Religious Lyric Research Articles

Dancing out of Form, Dancing into Self: Genre and Metaphor in Marshall, Shange, and Walker

Western culture has typically seen dance as an empowering activity, offering a forum for individual self-expression, or acting like a religious ritual that binds the and spiritually renews the individual. In literature, the dance for centuries has been a conventional celebratory ending, all of Shakespeare's comedies, for example, concluding with a wedding dance. Northrop Frye has noted dance's presence the masque, during which audience with the actors was encouraged (288); he also emphasizes the participation mystique of dance, comparing it to religious lyrics and poems of community (295-96). IN modern American popular culture, dance has been associated with opportunities for individual self-expression. For example, American musical plays such as My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle's linguistic triumph at the ball is noted Could Have Danced All Night. Jets and Sharks of West Side Story sing, strut, and leap their masculine prowess, while Maria whirls space, singing her love and female self-appreciation Feel Pretty. And more recently, the heroine of the film Dirty has danced her way into independence and sexual maturity. For our culture, inherent the act of dancing are, varying degrees, self-affirmation, eroticism, spiritual renewal, and communal bonding, suggesting dance's ability to heal the mind/body split. This split, which especially afflicts women transculturally, is identified by Adrienne Rich, Jane Gallop, and others as a major force perpetuating patriarchal culture for American women. Leslie Gotfrit has argued that not only dancing but also about dance (and reading about it, I would add) helps to heal this mind/body division: Dancing precipitates an incredible longing. To recover the pleasure -- the imagining and `re-membering,' the connecting again with my limbs, my breath, my body -- is to ignite desire. These are rare moments of realizing my body and mind as not distinct, and of feeling the power of creativity when embodied. This is my history and investment dance, always the shadow of the writing (176). This reintegration of body with mind is central to women's empowerment and to any political agenda that they may pursue (Gotfrit 184). Gotfrit explains how the physicality of the music and pleasure the movement liberate women's normally controlled sexual feelings, a control society expects of women: dance, letting go of the tight rein women often keep on their sexuality is possible...dancing permits and frees the body to experience sensuality and desire, [and] sexuality (frequently and area of silence and pain women's lives) is allowed expression; a dancing woman thus experiences pleasure from contacting her own sexuality and also feels control of herself (178-79). Because she is control, a woman can resist attempts to turn her body into a sexual object. Eroticism, resistance to sexual oppression, and self-proclamation, as well as communal unification and spiritual rejuvenation, then, are some of the pleasures of dance sought by Western women. African cultures also recognize dance's affective and spiritual powers, giving dance a central place their communal events, both secular and religious. As John S. Mbiti indicates his book, Introduction to African Religion, music, singing, and dance together are used in all activities of African life: cultivating the fields, fishing, herding, performing ceremonies, praising rulers and warriors, hushing babies to sleep... (8). Mbiti describes the function of music and dance during communal worship as a way of dissolving barriers between each person's mind, body, and spirit: Through music, singing, and dancing, people are able to participate emotionally and physically the act of worship. music and dancing penetrate into the very being of the worshipping individuals (61). Dance celebrations also dissolve barriers between individuals: The dancing and rejoicing strengthen solidarity and emphasize the corporateness of the whole group (Mbiti, African Religion and Philosophy 182). …

:Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship

Michael C. Schoenfeldt here offers the first major exploration of the connections between George Herbert's devotional poetry the social practices political discourse of his day. Viewing and Country Parson as part of the larger civilizing process of Western Europe, Schoenfeldt shows how Herbert discovers in the discourses of courtesy theology a common vocabulary of authority, selfhood, petition, discipline. Before entering the priesthood, Herbert nourished contacts in court, was elected University Orator at Cambridge, served in Parliament. In turning to God, Schoenfeldt argues, Herbert did not simply turn away from the secular world but also turned its language, particularly the language of courtesy, into the medium for his lyric worship of God. The confluence of courtesy spirituality in Herbert's poetry provides a fascinating insight into a society searching for an appropriate discourse of reverence in a time of baffling change. The first five chapters investigate the manifold ways in which Herbert's life works exemplify the interdependence of social religious behavior in the English Renaissance. The sixth final chapter extends this investigation into the nervous eroticism of Herbert's poems. Considering Temple as well as Herbert's letters, speeches, Latin poems, collections of foreign proverbs, translations, Country Parson, less familiar lyrics, Schoenfeldt offers a thorough detailed reading of Herbert's rich conflicted corpus. Prayer Power is not only a bold redefinition of the accomplishment of one of the finest poets of the English Renaissance but also the first sustained study to advance a cultural poetics of the religious lyric.

'Now, fye on youre wepynge!': tears in medieval English romance

'Now, fye on youre wepynge!': tears in medieval English romance Hwa se mei purh Godes 3eouve i beoden habbe teares, ha mei don wiS godd al pet ha eauer wule.1 And sir Bors rode streyte unto quene Gwenyver, and whan she saw sir Bors she wepte as she were wood. 'Now, fye on youre wepynge!' seyde sir Bors de Ganys. 'For ye wepe never but whan there ys no boote'.2 1 The figure of a weeping woman is so familiar in romance literature that it may hardly seem necessary to give it special consideration. Loosely associated with the modern catch-phrase 'a damsel in distress', the sorrowing woman of romance has been granted an apparently classic status: she is understood to imply the helpless dependence of the female on a male agent of rescue. Her sorrow is primarily a pretext for male adventure, whether military, amatory or both. In the English-speaking cultures which today study medieval narrative, weeping is predominantly a feminised and a disempowered activity. If 'men must work, and women must weep',3 then weeping women are patently idle or dysfunctional. But if the medieval English romance is viewed historically, its role in the gradual construction of weeping as a sign of weakness, and as a feminised action, can be seen as markedly unusual. For it is often acknowledged that in some other social and cultural contexts of the later Middle Ages and well beyond, weeping was permitted more freely to both men and women, represented in written texts as an activity of value, and encouraged as a purposive form of behaviour.4 A n d so to look again at the nature of tears in medieval romance 1 Ancrene Wisse, ed. J.R.R. Tolkien, Early English Text Society (EETS) OS 249, London, 1962, p. 125, lines 22ff. 'If God gives any woman the gift of tears in her praying, she may do whatever she wants with Him' [my translation]. All subsequent references are to this edition. 2 The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugene Vinaver, 2 vols, 2nd. edn, Oxford, 1967, 2, p. 808. All subsequent references are to this edition. 3 Charles Kingsley, 'The Three Fishers', in The Life and Works of Charles Kingsley, London, 1902, 16, p. 252. 4 See W.A. Christian, Jr, 'Provoked Religious Weeping in Early Modern Spain', in Religious Organisation and Religious Experience, ed. John Davis, London, 1982, pp. 97-11; Clarissa W . Atkinson, '"Your Servant, M y Mother": The Figure of Saint Monica in the Ideology of Christian Motherhood', in Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, ed. C.W. Atkinson, Boston, 1985, pp. 139-72; Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric, London, 1972; C.W. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe, Ithaca., N Y , 1983; J. Huizinga, The 44 A. Lynch literature is to question not only a textualised past, but also the modern generic and experiential boundaries that have separated romance from other kinds of writing. In this study, I shall argue that the representation of weeping provides a measure of discrimination between varieties of medieval narrative, but also indicates a transference of cultural values between notionally separate 'religious' and 'secular' worlds. The writing of affective reactions provided a complex site of tension between competing ideologies, in which the English romance gradually lent its support to a masculinist and secular ethos, but always remained liable to resistance from a view which stressed the efficacy of tears, so that by the fifteenth century, weeping had become the volatile and unstable narrative sign it was to remain for Spenser and Shakespeare. I do not ask here how much and why medieval men and w o m e n wept in actuality. In Catherine Belsey's words, 'the project is not... a social history of the period, but a (sketch-)map of a discursive field',5 and one small part of the field at that. M y purpose is mainly to examine the incidence of weeping as sign and structural element in some medieval texts, religious and secular, including fictional and romance narratives, and through that to suggest something of its...

"Purtreture" and "Holsom Stories": John Lydgate's Accommodation of Image and Text in Three Religious Lyrics

John Lydgate’s interest in the visual arts is apparent both in his frequent references to painting and illumination and in those poems he composed to accompany paintings or other visual arts. The latter poems are more than simply narrative or descriptive; Lydgate shows a definite appreciation for the potential effectiveness of visual images. In poems such as “On The Image of Pity,” “The Dolerous Pyte of Crystes Passioun,” and “Cristes Passioun,” Lydgate increases or curtails the complexity of the poetic description and decoration, according to the purpose of the particular work of art. In a strictly meditative lyric, for example, he combines visual images and text to create a focus for meditation that impresses itself on the memory and surpasses the impact of either medium on its own.

Sir Philip Sidney's Psalms, the Sixteenth-Century Psalter, and the Nature of Lyric

To describe critically the sixteenth-century religious lyric, and to integrate it with the contemporary amatory poetry: these challenges are perhaps as perennial as any other major issue touching Renaissance English literature. Because of the generality or indifference with which the topic has been treated, many readers find that to step from sixteenth- to seventeenth-century devotional poetry in English is to enter a climate of poetic quality and critical rigor for which, it seems, there is little precedent: we often seem to lack a clearly articulated idea of what sixteenth-century devotional poets, many of whom are also the most influential profane poets of the age, were trying to accomplish through their divine lyrics, and of how their concerns might be seen as continuous with those of later writers. Building on the extant studies of historical and doctrinal elements in this body of work, how might we undertake to recuperate our understanding of its generic identity as lyric? In its many translations and adaptations over the sixteenth century, the Book of Psalms is central to the development of the age's religious lyric. It belongs with Petrarch's Rime sparse as a master text through which the writers of the age tested their capacities, in this case not only as worshippers and theologians but as poets and critics. I would like to suggest that if we thoroughly investigated the sixteenth-century uses of the Psalter, we would likely find that poets adapt it to a thoroughgoing critical and experimental impulse. Their Psalters stand for a range of positions as to the nature and potentialities of lyric discourse. It might be argued that

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this article: Judges (Old Testament Guides). By A.D.H. Mayes. Daniel (Old Testament Guides). By P.R. Davies. The Prayers of the Bible. By R. E. Clements. Studies in the Gospel of Mark. By Martin Hengel. The Priority of John. By J.A.T. Robinson. Persecution and Martyrdom in the Theology of Paul (Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series, 6). By John S. Pobee. Exegesis at Qumiun: 4Q Florilegium in its Jewish Context (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplementary Series 29). By G. J. Brooke. Jesus and the Kingdom of God. By G.R. Beasley‐Murray. The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity. By Thomas Sheehan. The Logic of God Incarnate By Thomas V. Morris. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. III: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles. By Hans Urs von Balthasar, translated by Andrew Louth, John Saward, Martin Simon and Rowan Williams. Theology on the Way to Emmaus. By Nicholas Lash. Theology and Ministry in Context and Crisis: A South African Perspective. By John W. de Gruchy. The Triune Symbol: Persons, Process and Community. By Joseph A. Bracken. Culture and Eschatology: The Iconographical Vision of Paul Evdokimov. By Peter C. Phan. Lonergan, Spirituality, and the Meeting of Religions. By Vernon Gregson. Understanding Karl Rahner: An Introduction to his Life and Thought. By Herbert Vorgrimler. Encounter with God. By Duncan Forrester, James I. M. McDonald, and Gian Tellini. The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West. By Robert Taft. Beginning to Read the Fathers. By Boniface Ramsey. The Thought of Gregory The Great (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4/2). By G.R. Evans. The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire (Oxford History of the Christian Church). By J.M. Hussey. The Mediaeval European Religious Lyric: An Ars Poetica. By Patrick S. Diehl. Tradition and Change: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Chibnall. Edited by D. Greenway, C. Holdsworth and J. Sayers. The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading. By Jonathan Riley‐Smith. English Episcopal Acta II and HI: Canterbury 1162–1202. Edited by C.R. Cheney, Bridgett E.A. Jones, and Eric John. The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought. By Bernard McGinn. St Thomas More. The Answer to a Poisoned Book (Complete Works, Vol 11). Edited by Stephen Merriam Foley and Clarence Miller. The Reign of Elizabeth I (Problems in Focus). Edited by Christopher Haigh. Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms. By Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Episcopal Vision/American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America. By Robert Bruce Mullin. The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought. By Norman Vance. Religious Belief and the Will. By Louis P. Pojman. Education, Persons and Society: A Philosophical Enquiry. By Glenn Langford. Reason and Right. By Garth Hallett. The Value of Life: An Introduction to Medical Ethics. By John Harris. Just Health Care (Studies in Philosophy and Health Policy). By Norman Daniels. Music and the Emotions. By Malcolm Budd. The Development of Plato's Political Theory. By George Klosko. Montaigne in Motion. By Jean Starobinski. Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560–1640. By John Morgan. Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy. By John Rajchman. Sexual Desire. By Roger Scruton. The Sexual Creators: An Ethical Proposal for Concerned Christians. By André Guindon. Divorce and Remarriage. By Theordore Mackin. Annulment: Your Chance to Remarry Within the Catholic Church. By Joseph P. Zwack. Annulments. By Lawrence G. Wrenn.

George Herbert and Puritan Piety

Previous articleNext article No AccessGeorge Herbert and Puritan PietyJeanne Clayton HunterJeanne Clayton Hunter Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 68, Number 2Apr., 1988 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/487802 Views: 3Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1988 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Bibliography, (Dec 2021): 357–410.https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666560460.357Daniel W. Doerksen Show and Tell: George Herbert, Richard Sibbes, and Communings with God, Christianity & Literature 51, no.22 (Mar 2002): 175–190.https://doi.org/10.1177/014833310205100203

"In a valey of pis restles mynde": Contexts and Meaning

Middle English religious lyrics as rule prefer treating didactic and devotional themes to the more esoteric ideas associated with mysticism. The lyrics of Richard Rolle are perhaps exceptions, but even these present the theme of mystical union primarily as an elaboration of devotional meditations on the Passion or the Holy Name rather than describing the actual stages of contemplation. The anonymous lyric which begins In valey of 1is restles mynde appears to be notable exception to the rule.' Though the evocative power of the imagery has often been praised, the consensus of critical opinion was that the poem did not easily support rational analysis, until James I. Wimsatt argued that it uses imagery from The Canticle of Canticles in such way as to describe a fully developed mystical experience.2 Such images as the dove's nest of refuge, the garden of ripe fruits, the marriage chamber, and the couch are, as he demonstrates, those extensively developed as allegories of the mystical union between the Bridegroom (Christ) and the Bride (the Soul or, collectively, the Church) by the commentators on Canticles, particularly Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in his Sermones in cantica canticorum. Wimsatt finds comparable treatments of this theme in two Latin poems, one the well-known Jesu dulcis memoria, but apparently none in English, and this again may suggest the unusual nature of the poem. The significant use of imagery from Canticles locates the poem clearly in the broad and complex tradition of mystical writing. Less clear, however, is the exact nature of the experience being described. The terminology and imagery of mysticism, though shared by many writers, were nevertheless shaped into the expression of distinctive attitudes. While it would be wrong to argue the absence of any rationale for the imagery in the poem, thoroughgoing schematic reading ignores features of the text which are themselves related to trends in fourteenth-century English mysticism. The imagery from Canticles makes up less than half the poem and is used, where it does occur, in characteristically affective way. By examining its use, and by placing it in the context of contemporary writings which have as their subject the contemplative life, we may be able to reach more precise definition of this difficult poem's meaning. Undoubtedly the dominant feature of the text is the line from Canticles with which each stanza ends, the expression of intense desire spoken by Christ: quia amore langueo. The most important commentary on this line was that of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, not in his Sermones but in an earlier treatise, De diligendo Deo. This treatise must have been well known in its author's time since he refers to

The Williams Manuscript, Edmund Duncon, and Herbert's Quotidian Fever

The Williams Manuscript, Edmund Duncon, and Herbert's Quotidian Fever by Frank L. Huntley Certain events ettend the existence of en eerly end incomplete menuscript of Herbert's religious lyrics. Known es the Williems menuscript (W) from its current piece in Dr. Williems's Library in London, it beers no title end contains only 69 of the 164 poems in The Temple (Cambridge, 1633). The handwriting is thet of en amanuensis with corrections and emendations by George Herbert himself.1 Like the Bodleien menuscript (B), it elso came from Little Gidding, where it passed into the hands of the Mapletoft family, Judith Mapletoft being e niece of Nicholes Ferrer, founder of the religious community. The problem is, how did it get there end why should it heve left Herbert's hends in its unfinished stete? Was it discovered in his study at Bemerton efter his deeth, after, that is, he had surrendered the complete manuscript of his life's poetic work for publication? This is possible, but I do not think likely. When one notices the meticulous wey in which Herbert worked most of the IfV poems into the final Temple end rejected others, there seems to be no reeson for his keeping the earlier end partial draft. On the other hand, did e severe illness in body end mind before completing The Temple induce him to relinquish the eerlier copy of poems thet he hed written end corrected up to that critical juncture? Enquiry in this direction seems to offer the more plausible explenetion. The femilier story of the transmission of Herbert's poems told by the Reverend Edmund Duncon to Izeek Welton was published in 1670 in Walton's The Life of George Herbert. Briefly, it goes like this: "About one month before . . . [Herbert's] death," thet is, in eerly Februery, 1633 (I use 24Frank L. Huntley modem year-deting), Nicholas Ferrar, hearing of Herbert's illness, sent Edmund Duncon to assure the patient of the earnest prayers of his "femily" et Little Gidding. Herbert, very ill, received Duncon graciously. Thet evening "Mrs. Herbert provided Mr. Duncon a plein supper end e cleen lodging," end the following morning he continued his journey to Beth on some errand of his own. "Five deys leter" he returned to Herbert's bed-side end found the petient's condition worse. At this point Herbert geve Duncon e "little book" of his poems to teke beck to Nicholes Ferrer, end is seid to heve seid, emong other things: "Sir, I prey deliver this little book to my dear brother Ferrar . . . ; I desire him to read it; end then, if he think it mey turn to the edventege of eny dejected poor Soul, let it be mede public; if not, let him burn it; for I end it, ere less than the least of God's mercies."2 Traditionelly this pessege hes been teken to refer to the completed menuscript of The Temple (from which B was made), the basis of the first printed text. My hypothesis, however, is thet Duncon's visit to the poet took piece not in Februery, 1633, but in the Fell of 1626 when Herbert elmost died from en ecute quotidien fever et his brother Sir Henry's house in Woodford, Essex; end thet the "little book" wes not the complete mensucript of The Temple but only thet pert of it conteined in the IV menuscript, poems written end corrected before Herbert became e priest.3 Duncon's phrase "little book" is ept, for the W menuscript is ectuelly e little book, containing fewer then helf the poems of The Temple on 120 leeves measuring five and three-quarters inches by three and three-quarters. The whole hypothesis cen be ergued only on grounds of probability since no document providing absolute proof is likely to be forthcoming. We begin with the poet's first very serious illness. "About the year . . . [1626], end the 34th of his Age, Mr. Herbert wes seized with e sherp Quotidian Ague," wrote Welton (p. 22), "end thought to remove it by the chenge of Air; to which end, he went to Woodford in Essex, but thither more chiefly, to enjoy the compeny of...

Sad Clowns and Pale Pierrots. Literature and the Popular Comic Arts in 19th-century France by Louisa E. Jones, and: Pierrots on the Stage of Desire. Nineteenth-Century French Literary Artists and the Comic Pantomime by Robert Storey

Reviews175 later milieux such as Franciscan devotions and vernacular developments in liturgy. Finally, the discussion analyzes the formal characteristics that link the Italian pieces to other compositions in Romance languages and suggests lines of origin and development. Sticca addresses a second and still more difficult question when he turns from the liturgical Passion plays of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the large vernacular cycles of the later Middle Ages. There are, to be sure, some lines of influence, especially regarding narrative techniques within the drama; but it has been plausibly argued that the Passion play is a culmination of liturgical drama rather than a beginning of the vernacular mysteries. As a response to this discontinuity Sticca urges a method of comparative study, and he reviews the vernacular Passion dramas of the Later Middle Ages to map the points of convergence between national traditions. Though the analysis is organized in part as an account of present scholarship, it brings into focus fundamental interpretive questions, such as the nature of dramatic inventio through the rewriting of earlier texts, the relation of genres, literary bilingualism, and the continuing influence of liturgy and devotional literature on the late medieval drama. This is a book of great scope and learning, which supplements and extends Sticca's earlier study, The Latin Passion Play (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1970). The discussion of the planctus as a lyric form is, by comparison, more extensive than the commentary in Patrick S. Diehl's recent study, The Medieval European Religious Lyric (Berkeley. Univ. of California Press, 1985). The analysis of the planctus and the Passion drama builds convincingly on a study of thematic influences . More important, it identifies the ways in which medieval playwrights exploited the abiding differences between their disparate sources and their own form. ROBERT EDWARDS State University of New York at Buffalo National Humanities Center Louisa E. Jones. Sad Clowns and Pale Pierrots. Literature and the Popular Comic Arts in 19th-century France. Lexington: The French Forum, 1984. Pp. 296. $17.50. Robert Storey. Pierrots on the Stage of Desire. Nineteenth-Century French Literary Artists and the Comic Pantomime. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Pp. 351. $37.50. These two critical histories should be studied in tandem, and probably it is preferable to do Storey's before Jones'. Storey's meticulous documentation cum continuity should be consulted; Jones' clarifying narrative should be read. Further, Storey, whose grants-in-aid made possible a copious collection of plates, literally illustrates Jones. His criticism of her use of sources (p. xv, n. 5) is not entirely fair, even if partially founded. Storey relied chiefly on extant manuscript scenarios, while Jones relied more on published accounts. Each tack was appropriate since Jones is showing the development of a modern topos, while Storey 176Comparative Drama is itemizing and annotating documents. Each, not surprisingly, finds a different critical approach appropriate. Jones, who is looking for the larger outlines and inclusive patterns, draws on archetypal and generic syntheses in the Frye manner. Storey, who is concerned with the singular detail (which by accretion could form a pattern), draws on Freudian analysis, especially as propounded by Lacan. Accordingly, in Jones the reader finds the popular Pierrot mime tradition , which both she and Storey begin with Jean Gaspard "Baptiste" Duburau (apotheosized by Jean Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis ), a growing and changing organism; it changed as it was co-opted by the bourgeois vanguard both without and within the mime troupe. In Storey, the reader can infer an organism from the data, but the reader's attention is focused on the particularity of performer, "text," and Establishment response. Neither historian has much to say about the public that initially acclaimed and supported the Pierrot figure. Yet if these pantomimes had not already acquired an unwashed, unlettered, unmannerly, and foul-smelling following, literati such as George Sand, Théophile Gautier, Théodore de Banville, Gustave Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Paul Verlaine, and the like would never have discovered or exploited them. (Some established writers like J.-K. Huysmans and Champfleury actually wrote "plays" for the pantomime stage.) Although both, of course, note that the government regulation forbidding dialogue in low-level...

Patterns and Patterning: A Study of Four Poems by George Herbert

Bart Westerweel, Patterns and Patterning: A Study of Four Poems by George Herbert. Amsterdam: Rodopi (Costerus. New series, vol.41), 1984. 273 pp. $37. Distributed in the USA by the Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. by Michael Piret This is a contextual study after the manner of Rosemond Tuve and in the tradition of Rosemary Freeman. Its aim is "to establish the intended meaning of certain poems by George Herbert," its method the application of historical information about pattern poems and Renaissance emblematics to "The Altar," "Easter-wings," "The Pilgrimage," and "Love" (III). Westerweel seems fully aware of the special accidents that can befall imprudent contextual studies, and indeed he objects to the way in which "Tuve's scholarly method, however useful as a means of transmitting information, has a tendency to crush the poem through sheer weight of annotation." He even invokes an article in which F.R. Leavis, almost furiously attacking the New Scholarship that Tuve represented, had dismissed A Reading of George Herbert as a species of book that was "inimical to criticism, that is, to intelligence" (Scrutiny, 19 [1953], 162-83). "Relevance," says Westerweel, "would seem to be a key term here." The sage contextual scholar must avoid irrelevance, and vigilantly "sift evidence that clarifies the poem's meaning from material that does not." Perhaps the fundamental problem with Patterns and Patterning is that its evidence hasn't been sifted rigorously enough. For instance, common sense dictates that in studying the influence of emblems on Herbert's poetry, we should restrict ourselves to materials that Herbert had some chance of seeing. But Westerweel is continually unwary about chronological short-circuits, relating Herbert to the texts of English emblem books by George Wither (1635) and Francis Queries (1635), when it's hard to see why. He pertinently argues that the emblems in these books are relevant because they were derived from Continental books published before Herbert's death in 1633. But their texts are a different matter. We know, for example, that the poetic text of A Collection of Emblèmes was composed from scratch by Wither, and cannot even be 54 BOOK REVIEWS called the translation of some earlier Continental source, yet Westerweel introduces it into his discussions of Herbert time and again. And even while giving plentiful attention to Wither, he virtually ignores Daniel Cramer's Emblemata Sacra (1622), which is startlingly full of heart images that we have come to identify with Herbert, and which probably helped to shape his poetic imagination if any emblem book did. (The relevance of Cramer to Herbert was chiefly established, of course, by the most prominent study of this subject, Barbara Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, which is never mentioned by Westerweel.) We get the feeling that connections are being made forthe sake of making connections, and not very precisely at that. He provides a theoretical argument for occasionally preferring analogies to sources in explication — and it's a considerable one — but here it routinely opens the floodgates to a broad stream of analogical digressions which, unchecked by the kind of discipline that Tuve applied, can be just as unhelpful as the source-hunting that Westerweel is trying to shut out. The hazard of relating a poet analogically to traditions that were "in the air" during his period lies in the temptation to drift away from the poet, into a cloud of vagueness. Patterns and Patterning repeatedly withdraws into such clouds. In his chapter on "The Pilgrimage"forexample, Westerweel unpacks the traditional burden of the poem's penultimate line, "After so foul a journey death is fair." He asks rhetorically, "What does Herbert mean when he calls death 'fair'?" There follows a twenty-page dissertation on the traditions of contemptus mundi and the ars moriendi, and on the emblematic images dulce amarum and desiderans dissolvi. Through the scholarly haze, we hear Westerweel insisting that the poem ends triumphantly. The final words, it seems, contain nothing of the exhausted despair with which other critics have characterized them, but "express the pilgrim's faith" as he "pursues his way eagerly." Such a misrendering of the gutted, drained conclusion of "The Pilgrimage" is possible only...

Meditation as Poetic StrategyProtestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticleMeditation as Poetic Strategy Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski Louis L. MartzLouis L. Martz Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 80, Number 2Nov., 1982 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/391201 Views: 3Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1982 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: 이진아 John Donne in the Modern Popular Culture: Holy Sonnets and the Film Wit, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 28, no.22 (Aug 2018): 195–222.https://doi.org/10.17054/jmemes.2018.28.2.195

Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski)

Journal Article Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski) Get access Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. By Barbara Klefer Lewalski. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979. Pp. xiv + 536. $27.50. R. Chris Hassel R. Chris Hassel R. Chris Hassel, Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, has recently published Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year and Faith and Folly in Shakespeare’s Romantic Comedies; he is currently working on the Variorum edition of Richard III. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 33, Issue 1, Spring 1982, Pages 119–121, https://doi.org/10.2307/2870355 Published: 01 April 1982

Early English Carols and the Macaronic Hymn

The mediaeval English carol is preeminently a gift of the fifteenth century. Indeed, as Carleton Brown suggested in his edition, Religious Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century, very few carols are preserved to us from even the fourteenth century, while more than five hundred fifteenth-century texts survive. Of these, nearly a quarter, or 119 carols, are in a single manuscript of 166 lyrics attributed to James Ryman, a Franciscan friar of Canterbury. The character of Ryman's carols and the extent of his experimentation in vernacular hymnody suggest that increased acceptability of the popular carol form and its adaptability to the elaborate or "decorated" style of the macaronic hymn have combined to create in the fifteenth-century carol a significant evolution from the more "meditative" earlier English religious lyrics.

Book Review: Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric

Book Review: Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric

Gifts of Grace: Lewalski on English Protestant PoeticsProtestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski

Barbara Lewalski's major new study advances a claim with extensive implications for our understanding of religious and literary history in the seventeenth-century English-speaking world. She herself is forthright about the revisionist character of her enterprise in proposing to replace standing emphases on Counter-Reformation, Continental, and medieval influences on the art and spirituality of such diverse poets as John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, and Edward Taylor. Instead, she focuses on what she offers as a more germane but hitherto slighted native context: A broad consensus in regard to doctrine and the spiritual life, grounded upon belief in the absolute priority and centrality of scripture and upon paradigms afforded by the Pauline epistles, a consensus overarching the Anglican-Puritan divide and having great significance for religious poetry (p. ix). Lewalski's specific claim is, first, that seventeenth-century England witnessed the conscious evolution of a distinctively set of attitudes and approaches to the composition of religious lyric poetry, and, second, that the emergence of this Protestant poetics (her term) contributed directly to the remarkable flowering of the religious lyric in the seventeenth century, and especially to that major strain represented by Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, and Taylor (p. 5). Lewalski does not misconceive the force of the joint claim that informs her study. The wealth of materials with which she documents the coming into being of an English Protestant poetics in the seventeenth century mounts an effective challenge to critical commonplaces about the religious lyrics of the period and the supposed antiaesthetic orientation of thought more generally, whether these commonplaces arise from discussions of plain style, or alleged influences from Bonaventuran, Ignatian, and Salesian methods for meditation, or a thoroughgoing Augustinian ambivalence toward verbal art, or even imputed connections between denial of the dogma of Transubstantiation and a waning sensitivity to symbolic and metaphoric meaning. While explicitly corrective in its aims, however,

REVIEWS

Books Reviewed in this Article: Metaphor and Thought. Edited by Andrew Ortony. La philosophie comme panphysique: la philosophic des sciences de A.N. Whitehead. By Georges Hélal. Teilhard de Chardin: In Quest of the Perfection of Man. Edited by G.O. Browning, J.L. Alioto and S.M. Farber. Presence and Absence. By Robert Sokolowski. The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. By Richard H. Popkin. Heidegger on Death: a Critical Evaluation. By Paul Edwards. Existentialism, Religion and Death. By Walter Kaufmann. Sartre. By Peter Caws. God and Atheism: A Philosophical Approach to the Problem of God. By Bernardino M. Bonansea. Marx's Theory of History. By William H. Shaw. Die Konzilsidee in der Alten Kirche. By Hermann Josef Sieben. The Popes and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages. By Jeffrey Richards. Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great. By Jeffrey Richards. La Romanitas et le Pape Léon le Grand. By Philip A. McShane. An Ecclesiastical History of England; The Later Middle Ages – From the Norman Conquest to the Eve of the Reformation. By J.C. Dickinson. Byzantium and the Papacy 1198–1400. By Joseph Gill, S.J. Church and Society in the Last Centuries of Byzantium. By Donald M. Nicol. Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450–1521. By John W. O'Malley. L'Humanisme dans les lettres espagnoles. Edited by Augustin Redondo.Pp.376, Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1979, no price given. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth‐Century Religious Lyric. By Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Pietismus und Reveil. Edited by J. van den Berg and J.P. van Dooren. Sons of the Prophets: Evangelical Leaders of the Victorian Church. By Michael Hennell. The Story of King David. By D.M. Gunn. Festschrift für Ernst Fuchs. Edited by Gerhard Ebeling, Eberhard Jüngel, and Gerd Schunack. Luke and the Pastoral Epistles. By Stephen G. Wilson. Face à la Mort: Jésus et Paul. By Xavier Léon‐Dufour. Face à la Mort: Jésus et Paul. By Xavier Léon‐Dufour. Christ Proclaimed. By Frans Jozef van Beeck. Hans Küng: His Work and His Way. Edited by Hermann Häring and Karl‐Josef Kuschel. English Catholic Worship: Liturgical Renewal in England Since 1900. Edited by J.D. Crichton, H.E. Winstone, J.R. Ainslie. Literature and Violence in North Arabia. By Michael E. Meeker. China and Christianity: Historical and Future Encounters. Edited by James D. Whitehead, Yu‐ming Shaw and N.J. Girardot.

Four Middle English Religious Lyrics from the Thirteenth Century

Four Middle English Religious Lyrics from the Thirteenth Century

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. By BARBARA KIEFER LEWALSKI. Pp. xiv+536. Princeton University Press, 1979. £17.20. A. H. T. LEVI A. H. T. LEVI Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume XXXII, Issue 1, April 1981, Pages 297–298, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/XXXII.1.297 Published: 01 April 1981

Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric

Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric