Kevin,
I didn't express myself very well, I'm afraid. I didn't mean that I don't take her seriously (I do), but that many, especially American academics who assume a particular secular worldview, tend to read her religious experience in non-religious terms (sexual, psychological, political). The same thing has often happened with Donne, another writer who blurs boundaries between the sexual and spiritual/secular and sacred (so that "Batter My Heart," for instance, becomes a homosexual rape fantasy).
I think my broad point is that we need to take greater pains to understand early modern religious experience in its own terms.
Hannibal
Hannibal Hamlin
Associate Professor of English
The Ohio State University
Book Review Editor and Associate Editor, Reformation
Mailing Address (2007-2009):
The Folger Shakespeare Library
201 East Capitol Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
Permanent Address:
Department of English
The Ohio State University
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----- Original Message -----
From: Kevin Farnham <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Saturday, November 17, 2007 5:36 pm
Subject: Re: Petrarchism and Christianity
> Hi Hannibal,
>
> What you say about Saint Teresa is remarkable to me! I am currently
> working on a book (titled "I Face My Love") that I intend as a
> "successor" to medieval and renaissance love sonnet sequences, wherein
> my organizational "template" (somewhat as Joyce's template for Ulysses
> was the Odyssey) is "Interior Castle".
>
> I myself don't find St. Teresa hard to take seriously...
>
> Kevin
>
> ----------------------
>
> On Sat, 17 Nov 2007 15:26:24 -0500
> HANNIBAL HAMLIN <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > In the Ecstacy of St. Teresa, we see this the other way
> > around: her description of her spiritual experience is so obviously
> > erotic we find it hard to take seriously (especially if we throw in
> > Bernini's sculpture). Yet it's not really surprising that people
> > seek to describe the experiences of spiritual and sexual ecstacy in
> > terms of each other. They both represent experiences so intense
> that> we find them describable only by analogy or metaphor. But
> of course
> > certain religious positions (though not all, and not easily
> > categorized into, eg., Catholic and Protestant) find sexual love
> > problematic, hence the tensions.
> >
> > Back to Petrarchism and Christianity, mightn't it be more useful to
> > think not of a systematic conflict but of a fairly typical
> > Renaissance/Reformation syncretism? I note also (surprise,
> surprise)> that Petrarch wrote Psalms (sort of -- really pastiches
> of Psalm
> > bits, later translated by Chapman) as well as the Rime, and that he
> > writes glowingly of Augustine's Commentaries on the Psalms as
> well as
> > books by Dante and Homer.
> >
> > Hannibal
> >
> >
>
>
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