1st Edition

Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion Bodies at Prayer

By Naya Tsentourou Copyright 2018
    186 Pages
    by Routledge

    186 Pages
    by Routledge

    Miton and Early Modern Devotional Culture analyses the representation of public and private prayer in John Milton’s poetry and prose, paying particular attention to the ways seventeenth-century prayer is imagined as embodied in sounds, gestures, postures, and emotional responses. Naya Tsentourou demonstrates Milton’s profound engagement with prayer, and how this is driven by a consistent and ardent effort to experience one’s address to God as inclusive of body and spirit and as loaded with affective potential. The book aims to become the first interdisciplinary study to show how Milton participates in and challenges early modern debates about authentic and insincere worship in public, set and spontaneous prayers in private, and gesture and voice in devotion.

    Acknowledgements





    List of Abbreviations and Standard Editions





    Introduction: "Pathetical Prayer"





    Chapter 1 Dressing the Devotional Body



    "A linnen Sock over it": Material Bodies in Church



    Inventorying Dress



    ‘The ghost of a linen decency’



    Shifting Bodies in Milton’s Mask





    Chapter 2 "Stale and empty words": Consuming Prayers in Eikonoklastes



    Subjects and Audiences in Liturgical Prayer



    Prayer in the King’s Closet



    "Wholesome Words" and Manna



    Feeling and Eating Prayers





    Chapter 3 Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer in Paradise Lost



    Prayer in Hymns



    Singing Prayers



    Prayer in Sighs



    Sighs, Groans, and Agency





    Chapter 4 "As one who pray’d": The Iconoclastic Prayer of Samson Agonistes



    Samson’s Posture



    Samson’s Rhetoric



    Samson’s Violent Prayer





    Epilogue

    Biography

    Naya Tsentourou is currently Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, Penryn. She has research interests in Milton and religious lyric, as well as Shakespeare and the history of emotions. She has co-edited the collection Forms of Hypocrisy in Early Modern England (forthcoming with Routledge) with Lucia Nigri.