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This is the first extended study of Wordsworth's complex, subtle, and often conflicted engagement with the material and cultural legacies of monasticism. It reveals that a set of topographical, antiquarian, and ecclesiastical sources consulted by Wordsworth between 1806 and 1822 provided extensive details of the routines, structures, landscapes, and architecture of the medieval monastic system. In addition to offering a new way of thinking about religious dimensions of Wordsworth's work and his views on Roman Catholicism, the book offers original insights into a range of important issues in his poetry and prose, including the historical resonances of the landscape, local attachment and memorialization, gardening and cultivation, Quakerism and silence, solitude and community, pastoral retreat and national identity.
Wordsworth's interest in monastic history helps explain significant stylistic developments in his writing. In this often-neglected phase of his career, Wordsworth undertakes a series of generic experiments in order to craft poems capable of reformulating and refining taste; he adapts popular narrative forms and challenges pastoral conventions, creating difficult, austere poetry that, he hopes, will encourage contemplation and subdue readers' appetites for exciting narrative action. This book thus argues for the significance and innovative qualities of some of Wordsworth's most marginalized writings. It grants poems such as The White Doe of Rylstone, The Excursion, and Ecclesiastical Sketches the centrality Wordsworth believed they deserved, and reveals how Wordsworth's engagement with the monastic history of his local region inflected his radical strategies for the creation of taste.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Wordsworth's Creation of Taste
- 2: Quakerism, Cultivation, and the Coleorton Period
- 3: 'My second Self when I am gone': Legacy, Memorialization, and Incarnation
- 4: Pastoral Reclusion and The Excursion
- 5: Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Heritage
- Epilogue: The Medieval Revival
- Appendix I: Table of the Monastic Sites Visited and/or Studied by Wordsworth
- Appendix II: Map of Monastic Sites Visited and/or Studied by Wordsworth
- Bibliography
About the author
Jessica Fay is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and has published articles in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, and the Modern Language Review. Her research is focused on the poetry and prose of William Wordsworth; she has a special interest in Wordsworth's relationship with his patron and friend, Sir George Beaumont.
Summary
The first extended examination of the influence of monasticism on Wordsworth's writing. Covering the poet's development between 1806 and 1822, it considers how a series of sources describing medieval monastic life in the north of England influenced Wordsworth's thinking about regional attachment, trans-historical community, and national cohesion.
Additional text
In her accomplished and useful study, Jessica Fay conveys the depth and extent of Wordsworth's thinking about and qualified attraction to monasticism ... Wordsworth's Monastic Inheritance contains passages of astute, historically-informed close reading ... [a] thought-provoking book
Report
This book is distinguished by its carefully detailed study of Wordsworth's reading and thinking. Pamela K. Gilbert, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
