Collected Poems of Robert Southwell - Softcover

This book is a complete edition of the authentic poems, English and Latin, of the Elizabethan priest, poet and martyr S. Robert Southwell, offering new texts based on the very manuscripts which were circulated in secret among English Catholics in the years after the poet's death. This edition, by drawing its texts directly from a complete re-examination of these contemporary manuscripts, makes these poems more than items of literature; it allows them to regain some of their original purpose of communicating forbidden theologies and doctrines amongst a criminalised and near-silenced readership of secret, persecuted groups. These are the poems of those Catholics who did not or could not flee the country as the Elizabethan State bore down upon their faith in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. Southwell's new visions and visualisations in English bear their fruit a generation later in the works of Donne and Herbert. His rare Latin verses (here widely available for the first time, accompanied by a new translation) show also that that the Augustans, even Milton, owe him a creative debt.

Saint Robert Southwell was born in 1561 at Horsham St Faith's in Norfolk, the son of a gentleman who had conformed to the protestant church. He was reconciled to Catholicism and entered the Society of Jesus at Rome when he was seventeen. He studied in Douai, Louvain and Rome. He returned to England to work as a mission Priest (of neccessity in secret and always in fear of the English law which held that all Catholic Priests were traitors) in London from 1584 to 1592. He was betrayed, captured and imprisoned. After three years in jail, during which he was frequently tortured, he was martyred at Tyburn in 1595. He was beatified in 1927, and canonised in 1970. The texts of his poems circulated in secret at first in manuscript copies. Shortly after his martyrdom, printed editions, expurgated of explicitly Catholic material, began to appear and were much in demand and were widely influential. A few of Southwell's works have a secure place in the canon of English poetry, but the advocacy of such distinguished poets as Geoffrey Hill, and increasing scholarly interest in the minority traditions of Renaissance Britain, are beginning to claim for him a place as one of the most important English poets of the sixteenth century. Peter Davidson has edited the Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe(Vol I, 1998; II, 1999) the anthology of seventeenth century Poetry, Poetry and Revolution, 1998 and (with Jane Stevenson) Early Modern Women's Poetry (2001) all for Oxford University Press. He has also published numerous and studies of the culture of the coutner-reformation, most recently in the monograph The Universal Baroque Manchester University Press, 2007. He holds the Chair of Renaissance Studies in the University of Aberdeen. Anne Sweeney completed her doctorate on S. Robert Southwell at the University of Lancaster. Her monograph 'Snow in Arcadia: redrawing the English lyric landscape' was published by Manchester University Press in 2006. She is an associate of the Department of English at the University of Lancaster.