Tears in Heaven: Tracing the Contours of a Pan-European Transconfessional Genre

Anne Boemler,Bryan Brazeau

doi:10.3390/h11010004

Abstract

This article explores the genesis, proliferation, and readership of an understudied genre of religious poetry in early modern Europe. The weeping poem—a devotional literary genre combining elements of epic narrative and Petrarchan lyric that focused specifically on the religious grief of biblical figures—swept across Europe in the forty years around the turn of the seventeenth century. Although this genre was instigated by the Italian Luigi Tansillo’s 1560 Le Lagrime di San Pietro and has often been read as exhibiting a distinctively Counter-Reformation spirituality, our survey of weeping poems uncovers the surprising reach of this genre across multiple languages and even into Protestant England. The range and popularity of this specific kind of weeping poetry across early modern national, linguistic, and confessional lines shows how this constellation of texts transmitted a new form of devotional affect founded on imaginative identification with weeping biblical narrators. In other words, these poems demonstrate how interiority, rather than factional political or theological difference, could be the basis for new emotional communities of worship. Moreover, the relative obscurity of this genre to scholars prompts new questions around the viability of continuing to explore early modern European literary traditions from the perspective of nationalist/linguistic/confessional frameworks.

Highlights

Tansillo’s 1560 Le Lagrime di San Pietro and quickly gained popularity throughout Western. Europe, combined this renewed emphasis on weeping and contrition as devotional practices with lyrical compositions that described the penitential emotions experienced by figures in the Gospels and by early saints
Emotional communities that valued an interactive reading practice of weeping and penitence through identification with biblical figures including Saint Paul, Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary, and King David extended beyond many traditional boundaries in early modern Europe
By providing a script for emotional identification with a community of saints and Biblical figures, these texts contributed to a growing international sense of the Christian as an individual who chooses to join communities of worship based on emotional identification, rather than on the basis of rational conviction or political persuasion

Summary

Introduction

Poetic expressions of lamentation extend back to the ancient world. The book of Lamentations (quoted above) is only one of the most influential of a long tradition of poetic laments. Tansillo’s 1560 Le Lagrime di San Pietro and quickly gained popularity throughout Western Europe, combined this renewed emphasis on weeping and contrition as devotional practices with lyrical compositions that described the penitential emotions experienced by figures in the Gospels and by early saints. Emotional communities that valued an interactive reading practice of weeping and penitence through identification with biblical figures including Saint Paul, Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary, and King David extended beyond many traditional boundaries in early modern Europe. Their affective links help explain the durability and adaptability of the weeping poem across early modern national, linguistic, and confessional lines. By providing a script for emotional identification with a community of saints and Biblical figures, these texts contributed to a growing international sense of the Christian as an individual who chooses to join communities of worship based on emotional identification, rather than on the basis of rational conviction or political persuasion

Tansillo and the Lagrime Genre in Italy

Weeping Poetry as a Pan-European Genre

Weeping Poetry in England: A Case Study

Vincenti

Findings

Conincx