This chapter provides essential historical and theological background for the emergence of Cambridge Platonism. It traces the fortunes of the Calvinist or Reformed (or less accurately ‘Puritan’) theological community in England, of which the Cambridge Platonists were members, through the civil wars and Interregnum, with a particular focus on controversy about predestination. It presents the major outlines of the Reformed doctrines of double predestination, election and reprobation, along with the rise of anti-Calvinist currents of thought like Arminianism and Laudianism, with a view to exploring the ways in which these theological disputes contributed to political tensions that gave rise to the civil wars. Finally, it explores the central role played by the Cambridge Platonists’ colleges of Emmanuel and Christ’s in the training of Reformed preachers and the dissemination of Reformed doctrine, with particular attention paid to Reformed attitudes to the study of philosophy and pagan thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle.

This chapter traces the complex legacies of multiple religious traditions, including Christianity, Islam, and syncretistic spirituality, as they inform utopian strands of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American fiction, including the miraculous realism of Toni Morrison, the lyrical historicism of Marilynne Robinson, and the religiously themed science fiction of James Blish and G. Willow Wilson. Apocalyptic concepts, with a strong emphasis on transformative and liberatory possibility, are a recurrent element of these narratives.  The term “spirituality” itself is ambiguous, particularly in a national context in which religion has been a source of both oppression and hope. The chapter draws on postsecular critiques of literature and culture that, in John McClure’s terms, indicate “a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religion.” It argues that skeptical perspectives do not necessarily militate against the aesthetic and ethical potential of theologically oriented utopian fiction.

Denominational identity, though poorly understood in theological terms, was socially decisive to postwar Americans. Lowell’s lifelong preoccupation with religion took the form of an ostentatious Catholicism in the 1940s, influenced his conscientious objection to World War II, and helps explain his poems about Jonathan Edwards. Paul Mariani discussed Lowell as a “Lost Puritan,” while Kay Jamison investigated the proximity of madness and faith as “states of possession,” and Elisa New sees a “visionary” impulse in the poet. Milton and Hopkins stimulated Lowell’s poetry as much as questions of ethics troubled it. Lowell’s religious temperament remained permanently alert, calling into questions fossilized distinctions between early and late Lowell. Its recognition and contextualization provides interpretive access to his monologues and family portraits from Mills of the Kavanaughs to Life Studies, resurfacing wistfully in Day by Day.

This chapter focuses on Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius: An Essay upon the Good (1710), in which Mather makes a series of proposals for how Christians might advance the gospel cause and exercise social benevolence. For this purpose, Mather creatively amalgamated different variants of the genre. First published anonymously in 1710 but quickly associated with Mather’s name, Bonifacius has often been considered an aesthetically and intellectually inferior predecessor of the American essay tradition, rather than its first full instantiation. Even so, the work enjoyed great popularity in the United States and Britain throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin praised Bonifacius and acknowledged its importance in his early formation. This chapter investigates that connection and explores the relation between the sermon and the essay, dwelling on significant passages from Bonifacius and tracking its influence on a number of later philosophical and spiritual traditions.

This chapter sets the Laudian view of the Sabbath within their wider account of the feasts and festivals of the church and their account of the church’s capacity to constitute holy times as well as places. The Laudians’ opposition to puritan sabbatarianism is thus explained within their wider position, which enabled them to diminish the significance of the Sabbath attributed by the puritans as the only day marked down for worship by scripture, while simultaneously exalting the role and status of the other holy days denominated by the church, which were thus placed on an at least equal footing with the Sabbath. It was a position adumbrated in conscientious opposition to what was presented as the crude scripturalism and divisive effects of puritan sabbatarianism.

This chapter defines Andrewes’ position in terms of its opposition to a body of both religious and political opinion labelled puritan. While Andrewes’ anti-puritanism is shown to have been rooted in traditional conformist concerns about conformity and church government, it also, Hooker-like, encompassed wider issues of religious style and modes of being. Crucial here was what Andrewes identified and excoriated as the puritan cult of the sermon and view of faith centred solely on knowledge rather than practice or works. According to Andrewes, the result was hypocrisy on a heroic pharisaical scale and a histrionic, wholly performative, style of both preaching and piety.

This chapter analyses the ways in which a variety of men negotiated the collapse of the Personal Rule and the Laudian project. On the one hand, we have the Calvinist conformist Robert Sanderson, who, by shifting the emphasis of what remained the same set of opinions was able to distance himself, and the church of England, from the excesses of Laudianism, while still protecting that church from what he presented as the reckless assaults and absurdities of the puritans, and rallying support for the king. On the other hand, we have Peter Heylyn, by this point the archetypal Laudian, engaging ideologue, tacking and trimming by emphasising his opposition to popery, even as he used the same arguments that he was deploying against the papists to continue his remorseless assault on the puritans. Here, in effect, we can watch the Laudian coalition coming apart at the seams under the pressure of the Scots war and the political crisis that ensured in England.

This chapter analyses the Laudian attitude to Sunday sports, in a discussion designed to include the meaning of the altar and the sacrament in the constitution of the Christian community. Allowing Sunday sports re-inscribed the line between the secular and the spiritual as defined by the Laudian notions of holy places and holy times. It allowed affirmations of two different versions of the social body to be made on the same day, the one reinforcing the other, and it also prevented the day being dominated, and the social body being divided, by the essentially private, household-based, religious observances of the puritans. Here was affirmation of a broad-based Laudian version of the Christian community being enabled and maintained by the rites and observances of the national church against the divisive practices and beliefs of the puritans.

This chapter demonstrates that the Laudian avant garde was not limited to the university but encompassed older men in rural livings, whose commitment to Laudian values was, by this point, decades old, but whose views were also connected to the universities. The chapter reveals lively exchanges amongst such provincial ministers, in print and the pulpit, on some of the hot issues of the day. The chapter homes in on three men in rural livings, Robert Shelford, James Buck and Edward Kellett, all of whom have featured prominently throughout the book. Shelford’s works can be connected to firebrands in Cambridge like Richard Crashaw or Edward Martin, and to bulwarks of the provincial puritan establishment like Samuel Ward of Ipswich, who borrowed the image of the lodestone from Shelford in order to refute, in print, some of the central Arminian contentions that underpinned Shelford’s position. Some of the central claims made by Buck developed themes canvassed in the university and elicited a response, again in the pulpit and in print, from Humphrey Sydenham in Somerset. In this way something of the liveliness and fluidity of the theological scene during the 1630s is recaptured.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Laudians mixed and matched the authorities of scripture, of natural law, of apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition and of the positive law of the church. Where, on the issue of church government, the Laudians pushed the claims of scripture and of apostolic precept and precedent to assert and exalt the iure divino status of episcopacy, on the Sabbath they played down the authority of scripture and of apostolic practice, while exalting the authority of the church. The result was a nuanced position which refuted the scripturalist sabbatarianism of the puritans, while allowing the Laudians to retain an account of Sunday worship exalted enough for their own purposes and perfectly compatible with their account of the power of the church to consecrate holy times as well as places.

The chapter analyses the Laudian critique of puritanism as politically subversive of both monarchical and episcopal authority. Puritanism was portrayed by the Laudians as an ideology organised around ‘popularity’. This word denoted two things: firstly, the search for popular approval and applause, to be gained by a rabble-rousing espousal of singularity and an unprincipled criticism of those in power in church and state, and secondly, institutional arrangements – in the church, presbyterianism, and, in the state, an enhanced role for parliament – that subjected the rulers to the whims and opinions of the people. The organising trope was the puritan as a firebrand or incendiary, or alternatively as a malcontent tribuni plebis, with frequent either glancing or direct references being made to the so-called puritan triumvirs, Burton, Bastwick and Prynne.

This chapter lays out the Laudians’ view of what they took to be the currently deleterious physical and liturgical condition of the English church, which they attributed, in about equal part, to lay neglect and parsimony and puritan error. Having evoked the Laudian critique, the chapter then critically evaluates it, arguing that the Laudian account should not be taken as an accurate reflection of how things were but rather as a combination of anecdote and hyperbole, prompted, in part, by the Laudians’ own, very exalted, view of what true order should look like, and, in part, by the polemical demands of their situation and the intensity of their hatred for puritanism and all its works.

This seeks to summarise the conclusions of the book, asserting and defending Laudianism’s status as a coherent, distinctive and aggressive ideological position, and as a coalition made up of persons of varying views and degrees of commitment, and as such a set of responses to a dynamic and changing set of political circumstances. The methodological approach of the book is defended and the compatibility of the lumping, which underpinned the first four part with the splitting that characterised the fifth, is asserted. In its second half the Conclusion looks forward to the larger significance of Laudianism for the history of ‘Anglicanism’ and ends with an account of the Tractarian use of Laudianism and the ways in which the legacy of the Tractarians has, in turn, shaped the subsequent historiography of Laudianism. The attempt here, as in the book as a whole, is to free the topic from the ongoing quarrels about the historical identity and theological and pietistic essence of the church of England, so that it can be understood in terms of the period during which it first came into existence, and which it tried (so ardently and unsuccessfully) to transform.

This chapter homes in on the explicitly political, and allegedly anti-monarchical, effects of puritan error. Here what Andrewes presents as the integral connections between puritan presumption, hypocrisy and popularity – the latter defined as an obsession with getting and keeping the good opinion of the people, if necessary by defaming their rulers from the pulpit and in the press. Puritanism is thus presented as wholly inimical to monarchical authority in the state and episcopal authority in the church. Again, Andrewes is shown asserting the broad equivalence of the seditious doctrines and practices of the puritans and the papists. He placed special stress on the predestinarian roots of puritan hypocrisy and presumption and hence on the political consequences of what Andrewes took to be (typically puritan) predestinarian error.

This chapter outlines the Laudian view of preaching and its role in the life of the church. Preaching was placed in a secondary role relative to prayer, prayer being the end to which preaching was the enabling means. In a settled church, such as the church of England, the role of preaching was limited to providing the relatively few doctrines necessary to salvation. Not that sermons were necessarily the best means to discharge that task. Consequently, the Laudians redefined preaching to include the reading of homilies, the reading of scripture and catechesis. In this way a justification was provided for unpreaching ministers. The other role for preaching was to provide top-up lessons and exhortations in which the reigning sins and errors of the times were denounced; hence the prevalence of printed Laudian sermons denouncing puritanism. The puritan cult of the sermon and addiction to extempore sermons was also called out.

The Introduction is in three parts. The first introduces the object of study and the sources and methodology used to study it and puts the topic in its historiographical context. The second locates it in terms of the religio-political developments of the period between the 1590s and the 1620s. The third addresses the immediate political and polemical circumstances in which Laudianism rose to prominence and then power in the mid- to late 1620s, and then identifies the 1630 edition of Lancelot Andrewes’ sermons as the movement’s key foundational text or mission statement.

This chapter sets up the problem of the relationship between Arminianism – defined as a set of propositions on the subject of predestination, at odds with Calvinist orthodoxy – and Laudianism as it has emerged in this book. Predestinarian error played a central role in the Laudian analysis of puritanism – it underlay a great deal of puritan presumption and hypocrisy, as well as their most divisive, indeed sectarian, impulses and behaviour. In addition, puritanism was the organising other of the Laudian project. All of which meant that predestination was a topic of great interest to the Laudians. But when it came to the positive case for Laudian reformation, to Laudianism as a style of piety and way of being Christian, the doctrine was far less central. Indeed, the topic tended to fall within the remit of those things best left unaddressed and certainly not subjected to the sort of assertion and counter-assertion that had recently threatened to plunge the Low Countries into chaos. However, the intensity of the Laudians’ repudiation of the puritans’ Calvinist predestinarianism more than implied the presence of a counter-orthodoxy and certainly called down accusations of Arminianism upon the Laudians’ heads.

This chapter addresses the paradox, present both in the scholarly literature and in contemporary discourse, where Laudianism was often seen as both a revolutionary and a largely conservative or even reactionary movement; bent on root-and-branch reform and on the preservation of the moderate ‘Anglican’ status quo. This chapter shows that the Laudians presented themselves both as agents of change, pushing for the radical reformation of a church corrupted by decades of puritan corruption, and as conservatives, returning that church to its essential and original condition. What enabled both cases to be made was the extent of puritan influence over, and penetration of, the social and ideological fabric of the church. It was this that necessitated the reformation, which was designed to return the church to the condition it was in before the puritans ‘ruined’ it. That ideal state was variously located in either the Elizabethan or the early Edwardian reformations, and when such precedents were found insufficient to validate certain parts of the Laudian agenda, in the church of the apostles and the fathers. The result was once again a minimum and a maximum case for Laudian reformation, credit for which was variously attributed to Charles I, Archbishop Laud or the bishops more generally construed.

This chapter contextualises the rise of the stage Machiavel in the suppression of the Elizabethan Puritan movement in the late 1580s and early 1590s and the period’s distrust in the hidden, inward self of religious dissenters. The stage Machiavel of the early 1590s, most prominently embodied by Barabas in Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, bears traces of anti-Puritan polemics that have been mostly overlooked so far. Hence, the stage Machiavel can be read as a predecessor of the stage Puritan and as a theatrical convention, most notably in his typical revelation of his plans to the audience, which showcases the theatre as an institution that grants access, or rather a fantasy of access, to the inward secrets of religious dissenters. Marlowe’s Jew of Malta can be read as an expression of such a desire to make windows into men’s hearts and as a poetological statement that flaunts the complicity of the theatre in this enterprise.