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Elizabeth Clarke Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England

Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England takes the by now familiar approach of decoding the culture and history of early modern England through a particular trope or metaphor—in this case, the influence of the Song of Songs on English religious writing—but it defies the trend in monographs in English literary history by considering a wide historical scope, nearly the whole of the Stuart period. Elizabeth Clarke also makes her task more formidable by including writing that is on the edge of the canon, such as Francis Quarles’s emblems (1635) or the more obscure Caroline masques of the 1630s, as well as writing that has no pretensions to literariness, such as prose commentaries on the Song of Songs. Because she is more interested in using texts to illuminate politico-religious tensions than in charting an aesthetic literary history, the best and worst of these texts (in aesthetic terms) are given equal weight. To be able to apply the same rich sense of context to Donne’s Holy Sonnets (ca. 1600–1617), at one end of the century, and Benjamin Keach’s populist religious allegories, at the other, is a challenging task, and one that Clarke largely masters. The importance of this book lies in the way it repeatedly demonstrates just how closely intertwined were politics, religion, and literature in this period. The growth in sermon studies has reminded literary scholars that religious texts frequently responded to and shaped the politics of the day, but few literary scholars look beyond sermons to the vast corpus of other religious genres that dominated book sales in the period. In drawing together a wide variety of genres, Clarke is able to bring to light the depth and range of influence religious politics had on literary production, across the century and across sectarian divides. Although much of her book is devoted to Puritan writers whose political engagement culminated in the Civil Wars and