Merlin's Disciples

Merlin's Disciples

Prophecy, Poetry, and Power in Renaissance England

Howard Dobin

"This book presents a powerful new argument about ambivalent attitudes toward prophecy in the Renaissance, and how the government's uneasy attitude became an important means of undoing the desired aims of the Reformation. No less central is the book's discussion of critical method, a successful attempt to synthesize many of the most interesting aspects of poststructuralism of new Historicism...In both theory and the historical realm this book seems to me to have a claim to extraordinary importance." - David Bevington, University of Chicago

Political prophecy in Britain extends back at least to the twelfth century, to Geoffrey of Monmouth's collection of Merlin's prophecies. Through the Renaissance, the secular prophetic tradition burgeoned in new native prophets and interpretations, invoked by both the crown and would-be usurpers.
The Elizabethan period's veritable explosion of prophetic activity was kindled by the religious and political upheavals of the Reformation and inflamed by the nation's anxiety concerning the Spanish threat and the uncertainty of royal succession. The prophet appeared in many forms -- contemporary doomsayer, religious fanatic, partisan propagandist, and outright fraud. But whatever its source, prophecy challenged political, religious, and social institutions. It became a dominant mode of political discourse.
Methodologically, the book allies itself with the New Historicism, where its contributions are, first, to articulate the importance of deconstruction for the New Historicism in relation to a novel set of canonical and noncanonical texts and, second, to delineate a mode of subversive discourse that eludes both political and authorial control. The author shows that prophetic texts and the interpretive dynamics that surround them are virtually textbook models of certain concerns foregrounded in deconstruction and the New Historicism. The prophetic text claims a referentiality that is endlessly deferred; when that reference is politically invested, the powers that be shift responsibility from the text to its interpreters -- ofter, in this period, leading to torture and even execution.
Drawing on a wide range of theoretical influences, from Derrida to Weber and Geertz, the author knits together historical evidence and critical theory to show how prophecy functions in a great variety of texts, from little-known works like The Birth of Merlin to The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's history plays. An Afterword traces how political prophecy emerges as a potent public weapon in the civil-war period -- then is revived and transformed in the literary realm, in the disempowered and private vision of Milton.

Howard Dobin is Associate Professor of Englis at the University of Maryland at College Park.

This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the following original edition:
Title Merlin's disciples: prophecy, poetry, and power in Renaissance England
Author Howard Dobin
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1990
ISBN 0804717834, 9780804717830
Length 257 pages


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