Author:
Davis, David J. author.
Edition Statement:First edition.
ImprintOxford United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2022.
Descriptionxii, 223 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Note:Introduction: The Culture of Divine Revelation -- Part I. The Discourse of Experiencing God -- 'The entrance to my joys': Raptus in contemplative devotion -- 'Wee should bee rapt vp into the third heauen': the reformation of revelation -- 'Pictures are ... not for Worship': images of God in early modern England -- Part II. Raptus as Prayer and Poetry -- 'A love-token of Christ to the Soul': prayer and devotion after the Reformation -- 'Language of Angels': the poetics of divine ravishment -- Part III. Challenges to the Culture of Divine Revelation -- 'So unsatisfying ... is Rapture': the word and the spirit in the seventeenth century -- 'The foundation of all Knowledge': the ratinoale of divine revelation -- Conclusion.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-217) and index.
Note:Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England demonstrates that experiences of divine revelation, both biblical and contemporary, were central to late medieval and early modern English religion, shedding light on previously under-explored notions about divine revelation and the role they played in shaping English thought and belief."Experience God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England demonstrates that experiences of divine revelation, both biblical and contemporary, were central to late medieval and early modern English religion. The book sheds light on previously under-explored notions about divine revelation and the role these notions played in shaping large portions of English thought and belief. Bringing together a wide variety of source materials, from contemplative works and accounts of revelatory experiences to biblical commentaries, devotionals, and religious imagery, the book argues that in the period there was a collective representation of divine revelation as a source of human knowledge, which transcended other religious and intellectual divisions. Not only did most people think that divine revelation, through a ravishing encounter with God, was possible, but also divine revelation was understood to be the pinnacle of religious experience and a source of pure understanding. The book highlights a common discourse running through the sources that underpinned this collective representation of how human beings experienced the divine, and it demonstrates a continual effort across large swathes of English religion to prepare an individual's soul for an encounter with the divine, through different spiritual disciplines and devotional practices. Over a period of several centuries this discourse and the larger culture of revelation provided an essential structure and legitimacy both to contemporary claims of divine revelation and the biblical precedents that contemporary experiences were modelled after. This discourse detailed the physical, metaphysical, and epistemological features of how a human being was understood to experience divine revelation, providing a means to delimit and define what happened when an individual was raptured by God. Finally, the book situates the experience of revelation within the wider context of knowledge and identifies the ways that claims to divine revelation were legitimated as well as stigmatized based on this common understanding of the experience of rapture." --Provided by publisher.
