dc.creator | Woods, Chance Brandon | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2020-08-24T11:51:18Z | |
dc.date.available | 2019-08-08 | |
dc.date.issued | 2017-08-08 | |
dc.identifier.uri | https://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/etd-07212017-141936 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1803/15470 | |
dc.description.abstract | This dissertation argues that specific seventeenth-century writers appropriated the discourses of both conversion and mysticism as a strategy for self-differentiation and poetic production. Focusing on four principal figures, including Henry More (1614-1687), Richard Crashaw (1613-1649), Sir Tobie Matthew (1577-1655), and John Milton (1608-1674), the project examines how forms of conversion and mystical experience were utilized to address far-reaching cultural concerns about personal identity, revelation, and experiences of the divine. I argue that amidst a century of national anxieties about prominent magistrates changing confessional allegiance, these four poets explored the porousness of cultural and intellectual boundaries through innovative verse. Thus, far from denoting a transition from one singular identity to another, I demonstrate that conversion and mysticism could call into question fixed identity altogether and facilitate instead a liminal yet ineffable form of existence that was nonetheless intellectually fecund. Building on the scholarship of historians, literary specialists, and philosophers of religion, I develop insights first produced by the recent academic “turn to religion” to emphasize how significant the seventeenth century was in pioneering unique forms of religious expression. | |
dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
dc.subject | Mystical Theology | |
dc.subject | Renaissance Poetry | |
dc.subject | Ineffability | |
dc.subject | Early Modern History | |
dc.subject | Religious History. | |
dc.title | Transfiguring the Ineffable: Mysticism and Conversion in Seventeenth-Century England | |
dc.type | dissertation | |
dc.contributor.committeeMember | Paul Lim | |
dc.contributor.committeeMember | William Franke | |
dc.contributor.committeeMember | Scott Juengel | |
dc.contributor.committeeMember | Kathryn Schwarz | |
dc.type.material | text | |
thesis.degree.name | PHD | |
thesis.degree.level | dissertation | |
thesis.degree.discipline | English | |
thesis.degree.grantor | Vanderbilt University | |
local.embargo.terms | 2019-08-08 | |
local.embargo.lift | 2019-08-08 | |
dc.contributor.committeeChair | Leah Marcus | |