Contextualist scholars working on the rhetoric of corporeal presence in seventeenth-century English religious lyrics have naturally focused their attention on sacramental discourse of the Reformation era. As part of the Common Knowledge symposium on the future of contextualism, this full-length monograph, serialized in installments, argues that the contextualist focus on a single and time-limited “epistemic field” has resulted in a less than adequately ramified understanding of the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton. What the contextualist (...) approach misses is that even the religious discourses of the period were tied to a long and in no way local epistemological debate about signs and their meaning, whose roots are to be found in Greek and Latin rhetorical theory. This first installment of “Tokens of Love” commences a discussion of the role of classical pagan sign-theory in the development of Reformation sacramental discourse. (shrink)

In the second installment of this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Contextualism—the Next Generation,” Donne's religious poetry is set in dialogue not only with the “Great Controversy” of the 1560s over the nature of the eucharistic sign but also with pre-Christian semiotic discourses. From the perspective of contextualist scholarship, which recognizes in any temporal context a limited number of discourses available, Donne's religious poems of the period from about 1607 to 1620 register many contradictory conceptions, but contradictory only in (...) the sense that no contextualist map of religious identities allows for their miscibility or even collocation. Notoriously resistant to psychological and phenomenological interests, contextualism has no place for an early seventeenth-century Christian writer whose concern is less to join a school of thought on the Real Presence in the Eucharist than to dismiss the issue as vexingly trivial in comparison with the question of whether God thinks that each or any of us adequately loves him. For the questions that concern Donne, there are no determinate answers available, and no standard vocabulary. But the poet's alternating acquiescence in and fretfulness about indeterminacy and incomprehensibility constitute an intellectual and affective identity as much as does the attachment to any one or other more recognizable set of arguments and ways of framing them. (shrink)

The third and final installment of this book-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Contextualism—the Next Generation” treats two further writers in seventeenth-century England whose work is not representative of any stance or discourse that contextualist historians have recognized as available in that era. In Aemelia Lanyer's poetry, we find a resistance to established perspectives that is related to her sense that divine signification is always incomplete and that, therefore, the diffidence of female cognition is superior, when approaching religious texts, (...) to the assertive mentality that she associates with men. Despite his sex, however, and his reputation for theological and political radicalism, Milton too explicitly contends that the interpretation of scripture should always be “non-committal” because its signification is always incomplete. The “very magnitude” of the “great mystery” of the Incarnation, Milton argues in De Doctrina Christiana, should encourage the reader's mind to stand on “guard from the outset” against the tendency to make “rash or hasty assertions.” The urge to tamper with, pry into, add to, or hasten to understand the signifiers of divine meaning is shown, in Paradise Lost, to be the original sin of the first human couple. As much as for Lanyer, then, sex is for Milton bound up with hermeneutics—and, for both poets, the individual's relationship with God is a consuming passion, about which one may report a phenomenology of affects but can offer no contentions or arguments. (shrink)