This chapter surveys current theories of the Baroque, distinguishing between those that see it historically and those that view it as a recurring stylistic quirk. I draw particularly on José Antonio Maravall to advance a schema of recurring Baroque characteristics – fictionalising, hyperbole, melancholy, kitsch and plateauing. Some concepts will seem unfamiliar to scholars used to considering the Baroque as primarily concerned with music, painting or sculpture, or inextricably connected with the Counter-Reformation. These concepts are concerned less with the surface characteristics of the period’s culture and more with underlying ideological trends. I also ask how we can speak of the ‘English’ Baroque, since it has long seemed an alien concept to the residual tradition of English literary and cultural history.