Devotional experience and erotic knowledge in the literary culture of the English reformation : poetry, public worship, and popular divinity /
This book explores the ways in which Calvinist experientialism functioned as both theology and 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...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford ; New York :
Oxford University Press,
[2023]
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| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | This book explores the ways in which Calvinist experientialism functioned as both theology and 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. I maintain 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, I demonstrate how the English Calvinist tradition attributed epistemological potential to a wide range of ordinary experience, including sexual experience. 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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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (273 pages) : illustrations. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780191981616 0191981613 9780192886569 0192886568 |