The spirit of Richard Crashaw's Hymn to St. Teresa

Abstract

The sole Roman Catholic among the seventeenth-century English "Metaphysical' poets, Richard Crashaw (1612/13 - 1649) laced his art with the vigorous spirit of Counter-Reformation spirituality. I When he converted to Catholicism, sometime between 1643 and 1646, he entered a church experiencing a dramatic resurgence of individual piety and practice. The Council of Trent itself set an innovative agenda for the catholic community, stimulating a "new Catholicism" in lay education and activism. 2 New forms of Catholic spirituality also formed the flames of fervour, bringing mystical vitality to a faith on the defensive. This "unprecedented outburst of spirituality energy,'" issuing primarily from the lives and writings of Spanish mystics Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross, contributed to the renewed zeal of the church and established the pattern for the transplanted Catholic spirituality in the New World.