Literature And Religious Culture In Seventeenth-century England

LITERATURE AND RELIGIOUS CULTURE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Reid Barbour’s study takes a fresh look at English Protestant culture in the reign of Charles I ( – ). 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 endeavors, worship, the social order, and the cosmos. Barbour examines sermons and theological treatises to argue that Caroline religious culture comprised 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 reappraisal of crucial seventeenth-century themes, and will be of interest to historians as well as literary scholars of the period. R E I D B A R B O U R is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of two previous books on early modern England: Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction ( ) and English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture ( ). He has contributed articles to journals such as English Literary Renaissance, Studies in Philology, Studies in English Literature, the John Donne Journal, and Renaissance Quarterly. LITERATURE AND RELIGIOUS CULTURE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND REID BARBOUR University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Reid Barbour 2004 First published in printed format 2002 ISBN 978-0-511-48344-8 OCeISBN ISBN 0-521-00664-3 hardback To Marion Durwood and Mary Anne Baker Barbour, and Steven and Carol Arndt Wolfe Contents Acknowledgments page viii Introduction: spirit and circumstance in Caroline Protestantism The church heroic: Charles, Laud, and Little Gidding Great Tew and the skeptical hero Between liturgy and dreams: the church fanciful Respecting persons Decorum and redemption in the theater of the person Nature (I): post-Baconian mysteries Nature (II): church and cosmos Conclusion: Rome, Massachusetts, and the Caroline Protestant imagination Notes Index vii Acknowledgments Early versions of chapters and appeared as “The Caroline Church Heroic: The Reconstruction of Epic Religion in Three SeventeenthCentury Communities,” Renaissance Quarterly ( ), – . An early version of chapter was published as “Liturgy and Dreams in Seventeenth-Century England,” Modern Philology ( ), – . I am grateful to the editors of these journals for permission to reuse this material. The date of the earlier article, , reminds me that I have been working on this book for ten years. Given the challenges presented by the material and by my own (often dull-witted) struggles over method and argument, I have been fortunate in the gifts of advice and encouragement from a number of friends and colleagues: Amy Dudley, Ellie Ferguson, Ian Finseth, Darryl Gless, Vicky Gless, John Headley, Christopher Hodgkins, Richa