The Jeremiad In The Dictionnaire De La Bible

The Dictionnaire de la Bible (1693) says that: « Among all the holy books, there is nothing more affective, more sensible, more touching than the lamentations, where it seems that the prophet or the holy spirit through that prophet, has collected all the subjects of sadness and compassion to touch readers, and move them to tears and to groans.»1 Indeed, by Charpentiers time, Jeremiads had become a rhetorical commonplace, and if you like the sensational, terrible and touching, you should, according to Bretteville2, turn to Jeremiah. Dante quotes the Quomodo sedet sola civitas in book XXX of Vita Nuova, lamenting the death of Beatrice; the lutheran priests in Germany during the thirty years war used it as a model to lament the state of affairs3;