Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric

Abstract

The seventeenth century gave rise to the greatest flowering of the religious lyric in the English language. While the whole range of the devotional verse of the period is distinguished by its nuanced complexity concerning issues of theology, politics, and the historical circumstances of the individuals who produced these lyrics, modern criticism has neglected the vast majority of these works and their authors. The purpose of this volume, therefore, is to discover and (re)cover the devotional lyricists who have historically been overlooked altogether or dismissed as not belonging to the first order of poets. Precisely focused on that end, this collection contains 15 original essays that broaden our understanding of the seventeenth century religious lyric by examining the contributions of writers such as Robert Southwell, Aemilia Lanyer, William Alabaster, William Drummond, William Austin, Patrick Carey and others. Our view of seventeenth century literature cannot be complete or accurate unless we account for these neglected writers and their cultural roles in the development of the religious lyric. To that end, each of the essays in this volume seeks either explicitly or implicitly to make the canon more inclusive rather than exclusive.