In this essay I work with Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh’s formulation of “pluriversal decoloniality and decolonial pluriversality”: a sense of spaciousness in investigating and engaging with all that has been inherited from modernity and coloniality. I distance myself from those understandings of decolonial practice that seek to discard and replace: for literatures, like genders and sexualities, are a palimpsest, they build on waves of what is experienced and encountered through lineages. There are deaths and memories as well as traces and continuities, and I wish that they all be folded in for the reading, teaching and writing experience to be, as bell hooks outlines, exciting and passionate – and as Mignolo insists, exceeding the “object of study.” I see Octavio Paz’s critical method of reading as decolonial and draw upon it: keeping many thinkers and poets as unruly talismans thrown together in an unruly manner, I look at paradigms of gendered/sexual signs in relation to pedagogies and research methodologies for English literature in the global south. What could be a template to read historically, critically and imaginatively across and between Western and non-Western texts with an incisive, generous, difficult passion that marks all erotic pursuit as errant and explosive, even the intellectual?

This chapter concludes Part V by returning to the topic of Laudianism viewed not as a movement or an ideology but rather as a coalition, which status, when it was winning, gave it a flexibility that enabled it to attract the support of many people who were not themselves convicted Laudians. But when the Laudians’ star was no longer in the ascendant, that same coalition could easily unravel, as a variety of fellow travellers and fair-weather friends adjusted their positions to meet the changing circumstances.

This chapter examines the cutting edge of Laudian theological, ecclesiological and liturgical experiment in Cambridge University during the 1630s. The protagonists here were mostly young men, anxious to push the envelope of the doable and the sayable, and in the process attract the approval of their superiors in the university and church. Moving on from the further reaches of Arminian theology they toyed with notions like justification by works and the necessity of confession to a priest, more and more elaborate decorations of college chapels, and more and more florid performances of what they took to be ceremonial decorum and their critics took to be popish superstition and idolatry. These antics attracted the opprobrium of the old university Calvinist establishment and the support of an emerging clique of Laudian heads of house. A dynamic emerged through which the Laudian agenda was pushed further and faster than some its leading lights, up to and including Laud himself, might have liked. This was a syndrome that continued to operate right up until the collapse of the personal rule in 1640/1.