Poetic priesthood in the seventeenth century : reformed ministry and radical verse /
"Poetic Priesthood reads seventeenth-century devotional verse as staging a surprising competition between poetry and the established church. The work of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and Thomas Traherne suggests that the demands of faith are better understood by poet...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford :
Oxford University Press,
2022.
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "Poetic Priesthood reads seventeenth-century devotional verse as staging a surprising competition between poetry and the established church. The work of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and Thomas Traherne suggests that the demands of faith are better understood by poets than by priests—even while four of these authors were also ordained. While recent scholarship has tended to emphasize the shaping influence of the liturgy on the verse of this period, this book argues that verse instead presents readers with a mode of articulating piety that relies on formal experimentation, and that varies from the forms of the church rather than straightforwardly reproducing them. In offering their readers this poetic aid to devotion, these authors shape an alternative and even more ample form of ministry than in their ecclesiastical activities. While they do not often theorize their verse practice explicitly in these terms, that practice is continuous with their definitions of ministerial behavior both in their verse and in the other writings this book considers, including sermons, prose treatises, and polemical pamphlets. In a historical moment when some literary writing began to define itself as a discursive arena separate from theological or doctrinal considerations, these authors complicate that picture: they claim the work of priesthood for poetry—but they do so by critically interrogating the forms of the church, through the unique formal affordances of verse"--Publisher's description. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (vii, 242 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780191947902 0191947903 9780192671332 0192671332 9780192671325 0192671324 |