SOURCE: Mueller, Janel. “Complications of Intertextuality: John Fisher, Katherine Parr, and ‘The Book of the Crucifix.’” In Representing Women in Renaissance England, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted Larry Pebworth. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997, pp. 24-41.

In the following essay, Mueller investigates the source of Parr's metaphor of “the book of the crucifix,” which had its source in a sermon by John Fisher, and compares the two writers' use of the metaphor.

The level of current interest in interpreting texts as registers of cultural change in early modern England bespeaks an increasingly shared perspective in literary studies that again seeks to take history seriously. As we literary-historical types now go about our usual business of intertextuality—analyzing texts and putting them into relation with other texts—we avoid dealing solely in textual formulations of our concerns. Unless they are tethered to extralinguistic referents of context, relations...