Robert Southwell: Sacrament and Self

Robert Southwell’s understanding of the eucharist both informs his poetry and explains its significant influence on early modern English devotional poetry. Southwell inaugurated a tradition in English lyric poetry of figuring the “consecration” of poetry for religious use as a eucharistic transformation. This analogy has implications for early modern poetic accounts of subjectivity, and how those accounts fit into existing narratives of literary history. Southwell intends his work to have a pastoral function for his Recusant readership, acting as a temporary substitute for the transubstantiated host. The essay situates this pastoral function as it relates to the “typological” subjectivity developed in the Tridentine Missal, examining Southwell’s eucharistic account of subjectivity with particular focus on his long poem, St. Peter’s Complaint.