The Eucharist Poetics And Secularization From The Middle Ages To Milton

The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization from the Middle Ages to Milton explains the astonishing centrality of the eucharist to poets with a variety of denominational affiliations, writing on a range of subjects, across an extended period in literary history. Whether they are praying, thinking about politics, lamenting unrequited love, or telling fart jokes, late medieval and early modern English poets return again and again to the eucharist as a way of working out literary problems. Tracing this connection from the fourteenth through the seventeenth century, this book shows how controversies surrounding the nature of signification in the sacrament informed understandings of poetry. Connecting medieval to early modern England, it presents a history of 'eucharistic poetics' as it appears in the work of seven key poets: the Pearl-poet, Chaucer, Robert Southwell, John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and John Milton. Reassessing this range of poetic voices, The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization overturns an oft-repeated argument that early modern poetry's fascination with the eucharist resulted from the Protestant rejection of transubstantiation and its supposedly enchanted worldview. Instead of this tired secularization story, it fleshes out a more capacious conception of eucharistic presence, showing that what interested poets about the eucharist was its insistence that the mechanics of representation are always entangled with the self's relation to the body and to others. The book thus forwards a new historical account of eucharistic poetics, placing this literary phenomenon within a longstanding negotiation between embodiment and disembodiment in Western religious and cultural history.

The Eucharist in the European Middle Ages was a multimedia event. First and foremost it was a drama, a pageant, a liturgy. The setting itself was impressive. Stunning artwork adorned massive buildings. Underlying and supporting the liturgy, the art and the architecture was a carefully constructed theological world of thought and belief. Popular beliefs, spilling over into the magical, celebrated that presence in several tumultuous forms. Church law regulated how far such practice might go as well as who was allowed to perform the liturgy and how and when it might be performed. This volume presents the medieval Eucharist in all its glory combining introductory essays on the liturgy, art, theology, architecture, devotion and theology. Contributors include: Celia Chazelle, Michael Driscoll, Edward Foley, Stephen Edmund Lahey, Lizette Larson-Miller, Ian Christopher Levy, Gerhard Lutz, Gary Macy, Miri Rubin, Elizabeth Saxon, Kristen Van Ausdall and Joseph Wawrykow.

Religious satire and polemic constitute an elusive presence in Paradise Lost. John N. King shows how Milton's poem takes on new meaning when understood as part of a strategy of protest against ecclesiastical formalism and clericalism. The experience of Adam and Eve before the Fall recalls many Puritan devotional habits. After the Fall, they are prone to 'idolatrous' ritual and ceremony that anticipate the religious 'error' of Milton's own age. Vituperative sermons, broadsides and pamphlets, notably Milton's own tracts, afford a valuable context for recovering the poem's engagement with the violent history of the Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Restoration, while contemporary visual satires help to clarify Miltonic practice. Eighteenth-century critics who attacked breaches of decorum and sublimity in Paradise Lost alternately deplored and ignored a literary and polemical tradition deployed by Milton's contemporaries. This important study, first published in 2000, sheds light on Milton's epic and its literary and religious contexts.

Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism asks what happened when the world was shaken by challenges to the sacred order as people had known it, an order that regulated both their actions and beliefs. When Reformers gave up the doctrine of transubstantiation (even as they held onto revised forms of the Eucharist), they lost a doctrine that infuses all materiality, spirituality, and signification with the presence of God. That presence guaranteed the cleansing of human fault, the establishment of justice, the success of communication, the possibility of union with God and another, and love. These longings were not lost but displaced, Schwartz argues, onto other cultural forms in a movement from ritual to the arts, from the sacrament to the sacramental. Investigating the relationship of the arts to the sacred, Schwartz returns to the primary meaning of "sacramental" as "sign making," noting that because the sign always points beyond itself, it participates in transcendence, and this evocation of transcendence, of mystery, is the work of a sacramental poetics.

Vols. for 1969- include ACTFL annual bibliography of books and articles on pedagogy in foreign languages 1969-

Winner of the Book of the Year Award for the Conference on Christianity and Literature.--Thomas H. Luxon, Dartmouth College "CHOICE"

Examines the ways in which religion was constructed as a category and region of experience in nineteenth-century literature and culture.

div What does eating have to do with aesthetic taste? While most accounts of aesthetic history avoid the gustatory aspects of taste, this book rewrites standard history to uncover the constitutive and dramatic tension between appetite and aesthetics at the heart of British literary tradition. From Milton through the Romantics, the metaphor of taste serves to mediate aesthetic judgment and consumerism, gusto and snobbery, gastronomes and gluttons, vampires and vegetarians, as well as the philosophy and physiology of food. The author advances a theory of taste based on Milton’s model of the human as consumer (and digester) of food, words, and other commodities—a consumer whose tasteful, subliminal self remains haunted by its own corporeality. Radically rereading Wordsworth’s feeding mind, Lamb’s gastronomical essays, Byron’s cannibals and other deviant diners, and Kantian nausea, Taste resituates Romanticism as a period that naturally saw the rise of the restaurant and the pleasures of the table as a cultural field for the practice of aesthetics. /DIV