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Saving Edward Taylor's Purse: Masculine Devotion in the Preparatory Meditations

Saving Edward Taylor's Purse: Masculine Devotion in the Preparatory Meditations Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations, hundreds of private poems designed to temper himself for reception of the Lord's Supper, couch penitence in distinctively sexed language. While all evidence points to Taylor's de facto embodiment as the masculine ideal in Puritan Massachusetts, his introspective poetry often casts him in the feminine persona. Before God Taylor enacts an inner liturgy of submission and insemination wherein, by means of a gynetic dialectic, he obtains authenticity. But Taylor also achieves the same thing through an explicitly masculine performance. This article extends Ivy Schweitzer's work by attending to the andrological imagery of circumcision and emasculation, expressions of abnegation through which Taylor actually reinforces the authority of his manly self. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Literature and Theology Oxford University Press

Saving Edward Taylor's Purse: Masculine Devotion in the Preparatory Meditations

Literature and Theology , Volume 22 (3) – Oct 1, 2008

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Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press 2008; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
ISSN
0269-1205
eISSN
1477-4623
DOI
10.1093/litthe/frn038
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations, hundreds of private poems designed to temper himself for reception of the Lord's Supper, couch penitence in distinctively sexed language. While all evidence points to Taylor's de facto embodiment as the masculine ideal in Puritan Massachusetts, his introspective poetry often casts him in the feminine persona. Before God Taylor enacts an inner liturgy of submission and insemination wherein, by means of a gynetic dialectic, he obtains authenticity. But Taylor also achieves the same thing through an explicitly masculine performance. This article extends Ivy Schweitzer's work by attending to the andrological imagery of circumcision and emasculation, expressions of abnegation through which Taylor actually reinforces the authority of his manly self.

Journal

Literature and TheologyOxford University Press

Published: Oct 1, 2008

There are no references for this article.