Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England

by Ramie Targoff

Common Prayer explores the relationship between prayer and poetry in the century following the Protestant Reformation. Ramie Targoff challenges the conventional and largely misleading distinctions between the ritualized world of Catholicism and the more individualistic focus of Protestantism. Early modern England, she demonstrates, was characterized less by the triumph of religious interiority than by efforts to shape public forms of devotion. This provocatively revisionist argument will have major implications for early modern studies.

Through readings of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Richard Hooker's Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie , Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry and his translations of the Psalms, John Donne's sermons and poems, and George Herbert's The Temple, Targoff uncovers the period's pervasive and often surprising interest in cultivating public and formalized models of worship. At the heart of this study lies an original and daring approach to understanding the origins of devotional poetry; Targoff shows how the projects of composing eloquent verse and improving liturgical worship come to be deeply intertwined. New literary practices, then, became a powerful means of forging common prayer, or controlling private and otherwise unmanageable expressions of faith.

Genres: Academic

176 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2001

About the author

Ramie Targoff is professor of English, co-chair of Italian Studies, and the Jehuda Reinharz Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of multiple books on Renaissance poetry and religion. Her most recent book, Renaissance Woman, is a biography of Vittoria Colonna, the first woman poet ever published in Italy (in 1538) and Michelangelo's best friend.

Reviews

[Kris Lundgaard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of literary and cultural criticism that can lead to personal and spiritual renewal (especially the chapter on Herbert).

[Sean]

While the rest was fine and interesting, the introduction and first chapter shed a good deal of light for me not only on religion in the period, but on the history of Christianity and my own experience with it. It gave me some tools for thinking about the degrees of control churches might exert through prayer.