Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England

Reid Barbour's 2002 study takes a fresh look at English Protestant culture in the reign of Charles I.

Reid Barbour (Author)

9780521006644, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 December 2001

292 pages
23.6 x 16 x 2.2 cm, 0.536 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Reid Barbour offers a wide-ranging study … Barbour presents a rich array of materials and a new angle on many texts …' Literature & History

Reid Barbour's 2002 study takes a fresh look at English Protestant culture in the reign of Charles I (1625–1649). In the decades leading into the civil war and the execution of their monarch, English writers explored the experience of a Protestant life of holiness, looking at it in terms of heroic endeavours, worship, the social order, and the cosmos. Barbour examines sermons and theological treatises to argue that Caroline religious culture comprises a rich and extensive stocktaking of the conditions in which Protestantism was celebrated, undercut, and experienced. Barbour argues that this stocktaking was also carried out in unusual and sometimes quite secular contexts; in the masques, plays and poetry of the era as well as in scientific works and diaries. This broad-ranging study offers an extensive appraisal of crucial seventeenth-century themes, and will be of interest to historians as well as literary scholars of the period.

Introduction: spirit and circumstances in Caroline Protestantism
1. The church heroic: Charles, Laud, and Little Gidding
2. Great Tew and the skeptical hero
3. Between liturgy and dreams: the church fanciful
4. Respecting persons
5. Decorum and redemption in the theater of the person
6. Nature (I): Post-Baconian Mysteries
7. Nature (II): Church and Cosmos
Conclusion: Rome, Massachusetts, and the Caroline Protestant imagination.

Subject Areas: History of religion [HRAX], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]