George Herbert and Edward Herbert’s envisaged Republic of Letters overlapped with aristocratic values of gentility, honor, and decorum, as well as ideals of friendship, conversation, and disinterestedness. Participating in transregional, multilingual exchanges, they initiated a robustly cosmopolitan public sphere. The ideal of distinctive communion pursued by each brother in these interchanges is unique and likely to be at the center of future debates about British Protestantism. The Herbert brothers were not mere agents of transregional networks, coteries, and groups; they bore distinctive visions of encompassing community or communion. In George’s case, it took the form of an imagined contentious Eucharistic communion, and in Edward’s, of a communion built on free and disinterested disputation and consent. Both writers place individual experience, both lived and represented in language, at the core of the matter. They partook of a contentious communion that was both inward and of the world; intimate struggle and strife with oneself and others to embody the good were for them common signs of a vitally lived, dynamic truth.

This Introduction lays the theoretical groundwork for the book by exploring the place of 'sameness' in queer theory. As with related approaches that have a similar basis in post-structuralism and the politics of social difference, queer theoretical writing often poses values like heterogeneity, variety and change in opposition to a dominant order that is imagined as seeking sameness in the forms of homogeneity, conformity and assimilation, often taken to be intrinsically reactionary or pernicious. The Introduction traces how this opposition manifests through the development of key queer theoretical positions and also addresses the scattered history of engagement with sameness in queer thought. It argues that queer theory's theoretical and rhetorical orientation has prevented engagement with the significant investments in sameness that we can see in queer culture. Turning to coming out stories and the boredom they have inspired in queer readers, this Introduction also provides an initial case study for the connection between queer culture and forms of sameness that the later chapters continue to elucidate.

This essay examines the modelling out of mothers’ legacies, a genre of conduct books penned and left by mothers for their children, in the anonymous domestic tragedy A Warning for Fair Women (1599). Its research reveals how the play frames the ‘gallows speech’ of a convicted murderess – Mistress Saunders – as exemplifying this genre, and culminates in Saunders leaving a copy of John Bradford’s Meditations (1560) to her children. This act, coupled with her dying words, completes Saunders’ journey of rehabilitation from adulterous and murderous wife to redeemed and devoted mother. This essay emphasises the play’s function as a proselytising tool that sought to reinforce the importance of godly motherhood by depicting those who had transgressed it.

This chapter carries the discussion about love and community into the realm of the private and secular life. It discusses a work seldom broached, Edward Herbert’s unfinished play The Amazon, written as he was also completing De Veritate during his terms as English ambassador to France, 1619–21 and 1622–4. While in France, Herbert was frequently the guest of the Dukes of Montmorency, a family of Catholic moderates sometimes referred to pejoratively as “politiques” by the parti dévot, or ultra-Catholics. Edward Herbert argued against the dogma of institutionalized religion in his philosophical work De Veritate and for divorce in his unfinished play The Amazon. This essay analyzes the final “Song” in The Amazon as linking human affection with the “natural instinct” of De Veritate, a spiritual power that, for Herbert, moves both animals and humans, provides the basis for credible knowledge, and legitimizes divorce (on the grounds that too often marriage is antithetical to love).

This essay surveys a cross-section of deathbed narratives printed in English between 1592 and 1646, about individuals from a spectrum of social classes and confessional identities. It has two chief objectives, out of which come two main arguments. The first is to read behind some of these works and into the discursive and polemical contexts that, it is argued, first catalysed their publication. The second is to offer a fresh account of the deathbed narrative as an emergent devotional subgenre that combined many shared features across the confessional divide that gave rise to it (whilst remaining highly expressive of devotional identity): a didactic purpose informed by ars moriendi precedents, a specific narrative arc, inventive and extensive uses of print, and a flexible prose style shaped by a number of biblical, dramatic and literary analogues.

The fourth chapter deals with two post-apartheid texts by South African writers: Justin Cartwright’s In Every Face I Meet (1995) and J. M. Coetzee’s Youth (2002). In his London-based ‘autrebiography’, Coetzee considers the complex relationship between the ‘white writer’ and South Africa. In Every Face I Meet draws intertextually on William Blake’s poem ‘London’ to explore issues of racism, social inequality and colonial legacies in 1980s and early 1990s London. The chapter explores how these texts present the imbrication of race discourses and racisms from London, South Africa and other spaces in both the 1960s when immigration from former British colonies increased (Coetzee) and during the state-sanctioned racism of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure (Cartwright). Furthermore, in Coetzee’s novel in particular, the postmodern form inscribes the unwriteable and unreadable nature not only of London, but also of South Africa.

This chapter expounds and lingers with the poetics of monasticism, specifically the poetics of monastic discretion or discernment, especially as it appears in the Conferences of John Cassian. In dialogue with Michel Foucault and Thomas Merton, as well as modern poets Marilyn Hacker, Jane Hirshfield and Melissa Range, this chapter suggests that monastic speech and monastic bodies take materiality seriously, as something seriously mysterious and seriously inchoate, even and especially when that materiality proves to be a limitation. To be monastic, in life and in language, is to be always beginning.

This essay reveals how Thomas Middleton’s city comedy The Puritan Widow (1607) attempted to reconcile the conflicting religious roles of the play’s protagonist – Lady Plus – as chaste widow to her sexualised potential as a remarried wife. The play wryly subsumes what is here termed ‘devotion to mirth’ with devotion to God, whereby the dramatisation of communal feasting, festive combat and the wearing of livery all lead to the marriage altar, the re-establishment of Protestant religious values and the play’s denouement. In this way, audiences could be taught to adopt religious conformity through dramatic and festive re-enactment – satire could (and often did) point to the sacred. In this way, English playwrights could mock devotions and model them too.