This talk will investigate the problem of embodiment in the George Herbert’s 1633 The Temple and Richard Crashaw’s 1646 Steps to the Temple. This talk will begin with Lars von Trier’s 2013 Nymphomaniac and, using recent discussions in critical theory of “flesh” as distinct from the body, explore the problem of embodiment and pleasure that figures centrally in von Trier’s film. I will suggest that the problem the film poses parallels and illuminates the problem that the body posed to devotional practices in the seventeenth century. Within this historical context, then, I will explore how Herbert and Crashaw respond to seventeenth-century religious controversies by grounding their devotional poetics upon the passivity of the flesh, the bodily substrate in which suffering and pleasure — i.e., enjoyment — register and from which subjects form their religious sensibility.

Joseph Bowling is a third year PhD student in English studying the intersections of politics and religion in early modern English literature.