'Sole Author, I': Isolation and the Devotional Self in Early Modern English Literature

Caitlin Cornell Holmes

This dissertation investigates the use of "solitude" in seventeenth-century religious texts as a means to challenge the dominant scholarly conceptualization of "renaissance self-fashioning" as premised upon aesthetic consumerism. In the wake of the closure of the monasteries and other efforts to eradicate English Catholicism throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, solitude was often looked upon with a mixture of skepticism, attraction, and fear. Given these mixed understandings, English Protestants often sought to reappropriate older traditions into a via media, in effect rehabilitating these norms without explicitly Catholic resonances. In contrast to recent scholarly characterizations of Protestant devotional customs as communal, ritualized, and public, I thus argue that English and early American Protestant spiritual literature reveals an intense negotiation with solitude as a form of devotional practice, as Protestantism seeks to celebrate individual relationships with God. By reconstructing contemporary attitudes towards solitude, I articulate a growing conceptual difference between "solitude," better understood as an acceptable devotional and spatial construct, and "isolation," a term reflecting the psychological condition of a believer who is disconnected from his or her spiritual affiliations. Through the example of Donne's Devotions and Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, I suggest that, for some Protestants, scripture becomes a way to overcome their distressing separations from companions by constructing spiritual communities out of imagined readership. In a related vein, female prophets turn to spiritual distance as a rhetorical technique, as is evidenced in female prophets' mediated social, physical, and textual experiences. These women's efforts to distance themselves from normative religious expressions at times reflect an ungendered voice, using forms of extra-social, extra-corporeal, and extra-textual exclusion as premises for speech. These growing distinctions become most apparent in the works of John Milton and John Bunyan, in whose texts isolation becomes conceptually independent from solitude. In the wake of the Restoration, the efforts of writers to recast identity and community without regard to location came to a head, as dissenting worshipers were encouraged to embrace imprisonment, exile, and social ostracism, with the assurance that believers did not need to be physically near a community to be attached to it.

'Sole Author, I': Isolation and the Devotional Self in Early Modern English Literature

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