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

Secular Chains is a work of interdisciplinary scholarship addressed to English literary critics and historians working on the period 1649-1745. It offers original and extended readings of a range of canonical poets, including Milton, Dryden, Thomson, and Pope. But it also situates these authors within a richly detailed narrative of political conflict, religious controversy, and intellectual change. Its largest ambition is to re-evaluate the relationship between English literary culture and the political challenges to religious authority that emerged in the wake of the civil wars, and which culminated in the intellectual ferment of the early Enlightenment.