The Feeling of Being a Body: Resurrection and Habitus in Vaughan’s Medical Writings

Chapter 4 articulates more explicitly than the previous chapter the way resurrection beliefs in Vaughan’s poetry function as “critical theory” about selfhood, identity, and the social world. The chapter examines Vaughan’s devotional and religious “self-help” literature and Vaughan’s translation and expansion of a hermetic medical treatise. Vaughan’s immanent corporeal resurrectionist commitment to finding the “seeds” of resurrection leads him to posit an essential core of bodily life—the radical balsam—that seeks eternal life but that is sickened when it is penetrated and rewired by the social and historical world. The goal of Vaughan’s devotional writings and medicine alike is to rewire the self so that it reduces its investment in the historical and social world by having its life directed by the essential core, a move that is analogous to his poetic search for the seeds and signs of resurrection within himself his poetry (the subject of chapter 3). This vision anticipates Heidegger’s phenomenology and Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. Vaughan also describes a form of sexuality that anticipates Leo Bersani in imagining the body as socialized and yet as potentially unhinged from that social connectedness.

Framing Materiality: Relic Discourse and Medieval English Anchoritism

Relics carried great significance in medieval Christianity. Generally these relics, or at least first-class relics, were fragmented bodies, literal pieces of saints, where a part or parts represented the whole. This idea reverberates with what Robyn Malo has called “relic discourse.” She argues that as saints’ bodies became more and more elaborately enshrined in fancy reliquaries, they became less accessible to the people; similarly, the language of hagiographies and other devotional writings, with their characteristic rhetoric of treasure and brightness, provided a substitute for direct experience of the relic. Extending Malo’s idea to anchoritic literature, Sauer argues that anchorites, who are alive yet dead to the world, can themselves be read as living relics; therefore, anchoritic literature uses vocabulary and rhetoric that calls to mind relics and reliquaries. In this way, the position of the anchorite as a living relic, and thus a mediator among the living and the dead and the divine, is manifest.

Vernacular Books and Domestic Devotion in Cinquecento Italy

From the fifteenth century onwards, devotional texts represented a prominent part of the output of the Italian printing press. Much of this production, which often represented a privileged way to access the biblical text, is still largely unexplored. My article will analyse a selection of devotional writings printed at the end of the fifteenth century and in the first three decades of the sixteenth century that were directed to a large audience of laymen and women of medium to low literacy. I will analyse how these texts entered the domestic devotional practices of Italian devotees, focussing especially on reading. I will take into account their suggestions about how, when, and by whom reading should be performed; what readings devotees were encouraged to pursue; how the ideal reader was shaped in the paratextual apparatuses; and, finally, what textual tools the readers were offered to perform their reading practices.

The Law of Sacrifice

When placing Hopkins in the divisive and impassioned religious and academic world of mid-Victorian Oxford, scholars have frequently drawn attention to those University tutors and senior churchmen who in different ways influenced his mental and religious development: Benjamin Jowett, Walter Pater, Henry Parry Liddon, and (more distantly, from Birmingham) John Henry Newman. In comparison, relatively little attention has been paid to Hopkins’s own undergraduate friends and contemporaries at Balliol College, or to the question of how other young men responded to the same set of religious circumstances and intellectual influences. In this study Henry Scott Holland (1847–1918) is selected to illustrate discernible Anglican parallels to particular aspects of Hopkins’s literary style and religious faith. Examining the ways Holland’s Anglicanism resembles, engages, contests, and shadows the early spirituality of Hopkins throws useful light on their overlapping academic and religious contexts. Particular attention is paid to examples of shared vocabulary, to themes from Holland’s published sermons and religious writings, which correlate to elements of Hopkins’s work, and especially to Holland’s vision of a kenotic “law of sacrifice” set in the life of the Holy Trinity. Key works such as Holland’s Logic and Life (1882) and the influential volume of Anglican essays Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (1889) are utilized to inform a new perspective on Hopkins’s sermons and devotional writings.

Schütz's Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich? and the Politics of the Thirty Years War

For early modern Lutherans Heinrich Schütz's Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich? would have evoked fears of religious persecution. Its text, from the narrative of Paul's conversion in Acts 9, appears in seventeenth-century devotional writings and confessional polemics about persecution. Moreover, recently uncovered archival evidence shows that Schütz performed his concerto in 1632 at a state-sponsored political festival marking the first anniversary of the Battle of Breitenfeld, a major Protestant victory in the Thirty Years War. Here Schütz's concerto clearly stoked fears of persecution, because the celebrations touted the battle as a victory over Catholic oppression. The political context in 1632 might also explain some of the piece's most notable features. Its unusually brief text and vivid music do not illustrate the whole story of Saul's conversion but solely the moment at which Christ intervened to put a stop to persecution. Schütz's listeners would have heard in Saul's example a parallel to the victory they were celebrating in 1632 and the persecution they feared from their Catholic and imperial adversaries. This performance of Saul, the only one known from Schütz's lifetime, shows how his music partook in a broader campaign of Protestant propaganda designed to reinforce the confessional and political divisions that fueled this phase of the war.

“I cluppe and I cusse as I wood wore”: Erotic Imagery in Middle English Mystical Writings

The mutual influences of the medieval discourse of courtly love and the literary visions of divine love have long been recognized by readers of medieval lyrical poetry and devotional writings. They are especially visible in the affinities between the language used to construct the picture of the ideal courtly lady and the images of the Virgin Mary. Praises of Mary’s physical beauty, strewn with erotic implications, are an example of a strictly male eroticization of the medieval Marian discourse, rooted in Bernard of Clairvaux’s allegorical reading of the Song of Songs, where Mary is imagined as the Bride of the poem, whose “breasts are like two young roes that are twins” (Cant. of Cant. 4:5). Glimpses of medieval female erotic imagination, also employed to express religious meanings, can be found in the writings of the mystical tradition: in England in the books of visions of Margery Kempe, in the anonymous seers of the fourteenth century, and, to some extent, in Julian of Norwich. Though subdued by patriarchal politics and edited by male amanuenses, the female voice can still be heard in the extant texts as it speaks of mystical experience by reference to bodily, somatic and, sometimes, erotic sensations in a manner different from the sensual implications found in the poetry of Marian adoration. The bliss of mystic elation, the ultimate union with God, is, in at least one mystical text, confidently metaphorized as an ecstatic, physical union with the human figure of Christ hanging on the cross.

J.H. King’s ‘Expansive’ Theology of Pentecostal Spirit Baptism

Bishop J.H. King, an early twentieth-century Pentecostal Holiness Church leader, in some respects explained Spirit baptism in more ‘expansive’ terms than characterized Classical Pentecostal tradition in the United States in his time and later. In his theological and devotional writings are some of the same ‘expansive’ emphases Frank D. Macchia enunciates in his 2006 groundbreaking work on Spirit baptism, Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecostal Theology. Although King’s Spirit-baptismal theology was traditionally Pentecostal in important ways, there are some interesting thematic parallels between Macchia’s ‘expansive’ Spirit baptism theological proposal and the very modest (in comparison) treatments of the topic by King. The similarities relate to the baptism in the Holy Spirit as a Trinitarian act, as an infilling of divine love, and in connection with the latter, as a generator of a rich ecclesiastical corporate life of koinonia.