Abstract

This article contextualizes Richard Crashaw’s epigram “Blessed be the paps which thou hast sucked” within a contemporary debate about the proper role of ceremony in Protestant worship. More specifically, it identifies the scandalous feeding celebrated in the epigram with a pamphlet war raging in the mid- to late 1630s over the naming and placement of the altar. Far from articulating a clear “Laudian” position, Crashaw’s imaginative invocation of Luke 11:27–28 exposes and explodes the shared hermeneutic underlying both pro-altar and pro-table arguments. Crashaw’s poetic interrogation of the depth/surface hermeneutic informing the altar debate historicizes the affiliation between “literary” and “sacramental” habits of reading.

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