Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England - Softcover

Targoff, Ramie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226789691 ISBN 13: 9780226789699

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2001

Synopsis

Common Prayer explores the relationship between prayer and poetry in the century following the Protestant Reformation. Ramie Targoff challenges the conventional and largely misleading distinctions between the ritualized world of Catholicism and the more individualistic focus of Protestantism. Early modern England, she demonstrates, was characterized less by the triumph of religious interiority than by efforts to shape public forms of devotion. This provocatively revisionist argument will have major implications for early modern studies.

Through readings of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Richard Hooker's Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry and his translations of the Psalms, John Donne's sermons and poems, and George Herbert's The Temple, Targoff uncovers the period's pervasive and often surprising interest in cultivating public and formalized models of worship. At the heart of this study lies an original and daring approach to understanding the origins of devotional poetry; Targoff shows how the projects of composing eloquent verse and improving liturgical worship come to be deeply intertwined. New literary practices, then, became a powerful means of forging common prayer, or controlling private and otherwise unmanageable expressions of faith.

About this title

About the Author

Ramie Targoff is professor of English at Brandeis University. She is the author of Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

 

 

From the Back Cover

Common Prayer explores the relationship between prayer and poetry in the century following the Protestant Reformation. Ramie Targoff challenges the conventional and misleading distinctions between the ritualized world of Catholicism and the more individualistic focus of Protestantism. Early modern England, she demonstrates, was characterized less by the triumph of religious interiority than by efforts to shape public forms of devotion. At the heart of this argument lies an original and daring approach to understanding the origins of devotional poetry. Targoff shows how the projects of composing eloquent verse and improving liturgical worship came to be deeply intertwined; how new literary practices became a powerful means of forging common prayer, and controlling private and otherwise unmanageable expressions of faith.

From the Inside Flap

Common Prayer explores the relationship between prayer and poetry in the century following the Protestant Reformation. Ramie Targoff challenges the conventional and misleading distinctions between the ritualized world of Catholicism and the more individualistic focus of Protestantism. Early modern England, she demonstrates, was characterized less by the triumph of religious interiority than by efforts to shape public forms of devotion. At the heart of this argument lies an original and daring approach to understanding the origins of devotional poetry. Targoff shows how the projects of composing eloquent verse and improving liturgical worship came to be deeply intertwined; how new literary practices became a powerful means of forging common prayer, and controlling private and otherwise unmanageable expressions of faith.

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Common Prayer explores the relationship between prayer and poetry in the century following the Protestant Reformation. Ramie Targoff challenges the conventional and misleading distinctions between the ritualized world of Catholicism and the more individualistic focus of Protestantism. Early modern England, she demonstrates, was characterized less by the triumph of religious interiority than by efforts to shape public forms of devotion. At the heart of this argument lies an original and daring approach to understanding the origins of devotional poetry. Targoff shows how the projects of composing eloquent verse and improving liturgical worship came to be deeply intertwined; how new literary practices became a powerful means of forging common prayer, and controlling private and otherwise unmanageable expressions of faith.

Reviews

What could be more private than prayer? In fact, internal devotion and visible worship have long been inextricable, as this remarkable study of early modern England shows. Prayer was formal, public, and performed— the idea was that "bodily reverence," in the words of one religious treatise, would regulate faith. After the Book of Common Prayer was assembled, in 1549, the use of vernacular English for divine purposes influenced devotional poetry as well. Targoff's scholarship sheds new light on the religious life of both sixteenth-century England and twenty-first-century America.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226789691
• ISBN 13: 9780226789699
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176