Abstract
Late in James II’s brief reign as king of England (1685-1688), his poet laureate John Dryden wrote and issued a long and difficult political allegory called The Hind and the Panther. Among many other things that stirred within this poem’s fables and arguments, religious toleration is especially significant for the laureate’s arguments on behalf of ‘tenderness of conscience’ in spiritual matters represent an important dimension of the crown’s pleas and program for acknowledging the rights and privileges of the Roman Catholic community in England. The strategy of the crown (and its polemicists, including John Dryden) was to urge recognition of the spiritual rights of both Protestant and Catholic minorities who were poised against the vested interests of the Church of England. The struggle between the vested interests of that Church and the assertion of the rights of religious minorities turned on the concept of religious toleration; this paper aims to illuminate what that toleration meant in the late seventeenth century, how the concept of toleration was promoted and resisted, and how Dryden’s poem presents in miniature the fate of toleration in the midst of a religious crisis that ended in the political revolution of 1688.
Presenters
Steven ZwickerStanley Elkin Professor Emeritus, English Department, Washington University, St Louis, Missouri, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Toleration, Polemics, Revolution, Literature
