Barbour R. Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. — 292 p. — ISBN10: 0521006643; ISBN13: 978-0521006644.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 circumstance in Caroline ProtestantismThe 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 cosmosConclusion: Rome, Massachusetts, and the Caroline Protestant imagination