This study explores the way Calvinist experientialism provided both a theology and an epistemology in the poetry of five early modern English poets: William Shakespeare, Robert Herrick, John Donne, Fulke Greville, and John Milton. In both official church ecclesiology and informal devotional practice, the Reformation introduced the idea that an individual's experience of devotion did not only entail feeling, but also thought. For early modern English people, bodily experience offered a means of corroborating and verifying devotional truth, making the invisible visible and knowable. This volume maintains that these religious developments gave early modern thinkers and poets a new epistemological framework for imagining and interpreting devotional intention and access. These Reformed models for devotion not only shaped how people experienced their encounters with God; the changing religious landscape of post-Reformation England also held profound implications for how English poets described sexual longing and access to earthly beloveds in the literary production of the period. In placing the works of English poets in conversation with devotional writers such as William Perkins, Samuel Hieron, Joseph Hall, and William Gouge, this book demonstrates how the English Calvinist tradition attributed epistemological potential to a wide range of ordinary experience, including sexual experience.

Rhema Hokama received her PhD in English literature from Harvard University and is Assistant Professor of English literature at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), where she teaches classes on Shakespeare, Milton, lyric poetry, and global literature. Her academic work has been published or is forthcoming in Modern Philology, Shakespeare Quarterly, Milton Studies, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Multicultural Shakespeare, and Parergon. She recently completed a second book project about how the Reformation gave rise to new frameworks for thinking about national, political, and religious inclusion in early modern England and the Dutch Republic.