Taming the rebellious heart: The consecration of poetry and the passions in English religious lyrics, 1590--1681

This study examines the representation of spiritual experience in the religious lyric, the early modern literary form most closely associated with private utterances, during the period of its greatest flowering in English---from the poetry of Robert Southwell in the 1590s to the publication of Andrew Marvell's Miscellaneous Poems in 1681. My central contention is that a concern with the heart, thought in this period to be the center of the human person because it is where God interacts with the soul, accounts for religious lyricists' presentation of subjectivity, their moral designs on their readers, and their handling of desire. Rather than serving simply as a subject for religious lyricists to write about, the heart---particularly the rebellious heart, the heart resisting God's influence---furnished the reason for writing in the first place. Beginning in the 1590s, English Protestant and Catholic poets began to experiment with secular poetic forms, images, and devices to manipulate the passions of readers. They exposed the hearts of the lyric speakers so that readers (invariably assumed to be Christians struggling with casuistic concerns) could peer into and imaginatively engage the spiritual lives of other struggling Christians (real or imaginary). My chapters, discuss the centrality of the heart image and its connections to definitions of the religious poet (one); the pattern of psychological consecration typically enacted in religious lyric collections (two); common forms of spiritual edification (three); the management of desire in the holy sonnet (four); and Marvell's consecration of pastoralism (five). My project extends current scholarship on the material body by exploring how discourses on the passions depict psychological fragmentation and complicate definitions of lyric selfhood. The insights gained from lyric portrayals of interiority expand our understanding of Renaissance notions of the body, the passions, and the mind in general. Consequently, these insights apply to other forms of cultural expression, such as plays, prose works, even music and the visual arts.