Ithaca College

Dan Breen, Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of English, has been awarded the Gerald R. Rubio Prize by the International Sidney Society for his article, "Redeeming the Sonnet Sequence:  Desire and Repentance in Caelica."

The award is given annually for the year's best essay in the Sidney Society's academic publication Sidney Journal, as voted on by the Sidney Council, the Society's governing body.  Sidney Journal serves to highlight current scholarship on the work of the Renaissance poet Sir Philip Sidney, as well as that of his friends, correspondents, and family members.

Breen's essay examines Caelica, a seventeenth-century sonnet sequence by the poet Fulke Greville, in relation both to the Petrarchan tradition of love poetry and to Reformed discourses of repentance and salvation.  Noting the complex relationship within the sequence between expressions of erotic desire and of desire for salvation, the piece suggests that Caelica identifies a role for sinfully desirous aspects of the self even within the twin processes of repentance and conversion.  By drawing upon the resources of other poetic traditions—notably prayer—Caelica offers an approach to Reformed repentance that understands it to be concerned both with individual and communal redemption.

The essay appears in summer 2017's special double issue of Sidney Journal devoted to the work of Fulke Greville.