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Literature and Theology Advance Access originally published online on July 31, 2008
Literature and Theology 2008 22(3):339-353; doi:10.1093/litthe/frn038
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press 2008; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

This article appears in the following Literature and Theology issue: Sexing the Text [View the issue table of contents]

Saving Edward Taylor's Purse: Masculine Devotion in the Preparatory Meditations

Nathan Hitchcock

New College, University of Edinburgh

nathan.hitchcock{at}lycos.com


  Abstract

Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations, hundreds of private poems designed to temper himself for reception of the Lord's Supper, couch penitence in distinctively sexed language. While all evidence points to Taylor's de facto embodiment as the masculine ideal in Puritan Massachusetts, his introspective poetry often casts him in the feminine persona. Before God Taylor enacts an inner liturgy of submission and insemination wherein, by means of a gynetic dialectic, he obtains authenticity. But Taylor also achieves the same thing through an explicitly masculine performance. This article extends Ivy Schweitzer's work by attending to the andrological imagery of circumcision and emasculation, expressions of abnegation through which Taylor actually reinforces the authority of his manly self.


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