Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England

Reid Barbour 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 (1993) and English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (1998). 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.

• 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.

Review of the hardback: 'Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England has an exhilaratingly wide range of reference, and, in its quest to demonstrate that Church of England orthodoxy was far from uniform, goes in for some startling contrasts.' The Times Literary Supplement