Little Gidding and its devotional settings

2013

Since I have benefited from the scholarly assistance, general helpfulness, forbearance, and friendship of so many during the course of this project, I will gladly and gratefully speak of my debts, with no pretensions that repayment is possible. I would like to thank the following organizations for the fellowships and scholarships awarded to me in support of my doctoral studies: the Episcopal Church Foundation, the Boston University Humanities Foundation, the Boston University Women's Guild, and the Division of Religious and Theological Studies at Boston University. My advisor, Peter S. Hawkins, has from the beginning asked pointed questions with unfailing kindness. I could not have asked for a better "pattern," as the Ferrars would say, of scholarship and teaching in religion and literature. I am grateful to Christopher Martin of the English Department and Karen Westerfield Tucker of the School of Theology, whose expertise and willingness to serve as readers has made this a stronger and truly interdisciplinary project. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, has been a model pastor-scholar for me. I thank him for his collegiality, encouragement, and friendship over many years of teaching together, and for serving as a member of my committee. v Joyce and David Ransome's decades of scholarship on Little Gidding has made my own work possible. I am especially grateful to Joyce for her help with numerous queries on all things Ferrar. Deeana Klepper, Jonathan Klawans, and Karen Nardella at the Division of Religious and Theological Studies have shown me a number of kindnesses in their administrative capacities during the course of my studies, which I deeply appreciate. I would like to thank Trevor Cooper for making his article on the Ferrars' public worship available to me in advance of publication, and to Debora Shuger for sending me the manuscript of her talk on the Little Gidding Story Books. Constance Furey and John N. Wall provided valuable feedback and assistance along the way. All twenty-first century scholars of Herbert owe Helen Wilcox a great debt for her edition of Herbert's English poems. Fittingly, significant portions of this study were composed at Anglican retreat centers, and I thank these communities for their hospitality: the Society of Saint John the

Studia Liturgica, 2013

made his pilgrimage to St. John's Church in the tiny English village of Little Gidding, about thirty miles outside of Cambridge, on May 25, 1936. 1 Little Gidding was the former site of what today might be called a religious intentional community of the early seventeenth century, established by Nicholas Ferrar (1592/3-1637) and his family, who were friends of the poet and priest George Herbert (1593-1633). Five years after his visit, in 1941, Eliot composed his poem "Little Gidding," the fourth of his Four Quartets. He perhaps recalled the Ferrar family's night watches and their continual praying of the Psalms as he himself kept vigil as an air raid warden and firewatcher at St. Paul's Cathedral during the Blitz of London. Looking back on his earlier visit, Eliot wrote, "You are here to kneel/Where prayer has been valid."2 It is worth noting that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the question of what constituted "valid" prayer (in words previously composed or extemporaneous), the physical posture in which one prayed, and the holiness of sacred spaces, were all topics of heated debate. The Ferrar family, through their commitment to regular and corporate prayer, sought to "redeem the time," to use a phrase from Eliot's poem "Ash Wednesday." The manner in which they did this made them the subjects of liturgical controversy in the years leading up to the English Civil War. It is the times in which the Ferrars of Little Gidding lived and worshiped that make a study of their liturgical theology worthwhile; they also complicate it.' In

The Catholic Historical Review, 2014

American Imago, 2006

Julia Kristeva begins her Powers of Horror by probing the belly of the beast. She is writing about abjection but her opening remarks would not sound out of place in a critical study of the seventeenth-century English poet Richard Crashaw. Indeed it is surprising how uncannily her words mirror the horrified reaction of many readers to his devotional verse on the Passion and Crucifixion, and especially to that little poem which imagines the unthinkable, "Blessed be the paps which Thou hast sucked." Kristeva develops her theory of abjection out of Freud's speculation that the 'uncanny' is a primitive and instinctive reaction of dread and horror to what is unknown but strangely familiar, and which ultimately proves to be death, the hidden presence lurking in wait for us all throughout life. 1 Kristeva argues that abjection is a psychic defense against a "massive" and life threatening attack of uncanniness in which the subject is assailed by a premonitory fear of what death carries like a carrion-the "loathsome," the "Not me," a "weight of meaninglessness … on the edge of non-existence and hallucination … that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me" (2). As the stirring verses that end his poem "The Flaming Heart" illustrate, Crashaw did not fear but rather prayed fervently for this annihilation of self that beckons from the void of death. "Leave nothing of my SELF in me" (l. 106). He paid homage to St. Teresa of Avila's mystical victory over the powers of horror which put faith itself in extremis during the Reformation period. "Let me so read thy life, that I / unto all life of mine may dy" (ll. 107-08). 2 Kristeva emphasizes the link between abjection and death by describing abjection as a manifestation of "the horror within," resulting from "the collapse of the border between [what is] inside and outside," what is under and beyond the control of the body (53). Abject articles that draw attention to the porous boundary between the 'me' and the 'not me', the

2012

Finn-Atkins 2 moments in ecstatic rapture. A second text, El Castillo Interior written in 1577, elaborates further the perfection of prayer through the metaphor of the soul as a castle containing seven mansions. J.M. Cohen's description of Saint Teresa in his introduction to The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila as a "self-willed and hysterically unbalanced woman" strangely resembles John Richard Roberts' comment on Crashaw as a "hysterical poet." 34 The quality of hysteria is an uncontrollable emotion transmitted through experience, a medium of acquiring spiritual knowledge that is praised by Saint Teresa and Richard Crashaw. While several critics dismiss Crashaw's tender verse as "indigestible," "perverse," "shocking" and "foreign," a few others, such as Kimberly Johnson, call him a neglected gem among the group of authors, such as John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell and Henry Vaughn, that are frequently referred to as the "metaphysical poets." 5 In the essay "Note on Richard Crashaw," T.S. Eliot elevates Crashaw's overall poetic performance above the two esteemed romantics, Keats and Shelley. Eliot notes that the image of the speaker in Crashaw's "The Teare" who yearns to bring a pillow "stuft with Downe of Angels wing" to the head of a tear is "almost the quintessence of an immense mass of 10 Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility.

The American Historical Review, 2001

Renaissance and Reformation

Important for seventeenth-century English literary studies, this first scholarly edition of Crashaw's verse since George Walton Williams's Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw (1970) revivifies his unfortunately neglected metaphysical poetry for the twenty-first century. Though Crashaw occasioned some panic among the Anglo-American literary academy in the past century, the grounds on which he was then marginalized, as his new editor Richard Rambuss argues, now seem narrow-minded, arbitrary, and dated. This poet needs serious and sympathetic revaluation which Rambuss greatly facilitates. Crashaw wrote Latin as well as English poetry. Aside from an early volume of Latin poetry on sacred themes (1634), in Crashaw's own time his verse was published in three overlapping collections, mainly in English but also in Latin: Steps to the Temple: Sacred Poems, with Other Delights of the Muses (London, 1646); an eponymous revised and expanded second edition (London, 1648); and a Catholicized repackaging of Steps to the Temple's sacred verse, Carmen Deo Nostro (Paris, 1652), newly illustrated with twelve engravings (including two often attributed to Crashaw himself). He was apparently unable to supervise these editions, for he had fled to the Continent around 1644 to avoid Puritan religious persecution, and died in 1649. Rambuss's edition focuses on the English verse from both the 1646 and 1652 volumes; the latter presents its poems largely as they appear in the revised Steps of 1648, but with numerous significant variants. Rambuss further includes Crashaw's English poems that uniquely appear in the 1648 edition, his English verse appearing only in manuscript, and a 1653 edition of his poem Letter […] to the Countess of Denbigh, which revises the version in Carmen Deo Nostro. In reproducing the English poems of the 1646 and 1652 volumes, Rambuss restores their original order abandoned in Williams's 1970 edition. Thus we may consider the significances that order may have had for the poet or his publishers, and for the readers of his time. This edition aptly juxtaposes the 1646 and 1652 volumes: the former presents the poet as a Laudian Anglican within the Church of England, as does its 1648 successor; the latter, as a Roman Catholic following his conversion on the Continent around 1645.

Ars Aeterna, 2019

As a metaphysical poet, Richard Crashaw (1613-1649) is recognized for his stylistic experimentation and deep religious faith. In the course of his short life, he became a fellow at Cambridge, was later introduced to Queen Henrietta Marie, Charles I’s wife, in France after his exile during the Interregnum, converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism and was highly influenced by Baroque poetry and the martyrdom of St. Teresa of Avila in his style and themes. He is a poet with a “most holy, humble and genuine soul” and in the last six years of his life, which coincided with a period of great crisis in both personal and professional spheres, he worked intensively on the religious phase of his literary career (Shepherd 1914, p. 1). He reflected his devotion to St. Teresa and to God in his religious poems. Within this context, this study analyses Crashaw’s two Teresian poems, “A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa” and “The Flaming Heart” featuring the themes of the qu...

ELR, 2012