"Imagining Unity" investigates how an evolving concept of transcendence in early modern England, influenced by Reformation and counter-Reformation theology, created new ways of responding affectively and philosophically to emerging articulations of national identity in British devotional poetry. My project focuses on a series of politically disruptive moments in the seventeenth century--from the residual trauma of the Protestant Reformation to the Civil War of the 1640's--that troubled England's developing sense of national identity. In the shadow of these troubles, devotional poets reworked ideas of transcendence that they had inherited from medieval Catholicism to provide a sense of national cohesion in the midst of a changing political landscape. This dissertation explores transcendence as it is reconceived by four different authors: John Donne's work translates Catholic iconography to symbolize the ascension of a Protestant England; Aemelia Lanyer's poetry appeals to the exclusivity of religious esotericism as a palliative for the actual exclusion of women from political life; Richard Crashaw's writings reinterpret mystical union to rescue sovereignty from failure; and John Milton's work revises transubstantiation to authorize a new republic. By investigating how early modern poetry reimagines transcendence in response to political events, my project widens ongoing conversations in political theology and "the religious turn" of literary studies, which are often unilaterally focused on the influence that religion had on politics in the course of an inevitable secularization of culture. My contribution to this work, and the underlying premise to my argument, is that literature provides a forum for rethinking religious concepts at the heart of political organization despite the apparent impulse toward secularization. In doing so, literature serves as a cultural medium for testing the conceptual limits of transcendence--its viability as a tool for inspiring and maintaining social unity. This dissertation ultimately witnesses a concerted effort in the early modern period to extend the life of religious ideas within the political imagination through devotional poetry's insistent recasting of transcendence as central to the formulation of the body politic.

In using the doctrine of the Incarnation as a lens to approach the devotional poetry of seventeenth-century Britain, ‘“And the Word was made flesh”: The Problem of the Incarnation in Seventeenth-Century Devotional Poetry' finds this central doctrine of Christianity to be a destabilising force in the religious controversies of the day. The fact that Roman Catholics, the Church of England, and Puritans all hold to the same belief in the Incarnation means that there is a central point of orthodoxy which allows poets from differing sects of Christianity to write devotional verse that is equally relevant for all churches. This creates a situation in which the more the writer focuses on the incarnate Jesus, the less ecclesiastically distinct their writings become and the more aware the reader is of how difficult it is to categorise poets by the sects of the day. The introduction historicises the doctrine of the Incarnation in Early Modern Europe through presenting statements of belief for the doctrine from reformers such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldryk Zwingli in addition to the Roman Catholic decrees of the Council of Trent and the Church of England's ‘39 Articles'. Additionally, there is a further focus on the Church of England provided through considering the writings of Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes amongst others. In the ensuing chapters, the devotional poetry of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, and Richard Crashaw is discussed in regards to its use of the Incarnation and incarnational imagery in orthodox though diverse manners. Their use of words to appropriate the Word, and their embrace of the flesh as they approach the divine shows the elastic and problematic nature of a religion founded upon God becoming human and the mystery that the Church allows it to remain.