<span><span><span>Redescribing renaissance literature as a battleground of competing “theologies of language,” Baumlin reads Shakespeare’s </span><span style="font-style:italic;">Hamlet</span><span>, Donne’s </span><span style="font-style:italic;">Songs and Sonets</span><span>, and Milton’s “Lycidas” within a revisionist history of rhetoric: these works, Baumlin argues, mark stages in the Weberian </span><span style="font-style:italic;">Entzauberung</span><span> or “disenchantment” of literature, as they move from the word-magic of medieval Catholicism to a puritan-reformed “rhetoric of certitude.” Historians of rhetoric, of Reformation theology, and of renaissance literature will find this a carefully-argued, controversial, ground-breaking study.</span></span><br /></span>