"Marri' de Our Manhood, Making it Its Bride" Self-feminization in Seventeenth-century Religious Poetry

"Examining the devotional lyric as a siteof intersection between religio-political pressures, aesthetic theory, and Renaissance gender assumptions, this project tracks the relationship between conventional interpretation of the "Bride" of the "Song of Songs" as a figure for the devout soul and the phenomenon of self-feminization by seventeenth-century male poets ... This project examines John Donne, Richard Crashaw, and Edward Taylor to demonstrate that difference in eucharistic theology correspong to subtle changes in poetic appropriations of the Bride figure -- that is, that poets extend the Bridal metaphor based on their sectarian understanding of the Eucharist ..."--Abstract.