Secular Chains

Religion, as we all know, shapes the secular world. But it also shapes other forms of religion in ways that are not always—or even often—apparent. In this absorbing, albeit sometimes dense, study, Philip Connell shows how literature written in the year of Charles I’s execution to that produced long after the dawn of the Enlightenment was created in the shadow of sectarian division and conflict. In the introduction he cites the bleak description in Paradise Lost of a corrupt church which Michael conveys to Adam as he is about to leave the Garden of Eden (XII, 508–24), pointing out that this prophetic vision applies to both ‘Laudian sacerdotalism, and the wave of persecution that followed the Conventicle Act of 1664’. But it could equally well refer to Milton’s contempt for the ‘“hireling wolves” of Cromwell’s church in the 1650s’, as the Commonwealth was characterised by ‘widening ecclesiological divisions within republican argument’ (p. 9)—an issue which Milton turns to time and again in his prose writings. Serious narrative poetry written in the century after the Civil War invariably represents ‘the eclipse of religion’ (p. 17) as the descent of darkness, taking its cue from Paradise Lost, Pope’s Dunciad being an obvious example

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