This book proposes the poetic link between Donne and Crashaw during the English Reformation. In the first half of this work, Donne's Songs and Sonets, Verse Letters, religious works and Anniversaries are discussed as they reflect increasingly covert reverence for a holy mother figure. In the second half, Crashaw's juvenile poems and epigrams, verse in honour of the Virgin and Child, and mature contemplative verse are seen to express mystical homage to Mary and growing admiration for feminine powers of faith.

Ingrid Bergman's engaging screen performance as Sister Mary Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary's made the film nun a star and her character a shining standard of comparison. She represented the religious life as the happy and rewarding choice of a modern woman who had a "complete understanding" of both erotic and spiritual desire. How did this vibrant and mature nun figure come to be viewed as girlish and naive? Why have she and her cinematic sisters in postwar popular film so often been stereotyped or selectively analyzed, so seldom been seen as women and religious? In Veiled Desires--a...