Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope

Secular Chains offers an original and richly contextualized account of the relationship between poetry and religious controversy between 1649 and 1745. This was a period of political conflict and intellectual upheaval, in which traditional sources of spiritual authority were variously challenged and transformed. Philip Connell reveals the importance of English literary culture for our understanding of this process, and throws new light on the dynamics of change and continuity between the puritan revolution and the early Enlightenment. Based on extensive research in both printed and manuscript sources, the book combines detailed case studies of major literary figures with a sustained historical narrative linking the republican moment of the 1650s, the conflicts and crises of the Restoration, and the ecclesiastical politics of the early eighteenth century. Milton and Dryden provide the principal focus of the first three chapters, which explore the divisive issue of church settlement in the work of both writers, together with the increasingly prominent rhetoric of anti-clericalism and irreligion in the poetry and polemics of the later seventeenth century. Subsequent chapters extend the book's argument to the embattled condition of the Church of England in the decades after 1688, and the significant contribution of contemporary literary culture to a range of religious and philosophical argument, from heterodox free-thinking to Newtonian natural theology. Secular Chains demonstrates the close and continued relationship between poetry and religious politics in the age of Milton and Pope, and provides a new framework for understanding this complex and turbulent period in English literary history.

Table of Contents:
Introduction PART I: COMMONWEALTH 1: 'Hireling wolves': Poetry, Prophecy and Republican Religion PART II: RESTORATION 2: The Failure of Uniformity 3: 'Priests of all Religions are the same': Dryden and the Politics of Irreligion PART III: ENLIGHTENMENT 4: Whig Poetics and the Church in Danger 5: The Literature of Physico-Theology 6: Alexander Pope and the Modes of Faith Coda: Pope, Milton, Modernity

About the Author :
Philip Connell was educated at the University of Liverpool and completed his Ph.D. at King's College, Cambridge. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of English and a Fellow of Selwyn College at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on English literature and its contexts between 1650 and 1840, with a particular emphasis upon interdisciplinary studies in the fields of poetry, politics, and intellectual history.

Review :
The resulting volume may be mined by specialists for individually brilliant essays ... Almost every chapter highlights successive generations of Whigs' and Tories' efforts to tame, sublimate, or appropriate Milton's legacy ... His measured approach is a refreshing alternative to the pugilistic tones of an older generation of revisionist history a brilliant intervention into early eighteenth-century studies. Connell is both an adept and insightful critic with a fine eye for detail and a learned scholar, and this book is likely to shape our understanding of the period for many years to come. There is much to admire here... He drives a brilliantly illuminating analysis through the shifts in post-Restoration and early eighteenth-century high literary culture. In Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope, Philip Connell offers a richly informative discussion of religion, poetry, and politics in Milton and Marvell ... Connell's book is a welcome addition to studies of Restoration and early eighteenth-century poetry. Fascinating and wide-ranging ... Students of eighteenth-century poetry have needed a book like Secular Chains for a long time Drives a brilliantly illuminating analysis through the shifts in post-Restoration and early eighteenth-century high literary culture ... Connell successfully redresses a dominant tendency to read post-Restoration literature as the embodiment of a secularizing progression towards modernity, and the study of Miltons reading, and misreading discloses much more than a simple reception history an exceptional scholarly study, impeccably researched, expertly structured, persuasively argued, and engagingly written ... Connell has done better than others in a project that few critics have been emboldened to attempt. Connell's study is based on an astounding amount of research into print and manuscript sources of the period, here synthesized with enviable grace and fluency. It is a book of enormous erudition and subtlety