Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy Devotional Literature and the Spiritual Life in the Long Sixteenth Century

Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy offers a thematic genealogical study of the lyric as a site of devotion in early modern Italy. Drawing on a vast and heterogeneous archive of spiritual verse, this book casts an extended gaze on poets both well and scarcely known whose oeuvre and biography offer intriguing windows into the interplay of art and life. Building on the work of scholars in literature, history, art history, religion, and philosophy, Sarah Rolfe Prodan approaches the devotional lyric as a favored location and privileged instrument of personal and divine encounters. She elucidates early modern sacramental poetics in the light of epistemological shifts ushered in by projects of religious reform and expansion and by the birth pangs of modern science. Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy complements existing scholarship by going beyond the usual questions of form, style, genre, and gender to address the broader non-materialist, non-dualist worldview exemplified in the religious verse itself.