Free Download Francesca Cioni, "Materiality and Devotion in the Poetry of George Herbert"
English | ISBN: 0198874405 | 2024 | 352 pages | EPUB | 3 MB
George Herbert, his contemporaries, and readers inhabited a world of material things that were spiritually animated but deeply troubling. Habitual providential and typological interpretation imbued matter with meaning, and connected it with the rest of Creation; using material things was an act of interpretation, devotion an act of habitual reading. Materialist philosophies rejected distinctions between body and soul; injunctions to continuous prayer made every place and every bodily motion a potential house of and vehicle for prayer. At the same time Protestant doctrine and Church of England policy, expressed in sermons, visitation articles and works of theology as well as devotional manuals, prayer books and even physiologies and biographies, policed the ways and conditions in which material things, bodies, and spaces might be properly used in devotion.