Abstract
Although scholars have referred to the biographical aspect of The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, it is of course not biography in the modern sense of the term. Yet via the text’s disjunctive narrative arc the reader can follow a character unlike any other prophet in the Old Testament, a fully rounded character whose melancholy is moving and understandable. During the Renaissance, references to The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah and to Lamentations abound in popular and mainstream culture: poetry, emblem books, Bible illustrations, song books, musical transcriptions, jeremiads, sermons, theological treatises, woodcuts, etchings, engravings, paintings, and sculptures. While the reasons for this prophet’s seeming omnipresence may be varied, early in his prose-writing career Milton suggests why he considered Jeremiah so important:
This is that which the sad Prophet Jeremiah laments, Wo is me my mother, that thou has borne me a man of strife, and contention. And although divine inspiration must certainly have been sweet to those ancient profets, yet the irksomenesse of that truth which they brought was so unpleasant to them, that every where they call it a burden. (The Reason of Church Government, 1642, 1.802–03)
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Notes
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1964). Of the 146 illustrations presented in the back of the book, 25 of them are images of melancholy angels or women. The following is the list of the numbered images, all 25 composed during the Renaissance: 1, 2, 69, 114–16, 118–24, 126, 129–31, 133–38, and 140.
Adam H. Kitzes, The Politics of Melancholy: From Spenser to Milton (New York: Routledge, 2006), 10.
Walter L. Strauss, ed., The Complete Engravings, Etchings & Drypoints of Albrecht Dürer (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1972), 166.
Dame Frances Yates, “Chapman and Dürer on Inspired Melancholy,” University of Rochester Library Bulletin, vol. XXXIV (1981), 3.
For an excellent study of how The Winchester Bible was created, see Claire Donovan, The Winchester Bible (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993).
See Joseph Antenucci Becherer, et al., “The Prophet Jeremiah,” in Pietro Perugino: Master of the Italian Renaissance (Rizzoli International Publications Inc. and The Grand Rapids Art Museum, 1997), 236–39.
On the terms “ordinary minister” versus “extraordinary minister,” see Reuben Sanchez, Persona and Decorum in Milton’s Prose (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997), 23–24. See also, Stephen
R. Honeygosky, Milton’s House of God: The Invisible and Visible Church (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993), 176, 191–92.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980);
Judith Anderson, Biographical Truth (New Haven: Yale UP, 1984);
Richard Helgerson, Self Crowned Laureates (Berkeley: U of California P, 1983);
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986).
Terry G. Sherwood, The Self in Early Modern Literature: For the Common Good (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2007).
Gregory Kneidel, Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature: The Poetics of All Believers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Joan Webber, The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1968), 4.
Chana Bloch, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985), 4.
Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994). For the information that follows in this paragraph, I have relied upon Persona and Decorum in Milton’s Prose, 28–29.
Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978).
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© 2014 Reuben Sánchez
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Sánchez, R. (2014). “The Sad Prophet Jeremiah” as an Icon of Renaissance Melancholy. In: Typology and Iconography in Donne, Herbert, and Milton. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137397805_1
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