In discussions of the works of Donne, Milton, Marvell, and Bunyan, Early Modern Asceticism shows how conflicting approaches to asceticism animate depictions of sexuality, subjectivity, and embodiment in early modern literature and religion. The book challenges the perception that the Renaissance marks a decisive shift in attitudes towards the body, sex, and the self. In early modernity, self-respect was a Satanic impulse that had to be annihilated – the body was not celebrated, but beaten into subjection – and, feeling circumscribed by sexual desire, ascetics found relief in pain, solitude, and deformity. On the basis of this austerity, Early Modern Asceticism questions the ease with which scholarship often elides the early and the modern.

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"McGrath’s Early Modern Asceticism offers scholars a view that complicates some of the monolithic claims about influential writers and their views on religion and sexuality, which leads to a more nuanced appreciation of the intricacies of these ideas. The extensive knowledge McGrath displays about early modern theology provides an instructive context for understanding some of the variations and contradictions on display in the literature from the period."

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"Early Modern Asceticism makes important contributions to the study of the religious life of seventeenth-century England and complicates conventional accounts of several of the period’s central authors in valuable ways. It will be of interest to scholars of early modern literature and religion, and will be enriching reading for students of the various authors it analyzes."