In his recent Anglicanism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Mark Chapman notes briefly that the seventeenth-century English church produced a group of remarkable men, known collectively as the “Caroline Divines,” and rushes off to his next topic. More generally, the fact that the early Stuart period produced an efflorescence not only of theology and preaching—as exemplified in such worthies as Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, and Jeremy Taylor—but also of literature and the visual arts is seldom dwelled on outside the field of literary studies. The revival in recent years of an interest in spirituality—defined not in the contemporary sense of individualized eclecticism but in the classic mode of the disciplined cultivation of the religious life within the parameters of an established tradition—is a welcome spur to a heightened attention in Anglican studies, among others, to issues of public worship and private devotion.

Graham Parry, who is a professor of English at the University of York, brings a literary historian's sensibility to bear in this study of the religious arts in the early Stuart era—before those arts ran into, often fatally, the disastrous iconoclasm of the Cromwellian interlude. An austerely Reformed attitude to worship and its ancillary arts emerged during the reign of Edward VI and continued through that of Elizabeth, despite the latter's antagonism to the political dimensions of the Puritan movement. Their Stuart successors were demonstrably more sympathetic to a richer form of public worship, and Lancelot Andrews, bishop of Winchester, and Archbishop William Laud became particular advocates of this brief flowering of the liturgical arts. Parry characterizes this as the “Beauty of Holiness” movement, in which a theological rationale, rooted in Hooker's thought, was promulgated for a movement to express devotion in the realms of literature and the visual arts especially.

Parry systematically works through the areas of liturgy, architecture, church furnishings, painted (rather than stained) glass, music, devotional prose and poetry, and what today would be called historic preservation. He demonstrates an ability to describe lucidly and comment perceptively on each of these artistic realms. One of the most interesting themes is the impact that a growing awareness of Roman Catholic developments on the Continent, especially in the Jesuit ambit, was having on both sponsors and practitioners of the religious arts in England during this period. Angels, for instance, begin to make a comeback in church decoration, no longer in the six-winged medieval style but rather as Italianate amorini or putti (the life-sized infants familiar in the painting and sculpture of the era). Similarly, the Virgin Mary makes a reappearance in “metaphysical” poetry, as does even Teresa of Avila—in the poetry of Richard Crashaw, who eventually went all the way from high Laudianism to Roma.

In retrospect, this brief cultural moment is memorable more for its written expressions—Andrewes's Preces Privatae and George Herbert's The Temple, for example—than in the realms of architecture and the visual arts, where the “Beauty of Holiness” movement's expressions were neither very original nor stylistically coherent. More broadly, the movement is illustrative of the yin-yang–like rhythm of Anglican history, in which “protestant” and “catholic” moments and movements have engaged in an elaborate dance around one another. Although Parry does a good job of relating this movement to the Puritan-Laudian dance of those days, he does not go very far in relating it to the broader theological program of the Caroline Divines, or in situating it in the longer evolution of an emergent Anglican tradition. He does, however, give us a detailed and perceptive survey of a heretofore overlooked concatenation of religious arts in a seminal period in English church history that should be acknowledged more fully in subsequent treatments of the era.