Making Love in the English Reformation: Carving Images in the Temple of Our Harts

"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."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Hamrick, Stephen Cecil

Contributors dc:contributor

• Guibbory, Achsah

• Religion, General

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3086073

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/81389