The Invention of China in Early Modern Englanddescribes how several different English communities became aware of China. It begins by describing how early modern intellectuals used the utopian ideal of China to license all kinds of progressive innovation before chronicling how England’s growing commerce in southeast Asia radically changed China’s representation in the English discourse community. For the new community of English merchants proposing to trade in Chinese goods, China became the seminal example in the growing discourse community of English Orientalism. It was an absolute or...

The expressive and literary capacities of post-Reformation English were largely shaped in response to the Bible.Faith in the Languageexamines the convergence of biblical interpretation and English literature, from William Tyndale to John Donne, and argues that the groundwork for a newly authoritative literary tradition in early modern England is laid in the discourse of biblical hermeneutics. The period 1525-1611 witnessed a proliferation of English biblical versions, provoking a century-long debate about how and whether the Bible should be rendered in English. These public, indeed...