Inhabiting time: Donne, Herbert, and the individual body in theological history

In early modern England, individual faith was often experienced as participation in an ongoing theological history and in a world of present correspondences. The early modern typological method of interpreting Scripture implied both a set of theological assumptions about human history and a metaphoric construction of faith in relationship to the body and to nature. Studies of constructions of the body in early modern literature have generally overlooked typology, even though many early modern religious authors lived and wrote in the belief that, through Adam, each person's body stood in a network of correspondences relating it to God, to all other human bodies, and to the natural world. At the same time, explorations of typological themes and structures in early modern literature have shown little interest in what that literature has to say about the body.;In this project, I examine works by George Herbert and John Donne, in the context of contemporary religious writers, to explore ways in which early modern individuals imagined their bodies to be enmeshed with the material world through a cultural narrative predicated on salvation history and typological correspondence. I demonstrate that the narrative of salvation history shaped not only world history but also individual life, including both bodily and spiritual experience of the narrator of Herbert's The Temple and the speaker of many of Donne's poems. Donne's "Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness" shows how an individual's connection to the body of Adam ultimately becomes the individual's connection to the entire material world. Through the bodily and spiritual experience of taking communion, Herbert's narrator finds the ability to enter fully into bodily identification with Christ and thereby experience his own salvation. Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions describe a connection among all human bodies implicit in the typological interconnection among Adam, Christ, and any other individual, a connection that creates a community among all human beings across space and time. Throughout these explorations of Donne and Herbert, I argue that, for them, participation in salvation history was also participation in the material world.