Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England [Paperback]

Reid Barbour's 2002 study takes a fresh look at English Protestant culture in the reign of Charles I.Reid Barbour's 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. 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.Reid Barbour's 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. 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.Reid Barbour's 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, in terms of heroic endeavors, worship, the social order, and the cosmos. 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.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. Nal³/