Making Love in the English Reformation: Carving Images in the Temple of Our Harts
Hamrick, Stephen Cecil
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/81389
Description
Title
Making Love in the English Reformation: Carving Images in the Temple of Our Harts
Author(s)
Hamrick, Stephen Cecil
Issue Date
2003
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Guibbory, Achsah
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Religion, General
Language
eng
Abstract
"This project establishes that English poets replayed the Reformation conflict over ""true religion"" on a battlefield of Petrarchan lyric. Conventional, theology-based methodologies insufficiently account for the ongoing appeal of Catholicism and the ubiquity of representations of ritual practice in early modern English poetry. Reconstructing a cultural history that centralizes the continuing role of Catholicism in the period, I historicize the poetic figuration of both traditional and reform practices in love poetry. The study explores the work of poets writing in English from 1530 to 1667 including Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, George Gascoigne, Barnabe Googe, George Whetstone, Philip Sidney, John Donne, Lady Mary Wroth, and John Milton. I show that poets writing in the long English Reformation developed poetic strategies for amorous, political, and religious self-fashioning that embraced both Catholic and Protestant pieties. Building upon yet complicating the now familiar Protestant poetics and its iconoclastic theology, I recover what I call a poetics of adoration. This poetics of adoration incorporated the imagery of traditional, Catholic practice and its sacramental theology to rewrite Petrarchan discourse and in some cases to celebrate traditional religion. Some Protestant poets read these poems as a Catholic retreat into poetic discourse and responded by reforming Petrarchan poetry. The early modern Petrarchan religion of love inscribes the cultural impact of the Reformation and offers an overlooked site at which religion, culture, and literature intersect."
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