This thesis is concerned with intersections between poetry and prayer, in printed texts attributed to Edmund Spenser and Lancelot Andrewes. It takes as a starting point the pervasiveness of Ramism at Pembroke College Cambridge during these two writers’ overlapping years spent there as undergraduates, proposing that Ramist ideologies of the short and efficient, the organised, the hierarchical, the one-size-fits-all diagrammatic text, offer new ways of understanding the pedagogical aspirations—and the formal mechanisms—of Andrewes’s literary homiletics and Spenser’s religious allegories. I will be preoccupied above all by poetic economies of page space and prayer time: in representations of large in small, or the extraordinary in the ordinary, and the anxieties and humilities involved in such inadequate accommodated ‘insteads’.

Chapter one examines printed English versions of Andrewes’s Preces Privatae, reading its mise-en-page as reminiscent of Ramist logic books, and beginning to establish an early modern context of instrumental ‘diagrammatic reading’ by taking a particular interest in the work of curly braces as a ‘didactic technology’ which both performs and instructs prayer on the printed page. Chapter two considers Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes as devotional poems. Read diagrammatically, by their complicated poetic hierarchies and chronologies these self-sacred parodies enact a thinking-through of the theological cruxes of the Incarnation and its meditative contemplation in the broken gift-cycle of prayerful thanksgiving. Chapter three uses grammatical anaphors and abridgements in Andrewes’s Passion sermons and the Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine to derive a theory of accommodated reading based on metaphorical sizes and imaginary dimensions. My final chapter reads the ballad-stanza ‘Arguments’ with which Spenser prolepsises and summarises every Canto in The Faerie Queene as recognisably generic paratexts with analogies in the Geneva Bible, Thomas Speght’s 1598 collected Chaucer, printed plays, and the Sternhold-Hopkins psalter. Short, simple, and economical, the four-line Arguments seem at first a very different poetical space from the Spenserian stanza—but on closer reading, they demand an investment in the dimensions of printed language and the spaces and syntax of its storytelling which fits persuasively with the wider poetics of The Faerie Queene and with its narrative structures.