Early Modern Asceticism
Literature, Religion, and Austerity in the English Renaissance

Patrick J. McGrath (Author)

9781487505325

Hardback, published 18 October 2019

248 pages
23.6 x 16.5 x 2.4 cm, 0.48 kg

"McGrath’s Early Modern Asceticism offers scholars a view that complicates some of the monolithic claims about influential writers and their views on religion and sexuality, which leads to a more nuanced appreciation of the intricacies of these ideas. The extensive knowledge McGrath displays about early modern theology provides an instructive context for understanding some of the variations and contradictions on display in the literature from the period."

In discussions of the works of Donne, Milton, Marvell, and Bunyan, Early Modern Asceticism shows how conflicting approaches to asceticism animate depictions of sexuality, subjectivity, and embodiment in early modern literature and religion. The book challenges the perception that the Renaissance marks a decisive shift in attitudes towards the body, sex, and the self. In early modernity, self-respect was a Satanic impulse that had to be annihilated – the body was not celebrated, but beaten into subjection – and, feeling circumscribed by sexual desire, ascetics found relief in pain, solitude, and deformity. On the basis of this austerity, Early Modern Asceticism questions the ease with which scholarship often elides the early and the modern.

Acknowledgments