Devotional Poetry in France C.1570 1613

By Terence C. Cave

Dr Cave studies the relationship between the traditions of personal devotion in sixteenth-century France and the poetry which flourished at the end of the century and the beginning of the seventeenth. It was a poetry of intense personal commitment, preoccupied with penitence and confession, the vanity of life, the imminence of death, the meaning of the Incarnation and the Passion; often verging on mysticism and mingling of the sensual, the intellectual and the spiritual in a manner often thought typical of the baroque. It was part of a European movement, and there is much here to interest the student of the early seventeenth-century sensibility. A comparable book on English literature is Louis Martz's The Poetry of Meditation, but the lines of Dr Cave's enquiry are new. The book has a fourfold interest: to readers concerned with French literature; to those with particular interest in the traditions of devotion; to those concerned with comparative studies in the baroque period, and to students of rhetorical analysis.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521113458
• ISBN13: 9780521113458
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"