Chapter 2 focuses on discussions of faith in John Donne’s religious prose. Donne often addresses such questions by turning to legal discourses. Processes of evaluating forensic testimony provide useful structures for measuring probability or certainty in evidence and the assent that it generates. This is exemplified in Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr, which relies on widely recognised rules about forensic testimony to discuss pressing questions regarding belief and its legitimacy in post-Reformation England. The chapter then shows how Donne adapts this legal handling of belief to address questions about salvation and certainty for a variety of audiences. To lawyers at Lincoln’s Inn, Donne uses the technicalities of civilian law to support and critique post-Reformation understandings of soteriology. To a broader congregation at St Paul’s, he deploys common law evidentiary procedures to show that, to a limited but helpful extent, the evidence of salvation can be apprehended through legal methods.

This book’s Introduction sets out the key intellectual and historical contexts for its argument. It shows that religious belief gained an important cultural emphasis after the Reformation and that it was considered to be distinct from other kinds of belief or assent. Engaging with scholarly discussions of belief, this introduction suggests that the period from around 1580 to the 1650s witnessed an attempt to investigate what was particular about a specifically religious kind of belief. Its certainty and spiritual origin were compared to, and contrasted with, other kinds of assent that were generated by probable forms of argument. An important and widespread way of effecting this comparison involved considering religious belief alongside the kinds of assent generated in legal settings – when witness evidence is evaluated for its credibility. The introduction roots this discursive method in contemporary legal culture, before surveying recent scholarship on literary culture, law and religion.

This chapter addresses two suggestions for further thought on Faerie Queene and Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare's Richard III and the boar of winter. It reviews the primary mythographical tradition on the story's figures, including the boar that wounded Adonis on what some called his thigh and others his genitalia. The chapter then studies the suggestion that what mythographers have in mind is not only the coming of winter, but also what is happening in the circling zodiac and along the horizon.

Chapter 3 considers Francis Bacon’s use of legal evidentiary procedures and the important role they play in his discussions of religious belief. Its first half is given over to a wide-ranging account of Bacon’s philosophical prose. It sets out to establish that Bacon uses his knowledge of Romano-canon law and its evidentiary practices to shape his methodological reforms for natural philosophy. This chapter applies the findings of this survey to Bacon’s prose fiction narrative, New Atlantis. Requirements for credible legal testimony are, on the one hand, shown to shape the style of Bacon’s narration. On the other, though, Bacon’s discussion of evangelical conversion shows that, as a spiritually derived form of assent, religious belief transcends such legally derived criteria for credibility. New Atlantis thus develops Bacon’s philosophical distinctions between faith and knowledge. It also asks probing questions about religious belief and intercultural encounters in early modernity.

This chapter focuses primarily on four of Priestley's ‘time plays’, each of which is structured either around the return of a character or a reversal to a previous point in the action. Dangerous Corner and An Inspector Calls are also heavily indebted to a popular narrative form that relies on an investigation of the past in order to bring the present into clearer focus. Time and the Conways and Eden End are meditations on the nature of loss, but they also contain seeds of hope. The chapter ends by discussing J. M. Barrie's Mary Rose, which is haunted even more obviously than Eden End by the lost generation of the First World War. Loss in Mary Rose is eventually succeeded by redemption, but the ghostly protagonist can find release only by embracing her dead state.

This chapter considers the differences in Spenser and Shakespeare's approaches to poetics, psychology and patronage, first examining the allegory of The Faerie Queene and comparing the way Spenser and Shakespeare portray human identity. It concludes that, while Spenser and Shakespeare both use all four modes of being, they grant opposing generic scenarios and modes of psychic management.

In this chapter, the author talks about spatial lyricism and linguistic disobedience. The lyric is the basis of all his poetry, but its signature is blurred and reconstituted. The difficulty for the lyric in conveying ‘emotional’ content is that it cannot be effective if the material is not carefully controlled. The looser this control, the less we can accept the genuineness of the emotions. Regardless of time and place, at the core of the poem is the object–subject relation. The author's politics and ethics and poetry are inseparable: his vegan anarchist pacifist beliefs inform everything he writes, and he uses language to unsettle a world in which centralisation has denied rights. Is violent language violence? Is this where context comes into its own? The lyric intent softens the aggression. Rhythm is not unique to poetry – and a piece of writing with rhythm is not necessarily poetry or even poetic – but the consistent and regulated control and deployment of rhythm is accepted as one of the foundation blocks of the ‘poem’.

The book’s Conclusion develops the argument made by earlier chapters. It considers the variety of ways in which probable arguments, structured through imaginative engagements with legal forms of testimony, interacted with convictions and beliefs that were borne out of supernatural, spiritual influence. One key outcome of this discussion is the recognition that literature provided an important venue for comparing different kinds of belief and assent. Literary texts staged highly plausible legal cases, rooted in persuasively credible evidence; they could also qualify the force of these forensic arguments, especially when accounting for the ways in which religious belief was understood to work. This literary evaluation of modes of assent sheds new light on what it means to write a history of belief. The book ends by outlining a methodology that attends to texts and contexts where persuasive and probable modes of argument were afforded only provisional force.