Kuchar 2008

Kuchar, Gary. The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

“vast technology of mourning”

”While traditions of religious sorrow are especially characteristic of the later middle ages, post-Reformation culture did not exorcise itself of the medieval fascination with sacred grief so much as it complicated what was already a complex set of practices.” (1)

”I seek to explain how in the process of expressing what repentance, ‘’compassio’’, or despair feel like as lived experiences, early modern English poets find themselves addressing the most vital doctrinal and philosophical issues of the post-Reformation period.” (2)

religious sorrow as discourse, not just a theme

”less an emotional state than it is a language — a grammar of tears, so to speak” (2)

in Donne, “godly sorrow is an incarnationist language that speaks the Christian paradoxes which confound human thought.” (9)

devout tears as gateways between human and divine

compunction

Catholic — gift of compunction must be passively accepted to be salvific

Protestants — receptive passivity is irrevocable sign of grace

The poetry of tears and the ghost of Robert Southwell in Shakespeare’s Richard II and Milton’s Paradise Lost

Southwell, “St. Peters Complaint”

"His poems demand an active, even critical, response from readers. Through characterization by peripety, readers are being attuned to the gap between intention and meaning; they are being encouraged to recognize how the Spirit signifies in excess of Peter’s knowledge as the saint tarries with the double motions of compunction, its oscillations between sin and grace.” (34)

”devotional reading consists of a form of critical reading — one attentive to gaps, silences, and inadvertent meanings” (37)