer. The fact that the Usurer is finally saved by the gift of divine mercy, as also is Kirchmeyer's Mercator, intertextually throws into relief the damnation of Faustus and highlights Marlowe's problematic evocation of the question of pre-destination.

Thomas Mann’s depiction of neurosyphilis and other diseases

ABSTRACTThomas Mann (1875–1955), a Nobel Prize recipient rightly considered one of the great novelists of the twentieth century, was one of the most medically perceptive writers of recent times. His novels take place against the background of the different plagues (tuberculosis, cholera) that characterized the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of Mann’s later novels, Doctor Faustus, is set against a background of syphilis. In the 500-page book, which is subtitled The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as told by a Friend, we see the theologian turned composer make a pact with the devil. He “voluntarily” contracts syphilis and, as a result of the pact and despite (or because of) the disease, Leverkühn starts a brilliant 24-year career, becoming the greatest German composer of his time. While it is widely thought that Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) is the model for Leverkühn, we will show that other composers of the time also inspired the fictitious musician’s life and works. We will also illustrate the parallel between Leverkühn’s disease progression and political events in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and their similarity with current political events.

民衆本『ファウスト博士』と『フォースタス博士』 : 教訓から物語へ

民衆本『ファウスト博士』と『フォースタス博士』 : 教訓から物語へ

Doctor Faustusand the Art of Dying Badly

<i>Doctor Faustus</i>and the Art of Dying Badly

Pacts with the devil in the European stage: Christopher Marlowe and Lope de Vega

Roughly at the same moment, Christopher Marlowe, in England, and Lope de Vega, in Spain, composed a drama which included a pact with the devil: Faust and La gran columna fogosa . Marlowe, fascinated with Doctor Faustus’s legend, rendered it as a tragedy, simultaneously opening and closing the scenic path of the motif in England. On the other side, Lope exploited the theatrical power of a hagiographical legend linked to Saint Basil’s and composed one of his first comedias de vidas de santos . This paper analyses the deep differences regarding the modeling of the theme, concerning both characterization and structure.

Basquiat Cases: Hamlet, Doctor Faustus, and The Alchemist at the Royal Shakespeare Company

Basquiat Cases: Hamlet, Doctor Faustus, and The Alchemistat the Royal Shakespeare Company Grace Godwin HamletPresented by The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK. 03 12– 08 13, 2016. Directed by Simon Godwin. Designed by Paul Wills. Lighting designed by Paul Anderson. Composed by Sola Akingbola. Fights by Kevin McCurdy. With James Cooney (Rosencrantz), Bethan Cullinane (Guildenstern), Paapa Essiedu (Hamlet), Griffiths (Laertes), Byron Mondahl (Professor of Wittenberg/English Ambassador), Tanya Moodie (Gertrude), Cyril Nri (Polonius), Natalie Simpson (Ophelia), Clarence Smith (Claudius), Ewart James Walters (Ghost/Gravedigger), and others. Doctor FaustusPresented by The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK. 02 4– 08 4, 2016. Directed by Maria Aberg. Designed by Naomi Dawson. Lighting designed by Lee Curran. Music by Orlando Gough. Fights by Kate Waters. With Will Bliss (Valdes/Good Angel/Scholar), Jade Croot (Helen of Troy), John Cummins (Cornelius/Evil Angel/Friar), Sandy Grierson (Doctor Faustus/Mephistopheles), Nicholas Lumley (Wagner/Friar), Oliver Ryan (Doctor Faustus/Mephistopheles), Timothy Speyer (Pope), Eleanor Wyld (Lucifer/Scholar/Friar), and others. The AlchemistPresented by The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK. 05 26– 08 6, 2016. Directed by Polly Findlay. Designed by Helen Goddard. Lighting designed by Charles Balfour. Composed by Corin Buceridge. Fights by Kate Waters. With John Cummins (Ananias), Richard Leeming (Abel Drugger), Mark Lockyer (Subtle), Tom McCall (Kastril), Joshua McCord (Dapper), Siobhan McSweeney (Doll Common), Ken Nwosu (Face), Ian Redford (Sir Epicure Mammon), Tim Samuels (Sir Pertinax Surly), Timothy Speyer (Tribulation Wholesome), and others. [End Page 675] The summer saw a series of major auctions, including one in New York that shattered the record price for a canvas. Fixated on the eye-popping bottom lines, publicity pieces hyping the sales barely registered that 2016 was also a major Basquiat anniversary, marking thirty-five years since he achieved gallery representation and merited the Artforumprofile that brought his work to the attention of connoisseurs with little access to the SAMO©—a portmanteau/epocope for “same old shit”—tagged graffiti with which the artist made his name. In contrast, anniversaries were very much in the news in Stratford-upon-Avon where, for the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death, more of the “SAMO” simply would not do. The most high-profile event was Shakespeare Live!, a starry evening with a title that could be read as a descriptor of the April 23 BBC broadcast, or a hortatory appeal for a resurrection at Holy Trinity Church. Among the scenes, songs, and dances was a cheeky sketch wherein a gloom of Hamlets debated the ictics of “To be or not to be.” Benedict Cumberbatch, David Tennant, Rory Kinnear, and Sir Ian McKellen represented experienced Danes; Dames Harriet Walter and Judi Dench teased what might have been; Tim Minchin provided comic relief; and HRH Prince Charles himself tottered on stage to offer royal resolution. The company of royals and Shakespeareans ostensibly assembled to tutor Paapa Esseidu, the first black RSC Hamlet, in a production that overtly referenced the year’s other anniversary artist and his assertion that “the black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings” (qtd. in McGuigan 32). Though the influence was less obvious, traces of Jean-Michel Basquiat also appeared in Maria Aberg’s breath-taking Faustusand Polly Findlay’s vigorous Alchemist, rendering all three plays and their protagonists a trio of unlikely Basquiat Cases. Though born in New York to a Haitian father and mother of Puerto Rican background, Basquiat was adamant that his “roots come from Africa” (qtd. in Fretz 151), and summer 2016 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the artist’s dealer-arranged visit to that continent. RSC director Simon Godwin acknowledged his own star’s Ghanaian heritage by placing Elsinore in a West African Denmark, all hazy orange skies, overworked ceiling fans, and fervently chirping insects. Bernardo and “Francisca” exchanged the text’s “bitter cold” (1.1.6) for the djembe/dunun drums that signaled the Ghost, the large machine gun of the soldier delivering letters to Horatio lent fearsome plausibility to pirates lurking off Cape Verde rather than in the North Sea, and the wooden masks and syncretic...

Christopher Marlowe and the Failure to Unify by Andrew Duxfield

Reviewed by: Christopher Marlowe and the Failure to Unifyby Andrew Duxfield David McInnis (bio) Andrew Duxfield. Christopher Marlowe and the Failure to Unify. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. viii + 164. $112.00. Scholarship has often focused on the role of excess in the plays of Christopher Marlowe, from his overreaching protagonists and their aggrandizing dreams of imperial expansion or accumulation of riches and knowledge to the sumptuousness of the playwright's "mighty line" and the exotic worlds created by Marlowe's language. Andrew Duxfield's study instead focuses on "the process of reduction and the ideal of unity" exhibited in Marlowe's tragedies (1). Noting the widespread concerns in the 1580s over "the discordance of society and desire [End Page 113]for a move towards unity" (3), Duxfield argues that Marlovian drama explores such anxieties but does so in tension with his more typically noted emphasis on expansion, renegotiating and undercutting any attempt at reduction via the sheer ambiguity of the plays (1). The drive to unity as Duxfield describes it encompassed state, personal, and spiritual concerns (5), and is treated skeptically by Marlowe, who consistently produces an air of "moral ambiguity" in his tragedies, often through irresolution (5). The first chapter, on Dido, Queen of Carthage, argues that Marlowe "presents the world as an indeterminate and ambiguous place which is resistant to reductive, unifying projects" (37), focusing on the moral ambiguity of Marlowe's Aeneas (his indecisiveness and lack of chivalry) and his failure to live up to Virgilian expectations. Authority itself is ambiguous in the world of Dido, where the petty and humanized role of the gods serves "to deny the audience a stable moral framework on which to build their interpretation of the play" (22). "Moral indeterminacy" is also fostered by the dichotomizing of duty and desire in this play, which serves as an "integral device" for the interrogation of authority (28). The reduction of the translatio imperiimyth to a vehicle for English imperial propaganda is resisted and problematized, and the attempt to unify through "national self-fashioning" (33) is seen as highly fraught. The megalomaniac Tamburlaine's attempts to "subdue the known world and unify it under his yoke" (39) is the focus of chapter 2, where the infinite variety of the world ultimately cannot be reduced to a map to confute blind geographers. Duxfield argues that a "profound uneasiness" accompanies the plays' attempts at colonial and cartographic reduction (46), and that Tamburlaine's ultimate failure is the result of the disjunction between his reductive view of the world and himself (he thinks only in absolutes) and the more complex reality. The moral, physiological, and religious ambiguities of the protagonist are examined, the latter (especially his oscillation between acknowledging various faiths and remaining atheistic) preventing him from "creating a spiritually unified self-projection" (54). Familial and emotional factors further contribute to the fundamental inability of Tamburlaine to reduce complexity to a unified and unitary identity (63). In chapter 3, Doctor Faustus's failure to achieve the "unification of knowledge" he so desperately craves (66) is seen as the source of his tragedy. The ambivalent nature of the protagonist's moral identity and the play's inherent generic ambiguity (caught midway, as it were, between a medieval morality play and a Renaissance tragedy, as numerous critics have noted) exacerbate the situation: the play displays "a sceptical awareness of the incompatibility of different ideologies that co-existed in this period" (87), offering to be everything but failing to unify as any one thing. An especially interesting contribution in this chapter is the reading of Marlowe's [End Page 114]play through the lens of Hermeticism and its attempts to reconcile religion with the pursuit of knowledge to "potentially provide a solution to the religio-political schism of the time" (87). The possibility of religio-political unification is pursued further in chapter 4's focus on both The Jew of Maltaand The Massacre at Paris, and the tension in each between the "multitude" and the "individual." In Malta, Barabas famously occupies a "paradoxical state of belonging and not belonging" (90), effectively sacrificed by the governor in order to bring about...

Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the French Translation of the Faustbuch

Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the French Translation of the Faustbuch

Thomas Mann in English

Thomas Mann in English

The comedy of terrors: ideology and comedy in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

ABSTRACTWhile much recent scholarship asserts that the dark humor of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1589–1591) has a critical function, the political meaning of the comic elements of Doctor Faustus (1588–1593) has been largely ignored. This article aims to explore the critical function of comedy in the A-text of Doctor Faustus. The article does not mainly focus on the farcical scenes of the play, but argues that comedy pervades many parts – particularly the beginning – that have traditionally been read as ‘serious’ and even tragic. Inspired by Alenka Zupančič’s philosophical work on comedy, The Odd One In (2008), it is further argued that this comic undercurrent alters our perception of the protagonist and his bargain with Mephistopheles from elements in a metaphysical drama to figures in a critical exploration of the material life of ideas – especially the official religious and political doctrines of the Elizabethan state. Seen from the perspective of comedy, Doctor Faustus thus invites its early modern audience to reflect on the paradoxes of ideology as a both real and illusory mediator between state power and the subject.

Hellish Falls: Faustus's Dismemberment, Phaeton's Limbs and Other Renaissance Aviation Disasters—Part II

ABSTRACTThe first part of this essay (published in a previous issue of English Studies) grounded Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in the grisly history of Renaissance aviation. This continuation instead situates Marlowe's tragedy alongside other “Icarian” plays in the Admiral's repertoire that likely featured vertical ascents followed by horrific falls. While Part I spotlighted the links between Faustus and the failed aviators Icarus, Lucifer and Simon Magus, Part II reveals how Faustus's death evokes the flight disasters and subsequent dismemberments of Bladud and Phaeton—both of whom apparently featured in lost plays at the Rose. In presenting Faustus's “mangled limbs” on stage, the Admiral's Men would likely have recycled “Faetones lymes”, listed in Henslowe's property inventory. Phaeton's death could thus have provided an important literary and theatrical antecedent for the staging of Faustus's “hellish fall”. Collectively, these two articles hold a candle to the repertorial practices of the Admiral's Men, while showing how Repertory Studies can illuminate new dimensions of familiar plays like Faustus.

The fertile physics of chemical gardens

Many a child has enjoyed watching the gardens grow; many a physicist has puzzled over the transformation of self-organized, nonequilibrium patterns into permanent structures.

Editing for Performance or Documenting Performance?: Exploring the Relationship Between Early Modern Text and Clowning

Editing for Performance or Documenting Performance?:Exploring the Relationship Between Early Modern Text and Clowning Stephen Purcell The complexity of the relationship between writing and performance on the early modern stage is particularly evident in its scenes of clowning. A performance tradition that relied upon a combination of scripted and unscripted speech, clowning resists documentation in printed form: indeed, printing turns it into something else entirely. As Richard Preiss has noted in his recent book on early modern clowning, [a] playbook is not a performance: it is the retrospective fantasy of one, abstracted from the play’s synchronic and diachronic stage lives, privileging certain voices over others, retroactively framing playgoing as a continuous, monological, readerly experience. (6) It might be helpful to think of the printed record of clowning scenes (and indeed of early modern drama more broadly) along the lines of the “geological metaphor” used by Michael Keefer in his 2007 edition of the play to describe the 1616 text of Doctor Faustus: as “the product of distinct phases of sedimentation and partial subduction” (20). Unlike those of a geological specimen, of course, the layers of sedimentation in a printed text are impossible to separate from one another. The metaphor is nonetheless useful to describe the multiple processes of scripting, performing, transcribing, copying, remembering, rescripting and reperforming that underlie the composition of an early modern playbook. In 2012, I undertook an exploration of the Doctor Faustus clown scenes in an open workshop with actors from The Pantaloons theater company. This was not an “excavation” of the text: there was no attempt to recover original practice. It was, rather, an attempt to gain an insight into the [End Page 5] structures underpinning such scenes, and to explore the ways in which layers of textual sedimentation might build up through a new process of scripting, improvisation, remembering, and rescripting. The workshop explored the differences between the clowning scenes of the two surviving texts of Doctor Faustus (1604 and 1616), and encouraged the actors to analyze the structure of one scene in particular before generating their own semi-improvised version of it. In order to approximate the process of memorial reconstruction and gain a practical sense of the differences between semi-improvised performance and textual accounts of it, I then asked the workshop audience to take notes and translate the resulting performance back into text. This article gives an overview of some of the ways in which the scene travelled through its various performative and textual forms, and speculates as to the relationship between clowning and text on the early modern stage and page. The texts of Doctor Faustus bear the traces of the play’s early performance history. The 1616 text, or B-text, is considerably longer than the earlier version, containing 676 additional lines. Recent scholarship has tended to conclude that the 1604 A-text is probably closest to the version of the play that was performed towards the end of Marlowe’s life (c. 1588), and that the B-text represents William Birde and Samuel Rowley’s revised version (for which Philip Henslowe recorded a payment in 1602). The B-text alone includes such episodes as Faustus’s rescue of Saxon Bruno from the Pope (3.1), and the three-scene sequence in which the knight humiliated by Faustus in 4.1, here named Benvolio, plots a revenge that subsequently backfires (4.1, 4.2, 4.3).1 The B-text also features two additional comic scenes, in which the clowns meet the horse-courser who was earlier cozened by Faustus (4.5), and then return in the subsequent scene to be humiliated at the court of the Duke of Vanholt (4.6). Curiously, though, despite the B-text’s greater overall length, the first clown scene, 1.4, is longer in the A-text. This first scene stages the meeting between the play’s primary clown, Robin, and Faustus’s servant Wagner. Wagner’s lines are substantially similar in both texts, but the A-text’s Clown is much more verbose than his equivalent in B. The second clown scene, 2.2, features a similar scenario in both texts—Robin has stolen one of Faustus’s books, and...

Hellish Falls: Faustus's Dismemberment, Phaeton's Limbs and Other Renaissance Aviation Disasters—Part I

ABSTRACTWith its aerial voyages and ominous allusions to the failed aviators Icarus, Lucifer and Simon Magus, Doctor Faustus presents an uncanny commentary on the Renaissance dream of flight. This article uncovers Marlowe's infatuation with human flight as the ultimate act of physical, intellectual and spiritual trangression. So the grisly addition to the B-text, in which a group of scholars examine—like a forensics team at a crash site—the carnage of Faustus's “mangled limbs”, is more than a lurid flourish. Mangled limbs are splattered all over the annals of pre-modern aviation. While implicating the play in Renaissance aeronautics, this study of Faustus also has some eye-opening implications for theatre history. Faustus was penned at a time when on-stage ascents and descents became increasingly feasible, and Marlowe's Icarian muse may have spurred the Admiral's Men to interpolate more spectacular flying effects, taking advantage of the throne, pulleys and dragons recorded in Henslowe's Diary. The revisions to Faustus not only showcase the flight-simulation capabilities of the Admiral's playhouses but also associate Marlowe's conjuror with other presumptuous aeronauts in the company's repertoire. In particular, Part II of this essay (to be published in a forthcoming issue of English Studies) will argue that Faustus's “hellish fall” and dismemberment mirrors that of Phaeton, the titular protagonist of a lost play performed by the Admiral's Men in 1598. While reading the fall of these characters as a literal enactment of de casibus tragedy, Part II concludes that the increasingly sophisticated aerial stunts reflect a technological optimism about transhuman flight that undercuts the Chorus's warning not to “practice more than heavenly power permits”.

Dialectic and logic in Aristotle and his tradition

Sweet Analytics, ‘tis thou hast ravish'd me,Bene disserere est finis logices.Is to dispute well logic's chiefest end?Affords this art no greater miracle?(Christopher Marlow, Doctor Faustus, Act 1, ...

Being Staged: Unconcealment through Reading and Performance in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Bharata’s Nātyaśāstra

In exploring the ethical significance of the performative, if blasphemous, dimensions of the momentous events in Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus , this essay deploys insights from an ancient Sanskrit manual on drama, Bharata’s Nātyaśāstra , and its early eleventh-century commentary by Abhinavagupta. Bharata states that the aesthetic ‘essence’ ( rasa ) of theater emerges out of the functioning of vibhāva (the stimulus, the determinant device that produces affect in the audience), anubhāva (the enacted response and bodily expressions of emotion), and vyabhiċāri bhāva (the minor, passing, and mixed bhāvas produced by the major sentiments). Is there a simultaneous bid for the performative as constituting ethical identity ? If so, whose identity are we talking about — the portrayed character’s, the performer’s, or the viewer’s? Such are the questions that link this discussion of Marlowe and Shakespeare with Abhinavagupta’s gloss on the relevant passage in Bharata. Perhaps the early modern English stage had an intuition that was beyond the range of the discursive apparatus of Bharata or Abhinavagupta. It was the intuition that a performed moment of choice was more than fictive. It was constitutive of the ethical selfhood that accounts for Doctor Faustus being still such a disturbing play for viewers.

The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare by Heather Hirschfeld

Reviewed by: The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare by Heather Hirschfeld Eric D. Vivier (bio) Keywords early modern English drama, turn to religion, penitence, atonement, Merchant of Venice, Othello, English Reformation Heather Hirschfeld. The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. xii + 256 pages. $55.00. Heather Hirschfeld’s excellent new book explores the cultural and dramatic resonances of a central but often overlooked aspect of the Reformation in England: the impossibility of expiatory atonement in Reformed theology. Whereas other literary scholars and historians have discussed “more spectacular points of religious conflict, such as purgatory, iconoclasm, or the Eucharist,” Hirschfeld makes a convincing case for the significance of the redefinition of “repentance, atonement, and satisfaction,” which gave rise to considerable psychological anxiety and structural vicissitudes across a range of cultural practices and institutions (29). Hirschfeld explores the theological implications of the impossibility of doing or making “enough” in penitential satisfaction for several such practices and institutions—ecclesiastical debate, revenge, finance, and marriage—which she pairs with refreshing and nuanced readings of some of the period’s most important plays: Doctor Faustus, The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello. She examines the ways these plays work through questions of “enough” in repentance, and in her “Post-Script” she suggests that the theater offered the possibility and the pleasure of satisfaction no longer available in Reformed theology. Hirschfeld situates her work squarely in the so-called turn to religion in early modern literary studies. Such work assumes that the early modern secular and theological realms were inseparably intertwined, and that religious practice and doctrine cannot be reduced to or subsumed under the heading of “politics,” “economics,” or “power.” Like Sarah Beckwith, Huston Diehl, Bryan Crockett, Elizabeth Mazzola, Michael O’Connell, John Stachniewski, and Adrian Streete, Hirschfeld’s primary interest is the way early modern English drama acted as both an arena and an archive for the public exploration of radical [End Page 145] doctrinal change: “doctrine is itself a language, an aesthetic, and a structuring of meaning,” she claims, “and it remained in our period in crucial, mutual dialogue with the lived practices we associate with dramatic performance and content” (14–15). She examines an impressive range of ecclesiastical texts, conduct manuals, and other non-dramatic texts—spanning multiple periods, languages, and geographical origins—in order to chart this dialogue, and in doing so she navigates potential literary, historical, and theological minefields with experienced precision. Hirschfeld acknowledges the work by historians and literary scholars who have insisted upon continuities between the medieval and early modern periods in general and between Catholic and Protestant theology in particular, but she demonstrates the way that Protestant reformers emphasized “the radical difference of their model of repentance and its connection to solfidianism”—the Protestant doctrine of sola fide, or justification through faith alone (33). Whereas Catholic penance allowed for human beings to be agents in their own repentance—to do enough in order to satisfy God for their sins and thus to be satisfied in return—Luther and Calvin put renewed stress on original sin and insisted that men and women could never do enough to atone for it. What was for Catholics an increasingly calculable and precise transaction between God and the sinner was for Protestants entirely one-sided: human beings could only be justified through the inexplicable mercy of Christ’s passion, God bestowed his grace when and on whom he pleased, and repentance was the effect of this grace (and therefore the mark of election) rather than its cause. Hirschfeld’s most important historical claim is that this idea of “satisfaction” became “the premier shibboleth” for “differentiating Protestant from Catholic repentance,” and that the Reformation therefore “marks the historical juncture at which satis was satis only for Christ, when humans recalibrated—and rejected—their potential for doing enough in matters of atonement” (34–36). Hirschfeld’s chapters on the Descensus Tradition and revenge tragedy are particularly notable for her deep ecclesiological, historical, and generic contextualization. Her second chapter traces the consequences of penitential recalibration for the Reformation debate about Christ’s descent into Hell. Whereas...