Tokens of Love

Bibliographic Data

ID3849907
AuthorsYaakov Mascetti (0000-0001-5363-1832, corresponding author), Yaakov A Mascetti
Year2021
Volume27
Issue3
Pages368-421
Publication date2021-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCommon Knowledge (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0961-754X • E-ISSN: 1538-4578
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/0961754x-8906131
OpenAlexW3183877305
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited106

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

Aesthetics · Art · Consolation · Contextualism · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Lyrics · Passion · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Semiotics · Sociology · Theology · Early Modern Women Writers · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies of British Isles · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Psychology · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Renaissance Literature and Culture · Social Psychology · Theological Perspectives and Practices

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