Robert Southwell and the Revitalization of English Writing
The current re-examination of the works of Elizabethan poet and Catholic martyr Saint Robert Southwell, S.J., undertaken for a new and complete Oxford University Press edition of his works, brings to our notice the extraordinary part which he played in the revitalization of English writing in the late sixteenth century.
Professor Peter Davidson will discuss with Professor Michael Scott how Southwell’s imagination was fed both by Ignatian meditation and by the sheer energy in all the arts of the emerging Roman baroque. It is Southwell’s triumph to have brought the visual and intellectual expansions of the continental literary imagination across into English verse, an achievement as remarkable for its imaginative scope as for its profound influence on subsequent writing in English.