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Reading and Feeling in Early Modern Devotional Literature

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Reading and Feeling in Early Modern Devotional Literature University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Intimate Exegesis: Reading and Feeling in Early Modern Devotional Literature Bronwyn V. Wallace University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Wallace, Bronwyn V., "Intimate Exegesis: Reading and Feeling in Early Modern Devotional Literature" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2081. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2081 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2081 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Intimate Exegesis: Reading and Feeling in Early Modern Devotional Literature Abstract “Intimate Exegesis” proposes that early modern devotional literature offers feeling, and particularly bad feeling, as a productive matrix for interpretation. In this body of work, feeling – haptic, sensory, affective – generates an intimacy between reader and text in a reading practice that is also a means of coping with the tremendous gap between life in the fallen world and divine perfection. In an unlikely union that I argue involves a powerful shared approach to affect, embodiment, and interpretation, I bring patristic theology together with feminist and queer theory to address how Robert Southwell, Anne Lock, Aemilia Lanyer, and Katherine Philips develop sophisticated interpretive practices out of mourning, recalcitrance, despair, nostalgia, and failure, all grounded in the peculiar passions of embodied femininity. In their work, difficult or even destructive feeling is not an obstacle to reading and devotion, but rather enables the reader’s identification with and ve en desire for the text she reads. While recent debates in early modern studies have pitted historicism against queer temporality, devotional practice suggests that to read historically is – has always been – to read anachronically. The negative affects that Southwell, Lock, Lanyer, and Philips introduce to their scenes of leverage the properties of form and rhetoric to approach distant pasts, imagine radical futures, and above all to slow down the time of reading and the time of worldly politics, to stand still, to refuse to move on. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group English First Advisor Margreta de Grazia Keywords Affect, Devotional, Early Modern, Feminism, Poetics Subject Categories Religion This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2081 INTIMATE EXEGESIS: READING AND FEELING IN EARLY MODERN DEVOTIONAL LITERATURE Bronwyn V. Wallace A DISSERTATION in English Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Supervisor of Dissertation __________________________ Margreta de Grazia Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Professor of the Humanities (Emerita) Graduate Group Chairperson __________________________ Melissa E. Sanchez Associate Professor of English Dissertation Committee Zachary Lesser, Professor of English Melissa E. Sanchez, Associate Professor of English Peter Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is a project about intimacy in reading; that should tell you something about the world in which it took shape. It developed in moments of kinship and community, its vital earliest impulses provoked by acts of friendship and its late stages, marked by what seemed insurmountable stuckness, survivable only for sustaining intimacies of friends, mentors, and colleagues, and a handful of priceless people who are all three. Acknowledgement has a funny way of referring everything back to self; what should be an outward gesture becomes a narcissistic practice: this list of people and their fine qualities, all in terms of what they have given to me, to my project. I have not managed it here, but I would like to discover the syntax in which it would be possible to show that it is otherwise: that there is no me in this work, only us. That there is no such thing as single authorship. This dissertation has been supported by a committee of the kind every doctoral student should get to have. Melissa Sanchez has a special genius for powerful synthesis that I have not encountered elsewhere; her robust, incisive questions showed me the shape and direction of my own work when I could not see it myself. I hope one day to have satisfactory answers to them. To Melissa also goes the credit for provoking me, however inadvertently, to write this dissertation instead of another. Anyone who has been in the presence of Peter Stallybrass for five minutes knows what it is like to be inspired by him; he has not only provided this project with much vital material but infused its writing with some astonishing and unlooked-for moments of real joy. Zachary Lesser has been this work’s organizing white space, the invisibly structuring principle without which no content could be presented. His patience and calm have on many occasions when I had none of my own given me space to breathe, his has been the vital responsibility of telling me when something is done, and his acute rhetorical sensibilities have quietly but significantly sharpened my style. For Margreta, sine qua non, there can be no adequate thanks. She has taught me the value of difficulty, and she has shown me what honesty, empathy, and generosity really are. Her tenacity and her integrity have been at times the whole principle of this work. From the beginning she has valued this project’s riskiest ventures and refused to let me lose courage to pursue them; she has let the work run wild and then identified its insights and shown me their shape. If this and everything to come after is not dedicated to her, it is only because it is and always will be already so much hers. Natasha Korda set me on this path; in a straightforward way, I would not be here without her. Priscilla Meyer taught me to read. Each of them in her different way of remaining with me in the intervening years has shown me how a shared life in this work can produce invaluable kinship. Brian Cummings, who startled me by entering my life unexpectedly at a moment when I was silly enough to think I knew what I was doing, changed everything about what I wanted to think about and how I thought about it; I will never grow out of that debt. The friendship of Rita Copeland has been one of the great discoveries of the late stages of this work; in its earliest stages, she opened the treasury of classical rhetoric to me for the first time, and it’s to her that I owe my love of Augustine. Patricia Dailey’s seminar on embodiment was the crucible of this project in any number of ways; Origen is the shape of my debt to her. iii The Medieval/Renaissance reading group at Penn has been my intellectual home for more than seven years; in its unparalleled combination of rigor and generosity it has shown me what collective inquiry can be at its best. It taught me what a worthwhile question is; it is where I found my voice. For this I thank, in addition to those named elsewhere, David Wallace, Emily Steiner, Kevin Brownlee, Ania Loomba, Rebecca Bushnell, and Phyllis Rackin. I am especially grateful to Rebecca for her honesty and integrity, as well as last- minute material support in a research assistantship, and to Phyllis for keeping me honest. Elsewhere among the Penn English faculty, Jim English, Peter Decherney, Michael Gamer, Nancy Bentley, Timothy Corrigan, Chi-ming Yang, and Paul Saint-Amour have in various ways big and small sustained my work and my spirit. Current and former grads from Penn English, Comp Lit, and related fields have formed the invaluable intellectual community without which I think none of us would ever get anywhere. This project has been particularly nourished by the contributions and intellectual and pedagogical companionship of my cohort sisters, Marissa Nicosia, Marie Turner, Alyssa Connell, Marina Bilbija, Emily Gerstell, Sunny Yang, Amy Paeth, and Yumi Lee; Med/Ren co-conspirators Claire Bourne, Jessica Rosenberg, Tekla Bude, Simran Thadani, Kara Gaston, Dianne Mitchell, Alan Niles, Jackie Burek, Mariah Min, Samantha Pious, Erika Smith, Sarah Townsend, Anna Lyman, Lydia Kertz, Daniel Davies, Megan Cook, Thomas Ward, Stephanie Elsky, Emily Weissbourd, and honorary Penn alum Ari Friedlander; wise elders and example-setters Melanie Micir, Sarah Dowling, Jen Jahner, Greta LaFleur, and Julia Bloch; and many others including Jonathan Fedors, Alexander Devine, Ruth Rand, Carolyn Trench, Mary-Catherine French, Kelly Rich, Jessica Hurley, Christine Woody, Laura Finch, Julius Fleming, Don James McLaughlin, Laura Soderberg, Thomas Dichter, Phil Maciak, Dave Alff, Angela Britto, Jazmín Delgado, Evelyn Soto, Clare Mullaney, Eleni Palis, Najnin Islam, Orchid Tierney, and Mary Zaborskis. This list, remarkably, is shorter than it could be. We have been very lucky. The Center for Teaching and Learning provided me with a second home for two years. Cathy Turner, Julie McGurk, and Ian Petrie have been invaluable mentors, not least in sustaining an expansive definition of what this work is for. Among my fellow fellows, Bridget Swanson, Rose Muravchik, Lindsey Fiorelli, and Ian Hartshorn merit special mention as sustainers of my teacher-self. Between them, my CTL people have provided a disproportionate amount of the total laughter I have experienced in my time at Penn. Audiences at the University of York, the Shakespeare Association of America, the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, the Katherine Philips 350 conference, and Penn’s Gen/Sex and GSWS working groups have both given space to the work and important feedback on it, and provided it with much in the way of emotional sustenance. To Heather Love, Victoria Burke, Penelope Anderson, Abigail Marcus, Lara Dodds, Tessie Prakas, Piers Brown, Richard Strier, Kathleen Lynch, Cathy Nicholson, and especially Helen Smith for a timely invitation to York, I owe particular debts.
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