Ryan McDermott
University of Pittsburgh, English, Faculty Member
- Medieval English Literature, Early Modern Literature, Medieval Theology, Drama, Middle English, Phenomenology, and 10 morePerformance Studies, Reformation Studies, Historical Theology, Theology and Culture, Philosophical Theology, Systematic Theology, Medieval Literature, English Literature, Medieval Studies, and M-RThNedit
- My first book, _Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350-1600_ appeared in 2016 in the University of Not... moreMy first book, _Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350-1600_ appeared in 2016 in the University of Notre Dame Press's ReFormations series (on which more below). A long-term book project, _Genealogies of Modernity: The Bible, Literature, and Vernacular Theology_, challenges influential narratives that locate the origins of modernity in late-medieval and Reformation-era intellectual developments. I am also writing a theology of incorruptibility.
_Tropologies_ attends to the tropological, or moral, sense of scripture in order to illuminate changes and continuities in ethical thought and literature during a period of energetic reform in English religious culture.
In classical Greek the root of “tropology,” tropos, means a turn or a way of life. The first sense—turn—is poetic or rhetorical, in a manner familiar to modern literary critics: a trope was a turn of phrase, and “tropology” treated any use of figurative language. Early Christians capitalized on the term’s double meaning of “turn” and “way of life” to name the sense of scripture that involves the conversion or turning around of life, the moral sense. According to tropological theory, interpretation is never complete without action, and that action can take the form of writing. Tropology, in other words, is never simply an analysis of one text, but an invention of another—fruitful activity, acted out in the production of life and literature, even profane literature.
Texts we think of as “literary” and as “religious” shared the impulse to turn words, especially the words of sacred scripture, into works—books as well as deeds. In debates about the revelatory and ethical functions of scripture, poetry, and drama, reformist writers acknowledged the tropological imperative that Christians embody the text of scripture in their actions. <i>Tropologies</i> integrates literary and religious practices of interpretation and invention in order to shed new light on a shadow tradition of English poetry and drama that has been obscured by Chaucerian, laureate narratives of the invention of English literature. Studying tropology as an engine of literary invention in <i>Piers Plowman</i>, <i>Patience</i>, the York and Coventry biblical cycle plays, and the Reformation literature of King Edward VI's court, my book shows how the possibilities of poetry and drama changed as theology reconceived scripture’s salvific power and institutions reformed the laity’s access to it. At the same time, I treat works of narrative poetry and drama as powerful theological thought machines in their own right, thereby integrating vernacular literary texts more richly into the history of exegesis and religious reform.
_Genealogies of Modernity: The Bible, Literature, and Vernacular Theology_ brings to bear an overlooked corpus of premodern vernacular biblical and devotional literature on conversations about the origins of modernity in modern theology, biblical studies, secularization theory, and ecumenical dialogue. My argument challenges four influential genealogies of modernity:
Genealogy 1. A twelfth-century harmony of theology, biblical studies, and philosophy disintegrated in the fourteenth century when theology became a specialized discipline in its own right, ushering in an age of “free” scientific rationality opposed to faith.
Genealogy 2. An early fourteenth-century interest in the literal meaning of scripture paved the way for historical criticism of the Bible, which led to the rise of natural science.
Genealogy 3. At the same time, some theologians domesticated transcendence when they argued that God exists in the same order of being as humans and the rest of creation, thus putting human freedom in competition with divine freedom.
Genealogy 4. When they affirmed salvation by faith alone, Protestants detached ethics from salvation and evacuated moral discourse of the fundamental vocabulary of virtue.
Four chapters address each of these narratives in turn, using a case study of the transmission of a particular text or discourse from the late Middle Ages to the present, from Robert Grosseteste's 13th-centurty <i>The Castle of Love</I> to the 14th-century <i>Piers Plowman</i> as received in the 17th-century Reformation to vernacular commentary on scripture in the Facebook and mobile app YouVersion, which allows 100 million registered users to share their comments on the Bible.edit
A pre-publication copy of the review for Modern Philology.
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Piers Plowman suggests glum conclusions. The poem ends in disaster with the total corruption of the Church and the undoing of the penitential self as the pitiful Contrition abandons his own allegorical essence. No wonder some of the... more
Piers Plowman suggests glum conclusions. The poem ends in disaster with the total corruption of the Church and the undoing of the penitential self as the pitiful Contrition abandons his own allegorical essence. No wonder some of the poem’s best readers have identified failure as its chief engine of invention and closure. Yet this essay argues that Langland designs the poem to reframe failure within a history of salvation in which Christians can participate sacramentally to redeem failure, especially by penitential satisfaction. Satisfaction, then, not failure itself, motivates the poem’s inventive impulse. Langland conceives of sacramental and literary satisfaction not as the termination of a discrete penitential sequence (contrition, confession, satisfaction), but as an ongoing, open-ended habit of beginning again and making good ends. The essay examines two central types of evidence: chiastic patterning at the verse level and across longer passages; and the history of rubrics used to express satisfaction in penitential rites. Placing Piers Plowman in a history of sacramental satisfaction that includes Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Robert Crowley, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe, the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the essay illuminates continuities and contrasts in the theory and practice of satisfaction along multiple passages to modernity.
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A review essay centered around Cristina Maria Cervone's _Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love_.
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Research Interests: Medieval Literature, Theology, High Middle Ages, Late Middle Ages, Patristics, and 18 moreMiddle English, Medieval Studies, Commentaries: History and Theory, Hebrew Bible, Medieval Theology, Medieval English Literature, Medieval Latin Literature, Biblical Studies, Biblical Theology, Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East, Biblical Medieval Exegesis, Medieval Latin, Biblical Exegesis, Patristic Exegesis, Book of Jonah, Old Testament Exegesis, Glossa ordinaria, and Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
According to Henri de Lubac's history of medieval exegesis, the fourteenth century marked the tipping point for the disintegration of history and allegory. The Postilla super totam bibliam of the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra (1270–1349)... more
According to Henri de Lubac's history of medieval exegesis, the fourteenth century marked the tipping point for the disintegration of history and allegory. The Postilla super totam bibliam of the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra (1270–1349) plays a prominent role in this declension narrative by ceding the “spirit” of interpretation to the separate discipline of theology, and opening the space for critical biblical studies to attain autonomy. But what if Nicholas of Lyra was on the other side of this history? Arguing from the layout of early Postilla manuscripts and the institutional and manuscript culture of the fourteenth century, this article proposes that Nicholas's Postilla represents a vigorous and largely successful attempt to reintegrate Biblical text, historical scholarship, and theological exegesis. Nicholas's approach to the exegetical crises of his own day helps us to reassess the challenges and possibilities of theological exegesis today.
The essay surveys Newman's work in literary drama, from an early essay on Aristotle's Poetics to his adaptation of Roman comedies for production at the Oratory School, in order to approach his affinities with Hans Urs von Balthasar's... more
The essay surveys Newman's work in literary drama, from an early essay on Aristotle's Poetics to his adaptation of Roman comedies for production at the Oratory School, in order to approach his affinities with Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological dramatic theory. Newman does not find a Balthasarian theo-drama via literary drama – perhaps because he was not properly exposed to medieval religious drama – but scattered dramatic analogies in his history writing suggest that he undertakes a theo-drama in that genre. Von Balthasar and Newman employ dramatic analogies to reject chiliastic apocalyptic and foster ‘keromatic’ apocalyptic.
How are we to understand an invention that neither copies its source texts in a servile manner, nor competes to displace them? Piers Plowman defies the categories of primary and secondary translation. Instead, Langland adopts... more
How are we to understand an invention that neither copies its source texts in a servile manner, nor competes to displace them? Piers Plowman defies the categories of primary and secondary translation. Instead, Langland adopts non-competitive habits of invention from the theory and practice of tropological exegesis in order to embody ethical and literary sources in the invention of ‘heretofore unseen phenomena’. In the Pentecost episode, Will joins ‘many hundret’ in inventing the ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’, a hymn given to them by the Holy Spirit. The nascent church invents something completely new even as it conforms as closely as possible to its source, the Holy Spirit.
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The essay introduces Sergei Bulgakov's theology of creation and evil in order to develop a theology of language, conceiving language as the path along which humans receive their own givenness, but also participate in the creation of the... more
The essay introduces Sergei Bulgakov's theology of creation and evil in order to develop a theology of language, conceiving language as the path along which humans receive their own givenness, but also participate in the creation of the world. Poetry's attention to the difficulty of language, its acceptance of artificial disciplines, and its nonrational mode of knowledge uniquely attune it to language's creative—and destructive—potential. Like a monastery for language, poetry enacts a linguistic askesis, schooling its language and its readers in conversion. The essay includes a close reading of Gjertrud Schnackenberg's poem, “Supernatural Love.” A conclusion situates the essay's program for a theology of literature in relation to Henri de Lubac's work on spiritual exegesis and Hans Urs von Balthasar's use of literature in his theology.
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Graduate students across the humanities are invited to this seminar re-examining several influential declension narratives and exploring alternative possibilities within relevant disciplines: philosophy, theology, art history, and the... more
Graduate students across the humanities are invited to this seminar re-examining several influential declension narratives and exploring alternative possibilities within relevant disciplines: philosophy, theology, art history, and the intersection of biblical and literary studies—with intellectual, social, and religious history as continual interlocutors.
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A Syndicate Network symposium on Aers's recent book with responses by Stanley Hauerwas, Sheryl Overmyer, Rowan Williams, Steven Justice, Arabella Milbank, John Milbank, and David Aers himself.
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