Early Modern Asceticism: The Body and/as Language

• In Event: Donne in Dialogue

Abstract

Scholarship on the early modern period often takes for granted the disappearance of asceticism. The Renaissance, some argue, marks a decisive shift in attitudes towards the body, sex, and sexuality; it looks forward, away from a benighted medieval past, to a lucid future This paper complicates the subtraction narrative often told about asceticism, and through which the modern is located within the early modern and away from the medieval. In Reformation England, the most significant context for the retention of asceticism is language. How scriptural exegetes, linguists, and poets negotiate the relationship between matter and spirit, signifier and signified, and form and content, recapitulates the central problem of asceticism. What is, and what should be, the relationship between the body and the soul? This paper rediscovers early modern asceticism in the spiritualism, semiotics, and style of Erasmus’ scriptural commentaries, the linguistic theories of Abiezer Coppe, and the poetry of John Donne.

Author

• Patrick J. McGrath, Southern Illinois University