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Article: The religious epigram in early Stuart England.
- Article from:
- Christianity and Literature
- Article date:
- June 22, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Conference on Christianity and Literature. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The epigram, widely practiced in the early seventeenth century, has received remarkably little attention from scholars, and the religious epigram, as a distinct application of the form, has attracted almost none. Only Richard Crashaw's attempts (in both Latin and English) are well known, but his Epigrammatum sacrorum liber (1634) is just one example of a mass of writings that reached their English peak in the mid-1630s (Young). A thorough study of the style of this genre and its relation to the religious lyric and emblem is needed, but my purpose, drawing principally on the epigram collections of the 1630s, is to consider four questions: how was the form understood by its ...