Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric Research Articles

The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology. Paul Cefalu. Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+352.

<i>The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology</i>. Paul Cefalu. Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+352.

George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England. Gary Kuchar. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xv+288.

<i>George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England</i>. Gary Kuchar. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xv+288.

Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric

The seventeenth century gave rise to the greatest flowering of the religious lyric in the English language. While the whole range of the devotional verse of the period is distinguished by its nuanced complexity concerning issues of theology, politics, and the historical circumstances of the individuals who produced these lyrics, modern criticism has neglected the vast majority of these works and their authors. The purpose of this volume, therefore, is to discover and (re)cover the devotional lyricists who have historically been overlooked altogether or dismissed as not belonging to the first order of poets. Precisely focused on that end, this collection contains 15 original essays that broaden our understanding of the seventeenth century religious lyric by examining the contributions of writers such as Robert Southwell, Aemilia Lanyer, William Alabaster, William Drummond, William Austin, Patrick Carey and others. Our view of seventeenth century literature cannot be complete or accurate unless we account for these neglected writers and their cultural roles in the development of the religious lyric. To that end, each of the essays in this volume seeks either explicitly or implicitly to make the canon more inclusive rather than exclusive.

Discovering and (re)covering the seventeenth century religious lyric

Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Edited by Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. viii + 408 pp. $59.00 cloth. Although the title-page of this essay collection does not indicate its status as a festschrift, one of its main purposes is evidently honor the teaching and scholarly career of John R. Roberts (viii). The focus chosen for the collection is indeed most apt, since extending the informed critical discussion of early modern English religious lyrics has been the achievement of Jack Roberts's career. His pioneering annotated bibliographies of critical writing on Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw, as well as his own articles and essay collections, and his unfailing support of younger scholars, have combined to enable the increased attention given to the religious lyric over the past three decades. As Claude Summers writes in the closing contribution to this volume, Roberts's calculated strategy of restraint in the bibliographies has made them available to critics of every tradition (336). His evenhandedness in presenting critical approaches with which he might not personally agree bespeaks, in Summers's elegant formulation, Roberts's of the winding ways of scholarship and the mysteriousness of the creative process (337). An annotated bibliography, in the hands of a sensitive and objective scholar such as Jack Roberts, can function as literary history in itself, charting the shifting currents of critical taste. Criticism, after all, is an expression of an age as well as of the individuals who contribute to it. The volume under discussion is no exception, being very much an essay collection of our time in its expressed aim to extend the canon of the poems generally implied by the phrase seventeenth-century English religious lyric. The essays devote attention to a number of hitherto neglected groups, including women writers and English Catholics, as well as to poets who might be termed minor but whose work nevertheless adds to our understanding of the religious lyric and of the era. As Kari Boyd McBride vividly puts it, the canon can have the same effect as urban light pollution, erasing the dimmer and leaving us with a manageable set of constellations and bright suns. This volume takes us away from the familiar perspective, into the desert, where darkness reveals the innumerable of the night sky and masks the relationships we thought we understood (40). The rediscovered heavenly lights in this volume span the period from Robert Southwell and Elizabeth Middleton in the late sixteenth century to Joseph Beaumont and Thomas Traherne towards the end of the seventeenth. Holding true to the editors' conviction that there are many more stars in the sky than the sparkling Donne and Herbert, the fifteen essays explore exciting new constellations. The Scottish poet William Drummond keeps company with the anonymous author of Eliza's Babes, and the failed monk Patrick Cary finds himself in an adjacent essay to the maternal Mary Carey, author of the verse lament Upon ye Sight of my abortive birth. In reviewing an essay collection it is impossible to give detailed attention to every contribution, though there are many here deserving of serious reading. Among the most valuable, in my view, are those which implicitly or explicitly redefine the religious lyric through the individual case studies they have chosen: Patrick Cook's perceptive reading of Aemilia Lanyer's Description of Cookeham as a devotional lyric, for example, and Donna J. Long's plausible claim that women's elegies form a gendered subgenre, the recuperative religious lyric. Several essays situate devotional poets more firmly in their appropriate denominational group or doctrinal context, such as Ann Hurley's discussion of the vivifying force of Protestantism in the work of An Collins (234), and Kate Narveson's invented term Anglianism for the conformity to the established church evinced in the poems of William Austin (163). …

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

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

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

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

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

Protestant Poetics And The Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (review)

Protestant Poetics And The Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (review)

George Herbert: His Religion and Art

Reviews Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Textsand Studies, rpt. 1981. 247 pp. cloth $13.95. paper $5.95. by Louis L. Martz It is good to see Summers' book back in print, and at a price amazingly low for a book so well produced: only about six dollars for the paperback version. I hope that a great many students and teachers will buy it, for it stands as a valuable, indeed essential supplement or corrective for the various approaches to Herbert that have recently been offered by a later generation of readers: Stanley Fish's "self-consuming artifacts." Helen Vendler's "reinvented poem," or Barbara Lewalski's strictly Calvinist poetic. Summers' book represents a happy juncture of traditional scholarship and the old "new" criticism which was just rising to the peak of its power as this book appeared in 1954. Summers was one of the first to see that the "new" analytic criticism, searching for organic verbal unity in the poem, was no threat to scholarship, despite the outcries from an older generation (rather like the outcries now against the new critical theorists!). Summers' temperate, modest way of proceeding moves with utmost clarity to recognize the full complexity of Herbert's "religion and art" as inseparably one. His third chapter, "Religion," offers a warning that readers nowadays may well heed, when he says, "The religious differences in Herbert's lifetime . . . were much more complicated than the modern labels indicate." One can, he notes, "construct an abstract picture of the 'true-blue Puritan' and the 'Anglo-Catholic' — both members of the Church of England." And it is true that individuals may be found in Herbert's era "who conformed to these patterns." But, he adds, "they were far fewer than most of the discussions of the period's churchly affairs lead the modern reader to believe." "Those who sought the much79 Louis L. Martz praised via media between the two extremes found that it was no marked highway but a vaguely defined area; the paths which conscientious searchers for the truth found through it were rarely identical." Amid all the "debates and fretting jealousies" that Herbert deplored, some areas of agreement could be found: in "the devotional life and everyday activity" (pp. 49-54). It is in the devotional life of Herbert's poetry that apparent or latent contradictions in theology may be reconciled. There is no doubt, as Summers points out, that Herbert, like most clerics of the Church of England, adhered to certain aspects of Calvinism: his poem "The Water-course" shows him accepting the doctrine of double predestination. Such a stern doctrine, rigorously held, ought logically to lead to an opposition to the Book of Common Prayer, to destruction of stained glass windows, and to a denial of any efficacy in the sacraments. And yet, as Summers well says: "TheTemple shows that Herbert believed as strongly in predestination and the doctrine of the Covenant of Grace as he believed in the significance and beauty of the ritual" (p. 58). How could this be? The significance of the ritual, the ultimate source of its beauty, lies in its function of celebration and thanksgiving for the divine presence that Herbert, Donne, Hooker, and many others felt as still working with or within the "instrumental" sacraments of communion and baptism. If these are mere "tokens" the function of the ritual evaporates: even a priesthood is no longer needed. How that presence works Herbert does not say: he regards all such arguments as futile. But he knows that there is an efficacy that occurs in the very taking of the sacrament, as he tells us in his poem "The H. Communion" (for a detailed account of this issue see my forthcoming review of Barbara Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric in Modern Philology). All this is surprising, illogical, but undeniable, as the dozens and dozens of eucharistie allusions show throughout The Temple. The religious sensibility of the early seventeenth century could contain multitudes: Herbert could hold predestination and a version of the real presence within his belief at the same moment. We perhaps cannot see how this was possible...

Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric

Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric

Review: Review Essay: Religion and Lyric Poetry in the Seventeenth Century, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric

Review: Review Essay: Religion and Lyric Poetry in the Seventeenth Century, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric

Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric

Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric

Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric

Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric