Studies In Religious Poetry Of The Seventeenth Century

“Hence these studies are analytical and descriptive, rather than critical. I have tried to let the writers speak for themselves, venturing from time to time to interrupt their monologue, and the reader is invited to do the same.” — From the Preface

English devotional poets of 17c set in a wider European and Catholic context. This book offers a comprehensive account of the literary and theological background to English devotional poetry of the seventeenth century, concentrating on four major poets, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw. It challenges both Protestant poetics and postmodernism, the prevailing critical approaches to Renaissance literature: by reading the poetry in the light of continental Catholic devotional literature and theology, the author demonstrates that religious poetry in seventeenth-century England was not rigidly or exclusively Protestant in its doctrinal and liturgical orientation. He argues that poetic genres and devices that have been ascribed to strict Reformation influence are equally prominent in the Catholic poetry of Spain and France; he also shows that postmodernist anxiety about subjective identity and the capacity of language for signification is in fact a concern of such landmark Christian thinkers as Augustine and Aquinas, and appears in devotional poetry in the Christian tradition. Professor R.V. YOUNGteaches at North Carolina State University.

Designed to furnish the reader of 17th century literature with an overview of the intellectual background of the period by looking at the works of Browne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Glanville, and Locke.

To what extent do religious lyrics also participate in and reflect the social, political, and cultural contexts of the period in which they were written? These essays offer new insights into the religious poetry of Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Jonson, Herrick, Vaughan, and Marvell. In addition, modern theoretical criticism is discussed, and the editor has provided a selective, though extensive, bibliography of modern studies of the seventeenth-century religious lyric.