THIS paper reduces to three main points: the evidence that Thomas Browne lived in Halifax, West Yorkshire, from 1634 to around 1637 and drafted his Religio Medici there; a brief account of Halifax both in fact and, crucially, in legend in the period in question; and some of the reasons why all this matters to an understanding of Browne's work. As a setting, Halifax helps us account for crucial shifts in Religio. On the one hand, Religio Medici investigates theological and philosophical concerns developed by Browne at Oxford and on the Continent, all in a carnival spirit of improvisation within a ritualized framework. These concerns include matters such as nature's monstrosities and hieroglyphs, atheism, and heresy. On the other hand, Browne's work ponders potentially more mundane, if still vexing, social problems such as poverty, and social virtues such as charity.

Far from providing Browne with a bland or neutral setting for the composition of the Religio, Halifax offered him experiments in charity and in social engineering as he crossed the threshold between the intellectually transformative Continent and the practical life of vocation and family matters in Norwich. In this remote place without books, Browne took stock of a mind at once haunted by its own singular brand of skeptical melancholy yet lightened by an orientation to his world that was charitable and sociable. In West Yorkshire, he found a mode of utopianism that tempered carnival inversions with a powerful, reformist commitment to ripping the masks off contemporary customs and habits.

The interpretation of Epicurean political philosophy as embodied in the DRN has rarely proved simple. The problem begins with the Epicurean repudiation of public life accompanied by a retreat into a small group of friends who cultivate tranquillity. Against this apparently straightforward backdrop, the dense, passionate verses of Lucretius have provoked the later transmitters of Epicureanism into engaging an astonishing range of political concerns and positions. This chapter will consider four key historical moments in the interpretation of the DRN. For all their many differences, each of the four periods sponsors inventive and wide-ranging responses to the poem’s moral and political tendencies. In each case, cultural arbiters are inspired and provoked by what they posit as the poem’s tension between its passionate disruption of contemporary norms and its clarion call for a disengaged tranquillity. Construing their own age - sometimes approbatively, sometimes apprehensively - as a time of upheaval, they struggle to decide whether Lucretius offers recourse from or instigation to contemporary disorder, decadence and uncertainty. Finally, in each historical context, readers recognise that the poem’s moral and political arguments are rendered the more complex by Book 5’s extended account of civilisation.

First there is Virgil’s emulation of Lucretius in the politically vexed but nonetheless Caesarean Georgics. Second, at the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth, Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon engage the moral and political dimensions of Lucretius in their efforts to make sense of religio-political turmoil, wanton civil bloodshed and philosophical impasse.

In his celebrations of the Church of England, Thomas Browne often draws circles. Sometimes he envisions that the faithful children of that church follow its “great wheele,” Browne's version of hunkering down behind what Laud called the hedge and George Herbert the double moat of the ecclesia anglicana. According to Browne, Laud, and Herbert alike, outside the privileged temple crouch heresy, schism, and insubordination, three enemies just waiting for an opportune gap. But as Anthony Milton has recently written of this collectively but variously imagined circle in early Stuart religious culture, the dynamic and ambiguous struggle to determine the identity of the Church of England became increasingly divisive – or at least more openly and aggressively fractious – in the 1620s and 30s, reason enough for Laud to heighten the hedge and for Herbert to double the moat. For Browne, however, the loyal child of the mother church also explores the vast space outside a circle, singularly pursuing those “many things untouch'd, unimagin'd, wherein the libertie of an honest reason may play and expatiate with security and farre without the circle of an heresie.” If the safer Church of England relegates recusants and nonconformists to the jurisdiction of circumstance – standing around orthodoxy – Browne's re-conception of the theological cosmos applauds the same church for boldly and fervidly wayfaring in that extra-circular area.

I have argued that the Caroline expatiation in the circumstances of faith accounts for the stocktaking complexity and exploratory richness of its religious discourse.

At their best, the circumstances of heroism and fancy were believed to elevate English Protestantism. But no matter how much the circumstance of persons might factor into Caroline conditions for isolating and exalting the saint, church, or minister, the preoccupation with its complexities induced writers to consider the status of their Protestantism as implanted very much in the stage-play world. In the 1620s and 30s, the handbooks of manners, social comedies, and sermons address the problem of how the rejection of personal respects so critical to the God of the Bible can be reconciled with the social decorum so integral to early Stuart society. Whether it is Shirley staging comedies about the “town” or Donne preaching of conflict between a corporate and isolated soul, Caroline writers take stock of the proprieties governing their society.

So it is that the advocates of the Feoffees of Impropriations and, in general, of lay involvement in church affairs were compelled to grapple with the injunction against respecting persons as the Bible most often poses it: in social and economic terms. With St. Paul as their model, godly Christians attempted (in the words of Haller) “to adapt their teaching to the spiritual condition of all men” in a kind of “spiritual egalitarianism,” the very essence of which was God's disregard for persons, Jew or Gentile.

The Caroline fascination with the role of fancy in elevating the reverence of worship focuses on a circumstance of faith that shares many points of contact with the pomp and circumstance of epic religion. In both cases, a wide range of writers in the 1620s, 30s, and 40s answer the charge leveled at their church from Catholic quarters that theirs is an impoverished or a gaunt religion, a paltry showing for those talents divinely bestowed on the stewards of the church militant. In such cases, discussions of heroism and fancy mutually turn to the value and peril of ceremony. Accordingly, fancy is often held responsible for the heroic elevation of the faith, and even more often for the bankruptcy and bathos of epic inflation. Like heroism, too, the circumstance of imagination has both inward and outward manifestations.

Yet the skepticism of Tevian heroism notwithstanding, Caroline explorations of the assets and liabilities of imagination in worship are more intricately involved in the epistemology on which worship itself is premised, and thus in the uncontrollable ways in which the experience of faith unsettles the stability of English Protestant identity. Every seventeenth-century writer knew that fancy had a tendency to take flight, but with its strong links to ceremonial worship and to Stoic notions of the material pneuma, the faculty has a way of landing Caroline explorers of religious circumstance in the more mundane realms of the social order and of the body.

Like Nicholas Ferrar, Lucius Cary presided over an extraordinary community in which the circumstance of religious heroism was eulogized, scrutinized, and recast. More than Ferrar, however, Cary embodied for his contemporaries both the legacy and the enigmas of that heroism. One sees this tendency in literature produced about Cary even in the years before he established his academy at Great Tew. In a Pindaric ode celebrating the friendship shared by Cary and Sir Henry Morison, Ben Jonson commences with a bold image of just how elusive an other- worldly heroism can be for even the wisest interpreter. Then over the course of the ode, he refashions that image so that Morison and Cary come to mythologize a well-rounded heroic friendship – at once contemplative and dutiful, rational and fervent – as a pious and honest alternative to the courtly composite staged by those masques from which Jonson was finding himself excluded.

Jonson's image of elusive heroism is the Infant of Saguntum, whose response to his birth into the chaotic, ignoble, and savage inception of the second Punic War is return into his mother's womb. The Infant's return, or antistrophe, is imputed perfect by the poet whose emblem for the return is so “summed a circle.”

Of the circumstances of English Protestantism explored in the 1620s, 30s, and 40s, the reckoning of heroism requires from authors the greatest engagement with the past, with the circumstance of time. Overshadowed by their sense of an Elizabethan heyday for the honor of Protestant aggression, these writers struggle against the suspicion of their own belatedness, decadence, and paralysis. Far from collapsing under the pressure of the Elizabethan ethos, however, Caroline Protestants respond to the past of their own faith with an acute skepticism toward its myths and with richly inventive revisions of the heroic pomp and circumstance of faith. For heroic circumstance, they understand, comprises the various means – practical, ceremonial, or imaginative – through which the advocates of a church secure its singular elevation and, therefore, its warrant as the best of all possible churches.

Insofar as heroism comprises the means of ecclesiastical elevation, the warrant of tradition, and the claims of superiority, it dovetails with all the other circumstances of Protestant faith. Most clearly, the constructions of heroism contribute to, and depend on, the inner and outer conditions of worship – the circumstances of thought and place to be discussed in the third chapter. But as Guibbory has shown, presuppositions about ceremony are entangled with rival notions of how the social domain should be ordered and framed.

In the 1620s and 30s, the various respects of English Protestantism tend to converge in the study of nature, so that a radical reconsideration of what Seneca calls the pneumatic “circumstance” of human existence serves to center the stocktaking of all the conditions of Protestant faith and practice. With nature as their chief concern, writers trace the network of connections between the advancement of natural studies and all the modes in which they live out their religion: in time (the heroic past, the pivotal present, and the apocalyptic future); in thought (the internal respects of logic, knowledge, error, language production, and imagination); in worship; in the search for salvation; and in a society respectful of persons.

Fully launched in the 1620s, Bacon's Great Instauration prompts the painstaking and complex investigation of religious circumstances — the respects of person, place, time, heroism, thought, and ceremony — through his clarion call for the transformation of natural philosophy. From his announcement of a new method and a comprehensive plan in 1620, through the natural histories and the De Augmentis of the first half of that decade, leading up to that recasting of a religious society in the New Atlantis of the early Caroline years: Bacon's transformation of the study of nature magnifies the stakes, complicates the dynamics, and promises unprecedented resolution of the intellectual labors taken over the conditions of holy living. This transformation stimulates the naturalized stocktaking of religious circumstances carried out by such diverse writers as George Hakewill, Edward Herbert, William Harvey, and Thomas Browne.

As circumstances of the faith, both heroism and fancy are nodal terms by means of which Caroline writers mediate the outward and inward conditions of worship and take stock of the rival ways in which their church might be projected above the gray shades of casuistry. When writers in the 1620s, 30s, and 40s attend to yet a third term, the category of the “person,” their exploration of religious circumstance is no simpler even if at times it is more mundanely social. For that oft repeated Biblical stricture against respecting persons leads Caroline writers into a wide range of questions – about the criteria for ordination, for salvation, and for the appropriate interaction of saints and the worldly wise. The circumstance of the person has some points of convergence with other circumstances. With heroism, notions of the person bear the burden of accounting for what sets the church or its ministers apart from other churches or the laity. With fancy, competing definitions of the person provoke an inquiry into the inner human processes responding to or searching for saving grace. As Guibbory has argued, attitudes toward religious ceremony have corollaries in attitudes toward social organization; and indeed the accommodation made by saints in navigating the social order is one of the primary motivations for investigating the circumstance of persons.

In Caroline England, the fascination with the status of the “person” centers finally on two often conflicting queries.