Seventeenth-century authors so thoroughly imbued the language and imagery of the Bible in vernacular translation that their texts are to be read as attempts to inscribe themselves within the realm of the sacred. This book analyzes how three seventeenth-century English authors fashion themselves as a specific biblical figure, and how they fashion themselves in their works in order to bring their spiritual lives in line with the narrative arch of a biblical type.

This book analyzes the iconographic traditions of Jeremiah and of melancholy to show how Donne, Herbert, and Milton each fashions himself after the icons presented in Rembrandt's Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem , Sluter's sculpture of Jeremiah in the Well of Moses, and Michelangelo's fresco of Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel.