This dissertation addresses the question of how early modern devotional readers defined a text as spiritually efficacious. It considers two methods of reading that recent scholars have identified: the development and influence of the Erasmian, or humanistic method of reading based on the ideas of the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus; and a Lutheran, or evangelical method of reading. Erasmus set out a series of protocols for reading that have been studied most particularly by Eugene Kintgen. Luther, by contrast, did not formulate a method of reading, yet his influence created a kind of search for efficacy in a text. We can find this stated by Thomas Cranmer in the preface to The Great Bible (1538/40). Cranmer, who was influenced by William Tyndale who in turn was an early Lutheran, says there are two prerequisites for reading the scripture. The first is the fear of God. The second is a commitment to changing oneself. The modern scholars Brian Cummings and James Simpson have shown how this idea of self-correction became fairly general in sixteenth-century England. After a historical reconstruction of both the humanistic and the evangelical approach, each is then used as an interpretive lens through which to read Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and George Herbert's The Temple. This study shows that for the humanistic reader devotional efficacy was defined by a devotional text's similarity to exemplary forms of devotional writing, while for the evangelical reader devotional efficacy was defined by the power a text had to catalyze a reader's strong emotions.
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