The Early Modern Sonnet Sequence as a Neurodivergent Literary Form

Abstract

Chapter 3 argues that the early modern sonnet sequence was a neurodivergent literary form. Focusing on Anne Lok’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner (1560) and Jan Kochanowski’s Treny (1580), this chapter shows how these authors represented their grief, penitence, and relationships with God and family, through a neurodivergent frame. The neurodivergence of the sonnet sequence takes the form of a poetics of excess and repetition. Insofar as sonnet sequences involved experiences and emotions that were fundamental to being human—grief and loss, love and lust, a sense of the Divine, mortality—these essentially human experiences and emotions took a neurodivergent form. Rather than being a marginalised mode of expression in the early modern Europe then, neurodivergent literary style was central to how early moderns expressed their relationships with themselves, each other, and God.