... influence on literary history. early modern English lyric poetry clerical profession priest poets church structure prosopography Except in rare cases, writing poetry has never been a particularly remunerative pursuit. Most poets, therefore, have had other livelihoods. Many have had family wealth...

... with “knackes,” the poet must reveal in figures of truth. If it is the office of the priest to pray for the preservation of man’s estate before God, it is the office of the poet to make visible the decadence of man’s estate on earth. In the final lines of the poem, Gascoigne elides the offices of poet and priest...

... terms.3 Seeking to refocus critical attention upon the poet’s language, Andrew Zurcher has recently asked that we recognize “a new, linguistic level to Spenser’s allegorical think- ing across his works,” accessible by “a kind of reading that is attentive, at the level of the lexeme...

... of the people imprisoned in darkness (XVI  –  XX). As Christ’s resurrection is celebrated on Easter Sunday, Langland at last gives a glimpse of a joy- ful Christian community. It includes the nomadic Wille (figure of the poet and a power of the soul), now shaped by his encounters with Christ...

...Hilaire Kallendorf Scholars have for decades compared many aspects of the poetry of two contemporaneous Baroque poets, John Donne (1572–1631) and Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1640). But, oddly, no one has compared their almost simultaneous adaptations of the Old Testament Book of Lamentations. Why...

... of attention on the conceptual difficulties involved, both for medieval poets and for scholarship itself, in representing something as inher- ently resistant to representation as the city. Following David Wallace’s influ- ential description of the metropolis as a notable absence in Chaucer’s poetry...

... reader really care about the nuances of bibli- cal translation? Did readers respond to contentious readings through trans- lation, such as “priest,” “presbyter,” or “elder,” or the word Thomas More objected to so strongly: William Tyndale’s translation of Paul’s “caritas” into that scandalous...

... structures but also understood the inherent limitation that emplotment and narrativization entails. Focusing on a doctor, John Arderne, a patient-poet, Thomas Hoccleve, and a poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, the essay explores how all three reveal their understanding of the artifice of narrativizing pain and illness...

... to sound like kings. In fact, they sound like a particular king, Herod: their speech, allit- eration and all, is closely modeled on Herod’s in the cycle plays. It prefaces a Jewish theme in the play. After Aristorius and his clerk (Clericus) have spo- ken with the local priest (Presbiter...

...,” and “rose from the dead” so that believers might have communion with the saints, forgiveness of sins, and life everlasting as gifts for the virtuous and penitent. Priests addressed their parishioners in sermons on the theological import of believing in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven...

... of the executions of four priests: Edmund Campion and Alexander Brian in 1581, Edmund Geninges in 1591, and Robert Southwell in 1595. In the narratives of these deaths, we can see how English Reformations not only occasioned new relic-making by English Catholics, but also, paradoxically, resulted in relic cults...

... different forms is unlikely to think first of Scottish texts, even the Scottish Alexander romances, and certainly not of anything so little known as the poet-priest Richard Hol- land’s Buke of the Howlat, a hymn to the House of Douglas embedded in a beast fable. What makes this initially unlikely...

..., and duplicitous courtier-­priest.1 These contradictions belong partly to Skelton’s moment, for he is the poet of a transition. His idiom has roots both in the waning literary culture of the English fifteenth century and in the rising Tudor regime whose patronage he so ardently desires, and he presents...

... that priests were debased as conjurors and their work derided as superstition. In The Souper of the Lorde (1533), William Tyndale derides “fleshly papists,” referring to them as “juggelers [who] slyly can conveye him [Christ] wyth a fewe wordis into a syngyng lofe [loaf] . . . so that they shulde eate...

... the right use of worldly goods, about the greed of priests and the corruption within the Church, about kingship and authority, about the friars — there is the question of salvation. “How may I save my soul?” the dreamer asks Holy Church in Passus I, and it is this question, with all its implied...

... Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachussets “Guk guk, gud day, ser!” begins the rollicking medical satire “Sum Practysis of Medecyne,” attributed to the late fifteenth- century Scottish poet Robert Henryson. With these words, the poem’s narrator launches the boasting...

... that the bread and wine there offered, though apparently unchanged by the consecration, actually were transformed entirely and in substance to the body and blood of Christ.1 She did believe, she said, that God was omnipotent in heaven, but not that his body was present on the altar or that the priest had...

... and Jerome forward.17 At the center of these writings was the allegorical (and in Christian texts, typological) understanding of the description and explanation of the Jewish high priest’s attire in Exodus 28, in which God teaches Moses the craftsmanship and symbolism of Aaron’s intricate gar- ments...

..., as in this won- derful example from Martial’s Epigrams, where the poet writes to his little book that, if it is condemned by the critic Apollinaris, it would be only “fit for schoolboys to plough your backside” [inversa pueris arande charta].20 It would, he means, be suitable only for schoolboys...

... in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.” The other key was generally believed to be that of ordo, holy orders. Only a properly ordained priest could hear confession and grant absolution, thereby playing a crucial role in the removal of the culpa or moral...