Religious and Devotional Writing

Genres whose defining purpose is religious or devotional: liturgy, prayer, scripture and scriptural exegesis, the sermon and its manuals, hagiography, and verse or prose composed to praise or address the divine. Belongs here: liturgical books such as the missal, breviary and book of hours; Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic devotional and exegetical genres such as midrash, piyyut, koan, hamd and na'at; and hagiography and spiritual biography such as namtar and legendary. Does not belong here: a work that is a named verse tradition of a culture without a defining religious or devotional purpose, placed under world traditional verse forms instead, and a personal spiritual memoir that is explicitly classed as nonfiction prose in its own description, placed under nonfiction and documentary prose instead.