Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Introduction 3
who converted from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism and from Protestantism to
Roman Catholicism respectively, which of their poems are for Rome and which are for
Geneva.
The difficulty in defining the differences in these Christian sects is one that has
existed since the Reformation began, and so it is no wonder that current scholarship of
literature that is so filled with anxiety of ecclesiastical identity would also vacillate over
categorising writers. In the devotional poetry of the period this becomes even more
problematic, in that it is not just the religious persuasion of the writer that is argued over;
rather, at times it is even poem by poem that the debate takes place. In the scholarly quests
for distinctions, arguments can exist over the mention of the Virgin Mary; was she solely
the devotional right of Roman Catholicism? Or is predestination and the mention of the
‘elect’ a clear sign of a poet’s Calvinistic leanings? And if a poet is a Calvinist, does this
place him in the camp of the Church of England or that of the Puritans? The problem, as
will be shown, is that, despite all of the differences that exist between these three main
sects of English Christianity, there is a series of shared foundational beliefs that undergird
all of Christianity, and these places of agreement are more important to the religion than
the places of disagreement. The creeds of the early Church were adopted by all three sects
of English Christianity, and so an anxiety of identity is created, not because the beliefs are
so different, but because they are so similar. Roman Catholicism, English Protestantism,
and the Puritans all agree on the basic tenets of their faith, and so there is a Christian
‘orthodoxy’ that complicates all attempts to define rigidly the differences between these
ecclesiastical bodies.
In considering the devotional poetry of the seventeenth century, it becomes clear
that the poets of the time are not spokespeople for particular denominations nor are they
rigid ideologues; instead, they are human beings who are trying to express a form of belief