The Sidney psalter and the spiritual economies of abundance

pp. 257-275

in: Paul Cefalu, Gary Kuchar, Bryan Reynolds (eds), The return of theory in early modern English studies II, Berlin, Springer, 2014

Abstract

Studies of Renaissance poetry going back at least to C.S. Lewis and Yvor Winters have recognized that the period witnessed a contest of plain and abundant styles. In the 1990s, critics sought to historicize such formalist insights by reading them in relation to a wide range of social and cultural practices. For critics such as Richard Halpern and Mary Thomas Crane, the relation of economic practice to humanist poetics proved a particularly fruitful field of inquiry. In different ways, Halpern's study of a proto-capitalist literature of primitive accumula- tion and Crane's investigation of the pseudo-economic activity of gathering both sought to uncover the historical foundations of the ornate or abundant style.¹