>
> 2. The Catholic "school of the heart" tradition (schola cordis) was adapted
> for Protestants; see Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, ch. 6. Unfortunately for
> our purposes this is (a) a seventeenth-century phenomenon and (b) refers to
> the human heart, not the sacred heart.
>
And it also seems to me that Spenser's (and perhaps Sidney's) literary
employment of heart imagery speaks to a more textual conception of the
heart's iconography, as in the phrase in the Amoretti's first sonnet
"written in heart's close bleeding book". A lot of what's being written
on the heart these days has more to do with "body studies", such as
Michael Schoenfeldt's "Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England" and
the heart as text idea is also borne out in contemporary anatomical
tables, such as Vesalius's table III, "Arteria Magna" from Tabulae
Anatoicae Sex, in which the only body part with text actually written on
it is the heart. You may want to check out Eric Jager's book "Book of
the Heart". It's, again, mainly concerned with the textual issues
surrounding the heart metaphor, but he might at least provide mention of
the sacred heart tradition.
Gary Ettari
University of Washington
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