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The chapter focuses on the fact that providentialism was a central strand in the religiosity of evangelical Protestants during the period under discussion in this book. The doctrine of providence and experimental providentialism are defined and elaborated. English Protestant divines discussed the Doctrine of Providence exhaustively, with wearisome frequency, since it was a prominent theme of 16th- and 17th-century academic theology and practical divinity. The religious aspect of providentialism and its interpretation by the clergy, Protestant ministers, and various authors, writers are highlighted. Despite oppositions and apprehensions by the clergy and Protestant ministers, sermons and ephemeral literature, cheaply priced printed texts, ballad sheets and quarto and octavo books, were being printed in the early modern period. The role played by providence in domestic decision-making, in household divinity, and in the private management of crisis and calamity, political argument, tactics, and action in the heady atmosphere of the Civil War and Cromwellian Interregnum are emphasized.

This chapter examines the place of forensic rhetoric and of evidential uncertainty in two other innovative genres of the 1580s and 1590s: revenge tragedy and romantic comedy. In pre-Reformation penitential discourses on murder as sin, the concept of Purgatory as an intermediary or transitory place helped deal, conceptually, with the evidential problems of this-worldly justice, since sinful failures of justice might be atoned for in the purgatorial time/space between heaven and hell. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, like contemporary murder pamphlets, attempts to translate Purgatory's otherworldly intermediateness into the delay and deferral of justice by the processes of evidential inquiry in this world. The chapter then considers a scandalous aspect of the evidential uncertainty characteristic of Roman Comedy: the uncertainty of paternity that enables ‘romantic’ recognition. It shows how Lyly's Mother Bombie and Shakespeare's Lost Labour's Lost wittily adapt the forensic rhetoric of classical comedy to respond to this scandal.

During the 1780s and 1790s, Congregationalism predominated on the religious landscape of southern New England. Compared to other denominations, the Congregationalists enjoyed a tax‐supported religious establishment in Massachusetts and Connecticut, large numbers of churches and clergymen, influence with the political and social elite, and ministerial associations that enabled coordinated action. Given their prevailing public position, Congregational clergymen articulated a rich social ideology that centered on the role of divine Providence in communal affairs. The clergy's social discourse borrowed from both covenant theology and classical republicanism, but it constituted a distinct, providential synthesis. This providentialism enabled ministers to explain the successful outcome of the Revolutionary War and optimistically to project a millennial role for the new nation, although they could also use it to warn that sinfulness would invite God's wrath.

This chapter explores some of the ways in which a hugely popular literature of shipwreck and maritime disaster played an important ‘scripting’ influence on Romantic travel. It explores firstly the religious traditions and conventions strongly associated with this material (and accordingly, with the figure of the suffering mariner or maritime misadventurer), emphasizing in this regard the routine Providentialism of many of these accounts, and their connection with traditions of spiritual autobiography. The chapter goes on to suggest, however, that these associations between maritime suffering and spiritual revelation become complicated by the rise of more rationalistic and empiricist modes of travel writing in the 18th century. It is in part this tension that makes the figure of maritime misadventurer so fascinating to the Romantic imagination, a fascination that is explored in relation to Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Byron's emulation of the Mariner in his own travelling.

This chapter explores Wordsworth's indebtedness both to the literature of shipwreck and maritime misadventure outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, and to the literature of exploration outlined in Chapter 5. From this material, and especially from the traditions of spiritual autobiography and Providentialism in this material, it is suggested that Wordsworth absorbed deeply a sense of travel as properly a form of quasi-religious pilgrimage, and of misadventure as a route to spiritual discovery and renovation. The first section of the chapter discusses Wordsworthian misadventure in relation to Wordsworth's spiritual and creative anxieties and aspirations; this section focuses chiefly on The Prelude. The second section explores the public dimension to Wordsworth's adoption of the misadventurer, focusing on the ways in which Wordsworth harnesses misadventure to a nationalist and imperialist ethos: The Excursion is the principal text discussed here.

This chapter explores Byron's indebtedness both to the literature of shipwreck and maritime misadventure outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, and to the literature of exploration outlined in Chapter 5. It shows how Byron offered a significantly different inflection of the misadventurer persona to that fashioned by Wordsworth. A discussion of the persona fashioned in Childe Harold suggests that for Byron, misadventure was valued in sensationalist terms, as a broadening of experience, rather than as a route to spiritual revelation. The corollary to this was a Byronic scepticism as to the Providentialist assumptions and conventions often apparent in Wordsworth's scripting of travel and misadventure. This scepticism is apparent in Byron's notorious rendering of a shipwreck in Don Juan, which is the subject of the second section of the chapter. The final section explores the politically transgressive aspects of Byron's stance as misadventurer.

Spinoza's theological opponents agree that the core religious teaching of the Bible is the divine law revealed by the prophets, but disagree about the law's status and content. In order to show what is superstitious in their opinions, Spinoza must confront these disputes. His first step is to establish that the divine law is universal. The claim that the law was ordained for the Jews, as the Old Testament seems to claim, thus rests on a misinterpretation. This chapter examines Spinoza's philosophical argument for this conclusion. It shows how his view threatens Calvinist providentialism, and constitutes an attack on two flourishing seventeenth‐century movements, Christian millenarianism and Jewish Messianism. The argument is therefore not merely about the proper interpretation of the Bible. It is also a theologico‐political intervention in Dutch affairs.

Spinoza's positive account of the divine law is an extremely radical one, almost uniquely so in the context of seventeenth‐century debate. God is not a legislator who issues decrees and punishments, and prescriptions only become laws when they are ordained by a human agent. Human beings must therefore take responsibility for the laws under which they live. This chapter analyses Spinoza's complex defence of this position, tracing his distinctions between divine law, divine natural law, and revealed law. It also explains how the Treatise employs these resources to defend a number of controversial claims. Some of these are positive—for example, philosophy rather than Scripture yields the clearest understanding of what divine law prescribes. Many of them are negative—for example, Spinoza's account of law is designed to undermine the providentialism around which Calvinist theology is organized. Here we see Spinoza articulating the practical implications of his own philosophy.

Protestantism represented every indication of continuing vitality and vigour, a radical disjuncture with the Roman Catholic past and a violent disruption of the settled patterns of a late medieval piety which betrayed no signs of decline or decay. However, the book argues that there was a cluster of assumptions which penetrated every sector of English society, cutting across the boundaries created by status and creed, education and wealth. The book highlights the pivotal role played by providentialism in forging a collective Protestant consciousness, a sense of confessional identity which fused anti-Catholicism and patriotic feeling and which united the elite with their social inferiors. The book also emphasizes the debate on the English Reformation. Providentialism became a dangerously politicized discourse in the decades preceding the outbreak of the Civil War.

The chapter focuses on the history of a crude providentialism in which suffering and misfortune are simplistically equated with immorality and sin. It emphasizes on the encyclopedias of providential punishments inflicted upon shameless sinners. The tales of God's judgements recounted in blackletter ballads and pamphlets intermingled gratuitous circumstantial detail with stern spiritual admonition. The theory of sudden deaths and providential punishments as ‘God's judgement’ is exemplified through cautionary tales reported in cheap print and recounted in judgement books. Reformation doctrine and practical divinity stimulated providentialism of late medieval religious culture. The inexorability of supernatural justice was deeply embedded in oral tradition in early modern England.

This chapter analyses contemporary responses to moments of acute corporate emergency and crisis, as refracted through the pulpit and press and as reflected in official policy and the conduct of the populace. In the face of the hostile forces periodically unleashed by a harsh environment, it was not just the rhetoric of Protestant ministers and metropolitan scribblers which merged and converged. The viewpoints and theories of Protestants, clergies, and Protesatant ministers regarding divine providence in these calamities are exemplified here. The views of clerical Protestantism and the religion of the ‘common sort of Christians’, and between pre- and post-Reformation piety have also been compared. Ideology of divine omnipotence was considered to be a source of cultural and communal solidarity and a medium of ecclesiastical and political discord and dissent. Communities united against adversity and pulled together to stamp out vice and appease God's wrath. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the areas of friction and confrontation between clerical Protestantism and the religion of the ‘common sort of Christians’, and between pre- and post-Reformation piety, and also exemplifies providentialism being a conceptual framework flexible enough to absorb and accommodate discordant tendencies and the bifurcating strand.

This chapter opens with a discussion of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and explores the reasons why Puritans criticized the book as a violation of the closed canon. It considers the role of Puritan ministers as modern-day prophets, the etymology of canon and its philological solutions to the contradictions of Puritanism, the role of Puritan confessions in defining the canon, and the relationship between Puritans' providentialism and their views of the scriptural canon. It shows how important the closed canon was in shaping virtually every aspect of ministerial culture within New England Congregationalism.

This chapter opens with an exchange of letters between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wherein they discuss the early republic's problem with prophets. From that discussion, it argues that the strictly closed scriptural canon formed an important foundation on which Americans' notion of religious freedom developed. It examines the missions of various early American prophets and critiques the ways these figures have been characterized in the scholarly literature. It details the early stages of biblical criticism in the first part of the nineteenth century, arguing that a more historical approach to scripture and a more skeptical approach to the question of translation effected a sense of distance between Americans and the Bible. It explores the impact that rising Catholic immigration had on the canon debate. And it concludes by considering the interplay of revelation and race in the early republic.

This chapter considers how reformed thought addressed the perennial question of theodicy. The reformers inclined, for the most part, to the extreme providentialist view that evil occurred through an ultimately wise, though deeply hidden and mysterious, decision of God. Consequently, all the resources to resist misfortune that had been zealously cultivated in the old Church were beside the point. More deeply still, the reformers' providentialism cast the role of the devil and evil spirits in general into a very different role. The devil was, at best, an entirely captive instrument of the divine purposes. The most dangerous thing that the devil could do to people was, in truth, to persuade them of wrong opinions.

The first part of this chapter analyses the Providential rhetoric and civic and religious rituals (including oaths) by which the Constitution of 3 May 1791 was propagated and celebrated in the following months. The second section focuses on the sejmiks of February 1792, which, especially in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, delivered a clear endorsement of the Constitution in what was effectively a referendum. Particular attention is paid to the role of clergymen in cheerleading for the Polish Revolution, and in promoting the new discursive paradigm of ‘ordered liberty’, as well as to the controversial question of ecclesiastical censorship and evidence of continuing tensions between clergy and laity. Finally, the celebrations of the first anniversary of the Constitution are examined via the messages conveyed by ceremonies, speeches, hymns, and sacral architecture. Again, the Providential theme is omnipresent in what became an apotheosis of the king.

Chapter Six is devoted to Thomas May’s engagements with Lucan of the late 1620s, with particular reference to his translation (published 1626 to 1627) and The Tragedy of Cleopatra (published 1639, but first performed in 1626). It begins by situating May’s works in relation to Ben Jonson’s literary circle, detailing his friendship with figures such as John Selden, John Vaughan or Edward Hyde (later Earl of Clarendon). It argues that May chiefly assimilated the demise of the Roman republic to the fears among some members of the English political order that Charles’s increasingly absolutist style would put an end to laws, liberties and Parliaments, but that he was divided about how to react to these developments.

Chapter Seven closes the study by examining the responses of three writers – Samuel Daniel, Thomas May and Abraham Cowley – to the question of Lucan’s ending. It shows that each were concerned as much with the theme of endlessness raised within Lucan’s text, as with the notoriously unfinished state of his narrative. Moving from Daniel’s own unfinished Lucanian text, The Civil Wars, to May’s Continuation of 1630 and later Supplementum of 1640 and then Cowley’s The Civil War (early 1640s), another unfinished work, I argue that a shared concern about how to end their narratives reflected anxieties about the shape and indeed design of history, especially English history, and a recognition of the inadequacy or mendaciousness of the formal structures of literary narrative.

This chapter deals with Orlando furioso by Ludovico Ariosto. Orlando furioso does not abandon divine action of the characteristically epic type, though it infuses epic divine action with both irony and anxiety. There is also plenty of providentialism in the Furioso. The military plot of the Furioso is the Christian-Saracen conflict of Carolingian literary tradition. Ariosto also wrote the Cinque canti, first printed as an appendix to the Furioso in 1545. Cinque canti shifts the Furioso's balance of epic and romantic supernatural elements in the direction of epic. In the Furioso, Ariosto's view of divine providence is playful and optimistic when writing of the legendary past, anguished and uncertain when he turns toward the historical present. In the Cinque canti, he sets the story in a legendary past that bears closer resemblance to the historical present, and its supreme deity is not God but Demogorgon.

Perhaps another feature of the backlash against evolutionary materialism was the rise of a contemporary natural theological discourse in Arabic, which forms the focus of this chapter. Examining the broader intellectual milieu that formed around the rejection of materialism in Beirut in particular, and revolving around the work of the Sufi theologian Husayn al-Jisr, it shows how writings on evolution in Arabic helped spur renewed interest in older theological debates, particularly around the tradition of Muslim scholastic theology, or ‘ilm al-kalam. This revitalization of theology also shows how Arabic readings of Darwin necessarily drew in older textual traditions and debates. These readings were critically shaped by contemporary debates on Ottoman educational and institutional reform. Indeed, al-Jisr himself spent time at the Sultan’s court in Istanbul, and was commissioned to write a treatise on the contemporary natural sciences from a Muslim theological perspective.