Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry
The Poetics of Feeling

Firmly establishes the importance of early affective devotion in the hybrid poetics of the earliest English poetry.

Jennifer A. Lorden (Author)

9781009390316, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 November 2023

242 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.9 cm, 0.5 kg

'… a welcome contribution to scholarship on the history of emotions and affect, medieval spirituality, and Old and Middle English poetry.' Alice Jorgensen, Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Jennifer Lorden reveals the importance of deeply-felt religious devotion centuries before it is commonly said to arise. Her ground-breaking study establishes the hybrid poetics that embodied its form for medieval readers, while obscuring it from modern scholars. Working across the divide between Old and Middle English, she shows how conventions of earlier English poetry recombine with new literary conventions after the Norman Conquest. These new conventions—for example, love lyric repurposed as devotional song—created hybrid aesthetics more familiar to modern scholars. She argues that this aesthetic, as much as changing devotional practice, rendered later affective piety recognizable in a way that earlier affective devotional conventions were not. Forms of Devotion reconsiders the roots and branches of poetic topoi, revising commonplaces of literary and religious history. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Introduction
1. Displaced passions: sympathy and suffering in poems on Christ and the saints
2. Paradise and the problem of beauty in Old English poetry
3. Poetics at the end of the world
4. The poetics of the speaking soul from Old to Middle English
5. Luue and lyric in England across the conquest
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]