Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Introduction 24
and painful offering to God: life and joy, which are much more than a full belly and
a head full of alcohol. 27
MacCulloch rightly places his emphasis upon the common aspect of the meal and how this
commonality becomes a mediator between humanity and God and the physical and
spiritual. Baumlin notices this as well when writing, ‘For communication is a mode of
communion, God (and man) speaking to man through the material body; the preacher –
and the lover, we might add – is thus entrusted with the task of carrying on the Incarnation,
bringing charity to all, knitting men together in a “knot of unity”’. 28
From this place of
communion, the seventeenth century devotional poet has a great variety of means through
which to meditate upon, present, and reach God. God was human and is human and is
remembered and communed with through plain and simple objects of sustenance.
The expression of God in the mundane is central to the Incarnation, as can be seen
in the sacrament of Communion, but this everydayness allows for it to be interpreted into
the everyday lives of each believer, and so the expression and internalisation of the
Incarnation – and in this regard, of Christianity – then becomes personalised. When
delving into the muddied nature of determining Roman Catholic from Church of England
from Puritan in the devotional practices in England in the seventeenth century it is helpful
to be reminded just how much individuals in the time period were willing to transgress the
boundaries that current scholarship attempts to place upon them. A statement by Thomas
Browne in his Religio Medici gives an excellent example of this:
There is no Church whose every part so squares unto my conscience, whose
articles, constitutions, and customes seeme so consonant unto reason, and as it were
27 The Reformation, p. 10.
28 James S. Baumlin, John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse (London, 1991), p. 201.