Duquesne University Press

Divine Subjection

The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England

By Gary Kuchar

Published in 2005
$58.00  cloth
Short discount available
ISBN: 978-0-8207-0370-1  (0-8207-0370-2)

309 pages

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Book Information

Combining theoretically engaged analyses with historically contextualized close readings, Divine Subjection posits new ways of understanding the relations between devotional literature and early English culture. Shifting the critical discussion from a “poetics” to a “rhetoric” of devotion, Kuchar considers how a broad range of devotional and metadevotional texts in Catholic and mainstream Protestant traditions register and seek to mitigate processes of desacralization—the loss of legible commerce between heavenly and earthly orders. This shift in critical focus makes clear the extent to which early modern devotional writing engages with some of the period’s most decisive theological conflicts and metaphysical crises. Kuchar places devotional writing alongside psychoanalytical and phenomenological theories and analyzes how religious and conceptual conflicts are registered in and accommodated by the predication of sacramental conceptions of the self. Through a devotional rhetoric based on context-specific uses of linguistic excessiveness, early modern devotional writers reimagined a form of sacramental identity that was triggered by, and structured in relation to, a divine Other whose desire preceded and exceeded one’s own. Through readings of works by Robert Southwell, Richard Crashaw, John Donne, Thomas Traherne and other lesser known authors, Divine Subjection explores how writers reimagined the sacramental continuity between divine and human orders amid a range of theological and philosophical conflicts. Kuchar thus examines how rhetoric of sacramental devotion works to construct ideal religious subjects within and against the broader experience of desacralization.

Author Information

GARY KUCHAR is assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He has published articles on early modern literature and critical theory. He is the author of The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England.

Book Reviews

“Very reader-friendly. . . . Kuchar’s book gives a highly detailed and versatile interpretation of a delightfully broad set of texts, both poetry and prose. . . . This is a highly welcomed approach.” — Rhetorical Review

“Kuchar links our world to the early modern period in a striking manner. . . . an exciting intellectual display.” — CLIO