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Spanish and English Religious Poetry of the Seventeenth Century1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Edward M. Wilson
Affiliation:
Professor of Spanish in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge

Extract

A bout four hundred years ago John Knox wrote as follows in his Comfortable Epistle to Christ's afflicted Church: ‘Let Wynchester, and his cruel counsell, devise and study till hys wits faile, howe the kyngdom of his father, the Antichrist of Rome, may prosper: And let him and them drink the bloudde of Goddes sainctes till they be droncke, and theyr bellyes burst, yet shall they never provide long in their attemptes. Their counsailes and determinacions shalbe like the dreame of a hungry or thyrstie man, who in his slepe dreameth that he is eatinge or drinckinge; but after he is awaked, his pain continueth, and his soule is unpacient and nothinge eased. Even so shall these tyrantes, after their profounde counsayles, long devices and assured determinations, understand and know that the hope of ypocrites shal be frustrate; that a kingdome begunne with tyranny and bloudde, can neither be stable nor permanent; but that the glorie, the riches, and manteiners of the same, shalbe as strawe in the flame of fyre. Altogether with a blaste they shal be consumed in such sorte, that their palaces shal be a heape of stones, their congregations shal be desolate; and such as do depend upon their helpe, shalfal into destruction and ignominie with them.’

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1958

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References

page 39 note 1 Knox, John, Works, ed. Laing, David, Edinburgh 1854, III. 248, 89, 137.Google Scholar

page 40 note 1 Fray Domingo de Valtanas, Doctrina Christiana: en que se tracta de lo que deue cada vno creer, huyr, obrar, dessear, y que cosa es Dios: con otras cosas dignas de saber, Seville 1555, fols. 14r, 35v, 126r, 30v–31r, 82r.

page 40 note 2 Chaide, Pedro Malón de, La conversión de la Magdalena, ed. Garcia, P. Feélix O.S.A., Madrid 1930, II. 184–5.Google Scholar

page 41 note 1 Nicholas Ferrar: two Lives, by his brother John and by Doctor Jebb, ed. Mayor, J. E. B., Cambridge 1855, 58–9.Google Scholar

page 41 note 2 Cancionero de Montesino in the Romancero y cancionero sagrados, ed. Justo de Sancha in Biblioteca de Autores Españoles XXXV, Madrid 1855, 429b, 441a.Google Scholar

page 42 note 1 Cossio, José Maria de and Solano, Tomás Maza, Romancero popular de la Montaña, two vols., Santander 19331934.Google Scholar

page 42 note 2 Cf. Alonso, Dámaso, La poesía de San Juan de la Cruz, Madrid 1942Google Scholar; Poesía española, Madrid 1950, 228–82.Google Scholar

page 43 note 1 Op. cit., 184–93, 259–73.

page 44 note 1 Many of these poems may be read in the Romancero y cancionero sagrados, see above, note 255.

page 44 note 2 Sir Grierson, John, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford 1921, 181.Google Scholar

page 45 note 1 ibid., 103.

page 45 note 2 See the excellent study by Adolfo Méndez Plancarte in the introduction to the second volume of the Obras completas of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico 1952, xi–lxxi.Google Scholar

page 46 note 1 Wilson, E. M., ‘Félix Persio Bertiso's La harpa de Belén’, in Atlante, II (1954), 126–36.Google Scholar

page 46 note 2 Tuve, Rosemond, A Reading of George Herbert, London 1952.Google Scholar

page 47 note 1 Documentos inéditos para la historia de España. Correspondencia oficial de don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Conde de Gondomar, Madrid 1945, IV. 4. Despacho al Rey nuestro Señor en 17 de Marzo, 1614.Google Scholar

page 48 note 1 León, Fray Luis de, The Original Poems, ed. Sarmiento, E., Manchester 1953, 87.Google Scholar

page 48 note 2 John Donne, Ignatius his Conclaue, London 1611, 39.

page 48 note 3 Op. cit., especially 221–48.

page 48 note 4 Donne, John, The Divine Poems, ed. Gardner, Helen, Oxford 1952, xl–lv.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 50 note 1 Text reprinted from Hebel, J. W. and Hudson, H. H., Poetry of the English Renaissance, New York 1932, 441.Google Scholar

page 50 note 2 Loyola, San Ignacio de, Obras completas (Biblioteca de autores cristianos), Madrid 1952, 179.Google Scholar

page 51 note 1 The Divine Poems, ed. cit., 11, 7.

page 52 note 1 Lope de Vega, Rimas Sacras, Madrid 1614. Modern text in Oxford Book of Spanish Verse, no. 128.