Devotional Poetry in France c.1570–1613

Dr Cave studies the relationship between the traditions of personal devotion in sixteenth-century France and the poetry which flourished at the end of the century.

Cave (Author)

9780521113458, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 18 June 2009

376 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.1 cm, 0.48 kg

Dr Cave studies the relationship between the traditions of personal devotion in sixteenth-century France and the poetry which flourished at the end of the century and the beginning of the seventeenth. It was a poetry of intense personal commitment, preoccupied with penitence and confession, the vanity of life, the imminence of death, the meaning of the Incarnation and the Passion; often verging on mysticism and mingling of the sensual, the intellectual and the spiritual in a manner often thought typical of the baroque. It was part of a European movement, and there is much here to interest the student of the early seventeenth-century sensibility. A comparable book on English literature is Louis Martz's The Poetry of Meditation, but the lines of Dr Cave's enquiry are new. The book has a fourfold interest: to readers concerned with French literature; to those with particular interest in the traditions of devotion; to those concerned with comparative studies in the baroque period, and to students of rhetorical analysis.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1. Devotional traditions
2. The devotional treatise: method and matter
3. From devotion to poetry
4. Poetry of sin, sickness and death. 1. The penitential prayer
5. Poetry of sin, sickness and death. 2. Vanitas vanitatum and memento mori
6. Poetry of the Incarnation and Redemption. 1. The devotional sonnet - Favre and La Ceppede
7. Poetry of the Incarnation and Redemption. 2. The sentimental and the romanesque
Conclusion
Appendices 1–4
Bibliography
Chronological summary of primary sources
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]