Reid Barbour's 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, in terms of heroic endeavors, worship, the social order, and the cosmos. This broad ranging study offers an extensive reappraisal of crucial seventeenth-century themes, and will be of interest to historians as well as literary scholars of the period.

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.

Renaissance Papers collects the best essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. In the 2007 volume, two essays focus on Shakespeare's Roman plays: one on Lavinia's death and Roman suicide in Titus Andronicus, the other on the rhetorical construction of masculinity in Julius Caesar. Five essays address the literary implications of seventeenth-century religious belief and practice, considering the influence of the timing and delivery of sermons on John Donne, the impact of godly reforms on Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, the effect of Scottish on English Presbyterianism during the 1640s, the critique of reformist utopianism in Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, and the implications of Paradise Lost's lack of a frontispiece. Two essays on sixteenth-century poetry look at the literary voices of commoners and of kings: one focuses on the portraits of women and commoners in A Mirror for Magistrates, while the other examines the political implications of King James VI/I's metrical translations of David's Psalms.BR Contributors: Reid Barbour, Nora L. Corrigan, William A. Coulter, Julie Fann, Robert Kilgore, Sonya Freeman Loftis, Christopher Hair, Jim Pearce, and John N. Wall M. Thomas Hester is Professor of English at North Carolina State University, and Christopher Cobb is Assistant Professor of English at Saint Mary's College.

Sir Thomas Browne: A Life is the first full-scale biography of the extraordinary prose artist, physician, and polymath. With the help of recent archival discoveries, the biography recasts each phase of Browne's life (1605-82) and situates his incomparable writings within the diverse intellectual and social contexts in which he lived, including London, Winchester, Oxford, Montpellier, Padua, Leiden, Halifax, and Norwich. The book makes the case that, as his contemporaries fervently believed, Browne influenced the intellectual and religious direction of seventeenth-century England in singularly rich and dynamic ways. Special attention is paid in the biography to Browne's medical vocation but also to his place within the scientific revolution. New information is offered regarding his childhood in London, his European travels and medical studies, the setting in which he first wrote Religio Medici, his impact on readers during the English civil wars, and the contemporary view of his medical practice. Overall, the image of Browne that emerges is far bolder and more cosmopolitan, less complacent and provincial, than biographers have assumed ever since Samuel Johnson doubted Browne's claim that his life up to age thirty resembled a romantic fiction filled with miracles and fables. The biography has extensive material for anyone interested in the histories of religion, education, science and medicine, seventeenth-century England, and early modern philosophy and literature.

The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne General Editor: Claire Preston The first truly complete edition of Browne presents in full all of his writings, in print and in manuscript. It situates Browne's natural philosophy, antiquarianism, and theology within the landscape of the mechanical and experimental philosophies already established or emergent in his lifetime. The eight volumes are organised in chronological order of composition to show this polymathic writer at work over a lifetime, revising and adjusting in a process of ongoing intellectual refinement. Each volume includes a full textual and critical notational apparatus, and ample historical and textual introductions, all intended to appeal to scholars and students alike. Volume 1 presents the first comparative edition of Religio Medici ever to appear. It includes the 1643 authorized print version as well as the first manuscript witness and a representative of several middle-stage witnesses, to offer an authoritative overview of the evolution of this remarkable and influential work. The three textual witnesses are fully annotated textually and critically; the volumes include extensive general and textual introductions to a complex composition.

Doctor, linguist, scientist, natural historian, and writer of what is probably the most stunning prose in the English language, Sir Thomas Browne was a virtuoso in learning whose many interests form a representative portrait of his age. To understand the period which we more usually refer to as the Civil War, the Restoration, or the Scientific Revolution, we need to understand parts of the intellectual and spiritual background that are often neglected and which Browne magnificently figures forth.
This collection of essays about all aspects of Thomas Browne's work and thought is the first such volume to appear in 25 years. It offers the specialist and the student a wide-ranging array of essays by an international team of leading scholars in seventeenth-century literary studies who extend our understanding of this extremely influential and representative early-modern polymath by embracing recent developments in the field, including literary-scientific relations, the development of Anglican spirituality, civil networks of intellectual exchange, the rise of antiquarianism, and Browne's own legacy in modern literature.