Terence C. Cave
Devotional Poetry in France, c. 1570-1613.
Cambridge University Press, 1969. Author-signed first edition. xvi/356 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 5.75" x 8.75", is bound in dark blue cloth, with gilt-lettered black spine label. Book is in fine condition, with firm binding, clean and bright pages. Dust jacket, with price of $11.50 on front flap, shows light shelfwear. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
Author's inscription appears on front flyleaf.
"Dr. Cave studies the relationship between the traditions of personal devotion in sixteenth-century France and the poetry which flourished at the end of the century and the beginning of the seventeenth. It was a poetry of intense personal commitment, preoccupied with penitence and confession, the vanity of life, the imminence of death, the meaning of the Incarnation and the Passion; often verging on mysticism and mingling of the sensual, the intellectual and the spiritual in a manner often thought typical of the baroque. It was part of a European movement, and there is much here to interest the student of the early seventeenth-century sensibility. A comparable book on English literature is Louis Martz's "The Poetry of Meditation," but the lines of Dr Cave's enquiry are new. The book has a fourfold interest: to readers concerned with French literature; to those with particular interest in the traditions of devotion; to those concerned with comparative studies in the baroque period, and to students of rhetorical analysis."