Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England - Hardcover

Barbour, Reid

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521006643 ISBN 13: 9780521006644

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521006643
• ISBN 13: 9780521006644
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 292