Assistant Professor of English, Jennifer Lorden, published Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry
Summary
February 29, 2024 | Jennifer A. Lorden, W&M Assistant Professor of English, published Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry with Cambridge University Press in November 2023.
Full Description
Jennifer A. Lorden, W&M Assistant Professor of English, published Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry with Cambridge University Press in November 2023. Her book reveals the importance of deeply-felt religious devotion centuries before it is commonly said to arise. Her study establishes the hybrid poetics that embodied its form for medieval readers, while obscuring it from modern scholars. Working across the divide between Old and Middle English, she shows how conventions of earlier English poetry recombine with new literary conventions after the Norman Conquest. These new conventions—for example, love lyric repurposed as devotional song—created hybrid aesthetics more familiar to modern scholars. She argues that this aesthetic, as much as changing devotional practice, rendered later affective piety recognizable in a way that earlier affective devotional conventions were not. Forms of Devotion reconsiders the roots and branches of poetic topoi, revising commonplaces of literary and religious history.
