Five hundred years ago, conflict over how to read the Bible divided Christians into new sects – Protestant against Catholic – and the stakes of interpretation were incredibly high: torture, death, and damnation. Seemingly abstract battles about literal and figurative meaning played out in print, sermons, interrogations, and executions, and they reached a wider audience than ever before – from courtiers and clergy to poets and plowmen.

Interpretive Violence argues that these brutal and destabilizing Reformation debates shaped Renaissance poetry. Tudor poets questioned, dramatized, and gendered this fraught theological discourse in ways previously overlooked, from the obsession with glossing in Wyatt’s verse to the “martyred signs” of Lavinia on Shakespeare’s stage. In this innovative study – the first to read these texts with a feminist, formalist lens – Stephanie Bahr brings renowned poets and theologians into dialogue with neglected religious verse, polemic, and satire from across the sixteenth century. By integrating the interpretive violence of the Reformation into literary study, this work sheds new light on the theology, poetry, and reading experience of Tudor England.

In the Reformation, people were tortured and killed for how they read; this should inform how we read them and their literature. In these divided times – when debates about verbal violence, censorship, and factional interpretation are once again grimly current – Bahr shows how studying the past may help us better read ourselves.