The History of Christ Revealed (UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA MONOGRAPHS HUMANITIES)

My history of the neotypological lyric in the English Renaissance traces how a line of gifted, theologically astute sacred lyrics created a new kind of poem from the potential in a crucial concern of Reformed exegesis and how they successively transformed that form until they expended its potential for sacred expression. The distinctiveness of each poet comes not from major differences in the poetic features each employs but from the poets' characteristic emphases, their selection of certain ones out of common features, and their distinctive development of the potential. Consequently I begin wit ha characterizing illustration that draws parallels between a commonplace seventeenth-century Reformed theological tract and a representative neotypological lyric. I first show what he understood about typology, next describe why and how he used typology generally, and finally, by focusing on a crucial theme or a significant central poem in his works, examine his contributions to the tradition.