Edmund Spenser (c.1552-99) conducted two careers at once: a celebrated poet, he also pursued a lifelong career as secretary to various political and ecclesiastical figures. Richard Rambuss's ground-breaking book explores the ways in which this latter profession informed his poetic career. It argues that for Spenser, the manipulation of secrets provided a strategy for self-promotion and a means of measuring his distance from royal and aristocratic power. The study presents a new picture of Spenser and examines ideas of gender, power, and subjecthood in the Renaissance.
Edmund Spenser (c.1552-99) conducted two careers at once: a celebrated poet, he also pursued a lifelong career as secretary to various political and e...
Religion and sex, body and soul, sacred and profane: In "Closet Devotions," Richard Rambuss traces the relays between these cultural formations by examining the issue of "sacred eroticism," the literary or artistic expression of devotional feelings in erotic terms that has repeatedly occurred over the centuries. Rather than dismissing such expression as mere convention, Rambuss takes it seriously as a form of erotic discourse, one that gives voice to desires that, outside the sphere of sacred rapture, would otherwise be deemed taboo. Through startling rereadings of works ranging from the...
Religion and sex, body and soul, sacred and profane: In "Closet Devotions," Richard Rambuss traces the relays between these cultural formations by exa...
"Crashaw is quite alone in his peculiar kind of greatness." --T. S. Eliot
This is the first new critical edition in more than forty years of an astounding and unjustly neglected poet of sacred eroticism and homoeroticism--the traditional yet nevertheless startling expression of ecstatic religious feeling in sexual terms. Flamboyant, experimental, and cosmopolitan in his literary and religious preferences, Richard Crashaw (ca. 1613-1649) wrote exultant, high-flying verse that remains the most sustained effort in English to render ecstasy poetically. Routinely misunderstood and at...
"Crashaw is quite alone in his peculiar kind of greatness." --T. S. Eliot
This is the first new critical edition in more than forty years...
Traces the relays between these cultural formations by examining the issue of "sacred eroticism," the literary or artistic expression of devotional feelings in erotic terms that has repeatedly occurred over the centuries.
Traces the relays between these cultural formations by examining the issue of "sacred eroticism," the literary or artistic expression of devotional fe...
