Rambuss 1998

Rambuss, Richard. Closet Devotions. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.

devotion as a form of desire, devotional literature "as a literature of heightened affect" -- "interested in the manner by which religious (and other ecstatic) texts represent and stimulate affec, particularly in its most amplified registers" (1)

"Following Bataille's ecstatic tehorems on the complementarity of the sacred and illicit, my interests abide more with excess, transgression, and the heterodoxies of gender and eroticism that can be embraced inhabited through the mechanisms of devotion." (5)

Christ's Ganymede

"Donne's writing, like so muuch 17th-century devotional expression, espouses a devotion that is cathected onto the corporeal: a spirituality that, paraadoxically, keeps returning us to the physical body and its operations, even -- or all the more so -- in any pietistic endeavor to discipline or rein them in." (16)

"Achieving their effects whithc a rhetoric of the extreme and often deliberately courting the perverse, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and their fellows have accrued from their own time down into ours more charges of excess, indecorousness, and queerness than one finds imputed to any other early modern literary practice." (17-8) -- see e.g. Samuel Johnson on metaphysical

"like pornography, metaphysical poetry is great in its excesses." (19)

Christ's body is "sited at the breach between sacrosanct cultural boundaries. Christ's body, in other words, is one that by its very nature keeps exceeding, keeps transgressing the bounds of the licit, doing so in ways that touch upon the profane, the defiled -- even, I am going to suggest, the sodomitical in its diffuse early modern shape as the cultural category of ultimate stimatization." (19)

Lipsius, De Cruce

Crashaw; "among tose instruments that can penetrate and enter Christ's body is the poet's own tool, the pen" (27); "'Sancta Maria Dolorum' unfolds as a triangulated scene of mystic writing/wooing/wounding" (27)

Crashaw dwelling on closet, secret spaces, Christ as a series of open valves and mouths

"In thus envisioning Christ in his Passion as a highly fertile somatic field, one generative of numberless kissing mouths and tearful eyes, of countless orifices and dilated valves, of a literally promisuous, hypersemantic mix of bodily fluids, Crashaw aligns religious devotion and its affects with the body and its most visceral operations. Indeed, to reinvoke an association I posited earlier, it could be said that Crashaw probes the openings in Christ's body, as well as their ecstatic flow and eruption of secretions, with an explicitness, a studied fascination, that evokes no discourse so much as contemporary pornography's fetishistic explorations of the erotic body and its paroxysms." (34)