“Flores de adulterada elocuencia”: Poesía, predicación y materialidad en el Barroco“Flores de adulterada elocuencia”: Poetry, Preaching, and Materiality in the Baroque Era

Abstract

Abstract Scholarship has yet to study in full the relationship between poetry and preaching in the Baroque. So far studies have connected both discursive practices exclusively in terms of language and style. In my essay I examine a number of preaching treatises in which, curiously enough, their authors reflect on the role of poetry and the material space of preaching. Specifically, I analyze how the link between the materiality of the pulpit (shape, size, location, materials, acoustics) and that of the poetic word becomes a space in which we can better understand the relationships between subject, materiality, language, and power in the seventeenth century. Following Agamben's ideas on liturgy, I show that it is possible to reconstruct the (unfinished and unconcluded) process of creation of the Baroque preacher by studying the unexpected resistances that authors of preaching treatises find when reflecting on the materiality of the pulpit and the poetic language.