This chapter explores the relationship between Christianity and ecology in Clare’s poetry, letters, and biblical paraphrases. Critics tend to secularize Clare’s writing and so overlook its biblical, religious, and metaphysical content. The chapter redresses this by assessing Clare’s early Christian faith, his relationship to Wesleyan Methodism and the Ranters, his distrust of organized religion, and his divine ecology as an expression of rural Christianity. Clare looks beyond pantheism and natural religion to identify an interwoven and sacred creation inseparable from the parish. As such, Clare valued Christianity as a ‘religion that teaches us to act justly to speak truth & love mercy’, a social and ecological politics embedded in prayer, mystery, scripture, and faith.

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 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 new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

This essay explores the established Churches in Britain during the Romantic period, with a focus on England and Scotland. It considers the impact of the churchmanship that was evolving during this period, reveals tensions between the Church and nonconformists, provides examples of everyday belief and practice, and seeks to show why it was believed that a close alliance between Church and state remained necessary.

The conclusion reviews the findings of the book, noting that the ‘second Reformation’ included a series of changes and reform endeavours – Laudian, abortive, Westminster, Cromwellian, Caroline – which all in their different ways sought to push the Church of England’s ambiguous Tudor legacy in specific new directions. It notes that all religious groups were prepared to contemplate change to the church’s pre-war formularies, and that all were indeed required to adapt their religious ideas and practices in the face of the upheavals of these years. Portraying the disruptions of the 1640s as the climax of the Church of England’s early history rather than as an aberration in an otherwise continuous ‘Anglican’ master-narrative, the book has demonstrated how many elements of the reforms of the 1640s and 1650s had been anticipated in the doctrines, practices, statutes, bills, and reform proposals of earlier decades. It also maintains that compromise and negotiation were as ubiquitous as change and radicalization in the period’s religious politics, and argues the need to look beyond the simple binary oppositions of contemporary polemic. The period is best seen as a time when everyone was obliged to rethink what the established church was and how its past should be understood.

The Introduction explains the book’s intention to look at the religious history of the mid-seventeenth century in the context of the history of the Church of England and its earlier Reformations. Given that recent historians have emphasized that there was no single clear Church of England orthodoxy in the pre-war period, and have mostly ceased to use the term ‘Anglican’ altogether to describe pre-war conformists, it does not seem to make sense to describe the religious upheavals of these years as the destruction of a coherent established church. The book will instead propose that these events should be studied as an extended argument over the identity of the Church of England, and how it should be reformed, that involved a wide range of religious opinions. The use of the term ‘second Reformation’ to describe this phenomenon, and the rationale behind including the Laudian movement of the 1630s as part of this process, are explained. A final ‘Note on Terminology’ explains the meaning and rationale of several new terms introduced in the book to describe some of the phenomena discussed therein, and explains the rejection of the terms ‘Anglicanism’ and ‘Restoration settlement’ as anachronistic and/or misleading.

This chapter sets the social and ecclesiastical scene. It introduces the place of ecclesiastical law in the law of England. It explores the changing place of the Church of England in the life of the nation from the early nineteenth century, the role of the universities in educating future clergy and the significant place of the bishops in political as well as pastoral and spiritual leadership. It describes the need for more churches as the Industrial Revolution took a growing proportion of the population from the country into the towns. It introduces the challenge of the Dissenters with their rival chapels and the complexities of applying ecclesiastical law when there were controversies.

An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (2 vols., 1757–8) by John Brown (1715–66) has rarely been studied in depth by intellectual historians, incongruent to its own initial popularity at publication. The Estimatewas written in a declinist voice, following hard on the heels of Britain’s defeat by France at the Battle of Minorca in 1756. Brown was convinced that Britain’s initial bad fortunes in war against France were related to a general decline in manners and principles, exemplified by the spirit of party. Even more understudied is Brown’s final contribution on the subject: his Thoughts on Civil Liberty: On Licentiousness and Faction, published in 1765, one year before he committed suicide. In this work, Brown tried to do what many political writers, including the principal ones discussed in this book, had held to be impossible: to demonstrate how a free state could exist without the internal conflict exemplified by party.

This chapter examines the place in English history memory of what is generally considered the original ‘event’ of the Reformation: Martin Luther’s posting of the Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. Despite its uncertain historical veracity, the episode was prioritised by the ideological demands of the first Reformation centenary celebrated in Germany in 1617, and thereafter (particularly in the nineteenth century) it became a magnet of Protestant artistic expression and cultural identity. In England, however, interest in Luther’s ‘Thesenanschlag’ remained remarkably muted through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even in 1817, when a commemorative impulse fired by imaginative remembering of the episode swept through Lutheran Germany, Scandinavia and the United States, English interest remained muted. Across the nineteenth century as a whole, non-conformists were much more likely than Anglicans to celebrate the valour and significance of Luther’s ‘deed’. The reticence points to a long-standing reluctance among Anglicans to acknowledge Luther, even at a remove, as a founder of the Church of England. Yet a long-standing failure to advance consensually any alternative date or event as the foundational moment of the English Reformation is striking, underlining the unresolved tension over continuity versus rupture which lies at the heart of Anglican historical identity.