""Closet Devotions" is a bold and original work. Rambuss asks us to take seriously the relation between sexual and religious affect in the Renaissance devotional lyric, without reducing one to the other. In a series of virtuoso readings, he brings together two previously distant fields of scholarly inquiry, enriching our sense of the affective intensity of religious lyric at the same time that he demonstrates the astonishing scope of human sexuality."--John David Guillory, Harvard University