Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England

by Achsah Guibbory

• ISBN13: 9780521593557
• ISBN10: 0521593557
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-02-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book examines the relationship between literature and religious conflict in seventeenth-century England, showing how literary texts grew out of and addressed the contemporary controversy over ceremonial worship. Examining the meaning and function of religion in seventeenth-century England, the book shows that the conflicts over religious ceremony which were central to the English Revolution had broad cultural significance; they involved not only conflicting attitudes towards art and the body, but a clash between different ways of constructing social relations, human identity, and the relation of the Protestant present to the Jewish, pagan and Catholic past. Achsah Guibbory's readings of Herbert, Herrick, Browne, Donne and Milton explain how their writings show what was at stake in the conflict over ceremonial worship, and how different ideas of community turned on that conflict.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
1. Introduction	1	(10)
2. Reading the conflicts: ceremony, ideology, and the meaning of religion	11	(33)
3. George Herbert: devotion in The Temple and the art of contradiction	44	(35)
4. Robert Herrick: religious experience in the "Temple" of Hesperides	79	(40)
5. Sir Thomas Browne: the promiscuous embrace of ritual order	119	(28)
6. John Milton: carnal idolatry and the reconfiguration of worship, part I, 1634-1660	147	(40)
7. John Milton: carnal idolatry and the reconfiguration of worship, part II, after the Restoration: the major poems	187	(41)
Notes	228	(41)
Index	269