Early Modern English Devotional Poetry - BA Seminar – שירה דתית אנגלית בעת החדשה המוקדמת – סמינר תואר ראשון

The period 1500-1660 was one of immense cultural and intellectual change in Europe in general and England specifically. Marked by the rise what we now term, rather loosely, Renaissance and Reformation, every single concept about man and his creative, thinking faculties was radically redefined and re-negotiated. While this was indeed the age where, in many respects, the modern self was born, this was not as yet a secular age. The renaissance self was always a deeply religious one and contested religious habit of thoughts stand at the heart of the great intellectual struggles that defined the Reformation and Counter-Reformation crises and the many wars of religion that followed, both on the battlefield and through the printed word. The central premise of this seminar is that the renaissance self-discovered in much of this period's most celebrated poetry was a deeply divided religious self, and that the key to understanding much of this period's poetry lies therefore in uncovering the various devotional and religious habits of thought and their related rhetorical structures which give much of the poetry in this period its distinctive appeal and power. We will examine in this seminar a wide range of Early Modern English verse that can be defined in the broadest possible sense of the term "devotional" - from early Tudor paraphrases of the Hebrew Psalms, through seemingly secular sonnets steeped in religious imagery and feeling, to religious satires and metaphysical devotional poems of prayer and agonizing repentance. Throughout, we will combine close textual reading with rhetorical analysis and wider reflections on the various religious, philosophical and theological concerns that shaped the "devotional" voice in the period, and through it the shape and trajectory of English poetry itself.

Primary texts: A wide selection of poetry from the period to be posted on the course website.

Requirements: Active class participation, midterm assignments: annotation assignment (10% of grade), unseen analysis paper (20% of grade); and final seminar paper (70% of grade).