Subject Area: English

You will study representations of loving, praying, and killing in a wide range of literary genres from one of the principal periods of English literature: the Renaissance. You begin with the dangerous loves, private devotions, and executions at the court of Henry VIII as they are recorded and suffered by poets such as Wyatt and Surrey. You then move to modes of loving, prayer, and homicide as they are experienced and dramatized by some major dramatists and poets (such as Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser) during the reign of Elizabeth I. You will consider the refined, erotic love lyrics of Donne alongside his impassioned speculations about God and suicide in his verse and prose. You observe the piety of religious poets, such as Herbert, and read refined speculations about love, divinity, and regicide in the poetry of Marvell, Mary Wroth, and Katherine Philips. You will conclude with Milton’s sublime treatment of all three themes in his epic poem, Paradise Lost. Contexts for your reading of these works will be Graeco-Roman tradition and the Reformation—a movement in western Christendom that issued in the difference between Protestant and Catholic which motivated sectarian violence across western Europe during the period.