Kimberly Johnson

Richard Crashaw's Indigestible Poetics

principle of passion, or the heart as a seat of affection, as in the ‘‘Hymne to Sainte Teresa’’: ‘‘Her weake brest heaves with strong desire’’ (40). By contrast, Crashaw uses ‘‘Teat’’ (and ‘‘Teates’’) only in ‘‘Blessed be the paps.’’ 37 Kimberly Johnson Crashaw’s Indigestible Poetics

Per Fretum Febris : The Diseased Body in John Donne and Brett Foster

John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions has long been appreciated for the allegorical resonances of its self-scrutiny, but it also uses the precise and painstaking details of its investigation into illness as an instrument for producing compassion. The imbrication of dogged analysis and empathy on display in Devotions is bequeathed as a striking heirloom in the late work of Brett Foster, a poet who likewise records the unsparing details of his own mortal decline in an effort to register, and to produce, human understanding. Foster’s engagement with Donne’s meditative project helps to reveal the humane investment at the heart of both writers’ work in extremis.

Ryan Netzley Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry

Over the past decade or so, interrogations of the relationship between the Eucharist and literary texts have become something of a minor fad in early modern critical studies, as many scholars work to articulate the aesthetic and hermeneutic similarities between reading and communion. It is not at all surprising that literary texts should register the sacramental controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for the ceremony at the ritual center of Christian observance is unavoidably bound up with questions of signification and with the cultivation of a soteriologically efficacious interpretive practice. The Eucharist is, after all, a rite deeply involved with questions of representation, and the matter of how, exactly, Christ is available in the sacramental elements of bread and wine is one of the animating debates of the Reformation. While a number of scholars have acknowledged, explicitly or implicitly, the proximity between sacramental worship and the processes of signification, critical attention remains largely focused not on the way Reformation-era devotional poems express and embody changing notions of the operation of signs but, rather, on whatever commentary concerning sacramental doctrine (or doctrine in general) a text seems to offer, as if a religious poem were merely a theological treatise with line breaks. Ryan Netzley’s Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry seeks to redirect focus to the poetic text as such, sidestepping the urge to establish a poet’s doctrine in favor of an approach that recognizes poems as worthy of attention in and of themselves. This redirection is not historically naive, nor does it revive a kind of New Critical suspicion of context; rather, it acknowledges that a focus on confessional identity often imagines ‘‘Catholic’’ and ‘‘Protestant’’ and other such designations as if they main-