Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric Of Sacramental Devotion In Early Modern England (Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies)

Combining theoretically engaged analyses with historically contextualised close readings. Divine Subjection posits new ways of understanding the relations between devotional literature and early modern 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 desacralisation -- 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.