Protestant Baroque

Abstract

Much traditional scholarship on the Baroque sees the notion of the Protestant Baroque as contradictory. This chapter explores ‘emergent’ or ‘partial’ Baroque characteristics in two Protestant poets, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer, followed by the Protestant women of Little Gidding, the ‘Arminian nunnery’, whose ‘storying’ and biblical harmonies show how broader cultural dynamics could permeate even a marginalised group of women, who have only recently attracted critical attention. I look across the Atlantic to examine the English equivalent of the colonial Baroque prominent in Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic culture, and consider two New England writers – briefly, Anne Bradstreet and more thoroughly, Anne Hutchinson – to analyse the extent to which New England can be set within the scope of not just colonial but specifically Protestant colonial Baroque.