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The Reformation Revisited: The Romantic Via Media from Barbauld to Wordsworth

ABSTRACT The innovative study of “religious politics” in Romantic studies enabled by Robert Ryan’s The Romantic Reformation (1997) has itself called into question the standard linear model of Romanticism as late Protestantism retained by Ryan. Extending scholarship on both Romanticism’s regulation of Protestant enthusiasm and its attraction to the superstition associated with Roman Catholicism, this essay instead examines the Anglican Church’s claim to be the via media, or middle way, between these two errors, as a pervasive cultural model that better accounts for the multifaceted and ambiguous voices of Romantic religious politics and poetics. After tracing the via media’s development through the writings of John Henry Newman, David Hume, and Robert Southey, the final sections offer two case studies demonstrating its dual disciplining that recuperates, but also moderates, superstition and enthusiasm: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s satiric “The Groans of the Tankard” (1792) and William Wordsworth’s retrospective sonnets from Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822).