"If truth be thine, what needs a brutish force?": Henry Vaughan, "Silex Scintillans", and interregnum Anglican survivalism.

The following thesis examines the historical and critical conflation of politics and religion in Interregnum England and Wales. With reference to Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillan (1650, 1655), this thesis attempts to deconstruct this understanding of seventeenth-century poetry. While not a work of deconstruction, as it is properly understood, the following text argues that this historical and critical conflation has placed an arbitrary and inhibiting limitation upon the scholarship of the period. Vaughan's Silex Scintillans has long been considered a representative text of Christian mystical poetry. However, since the 1970s, following the work of Martz and others, the text has been subject to increasingly political interpretations. In expanding the interpretive categories mentioned above, this thesis attempts to resituate Silex Scintillans within the Christian tradition while arguing that it is best understood as a representative piece of Anglican survivalist literature. --P. ii.