1. Introduction: Maimed Rights in Shakespeare’s England.- 2. Pride and Penitence: Political and Moral Allegory in Medieval Arthurian Romance and Richard II.- 3. Demonizing the Other: “The Prioress’s Tale,” The Jew of Malta, and The Merchant of Venice.- 4. Writing, Memory, and Revenge in Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Hamlet.- 5. Afterlives of the Martyrs: King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Virgin Martyr.- 6. “Remember the Porter”: Memorializing the Medieval Drama and the Gunpowder Plot in Macbeth.- 7. Conclusion: Shakespeare “Our Contemporary”.

Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.  

“This … is a timely book. It is also highly readable and easy to recommend: it is never less than stimulating, its parallels between medieval and later texts often illuminating and thought provoking.” (Ivana Djordjević, Speculum, Vol. 94 (4), October, 2019)

“Alfred Thomas combines an acute sense of the political, probing for tales of tyranny and resistance, with an ability to place literary works in their deep historical context. The lay reader will be intrigued by the parallels he draws between the Elizabethan era and the present.” (Peter Rutland, Professor of Government, Wesleyan University, USA) “In Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages, Alfred Thomas has written an original, learned, refreshing book on a famous and familiar subject that challenges many of the common critical assumptions about the sources and historical contexts of several of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. With subtlety and brilliance, Thomas not only demonstrates that medieval tradition and culture were well-known and respected by Shakespeare, but that they would also have influenced the distinctive responses of Catholic and Protestant audiences in the late years of the reign of Elizabeth I. Thomas presents his case with an impressive array of evidence in this fascinating study.” (Robert Kiely, Professor of English, Emeritus, Harvard University, USA)

Places Shakespeare and his work in the religious and political context of his own time Provides a new interpretation of the medieval influence on Renaissance plays Examines the connectedness of religion, literature, and art