Abstract

abstract:

In this essay, Emily Jennings collates the available documentary evidence about the contents, authorship, and reception of "Balaam's Asse," a controversial work of scriptural exegesis addressed to James VI and I and discovered at Whitehall on April 28, 1613. The treatise refuted the common places of Protestant commentary on the Book of Revelation, labeling the king, rather than the pope, as the Antichrist and identifying Britain, not Rome, as Babylon. Its anonymous writer was a witty, audacious Catholic controversialist who exposed and exploited the rhetorical manipulability of the verbal formulae, punitive rituals, commemorations, and biblical interpretations through which Protestant hegemony was typically asserted in mid-Jacobean Britain.

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