Richard Crashaw's Finesse: Text, Context, Wit

Abstract Textual transmission of the poetry of Richard Crashaw (1612/13–1649) requires more careful interrogation than it has had to date. In 1646, already three years out of England and a convert to Catholicism, the poet was not present in London to supervise the publication of Steps to the Temple (1646). Nonetheless this is the text foregrounded in modern scholarly editions, which do not give appropriate access to manuscript variants, fully examine preceding scribal publication, or acknowledge the extent to which the Bodleian Tanner manuscripts often supply superior readings. The interrelation the poet saw between minuteness and care in the aesthetic realm of poetry and the aesthetic in church order, decoration, and sacrament, is reflected in his finesse of both language and punctuation, which has been obscured by this overall textual mediation. The Tanner manuscripts, combined with variants in ‘On a Treatise of Charity’, allow us to conjecture the likely interference of an editor and discover more about how Steps was produced. The wonderful female personifications in ‘On a Treatise of Charity’, embattled by the puritan ethos, embody Crashaw's own delicate and threatened art. Movingly this under-read poem demonstrates the interrelation of faith, worship, and the aesthetic as the poet understood it.