The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England

Kuchar, Gary

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511481444

Cited by 26 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 137 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In arguing this, I build on recent work by Gary Kuchar on poetry and religious sorrow, according to which, ‘godly sorrow is a discourse that allows writers to theorize how the relationships between divine and mundane worlds are registered at the level of affect’ (9). Although my methodology emulates Kuchar's cross‐confessional approach, where I differ from Kuchar is that I wish to separate sighs and groans from tears and focus exclusively on the former as the medium through which poets and authors of religious works understood their communication with God.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sighs and Groans: Attending to the Passions in Early Modern Prayer

Tsentourou

2015

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Studies on early modern passions in the last two decades have focused on the body as the site of subjectivity but they have rarely taken into account the role of the body in the context of private prayer and the sighs and groans it is meant to produce in addressing the divine. Studies on seventeenth‐century prayer, on the other hand, have started to consider gesture and voice in devotion, yet they tend to interpret discussions of physiological expression as purely metaphorical. This article examines the widespread phenomenon of sighing and groaning in prayer as both a cognitive and a sensitive experience in order to demonstrate how early modern writers imagined sighs and groans as symptoms and agents of passions simultaneously, blending in the process anatomical and theological discourses. This new methodology raises questions about the subjectivity of early modern petitioners, their experience of the distance with the divine and finally the soundscape of private prayer.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sighs and Groans: Attending to the Passions in Early Modern Prayer

Tsentourou

2015

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The notion of an English recusant literature is also troubled by the fact that Catholic writers were in conscious dialogue with literary history, with Protestantisms and Protestant writers. Recent scholarship by Highley, Kuchar, Marotti, Monta and Shell has demonstrated how carefully Catholic writers followed political affairs in England, how thoroughly they read Protestant authors and how fully they responded to Protestant literatures. For example, the first printed poetic response to Spenser’s Faerie Queene – entitled A Fig for Fortune – was written by Anthony Copley, a Catholic writer and a cousin to Robert Southwell.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Modern English Catholicism and the Rewriting of Literary History

Monta¹

2010

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article considers the implications of the reinvigorated scholarly interest in early modern English Catholicism and its implications for early modern literary history. Surveying contemporary scholarship as well as little‐known or understudied early modern printed and manuscript texts, the article suggests ways in which the study of English Catholicism is reshaping our conceptions of early modern religious, political, and literary cultures.

show abstract

“…But the woman melancholic does not exclusively aim to create a piece of art which, recording absence, denies the physical world and the material body. As has been discussed with reference to Hester Pulter, the marmorising melancholic seems willingly to encase herself in the 124 Cf. Freud: "The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies … and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished" (253).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…No matter how impoverished the state of the psyche, writing is a vital therapy for the dispositional melancholic. 124 It is perhaps, as Nietzsche writes of Dionysian man, the only therapy available to the melancholic imprisoned in thought: "at this juncture, when the will is most imperilled, art approaches, as a redeeming and healing enchantress; she alone may transform these horrible reflections on the terror and absurdity of existence into representations with which man (sic) may live" (23). As Nietzsche's remark suggests, the making of art is for the melancholic not a wholesale cure for world-weariness so much as a satiating act of transformation, an activity which transforms an invisible experience into a thing that is real, has matter.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Matter of Early Modern Female Melancholy

Rayner¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

<p>The Renaissance is often touted as the age of melancholy. For fictional personages like Hamlet as well as for writers like Robert Burton, melancholy served both as a burden and a blessing, facilitating intellectual activity at the expense of psychological and bodily comfort. Precisely because of its Aristotelean associations with brilliance, melancholy was off-limits to early modern women, who were afforded a pathology different not merely in degree but in kind to that of the male melancholic. Female melancholy was understood as an entirely corporeal illness, lacking any semblance of the creative or intellectual fecundity which its male sufferers enjoyed. Literary critics and cultural historians have long taken the authors of early modern medical treatises at their word, and because of this, the extant scholarship on melancholy projects an overwhelmingly masculinist history of the emotion. Those scholars who have addressed the subterraneous literature of women’s emotion in the Renaissance, moreover, have commonly understood female-voiced articulations of negative affect through the lens of “grief” or “sorrow”. A poetics of female melancholy in the English Renaissance is thus still awaiting formulation, and it is this critical absence that I move to redress. Putting male-authored, canonical works of literature in dialogue with the poetry of three seventeenth-century women writers, this thesis pursues the topic of a literary melancholy that is specifically female, or female-voiced. Chapter One explores the shape of female melancholic discourse in two Shakespearean texts – Hamlet and The Two Noble Kinsmen – and in the poetry of devotional poet An Collins. Chapter Two considers the telos of self-marmorisation (the female melancholic’s turn to stone) first in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Milton’s Comus, and then in the verse of Hester Pulter. Finally, Chapter Three discusses the presence of postlapsarian melancholy in the elegies of Lucy Hutchinson. All three chapters argue for the significance, the matter, of artistic representations of women’s affect in a period which has traditionally seen male expressions of melancholy raised above female expressions of the same.</p>

show abstract

The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England

Cited by 26 publications

References 137 publications

Sighs and Groans: Attending to the Passions in Early Modern Prayer

Sighs and Groans: Attending to the Passions in Early Modern Prayer

Early Modern English Catholicism and the Rewriting of Literary History

The Matter of Early Modern Female Melancholy

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About