ABSTRACT
Scholarship on religion and embodiment in the early modern period has often focused on the value and dangers of the human senses as a means to access the divine. In contrast, this essay investigates what I argue is a pervasive concern with God’s own senses. In the works of Protestant writers and thinkers across a broad spectrum – from radical reformers such asJohn Calvin to devotional poets such as George Herbert and Guillaume Du Bartas – human virtue and vice have sensory qualities which are perceived by an anthropomorphised deity. This notion of an embodied God, however, was also profoundly troubling, particularly in the context of Reformation debates surrounding idolatry and iconoclasm. The resources of poetry, I suggest, offer a way to negotiate the difficult but necessary sensory relationship with the divine.
