Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans: Scripture Uses

It has been said that the poems of Vaughan's Silex Scintillans (1650; 1655) are the most biblical in English: this book revises our understanding of that claim, not by rejecting it, but by asking what it might have meant in the 1650s. Recovering the historical, literary, and scriptural context of Vaughan's poetry and his neglected prose works, particularly The Mount of Olives (1652), this study reveals the different ways in which Vaughan's work is shot through and fired by the Bible as it was read in the "Godly nation" of the mid-seventeenth century.