Rövid leírás:
Discusses the ways in which post-Reformation devotional practices informed expressions of desire in the poetry of five Renaissance English writers: Shakespeare, Donne, Greville, Herrick, and Milton.
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Hosszú leírás:
This study explores the way Calvinist experientialism provided both a theology and an epistemology in the poetry of five early modern English poets: William Shakespeare, Robert Herrick, John Donne, Fulke Greville, and John Milton. In both official church ecclesiology and informal devotional practice, the Reformation introduced the idea that an individual’s experience of devotion did not only entail feeling, but also thought. For early modern English people, bodily experience offered a means of corroborating and verifying devotional truth, making the invisible visible and knowable.
This volume maintains that these religious developments gave early modern thinkers and poets a new epistemological framework for imagining and interpreting devotional intention and access. These Reformed models for devotion not only shaped how people experienced their encounters with God; the changing religious landscape of post-Reformation England also held profound implications for how English poets described sexual longing and access to earthly beloveds in the literary production of the period. In placing the works of English poets in conversation with devotional writers such as William Perkins, Samuel Hieron, Joseph Hall, and William Gouge, this book demonstrates how the English Calvinist tradition attributed epistemological potential to a wide range of ordinary experience, including sexual experience.
A book that takes its poets as seriously as its readers in the pursuit of providing a coherent and illuminating account of how and why the long process of the Protestant Reformation, and specifically a Calvinist devotional experientialism, not only permitted but actively spurred the writing of poetry that mixes erotic desire and religious devotion in ways that still feel bold today. This is a book that doesmuch to cultivate the field of early modern studies, and right now that feels more important than challenging it wholesale.
Több
Tartalomjegyzék:
Introduction, „Our Senses Do Confirm Our Faith”: Experience and Devotional Certainty in The Winter’s Tale and English Reformation Culture
Orthodoxy and Marginality: William Perkins, Richard Hooker, and the English Experiential Tradition
Part I. Theater and Ceremony
Shakespeare’s Sweet Boy: Love’s Rites, Prayers Divine, and Hallowed Name in the Sonnets
Herrick’s Players and Prayers: Ceremony, Theater, and Extemporal Devotion in Hesperides and his Noble Numbers
Part II. Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm
Donne’s Speaking, Weeping, Bleeding Images: Iconophobia and Iconophilia in the Holy Sonnets and the Sermons
Greville’s Iconoclastic Desire: Reformed and Literary Devotion in Caelica and the Life of Sir Philip Sidney
Adam and Eve in Bed and at Prayer: Recasting Milton’s Iconoclasm in Eikonoklastes and Paradise Lost
Works Cited
