The intellectual and religious landscape of England immediately prior to the Civil War has been frequently said to be characterized by two conflicting forces, one involving a strengthening of what has pejoratively been labeled Puritanism or Calvinism and, the other, the emergence of Laudian high churchmanship. The scene was, however, far more complex, and the inability to make distinctions has certainly resulted in considerable misunderstanding with regard to a poet such as Richard Crashaw, whose later conversion to Roman Catholicism should not be seen as dominating the poetry he wrote before his exile to the Continent. Quite unfairly, the anachronistic categorization of Crashaw even in his early verse as a “Catholic” poet seems to have marginalized him with one result being, as Alison Shell has noted, that his poetry is even nowadays “missing from the shelves [in bookstores] where cheap editions of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne are easy to find.”1 I should like to argue that in the verse that he wrote prior to leaving the Church of England Crashaw was representative of a major current in the Anglicanism of his time—a current that was identified with John Cosin, who was to become a central figure in the re-establishment of Anglican forms of worship in the 1660s.

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page