Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England

Erscheinungsjahr 2008
ISBN: 978-0-521-00664-4
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 292 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 628 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barbour, Reid

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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.