Spee, Southwell, and the Poetry of Meditation

Abstract

HERE IS a curious similarity between the lives and works of Robert Southwell (1561-95) and Friedrich von Spee (159135).1 Both were descendent from nobility, were well schooled in the continental humanistic tradition, and, at an early age, became Jesuits. Later both were deeply involved as missionaries in the Counter-Reformation movements of their homelands; both witnessed religious executions and wrote tracts appealing for toleration; both risked and early gave their lives to the service of God, and both left behind a legacy of unpublished vernacular poetry. The remarkable similarity of their poetry cannot be safely explained on the basis of direct influence of the older writer upon the younger,2 but may rather be looked upon, to a large extent, as the product of a very similar religious and literary environment.