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Discusses the ways in which post-Reformation devotional practices informed expressions of desire in the poetry of five Renaissance English writers: Shakespeare, Donne, Greville, Herrick, and Milton.
List of contents
- Introduction, "Our Senses Do Confirm Our Faith": Experience and Devotional Certainty in The Winter's Tale and English Reformation Culture
- 1: Orthodoxy and Marginality: William Perkins, Richard Hooker, and the English Experiential Tradition
- Part I. Theater and Ceremony
- 2: Shakespeare's Sweet Boy: Love's Rites, Prayers Divine, and Hallowed Name in the Sonnets
- 3: Herrick's Players and Prayers: Ceremony, Theater, and Extemporal Devotion in Hesperides and his Noble Numbers
- Part II. Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm
- 4: Donne's Speaking, Weeping, Bleeding Images: Iconophobia and Iconophilia in the Holy Sonnets and the Sermons
- 5: Greville's Iconoclastic Desire: Reformed and Literary Devotion in Caelica and the Life of Sir Philip Sidney
- 6: Adam and Eve in Bed and at Prayer: Recasting Milton's Iconoclasm in Eikonoklastes and Paradise Lost
- Works Cited
About the author
Rhema Hokama received her PhD in English literature from Harvard University and is Assistant Professor of English literature at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), where she teaches classes on Shakespeare, Milton, lyric poetry, and global literature. Her academic work has been published or is forthcoming in Modern Philology, Shakespeare Quarterly, Milton Studies, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Multicultural Shakespeare, and Parergon. She recently completed a second book project about how the Reformation gave rise to new frameworks for thinking about national, political, and religious inclusion in early modern England and the Dutch Republic.
Summary
Discusses the ways in which post-Reformation devotional practices informed expressions of desire in the poetry of five Renaissance English writers: Shakespeare, Donne, Greville, Herrick, and Milton.
Additional text
A book that takes its poets as seriously as its readers in the pursuit of providing a coherent and illuminating account of how and why the long process of the Protestant Reformation, and specifically a Calvinist devotional experientialism, not only permitted but actively spurred the writing of poetry that mixes erotic desire and religious devotion in ways that still feel bold today. This is a book that doesmuch to cultivate the field of early modern studies, and right now that feels more important than challenging it wholesale.
