Christian Poet Research Articles

Fausse loyauté et psychologie poétique. Sur les traces de deux écrivains danois oubliés en tant qu'auteurs de romans policiers, Hans Scherfig et Ole Sarvig

Two Danish authors, the communist Hans Scherfig and the esthete and Christian poet Ole Sarvig, wrote thrillers which were never acknowledged as real “literature”. Scherfig used the English whodunit as a model for his depiction of satirical mores and Sarvig used the thriller The Chaser to describe the spleen and uprootedness of modern man.

Highlights in this issue

Reading books to children is assumed to be better than allowing the child to watch TV. However, is there any scientific evidence for this assumption? Shohei Ohgi et al have now demonstrated greater frontal lobe activation in children, who are engaged in picture book readings as compared with children watching videotapes telling the same story. Frontal lobe activation was assessed by near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), (pp. 225–229). Maternal age at child birth increases in developed countries. This is partly due to assisted fertility. Whether this leads to increased adverse outcome is discussed in an article by Malcolm Battin on behalf of the Australia and New Zealand Neonatal Network. They report disproportionate increased neonatal intensive care admissions of infants born to mothers aged over 40 years. However, the neonatal outcomes of these infants were not different from infants to younger mothers (pp. 219–224) Infants who cry excessively and have feeding and sleeping difficulties are predictive of disturbed preschool adaptive behavior and social skills. This is shown in a prospective population by Dieter Wolke’s research group in Basel and Coventry (pp. 286–290). A & B:s (apnoea and bradycardia) are common in preterm infants. Although caffeine is the drug of choice various other treatments have been proposed, which are reviewed by Christian Poets. (pp. 172–177). Several articles in this issue deal with childhood obesity Anne Nielsen et al present new Danish reference values for height, weight and body mass index (pp 268-278). Akós Baráth et al from Hungary point out the importance of carefully monitoring weight and blood pressure status of children and adolescents (pp.251-255). Maroje Soric and Marjeta Misigoj-Durakovic propose that overweight children should spend more time on physical activity during weekends (pp. 244–250). HGM Oude Luttikhuis et al from Holland report that parents often perceive children with overweight as having normal weight and obese children as only slightly heavy (pp. 263–267).

Topos "locus amoenus" w łacińskiej poezji chrześcijańskiego antyku

This paper deals with the topos of locus amoenus in Latin poetry of Christian antiquity. Descriptions of idealized landscape can be found in whole literary tradition from Homer on. In Latin epic poetry Virgil used this device to describe Elysium, which Aeneas enters in the Aeneid. In Virgil’s eclogues locus amoenus is a place of refuge for shepherds from calamities of fate and an alien world. For the farmer in his Georgics it is a reward for honest agricultural work. For Horace it was an escape from the noise of the city. For Christian poets, Prudentius in Cathemerinon, Sedulius in Carmen paschale, Avitus of Vienne, Dracontius, Venantius Fortunatus and other, locus amoenus becomes the biblical paradise in the eschatological sense, or morę generally, salvation. Use of the topos of locus amoenus shows the cultural continuity of antiquity. In Christian poetry this theme is filled with a new content, but the process of thinking and artistic creation remains they share with classical authors.

Tendances esthétiques de la poésie latine tardive (325-470)

Impregnated with the triumphalism of the reigns of Constantine and Theodosius and persuaded, also after 410, of the eternity of Rome (Roma aeterna), of the triumph of light over darkness, the late Latin poetry is characterised by the search for a point of balance between its will to adopt the classical inheritance (rhetorical, literary and ideological neo-classicism) and the expression of its Alexandrian taste (mixture of poetic genres and tones; miniaturization and fragmented composition; predisposition towards a world of metamorphosis, change and illusion; taste for spectacle and the spectacular; sophistication and art of the enigma). In general, there is no fundamental difference in aesthetic attitude between pagan and Christian poets (contra R. Herzog); every poet, in his own way, strove for a balance between neo-classicism and neo-alexandrianism within the triumphal expression of contemporary ideology. But, for the true Christian, poetic activity became a spiritual act, a form of divine worship, and ...

Spirit and Flesh in Twentieth-Century Welsh Poetry: A Comparison of the Work of D. Gwenallt Jones and Pennar Davies

In Poetry Since 1945, a masterly assessment of Welsh poetry between 1945 and 1970 published more than thirty years ago, the then-young literary critic Dafydd Glyn Jones described the impact the Penyberth incident--the Burning of the Bombing School--had made on Welsh literature up to that time. Penyberth in North Wales's Llyn peninsula and the heartland of Welsh-speaking Wales, was where the British War Ministry had decided, in the teeth of local and national opposition, to build a testing ground for its Air Force pilots in preparation for the impending European war. On September 8, 1936, three leaders of the Welsh Nationalist Party--an academic, a schoolmaster, and a minister of religion--took it upon themselves to block the government's plans by setting the place on fire; they each received sentences of nine months in prison for their pains. That most unexpected for freedom and dignity signaled a new phase in Welsh national consciousness, when those who were committed to Wales were challenged for the first time in the modern era to act radically in order to preserve their culture and their way of life. In response to that incident, the poet Robert Williams Parry in his sonnet Cymru 1937 (Wales 1937) had voiced an almost existential plea calling on his contemporaries, whether pious secular, to do something rather than to lament impotently on the demise of their nation: O'r Llanfair sydd ar y neu Lanfair Mathafarn Chwyth ef i'r synagog neu chwyth ef i'r dafarn. (Llwyd 129) From the Llanfair on the Hill the burial place of the Methodist revivalist and hymnist Williams Pantycelyn, or Llanfair Mathafarn, the Anglesey abode of his eighteenth-century contemporary, the dissolute poetic genius Goronwy Owen, blow him to the synagogue him to the tavern (my own translation). This wind, wrote Dafydd Glyn Jones, blown through Welsh poetry ever since, and--thanks largely to the powerful voices of the two Christian poets, Saunders Lewis and D. Gwenallt Jones, against whom the still small voices of Marxism and Humanism had no earthly chance,--it has blown, almost without veering, from Llanfair ar y Bryn (47). Even in 1971 this, in the world of literature, was a most unusual situation. The twentieth century had seen the progressive secularization of Welsh life, not least among its intelligentsia. The University of Wales, its first constituent College having been established in 1872, had taken its earliest strides at the exact time when Darwinism and other humanist ideologies had undermined, to an increasing extent, the older values and orthodoxies. If the liberal theology that became so pervasive among a section of the religious leaders at the turn of the century had been, for some, a means of preserving the integrity of Christian faith in the context of the modern age, for others it was all too easy to pass beyond liberal Protestantism altogether into a full-blown secular humanism. If Christianity was merely humanism with a pious tinge, what reason was there to stay Christian at all? Just as this was occurring among the intelligentsia, the great phalanx of the working class, and not just in the industrial south, was also traveling in a secular direction under the influence of socialism and the labor movement. By the first decade of the century, the older individualism was being superseded by a class-based politics that prized workers' rights much higher than religious faith; the people's utopia became a much more potent symbol than the Kingdom of God. Following the deep tragedy of the First World War, the feeling was that the new Wales would be a secular Wales with religion having been banished to the past. And so it was, a fact exemplified during the 1930s by the poets and the novelists of the Anglo-Welsh: Rhys Davies, Idris Davies, and Dylan Thomas. It was also true of the most creative artists who wrote in Welsh: T. H. Parry-Williams and Robert Williams Parry being cases in point. …

Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics (review)

Reviewed by: Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics Romana Huk Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics. Michael Heller . Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2005. Pp. xvi + 247. $21.95 (paper). In "Doubt," the prose-poetic section of her recent book, Gone (2003), Fanny Howe, the leading avant-garde Christian poet, writes: When all the structures granted by common agreement fall away and that "reliable chain of cause and effect" that Hannah Arendt talks about—breaks—then a person's inner logic also collapses. She moves and sees at the same time, which is terrifying. Yet strangely it is in this moment that doubt shows itself to be the physical double to belief; it is … the invisible engine behind every step taken. Doubt is what allows a single gesture to have a heart. (25) One of the most striking hermeneutic reversals of the last century—made suddenly apparent in our new one—was in the trade of mystifying forms of either knowing or unknowing for doubt, belief's "physical double," as a tool in both religious and poetic thought. Michael Heller's Uncertain Poetries—a selection from twenty-five years' worth of essay-writing—elegantly pursues this reversal alongside its relation to what, in his own Jewish-American reading and writing concerns, is dispersal: the diasporic yet adhesive, "midrashic" unfolding of textual interpretation and re-visionary composition over temporal and linguistic, as well as geographic, distances. In this book, which Heller (better known as a very fine poet) tells us we should regard as "an intellectual biography," such reversals and dispersals eventually fold over one another in remarkable and moving ways. That's a pun, in part, because these essays do actually enact the uneasiness which Heller suggests is required in post-"structural" or post-"logical" writings, be they theology or poetry. Such uneasiness arises from a vertiginous location in both affirmation and doubt, from a perspective that looks both backwards into tradition and forwards from it, casting itself into perpetual hegira or wanderings, continual "move[ment] out from under the father's name" and from its "idea of fixity" in acts of renaming that provisionally suture the text of exile to the world as met (172). Whereas Howe's movement out of certainty involves "loss of [End Page 599] memory" (25), Heller's involves the making of what he calls "counter-memory": "That is, if the commonplace of Jewishness … involves textuality and commentary, it is also true that the poetics of Jewishness involves the undoing of text and comment, that textuality is a kind of traveling away, of departing, of heresy" (168). Such movement, in his essays, takes the form of writing in sub-sections that continually reapproach the issue at hand, proliferating new angles of departure from, and return to, formative texts. In the poetry that he values, it takes the form of "struggle" within the lyric (that genre formerly known as monologic) which ultimately unbinds the writing subject from its own self-preservative inner logic, moving it outward from sanctuary toward the world and others. As this description would suggest, Heller's wanderings often take him not only into the work of the American Objectivist poets, about whom he wrote his award-winning critical book, Conviction's Net of Branches (1985), but also into the texts of Benjamin and Heidegger, Scholem and Levinas, and other theorists of difference, dialogue, and the "outside," such as Kristeva, Bakhtin, Derrida, Bataille, and Blanchot. The essays here are arranged in four parts (three of which move counter-chronologically by topic, ranging forwards by doubling back into history). First, Heller offers instigating thoughts on the "The Uncertainty of the Poet," as depicted in de Chirico's 1913 so-named painting and elaborated in Saussure's linguistics, both of which dislocate the knowable world of words from what they signify, leaving us in Baudelairian "dis-ease," "drawn down a corridor made of words, pulled or birthed into and surrounded by language," (3) but disabused of any "masquerade by which [the sign] called itself reality" (12). And yet, Heller insists (in biblical language), it is this very dis-ease, or doubt, that "liberates us" for movement, "deliver[s us] to...

SYRITHE PUGH, Spenser and Ovid. Pp. vii + 302. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. 47.50 (ISBN 0 7546 3905 3).

SPENSER's debt to Ovid has long been acknowledged, but has until recently tended to be subordinated to his debt to Virgil. In Syrithe Pugh's sustained and scholarly analysis, Spenser's Ovidianism is shown to be much more systematic and subversive than previously recognized. Spenser is presented as a more coherent and authoritative model of independence from monarchical power than his younger contemporaries Donne and Marlowe, as he makes a more thorough use of the Ovidian mode of opposition. In this, Pugh to some extent follows Patrick Cheney's argument in Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), but finds a greater and earlier subversive element in Spenser than in Marlowe. The argument is very clearly organized, and shows how Spenser at different times makes use of different elements of Ovid's œuvre. The use of the Fasti in The Shepheardes Calender enables a critique of Queen Elizabeth's appropriation of the canonical year to the service of her own cult. Perhaps the most satisfying chapter here is the reading of Book I of The Faerie Queene, in which the Redcrosse Knight is seen as a poor reader of Ovidian error. Una can read the cave of Error as ‘Beware!’ but George is unable to see such subtle subtexts. In the Fradubio episode ‘he can only regard metamorphosis as an astonishing but empty fiction, and does not look for the metaphorical and moral meanings it can convey’ (69). Crucially, in an argument that owes something to the work of Colin Burrow, Pugh shows that Ovid's valuation of pity makes him in many respects an easier model for a Christian poet to follow than the sterner Virgil. Book II of The Faerie Queene is therefore a demonstration of the limitations of Virgilian temperance. In the reading of Book III, there is a very convincing demonstration of how Spenser rehabilitates images of maternity, which had been monstrous or dangerous in earlier books, though the Ovidian basis of this rehabilitation does not seem completely necessary. More compelling is the reading of the Garden of Adonis as replacing the Virgilian preoccupation with the dynastic with ‘a vision of the totality and mutability of the human condition, shaped and contained not by any political programme but only by an intimation of providence itself’ (144). Whilst one might wonder if the Garden is really such a positive place for Spenser, the use of Ovid here is powerfully demonstrated.

Los Versus Paschales de Ausonio comentados por Francisco Sylvio

The present article analyzes the commentary that Franciscus Sylvius realizes to Ausonius's Versus Paschales. We find scanty annotations of grammatical nature and abundance of doctrinal and theological notes, of what we deduce that the intention of the commentator is to highlight that Ausonius is an authentic Christian poet.

Bridal Songs: CatullanEpithalamiaand PrudentiusPeristephanon3

Prudentius' account of the martyrdom of the young Spanish girl Eulalia inPeristephanon3 is particularly interesting because not only does it consist of her defiance of an order to pay homage to the pagan gods but also a rejection of pressures to get married. If martyrdom constituted an act of rebellion against the conventions of pagan society, then female martyrdom was doubly so and the ways in which it was presented to a community in which Christianity was still struggling to establish its reputation is worthy of detailed examination. Prudentius was arguably the Christian poet most influenced by his pagan predecessors, making an active effort to compose poetry worthy of the great Latin poetic tradition. When examining the classical antecedents ofPeristephanon3, scholars have largely concentrated upon its Virgilian echoes, emphasising the heroic dimensions of Eulalia's conduct by comparing her to Virgilian ‘heroines’ (the Sibyl, Camilla and Dido) who challenge conventional female roles. Some critics have pointed to elements of an epithalamium within the poem but they have related this imagery to late antique epithalamia or to theSong of Songsrather than looking for antecedents within classical poetry.

Le Chant de la grâce: Port-Royal et la poésie d'Arnauld d'Andilly à Racine

By Tony Gheeraert. (Lumière classique, 47). Paris, Champion, 2003. 622 pp. Hb€95.00. This compelling study takes a single erroneous preconception and stands it on its head, showing not only how a certain accommodation of poetry and poetics was in evidence at Port-Royal in a period when its affiliates might rather have been suspected of an ideological hostility to any such activity, but also that an important evolution takes place within the writing in question. To this end, Tony Gheeraert demonstrates convincingly how a consistent network of images and motifs, stemming most frequently from the Bible and Saint Augustine, defines the poetic tradition of the solitaires and their allies, whilst tracing a shift in the aesthetic by which it is transmitted. He begins with a helpful survey of the definition and limits of the corpus treated, identifying Robert Arnauld d'Andilly, Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy, La Fontaine (in the Recueil de poésies chrétiennes et diverses) and Jean Racine as central to his concerns, alongside a certain amount of more tangentially related writing, often in a polemical idiom. He opens the first part with an exposition of the aesthetics of Port-Royal, and foregrounds the Augustinian injunction to turn the undisputed power of poetry towards God, rather than allowing it to be an end in itself. In this way, the tainted postlapsarian activity of poetic composition is, at worst, neutral and, at best, capable of promoting redemption in the writer and reader. What is rejected, on the other hand, is l'éloquence profane and, in a compelling analogy, Gheeraert examines the parallels between poetry and grace when viewed in this perspective. But poetry is also memorable, and thus may serve to mediate theological truths, to say nothing of polemical jibes, as was the case in the (controversially scabrous) Enluminures of Lemaistre de Sacy. The images that dominate are thereafter enumerated and exemplified: illumination, le cœur ardent, fall and ascent, wounds and balm, deserts and gardens and, finally, reconciliation. In the second part, Gheeraert explores the differences in tonality between what he sees as the two generations of Port-Royal. He begins by looking at the idea of the poet as déchiffreur of God's presence in the world, and reveals in the process certain unexpected common features in the poetry of Arnauld d'Andilly and that of Christian poets active in (apparently) radically different traditions. The later generation, dominated by Lemaistre de Sacy, turns, on the other hand, to a more critical and reforming attitude towards poetic creation, accepting its presence, but eschewing ornament, ostentation, and indeed any attention paid to the music of the words per se; for Sacy, poetry was an exercise in asceticism, a process of suppression and constraint. What the book as a whole magisterially brings into focus is the degree to which Port-Royal, seen in this light, functions as a microcosm of the evolution of poetic composition in the French seventeenth century tout court, a development that is exemplified in action in the anonymous Lettre au Père Adam jésuite, attributed to Guillaume Le Roy, and incorporated in its entirety as an appendix.

The Religious Epigram in Early Stuart England

The epigram, widely practiced in the early seventeenth century, has received remarkably little attention from scholars, and the religious epigram, as a distinct application of the form, has attracted almost none. Only Richard Crashaw's attempts (in both Latin and English) are well known, but his Epigrammatum sacrorum liber (1634) is just one example of a mass of writings that reached their English peak in the mid-1630s (Young). A thorough study of the style of this genre and its relation to the religious lyric and emblem is needed, but my purpose, drawing principally on the epigram collections of the 1630s, is to consider four questions: how was the form understood by its practitioners and audience, under what circumstances and for what function were these epigrams written, to what function were they later put in circulation or publication, and, finally, what different role did the satiric religious epigram fulfill? Ultimately, I argue that the religious epigram was a subgenre that never fully overcame its vexed legacy and reputation, in either its devotional or satiric modes. Religious epigrams in early seventeenth-century England were part of a broad European phenomenon: Neo-Latin, French, and German religious epigrams were widespread, with a tradition going back well into the sixteenth century. (1) This is considerably earlier than English attempts at the genre, which I identify as reaching their high-water mark in the early to mid 1630s. (2) The secular epigram in England had reached its peak between 1595 and 1620, best-known in Jonson's English epigrams and John Owen's neo-Latin ones. I suggest that the cultivation of the religious epigram in England in the 1620s and 1630s stems from both direct imitation of the continental religious tradition and the adaptation of the English secular tradition represented by Jonson, Owen, and Sir John Harington. Also clear is that religious epigrams in England were very much a manifestation of the university culture of Oxford and Cambridge: they were most often written and collected by students and scholars and published by Oxbridge printers. Nearly all Renaissance epigrammatists looked back to Martial, the most prominent classical poet in the genre. Martial's style, tone, and the organization of his epigram books were imitated by self-consciously literary writers like Jonson and Owen, and his example offered the genre a classical legitimacy. However, while was highly venerated as a stylist, his frequent obscenity was a significant difficulty for both Renaissance readers and those who wished to rehabilitate the form for Christian use. A range of writers attempted adaptations and censored editions to render him suitable for a Christian readership. Jesuit scholars in particular developed these expurgated texts, which culminated in the widely used edition by Mathaeus Raderus in 1599, one mocked by John Donne as gelded Martial (Sullivan 294). Taking a different approach was the Lutheran Johann Burmeister, who in 1612 published a faithful edition of Martial, Martialis Renati. Parodiarum Sacrarum partes tres Quibus obposita M. Val. Martialis Epigrammata that combined the original epigrams with more edifying paraphrases or parodies on the facing page (Sullivan 281). Such attempts helped to edify the form, making possible the original religious epigrams of the period. But Crashaw also laments at length that the seed of Idumaea had grown in the soil of Bilbil, the home of (642). He is wishing, vehemently, that had been a Christian poet. While the goal of Crashaw and others was to sanctify and reclaim the form, to achieve a Christian parody of it, often the result feels closer to burlesque. Ruth Wallerstein writes: To characterize them [Crashaw's epigrams] in a word, they translate the Bible into Ovid (59-60). (3) A number of early seventeenth-century epigrammatists directly mark their conversion of the form in program poems, using the language of repentance and conversion as they adopt religious subject matter. …

A Prophet in the Wasteland

The late Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz was a voice of transcendent beauty amid the wasteland of modern and postmodern verse. His bold choice of themes, clear voice, compelling images, and searching faith are an encouragement to Christian poets and readers of poetry, showing us that, when it comes to spiritual matters, the contemporary world is open for discussion.

Christina Rossetti's Poetic vocation

This article argues that Christina Rossetti's Christianity enabled her to overcome the restraints placed upon the Victorian woman writer and publish her poetry. It compares her to Gerard Manley Hopkins, the other pre-eminent Victorian Christian poet, to show that while he felt constrained by his faith to refrain from publication, she felt empowered by hers to enter the literary marketplace and seek a readership. Whereas Hopkins felt his Christianity demanded him to be silent and reclusive, qualities attributed to the ideal Victorian woman, Rossetti modelled herself more upon the masculine type of the Christian preacher, believing her poetry might serve to bring her readers closer to God

Bède et la tradition grammaticale latine

This article examines the orientation of the grammatical culture of Bede through his sources for the De arte metrica (DAM) and the De schematibus et tropis (DST). These treatises are not addressed to beginners, but aim at giving students a sophisticated Christian culture. From the grammarians of Antiquity Bede retains the initiation to a discerning and searching reading of the authors, far more than the theoretical definitions of the Artes. Which authors ? The poets, of course, but Christian poets, substituted for those of ancient Rome : these Christian poems, for which the DAM is the reader’s guide, are like a reflection of Holy Scripture. In passing from one treatise to the other the student crosses a decisive threshold both in his education and in the corpus of reference works. For the only true poetry is the word of God transmitted through Scripture « which we believe to be the intrinsic bearer of life everlasting »

Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England (review)

Reviewed by: Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England Virginia H. Blain Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England, by Cynthia Scheinberg. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, gen. ed. Gillian Beer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 275 pp. $55.00. This is a very timely publication. There has been a huge revival of interest in Victorian women's poetry in the last ten years, and it has led to a major reconfiguration of the English poetic landscape of the nineteenth century. Many of those feminist critics engaged in the recovery work of lost female voices from this period have had agendas far removed from the religious sphere. Yet religion and religious devotion were one of the major motivations driving many women poets towards publication of their work at a time when self-display of this kind was severely frowned on for women. Cynthia Scheinberg's excellent volume clearly demonstrates the importance of the religious element in the work of some of the most well-known of female poets, Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, where these elements have not been so much overlooked by earlier critics as perhaps, too homogeneously interpreted. For the angle introduced by Scheinberg is that of Jewish identity within Christian cultural formations in the Victorian period. She has chosen two poets from the mainstream Christian [End Page 152] (Protestant) culture to compare with each other, and with two Anglo-Jewish poets, Amy Levy and Grace Aguilar. Her readings bring to light some unexpected and highly illuminating insights, and cast a different interpretation on some aspects that have previously been too quickly assimilated into a "normative" Christian reading. Scheinberg's research has taken her beyond the more obvious figures in the new canon of women poets; her chapter on the remarkable Jewish poet Amy Levy, and one on the less well-known Grace Aguilar, show an impressive breadth of research. Her work on Aguilar is particularly valuable as she is so little known—and less understood, as an openly Jewish writer occupying space within a Christian tradition—and I found the discussion of Aguilar's poetic project judicious and illuminating, having only known her previously through her best-selling Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters (1847). Amy Levy's remarkably fine poetry has been taken up with avidity by critics anxious both to pay tribute to its understated intelligence, depth of feeling, and musicality and to decode the evidence of same-sex desires in pre-twentieth-century verse. Scheinberg accepts this evidence, but her extensive and finely tuned readings help to inflect the poetry towards another of its deeper interests, that of Jewish identity and its meaning for a young woman with a more problematic relation to her own Jewishness than Aguilar's, a relation which has often been traced in her novels—especially the remarkable Reuben Sachs (1888)—but seldom in her poetry—until now. Both Aguilar and Levy, of course, were grappling not only with issues of Jewish identity in a Christian culture, but also with an often openly expressed and virulent antisemitism which pervaded mid-Victorian British culture. "Run to Earth" is an early Levy poem (not noted by Scheinberg) that might well repay a reading of this kind, dealing as it does with the horrific hunting down and destruction of a gypsy woman and her baby by a pack of stag-hunting aristocrats, starved for their usual prey on a day out in the forest. Of its kind, it is a chilling study of the roots of racism. Scheinberg's tracing of the multiple explorations by non-Jewish women poets of the archetypal Jewish figure of Miriam, prophetic singer of womanhood, is especially interesting. She shows the different inflections given to this figure by the Christian poets, arguing that there was a tendency to project upon the Jewish woman an erotic and public power of performance denied to "the angel in the house." Here I wish Scheinberg had been able to include a discussion of the extraordinary Adah Isaacs Menken, Jewish convert, actress and poet, whose one volume of poems Infelicia (1867) makes some unusually powerful indictments of Christian women's culture, seen as complicit with...

The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance by Phillipa Hardman (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 733 Germanic legend and Christian teaching. Both have played a part in the creation of the poem, he argues; he is as willing to see analogues to Beowulf in the Icelandic sagas as in the biblical story of David and Goliath (and as ready to admit that such analogues are often imprecise at best). His discussion of the poem's spiritual atmosphere is well served by close attention to repetitionsof phrase and image, both within the poem and in other Old English texts like Andreas and the anonymous homilies; his refusal to re? gard verbal parallels between poems as mere 'formulaic repetition' leads him to argue for the influence of Beowulf not only on Andreas (a possibility long recognized) but on the works of Cynewulf as well. Not all the parallels he offerswill be equally com? pelling, and the direction ofinfluence is not always unequivocally established, but such corpus-wide concording of poetic language leads us closer to a sense of the network of intertextual influences that furnished the literary imagination of Anglo-Saxon poets. Further chapters discussing the presentation of character (pp. 169-202) and speech (pp. 203-37) are more conventional, but even relatively familiar observations are distilled into well-craftedaphorisms (e.g. 'insomerespects[...] Beowulf's own approach to Heorot is every bit as stylized as that of Grendel', (p. 208)). His final descrip? tion of the poem as the meditation of a historically minded Christian poet on the pre-Christian past 'all too aware of human limitations, [who] judiciously suspends judgment' (p. 263) is not daring or novel, but Orchard presents it lucidly, fluently,and strongly. The book concludes with a generous abundance of back matter: a collation of conflicting manuscript foliations, fiftypages of 'Repeated Formulas' in the poem, the massive bibliography, a most necessary 'Index of Lines and Passages Cited and Discussed', an index of scholars cited, and a general index. As a 'Critical Companion' to the poem, Orchard's book offers more than it pro? mises; it is certainly a reliable guide through the major areas of critical concern in the understanding of Beowulf (the damaged manuscript, the difficultlanguage, the unknown context and obscure meaning) and any student of the poem will be grateful forits clarity and thoroughness, but it is also a full-scale application of the most recent tools of rhetorical and stylistic criticism, surveying the entire corpus of Old English to place the art of Beowulf in the context of the literature of its age. Orchard proceeds confidently and meticulously; his work will inspire and encourage new approaches to the poem. Any reader of Beowulf will find much pleasure in this book, and it is a worthy companion indeed to a poem that still, thankfully,always remains just beyond our grasp. University of Tennessee at Knoxville R. M. Liuzza The Matter ofIdentity inMedieval Romance. Ed. by Phillipa Hardman. Cambridge: Brewer. 2002. xi+165 pp. ?4?; $75- ISBN 0-85991-761-4. These essays were originally presented as papers at the seventh conference on Ro? mance in Medieval England, held at Reading in 2000. There was no set theme, but a recurrent concern was the idea of identity. The resultant book argues, says Phillipa Hardman's introduction, that at a profound level the subject of identity is the matter of all romance. The collection, nevertheless, contains some important contributions where this is not the major topic. Attainment of personal identity is central to the firsttexts considered. Tony Davenport 's discussion of the abbreviated version of the swan-knight material in the Chevalere Assigne emphasizes its increased focus on the educative process by which the hero reaches adulthood, an achievement poignantly contrasted with the position of the doomed swan sibling forwhom there is no such possibility. Sir Gowther, too, is a romance about process, as Joanne A. Charbonneau says, 'of possibility, of becoming'. She finds, however, that factors such as the uneasy 734 Reviews movement between genres and the muddled inclusion of pointless detail result in an incoherent text whose very nature is problematic. Disturbing questions about human nature are raised but the text offersno satisfactory answers. Attainment of identity is less important in Sir Beves of Hamtoun, and Corinne...

Renaissance Monks: Monastic Humanism in Six Biographical Sketches

List of Illustrations Foreword, Gerhard B. Winkler, O. Cist. Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction 1. An Editor of Latin Bibles and Works of the Church Fathers: Conradus Leontorius, Monk of Maulbronn 2. A Graecian, Christian Poet, and Playwright: Benedictus Chelidonius, Monk of Nuremberg, Abbot of the Schottenstift, Vienna 3. A Historiographer and Distinguished Verse Maker: Bolfgangus Marius, Monk of Aldersbach, Bavaria 4. A Latinist, Supporter of Reuchlin, and Editor of Christ-centered Poetry: Henricus Urbanus, Monk of Georgenthal, Thuringia 5. Jack-of-all-Trades: Vitus Bild Acropolitanus, Monk of Saints Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg 6. When Monks Were Eager to Study the Sacred Languages: Nikolaus Ellenbog, Monk of Ottobeuren, Swabia Conclusion Select Bibliography Index of Personal Names Index of Places Index of Subjects

Die Musen Im Dienste Christi: Strategien Der Rechtfertigung Christlicher Dichtung in Der Lateinischen Spätantike

AbstractThe present article examines the arguments by which early Christian poets in Late Antiquity justify their attempt to combine Christian content and pagan poetical form. It focuses on the poetologically significant parts of their works, especially the proems. Whereas the earliest poets, i.e.Proba, Prudentius and Orientius, justify Christian poetry by its effects on the poet's personality and in the context of the poet's life, Juvencus prefigures another type of argument which is fully developed in Sedulius' Carmen paschale, according to which Christian poetry is justified by its material and formal qualities. This new type of argument has enormous reception in the Middle Ages and is especially adapted by Hrotsvith of Gandersheim who combines content and form as two coordinates of a more differentiated system.

Gerard Manley Hopkins on Planet Earth

Nineteenth‐century Jesuit priest and poet, Gerd Manley Hopkins (1844–89), produced poems on natural themes which were not only revolutionary for their structure and style but also disctinctive and forward‐looking for their treatment of the environment. In these poems, he presents nature as intrinsically (rather than instrumentally) valuable, God as concerned with the salvation not only of humans but of the environment, and humankind as responsible noy only for polluting the Earth but for participating in its salvation. Christian poets of the twenty‐first century need to hees and follow Hopkin's example.

BOOK REVIEW: Cynthia Scheinberg.WOMEN'S POETRY AND RELIGION IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND: JEWISH IDENTITY AND CHRISTIAN CULTURE. pp. 275. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Cynthia Scheinberg's analysis of the religious poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Grace Aguilar, and Amy Levy should significantly reshape the study of Victorian poetry. By offering a contrapuntal comparison of Victorian Christian poets with their Jewish contemporaries, she is able to expand our knowledge of the genres of Victorian women's religious poetry, and to illuminate the extensive conflict between Christians and Jews over possession of their shared symbols.