This is an important book for a right-wing Kuhnian like myself, for it presents an alternative way to deal with the past and frustrates what Pocock would call my “antiquarian interest” in literary texts. With her book on The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature, Beatrice Groves addresses, with the dispassionate solidity of a historicist literary scholar, precisely the ways in which early modern English literature elaborated on the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple as a means to fashion, represent, and elucidate “England’s sense of itself” (6). With her study’s new perspective on this motif in “early modern literary, dramatic, theological, and visual culture” (7), characterized by a series of rereadings of canonical texts in the second part of the book, Groves demonstrates how political and theological discourses in late medieval and Renaissance England used and elaborated what James Shapiro has called “Jewish questions” (the past) in order to “answer English ones” (the present).

The transition highlighted in this study on the Reformation’s re-narration of “the story of the fall of Jerusalem” (51) is therefore not, to use Pocock’s words, one leading from the “synthesizing and allegorizing mind of the Middle Ages” and their “imaginative conflation of the life of antiquity and the life of the contemporary world” to a humanist relegation of the past to the status of a historical narrative lacking “all claim to be applied immediately and directly to modern life” (Ancient Constitution [5]). Quite on the contrary, Groves’s exhaustive work shows, with a variegated series of demonstrative case studies, how the fall of Jerusalem turned from an ahistorical narrative “read in relation to the Incarnation,” and as “a vindictive coda to the Crucifixion” with its “dramatic piece of evidence for God’s transfer of favor from synagoga to ecclesia,” into a persistent “reference to the present time” of Tudor and Stuart England (51). The present of this old-testamentarian past was a central characteristic of English Protestant habits of thought, and while for “traditional Catholic theology” the stories of the Old Testament were a prefiguration of Christ, for the Reformers those narratives were fulfilled not only by the neo-testamentarian texts, but also by their own lives (51).

An excellent example of this merging of past and present in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Protestant exegesis is, as Groves shows, the proximity between the pulpit and the stage, between the sphere of influence of preachers and that of actors. Both were “drawn to the emotive, instructive and prophetic history of Jerusalem’s fall” (86), both “boasted their own ability to bridge and divide between admonition and entertainment” (89), and both preachers and players were constantly intent on “trying to move their audiences, and [use] rhetorical devices” (104). English Protestants “habitually read Jewish history as English prophecy” and thus strengthened “the belief that Jerusalem’s destruction is a warning for England” (109): for these reasons, Groves concludes, spectators attending plays and sermon auditors were “expected to weep over their own sins” by empathetically (and cathartically) identifying their own lives with those of Christ as he wept for the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, and with the daughters of Jerusalem as they shed tears upon Christ’s Crucifixion. Past and present intersected in the consciousness of the individual.

In engaging what she calls the “English attitudes towards Jews” present in “early modern texts,” Groves recognizes in the vast literature she has read a “desire to challenge, not simply transmit, traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes” (230), and concludes the book with a comment on Zwingli’s concept of God’s love for the Jews, stating that “he reclaims it as a sign of brotherhood of Jews and Christians” as they are “both, equally, chastised and treasured children of God” (231). In this way, Groves herself uses the past and its narratives as the means to understand and fashion her present. This work is not only a major contribution to the understanding of early modern English Protestant elaborations on the destruction of Jerusalem, and of the use of historical narratives in the fashioning and understanding of the present: her work rereads early modern English literature to enhance the dialogue between the two sides of an (apparently) irreconcilable dichotomy.