Closet Devotions (review)

Contemporary theories of early modern literature and culture are strained by debates over desire, sexuality, and the textual body. Richard Rambuss’s Closet Devotions contributes to the criticism with the discussion of a familiar subject—eroticism in the verbal and visual arts—but offers a refreshing and original reading of seventeenth-century sensuality and spirituality. Rambuss strives “to read through—indeed, to read into—the conventions and conceits of what I call, after Bataille, sacred eroticisms” (2). Specifically, by critiquing the recent work of cultural historians, the author argues that the spiritual and the physical create a dialogue within devotional texts that transgresses traditional homiletic readings. In support, Rambuss draws from extensive seventeenth-century religious writings to include the poetry of John Donne and Richard Crashaw, sermons and spiritual diaries, and religious writings by women that align the spiritually contemplative with erotic descriptions of the devout body of Jesus.

The first section, “Christ’s Ganymede,” investigates the language of male homoerotic desire and its connection to Christ’s body in the devotional lyric poem as compared to and contrasted with early modern and contemporary art. Rambuss begins with a brief discussion of the gay pornographic film More of a Man (1990), which opens with a nude Catholic man kneeling in supplication before and almost soliciting an effigy of the crucified Jesus. The introduction acts as a segue into the devotional poem by acknowledging the disparity between the corporeally spectacularized and the meditative lyric constructed of the language of devotion and desire. He sees the devotional lyrics of Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and their peers as tools to address or exhibit the body of Christ, for we find in their poetry “more charges of excess, indecorousness, and queerness than one finds imputed to any other early modern literary practice” (17–18). Rambuss also carefully investigates the thematics of physical and tropological acts of sodomy or penetration, the body of the poet and the body of Christ open to desire and devotional access. Gender, he argues, rarely defines physical activity or passivity. Rather, the poets and Christ occupy all plausible gender roles to experience simultaneous spiritual ecstasy while transcending contemporary social and religious expectations of marriage and procreation. The author is valuably alert here to the trickiness of critically approaching sexuality as a historical construction. In other words, Rambuss endorses the sexual act as an erotic action asserted by any gender while recognizing the anachronism of sexual classifications.

The second section, “Devotion and Desire,” sets out to analyze homoerotic language and imagery more expansively by exploding conventional meanings of Christian commonplaces in early modern devotional works. In this section, Rambuss confines himself to selected texts by performing close readings of problematic materials, through which he makes discoveries about the erotics of spiritual relationships between the devout and devoted. Rambuss discusses specific moments, even in Puritan polemicist writing, that speak to spiritual devotion through an obviously heightened erotic, homosocial discourse that modern audiences do not merely “read into” the texts. For example, William Sherlock’s A Practical Discourse Concerning Death (1689) emphasizes the male necessity to become more libertine to partake in the pleasures of heaven. Just as intriguing, Alexander Grosse’s volume of sermons Sweet and Soule-Perswading Inducements Leading unto Christ (1632) expounds upon the homosocial bond between master and servant, which elevates the natural association of male friendship with erotic love. Rambuss’s reading insightfully interprets the conflation of religion and eroticism that stimulates a physical response and spiritual exertion.

In the final third of the book, “The Prayer Closet,” Rambuss argues that the personal, meditative space of the prayer closet underscores the relation between God and the self because it is there that devotion passes concurrently through the body and the soul. The prayer closet emerges through the evolution of devotional literature as the privileged, private site of sanctioned access to God, particularly within the semi-private sphere of the household. Furthermore, Rambuss uncovers many treatises that contain sensual imagery, that is, prayer likened to sexual intercourse in the closet as the erotic space...