Tears in Heaven: Tracing the Contours of a Pan-European Transconfessional Genre

This article explores the genesis, proliferation, and readership of an understudied genre religious poetry in early modern Europe. The weeping poem—a devotional literary combining elements epic narrative Petrarchan lyric that focused specifically on grief biblical figures—swept across Europe forty years around turn seventeenth century. Although this was instigated by Italian Luigi Tansillo’s 1560 Le Lagrime di San Pietro has often been read as exhibiting a distinctively Counter-Reformation spirituality, our survey poems uncovers surprising reach multiple languages even into Protestant England. range popularity specific kind national, linguistic, confessional lines shows how constellation texts transmitted new form affect founded imaginative identification with narrators. In other words, these demonstrate interiority, rather than factional political or theological difference, could be basis for emotional communities worship. Moreover, relative obscurity to scholars prompts questions viability continuing explore European traditions from perspective nationalist/linguistic/confessional frameworks.