The expressive and literary capacities of post-Reformation English were largely shaped in response to the Bible. Faith in the Language examines the convergence of biblical interpretation and English literature, from William Tyndale to John Donne, and argues that the groundwork for a newly authoritative literary tradition in early modern England is laid in the discourse of biblical hermeneutics. The period 1525-1611 witnessed a proliferation of English biblical versions, provoking a century-long debate about how and whether the Bible should be rendered in English. These public, indeed institutional accounts of biblical English changed the language: questions about the relation between Scripture and exegetical tradition that shaped post-Reformation hermeneutics bore strange fruit in secular literature that defined itself through varying forms of autonomy vis-a-vis prior tradition.

Jamie H. Ferguson is Associate Professor of Honors and English at the University of Houston. 

Chapter 1: Introduction: Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England.- Part I: Reformation Hermeneutics and the Meaning of English.- Chapter 2: Biblical Authority and the Meaning of English in the More-Tyndale Polemics.- Chapter 3: The Roman Inkhorn: Literary and Religious Resistance to Latinism in the English Renaissance.- Part II: Reformation Hermeneutics and Sidneian Poiesis.- Chapter 4: Biblical Hermeneutics and Poiesis in Philip Sidney's Apology and the Sidney Psalter.- Part III: Reformation Hermeneutics and Post-Petrarchan Poetics.- Chapter 5: Tradition and Tautology in Shakespeare's Sonnets.- Chapter 6: Tradition and Invention in the Songs and Sonets and Sermons of John Donne.