Confessional Poetics: Repentance and Confession in Early Modern Devotional Verse

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My research will focus on the language of repentance and confession in the early modern devotional lyric. By demonstrating the influence of Petrarch on religious poetry, and by examining the sacramental status of confession across denominations, I will offer a novel interpretation of poetic tropes such as divine ineffability and "sacred parody", which grapple with the uncertainty of forgiveness. Forms of spirituality which emphasize a gendered bodily experience of repentance will then lead me to reconsider the centrality of self-exegesis (and therefore of the inner/outer dichotomy) in the cultural history of the self and of the lyric.