Intimacy and the Body in Seventeenth-Century Religious Devotion
Bromley, James M.
Early Modern Literary Studies 11.1 (May, 2005)
Abstract
This paper outlines a debate over the role of the body in intimacy with God as it is represented in seventeenth-century English religious literature. In the work of Joseph Hall, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw, the body was a critical problematic within articulations of intimacy with God. Hall, in the tract entitled The Remedy of Prophanenesse, is the first to refer to the human-divine relationship as intimate. The tract, however, develops a disembodied intimacy with God based in Protestant modes of devotion. While Hall and Herbert, both Protestant, similarly write the body out of human-divine intimacy for reasons both theological and historical, Herbert expresses anxiety about the qualitative effect that the disavowal of the body has on the human-divine relationship. In contrast, the Catholic poet, Crashaw, with theological support in the doctrine of transubstantiation, celebrates the role of the body in stabilizing and enhancing human-divine relationality. Aesthetic, national, and theological concerns have since marginalized Crashaw’s model of intimacy. This marginalization has been reproduced in critical work on Crashaw that has judged his embodied intimacy with the divine to be indecorous. However, the existence of these three models of human-divine intimacy point to a moment in the history of relationality when it was possible to articulate multiple, and even contested models of intimate life. This paper, then, suggests that the field of early modern relationality, at least in religious discourse, was more complicated than has been formerly understood.
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