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of Lord Byron (1978), and also the essays collected in Byron, the Bible and Religion:Essays from the Twelfth International Byron Seminar, edited by Wolf Z Hirst (1991),have all gone some way towards redressing this general lack. Knight’s work,however, is dedicated to reading Byron from his biography, and taking the poetry assupport to that enterprise. Looper’s compendium is useful, but it is a compendium,not a commentary. Byron, the Bible and Religion, on the other hand, is a very usefulcollection of essays, especially those by Hirst, Thorslev, and Ray Stevens, andparticularly in regard to Cain and Heaven and Earth.The critics whose work has been most useful to this study are spread across aconsiderable span of time. Samuel Chew’s Dramas of Lord Byron (1915), MichaelKennedy Joseph’s Byron the Poet (1964), and Robert M Ryan’s The RomanticReformation: Religious Politics in English Literature 1789-1824 (1997) are allvaluable to this study not just for the depth of their scholarship in general, but inparticular for the consideration of the religious aspects of Byron’s work. Theyexamine much of what others slight. Ryan is one of the very few to realise, forexample, the role which Lucifer actually plays in Cain.All too frequently, the critics who slight the religious aspects of Byron’s works adoptinto their reading such presumptions as Byron’s “Calvinist background”, which is acritical issue in its own right. Annabella, Lady Byron, claimed that the poet “had thegloomiest Calvinistic tenets”, 12 and William Harness asserted that “Byron, from hisearly education in Scotland, had been taught to identify the principles of Christianitywith the extreme dogmas of Calvinism”. 13 A number of subsequent critics have thusread Calvinism into his depictions of faith.These critics include E W Marjarum, on Byron being “haunted” by his “Calvinistictraining”, 14 Lovell, on Byron’s “Calvinistic concept of deity”, 15 and Marchand, on12 Annabella, Lady Byron, 5/3/55, quoted in Coleridge 13.262n.13 A G L’Estrange, The Literary Life of William Harness (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1871), p.13.14 Marjarum, p.21.15 Ernest J. Lovell, Jr, Byron: The Record of a Quest (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1966),p.213.12