Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England

by Reid Barbour

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521809474
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/03/2011
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.67(d)
Lexile:	1670L (what's this?)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"Reid Barbour wrote the most serious and solid book on Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth Century England to be publisged in 2002." Studies in English Literature

"Reid Barbour's scholarly and engaging study of Caroline religious culture merits attention from historians and literary critics of the period...a fine work of scholarship." Renaissance Quarterly

"...one certainly derives from this book a powerful sense of the complexity and diversity of English religious culture of the 1620s to 1640s, and Barbour's rich accumulation of examples does ultimately convince." Sixteenth Century Journal

From the Publisher