Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope by Philip Connell (review)

An important contribution to early modern studies and a model of what is required for scholarship to make an impact on multiple disciplines, Secular Chains merits attention from both experts on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature and critics and historians working in other subfields. It is unusual to encounter work by literary scholars whose historiographical criticism is as learned and productive as their literary criticism, yet Mr. Connell's grasp and reshaping of Stuart and Hanoverian historiography is as nuanced, productive, and chronologically expansive as those of nearly any historian working in the period covered by his book. And the range and depth of his work with print and manuscript texts—which is by no means even remotely confined to poetry—is impressive by any standard.

Mr. Connell marshals formidable skill, acumen, and erudition to offer a mutually informative study of some of the most important literary texts written between the 1650s and the 1730s and the wider world of religion, politics, and discourse in which they first appeared. His intricate, efficient, and precisely situated commentaries on specific works improve our understanding of them as literary creations, but Mr. Connell also pays close attention to literary technique (which itself can have ideological resonance) in order to improve historians' understanding of literary texts as religious, political, and intellectual interventions. He uses poetry as a unifying and limiting category of analysis to work across the ideological divides of the period. Working across these divides is uncommon among later Stuart and Hanoverian historians. Much like Peter Lake, a scholar of the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, Mr. Connell's synchronic range of vision allows him to observe structural similarities between the literary, religious, and political activity of different groupings while exploring little-noticed fissures within those same groupings.

Each chapter of Secular Chains employs this procedure to great effect. Arranged chronologically, the book oscillates between discussions of puritans, republicans, Whigs, and freethinkers, on the one hand, and royalists, Tories, high churchmen, and Catholics, on the other. The first half focuses on how poets engaged with the ecclesiological dilemmas that troubled both the English republic and the Restoration monarchy. Chapter 1 interprets Milton's writings during the 1650s as a series of dynamic interventions responding to and in turn influencing the shifting tensions within English republicanism, which during the Commonwealth assumed a variety of godly and Erastian forms. In the next chapter, Mr. Connell introduces Dryden as a commentator on similarly structured ecclesiological tensions within Restoration royalism, and then reads Samson Agonistes as an example of nonconformists' reflections on their own intramural divisions. At this point the reader can clearly see how the book is weaving together an invaluable comparative tapestry of ecclesiological arguments across groups and regimes, and using that tapestry to provide unique perspective on the poetic production of a discrete, postrevolutionary literary culture. This concludes with Mr. Connell's revealing commentary on Absalom and Achitophel. The commentary is grounded in a valuable discussion of the Tory press's critique of Whig and puritan religious imposture during the Exclusion Crisis.

While the book's second half is more engaged with intellectual and cultural history, Mr. Connell's readings remain situated within a perceptive analysis of religious politics. In the final chapters, he makes a case for the persistent importance of religious conflict in English politics and literature into the 1730s. This long overdue observation about what he calls "the rage of religious party" will sit well with Robert G. Ingram's description of polemical divinity as "a warfare on earth" in his latest book, Reformation Without End. In the fourth chapter, Mr. Connell maps Whig literary culture—in particular, the works of John Dennis and the earl of Shaftesbury—onto its unstable relationship with the religious conflicts of Anne's reign. This begins his attempt to understand the relationship of Whig poetics not only to freethinking and radical Erastianism and heterodoxy within the church, but...