Confessional Poetics: Confession and Repentance in Early Modern Devotional Verse

This thesis examines the influence of penitential theology and practice on early modern devotional verse. Taking shape as a series of case studies, it analyses poetic representations and performances of confession from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. The first chapter presents Petrarch’s reception of Augustine’s 'Confessions' as the paradigmatic model of what I call ‘confessional poetics’: dramatisations of repentance in Petrarch aspire to rehabilitate a fallen subjectivity, but also risk deepening its fractures. The second chapter tracks the influence of a Calvinist understanding of repentance in Anne Lock’s 'A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner', shifting the focus to the literature of the English Reformation, a period in which the contested status of the sacrament of penance brings to the fore the tensions in the language of confessional self-fashioning bequeathed by Petrarch to the European lyric tradition.

The third chapter discusses the poetry of Robert Southwell in terms of the penitential dynamics of ‘sacred parody’, arguing that the genre is caught between censure and repetition of courtly love. Next, I address the drive to purify the impure and ‘abject’ in John Donne’s 'Holy Sonnets', and the impact of liturgical reform on George Herbert’s negotiations between private and public speech in 'The Temple'. The thesis draws to a close with an analysis of avowal and disavowal in the poetry of Richard Crashaw. The requirement to verbalise inwardness plays a vitally important role in the cultural history of the ‘self’. What also emerges from this study of penitential verse, however, is the centrality of literature to such a history. Not only does ‘confessional’ poetry throw light on the theological controversy surrounding penance in the early modern period, but it also puts under intense scrutiny the ability of language to shape and transform its speakers – and its readers.