SOURCE: Corthell, Ronald J. “Joseph Hall and Protestant Meditation.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 20, no. 3 (fall 1978): 367-85.

In this essay, Corthell explores the Protestant undertones of Hall's method of meditation, particularly focusing on the relationship between Hall's Protestant ethos and his Senecan prose style. Corthell describes Hall's meditations as an example of his integrated approach to Protestant Christianity, merging strains of Puritan and Anglican thought.

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Several recent studies in seventeenth-century literature have drawn attention to a distinctively Protestant theory and practice of formal meditation which developed as a response to the widely disseminated method of the Jesuits and which, like the Ignatian exercises, contributed significantly to the literary temper of the age.¹ U. Milo Kaufmann and Barbara K. Lewalski agree that one of the most important sources of this Protestant tradition is Joseph Hall's Arte of Divine Meditation (1606). Thus, to Hall's impressive string of “firsts” in...