Matthias Egeler's "Elves and Fairies"

Matthias Egeler is professor of Old Norse literature and culture at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, after years at Oxford, Cambridge, and Munich. His research focuses on Old Norse literary, cultural, and religious history; the literary and religious history of medieval Ireland; and the world of Icelandic folk tales.

Egeler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld, and reported the following:

Page 99 starts with Shakespeare – Puck is speaking – and the impact of Shakespeare’s fairies on the later development of their cultural history, but then switches over to King James I (he of the King James Bible) and the role of fairies in the Scottish witch trials.

King James saw himself as the foremost enemy of Satan on earth, and in this capacity he both acted as a persecutor of witches and wrote a theoretical treatise about the wiles of the Enemy (his Daemonologie, 1597), which among many other unpleasant things also elucidates how Satan creates illusions of fairies that seduce human beings to all manner of unchristian acts. In the writings of King James, we meet the perspective of a ruling elite that condemned fairies and any kind of interaction with them as satanic and deserving the harshest punishment possible. Puck, on the other hand, is a figure of English folk belief that is attested already in early medieval documents, centuries before King James; and Shakespeare does not condemn Puck, but playfully uses this figure to create a delightful world of miracles and illusions. So page 99 opens up a triangle between folk belief, its condemnation by the ruling powers, and its transformation into art – and these are exactly the three basic pillars around which the book is constructed. I am astonished that this test works so well. It must be fairy magic!

Learn more about Elves and Fairies at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Indira Ghose's "A Defence of Pretence"

Indira Ghose is emeritus professor of English at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She is the author of Women Travellers in Colonial India, Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History, Much Ado About Nothing: Language and Writing, and Shakespeare in Jest.

Ghose applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Defence of Pretence: Civility and the Theatre in Early Modern England, and shared the following:

For a thumbnail idea of the book, page 99 is a bit of a mixed bag. It is part of a chapter on city comedy, a satirical type of drama very much in vogue at the turn of the seventeenth century, teeming with prodigals, con artists, and social aspirants. Plays set in London were a novelty, and offered the audience a frisson of excitement at seeing their own lives displayed onstage. The most resourceful characters were often the prostitutes, canny businesswomen with an eye to the ultimate prize: marrying rich. The way to achieve this goal was to adopt the manners, deportment, and style of a gentlewoman. Everyone in these plays is playacting, faking it until they make it. The plays catered to the fantasies of self-reinvention and social climbing that had the entire society in its grip.

Civility is, however, much more than about acquiring cultural capital. It relates to both manners and citizenship. The book as a whole looks at the radically divergent ways civility has been pressed into service: in the pursuit of social distinction and as a tool to entrench hierarchies by excluding others from the club, or to forge a community with a shared purpose, reminding us that we all have a stake in society. Manners are simply a repertoire of conventional words and gestures that we use to demonstrate mutual esteem. Civility is an art of performance. The drama of Shakespeare's time is deeply vested in exploring the way our lives are shaped by dissembling—and suggests that human beings are always playing roles. Pretence might be an inescapable part of social life. In an ideal world, sincere sentiments of reciprocity would be desirable. In a polarized society, how we really feel about other members of society might be irrelevant. What matters is the purpose our pretence serves—rampant self-interest or the interests of the wider community.

Learn more about A Defence of Pretence at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark S. Cladis's "Radical Romanticism"

Mark S. Cladis is the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where he is a faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies, the Center for Environmental Humanities, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination, with the following results:

Summary of page 99: Rousseau, in his epistolary novel Julie, revolutionized Western aesthetic and religious sensibilities. Once considered barbarous and godforsaken, the Alpine landscape became for him a site of beauty, revelation, and moral awakening. His heroine Julie embodies a “worldly religion”--a lively faith bound to the Earth and to the suffering and goodness of human and more-than-human life. Her husband Wolmar, by contrast, stands for a cold, detached rationalism, a moral reasoning cut off from the vitality of the world. Rousseau’s transformation of the “ugly” into the divine helped shape Romanticism’s spiritual and aesthetic imagination--from Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft to Emerson and Thoreau.

The Page 99 Test: Page 99 offers a remarkably good window into Radical Romanticism. It captures the book’s central claim that Romanticism is not a flight from the world but a radical reorientation toward it--a spiritual and political renewal grounded in earthly relations. Rousseau’s inversion of ugliness and beauty, alienation and belonging, prefigures the democratic and ecological visions that the book traces across later writers and movements.

Still, the page shows only one part of the book’s landscape. Other sections expand beyond Rousseau’s Europe to include feminist, Black, and Indigenous reimaginings of the sacred, the political, and the ecological--traditions that widen the very meaning of Romanticism, ecology, and of democracy. Rousseau’s Alps are an early instance of what I call “radical Romanticism”: a mode of world-making that treats care, vulnerability, and interdependence as spiritual practices. His mountains mark the moment when what had been dismissed as barren and broken becomes a place of belonging and revelation, when the world, once shut out, is allowed to speak. Other sections, however, shift from mountains to more precarious terrains--sites of slavery, gendered oppression, and dispossession--but the same pulse endures: the conviction that beauty and justice begin in how we inhabit the Earth.

If Rousseau teaches readers to look again at what they had dismissed as barren, later writers push the question harder: What does beauty mean in a world structured by inequality? Where does revelation occur when land itself has been stolen, polluted, or enclosed? Those voices--feminist, Black, and Indigenous--stretch the Romantic impulse toward care and relation into new ethical registers. They ask not only how the world speaks, but how we learn to listen when its speech is fractured by violence and loss. In that listening, we stand to learn how care, land, and emancipation are braided, and how the sacred becomes legible in places marked by dispossession as much as by beauty.

Learn more about Radical Romanticism at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua R. Shiver's "War Fought and Felt"

Joshua R. Shiver is an upper school history teacher. He holds a doctorate in history from Auburn University.

Shiver applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, War Fought and Felt: The Emotional Motivations of Confederate Soldiers, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Men also bonded by carousing together. In a letter to his cousin, Private Daniel H. Whitener of the 35th North Carolina Infantry Regiment wrote that there was a “different kind of religion that is in our regiment” which involved “some a cursen and swering some playing cards Some dansing and all kind of foolishness.” Likewise, Private Benjamin L. Mobley of Cobb’s Georgia Legion wrote to his sister that “Sis I enjoy my Self fine ly we have a dance evre night or two when the fiddle is at home.” The shared experience of dancing, playing cards, and listening to music was important in building esprit de corps. According to psychologists Bronwyn Tarr, Jacques Launay, and Robin I. M. Dunbar, the experience of listening to music, either passively or through active engagement leads to synchrony (otherwise known as “self-other merging”) or neurohormonal mechanisms (primarily in the form of endorphins) which encourage interpersonal bonding. It is like, they note, “that some combination of endorphin release and self-other merging lead to the social bonding effects of music, although the relationship between the two mechanisms remains to be sufficiently explored.”

Sometimes, music shared with one’s enemies promoted interpersonal connection. Private George K. Evans of the 4th Virginia Cavalry was on picket duty one night in the later summer of 1862, when he heard music coming from nearby Union ships. “I was ¼ of a mile frome any other Videt,” he recalled to a friend from a hospital soon after, “and stood two hours one very dark night and listened to the music on the Yankey gun boats which kept me frome being loansome.” Even today, men generally build relationships through shared activities. It was no different in the mid-nineteeth century. After the Battle of Fredericksburg, Captain D. A. Dickert of the 3rd South Carolina Infantry Regiment recalled that even in the midst of camp’s ennui, “troops abandoned themselves to base ball, snow fights, writing letters, and receiving as guests in their camps friends and relatives, who never failed to bring with them great boxes of the good things from home, as well as clothing and shoes for the needy soldiers.”

If readers opened my book to page 99, they would not get a good idea of the whole work. With its emphasis on social bonding and neurobiology, this page does capture some of the essence of the book. However, War Fought and Felt provides a much broader understanding of the relationship between Southern masculinity, interpersonal relationships, emotion, and psychological and neurobiological research. This is a book about why soldiers fought and, most importantly, how primal emotions shaped their military service. Moreover, it examines how Confederate soldiers reshaped pre-war cultural norms of emotional self-control to meet the inordinate and unprecedented brutality of America’s bloodiest war.

At its outset, the American Civil War was expected by many to be a short and relatively bloodless affair. Only a few months into its first year, it was clear that this would not be the case. Instead, the American Civil War stretched on for far longer, and the body counts stretched far higher, than anyone could have dreamed. The human psyche was not made to endure the horror of such prolonged conflicts, and it should be no surprise that emotional self-control proved increasingly unrealistic. Many soldiers wondered: would the next charge be their last? The next outbreak of disease the beginning of the end? Their last letter home their final words?

This continual sense of impending demise led to soldier’s eschewing norms of emotional self-control in favor of emotional effusion on a level far greater than one would glean from the past eighty years of studies on the common soldier of the American Civil War. While there have been many books attempting to answer the question of why Civil War soldiers fought, and more recently, books on the “inner worlds” of Civil War soldiers, none have taken as broad of a sample from which to draw their conclusions as War Fought and Felt does. It paints a complex portrait of complex men who fought for complex reasons who were unified by their desperate need for emotional succor. In this way, it is an attempt to understand Confederate soldiers in three dimensions rather than the two-dimensional socio-cultural or ideological explanations of their motivations in past literature. In essence, it is a story about humanity, the necessity of relationships, the power of emotions, and the struggle to survive.

Learn more about War Fought and Felt at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Tibble's "Assassins and Templars"

Steve Tibble is honorary research associate at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of The Crusader Armies, The Crusader Strategy, Templars, and Crusader Criminals.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood, and shared the following:

On page 99 we find the local leader of the Assassins, an extreme and highly secretive religious group, lulling a neighbouring Bedouin leader into a false sense of security and, it was said, after luring him ‘into his hands, he put him in fetters and killed him in cold blood’. The Bedouin were unimpressed and responded accordingly. They launched a surprise attack on the Assassins and in the frenzied slaughter that followed, the Assassin leader's head and hand were cut off, and his body was hacked to pieces ‘by swords and knives’.

Page 99 is eerily good as an example (albeit a partial one) of the book's main narrative...that the Assassins and the Templars both developed into what one might luridly call 'religious death cults'. They used the 'extreme ways' of their cults to carve out a level of influence that was vastly disproportionate to their numbers. On this page we find the Assassins being attacked by some extremely annoyed Bedouin - but despite the setback of having their leader's head and hand hacked off, the Assassins pursued the Bedouin tribe for almost twenty years to get their revenge. The Assassins turned grudge-holding and political murder into an art-form. Relentlessness and the implacable delivery of death were at the heart of their 'brand-promise', and that promise has reverberated through the centuries.

The Assassins and the Templars have become two of the most legendary groups of modern times - and that 'brand promise' is at the heart of their enduring interest. Although both have accumulated a huge deadweight of mythology and absurd conspiracy theories along the way, the roots of their intertwined story contain, oddly enough, much that is true and similar. The tactics were different, but their foundations were the same. The promise of unstoppable death might be ‘in your face’ in the form of a Templar charge. Or it could be unstoppable death ‘in your back’ in the form of an Assassin’s dagger. But death was at the core.

Both groups were tiny in number, certainly compared to the military and political behemoths that they were frequently pitched against. But they were huge in terms of the effect they had on the world. Both groups were legends in their own lifetime, and those legends have only grown over the intervening centuries. Their myths have inevitably become distorted over time – but they were often deliberately promoted and are not entirely without a basis in fact. This book is the story of the unlikely reality behind those equally bizarre legends.

Visit Steve Tibble's website.

The Page 99 Test: Templars.

The Page 99 Test: Crusader Criminals.

--Marshal Zeringue

Russell Fielding's "Breadfruit"

Russell Fielding is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology & Geography, which is housed within the Spadoni College of Education and Social Sciences, and the HTC Honors College at Coastal Carolina University. I. He is a geographer who studies sustainable food systems in the world’s coastal and island settings. Fielding is the author of The Wake of the Whale: Hunter Societies in the Caribbean and North Atlantic (2018).

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Breadfruit: Three Global Journeys of a Bountiful Tree, with the following results:

From page 99:

“Sir, your abuse is so bad that I cannot do my duty with any pleasure.”

As if to enact literally the farcical warning that “floggings will continue until morale improves,” Bligh punished Christian for this remark.

… Before sunrise on April 28, 1789, the crew mutinied.

On page 99 of Breadfruit: Three Global Journeys of a Bountiful Tree, the narration is midway through the story of the mutiny on the Bounty. This British naval mission of the late 18th-century was intended to procure breadfruit saplings in Tahiti and to transport them to the Caribbean where they would be planted, propagated, and distributed among the islands of the region to provide food for laborers enslaved on British sugar plantations. After the mutiny, Captain Bligh was set adrift in a longboat and the Bounty was burned, marking both the figurative and literal finality of the mission’s failure.

For many readers, the story of the mutiny on the Bounty is the single preexisting touchpoint connecting their literary experience to the subject of breadfruit. The early 20th-century botanist David Fairchild once wrote that, “it is curious to me that every educated person should have heard of the ‘Mutiny of the Bounty’ and, merely as incidental to the sea story, should know about breadfruit… Could we infer from this that most people are excitedly interested in what other men do that is dangerous, but only mildly so in the plants they grow?”

In writing a book about breadfruit, I knew that the story of the mutiny would need to play a role, but I didn’t want it to steal the focus. I believed, contrary to Fairchild’s supposition, that a plant story could indeed hold a reader’s “excited interest.” I decided to describe the mutiny, and to allude to it in the book’s subtitle, but to get it done with and move on, calling back only occasionally and to draw out counterintuitive connections. Focusing as it does on the “three journeys” of the breadfruit tree—from its point-of-origin in Southeast Asia across the Pacific, from Tahiti to the Caribbean eventually successfully, and around the world as both a novel culinary ingredient and a tool for sustainable development—Breadfruit includes the Bounty story only as that of an aborted journey, a failed, presumptuous attempt.

As such, the Page 99 Test produces an interesting result with Breadfruit. On the one hand, it drops the reader directly into the single most famous, or infamous, breadfruit-related story in the canon of English literature. On the other, the story receives a far more succinct telling than the voluminous tomes and full-length motion pictures that other authors have derived from these events. In Breadfruit, the Bounty story is given its due respect, but the book quickly moves on to the more interesting, successful, and world-changing journeys of this bountiful tree.

Visit Russell Fielding's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Riordon's "Crush"

James Riordon is a journalist who covers physics, math, astronomy, chemistry, and Earth science. His articles have appeared in Science News Magazine, Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, New Scientist, and the Washington Post, among other publications. Riordon is currently a senior science writer with NASA's Earth Science News team.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Crush: Close Encounters with Gravity, and reported the following:

What's on page 99:

Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz were the best of frenemies. As two of the greatest mathematicians in the last 500 years, they independently invented calculus, and feuded brutally over who deserved credit for the powerful new branch of math. All the while, Newton and Leibniz deeply admired each other’s genius.

Page 99 of Crush features my attempt at a bit of Newton/Leibniz fanfiction. I exploit Newton’s tortured relationship with Leibniz to show how he could have studied gravity by petulantly hurling things at a portrait of his rival hung on a dining room wall. With a little poetic license, including the gift to Newton of a laser pointer from a passing time traveler and his dining room being hoisted on a crane and then released to free-fall to Earth, I imagine how Newton could have compared his version of gravity with the one Einstein discovered centuries later.

Does the Page 99 Test work for Crush?

Page 99 isn’t a perfect reflection of Crush as a whole, but it’s pretty good. Throughout the book, I strived to explore gravity with examples, analogies, and stories that are different from the standard fare in the field. A few sections, including the portion on page 99, are fanciful. Most are based firmly on historical facts. In either case, I worked to accurately depict what we know about gravity, from the microscopic scale to its role in shaping the cosmos, and through time from the Big Bang to the ultimate fate of the universe eons from now.

One of the challenges of a book about gravity is ensuring that it’s compelling to a broad spectrum of readers, including curious nonscientists and experts in the field. The anatomy of snakes and elephants, the possibility of life inside black holes, and the challenges of living without gravity for extended trips in space are among the entry points to important subjects related to gravity that I believe would surprise readers of nearly any expertise level.

I could have stuck with the more straightforward and pedantic approach. But wouldn’t you rather know that Galileo pondered how many dogs and horses you could stack before their bones would break; why gravitational waves are crucial for the existence of life as we know it; or how you can explore the structures hidden inside black holes with simple experiments in your kitchen sink?

I’m guessing that most people prefer the fun and fanciful approach to pondering gravity. For those readers, I give you Crush.

Visit James Riordon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marion Orr's "House of Diggs"

Marion Orr is the Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and professor of political science and urban studies at Brown University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, and shared the following:

The Page 99 Test fits with my new book, House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs, Jr. The book shows that Diggs was a serious policy-oriented legislator who took Congress’s “oversight” authority seriously. On page 99 of House of Diggs, Diggs is in his element. Page 99 describes Diggs pressing the Kennedy administration to force the major commercial airlines to hire Black Americans for in-flight positions as pilots, engineers, and flight attendants. Discrimination was rampant in the airline industry. When Diggs entered Congress in 1955, there were nearly 5,919 stewards or stewardesses. None was Black.

Congressman Diggs was aware that it was a violation of executive orders issued by President John F. Kennedy for any corporation receiving federal government contracts to discriminate based on race. Page 99 covers Diggs discussing with Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who chaired Kennedy’s Committee on Government Contracts, a strategy designed to force the airlines to open in-flight employment opportunities to Black pilots, engineers and flight attendants. Diggs pushed Johnson to tell the airline executives that they will lose millions of dollars in federal contracts if they did not hire Black pilots, engineers, and flight attendants. By threatening to cancel existing federal contracts, Lyndon Johnson made hiring Black flight attendants a personal priority, a pace that accelerated after Johnson ascended to the presidency and signed the Civil Rights Act in 1965, outlawing racial discrimination.

I show in the remainder of House of Diggs that Charles Diggs’s approach to the issue of discrimination in the airline industry was emblematic of his approach during his time in Congress, dogged persistence combined with moral certainty.

House of Diggs also shows that Diggs’s contributions were international in scope. In 1959 he became the first Black member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. From this position, and later as chair of the Subcommittee on Africa, a position he assumed in 1969, Diggs ignited, virtually alone, what little congressional interest there was in Africa. Diggs used the Subcommittee on Africa to raise America’s awareness about apartheid, the political system in South Africa that prevented the country’s Black majority from having a public policy voice. House of Diggs describes how a lot of the early work in the American anti-apartheid movement began in Diggs’s congressional office. Diggs played a key role in the formation of TransAfrica, the powerful anti-apartheid organization. Randall Robinson, TransAfrica’s first executive director, worked as Diggs’s chief of staff, and learned a lot about Africa from Diggs.

House of Diggs details how Diggs cajoled and pushed U.S. agency heads, cabinet secretaries, and presidents when necessary to advance civil rights for Black Americans and to change U.S. African policy.

Learn more about House of Diggs at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Min Joo Lee's "Finding Mr. Perfect"

Min Joo Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Finding Mr. Perfect: K-Drama, Pop Culture, Romance, and Race, with the following results:

Page 99 of Finding Mr. Perfect: K-Drama, Pop Culture, Romance, and Race examines online discourse among some Korean pop culture fans who expressed interest in forming intimate relations with Korean men. After analyzing some of the quotes from the online spaces, I make the following observation:

However, the comments risk perpetuating Western Orientalist stereotypes of Asian masculinity that effeminized them when such characteristics are deemed to be facts applicable to all Korean men rather than as one of many facets of Korean masculinity. After all, to say that “a Korean guy is a guy before he is Korean” implies that Korean men are somehow atypically masculine because of their Korean-ness and only conform to the conventional concept of a “guy” when he prioritizes that identity above his identity as a Korean, as if the two identity categories cannot coexist.

If the readers open my book to page 99, they would be able to deduce approximately half of the book’s main argument.

The book is largely divided into two parts. Chapter 3: Digitalized Intimacies of Hallyu (which page 99 is a part of) and Chapter 4: “Korean Men Are So Bad Because They Are Perfect”: Hallyu Tourists’ Experiences in Korea examine Hallyu tourism from the transnational fans’ perspectives. I argue that while the Korean pop culture fans’ racialized erotic desires for Korean masculinity are problematizing the overtly racist stereotypes of East Asian masculinity that proliferated in the West for a long time, such desires risk essentializing Korean masculinity in different ways if the fans are not careful with how they conceptualize their desires. Meanwhile, Chapter 1: Mouth Agape and Ecstatically Screaming: National Media and Industry Personnel’s Conception of Foreign Hallyu Fans and Chapter 5: “How Can We Compete with Men Like That?”: Korean Men’s Perception of Their Newfound Popularity examine the Korean government and some Korean men’s perspectives on Hallyu tourism. In these chapters, I argue that Korea operates through its own racialized erotic desires for foreign fans. The main message of the book is that Hallyu tourism is driven by the disparate racialized erotic desires of the Korean government, some Korean men, and a subset of Korean popular culture fans. If readers open the book to page 99, they can find the first part of my main argument.

Learn more about Finding Mr. Perfect at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Raphael Magarik's "Fictions of God"

Raphael Magarik is assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Fictions of God: English Renaissance Literature and the Invention of the Biblical Narrator, and reported the following:

From page 99:

foregrounding alternatives, Cowley emphasizes the “conjectural,” artificial element of his narration.

As he foregrounds the arbitrary, possibly mistaken exegesis that undergirds his own narration, Cowley also lards the passage with evocations of music, such that his ekphrasis 0nally serves an oral, auditory art form associated more closely with narrative poetry. Where the Jewish sources on the New Year speak simply of sounding a horn, Cowley imagines an all-day music festival, with instrument played “From op’ening Morn till night shuts in the day” (II.228). Similarly, he writes that the Jews think that Abram, “whilst the Ram on Isaac’s fire did fry, / His Horn with joyful tunes stood sounding by” (II.238–39). Though the association between the ram’s horn, the binding of Isaac, and the New Year is indeed, as Cowley’s note says, “the common position of the Jews,” he adds the (comical) image of the relieved father instrumentally accompanying the barbecue. In the note, Cowley bristles at the Jews’ suggestion that consequently only “Rams Horns” may be played on the New Year; that would ruin the orchestral, entertaining performance he is imagining. This performance becomes the auditory motivation for the tapestry sequence, which concludes with the ram burning “while on his Horns the ransom’ed couple plaid, / And the glad Boy danc’d to the tunes he made” (II.328–29). The dancing boy evokes the dancing David, connecting this episode to the meta-poetic, musical performances that run throughout the Davideis. Cowley frames his ekphrasis by pointing up its fictional construction and amplifies a musical motif at the expense of the visual artistry.

The musical element is more salient because, besides naming their origins on a “Syrian loom” (a sly nod to his importation of a classical trope), Cowley does not describe the tapestries at all as visual art. They are instead excuses to tell biblical stories. Most strikingly, while the first nine images record speci0c moments, the tapestry depicting the binding of Abram is a visual impossibility: Can an image capture how, say, Isaac “sometimes walk’d before / And sometimes turn’d to talk” (II.30:–8), or Abram “mount[s] slowly,” then cries, lifts the knife, smiles as he hears the angel, and so on? Perhaps we are to imagine the tapestry as a graphic novel, but no effort is made to “story-board” the narrative into scenes. Rather, the ekphrasis functions as an impersonal device of narration, a repository not of images but of a told story. Comparing this scene to the Christiad’s ekphrastic scene discussed in my introduction, one notices how, unlike Vida (or, for that matter, Virgil), Cowley ignores the viewers, who are introduced and then disregarded. Because the physicality, visuality, and sense of scene disappear, the ekphrasis resembles one of Cowley’s other “digressions,” passages in which

Page 99 of my book, Fictions of God, comes from the chapter on the mid-seventeenth century English poet Abraham Cowley’s unfinished biblical epic, The Davideis; here, I am discussing Cowley’s descriptions of visual art and music within his own poem; through these descriptions, he meditates on his own fictive reimagining of scriptural material. Cowley is hyper- aware that as he reads through the dense thicket of critical debates in the commentaries on the biblical books of Samuel, he makes interpretive choices that reflect his own literary needs and interests; often, he invents his own, fictional material. By representing art-making in the Israelites’ world (tapestries depicting earlier scriptural events, music played at the New Year festival, and so on), he finds models for his own artistic practice.

Surprisingly, this page decently captures the book as a whole. Fictions of God is all about how early modern commentators and then imaginative writers saw in the Bible not an authoritative foundation of truth but a model for fictional invention. They came to understand scriptural stories as told by human, characterized narrators, each with a limited and specific perspective—and each of whom is thus potentially unreliable. Page 99 offers a tiny example of many of the book’s big arguments: that writers like Cowley encountered the Bible not as a singular, clear text but as densely mediated, externally through scholarly and theological commentaries, and then internally because they understood apparently third-person, impersonal narration to reflect specific human perspectives. My book thus offers a prehistory of an idea readers today mostly take for granted (the distinction between authors and narrators), which, I show, emerged during and through the turbulent, early modern process of secularization. (The piece of the book not represented on page 99 is this broader, social and political context: state formation, disciplining religion, suppressing enthusiastic popular movements inspired by claims to direct divine revelation, producing new confessions and churches, and so on.) A coincidence also helps this page do representative work: it contains a sharp contrast between Cowley’s poem and an earlier biblical epic I discuss in my introduction (Vida’s Christiad), which exemplifies my argument that the seventeenth century witnesses a massive increase in narratological sophistication in poetry written using biblical themes. I even considered putting the material on page 99 in my introduction for that reason, but ultimately decided it was too technical to belong there.

Learn more about Fictions of God at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue