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

Introduction 29
Here Prior shows much of the difficulty in using the religious language of seventeenthcentury
England to define the various Christian camps with which individual believers
would align themselves, because the same language by all political and religious
movements, but for different purposes. The difficulty in placing individual believers into
Christian sects by way of their rhetoric becomes more problematic when applied to the
devotional poets because they were often more concerned with exhibiting personal belief
than defending or attacking schismatic arguments. Using George Herbert as an example,
Summers nicely summarises the difficulties that exist when trying to categorise the
devotional poets of the seventeenth century:
It is difficult to make our fairly rigid modern conceptions of Puritan and Anglican,
or of high, broad, and low, apply to a man who was engaged in no major
theological or ceremonial controversies after his university days and who died
before 1640. The religious differences in Herbert’s lifetime, moreover, were much
more complicated than the modern labels indicate. 35
As this dissertation will show, when individuals move closer to the central orthodoxy of
Christianity, the Incarnation, the religious differences that arise are of personal
interpretation and application rather than denominational defence. Though critical studies
of Early Modern religious poetry have increased in numbers over the last twenty years, this
dissertation is unique in its consideration of the Incarnation as both a point of unity and
individuality for the devotional poets of the period. When one looks at the way in which
the Incarnation and its theological implications are interpreted and applied by devotional
writers, one finds that this doctrine that is a point of unity for Christianity becomes a
35 George Herbert: His Life and Art, p. 49.