Religious Affect, Gender Embodiment, and Renaissance Form

Abstract

In the European Renaissance, where affectus animated Christian humanist projects, writers often give religious affect bodily and literary forms that involve experimentations with gender. Guided by Eugenie Brinkema’s theory of formal affects, this chapter shows how “unspeakable joy,” a central passion in Christian notions of salvation, can be read as a religious affect, in which subjects negotiated the effeminate passivity of religious experience and the masculine activity of religious expression through engagements with scriptural form. In a case study of a poem by John Donne, I show how Donne gives the unspeakable joy of Edward Tilman, a fellow English minister, a unique literary and bodily form (a Christianized ode, a “blest Hermaphrodite”) after grappling with the confluence of the minister’s passivity and activity. To conclude, the chapter suggests how Renaissance scholars might approach gender embodiment via religious affect in drama, the period’s other major literary form.