Essays by leading historians and literary scholars investigate the role of religion in shaping political, social, and literary forms from the Reformation to the Civil Wars. Individual essays discuss the relationship between religion and culture, and explore how religion informs some of the central texts of English Renaissance literature, including work by Foxe, Hooker, Shakespeare, Donne, Lanyer, and Milton. The collection demonstrates the massive centrality of religion to early modern constructions of gender, subjectivity, and nationhood.