This book investigates how an evolving concept of transcendentalism in early modem England, influenced by Reformation and counter-Reformation theology, created new ways of responding effectively and philosophically to emerging articulations of national identity in British devotional poetry. My book focuses on a series of politically disruptive moments in the seventeenth century - from the residual trauma of the Protestant Reformation to the Civil War of the 1640's - that troubled England's developing sense of national identity. In the shadow of these troubles, devotional poets reworked ideas...