States of grace in early modern literature

This dissertation examines the political implications of grace in literary works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Lanyer, Milton, and Bunyan. Instead of reading early modern theology as a simple analogue for or expression of the early modern state, the project approaches theology itself as a tool for reading and redefining power, an approach it argues early modern authors share. Grace---God's unilateral saving action toward his creation---may seem like one of the kinder, gentler aspects of Christian theology, but its historic centrality to the theological tumults and bloody political conflicts of the early modern period suggests that it and the early modern polis were uncomfortably intertwined. States of Grace contends that early modern writers understood grace as a fundamental element of state power, either as its opponent or its tool. This literary history and political theology of grace traces writers' engagements with the doctrine from its roots in Augustinian anti-Pelagianism to its wildly different development in Arminians' cooperative version of grace while engaging contemporary literary and political theorists to illuminate a connection between God and the city in unlikely texts. Although each of the authors examined here makes use of different theologies of grace to highlight different problems in the state, their approaches cover only a fraction of grace's possible political uses. Wielding the theology of grace effectively allowed authors in the period to express a broad range of attitudes toward power, from submission and collaboration to frustration and outright revolt.