About

Sarah Beckwith works on late medieval religious writing, medieval and early modern drama, and ordinary language philosophy. She is the author of Christ's Body: Identity, Religion and Society in Medieval English Writing, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in York's Play of Corpus Christi, and Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. She is currently working on a book about Shakespearean tragedy and about philosophy's love affair with the genre of tragedy, as well as The Book of Second Chances, a book about versions of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. She has co-edited JMEMS for several years, co-founded the book series Re-Formations with the University of Notre Dame Press, and is the editor of numerous collections of essays and journals.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Physical therapy
• Aesthetics
• Theology
• Epistemology
• Medicine
• Clinical psychology
• Psychology
• Psychiatry
• Philosophy
• Physical medicine and rehabilitation

Selected publications

• The Three Theological Virtues

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-01-19 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In the Christian tradition, faith, hope, and charity have God as their object and instigator, and they are the means by which we share in his nature. Hence they are called theological or deiform virtues. But during the Reformation Luther emphatically isolated faith from the other virtues, and from the virtue tradition tout court. This understanding of faith deliberately severed faith from any idea of virtue as human deed, habit, or disposition, and from any works, for that would precisely compromise the exclusive and one-sided donation of faith as a freedom from any necessary conditions of human emotion or thought. In this chapter I examine this trajectory and its logic. I trace the integration of the theological virtues, briefly looking at the allegorical treatment of the virtues in Dante and Spenser, and discussing the implications of this severing in Calvinism especially in its pastoral implications. When it comes to Shakespeare I focus in particular on hope in The Winter’s Tale, and faith in Cymbeline, on the understanding that each play treats these examinations in the context of a ruptured and interrupted love.

  PublisherDOI

• Absent Presences: The Theatre of Resurrection in York

  2023-05-10 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The dead come to life in the bodies of the living – not just in resurrection but also in theatre. Corpus Christi theatre fully understands the complexity of this interrelationship in the palpable apparitions of Christ-the-actor to audiences in the Resurrection sequences of the York cycle. The earliest Middle English forms of the word “theatre” identify it as “a place for viewing, sight or view”; likewise the word for vision is during the very period of the performance of the York cycle, going through crucial changes, from meaning the “action or fact of seeing or contemplating something not actually present to the eye, a mystical, supernatural insight” to the “act of seeing with the bodily eye; the exercise of the ordering of the faculty of sight.” The origins and development of the “quem queritis” dialogue, so ostentatiously revisited in the York Resurrection play, are obscure and the evidence complex and contradictory.

  PublisherDOI

• The power of devils and the hearts of men: notes towards a drama of witchcraft

  2023-02-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Criticism of Shakespeare’s Macbeth seems to have polarized around one or other of the poles of Gifford’s analysis, ignoring the equivalizing, equivocating effect of that ‘is’. Any attempt to reduce the witches in Macbeth then, either to a figment of Macbeth’s imagination, or indeed to a mere superstitious and erroneous outdated belief in the fiction of the witches, misses the point, for the power of devils and the hearts of men are inextricably intermingled. Witchcraft, in the words of Christina Larner, one of the finest of the subject’s historians, ‘always began with the pointing finger extending away from the self’. And any analysis of witchcraft would have to examine the relationship between ‘nation’ and locality, between prince and people, between the elite and ‘popular’ culture. The ideology of witchcraft is crucially bound up with the patriarchal ideology of the femininity.

  PublisherDOI

• A Vision of Language for Literary Historians

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-12-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Wittgenstein did not address the question of history directly or extensively. But his vision of language is pervasively historical and has implications for the way we do literary history. This chapter examines the idea of use at the heart of Wittgenstein’s vision of language, especially how it differs from the question of context, and how it is related to “forms of life.” After exemplifying these concepts in Wittgenstein by revisiting some of the early remarks in the Philosophical Investigations, I explore the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to show how the teaching of the differences in the use of words is at the heart of its practice. Finally, I highlight the work of an exemplary critic, William Empson, who regarded his work as an important corrective to the OED, and whose work is highly attuned to the history of use. The implications of Wittgenstein’s vision of language with its fundamental revision of linguistic agency show that much contemporary historical criticism is not historical enough.

  PublisherDOI

• Imagining the Virtues: Medieval and Early Modern Histories

  Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · 2022 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Philosophy
  • Aesthetics

  The tradition of the virtues was the model for moral practice from Aristotle to Luther. This tradition framed practices of living well in relation to visions of the good, and in its later Christian version, of God. One became good through practice, just as a harpist might play well through disciplined habits of exercise. In Alasdair MacIntyre's extraordinary excavations of philosophy and intellectual history, the Reformation is by and large neglected as he traces a path from Aristotle to Hume and beyond. This special issue seeks to put the Reformation(s) back into the picture and to see what avenues might be opened as a result. Articles explore what happens to ancient and medieval habits, practices, and conceptualizations of virtue and the virtue tradition resulting from the complex reorganizations of ritual, sacramental, ecclesiological, theological, and ethical practices during the Reformation era. The essays in this issue explore various strands of the Reformation in which the virtue tradition is maintained, transformed, or rejected.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tragic Implication

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-02-28 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  “Tragic Implication” looks at the links between the first and last essays in Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell’s concept of acknowledgment as it emerges in the last two essays in this collection has received a fair amount of attention. This essay, by contrast, looks at his work on and in ordinary language philosophy as it emerges in this first extension and radicalization of Austin’s work in the title essay, and shows the latency of tragedy in that early work, even as Cavell goes on to find Austin’s work unable to accommodate tragedy. It thus links Cavell’s earliest work on Austin, with his latest work in A Pitch of Philosophy, and returns to Cavell’s reading of Lear to show that it is King Lear that teaches him his differences with Austin.

  PublisherDOI

• Enter the Child: A Scene from Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason

  Philosophy and literature · 2022-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Taking its cue from a resonant passage in Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason, this essay reflects on the necessity of the figure of the child for Cavell's philosophy and for his understanding of the differences between Austinian and Wittgensteinian criteria. It develops the difference between instruction and initiation by meditating on how we learn the words for love. Finally, I examine briefly the figure of the boy Mamillius, son of the skeptic Leontes, in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, whom Cavell first noticed as central to the play's energies.

  PublisherDOI

• Appraisals of disability and psychological adjustment in veterans with spinal cord injuries

  Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine · 2020 · 13 citations

  • Physical medicine and rehabilitation
  • Psychology
  • Clinical psychology

  Results indicated SCI/D specific appraisals are predictive of concurrent poor psychological adjustment and provide insight into satisfaction with life beyond measures of emotional distress.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Fortunes of Tragedy

  Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  “Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye.” So wrote Chaucer at the end of Troilus and Criseyde. But how compatible are the forms and ideas of tragedy with Christian tradition, its theology and liturgy? What are the relations between medieval and early modern discourses of tragedy? In The Tragic Imagination (2016), the distinguished Anglican theologian Rowan Williams presents a grand narrative maintaining the compatibility of “the tragic imagination” and Christianity. Yet the story neglects, without any comment, the entire Middle Ages. This special issue of JMEMS explores the fortunes of tragedy as a genre by investigating the sources and consequences of this missing middle of Williams’s book. It also concerns what led generations of Christians to invent or reinvent tragic forms of drama and literature in the early modern period. The essays illuminate in new ways the divide between medieval and early modern studies that continues to be intrinsic to departments of the humanities despite increasing acknowledgment of the distortions of cultural histories created by such institutionalization.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Conversions

  Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · 2018-09-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In its most basic sense, the term conversion (Latin conversio) signifies a reversal, a change of direction. Yet the change or turnaround that is conversion has meant many different things in different cultures and across a wide range of discourses from logic to lyric poetry, theology to politics. Even within the long traditions of Christianity, understanding of conversion has included significantly different inflections. The study of conversion has great potential to illuminate many aspects of medieval and early modern culture in terms of revolutionary change or of striking continuities across what seems a cultural revolution. Articles in this special issue address foundational questions about the nature of the self over time (continuous across a single life-narrative or cleaved in two by a momentous event); reconciliation with or a break from different social, religious, and political communities and relationships; the roles that introspection and exemplarity, the inner life and the lives of others, play in conversion; the rhetorical forms and linguistic grammars of conversion; the links between persuasion and conversion; the relationship of moral transformation and philosophical or religious vision; and the links between conversion and authority, between conversion and violence.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Annabel Wharton

  Duke University

  33 shared

• Judith Bennett

  32 shared

• Randall Styers

  32 shared

• Patricia Cox Miller

  32 shared

• Edward Bleser

  Rice University

  32 shared

• Kalman Bland

  National Humanities Center

  32 shared

• Kristen Hanson

  Phelan-McDermid Syndrome Foundation

  32 shared

• Bart Ehrman

  University of Tübingen

  32 shared

Awards & honors

• Bass Fellow (2008 - Present)