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

Introduction 2
the nation reaches the seventeenth century, it is presided over by a Scotsman who refuses
to adopt Presbyterianism. It is moved further into ceremonialism by his son, and
successor, Charles I, as well as Archbishop Laud, both of whom are executed by Puritans
who rule the country for a brief period of time until the Restoration restores the monarchy
in the person of Charles II, and under him the church returns to a high Protestantism,
which it largely continues under to this present day. The exact nature of how reformed the
Church of England is, and whether or not a Reformation even took place, are now the ongoing
debates of historians and scholars. 1
The contentious nature of these debates has not escaped the scholars of the
literature of the day, and so there has been (really since the beginning of the English
reformed church) an attempt to define what is a Catholic writer and what is a Protestant
writer. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, the discussion of what defines a poet
as being Protestant or Roman Catholic has largely been discussed in the light of two
books, Louis Martz’ The Poetry of Meditation and Barbara Lewalski’s Protestant Poetics
and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. 2
Martz uses the devotional practices
developed by Saint Ignatius of Loyola to show how the Jesuit devotional methods can be
seen in much of the English devotional poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
with Lewalski arguing that a Protestant poetic is one which places a heavy emphasis upon
scripture and the word due to Protestants’ emphasis of sola scriptura. A problem to their
approaches can be found in that Martz and Lewalski both claim the same poets to be either
more Protestant or Roman Catholic depending upon whether Martz or Lewalski is writing
the book. There has been much discussion regarding whether the poets of this period are
closer to Rome or Geneva, and in the case of poets like John Donne or Richard Crashaw,
1 David Daniell, William Tyndale (London, 1994), and The Bible in English (London, 2003); Eamon Duffy,
The Stripping of the Altars, 2 nd edn. (London, 2005); and Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘The Myth of the English
Reformation’, Journal of British Studies 30.1 (1991), 1-19.
2 Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (London, 1962); Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and
the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, 1979)