Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion : Bodies at Prayer

Miton and Early Modern Devotional Culture analyses the representation of public and private prayer in John Milton's poetry and prose, paying particular attention to the ways seventeenth-century prayer is imagined as embodied in sounds, gestures, postures, and emotional responses. Naya Tsentourou demonstrates Milton's profound engagement with prayer, and how this is driven by a consistent and ardent effort to experience one's address to God as inclusive of body and spirit and as loaded with affective potential. The book aims to become the first interdisciplinary study to show how Milton participates in and challenges early modern debates about authentic and insincere worship in public, set and spontaneous prayers in private, and gesture and voice in devotion. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 List of Abbreviations and Standard Editions 10 Introduction: “Pathetical Prayers” 12 1 Dressing the Devotional Body 34 “A Linnen Sock over It”: Material Bodies in Church 35 Inventorying Dress 41 “The Ghost of a Linen Decency” 46 Shifting Bodies in Milton’s Mask 51 2 “Stale and Empty Words”: Consuming Prayers in Eikonoklastes 66 Subjects and Audiences in Liturgical Prayer 67 Prayer in the King’s Closet 70 “Wholesome Words” and Manna 76 Feeling and Eating Prayers 83 3 Hymns, Sighs, and the Materiality of Prayer in Paradise Lost 97 Prayer in Hymns 98 Singing Prayers 103 Prayer in Sighs 107 Sighs, Groans, and Agency 113 4 “As One Who Pray’d”: The Iconoclastic Prayer of Samson Agonistes 126 Samson’s Posture 130 Samson’s Rhetoric 133 Samson’s Violent Prayer 141 Epilogue 154 Bibliography 162 Index 182 __Miton and Early Modern Devotional Culture__