Political Atheology: Sovereignty, Fiction, and Secularization in Early Modern England

My project offers a new paradigm, “political atheology,” for understanding literature’s role in the secularization of sovereignty in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This study ranges across a number of topics crucial to the period, including the Reformation’s disruptive effects on traditional forms of political legitimacy; the Machiavellian revival of pagan civil religion; skepticism and demonology; the history of emotions and the senses; English imperialism and nationhood; and the emergence of liberal republicanism. Nonetheless, it tells two main stories. In the first, I show how Elizabethan writers, including George Puttenham, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare, turned to the idol—that archetype of counterfeit authority—to ironize sovereignty as a salutary fiction