Conflicts of devotion: Liturgy, poetry, and community in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

摘要

Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgy, Poetry, and Community in Elizabethan and Jacobean England aims to refocus critical understanding of the new ways of formulating communities, poetic and liturgical, that took shape in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It begins with an examination of two influential modes of liturgical rhetoric---a "rhetoric of excess" and a "rhetoric of absence"---in the rubrics for Holy Communion and Burial in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer in order to shed new light on the linguistic and communitarian implications of the new English vernacular religious rituals. The study then follows the thread of these modes of articulating and reshaping spiritual community through the elegiac poetry of Edmund Spenser, the devotional lyrics of John Donne, the complaints of Robert Southwell, and the sacred poetry of Richard Crashaw. Each of these four poets was caught up in the crisis of community that resulted from the Henrician Reformation, and each of them struggled to re-imagine and reshape the spiritual communities that also made up their most immediate audiences. By examining these rhetorics of excess and absence in the liturgy and poetry of the eight decades between the Elizabethan 'settlement' and the English Civil War, this study not only offers new readings of both neglected and well-studied texts, including fresh perspectives on the elegiac and 'metaphysical' modes, but also provokes deeper reflection on the potential of liturgical poetics for the creation and sustenance of relatively stable communities out of the discursive materials of deep religious and political crises of identity.